Brain Dead (Adam Simon #1)

Conducted by Giallo Julian

(Modified for readability)

Ah, so curiosity got the better of you, eh? To be fair, how could it not? We’re talking BRAIN DEAD with ADAM SIMON himself on Dread Central! Well, let’s not waste anymore time, then. ENJOY!

“Rex Martin studies the preserved brains of paranoids and schizophrenics looking for deformities that might be corrected with brain surgery. This world-renowned brain surgeon is about to test his controversial lab research in the real world… The patient is Dr. Halsey (Bud Cort), a brilliant physicist, who after brutally murdering his wife and children suffers from acute paranoia. Dr. Halsey, now under observation at Lakeside Mental Hospital, is unable to divulge a mathematical formula that the managers of Eunice Corporation, his employers, want desperately. But is it just the doctor who requires surgery?”

INTERVIEW:

Giallo Julian: “Alright, so here we go. Adam Simon! Pleasure having you here. It’s again — MINDBLOWING. I really appreciate you taking time to talk to me about all this, and being my first video interview ever.”

Adam Simon: “I’m thrilled! I’m honored I get to be that.”

GJ: “This [Brain Dead] is your feature film debut! I can only imagine the excitement you had for your first big movie. I know the slim basics of this film’s background — Julie Corman had interns shuffle through scripts, this one was found and updated, it was shot in twenty days — but could you elaborate more on how the flick came to be? How did you personally come across it? How much creative control did you have over the production?”

AS: “Well yes, in the end, in part due to [Roger] Corman’s methods, and in part due to Julie producing, and she always produced the slightly more artistic, quirky, pretentious even — the artier versions of the Corman stable.

“But to back it up, throughout Corman’s career — and very much still true in the Concord-New Horizons era — the way you ended up becoming a director or writer there usually was because you were doing something else. Invariably, you started out in the editing room, you started out in the PR (Public Relations) department, you started out in any number of functions. And over the years, you got to — he’d [Corman] give you your break. That was part of the bargain you were making,  and that’s famously — you know, that’s everybody. It’s Joe Dante. It’s Jim Cameron. It’s not [Francis Ford] Coppola, but even Coppola started with re-editing films that Roger had bought foreign. So that’s the typical way. And my path with Roger was not that way at all. It was actually pretty unique, and he said to me he hadn’t done it before, and didn’t necessarily do it again.

“The short version would be — I was still in film school, in the period running up to that, when I had been lucky enough, or whatever, successful enough to make a film within film. So once in USC (University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts) — I don’t know if they still do it this way — but it was a real kind of bloodthirsty competition amongst the students, and one of the reasons I chose to go to USC. At the time, I was — I didn’t come from money. I didn’t come from LA [Los Angeles]. I came from the southside of Chicago. I had no idea how to break in, nor did I have the private means to just go off and make a little movie, or anything like that. But I knew —

“A. —  That I could probably get scholarships and work study stuff at USC. Which I did, I got a lot of help to go there, and would teach freshman writing and stuff to pay my way, or be a projectionist. Stuff like that, because I had done that stuff as an undergrad.

“But also, I knew at the end of the line — more or less — or once you had been there a couple of years, you could compete to do these short films where the faculty would choose the scripts — people would submit scripts, and just like a little studio in the real world back then, everybody would compete to get to direct them. Now, the writer of that script might compete to get [the] director [chair], but so could everybody else. And if you succeeded at that, you know — they would make five of those, I think, a year, and they paid the full budget for.”

GJ: “Oh wow!”

AS: “And so the screenings, once a year, of those films were kind of a big deal in the eighties. Everybody would be there — I mean big studio executives, top agents, everybody would come to those because there was some excitement around [it]. This is where new filmmakers might come from, and also, from their point-of-view, a very even playing field.

“You were going to see five films, or whatever it was. They all had to be exactly twenty minutes. They couldn’t be over or under. They had to be made for the exact same budget on the exact same schedule. So there was a sense… they were seeing a skills test there. Anyway, long story short, I had gotten selected… to direct one of those [films] off a script I hadn’t written, but I was free to rewrite it. And it was a little World War II story, which was… ambitious to make a twenty minute student film that took place in the North Africa campaign. But we pulled it off, and pulled it off really well. And so that screening was a big deal, and that was a life changer for me.

“Roland Joffé, I think, was the host of that screening, and he made a big point of pointing to that film and saying, “Now we see what a director does!” And stuff like that. A lot of hype. And there was a little bit of hype around me anyway, because I had been writing these plays with a then not-very-well-known — but now very-well-known — actor named Tim Robbins, as part of a theater group that he had founded… So people in town knew my plays, and now here was this film I’ve done, so I walked out of that screening with a big ICM (International Creative Management) agent, and with people saying, “Okay, what feature did you want to make?” I won’t get lost in the details, but the short version was I brought a script by one of my classmates at USC, Richard Smith — who sadly died very young — but it was a brilliant script called Maverick.

“That was a real twist on the prison escape movie… kind of a Birdman of Alcatraz approach with a really sensitive, interesting hero, who time and again drives this warden crazy by being able to escape. And we set it up… to be a huge film debut for me with Larry Gordon, who was probably the top action movie producer at the time. And I was in the process of casting it — and I’d already cast, I think, Donald Sutherland as the warden, and was in the process of making a deal with Matthew Modine to play the lead — when I got a call from Gordan and his company to say, “Hey! Great news! We’ve sold half the project to Sylvester Stallone because he wants to play the lead!”

“And look — I got a lot of respect for Stallone, and they said, “But Stallone has director approval. You’re protected if he doesn’t want you to do it, you’re going to get paid a lot of money not to work.” And you gotta remember at the time, I’m still like a twenty-six year old guy who’s got one foot in film school, and has come out of nowhere. So I meet with Stallone, who was a very decent guy, and he was kind of sweet… He said, “I gotta tell you, I want this to be a career changer for me. I want to play a different kind of character, and I just feel like I’m going to need a more experienced director to help me become this other thing.” And I’m like, “Dude, I get it.” It was fine.

“That became the film Lock Up. So my actual first screen credit is  — I don’t know what, “co-executive producer” or something like that of the movie Lock Up. Which has almost not a single scene in common with our original script, but does still have… the late, great Donald Sutherland as the warden, so I guess I earned my credit that way.

“So the point is, literally just a week or two after that when I’m… coming home one day to my apartment, thinking about, What am I going to do? Am I going to finish these last credits I got in school? Am I going to start writing something to direct? Or working with whatever it is? And there was an envelope sitting in front of my door, and it had the Concorde-New Horizons insignia… I opened it up, and it had this really fat script. Like, god, I wish I still had it. Somewhere in my archives, I may still have a copy of the original. It was really long, like, one hundred and thirty, forty, fifty pages. And though it was Xerox, you could see it had been written on a typewriter. You know what I mean? Because the printing was not all even and perfect the way it would be [otherwise], you know?”

GJ: “Sometimes a letter is kind of lower than the other ones.”

AS: “Exactly!… I look at the title, and the title says Paranoia. I’m like, That’s interesting. And it says “by Charles Beaumont.”

“At which point, my head sort of explodes, because he’s literally one of the writers I most worshiped growing up, with so many Twilight Zone [episodes], so many great horror stories, so many great screenplays. Amazing guy! 

“And there’s this little cover letter from Julie Corman saying, “Hey, we’d be interested in talking to you about maybe directing this…” I’m looking at it going, Wow, that’s really cool! And I’m also thinking, Wait a second — Charles Beaumont? I’m 99.9% sure he’s dead, and been dead a long time.

“And it’s true, he had actually died not long after writing that script in the early mid-sixties. But he had written it for Roger [Corman] to direct, and I read it, and it was fascinating… I could clearly see it had within its DNA one of Beaumont’s most famous short stories, which is called Perchance to Dream — about a guy in a psychiatrist’s office who’s plagued by terrifying nightmares that always end the same way: with his death.

“But anyway, so I met [the Cormans], talked to them, and the reason they had found me apparently — I think it was actually Julie’s assistant… I think her boyfriend was an executive at one of the studios who had been at the USC screening, and had said to her, “There was this one film that was really, really cool. You should do some[thing] with that guy, you know? Stop just developing your talent in-house and grab that guy.” So it was actually because of that student film they had seen — and then Roger had seen it, and Julie had seen it, and said, “Yeah, okay!”

“And then at that point, he [Corman] basically wanted to know, “What kind of things would you want to do to it?” And I outlined a handful of things — we can come back to that. I wanted to be faithful to it. I worshiped Beaumont. I didn’t care about writing credit… It was just about how to both shrink and update it. It was at that point a twenty-five year old script. So they said, “Yeah, you can do it. And you can more or less do what you want to it.”

“I think the original shooting schedule was fifteen days, which at one point they added a few days because he [Corman] approved and liked what we were doing. And I think in the end, you’re right. We got maybe a couple of extra days to do some pickups and stuff. So yeah, it was still made on his typical whatever [the budget] was back then. $600,000 or whatever budget in that schedule.”

GJ: “I wasn’t expecting that much of a story to it! That’s amazing, and it’s crazy how everything is connected to that one [student] film that you did. And then, all of the sudden, the grape vine hears about it, and then there you are.”

AS: “Yeah, it’s great! The other advantage I will say I had — because it was a Julie film. Roger’s films tended to be on a — All the films were made on a quick schedule, but he also had planned out his schedule pretty far in advance, so you often had very little time to get the script in the way you’d like to before you had to start shooting, no matter what… But in both this one, and later with Carnosaur — by Corman standards — I was given an unusually long amount of time to think about and really work out a creative approach. Brilliant as Beaumont was, there was a lot of work that was going to have to be done.”

GJ: “He really liked you! He was like, “This guy’s onto something, so we’ll give him an extra TWO days.”

AS: “Yeah, exactly.”

GJ: “Onto the next question. It actually goes back to the last question — about how it was originally written in the sixties… I was wondering if there were any notable deviations from the original script to the shooting script — other than it being pushed [up] to the nineties.”

AS: “Yeah, you’re right. And of course. By the way — side note — we actually shot this film in — I wrote and shot it in 1989, and then it was released, I believe, in February of 1990. And the posters at the top, I think it was Mike Elliott — who went on to produce a ton of horror movies, including the next couple of mine — running the ads at the time. I always give him shit for this — he had put across the top of the poster “The Most Terrifying Film of the Decade.” Right? It’s like February 1990. I’m like, You mean the most terrifying film of the last two months?”

GJ: “You know what? It very well could’ve been!”

AS: “It could! It could’ve been!

“I admired a lot in the script. You could also tell it was literally Beaumont’s first draft. He would have done more work on it, and he would have worked more with Roger [Corman] on it if he lived, and if the film had been made.”

GJ: “It’s raw, almost. Just the raw idea.”

AS: “It was, and there was a lot of rawness in it, and I recognized immediately the Beaumont touch — so much of what we think of as The Twilight Zone twist is from Beaumont — but he also has many other really distinctive elements that were in there. Particularly this tendency to populate it with all these interesting, quirky characters… But yes, there were a lot of things that didn’t necessarily make sense, but also… Well, just two, I would say.

“Especially for your first time out — your first film —  at least for me, you know you want to — While being true to what the material is, I also wanted to bring to it the things I loved most. And… I’d say at the time, I was very, very influenced by both a novelist, Philip K. Dick — now very famous.”

GJ: “[sarcastically] He sounds familiar! I might’ve heard of him.”

AS: “Yeah, and probably my favorite filmmaker at that point — or the one who was doing films like I was picturing doing, especially in the horror/sci-fi realm — was David Cronenberg. So in the back of my mind was, What would Cronenberg and Dick do to this?

“And a lot of the ultimate choices I made were inspired by that. But really, at core, it was one big issue. When that thing was written in the early sixties, psychoanalysis — and I mean like old fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis, with someone lying on a couch, and someone sitting in a chair — was all the rage. And not only was it all the rage — and you would see [it] in lots of movies and TV shows and stuff — but also, I think, people really believed it in a way. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but it was kind of, “Yeah, that’s the way the mind works” or whatever.”

GJ: “Not much question to it. Like, that’s “definitive.” That’s how the mind works, and then there’s no leeway.”

AS: “Yeah! So Beaumont’s script is all about that. It’s all about the Freudian psychological sense of the mind. And so the relation between a Freudian psychiatrist and his patient who do, as in my film, end up swapping bodies or losing identities to each other, but it had nothing to do with the brain. It was the mind. It was the Freudian mind, and that was the first fundamental thought I had, because this was also the same moment where there was this huge new interest and knowledge about neurology. Oliver Sack’s books — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings — had come out to a lot of excitement. And I really was fascinated by this idea about the brain —  about the idea in which the brain was what this was all about — and not necessarily the Freudian mind.

“And so I did a deep dive on all these books. The one that I most remember was a book with a great title called The Three Pound Universe.”

GJ: “It’s a great title!”

AS: “And I’m like, That’s a great title! And that’s the concept I wanted to go with. That also… fit more in with the science fictional Cronenbergian/Philip K. Dick-type approach I wanted to make… I wanted it more based in science rather than psychology.”

GJ: “Psychology is almost like a philosophy kind of thing as well [as a science].”

AS: “Exactly, and I’m a big believer that it’s great. There’s lots of self knowledge to be gained from it. But you can’t disregard the ways in which the world we perceive and move around in is mediated physically through your brain and what happens… I literally had found footage of the first lobotomies, like the one I recreated in the movie, or of things where people are having parts of their brain stimulated, and they’re literally seeing different things. So I just immediately said to Roger [Corman] that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to take this out of the realm of psychology and put it into neuroscience, and make it about the brain. At that point, it was still called Paranoia, not Brain Dead.

“And that led to a ton of changes… as you can imagine… it therefore brought in the whole corrupt medical science corporation.”

GJ: “The Eunice Corporation!”

AS: “Exactly. And so that changed… a lot of it. I think the only characters in any way that survive… from Beaumont’s original [script] are, in some sense, the doctor himself — though I gave him a new name in tribute to one of my high school English teachers — and the patient, Halsey. I think Halsey was always Halsey, so I kept him as Halsey.

“And probably the thing I was, in the end, proudest of… was that I had done all that knowing that, of course, it’s going to say “screenplay by Charles Beaumont”, and I would just be thrilled to be directing a movie that said “written by Charles Beaumont.” And when they gave the script to Beaumont’s son and daughter — I think it was, who were in charge of his estate — they really loved it, and they said it was great, and they said, “You know, we think Dad would really love this, too, and he would have wanted Adam to get credit, because clearly there’s something going on there.” So, the fact that I posthumously, thanks to his family, got to share the writing credit with one of my heroes was a huge, huge gift to me.”

GJ: “That’s amazing… I can only imagine sitting there, seeing your name right next to one of your heroes. Right there in a movie YOU made and wrote. That is — That is awesome. And yeah, you were bringing a lot of stuff [into the script] because the movie [Brain Dead] is more about the chemical and physical makeup of the brain, and how that affects reality, more so than a psychological thing. But I’m sure I have a question about that somewhere in here, so I’ll get back to that.

“I think it’s safe to say that Brain Dead is probably the highest concept [plot] out of the three movies we’re going to talk about. I think this is the one that’s… a lot to unpack. I was going to ask how much of the film’s “weirder” aspects are your influence. Which, I’m assuming since you wrote the screenplay, is probably all of them.”

AS: “For the most part, yes… In a somewhat juvenile way, it was kind of like, I’m going to make this movie, then who knows? I get hit by a car the next day! It’s like, maybe I’ll never make another movie, you know? And I think when you’re starting out, and you’re young, you try to shove all your own passions and interests into it. So everything from who I was casting in it, to what I was naming characters, to little nods to H.P. Lovecraft, little nods to Philip K. Dick.

“But also, as you can see, I’ve always been inspired by history, philosophy, science. I love film. I grew up obsessed with movies and comics and fantasy, horror, sci-fi, mystery novels, all that stuff. But I also just always had a really eclectic hunger for… the weirder sides of all those things. Weird history, weird thoughts, or even vanished old versions of rejected knowledge. Yeah, chemistry is interesting, but alchemy is REALLY interesting… So I definitely channeled a lot of that in there… One other thing I do think I brought to it — but that was very much also inspired by yes, Philip K. Dick, yes, Cronenberg… by Charles Beaumont, and by Rod Serling, and some of the other writers, who all worked in the milieu before me here in LA, which… reading them had always led me to believe that one of the cool things about genre fiction… is that compared to your regular realist type of story, they tend to have a lot more room to be philosophical.”

GJ: “Oh, I agree.”

AS: “Or even metaphysical. They can be about things like that, whereas your typical realist story back in the day would be like Kramer vs. Kramer, about a family divorcing or some kind of regular drama. It’s invested mostly in the realism of the characters and their emotions and their psychological states and their social problems, or their poverty or whatever. All of which are awesome and great topics for telling stories. But in a way, it’s harder to touch on these more out-there, weirder, philosophical questions, like Well, what is reality? How do we make it? You know?

GJ: “Yes.”

AS: “Real nature of dream vs. reality, all that kind of stuff. So it’s not a coincidence that it tends to be science fiction, fantasy, and horror that ask those questions, and I definitely was leaning into that.”

GJ: “Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. Genre fiction makes all these questions and philosophical deals a lot more digestible because you’re putting it into a format that on the surface level [for example] is about aliens coming down and messing with us. But on a deeper level, you’re like, Oh, the aliens represent this and that and situations [like] this! And it’s a lot easier to get people into it.”

AS: “Yes… this is something we’re talking about in my world-building class. The first thing you’re asking people to do with a story like that is — Come into a world that’s not, or not exactly, the world they know. And the minute you do that, potentially everything is up for grabs, because of the nature of the world itself. And you got to convince people to buy into it, but the minute you do, fundamental questions about the nature of reality — or the nature of the human, or all kinds of things — suddenly you can play with them in a way that [you can’t] if you’re telling a story that’s about a bank teller, and even if his bank gets robbed, it’s still the world as you know it. It would really break that world to suddenly raise questions about, Is this really happening? Could this be a dream? That just wouldn’t make sense, because the premise is, This is YOUR world.”

GJ: “Exactly.”

AS: “As opposed to the premise, This might not be the world as you know it. Or, The world you think you know might not be what you know.”

GJ: “Sounds good to me. It also helps that… the more realistic stuff — that’s stuff we deal with every day of our life. I want to see an alien come out of nowhere!”

AS: “I’m kind of with you there. As one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, famously said — “The only people who complain about escapism are jailers.”

GJ: “That’s a good one! I’ll have to remember that one, that’s really good… Oh man, I’m learning a lot today. I love it. Thank you! But alight, next question.

“We’re going into spoiler territory right now, so I’m assuming everyone who’s going to be reading this has seen the movie [Brain Dead]. Or if not, they’re interested [enough] to go see it now!

“There’s a lot of clues in the film about what’s really going on — Dr. Martin’s spiritual outlook on brains, the allusions to paranoia and experimentation, the unreliable perception of Martin’s reality, the question if reality is dependent on one’s own mentality — altered or otherwise — all that and so on. So my question is — Is there a definite answer to what’s happening in the movie, or is it left completely up to interpretation? Because the way I see it… the whole movie is just a dream occurring [inside] a disembodied brain floating in a jar, based on Martin’s earlier comment where he’s talking about, “Hey, I wonder what he’s dreaming in there.” — Paraphrasing a little bit. And I was wondering — Am I close? Am I way off base? Is there an actual conclusion?”

AS: “The answer is yes and no…I think that when it works, it’s because what I’m about to say is true, which is — I don’t think if you set out to create something that’s completely indeterminate in its ultimate meaning, that it actually will work. The only person who can get away with that — I mean, because it’s not that nobody gets away with it — but you know who gets away with that is someone like David Lynch. You’re never really going to be able to map all the possibilities of even Twin Peaks, let alone Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway.”

GJ: “You’d go crazy trying to do that.”

AS: “Yeah. So I think he [Lynch] has moved into a realm of pure surrealism. But in most cases, you — Or let me just put it to you this way. So I did map very carefully what I believed to be what’s actually happening [in Brain Dead]. I can tell you what I think that is, and I will, if you’d like.”

GJ: “Oh, I would love it!”

AS: “But I’m struck by how many people — like yourself, like others, who’ve seen the movie multiple times — present to me a completely different explanation for how it all works, and they can back it up and say, “You must have intended this because there’s evidence in the film!”… Including when we just had that great screening at the New Beverly [Cinema], [with] my seventeen year-old son and sixteen year-old daughter and my wife — in addition to a lot of other folks [who] were there to see it, and were really interested. 

“Talking about it afterwards with my son and daughter and their friends who’d come to see it, they [each] had a completely different explanation for what actually happened in the movie. And they were busy trying to convince me that they were right, and I’m like, “Well, dudes, I love that that makes perfect sense. That’s not necessarily my plan for it.” But I think my plan… always was that it would be structured so carefully, that there would be multiple — and not — “Commensurable”…  meaning there’d be multiple contradictory, but equally logical, explanations.

“One of which is yours. That is, that thing we see at the end in the bottle was always there, and is what it was. One is, for example, my son’s. He’s convinced that Martin is Halsey, that this is really… about the guy who did those things, and who briefly thought he was his own doctor. Whereas the simplest one to me, and the one I use as, Here’s the A logic from which I’m going to base it, while seeding what we would now call Easter Eggs that allow you different entrance and exit points was — No, the story as you first encounter it is accurate. And is accurate — with the intrusion of little minor dream scenes — up to the point where he [Dr. Martin] gets hit by the truck. Where he’s having the wrestling match with the homeless guy over whose brain is in the jar.”

GJ: “[quoting movie] That’s my brain!”

AS: “Yeah! That’s my brain! You might recognize that guy. That’s Lee Arenberg, who is an actor from our theater group. He’s probably best known for being in all the Pirates of the Caribbean films, as one of the most characterful… pirates. And also in that TV show — the one where all the fairy tale characters live in the same town.”

GJ: “Oh! Once Upon a Time, or whatever it’s called.”

AS: “Exactly! Yeah. That wonderful, wonderful actor. And that’s Lee playing the part. 

“And so when you come back late in the film to the operating theater, that you can see looks like the same structure [from earlier in the film], and it’s an adaptation of the same set that you’ve got behind you on your recording right now. [I had this background during the interview] But now, you see there’s a regular operation room in which his wife (Patricia Charbonneau), his friend Jim — his “friend” Jim — and his assistant, who’s standing over your shoulder there, Berkovitch (David Sinaiko). [the rightmost character in the previous image] They are all watching, hoping he’s not going to die, and he “dies” on the table there.

“So yeah, in my intention, that was it. And the clue for that, to me, is that in the other alternate worlds you’re in along the way… you never see Berkovitch… Anytime you see him — once things get squirrely — is at the very end when he’s there. So to me, I place him like a little chess piece… to be, from my point of view, the signal that — No, this is the REAL real.”

GJ: “He’s the anchor!”

AS: “He’s the anchor of that moment. Though, of course — given the very, very, VERY ending — we’re still somehow having a voiceover from a brain in a bottle that’s making some Cartesian jokes about — I think, therefore I am — does suggest like — [inquisitive inflection] Huh? And I think that then sends you back around like a Möbius strip to all the different possibilities within it. “

GJ: “So much like Martin’s reality, our reality in this film is what we make of it — based on us, and not so much there being an actual [canon]. There’s a way you say it is, there’s people’s [interpretations], but as you said, it’s valid for everyone else’s logic to fit in there, too. Because there’s all those different “clues” and stuff like that. So it’s all dependent on the person.”

AS: “You can definitely go down the rabbit hole of the ways in which not just brain science, but physics — at its strangest and weirdest — says a lot of weird things about the universe and its relationship to the structure of the brain and other things.”

GJ: “Yeah!”

AS: “Yeah, for sure. It just needs you down there. Look, at its simplest, it’s just predicated on the idea that you know you’re just — It’s not that I don’t believe there is  — I don’t think we’re living in a simulation.”

GJ: “Oh yeah, no.”

AS: “I believe there really is a reality, and this is that reality, but my perceptual experience of that reality is constructed in my brain. If I’m not crazy, it’s connected and is pretty close to THE reality. But we all experience moments like — you’re waiting for somebody, you’re standing on the street, people are walking towards you. For a moment, you see that person [you’re waiting for] walking towards you. It’s actually them. And then, as they get closer, you see, Oh no, it’s not them! Well, in that moment, your brain filled in the blank and made [the person] be your friend. Do you know what I mean? Reality is constructed that way.” 

GJ: “It’s like an empty Mad Lib that you [somehow] get wrong. You’re sitting there like, Oh, that’s so-and-so! And then you’re like, Oh wait! I gotta mark that out and put that [new information] there.”

AS: “Exactly. And your brain is constantly revising and making it closer to “The Real.” But I tend to take the view that we don’t really have access to “The Real.” It’s there, but we’re dependent on our perceptions, and our brain, and our mind, and all this, and our bodies to piece [it] together. It’s more like this [the human body/mind] is our spacesuit, and at the same time, it’s putting the data together and creating the environment for us to move around in.”

GJ: “And unfortunately, our brains are unreliable narrators… if you don’t have enough data, we just make shit up.”

AS: “That’s right! And it does all the time, especially once you close your eyes and go to sleep, but even when you’re awake.”

GJ: “Oh yeah, for sure. I mean… how do I know what I’m seeing is what you’re seeing? And we won’t know until — I don’t know, someone does something. Watch me get proven wrong in twenty years, but I feel like that’s going to be impossible [to accomplish].”

AS: “Yeah, I think that’s true.”

GJ: “Yeah. Alright! Next question!

“Bill Pullman AND Bill Paxton! What a duo for a first feature! Not to mention George Kennedy, Bud Cort, Nicholas Pryor, plenty of great actors. How was it like directing such a cast? Was it a smooth shoot? Was there growing pains?”

AS: “Oh, it was super smooth. That was one of the joys. On the other two Corman films, I — in so many ways — got to do something similar, but it wasn’t really until my TV show, Salem, that I got to do more of what I did there. Get the pleasure I got there, which is more like being part of a theater company, which I had come out of — The Actors’ Gang. Where there is just a different atmosphere when you’re working with actors of a certain caliber, but also where they feel like, Hey, this is our theater! Let’s put on a show! Let’s have fun! It’s great. I gotta give a lot of credit to — the woman who died way, way, way too young — named Barbara Cohen.

“Roger [Corman] normally did not allow casting directors. He had an in-house casting department. I think the one element of casting that he insisted on for [Brain Dead] — and I was totally down for — was George [Kennedy], because he was just old friends with [Corman]… Roger was a great one for collecting chips over the years, and then cashing them in at the right time… we’ll come back [to that] when we talk about Carnosaur.”

GJ: “I mean, he must have had a whole stack [of chips] for George Kennedy, because he just kept showing up in things.” 

AS: “Exactly, and George just enjoyed that. So he [Corman] said, “You got George.” But I was sort of free to cast the rest, and he agreed… a very small part of the budget would be given to the casting director to have more free casting, because part of what I wanted to do was —

“A. I wanted to use a lot of theater actors. I wanted to use a lot of the actors from my theater company.

“But also, I didn’t want it to feel — I admired a number of other Corman features that were being made at the time, but for better and for worse, one of the things that marked out the Corman films was… a stock company of actors they’d always go to. A combination of TV actors and older character actors and stuff.

“But I had also written it with the original lead part fundamentally for Tim Robbins to play, and he was going to play it. And we were partners in the theater group — and these were the plays we would write, and he would direct… I think he had done Top Gun, a little part in there. Maybe he had done Howard the Duck. He hadn’t done a ton yet, but he was starting to rise up as an actor, and when we did the first read-throughs of the script… he was the lead. And I think Barbara [Cohen] had already suggested at that point Nick Pryor — standing behind you there [man in middle of image] — for the imaginary or not, you know, killer/doctor/carpet salesman, and a couple of [actors for] other parts.

“But the lead was going to be Tim. And fairly late into the process — but still well, well, well before shooting — Tim called me up to say he had been offered a part in Jacob’s Ladder — which has got a lot of resonance with this, and is one of the best scripts I had ever read. It’s a great script. Adrian Lyne is a fantastic director, and they were going to offer him [Robbins] a ginormous amount of money — for the time — but it certainly was going to be the biggest thing of his, and I think probably the first film that he was going to truly, in that sense, be the star of. And he said, “But look, I will say no, because I gave you my word. I’ve already told my agent I gave you my word.” And I said, “No, no, no, you gotta do that. If you don’t — however good this film [Brain Dead] turns out to be — you’re going to resent it later on. So, of course, go with God! You gotta do that!” I’m glad he did, because he’s so great in that film [Jacob’s Ladder]. And I love that film. And I often think of the films as kind of weird step siblings of each other in a way.”

GJ: “I mean, they’re both very similar [in terms of] messages and sources.

AS: “Yeah, they both are playing with a sub-genre of its own, of the “life that passes before your eyes when you might be dying” type of story. Like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or some other famous stories.

“But at that point, it became an open search for who would play [the lead]. And Barbara said, almost right away when I described to her what my intention was with the character — if I had a model for it, there’s an old Howard Hawks comedy with Cary Grant… called Monkey Business. Oh, and he’s done… another famous one in the thirties called Bringing Up Baby. Both of which Cary Grant plays not his usual suave self, but a somewhat addled scientist. And I said, “That’s my ideal. It’s like Cary Grant playing the, you know, addled scientist.” And Barbara said, “Here’s this actor you’ve got to see.”

“Now [Bill] Pullman, he was an incredible theater actor. He had been in a number of movies, including a comedy — an ensemble comedy. The name has escaped me. I want to say it’s something like “Dirty People?” “Rough People?” [Note: It was Ruthless People] Something that was him and Danny Devito and some other people. It was great, about kidnappers who kidnapped the wrong person… I don’t think Bill had done a screen lead at the time, but he was very much a rising star. And because he was such an important theater actor in all these Sam Shepard plays, it was clear he was going to be a star. But I never heard of him… she arranged for us to meet, and I thought, Yes, this is the guy!

“[Bill] Paxton is a different question. We were part of the same circle of friends — of actors and theater people, too. I knew Bill through the actor Xander Berkeley, who is later in… all of the first season of Salem, in a lot of my plays and in my student films, and is a fantastic actor. And I think through Xander I met Bill. And their best friends were this other couple, the wife of whom was Barbara Cohen, this casting director. But there was never any doubt in my mind that Bill Paxton — who again, was not doing leads. He was usually playing the bad guy or the really funny “other guy” like in Aliens. All kinds of wonderful, wonderful things, and one of the greatest actors and just greatest human beings I’ve ever known. And there was a moment I know where, when Bill [Paxton] was already attached to play the best friend, when Tim [Robbins] stepped out, and Bill’s like, “Let me do it! Let me do it!” And it would have been interesting. I sometimes imagine if he had done it, because later he became a real leading man. Yeah, in movies like Twister, obviously, and many, many, many great films. But at that point, I have to admit, I sort of saw him as the guy in Near Dark, the guy in Aliens.”

GJ: “[Paxton’s] the ensemble dark horse. [The character] people like, but never the main person.”

AS: “That’s right. And to his credit, though, he loved it, loved the script, and was just always game for having fun. Plus, he himself had come out of that Corman world. Not as an actor, but as a crew person.”

GJ: “Oh? I didn’t know that!”

AS: “Oh! Well, little know fact — do you remember, if you have a vivid at all memory of Aliens, the character he plays… is named Hudson, because when Jim Cameron was the head of the art department for Corman for movies like Battle Beyond the Stars, Bill [Paxton] was just a set decorator for him. And one of his main jobs was to use what’s called a Hudson Sprayer, which was used for quickly painting set walls. So they had come up together through that… [The name was] in tribute to that.

“He [Paxton] was totally game from coming back to literally the same studio where he had worked on those films… when Cameron was still there.

“As for the other [actors], as I said, a lot of them came out of the theater we were with. Nicholas Pryor… was also Barbara’s idea, and he’s just a fantastic character actor. So just — It’s one of those things I feel like we don’t do often in movies anymore. But if you just, like, randomly turn on Turner Classics or something like that, and watch… some old, classic Hollywood movie, even one that you’ve never seen before, that’s not even the greatest of them, and one of the great pleasures will be all the little actors. All the character parts are so vivid, they’re all so distinct. They’re not just also rising stars. Do you know what I mean? That person’s [the modern bit actor] too good looking. They’re too much like the — Oh wait! You weren’t quite good enough to be the lead, so you’re getting a smaller part. As opposed to all those wonderful, quirky character actor parts.”

GJ: “Yeah! I think character actors aren’t being utilized as much as they could be. I mean, now it’s like everyone has to be a big star. Back then, it was like, “Hey, you’re really good at playing these types of characters, You’re going to be this [role] in these movies and what not.” Like Dick Miller!”

AS: So every guy, the bartender, or the Swedish waiter, or the cab driver, or whoever John Laurie would play, or Sydney Greenstreet, or whatever. Yeah, I love it.”

GJ: “I completely agree, and I hope we can get back to that point sometime. I know that’s still pretty prevalent in indie cinema, but we’ll see if it ever comes back in bigger films.”

AS: “We’ll see.”

GJ: “Alright. So, of course, we have to talk about the brain surgery scene. It’s so well done! Was it hard to shoot? Was there anything you wanted to do that didn’t make it into the final cut? Or was that pretty much what you had in mind for the entire scene?”

AS: “Pretty much… In that one, another friend who contributed was a fantastic artist who… did work on some of the storyboards with me. But in particular, that’s one of the only scenes that — and probably the wall of brains coming down — there’s only a handful of scenes that we storyboarded. And that one in particular I wanted to storyboard because I wanted it to be so clear and so specific. Though it’s pretty influenced by, in a different way, movies like the Manchurian Candidate, the original Manchurian Candidate — you get these weird scenes where the prisoners are sitting there and think they’re at a tea party, but they’re actually being interrogated by the North Koreans or the Chinese, or something like that. The funny thing about that — because I’m so into the weird facts of reality and the fact that the reality is stranger often than things you make up, I’m always bringing into my work those things. 

“And invariably, critics or people carping at it from the internet or whatever, will always point to those things and go, “That’s ridiculous! That could never be true!” So in Salem, there’s stuff like the toad inside the guy and stuff that people are like, “Oh, you just made that up!” Or the witch who steals men’s genitals and turns them into birds and keeps them in cages. That all came back from stuff that people believed was true back in the 17th century. And similarly, this is factually true for significant signs of brain surgery. The patient has to be awake — but the number of even respectable critics who said, “Well, it’s got these ridiculous brain surgery scenes where the person’s wide awake!” And I’m like, “Dude, that’s ACTUALLY real.”

GJ: “That’s how it works!”

AS: “That’s how it works! Now, whether or not they see things the way I showed them… Who knows? But that [patient being awake] was real! In terms of the physical [prop] brains themselves — I think it’s probably enough decades ago that I can admit this probably illegal secret. So initially — and remember, I was young and dumb — I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get a real human brain? To give it some authenticity? Especially for the beginning of the film. Very first thing you see in the film is, in fact — first Berkovitch, the assistant, and then Dr. Martin with a brain in front of them. And my art director/prop master said, “Well, let me look into it, because there’s medical supply houses.”… lo and behold, before the first day of that shooting, we got delivered an ACTUAL human brain… And the minute we actually had it, I’m like, Wait, this might be a mistake. I mean, this is serious. This is serious now. But it was the day we were going to shoot that opening thing where they’re touching it. So, we shot that scene.

“That was the first day we had the brain. So when you see that at the opening of the film, that is an actual human brain being touched there. We then got some frantic phone calls from the medical supply company, who had put it together that we weren’t actually a university or research organization, but were using it for a movie. And they were like, “Okay, you can’t do anything to it!… Look, everybody could get in big trouble. You have to give it a proper burial. You have to do —” I mean, it was a whole list of things that we had to do, and I’m thankful and sorry to whoever the poor soul whose brain that was.”

GJ: “Hey, he’s in a movie now! Or they’re in a movie now. Whoever it is.”

AS: “Exactly!”

GJ: “I thought those effects looked really good!”

AS: “Yeah, exactly! So the brains you see generally floating in the jars — like when they fall over and stuff — those are sheep brains, which look the most like human brains, though they’re a bit smaller. But because of the fluid they’re in, they get magnified, so they look pretty well. And the brain you see on Halsey’s head, and later on Martin’s head, that’s something the Burman brothers created. And it’s one of the best effects in it. I mean, the stuff with the butterfly at the end, they built up his head a bit too tall… That was a bit of a tricky one that didn’t quite work, but the guys did not have much money or much time.

“But the actual brain surgery effects they did were fantastic… we also did a trick that was inspired by stuff Ridley Scott did in Alien, and that Cameron did in [Aliens], where sometimes something looks even more real when you’re not seeing it directly, but on a screen within a screen. Like the way that exploration of the alien ship happens in the first Alien… if you go back and watch [Brain Dead’s surgery scene], a lot of the most intense shots are from inside the boardroom where they have the monitors set up.”

GJ: “You can see it on the [screens].”

AS: “Which is videoing the same thing. So I’d show it occasionally where [Dr. Martin] was doing [the surgery], but often showed it there [in the boardroom] because it made it feel even realer in a way.”

GJ: “And it puts you in the shoes of the evil corporate people in there, and they’re seeing all this. What they’re thinking and stuff. That’s really cool! I didn’t even think about that!”

AS: “Exactly.”

GJ: “Man, that is a BUNCH of stuff I didn’t know. I appreciate that!”

AS: “No worries!”

GJ: “I gotta watch it again, so I can see the real brain and be like, “Aha! They’re cheating! That’s not an effect at all!”

AS: “I didn’t mention it out loud at the New Beverly screenings. I was worried that it might actually freak people out. The other thing we did there that’s fun was I found this footage of this guy, Walter Freeman, who was famous for doing lobotomies in the fifties. And so that scene where there’s black-and-white footage… We literally recreated the exact shot they did from the same point-of-view… And then I had my father — oh, blessed memory — who looked a little bit like Freeman, I had him play Freeman. And that’s me lying on the gurney receiving the lobotomy.”

GJ: “Really? That’s so cool!”

AS: “That’s my Hitchcockian cameo! Getting a lobotomy in my first film.”

GJ: “Hey, you know what? Those are the fun kind of cameos! Where it’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m just the dead body in the background.”

AS: “Exactly.”

GJ: “Cool. Holy shit — Oh man, sorry! I gotta process a minute. This is a whole lot of information being thrown at me… It’s just so interesting and fun seeing the ways that filmmakers and creators get away with things. Just sitting there like, “Hey, we gotta do this scene, but we don’t have all the stuff for it. What if we do this? What if we get a real brain just because, you know, points for authenticity!”

AS: “That’s part of what I will miss — I ALREADY miss — as AI and CGI fill a lot of those functions. Not that it can’t make beautiful things, but it leaves out that homemade element, especially when it comes to horror. It’s one thing to create a vast city out of it [CGI], or a dragon, or something more fantastical, but especially for things you want to feel visceral, there’s something about having… something physically real there. Even if it’s more clearly fake, or looks less realistic than the CGI version, it might still be more scary.

“My favorite example is The Exorcist, which scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid when I saw its first run, and still scares me to this day. The scariest thing in the movie to me always was the moment Regan’s head turns all the way around. And it’s not like you can’t see that’s a puppet, but that was somehow part of the TERROR. I’m like, Oh my god! It turned into a ventriloquist dummy and turned her head around! And I try to imagine if you do that with CGI and you had a CGI version — I don’t think it would be scarier than the Dick Smith puppet that turns its head around.”

GJ: “Well, it’s because it’s there. People are reacting to it. I could run into that doll one night in the middle of an alleyway and get my shit scared. I’m not going to run into the CGI monster in there because it DOESN’T exist.”

AS: “No, and… I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure that, like, the limbic system of our brain evolved for hundreds of millions of years for the most fundamental purpose of going, Is that a tiger in the woods? Or is that not a tiger? Do I need to run or not? And if you do a beautifully rendered [CGI] tiger like in Life of Pi, I think your limbic system is going, [shakes head] No tiger. Whereas if I did [practical effects] — as I did sometimes in Carnosaur, I basically have a sock puppet on my hand, and I just go like that [pantomimes his hand as a snapping dinosaur], your brain is at least going, [frantically pointing] Tiger! IT might be a tiger! Because there’s something there.”

GJ: “Exactly!”

AS: “It’s not just pixels, you know?”

GJ: “Yes, and they’re like… I could run into that puppet one day, and [it could rip] at my face!”

AS: “Exactly.”

GJ: “But Sharktopus isn’t going to come at me because it doesn’t exist — unfortunately.”

AS: “Unfortunately. We can only wish!”

GJ: “Yeah, I know, right? Not so much. But yeah, no, I completely agree with you! AI and CGI do take some … fun things away from the filmmaking process, which is that adversity. It’s that having to think on your feet. If you don’t have to think on your feet, and you could just type something up or make something in a computer, then where’s that experience? Where’s that fun? I mean, don’t get me wrong, [CGI] has its place.”

AS: “The number one thing it’s already taken away is real crowd scenes, real audiences, or real masses. Because I get it — it’s very expensive. You’re just shooting a scene of a boxing match, and you want the arena filled all around… CGI can do a pretty darn good job.”

GJ: “Just get five people and — [pantomimes copy-pasting audience]”

AS: “I know. But you go back and watch old movies where those are real human beings and, again, I feel there’s a different value. It’s just now you’d have to be a filmmaker with enough clout and enough money to say, “No, I want a freaking extra in every one of those seats. [I want to] see their faces because I want the guy with the unexpected, weird, warty nose. And I want that lady over there with the crazy laughs.”

GJ: “Just pull people off the street! Tell them we’re making a movie and get them in here! I don’t care who it is!”

AS: “Yeah.”

GJ: “And it has that vibe, that liveliness to it that CGI doesn’t have. But I can go on this for another hour, so I’ll go ahead and keep going [with the questions]!”

AS: “Yeah, I do have to get out of here eventually, but that’s okay. You keep going!”

GJ: “Yeah, I know, right? [laughs]

“Alright, next I want to talk about the Eunice Corporation — the evil capitalistic business wanting to use brain altering surgery for monetary gain. Surgery for personalities and what-not. Are they your own creation? Are they truly behind everything? Or are they a red herring? And is it safe to assume they represent your stance on similar institutions that may or may not exist?”

AS: “[laughs] Yes, they are. They are my own inventions. One of the things that was very much not in Beaumont’s original script, because it was much more of a one-on-one [story] between the doctor and the patient… I think it was influenced by both… Cronenberg and Philip K. Dick. Think of the — I forget what it’s called — the corporation in Blade Runner. And in the book it’s based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”

GJ: “I’ll just call them Weyland-Yutani.”

AS: “Tyrell. I think it’s the Tyrell Corporation in that, right? Or the corporations in Cronenberg’s films like Videodrome.”

GJ: “The Fly and stuff.”

AS: “The Fly especially. Absolutely. So yeah, I definitely wanted that. There was also a TV commercial on a lot in that era, and I don’t know if it’s because it was one of the first of the mega-conglomerates that admitted what they were — there was this company called Beatrice, that was like a food company, but it also made this and this and this and this… there were these ads you would see on TV that would show you this just astonishing array of things, from pats of butter to jet planes. And it would say, “We’re Beatrice.”

“So I was actually wanting to have fun with something that is now, I’m sure, long forgotten. But at the time, [the commercials] had some currency, which was that people had all seen these Beatrice ads. So I wanted a name like that — and again, going back to being a bit of a juvenile prankster and having fun with my first movie, and having a lot of names from my grade school and high school [in my film], because I knew lots of these folks back in Chicago. So I couldn’t call it Beatrice, so I called it Eunice, because of our [high school] freshman grammar teacher… Eunice McGuire, who tormented all of us back then on proper grammar and spelling, and I named the corporation for her. And then it became kind of a running joke. I don’t think Eunice appears in Body Chemistry II[: Voice of a Stranger], but it certainly appears in Carnosaur again.”

GJ: “Yes it does, and I plan on talking about that when we get to Carnosaur. Don’t worry, I got my theories!”

AS: “That was the idea as to my feelings about it. Like, Hey, it’s the world we live in, but it’s actually only gotten worse and weirder. But yeah… it’s not like GM (General Motors) makes just cars. Oh no, they’re also a bank! And they’re this! And they’re this! And they’re this!… I’m a great science fiction fan, and there’s a lot of science fiction about the idea of corporations becoming countries, and they have so much. And to this day, you can see it… I’m very much, definitely on the paranoid, suspicious side about giant companies, or giant medical companies. You know, Big Pharma and these [corporations]. And I’m not a nut, I don’t think they’re necessarily sitting in a room plotting evil.”

GJ: “Well, they don’t need to, because that’s just the nature of business. It’s capitalism.”

AS: “Yeah! And they make, you know — I guess the best comparison I’d be able to make is — they can function kind of like the Devil. Just in the sense that they can be behind all kinds of things.”

GJ: “Exactly! Like Coca-Cola — I mean, not a lot of people know, but they are responsible for a bunch of, like, South American war crimes, or whatever it is down there.”

AS: “Yeah, same with banana companies. “You’d like to buy that banana? We had to overthrow a government so you could get that banana.”

GJ: “[sarcastically] “But it’s good, right? [That banana’s] very good!” It’s like that scene in Carnosaur. “That pie’s really good, right? We had to use goat [embryonic] fluid, but it’s really good!” There’s no sense of morality to them. There’s no sense of, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” It’s more like, “Oh, if we DO do this, this will give us a lot of gain!”

AS: “Well, especially the tech companies. I think we rushed for it. Because, you know, it’s never a good thing if a giant mega-corporation has as their motto, “Move Fast and Break Things.” I mean, that’s always questionable to me.”

GJ: “I feel like that’s what I DON’T want to do!”

AS: “It’s a recipe for disaster! No!”

GJ: “Run with Scissors, Blade Up!” Or something. That’s what it says to me, and I’m like, I’m not sure I want to do that. But you’re right — tech companies are the worst about it. And again, I could — Your [views are] too similar to my views, so I could go on this forever. So let me go ahead… to the next .

“Alright, here’s the one that’s more just for my personal curiosity.

“So, despite being prominently featured on the poster, the “stretched-out-face-machine” only briefly appears in the actual film. But not only that — I assume the poster was the catalyst for the movie’s synopsis, which is:

“In a showdown of man versus machine, Martin plunges into a chaotic nightmare trying to save his mind from the megalomaniacal corporation.

“Which I feel isn’t an accurate rundown of the film at all.”

AS: “It’s not!”

GJ: “Yeah! I remember watching the movie for the first time, and reading that, and I’m like, Okay, this is going to be some sort of, like, “Oh, we have to fight the machine!” It’s going to be a big, bad computer! And then getting something completely different. But I get why they used the face. I do. It’s pretty striking. You sit there, and — that got me to be like, Oh, I gotta watch this! That face looks really creepy!

“Were you aware of the synopsis? Like, why THAT synopsis? Was it just someone looking at the poster and making stuff up? Was it just Corman making shit up again like he did with Screamers?”

AS: “[movie trailer voice] Screamers! You’ll see a man turned inside out!”

GJ: “Exactly!”

AS: “Oh wait! Actually, you never will see a man turned inside out!”

GJ: “There’s one scene where you see a guy changing [into a fishman]. Maybe that’s the scene? But I know we got Jim Wynorski, I think, to make a fake film [trailer].”

AS: “One of Jim’s famous things is he made that up… I remember being a kid and hearing the radio ad, because you’d hear this incredible sound of the guy being turned inside out. And that was not in the film at all, because that’s the way Roger [Corman] often worked.

“Okay, so you gotta remember this about Roger. The way he financed these films — because he always financed these films himself, right? — he wasn’t taking money from studios, or banks, or anything like that. And he was one of the pioneers of something that a lot of other companies in the video era started doing, which is — He would pre-sell the film. Often long before they were made, sometimes long before they were written. Do you know what I mean?”

GJ: “Pretty much like Charles Band.”

AS: “And Band was kind of a spin-off from Roger. Roger was the secret, silent partner — literally financially — of Charlie Band. He was putting up lots of financing that not many people know.”

GJ: “I didn’t know that. I knew they knew each other. I didn’t know that he [Corman] was helping him [Band] fund things.”

AS: “Roger told me they were, and that for reasons to do with what his deals were with distributors… he was prohibited from being involved in other film companies like that. So I know he was a big supporter, not just friendwise, but I think he was a big investor in those.”

“So, there are two separate questions — the issue of the blurb versus the issue of the face on the cover.

“The blurb, I totally understand that they were going to do whatever they could to sell the movie, and I will give them credit. They did not — Roger did not know what to make of the movie when it was done.”

GJ: “That’s completely fair.”

AS: “You know, there was… I mean, in certain ways, it was not his kind of thing. He really liked it, but he really didn’t have a clue about it, and how to sell it. And did, in fact, have to be reassured by other people around, or some of the other directors he trusted — Rodman Flender, who was kind of his main executive, and Brad Krevoy — to look at the film and say, “Tell me it’s okay. I shouldn’t try to make more sense of it.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, don’t touch it. It is what it is.” So I get it. It was going to be a hard film to sell. And it’s in this subgenre of the puzzle movie in a way, and those are hard to sell if you’re admitting that’s what it is. So they had to find some other angle, and they wrote in — I don’t know who wrote that. I’m going to guess.”

GJ: “I mean, you could see the movie that way [the blurb describes it] if you wanted to. It’s just the guy kind of [took liberties] a little bit.”

AS: “You can in a very abstract way, but no, it’s not that. And it probably was Mike Elliott, who I think was running the department at the time. That’s also, by the way, his face you see behind the hypodermic [needle] in the original poster, not the video [box], because the video box was quite different… And the original movie poster was more playing on a kind of medical horror, like Coma, or The Andromeda Strain, or something like that. Which is initially, I think, how they thought they were going to sell it. But that wasn’t a genre that was still [popular] that much, and I think [they restructured] when they were shifting to the video, because it’s on the video box that they wrote that blurb for and used that picture. Now, when I first saw them using that picture — and by the way, that’s Barney Burman, who alongside his brother Rob, did all the effects for the film. That’s actually Barney himself.”

GJ: “That’s his cameo!”

AS: “I was really annoyed when they did that, because I felt it was giving the gag away. Because in the movie, when you see that face — and you only see it in the beginning of the film. And it was based on a drawing, that little sketch I did, that then my friend Dmitri did a more beautiful drawing of. It’s literally meant to be a disembodied face, only connected by nerves to a brain sitting behind it. And yet, in that photo, you see the guy’s hands holding it. And I’m like you just gave — That was a backstage photo we took for fun. It gives the gag away. But they were like, “No, it’s scary! People love the photo!” So really, it’s taken me… thirty years, or whatever it is, to make my peace with that, because it made Barney’s face be seen everywhere, and so many people love it. And so many people say that they originally rented the movie because they thought that was such a cool image, and they don’t seem to think what I thought when I saw it, which is like, But no, you’re giving away my gag! You’re showing behind the curtain! That it’s not real!”

GJ: “So it’s a begrudging thing. Where you’re like, [resigned voice] I guess it works, dammit!”

AS: “[resigned voice] Yes, I guess it does.”

GJ: “I mean, I said [it] got me to watch the movie.”

AS: “Exactly! I think they were right in the end. They’re notorious for that kind of stuff, like I said. But whatever it takes to sell the movie, that’s what they were going to do, you know?”

GJ: “[sarcastically] I mean, I guess that’s like their job or something. I don’t know.”

AS: “That’s for sure.”

GJ: “Alright! Two more questions! Two more questions. Next one up — that ENDING THEME. We have to talk about it. It’s jammy as hell! Who came up with that song?”

AS: “So you know who gets credit for that?”

GJ: “Who?”

AS: “Bill Paxton.”

GJ: “Really!?”

AS: Bill Paxton. Bill Paxton… was part of a band at the time called Martini Ranch. And I got them — He suggested that they would do a song for the end of the movie. And Corman never had songs, and he said, “Well, I’m not going to pay for a song. I’ve already paid for the score. I’m not going to pay for the song.” So I said to the guys, “We’d love to have you write an original song and use it, but we can’t pay anything for it.” And they said, “Well, tell you what, if you let us use footage from the film for the music video —” And there was actually a music video… made that I think even played on 120 Minutes… on MTV back when they actually showed music videos. They showed indie bands [and] weird videos. So I went back to Roger and said, “Look, we can have the song for free, and we just have to let them use some footage for free.” And he was like, “Okay, done.”

“So yeah, they wrote the song — [imitating song] B-B-B-Brain Dead! — for the movie. And I don’t remember the names of all the guys who were in that band. They were a lot of session musicians in other more famous bands. They were around, I don’t know, I think for probably their five minutes of semi-fame. I don’t think they ever really broke through and were big… they might even have all been Billy’s [Paxton] pals from Texas. You know, from where he was.”

GJ: “Where I’m from!”

AS: “I don’t know. They were LA guys trying to become a rock dance band, or whatever, and they wrote the theme from Brain Dead. [laughs]”

GJ: “Honestly, I think they hit the top right there. They peaked! All downhill from there! [laughs]”

AS: “[laughs] Well, what I really loved was — and this is again, remember, this is [19]89 — it’s early, early, early days… for the whole sampling thing… where there’s bits of words and stuff in music, like especially hip-hop obviously took it to the next level. But yeah, that’s my favorite thing in there, is that they actually… sampled all these lines of dialogue from the film, like, [quoting George Kennedy] “W-what about the numbers?” Using them rhythmically over and over.”

GJ: “Those are the lyrics, too! You’re like, I want to look up the verses to the song. And it’s just a bunch of quotes!”

AS: “[quoting song] “He’s going to be brain dead. B-B-B-Brain Dead!” There’s no singing! It’s actually just pieces of dialogue from the movie. It’s early — should be in the history books as early, early sampling.”

GJ: “I know, right? They should be like, “One of the earliest samplers was Brain Dead’s ending theme.” And you know what? I think it gives it a lot of charm. I think it’s great! It really adds to a lot of it, because the film — whilst darkly serious at points — also is comedic. The whole idea is just a… bit comedic. I see it more as a dark comedy in some aspects.”

AS: “I think so! I mean, you can never call anything a black comedy, because that’s the kiss of death. But, you know, my favorite things always are what they used to call tragicomedies. Even Hamlet — frickin’ tragicomedy! That’s what it is, because it’s a tragedy, but it’s got some funny things in it, and it should… I talked a lot with Ron Schimidt, who was the DP [Director of Photography] on the film, that when filmmakers tend to do dream scenes or hallucination scenes, everything gets all woozy. [exaggerated sound effect with hand gestures] Woooooo!”

GJ: “Oh yeah. Where it’s like a fish-eye lens almost.”

AS: “I don’t want to do that… I’m a Hitchcock fanatic, and for example, famously he did Spellbound. Where the dream scenes are literally designed by Salvador Dali, and they’re beautiful. But they don’t really — I don’t look at that and go, That’s what a dream is like. But one of my favorite Hitchcock films is North by Northwest. And North by Northwest, to me, totally feels like a dream. One of those crazy dreams where you’re running and being chased, and this happens, and this happens, but it’s so lucid and clear. So one of the things I actually said to Ron [Schmidt] was, as we go deeper into hallucination in this film [Brain Dead], how do we make it actually look clearer and clearer and clearer? So that, in fact, by the time we’re later in the film, things are shot more brightly and more sharply than earlier in the “reality” sections of it. And he did a great job of that.

“And that was also a lot of the tone that Bill Pullman and I talked about. And again, it’s part of what I meant by Cary Grant — in a sense of Cary Grant of North by Northwest, the Cary Grant of Monkey Business, the Cary Grant of Bringing Up Baby. That even though they’re in all these things, there’s a lightness to the character. And there’s humor. And there’s no way you’re going to have Bud Court and not also laugh. No way you’re going to have Lee Arenberg and Nicolas Pryor and not also laugh.

“And that’s also Bill Paxton, because there’s never [been] a guy who had a more infectious grin than Bill did — even when he’s being all Snidely Whiplash and evil. So gleeful about it, you know?”

GJ: “Which is ironic, because he’s the most serious character in the entire movie… Which is funny within itself!”

AS: “He is, he is. It is. We should also pay tribute to the fact that he had such a good time with the film [Brain Dead]. We all had so much fun, and he and Bill [Pullman] had so much fun together… he loved that it was kind of this family thing, all these old friends of mine [and] family. My dad was coming in to do that one scene, and he [Paxton] said to me one day, “My dad wants to come out and visit. Can we put my dad in the film?” And I’m like, “Duh! Of course!” And I met his dad, John Paxton. Wonderful, wonderful guy — who’s also no longer with us — and he is in the boardroom. He’s the one board member in the boardroom scene who raises an ethical objection.”

GJ: “Oh, that’s his dad!?”

AS: “That’s Paxton’s dad. Yeah!”

GJ: “Holy shit, I had no idea. That’s awesome! See, that’s why I love films like this… lower budget films. It feels more connected than a lot of [big budget films].”

AS: “Well, that’s the thing. There’s so many things you can’t do when you have a small budget, that you have to also have fun doing the things you can’t do if you’ve got a big budget. Which includes certain kinds of fun, and bringing your family and friends along, and putting in quirky in-jokes and that kind of stuff. Why not?”

GJ: “And all that permeates through the screen to the audience.”

AS: “I hope so.”

GJ: “They can feel — Brain Dead, Tremors… you could feel the camaraderie in there. It’s real. Aliens — you know they had the [actors playing the] marines hang out all the time, and you can feel it.”

AS: “Exactly. You feel it.”

GJ: “Alright, last question, and the ball’s in your court. Is there anything else about the film you can tell us? Any behind-the-scenes stories? Fun narrative bits nobody caught yet? Anything like that? And don’t worry, I’ll bring up the Carnosaur connection when we talk about Carnosaur!”

AS: “Yeah, we’ll discuss the ways we used [the Eunice Corporation] in Carnosaur for sure, which is really fun to me.

“You know, it’s funny. I have now several decades to look back on the film [Brain Dead]. And I’ve thought often about — well, if I was making that film now, what would I do? How would it be different? Besides that it would have a lot more money, and I would be a much more experienced filmmaker… Part of its lightness is predicated on the fact that I was a… twenty-seven year old kid, just having fun making this movie. One thing I wasn’t doing, though — which I do think Beaumont, in his original script, did much more than I did — was feel like, What would it be like to be a middle-aged man whose reality crumbled before him? In other words, to have more emotional psychological reactions.

“That would have been a much heavier film. That would have been probably more like a Cronenberg film. It would have been much more terrifying. That was not the tone I went for. So the pleasures of the film are, in part, because [they] do derive — in a funny way — from my own youth and lack of experience. And the fact that I was just having fun with it as a concept. Whereas if I did it now as an older guy, and I was also someone looking more for the emotional reality of things, it would probably have been a much heavier thing. That wouldn’t have necessarily made it better.

“Beyond that, there’s one other funny story I’ll tell you about, because it’s one that means the most to me in retrospect.

“My other hero at the time was a filmmaker — Well, let me press that this way. Maybe a month or so after the film came out, I got a call from Roger [Corman] one day, saying, “Hey, congratulations! You know, I showed the film at the —” I think it was… It wasn’t Avoriaz [Film Festival]. It was another big French film festival. Not Cannes [Film Festival] or Venice [Film Festival], but a significant film festival. And he said, “You know, the jury loved it. They really wanted to give it the jury prize.” I’m like, “What do you mean they WANTED to? Did they give it the jury prize?” And he said, “Well, no, because it was being entered out of competition.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, they would show it, but if I wanted to enter for competition, I would have to put in the $2,500 entry fee, and I wasn’t going to do that.” And I said, “Roger! If you told me, I would’ve put up the money to put it in there!”

“Cut to maybe a year or two after I did Carnosaur. So my Corman thing is done… I get to meet one of my heroes, which is a guy named Sam Fuller, because I was making a film about Sam. You can see it, I think, probably on YouTube. It’s called The Typewriter, the Rifle, and the Movie Camera. It’s worth a watch. He was just one of my heroes. And, in fact, I had done a real nod to Sam and my favorite film of Sam’s in the movie [Brain Dead]. He made a film called Shock Corridor, that all takes place in an insane asylum, and where they didn’t have money to make this long corridor. So he did a forced perspective, and he had little people walking back and forth in the back part of it, so that it would look like it was much further away than it was. And if you look at the hallway scenes in the mental hospital in Brain Dead, I basically did that. We did a forced perspective stage. The film is filled with my tributes to my favorite films, and one of them was that.

“Cut to five, six years later [after filming Brain Dead] — I’m in Paris filming this documentary about Sam Fuller, who’s in his eighties. I’m utterly thrilled to be there. I’m mostly keeping quiet because I’m directing it, and I’ve written it, and I’ve written out the questions for Tim [Robbins] and stuff. Tim’s doing the talking, and Tim’s very famous, and Sam is thrilled Tim loves him, and vice versa. But, you know, it’s sort of my tribute to Sam. We do it, and the shooting is finished, and we’re all having this dinner. And I don’t think up to that point I had actually said anything directly to Sam, between us, because he was talking to Tim and to others and his wife.

“And suddenly, at the end of that dinner we had together, he suddenly did one of these. [points finger] He’s like, “Ah, I remember! I’ve seen one of your pictures!” He’s pointing to me, and I’m thinking, Okay, you know he’s making a mistake, because I don’t think he’s seen [any of my films]. And he’s going, “No, no, no! You know, the one with the brains in the hospital running around.” I said, “Brain Dead?” He said, “Brain Dead! Yeah!” He said, “Matter of fact, I was the head of a jury at the Deauville Film Festival, and I LITERALLY got up and locked the door until I talked everyone in that room into giving that film the jury prize. Then some son-of-a-bitch told me we couldn’t because it wasn’t officially entered!”

“[extremely excited, as he should be] So at that moment — to realize that, like literally, like, maybe, you know, one of my absolute greatest heroes — not, not, not also that — and to bring it full circle to that crazy story that I’d half forgotten that, that Roger [Corman] told me about, the film not getting the jury prize. And to realize that my hero, Sam Fuller, was the one who wanted to give it. And we then had this whole conversation where he was remembering all these different scenes and going, “You know, that little movie had more imagination in it than all these other big movies they were showing there, and I was like that was the ONE!” And I said, “Well, but Sam, I hope you don’t mind that I stole that whole [forced perspective scene] from Shock Corridor. Because my favorite — I love Shock Corridor. It’s one of my favorites of your movies, and I stole that.” And he just said, “Kid, you didn’t steal it. It’s what the French call an homage.” And I said, “Yes, it was definitely my homage.”

“So I carry that memory very close to my heart. That despite the fact that I didn’t actually get — it’s almost worth not getting the jury prize to know that it was Sam Fuller who locked his fellow jurors in the room to try to make them give it the jury prize.”

GJ: “That’s amazing. That is — That is so crazy. How do you make shit like that — Life is stranger than fiction. How do you make shit like that up?”

AS: “Indeed. Stranger than fiction!”

GJ: “I am so glad you had that experience!”

AS: “You will return to that story, in a way, when we talk about Carnosaur, because it was not long after Carnosaur. And there was a part of me that was like, Am I ever going to make another movie? Am I going to write another movie? You know? And we’ll talk about why. One of the things that reawakened my belief that I could and should keep going was THAT. That experience along with things that happened with — Well, I’ll tell you, this kind of fits in with that.

“So that trip — Sam had a stroke not long after that, and we’d only shot the footage of him in Paris, and all the interviews we did with him there, which wasn’t what we’d originally planned… We were going to go with him to Normandy Beach, where he had been as a soldier, and all this sort of stuff. So instead, I had to reach out to a number of other filmmakers who I knew really were passionate about him, and in particular — I think the three who are in the film are Marty Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino.

“As I said, that whole trip was kind of about reconnecting to why I ever wanted to make movies and loving it. Because at this stage — because of a lot of stuff around Carnosaur, I was feeling like, No, I’ve had my at-bats, and I’m a failure, and this is no good, and nothing I’ve done is any good.

“And this it starts with Sam Fuller saying to me, “Oh no, I know that movie.” And then we went to New York to interview Scorsese, and Scorsese said, “I like Brain Dead.” I said, “You saw Brain Dead?” He said, “Yeah, it’s Julie Corman!” He said, “You know, she did my first film.” Which was Boxcar Bertha. I said, “Yeah, well, it’s [Brain Dead] not very good.” Martin Scrosese said, “It’s better than Boxcar Bertha.”

“Which I don’t agree with, but to have Scorsese say that — [shrugs] So then, we go back to LA, and we’re going to shoot this scene where — I’d never met Tarantino. I was a fan, I liked his work, and I knew he loved Fuller. And it’s a really fun scene… where he and Tim are rifling through Sam’s old garage, and discovering all the old props from the movies. But when Quentin showed up for the shoot, he said, “Oh hey, I brought something.” And he pulls out a VHS copy of Brain Dead, which he had bought or kept from that video store he famously worked at. You know, when he made his first movie. And he brought it to set to have me sign it.

“And I definitely took that whole experience — It’s why I love that little documentary so much, because for me, it’s obviously my tribute to Sam Fuller, but it’s — I look at it and go, And that’s the journey that began my career again. Because it re-gave me a bit of self-belief that these three little movies that I had done were not worthless, that I should still keep going and do bigger and better things. Because all of them [Fuller, Scorsese, Tarantino] had a certain kind of love for Brain Dead which I didn’t at that moment, frankly.”

GJ: “You were noticed. People loved your stuff. Even if you had some issues with it, you put something out there and people watched. People knew. People loved. And that’s something you can carry.”

AS: “Absolutely! To have your heroes, the best of your contemporaries like Quentin, the people you look up to in the previous generation like Scorsese, let alone one of the ancient gods, the old ones of great [Fuller].”

GJ: “Three different eras.”

AS: “All specific, three different eras, all going, “I know that movie.” And I didn’t bring it up to them. I would have never brought it up. I was way too modest and keeping my head down, and just making the movie.  And the fact that all three brought it up — I literally can’t tell you what that meant to me at the time, just in terms of reigniting the self-belief you need to have to pick yourself up and keep going, which will always be true in a career. In whatever you do, I think.”

GJ: “[sarcastically] It’s almost like you’re a good filmmaker or something. I don’t know.”

AS: “We’ll see. We’ll leave it to posterity. [laughs]”

GJ: “[laughs] Well, I think you’re a FANTASTIC filmmaker.”

AS: “Hey!”

GJ: “And I really appreciate you coming here and letting me talk to you about Brain Dead a bit. And I look forward to talking about Body Chemistry II. I REALLY look forward to talking about Carnosaur, obviously!”

AS: “Oh yeah, that’s the one! Really, I’ve had a great time.”

GJ: “Me too, man! You have no idea how much this means to me. This is a dream come true. This is surreal. I feel like this is my own Brain Dead [hallucination] right now.”

AS: “Yes, one of the more surreal movies of the nineties. Yeah, and it did kind of kick off. That whole decade ended up being the surreal decade for movies.”

GJ: “Oh yeah!”

AS: “To think, we might have been the first of the nineties. Surrealism got bigger and better as it went along.”

GJ: “I bet people watched Brain Dead like, “Oh, we gotta do that! This is good!” I bet you started off the whole trend!”

AS: “[laughs] I don’t know about that.”

GJ: “But we’ll tell ourselves that!”

AS: “There might have been a couple of little moments in Jacob’s Ladder that were inspired by the script of Brain Dead, that I know Adrian [Lyne] read, and that we didn’t get to film because they were too expensive. But if you look carefully at Jacob’s Ladder, there’s a particular scene of a guy on a gurney, and what he sees on the ceiling is not in that script, and kind of is in [Brain Dead’s script]. But it’s part of what thrills me about that movie, too. Besides seeing my dear friend, the brilliant Tim [Robbins]. That’s such a great movie.”

GJ: “They’re watching what you’re doing. It’s like, “What can’t they afford to make? We’ll put that in our movie!”

AS: “Exactly! “What can we do way better than that guy can? [laughs]”

GJ: “[laughs] Well again, thank you SO much….Have a great rest of your night!”

AS: “My pleasure! Thanks, you too, dude. More to come!”