Friday, June 20, 2008

Re-Animator Interview


Fast & Cheap Movie Thoughts has a nice little interview with Stuart Gordon (Hi Stuart!) here about the origins of his first movie RE-ANIMATOR. The movie has always been one of my favorites as I remember seeing it in a movie theater back in '86 - 87 .

Several of Stuart's comments holds true even today when you are working on a low budget movie:

How conscious were you of the budget limitations as you were writing?

STUART GORDON: With low budget, it really has to be minimalist. You have to have as few sets and locations as possible and as few characters as possible. You really have to determine what's really essential and what do I really need to tell this story. If it isn't essential, it usually will get cut.

Was there anything you learned on that script that you took to future writing projects?

STUART GORDON: One of the things was that when you're working on a horror film, every single scene should have some tension in it. That was one of the things we really worked on with Re-Animator. You really can't have any scenes with people just sort of sitting around and relaxed. You have to really find the tension in each scene. There needs to be something scary about every single scene in the film, otherwise you're letting the audience off the hook. What you really want to do is to keep people on the edge of their seats all the way through.

Several decades later I earned that show-runner Tim Minear (ANGEL, FIREFLY, THE INSIDE) worked as a Production Assistant on that movie.

That's all sorts of awesome!

2 comments:

wcdixon said...

That is all sorts of awesome...and I was just discussing Stu Gordon with someone last week, and specifically the awesomeness of Re-Animator.

Coolio.

chris said...

So do you think that horror movies are still a good investment or is there a glut of them nowadays?