Late Night Classics – Piranha

Thirty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws scared the bejeezus out of moviegoers and turned hydrophobia into a household word. The term ‘Blockbuster’ was derived from the huge lines that would wrap around blocks in the summer of ’75. Like sharks drawn to blood, producers and studios were looking to cash-in on the nature run amok antics of ‘Bruce the Shark’ as a school of rip-offs swam to shore.

Orca, Tentacles, Barracuda, Up From the Depths, and Devilfish were just a few of the flicks to take the bait and they were all received with lukewarm reviews from fans looking for more bite for their buck. The two most famous knock-offs are Joe Dante’s Piranha and Enzo G. Castellari’s Great White [The Last Shark]. Shortly before Great White was released, Universal Pictures filed suit against the producers claiming the film was too derivative of Jaws. Universal won the lawsuit and Great White was pulled very shortly after its release.

Piranha didn’t meet that fate when released in 1978 as it became an instant midnight classic because of a witty script and the razor sharp direction from Joe Dante. The flick never strayed from the fact that is was just having a good time, and since it was made with its heart in the right place, it surpassed all expectations and became the cult favorite it is today.

Jason Bene: How did you become part of the pool of great directors to work with Roger Corman?

Joe Dante: I was in the mid-level group following California guys like Bogdanovich and Coppola. Then the New York group came out, which was headed by Martin Scorsese and all of those film students. I was friends with John Davidson, who was one of Marty’s students. They were constantly recommending people to make movies for Roger for essentially nothing. Everybody who came out was quite aware that this was possibly a springboard to something else because so many people had come through the system on the other end. I was a big fan of Roger’s to begin with, so I was thrilled to come out and work for him because I was trying to get to meet him for years. I sent letters. I set up retrospectives. I did all sorts of stuff on Roger’s movies. Then I came out here and I was put to work in the trailer department.

Jason Bene: How long after the success of Jaws did Roger decide he wanted to do this film? How did you get brought on as the director?

Joe Dante: I don’t think he so much decided because of Jaws. There were a lot of imitation Jaws pictures that did come out and one of them was a script owned by a Japanese producer. It got to Roger for some funding and he thought it was a good idea, but he didn’t like the script. He wanted it re-written and his story editor [Frances Doel] found John Sayles, who had just published a novel. I met with John and we got along great. He basically took what was a standard nature strikes back movie; the sort that was being made by many people at the time, and re-worked it into something I was interested in. It had a slight science fictional plot and a little politics and a lot of parody of that genre of film. It is a little different than the movie that we made because once you get out there and if you don’t have a lot of flexibility to intepret the script based on the conditions prevailing, then you’re in trouble. We did make a lot of compromises and I did try to get John out there to Texas by giving him a little part figuring that would justify him being on the set. He had written it for a state-of-the-art water park and there was nothing like that where we were shooting. We did find a dilapidated amusement park called ‘Aquarena Springs’ which had permits. We just downsized it all and created the character that Dick Miller plays, the slightly seedy guy who puts on a Texan accent when he’s talking to the public, when in fact, he’s from Brooklyn.

Jason Bene: You worked with Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy who have become regulars in your pictures.

Joe Dante: The idea at the time was that you had to cast people who had television ques, which was a process for measuring the audiences familiarity with actors. If you had certain names in the picture it would help you get a network sale. When you were making these pictures in the 70′s part of the deal was you that you always expected to sale it to a network, even if it flopped financially. At the box-office you could always get some of your money back by selling it to the network. The names that are in the picture like Bradford Dillman, Kevin McCarthy, and Keenan Wynn were basically dictated by what the market was bearing. In fact, you’ll see that Keenan Wynn did a number of these pictures, these couple of day parts around this time because of the name value.

Jason Bene: How much of the in-jokes and the campiness was in the script and how much of it did you inject into the film?

Joe Dante: It’s a long time ago. I’m sure I did my share of injecting things, but it was a pretty solid script. His characters were good. He was a good writer then. I think one of the reasons the picture has floated to the surface after all of these years of similar rip-off movies is it’s well-written. It’s better written than a lot of the competition.

Jason Bene: Piranha is like another creature feature John Sayles wrote, Alligator, which is thirty years old this year.

Joe Dante: Right. I think Piranha got him Alligator. He was writing Alligator at the same time he was writing The Howling for us. In fact, we would trade off with the other company and see who was going to pay for John’s lodging when he came out here. We always knew he was working on both scripts at the same time. You could go to John’s hotel room and knock on the door and he would say, “Who is it?” You would say who you were and you could hear the paper being ripped out of the typewriter and another paper being put in. He was always working on the other picture, then you got there and he would put yours in. To this day I’m convinced that one of The Howling‘s dream sequences is in Alligator and one of Alligator‘s dream sequences is in The Howling. He used to write them on the airplane. He would come out to the meetings and we would discuss it and everything and then he would write on the way back home. He had half of it written by the time he got back to New Jersey. He was very prolific. At the time of Piranha he had not directed his first picture yet. He hung around long enough and watched me doing the stuff on the set to know what not to do. When he made his picture he didn’t make any of those mistakes.

Jason Bene: What was Steven Spielberg’s and Universal Pictures reaction to Piranha?

Joe Dante: I don’t know any of this first hand, but I understood later that Universal was not pleased that this rip-off was coming out. It was Spielberg who convinced them that the picture was not a Jaws imitation so much as a parody of it. Universal wasn’t amused by any of this competition. There was a picture called Great White that they actually had taken off the screen in America and taken out of release. I don’t think it has seen the light of day here since then.

Jason Bene: It had a short run and Universal had it pulled. It had Vic Morrow in it and the director was Enzo G. Castellari.

Joe Dante: You can get it overseas. You can release a movie overseas and give them the names of previous movies and put a number after it and you can get away with that.

Jason Bene: At the time Great White came out Universal was prepping Jaws 3-D and they didn’t want any kind of competition floating around.

Joe Dante: I worked on Jaws 3, People 0, which was the one that didn’t get made by National Lampoon. They were very, very jealous of their tentpole. The reason they didn’t make that picture was they didn’t want to make fun of their meal ticket. The National Lampoon people kept wanting to make it zanier and the producers [Zanuck/Brown] said, “We got to play this straight.” You don’t plan a picture with a title like Jaws 3, People 0 and play it straight. You can’t. There was a tremendous amount of back and forth on that picture as to what kind of movie it was going to be. Ultimately, it was abandoned which was good for me because I went on to do The Howling.

Jason Bene: They did end up making a comedy called Jaws: The Revenge.

Joe Dante: I don’t think that was intended.

Jason Bene: You are a big fan of the cinema of Mario Bava. How was it working with Barbara Steele?

Joe Dante: Barbara’s part was another scientist who was originally written to be a guy. It could have easily been played by a man or a woman, but it was more interesting being played by a woman because there was an indication that maybe she and Kevin had some sort of affair. It was great to have her. To hang around with Barbara Steele for a couple of weeks in Texas was quite something.

Jason Bene: Did you ever think there would be a day where the lead from Black Sunday would be in one of your movies?

Joe Dante: No. Here is my first solo movie and I got Barbara Steele. It was fabulous.

Jason Bene: Continuing with the Italian connection. You have composer Pino Dinaggio doing your score.

Joe Dante: I was floored when it was suggested he would even do a thing like this. I just recently watched Don’t Look Now and it’s a brilliant score. And he had done Carrie, of course. Another great score. I didn’t think he would ‘stoop’ to doing a picture of this low budget. He was very collaborative. It was difficult for him because he didn’t speak English very well at the time and I certainly didn’t speak Italian. When we spotted the picture for him I had to have Paul Bartel translate for us. He went to Italy and recorded the score and it came back in these rolls with numbers on them and it was my job to put the music in the spots where it was supposed to be in the mix. I lost one of the rolls. It’s the cue for the scene at the end when Dick Miller pushes the cameraman away who is filming all of the stuff. I just couldn’t find the number so I put something different in. To this day, I don’t know what piece of music was written for that. Obviously it was better than what I used, but it was a wonderful score and it classed up the picture immensely.

Jason Bene: Is there any truth to the story that actress Heather Menzies did not want to do nudity so you had to cast a waitress who worked at the Holiday Inn where you and the crew were staying at?

Joe Dante: Yes. It’s totally true. Heather Menzies decided at the last minute that her husband was very upset if she did this nude scene. She had contractually said she would do it. I wasn’t going to make her do what she didn’t want to do, so we needed to cut to stunt breasts, basically. I should have made her do this with me, but I didn’t. I had to go into a room in the Holiday Inn and they bring in a waitress who took her top off and I said, “You’re fine, you’re hired”. It was so embarrassing. She took off her top when the time came and that’s the one’s you see in the movie.

Jason Bene: You had two geniuses by the names of Rob Bottin and Phil Tippett working on your make-up effects. That must have been a huge plus for you.

Joe Dante: We had John Burke. We had a whole bunch of other guys like Chris Walas. They were a bunch of people who had just done Star Wars. They were excited about doing these things. Phil and his wife were a mainstay and we really couldn’t have done it without them. He was in his wetsuit all of the time. He was really knocking himself out for this thing. They built some monsters for me for the laboratory scene, which we didn’t have any in the script. In my efforts to tip the movie more towards science fiction I wanted there to be a whole lot of strange experiments in there, including a stop-motion creature that Phil did. It has no bearing on the story whatsoever. We thought it would be fun to have it come back in the movie and get run over by a police car on the way to the summer camp, but we couldn’t afford to do that. The producer [John Davidson] said, “Maybe it should come back and be one hundred feet tall.” That would have been nice but we couldn’t afford that either.

Rob Bottin was only sixteen or seventeen years old and he was a genius then. He wanted to direct some second-unit and I said, “Sure you can do it. I can give you a camera but I can’t give you any sound.” He said, “That’s okay, my girlfriend and I will play deaf-mutes getting eaten by piranhas.” There is a scene that he shot that’s not in the movie of these two people signing each other then getting eaten by piranhas. It’s not in the movie except for one shot. Rob had made a prosthetic head of himself half-eaten by piranhas that pops up. That’s his movie and it was too good not to use.

Jason Bene: This is long before CGI. How were you able to pull off the underwater footage of the piranhas?

Joe Dante: I certainly wish I had the resources that the new movie has. We had to basically improvise because the movie wasn’t going to get made if Roger Corman didn’t feel the special effects were going to pass muster. There was a test period where we literally went to the University of Southern California [USC] swimming pool and went underwater and shot all different kinds of fish: rubber fish, puppet fish, fish on strings, fish on rollers, fish all over. Then we would go to the lab the next morning and we would like at what we had done and if it wasn’t good, which it wasn’t, then we’d go back and try to do something else. After about a week of that we actually figured out how to do it and how to make it look pretty good and what frame rate to shoot it at. We got some prosthetic body parts and karo syrup and blood. We shot a bunch of things that we showed to Roger and then he approved to make the movie. The scene where the fish attack the raft was shot all in that one week at the University of Southern California [USC]. That was the first thing that we shot, then we shot all of the rest and built the underwater set. When we left to go to Texas it turned out that the combination of karo syrup and stuff in the water caused this fungus to start and eat away at the sides of the pool. They had to call scientists from Sacramento down to figure out what this stuff was and they pronounced it a new life form, which they had to kill in order to get the water out of the pool and sandblasted it and repaint it. I’m sure that added some money to the budget.

Jason Bene: One of my favorite not-so guilty pleasures is Dead Heat. Director Mark Goldblatt is your editor on this movie and has gone on to work on some huge flicks.

Joe Dante: I had known Mark and a number of other guys before that. We would run movies at a 16mm film collection and John Davidson and I would get together and run all of these movies. Mark was a friend before we started this and he has since become one of the top editors in town. I have always felt that Dead Heat was an unfairly maligned movie that is a lot of fun. I know that Mark nursed directorial ambitions, but he had pretty bad luck with the few things that he did manage to do. I think he ultimately figured this wasn’t where he was going to make his living so he got out of it. I thought Dead Heat was a lot of fun. Admittedly, Joe Piscopo was not cool at the time and his presence in the movie lead people to downgrade the whole concept of it. I think taken on its own merits it’s an interesting and fun movie.

Jason Bene: By the late 80′s most genre films were going the horror-comedy route and with this film you got horror, comedy, and action. There were great make-up effects done by Steve Johnson.

Joe Dante: And not a bad story and it had a great cast. I can’t quite figure out where the heat comes from.

Jason Bene: Mark got to work with Vincent Price and ‘Kolchak’ himself, Darren McGavin!

Joe Dante: I was on the set with all of them. Vincent Price was a very gregarious guy. He would talk with anybody and he had hundreds and hundreds of stories. He was in pretty good shape then. When you get to Edward Scissorhands he’s obviously declined somewhat, but in Dead Heat he was pretty much his old self.

Jason Bene: Some guy named James Cameron decided to do a sequel to your film called Piranha II: The Spawning.

Joe Dante: I don’t know that he decided to. I think that the Italian producer [Ovidio G. Assonitis] decided to do it and he wanted an American name behind the camera because it would help him sell the picture. I don’t think he ever intended to let Jim finish the picture.

Jason Bene: I hear different stories about how much of that film he actually directed.

Joe Dante: He directed a bunch of stuff with the actors. I don’t think he directed any of the flying piranha stuff. I think that was all Ovidio. I’m sure Jim doesn’t put it on his resume. People delight in connecting him to that picture.

Jason Bene: He had done some work on Galaxy of Terror so he was definitely working in the low budget arena at the time.

Joe Dante: Oh, totally. He was doing a lot of stuff for Roger and very resourcefully.

Jason Bene: Two years ago I went to a screening of Aliens and James Cameron was present for a Q & A. Afterward a fan tried to hand him the DVD of Piranha II and James said, “I’m not going to sign something from a movie that I was fired from!”

Joe Dante: [Laughs]

Jason Bene: What are your thoughts on the first remake of Piranha, the 1995 Showtime version that Roger Corman produced?

Joe Dante: It was a real remake and it was the same script as the original. The guy [Scott P. Levy] who directed it called me and he said, “I’d love for you to do a cameo in this movie.” For whatever reason I couldn’t do it. I said, “Where are you going to shoot it?” He said, “I’m shooting it here.” And I said, “Well, what are you going to use for rivers?” He said, “The rivers are all from your picture.” When I saw it I realized what they had done was basically taken the other picture, cut out all of the stuff with the actors, kept all of the special effects, and they were going to fill in the part with the actors with different actors. What they missed was the tone because they did the same script and they played it completely straight and it didn’t work. Monte Markham is not the kind of guy you would hire for the part that was originated by Dick Miller. As a result, you have this sort of strange, earnest version of the story which didn’t carry much weight.

Jason Bene: It had to be played tongue-in-cheek.

Joe Dante: It was written to be tongue-in-cheek. When you make these kind of movies they have to be played serious enough for the audience to be vested in them, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily play themselves that serious. To do a serious-minded remake of a picture that’s supposed to be lighthearted, no matter how many people get killed it in, I think is wrong-headed. I don’t think it has seen the light of day since then.

Jason Bene: Where you asked to do a cameo for Alexandre Aja Piranha 3D?

Joe Dante: I was asked to be in it and I couldn’t do it because I was finishing The Hole 3D. Eli Roth plays the part that I was supposed to play, which I now see is bigger than what I was led to believe. Its got breasts being eaten by piranhas. Its got naked girls in it. Its got gallons of blood. The director is saying there is more blood being used than in any movie ever. There’s more blood than the elevator scene from The Shining. I don’t see how it could possibly miss. I think it’s going to make a fortune.

Jason Bene: How involved were you with the Shout! Factory Blu-ray?

Joe Dante: Those guys are very, very serious about what they are doing. A lot of Roger’s pictures have been poorly served on video, particularly if he was in charge of putting them on because he doesn’t spend money wildly. The Shout! Factory people have been really sincere about trying to get the best materials for these pictures. They are going back to some of the older pictures like Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of this Earth and trying to find good materials on them, which is not easy because some of these things are really hard to find. The quality of the material on Piranha is almost better than it looked in theaters when it was new. They did a remarkable job. It’s a little embarrassing how good a presentation it is because you wonder why isn’t there a presentation like this on some Orson Welles’ movie. The movie will never look any better than it does now.

I can’t thank Joe Dante enough for giving Killer Film another amazing interview. Don’t forget to read my interview with Joe about his next movie, The Hole 3D. Please stop by Trailers from Hell! and check out the sweet trailers with commentaries from Hollywood’s finest. While you are there you can also pick up your copy of Trailers from Hell! Volume 1.