To fans of cult movies Philippe Mora will always be the director of MAD DOG MORGAN, the brutal Aussie saga of a bloodthirsty bushranger played by Dennis Hopper, the strange monster movie THE BEAST WITHIN and the first two HOWLING sequels. But there’s another side to Philippe Mora. In fact, many other sides. The man who turned a spinning ballerina into a werewolf in THE HOWLING III and who directed that wild transformation scene in THE BEAST WITHIN, is also an established painter and the director of numerous documentaries about Nazi Germany, the first of which, SWASTIKA, caused an uproar at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. He shared a flat with Eric Clapton in sixties London and had a Wiener schnitzel with Albert Speer in Heidelberg. It was impossible to cover everything in Mora’s sprawling career in the arts and film in the 90-minute talk Roel Haanen had with in him August 2024. Because a part of this talk would be used for a UFO article in the magazine Schokkend Nieuws, the first half of the interview concentrated on Mora’s excellent adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s non-fiction bestseller COMMUNION, which deals with the writer’s alleged abduction by alien beings.
-When Whitley Strieber approached you to direct COMMUNION, what was your first reaction? What did you make of his claims? You knew him from your London days, right?
-It really was the other way around. I was in New York, and I saw a book by Whitley Strieber. The Hunger, I think it was. And I saw his name and I thought, I wonder if that’s the same guy I knew in London in 1969, at the London School of Film Technique. So, I called the publisher and I said, please tell Mr. Strieber that Philippe Mora, an old friend, would like to get in touch with him. He called me back almost immediately and we got together. And I said: What have you been doing? He said: Look, you’ll laugh at me if I tell you what’s going on with me. I said: No, I won’t laugh at you. And he said: Well, I think I’ve been abducted by little blue guys. And boy, it was hard not to laugh. But I didn’t laugh. He told me the story of being abducted and he asked me what I thought he should do. And I said: I think you need a psychiatrist… and a publisher. You need to write about this. And so he did both. We kept in touch and I told him I was very interested to see what he’d written. I’m leaving out a lot, because it’s a long story. But basically, because he had told me the story and I was asking about the book, he sent me the manuscript of Communion. And I said: Whitley, this would make a great movie. Why don’t we make it together? We’ll be partners on it. Then at least there’ll be creative control, because it’s such a personal story.
-You financed it independently. Wasn’t there any interest from the studios?
-No, not at first. I gave it to a few people in Hollywood here. And they said: No, that’s ridiculous. We don’t see how this could be a movie. And then of course it became a bestseller. It went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, in the non-fiction category, which was controversial. So when the book became a success, I went back to some of the studios. David Puttnam was the head of Columbia at the time. And he had been one of the co-producers of BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME and SWASTIKA. I thought: Oh, this is going to be a shoo in, no problem. Then the word came back from one of his lieutenants, that no, sorry, David doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t believe it. And I said: Since when has believing a story got anything to do with making movies in Hollywood? I mean, do you believe RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK? By then the book had gone through the roof, so with the help of Ed Simons, an English producer, I was able to raise five million dollars which was enough to make the movie.
-Was there anything about the experience that Whitley had, that rubbed off on you while you were working with him?
-Well, I’ll tell you two things. When the book became such a phenomenon, and we were working on making the movie, I started hearing weird clicks on our phone. It turned out that we were being bugged. I’m not sure by whom, but we were convinced it was the Air Force or something like that.
And the second thing. After the film was made, I flew to San Antonio to see Whitley, who was living there at the time. And I was followed by a guy that looked like Robert Redford in that CIA movie. He was right behind me as I checked in. When we get on the plane, the guy is seated right next to me and he started chatting, and he said: What were you doing in San Antonio? I said that I was seeing my friend Whitley Strieber and that we had just made this movie, COMMUNION. And he said: That’s the best movie ever made about alien abduction. And he asked more questions. So, at one point I just asked him if he was a journalist. And he said: No, sir. He opened his jacket and showed me a badge, which said Defense Intelligence Agency. Which, by the way, I’d never heard of, but subsequently I have learned that it’s like the CIA of the Pentagon. Now, I have to abbreviate the conversation, because this guy and I talked during the whole flight from San Antonio to Los Angeles. He asked me if I had ever met any aliens. I said: No, sir, I haven’t met any aliens. He said: Has Mr. Strieber met any aliens? And I said: Well, he thinks he has, but I don’t know. So, the questioning was like that. It seemed to me that they were really interested to know whether it was a hoax or not. But it wasn’t a hoax. I mean, Whitley did believe it.
-So, when you started making the movie, at a minimum you believed that he believed it.
-Yes, a hundred percent yes. He obviously believed it. And he had been to a psychiatrist. He had tests for a temporal lobe epilepsy and all kinds of things.
-It always seemed to me that Strieber earnestly tried to philosophically examine his experiences. If he’d just wanted attention, he probably would have written a more sensationalistic book.
-Yes, that’s true. But the more the book sold and the more it became a phenomenon, the more he started shifting his ambiguity about it. If you recall, in the book, he is not really saying it happened. He is saying it might have happened. It was more philosophical, to use your word. And the more the whole thing went on, the more he started saying it definitely had happened. And then he wrote another book and so on.
Was there any aspect of the book that you had trouble with, while making the film?
-One amusing thing. When we started making the film, I said to Whitley: You say that you had an anal probe from these aliens. Do you really want me to put that in the film? It’s going to follow you around. And he said: No, no, that was definitely part of the experience. You put it in. So, I had the effects guys build this thing which Whitley said had moved like a snake. Because we were getting into tricky territory, I wanted Whitley to approve the probe we had built. So, he came to the workshop with his wife Anne, who I didn’t know terribly well. Anyway, it took about four or five guys to carry this thing out. And his wife said: Oh my God, Whitley! I didn’t know it was that big! You never told me it was that big! And Whitley said: It was terrible, Anne. It was just terrible.
And cut to: Whitley’s about to go on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, to promote the film. Now, Johnny Carson, that was the biggest thing you could do. And I thought: Oh my God, if Johnny Carson asks him about the anal probe, then my career is over. I mean, this is crazy. Anyway, Johnny Carson says: Here’s Whitley Strieber, famous author of The Hunger, and so on. And he says: Whitley, I understand the aliens gave you an anal probe. And Whitley said: It was terrible, Johnny. It was just terrible. And you could see Johnny Carson thinking: I’m getting off this topic. So, immeiately he asks: So, what was it like working with Christopher Walken?
-Speaking of Christopher Walken, did he believe any of what Strieber had written?
-No, he did not. I took Christopher to a real meeting of alleged abductees. But he never believed any of it. He was a skeptical New Yorker, and he just didn’t believe it. They never had any deep conversations or anything like that. So, there was always a bit of tension there.
-How did that tension manifest?
-After we’d started shooting, and Whitley had seen some of the dailies, he called Christopher on the telephone and then Christopher called me. He said: Whitley Strieber just called me and said that if I continue to portray him as a loony, he’s gonna jump off the top of a building. I said: What did you tell him? He said: Well, I told him to call you. And just at that moment my other phone rang. And it was Whitley, and he said: Why am I being portrayed like this? And I said: Whitley, this is not a documentary. We want to get to the heart of the real story, but it’s not a documentary, and -you have to respect Chris Walken as an artist. He’s putting his spin on it, and it’s not supposed to be you literally. So, to his credit, he accepted that.
Is it true that Whitley Strieber wanted Dan Aykroyd to play him in the beginning and that you nixed that idea?
-No, that story comes about because we were in a meeting in my home in L.A. and the phone rang. This was in pre-production. It was Dan Aykroyd. He asked me whether he could buy Communion, the book. I said: No, sorry. We’re making the movie. Actually, the same thing happened later on when Tom Pollock, he’s passed away now, then head of Universal, asked if he could buy Communion for Steven Spielberg. And I said: I’m sorry, Tom, but you can buy our film. We start shooting it in three weeks. So, at that point there was high interest in the book. It just got bigger and bigger.
-You caught Walken just at that point when he started to become a different kind of actor. Around this time there was KING OF NEW YORK, THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS and COMMUNION. And he played all those roles really showy. How did you direct him?
-I encouraged him to let loose, which I do with actors. It’s one of the things that I enjoy very much. When actors are reciting lines, you have to be a very good actor to make it seem real, in my opinion. You see it in bad movies, where the actors are just reciting the lines. So, I always encourage improvisation. I’m not the first director to say that. I was invited to a dinner in New York once, this was before COMMUNION, and Orson Welles was the guest speaker. And someone asked him at the end of the dinner: What is a director? And Orson Welles said: A director is someone who presides over accidents. I love that. It has always stuck in my mind, and to a great extent it’s true. You want the accidents to… You want those magic moments to occur. It’s my long-winded way of saying I encouraged Christopher Walken to just go for it.
-Did that improvisation extend to the dialogue between Walken and Lindsay Crouse? Because it seems so naturalistic.
-Some of it was, yes. Interestingly enough, there’s another reason why those scenes seem so realistic. This is a little bit indiscreet, but it’s a long time ago now. Lindsay Crouse was married to David Mamet at the time. And Lindsay wasn’t happy with the dailies. She told me to fire the cameraman. She said she looked terrible. And I said: No, you don’t look terrible at all. Behind her David was pointing to the men’s room, indicating he wanted to talk to me. And I said: Lindsay, I’m terribly sorry. This is really rude of me, but I must have a pee. She laughed and she said: Okay, fine. So, I meet David in the bathroom and he says: Look, it’s not the cameraman, it’s me. I just told her we’re getting a divorce. I said: Oh, David, for God’s sake! Couldn’t you wait until the end of the movie? I was being selfish. Anyway, that’s part of why those scenes, her yelling at Christopher Walken, work so well. It really was the marriage breaking up, just as we were making the movie.
-It’s the psychological aspect that makes COMMUNION work so well as it does. It’s a psychological drama first.
-Yes, I did take it into more of the psychological realm. Did it happen or was he imagining it? So, the movie is kind of surreal in that respect. This is patting myself on the back, but since I’m the only person here, no one can see it, but there was an internet magazine called Movie Web and they did a survey of what the best alien abduction movies are. And COMMUNION came out on top, and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND came in second. Which I liked because our budget was considerably less than Mr. Spielberg’s.
-If there’s one tiny little gripe I have with COMMUNION, it’s that the aliens are too tangible, too real. Even in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND I would have preferred it if Spielberg had just shown us silhouettes. The more we see, the more we scrutinize. In your movie, the little blue guys are so tangible that it conflicts a little bit with that ambiguity that you so beautifully captured.
-I actually don’t think they look real. I was trying to get this nightmarish dreamlike thing. The beings float around at the end and they look like puppets. So, in that sense, I don’t agree with you. And you’ll recall from the film, when Christopher Walken sees the little blue guys, he bursts out laughing. That’s actually what happened. Walken burst out laughing. I mean, he wasn’t… We didn’t plan on that. He just burst out laughing, and I thought: Oh, I’m going to keep that, because that is what the reaction would be. This is crazy. Put your finger on the key theme of the whole story. Was it a dream? It could have been a dream. But it could have been real. So, I’m trying to have it both ways.
The other way that I dealt with what you’re getting at, is in the spaceship – well, you never actually see a spaceship, because Whitley never really referred to a spaceship – when Walken puts an alien mask on his face. Now, that confused Hollywood a bit because it’s not literal, you know? Suddenly, the magician’s showing his tricks. And there’s a reference to that when he’s got the magician’s assistant, and he says: I am the dreamer and you are the dream. So, my response to what you said is yes and no.
-That’s fair. I read in The New York Times of October 1998, when you were interviewed about COMMUNION that you would be directing a film version of Strieber’s novel Majestic. Obviously, it never got made, but I was wondering how close did you get with that project, and why it never came to fruition?
-I don’t remember the details of why it never happened, but I can tell you, raising money for anything is a nightmare. It’s terribly difficult. I don’t remember exactly what happened there. Whitley and I drifted apart, not for any dramatic reason. I went on to other things. But that was a great story. I wish I had been able to get it together.
-You also did a UFO documentary called ACCORDING TO OCCAM’S RAZOR, which I haven’t seen. I was wondering if you could talk about what its relation is to COMMUNION, if anything.
-It started when I was in Palm Springs with my family. One of my boys, they were very young at the time, said: Dad, Dad, I just saw a flying saucer. And again I was thinking, did it happen or did it not happen? I thought maybe that’s just because of COMMUNION. My kid’s trying to please his dad by saying he saw a flying saucer. So, I got the idea to apply Occam’s Razor, which is basically the basis of our idea of so-called common sense, to this whole UFO thing. You know, in court, eyewitnesses can send someone to the gallows. But why don’t we believe people who see flying saucers and aliens? I mean, it’s an eyewitness. So, I was intrigued by that idea and concocted a semi-documentary type thing on that principle. It’s like my notes on COMMUNION, if you like. Not ridiculing the idea, but examining it.
-Let’s circle back to the beginning of your film career. I saw SWASTIKA last week for the first time. These days the footage that Eva Braun shot of Hitler has been widely seen, but even so, it is still a powerful film. And one of the things that makes it powerful is the reconstruction of the sound, which gives the movie an eerie immediacy.
-Let me comment on that because it’s a very important point to me. I always saw the project as a feature film and it just occurred to me to get lip readers. So, I got some German lip readers in London and I thought: Oh my God, we might have some historical sensation here. But what they could read was very banal. Hitler was saying things like: I think we should go for a walk. And obviously you can’t lip read when Hitler has his back to us. So I thought, well, we’ll use authentic things he did say. We’ll get the actors to say in German things he actually said. So all that stuff about GONE WITH THE WIND and all that, that’s all documented.
Nevertheless, I was still very concerned about accuracy. After all, this is historically important. Now, the only two people who could authenticate what I’d done, who were there at the time and still alive, were Albert Speer and Arno Breker. My producer Sandy Lieberson got me into a meeting with both of them, first with Albert Speer. I went to Heidelberg to Speer’s house. This is 1972, so he hadn’t been out of Spandau long. He opens the door and he’s standing there with his abnormal sized head and a St. Bernard dog complete with the rum under the collar. The first thing he said to me was: Are you Jewish? And being a very young, sort of naive guy, I enthusiastically said: Yes, of course, yes, I’m Jewish. And then he asked if I was Australian. And I said yes. Then he launched into Nazi propaganda almost immediately. He said: You know the British used a lot of Australians, they sacrificed a lot of Australians in Greece. Do you know that? And I thought: God, this guy is still a complete Nazi.
And then he offered me tea, at least his wife did. I sat down, spoke to him. I asked him what he would do if Hitler walked into the room. And I’m not going to do the accent, but it sounded like Dr. Strangelove to me. He said: If Hitler walked into the room now, I would be compelled to do as he asks. Whatever he asked I would have to do it. Such was the force of his personality. Well, if he’d said that at Nuremberg, they would have hanged him.
So anyway, my father was important in this story, because he was in the French resistance with Marcel Marceau. They used to dress up as nuns and smuggle kids to Switzerland and to the United States. I couldn’t wait to tell my dad – this sounds like Mel Brooks now – that I had had a Wiener schnitzel with Albert Speer. Which I did, at his local restaurant in Heidelberg. So I called my father from Heidelberg. My father’s in Melbourne, Australia. I said: Dad, you wouldn’t believe it. I just had a Wiener schnitzel with Albert Speer. Silence. And then ominous silence. And then my father said: Did you kill him? And I suddenly thought: Oh my God, what have I done? So I’m making light of it, but not really. That was a dramatic moment for me. My father and Marcel, by the way, really liked the film. They understood the film.
-Not everybody did, at the time.
-No! When I made SWASTIKA, I didn’t want narration, because I thought it was unnecessary. I thought it would be much better to immerse the viewer, to put you in Nazi Germany and see what it was like. It never occurred to me that people didn’t think Hitler was a disaster for humanity. It just didn’t occur to me. I’d grown up in a resistance household. The verdict was in, I thought. As an artist and as a documentarian, I don’t believe you should spoon feed the audience. I still feel that way. So, I never thought it would be controversial.
But it was absolutely amazing in Cannes at the premiere because no one had seen the home movies that Eva Braun had shot at the Berghof. No one had seen Hitler like this, in color and filmed Cinema Verité style by his girlfriend. It was just a shock to a lot of people. The French in particular started screaming at the screen: Assassin! Assassin! Assassin! I thought: I’m getting out of here. This is a disaster. I left the palais while people were still yelling and everything. Then at the end of the film, Noel Coward started singing: Don’t Let’s Be So Beastly to the Germans, and that started more uproar. So, I’m running down the fire escape and I feel a hand on my back and it’s the PR guy who was handling SWASTIKA. He says: What are you doing? I said: I’m getting out of here, I’m going to the airport. He said: No, no, no, no. Then I heard a loudspeaker: Press conference! Philippe Mora at Salle de Presse. I go to the press conference. Another mini riot. The film was, however, heavily defended by Robert Hughes, who was the art critic of Time Magazine at the time, saying: It’s clear what the point of view of the film is. So, that was good. Time Magazine and a lot of the world press understood the film. It got great reaction.
-Does that first reaction still bother you?
-Well, one thing I’m still grappling with when I think back on that time, was something James Baldwin said to me at that screening. He came to me after the screening on the terrace at the Carlton Hotel. He said: That’s a wonderful film. But I do have an issue with one scene. I think you are unfair to Jesse Owens. I said: Unfair? What do you mean? He said: Well, he said he was having a great time in Nazi Germany. And I said: Well, that’s the point, sir. I mean, he was. That’s the point. It was all staged. That’s why I had it, because obviously the Nazis fooled the world. They did fool the world there at the Olympics. There’s a lot to that point. You know, was I unfair? I don’t think I was. I think I showed what happened. And what happened was faked. So if you’re a documentarian, do you show faked film? That is actually the whole point of SWASTIKA.
-Did Albert Speer eventually see the film?
-Yes, Arno Breker as well. I showed them SWASTIKA to authenticate the lip reading and the voice of the actor I’d got to play Hitler, because it was very hard to hear what Hitler actually sounded like when he wasn’t screaming. So I was concerned about the authenticity of what I’d done. We showed it to Speer and his reply was very Nazi: That it was exactly what it was like at the Berghof, but you have a voice actor saying my words and he has a cold, and I never get colds. I thought: Goodness, if that’s the only criticism, I’ve done a good job.
After that I met Breker in Paris. And he said: The film is accurate, except for one very important thing. At the end you show the bulldozer pushing bodies into a mass grave. And I can tell you, speaking as a sculptor, those bodies were faked. They were models. They’re not real bodies. The only place in the world where they have the skill to make puppets like that is in Hollywood. So that was faked in Hollywood.
-Unbelievable.
-Yes, it is unbelievable. You know, the Nazis had that line for a while, that it was faked. It’s such bullshit. And that’s one of the reasons that when they first went into the camps, general Eisenhower said: We need to film this immediately because no one’s going to believe it. Sadly, that’s still going on now. There’s still denial of the Holocaust.
-Let’s talk a bit about the Australian film scene of the seventies. I rewatched NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION and somewhere in the film it is said that the Australian film scene in the seventies consisted of two groups of filmmakers: the more cultured filmmakers and the vulgarians. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
-Well, no. I think there’s a lot of shades of those two aspects. There was what I would call boring BBC type Masterpiece Theatre films. There was that. And then there was the All Stops Out Films. You know, Mark Hartley coined the term Ozploitation, which was clever, but doesn’t really describe it. I feel partly responsible for that because of the shot of the guy’s brains being blown out at the beginning of MAD DOG MORGAN, which by any standard was a shock at the time in movies. And there was no Australian film industry. There was nothing. MAD DOG MORGAN was the first Australian film to get a release in the United States for a long time. It played in 40 cinemas in L.A. and 40 cinemas in New York. And suddenly people go: Gee, what’s going on in Australia? And the L.A. Times, Kevin Thomas, a big critic then, said: MAD DOG MORGAN signals the beginning of a renaissance of cinema in Australia. Well, that was a big deal. So, a lot of my colleagues – and this is me by myself in a room patting myself on the back again – started making violent stuff because MAD DOG had been sold in the States. But was it vulgar? I don’t know. Is THE WILD BUNCH vulgar? Is A CLOCKWORK ORANGE vulgar when the gang rapes the woman? Well yes, it probably is. Is Shakespeare vulgar with Titus Andronicus when the guy makes a meat pie out of a human? Is violence vulgar? That’s a big question.
-But there’s a difference between MAD DOG MORGAN and, say, TURKEY SHOOT by Brian Trenchard-Smith.
-Yeah, it’s just a different kind of cinema. I mean, TURKEY SHOOT is shock cinema, you know. MAD DOG is about the history of colonialism. Brian’s a friend of mine, by the way. And a footnote to that is that Brian’s DEAD-END DRIVE was written by a very old friend of mine, Peter Smalley, who wrote the first film I ever made called TROUBLE IN MOLOPOLIS that was produced by myself and Eric Clapton in London.
-The only other Australian film that I can think of that deals with that violent colonial history in a similar manner is THE PROPOSITION, but that was made thirty years later. Is it hard for Australians to deal with that past?
-Yes, because it’s a racist, genocidal past. They’re still conflicted. I can say it in plain English: there was a genocide on the Aboriginal, indigenous people. Growing up, I only ever saw an Aboriginal on stamps and coins. And my family, of course, as Holocaust survivors, they spoke a lot about those issues all the time. And I remember my dad telling me that the worst thing happening in the world at that time was apartheid.
There was one famous Aboriginal at the time in Australia called Albert Namatjira, an artist, and he became world famous. My parents’ home was really an art gallery. They had exhibitions. And when the Queen was visiting Australia, I think it was in 1954 or something, my parents had organized an exhibition of art by anti-establishment artists, who are now all famous Australian artists: Arthur Boyd, Charles Black, Sydney Nolan, all these great artists. But it got into the newspapers and one day while this exhibition was on in our studio, Albert Namatjira arrived accompanied by two police officers. And he was this awesome, tall guy. I’m like maybe eight years old or something like that and he was the first Aboriginal I’d ever met. He walked around our studio and looked at all the paintings and he was terribly nice to me. But I couldn’t understand why he had come in with two policemen. Well, my mother explained to me that the Aboriginals weren’t allowed to walk around the streets of Melbourne without police. I do recall being shocked by the whole thing.
Australians haven’t faced that. In America they had a war of independence, but Australia never did. I never understood going to school why I had to sing God Save the Queen every morning in school, because I looked at a map and England was a long way away from Melbourne. I couldn’t understand the whole thing. Australia is still not broken free of its colonial masters. They’re still dealing with it.
-After MAD DOG MORGAN you went to the States to make THE BEAST WITHIN. How did your first American movie happen for you?
-Well, after MAD DOG came out in Australia, it was actually controversial because it was not in so-called good taste. The head of the Australian Film Commission at the time said to me that they were shocked by the male rape. Apparently, it’s okay to rape women in movies but not men. And he said that: Look, the government’s funding us because they think making movies here will help tourism. We don’t think raping a Hollywood movie star in an Australian jail will help tourism. And being a smart-ass at the time, I said: Well, I disagree.
Despite the fact that MAD DOG had sold in America and was triggering a whole lot of other movies that were more violent, I couldn’t get work in Australia. So, when Kevin Thomas gave me a glowing review in The Los Angeles Times, I thought: I’m going to go where I’m liked. So I went to L.A. and I met with Dennis Hopper’s agent, Robert Raison, who’d been a famous agent. He was very nice and let me stay at his place and we tried to get some things going. Nothing happened. Then Bobby Littman, famous agent for so-called foreign directors in Hollywood, like Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, took me under his wing and he got me the job at United Artists, directing THE BEAST WITHIN.
Bobby said: Look, I’m going to show you scripts here with offers, but don’t bother reading the scripts. If you read the scripts here in Hollywood, you’re never going to want to work here. He showed me the script for THE BEAST WITHIN. Here’s one, he said, it pays 100.000 dollars. Of course, the first thing I did was start reading the script. On the first page, a woman gets raped by a giant grasshopper. I thought: No one’s read this. It’s impossible. So, we go to a meeting with the head of the studio. And Bobby warns me: Just say yes, okay? Don’t talk about the script. Just say yes. So, I’m obeying instructions. We go there, we sit down. The head of the studio asks me: What do you think of the script, Philippe? And I said: Yes. He said: No, I mean what do you think of it? What do you really think of it? And my agent is gesticulating behind him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think anyone had read it, because there was hardly a script at all. So I said what popped into my head: This film could be like steak tartare. And the head of the studio looks at me. He says: Steak tartare? Steak tartare? And he looks to his assistant, Anthea Sylbert. And she says: Philippe is French. And he looks at me and says: Philippe, you’re the man for this picture! I swear to you, that’s how I got my first job in Hollywood, by saying steak tartare.
-What I like about THE BEAST WITHIN is that it has a weirdness that you don’t see in Hollywood very often.
-Well, you know, that’s an interesting observation. One of the reasons, I think, is because we filmed it in the deep south, in Mississippi. And there was a weirdness there that you just couldn’t fake.
The budget was five million, which, for United Artists was a joke. They probably thought they could make some money on a quickie by this Australian guy. So they said: You’re going to shoot the film in a disused mental hospital in Mississippi. Well, the mental hospital turned out to be the largest mental asylum in the United States. And the first day there, a man came up to me and asked me for some matches. I gave him my matches and he put the whole matchbox in his mouth and started eating it! Anyway, it wasn’t disused, it was an active mental asylum. Then they assured us that they were going to lock all inmates up so that we wouldn’t be disturbed.
And I’ll tell you another thing, regarding your observation that there’s a weirdness about the film. We filmed the big transformation scene, where the guy’s head blows up, on a disused floor. Or so we thought. While I was filming that scene, I suddenly heard sobbing and crying behind me. I turned around, and there were about five women in gowns, with the craziest hairstyles you’ve ever seen. They were inmates who’d somehow escaped and had come up and saw us shooting that scene. I’m sure those poor people thought it was real. They thought: Oh, this is what happens to us at the end. They cut our heads off. Because to them, it probably looked like an operating theater, with all the lights, you know. Then these male nurses rushed in and took these women away. Those poor people are probably still in straitjackets. I mean, it’s a horrible story, but that’s what happened.
-You did a lot of different movies, early on in your career: from documentaries and historical movies like MAD DOG MORGAN to the superhero musical THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE to THE BEAST WITHIN and the action drama A BREED APART. Were you trying to avoid being typecast as a director?
-The short answer is yes. I didn’t want to be known as the horror director, the western director, the Aussie director, whatever. But also, there’s a practical element to this rule, which is: it takes a year at least to even make a bad movie. I have told young filmmakers: Don’t waste your time on schlock, because it takes the same effort to make a good movie as it does to make a bad movie. And some directors keep making the same movie. But I was always a film buff. I’d started that film magazine, Cinema Papers. I knew a lot about movies. So, you’re right, I didn’t want to be typecast, I deliberately tried to do different movies.
Of course, there’s the satisfaction of getting a paycheck, which I appreciate. We all need a paycheck. That’s why I made THE HOWLING II, because I did need a paycheck at the time. But that film put me in a bit of a quandary, because if you’re offered a sequel, and you try to remake the first one, the fans will say it’s horrible, and if you make an original movie, they’ll criticize that. So it’s really a no-win. But I thought I could do something with it.
-And then HOWLING III is your version of doubling down on that. Because if HOWLING II is a strange film, then HOWLING III is… I mean that movie is ut of… that’s in orbit. That’s such a weird movie.
-Well, you know, that’s my… I guess that was my latent nationalism coming out. I thought: Why can’t we have marsupial werewolves? That was kind of a crazy idea. I wrote the script quickly in Sydney. That film was made for a million dollars, by the way, which was peanuts. I’m proud of that, but you know, I think it was James Cameron who said to me: Look, no one cares about the budget. They just want the entertainment. Anyway, it was made very cheaply. And the producers who had made THE HOWLING and THE HOWLING II read it and they asked me: Are you sure this is a horror movie? I said: Have you ever seen a marsupial birth? The embryo comes out and then crawls up and goes into… And they said: Okay, it’s a horror movie. That’s how that came about. And yeah, it was in orbit. It was deliberately in orbit.
-It’s obvious that you’re having a lot of fun with the movie, but were the money people in on the joke? Did they get what you were doing with it?
-No, but what they did get was the money that came in. Because the day it was released on video, I think they sold like five million dollars’ worth. It was the last HOWLING movie to be released theatrically. And then they asked me to do another one. I said: No, I don’t want to be Mr. Werewolf. I walked away from it. Then they made another six. It’s the only series where the preceding film has got nothing to do with the next one. I can say I started this idea.
-You said earlier that sometimes a filmmaker needs a paycheck. Somewhere down the line you stopped making movies for paychecks and only made films that you yourself wanted to make. A lot of those films have to do with you trying to understand what happened in World War II, like THREE DAYS IN AUSCHWITZ and GERMAN SONS. What still fascinates you about it?
-Oh, I think, simply put, we don’t know why it happened. There’s been more written about this than probably any incident in history apart from the crucifixion. But there’s no explanation. There’s endless books and endless theories. But the fact is 50 million people died. It’s still a mystery. Was it Hitler? Was it the forces of history? Was it inevitable? Why? I’m making a documentary now – actually it’s hybrid – and it’s called THE DAWN OF GENOCIDE and it goes to your question. It’s a documentary about the origin of genocide as far as we know. And the film will demonstrate the theory that the first genocide, a theory which I believe by the way, is when Homo Sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals. That’s becoming more and more an academically approved theory. Because the Neanderthals weren’t stupid. They had sculptures, they had art, they had artifacts. Maybe that first genocide goes some way towards explaining why.
-Does it worry you that even the next generation that came after the World War II, which you belong to, is getting older, and that in about 20 or 30 years there will be no one left even of that second generation to tell the stories?
-Look, that’s history. Yes, it worries me. But one interesting thing is that the second generation survivors like myself are biologically traumatized from the preceding generation. They always thought evolution is slow, that it’s impossible for the next generation to be traumatized. But now there are many academics who believe that DNA can have been altered by trauma. So, in terms of history and the recording, yes, there’s going to be a lot of people, a lot of people are going to die and we won’t have the firsthand accounts.
But look, incredibly enough, genocide is continuing. I mean, so I don’t think the issue is going to go away. Yes, that particular war, the memory will die, the first hand memory will die. But you’re from the Netherlands, the Nazi trauma occurred in the Netherlands as well. But then there’s Anne Frank and her story. A very moving story and one of the greatest symbols of the whole thing. That’s still there and that’s amazing.