Werewolves, Gremlins, Piranhas, Daffy Duck, William Castle, Tom Hanks… If there’s one thing about Joe Dante it’s that he’s never been predictable. Calum Waddell speaks to one of Hollywood’s most quirky and ambitious filmmakers.

For someone now a “Master of Horror” you were quick to leave behind directing movies like Piranha and The Howling and move onto more family-orientated films such as Explorers, Innerspace, Matinee...

They are all still fantasy films. Everything is pretty much in the same genre when you think about it. Innerspace is a science fiction picture and The ’burbs is a horror picture. I would say there’s always a dark side to most of my movies.

Speaking of which, did the studio have any problem with how you were going to end The Howling?

Nope, and the studio, Avco Embassy, was an interesting company at the time – they were doing John Carpenter and David Cronenberg movies, they had a little niche for the horror film stuff. And they got in Bob Raimi, who was a good guy, he used to work for Roger Corman in sales, and the best thing about him was that he had a really short attention span. So he would pop his head in and he’d go, “How’s it going?” Well you’d start to tell him and he’d go, “Okay, great, fine” and then he’d leave!

The only criticism I got was after the first day’s dailies, which was the scene in the bookstore with Dick Miller, and I got back and there was a note, “Is this supposed to be a comedy or a horror picture?” It was as if there was a problem. I said, “Well actually it’s both – if you lull them into submission with the comedy then you can scare them…because they have to be relaxed if they’re going to get scared.”

The only thing was that when we finally did the special effects, and the big transformation scene, they fell so in love with it that they made copies of it and sent it to all the exhibitors and then they didn’t want me to shorten it. It’s a little long – it just goes on a little longer than I think it should. But that was really what they were using to sell the picture, so I can’t complain because it was very successful.

Ever want to do a George Lucas and go back and change it, or add CGI to Gremlins?

No! I still think the special effects are pretty impressive.

It took some time for you to make the sequel to Gremlins – were you hesitant?

Well, that was Warner Bros; they were ones who wanted to make a sequel. They wanted to make it right away and I said, “Forget it.” The first one was a really hard movie to make and we got no support from anyone while we were doing it, which made it three times as hard. And then when they said, “We want to make a sequel” I said, “Not me, I’ve had it with these Gremlins – get somebody else.” So they started working on their proposed sequel the next year, but they never could come up with a script or a reason to make the movie. Then, six years later they said, “We’ve been through everybody in town, we want you to do it... and we need the picture for next summer. If you agree to do it, we’ll let you do whatever you want.” So I did. Then they said, “We didn’t mean having the audience leave the theatre because they think the film is broken!” and they were very upset about us making fun of the merchandising.

When Explorers bombed you complained that it hadn’t found its audience, with the advent of DVD does it have a chance?

No – I don’t think there’s an audience for that picture. I was disappointed, but I didn’t get to finish the movie. The studio changed hands while I was making it and the new people wanted it out a couple of months early and my contract specified that I had a couple more months to work on it and they said, “Well sue us!” [Peter] Bogdanovich had just sued Universal over Mask and it was a very ugly thing. It was in the papers and it didn’t help one little bit. I said, “No, I guess I’ll just try and get the picture finished in time,” so what you see is a rough-cut. We had a preview and we couldn’t change it because they were already printing the reels. I regard it as a movie that I never got to finish.

The ’burbs was another tricky sell. It’s a very difficult movie to categorise…

It is, and the thing with The ’burbs was that it was made during a writer’s strike – we couldn’t have the writer on the set to change anything, so I figured, “Well if we’re going to be in a situation where we have to improvise we should do the movie in order.” We did it on the Universal backlot so we could shoot the movie in the order in which the scenes took place. Then if people wanted to ad lib or change their characters they could do it in an ongoing fashion. So a lot of the movie is just behavioural stuff, just about the characters – it’s a very small story. The story used to end with the Tom Hanks character getting taken away in the ambulance and when they cast Tom Hanks they said, “Well you can’t do that to Tom Hanks, you have to have a different ending.” So we filmed a number of endings.

When you made Matinee did you not want to go for the Ed Wood approach and make a straight biopic about William Castle?

We couldn’t really call him William Castle because Castle didn’t go to Florida and he didn’t really make those kinds of pictures – Castle didn’t make those Jack Arnold science fiction movies, he made horror pictures. So in order to tell the story that we told we had to falsify it, we had to make the John Goodman character into a composite. He’s really a little bit of Castle, a little bit of Roger Corman, a little bit of Ed Wood. But, again, that was a movie that almost didn’t get made. I had it at Warner Bros for years and they didn’t want to do it, we went through a number of drafts and then we started to get some foreign money and we got it up and running. Then, when we were about to shoot it, the foreign money just wasn’t there – as so often happens with foreign money. Universal came in and picked up the tab, but Universal was really not the right studio for that picture because it was not a big, mass audience, 3,000-theatre-opening movie.

In a way it was just a little art movie. It got a big saturation opening and then obviously there weren’t enough people to support it and it just disappeared, but I was lucky to get to make it at all.

I know that you didn’t write the script for Matinee – but the film looks quite personal…

I was the same age as the kid in the movie and his room looks like my room did – a lot of the props are props from my garage and, yeah, I only wish that some filmmaker had come to my town. There are certainly biographical things in there.

When it came to doing Small Soldiers technology had advanced considerably, and you used a lot of CGI in the film. Did this make it less challenging than something like Gremlins or The Howling to make?

The interesting thing about making these movies is that the technology is different every time you make a picture. Sometimes I do TV shows or commercials just to see what’s going on with technology. By the time I got to Small Soldiers the technology was way beyond anything that I had done on The Howling or Gremlins. We actually ended up using a lot more CGI than we had planned – and we had Stan Winston do these puppets of the characters. But it ended up being a lot more efficient to just shoot the background plates and put the soldiers in there with CGI. It was less time consuming and, in the end, I think it was actually less expensive as well.

Was it a long process to make your most recent full-length feature film, Looney Tunes: Back in Action?

It took me a year and a half to do the picture and, frankly, it wasn’t much fun because the people I was working for didn’t particularly care about cartoons. They didn’t really understand the things that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck can do and still be in character. If they don’t have their character then they don’t have anything – it might as well just be a bunch of Terrytoons or Woody Woodpecker up there.

Just trying to keep the movie on the straight and narrow so it didn’t look like we were doing Space Jam 2 was difficult – there was a lot of contention on it and it took forever. There was a year for pre-production, then we shot for half a year. Then we were in post-production for a year, and it’s a comedy so you have got to look at the same jokes over and over and over. Around the 28th time, no matter how funny the joke was the first time around, you can’t help but second guess yourself and say, “Is this really that funny? I’m not so sure anymore because I’m so sick of seeing it.” We ended up changing jokes just because we were sick of them – and I don’t know if we put in the best joke, because the joke we took out might have been better. But we finally got to a point where we just couldn’t stand it anymore. You just can’t watch a movie that often and have any objectivity about it.

Originally published in Dreamwatch 148, January 2007.