Joe Dante's back. The irrepressible director who brought anarchic B-movie-isms into the mainstream via The Howlingand Gremlinsreturns after a long gap with The Hole. He tells TARA BRADY about Hollywood interference, bad 3D and the struggle to get films made "There are far more people around telling you how to do your job. These are people who wouldn't even go to see your movie if they weren't working on it"
DURING THE 1980s, as a gold rush of kidult entertainments yielded up such perennial delights as The Gooniesand Indiana Jones, movie patrons around the planet seemed to decide that Joe Dante was the new Steven Spielberg. Better yet, he was the new old Spielberg, a more mischievous version of the director behind Jaws as distinct from the Spielberg who made The Color Purple.
Dante's appreciation of 1950s sci-fi classics and matinee fare was, in turn, not lost on the similarly inclined E.T. director, who hired Dante to direct a segment of a portmanteau movie adaptation of The Twilight Zoneand to develop an old-fashioned invasion picture called Gremlins.
"I was never going to make it as a member of the brat pack," says Dante. "I appreciate all Steven did, but I was really from the scruffy end of town. I just happened to come around at the moment when B-pictures suddenly became A-pictures."
The rest ought to have been history. But while Dante has, in the interim, scored mainstream successes with Innerspace, The 'Burbs, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, he has, more often than not, struggled to get projects off the ground.
"I've had difficulties," he nods. "But that didn't start happening until the late 1990s. It's never been easy. I don't think that Dario Argento or George Romero or John Carpenter have had an easy time. All of those guys have a chequered history of being kicked off films. Tobe Hooper has been kicked off a whole load of films. So it's tough. You've got to stay in the business and that's hard in itself.
"But any Hollywood director will tell you that there's more interference now. There are far more people around telling you how to do your job. And these are people who wouldn't even go to see your movie if they weren't working on it. That can be very vexing."
If anything, Dante suggests, the studios are getting progressively worse. "It's harder when you get to my age," says the 63-year-old. "This is a very ageist industry. They don't like to hire older directors because (a) they won't do what they are told; (b) they get a bit more money; and (c) they'll confront you. They'll say you don't know what you are doing.
"It's easier to hire some young guy who doesn't know what he's doing. He can be bullied around. He will take direction."
Joe Dante, a lifelong fan of killer B-movies, was born to professional golfers in New Jersey in 1963. His father, also Joe, was the author of The Four Magic Moves To Winning Golf, a classic of its genre and a consistent source of amusement and debate among PGA players since its publication.
"My father was a golfer and his father was a golfer," says Joe jnr. "And from those genes you get a golfer that wasn't all that good - me. He was good. I wasn't. And I wasn't that interested. To his credit he didn't insist, and he was very supportive when I said I wanted to make films.
"He'd be dragged to giant monster movies. The poor guy would work from eight in the morning, then come back and he'd let me drag him to Tarantula. That's dedication."
Monster movies and the Cold War would prove to be lasting influences. "A movie called Them! was the first that got me," he recalls. "The one about giant ants. This was the radiation era. We were all told that radiation could kill us. We were also told that the bomb was going to drop at any minute. Every time a plane went over you would listen for the whistle to go. The fear was instilled in us. Then I'd go to these films and be up all night with nightmares. My mom would ask me: 'If they give you nightmares why do you go?' And I couldn't help myself. I was just fascinated."
Like Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard and countless others, the young Joe Dante would first hone his film-making skills under the tutelage of schockmeister par excellence Roger Corman. The picture was Piranha.
"Roger was notoriously cheap," laughs Dante. "That's why he now owns half of California. He would tell you that you couldn't have a generator. We had to line up cars and point lights at them. That couldn't work. So you'd find a way of hiding a generator in the budget.
"That was great training. All those lessons. You thought: 'I'll never need those lessons when I work for a big studio.' But you do. You use all those things you learned about how to avoid using a reverse shot or whatever."
These practices have, indeed, served Joe Dante well. Although his unique, anarchic brand of family spook pictures has fallen inexplicably out of favour with the studios, the producer-director has continued to produce fantastic work, including a recent adaptation of James Tiptree jnr's sci-fi classic The Screwfly Solution, part of the Showtime network's Masters of Horrorseries. He has, additionally, been beavering away on new technologies, creating Haunted Lighthouse, a short 4D film (that's 3D with physical effects) for SeaWorld theme parks.
"I have a romantic notion of 3D from the early days," he says. " It Came from Outer Spacechanged my world. But it died away because the presentation wasn't up to scratch. It involved two prints, and if you spliced one you had to splice the other. Then they brought it back in the 1980s with this technique involving a prism, but that was too dark. Now it has really improved with the digital thing. It's not for everyday use, but it's a great storytelling tool for certain pictures."
It is, sadly, rather typical of Dante's luck that as soon as he had persuaded his producers to allow him to shoot The Holein 3D, everyone else decided to tweak their movies into that same format. As a result, The Hole, a marvellous family-oriented mock horror, is still awaiting release in the US, where digital screens are suddenly backed up with faux 3D projects.
"Suddenly this wild card came along," says Dante. "All these movies that weren't actually shot in 3D started to convert. Suddenly there were no screens to show it in the US. It's sad, too, because people go and see those bad 3D films, and they're dark and hard to watch. So then people say I won't go back and see one of those. They have this great technique and they are going to ruin it."
No matter. The Hole 3Dmakes for a delightful, properly scary all-ages picture, the likes of which we haven't seen since, well, when was the last Joe Dante film again? "It's my first feature since Looney Tunes back in 2003," he says.
"People look at this big space in a director's career and they say 'Oh, was he in rehab? Did he fall off a mountain?' The truth is I was working on pictures. But that doesn't mean I actually got to make them."
We're ecstatic that Joe Dante is still slugging it out, still bringing his uniquely anarchic sensibilities into the multiplexes. But doesn't it get frustrating for him? "Oh, it's worth the fight," he says. "It's just a shame it has to be a fight. If you were hiring a guy to build your house and you began telling him how to do it, that would be a waste of money. So I'm going to keep building houses."
