Behind The Scenes: Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981) With Stephen Lack And Michael Ironside

I had started to work as a makeup artist in Montreal. It was very early in my career. And there was this movie called Scanners and they needed somebody to do special effects makeup and I kind of did that. And so I got hired and then they needed to bring somebody who had more experience because I was going to be their assistant. So they brought somebody from L.A. and that person turned out to be Chris Wales. And also there was another guy that came from L.A., Tom Schwartz. So there was a trio of us. The trio of us, we were at the basement of this production office. Everything was like in that building. So we were in the basement with the wardrobe department, which we tormented all the time. Chris and I, when we did Scanners, like I said, we were in this basement. So we were just like building stuff and I was making like eyeballs and things like that for that exploding head. And I learned a lot from Chris because he had more experience making moles and so on and so forth. But we also laughed a lot. I mean, we were joking around all the time. It was amazing. Famous exploding head. First of all, we took a mold, took a cast of Louis Del Grande's face, you know, in that sort of like position. We also forgot to take a cast of his hands, but he left already. He was from Toronto. So what we did is we took a cast of Chris Wales' hands. So what you see in the picture when the head explodes, the hands on the desk, those are Chris' hands. Plaster cast. But as far as the head is concerned, the exploding head, I believe if I can remember correctly, I think we did three tests. We had a plaster one, which was loaded with goo and explosives by Gary Zeller. And it looked exactly like a plaster head exploding, like a statue. That didn't work. Then we had, I believe we had a wax one. And that didn't look right. You know, it was just like chunks. And it looked more like, you know, with the explosives inside, I remember with all the sparks going off. It looked more like the Death Star than Star Wars exploding at the end. It didn't look like flesh. Then we decided to do a gelatin head. So what we did is in the rubber mold, we poured some flesh colored gelatin. Then we poured on top of it some red colored gelatin for the muscles and stuff. Then there was some wax poured in there to make a coating, you know, a shell inside, white. And then we filled it up with all kinds of garbage. I mean, we had like, we were like kids. So we were feeding ourselves on like McDonald's and stuff like that. And guess what wound up in their leftovers? You know, and, and God, anyways, there's pig blood and all that stuff. And then we top that off with with more wax and plaster. And of course, we put that on the dummy. And I remember, since the explosives charge didn't seem to work, because they created like a lot of smokes and sparks. What happened with the one that you see in the movie is we were in this big warehouse, and Gary Zeller took a shotgun. And he was lying behind the dummy and pointed it like right there, lying on the ground, and just shot it. And that's what you see in the movie. We make that movie, The Brood. And then the next year, I said, everybody said to me, and I said to everybody, well, let's make more than one. Let's make three movies this year. We created a film plan. And we said, instead of raising 2 million, let's raise 15 million, which was the easiest thing I've ever seen. And we decide, okay, we'll make three movie, a comedy, two comedies. And I said, David, we got to make another movie. He said, yeah, I'm working on this thing right now. I don't know what the title was. It wasn't Scanner. And the script is barely there. I've got two third of it. I said, only one condition, I got to shoot it before the end of the year in April or May or something. He said, okay, we'll get it going. Well, I'll get it. I'll get it. So anyway, that was the beginning of Scanner. The making of Scanners was chaos. You had to be there to see it. And there, my theory that the making of a movie has nothing to do with the success of the movie. Videodrome was incredibly well organized. It was a total flop, the box office. Not to say that it didn't become an enormous cult movie. Scanners, the script was barely ready when we started to shoot. Okay. So that brings a lot of production issues and stuff. The ending was not to our satisfaction. That's why we reshot an ending three months later, four months later. The actors, oh my God. The lead was Stephen Lack. David really wanted Stephen Lack. And after a couple of days, David told me, he's really not an actor. I said, you knew that? He said, yeah, I knew that, but I can only have him play himself. He's got to play himself. Exactly. Because he can't act a character. He can be himself very well. So he had him be himself. Then Jennifer O'Neill, who didn't really realize she was doing a horror film. When she arrived, she said, there's seven heads exploding in this movie. I don't want more than one or two. I'm going home if I don't have that. So David had to cut heads exploding. And then she wanted a grand piano in her hotel room. And then she wanted this. And then she wanted that. And I said, what did we get ourselves into? Well, turned out by the way, that she's a great lady and she was as nice and kind as can be during the shoot. So sometimes they position themselves one way or the agent, the manager, but during the shoot, it was great. Michael was a rock. Michael has a character. He's got a temper, but he was extremely professional and very good. And then Patrick Penguin. Patrick was fantastic in his role. But here is another British actor who drank like crazy. And we had to shoot him early in the morning, first half of the day. And then like clockwork, he would call David at night and tell him how to direct him the next day. David had to deal with this. I guess I was hanging out with a bunch of people that were making films and I was making suggestions to their product, changing their directions. And they said, well, what are you doing today? And interesting thing about being an artist is actually, you're never doing anything that you're, I mean, in those days, art was not agenda driven. Today, it's a whole different situation. But you had free time. And it was in the 70s. And so they came to my loft, where I was painting and exhibiting. Not in the loft. I mean, I was having external exhibitions. And the movie was accepted into the new director series at the Whitney. So all of a sudden, my performance was getting reviewed by the Village Voice and the New York Times, etc. favorably. David chose me, but I'm trying to analyze what his thought processes are, and they're beyond me. Okay, so he saw the two products, Montreal Maine and Rubber Gun, and maybe something else I might have done. And poor thing, like I said, he must have blacked out. And he said, God, this is either the craziest person in the world, or the world's greatest actor. Well, I think he's settled on craziest. But we pulled the friggin thing out of the fire. He'd written the script, then his wife got pregnant. And she was having a baby, or whatever they were having. And of course, David tripped out on that, and took that into making the brood with Oliver Reed, and abandoned scanners. And then, to the best of my knowledge, at the end of a fiscal year, a film producer with whom he either had been working before, or at least was aware of David's work, approached him with the budgetary possibility of doing scanners. And they had something like a very short period of prep time, which is good, because that meant that nothing got self-conscious, and it was banged out in the true seat-of-the-pants fashion, which is something I'm used to. And we did it. Now, we had a lot of stuff to do. This was a time in Montreal where there was not even a film commission, where there was no, nothing was organized. You decide to shoot on the street, and have a car crash your building, and no real notions of safety codes, and stuff like that. So, it was very, very, very difficult. You had inexperienced people doing stuff, with a framework of total commando filming. Well, let's try to have a car crash into this building. How do we do it? Well, let's improvise. Fortunately, no accidents, nothing. But it was all like, hey, let's see what we're going to do here. I'm sparing everything that happened in between. Like, I'm basically putting $100,000 more to reshoot the ending, because it didn't work. So, we shot, I think, I think we reshot the ending in small. So, we reshot the ending. Dick did the effects. I don't remember, I don't think we hired him immediately, but I think at one point we knew we needed somebody really, really good. And we called Dick, and he came. And he was, at that time, the number one in the world. We did do like a mechanical dummy head of Stephen Lack for the first ending that we shot. That didn't work out, because there wasn't enough stuff happening. It was just like a dummy head with the eyes popping out, and that was it. So, there was an alternate ending that was written with all these special effects, and stuff that Dick Smith did. Then he actually came. I had a loft in Old Montreal, and my shop was in there, and Dick came over there, and he built a lot of stuff back in Larchmont. I remember we took a cast of Stephen Lack in my loft, and this was the first time that I ever seen this. He put scleral lenses in his eyes that covered his entire eyeball, so he could take a cast of him with his eyes open, which was amazing. Then he did a dummy head of Stephen Lack, where you see the eyes popping out. But he had all these other special effects, like the veins creeping, and stuff that Dick Smith did with material called Elvisite at the time. There were appliances, and he did the makeup test in my loft, I remember. Also, the dummy that you see, when Stephen Lack is all burnt up, he's deep fried, basically, on the floor. It was a plastic skeleton, biology skeleton. He actually took some paper, and he took some dough, and he packed the dough around with John Caglioni, and David Smith, his son, was there. They were just taking a flame torch, and torching the dough, so baking, basically, the whole thing. That's what you see in the movies. They worked around the clock, I remember, shooting all that stuff. I mean, non-stop. He was exhausted. He would just take a little nap on a cot, and then there he was, slapping on more prosthetics, and all this complicated stuff, on both actors, Stephen Lack and Michael Ironside. I didn't know the extent of his work when I did scanners. I had heard about him, but I was very knowledgeable. It's when I got to New York, because he was consultant. At first, he was consultant on the picture. I went over to New York, and Gary Zeller was doing the physical effects, also from New York. Tom Schwartz and I went to New York to consult with him. We went to Larchmont, and of course, went to the famous basement where he worked, his secret lair. That's where I discovered all this incredible stuff, like the exorcist, and all these things were around. I'm like, wow. Anyway, so you dispense all this information on how to do this effect, and so on and so forth. We just bought all these materials, and chemicals, and so on, while we were in New York. It was great. The code word for me was, David, how am I going to play this? How do I play this? Everything I'm saying is a question. You're doing fine. You're doing fine. I distilled it to a phrase. Are we doing Alice in Wonderland again? Excuse me, Mr. Caterpillar, you say I'm a scanner? You're a scanner. Excuse me, I have to go back to my pipe. That's how it was. David seemed pretty relaxed, as far as I was concerned. The only thing he would say, he would give me the slightest amount of direction. Things like, try and not bounce when you walk. I ask questions through most of the movie. I wander through it as somebody who is a good mind, but suppressed, unreleased. When the time comes to release that mind, luckily, it was during a reshoot, and I had the opportunity to rest. I can help you. We can destroy Ravik together. I thought Jennifer was terrific. She knew what was going on so much more than I did. Our first scene together, I get shot outside the clinic. She gets shot or something, and I'm leaning over her. This was the first day of shooting. I go, Flavia, Flavia, are you all right? She looks up at me and she says, my name is Kim now, because the script had been changed. How did she have the new pages and I didn't? I was a Canadian. I was an afterthought, but Hollywood royalty, they gave her the page that was going to be on the screen. God bless them. Telepathy is not mind reading. It is the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space. I want your brain to make his heart beat faster. Oh, Patrick. Now, there's a man I bonded with. There's a man who was inside and outside at the same time all the time. An incredibly intelligent man, an incredibly sensitive man, and an incredibly accomplished man. He could do anything. He was riveting. You just wanted to watch him. He was like any other fascinating animal in a nature documentary. He's one of those people, he was compelling to watch every movie you've ever seen him in, in Braveheart. You're just wondering, why doesn't the camera just open up and just live on this guy? Meanwhile, of course, he was not secure. That insecurity makes you summon everything up. Anyway, we slapped a movie together. I come to LA, and I go see my very dear friend, Bob Raimi, who at that time ran AFCO Embassy, which was the place now for the horror filmmaker Dante and Carpenter, and named them The Howling and all these movies. He said, I want this movie. It's great. It's great. We made it. We started working on the marketing. How are we going to market this movie? So a lot of thinking. I was very involved. And then someone, I don't remember if it was me, if it was Bob, if it was one of his people, said, let's test the movie. So we tested the movie. And when the head exploded, it was unbelievable in the theater. So the next day, that person who I don't remember said, why don't we do simply a trailer of the reaction of the people watching the head explode? That became the trailer of the movie. And the rest is history. That trailer got us an opening that was unbelievable. But I'll tell you, to see the reaction, like I did in New York, when the movie was released in the big, big, big theater there where it was playing, and have 2,000 people jumping and screaming with their head exploding. It was incredible. And the grosses start coming in. And when I got, Bob Ramey calls me, he said, you won't believe what this drive-in did in California for the weekend. He says, $185,000 a weekend. He says, that's unbelievable. We have a huge hit. And we were number one. And it was a monumental hit. Reviews were all over the place. Some people said how terrible it was. Some said it was great. And worldwide, I mean, I remember in France, the enormous number of billboards everywhere. The movie just, now Cronenberg was known by the world. I was surprised by the size of the release. I never saw a double-page ad in the New York Times announcing a film. All over the TV was running ads every 15 minutes. In five seconds, your head explodes. You know what I mean? First, you have a headache, then you have a nosebleed, and then your head explodes. People don't understand. They say, oh, why don't you do more films, et cetera? Well, I was horrified by the attention I was getting, because everywhere I went, people knew who I was. And I was getting a couple of calls from major players in LA. And I know it's going to sound pretentious, but the idea of working to generate the income that would keep the people away from me that might have preconceived ideas as to who I am, or what they might get from me by being closer to me, the idea of generating that income to separate myself from those people who my normal compulsion and need for affection was driving me to perform. The schizophrenic aspects of that relationship said, you know what? Go to the studio, make paintings, leave them alone. They'll leave you alone. And that's how it's worked out.