Joe Dante: Director's Reel

Director Joe Dante talks about his making his most iconic films: Gremlins, Piranha, Explorers and more.

Video Transcript

- Ow!

- Did you get bit?

- Ouch! Ow!

- Dad!

- Stay back!

- Dad!

- Stay back!

- Dad! Dad!

JOE DANTE: I was convinced while I was making it that it was gonna be the worst movie ever made, and it was gonna kill my career. And I didn't even go to the wrap party. I was so desperately editing the picture night and day, living in the editing room. And surprisingly, it turned out to be not bad, and it made a lot of money, particularly in South America.

There were no illusions about it being a "Jaws" rip off to the point that we made a specific reference to "Jaws" in the main titles by having somebody playing a "Jaws" videogame just so we know that you know, and we want you to know that we know that this is a rip off. So relax.

- Oh, my!

- What is it?

- It's your new pet.

JOE DANTE: Well, the biggest question was, how are these gremlins gonna be created? And we flirted briefly with the idea of putting monkeys in suits, and we got a rhesus monkey and put a gremlin head on him. And he ran all over the editing room and shat all over everything. And we realized that that wasn't going to work.

So it became basically up to us to pioneer some sort of new kind of puppeteering, sort of on the muppet vein, but it had never been done to this extent before. So we were really basically R&D-ing our movie while we-- while we made it.

[CACKLING]

And it was complex, because all the sets had to be built up on stilts, and the puppeteers were underneath the sets, or behind furniture, or behind walls, doing their puppeteering by looking into little video monitors with the picture reversed. And they would use their hands to manipulate the eyes, and they'd have mouths, and the arms, and the ears, and you'd have to get it all in sync. And it wasn't any one person doing all these things. It was all a group of people, so they all had to be copacetic about what-- what they were doing, and there was much trial and error.

- I christen thee the Thunder Road. The Thunder Road!

JOE DANTE: Ethan just came to an audition with some other kid who was an actor friend of his. And he wasn't an actor. He was just a kid with braces. And he was awkward, and funny, and he was kind of cute. And it was sort of like, well, let's-- let's see if he can-- let's give him a test, see if he can act. And he was very endearing, and the studio said we've got to have lots of tests. And we tested every-- every slick child actor in town, and Ethan Hawke, the kid who never acted before, got the lead in a Paramount picture.

And I think when the movie didn't do well he thought it was his fault. Unfortunately, the-- what got released of "Explorers" is the rough cut of the movie, which we never got to refine. We never got to "find the movie," quote, in the editing room. It's just-- it is what it is.

Not many people got it. Although, over the years, it's become, you know, a very popular and beloved movie, but it's-- it's the movie of mine that I-- I revisit the least, because it's-- it's just painful to watch what is an unfinished version of what I wanted to do.

- I'm in here inside you, inside your body.

- Oh, god. Oh, god! Somebody help me! I'm possessed!

JOE DANTE: It's a movie that I had really a tremendous amount of fun making. Directing Marty-- the thing that's great about it is that he does like to do a lot of takes, and so it's not like you're gonna get off with the first take.

- Are you feeling all right?

- Would I be in a doctor's office if I was feeling all right?

JOE DANTE: The scene in the doctor's office, where he's waiting to see his doctor-- Andrea Martin and Joe Flaherty are sitting next to him-- is a reshoot of a scene that we had done with two other extras. It's the same scene, and it's the same dialogue, but it didn't work, because he didn't have the-- the rapport with the other extras that he had with his SCTV people. And so there-- there was a lot of that kind of thing.

- Hey.

- Whoa! Whoa!

JOE DANTE: Tom, who was-- had just made "Big," he was concerned about playing a father. He thought maybe that would mean his leading man days were over. His "Bachelor Party" days would be behind him. And so he kept saying, does he really have to have a kid?

And-- and we said, yes, he does. He has to have a kid. That's part of the plot.

- All right, this is what I need, Carol. I need this. And you'll see. At the end of the week, I'll be a brand new human being.

JOE DANTE: He and Carrie Fisher were-- they're such great ad libbers that their whole relationship is practically a-- one big ad lib. And not that Dana Olsen's script isn't good and not that lots of his script isn't on the screen, but there's a-- there's a tremendous number of really funny moments in the movie that are completely off the cuff. And I think audiences sense that.

- For that, my little friend, we'll just have to cut you.

JOE DANTE: When Chris came in, he had an idea that he wanted to play it wacky, and he wanted to have long hair, and he wanted to look like his character in "The Gorgon" with the-- the big mustache. And I took him down to the set, and I said, you know, this is-- this is pretty austere. I need the formidable, forbidding Christopher Lee in order to be able to make fun of that. And then he got it right away, and then-- and then he played it that way.

Rick Baker didn't want to come on if he had to redo Chris Walas's "Gremlins," because it's-- what's in it for him? And so to induce him, we changed the story so that there was a genetics lab run by Christopher Lee. And they turn the gremlins into different kinds of gremlins, so all the designs and ideas that Rick had we could come up with, and we could make different kind of gremlins out of. And plus he changed the designs of Gizmo and the regular gremlins a little bit.

It was much more comprehensive, many more gremlins than they were in the first movie. More money for special effects so that we could have a-- the big scene at the end where they had the brain gremlin, voiced by Tony Randall, sings "New York, New York" with a machine called the Gilderfluke, which was able to record the-- the voice and then make the mouth-- mouth move, too, as if it's in sync. And we had a flying gremlin, and we had-- we had all sorts of stuff that we couldn't have possibly afforded to do in the other movie. And it's a pretty manic, crazy movie and one of my favorites.

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