Behind the Scenes: Gremlins (Dante, 1984) with Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates

Well, this is Chinatown. Well, it's not really Chinatown, it's Burbank. Chinatown in Burbank. And this is the first scene in Grummel. This is the scene that sets up the lead character of the picture, played by Hoyt Axman, who is a not particularly successful inventor. It's in this very environment, this very seething, teeming mass of humanity, that he finds this strange animal. I can't tell you too much of the plot, but here in Chinatown, I'm looking for something unique and special. A Christmas present for my son, as it were. I do find something special. And you're gonna have to go see the movie for the rest of the kids. Husband. Gremlins is a... sort of a Gremlin and his boys story. It's a picture about something that probably could never happen in real life, but we kind of wish parts of this movie would happen to us, and other parts of this movie we hope will never happen to us. And it certainly is not a horror film. It's also not a spoof on a genre. It's one of the most original things I've come across in many years, which is why I bought it and gave it to Joe to make into a movie. Hey, John. Uh-oh. Hoyt. You're too big. Get smaller. Can you walk back a little bit, like under that lamp there? Take a step. It'll be well-timed so that you can avoid them. And I'll put him just far enough behind you so that he has to wait. How far are you gonna take it? I think until you actually go down there. Okay, so we'll carry it all the way down. You got it. Don't forget to... I want you to be happy, Joe. There's no reason I'm doing the picture. I don't want the money, I don't care about the picture. You don't want the money? Oh, great. Because it just so happens. Okay, I'm ready. Who's ready? Raise your hand. I suppose I first heard of gremlins in the Bob Clampett cartoon, with Bugs Bunny, in which he's in an airplane and there's some gremlins and they're trying to tear the airplane apart. Get a load of this, folks. It is here. A constant menace to pilots are the gremlins who wreck planes with their... Our gremlins are somewhat different. They're sort of green and they have big mouths and they smile a lot and they do incredibly rude and nasty things to people and enjoy it all the while. They're a lot like kids. We like to think of them as lovable but horrible. They start out real lovable and they get a little more horrible. If I tell you the ending then you'll act like you know it and it won't be as good. Okay. It'll only take a picture, it'll be out in a year. A year? About a year. Can you bring it out on Christmas? No, I can't bring it out on Christmas. It's not a Christmas. If you bring it out on Christmas then it's a Christmas movie. It's not a Christmas movie. Well, because it's a Christmas movie and then two weeks after Christmas it's, oh, Christmas, that's old. It's better for summer because in summer everybody's hot and sweltering and they'd love to go see a picture that happens on Christmas. You're not buying that, huh? You're the director. Marker. Action. I thought you said this place wasn't very far. It's not far. It's right up in here. Come on. Better do it again. Cut. Right away. What do I know? I'm seeing it on TV. How could I tell? Well, in this scene the final, the last gremlin who's been pursuing me, or I've been pursuing it and been tangling with it through the whole movie, has finally been trapped in a large department store and I've had to follow it and it's been doing various things like throwing saw blades at me and throwing large boxes and a pitching machine and shooting me in the arm with an arrow and coming at me with a chainsaw and all sorts of exciting stuff. This picture is by far the most ambitious thing I've ever worked on in that the characters we've had to create for this picture are active through the entire picture and do an awful lot of stuff. Here in Gremlins, every other shot is a gremlin doing something. The film is everything. I mean, it is funny. Extremely funny at times. It's really scary. I mean, scary to the point of sometimes in the middle of a scene I'll get so carried away I'll be completely screamed out by the end of the scene. The first couple of times I worked with the gremlins I was so frightened by them because I tried to stay away from them as much as possible. It's kind of like E.T. with teeth. What I like in movies especially are movies that do things that you can't do in real life and show you things that you can't see just by walking out in the street. There have been a lot of great movies that show you real life as it is lived and should be lived but my favorite kind of movies are the ones that show you things that you really can't see anywhere but in the movies. And this picture, believe me you'll never see any of this stuff except in the movies. Gremlins. What a fairy tale. Little men. Oh, brother. Well, I remember back in the 80s when Amblin was just starting out and it was my wife, Kathy Kennedy and Stephen and I in a fresh new company and we wanted to make a lot of movies. And so there are a lot of writing samples coming in and we were very excited and Stephen was reading a bunch of them. I just took about 20 scripts home for the weekend and literally in the pile was this thing called Gremlins. And I noticed the name of the writer. There are a lot of writers named Chris Columbus. I didn't know whether that was Ananda Plume, whether he was hiding his actual identity but I was very intrigued with the script. I read it and I said, this is like a candy store. This is like every delightful piece of devilish comedy horror I've ever read before. And so I bought the script. I lived in a loft in Manhattan and it was not a pretty place to live. I would sleep at night with my arm draped over the bed and there were mice. So every now and then I would wake up in the middle of the night with a mouse sort of brushing by my hand and I had this fear of them starting to nibble on my fingers and I thought, well there's nothing really more frightening than these tiny little creatures. So I just started thinking about it and thinking about it and that's where the idea of Gremlins originated. I remember my dad used to spend most of his Saturday afternoons under the car in our garage and he would always talk about the Gremlins in the car that were causing it not to work and causing it to break down. So it was that idea of Gremlins, these things that cause mayhem that really sort of started the whole writing process. I have a story to tell. Yeah, I know. Who hadn't got a story? I spent a lot of time in Chinatown in New York as a student because it was cheap to get dinners and lunches there and there were always these shops, always these little side alleys and really interesting places that sold things that I didn't see in many other, you know, you wouldn't see in your average Duane Reade, right? So I was kind of obsessed with these little tiny stores and I was actually too nervous and a little too afraid to go into. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting if you found one of these kind of odd pets in this Chinese shop? At the same time, I knew that these cuddly creatures were going to turn into these horrific monsters, but I didn't know what to call it. Has it got a name, Dad? Yeah, Mogwai. What? I went to a bookstore, actually, and found a Chinese-American dictionary and I looked up the name Devil and Devil was Mogwai and that's where I came up with the name Mogwai. So I started writing it and I wouldn't go out with my friends. I wouldn't really do anything. I was obsessed with writing the screenplay and the first draft of the movie was a very hard, R-rated horror film. Basically, the cute little Mogwai were accidentally fed after midnight and they turned into these horrible gremlins and it was really tough, tough stuff. Billy's mother's head was cut off and it rolled down the stairs. The gremlins all went into a McDonald's at one point and ate all the people but left the food at all of the tables. So it was dark and twisted and a lot of fun to write and I sent it to my agent and he sent it to maybe 45 to 50 producers and everyone rejected it. But maybe about six to eight weeks after the script was sent out, my roommate, who is now my producing partner, answered the phone and he said, Steven Spielberg's on the phone. I said, nah, don't lie to me. He said, no, the guy says he's Steven Spielberg. So I was very cynical. I picked up the phone and I said, yeah, okay, who is this? And he's like, this is really Steven Spielberg and it was Steven telling me how much he loved the script and he asked me to come out to L.A. and meet with him and that's basically the beginning of how it all started. I was still kind of curious because based on Steven's body of work, this hard, R-rated movie did not seem like the kind of movie that Steven Spielberg or Amblin were going to make. And as we started to talk about it and as we met a few more times, I realized that his goal was to make it more audience friendly and still maintain its satirical edge and it was really smart, really taught me a lot about understanding the needs of an audience. And Steven came up with one idea that I think solidified the commercial success of the movie, which was one of the gremlins not turning into a bad gremlin. My script, they were all bad, but he felt that one gremlin should stay true to his original Mogwai form and basically become Billy's companion and sidekick during the course of this film and that gremlin was Gizmo. So that really turned the movie around and made the film sort of much more accessible to an audience and much more emotional. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I think I wrote 7 to 8, maybe 10 drafts of the thing and the movie continued to get better and better and I realized, well, the key to writing really is rewriting and at some point, Mike Fennell and Joe Dante came on board. I picked Joe Dante because these two movies he made, one called Piranha and the other called The Howling, had this kind of an aside. It sort of winked at the contemporary culture and especially the culture of movies. Just a couple across and then as we pull back, then people can come in from behind camera and everything. I don't want it to be real sudden, but I don't want to get this sudden feeling that, oh, I know what they're going to do. There's going to be a lot of people. We just sort of gradual it up. Joe knows movies so intimately and he was really able to capture a kind of Norman Rockwellian spirit, but it would be Norman Rockwell on the dark side of Norman Rockwell. Joe took that sense of American illustration art and he turned it on its head and had a great time doing it. That's for the big shot. No, it's for them coming in. Ah, now all you have to do is explain it to me. Okay, fine. The Gremlin script arrived in the mail at my ratty Hollywood office where I was barely holding on and I was wondering where my next job was coming from and incongruously this envelope comes from Steven Spielberg, which I assume has obviously gone to the wrong address. So we read this thing and it was like, oh my god, this is incredible, but, you know, how are we going to do it? It's impossible. This is, of course, 30 years ago. This is the pre-digital era. So I drew up some storyboards and I went to visit him when he was mixing ET and I showed him my storyboards and we talked about it a little bit and I found myself being attached now to this picture that was ostensibly going to be made by Steven and I think that Steven's concept for fantasy films was that they played more believably if the actors weren't that familiar and the audience would get over the idea that they're watching so-and-so and just get into the characters. Dad, it's really neat. Where did you get this? Some little junk store in Chinatown. Can I pick him up, Dad? Sure, go ahead. When it came time to audition for Gremlins, I basically had done two or three credits, one lead in a movie, and was kind of considered one of those young New York kind of up-and-coming type actors. So when I got the call for a Spielberg movie, I was very excited. That's kind of how it was pitched to me. It was going to be this new Spielberg project and it was very hush-hush. People didn't really know anything about it. It was called Gremlins. We couldn't show you the script. It's far too confidential. So the only thing that I got for the first audition was the scene in which Phoebe and I are talking about Christmas and then I ask her out for a date at the end. And for the final audition, I sat down and sitting right across from me was Phoebe. They kind of paired us together. And I was really quite nervous, but Phoebe was so sunny and happy and completely unnervous that that kind of calmed me down a little bit. I mean, she just seemed so confident. But apparently at the end of the audition, I put my head on Phoebe's shoulder and I kind of like looked up like, sigh, like it was what a romantic scene and how pretty is this girl and how happy am I doing this audition and everything. When Zach put his head on Phoebe's shoulder, it was something between the takes. They weren't reading the scene. We actually thought, oh, look, he's already in love with her. And it was that moment that we saw that they had a great chemistry. Night, Billy. They didn't involve me much in casting. I was the writer, so I was just happy to be invited to the set whenever I was allowed to come to the set. So I would just hear who was cast. And I was particularly excited about Hoyt Axton. I loved his music, and I know his mother had written Heartbreak Hotel for Elvis Presley. So I was a huge music fanatic, still am. So I was very anxious to meet him, and I was really excited when he was cast. I want to say something nice about you. I don't have any awards. They're not ready yet. But one of the greatest experiences of my life as an actor, and I have been an actor all week, and I like it a lot, has been working with Mr. Dante. He's incredible. You'll hear readings like this every five minutes. He's an incredible human being. And a great American. So far the checks haven't bounced, and I'm very glad to be here. Thank you, Joe. I really think that the casting of Hoyt Axton was one of the keys to the success of the movie because he's such an incredibly natural actor. You never really get the sense that he's ever forcing anything. Like the classic scene where he gives me gizmo and explains the rules to me. I don't want to say he ad-libbed it, but Joe was like, you just say it however you would say it. Just make sure that you explain the rules in a way so that nothing's left out. So Hoyt would take the script and he would kind of like, at least for that second, he'd kind of throw it away and go, all right, so there's three things that you can't do. Number one, he hates bright lights. We know that. But you've got to keep him out of the sunlight. Sunlight will kill him. Number two, keep him away from water. Don't give him any water to drink. And whatever you do, don't give him a bath. And I was watching him going, this guy is so natural. It's like he's doing nothing. And probably the most important thing, don't ever feed him after midnight. The mother was Frances Lee McCain, and she was terrific. We also cast Corey Feldman and Judge Reinhold, and then Holly Holliday for Mrs. Deagle. And then of course, Joe likes to salt in as many actors that he grew up seeing in horror movies and things. So we got Harry Carey Jr., who was in a whole bunch of John Ford movies, Bill Shallert has a small part, Ken Tobey, the star of The Thing. Fantastic ideas for a fantastic world. I make theological logical, and I have something here that I think you might be interested in. Another great B-movie actor that Joe liked was Scott Brady. Did your father always give you vicious little monsters for a present? And then of course, Dick Miller, who tried to put in everything, and he played the pivotal role of Mr. Futterman. Goddamn foreign guys, they always freeze up on you. You don't find American machinery doing that. Our stuff can take anything. It's one of the most fun things, as I say, about making movies is working with actors, and everybody seemed to have a pretty good time. Although the movie was set at Christmas, and I think it's a big plus that it's set at Christmas, the movie was shot in the middle of the summer. Let me see, because I want to make sure that the kid is in it too. I'm pretty sure that we started shooting about the second or third week of April, and my last day was August the 4th. So basically, it was late spring and summer of 1983 in Los Angeles, and we shot almost entirely on Burbank Studios. So for those of you who haven't been to Southern California, the San Fernando Valley in June and July and August is extremely hot, and I'm almost always wearing a blazer, and I would wear a button-down shirt and everything like that, and I had to wear my kind of wine-colored parka, and it's 105 degrees out. So for me, it was very, very difficult because I was hot all the time, and then there's no snow. It's all white sand, or every now and then at night, when it was cool enough at night, they'd bring this huge ice truck with these enormous blocks of ice, and they would grind up the ice into snow, and they would spray it on the ground. So they would do those kind of tricks. For the close-ups, they'd have ice, and then for other times, they would just have sand. And then there was a whole discussion about how we were going to do seeing our breath, and we were just like, it's a movie. You're not going to see our breath, so we're just going to have to, like, we're not even going to go there. We're not even going to try and do it like once or twice to give the illusion. We're just going to hope that people are so into the movie that they don't notice it. Hey, Dr. Morell. Morning, Billy. Morning. The movie was always designed as a bit of a satire, a little bit of a riff on It's a Wonderful Life. So I felt that in that spirit, that the audience would accept sort of the storybook element of Gremlins. Good morning, Mrs. Deagle. What's good about it? The original concept was that they thought that it would be nice to shoot the movie in a real location, and I thought that was a terrible idea. For one thing, it's a fantasy, and the characters, the puppets, are not going to look as real if you take them out on broad daylight, on Broad Street, with cars going by, as they will on a back lot, because back lots are stylized, and also they bring associations from old movies. So we wanted to stylize it to the point where it was obviously a back lot town, and it was obviously a place that's idealized, and it's not something that you have to completely believe in. It's a state of mind. All of a sudden, you go by this stuff, and it's like, whoa! And as you go further on down the street, you've got more smoke Our production designer was a guy named James Spencer, who had a similar sensibility to Joe and I, kind of a little off the wall. So in addition to the sets, obviously, he also designed all the Pelzer inventions, you know, the wacky Pelzer inventions that didn't work. Every frame is packed with so much visual information that you can watch the movie over and over and over again, and you can still every now and then go, oh, you know what? I never noticed that. The sequence where Hoyt Axson's on the phone, see in the background? The time machine? They're gonna cut away. Okay, now they cut back. See the time machine's gone, and the guy's searching for it on the floor? It's very, very fun visual style. There's other distractions in that scene. Jerry Goldsmith's in that scene, and it was just a fun thing to do. Steven does a little cameo in the scene, and he goes rolling by in this contraption. I had hurt my leg, and I had this cast on, and I was visiting to sit on crutches, so Joe threw me in a wheelchair and had me do a drive-through. And there's actually a character in that scene who is supposed to be me that the crew put in, because at the time, my dress, my costume for directing was dark glasses, a knit tie, and a white shirt. And there's a guy who comes out of a phone booth in that scene who was supposed to be me. Even I didn't get it. Now I have another reason to hate Christmas. Okay, what are you talking about? The worst thing that ever happened to me. Was on Christmas. I think my favorite scene in the movie is Phoebe's speech, because I thought she delivered that speech beautifully. It was Christmas Eve. I was nine years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. Phoebe Cate's monologue, which I always thought from the beginning, was hilarious. And I thought it was just a really good example of dark humor. I went to try to light up the fire, and that's when I noticed the smell. She told me that really the monologue was the key part of the role that really made her say, I gotta do this. It's so outrageous. Firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead, they pulled out my father. You know, in terms of being honest and vulnerable, you believe that her father actually climbed into a chimney dressed as... How absurd is the concept? He climbed into the chimney dressed as Santa Claus and broke his neck. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus. The story itself, which she tells with great drama, is kind of poignant. But on the other hand, it's, on the face of it, it's ridiculous. And so the audience doesn't really know whether to laugh or to cry. And that was exactly what I was looking for. And in fact, it encapsulates, to me, the whole tone of the movie Gremlins. And it was immediately controversial as soon as we shot it. I remember leaving the editing room and Tina Hirsch, the editor, said, well, that scene will never be in the movie. Which more or less strengthened my resolve to keep it in the movie. And I also thought it was her best scene. I thought she was great in it. And all through the movie, the executives hated the scene. And they said, you gotta cut it. People will walk out. I said, it's 55 seconds long. They're not gonna walk out. We were adamant that we had to keep that in the movie because that's what separated the movie from the pack. That's what made it unique and a little twisted. And it stayed in and it hasn't seemed to hurt the popularity of the movie over the past 30 years. The scene with the chainsaw, Joe and I just came up with that on the day. We were walking around and I was kind of marveling again at Jim Spencer's production design. And I was like, wow, you know, I knew this was a department store, but you've stocked this thing like it's a department store. I mean, you've got a gun rack there and you've got a real working fountain there. And I said, oh look, you've got the Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage there. And he goes, yep, there you go. And I said, wouldn't it be cool to have a baseball bat chainsaw fight? That would be awesome, wouldn't it? And he goes, that would be awesome. But the one bone of contention I have with Gremlins is that Gizmo comes in in the pink car and he pulls the thing and he opens the shade and that kills Stripe in the fountain. But the way we shot it was I got to be more like Bruce Willis diehard stuff. And he's shooting the gun at me and I did my own stunts. I was really proud of it. I dove over this big rack of like potted flowers that they had. And I dove over it and I land on the ground and I pull the shade and I kill the Gremlin. So then I went to see the premiere and it's Gizmo on this pink car saving the day. And I said to Joe, what the heck? I thought I was the hero of this movie. And Joe turned to me and he goes, the name of the picture is Gremlins. Not Billy's Adventures in Kingston Falls. It's called Gremlins. So the Gremlin is going to save the day. And I went, okay. I really felt when we had finished that we'd really made a hell of a movie. I mean, I really felt that there were some amazing scenes in it and I thought the effects were incredible. When the movie was finished, I thought that it was quirky and offbeat in a way that I approved of. I didn't know what anybody else would make of it until we went to our first preview in which the reaction was tumultuous. I never have been before or since ever in a theater where people went that berserk over a movie that they obviously didn't, had no expectations for. They had no idea what they were going to see. I mean, they just went nuts. And we looked at each other and said, I think, actually, this might be a hit actually. Then the movie came out and did something that very few movies do which is, came out huge the first weekend and then the second weekend which now tends to fall off, it got larger the second weekend. It made more money the second weekend than it made the first weekend. I can't remember the last time that's happened. I remember the gremlins came sort of unexpectedly roaring out of the gate and it became kind of a cultural hit overnight. I will never forget reviews. It was interesting because some of the reviews were good but some of them were, you know, offended by the film. I remember Leonard Maltin, he called the film Icky Mayhem and every time I see, I don't, I don't talk to the guy in person but when I see him, I don't think of Leonard Maltin, I think of the name Icky Mayhem because that's all he could say about gremlins. Ow! I just went from completely anonymous person to, you know, a month later not being able to walk down the street. It was crazy. It was a complete change. Within three weeks, everywhere I went people were sort of like, oh, hi, or can I help you? Oh my god, it's you. You know, people just blurt stuff out. I would see kids going to school with me on the lunchbox. I was like, it's me on the lunchbox right there. I don't know if you saw that. That's me on the lunchbox. They were making gremlin toys of Stripe to put in the crib with the baby. Which, you know, okay, gizmo, I get it, but a Stripe toy in the crib? It seemed odd to me but it just happened to be, I think, the right movie at the right time and it put me on the map. All of a sudden, I was not just the guy who worked for Roger Corman, I was the guy who worked for Steven Spielberg and made a movie that people wanted to see. And so, all during that summer, it was constant, you know, battle between Ghostbusters, which has been the biggest movie. Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Gremlins. Ghostbusters generally beat us in most places but when the movie came out, partly because it was advertised with a very E.T. looking poster with E.T. colors in a fuzzy hand coming out of a box that made it look like Son of E.T., a lot of parents were upset that when they went to the movie, it wasn't Son of E.T. The first half of it was Son of E.T. and the second half of it was Monster. And so, there were some thoughts that maybe this movie was not appropriate for a P.G. rating. Yes, there's violence in it but it's comic violence. It's made-up fantasy violence but it also felt very real. At the same time, Steven made Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom, which came out that summer as well and that was P.G. as well but both of these movies went just a little beyond the constraints of P.G. in terms of intensity and it became clear that there had to be a middle ground between P.G. and R. So, P.G. 13 was born thanks to Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was great making this movie because, well, first of all, you know, Joe and I had just, you know, come from very low-budget movies. This was our first studio movie in Warner Brothers, you know, and it was really important for us to have Steven and Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy to support us and help us navigate the complicated shoals of studio politics which we were completely unfamiliar with at that time and when the studio first saw it, they were somewhat taken aback and didn't know what to make of it and again, Steven was like, trust me, audiences are gonna love this and he was right. I just loved visiting the set and I just simply loved watching the dailies. It was Joe's movie and once the film was cast, I just sat back and had a lot of laughs. I had a great reaction the first time I saw the movie. It was so much fun but you kind of were going, should I be laughing at this? Should I be going, oh no, but it was so great. The Gremlins were so fantastic. The story was so much fun. The Gremlins are kind of like our impulses. It's like our id. It's like what we want to do. It's the bad side of us and it's fun to be bad and the Gremlins were having so much fun being bad. I think deep down a lot of people kind of related to it and enjoyed it. In a sense, all of us making movies in the 80s were like the Gremlins themselves taking over that town. We kind of moved into Hollywood and did what we wanted to do and because no adults were there to stop us or even wanted to stop us and they didn't stop us because the films were doing so well at the box office, it was a really interesting time of I guess creative insurrection. It was exciting at the time and now of course it lives on and you go into the East Village and you'll see kids at NYU wearing Gremlin shirts and that's what really feels great. I was a lucky guy to be in the places that I was to get to make the movie. I was lucky to get to make the movie when I did. I was lucky that the picture was a big hit. I was lucky that I was able to have a career after it but you know when the bus hits me they're going to say this is the guy who made Gremlins. I'm identified with Gremlins. This is the movie that defined my career. I call it a medley of my hit because I never had another movie that was as big as that and many directors are lucky if they ever get a movie that big so it was a great thing for me certainly.