Can any introduction be sufficient for a legend of Roger Corman’s standing? Still keeping busy at the age of 82, the man who launched such Hollywood heavyweights as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Joe Dante, finds himself the subject of a new DVD box set. The 15th September release collects such horror hits as The Haunted Palace, Premature Burial and Masque of the Red Death and bundles them alongside such non-genre work as Five Guns West, Gunslinger and the Peter Fonda biker epic The Wild Angels. Calum Waddell caught up with the grand old man of exploitation to discuss a life in B-movies and his upcoming production of Death Race…

Tell us about Death Race, the upcoming remake of the classic Death Race 2000…

Well, we just showed a product reel of it at Comic Con in San Diego. Paul Anderson, Jason Statham, Joan Allen and I all flew down there for a panel discussion and we got a very good reaction from the 6000 people in the audience.

Of course, the story comes from Death Race 2000 but this is a much tougher, and harder, picture. It has a streak of ironic humour, as well as some social commentary, and I would say it does a good job of paying homage to the original. But, certainly, you would be wrong to expect a straight remake. In fact, I think that it is a sign of the times that Paul chose to direct a much harder-hitting, and more intense, sci-fi/action picture. I think it will do very well.

The new Roger Corman Collection box set explores your work with American International Pictures (AIP), and includes such movies as The Haunted Palace, The Premature Burial and Masque of the Red Death. How did your time with AIP, and your Poe adaptations, begin?

What happened was that AIP was doing a series of low budget black and white horror and science fiction films, shot in about 10 days for around $90,000. They would usually pair two of these B-films together as double bills and they were doing fairly well with this – but not brilliantly. So they wanted me to do two for them but I was getting a bit tired of that and I saw that the grosses, whilst still profitable, were dipping a little bit.

Eventually I told them that the concept of double bills was coming to an end and I said that I would rather take $200,000 and shoot for 15 days and do a colour picture. They asked me what I wanted to make and I said The Fall of the House of Usher because I had always enjoyed the works of Edgar Allen Poe. They agreed because they were an up-and-coming, small company and they realised that doing a picture such as that might allow them to move up a notch and be seen as bigger than what they were. We even shot these Poe movies in widescreen and utilized some fairly big sets – to give the impression that they were a lot more lavish than the budget allowed.

Is it true that you were inspired by Mario Bava on some of your Poe movies?

Actually I was not familiar with Mario Bava’s work until we did The Pit and Pendulum. Jim Nicholson, who was the head of production at AIP, had seen a Mario Bava film called Mask of Satan and there was an English actress called Barbara Steele who starred in it. Jim was very struck by her so he arranged a screening of this film at his house and he invited me over to have dinner and to get my opinion on Barbara because he thought that she could play the lead in The Pit and the Pendulum. Well, I thought she was excellent in the Bava picture so we hired her. I was very impressed by the work of Mario Bava from that day on and I think that he was an excellent director.

Can you talk about making The Terror? That is probably the most famous example of you pulling your resources together and shooting a film very cheaply and quickly with the help of some friends…

What happened was that I had a little bit of money and free time. I was doing one of the Poe pictures and I hired Boris Karloff to work two days on the sets that had been built for the previous film. Then I brought in Jack Nicholson to play the lead. The story for The Terror was conceived very quickly over a weekend. We intended to shoot the rest of the picture once I had some more money and had completed the script. So I shot about 30 pages in two days.

I did some shots inside a castle and then my ace assistant at the time, Francis Ford Coppola, came along about a month later and shot a large portion of the picture. Then Francis got a better deal at a larger studio and everyone else worked on it in bits and pieces, developing the script and so forth. Then finally, on the last day of shooting, Jack Nicholson came up to me and said, “Roger, every idiot in town has directed a part of this picture. Will you let me direct the last day?” I said, “Fine Jack, here you go.” [laughs] The picture does not make a great deal of sense as every director brought a new style and modified the script. But weirdly enough, that picture has been successful and some critics have even taken it seriously. None of us took it seriously though. [laughs]

Your psychedelic movie The Trip had the honour of being banned in the UK for over 25 years because it was felt that it glamorised drug use. How do you feel about that?

I never understood the fuss over that movie! The Trip was screened at the Cannes film Festival and at some point they cut out almost all of the psychedelic scenes, which was the core of the picture. That made me furiously angry and I’m still bothered by it now. I have good memories of that film: Jack Nicholson wrote a great script and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were very reliable actors.

The Roger Corman Collection is out on region 2 DVD on 15 September 2008. Death Race is released in US cinemas on 22 August 2008 and UK cinemas on 26 September 2008.