Sept. 16, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:05:48
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here we go. | ||
| Rob Zombie, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate it. | |
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| Three from Hell comes out tonight. | ||
| Yes, finally. | ||
| It's such a crazy leap that you've made. | ||
| I mean, people know you as much now for your films as they do for your music. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| I've really noticed that when I'd be in an elevator. | ||
| The music fans, I can pretty much spot them. | ||
| But when some guy comes up to me in an elevator, it looks like he's a lawyer or something. | ||
| Which I have to get to grips with that because I'm old. | ||
| Every time a cop comes up to me, I'm like, what does this guy want? | ||
| I'm like, oh, he's like a fan because he's 30 years younger than me. | ||
| But like, yeah, when normal people are like, oh man, I'm so into this or that. | ||
| Because, you know, I figure like, you know, heavy metal music is very specific, but everybody likes movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you can never spot the fans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I can pretty much spot them. | ||
| What do you look for? | ||
| Metal fan? | ||
| Like, what do you see? | ||
| Like, what's coming your way? | ||
| Well, it's changed, but now it's always a guy with a shaved head and a long goatee. | ||
| That's very similar to MMA fans. | ||
| Yeah, nobody has hair anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, I swear sometimes I'm on stage, the fans are like, what's with the long hair? | |
| That's funny. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| That was rock and roll. | ||
| It was synonymous. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, not anymore. | ||
| What made you make that leap into horror films? | ||
| Well, I always wanted to make movies. | ||
| That was always my main goal in life. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Before music? | ||
| Well, it was... | ||
| Well, let me back it up. | ||
| I loved everything equally, but as a kid, it all seemed unattainable. | ||
| So it was all fantasy. | ||
| Like, oh yeah, I'm going to go to Hollywood and make movies. | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm going to have a... | ||
| Ben, like, no, you're not. | ||
| You're just living in some crap town. | ||
| You're gonna do nothing is what it felt like. | ||
| You grew up in Haverhill? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I grew up in Newton. | ||
| Newton over Falls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's so funny. | |
| I think when I was a kid and played ice hockey, we would play against Newton. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I think we wrestled you guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, God, wrestling, man. | ||
| I hated having to wrestle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| It's so exhausting. | ||
| It's the most exhausting. | ||
| It's like 30 seconds. | ||
| I'm like, that was the worst 30 seconds of my life. | ||
| Growing up, I mean, it's like you can have a crappy band in the garage with your friends, but it's not going to do a thing. | ||
| And then we had a Super 8 camera, so we'd make crappy Super 8 movies. | ||
| But none of it seemed realistic. | ||
| I thought my life was going to be, you know, world's worst bike messenger. | ||
| In New York City. | ||
| That seemed to be what I was destined for. | ||
| But then as the band started taking off, which seemed odd on its own, there was a chance to make music videos. | ||
| I'm like, fuck it. | ||
| I'm directing these music videos. | ||
| This will be film school for me. | ||
| And that's what it sort of became. | ||
| Did you have this thing that a lot of people have when things start going well for them? | ||
| You have sort of like imposter syndrome. | ||
| You're like, what the fuck? | ||
| Are they going to find out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| My whole life is like, ah, fooled them again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think everybody feels like that. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| I mean, because I was always so shy. | ||
| I was so shy. | ||
| I wouldn't even want to talk to people on the phone when I was a kid because that was too much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That one day I realized... | ||
| This is how I realized it one day. | ||
| In high school, I didn't associate with anyone. | ||
| No one remembers me because I was just invisible. | ||
| But me and my friends were sort of into punk rock in a place where no one knew what that was. | ||
| That was just like... | ||
| And then the day we graduated, we were hanging out around McDonald's, and the main asshole jock kid came up, who would be your worst enemy, and he was suddenly like, Hey man, I'm going to college. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where do you guys get your cool clothes and stuff? | |
| Like, wait a minute! | ||
| It was four years of torture from you and your douchebag friends, and now the day we graduate, we're like, Hey, you guys were... | ||
| So that's what I do. | ||
| Everyone's so fucking insecure. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| And then the next day, I was like, I don't care anymore. | ||
| Oh, that's crazy. | ||
| I'm a different person. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to forgive those people. | ||
| You know, the people that fucked with you in high school, it's hard to let that go and realize they just were probably tortured at home. | ||
| Well, you can't let it go because that's your motivation. | ||
| I'm always motivated probably by anger and revenge and things of that nature. | ||
| That's why when people want anti-bullying, I go, well, it might be anti-success later on in life. | ||
| Because, you know, people that get fucked with tend to... | ||
| Yeah, Chris Rock has a bit about that. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| It's certainly true for fighters. | ||
| Almost all the best fighters in the UFC have some story where someone was fucking with them when they were young and they had to figure out how to fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| What's the first thing we all do? | ||
| Take karate lessons! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Well, even Chris Rock's bit involved Steve Jobs and a lot of other people, like, do you not want Microsoft? | ||
| Yeah, no, it's super true. | ||
| It is super true, and it's also, it's interesting that you said that you had social anxiety. | ||
| So many people that become entertainers also had some form of social anxiety when they're young. | ||
| Yeah, I had to do this thing last, no, the night before last. | ||
| I was presenting this award to somebody at this event. | ||
| And, you know, I'm picturing, oh, the stage will be really big and high, you know, I can get up there, it's super impersonal, it doesn't matter. | ||
| And I get there, the stage is like lower than this desk, and it's like all the tables with people eating dinner right there. | ||
| I'm like, oh, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nightmare. | |
| I can't do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because you have to sort of be normal. | ||
| I used to freak out when I had to talk to bank tellers. | ||
| I used to like, you know, you're in the line. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense, right? | ||
| But the line of like, I'd have to deposit my check and I'd be in the line. | ||
| I'm like, four more people and I got to talk. | ||
| I totally know that feeling. | ||
| Fuck, it's so crazy. | ||
| I was like that about every... | ||
| I was like that with my own... | ||
| Not my family that lived in the house, but for like... | ||
| An uncle came over, like, I can't deal with Dylan. | ||
| I'm talking to Uncle Bill. | ||
| I'll be upstairs. | ||
| Call me when he leaves. | ||
| Yeah, and then it's crazy that a guy like you winds up singing in front of fucking thousands of people, playing guitar in front of thousands of people. | ||
| I wish I could play guitar, but I will sing in front of the people. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Oh, it's a festival. | ||
| It's a hundred thousand people. | ||
| I'm like, who gives a crap? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But there's two people out there that want to say hi. | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's weird. | ||
| Yeah, especially if they're right in front of you. | ||
| One of the weirdest shows that any comic ever has to do is shows where there's a really tiny audience. | ||
| Like the comedy store at one o'clock in the morning, and there's like five people. | ||
| That's brutal. | ||
| It's just so weird. | ||
| It's like 500 people, no problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Five people. | ||
| That's why starting, when people are like, oh, do you ever want to go back and play clubs and more intimate settings? | ||
| I'm like, no, no. | ||
| I want the shows to be bigger, as impersonal as humanly possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because I hated playing clubs and the people right in front of you doing that. | ||
| Oh, that's the best. | ||
| I know we do kind of suck, but can't you just go with it? | ||
| Give me a break, man. | ||
| Let us get our feet. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What kind of music did you guys play in the very beginning? | ||
| Well, when I started, I was living in New York City, and when my first band, White Zombie, started, I was working at Pee-Wee's Playhouse, actually. | ||
| I was a production assistant for Pee-Wee's Playhouse for the first season. | ||
| Did you know Phil Hartman? | ||
| No, I was a production assistant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| But did you see him? | ||
| I saw people around, because it was Phil Hartman, and it was Paul Rubens, obviously, and it was William Marshall, who played Blackula. | ||
| He was the cartoon king at that point. | ||
| And it was all these great people. | ||
| Larry Fishburne, Cowboy Curtis. | ||
| That's right! | ||
| I'm trying to think who else was there. | ||
| Wow, I forgot he was on it. | ||
| The only interaction I ever had with anybody was Paul Rubens, and I was standing there, and he walked by, and he goes, where's the bathroom? | ||
| I was like, it's right there. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That was it. | ||
| So, I forgot what I was thinking. | ||
| Oh, but anyway, I was hit sidetrack. | ||
| It's crazy that White Zombie was your first band, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are the odds? | ||
| It was weird, because we didn't play any covers, and we sort of, nobody really knew how to play when we started, and we sort of invented sound based upon completely not knowing what you're doing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's like any band, like the Ramones. | ||
| It's like, well, we know these three chords, but we understand, they instinctively understand catchy pop songs, even though it doesn't make sense. | ||
| Because when you try to learn a Ramones song, it doesn't make sense. | ||
| Even though it seems like, oh, these are really simple songs. | ||
| Because I've played them before, because I've done this Ramones tribute thing. | ||
| Like, oh, verse, chorus. | ||
| Wait, verse again, two choruses, then another. | ||
| Like, they're so catchy, but the structure is so odd, because you could tell they were just sort of... | ||
| Inventing this thing they were doing. | ||
| And that's how I felt with us. | ||
| Because I had this weird idea like, let's never play conventional drum beats. | ||
| Which is like saying, let's never make this song fun for anyone to listen to. | ||
| I got over that. | ||
| But it just, yeah, you just... | ||
| I don't know what I'm talking about. | ||
| Did you take any classes in the early days? | ||
| Well, I went to New York originally to go to Parsons School of Design for Fine Arts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But I got kicked out because my grades dropped too low, because I went from Haverhill to New York, so I was like, I'm just hanging out at Danceteria all night. | ||
| I'm not going to school. | ||
| Because Danceteria was amazing, because one night it would be, you know, Run DMC, like, before anyone knew who they were, and then it would be like Nick Cave, then it would be this. | ||
| It was like, I stayed there every night until 4 a.m. | ||
| And then we'd go to school and just, you know, fall asleep. | ||
| Or fall asleep on the train ride home to New Jersey, then try to get back. | ||
| So you never went to school for classical musical instruments or anything like that? | ||
| No, I never went. | ||
| I can't learn anything. | ||
| I think I'm incapable. | ||
| I just have to do it and figure it out and do it wrong a thousand times. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I'm just incapable. | ||
| Even as a little kid, if we got a game, I was incapable of reading the directions. | ||
| We would just, let's just make up our own rules. | ||
| We got a spinner and these little guys. | ||
| Let's just, you know... | ||
| It's like three lines of directions to learn how to play the Happy Days game. | ||
| We wouldn't bother. | ||
| You're giving so many kids out there hope right now, listening to this. | ||
| They're like, that's me! | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you're... | ||
| You can make it! | ||
| You can be... | ||
| You can be Rob Zombie! | ||
| You can be an idiot and make it. | ||
| I mean, I remember when I got kicked out of school, I was sitting in New Jersey. | ||
| I was probably... | ||
| 19, maybe 20. And I was just sitting there thinking, well, I did it. | ||
| I'm a fucking loser. | ||
| Because I had, you know, I was making like 100 bucks a week. | ||
| I got kicked out of school and I was sitting there in this crappy ghetto neighborhood in Jersey City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you're just like, what did I do to my life? | |
| It worked out. | ||
| Yeah, it worked out somehow. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Things just eventually get better. | ||
| You keep going. | ||
| I don't know how. | ||
| I guess I don't know how because it never seemed like it was going to. | ||
| White Zombie was a band that seemed like everyone hated. | ||
| And no matter what, we had to be literally the last band in New York City to get a record deal. | ||
| Maybe that's why we got it. | ||
| They're like, we're literally out of bands. | ||
| We have to sign them. | ||
| But even when that happened, there was always this weird thing, and maybe you could relate. | ||
| We offered a record deal with RCA Records. | ||
| Now, we're a band that hasn't got anything. | ||
| And I was like, nah, doesn't seem right. | ||
| I turned it down. | ||
| And then we got MCA and I turned it down. | ||
| I was like, I think we should hold out for Geffen Records. | ||
| Now, we have nothing. | ||
| There's people holding out for Geffen Records because they were the biggest at the time. | ||
| With no reason to be holding out. | ||
| But we got signed to Geffen eventually. | ||
| How did you have those kind of balls? | ||
| Because that seems like you would... | ||
| Well, I think it's balls mixed with stupidity at the same time. | ||
| Because I know I could be my own worst enemy. | ||
| Because even when I signed to Geffen, you know, I come up with an album title. | ||
| They're like, really? | ||
| You're going to call it La Sexorcista, Devil Music Vol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
1? | |
| Is this just to guarantee we don't get any good placement on the album in stores? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| And then they're like, well, let's hire so-and-so to direct a video. | ||
| He just did the naming some big, the White Snake video. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm going to do it. | ||
| And they're like, oh, God. | ||
| This idiot. | ||
| But it all worked. | ||
| It's crazy, though, that you passed on two legitimate record companies. | ||
| I mean, most kids, when they're starting out, are so, you know, you're like, holy shit, this is our chance. | ||
| I didn't think they were good enough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Even though we weren't good enough for anything either. | ||
| I don't know what that thought was. | ||
| Well, maybe you just... | ||
| I mean, I'm not a believer in fate, but if Kind of seems to fall into place for you it Yeah, I don't know It's like I feel like my whole life is just like I could have gotten hit by that car. | ||
| I just didn't I You know? | ||
| Because I just stopped one second short from actually stepping in front of the speeding car and made it. | ||
| So you always wanted to make movies, though? | ||
| That was always something I wanted to do, for sure. | ||
| But that seemed completely undoable. | ||
| Because it was just like Hollywood and movies. | ||
| I mean, it feels so far removed. | ||
| I mean, living on the Lower East Side, playing CBGBs and being broke, that seems doable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that actually what inspired me there is I would see so many bands, I go, well, they suck. | ||
| I mean, we... | ||
| At least better than they are. | ||
| That was, I guess, the motivation I had. | ||
| But movies just seem like no way. | ||
| That works for comics, too. | ||
| That's one of the best things. | ||
| Richard Jenning once said that about open mic nights, that really bad comedians are great because they inspire people to try it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| I think I have so many friends that are comics that I've always become good friends with over the years. | ||
| And I think it's so similar. | ||
| I can't imagine standing there trying to tell jokes that people aren't laughing, but I also can't imagine standing there playing songs that nobody wants to hear, and they're just looking at you like... | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's kind of similar. | ||
| Well, the thing is, I think it's probably even harder, maybe, with songs that nobody knows. | ||
| Because people will listen to jokes because they make them laugh, but songs that no one knows, and a band that no one knows, like, man, you've got to figure out a way to rope these people in. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I always figured like... | ||
| I was always visually oriented, so I always made sure the band had to look a certain way and act a certain way. | ||
| The way I wanted them to be, you know? | ||
| I thought at least there's that. | ||
| At least you can go, this is awful, but look at these maniacs where, you know, everybody's hair is down here and they're going crazy and no one else is going crazy in the club, but they are. | ||
| At least it's, you know, an entertaining train wreck to watch, at least, you know. | ||
| What kind of films did you like when you were growing up? | ||
| I mean, when I was a kid, I would literally just get the TV guide because we're talking like, you know, the early 70s. | ||
| And I would circle everything that I was going to watch for the week. | ||
| Like I would plan it out. | ||
| It wasn't random. | ||
| It was like, okay, 1 o'clock, white heat's on. | ||
| I'm going to watch that. | ||
| Beneath the Planet of the Apes comes on at 4. | ||
| We're going to jump to that. | ||
| Then, you know, we're going to take a break to watch Gilligan's Island. | ||
| Then I'm going to come back because Good and Bad and Ugly is on tonight because it's Clint Eastwood week. | ||
| And I would just plan it out the whole week. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| I would just watch everything. | ||
| Kids today will never understand TV guides. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Never understand. | ||
| And the ones that would come with the Sunday paper, you'd get the guide with the paper and you'd figure out what's going to be on. | ||
| It was the greatest thing ever. | ||
| We would look forward to what was going to be on TV. Remember as a kid, like, you knew Planet of the Apes was going to be on. | ||
| Like, the whole neighborhood was on fire because Planet of the Apes was going to be on. | ||
| Now it's like, whatever, it's on my phone right now. | ||
| It's always there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think there's something... | ||
| Don't you think, and I don't know how this figures into comedy, but I'm sure it does. | ||
| There was something about having to be exposed to everything because there was nothing else that I know as much about John Wayne movies as I do about horror movies. | ||
| Right, you didn't get to choose. | ||
| Whereas now everything's so compartmentalized that people just, like, if you hear a band, you go, let me guess what your favorite band is. | ||
| The band you sound exactly like because you have no other influences. | ||
| As opposed to a lot of metal bands I know that are huge, they go, well, my favorite band was actually ZZ Top, so we just decided to play ZZ Top riffs really fast, and that's how we created this. | ||
| But now everybody's just so like, I only like this. | ||
| Yeah, you get in those confirmation bubbles, where everybody else likes what you like, and you just... | ||
| Operate in the same circles. | ||
| Yeah, you can get real weird that way. | ||
| Well, it's weird. | ||
| But if you're taking influences, stealing things from everywhere, you can put them together in a new way. | ||
| But if you're like, I only like metal, I only guess you sound like metal. | ||
| Well, that's the cool thing about the radio, right? | ||
| I mean, I've been recently listening to Spotify, which I never listened before, but listen to streaming services. | ||
| I get exposed to, you know, there's like a channel. | ||
| Like, there'll be a Rob Zombie channel, and there'll be a bunch of other shit on it as well. | ||
| Like, you know, there's Led Zeppelin Channel, and you hear some weird music that you didn't expect from some bands you didn't even know of. | ||
| And I miss that from radio. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I just want to, because you want that moment of like, oh, whoa, what's this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's fucking cool. | ||
| I'm going to listen to that. | ||
| I didn't know what it was five minutes ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and now, I mean, because even as a kid, I mean, I hate talking like this, but I can't help it. | ||
| It's like, you know, like just FM radio is like, okay, the Allman Brothers, then Diana Ross, then Kiss, then ABBA. I'll just listen to all of it. | ||
| Because it's on the radio. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I remember growing up in Boston, remember WBCN? Oh, yeah. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They played one time, I forget who it was. | ||
| It might have been Mark Parenteau. | ||
| I forget who it was, who was the DJ. Oh, I heard that in a long time. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Was saying that this, look, this is not, it might have been COZ. It might not have been BCN. Anyway, whoever the DJ was, it was a rock station. | ||
| And they were like, look, this isn't rock. | ||
| But it's fucking good. | ||
| They didn't say fucking good. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| And that's why we're playing it. | ||
| They played Michael Jackson. | ||
| And I remember thinking, wow, this is so crazy. | ||
| They're going to play a Michael Jackson song. | ||
| But it was really good. | ||
| And so you're like, okay, I'll take it. | ||
| It's funny how you remember that, because I still remember them one morning brushing my teeth, and they're like, oh, we're playing this new band, The Police, his song Roxanne. | ||
| I thought it was like this, you know, black reggae band until I saw a picture of him. | ||
| Rest in peace, Rico Kasich. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| Lost him today. | ||
| Rico Kasich from The Cars. | ||
| That's a bummer. | ||
| That was a bummer. | ||
| Those guys are so... | ||
| The Cars is one of those bands where whenever you don't know what to listen to, you can always listen to The Cars because there's so many good songs and it's so good. | ||
| Yeah, he was such an interesting guy, too. | ||
| Such an oddity. | ||
| Tall and lanky with the sunglasses on. | ||
| And the supermodel and every song's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, they were weird. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| He was brilliant. | ||
| That's a bummer, man. | ||
| That's a bummer. | ||
| And he was cool, too, because I remember when he produced the Bad Brains record, Rock for Light, and I was like, Rick O. Kasich? | ||
| He's hipper than I thought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| So, like, movies-wise, movie-wise, like, when you were a kid, were you into horror films back then? | ||
| I was into everything. | ||
| But I love that for sure, but I, like... | ||
| I don't even know if we... | ||
| We definitely didn't call them horror movies. | ||
| We thought everything was a monster movie. | ||
| Like, oh man, check out this monster movie. | ||
| Like, that's just what we'd call it. | ||
| Because it was always like, you know, we had Creature Double Feature on Channel 56. Do you remember that? | ||
| Sure! | ||
| Yeah, that was like the... | ||
| Every weekend, it was like, oh fuck, it's Destroy All Monsters and, you know, whatever. | ||
| Creature Double Feature! | ||
|
unidentified
|
On Channel 56. So that was, yeah, so big time. | |
| That ruled our world. | ||
| So watching them back then, that's when you got the idea? | ||
| Well, I got the idea that I loved it and I wanted to do it, but it was the idea, like, yeah, I want to be an astronaut, too. | ||
| Like, it didn't seem like an idea that was ever going to happen. | ||
| Right, it was just something that you were really into. | ||
| Yeah, and it's really funny, too, this funny, weird thing, because at one time in high school, me and my friends filmed a sequel to Escape from New York, the John Carpenter film. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've got nothing better to do. | ||
| And then to be like, you know, however many, 20 years later that I remade a John Carpenter film, Halloween, was just so bizarre. | ||
| I guess I've been thinking about it for a long time. | ||
| But, you know. | ||
| That is kind of crazy. | ||
| It's weird, yeah. | ||
| It's weird shit like that. | ||
| When your first actual film was what? | ||
| Like 2004? | ||
| 2000. 2000? | ||
| Yeah, because the way it went down was... | ||
| This is a funny story too. | ||
| I made my first movie, House of a Thousand Corpses, at Universal Studios. | ||
| And it was 2000. It could have been even the tail end of 1999. I'm not sure. | ||
| The only reason I know it's 2000, I had a rap gif somebody gave me and they put a date in. | ||
| I was like, oh shit, it was 2000. So I made the movie with Universal Studios. | ||
| And once they screened it, we had our test screening, which I thought went great. | ||
| What do I know? | ||
| The head of Universal at the time came up to me and was like, we have to talk tomorrow. | ||
| I was like, oh man, that was not a good tone. | ||
| That wasn't a, you're so great, we want to give you a five-picture deal, tone of voice. | ||
| So the next day they dumped the movie. | ||
| And, you know, just basically booted us out. | ||
| What was the conversation? | ||
| They were like, basically this is unreleasable. | ||
| I don't remember word for word, but that was the conversation in a nutshell. | ||
| But at the time, too, you figure there was no horror coming out of Universal. | ||
| They were making like the Flintstones movie, and that was not the image they wanted. | ||
| This really vile sort of backwoods hillbilly murder fest where the bad people win, essentially. | ||
| I mean, horror films were sort of like not even a commercial thing at that point, in a way. | ||
| So then, which is funny now, if you go to Universal Studios Hollywood or Orlando, there's a huge House of a Thousand Corpses event going on in both theme parks. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I was there for the grand opening, like, that's funny. | ||
| Again, like, it's like a train, it's like, I get fired from here and now, you know, 20 years later, it's a theme park attraction in the exact place I got fired from. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Which is so weird. | ||
| What was the conversation like before you decided to do that film? | ||
| I mean, how did they let you do it? | ||
| Again, I think getting to make a movie for Universal Studios was such an amazing experience, but I think I was too naive to understand what was happening. | ||
| It'd be like you did one set of comments like, hey, we're going to put you on tour with George Carr. | ||
| You're like, cool. | ||
| I guess this is the way it happens, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And then it's after like, wow, I didn't really appreciate it. | ||
| It just went down, did I? Not that I took it for granted, but I had... | ||
| I had met with someone at the theme park about doing a haunted maze during their Halloween Horror Nights based on my album. | ||
| And then sort of by being in the offices was meeting people and having just meetings about stuff or I just didn't want to leave once I got in the studio. | ||
| I just loved being there even though I had no business being there. | ||
| And somehow I remember being in the guy at the time, his name was Kevin Mischer, his office Pitching him a movie I didn't have a pitch for. | ||
| I had a title, but nothing else. | ||
| And somehow it progressed from there. | ||
| I was like, really? | ||
| I told him kind of a cool title with a completely half-assed idea that I was making up as I was talking to him. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| What was the conversation? | ||
| I don't even remember. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| I wish I could remember it well because after the fact... | ||
| I'm like, how did this happen? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| This is like, your story is like the anti-ambition story. | ||
| It's like the anti-preparation story but super successful nonetheless. | ||
| Yeah, I guess the goal is just be vague with people. | ||
| Be vague and look cool. | ||
| And act like you don't care. | ||
| And I had that attitude too. | ||
| I remember once the movie was rolling, I was like, This is who I want to cast, and this is exactly what I want to do, and if you guys don't want to do it, that's cool. | ||
| Let's just not work together. | ||
| And they did it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like, that's a great pitch on my part, right? | ||
| And we shot it on the Universal backlot. | ||
| We were, like, right there, like, doing the whole thing, and big production, and it was weird. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| When it wrapped. | ||
| Like, final day, final scene, and that's a wrap! | ||
| Were you like, what the fuck just happened? | ||
| Well, the funny thing is, after we wrapped the first time, we had a little test screening within the studio, like friends. | ||
| Like, oh, we should probably punch up the ending. | ||
| So they gave me more money to reshoot the ending than I actually made my newest movie with. | ||
| It was like money was nothing. | ||
| You know, they're throwing money around like nothing. | ||
| I was like, oh my god, this is insane. | ||
| We were building these giant sets, doing all this crazy stuff. | ||
| It was after that that, you know, the problem started. | ||
| I wish I could remember these things better. | ||
| It's weird that I don't. | ||
| But what attracted you to this ultra-violent, psychopath, outcast, murderous style of movie that you do? | ||
| Because you have these almost mutant society, psycho-murder people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But people fucking love it, man. | ||
| I've always dug outsider mentality. | ||
| Anything that involved... | ||
| I think it started as a kid. | ||
| As a kid, because a lot of people can relate to this. | ||
| I didn't feel like I fit in. | ||
| I was weird. | ||
| I didn't fit in. | ||
| I didn't get what were the cool shoes to wear or the right freaking IZOD shirt. | ||
| I didn't understand. | ||
| I wasn't trying to be, you know, no one's trying to be weird, and they're like, oh yeah, I want to be weird and hide away because I'm weird. | ||
| No, it's like, I don't understand. | ||
| And I think when I would watch monster movies, the monster was always that mentality. | ||
| Like King Kong's like, hey man, I'm just trying to get along. | ||
| Why is everyone shooting at me? | ||
| And Frankenstein's like, hey, I was just born yesterday. | ||
| Why are you trying to kill me? | ||
| Like, and I think as a weird kid, you relate to the monster. | ||
| so as life went on and you know the i would always relate to the outsider then i would always relate to movies like taxi driver bonnie and clyde and be like yeah travis bickle you know he's he's the man you know and i would always be like anything anti-society anything and fuck you fuck everything that's normal right like revenge yeah yeah I was just into it. | ||
| I felt real similar when I was a kid. | ||
| I was always into monster movies. | ||
| I was always into something that just tore all the normal people apart and just ripped apart all the preconceived notions of what everybody thought was going to happen. | ||
| And then towards the end of high school when I discovered punk rock and you figure out there's an entire form of music where they're just like, go fuck yourself. | ||
| That's why we're here. | ||
| I was like, I'm in. | ||
| And so many other people as well. | ||
| Yeah, and it just flips your whole idea of what life is. | ||
| And then when I moved to New York, I was like, wow! | ||
| This is an entire city of people who don't give a fuck. | ||
| Yeah, that's where they come. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit about anything here. | ||
| It's amazing how your movies resonate with people. | ||
| In a fanatical way. | ||
| Read the comments on just the trailer for Three from Hell. | ||
| People are so fucking pumped. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| It's been a long journey because when my first movie came out, I think every review basically said something along the lines of, worst movie ever made. | ||
| I hate this movie. | ||
| And now people are like, dude, that's your best movie. | ||
| You've been chasing it ever since. | ||
| So it's just weird. | ||
| Same with White Zombie. | ||
| When our first Geffen, I still remember this, our first Geffen record came out, I saw the first review. | ||
| It was this magazine, Alternative Press, who two years ago gave me this Lifetime Achievement Award, and I had to read the review while I accepted the award. | ||
| The review said, this is the worst band ever. | ||
| I was like, ever? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It said, this is the worst band ever. | ||
| Ignore this band. | ||
| So there was something, you know, there must have been something. | ||
| Did you ever contact the person who wrote that? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Back then, I was just like... | ||
| I mean, I felt like maybe a few years later, once you were really successful. | ||
| I can't remember who it was. | ||
| I used to be upset by reviews until I saw who wrote them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then you go, that guy? | |
| A lot of critics are critics because they really wanted to be writers. | ||
| They just don't have a lot to contribute, and so they just shit on things. | ||
| And it's just like when you're young and you're new and you're reading it, you think that the guy's writing it all badass. | ||
| You're like, oh, this dude must look like Lemmy. | ||
| He must be this hard-ass guy. | ||
| And then you see a guy like, that guy wrote it? | ||
| Oh, fuck him. | ||
| And fuck everyone else who ever writes anything again. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| But the thing is about music is it's so subjective. | ||
| Someone who grew up wearing the right eyes, odd shirts, hanging with the cool crowd, your music's not going to resonate with them the same way it's going to be with other people that felt like they were outsiders. | ||
| I can only do what I do and I don't know what would be popular. | ||
| I don't understand popular culture in a way because when people are gushing over something, a movie or something, I say, I go, I hated that movie. | ||
| I know it made $500 million and it's everyone's favorite movie. | ||
| I go, I could barely sit through it. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of those being made. | ||
| Same with music. | ||
| Like, I'd be like, oh, I love the Velvet Underground. | ||
| Everyone's like, but what about... | ||
| And they'll name something like, you know, I don't want to bash anybody, but something so popular. | ||
| That makes me want to kill myself when I hear that. | ||
| Literally, it's sickening. | ||
| Do you like any films today? | ||
| Is there anything that you watch today that resonates? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I see stuff all the time. | ||
| And, you know, I mean... | ||
| What kind of shit do you enjoy? | ||
| I watch everything. | ||
| I mean, whenever there's something that's more like... | ||
| Smaller movies I really like. | ||
| Like, I was thinking about the other day about this time in the 90s where, like, you got movies like Napoleon Dynamite and American Splendor, which I thought, you ever see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I thought, Paul Giamatti is Harvey Picard. | ||
| This is like the greatest movie ever made. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a great movie. | |
| And Ghost World, those early Terry Zweigoff films, I was like, that's where I kind of my head was at, just weird movies like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, Napoleon Dynamite, to this day, is one of the greatest comedies of all time. | ||
| As soon as that movie started and the credits were food, I was like, this is like the greatest thing I've seen in a theater in like 20 years. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Well, I just don't understand why they never made a second one. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That didn't make any sense to me. | ||
| I'm like, this is a fucking franchise waiting to happen. | ||
| Like, him and the other dude, who was the guy who played his uncle? | ||
| Uncle Rico? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the fucking guy was amazing. | ||
| They were so, like, over-the-top but believable. | ||
| Like, everything about it. | ||
| When he's feeding Tina. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Come on, Tina. | ||
| It just doesn't seem like I could miss. | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| Yeah, well, I can see them doing it now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 50 years later. | ||
| They try to do that with Dumb and Dumber, remember? | ||
| They did it way, way, way too late. | ||
| And Jim Carrey's like 50, and everybody's like, this is just weird. | ||
| You're not young anymore. | ||
| You can't be a buffoon. | ||
| That's hard lightning in a bottle to recreate Dumb and Dumber. | ||
| Yeah, right, right, right. | ||
| It's like Step Brothers. | ||
| There's certain movies that just... | ||
| Right, you gotta kind of leave them alone. | ||
| I remember seeing Step Brothers and I was like, is it my imagination or is every single fucking thing in this movie hilarious? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, those two guys together seem like they can't miss. | |
| You know, in Talladega Nights, they were fucking amazing in Talladega Nights. | ||
| I love when a comedy's made well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because so often they're not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's what I liked about The Hangover. | ||
| If you turn the sound off and you just looked at it, it's a really good-looking, well-made film. | ||
| And then you turn on the sound and you realize it's hilarious. | ||
| But so many comedies are just so shitty. | ||
| What's that new Seth Rogen-produced film with kids? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Good Boys? | |
| Yeah, I didn't see that yet. | ||
| My fucking wife said it was amazing. | ||
| She said it was like, piss your pants laughing. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's good to know. | ||
| I need to go see it. | ||
| You didn't see it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I liked it. | |
| It was like a live-action South Park. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a good way to describe it. | |
| Did you see it? | ||
| Yeah, I watched it a couple weeks ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| You liked it? | ||
| Because it's R-rated. | ||
| Seth Rogen can't miss. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| Now, when you were a kid, you liked all kinds of stuff, but did you think if you wanted to make films that you would be making the kind of films that you're making now? | ||
| These, like, butchers? | ||
| Well... | ||
| I guess, since the first thing I made was that, and I was into it. | ||
| I mean, I liked, because what happened, too, was when I moved to Manhattan in, like, 1982 or something, I discovered when New York City was all second-run theaters and double features, so I could finally see the laundry list of films I'd never been able to see. | ||
| I remember the first time I, like, 8th Street Playhouse was a good example, where the first time I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre was on a double bill with Jimmy Plays Berkeley. | ||
| hendrix movie i don't know why that was the double bill but um i forgot about double bills yeah and i would go see like oh my god it was a she-wolf of the ss is playing with faster pussycat oh my god this is and i could because i could never see him because there was no vhs yet or or was so new that those movies weren't around that i just had books and i was just staring at books because back in the day you know it's kind of because with the uh this new movie three from hell you know it's playing on about a thousand screens so it's not like everywhere | ||
| Like, you can't walk two feet and it's on five screens. | ||
| And people are like, fuck, man. | ||
| It's like a 15-minute drive from my house. | ||
| I was like, I would literally drive for five hours as a kid if there was a movie I wanted to see. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| I'd ride my... | ||
| One time I rode... | ||
| Before I could drive, I rode my bike for like three hours to see Night of the Living Dead at a midnight screening because I'm like, I'm going to see this no matter what. | ||
| Because if you didn't see it, it was just going to Evaporate. | ||
| That's one of the things I love about people from Canada. | ||
| Canada, they drive everywhere. | ||
| I have friends in Alberta. | ||
| They'll drive seven hours to go see something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what you have to do. | ||
| You get up in the morning and that's your day. | ||
| You're driving somewhere. | ||
| And when I was younger, that was part of the fun. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| Yeah, it's an adventure. | ||
| So the concert's 30 hours away, so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you study or have you watched a lot of really old horror movies? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I watch, sometimes I feel like I'm searching for things to watch because I try to watch literally everything and I want to own everything. | ||
| So I have like a vault at home that has, you know, 20,000 movies in it. | ||
| Because I never, if somebody mentions something and I don't know what it is, I'm like, fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| And I like write it down and I immediately have to go like investigate it. | ||
| So when you say a vault, like an actual vault? | ||
| Like a bank vault? | ||
| No, I just call it a vault. | ||
| It's just a room that I built that just is nothing but like a movie library because I want to own everything. | ||
| So you have a physical copy of all these? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What format do you put them in? | ||
| Well, now they're DVD. I mean, they were Laserdisc and VHS, and then I started trading more. | ||
| Because what happens now, it's great that everything's digital, but if you go to iTunes, 99% of the things I want to see aren't there. | ||
| Because they're not, you know... | ||
| So you can do that thing now that was nice on Amazon where you can... | ||
| They will burn the movie on CD to own. | ||
| Because it'll be weird movies. | ||
| I was spent forever trying to find it. | ||
| I mean, I got it many years ago. | ||
| There was this movie called Dirty Little Billy with Michael J. Pollitt as Billy the Kid. | ||
| I was like, where do I see this? | ||
| Dirty Little Billy. | ||
| Yeah, it's this amazing movie from the 70s. | ||
| And finally, you can get it. | ||
| It's made to order CDs. | ||
| I mean, DVDs on Amazon and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When I was a kid, I was gigantically into horror films. | ||
| And I used to read Fangoria all the time. | ||
| And I remember they were getting into these... | ||
| They were slasher movies from, I guess, the 60s that I'd never heard of that were ultra-gore-fest movies. | ||
| God, I'm trying to remember who was the director, but there was a guy who was famous for these... | ||
| Probably Herschel Gordon Lewis, is that what you're thinking? | ||
| I think that is... | ||
| Like 2,000 Maniacs and Blood Feast and stuff like that? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Like, that stuff, I never was exposed to that. | ||
| I've still, to this day, I've never seen one of those films, but the magazines were covered with, like, people with axes and blood. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because things would play at the drive-in and then go away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's how I felt when the first time, I loved when 42nd Street in New York was the real 42nd Street. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I remember, it was so funny, me and my friend, my roommate back then, we'd always go to 42nd Street to see movies, because it'd be like, Cannibal Holocaust. | ||
| I would just see the post, like, what the fuck is Cannibal Holocaust? | ||
| And you'd go see this Italian cannibal movie, and you'd go, this is literally the most, I cannot believe another human made this movie. | ||
| And it blows your mind. | ||
| But I remember every time I went to 42nd Street, I saw a really bad incident happen. | ||
| Like, you could not go there. | ||
| We'd be waiting in line and like, oh, let's go get some french fries before the movie. | ||
| Two guys would start fighting at McDonald's. | ||
| One guy would just pummel the other guy. | ||
| There'd be blood everywhere. | ||
| I'd go, it happened. | ||
| Next time we'd go, we'd see a guy stab another guy in the theater while watching. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Literally, I never went there once. | ||
| And even right till I was recording my album before I moved, I remember walking to the studio, which was like maybe 43rd, and there was a dead body lying there, and they had just found him, and they were just starting to put the sheet. | ||
| So I actually didn't see the violin act, but I saw the dead body. | ||
| But he didn't care. | ||
| Like, New York, it was like New York, when I moved to New York in 82, still seemed like, you know, taxi driver New York. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was when it was. | ||
| It was a wild fucking west. | ||
| So exciting, because Haverhill was so boring in comparison. | ||
| Yeah, couldn't be more boring. | ||
| If its goal was to be boring, it... | ||
| Gold medal. | ||
| Yeah, it succeeded. | ||
| I remember, Haverhill was so bad that when we were kids, I remember, I don't forget, maybe this was around the bicentennial. | ||
| I think they were trying to drive business because Main Street, and you can't even blame Walmart back then, was dead. | ||
| There was nothing there. | ||
| It was just a ghost town. | ||
| And they're like, they just put all these banners up. | ||
| Haverhill, the all-American city. | ||
| But it was like the catchphrase is going to matter. | ||
| That's going to make people open businesses. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know. | ||
| I was like, this is so bad. | ||
| Time to sell flags. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I went to New York City for the first time in the 80s as well. | ||
| I'm trying to remember what year it was. | ||
| It was like somewhere probably around 82 or 83. And when we were... | ||
| In the city driving around, I remember thinking, like, this is the craziest fucking place I've ever been in my life. | ||
| The buildings were so big, it didn't make sense. | ||
| Pulling up to it, I remember we drove up on the West Side Highway, and you see the city coming up in the distance. | ||
| You see the buildings getting larger and larger as you get closer. | ||
| It's mental. | ||
| Didn't seem real. | ||
| I remember being on the sidewalk. | ||
| Now, this is coming from a place where a sidewalk means there's literally no other person on the sidewalk as far as you can see. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he was standing on the sidewalk. | ||
| It must have been uptown somewhere. | ||
| And it was like you couldn't move with people. | ||
| I was like, what is happening? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sworn. | ||
| I've never seen like this is how it is all the time. | ||
| Like I live in the street in Haverhill. | ||
| Like a car drove down it like once a day. | ||
| And it was probably your dad coming home from work. | ||
| Like there was just nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you had a time machine, though, and you went from 1982 and you said, hey, what do you think it's going to look like here in 2019? | ||
| You'd be like, fuck, man, it's going to be Mad Max! | ||
| There'd be fucking cars driving with black smoke coming out of them, people shooting people right on the street. | ||
| It's going to get worse. | ||
| It's not going to get better. | ||
| Yeah, the only thing I remember, right towards my end of being there, there was the Tompkins Square downtown, and that was where homeless people lived. | ||
| It was Alphabet City. | ||
| It was the worst. | ||
| Wait, I want to back it up. | ||
| When I first moved to New York, the first night I was there, this sounds like I'm making it up and I'm not. | ||
| The first night I was there, the dorm that I was in with all my roommates overlooked Union Square Park, which is like Needle Park. | ||
| You just went there to buy dope and that was it. | ||
| Now you go there because it's a farmer's market and it's beautiful. | ||
| And I heard this guy screaming and screaming and screaming. | ||
| I was like, Jesus Christ, what is going on? | ||
| Because it was like 100 degrees. | ||
| Of course, there's no air conditioning. | ||
| I look out the window and I watch these cops beat up this guy. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| And then they dragged him down to the subway. | ||
| And the next day, all these cops showed up at the dorms. | ||
| And it was this guy, Michael Stewart. | ||
| It became a really famous case. | ||
| They called him a graffiti artist and he had been beat to death by the cops. | ||
| And me and all my roommates saw it. | ||
| And the next day they came and took our statement and we all had to testify in front of the grand jury. | ||
| This is my first day out of Haverhill. | ||
| I witnessed a murder. | ||
| But again, it's like the same thing with my deal at Universal. | ||
| I was too naive and weird to really comprehend what I'd seen. | ||
| Were you kind of pumped? | ||
| Like, wow, things are happening. | ||
| I'm so jaded. | ||
| It didn't disturb me or seem like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what's wrong with me, but I am desensitized by all the violence I've witnessed as a child, I guess. | ||
| Would you see more violence before that? | ||
| Well... | ||
| There's one famous thing I remember as a kid. | ||
| There's two famous things I just saw. | ||
| When I was a kid, the family business that my mom came from was, like, carnivals. | ||
| Like, you ever see that movie, Carnie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With Gary Busey? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's exactly the life as a kid that I remember. | ||
| When I saw the movie, I was like, this is... | ||
| This was our life. | ||
| So that makes sense, this attraction you have to these drifters. | ||
| Yeah, it was always what I was surrounded by. | ||
| So that was the thing I remember as a kid. | ||
| Except it was around 1977, I think, because I remember Kiss Love Gun, it just came out. | ||
| Because I was all pumped about it. | ||
| And the family worked there. | ||
| My mom and dad and me and my brother had to work and sell food and stuff and I hated it. | ||
| We used to have to dip the candy apples and hand them to people and they've healed now but I had burns all over my hands because the apple candy would be so hot it would drip on my hand and burn my hands. | ||
| Anyway, I digress. | ||
| But one night there was the gambling tents which were all rigged of course. | ||
| And someone had some guy getting fleeced for all of his money and came back and lit the tent on fire. | ||
| And then suddenly, shit hit the fan. | ||
| Everybody that me and my little brother had been around all the time, it's like, boom, all these guns start coming out. | ||
| And you start hearing guns popping up. | ||
| And then the tents just went like nothing was fireproof. | ||
| So everything's on fire. | ||
| It's complete chaos. | ||
| And I was probably in fifth grade. | ||
| My brother was probably in second grade. | ||
| And everybody's screaming to run around. | ||
| And this guy was like, I don't remember his name, but he worked there. | ||
| He was like, hey, you guys should come over here. | ||
| And before he finished his sentence, somebody ran up and hit him in the face with a hammer and broke his whole face open. | ||
| It was just gushing blood. | ||
| And we're like, and then eventually my parents got us in the car and we left, which was, that was my parent. | ||
| My mom was like, we're done. | ||
| This is, we're not doing this anymore. | ||
| That was the last time we ever did it. | ||
| Wow, what a great way to go out, though. | ||
| But the best was going to school in September. | ||
| Like, what did you do this summer? | ||
| And that was my story. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We didn't go to Camp Winnipesaukee. | ||
| We were in a carnival riot. | ||
| What was the gambling tent? | ||
| Like, what kind of games are they rigging? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, everything's rigged. | ||
| Like, anything from... | ||
| And there's even a great scene in Kearney where... | ||
| A friend of mine who's in a lot of my movies, Meg Foster, plays the one where she's holding all the long strands of rope. | ||
| And she's training Jodie Foster like you pull the rope and it's connected to a prize. | ||
| And everything's rigged. | ||
| The weighted lead milk bottles you're supposed to knock down with a softball. | ||
| I mean, everything's rigged. | ||
| I mean, there's certain ways that you know how to cheat them so that when the guy's showing you how to do it, look, it's so easy to throw it like this, but there's a certain way you can throw it. | ||
| It'll work, but other ways won't. | ||
| I would never be in the gambling tents because they were actual gambling. | ||
| We were like little tiny kids, but it was probably roulette wheels, I'm guessing. | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| That way, you know, the guy spins it and probably gets something with his foot and it never stops on the number that the guy's got all his money on because he let him win a bunch of times or something. | ||
| So when the fire broke out and people started shooting, who was shooting at who? | ||
| I don't know what was going on. | ||
| Just chaos. | ||
| We're little kids. | ||
| You're not really comprehending this going on in fourth or fifth grade. | ||
| You're just like, that guy's now got a gun. | ||
| I hear gunshots. | ||
| Everything's on fire. | ||
| There's smoke. | ||
| People screaming. | ||
| This guy's now gushing brains out of the front of his head. | ||
|
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|
Fuck. | |
| I said there were two stories. | ||
| Oh, the second story. | ||
| The second story I kind of put in the new movie, Three from Hell. | ||
| This was like when I was in high school. | ||
| I was in the backyard rehearsing with my two friends, our band or whatever. | ||
| And we heard this screaming. | ||
| And it was a bright, sunny day. | ||
| It seemed like a David Lynch movie, Suburbia. | ||
| And this fat, naked guy was running down the street, covered in blood. | ||
| He had been stabbed a whole bunch of times. | ||
| Like people are mowing their lawns and looking at... | ||
| And I just remember a bloody naked guy running down the street screaming like a weird scream. | ||
| People scream weird when they get stabbed. | ||
| And so I put something like that in the movie. | ||
| But it just, yeah. | ||
| What happened to him? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
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|
I don't know. | |
| He was like, he was knocking on people. | ||
| And again, I was like, oh, it's weird. | ||
| And I just went back and we continued rehearsing. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Like, again. | ||
| That must have flavored the music a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I should be really bothered by things like that. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, there's a thing that happens when you see too much. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why cops and soldiers have some of the oddest sense of humor. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| Yeah, they've just seen too many bodies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, imagine the guys that have to come scrape up all the stuff off the road and put it in the bags. | ||
| Oh, man, geez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But yeah, that was the life I remember. | ||
| I remember my mom's brother. | ||
| He would always... | ||
| He didn't always do this, but sometimes he was a biker. | ||
| So he'd come over to the house and he had a chopper with iron crosses on it. | ||
| He kind of looked like he had a big mustache. | ||
| And I was like, this guy is badass. | ||
| Like, drive us around the neighborhood so everyone can see us. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of that stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is... | |
| So, when you were saying that you collect films, and you have films, did you go back to the really old ones, like Nosferatu? | ||
| Oh yeah, I love silent movies. | ||
| And now they're easier to get, because I always loved Lon Chaney, but so many of the films were hard to get. | ||
| I was showing my kids Lon Chaney two nights ago. | ||
| What movie did they watch? | ||
| Well, I was showing them the original Wolfman, and I was showing them Jekyll and Hyde. | ||
| I was showing them some of the... | ||
| Lon Chaney Jr. Well, Lon Chaney Jr. was Wolfman, but his dad, who was in Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback in Notre Dame. | ||
| Wasn't he Jekyll and Hyde as well? | ||
| That was Lon Chaney, right? | ||
| No, Frederick March. | ||
| Oh, it was? | ||
| Well, it depends. | ||
| There's the John Barrymore. | ||
| Silent Jekyll and Hyde, but you're probably not sure. | ||
| The Frederick March one is great. | ||
| It's so perverted. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| The prostitutes and stuff. | ||
| Isn't that the one you showed your kids? | ||
| Like from the 30s? | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| From the 30s? | ||
| After they watch porn. | ||
| Well, there's the boring one with Spencer Tracy. | ||
| Is it boring? | ||
| Just compared to the other one. | ||
| Because anything that's sort of like the pre-code stuff is really amazing. | ||
| We watched the beginning of the Spencer Tracy one because it was so strange. | ||
| There's actually, on iTunes you can watch a preview, but it's not really a preview in its old films because they didn't have previews back then. | ||
| So it's just a scene. | ||
| And it's a scene when he's becoming Mr. Hyde, but he doesn't look any different. | ||
| Yeah, he just kind of messed up his hair. | ||
| Looks a little meaner. | ||
| The Frederick March one is one of the best ones ever made. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| But Lone Chaney was like... | ||
| It was Phantom of the Opera, which is a really interesting one, because he put on some really painful makeup for that film. | ||
| I mean, he just invented everything, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The things you do. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how much the stories have been exaggerated by publicity departments over the years, but yeah, I mean, it's just incredible. | ||
| And movies like The Unknown or The Unholy Three, like you can get everything now. | ||
| Forever, it's like impossible to see these movies. | ||
| For a long time, I don't do it anymore, but I used to collect vintage movie posters, and that's what I would go after. | ||
| The Lon Chaney silent movie posters, because a lot of times I'd be like, there's only one of these in existence, and I was like, I gotta have it. | ||
| Then I realize I'm spending too much money on things. | ||
| Those old films, you know, when I was trying to show them to my kids, I was just trying to... | ||
| We were going from the 20s to the 30s. | ||
| There's a movie that's the original horror film that I found out was 1920. It's actually two years older than Nosferatu. | ||
| It was Dr. something... | ||
| Dr. Caligari. | ||
| Caligari. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, we watched a little bit of that, too. | ||
| But I just wanted to show them how weird it is, like the progression of film, particularly scary films, because when my kids were real little, my wife was out of town, and I said, do you guys want to watch a scary movie that's not really scary? | ||
| And they were nervous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How old were they? | |
| At the time, I think they were five and three, or maybe six and four, somewhere around there. | ||
| So I'm throwing down the test. | ||
| Do you want to watch it? | ||
| But I knew it wasn't going to be really scary, so I put on the original King Kong from, what was that, like 30? | ||
| 1933, I think, yeah. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| And we were laughing. | ||
| I was like, let me tell you something. | ||
| We're going to watch this, and it's so fake. | ||
| It looks so dumb. | ||
| I go, we're going to laugh. | ||
| And so we were cuddled up on the couch. | ||
| They were nervous. | ||
| And then once they saw the thing, they're like, that's it? | ||
| That's the monster? | ||
| I was like, let me tell you something, kid. | ||
| In 1933, this was scary for people. | ||
| They really thought this was realistic. | ||
| They thought this was amazing. | ||
| Do you ever have that moment you watch something, like say, I do this like Frankenstein. | ||
| Like you've seen it so many times that it's hard to watch it like you've never seen it before. | ||
| But sometimes I'll be watching something... | ||
| Frankenstein is killing Fritz and there's no music and he's just screaming. | ||
| I was like, this must have fucking been so intense because no one had seen anything like this. | ||
| They're watching this creature who they don't understand the makeup because no one knew how it was done. | ||
| Like especially because he kind of the first appearance of Karloff as Frankenstein, he kind of backs in and turns. | ||
| His head's flat. | ||
| He's got bolts on his neck. | ||
| The Jack Pierce makeup is so incredible that I was just like, people must have been running for the door. | ||
| Pull up a picture of what Boris Karloff looked like in that movie. | ||
| I haven't seen that in forever. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It was so good. | ||
| Also, it's so difficult for us to understand perspective. | ||
| To put yourself in their place back then. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| The lighting was incredible. | ||
| Now, we're used to seeing that. | ||
| It's so iconic that it becomes like... | ||
| But if you'd never... | ||
| I mean, never seen anything like that before. | ||
| I mean, I guess, going back to what we said a second ago, like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera and his Quasimodo, you kind of... | ||
| The bolts in the neck. | ||
| But that must have just been like... | ||
| Fucking cables for a battery. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| The posts on his neck. | ||
| Do you remember when they did a remake with De Niro? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I don't remember a movie very good. | ||
| I don't remember it either, but I remember it being terrifying looking. | ||
| Updated. | ||
| Yeah, he looked cool in that. | ||
| It's a tough one though with those movies because they got it so right the first time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the performances are like... | ||
| I really like Lugosi in Dracula. | ||
| And when you watch it... | ||
| I always feel like he's like Brando of that time because everyone else is talking like, yeah, well, they're still doing Vodkaville and they're way over the top and they're too much. | ||
| And he's doing this thing where sometimes you almost can't understand him because of his accent. | ||
| Like, wow, he's in this whole weird head trip and they're doing play. | ||
| Hey, listen, buddy. | ||
| You know, like the way they're talking. | ||
| And that's why nobody can remember... | ||
| David Manners who got paid ten times with Lugosi, but Lugosi is like this iconic thing like Marilyn Monroe. | ||
| I mean, this was so out of time with so special what they were doing. | ||
| Yeah, even in the film there's a scene where the woman had been bit and he's like, what's wrong? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's going on? | |
| He's so corny and over the top and in that, you know, the style of that era, but Lugosi is on another level. | ||
| A lot of those actors then seem very much like they were in the closet and they were trying to play with the woman. | ||
| And Lugosi has that vibe like, I'm going to fuck everything on this set before I leave this movie. | ||
| He just reeks of like, I'm Hungarian and I'm going to nail every actress in this film. | ||
| Yeah, and he's a fucking powerful vampire. | ||
| He bought into it. | ||
| He was in the role. | ||
| He was in the headspace. | ||
| And a lot of those movies, another good one is The Black Cat, where the same guy was in Dracula's, and he's so swishing over the top, and Lugosi and Karloff together is so intense. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| There's two different movies going on. | ||
| This weird Hollywood movie and this weird thing these other guys are doing, man. | ||
| It's like Brando in Apocalypse Now. | ||
| He's making a whole different movie. | ||
| Him and Dennis Hopper. | ||
| It's cool to just go back in time and see the progression of horror to go from those films. | ||
| I still think Nosferatu to this day is one of the coolest vampires ever. | ||
| It's so incredible looking. | ||
| There was no sort of benchmark before him. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, and he looked so fucking weird with the long fingers and he looked creepy. | ||
| And the way he would rise, remember when they had him on a board? | ||
| Oh yeah, it just was like straight up. | ||
| And he would sit straight up. | ||
| It looks incredible. | ||
| And I still, and I love the... | ||
| The Herzog remake with Klaus Kinski. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Werner Herzog did that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Kinski's so perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I forgot about that. | ||
| Because he's another crazy actor that just reeks of crazy right off the screen. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just hard to do a good monster movie these days. | ||
| I mean, I'm a gigantic Rick Baker fan, obviously. | ||
| Yeah, Rick's amazing. | ||
| He's coming on here, too. | ||
| Oh, is he? | ||
| I'm super pumped. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| His new book looks amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm so excited. | ||
| I'm getting them to promote that. | ||
| But when I was a kid, I wanted to be a makeup artist. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| It was one of the things that I wanted to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I studied Rick Baker, and I studied the early Lon Chaney days, like we were talking about. | ||
| And I just love the prosthetics in Star Wars and shit. | ||
| Which, by the way, I went to the Star Wars attraction yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you did? | |
| At Disneyland. | ||
| It's the shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| That fucking Star Wars ride. | ||
| The ride is incredible, man. | ||
| It's simulated though, right? | ||
| Yes, it's simulated, but you throw up. | ||
| Simulated rides make me want to just... | ||
| I won't throw up, but I'll feel like I want to for the rest of the day. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| So my kids were steering. | ||
| They got a chance to steer. | ||
| They were the pilots, and you're slamming into fucking... | ||
| Because they have to coordinate. | ||
| One goes up, one goes down, left and right. | ||
| So up and down is one kid, and left and right is the other. | ||
| Are they next to each other in the cockpit, or are they separate? | ||
| Next to each other. | ||
| Pretty close. | ||
| But they're screaming at each other. | ||
| Don't hit it! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| They're like asteroids flying. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| They're hitting shit. | ||
| But just the ride is fucking incredible. | ||
| I mean, you can see there's so much money poured into there. | ||
| And apparently there's a bunch of other ones that are in the process of developing, too. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| But I loved those movies. | ||
| And a big part of it was like the cantina scene. | ||
| If you went to that now, you'd be like, oh my god, it's obviously a mask. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like their face doesn't be like... | ||
| It's like that weird werewolf guy. | ||
| Yeah, but they're not moving. | ||
| But back then, I was like, this is amazing. | ||
| This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. | ||
| I can so clearly remember seeing that movie for the first time. | ||
| I remember coming out of the movie shell-shocked. | ||
| Everything I thought about everything just changed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Life will never be the same. | ||
| That's another movie that's so hard to put in perspective. | ||
| I've watched it with my kids now and it's like you gotta bring them back to the 1970s when this movie came out. | ||
| You don't get it. | ||
| Like back then this was fucking insane how good it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we had little competitions with our friends to see who could watch it the most amount of times. | ||
| I think I saw it like 13 times. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| Someone gave me a Blu-ray of the original before Lucas did all the extra stuff and ruined it. | ||
| Somehow they had cut together. | ||
| Somebody went to all the trouble of getting like a Japanese laser and they cut together a Blu-ray of exactly the movie as it was in 1977. What did he do differently in the new version? | ||
| Enhance some of the special effects. | ||
| He added that scene with the digital, you know, Jabba the Hutt. | ||
| And just like, there'll be like the Tauntaun that's like, there's just little robots and bullshit everywhere that wasn't there in the original. | ||
| And now, what seems so badass for effects in whatever it was 2000 now looks super bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cheesy. | |
| But the stuff from 77 still, that's why I always want to, like you watch 2001, you go like, how can this still look better than everything? | ||
| These are literally models shot in 1968 or something. | ||
| Well, Kubrick knew the limitations of the visual format. | ||
| And so he shot things in a way where he wasn't willing to compromise the way something looked to show you something. | ||
| Sort of like the King Kong animation. | ||
| That's the best they could do back then. | ||
| But Kubrick figured workarounds. | ||
| I just read this new book that came out, maybe six months ago, that's all about the making of 2001, and the book is so detailed. | ||
| I wish I could remember the title of it. | ||
| And it's amazing, the amount of time. | ||
| Stuff you take for granted now, just... | ||
| How they had to make the digital readouts on the computer screens. | ||
| Because that stuff did not exist at all. | ||
| So the amount of time that went into just simple background things that nobody cares about. | ||
| It's just mind-blowing. | ||
| Just the weightlessness scenes and how they did all that stuff. | ||
| Which still look amazing. | ||
| No, it's still an incredible movie. | ||
| And it's also a time capsule, right? | ||
| It's one of those films that it's great, but it's also great in a time capsule. | ||
| I love it because... | ||
| I love all of his movies for the same reason. | ||
| Because they take over the viewer. | ||
| Like most movies, they're like, you watch it and it's doing what the movie thinks will make you happy. | ||
| Whereas Kubrick's doing stuff like, well, this is what it would be like to be in space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the pace it's going to unfold at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, which is painfully slow at times. | ||
| Well, you can't get away with that today. | ||
| No, because people are too... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They don't have the attention span, I don't think. | ||
| And same thing with Barry Lyndon or Clockwork Orange. | ||
| It doesn't matter what movie it is. | ||
| The Shining. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like now if someone made The Shining, it'd go, it's great. | ||
| You gotta cut the first hour out of it. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Too much build-up. | |
| We're gonna start it with the red rum scene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Start it with a hatchet slamming into somebody. | ||
| The opening shot would be, you know, Scatman Clothers. | ||
| And then go three months earlier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then get with an axe. | ||
| Yeah, they would do that. | ||
| They would go three months earlier. | ||
| They would do that. | ||
| It's cool to see, though, those films, they did what they could do with what was available. | ||
| Whereas with now, the problem with CGI is they use it. | ||
| And they overuse it. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I mean, CGI can be phenomenal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| But it's a tool, and it's turned into a crutch. | ||
| And I see it with actors. | ||
| Like, you see actors a lot of time, and I feel bad for the actors, because you see actors that you go, I know these guys are great, but they're awful in this movie, because they didn't train to stand in a warehouse that's green and pretend to look at stuff. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| So they really... | ||
| Like, when you watch The Phantom Menace, you go... | ||
| Why does it suddenly seem like Liam Neeson can't act? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because he's like, look at that dot on the wall. | ||
| I mean, and you know these guys are incredible actors. | ||
| I was talking to somebody once, a kid that was in my movie. | ||
| He was in all the Spy Kids movies. | ||
| And he said it was so hard because they'd be on a green screen. | ||
| They'd be like, you're looking at that. | ||
| Well, we're not sure what you're looking at, but just stare at that dot and react. | ||
| He's like, well, what is it? | ||
| Is it a dragon or is it my mom? | ||
| What am I reacting to? | ||
| We haven't figured it out yet. | ||
| And he said he was always in a constant state of confusion as to what he was reacting to. | ||
| Well, it's hard, too, when you go back and you look at some of them. | ||
| You know what movie got it right that sort of didn't get enough respect in its time, but in time, as time passed, it's become more respected? | ||
| It's Starship Troopers. | ||
| Yeah, I don't remember that movie that well. | ||
| I thought you were going to say Forrest Gump. | ||
| No, but removing Major Dan's legs. | ||
| I mean, that's like when CG's awesome. | ||
| I thought, oh shit, they found a guy with no legs who's a great actor, because I don't know who Gary Sinise was back then. | ||
| How about the ping pong scene? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| There's a lot of CGI shit. | ||
| Stuff like that's amazing. | ||
| What I was getting at with monster movies, though, it's Pat McGee. | ||
| He's the guy who did that werewolf, the one that's out there. | ||
| He'll make them for you. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And we had this conversation about it. | ||
| We were saying that you can see CGI, and even if it's awesome, your brain knows it's CGI. That's funny. | ||
| I have that same thought, that it's something subliminally your brain knows it's all fake. | ||
| Yes, like Godzilla. | ||
| Whereas, like... | ||
| Yeah, like Godzilla, like when you know it's a guy in a rubber suit crushing things, like if you watch the original one when they cut in Raymond Burr, there's something so dark and fucked up about that movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Because everything's, that's real fire. | ||
| There's actually three-dimensional objects blowing up. | ||
| But when it's so big and fake, like I always say, like, what's scarier? | ||
| A giant CG creature that you know you will never see or like a maniac with a pillowcase over his head holding an axe coming at you. | ||
| Like your brain goes, that could happen. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Because the other thing is like, well, that's like Roger Rabbit. | ||
| That's not going to happen, you know? | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It might be cool or it might be big, but it's not... | ||
| Like one of the scariest horror movies of all time is Alien. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in the first few encounters they have with the creature, you don't even see the damn thing. | ||
| No, because it's... | ||
| You couldn't show it that much like the shark in Jaws, but when you see it, it's like it's actually there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you can feel that its jaws are right in front of Sigourney Weaver's face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's not like she's looking at nothing and her eyeline's a little off because it's a tennis ball and a stick she's looking at. | ||
| There's something about it really happening in the space that I think people can feel it. | ||
| And Sigourney Weaver, I think Sigourney Weaver in Alien is the greatest female action hero star ever. | ||
| Because you bought it hook, line, and sinker. | ||
| She was a scientist. | ||
| She wasn't supposed to be this heroine that's out there just fucking things up and killing everybody. | ||
| And she wasn't supposed to be super hot and sexy and young. | ||
| But she was hot enough. | ||
| Because she became tough. | ||
| I remember when Alien came out. | ||
| It was kind of like when The Thing came out. | ||
| And all the reviews were bad, if you remember. | ||
| Was it really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the reviews for everything are bad when you go back and go, oh, there's no redeemable characters. | ||
| They're all these cardboard characters. | ||
| They rip everything apart. | ||
| But it's like Harry Dean, Stan, and Yafit Kodo. | ||
| Fucking movie was amazing. | ||
| Great character actor doing these great roles, but it was like... | ||
| Now if they remade that, it'd be like... | ||
| Fuck the reviews. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| The reviews never mean anything. | ||
| They're just like so crazy. | ||
| The first time... | ||
| Was it Harry Dean Stanton that saw it the first time? | ||
| Who was it that saw it the first time where they climbed down into the... | ||
| They climbed down the stairs and it's... | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| You only see it for like a second. | ||
| But it was a physical thing. | ||
| But the point is, it was an actual guy in a suit. | ||
| And you knew by the way it was moving that it was an actual guy right in front of him. | ||
| And it took up three-dimensional space in real life. | ||
| And you could feel it. | ||
| And, you know, just like when the chest burst thing... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's an actual thing. | ||
| It's a thing. | ||
| It's fucking bizarre. | ||
| Or an American Werewolf in London. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| You see brief glimpses of this thing, like really quick, like one frame, one second of it, and then at the end of it, you see it, even when they kill it in the hallway or in the alleyway. | ||
| Spoiler alert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That, you know, you only see it for a couple seconds when it stares at her, and then they gun it down. | ||
| Yeah, that was like the heyday for effects. | ||
| Everybody I know who does effects, it was like the thing, American Werewolf in London, or the howling was like the thing that made every... | ||
| And Fangoria when that started, and you started really getting articles and stuff, and like Rob Bottin and Rick Baker became like rock stars to the horror nerds. | ||
| Well, the Rick Baker scene when he transforms into the werewolf in the chick's apartment, when he's in the nurse's apartment for the first time, and he's like, I'm fucking burning up! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| His back is popping. | ||
| And it's like bright. | ||
| It's a bright lit apartment. | ||
| That's what makes it weird. | ||
| Yes, and the hands stretch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Fucking wild man to this day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So weird. | |
| And then he tried to kind of recreate the actual makeup style werewolf with the Wolfman, with Benicio Del Toro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it just wasn't there. | ||
| The movie wasn't there. | ||
| It just wasn't quite good enough. | ||
| But there's one fucking badass scene where it becomes the Wolfman when they're in the insane asylum and they're doing tests on him. | ||
| Do you remember that film? | ||
| I don't remember that film that much. | ||
| I hate saying things because this was my thought at the time. | ||
| I remember watching it thinking, Benicio de Toro seems like he doesn't want to be in this movie. | ||
| Which is such a stupid thing for me to say because I don't know what the fuck he wants. | ||
| Because I think he's a brilliant actor and I really like watching it. | ||
| But it just had that feeling like I don't know what it was. | ||
| And I've talked to people connected with that movie and I don't think it was a great experience for people for some reason. | ||
| Maybe there's a lot of meddling. | ||
| Probably a lot of meddling. | ||
| Is that something that's a difficult thing to manage or do you not have to deal with that anymore? | ||
| I had to deal with that a lot when I made the two Halloween movies for Weinstein Company. | ||
| Because they're this gigantic franchise. | ||
| Well, there was weird meddling. | ||
| It was just kind of psychotic meddling. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Just weird. | ||
| Like, my phone was ringing all the time when I'm on set working, and it'd be like, we think it should be this. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| While you're working? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, if I did that, then everything we shot doesn't match. | ||
| And it makes no sense. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| They're doing coke and just coming up like this. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just weird thoughts all the time. | ||
| But I mean, a lot of times... | ||
| I don't want to name all these names of people, but I remember working on one movie that never happened, and whatever was the number one movie from that weekend was exactly the notes I would get for what we were working on. | ||
| It didn't... | ||
| And I swear to you, because it was around the time of Private Parts, and Private Parts was number one. | ||
| I go, I guarantee you when I walk in the office, they're going to say, can we get Howard Stern in this movie? | ||
| And they did. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| It didn't matter what it was. | ||
| If it was Starship Troopers, you go, can we get giant bugs in this movie suddenly? | ||
| It wasn't the Halloween movies. | ||
| It was another movie that never actually happened. | ||
| And you're just like, this is insanity. | ||
| The uncreative executive that wants to be creative, that is a classic story in Hollywood. | ||
| I mean, that's really like a villain in a film about a guy trying to make a movie. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I always thought, I will give credit for things, like, I remember working with Bob Weinstein, and I always thought, like, the first thing he would say was spot on. | ||
| Like, they love movies, and they have a good sense of movies. | ||
| And he would say something, he'd be like, eh, that... | ||
| What happens between the second act and the third act? | ||
| It's a bunch of bullshit. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| And you go, yeah, you're right it is. | ||
| But like when he went to the next level of the detail of what's wrong with it, it's kind of like someone going like, that joke's not funny. | ||
| Here's how it would be funny. | ||
| And you're like, no, no, no. | ||
| The first part of your sentence was all he needed. | ||
| I don't need you now to tell me how to make it funny. | ||
| And that's what happens. | ||
| I don't do them anymore, but back when I would be forced to do test screenings, With an audience? | ||
| Just sitting there, you'll know. | ||
| You'll go, okay, they're bored during this part. | ||
| It's boring. | ||
| Or they're not laughing. | ||
| It's supposed to be funny. | ||
| I don't now need that kid to get up and explain to the studio how to save the picture because he watched a movie once. | ||
| So the process is like half good and half insanity. | ||
| Do you get any people upset that in some way you might be glorifying violence? | ||
| Maybe, but I never hear about it, because I don't think that's true. | ||
| I mean, or if it is true, I don't think it matters. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because it's fake. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's like, I don't think the rules of real life apply to art. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because that's why art exists. | ||
| Just like, you know... | ||
| And you just have to feel that way because it's like, okay, well, if we're going to run every movie through the PC filter, then in American History X, Edward Norton can't be racist. | ||
| And now we actually don't have a movie. | ||
| Or Travis Bickle can't kill anyone. | ||
| He just has to save Jodie Foster because he's a nice person. | ||
| It ruins everything. | ||
| But the rules of real life are different. | ||
| But for fiction, I mean, they can't be rules. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And how else are you going to depict these absolutely possible scenarios? | ||
| Like if we're saying that there isn't homicidal maniacs in real life, that's nonsense. | ||
| So if you're allowed to make a depiction of real life, of course it's going to have to include… Racists, murderers, psychopaths, everything. | ||
| And I just think it's, you know, it's art, and it can go anywhere, and it's always, if it's shocking, that's probably good, and it won't be shocking next year, like how... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whatever you're showing your kids at one point was shocking, and now they're like, seriously, Dad? | ||
| Yeah, we were talking about Jaws. | ||
| Jaws today, apparently, would be PG. It was PG then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it? | |
| Can you believe that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| It was. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It was just shocking, especially... | ||
| Scared the fuck out of everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| But that's because my parents took us to see it, which was awesome, but I was traumatized for sure. | ||
| Yeah, that was a crazy movie. | ||
| I didn't want to have anything to do with the water after that movie. | ||
| Yeah, I still don't. | ||
| But the special effects as well, man, when that shark rises out of the water for the first time... | ||
| When he's throwing the chum in the water, why don't you come on down here and chump some of this shit? | ||
| We're going to need a bigger boat. | ||
| It's hard to believe those lines were once just lines in a script. | ||
| Yeah, I know they're iconic. | ||
| They're a part of culture now. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a style of film or a kind of movie that you want to do that you haven't done yet that you're thinking you'd like to get into? | ||
| I mean, there's two different projects I tried to develop for a long time and they both failed. | ||
| To get off the ground. | ||
| One was this movie called The Broad Street Bullies. | ||
| And it was about the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers. | ||
| And the movie is – the true story is so insane that you can't believe it's real. | ||
| Just the way that they decided – you know, they're a fledgling team. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| cared so they basically built a team of tough guys you know which is kind of like slap shots almost like the same won the stanley cup twice based on just being so scared so and so terrorizing other teams would be scared to play them and they'd be like oh you got the philly flu because major players be like i'm too sick to play when we get to philly because and you go back and you watch the fights that took place during those those seasons they literally go into the crowd and they're fighting with fans and They come off the ice. | ||
| They break up. | ||
| I mean, when the guys are fighting, it's not, and it doesn't seem like good natured, like, okay, we're going to go, we're going to go. | ||
| It seems like gripping someone's hair and punching them in the face till their teeth are all gone type fighting. | ||
| Cops are breaking up the fights on the ice. | ||
| Cops. | ||
| Cops. | ||
| With skates? | ||
| No. | ||
| Uniformed policemen come onto the ice and start breaking things up. | ||
| Right, but they're sliding around with their regular shoes. | ||
| It's all on YouTube. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I mean, I researched this for years. | ||
| And then they just, you know, and Bobby Clark at that time was like the most hated man in hockey. | ||
| I don't know if you're a hockey fan at all, but he was just like, another one of those guys who he had, I don't know, I could go on forever for a movie that didn't make, but I kept trying to make it go and go, and it just never, you could just never, and I went to Philadelphia and I was hanging out with the team and I was in their archives and having access to everything. | ||
| I thought, this is going to happen and just couldn't, it wouldn't move. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if the team and the team owners want to glorify that time in the... | ||
| There's an amazing documentary on it that was on HBO maybe like five years ago. | ||
| You've got to watch it. | ||
| Do you remember the name? | ||
| It might have been called Broad Street Bullies because the spectrum was on Broad Street. | ||
| So that's how they got the name. | ||
| But it's nuts. | ||
| And it was like Dave Schultz and he's wearing like a Nazi helmet and he was the tough guy on the team that everybody was petrified of. | ||
| These guys had really long hair and big beards. | ||
| I mean, this is not like hockey now. | ||
| Everybody looked like a maniac. | ||
| And they'd get stuff like, you know, you'd see them get stitches, get hit, get stitched, go back on the ice with the stitches. | ||
| There's jerseys covered in blood and they don't even change their jersey. | ||
| They're playing covered in blood. | ||
| Well, it's such a crazy sport. | ||
| Something they never do now. | ||
| Well, the sport still to this day is such a throwback because it's the only sport where you're allowed to fight in the middle of the sport. | ||
| Can you imagine if they had that with basketball? | ||
| Hockey players are the toughest motherfuckers because I always loved hockey. | ||
| I wanted to be a hockey player when I was a little kid, and that was my thing. | ||
| And for a long time, me and my wife, we had season tickets for the Kings, so we'd go to every single game, year after year after year, and we'd always hang out with the team, and they'd come to our house and then party, and we'd always be with them in Vegas. | ||
| And And they're like football players on skates. | ||
| And they're all for these guys from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and they kick their teeth out and they get crazy in the bar. | ||
| They're like mental. | ||
| And they're just like, who else is skating at 90 miles an hour crashing into boards that just have no give? | ||
| But it's so interesting that it's the one sport where it's written in that you can fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They fight. | |
| I mean, it's... | ||
| So funny. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| Like, that would make so many sports so much more interesting, but nobody would ever do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's literally the tough guy sport. | ||
| It is the tough guy sport, and the thing that always drove me crazy, like... | ||
| It drove me crazy. | ||
| Like, it involves me. | ||
| But they would always advertise the LA Kings as, like, it's like this family thing. | ||
| Like, oh, come on down and cheer for the Kings. | ||
| And it'd be, like, a girl in a hockey jersey on the billboards around the time. | ||
| Like, you should just put up mugshot-style portraits of the players, like, smiling with their teeth missing. | ||
| And it just says, you think you're a fucking tough? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Kings. | ||
| And it's not like the old days where they're kind of, like, skillful. | ||
| They're, like... | ||
| This guy's like six foot five and you put them on skates and they're huge and they're all jacked up and big like football players except they're on skates. | ||
| I think it'll be a hard sell for a lot of people. | ||
| But what's not a hard sell is MMA, which is weird, right? | ||
| Because that's like the darling of so many. | ||
| You go to the fights and Matt Damon will be there and Leonardo DiCaprio and everybody wants to be seen there and Kanye's in the crowd. | ||
| It's one of those things where people have decided, like, that's okay. | ||
| Meanwhile, they're smashing their faces open with elbows on the ground. | ||
| It's mental, man. | ||
| Heads trapped against the cage and they're pummeling each other and it's okay. | ||
| And you watch it, they break it up like, I'm pretty sure that guy's already got brain damage. | ||
| You needed to stop that punching a few seconds earlier. | ||
| Well, it's okay, though. | ||
| It's a crazy sport. | ||
| Because it's become, like, that's what I'm saying, it's weird. | ||
| Like, a fight in a basketball game is a giant deal. | ||
| Like, oh my god, a fight broke out. | ||
| This is crazy, yeah. | ||
| If a guy, you know, like, judo tossed a guy and landed on his head. | ||
| Somebody did that recently in a hockey game. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| Like, Robin Black did a breakdown of it where some guy got a guy in a clinch and hit him with a hip toss and slammed his head onto the concrete. | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, I can see why they want... | ||
| I think they probably like hockey being more family-friendly because the arenas are so nice. | ||
| You know, bring the kids and they don't want a bunch of maniacs beating the shit out of each other. | ||
| But they can still fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They can still fight, but it is just... | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| Oh, that's bad. | ||
| That's horrible. | ||
| That's an asshole move because that's not even fighting. | ||
| And plus, that guy landed with both of their weights, the guy's on his head, he's out cold. | ||
| I mean, that's like serious, serious fucking brain damage. | ||
| Yeah, I remember one time, one particular incident at the Kings game where the guy was out and it went on forever and the vibe was so heavy in the arena because we're like, is he dead? | ||
| Because, you know, when someone hits and they just stop moving in that way, it freaks you out. | ||
| You pull up some Broad Street Bullies fighting from 1974. Yeah, pull up some of that. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen so many. | ||
| Dave Schultz. | ||
| Oh, that's this thing. | ||
| Yeah, this is the documentary. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Oh, look at the way they look back then. | ||
| Everything, it's like, back in the day, it's just such a weird thing to see people from that era. | ||
| Oh, here they are. | ||
| Yeah, they don't, this is like early days before they became insane. | ||
| Oh, so it built up? | ||
| Because what happened was when they were starting as a team, they got really manhandled one time by a certain team. | ||
| And they were like, this is never going to happen again. | ||
| And they rebuilt the team with basically thug-type guys. | ||
| I'm always amazed that anybody can punch while they're on skates. | ||
| I can't even skate. | ||
| How the fuck do you maintain your upright position? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| These guys are amazing athletes. | ||
| One time I went down and got to skate at practice with the LA Kings with the guys who were injured. | ||
| Man, that rink seems small when those big guys all get on the ice. | ||
| It seems like, wow, there's no room up here. | ||
| But also, they collide into each other against the wall, which the amount of shock on your body. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's amazing that I mean, they just go and go and go. | ||
| That's Dave Schultz. | ||
| Maybe we can reignite some interest with this conversation because I think that would be it. | ||
| Look, he's pulling his fucking hair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Holy shit. | ||
| I'm going to watch that. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| So have you tried again recently? | ||
| No, I tried. | ||
| Do you really think that it's just like they just don't want to be connected to this story? | ||
| Well, there's this guy, Ed Snyder, who was the guy who started the whole team. | ||
| And I thought he was the reason it wasn't going to happen. | ||
| And then he passed away because, I mean, he was pretty old. | ||
| And then we started talking to the newer people and it just, I don't know, you're like, how many years of my life am I going to dictate, you know, put into this? | ||
| And someone said to me one time, well, you got further than anyone else ever did. | ||
| I'm like, how many times have they tried to make this movie? | ||
| Why didn't you warn me about that five years ago? | ||
| Is there any other kind of movie that you're interested in other than something like that? | ||
| Well, yeah, there was this other one that I worked on for a long time that never went either. | ||
| I had bought the rights to this book called Raised Eyebrows, which was about the last few years of Groucho Marx's life. | ||
| This guy, Steve Stolia, wrote it. | ||
| And he was a 19-year-old college kid Who started this petition drive. | ||
| Do you like the Marx Brothers? | ||
| Love them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Animal Crackers had been lost. | ||
| That was the lost film. | ||
| I think it was at UCLA. Sorry, Steve. | ||
| I can't remember your college. | ||
| He started this petition drive to get Animal Crackers released from the vault and released. | ||
| Because it hadn't been seen since the 40s or something. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| This was in the early 70s. | ||
| And through that, he became Groucho's assistant. | ||
| But Groucho's final years are really dark because he kept having strokes and he was ill. | ||
| And he had this woman, Erin Fleming, who was supposed to be his – they kind of played it like it was his girlfriend, but she was sort of the caretaker. | ||
| And it turns into Sunset Boulevard inside his house, you know, and Steve eventually is put in charge of Groucho because it's a really dark story. | ||
| Turns into Sunset Boulevard, how so? | ||
| Because Groucho is being abused and drugged by this woman. | ||
| She isolated from his family and it's like happening in this Beverly Hills home and it's just dark. | ||
| It was dark towards the end for Groucho. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| But the book was fascinating because the guy who wrote it, Steve, who's still alive, and we're friends. | ||
| It was one of those books you read in like five seconds. | ||
| And I just happened to find it by accident. | ||
| I was like, this is an amazing movie. | ||
| But again, years and years go on trying to get it made and just can't get it going. | ||
| Groucho was such a controversial character. | ||
| He had one of the greatest lines ever on You Bet Your Life. | ||
| He's talking to this guy, and he's asked the guy, like, you married? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How many kids you got? | ||
| The cigar line. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The guy says he's got a gang of kids, and he goes, geez. | ||
| He goes, oh, I love my wife. | ||
| He goes, I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth every now and then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a hugely controversial line. | ||
| Yeah, he was amazing. | ||
| Where's his eyebrows? | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| He was very outspoken. | ||
| He was on Nixon's shit list and stuff. | ||
| My years inside Groucho's house. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's really fast. | ||
| If you get that book, you'll read it in like two seconds. | ||
| It's always sad when some iconic old figure is being taken care of as he's older and you know he's getting fucked over and someone's waiting for him to die so they can get the money. | ||
| Yeah, and she kept kind of doing this thing like, we're going to make your comeback Groucho and we're going to do a TV special. | ||
| It's going to be like you and Frank Sinatra. | ||
| And Groucho's on his third stroke and can't really talk. | ||
| And a couple of the final appearances of him are pretty rough. | ||
| Because he was pretty sharp and good. | ||
| Even when he was older, we watched him on Dick Cavett or something. | ||
| But then it got bad. | ||
| And then, how did this lady get into his life? | ||
| How did that go down? | ||
| I'm trying to remember. | ||
| She was... | ||
| I think she was his secretary at first and just kind of weaseled her way in. | ||
| I can't remember exactly. | ||
| I should be able to remember. | ||
| I read the book so many times. | ||
| There's so many stories like that. | ||
| I think there was a Stan Lee story like that in his last few days. | ||
| That happens a lot. | ||
| Yeah, people were trying to get his money. | ||
| I remember that one, Martha Ray? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was like the thing towards the end with her. | ||
| It was like, oh, and her boyfriend. | ||
| And she's like this in a wheelchair. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Weird shit. | ||
| And I was like, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that is sad shit. | ||
| And their kids are done with them. | ||
| And so someone else is taking care of them. | ||
| Well, they're so old. | ||
| Their kids have all died of old age. | ||
| And this was like, you know. | ||
| So you wanted to do that film? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What happened with that? | ||
| It just couldn't get it going. | ||
| Every time it seemed like we were on the move, it just would stall. | ||
| Then I had a falling out with the producers, and I was like, you know, five years spent with this, I'm out. | ||
| Oh my god, the dream of time. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| For every movie I've ever gotten made, there's probably five others that I tried to get made that couldn't get made. | ||
| It's a real time suck. | ||
| Yeah, that's a fucking huge drag, man. | ||
| Now, when you do get a film made, is it generally that you come to the studio and you have this idea and you bring it to them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's usually like... | ||
| Well, the Halloween movies were different because I remember I had no thought. | ||
| I wasn't thinking about Halloween. | ||
| I wasn't thinking about anything like that. | ||
| And I got the thing like, oh, you know, the Weinstein Company wants you to go have a meeting with him. | ||
| Bob Weinstein, he's in L.A., yada, yada, yada. | ||
| So I go in to meet him and he's just like, Halloween, what do you think? | ||
| I was like, oh, it's a great fucking movie. | ||
| I mean, I didn't know what he was getting at. | ||
| He's like, we own the rights and we want to do something with it. | ||
| We don't know what to do. | ||
| Because they didn't know if they wanted to make another sequel or just call it Halloween but not have Michael Myers. | ||
| There was no preconceived idea and it was my idea to basically try to reboot it, start over with new people playing all the same roles and do that. | ||
| And that was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It came out in 2007, so it was probably 2006 when I did that. | ||
| Who was involved in the more recent one? | ||
| Lion's Gate is the company that did Three from Hell. | ||
| Because I had done, after Universal booted me with House of a Thousand Corpses, it was eventually acquired by Lion's Gate. | ||
| And Lion's Gate made the sequel, Devil's Rejects, which was already 15 years ago. | ||
| And a couple years ago, I got a real bug to make another one, and I just went into Lion's Gate. | ||
| And there was the same executive still there, and I was like, what do you think about doing this? | ||
| And they were saying, you know what, that was the last really fun time we had making a movie. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| LAUGHTER That's gotta feel good. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, wow, that's sad, but okay. | |
| Now, do you have long-term plans in terms of what you want to accomplish as a guy who makes movies? | ||
| Well, yes and no. | ||
| I mean, I don't have a... | ||
| I'm not trying to gear up towards making bigger films because I know I wouldn't work in that system because it's just not... | ||
| I don't want to make things by committee. | ||
| I want to go like, this is the fucked up crazy thing I want to do and I don't want to water... | ||
| Because I know so many people... | ||
| That'll be like our friend Tom Papa. | ||
| I remember him telling me about his TV show, Come to Papa. | ||
| It was like this certain idea. | ||
| He said, by the time the TV people watered it down and changed it, it gets on the air. | ||
| It's like, well, it's so far removed from the original idea that I don't want to do that. | ||
| My goal is just get it made. | ||
| Whatever it takes. | ||
| Don't try to be blockbuster guy. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I mean, you know, the Halloween movies were on 4,000 screens. | ||
| It was like the number one movie. | ||
| But it didn't make me any happier. | ||
| It's just about making the thing where I can look at it and go, I love it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| Because, you know, at this stage, that's what I want to do. | ||
| Yeah, the genre is still so attractive, but there's just not a lot of those examples, other than like, well, your films are probably the most prominent currently. | ||
| Well, I mean, if everything's meant, I mean, horror movies are big business, but if they look at it that way, then they start making them... | ||
| Overly palatable to a wide audience. | ||
| There's types of horror movies, though. | ||
| You know, there's like supernatural horror movies, there's monster movies, but then there's like homicidal maniac movies. | ||
| There's so much stuff. | ||
| And you kind of own that shit. | ||
| Redneck homicides, that's my genre. | ||
| I mean, who's got it? | ||
| You know, it's like the hills have eyes. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And then you. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Hills have eyes. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like that kind of psychopath, chainsaw massacre type shit. | ||
| I love white trash type stuff. | ||
| Well, the carny background. | ||
| Because that's just... | ||
| I was that typical kid who worshipped Evel Knievel. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Maybe that would be a fucking movie, man. | ||
| That would be a movie. | ||
| That'd be a fucking movie, man. | ||
| I worked with his son. | ||
| I worked with... | ||
| Robbie Knievel? | ||
| Robbie Knievel during the Fear Factor days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Yeah, he did something on Fear Factor. | ||
| Yeah, it was cool. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| But, you know, I was like, damn, dude, your dad was a fucking psycho. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shit that that guy subjected his body to. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And when you watch that shit, and you watch the Philadelphia Flyers, that time in the 70s was fucking mental. | ||
| It was mental. | ||
| And you're just a little kid watching Evil Knievel and listening to Alice Cooper and watching hockey fights, and that determines who you become. | ||
| Yeah, Evel Knievel was just... | ||
| I mean, there's a... | ||
| I think it was a Rolling Stone piece of his body where they showed all of his x-rays and all of the bone breaks and steel rods that were... | ||
| various bones that were screwed together. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, man. | ||
| What kind of pain was this guy in? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, did you see... | ||
| There's a fairly new documentary. | ||
| I think it's called Being Knievel. | ||
| I think. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Well, it's maybe a couple years old, actually. | ||
| But... | ||
| Yeah, just any one of those crashes. | ||
| I think this is a famous one in London, and he jumps over the double-decker buses. | ||
| And you can see him land, and the bike looks like it's made out of rubber, and he looks like he's made out of rubber. | ||
| It looks like every bone in his body just broke. | ||
| And that's going to do it again and do it again. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, that was his thing. | ||
| Imagine that being your thing. | ||
| Your thing is you fly through the air on something that's supposed to stay on the ground. | ||
| A full-size Harley that's not made for jumping or doing anything or landing, for that matter. | ||
| It doesn't have any particularly bouncy shocks or anything. | ||
| It's just hitting like boom! | ||
| Ka-dunk! | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's a weird thing to be that guy because there was some people in the past that had done some pretty interesting shit and risked their lives, but He was doing it consistently with an engine. | ||
| That was like the thing about him. | ||
| And he was like one of the most famous people in America. | ||
| Yeah, with an American flag suit. | ||
| Yeah, it was like the Fonz and Evel Knievel, you know? | ||
| There he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Being Knievel. | |
| You've got to see that if you haven't seen it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, what a crazy character. | ||
| And there's stuff in there that kind of blew my mind because we all remember the Snake River Canyon thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But they were showing how out of control it was with the people that showed up and were so drunk and the crowds were fighting and crazy just on their own. | ||
| It's mental. | ||
| Like just what was going on around the event. | ||
| That's one of those things you can't really do today the same way. | ||
| Like, if someone jumps over things today, it's like so many people are jumping. | ||
| Like, you're not going to get famous that way. | ||
| Because, like, think about just the bananas shit those BMX guys do, where they're flipping three times in the air. | ||
| It's commonplace, almost. | ||
| Yeah, no, watching Evel Knievel is like watching the original King Kong with your kids. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Like, oh, that was a big deal once? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He jumped seven buses, whatever, I did it on my bike. | |
| Yeah, that would be a great film. | ||
| I don't know what you have to do now, catch bullets with your bare hands or something? | ||
| Well, now there's people doing parkour and climbing buildings with no ropes. | ||
| You ever watch that kid, Alex Honnold? | ||
| Do you know who he is? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's the free solo guy? | ||
| Oh, the free solo guy, yeah. | ||
| I still haven't seen that yet, but everyone tells me. | ||
| He's so nice and so normal. | ||
| When you talk to him, I've had him on the podcast a couple of times, and I'm like, how are you the guy that's wanting to climb the face of these fucking clowns? | ||
| And some of them, they're not straight up and down. | ||
| They're leaning backwards. | ||
| He's got hands wedged in these cracks. | ||
| Look at that picture. | ||
| That doesn't make you shit your pants. | ||
| And he's getting older, and he's starting to get injured now, too. | ||
| And for the first time in his life, he's had... | ||
| You know, for a long time. | ||
| He had no injuries, no problems, and he's been doing this a long time now. | ||
| His body's not holding up the way it used to. | ||
| When do you retire? | ||
| Like, when are you Muhammad Ali or Evil Knievel and you know it's time to stop? | ||
| When the fingers slip, son. | ||
| That's when you retire. | ||
| I mean, that's what all of the people that have done it before him think. | ||
| They think, look, this is going to end badly. | ||
| It's crazy to be known as the guy who's doing something that scares the fuck out of everybody. | ||
| You're the guy that everybody's watching to eventually fall. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at the angle. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't even seem possible. | ||
| Well, he's incredibly strong. | ||
| His hands, like, he's a slender, thin guy, but he has gorilla hands. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're fat-ass fingers, and he just can shove them into these cracks and hang on in place. | ||
| He was telling me a story about how he was free solo climbing this one mountain when he realized, you know, like, fucking 300 feet up that he forgot his powder. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| So he's got no chalk. | ||
| So he's, you know, things are getting slippery. | ||
| He's climbing and he finds these guys that are connected to ropes halfway up. | ||
| And he says, hey, I don't have any powder. | ||
| Can I borrow your chalk? | ||
| So the guy gives him his chalk bag. | ||
| He makes it all the way to the top and leaves the chalk bag at the top for the guy. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| I wonder if those guys are like, that guy doesn't have any ropes. | ||
| As he's going by. | ||
| No ropes or chalk. | ||
| He doesn't have any fucking chalk. | ||
| If you ever lifted weights, that bar gets slippery. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| You need chalk to grip things right so you can really get a hold of stuff. | ||
| But that's just weights. | ||
| You could put the weights down. | ||
| The worst fall is going to be three feet to the floor. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I can't even watch his stuff. | ||
| My hands are sweating right now thinking about it. | ||
| I haven't watched that, but I got to. | ||
| Everyone's always talking about it. | ||
| No, it's an amazing documentary, but he's just a fascinating guy because it doesn't make sense. | ||
| He's not like some Steve-O type guy who's just a maniac and just like always trying to freak people out and do the next thing. | ||
| No, he's a real guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm putting a rocket on a sharpened cart and crashing into a brick wall. | |
| Exactly! | ||
| When Steve-O comes up with ideas, he'll tell them to me. | ||
| I'm like, don't do that. | ||
| Don't do that, man. | ||
| Stop doing that. | ||
| But I get it. | ||
| That's who he is. | ||
| He's a legitimate bona fide maniac. | ||
| The Alex Honnold guy is so calm and peaceful. | ||
| You know, he said, like, he's like, well, you know, I'm pretty mellow. | ||
| You know, it's like when the whole thing is pretty mellow. | ||
| It's like when things go wrong, that's when it's not mellow. | ||
| I'm like, oh, God. | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of how everything is. | ||
| So do you see things like that, like current events stuff, or like a person like him and think, hmm, is that a movie? | ||
| Is there a movie in that? | ||
| Like... | ||
| Sometimes I see things. | ||
| I'm trying to think the last time I thought that. | ||
| And I'm always late. | ||
| Like you'll go, oh, I just saw that. | ||
| Oh, it's already in production. | ||
| I'm never ahead of the curve enough to be on top of it. | ||
| That's a bummer. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, no, there's all kinds of things like that that I would love to do, but it's like, it just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| The time, sometimes, I just... | ||
| Like I said, I told you two projects that took so much of my life. | ||
| I mean, I sat there and watched the... | ||
| Because the whole Flyers movie ended with them winning the cup the first time. | ||
| And I watched that series... | ||
| I got all the games with all the original commercials, which were incredible. | ||
| The commercials of Salvador Dali selling house paint, like weird shit. | ||
| And I had the whole series memorized. | ||
| I could have called the commentary on it. | ||
| I watched thousands of hours of watching this hockey. | ||
| Because I was like, if I'm going to make this movie, I'm going to be the number one Phillies expert on everything. | ||
| I don't want anyone to say anything. | ||
| I'm like, oh, gee, I don't know. | ||
| No, I can't remember anything. | ||
| And then it was all for nothing. | ||
| That's the way things are anyway, though. | ||
| So you invested too much. | ||
| Yeah, but you kind of had to because it's like I figured with a topic like that they have such – the fans are – I mean they're like that. | ||
| They're like gods in Philadelphia. | ||
| I mean the best thing – just think of this as a movie. | ||
| Okay, just this one scene. | ||
| When they introduced the team in Philly, I think it was 1967, they had a parade to introduce them because hockey was coming to town. | ||
| They said they had a parade with the players and there was like maybe no one there to watch the parade. | ||
| And even one of the guys goes, all I remember is a guy leaning on the lamppost giving me the finger as the parade went by. | ||
| And then when they won the Stanley Cup, they had a parade. | ||
| Two million people showed up in the streets of Philadelphia. | ||
| And the footage of that, if you can find it while you're over there, the entire, you know, like 100,000 people show up for the Lakers and everyone goes crazy. | ||
| Two million people is four Woodstocks. | ||
| In the streets? | ||
| In the streets of Philadelphia to watch a team drive by in the back of convertibles. | ||
| They all look like porn stars because they're on fur coats and big mustaches and big afros. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| And that was such a short period of time. | ||
| That was maybe like seven years from go fuck yourself to you guys are Philadelphia. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it was all during that time period when they made Rocky. | ||
| So Philadelphia was like... | ||
| The shithole of America. | ||
| And every sports team was bad. | ||
| The real life story just reads like fiction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Here's the footage. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Look at all those people. | ||
| And that was the entire parade road. | ||
| People were hanging out of buildings. | ||
| That's when they won the game. | ||
| It was just incredible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, growing up in Boston, believe it or not, I wasn't a hockey fan. | ||
| I worship the Bruins. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| I was just into martial arts, and I didn't even like sports. | ||
| I found out about martial arts, really, the school that I wound up going to because I was coming home from a Red Sox game. | ||
| I was into baseball at the time. | ||
| And I went up to this gym and this martial arts, this Taekwondo school, and I happened to be going there right when this guy, his name was John Lee, was practicing. | ||
| And he was a light heavyweight champion at the time. | ||
| And just incredible. | ||
| And I got to see him hit this bag, and I remember thinking, I can't believe someone can do that. | ||
| Like, he hit it so hard. | ||
| He was kicking this bag, and I was like, fuck, I want to learn how to do that. | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| This was 19, I was 15? | ||
| 14, 15? | ||
| So 81, 82? | ||
| Somewhere around there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And when I was 19 years old, so I really wasn't paying attention at all to sports. | ||
| I was balls into martial arts. | ||
| But I was working at the Boston Athletic Club. | ||
| And Bobby Orr, who was long retired, used to come there to work out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And he had had so many knee surgeries. | ||
| Oh, it was terrible. | ||
| That I used to have to help him. | ||
| I mean, everybody was like, holy shit, it's Bobby Orr! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bobby Orr's here! | |
| Bobby Orr! | ||
| It's fucking Bobby Orr! | ||
| I kind of knew he was Bobby Orr, but it wasn't like I was meeting Bruce Lee or something. | ||
| If I was meeting Bruce Lee, I probably would have fainted. | ||
| But it was this hockey player guy, and I used to have to help him to get on the VersaClimber. | ||
| You know what a VersaClimber is? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's one of them out there in the gym. | ||
| You climb on it. | ||
| It's an amazing cardio machine. | ||
| But you put your feet in these things. | ||
| It was in Rocky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah, he's in Russia. | |
| Drago was working on it. | ||
| But Bobby wanted to get on this thing, so I used to have to help him. | ||
| Because he couldn't bend his knees. | ||
| His knees, like the range of motion, like here's a leg, here's a normal range of motion, right? | ||
| His knees would go like this. | ||
| They wouldn't lock all the way out. | ||
| They would bend slightly, and they would move from this bent slightly to this. | ||
| That's all he had. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| He had a little bit of bend in his knees. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He would play racquetball, and he would just fall over. | ||
| So he'd play racket, but the ball was over here. | ||
| He would just tip and fall over. | ||
| It was like he was on these legs that weren't legs. | ||
| It was like he was on sticks. | ||
| They just didn't work. | ||
| I remember seeing the scars up and down the sides of his legs. | ||
| Yeah, I remember seeing those as a kid. | ||
| You'd see pictures. | ||
| I followed the Bruins, so I was always into Bobby Orton. | ||
| He probably always was back on the ice too soon. | ||
| Another injury. | ||
| Stitch him up. | ||
| They didn't know how to fix things back then either. | ||
| And he's so incredible. | ||
| Bobby Orr was like, at that time, like if young Brad Pitt was the greatest hockey player of all time. | ||
| I mean, he didn't even seem real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, he's like the golden boy. | ||
| And I keep making you pull up hockey clips, but like you see some clips and it's like, the way he's skating compared to everyone else, it's like... | ||
| Did everyone else just learn that day? | ||
| Like, he's just skating around him like they don't even exist. | ||
| It's just like, and as a kid, you're like, this is the greatest person alive. | ||
| Well, that's probably also why he blew his knees out, right? | ||
| Because he was just, he was taking these crazy risks and moving so fast. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| I mean, he was just... | ||
| And people were probably trying to take him out left and right, too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he... | ||
| Well, the thing with him, too, he was a defenseman. | ||
| Not a forward. | ||
| So he would play like a forward, but he would be a defenseman. | ||
| So he's supposed to be the tough guy defending the goalie, yet he's like a leading scorer. | ||
| So he was sort of too good for everything. | ||
| So he's taking all the hits and scoring all the goals. | ||
| He was such a nice guy. | ||
| I remember thinking that, too. | ||
| When I was a kid, I always used to be intimidated by people who were really nice guys. | ||
| I was like, how is he so nice? | ||
| Because I was kind of a prick. | ||
| It was driving me crazy. | ||
| I felt inferior. | ||
| I was like, God, I wish I was that nice. | ||
| I was mean. | ||
| I was a mean kid because I was fighting and I was like, the way to fight is to be mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you want to get good at fighting? | ||
| You got to be fucking mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, by then, I'm five years into fighting and that's all I want to do. | ||
| And so, I'm around this guy. | ||
| I feel like, God, he's so, he's so nice and he's like the greatest hockey player of all time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, Fuck! | |
| I'm such a loser. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| I remember in high school, the kids that would always be in the fights and kick everyone's ass, they're like, you can't compete with that. | ||
| He's just born crazy. | ||
| He likes to fight. | ||
| If you punch him in the face, it'll probably make him happy. | ||
| After he smashes your head into the sink and, you know, kills you. | ||
| It's just like, yeah, it's just a different way people... | ||
| Well, I never got into... | ||
| I wasn't really a street fight person at all. | ||
| I was scared of it. | ||
| That's how I got into martial arts, because I was scared of fighting. | ||
| But the difference between people that were like a Bobby Orr or a regular player always fascinated me. | ||
| I was like, how is one guy Michael Jordan? | ||
| How is one guy... | ||
| How is one guy, you know, Reggie Jackson? | ||
| What is he doing different? | ||
| How does this guy rise above everybody else? | ||
| They're just special, because I would read about him and be like, you know, they knew he was good when he was a kid. | ||
| They'd be like, come watch this eight-year-old out skating people. | ||
| Like, he was, I think, I forget, I'm not a Bobby Orr expert, I can't remember things, but I remember being scouted at 14, like he was an adult. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| But that's what you have to be, I guess. | ||
| I mean, we all remember kids from high school that's like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're like a professional athlete and we're like stupid kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, why are you shredded? | ||
| And we're just like dopey kids. | ||
| Like, what's going on here? | ||
| What kind of musicians, too, right? | ||
| Remember when Prince first came out? | ||
| Wasn't he like 19 when he came out with I Want to Be Your Lover? | ||
| Yeah, some people are just special. | ||
| They're just Mozart, but in fighting or hockey. | ||
| It's so humbling. | ||
| Well, that's what goes back to the thing we said like an hour ago. | ||
| Fooled them again. | ||
| Because like, those guys are actually special. | ||
| Well, there's always going to be people like that, right? | ||
| That just put it all into perspective for you and make you realize like, wow, just, okay, I'm a regular person. | ||
| It's fun watching people like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then there's people like that sometimes that they just self-destruct because they don't care that they're good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, and I remember people like that, too. | ||
| They do nothing with it. | ||
| That's true, too. | ||
| You know, which is weird. | ||
| Yeah, there's... | ||
| Sometimes people can be too talented where things come too easy. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a thing, like... | ||
| You know, you were talking about earlier about being bullied... | ||
| Like, maybe if we get rid of bullying, we're going to get rid of a certain amount of success, too. | ||
| I mean, it's not like I don't want anybody to hurt their feelings, but I understand that there's something that comes out of that, right? | ||
| Well, there's something that comes out of it being really hard for you to do. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Like, when you figure out how to do it, you've developed this indomitable spirit because you've managed to make your way through the hardest levels of the game to get to the top. | ||
| It's not like you were just faster than everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can't be, like, pro-bullying, because that's weird, but there is something to it, because, like, real life just bullies you anyway. | ||
| There's something to adversity, for sure. | ||
| Like, you have to be able to, like... | ||
| Like, whenever someone says, like, what's your advice for, like, you know, doing this, like, being in show business or something, I go, if being told by complete strangers that you suck all day long does not bother you in any way, you know, then maybe it's the business for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| But maybe it's not because I think it bothers everybody who wants to do well. | ||
| But there's a difference between bothering like, ah, that's a drag, or like, I quit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because there's always, this is funny, whenever someone comes to me and they say like, hey, I wrote this short story. | ||
| Be brutally honest. | ||
| I mean brutally honest. | ||
| That person's like... | ||
| Secretly saying, please say something nice about this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Come watch my show and be brutally honest. | ||
| You're hideous to look at and you're the least talented person I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| That's such a request. | ||
| Like, I've had people ask me to read their scripts. | ||
| I'm like, hey, bro, you're asking me for an hour and a half of my time. | ||
| I don't even know you. | ||
| Do you know how valuable an hour and a half is? | ||
| I have children and three jobs and a lot of hobbies. | ||
| I don't have an hour and a half to watch a movie. | ||
| I don't even want to read a script when my agent sends it over. | ||
| I don't want to read yours. | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of time suck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I can just get this Rob Zombie, if I can just get this Rob Zombie, he can make it. | |
| Then it'll all work out. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| The people that always make it never talk about themselves. | ||
| No. | ||
| The people that can't tell you about their great idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very rare. | |
| It'll never not be an idea. | ||
| It's very rare that that idea is actually great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like there's certain qualities that someone has to have to make something that's truly exceptional. | ||
| And very rarely do they want to tell you that it's truly exceptional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's weird. | ||
| Maybe it's the insecurity thing that you don't want to tell anybody what you do because you never think it's good enough as opposed to people that are not good enough and they always want to tell you about themselves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's a problem. | ||
| The wrong people are talking about themselves. | ||
| Well, it's like, it's human psychology, but I think the thing about, like I was saying about Richard Jenny would say that looking at shitty comics is what inspires people to do comedy. | ||
| We learn from all of the psychological disasters, all the people that think, like all the guys that think they're better looking than they are. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And they walk up to a girl and the girl's like, what the fuck What the fuck are you talking on? | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| There's something to be learned from that. | ||
| I had a friend growing up that would swing at every pitch. | ||
| This guy would go up to every girl. | ||
| And he wasn't a particularly good-looking guy. | ||
| He wasn't smart. | ||
| He wasn't funny. | ||
| But he was bold. | ||
| And I would learn from him. | ||
| Girls would be angry at him. | ||
| Angry that he had the balls to ask them out. | ||
| And then they probably would go, right? | ||
| Very few. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| So his strategy just didn't work. | ||
| It didn't work at all. | ||
| He'd have to find girls with something wrong with them. | ||
| Like, there's something wrong with them. | ||
| They have a screw loose. | ||
| I thought the end of that story was going to be his boldness paid off. | ||
| No! | ||
| No, he's just dating paraplegics. | ||
| No, he became an alcoholic. | ||
| His fucking life is a disaster. | ||
| I've lost touch with him 15, 20 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| He's out of his fucking mind. | ||
| But I remember when we were kids, I'd be like, Jesus Christ, because... | ||
| One of the things about getting the show business that helped me is I was always super insecure to talk to girls. | ||
| But then when I would do stand-up, you would do work at clubs, and you'd be the guy on stage making people laugh. | ||
| They wanted to talk to you. | ||
| You actually want to talk to me? | ||
| This is crazy! | ||
| You know, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| That guy would just fucking anybody. | ||
| Like, look at that hot bartender. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| I'm going. | ||
| Every flight attendant on this flight. | ||
| He would just buy cocktails and take chances and ask for phone numbers. | ||
| But you can learn from people that fuck everything up. | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| You learn from everything, man. | ||
| But I have this theory that nobody can learn from other people's mistakes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Maybe it's just the way you think and I think, but it's the rare person who learns from other people's mistakes. | ||
| Yeah, it's rare, but it's possible. | ||
| Because I always think like, heroin? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Didn't Lou Reed finish that one for everybody? | ||
| We're still going to give it a go because it's different when you do heroin or just anything. | ||
| I mean, I never know anyone that learns from anyone's mistakes because you can, even if you're in the business and you go, look, Here's my piece of advice. | ||
| Don't spend that money on that because that's the only you're going to see. | ||
| Put it away. | ||
| Do this because that's an advance. | ||
| That's not coming every month. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then, you know, two minutes later they're broke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I don't give people advice because they don't want to hear it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Be broke. | ||
| The people who really want advice and they're going to use it, that's like one out of a hundred. | ||
| But they do exist. | ||
| Yeah, but it's rare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those are the people that are smart and they're like, aha. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I try to learn as much as I can from other people's mistakes, but they don't feel as bad as they feel to those people. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| Mistakes have to hurt. | ||
| They have to fucking hurt, man. | ||
| Like bombing. | ||
| Like bombing on stage is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. | ||
| It hurts so bad that you learn and you're like, okay, I am gonna figure this out. | ||
| I'm never having that happen again. | ||
| I gotta get better. | ||
| That must be so bad. | ||
| I mean, I can relate to it because, you know, I've done a different sort of bombing in front of people on stage. | ||
| But you can't really learn from other people bombing. | ||
| I think you kind of – that's one of those things you kind of got to do yourself. | ||
| How long does it take – because I'm always fascinated by it. | ||
| How long do you feel it takes – I mean, this is not really a question I guess you can answer, but – to you find your voice and you go, okay, this is me. | ||
| I'm this guy. | ||
| I'm not Richard Pryor. | ||
| I'm not Jerry Seinfeld. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It depends on how much time you- Some people maybe never find it, I guess, but- A lot of people never find it. | |
| There's impossible comics, whereas you see them and you go, oh my god, this poor bastard. | ||
| He's trying to do something that he's never going to be able to do. | ||
| There's people that just... | ||
| They're never going to be able to do it for whatever reason. | ||
| Whatever psychological ingredients that they have, it's not enough to make chocolate cake. | ||
| Like, you don't have any eggs? | ||
| You don't have any flour? | ||
| Bro, you're fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know, yeah. | ||
| But then there's other people that... | ||
| Their ego protects them, where they believe that they did well when they didn't do well. | ||
| They're delusional. | ||
| And that's the worst thing. | ||
| Because they're trying to protect themselves from the bad feeling, but they don't understand the bad feeling is your friend. | ||
| Because it sucks hard, but that's the fucking medicine. | ||
| You take that medicine and you've got to go, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| What did I do wrong? | ||
| This is what I did wrong. | ||
| I've got to not do that again. | ||
| You've got to put more time and focus and effort. | ||
| It's really dependent almost entirely on how much you do that objectively and your focus, like how you can look at it. | ||
| Some people just don't ever want to, no matter what they're doing, whether they're painting or making comic books, they don't want to ever look at it the way other people look at it. | ||
| They want to think that everything they do is amazing. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| My kids will show me something and sometimes it'll be funny. | ||
| My daughter will make something on an iPad. | ||
| Sometimes it'll be funny. | ||
| And sometimes it's like, look, you gotta edit this. | ||
| There's too much shit going on here. | ||
| This is boring. | ||
| But they think it's great. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because she's fucking nine, okay? | ||
| But when you're 28 and you think everything you do is amazing, it's like, okay... | ||
| But do you think that's worse now because of things like Instagram? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Where everybody puts up anything and you want to go, you look like an idiot, but their friend's like, you are so hot, or something. | ||
| Everyone can feed their delusions. | ||
| That's certainly, but you also could take the sting of criticism and you get it from way more people than you ever have before. | ||
| Like, if you're someone who puts something up on Instagram and you think it's funny and then the people come at you hard, like, whoa! | ||
| Like, you might, you know, if you're a comic and you've been doing stand-up for five years, you're never going to work in front of, not in normal circumstances, you're never going to work in front of 5,000 people. | ||
| But you might get 5,000 people saying you suck if you put something up on Instagram. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can tell. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you can tell when somebody's funny almost instantly. | ||
| You can tell, but some people surprise you. | ||
| Like, some people in the beginning, like, wow, this guy's got it rough. | ||
| But then one day, it just clicks, and they just keep working at it. | ||
| But it's a matter of whether or not they're willing to put the building blocks in the right place, and whether or not they're going to admit that the structure that they have currently is not viable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And some people aren't, but some people are. | ||
| It's like, it doesn't... | ||
| And also... | ||
| It's just like movies, right? | ||
| Everybody's got a different style. | ||
| You know, your films are your kind of films, whereas, like, there's other people that are doing, like, these really simple, sweet, you know, chick flicks, and that's for them. | ||
| That's what they like, and there's people that find that, and they think it's amazing. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's like, you've got to find whatever the fuck it is that you do that you would like to see. | ||
| Yeah, because that's hot. | ||
| That's the only way you can judge it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I do what I do because that's what I like. | ||
| So what I'm doing, I go, okay. | ||
| But if I was trying to do something else that I didn't get, I might go, well, what do I judge it against? | ||
| Like, what you're telling me is good? | ||
| Then I'm lost. | ||
| Well, you'd be like the executive asking you to get Howard Stern in the movie. | ||
| Like, they don't know why they want him in the movie. | ||
| They just know he's famous. | ||
| Like, oh, he's in the movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He just came out. | |
| Get him. | ||
| Let's get Howard. | ||
| And that's what happened when I was doing the Halloween movies a lot because they'd weigh in so often. | ||
| That it can start messing with you. | ||
| Because you don't know which end is up. | ||
| Because you just want to go, Jesus Christ, can I just fucking focus for five seconds before you send another 18 pages of weird notes? | ||
| And you really don't know which end is up anymore. | ||
| I've never been there for a film, but I've been there on TV shows. | ||
| It's a drag. | ||
| It's very confusing because you don't know anymore because you're so spun out from too much information. | ||
| I find most of the time, and that's why I'll defend a filmmaker like Ed Wood and why people still talk about Plan 9 from Outer Space because, yes, technically it's inept, but there's something so specific about this guy's bizarro vision We're good to go. | ||
| Far superior made films from back then that nobody gives a shit about. | ||
| It's just like there's something about keeping that weird, bizarro vision alive and not having the committee ruin it. | ||
| Yeah, if enough people know that it's going to be an Ed Wood movie, they're going to go see it. | ||
| There's enough people that find out about it. | ||
| They're like, yeah, this guy's just weird shit, man. | ||
| Let's go see his weird fucking movie. | ||
| How did he make a movie more entertaining in six days with like $300 than you made with $200 million? | ||
| Well, especially after The Taste of Time, because if you look back at it now, I mean, people will gather around and watch it, especially after the Johnny Depp movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Johnny Depp was such a weird Ed Wood. | ||
| He's so great in that. | ||
| So great! | ||
| He's such a fucking strange character for him. | ||
| I think Ed Wood and Young Frankenstein at Two Times were like, that's the perfect comedy. | ||
| They're just such perfect films. | ||
| Ed Wood is so weird. | ||
| The Johnny Depp version of him is like, what kind of character are you? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember right when it came out, no, it was right when Martin Landau got nominated for an Oscar. | ||
| I ran into him at a newsstand, and I never go up to people because I don't want to bother anybody, but I couldn't resist. | ||
| And it was like one of those cases where he was so nice that I was like, oh my god, which was great. | ||
| He was great in that movie, too. | ||
| And he seemed so shocked that some young, weird dude was so excited to meet Martin Landau. | ||
| Because, you know, he's pretty old. | ||
| Yeah, that's cool when a movie like that sort of reignites people's appreciation for someone, too. | ||
| Because I always liked him. | ||
| He's always been great. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because I was like a space 1999 dork and stuff back in the day. | ||
| Is there ever a guy that you are such a big fan of as an actor that you would kind of try to make a movie around him? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I mean, the sad part is so many of the people that I love are gone. | ||
| You know, like, I've tried to put a lot of people I really love in all my movies. | ||
| A lot of, like, just weird character actors from the 70s that you'd see in, like, Clint Eastwood movies and stuff. | ||
| But, like, Jeffrey Lewis, you know, who's in, like, you know, his sidekick in Every Which Way But Loose and is in High Plains Drifter. | ||
| You know, Juliet Lewis's dad, Jeffrey Lewis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And he was, like, the greatest. | ||
| I worked with him twice and... | ||
| And he would tell me the funniest story once. | ||
| He goes, this is what I learned from working with Clint. | ||
| Whenever I was in a scene with Clint, I'd make sure I put my hand on his shoulder. | ||
| That way I knew he couldn't cut me out of the scene. | ||
| But he was an amazing guy. | ||
| I remember when I did this animated movie. | ||
| With Tom Papa called The Haunted World of El Superbiso. | ||
| And Jeffrey Lewis was in it. | ||
| He had just come from boxing. | ||
| At that point, he was in his 70s. | ||
| But he was little. | ||
| But he had that Eastwood body where he's still ripped. | ||
| You know, Clint Eastwood, you don't think of him as like... | ||
| But then he has that Charles Bronson body back then. | ||
| He was boxing in his 70s? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was like, don't be fooled. | ||
| I can still kick your ass. | ||
| I was like, yeah, I'm sure you can. | ||
| Okay, man. | ||
| Relax. | ||
| He's a hilarious guy. | ||
| You know the movie that I fucking love that it hardly gets talked about anymore is Bad Lieutenant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Harvey Keitel. | ||
| You don't hear from Harvey Keitel anymore for whatever reason. | ||
| Is he in the new thing, the Irishman? | ||
| The Scorsese thing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He seems like he should be. | ||
| That fucking guy has depth. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| There's scenes in movies when he gets angry. | ||
| You're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| He's hit this weird place where he might murder the person he's in the film with. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I've heard different weird stories of why. | ||
| Because he was in Eyes Wide Shut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And Kubrick filmed him for a long time and then replaced him with Sidney Pollack. | ||
| Why? | ||
| i don't know but i would always hear these different weird like that weird that there was weird that he did and i don't know if it's true so i don't repeat it but i always wonder because he's so great yeah but to shoot for six weeks or two months and then be replaced it was a weird thing well he's his scenes there's something about him like like pulp fiction he's so authentic like you believe he's the cleaner He's so great as sport and taxi driver. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that might be the first thing I saw him in. | ||
| He just seemed so authentically sleazy. | ||
| I used to have a bad lieutenant poster. | ||
| What the fuck happened to it? | ||
| But somewhere along my travels, moving from place to place, I lost it. | ||
| He was amazing. | ||
| That fucking movie was so crazy because it was like a bad cop. | ||
| Really bad cop. | ||
| Really bad cop. | ||
| Over the top bad. | ||
| But probably fairly realistic. | ||
| Probably, unfortunately. | ||
| Did you ever see the documentary The 7-5? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a great documentary about corrupt cops in New York. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Michael Dowd, who was one of the guys who was one of those corrupt cops who wound up going to jail, and now he's out. | ||
| And, you know, I had him on the podcast and we talked about it. | ||
| It's fucking, all of it is true. | ||
| All of it's documented and all of it's insane. | ||
| What year was that all happening? | ||
| I want to say it was the 70s, right? | ||
| I always assumed corruption happened in the 70s. | ||
| A lot of it. | ||
| Like he was showing up at the precinct with a fucking Corvette and everybody was like, what is going on here, man? | ||
| And they were knocking over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
80s and 90s. | |
| Oh, it was? | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I just assumed it was Serpico time period. | ||
| Yeah, but he's out now, man. | ||
| And it's just one of those stories that's so fucking crazy. | ||
| Just, you know, knocking hits out on him, and they were putting hits on other people. | ||
| It's just maniacal. | ||
| Was that in New York? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was like the Wild West. | ||
| But he talks about, like, first day on the job, being exposed to corruption, like they threw some guy out of a fucking balcony. | ||
| And he's like, you know, like, this guy jumped, right? | ||
| And he's like, oh, okay. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I forget what the exact story was, but some ridiculous shit like that where they were, he was, I mean, it was like, it was corrupt long before he got there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He just sort of stepped into the mess of it. | ||
| You know, it's, What you're talking about, your early days in New York City, seeing that guy get beat to death by a cop, that was kind of how police had total autonomy. | ||
| They had so much power and authority back then. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| I remember another incident. | ||
| This was right before I left. | ||
| I think I started talking about this, but I didn't finish. | ||
| It was like they had Tompkins Square Park, and that's when that area was getting gentrified. | ||
| That was the big word. | ||
| And there was like kind of a riot. | ||
| There was all the people protesting the gentrification of the Lower East Side. | ||
| This was probably like, I don't know, fuck, I forget, maybe early 90s, late 80s. | ||
| And the cops showed up on horseback. | ||
| And I had just walked out to go to the deli. | ||
| I didn't even know this was happening. | ||
| I just walked right into the middle of like, what's going on here? | ||
| And then the cops just started racing through the crowd and I just started running. | ||
| And I saw a friend of mine, he died now, but he was a singer of this punk rock band, Reagan Youth. | ||
| And I saw this cop just jump on him and start pounding on him. | ||
| So bad. | ||
| He had really long dreadlocks. | ||
| The next time I saw him, his head was shaved and it was all stitched up because he just had so much damage to his head. | ||
| He had been in like a coma or something. | ||
| And then it was a big scandal. | ||
| You could probably find this because the cops all put black tape on their badge numbers. | ||
| So that no one could tell who was who while they did all this shit. | ||
| And it was like on the front cover of the New York Post, a picture of like a, I think the post, a badge with the black tape. | ||
| That shit was wild back then. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| Well, the Chicago elections and the riots during the 1960s was like a turning point in Hunter S. Thompson's life. | ||
| Because he was there and he watched these cops just beat the fuck out of people. | ||
| And he said that he saw... | ||
| Far worse beatings by the Chicago police than he ever saw for the Hells Angels. | ||
| Because, you know, his first book was the Hells Angels book. | ||
| So he was around those guys for a year, watching them get into biker brawls and shit. | ||
| He's like, this fucking paled. | ||
| It paled. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| But it's crazy, too. | ||
| But sometimes I... Being a cop must be a crazy job. | ||
| Horrific. | ||
| Because I can't imagine... | ||
| I mean, it doesn't justify any of the stuff we're talking about, but I can't imagine how you couldn't go crazy in that job with what you see every day. | ||
| Most of them, I think, have PTSD, and it's not addressed. | ||
| Most people have disdain for them. | ||
| Almost everybody they meet is a liar, because you meet a guy, like, I didn't know how fast I was going. | ||
| Oh, this is my house. | ||
| Oh, I just can't find my keys. | ||
| Like, everyone's lying to you, and you're the enemy. | ||
| You are a professional enemy, and you're wearing an enemy outfit, right? | ||
| For all these criminals, you're the enemy. | ||
| It's a terrible way to live. | ||
| We need them badly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You can't win on that job, I don't think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, you can't. | ||
| And people don't get paid enough. | ||
| People don't respect you. | ||
| They don't appreciate you. | ||
| They don't want you around until they want you around? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then you're not there fast enough? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then you suck. | ||
| And cop movies, that's what's crazy. | ||
| Cop movies, people love. | ||
| People love cop movies and the cops are the good guys. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| But their interactions with humans in real life, boy, if people treated them the way they think about them in the movies, it would be a wonderful time to be a cop. | ||
| It's weird, though, because I remember that time period in New York. | ||
| I have a different relationship now when I see cops, but as a... | ||
| As like a bum kid at 19. Like I remember walking down the street and a cop would cruise alongside, roll down the window and they'd start taunting me, saying shit. | ||
| Like, you know. | ||
| Bullies. | ||
| But they're just like waiting for you to say something back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that's weird. | ||
| You know, I was just walking down the street. | ||
| I wasn't, you know, even jaywalking down the street. | ||
| Now whenever a cop comes up to me like, oh no, what's happening? | ||
| He'd be like, dude, I saw you in Slayer. | ||
| It was fucking awesome. | ||
| I was like, that was weird. | ||
| Yeah, it's gotta be super strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they're more accountable now than ever before. | ||
| I think that's one of the great things about body cameras and cell phones. | ||
| Cops are, you know, you just can't rock it that way before. | ||
| But I don't think they get enough counseling, and I don't think they get enough money, and I don't think it's a stringent enough screening process. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that are, you know, they're powerless twats when they're young, and they want, oh, I just wish everybody's gonna fucking pay me. | ||
| If I could be a cop, and they become a cop for all the wrong reasons. | ||
| And then they're the ones that give the good cops a bad name. | ||
| And if you think about the amount of interactions that people have with police, and this is why perspective is so important. | ||
| There are fucking 320 million people in this country, and cops have millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of interactions with people all the time. | ||
| But how many of those interactions are positive? | ||
| The vast majority of them are not police brutality. | ||
| The vast majority of them are not shooting someone and planting a weapon on them or planting drugs on them. | ||
| The vast majority of them are cops doing a really hard job and doing their best. | ||
| But nobody gives a fuck about that. | ||
| You only care when the cops go bad. | ||
| It's just perspective. | ||
| Which, you know, nobody has. | ||
| No, nobody does. | ||
| That's too nuanced of a conversation with the world now. | ||
| Nobody has any perspective on anything. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I appreciate you coming in here, and your film is out tonight. | ||
| Tonight. | ||
| Tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Three from Hell. | ||
| Three from Hell tonight and everywhere. | ||
| Well, somebody will tell me they couldn't find it, but it's trying to be everywhere. | ||
| So, and then when will it be available, like if someone wants to get it off Apple TV or Amazon? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| I mean, it's a three-night Fathom event, and then it'll be in theaters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Here and there, and then it'll be out probably October will be most accessible for people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I should have brought that information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No worries. | |
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Appreciate you being here, brother. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| Thank you. |
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