Joe Dante returns to horror with The Hole 3D

The fact that I still watch movies religiously proves that I am still a big kid at heart. It doesn’t go away. It has been embedded in my chromosomes since I first Jaws at the age of four back in 1975. The same can be said for the people who made the movies that were my babysitter growing up. Their love for all things fantastic is carried over from their upbringings to the silver screen via the platform known as filmmaking.

Joe Dante might be the perfect example of this fandom. Whereas my heroes were George A. Romero, George Lucas, and John Carpenter; Dante cites Frank Tashlin, Chuck Jones, and Jean Cocteau as major influences in his life. He has taken the knowledge he learned from these legends and carved out his own style of moviemaking that walks the line between horror, science fiction, and comedy.

The list of films that he has made are favorites amongst most fans: The Howling, Explorers, Innerspace, Twilight Zone: The Movie, The ‘burbs, Matinee, Small Soldiers, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

In 1978, he directed the late night classic Piranha, a film that spoofed Steven Speilberg’s blockbuster Jaws. Spielberg loved the film so much that he produced Dante’s box-office smash Gremlins. Along with its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Joe put his signature on cinema with an ingenuity that would have animator and cartoonist Tex Avery smiling in the heavens above.

There is a mega boom in Hollywood right now called 3D. Avatar has taken it to new levels and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Joe Dante’s new film The Hole went in production in 2008, long before the floodgates opened. Sit back and relax as Joe and I talk about his new film that looks to bring back the fun of the 80′s horror scene.

Jason Bene: Recently you worked on a couple of episodes of Masters of Horror and the wraparound segment for Trapped Ashes. This is your first feature horror film in some time. What brought you back to directing a throwback to the fun horror films of the 1980′s like Gremlins?

Joe Dante: I hate to say it’s Gremlins without Gremlins because that doesn’t sound very good. It’s got some of the same attitude that those 80′s pictures had. What mainly appealed to me about it was that it was a small film with a small cast of people that you like and were well written – and it was in 3D. I’ve always been a big 3D fan, and I am actually old enough to have seen 3D movies when they were new. It’s had various ups and downs in the 50′s and the attempt in the 80′s to revive it. Now it’s all digital and all of the problems associated with the earlier versions of 3D disappeared because the digital image is so much more steady. I sort of boned up a little for this by doing a theme park film for Busch Gardens called The Haunted Lighthouse which was in 3D. It was a 70mm type of 3D, which was very cumbersome, and this 3D is shot with video cameras and it’s a pleasure to work with.

Jason Bene: 3D seems to be taking over. You actually shot it with 3D cameras?

Joe Dante: Well, yeah. I’m kind of miffed about the success of these fake 3D movies, where you shoot the picture and then you go back and send it to India or something and some guy pushes a button on the computer and all of the sudden it’s 3D. It may be 3D, but it is not very good 3D, and it is not as good as 3D that is actually shot that way because it’s an art. There is an art to doing it. You have to plan for it. You can’t just take random images and dimensionalize them. You have to plan your coverage. You have to plan your cutting. You have to plan your compositions so that you can take advantage of the medium. These Johnny-come-latelies fake movies don’t do that. They force them on the public as if they’re real 3D and the theater owners jack up the prices and everybody makes lots of money. So they figure this must be good, but I think it’s going to kill 3D again. It was killed last time because of the problems in projection and sloppiness. It could happen again.

Jason Bene: Ironically, isn’t that the route that the remake of your movie Piranha is going?

Joe Dante: I asked them that. They asked me to be in it and I was doing something else and couldn’t do it. I told them I was suprised that they weren’t going to release it in 3D and they had a good reason which is to do it in Digital 3D on the water will funnel it. It is a very difficult thing because the way video reacts to sunlight and the way it handles it. They were afraid it was going to look terrible, so they said we’d really much rather do it in post. They are apparently working on it now. The fish of course are done with computers, so they’ll probably look fine.

Jason Bene: That’s good to know it’s not a case like Clash of the Titans.

Joe Dante: These people always planned to do it in 3D but they just discovered that the technology that they wanted to use wasn’t really going to work for them.

Jason Bene: The Hole seems like a coming of age tale similiar to the 80′s film The Gate, that dealt with monsters who came up from the depths.

Joe Dante: It is a little like The Gate and that was actually a stumbling block for me initially because I had seen The Gate and it was pretty good. It’s really based on the ending of the picture which is completely different than The Gate, the reason why there is a hole and the reason why things come out of it is completely different in our picture. It seemed to me that it was still worth doing because at heart it’s kind of a family melodrama and there are things about the characters that you learn at the end of the picture by going into the hole; so it’s sort of the opposite of little monsters coming out.

Jason Bene: Are the creatures going to be CG or practical make-up FX, or a little of both?

Joe Dante: We used very little CG in the movie. It’s not a particularly expensive movie. It was originally conceived as a flat normal movie, and when they asked me if I was interested in doing it I suggested to the producers that they do it in 3D - and I was really not expecting them to say yes. This is quite a while ago, Avatar was in production but there hadn’t been the interest in 3D that there is now. To my surprise they said sure, they would go ahead and do it. They added another couple million dollars to the budget and it was not an expensive film. It was a risk for them to take but I said, “look, no matter what, when all is said and done, you are going to have a 3D film, and this is a medium that’s seems to be coming to stay, and even in television.” You’re getting two movies for the price of one. You are getting the normal flat movie, and you are also getting this extra dimension which you can exploit.

Jason Bene: You are correct with 3D. I don’t think this is a phase like it was before because of the fact they are releasing 3D televisions.

Joe Dante: The question you have to ask yourself though is are people really going to want to sit down and watch five hours of 3D television? I can see people going to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, but to watch the commercials in 3D; to watch The Oprah Show in 3D; and to watch the news in 3D. I just don’t think there is an appetite for that. Sports, yeah. Obviously sports. I think that’s going to be the main selling point for 3D television, but I just can’t see people just wanting to tune in for the Home Shopping Channel in 3D.

Jason Bene: It’s funny because I took my wife to see Avatar and she walked out after twenty minutes because she got motion sickness.

Joe Dante: Some people actually can’t see 3D. A certain percentage of the public actually can’t process it so it gives them headaches or worse, it’s just blurry or dark. Those people will never like 3D. The problem I see is when people go to a theater and it’s improperly projected, and they say, well this sucks and I’m never going to want to see another 3D movie. I’ve seen it happen.  I’ve seen  people go up to the box office and say, which theater is playing it in 2D because I don’t want to see 3D because I had a bad experience. If 3D is ever going to catch on, and this is the technology that is going to do it, but just like the previous versions, if is presented poorly – it’s going to kill it.

Jason Bene: PG-13 genre films seem to get a bum rap. In the end it’s the storytelling that will guide a good picture. What audience is The Hole aimed at?

Joe Dante: The Hole is really an attempt to go back to the kind of Gremlins and The Goonies 80′s kind of movies that a lot of people grew up with. I didn’t grow up with them because I was older. A lot of my younger friends are big Gremlins fans and they saw it when they were seven or twelve or whatever. There used to be a lot of those kinds of films and now there really aren’t because horror films tend to be very grisly. The Wolfman was a major casuality of being rated R. Obviously when they decided to make the picture they wanted to make it gruesome and gory and they were going to go for that. They spent a lot of money reshooting, and they spent a fortune remaking the picture so it could be even more gruesome. Then when it came out because it was rated R, half the audience didn’t go. There is a lot of pressure to try and take semi-mainstream horror films and put them in the PG-13 category. On occassion its resulted in the movie being kind of ruined because they’re really R-rated movies. You can’t just stuff an R-rated movie into a PG sized class. It doesn’t really work. You have to plan it that way. It has to be planned. You can get edgy, but you can’t get too edgy. You can’t have breasts. You can’t have nudity. You can’t have a lot of gore. That is frankly okay with me. I’m probably showing my age, but a little gore goes a long way with me. There are only so many things you can do to the human body and most have been done.

Jason Bene: That’s what was great about the 80′s was there were very violent movies, but there was a good balance between horror and horror-comedies.

Joe Dante: There was a balance beween all kinds of movies. It was a different era and much different than the one we have today. There are less movies that cost more. The star system seems to have completely tanked. Putting movie stars in movies doesn’t seem to draw people in anymore, with the exemption of Will Smith and a couple of other people. Basically the studios are kind of frantic because they don’t know what to make and they don’t know who to make it for. They are not even sure where it’s going to be distributed or how it’s going to be seen. Or whether it’s going to be on pay-per-view or whether it’s going to be downloaded, or whether it’s going to be in theaters. There’s a lot of frantic worry going on in the executive suites about what kind of movies to make. The one thing they can always count on is they can make a couple of bucks with a horror movie. Then the problem becomes who’s the horror movie for? Most of the bucks are going to come from teenagers, and the teenagers who are probably under eighteen. If they are under eighteen, then they can’t get into a R-rated movie. We all know they do, but not in the kind of numbers that’s going to produce big bucks. Then it’s a question of how scary or intense can we let our movie be and still not have it be rated R? The horror aficionados, the fans,  the ones who grew up on Fangoria and those kind of magazines, they want more and more blood. They are very disappointed when a picture doesn’t have enough blood quotient. They won’t support some of these other kind of pictures.

Jason Bene: It’s definitely changed. I don’t know what horror fans want anymore.

Joe Dante: I was just at Monsterpalooza over the weekend and it was a very well attended event. Comic-Con is the Cannes Film Festival of the entertainment world. It used to literally be about comic books, now everybody is plugging their new movie. It’s a huge event. There’s a tremendous audience out there for material. They want to see stuff. They want to be entertained. The problem is they are kind of fickle about what it is they really want to plunk there money down for. Until somebody can figure out how to tap into that, it’s going to be a ‘catch as catch can’ kind of a situation where people are going to make pictures and they are not going to know who they are for. That can lead to some bouts of indecision in the editing room. It should be softer. It should be harder. It should be more of this. It should be more of that. I find that it works a lot better when everybody agrees in the beginning what kind of movie they are going to make. Rather than changing their minds in the middle of production.

Jason Bene: One of my favorite horror films in recent years was the horror-comedy Trick R’ Treat. You have one of the actors from it in The Hole – Quinn Lord. He looks like a star in the making.

Joe Dante: Quinn plays a little girl in our movie. One of my favorite horror movie directors is the Italian director Mario Bava. He did a picture called Kill, Baby…Kill! in which the main evil character is a ghostly little girl played by a little boy. So we actually copied that make-up and Quinn plays essentially this ghostly girl character. Just the fact that it is a boy and not a girl makes it subtly off in a disturbing way. That’s how he got that part.

Jason Bene: Who does Bruce Dern play in the movie. And are we going to see Dick Miller and Robert Picardo?

Joe Dante: Bruce Dern plays the guy who owns the house before the family movies in and finds the hole in the basement. You are not going to see Robert Picardo because I had to make the movie in Canada. When you make a movie in Canada you can bring a certain number of actors from America, but in general, you have to use Canadian actors for the most part because you want Canadian content so you can take advantage of their tax breaks. Except for one movie in the last ten years, everything I’ve done has been in Canada. People like Bob Picardo and Dick and all the people I like to employ, I’ve had to do without because in supporting roles you almost always have to us local talent. Which I find quite restrictive. I’m not very crazy about it but that’s the way the business is. Dick Miller does manage to slip in because I did some re-shoots down here because it got really, really cold in Canada. With the exteriors the kids were talking and breath was coming out of their mouth in 3D, and it’s supposed to be set in the summer. I told the producers we would have to shoot the exteriors down here. We did a week or two down here after we were finished up there.

Jason Bene: You have said that the tagline for The Howling actually fits The Hole better – ‘Imagine Your Worst Fear a Reality’.

Joe Dante: That’s sort of what is in The Hole is your worst fears. The characters’ worst fears. It would be a great ad line but I don’t think you can recycle it from one of your old movies.

Jason Bene: There was a trailer for the film that played at last year’s Comic-Con. Was that just for Comic-Con and are we going to see a trailer soon?

Joe Dante: That was made just for Comic-Con. The picture was not even finished editing yet. A lot of the FX were finished so they couldn’t be in the trailer. We put together what we had and went over okay. They ran it in 3D.

Jason Bene: Has The Hole secured any kind of distribution? Are we going to see a national release?

Joe Dante: Well, that’s the idea obviously. It was supposed to be out by now, but the plethora of fake 3D has used up all of the theaters and there are only so many 3D theaters anyway. A small indie horror picture with no names in the cast is pretty hard to go to battle against Clash of the Titans and the star-studded Alice in Wonderland. Now, of course, everyone is getting on the bandwagon and they are all deciding to turn there flat movies into 3D, so there are many more 3D movies in the hopper than we thought there was going to be when we started making the picture. I think it won’t come out until Fall.

Killer Film can’t thank Joe Dante enough for giving us an interview about his new film that we are all dying to see. As updates about its release come in, you can bet our news team will be on top of it. Make sure you visit Joe’s website trailersfromhell.com, where you can buy the DVD of Trailers From Hell Volume 1. You can also browse through the various trailers on the page that have running commentary from everyone from Eli Roth, Mick Garris, Stuart Gordon and many others!