BONUS - Interview with Armand Mastroianni (Director, Tales from the Darkside)

Dark Destinations may be end times Night's preacher. Why would a few more casualties struggle me because of their blood? Will join yours? A radio drama anthology. You are wrong how you figure? Every mark on Longo is hunting you down, not you, your partner, he said, I didn't have a ray gun. Full cast performances set in the haunted corners of the globe. Darkness is coming for you. That's the fear that taunts me. Dark Destinations

by fatherm Alone at Weirdingwaymedia dot Com. Weird In Welcome Back Midnight doers to

a very special segment of the show, I'm follow them Alone and Joining Me Tonight. Is a filmmaker, producer, actor who not only was responsible for

dozens of features, including the classics He Knows, You're Alone and Cameron's Closet, but he also directed eight episodes of Friday the Thirteenth series, two episodes of Dark Shadows. Over a long and illustrious career, he's worked with illuminaries like John Palito, Kenneth McMillan, Joe Morton, Talia Balsam, Michelle Nichols, Olivia Hussey, Steve Railsback, Piper Laurie Eddie, Albert Mel Harris,

Chuck McCann, Bobby the Chico, TJ. Castronova. If you know you know Midnight Viewers, Annabeth Yesh Hector, Alissando, this is ridiculous, Jurgen proc Now, Ali Sheety, Meat Loaf, Luke Perry See, Thomas Howl, Tiffany ambertheas and personal favorite of mine, Fay done Away, My God, sir. It goes on and on. And while he directed the Clairvoyant, he himself had clairvoyance enough to cast mister Tom Hanks in his first theatrical feature. He is a dark Side bit of royalty, having directed four episodes

of the series. Please join me in welcoming mister Arma Mastriani to Midnight Viewing. Welcome Sarah, Hey, what a pleasure to be here. It is entirely ours. Tell us how obviously you were. You were making movies before you got to Dark Side. Dark Side was your first television series. But what got you? What got you there? What got you into the movies? Where'd you go to school? Where'd you grow up? Man? I grew up in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York, and I guess I was

always fascinated with movies. I remember going to see a film when I was maybe five or six years old, and I just watched the curtains open and I saw that giant screen and then all of a sudden these images on the screen, and I said, wow, that's amazing, look at that. You know, I want to do that. And I, you know, just on my own, I never studied or went to film school. I kind of like, yeah, I tuk my dad into buying me a eight

millimeter camera, not even super no, not even super. And in those days, it was one of those magazine type cameras that you put it in twenty five feet, take it out, turn it around, put it back in, and shoot the other twenty five feet, and then send it out to be developed. They'd splice it all into one reel, fifty foot reel. So he kept asking, he kept saying to me. My dad would say, like, what do you what do you want a camera for?

What are you going to do with the camera. I said, well, you know, I want to make movies and stuff, and he and he goes, movies, what do you mean of the family, And I was going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because you know that was

not his you know, not his vocation. You know, he came from Italy with his two brothers and they founded a jewelry business in New York City and they were very successful at it, and he had aspirations of me taking over the business, and naturally I worked for him, yeah, during the summer vacation and stuff like that, but my heart wasn't in it. Although when I used to go out and sell for him, I used to, you know, sit down and start talking to the buyers and I'd be I'd

say, hey, by the way, do you see this movie? Wasn't that amazing way they told the story? And they, you know, and they get so wrapped up into my enthusiasm. They order and order and order stuff. But they love the stories I tell. And I found that I was a good storyteller too, because when I was in the boy Scouts, I used to they always always picked me to tell a campfire story at night, and then everybody was too scared to leave and they didn't want to go

off to their tents alone, you know. And in the middle of the night. I'll never forget this, I heard one guy, mister Flanning, who was our scout master, Please I need to go to the bathroom. Come and come with me. He just you know, we used to go out and pee in the woods or whatever. But you know, yeah, I'd create these stories. You know, a lot of them, you know, were stories you know, you heard, you picked up on, and

I'd always embellished them somehow. And then the twig snaps heard and he turned around and there was something that looked like a person standing there, you know, like I'd always I had very very vivid imagination. And you also have an incredible attention to detail. Well, I've been I've been looking at a lot of your stuff over the past few days and and you're you're you're very

meticulous actually in your in your presentation and your shots. Yeah, well, I I enjoy that because I think the whole experience of making a film is telling a story visually. And you know, if you can say it through through visually, you don't need to you don't need to say it verbally.

And and that's how I learned, because I when I made these super eight more the eight millimeter films, I used to get my friends together and we'd I'd come up with some scenes or I'd write a little story and that I wanted to direct, and I wanted to make and we'd shoot it and I'd splice it together and then i'd show it to them and i'd play music from a tape recorder in the background, and you know, and that evolved into,

you know, becoming involved in school with the projects and making short little films, and one of them won an award at a festival, and that prompted me to go into another one. And then I did a sixteen millimeter film because I formed a club in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association. They paid for they funded us as a film club, and all the kids came to work on films there and I was able to make a film there and I made a short film called The Private Worlds of Sophie and Bernie

Schwartz. It was sort of a comedy and this was the first time I was able to use sound and stuff like that, and it was sixteen millimeter in French. At this point, well, I mean, I was just starting in college. I had the other ones I had made were in high school, right right, But this is like an actual short film, you're

yeah, twenty minute film. And it really turned out good because I had this concept, I said, I want to tell a story about a middle aged couple that are really no longer attracted to each other, and they exist in the same household speak but not really to each other. They speak at

each other. They they're like, she's got the curlers in her hair and a bathrobe, and she's making the coffee in the morning, and he's eating his breakfast, you know, getting ridy, and he's like an overweight guy and she's this mousey looking woman and they you know, the spark has gone out of their marriage and they just talk. But they don't talk to each other. They talk at each other like she'll say, you know, Stewart's is having a great shoe sale today. I'm going to go there and check

them out out. And he goes, yeah, you know, look at this nine o'clock tonight hangover Square. I gotta watch that. I like that movie larrd Krieger, you know, And that was their existence. Now once they are separated from each other, my story was that they had to survive

somehow, but they created fantasies. So she imagines the gardener in the backyard, so she's looking through the Venetian blinds and she's looking at the gardener doing the and he takes his shirt off because it's hot, you know, and she's like studdying his torso, you know, and she's like and then the doorbell rings and all of a sudden it's the delivery boy. This young guy comes in. Hey, missus Schwartz, I got your stuff, you know,

and he brings the bags and she goes, put him on the table there, Jimmy, you know. And as she's going, you know, tell us Saul that the last week those vegetables were a little And as she's speaking, her fantasy takes over and she suddenly says, you know, missus Schwartz, you're one of the nicest looking women of all of my mom friends. And he's not opening his shirt a little, you know, and she's going Jimmy and goes, yeah, come over here, missus Schwartz, give

me a hug. I want to hug it, you know. So they had these wild sexual fantasies, and he is on his way to work and he sees the woman at the fruit stand and she's she's playing dumb dun dun dun da da da d Hey fresh fruite today, and he goes, not today, I'm late, and but in the minute he gets on the elevator as he gets as he's getting off to get on his floor to work, and she's standing there in this Carmen Miranda dress with all the fruit in her

hair and everything, and they start to dance together, and they dance off into his office, which becomes something else, and it's a story about that, and ultimately at the end, the two of them meet at that end of the day, and they've gone through four or five different fantasies, and they meet at the end of the day and the music is playing on the

radio and he's clipping his toe nails. She's putting new rollers in and they kind of step backward and looking at each other in the mirror, and they hit each other and he looks at her, and the music says, starts taking off with his beautiful waltz, and he takes her in his arms, and he starts dancing with her, and he's dancing, and suddenly he's dancing

with his fantasy, and then she's dancing with her fantasy. Then she's dancing, and it keeps changing, changing, changing, until they stop and they look at each other and he says, Sophie, she's Bernie. So they discover each other through their fantasies and the Walsaw Well. This film got entered into the Fordham University Film Festival. The judge was Auto Preminger. Good lord, okay, stops the festival and says, this is the winner and I

want to meet the director. I get a telephone call in Brooklyn, New York. My mom says, Columbia Pictures want to say, Auto Premenger's office is on the film that speak. I said, are you kidding me? And they said, mister Premenger would love to meet you. Would you kindly come into Manhattan to the so and so la. So I did and I was like, wow, I can't believe this. And I get there and his attendant, his office person, says to me, just a moment,

please, he'll be with you in a few moments. He's on the phone and then he got I heard the buzzer and she says, you can go in now. And she opened the door and there's this beautiful office and he's sitting naturally against this gigantic window and he's shading his bald head with an electric rage and he goes, come in, come in. Your picture made me laugh and made me cry. It's so beautiful. How did you make this movie? It's so perfect? I said, well, thank you so much,

Thank you so much. He says, I am going to make sure everyone sees this movie. He got on the phone in front of me, called Paramount Pictures, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, and another company I forgot, and I went that day. I brought my film to Columbia Pictures, which was in the building, and when they watched it, they came back to me. I said, you know, we love the short, but

we don't make shorts, we make features. Why don't you write a script or something, or come up with a script you want to do, bring it to us and let's see. So that encouraged me to and then Otto was so generous what he did. Invited me on a Sunday afternoon to his home on someton place. He had about maybe thirty or forty people there, all from the industry, had a huge buffet laid out, and he showed my film to them. Oh my gosh, generous thing I've ever experienced.

And it encouraged me to become exactly like that, not the monster that he was called all the time, the screamer and all those things, because I've experienced this with a number of directors, including Auto premacher, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppolak. They were so wonderful and generous to me. So I ended up making writing a script called Rapallo and Sons, which was a comedy

almost like Moonstruck. And it was way before Moonstruck. This was nineteen seventy something, and I gave it to an actor who lived in the neighborhood. I never met him. I just happened to call him up. See this kind of I persevered, you know. I went after people, you know, like I called Vincent Gardinian and I said, listen, he's listened. A lot of people send me scripts. I'll read it. I'll let you

know, I figured. But two weeks later, I get a telephone call. Hello, my mom, this is Vince Gardenia. I loved your script. I laughed so much. It's so wonderful. How do you write this thing? It's so good? Blah blah blah blah blah, I said, well, I wrote it with a Franciscan monk, brother Jonathan, Who's who he wrote. He used to write plays for the Ensemble Studio theater, but he was a si Franciscan monk. Wow, and we worked together and we wrote the script. Anyway, he says, by the way I gave it

to I hope you don't mind. I gave it to my agents at the William Morris Agency. They loved it, and they want to meet you and they want to sign the script. I want to sign you as a client, I said, are you kidding me? Wonder? So I went up and I met, and I sure enough signed with the William Morris Agency. And before I knew what the picture was set up at Palomar Pictures. Yvonne Passer was going to direct. Since I was a I had not directed a

feature yet. Wit isn't that the whole idea? Yeah? Well, I mean what happened The guy who was breaking the script down for them, George Manassei, their production manager, came to me and said, listen, do you want to make a movie because I got these two guys, these two Broadway producers who have some money. They want to make a horror film. I said, sure, of course, So I went in met with them. They had seen my shorts film shorts and and my and so what happened

is they summertime, you know, they said yeah. They said, so what's the movie? And I'm going the movie? He said, the movie the horror film you want to make. I thought, yeah, So I started pitching the story that I used to tell at the campfire in the and they and they're eating their lunch and they're like kind of nodding, like they've heard this one before. And I swear to God I that moment I said,

this is they're not buying this. They're not buying this. And I said, but then we pulled back and that's on a screen in a movie theater and there's people sitting in the theater watching this, and the real killer sits oh. And that's the beginning of he Knows You're Alone. And I wrote that with my dear friend Scott Parker, who was also working for his dad in the jewelry business, and we used to meet together and write write the story, and we used to come up what's scary? And I said,

look, I don't want to make a gore movie. I want to make a very scary psychological thing, you know, a thriller where where it's all implied, but I mean you might see that that knife and all that stuff, kind of like psycho because I was very influenced by Hitchcock and even Halloween. You know, so you weren't ripping end trails out of co eds were no, no, no, you're making a suspense picture. I hadn't seen Friday the Thirteenth yet, but that was a lot of talk about that.

So we made this film and it was it was dirt cheap because they were going to they were getting another investor named Sam Arkoff who used to run AIP Pictures. But he calls the last minute. We're starting production, pre production, and he says, I can't do it. Fellas he says, you're going to you know, I have to bail on you because I'm involved

in two other pictures and I'm not going to have that. So they said, well, we can't make it, you know, because we were going to make it like I think six hundred thousand dollars or something like that. And I said, no, no, no, we'll still do it. We'll still do it. We'll make it for three hundred that, you know, for just whatever you have. And they said you can't, you can't, and we'll shoot on Staten Island and I know people and he knows,

my friend knows people will put it all together guerrilla style. Finally they said all right, all right, let's give it a shot. And that's how that happened. And I just say that, I love how scrappy you were in this situation where you're having, you know, being feted by auto premanger and your film is being shown and you're at every studio and yet you're on the ground making it happen. I just loved that. I was very very

fortunate. I just had a path that was very open to me, and it just kept Anyway, the film gets made and they bring it out to Los Angeles. The two producers bring it out to Los Angeles ahead of the con Film Festival because they were going to go to conn to sell the foreign rights. You know, they figured they'd make a few dollars with it. Well, the studios were supposed to see wanted to see it because it was still a week before, so they figured, all right, let's invest some

money, we'll go out there. So they showed it. The first one to see it was supposed to be twentieth Century Fox, but they cancel the screening because they had a conflict, So they said, who's next in line? We don't want to waste a day MGM. So they brought it to MGM and MGM loved it. They watched it twice because when they went to

pick it up, the picture was just starting again. So they knew something was up because there was a packed house of executives and all the people there and the guys stood up at the end, said, Wow, this movie was fantastic. Loved it. It's scary. Oh God, excuse me. Who are you guys in the back? Oh, we're the producers. We're here to pick up the print. Oh would you please step outside, we'll

call you. And they did and they got a call and they said, look, well buy the film as long as you don't show it to anybody else or put us in any bidding war with this. And they got a fortune for that movie. They got a lot of money up front. And I know that because they didn't pay us that much. And they gave me, like, ey take seven points. You know, it was the producers

seven points seven points. Once they're one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you know, investment was paid off or close to two hundred thousand out of two million dollars. You know what the profit was? It was phenomenal. I bought it. I was able to put it down payment on a house. You're just telling me the American dream over and over. Yeah. Yeah, Well, immigrant father and no formal training. Just love love for cinema I learned on my own. I was cutting in my own films. I used

to splice them together and play with the sound so match. And the first note I wrote about your work when I was watching This Weekend is this man is a visual storyteller. Well, I hope so, because that's what I aspire to be. Yeah. Are, But it just seems like so many directors are just telling the story and setting up some shots and getting the coverage

and everything. Ever, no matter the media, if it was a theatrical feature, it was an episode of television, And no matter what the genre of television, I noticed jumping from one to one more often than not. It's what you said before. It's less about dialogue and more about just telling

the story. If you don't have to say anything, you don't have to I noticed, particularly in the Friday of the thirteenth, where there seemed to be passages that lasted like six seven minutes with maybe one word, and I just marveled at that because I love that. So few filmmakers kind of believe in just the power of the moving image. You know, George Miller's out there making you know, basically silent movies set with sound effects and music.

These days, he seems the only other guy out there doing it. So I don't know if that's a question. It's just an observation I had about your work that I really admired. There's a Korean filmmaker who made him film called Morbius Mobius or Morbius Unbelievable. It's Oedipus complex, but it's done. It's all done between a mother, father, and a son, and not one word has spoken. Grunts usually, you know, sound effects and stuff, but nobody opens their mouth and says one word. It's all employed.

You could. You don't need a word. You don't. There's no subtitles to read, and it's it's a shocking film, but it's very graphic,

very But I loved that because it was conveying everything through visuals. And you know, it's interesting you said that because the first review I had, which was a very good review on the first TV movie I directed with Michelle Lee and James Farantino, was exactly saying that, saying that the way you know he sets up these shots, they're very visual without having to inform us in any other thing. You get the feeling that she's walking on eggshells. You

get the feeling that there's something about to happen. Even with the way he frames the tea kettle in the foreground, that the steam starts to intensify or you know, they picked up on those things, and I feel very happy about that because that's my ambition is to tell stories through pictures. So essentially, you know, he knows you're alone. Got sold to MGM, And

oh, one more thing before you continue. The logo for that movie is one of my favorite logos, really, that the drawing with the hands coming down to form form the h It's fantastic, right right, right right, Well that wasn't my design, I know it. I'm just saying I made a movie and that logo exists and it's awesome. Well, our original title was either the Uninvited Shriek. I know Tom always is a kid with me, he writes. In fact, he'll write me letters and remembers every single

one. I used to try a new title on everybody while we were shooting, and so we released it as blood Wedding and a Skull with a veil on it and MGM said, well, we don't, can't do that. Plus there was a famous Garcia Lorca play, so they said they're what do you call their public City department worked on it and the head guy came over to me and a guy named Ira Tello'll Never Forget, and he shows me. He says, here, here's the name of your movie. He Knows

You're Alone? And I said, yeah, who does isn't that the tagline? Like a stalker watch out? He Knows You're Alone? Oh yeah. In fact, it played next to another friend a film called When a Stranger Calls on the same bill. It said when a Stranger calls, he knows You're alone. You know it sounded level. So yeah, we were in and they did this whole promo. They brought us out for interviews and everything, put us up at the Beverly Hills. He'll tell first class per diem,

which I never heard of. And the next thing I know, I get a telephone call from Warner Brothers saying William Friedkin wants to meet with you. Esuys. Oh my god. The guy who made The Exorcist French connection. So I said, how do I get there? And they told me go over the drive and blah blah blah blah blah. They in rented me car, a car and everything. I'll never forget this. I go in again. It was like the Auto premature thing. I walk in and assistant

said, Billy will be with you in a couple of minutes. He's on the phone. All of a sudden, she said, armand Mostriani is here and he's okay. And the door opens and he's wearing this white jumpsuit like Hannibal. He comes out. He goes, come over here, and he gives me a big hug. He says, your picture scared the shit out of me. He says that film was so good. How did you make this film? Blah blah blah blah. I said, oh my god. And we sat down and we started talking a little bit and he hands me

a script. He goes, I want you to make this one. And I took the script and said the Night of the Full Moon. I went wow. He says, do you you know you'll direct it? And I said, you mean you're not going to direct anymore? He said no, I'm going to still make films, but I want to produce some films too, and I'm want to find very interesting filmmakers like you, like yourself,

and I'm going to do that. I said, fantastic. He says, I'll tell you what read the script, and we'll have dinner tomorrow night. You want to do that, I said, with you, of course. And so imagine getting out of that room with the script in your hand. Are you going to drive all the way across the over the hill. Of course not. I sat in the car and I stopped the meeting, and I'm going, oh, okay, okay, oh no, this is bad.

And then I said, you know, I think it's a psychological test, because he gives you a bad script to see if you know what you're doing. So I go home and I did finish it, and I called back and I said I read the script. And she said, well, Billy's on the phone. He'll he'll get back to you. I've scheduled you guys for dinner tomorrow night, and blah blah blah. Okay, great, he does call. He does call me back and goes, hey, so

what do you think. I said, Well, it's pretty bad. Long silence, and he goes, you know, any script can be fixed, and I went, oh, he likes it. Oh, oh god. So I said, he said, look, are we going to have dinner tomorrow? And I I said, yes, definitely, And so he was so nice. I sat there with him Andnute we were ordering and he's he had his hand uff to his face like this, and he's going, what do you want to do? And I go, well, I have some ideas for a film. I want to do a story about New York City,

and I want to do that. There's a killer loose in New York City, kind of like a Jallo film, you know, Tanyan. And he goes, huh. And I see a scene in a swimming pool where guy is all by himself and the lights go out, almost like in cat People, and suddenly he's yanked down under the water and his handcuff is his ankles handcuffed to the bottom rung of the ladder so that his face is inches away from but he can never breathe, and he's trying to pull himself.

He's trying to rip his ankle off, and blood's coming in the water, and he goes, I love it. I love it. And then I see the woman in a scene later on, because I always see these bed sheets flapping at night in the wind, and this woman is running through away from the killer, and she's pulling the bed sheets like this, and you

never know if he's going to appear in front of her or whatever. And so he loved it, and he called my agents at the William Morris Agency the next morning and he set up the whole development of The Killing Hour and I wrote it again with the one I wrote. We Apollo and songs with the Franciscan Monk, and we wrote the story. And he kept calling and he'd say, I like this scene. I like this scene, he says, But all your victims are men. He says, is this a gay film? I said, no, no, no, no, no,

no, it's not gay. There's a reason that all these men have to be killed within a certain period of time because they're all involved within it, with it with something with an individual who does not want to be exposed. And it turns out that individual is the head of a like a NewsCap He was like, I had Heraldo Rivera in my mind because he was very popular at the time. So Perry King plays this talk show host but very cocky,

very brave, but he's involved in the murder of this girl. And with four other men, they decided to do this kinky thing, this kinky knight, and they pick up this girl. They hire this girl who's like a into all kinds of s and m and stuff like that. But she dies, she's killed while this is happening, and so they throw her body in the river and they leave handcuffs on her, and there becomes the killings,

the handcuff killings. But then when he realizes that these people also know who he is and can expose he's got to go out and continue these murders. And his best friend is a cop who wants to be a comedian, a stand up comic who does stand up comic stuff. And that's the story, very popular at the time, stand up. Yeah. And so what we did was we made this film, but Billy unfortunately got very sick.

He had a heart attack, a major heart attack, and he said, I'm not able to move forward right now, and I'm not going to be for a long time, but if you're able to get this movie started. This all came through his assistant because he couldn't. He was in the hospital, it's yours. You don't know me anything except what we paid for development. And I went holy. So I called the guys from He Knows You're Alone, who were very wealthy right now, and they said, sure,

we'll do it, we'll do it. So we made the Killing Hour and then you know it continued. I got called and from Los Angeles to do a movie called Supernaturals. And then can I just say the swimming pool scene that you mentioned, Yeah, it fucking horrified me as a child. Oh you saw the Oh yeah, I was already tripidacious about getting in a pool. But like things like that. And there was another film, I think Ghost Story they had a swimming pool steam where like there was a sheet of

glass had gone over. Yeah yeah, yeah, Like those didn't did me? No favors, come friend, thank you? Well there are things that, you know, leave an indelible mark on you. I mean, like the shower scene in Psycho Jaws. How many people were afraid of going in the water after that? You know, this dark object underwater with a gigantic mouth that's going to come and grab you. You know, it's like whoa. So you know, but I was able to be I have to say.

I think I was blessed to be able to move on from one to another to another, and and and While I was in Los Angeles doing the Supernaturals, I got a call from somebody who said, listen, we're putting something together called Distortions and Olivia Hussey and Edward Albert Jr. And all this stuff. We want you to direct it. I said, oh, sure, sure, you know I Meanwhile, I'm not in the director's guild at this point, so I was I was able to work. You know.

They liked that because they didn't have to go through all the in the paperwork of hiring assistant directors and all that stuff. So that led to Cameron's Closet and then Double Revenge for the See. I usually ended up doing a couple of movies for these companies because they liked the way I worked. I was always very respectful of the budget because I realized, Hey, it's like sending a kid into a candy store and saying you got five dollars to buy candy.

You could spend it all on one thing, or you could take your time and spend it on this and this and this, but that's it. You're not getting any more, you're not getting six dollars or eight dollars. So I always kept that in mind, and I always said, no matter what I have to do, I have to stay to the close to this budget. I have to stay right on it or less if I can and still make a good movie. And if I have to, I have to make shortcuts or I have to combine things to make things work. So I

did. After those couple of films, Double Revenge and Cameron's Closet, I started getting called for. I think it was Tales from the Dark Side. Yeah, Tails from the Dark Side, which was still again non union, so they were able to do it, and we were able to do a couple of Tales from the Dark Side. And what was so nice about it?

I see, this is how I learned from other directors. There was a kid on the set who used to was from the office and he used to make deliveries and he used to come and just like spend as much time as he could, just watch him before he had to leave. And I called him over. I says, what do you want to do? One day? He said, well, I'd love to write. I want to make movies too. I want to I said, well, why don't you come in spend a little time on the set. And he goes, can

I is that all right with you? I said, of course it is, and and he did and he started we started talking, and he says, you know, I have an idea for one of these, And I said, what kind of I have an idea about a politician who has to go and make the speech and he has to go, you know, to this He goes to this town and they take his clothes away to be pressed and everything and everything comes back exaggerated into clown suits and stuff to make he's

because he's really a buffore, you know. And I said, okay. And I said it's got to end like in a circus then, because I want to do like a Fellini thing, you know. And and I actually think he should a car should come to pick him up, and it should be a little tiny clown car, a little red car with a battery operator. And he can't understand. And we got this fabulous dick Sean to be in it. This guy was over the over the top when he realized I

was going to take his story, we were going to adapt it. He and I adopted it, and they bought this the episode and we made it. It's cool. I think it's the shoe fits. Shoe fits absolutely with Dick Sewn, who was terrific. But the first one I did, I think was Painkiller for them Oby and Peggy Cass and Farley Granger. My god, he's fantastic in the episode. He's wonderful. And you know what I

said to him. He would he would pivot on the exact word at the same moment, like he go, nor would you you had then and he'd used that same thing, and I stopped and I one day I said to him, Parley, how did how is it that you there's no like variation? He said, oh, my god, Armand we could never do that in the old studio system. We had to match constantly for the editor because then if we change things, it wouldn't matter in cutting. They wouldn't be

able to cut you back to us because I'd be doing something different. I said, yeah, but it's amazing how good you are each time, you know, and that those are the old trained Hollywood stars, which were you know, the newer ones that I worked with, like when I did Supernatural, for example, I loved him. Maxwell Calfield was great, but he would never do the same thing twice. You would never even hit his marks because he wasn't worried about that. He was worried about his moment, you

know. So the one thing I also learned was everybody's different, and you're going to work with a lot of different people in this in this industry, and you're going to have to be able to adapt to all the different personalities that you're working with. Some are going to want to listen to you, some of them not going to want you to tell them anything, and some are if you start suggesting too much, I'm going to tell you to go away. So you got to know who to play and who to befriend and

who how to you know, So I learned all that. That was part of my you see, the blessing when I say it's a blessing, was that I without having gone to school for filmmaking and directing and all that stuff,

I learned through the process of doing it. And I always said, when I do a film, I always want you to call the film schools and ask if any kids want to intern on my sets because I want them to watch and see, because that they're going to learn more watching and experiencing how movies are made and seeing the problems that arise and how they're dealt with. And I would always call the interns over and say like, Okay, did you see now we just set up this shot? Would you have done

it any differently? He goes, well, I would have maybe done this and then this, And then I said, but you see what you just did. You added two extra three extra shots now and those three shots, those three shots are you know, going to cost you more time to do them. If you combine them into one, you get it all done at once. So so important to have angels, isn't it. Yeah. I mean you've had some in your life and here you are doling it out as

well. But the most one of the best experiences for me, I mean, working with Billy Friedkin was phenomenal. And Billy, you know, was even until he passed away recently, but he used to be so kind. Even took my son and when he was signing books at book Sop, he spent a half hour talking to Paul my son about filmmaking and what do you want to do Paul, And it was just so generous of him. You

know. Freakin has a reputation for being rather cantankerous, and well, you know what he tells me, No fools, But you know what he said to me, armand you know what you do. On the first day. I assemble the entire crew and I find someone thing. Everybody's there, and I say, oh, by the way, is this who wears props? Is this your idea of something? And yes, sir, do you know what I think that stinks? You're fired? You're off this movie. I'm

going to get somebody else in front of the whole crew. And I said why, He says, because it sets up who's in charge and they know immediately from day one. I said, yeah, But Billy, they also come to work each day with their stomach in knots, not whether or not they're going to get fired or not. And he says, doesn't matter. He says, you have to always maintain control. Well, I maintained control on my films, but I didn't do it that way. So I learned

another thing too. When I heard they were going to shoot The Godfather on Staten Island up on the wedding sequences. They had a picture in the newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. I'll never forget this of a bearded man with a scarf around him, a little heavy set, I said. Director Francis Coppola sets up shots scouting location here on Longfellow Avenue. Photo said, I've got to go. I've got to go. So I your Italian American alarm go off, like, Holy God, well I'm right here. It wasn't

that. It was more of wanting to be around the making of movies because I used to be. I used to when I was working for my dad in Manhattan, a lot of films were being made. I was on the set of Marathon Man. I saw Laurence Olivia. You know, cut that guy's start zell zell. You know that woman's screaming prosstry. I was there

when they were shooting that. I was on the set of Midnight Cowboy, Saint John's Lessinger film where they're in the subway and John Voyd has spilt some ketchup on his pants and he walks over to one of those little machines where he used to put five cents in and get some gum or something, and he just looks in himself in the mirror, you know, And they kept They shot that about ten twelve times that I was going, like, I

keep doing this. They're not talking, but anyway, And I used to love just being around the whole environment of movie making, watching the cameras, how they moved them and all that stuff. So when The Godfather happened, I remember I got there and I saw that everything was cordoned off. You couldn't get in, but there were a lot of extras waiting to be bust up to the location. So I kind of meandered and fit my way into

the extra. And when we got off the bus, they had us wait on one side, and I saw this guy, Francis Coppola, walking back and forth, and Gordon Willis was there, and he kept looking at this guy. He says, no, we can't shoot, and Francis just going, why gardon god, damn it. You know we got to shoot this thing. I'm behind you gotta he was yelling, and I said, oh God, oh God, Well, I guess this is the time I got.

Let me go up to him. Yeah, worst time. So he walks away from it like in a huff, and all of a sudden I tapped his arm. I said, excuse me, Can I ask you a question? He goes, yeah, what and He looks at me and I said, look, I'm a student. I make films. I make super eight and eight milimeters in sixteen millime. I started sixteen, and I just want to learn as much as I can. I want to watch. Is there any way you could let me just hang out here and just watch?

Yeah, no problem, Oh, thank you, thank you so much. I walk He walks away, and somebody puts the hand omies, what are you doing here? He turns right, It's okay. He's with me. I'm over here, and he used to get me box lunches. I'd sit

right next to him, right by the camera while he's directing. Remember this scene, Diane Keaton, I didn't know your father knew Johnny Fonteine that my father knew him, because he's at the camera going like to Diane Keaton, So she go, I didn't know your father knew Johnny Fontaine because it's just on them, no extras in the background shooting. They're reversed like I'm like,

I'm looking at you right now, that kind of thing. And then later on when they turned around, they put all the people back there, all the extras. So he kept going, that's the way you direct you make faces at them. I got to talk to Malon Brando, who had your plugs in his ears and he was drinking slowly and he would go around going like, I said, you know what, I saw your film One Eye Jack's and everything you get? Oh you like that? That good?

Yeah? Because he had this thing in his mouth and he said, is he going to direct another one? He goes, I'm on no more, I'm just going to do this doing this And he was fun, he was nice, and he signed something for me. Malon Brando and I spoke to all the other people up there al Pacino. Everybody was so much fun. And I was there for three days because they he kept telling me to come back, come back, come back. He watched Oh my gosh, this

was the most incredible thing. I watched the scene where they shot in the garden. So tell me, Michael, this guy who comes to you this pars anything, how's your kid doing her? He reads the funny papers, well all that is on giant cue cards over al Pacina's shoulder, and and and Brando would do something like he go, Michael, so read the lines right and come back to him and say tell me something. And it looked like he was thinking, you know, it looks like he was. It

was beautiful. The ultimate thing about Marlon Brando, because you hear that story about him putting lines here or having it fed into his ear and stuff, and it just sounds like, oh, he's being lazy and whatever. But there is a method there, like it was. He was super effective. He was doing it for he was doing it as a he wanted that spontanety. Here is a shot from the Godfather, and look at that who the lines are on Robert Duval's chest. Yeah, Branda reading them. I mean,

he really did stuff like that. So it was I took a few pictures and I hit them, you know. But and then I remember Coppola inviting me to Godfather too, and I met with Robert de Niro and all when they were shooting the Feast of Saint Rocco. Yeah, amazing. They invited me to the screenings the two premieres, and so he was so nice to me. I said, I want to be just like him. I want to encourage other young people to make films and come up and participate.

So I've always done that every time I make movies. I've always got young film students and stuff. On the set. And you know, I was very fortunate for you know, the companies to allow me to do that, because a lot of them would have said, no, we don't want more. People would have to feed them and you know, right, But you know, I had fun doing the Talales from the Dark Side and that led into a few other things other well, if I can ask you some specific

questions. Today is Ernest Dickerson's birthday? Oh yeah, and now he was your DP on at least two of your episodes, and I'll never forget he had to. He was laughing so hard when we were filming If the Shoe Fits, because Dick Sean made us laugh that the camera would jiggle so you'd have to get away from the camera. And the same thing with the Painkiller. I don't think he shot Painkiller. I think that was somebody different. No, it was at the Shoe Fits Dick Sealman, because I remember him

laughing so hard. And I see Ernie once in a while because we get together with the other film directors at Mick Garris holds a thing sometimes we haven't

done it in a while. We like Quentin Tarantino, all these people. Gameroo del Toro was crave and when he Masters of Horror, you that's what we were. They called the Masters of Horror. So we used to get together and do that. But you know, and then I get a go ahead, So you were asked, well, that's well, that's his that's his first gig on Twnesson The Dark Side, and could you tell me a little bit about that? This involves him obviously the house style, were you

dictated a a like how and how you could shoot basically? No, not so much on that one. I to have Robert Draper, who's one of

the dp's on the show. I worked with rob you work. He shot a couple of my movies. No, I mean they did want to be able to cut it for time, you know, because these had to fit into a certain category, so we didn't have to have a certain amount of coverage. And if somebody started to get too artsy and make long, you know, moving takes that you can't cut out of, then they come like

Tommy Castronov would come down or or I shot one in New York. Yeah, the Painkiller was in New York. That was a different But but in California, I know TJ. Who we became such close friends in fact I made his movie Double Revenge. He had a script is armand I want you to make this for me, and I brought it to the company who did Cameron's Closet, so in that as well. Is he not who TVA?

He passed? No? No, was he in the film? I mean the no, no, no no. We we do little walk ons here and there, but I don't remember him being in any of the of the shows. Coincidentally, I co host another podcast that's about the television series Taxi, which he was a regular on that show for many of the he worked at Mario's there he was. He knew Tony and all those guys over there

very well. Yeah, yeah, a lot of stories with TJ. But here a few though, just like what's what what is your relationship with him on the show, Like how are you interacting with him? From directors,

we were like buddies, he was. I mean, he'd yell, he'd yell at people, come on, we got to move this thing. Guys, we're not doing gone with the win here, you know. And but he never had a problem with me because I think he requested me. He had seen the Painkiller one that I did with lu Jacobe. You know, he said, I want this guy, bring him out. Let's bring him out. And because I was living in New York at the time, I was living in Staten Island and he was, so can I just I'm sorry

to interrupt, but you filmed both on the East and West coast. Yeah,

for the show, okay, because they were shooting in Manhattan. They were shooting some and it was Mitchell Galic No I think, yeah, and somebody else. And of course who was running George Romero's company there at the time, those Richard, of course Richard and yeah, we did that in New York and then they saw it in LA and they said, we want

this guy out here. And that's really what's happened for me. I mean, even with Tales from the Dark from Friday the thirteenth and More of the Worlds all those things, people would see things that I did and I want this guy, and I'll never forget. I mean, I became very close friends with John Anderson, who was a seek at the time, and he just loved me. He said, I gotta get armand on this one.

Our mom's got to do this one. And it was it was. It was very fortuitous for me because the actors I would work with would really like

me because I would be very considerate of them. I'd listen to them, and I give them options and not tell them how, and words spread and and so that's why when it became time to do my first TV movie, the network would not approve me because I was doing feature films at the time, or you know, independent feature films, and they said, we need a guy who knows how to shoot TV right, which is generally what's faster, I mean overall. Yeah, Michelle Lee said, I will not do

it unless you get this director. And they were so reticent to do it, but they finally bent and they got it and they were very happy. It turned out to be a huge hit. It's called When No One Would Listen, originally called My Husband Is Going to Kill Me, and it was based on a true story of a woman who was who leaves her abusive husband with the kids and he finds her and ultimately does kill her. And it

was but it was, it was, it was. It was an interesting film and there you know, tell James Farantino, right, James Farantino was, yeah, very it was see talk about taking visual chances. This is

my first TV movie. I think I should follow the book and follow no. I told him, I said, I want to do theatrical lighting, like when they go when she takes the kids to the shelter and we go into this big room and know there's all these women on cots, kids sleeping next to them and everything, and Cecily Tyson takes them through all these things.

I want three pools of light on the wide shot, and as they leave, let that pool of light diminish slowly, and then the next one they go through, then that one diminishes, and Toni's just one pool of light over them, and you know what what's in the room, but you don't really get to see it. You're just you're with these two kids. The mother and Cecla will talk in the morning and then she comforts the kids. The camera slowly pushes and pushes in in the in the light fades fad,

fads to black. And that was a theatrical thing you do on on a stage, not in a film. But everybody loved it. They said, this looks really different. It's it's doesn't look like a TV movie. And I did that also with when she gets killed at the end, it suddenly she she looks at the cigarette that she smokes. She's been telling us

the story and you don't know where she is. And she looks and the ashes have gone down, and she she reaches out a frame and you see a little tin and she just puts it out in the tin and it cuts back and she's on a gurney and her body is laying flat and there's this big white light over the over the gurney and it says Jessica Cochran was killed on such and such a night with bullets to the heart. And then the camera the lights fit slowly dimmed black, and it was I opened the movie

on a black screen again. And they didn't want to do that, but they loved it because then she lights a match and the glow illuminates her face and she lights a cigarette. This is the opening shot of the film and she the first time she looks right at the camera and starts talking. I think I was seventeen or eighteen when he hit me, but I thought, boy, he really loves me. Anyway, I met Gary and we start going into the film and it was like, and you don't know where we

are. We're in the mark. She's telling us that from her why. So I did take a lot of chances. Yes, And I do remember a couple of the series that I got on. And I wasn't a fan of doing series because spirit series had established people in it, had kind of looks that had been established and stuff, because I like to bring my own stuff, my own style to it. But there were a couple that said, look, we like to shoot everything with long lenses and that's the style

of this series. I said, okay, I'll keep that in mind, and you know I did. I kind of did. But the other very interesting thing was the call for Dark Shadows. I was at home. Let's be not dark Shadows. I watched that when it was when it was run, I was about fifteen years old, and I was glued to my television. I was talking about the black and white one, the early no I had already consumed that. I'm talking about the revival with the men crossed.

I get a call from Dan Curtis's office and and they my wi. My wife comes out and says, do you have a call from Dan Curtis wants to speak to you? I said, really, okay, So I get on Hello. Hello, I love Wins of War. You have great film, great show, great meal, thank you, thank you very much. He's I got to tell you something. I was watching TV the other night. I saw your your Friday the thirteenth, the one you did about the

Marquis de Sade. He says, no house pit. Yeah. I love the way you shot that, with those very low angles and foreground, and he says, that's the way I shoot. I love that you. I said, maybe I copied your style. I was influenced by the way you shoot, and he says, I love it. He says, I want

you to come out and work on Dark Shadows. You'd be interested. I said, you mean the series you're doing, and he explained to me, yes, yes, yes, So I remember coming out and taking the job, and I did the first two after him because he did the pilot and the first one. Then I did the next two. And he says, I wish I could fire all the other directors because I want you to keep this look going. So what I'd like you to do. I'm not going to let you go home. I want to make you the producer of the

show and you stay on and you control the other directors. I said, Dan, I can't do that. I don't want to tell I don't want directors telling me how to shoot, and I don't. He says, you teach them, you show them you so but reluctantly. And I've always did it with a very nice way, because I also knew what he was looking for. He wanted to keep the style of the show. But again I took huge chances there. In that one, I did something that you know,

everybody says, and he bites her on the neck. Boom. That was the shot. And I said, this has got to be a very sexual seduction. She has to lure him. He's out there in the garden waiting for her, and she's sleeping, and she could feel him, she could sense him, and she had this very low cut thing, you know.

And I said, I want to do a shot where she's walking barefoot through the leaves and she's moving and she senses his presence in that distance and she goes up to him and they stare at each other, and then she opens his She reaches up and opens his shirt and she rubs her hands on his chest and then slowly turns her back to him and offers her neck like this, you know, and like she offers do me. And I said, I want her breast to be heaving and heating, and the camera will

move down, move down, move down. After he bites, just drop lit of blood, like an orgasm of blood. And it was and it worked, and in fact, it took the headline of the newspaper that's they went nuts. Hold on one second, I gotta show you this. I can't wait. The newspaper. I did this. The newspaper USA today, it said, a very sexy dark shadow and that's the shot they used. Awesome, that's fantastic. And I recognized the shot. Yes, I remember,

Oh my god, and how wonderful. And I became such good friends with Ben for us. We used to go to Rosa Rito Beach on a Friday when we'd wrap, and he'd have Margarita's waiting for us and we'd all have fun. And it was a way to make and even Barbara Steele,

you know, she was always playing everything. So I said, Barbara, I want to do something. I want I want him to like reach in and undo your hair with fingernails. I want him to like really just take you apart and as though he's going to crush your skull. She says. I love that. I love that oh, Felini used to do stuff like that. Well, I just want to try this. And I remember getting a call from MGM saying that I spent the half a day shooting this one.

You know, this this particular thing, and it's only a quarter of a page. I should have knocked it off in like an hour. So they said, what the hell's going on there? And I said, well, I'm just trying to do something. And when they watched the dailies, Lynn Loring was there, she says, oh my god, I'm getting so hot watching this. This is so good. This is so good. And they loved it, and so there was no problem with, you know,

telling me to take over the show. And that's what I did. I became a producer on the show and worked with all the other directors who I'm friendly with, you know, because I was never interfering. I was never I always said, look, we got to kind of hold this, look through the thing. We've got to try to make your shots, try to design stuff that has those four grounds. And well it needs to have a

style. I mean, that show in particular is one thousand style. So it only makes sense that somebody which should be you know, minding the rudder. Yeah. Yeah, but Dan loved the ideas I brought to it, you know, because I said, let's, you know, let's let's bring it up to the nineties, let's make it. Let's sexualize this show, because I mean it is you know, the other one, the black and white one, wasn't at all sexy. It was just boom boom boom.

It was just creepy and fun. And I think when I did one of the tales from the Dock now tells me Friday the thirteenth, I did a vampire one called night Prey, Night Prey. Yeah. I did this kind of lesbian love scene with these two girls, and I got it's fantastic. Yeah, And again that's that's a long period of time with no talking.

The husband's watching this. It's like, I just love that it kind of may of changing people around and seeing what would you know, putting like, how would I feel if I saw my wife and some other woman making out? I mean it would be like what But would I be morbidly fascinated by

it? And you know, erotically charged watching it? You know? So, by the way, like I'm watching the show again because I watched all of your Friday the thirteenth, because that's another show I watched when it was airing rather religiously and have not really revisited it until just this past week. And now I'm going to revisit the entire series because I find it remarkable. One of the beginnings of your episodes, it's a man, he's driving and

he's looking for a prostitute. Again, just visual storytelling. Just oh. That was the first one I did that was called Dead No very first episode of tales, and that is I ended up doing what eight more because Nick frank Mancuso Junior and producer John Anderson said, oh my god, look what this guy did. You know, It's like they loved what I was doing. So and better Off Dead, by the way, it's the name of better Off Dead, Yeah, Neil Neil Monroe. And then his daughter has

got this horrible disease that only a prostitutes. And then I came out the idea that we had to drive this needle all the way through the neck, and that the mother when they watched that, Franklin Cusso's mother said, oh, I can't watch this, I can't watch it. They had this the first time. They put a disclaimer at the beginning of the show, saying tonight's episode contains you know, and I like that, Oh my god,

you should. The thing is, you know, the show was kind of advertised is like aimed for adolescents, when when as I remember it and now what I'm getting at is I'm rewatching and I'm like, my god, this is really subversive, Like how is he getting all of this on the air? Like you know, you know, I know you'd hear trouble about it

nowadays. Never mind, you know what, they allowed me to push the boundaries, even with the Mesmer's Bobble, you know, the one with Vanity in it, Yes, totally totally naked in those scenes and the guy's crawling inside her, you know, And and she would walk around but naked around the set because she was just she said, I got to be naked.

What the hell everybody's seen me already, so let's keep going. And Vanity Vanity, Yeah, name is Vanity, but she was that whole idea of it came to me and I worked with Jim Henshaw, who was the writer. I kept saying, Jim, let's let's ever want to get inside her. He literally wants to not only wants to become her. He wants to crawl under her skin, which he kind of does at the end, and then it starts to But of course we didn't I or anything like that in

those days. We had to make everything practical and you know, there was no AI or anything. You know, everything was done on the set. So yeah, I think I was very fortunate that they They wouldn't do that without the directors though. I remember that one of the directors wanted to do something in John said nope, nope, follow the script. They allowed me to branch out and do stuff. They really you were bringing flair to it and telling a story more efficiently, Like who cares if it took you a

day to shoot that one quarter page of the script? It's in USA today, Man, Sure I was the headline. Can I just say, of all the Friday the thirteenth episodes, mightier than the Sword with comb FIORI Yeah,

yeah, Fountain pen Yeah. I loved that episode and immediately well done. And and what I really love about the show and a lot of your episodes do this. It sort of shunts the main cast to the side and you just tell the story. Yeah, yeah, because I never I shouldn't say this I mean, I felt like the main cast were the staples that

just held the piece together. But the the story and how those characters were living through the story, the characters in the story that these guys are investigating because they had to go and find the cursed object that these characters, these characters had, I always found them more fascinating because it was a wild kind of fantasy world that they were going. They were existing, and and our guys were like the police coming in to solve the murder, like where were

you last night? You know, Jack and Roby and uh and John LeMay which was what was da Ryan Jack? No, Jack was the old man I met, Yeah, Ryan and Yeah. So I mean, yeah, like those those were the kind of fun things and and I really enjoyed the fact that I was able to take such liberties and and do stuff like even in Mightier than the Sword, there's a an ending is a nightmare, it's

a dream. I think she wakes up screaming and wonderful. By the way, because it was it felt like an after shot that wasn't there, that was there. That's something I said to Jim, I said, you know what I want to do here. I want to make this happen like and fool the audience and make it think it's really but it's it's her nightmare. She's never going to forget. Yeah, so yeah, that was that was enjoyable. I used to I used to be very very aware of shot lists

in those days. They used to, Oh good, I meant to ask you, because it seems like you would have a massive shot list, and I didn't, because it happened. They never used them. I never used them. I would sit down and sketch all these things and design shots and

say I got fourteen shots that I got to do fifteen shots. When you're on the set, everything changed for me. Everything would become like, oh wait, wait, wait, why don't you go over here, and why don't we go over there with the camera and push this in? And that you know, all that inspiration was happening spontaneous, and so I've never used shot lists after that. I did everything from here. It was shocking. Yeah, I know, and I know people meticulously, like you know,

Hitchcock does it, but I would find that very boring to them. Once the film's made, then you've made it already, it's all sketched out. What are you drawing? Now, oh yeah, I find it actually very very inspiring that you say that, because I think you can overthink it. You can't. I mean, you know, look, unless you're doing animation, there's no reason to not improvise. If you're on a set, correct

like it. Just you know, all these different factors are going to come up the performance, what the room looks like, how they decorated it. If you over rehearse your actors too, it's the same thing. They become a little you know, so used to it that everything you know is done

by rote and there's no like spontaneity. And sometimes what I like to do is whisper into the actor's ear or something, give them, you know, an adjustment or some kind of a choice to make, and not let the other actors know, and I'll shoot that take and see what happened, because sometimes they'll be a surprise that's so wonderful that you know, you get a genuine reaction that you know wasn't done five times already, you know. So I like doing that kind of stuff, and I think that's why the actors

liked me. And actors always would recommend me, to recommend me, to recommend me. So when I started doing a lot of the television movies. I I had just finished doing a big epic film called The Ring in the Prague and Austria and London and Switzerland, and then we came to New York to shoot. It was all in the forties and it was about the World War Two. It was a Nestasia Kinsky, Michael York, it was a

huge cast. It's one of my favorite films that I made. I feel deficient for not having seen it, but I'm going to rectify that as soon as they get out of here. There we are shooting at the hotel and there's Michael York in the background, and it was, Oh, it's one of my favorite films. It's based on a book by Danielle Steele called The Ring. Danielle Steals The Ring, and they are parts of it on YouTube. I don't know if there's there's DVDs floating around and I'll find it.

But it is an amazing film because everybody. I mean, I don't want to say it's an amazing film because I made it, but I loved making it so much because when I got there first, I was relocked and I saw Danielle steal all this's got to be a love story of some sort, and I don't want to do it. But it was this thing the script, you know, because it was two nights. It's a four hour movie, so three hours and something. So I opened up thing that I'm exhausted.

I don't want to do this because I just finished a movie and my agents had just read it, and I said, Berlin nineteen thirty three Hitler is just coming to power. Oh oh oh, and I'm reading. I'm reading that period and thirty three. I'm in eazing. And I discovered I don't know if you know the actor Alessandra Novola, I do. Yeah,

he was just in Many Saints of Newerk. Yes, he is somebody I wanted so desperately played a Nastasia's son because it moved so many years ahead at the end, and the producer, Doug Kramer, did not want him. He wanted some I don't know surfer guy from Los Angeles who was on tape. And I said, I don't like this guy, Doug, I don't, and he said, well the other guy can't. It looks like a ferret. I don't. I don't think. I said, what are you

kidding? I said, he's wonderful. There's a natural quality about him. But then Doug bowed and he said, you get him, you know, you make him look good, and he was wonderful. Alessandro. Then right after that, Alessandro got to play Pollocks in Face Off. He got he played the brother of Nicholas Cage yea and so you know, and and and making a film of that stature was a huge, huge effort for me. I mean it was shot, we scouted all over the place, it was

hundreds of extras. It was all about the Nazis. I had to blow

up all these buildings and everything, and it's all in the Film's very big budgeted film. So I come back and I'm editing the film and I can't wait to go back home to Staten Island, my house. And I get to call my agent and says, they want to have breakfast with you, these two producers that have a project. And I said, now, I'm not going to do anything for a while, going to take a break. So he called them and they said, no, no, no, we have to talk to him. Just have breakfast at least. So I said,

all right. So I met them and they put a script in front of me called Robin Cook's Virus and I said, guys, thank you so much, but I really don't. No, no, no, we have to make this movie with you. And I said why, He said, no, we will. And I'll tell you what. If you make this movie for us, you can go home and we'll bring your family out here. We'll do everything. You can take a break, and we'll guarantee you a second movie right after it. How's that? I said, it sounds

great, but I'm just tired. And I said, oh, I'll go read the script. So I called my agent. I said, well, what's up here? Why is this? So this as well? The actress who they is the lead is Nicolae Sheridan, and she won't do the movie unless you do it. And I said, I don't know her. I've never met her. She she's all the girls women you worked with all those other movies. They were raving about you to her. She's got to get you. And she saw some of the stuff and she went. So I

said all right. And they paid me a fortune too, a lot more than I was making. And so I made it was like, yeah, so it was good. I watched it when it aired. Yeah, I guess your your you know, your enthusiasm hopefully is put in on film too. Your your your love of making the films. And I'll be honest with you, a lot of them were really bad scripts. I mean a lot of these TV movies were so formulaic and stuff. And I do remember that when I got hired to do Gone but Not Forgotten. It was a big

epic mini series with Brookshield, Scott Glenn. There was a lot of people in it, Lou Diamond, Phillips, I cast my friend John Pallito, there was a lot of people, Juck McCann. I remember getting up there the Sacramento. They flew me up. I read the script. I said, wait, wait a second, wait a second, big holes here, guys. Big Holds is based on a famous novel by Philip Margalin. So

I said, let me call the writer. So I called the writer up and he says to me, he says, you're making I understand you're making my film Gone but not Forgotten. I said, yes, but Philip, let's I want to talk to you about a couple of these sequences here. And he says, you know, I got to be totally honest with you. I'm on a way ahead of you guys, I'm on another book. My head isn't in that one. I'm sure you'll figure it out, you

know. And so I brought a friend of mine up and we held up the picture for two weeks and did a lot of extensive rewriting, and then I got my cast and we started making the movie and I took I went really dark in this film, and I did stuff that was very visual, where you know the face, and I would push in on the person's face and her eyes would move and would have to she'd have to hold that moment.

Everybody would measure that. And then I'd cut to another place where where she is in a completely different time, and I pick up the same shot and pulled back. And when they blended it, we blended it. We put one face over the other. It almost melded right into became another scene without a cut, and it was beautiful. It was Patty McCormick from The Bad Seed Yea, and she plays a woman who shoots her husband and Brooks Shields is an attorney and Scott Glenn is a psychopathic killer. And boy,

there's some very very very dark stuff in that movie. Rape is He has women tied in barns that that are urine stained and he goes in and sexually uses them at his pleasure, you know, like he brands TV movie. Yeah it was a musical, it was, but when they saw that,

and that's how I started working for that company. And I did. I forgot how many movies, maybe twelve fifteen, A lot of the miniseries like Nowhere, Final Approach, Pandemic, r h I, you know those who were They just gave me like carp Blanche, do what you want, You've got free ring And I did a lot of movies with them, a lot of big miniseries for them. You've worked with Chuck McCann a lot, including Tales from the Dark Side, And tell me a little bit about your experiences

with mister McCann. We're big fans of his. Well, we became best

friends. We were like I used to go and have dinner with him all the time up in the house with him and his wife Betty, and and when he used to bring me always to the Playboy Mansion because he was best friends with hef and I went there like dozens of times, and in fact I even came, my wife came, and and for Easter they had an Easter egg hunt, and my son came out and he, you know, he was seeing this place and all the actors were there and everything, and

and even you. Hefner was really great to talk to you. We'd sit down and have some really interesting conversations. But Chuck, Chuck was always the sweetest guy. I mean, you know, like he you know. I did the Impressionists with him. I think that was the first, and I used them again and again. I used them in Cameraon's Clauset. I used them in Invasion. There was another big movie I did, four Hour for NBC with Luke Perry about an alien invasion. It was kind of like Bodies

snatches. Oh, I remember again a lot of visual style in there that they wanted to fire the cameraman because I said, no, I want, I want this kind of green light to spill onto this and I want I want when she steps close, I want her face to slightly have that green cast. And they starting, what the hell is going on up there? What are you guys shooting? It looks horrible. It's these colors are weird, I said, intentionally, so they said, look, they flew out.

The two producers flew out. This was the guys who hired me from the First one Buyers, and they said, look, we want to fire the DP. I said, well, okay, and then fire me too, because let's I'm going to go with them. No, what are you talking about? No, no, no, no no. We just can't look at this because we don't know if these studios are going to the network will accept this. And I said, let me finish the movie. Please, let me finish. And they loved it when it was finished because it

was very eurie. It was very dark and wild. Why do they keep doubting you? It's so crazy. It's not that they're doubting me, it's they you know, everybody has a protocol. Everybody has a safe place that they exist in and if they want to get hired again as producers, they fulfill, you know, the wishes of the network. But the network came back to say, hey, this is really good, so they shut up,

you know. Yea, everybody knows, you know. And and of course, when you're making something that's a little off the path of what's been tested, you become fearful that you might be treading on ground that is not solid anymore, and that you're going to fall or you're going to make something

terrible. And that, of course is always the case. And I always worry that, you know, the film, the last film I make is going to be my last, because who knows if I'm ever going to get hired again, you know so, And that was my and that's why I ended up doing so many films, because I always have felt, this is my last one. I bet this is going to be my last one, and but it would always work out and I would be able to somehow take the storyline and change it a little bit. And oh, I'll give you

an example. I had a film that I was brought out. It was a huge budget, and I mean I loved the concept, but the story was ridiculous. Here's a guy who's in jail and he keeps calling his girlfriend, who's free, and he stole a lot of money. Now she has the money, she's holding it for him, but he's telling her, you got to you got to, you got to break me out of jail,

you got to come here. And I said, if that were me, if I was the girlfriend, say hey, you know, tutelut boy, Because I got the money, I don't need to put my life at risk. So I. So they said, well, how can you fix this? What can you do? I said, well, let's think for a minute. I said, well what if what if he has the money someplace buried out in the desert and she wants that money as much as he does.

So now he's got an advantage. He can lure her and she gets in the helicopter and puts a gun to the guy's head and says, you fly me into that prison yard and you get that guy free. Now that it works, you know, so much better the story, you know. So that's that's what I enjoy doing that though, because then it makes me feel like I'm putting my creativity their work. Let me bring it back to Telson The Dark Side, your final episode tests in the Dark Side, which

is social Climber, right right? That was with Rob Robert Ramanezmans Yes, and Albert Haig and oh, isn't she effortless? She's wonderful. It's like she's on another plane of existence acting wise. It's just it's like watching Robert Devall. It's like, is there acting involved? No? Some of that. Some of these people just make it look so effortless. It's an amazing episode because you get away with an ending with a character dying off screen and

then when we cut to him with all smoking and such. It's it's it's wonderful. It doesn't feel like a cheat at all. Well, I vaguely remember that one. I haven't seen it, probably since I made it. Oh you know, it's a story of a cobbler and the kid. Yeah, the man who teaches him. Yes, he's got to he's got a magic shoes. Yeah, like a little magic spike that he puts into each

of the shoes. Yeah. It was fun. It was fun. It was and then you know they were you know, but but this is my experience with all these shows, like you know, you go on like even

more of the worlds. I ended up doing the last one. I did the last one for Friday the thirteenth, and Frank minke Cuso said, we want to go out in a blast here, so you're going to direct it and it's the Charnel Pitt and and break the bank on me. I don't care because they're not going to renew the show. So I was wondering about that because I was watching the episode and I was like, I can't believe that he got away with like this much production value on this show, so

that's interesting. And the same thing with War of the Worlds. I did a couple of things there, and one of them was about an eighty year old woman that gets pregnant and she's the thing is growing inside her from an alien and it was like, yeah, mister Mastrioani, you're a master of horror. Master of horror. No, I don't think so. I think. I had a dinner one night with Wes because Wes and I worked on Nightmare Cafe together. He did two, I did two you and we still

we were always good friends. And he said to me, you know, I really envy you, and I said, you envy me? Why? And he is, because you get to do diversified stuff. You don't always make horror film and if I make something different like Music from the Heart, nobody goes to see it. And you get to do movies like The Ring and then you you know, a faith based story, or you did this and you did that, and you did you know, Virus, and then you did an action film, then you did a western. Then he said

I would love that. I said, well, you want to switch places, you know. Mister George A. Rameiro used to have the same complaint that he had been locked into the horror hole, but he always said, like a good thing. I like scare shows. Did you have any interaction with mister Romero early once? I met him only once. Yeah, No, he wasn't really on the set or anything like that. It's my understanding that he was putting together Day of the Dead while before I let you go.

Would you like to tell me anything about some animated Dante shorts that I've been seeing and I'm looking forward to more upcoming ones. I did a film called The Celestine Prophecy, which was based on the book, which sold so much stuff, and at the screening at Chinese Theater here in Hollywood, this gentleman came up to me and said, listen, I wanted to meet you. I want to talk to you. I want you to work with me. I want to do I want to tell the story of the divine comedy.

It's my passion. It's this and that. So we've you know, interacted in the last few years, and he's been he always puts stuff together, and he asked my opinion, and he wants my involvement in it, and somehow and and and that's the extent of it. In fact, he actually just spoke to me before about an hour ago. Before we spoke, he was asking me about you know, he's working on the opening and he

said, should I use this or that? What do you think? And and you know, it's it's been, it's been, it's you know, it's nice to help other people. I feel that it's always you know, we should, we should collaborate because that's how we learn from each other, you know. I mean even I learn every day when I'm making a film, I learn new things I learned and every film is different because I'm working with new, new, new team, new actors knew this, knew that,

and you learn how to work with them. You know. You you see who's going to give you trouble. And and the ones I was warned again ended up liking me so much. We had such a great relationship. Like they said, don't make that film with Sybil Shepherd, She's horrible to work with. I met Sybil. There wasn't one moment of tension. She just had me over for dinner. She said, Carmen, come over, I'm gonna cook, and Michael's coming. She was going out with Michael Bolton

at the time. And he came to the set. Oh no, that was Nicholas Sheridan. That happened. But Sybil used to We used to go out. We used to go to movies together and stuff. While I was making Missus Washington goes to Smith and she was the sweetest person. The same with Nicola Sheridan. They said she's a monster, and oh well, she

was so nice. In fact, she was so concerned about this one actor who we hired to play a doctor and had all his stuff was medical jargon and he had to get it out fast. And the two of them were looking at each other and he says the contract says a little bit of and he was sweating, and she was going, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And I realized the guy was having tremendous problems, and I said, we can't shoot this. And I know we can't because well,

he's never going to be comfortable. He's just going to barely eke it out. So I said to them, and I said, you know what, what is this moment about. You are getting ready to go into to see one of the victims of the virus. So I want you to play this scene while you're getting dressed. I want you to I want the gloves to be being put on. I want you to put your masks on like that.

And once that was, once his mouth was covered, I was in room him a much more interesting scene because I was photographing their hands, their hands tying things, him putting the cap on, She's putting this on, and he's going and throwing. And later on he was able to read exactly what he had to say with the right pace, and we just dubbed it in amazing. So, I mean, I can I can tell you so

many experiences that I've had in so many wonderful moments on the set. I mean, there have been moments where the tension was very, very high too, But most of the times it's when you love something as much as I know I do, you never see flaws in it. You always it's like, you know, looking at the children. Your children are always beautiful, even some people might say, well, that's not such a good looking kid. You know, you are a visual stylist who's very good with actors,

evidently, and we're huge fans of yours of midnightteen. Do you have any projects coming up you want to you want to plug for me head on out. You know, none that are really going. There's always lots of stuff in the hopper, you know, there's all kinds of projects that we're playing with. I mean of a friend of mine from back East who's written a

couple of very good scripts. One of them is called The Butterfly, and it's it's a story about a woman who discovers how father was secretly trading illegal stocks in the stock market, and he left all the stuff and he passes away, and she's cleaning out all the stuff and she finds all these pieces of information and she becomes so you know, involved with it. She starts doing the same thing and she becomes it's almost like do you see a movie

called Emily the Criminal. It's Plaza, right, Aubrey Plaza. And then he also wrote something hilariously funny called Santa Must Die, very very funny script. I mean it's it's it's a real slapstick kind of Adam Sandler, you know, almost a mel Brooks kind of thing. It's way over the top. I love that. And then he wrote something called John the Painter,

which I really like. It's based on a true story where this family gets together to tell the story and they all watch these old films of their dad, and they find out her father was actually involved in a murder of a mafia guy who wanted to kill his own who wanted to kill his son, and he protected his son by Oh, it's a really good story. I hope each and every one of those gets made, and I hope you're the one behind the camera. Oh, it would be fun because I'm not retired.

Good now. We need you in this world, and I just wanted to thank you so much for joining us here tonight on the Midnight VI Pleasure. You know, if it's okay with you, We're probably gonna hit you up again. I'm gonna eventually a little more in depth with with some of the some of your other projects that you've been working on. We'd love to speak to you again. I will be your guest anytime. Midnight Viewing. The Horror Anthology Podcast is a proud member of Weirdingway Media. Our theme song

was composed by HP with an assist from Donald Rubinstein and Erica Lindsay. If you want to hear these episodes early and commercial free, become a patron over at patreon dot com, Slash fatherm Alone. Not only are the episodes up early, but we have extended interviews and bonus podcasts where we spotlight the best episodes of horror anthologies from every series. But if you just like the show and want to help, please share it with your friends and give us a

rating on your favorite podcatcher. Together, we'll keep journeying through the places that are just as real, but not as brightly lit.