Let’s talk about casting. How did you cast Emmanuelle Béart as the angel?
This was the biggest casting call of my career — probably bigger than a lot of people’s careers. Without exaggerating, I saw probably 6,000 candidates — not all in person, but in photos, tapes, etc. We held open casting calls where the lines stretched all the way down Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Dino DeLaurentiis got the media on it, so every aspiring, attractive actress wanted to be the angel in this movie. It was massive. I went to so many countries for auditions. Visited all the top modeling agencies. Because I was a fan of silent movies, I wanted to be find an actress who could convey her thoughts without saying a word. I wanted to be able to look in her eyes and understand her.
After months, we just ran out of candidates. We did screen tests with the three actresses I had — one was from New Zealand, one was from Sweden and one was from America. We had Michael Knight audition with them. When we were done, I knew we didn’t have her yet. I was praying that when Dino saw the screen tests, he would feel the same way I did. Thank God he did. That started the process all over again, and I ended up taking a trip to Paris to see some French model. I was walking down the Champs d’Elysees one day I saw a poster of Emmanuelle Béart, who was the biggest star in France at that time. And immediately my quest became a quest to get her in the movie…But the other posters around town were Jason le Mort-Vivant, which was my Friday the 13th…And how’s a guy who made a Friday the 13th going to get France’s latest star in his next movie? I managed to do it by going to Montreal, where she was doing a press junket for her film Manon des sources. I pitched the story to her. She cried at the end and agreed to do the movie. I had my angel.
Michael Knight was already cast only. I’d gone through a lot of casting calls for his part as well, and seen every twenty-something male with comedy chops, from David Duchovny to Tim Daly to Judd Nelson…. When I go back and look at the casting tapes from this movie, I’m amazed. Jennifer Connelly read for Phoebe’s part. So did Uma Thurman. So many now-famous people in the early part of their career. I initially wanted Jim Carrey for the lead. At that point he had only done a couple of small films and a TV series. I thought he was perfect, but Dino didn’t agree. For the supporting characters John, George and Rex, I tried to cast as close to the real guys that I’d hung out with. David Dukes played the father. I had done a stage play with David at the Music Center, called “Light Comedies,” and I thought he was brilliant.
How did you end up casting Phoebe Cates?
She’s just one of those people that everybody likes instantly. There’s just something about her that is very open. She’s also very mischievous. Sometimes I’d look over and see Phoebe, and I could tell that her wheels were turning. She was always scheming something funny. Michael Knight also had a great sense of humor, but because he was the male lead, there were moments when he would get ultra-serious. And Phoebe went after that. She looked for those vulnerable moments, and she make him feel insecure about his hair or whatever. Just to play with him. Through it all, she was a consummate pro.
Oh and Charles Lane — who played the priest! Charles Lane was in almost every Frank Capra movie. I don’t know how old he was at that point. He was one of those guys that used to go to work at Columbia every day and wait in Gower Gulch. He was under contract as a character actor. He told me, “I never had any idea what I would be doing at the beginning of the day. One A.D. would put me into a Western and I’d be done by lunch, and then somebody else would say we need a guy to play one of the gangsters on this other picture.” Sometimes he’d do three movies in one day. His resume was unbelievable — and for me to have a long time Frank Capra actor, part of his stable of actors, was like a dream come true.
I also did a little cameo in the church scene. I wanted a guy to come out of the confessional and be so enraptured by the sight of the angel that he would back himself into the candles and set himself on fire. Believe it or not, Kevin Kline was on set to see Phoebe — because they were just starting to date — and somehow he’d heard about it and he said, “Hey, I’ll to do it as a cameo, but I don’t want a credit or anything.” I said, “That’d be great.” He said, “I’m going over to England — I’m doing this little movie with some of the Monty Python people and maybe when I get back, if you still haven’t shot the scene…” It’s that kind of humility, that kind of team-player attitude, that makes him such a great guy. He can do anything and there’s no big ego about it. So I told him I’d try to put it off until he got back.
He went and did A Fish Called Wanda and when he came back, I was still shooting…which is pretty amazing, considering that most of the movies I do now have seventeen or eighteen day shoots…But by that point I’d already had to shoot the scene. Hiring a stuntman was expensive, so I ended up doing the gag myself. It wasn’t the greatest moment in the film.
I can’t believe they let the director set himself on fire. If something goes wrong, the movie doesn’t have a director…
I’ve certainly been on a lot of other shows where I haven’t been allowed to get away with things like that. Why they allowed me to do it, I don’t know…Maybe by that point they were like, “Fine.
Set him on fire. Screw him. If he dies, we’ll collect the insurance.” That was a George Bailey “worth-more-dead-than-alive” moment.
Save that shot until the end of the shoot and they’ll be glad to set the director on fire…
It would have scared me if it was that well-plotted. [laughs] No, we shot it way before the end.
Did Capra see the finished film?
Yes he did. I sent him the movie and he said he really loved it. I said, “Would you mind giving me a quote because a quote from Frank Capra on this movie…that’s like doing a western and getting a quote from John Ford.” So he actually gave us a quote. He said, “A wonderful movie. I loved it.” Dino wouldn’t put it on the poster though. He said, “Who’sa Frank Capra? These kids today don’ta know froma Frank Capra…”
My God, Capra was so kind. I have a picture of me and Nancy with him, and another photo of him holding my script when I gave it to him in Palm Springs. He was just so open. It was great. When I would contact him and say that I couldn’t get anybody to read my script, much less want to make it, he would just say, “Nobody wanted to make most of my pictures either. You’ve got to fight.” He said, “Just do it.” The fact that it was coming from Frank Capra was really inspirational.
After Date with an Angel, you had a long period of working as a writer/director on several TV series, starting with Amazing Stories.
That was really a blessing from my friend Mick Garris. He had gotten into that world because of his connection to Spielberg and he pulled me in to co-write an episode that Rob Zemeckis directed. Later I wrote an episode on my own called “Such Interesting Neighbors.” I got to go on set and watch some of these people direct: Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Joe Dante…They had such an array of huge talent on that series. I knew I could not aspire to direct one of those. It was just a compliment that I could write a script that Steven Spielberg would actually read and make notes on. It was chance to do something for people I admired, so I looked at that as a wonderful step in my career. Thank you, Mick.
I tried not to take too many jobs in episodic television. I was worried that I would lose control of my personal storytelling goals if I became a director-for-hire. There’s nothing wrong with series work and I would never say that anybody should turn down work. But for me the goal had always been to do projects where I could either create from the beginning or add my own storytelling ideas. On a lot of TV shows, the scripts aren’t ready until the day before you shoot, so you only have a bare bones idea of what you’re going to do. In a situation like that, I felt I couldn’t do much beyond shooting standard coverage. I can do it, but I don’t really enjoy it. To me, a “vision” is everything. A part of who you are should be in the work.
Film is an expressive medium that requires the storyteller to g
ive a point of view in the process. The viewer has to have a sense that someone is guiding the story. If I can add some of my own personality or something that means something to me, I’m far more inspired and invested. That elevates the work.
You wrote several episodes of the TV series Friday the 13th. How did you get involved with that show?
Frank Mancuso was going to do a series based on a pawn shop full of cursed objects. The former owner of the pawn shop cursed all of the objects so that they would empower their owners in different ways — making them a better singer, a better dancer, richer, younger, whatever it is. The series was about the new owners of the pawn shop, who have to reclaim these objects, to keep them from hurting or killing people. It made no sense to me that he could make a series off of that, so I was amazed when he managed to make that work — especially for three seasons. The show was given a terrible time slot (it was on at midnight) and it never got any decent publicity. Each episode was as good as its villain, who came into the show along with whatever the cursed object-of-the-week was.
I was in between feature jobs when Frank came to me and said, “Would you like to direct one of these things?” I thought, Why not? So I did an episode called “Master of Disguise.” I liked the story [by Bruce Martin] because it was about the film industry, and I knew that I could have fun with the kills…like using an Oscar statue to beat someone’s head in, or electrocuting a nasty film critic while he watches his own TV show. I purposely cast that actor to look like a local critic who had given me a bad review on Date with an Angel. But the coolest thing was the fact that John Bolger, the actor who played the killer, had a Timothy Dalton / James Bond quality to him. When I met him for the part, I thought it was great that this horrible killer looked like James Bond. Through the power of his cursed makeup case, he was movie-star handsome and had every woman going crazy over him. But, in truth, his face was deformed.
I also wrote and directed an episode called “The Playhouse.” That one was very personal, because it dealt with children and now had a young son. In this story, I wanted to empower these kids through the supernatural. The horror in the episode comes from their everyday home life. I thought, What if they could take their pain and rage and use that to build a fantasy land that they had all to themselves? Unfortunately, because of the budget, we couldn’t execute it as well as we could have in a feature film. To me the idea was far more complex and interesting than what I was able to execute. But both of the child actors, Lisa Jakub and Robert Oliveri, were sensational.
In the third season, I become a story editor on the series, so then I had a chance to pick many of the stories. Despite the budget restrictions, I’d go after anybody and everybody who might want to be involved. Directors on the series had a lot of creative freedom, so that helped — but we had no time, no money, and every day was an eighteen-hour day. Thankfully, the Director of Photography, Rodney Charters, was able to roll with whatever was thrown at him.
You wrote an extremely ambitious two-part episode called “The Prophecies,” which seems to be heavily influenced by The Exorcist…
That was part of the marching orders for the beginning of the third season. Frank Mancuso wanted to do an exorcist story and John D. LeMay wanted to leave the series. He was getting movie offers and he wanted out, so Frank said, “Okay, kill him off…But kill him off in such a way that he could potentially come back later. And make the episode somehow like The Exorcist.” “Sure,” I said. “No problem.” Yeah right.
So I dove back to my Catholic background to see what I could find there. I was intrigued by the idea that the best way to destroy the faith of the faithful is by destroying their heroes. As a kid, I saw how the assassination of John Kennedy affected the entire country. That was a turning point, because they killed the symbol of hope in America’s future. And then Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It seemed like there was this vast conspiracy to take away our faith. So, in the episode, I wrote about a nun who had a vision of the Blessed Virgin saying that there will be this little girl who will be the hope for the future. That child became the target of the archangel Astaroth, who was leading this anti-Catholic conspiracy. John LeMay’s character ended up getting possessed by Astaroth and killing the nun, who was leading this big supernatural conspiracy. I don’t know how well it all worked, but it certainly tapped into my Catholic background. For a TV series, there was a lot of religion woven through the storyline.
Tell me about your episode of Freddy’s Nightmares, “It’s a Miserable Life.”
That was a very different type of horror series because they really didn’t know what they wanted to do with the show. They just knew that Freddy was going to be in the middle of it. Everybody got to do what they wanted as long as you didn’t go over budget, which meant you didn’t shoot more than twelve hours a day. And I was always pushing the envelope…every day.
The script by Michael DeLuca, who is now a major producer, was not completed when I came on. I was working with a series of loose ideas that hadn’t really been fleshed out, so there was a lot of improvisation. But DeLuca had a great energy and he loved all this crazy shit that I was doing with it. There really were no rules on that series. We could make the comedy as absurd as possible. We could do surreal images just for the sake of surreal images. Whether or not it all tied together and made any sense to anybody whatsoever, I don’t know. I’ve always had this dream of being able to do a movie that is just pure surrealism, where I just track from person to person, listening to each person’s thoughts for a few moments and then moving on to the next person. It’s a very uncommercial idea but I personally think it would be a very interesting indie film. I’m a major Luis Buñuel fan. He and Fellini have had a great impact on me — the way they blend dreams and reality.
Anyway, when we finally had the premiere of the show, I remember Bob Shaye [then-head of New Line Cinema and executive producer on the Freddy’s Nightmares series] came up to me. He’d been really angry at me because I had gone over budget, but he came over and said, “I really thought yours was one of the better shows. It was really scary.” That meant a lot to me, because I’ve always said I’d rather get fired for trying to do what I thought worked, than get fired because I was just phoning it in.
In 1990, you adapted Stephen King’s short story “Sometimes They Come Back” to the screen. Are you a Stephen King fan?
I’m a huge Stephen King fan. Obviously King saw the same Twilight Zones we all saw, the same Outer Limits, the same Corman movies — he loved that stuff — and because of his amazing writing talent he was able to take those basic ideas and stories and fill them with the thoughts of his characters. That’s his brilliance. He shows us our dreams and our nightmares in [his characters’] thoughts, which allows his readers to have a personal relationship with the stories.
In my opinion, most of the Stephen King movies don’t work. You can’t get that same experience [of the characters’ thoughts], so the filmmakers usually substitute something else. The movies that really succeeded were the ones that had stronger characters — Stand by Me, Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Stand. But a lot of the other ones didn’t quite get there for me, because you’re trying to condense something that’s so rich in the books into ninety minutes of screen time. You can sell it by its title and you can sell the idea, but ultimately it’s got to be fleshed out differently.
I think that’s what Sometimes They Come Back suffered from — it wasn’t fleshed out properly. The writers had to expand a short story, so they put a lot of “Stephen King’s greatest hits” moments into it. Like an evil car [Christine], a train [Stand By Me]…a lot of things like that were borrowed from his other works to flesh out the story.
I have to admit that when I watched Sometimes They Come Back, I was confused about the nature of the monsters. Are they ghosts or are they the living dead? Do they exist in the flesh or only in the main character’s imagination? What are the rules?
When Dino DeLaurentiis offered the project to me, I remember saying to h
im, “This really doesn’t work.” The writers had moved on because they were not going to do another rewrite without being paid a fortune, so Dino brought in Tim Kring, the future creator of Heroes. Tim is a great guy and very smart, and we saw eye to eye right away. But whenever you deal with Dino, there are a lot of stipulations — “don’t lose this, don’t lose that, because I like that…” So we were trying to Frankenstein things together.
Eventually the main question was whether or not the audience would accept that we’re in this realm where anything can happen. I think if you’re a horror aficionado, you know that there needs to be — like you said — rules that are very clear and show an understanding of the genre. For most people it’s either creepy because it’s surreal, or it just doesn’t 100% work.
In the short story, the threat is a group of teenagers who are possessed by the spirits of the dead. In the movie, I wasn’t sure if the teenagers were possessed or reincarnated or just ageless monsters. At first, I thought they only existed in the head of the main character, because he’s so tormented by his past — but then his wife and son are able to see them too and be hurt by them…
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 9