Interview to Roger Corman

1) I think you are one the hardest working man in business and it’s in my opinion that your philosophy is very simple: your way or the highway.
But from what I saw from your biography, you really wanna so bad to be a movie director and maybe even be an independent producer. How did it start your idea, from the very beginning? What was in your mind when you started?


ROGER CORMAN:
My father was an engineer and I went to Stanford University as an engineer in major and, while there I found out that the film critics of the University papers, got free passes to the all theatres in the area, so I immediately wrote a couple of sample reviews to the men of the papers, and they took me on as a film critic. I’ve always been interested in the film but I started taking it more seriously when I was sitting down and actually looking at the film, studying it and writing the criticism. I graduated in engineering but I worked only one time as an engineer.
I’ve never really worked as an engineer.


2) But the engineer job gave you in any sense a strong appeal of pragmatism, which leads you to do many, many films all together. So, how did you managed not to loose your mind to put all those works together? You have to be very pragmatic, I think.


ROGER CORMAN:
I would think that the engineering education, the training in a very pragmatic logical profession did help me, because I’m a strong believer in pre production planner, particularly if you are making low budget films, you do not have time to attend the motion picture and wait for inspiration .You got to walk under the set with everything planned out, your notes, I also put my sketches from the move under the camera and these are my scripts, knowing that I will never follow my notes one hundred par cent. What you are actually doing it’s the difference between theory and reality; your notes are theory here and the reality is sometimes too complicated. Or you may did it with a better idea! But I would say I followed those notes maybe eighty par cent and at a twenty par cent I changed them.


3) But, to make low budget movies you have to follow a strong intuition, or what it will be for the idea, for the script. And at the very beginning you were maybe one of the firsts, if not the first to follow the road of the Independents. How did you managed to find for the right movie, you followed your heart, you looked around to see what was going on? Which was your way to choose for the right movie to be done?

ROGER CORMAN:
I think for choosing the right way for a film and the choosing of the subject of the film itself, is partially the logical mind and partially the unconscious mind. I think that much of what would you do, would you do for reasons that you don’t totally understand, that there’s nothing I can do about it, my unconscious mind is whatever it may be. But consciously I would pick the subject that is interesting to me, that I hope to be interesting to other people and then I follow a very logical and detailed way to carry out that plan.


4) Especially in the fifties, when you were moving very quickly from a subject to another, how did you direct the actors, keeping them real, with the real feelings more than sometimes that of a fictional feeling?

I meant that trying to create reality in an actor’s work is to do most of the work before the picture ever starts; to rehearse, to talk with the actor, to do improvisations, so that, when somebody would see me directing they would see very little actual work on the set. I just say few things to the actor and I are already in agreement on the basic motivations and on the basic relationships and themes of his and our work.


5) I’m quite sure people trust you a lot, just to go ahead. And, how did you managed to keep people close together? Do you have a strong team close to you?

ROGER CORMAN:
I had a very strong team of actors who worked with me and a group of technicians who worked with me and the process was quite simple: I got the best crew I could find talking to other people, hired them for their first picture and then made notes on how good everybody was. When I made my second picture, I hired back everybody, I read it hard to bring new people; and I kept doing that picture after picture and it got to the point where the crew was known as the Corman crew, because they had done so many films for me and the crew became somewhat famous in independent film making in Hollywood. So that when I was not shooting, somebody was just hired. My number one assistant director would say: bring alone Rogers’ crew and so they all worked together and I think it helped me and helped them, because they became a team.


6) At a certain point I suppose that people came to you bringing you scripts more than you looked for them. When did it happen? Do you have an idea, when you said to yourself: ok, now it’s different?

ROGER CORMAN
Most of my early pictures with my idea or the idea of somebody from the distribution company who just say, we’d like to do another picture or we like to do a picture about this, because they knew the way I worked….So I had a great deal of freedom right from the beginning, nobody told me you must do this in this script but they just said: we want a picture about this. I did a picture called “Teenage Dull” and it was a financier who just wanted a picture about teenage delinquency, in which women would be important to the film. So I took the decision to develop the story and work with the writer I know. So we were able to develop and make the picture we wonted.


7) From this moment of your career to another moment, when you took the decision to be a producer and to have a production company, how did you managed this passage? Was it necessary, did you want to be a producer since many years before?

ROGER CORMAN
The concept of becoming a producer was not necessary. What happened was, I originally started as a writer and then became a producer and then became a director. The process of going back to being a producer was not necessary, I was doing very nicely as a director and I made very little money and I wanted to invest it. I know very little about the stark market and the other normal means of investing. I thought what I know is making motion pictures, what I should do is just finance somebody I know who I think is good, and I was a young film maker and Hollywood got no other young film makers, and the first point I did was a picture called “Stake out on Dolb street”, directed by Irve Corsion, when he was doing the Second Star War picture and he was a very proper and a very good director. And it made quite a bit of money, and I took my share in back somebody else. So, it was a continual think of reinvesting and without really thinking about it I had created a little production company! In 1970 I was directing a film called in Ireland and I just felt tired. I had directed too many films in too short a period of time and what had been fun to me, incredibly satisfying, was to direct. Now, on that film I felt: this is just a job for me, and I don’t wonna do it! So I quit for a year, the traditional sabbatical, and I got a little bored during that year, and so I back to couple a little pictures, distributing myself. They were immediately successful and what I can say is that I had my production and distribution company and I stayed with that.


8) Did you take notice on what was happening in the audience field just to look after, now the movie was going in distribution? Was it easy for you, did you feel obliged to do this or just let the movie go?

ROGER CORMAN
Not always, but generally the idea was mine and I was saying: pictures on this subject will work. Then I was bringing directors and writers to develop the story but giving them great freedom to develop this script. So, I was still gaining in pictures based upon my own ideas and I was still appealing primarily to a youth audience. But major studios were still working primarily appealing to an older audience because their great stars were older - it takes years for a star to become really established - so, the youth market was always there.


9) The meaning of the word freedom goes very well with the ideas of the sixties and the idea of the independent movie goes very well with the coming of rock’n roll music. This is what happened after the appearance of Elvis Presley. I even think you did a movie with The Platters or someone like them who played in the late fifties, I recall a Florence Film Festival…So, you are very much into music!


ROGER CORMAN
I’m very much into music. I picked specifically the groups or the composers for all of the films when I was young. Today I’m no longer into music and I say to the director or to the young members of our staff: I’d like to see a traditional score for this, or I see a pop score here, and particularly for the pop score I say, you make the decision ‘cause I’m no longer in competence. But I did make one of the first rock’n roll pictures, I made a picture called “Rock All Night” with the Platters.


10) In the sixties you did some important and legendary movies like “Wild Angels” or “The Trip” or…I remember a film called “Gas”, it was a very strange movie!

Oh yes! “Gas” was a very strange movie, a sort of fantasy, reality, told immediately after the world has been almost wielded out and a few people left. The word “gas” was based upon something that actually happened in Vietnam war. It was like this: an American officer said, we have to destroy the village in order to save it! So, this statement become very famous because it was such an insane statement, and the entire world group picked it up. And I used the words- we had to destroy the village in order to save it- in the film.


11) When you were making these movies the younger audience discovered you, and even the movies of the fifties. Even if these are in my opinion the most American movies in your career, I suppose you have a strong feeling with Europe as well.


ROGER CORMAN
Yes, I’ve worked in Europe, I studied at the Oxford University in England and I spent a very amount of time there. But my films are specifically American; it’s where I grew up, it’s where I know the culture and, particularly the films of the sixties such as “The Trip”, “The Wild Angels” and “Gas”, these are films shouted with young people in reality, in the streets. And I was even thinking about European acceptance of the film; I was making a film about young people in America, and it was just that.


12) Does it sounds strange to have so many loyal followers in Europe today, or you feel it’s all right? Maybe, people now get more seriously that movies, like tonight we’ll enjoy “The Trip”!


ROGER CORMAN
Somebody was talking me earlier today and they brought up something that I’ve never thought of before, they said that people interested in my films are young people. Some of them were maybe from the University of Milan and they said that many students are interested in my films and older people are not! So, people who saw them when I came out were young when they saw them and they are old now. I think that kind of interesting, I recognise that not many people are interested in the films of the fifties but the fact they are and they were young people, might say something about the fact I was making films for young people and there was something in them that still interest young people. Maybe a new generation of young.


13) It seems to me that there is in any movie of the sixties a strong sense of personal ethic. Did you ever look back to those films today, did you ever change your mind or your interests? Do you consider some of those films most important now than before?


ROGER CORMAN
I’ve not seen a number of them for long time and I saw a few good reason because I did the narration, because there are remakes in dvd. And there are thinks on the films that I don’t even remember shooting, so they are little surprising to me. But it’s interesting because they showed me the dating. So, for instance, for “The Trip” Jack Nicholson wrote the script, he was a very good writer, even if he was an actor too, and his actor career was going so well at that time. I knew he had played around with LSD, so I asked him to write the script. Even the music for “The Trip” was written by Jack Nicholson, and The Electric Flag, a very prominent rock band who worked with psychedelic, another word from the sixties’ music.
And…I forgot what the question was!!


14) The question was about your ethic position in your films, but now that you was talking about “The Trip”, there is another question that I want to make right now before I forget it. It is a very specific question, especially for my friend Francesca, she’s making a University thesis on Gram Parsons, the guy who is actually playing in the band but the music does not play; you used a guy in “The Trip”, he was playing with the International Submarine Band, but for some reason the music you choose was from another band. What was happened? There was a clash of interest, maybe some major interest for the publishing company!


ROGER CORMAN
It was the Publishing company and the composer, after shooting the film and getting ready to lay down the music, they’d guarantee us a certain number of sales of the album, so the all music had to be done by the group on the record there, and so they rerecorded everything.

14a) There was no recording of the original songs and of the band playing?

Only the recording on the track that I was shooting.


15) One of my favourites movies is “The man with the X ray eyes”, which is in my opinion the gospel accordingly to Roger Corman. What was the story behind that movie? It’s such a contemporary, absolutely unique; it has to be seen by University guys.

ROGER CORMAN
“The man with the X ray eyes” was one of the films where somebody would come up with an idea. The advertising department, the A I P, came up with the idea and they had done some research that a film called “The man with the X ray eyes” will be saleable and would do well. And they said: Would you like to do a film? You can do everything you want, just as long as we can call it “The man with the X ray eyes”. And I said: yes, it’s a good idea, a man with a X ray vision! And I came up with something: I remember in the film he was a high doctor, which is obvious. But I remember the first story, because I wrote the first treatment, and he was a jazz musician who was taking a lot of drugs and the drugs caused him to have X ray vision. Then I wrote about a ten page treatment, I looked at it and thought: I don’t like this at all! So I threw it away and then went to the idea he was a doctor, because it gave me the chance really to say more thinks and to develop my own idea.


15b) It seems to me you wanted to tell something, that you wanted strongly to say something. It’s about religion at the very end.

Yes, it was about the confluence of science and religion , which is the basic I think. A scientist who becomes religious at the end. And I’ve always thought that one of the major themes for ourselves for hundred years, for at least two hundred years has been science, and his growing up and his becoming more important in our lives. And there is a sort of similarity between science and religion and the clash between them. This is certainly what the film was about!


16) My last question is about the actual way of the Independent production. What do you think, how do you feel the independent movie scene in USA today? How far and how similar. What keeps the two things of the present and of the past together?

ROGER CORMAN
Well, the independent movie scene in USA is not very good at the moment. The power of the majors was greatest in the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties years, but it has started to fail a little bit when I came in it at the end of the fifties and the independents were at their strongest, as in the sixties and the seventies.
Since then the majors have been regaining their ground and at the moment the market is not good for independent film makers. I think it may come back; I’ve great faith particularly in the technology. I think digital film making is going to become more important and it would be a useful tool for everybody but it would be more useful for the independents who can make bigger films, who have always been constrained simply by the costs of the films, it’s very expensive! Using digital technology you cut the costs of your film, you can come with experiments, you can take chances. I think the future is a good future for independents. It’s through the use of digital at least for the moment and other technologies to come.


17) Don’t you think fictional TV is too much affected by the independent movies?

ROGER CORMAN
Yes, I think television has taken a great deal from Independent cinema; probably more from Independents than from the other Majors. That it gained is another problem. But life is problems, and our job is to solve those problems!

Ernesto De Pascale