Joe Dante Interview Part 1
What can you say about Joe Dante that has not been said already? Director of The Howling, Gremlins, as well as Amazon Women on the Moon, Joe has been making great films for the last 40 years. When Joe speaks about filmmaking we sit as his feet and listen.
13BIT:
How did you get involved in filmmaking?
JOE DANTE:
Well, I was a terrific film fan when I was a kid. I practically lived at the movies. And so I’ve had — I guess, I didn’t realize it, but I was storing up a whole lot of film knowledge in my head. And I — I wanted to be a cartoonist. went to art school and discovered that cartooning was not an art and that if I wanted to stay in school, I’d better take something else. So, I took film. And, you know, it’s almost related to cartoons in that there are storyboards and frames and shots and things. And I sort of drifted into it, because I didn’t really expect to be a filmmaker. But I had an opportunity to come out to California and work for Roger Corman, making trailers. And that led to a chance to direct my first movie, which is an entree that I’m afraid is denied to most people today.
13BIT:
It’s funny that you say that. Well, another person we’ve been speaking with, a friend of ours, Nina Paley, is — was a cartoonist and then she became a filmmaker. And now she wants to go back to cartooning.
JOE DANTE:
Yes. No, I can understand that. There might be a little more future in cartooning than there is in filmmaking.
13BIT:
Yes. I don’t know. I think — you know, she had massive problems with rights. She used some music without rights, and she — but we’ve also been trying to get a hold of Corman as well to write on our Low Budget Legends
JOE DANTE:
No, he’s definitely one.
13BIT:
Why do you think there’s going to be more of a future in cartooning?
JOE DANTE:
Well, I just — I think the — that movies are changing. I mean, movies as we understood them are a 20th Century art form. And the 20th Century is over. It is now turning into something else. As far as where the movies are distributed and who they’re made for and who they’re made by — that’s all undergoing a tremendous change, partly because of the new technologies available to make films, but also the technologies available to show them.
And, you know, whereas when I was starting out, my advice to a kid would be “Get yourself an eight millimeter camera and, you know, make some eight millimeter films,” now you can make with a videocamera some pretty good-looking movies. And you can finish them to a point where we were never able to do with film because you can do it on the computer. Coppola once said that he thought the future belonged to those who were going to make their own movies. I think that’s true to a degree, because you can actually make — if you can afford to pay for it, you can make a feature film without the help of the system. The problem is that once you’ve made it, you have to get someone to watch it. And that becomes the difficulty because there are so many things available, so many channels, so many different pieces of material to look at, that to break out of a pack is very difficult. And that’s what film festivals are for. The film festivals used to be just sort of to appreciate film. But now they actually perform a needed function of spotlighting movies that people wouldn’t ordinarily know exist.
13BIT:
That’s exactly the position we’re in. It’s funny you should say — I mean, because we make movies now and we couldn’t do it with film. Yes, no. It’s — so, how much did it cost to make your first movie?
JOE DANTE:
Well, the first movie that I made for Roger Corman cost $60,000. And the only reason it got made was because me and a couple of other people who worked there were chafing at the bit to direct a movie. And we weren’t satisfied with just doing the trailers. So, we — on a bet, basically, we said that we would make a picture — we could do it in ten days and we could do it for $60,000 and it would be a releasable movie.
The reason was that we were familiar with all the action scenes from previous movies that were made by the company, and we wrote out script around those. And we made it about a movie company making those kind of movies. So, we dressed our actors the way the actors in the clips were dressed. And we cobbled together this comedy together about making movies, which, when you look at it today is actually almost a newsreel of the way pictures were really made — on the low budget level in the ’70s.
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