Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  It sounds like these events are deeply cathartic for you all.

  Each of us respectfully listens to what the others have to say and you realize that you relate to many of their experiences. It’s really a fascinating group of people because you have directors like Guillermo Del Toro, who are very hot right now, sitting next to somebody who hasn’t been able to get a picture made in fifteen years, but they are there, too, god bless us! So, it’s very democratic and everybody is treated well and has a good time. We couldn’t possibly be nicer to each other and everybody is always very open and honest about everything. The truth is, we love to do it and we all genuinely like each other. Oddly enough, one of the most interesting things is that everybody insists on taking photographs of one another. Honestly, you have all these directors and all they want to do is take photographs of themselves with other directors! [Chuckles] Dario Argento was at one dinner and everybody took pictures with him. I mean, everybody takes pictures with everybody else and they are all running around the table like crazy, constantly posing and clicking away. You would think they were all members of some fan club rather than famous filmmakers.

  At what point did the Masters of Horror series for Showtime evolve out of these dinners?

  Well, as the dinners went on, everybody started talking about the possibility of us doing something together. Mick Garris was really the instigator of the project and he was the one who took it to the company that financed it. Mick is a great guy, and is rightfully credited with creating Masters of Horror. It was Mick’s perseverance that put the project together and he made the deal. All the guys were enthusiastic about doing Masters of Horror and even some of the directors who were living and working overseas, like Dario, wanted to be involved.

  Considering the fact that you mostly work from your own original material, you declined the opportunity to write a script and instead selected Pick Me Up by the acclaimed horror author David J. Schow. [2] Why exactly?

  I was sent a couple of scripts they had from various writers, but I saw something in Pick Me Up that I immediately liked. I was intrigued by the premise of these two isolated serial killers — one a truck driver, the other a hitchhiker — roaming around like lone wolves and preying on people without conscience. These men eventually end up crossing each other’s paths in pursuit of their next victim, a young woman, which leads to this amusingly dark climax. I thought Pick Me Up took a rather unique and unexpected approach with the serial killer theme. It also had the prominent part of the truck driver that I knew I could give to Michael Moriarty. Of course, in choosing David’s script, I saved myself the trouble of having to write something. The money portion of Masters of Horror was very small compared to features, so I was more than happy to find a good story that I liked and wanted to do. Although David’s script was very good, I was able to rework a little of it and change some of the dialogue. I invited David to be on the set in Vancouver, Canada, and he was up there every day with us. I kept him apprised of everything we were doing. I wanted to treat David as I would want to be treated if I was the writer on a picture. I’ve been through experiences on movies, where the writer was not welcome on the set, and I’d always felt bad about it. A lot of directors feel uncomfortable when a writer is present, as they feel the writer is looking over their shoulder. I don’t feel that way. If I was going to direct this script, which had been written by somebody else, I wanted to give this person the respect he deserved. So, I made sure that David was involved in every decision we made.

  Were there any other scripts produced for the series that you were considering?

  I have no recollection whatsoever of the scripts I rejected, or my reasons for doing so. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember most of the films that were done by the other directors. I wasn’t too excited about most of the ones that were made. I thought Pick Me Up was very good, but many of the others were below the high standards of the people who were directing them. I felt that Masters of Horror wasn’t as good as Tales from the Crypt [3], which was a previous horror series that had been done on HBO. I thought the level of quality on that show was much higher than on ours. I also felt that many of the guys didn’t do a good job on their pictures and selected very poor material to begin with. I won’t specify which ones I’m talking about because I don’t want to insult anybody. I just felt that the series as a whole really wasn’t great. I’m sure that is one of the reasons why Masters of Horror didn’t go on any longer than two seasons. What about you? Which films did you like?

  Personally, I liked Joe Dante’s Homecoming, John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns, and Stuart Gordon’s Dreams in the Witch-House.

  Joe Dante did the one about the war veterans, who came back from the dead to vote. Yeah, I liked that picture and thought it was clever. It was very well-directed by Joe. Let me see, which other ones were pretty good? [Pause] Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even want to speculate. I think a couple of the other films were also good, but I must be honest and say that I didn’t watch them all. I caught a couple of them and when I saw they weren’t very good, I didn’t watch the rest. I can’t really recall which film was John Carpenter’s. I do recall he did one about a monster baby being born.

  Yes, Pro-Life, which featured in the second season. [4]

  I looked at that one with a great deal of curiosity because the idea was so obviously stolen from It’s Alive. I couldn’t understand why John would do such a thing, but I never said anything to him about it. I didn’t think that film was very good either, but on the whole, John has done tremendous work. I just don’t think that is one of his better efforts. I really wished they hadn’t done something that was such an obvious takeoff on It’s Alive, particularly when I was involved in the series.

  In fairness, I think the writers of Pro-Life were mostly referencing Carpenter’s previous body of work, particularly Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing.

  I really don’t remember much about it. I saw the film once and I was just a little repelled about the whole experience, frankly. I had my questions about why that material was selected in the first place. There were so many other stories that could have been done; so many other choices that could have been made.

  There were few restrictions on the content of the films that the directors could make. I know that you are no great lover of excessive violence, but were you at all tempted to do something outrageous as Dario Argento did with Jenifer and Takashi Miike did with Imprint?

  No. The prospect of doing extreme violence didn’t appeal to me at all. As you know, the blood and gore is just not my kind of movie. I believe I did see Dario’s film, which was about a flesh-eating monster-girl. It was very explicit, but it was also pretty good, too. If I remember correctly, at one point she is performing oral sex on some guy and then eats his penis up! [Laughs] That was pretty disgusting, and I don’t go in for the disgusting stuff. I wanted my film to work from a good premise and contain some good suspense and dark humour. I know that a lot of the horror fans love that kind of explicit violence and were perhaps expecting it.

  You did shoot the scene where Walker [Warren Cole] partially skins and tortures the young woman in the motel room.

  Yeah, but that sequence didn’t go on for too long. I believe I cut that torture scene back a little. In fact, we never shot that much of it anyway. The producers demanded that some moments of horror be included in each film. They didn’t have any input, but they more or less told you that the film had to contain some gruesome and scary aspects. Otherwise Pick Me Up would have just been a suspense story, not a horror film. I didn’t dwell on the torture for too long, but a very creepy little touch in that scene is when Warren Cole puts tape over the young girl’s mouth and paints lipstick on it to simulate a mouth. I actually came up with that idea on the set. That did not appear in David’s script. I thought that was something that had never been done before. It was a little detail that was perverse and disturbing, but not explicitly violent. You don’t see any knives penetrating flesh or anything like that. You
simply see this sadistic guy putting lipstick on somebody’s face while they have a bandage over their mouth. It’s weird. It’s very weird, but it isn’t gory.

  What was it like returning to directing after nearly a ten year absence?

  Well, on Masters of Horror there was a staff that was producing the series in Vancouver, and they shot every film there for John Carpenter, for Dario Argento, for John Landis, for me, for everybody. They had everything pretty much worked out in terms of the sets, the transportation, the equipment, and the crew. All we had to do was show up and direct the picture, whereas on most of my movies I’ve had to hire the crew and set up the entire production myself. Here, I could literally just walk in and direct the film, and that’s probably why I did it. We shot for about ten days and were working thirteen or fourteen hours each day. Unfortunately, they booked us in there at the worst time of the year. It was freezing cold and it rained every damn day! We were working under the worst possible conditions, and so it became a very difficult shoot. The whole thing worked out okay, but I must tell you that I was glad when it was all over. Pick Me Up was the only movie I’ve ever made where I spent all my time inside the trailer. On all the pictures I’ve done, I’ve never even had a trailer because I always want to stay on the set with the actors and crew. On this particular film the cold weather and constant rain was so punishing, I would retreat into the trailer at every opportunity. I’d sit in there and wait until somebody informed me that the camera and lighting was ready. Then — and only then — would I venture out and direct the scene. I can honestly say that is the only time I’ve done that in my career.

  Did you miss being on a set in spite of the conditions?

  Not on that picture! No, the unpleasantness of the location was more than I could bear and greatly affected my ability to enjoy the experience. It was a pretty miserable shoot. I mean, we were basically out in the wilderness. At one point, some of the crew went up on a hill above the road in these cherry pickers to put up these big 10K lights that we were using to illuminate the exteriors. They suddenly radioed us and said, “Hey, we can’t get back down! There are two bears roaming around up here!” They were trapped and afraid they were going to get eaten. I said, “Okay, I’ll send a couple of guys up there to get rid of the bears.” Of course, I had no idea exactly how they were going to do this, but these guys went up there and succeeded in driving the bears away. As soon as they were gone, we proceeded onward. So, we were not only fighting the rain, the cold, and the rigors of this wilderness area, we were also fighting off bears, too!

  Like a lot of serial killer movies, Pick Me Up flirts with the idea of fate and the fear of inexplicably random violence. Is that something you relate to personally?

  I think most of us can relate to that fear. People who have been victimized will often say, “Why me? Why hasn’t this awful thing happened to somebody else?” Well, the fact is it’s always got to happen to somebody. That’s not a pleasant thought but it’s true. Somebody always has to suffer in this world. Somebody’s misfortune and pain always has to make the newspapers that we read and the television that we watch. It’s always somebody’s mother, father, daughter, son, brother, sister, friend. It’s always somebody. The two serial killers in Pick Me Up are out there somewhere and it is Fairuza Balk’s great misfortune that she happens to stumble into their universe.

  Interestingly, Stephen King once claimed that the fundamental root of all horror stories is that “bad things happen to good people.”

  I’m sure that’s true. Again, how many people live their lives without a thought for the bad things that can occur? I would think very few. Most of us are conscious of the horrors of life — the accidents and unfortunate coincidences that can destroy you. One morning you can be kissing your child goodbye and sending them to school, and in the back of your mind you are thinking, Will they return home safely? We see news stories of kids being murdered in their schools. You believe they are safe there, but maybe an intruder or another kid has brought a gun to school and gone on a killing spree. You can wave goodbye to your wife as she gets in the car and never see her again. She can be involved in an automobile accident or breakdown at the side of the road and be murdered by some passing maniac. You can go to the doctor’s office and get some bad news — it’s cancer or some other terminal disease. These are all very disturbing thoughts, but these are the realities of life. Bad things can and do suddenly happen, and yeah, all of these fears inform our horror stories to some extent.

  How much thought and effort went into selecting the truck that Wheeler, Michael Moriarty’s character, drives?

  I told the production people exactly what kind of truck I wanted, and they told me they couldn’t get it. I then told them they had to get it. When they finally did get it, I told them that I wanted the truck painted red. They did this, and I was happy. I mean, these things can sometimes be important. Although the truck is just a truck, if it looks right it can be an interesting and menacing presence, even a supporting character in some ways. The first truck they brought me was this ridiculously small truck. It was like a pickup truck or something, and I immediately sent it away. I insisted, “No, you’ve got to get me a great big truck,” and they did. Sometimes, in filmmaking, it’s just a matter of having to reject the first notion that people come up with in order to get what you want. People will always take the easiest course for themselves at first, so you just keep sending them back until you get exactly what you require.

  Were there any conflicts on set?

  I did have my differences with the crew up there on location. When we were shooting the picture, they had their way of doing things and I had my way of doing things. The crew had been shooting these Masters of Horror films for months and they were used to working together a certain way. My approach was somewhat different from theirs, so I had to quickly get them accustomed to my way of working, at least for the duration of making Pick Me Up. For example, the motel you see in the film: we took over that entire establishment for our purposes. At one point, I asked somebody, “Hey, where’s the makeup people and the wardrobe people?” This person replied, “Oh, they are at the holding area.” I said, “Where’s the holding area? Take me there.” We then got into a car and drove for fifteen minutes to a vacant lot, and there were all these trucks parked there. Somebody said, “This is the wardrobe department; this is the makeup and hair department; and over there is everything else.” I said, “Why do you have everybody stationed all the way out here? Every time we need to do something you have to drive for fifteen minutes going and fifteen minutes coming back. That’s thirty minutes of production time! We have an entire motel at our disposal with all these empty rooms. Get your stuff together and move over to the motel.” They said, “That’s not how we do things.” I said, “It’s the way you do things on this production.” So, they did eventually move everything over to the motel and there were plenty of rooms available to house the various departments and their equipment. I mean, it was ludicrous! That one decision must have saved us several hours every single day, but that was the way they worked. If you leave things to production managers and production people, they always do things the wrong way.

  That was your considerable low-budget experience coming into play there.

  It was common sense, that’s all. They had all these trucks and they felt like they just had to use them. They didn’t need them at all because there was maybe one wardrobe change in the whole film. I mean, the actors all wore the same clothes and the action all happened in consecutive time. We didn’t need a lot of costume changes, so why the hell did we need a whole wardrobe department and wardrobe truck when we could hang the one costume up in a closet? That would never have happened on one of my other pictures, but I had to deal with the way these people operated. If you tried to change things they would give you this strange look because that was not their established procedure. People then think you are a difficult person. They say, “Oh that Larry Cohen, he likes to push everybody around!” What can you
say? All I was interested in was making a good movie. It’s all I really care about. I’m not concerned about anything else except what goes up on the screen. Actually, I have no idea what the exact figure for the budget was. I wasn’t the producer and I never asked them because, frankly, I didn’t care. I wasn’t paying for it. But I do know that the budget wasn’t that much. [5]