I WAS A WUNDERKIND

He doesn’t like slasher movies, mummies or zombies. He doesn’t even watch many horror movies. Still, Jeff Lieberman is best remembered for a trio of genre films he did in the late seventies and early eighties: SQUIRM (1976), BLUE SUNSHINE (1977) and the excellent JUST BEFORE DAWN (1981). After earning a living writing unproduced screenplays and directing documentaries, he returned to the genre in 2004 with the bitingly funny horror movie SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER, with which he came to the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival that following April in 2005. That’s where Phil van Tongeren had a long conversation with him about his career. ‘People make mistakes and I made a really big one.’

Let’s start with your last feature, SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER. It seems to be a condemnation of violent video games, but on the other hand, you don’t seem to take the subject matter that seriously either.

I’m not condemning video games. I did the same with video games in this movie as I did with drugs in BLUE SUNSHINE. If you hear what they say about violent video games in the media, and how they could influence children, what I do is, I take an extreme example of what if they’re right? I’m not saying they are right, but isn’t it fun to imagine what would happen if a kid, who’s completely brainwashed, can’t separate fantasy from reality? What’s the worst that could happen? That’s much more interesting than saying: but kids have always been violent! The funny thing is, people come up to me after they’ve seen the film and they talk to me about violent video games, like you yourself did, but I don’t know any more about the subject then they do.

But is the audience confused about your stance on the subject?

I don’t think the audience is confused by the message. They’re laughing, they get scared. I’m entertaining them. In that respect it’s one of my most successful movies. The confusion that you’re talking about happens afterwards. There are many movies that you see and forget about after ten minutes. With SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER, if they talk about that subject matter later on, I’ve done a good job. That’s why I say it’s one of my most successful movies. I’ve always had people telling me after they’ve seen a film what they thought about it – they thought it was great, or they didn’t think it was great, or they thought it was too slow in this part of the movie, and so on – but I’ve never had so many people coming up to me to talk about the topics the movie covered. But as I said: I don’t know more about the subject then they do.

You know, I did a documentary for HBO on Sonny Liston. It won an Emmy Award. A lot of people saw it. I got interviewed about it many times, and they always ask me who I think is the top heavyweight fighter of all time? What were the best boxing matches in history? What do I think would happen if Sonny Liston would fight this or that fighter? As if I am a boxing expert! Just because I made a documentary, doesn’t make me an expert. If I’m an expert on anything, it’s filmmaking. If you wanna know about boxing, go to a boxing historian. They know so much more than I do.

So, you didn’t consult an expert on the psychological impact of video games for SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER.

No, and I didn’t on BLUE SUNSHINE either. That movie deals with a delayed reaction from LSD in the chromosomes. I made that up, off of what the news was saying. They were saying stuff like: Don’t take LSD because your children will come out deformed. So again, I said: Boy, wouldn’t it be great if everything they’re saying is true. That would be so funny. I just put it up on the screen.

On another level SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER is a throwback to 1980’s horror movies, especially the slasher movies of that era. Was that deliberate?

I don’t like the term slasher movie and I don’t think I ever made one. If that term means fifteen different ways to kill people, like in FRIDAY THE 13TH, then I’ve never made a film like that. It’s boring to make. When you have characters that are only there to get killed, it means the writer was too lazy to come up with characters that you care about. All it is is somebody that goes outside when they shouldn’t and they get a hatchet in the forehead. The audience back then, when those films were made, said: Wow! Did you see that? Because they had never seen a special effect like that. So, then someone gets their head chopped off, someone else gets impaled. It was like one shock special effects gag after another. Because they made so much money, there were a lot of those so-called slasher movies. I never thought they needed me to do that. They’re devoid of interesting ideas. The reason people call them slasher movies is because that’s all they remember about them: people getting slashed. What’s FRIDAY THE 13TH about? It isn’t about anything. But then they go: Yeah, but there was this one scene where the girl gets a telephone pole up her ass. Or whatever the hell they remember. But in SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER you see two people get killed on screen in the entire movie.

And there are some corpses lying around.

Yeah, but why isn’t a Bruce Willis thriller where five-hundred people get killed a slasher movie? It’s a lazy way of categorizing films.

Still, it reminded me a bit of HALLOWEEN, with a masked killer wandering around a nice neighborhood.

You know the funny thing about HALLOWEEN? When it was made, it was an incredibly single-minded vicious horror movie. One hundred percent successful in what it wanted to do. In my mind, when I first saw it, I thought it was perfect. But it didn’t need to be about Halloween. It could have taken place during any night of the year. In fact, the script was called THE BABYSITTER MURDERS. Debra Hill and John Carpenter thought HALLOWEEN was a better title, so they changed it. But if it happened on a Tuesday on November it wouldn’t have made any difference to the story. If my movie was called HALLOWEEN it would make more sense, because I made it because of Halloween. It could only work on the day where a killer could walk around in a costume and indiscriminately kill people and prop them up on their own front lawn and instead of getting arrested get his picture taken. It’s totally credible. The reason the audience is laughing is because they know it’s true. In fact, I was just thinking about this the other day: the movie’s coming out on DVD on October 4th. Suppose someone watches it and thinks: Hey, let’s try that out! Wouldn’t that be great for sales? Of course, I don’t want anybody to get killed for real. But if it did happen, I would say: Don’t blame me, I’m just a filmmaker.

How did the project come about?

I hadn’t done horror movies for so long and the new generation of fans really appreciated my old movies. Suddenly I was one of the golden age of horror guys. They wanted me to go to festivals to show the old movies. I was reluctant about that, because I was doing other things. I’m working all the time, just not on horror movies.

People even thought I was dead. It happened more than once that I contacted someone through email and they said: This can’t be the real Jeff Lieberman because I heard he was dead [laughs]. Their thinking was: if he was alive after doing those three horror movies, why hasn’t he made any more? He must be dead. I mean, David Cronenberg, whose movies were compared to mine, especially BLUE SUNSHINE, kept making them.

So, long story short: one of the fans of the old movies is the producer of the new movie. That gave me a lot of creative control. I feel very comfortable about my old movies now. I made them, but that’s not who I am now. SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER brought me up to speed for 2005 and I think it compares pretty well with other movies being made now.

You just mentioned that BLUE SUNSHINE was compared to Cronenberg. I can see that. But when you made the film, was that something you were aware of?

No, because at the time I didn’t even see his movies. I saw SCANNERS. That’s the only one I saw. At that time there was only one filmmaker that worked in the genre that I even paid attention to and was impressed by. That was Brian De Palma. There wasn’t even a number two or three. I thought he was a genius. He was constantly being criticized for trying to be Hitchcock and I remember thinking about that when I learned filmmaking. I knew what it took to do what he does. Yeah, he was influenced by Hitchcock but his personality is in everything he does. Hitchcock never used the camera the way De Palma did, never had that incredibly vicious wit about everything he did. De Palma got really slick. And then after CARRIE he became mainstream Hollywood – and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I can’t think of anybody working in the genre that had that kind of mastery that De Palma has and it’s strange that nobody even talks about it. John Carpenter and Wes Craven are not even in his league. It’s a whole different level.

If De Palma has one weakness it’s that he was too dependent on the material. I don’t care how good a filmmaker you are, you have to marry yourself to the material. I have the advantage of being a writer. If I didn’t write, how am I going to use my directing skills on a piece of material like SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER? What I want to express as a director goes hand in hand with what I want to express as a writer. I can’t find that out there. I wish I could, because writing is a bitch.

When watching De Palma’s movies while you were learning the craft yourself, did you want to make movies the way he did?

Yes, I did. I didn’t copy anything – I have enough of my own ideas – but there’s something in the adventurous spirit in the way he made films that I found very inspirational. Also the way he found humor in places where you never before thought you’d find it. He did that again and again. Even in SCARFACE you have that scene with the chainsaw in the bathroom. Any filmmaker would move the camera away from that, because you hear the chainsaw, you hear the screaming. There’s no need to show it. Let the imagination of the audience do the work. That’s pretty much how I would shoot it. But De Palma – and this is signature him – goes: Yeah, that’s what you think, but we’re going back in! That’s what I’m talking about. That is fucking brilliant! When I saw that, I thought: This guy hasn’t lost anything. At the time I wished he would just do horror movies and show everybody else his level. He was so fresh and incredible.

Before you made your debut with SQUIRM, did you have any film experience?

Yeah, I made SQUIRM when I was twenty-five. But the first film I ever did was called THE RINGER. It’s on the DVD of BLUE SUNSHINE as an extra. It’s a twenty minute short. I’m in it. It was the film that got me a job at Janus Films, an American distributor that was mainly founded on all the early Bergman and Truffaut movies. So, I got to see all the movies by Vittorio De Sica and Antonioni. When I saw BLOW-UP I knew I wanted to make movies. Before that I thought I was going to be a commercial artist. I went to art school, doing painting and drawing. I had no interest in movies when I was a kid, aside from the stuff all kids like. Monster movies at the Saturday matinee. But I never thought I wanted to make films until I saw BLOW-UP. You remember that one sequence in BLOW-UP where you just have the trees in the wind? That one sequence was like taking drugs, without taking drugs. Using sound and visuals in such a way that is exactly like a drug experience. That’s what made me want to make films.

You had some drug experience yourself back then?

It was the sixties. It was foremost in my mind, what LSD did and what other drugs would do, altering your reality. But hallucinations held no interest for me. To me it was all about heightening reality, seeing clearer. Reality is right in front of you. So, if you could project something without taking drugs, that would certainly be better. And with film you could do anything you want. That one sequence in BLOW-UP has no music. If you watch JUST BEFORE DAWN there are so many sequences with no music at all, where you just hear cicadas and the wind. That was me in my BLOW-UP mode. Brad Fiedel, who became a huge film composer, didn’t fight me on that. He got it and he complimented me on the way I used his music.

How did you get the idea for SQUIRM?

My older brother and I used to go fishing all the time. And he had read that you could get the worms out of the ground by taking a train transformer, from a toy train set, and sticking the poles in the mud. It has to be muddy and you have to do this at night. Then when you turn on the electricity the worms will be shocked and they’ll come out of the ground. But every time I put on the light on in the back yard, so we could catch the worms, they would crawl back into the mud. I was maybe eight years old. Cut to: twelve years later. I take LSD and then the idea came to me, magnified by a thousand. That’s the idea for SQUIRM. In the movie there’s a guy telling this story about the train transformer. Word for word, that was my experience.

So, when you wrote it, you didn’t know if it was going to sell.

No, I got married very young. My daughter Erica was maybe three or four months old. I had no job. I had only done THE RINGER and I was going to be a freelance filmmaker. What does that even mean? We were living in New York. What was I going to do for money? Yet, I was sitting there and I wrote on a yellow pad: SKWORM, a small town gets overrun by a sea of carnivorous worms. Something like that. So, I yell out to my wife: What do you think about this idea? I tell her and from the kitchen she yells back: That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard! But she said it with such disgust that the next morning I went out to look for a job. That’s when I wound up at Janus Films for two years. So, I had a few pages on SQUIRM on a yellow pad that sat there for two years. When I felt a little more secure and I didn’t have to worry about money so much, I went back to it. In about five weeks I wrote the script. I couldn’t type so I wrote it all out on yellow pads. My wife typed it up. Two producers – Ed Pressman and Edgar Lansbury – both wanted to do the movie. So, I had this condition that I wanted to direct. I didn’t get paid any more than if I just sold the script. I’m not Sylvester Stallone or anything – because what he did with ROCKY was unbelievable – but I did say to them: Listen, if I’m not directing you’re not getting the script. They offered me twenty-five thousand for it. That was a year’s worth of financial security. I had a wife and child and still I said that. Boy, what balls I had.

Weren’t the producers afraid that it would be a complicated shoot with all these worms?

There’s a saying: be careful what you wish for. Because I wanted to direct it, but what the hell do I know about worms? I don’t know if I can make the worms behave the way I wrote in the script. I hoped I could hire people who knew, but unfortunately on SQUIRM nobody knew. It’s no CGI, you know? Today it would be easy.

What did SQUIRM do for your career?

I got spoiled, because this is what I thought: If I write a script and I finish it, I can sell it and it gets made with me directing it and then it goes into movie theaters. This was my attitude, this is what I believed and this is exactly what happened with SQUIRM. I liken it to that moment in a cartoon, when the character walks off a cliff and they walk straight ahead until they look down and realize that they should be falling. Then they fall. I was that character, except I never looked down. I didn’t even think of any other way this could turn out. They took it to the Cannes Film Festival, to the market there, and immediately all these countries wanted to buy it. Sam Arkoff went up to them and said: Let me take this over for the whole world.

So, that’s where Arkoff came in.

Yeah. He said he loved the movie. It was perfect. Next thing I know he wants to cut down this ninety-seven minute movie to ninety-two minutes. I said: What happened to it being perfect? Sam said: Doesn’t matter. It has to do with getting people into the theater, out of the theater, cleaning up the popcorn in between. It had nothing to do with content. The movie had to be ninety-one point something minutes for the turn-over. To his credit, he flew me out to California and let me cut the five minutes out of it. He didn’t care where I took it out, as long as I took it out. So, I was just doing these tiny trims that hopefully added up to five minutes.

No whole scenes?

Not even whole shots! Just shortened everything. Every time the editor went: Okay, that’s half a second. Today, on the computer, you could do it automatically. But back then we took out twelve frames, so half a second. It added up.

And when did you write BLUE SUNSHINE?

I wrote it while I was editing SQUIRM. It came very naturally to me. I wrote it really fast. Because I had the producers right there – and they heard the idea and liked it – I didn’t try to shop the script around. They immediately wanted to make it.

Didn’t the subject matter seem a bit more risky to them?

I don’t know what would have happened had I tried to shop it around. Probably Hollywood would have seen it as a drug movie, even though I never thought of it that way. But these producers didn’t just buy the script, they bought me. I was a wunderkind. Only about twenty-five years old. I had just made a movie for them that was already in profit and it hadn’t even come out yet. They knew they were going to make money. So, they stuck with me. On the other hand, if they didn’t like the idea, they could have said: Why don’t you think of something else?

It has gained quite a cult following.

It has. They’re supposed to do a remake. Peter Webber, the British director who directed GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, had seen the movie when it first came out in England. He got a producer at MGM interested in doing a remake. He’s writing it right now and he’s going to direct it as well. [This remake never came about –Ed.]

Are you involved in any way?

Yeah, because I own half the movie. When they actually make the movie I’ll do some consulting on it as well. Peter already told me he also wants me to be in it, doing a cameo or something. I hope I get to kill somebody [chuckles].

When it first came out, did it do as well as SQUIRM?

No, it did not. They brought BLUE SUNSHINE to Cannes where it was way better received than SQUIRM was. It got some serious critical appreciation. It got invited to the London Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival. These were not horror festivals. I didn’t go to any of them, but they showed my movie. The two American networks, ABC and CBS, each offered one point two million dollars for two runs on television. The movie had cost five hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make.

This was after it was shown in theaters?

No, this was still at the Cannes Film Festival. It hadn’t been released yet. So we thought: Forget theatrical. Let’s just sell it to the network. Let them do a TV Movie of the Week with it and we’ll split the profits. It was a lot of money for less than a year’s work.

But the bad news was that we were just going into this period where people who want censorship get the upper hand. These are cycles in society. This was happening in the late 1970’s. The networks wanted to use censorship to appease their Christian coalition or whoever they were answering to, which is always a small group of people with big mouths. The other people, who think it’s stupid to have this kind of censorship, they never speak up. That’s the way it works. Now, if you’re a network, are you going to make cuts in DIRTY HARRY or are you going to use a movie like BLUE SUNSHINE to make your point? I saw the list: Man aims gun. Take it out. Woman holds knife. Take it out. I said: If I make these cuts, not only won’t they buy the movie, it won’t even make any sense anymore. Both networks wanted this. The producers said: We could do reshoots. In fact, we could reshoot the whole movie and still make money. I didn’t want to do any of that. So, instead of one point two million, we got ninety-five thousand to play at eleven o’clock at night.

And what did it do in theaters?

In theaters it was very limited. They did fifty prints, I think. A company called Cinema Shares, a very small independent distributor who went out of business.

But as a filmmaker, wouldn’t you have been disappointed if your movie had been shown only on television?

No, it would have been a smart move. The money was right there on the table. Everybody likes the idea of a movie in a movie theater, but they don’t realize how the business side works. You’re not in this business just for the glory of seeing your name on the marquee, you have to look at how the business actually works and how that money is going to filter back to you. The place where almost none of it filters back to you is the theaters.

So, when BLUE SUNSHINE didn’t become a success right away, what happened to your career at that point?

Actually, after BLUE SUNSHINE I was pretty much in demand. They had seen two movies in Cannes from a young American director who had gotten sort of a following just off of those two movies. I was being offered projects. The people who put together the European version of DAWN OF THE DEAD and released it as Dario Argento Presents ZOMBI, thought: Let’s do this again with another American director. The guy comes to America and shows me this artwork: Dario Argento Presents A Jeff Lieberman Film: MUMMIES. I said: What’s MUMMIES? He started to tell me what a mummy is. I said: No, I mean: Is this a movie? He said: yes. I said: Well, can I see it? He said: No, we want you to make it. I said: Where’s the script? He said: No script! How about a story outline? No story! He wanted my permission to take this artwork to Cannes. I said no.

Because you don’t like mummies?

Because I didn’t know what I was saying yes or no to. It was just so bizarre to me. But you’re right: I wasn’t interested in mummies. So, how do I know if I can write a script about that? It was just selling our names: Argento and Lieberman. That’s what they used to do. If they got enough people interested and they could pre-sell it to enough countries, they would make the movie.

That’s the way Roger Corman used to do it, right? First doing artwork and the selling the movie on the basis of that?

I think who did it most successfully were Golan and Globus of Cannon. They once put Dustin Hoffman on one of their posters and Hoffman didn’t know about it. He sued them. He took them to the mat and they stopped doing it.

So, MUMMIES didn’t go through. But you made JUST BEFORE DAWN a few years later.

Well, I was always writing and working on projects. I made JUST BEFORE DAWN in 1980. It was something they offered me. They offered me more money than I ever made before, to go to Oregon and shoot this film. They did the exact same thing: they pre-sold the movie, claiming they had George Kennedy and Linda Blair as the stars and me as a director. But I hated the script. It was called THE LAST RITUAL, it was about a snake ritual in the Smoky Mountains. I don’t even remember why they had a snake ritual in there, but it was important enough to the story that they called it that. I thought the script was awful and I did a page one rewrite, under pseudonym. I used the first and middle name of my nephew who had just been born. I totally rewrote it. The producers didn’t care, as long as I didn’t rewrite it in such a way that a buyer could say: This isn’t the movie that I bought. So, I kept the names of the characters the same. And it’s still about a group of people going into the woods when they probably shouldn’t. But I changed all the dialogue and most of the action.

Did the producers want it to be a cash-in on the success of FRIDAY THE 13TH?

Well, FRIDAY THE 13TH came out when we were in pre-production. But once the producers saw it, they wanted me to go see it as well. They had heard how FRIDAY THE 13TH, which was made for three hundred thousand dollars, was picked up by MGM for three million and then did phenomenally at the box office. These producers kept telling me they wanted killing after killing in JUST BEFORE DAWN. But I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t even think I could do it. You still have to tell an actress: Go walk outside and you’ll get a hatchet in your forehead. If she has any brains at all, she’s gonna ask why she’s going outside. And I, Jeff Lieberman, would have to say: Well, because you can’t get a hatchet in your head in front of all these people in the living room. That’s not the guy you want to direct a movie like this. I would be bad at making a slasher movie.

Are you happy the way JUST BEFORE DAWN came out?

Yeah. I just saw it again, doing a commentary. I noticed that although the producers wanted FRIDAY THE 13TH, I made a fucking art film. It looks like Truffaut made a horror movie [laughs]. Brad Fiedel watched it again in preparation of doing the extras for the DVD, and he told me I was very courageous in making a horror movie without the usual stuff. I never thought I was courageous, because I just went with my creative instinct. Why is it that twenty-five years later we’re still talking about JUST BEFORE DAWN? Because I didn’t give into the pressure of making a movie like DON’T GO INTO THE WOODS or whatever.

I have a lot of images in my mind of JUST BEFORE DAWN. At the risk of calling it a slasher movie, I do remember thinking at the time that I thought it was one of the best of that whole cycle of films.

Now people do say that as well. I was constantly told it was THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES, but – and this is probably going to be the eight millionth time I’m saying this – I have never even seen THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. I still know why it was a hit. The same way I knew why NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD made so much noise when it came out, without having seen it. In 1968, when the movies were still Cary Grant and all that, if you showed a human arm getting eaten, no matter how stupid and hokey it looked, you were going into a whole new territory. You would never see Cary Grant eating somebody’s arm. It would gross out Cary Grant’s audience. But I didn’t need to see those movies, because my hunch was always that from a filmmaking standpoint it would probably suck. They’re made to shock.

A movie called SNUFF for instance, that was one of the most brilliant marketing campaigns in movie history: In Brazil where life is cheap… That’s genius! So, I don’t have to watch the movie for that scene in which the girl is supposedly killed for real. It’s all over for me. I say: I wish I thought of that. It’s the same for me with every one of those films. To this day I haven’t seen THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD I finally saw on television not too long ago. I thought it was horrendous, stupid, laughable. I can see how in 1968 nobody saw anything like that before, but the filmmaking… I don’t even know how to categorize it. What was I even looking at? These extras probably asked Romero what they should be doing, because they’re supposed to be zombies. But of course, there’s no such thing. So, Romero said: I don’t know, just wave your arms like this. It looked so stupid to me. But in 1968, the idea of it overrode everything. Timing is so much with these things.

I don’t agree with you on the quality of the picture and it’s a shame you haven’t seen THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, because that’s technically a great movie.

Is it? Like I said, they don’t need me to do those movies. George Romero did an entire career built on zombies. He has just done another one. And all these young people, coming out of film school, think they wanna do a zombie movie. Of all the ideas that you could have come up with…

When I was in film school, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do a subgenre that somebody else had already done successfully. Why would you? We had different examples. When A CLOCKWORK ORANGE came out, I was at the first show on the first day at twelve o’clock in the afternoon. I stood I line the same way kids today stand in line for STAR WARS. Of course, Kubrick didn’t have the same following George Lucas has, but he did have a following. Filmmakers like him, and Antonioni, we were waiting for their next movie the same way you waited for a new album by a rock star. Kubrick was god. But there was nobody working in the horror genre like that.

Do you see any contemporary horror movies these days?

Sometimes I’ll see a new horror movie. What did I see? I saw HOUSE OF WAX. Walked out after fifteen minutes. Why bother with all these remakes anyway?

What is your taste in movies? What do you watch when it’s just for pleasure?

My taste runs all over. It certainly isn’t horror, but the satire of SHAUN OF THE DEAD I really enjoyed. But then I also love Mike Leigh’s films, who’s absolutely brilliant. I could never do characters and scenes the way he does them. When I watch one of his movies, I think: What the hell am I even doing? How can I even pretend to do the same work he does? I also loved TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. That movie cracked me up. So, go figure: Mike Leigh and South Park, that’s my taste.

So, what happened after JUST BEFORE DAWN, because suddenly there are these wide gaps between films.

That was a mistake. People make mistakes and I made a really big one. I was just so frustrated that I had made these movies that I thought were really good and they were handled so badly in distribution. Even though I got paid, it was still a real letdown when nobody sees the film. And then my father died suddenly during the production of BLUE SUNSHINE, so I was mad at the world in general. So, after JUST BEFORE DAWN, I said: Fuck it, I’m not going to do another independent film. A friend of mine kept saying: Just keep doing them. You’re a known quantity. You can get films financed. Sooner or later one of them is gonna break out really big. I just didn’t listen.

I did do a movie in 1987 called REMOTE CONTROL, for which they paid me more money than the others put together. The budget was three million dollars. It was a disaster. I wrote a script that I thought was terrific, but by the time we were ready to shoot it, when we had the movie cast, my script was so ambitious – a movie within a movie – that I needed ten million to pull it off. I thought three million was so great, but when I saw what we were actually doing, it was so different than what I envisioned in my screenplay. I remember saying to my wife: The die is cast. Nothing could save this movie. And that’s a hell of a way to feel about your own movie before you even shoot the first frame.

The company I was doing it for, was making ten movies at the same time. Because it was the home video explosion and they had all this money that they needed to spend in a short period of time. Even a big studio has trouble handling ten movies at once, for an independent it was crazy. Penelope Spheeris was making a movie for the same company. The casting director was working for all these movies together. We were watching casting tapes with other directors. I said: What if Penelope wants the same actor I want? She said: We’ll flip a coin. It was like a factory.

So, did that experience made you walk away from movies?

No, because I did other stuff. I wrote screenplays. In Hollywood you get a hundred and fifty or a hundred and seventy-five thousand for a first draft. I was making more money than if I took a year out of my life to make a movie. But nobody knows about it if it doesn’t get made. Believe me, during that period of time, that’s when I made the real money in my career. That helped me to own a big house and put two kids through college. That was all paid for by stuff you don’t know about.

What kind of scripts were you writing?

I did a script for Dustin Hoffman, which got very close to getting made. But since it didn’t get made, you don’t know about it. But I got paid.

Wasn’t that just as frustrating as directing films and having them handled badly in distribution?

Yes, it is frustrating. That’s why I went into directing documentaries. I did a big one for Showtime with Rob Reiner as executive producer. That was a huge success. Then I did the Sonny Liston documentary, which won an Emmy Award. These documentaries were watched by millions of people. But the horror fans don’t know that.

I also wrote THE NEVER ENDING STORY III, a thirty million dollar movie, for which they paid me a huge amount of money. It was not like I was in exile.

I wonder why, when you chose to direct another feature film after such a long time, you decided to write and direct a low-budget horror movie.

Somebody who knows me really well said that in retrospect I was probably having a midlife crisis. She said that instead of buying the sports car that I had when I was twenty-five years old – which in fact I did have at the time, a Triumph TR6 – I went and did a horror movie like when I was twenty-five. At first I thought she was crazy, but the more I thought about it, that’s exactly what happens when you have a midlife crisis: you don’t know it’s happening! It’s not like you’re having a fever or something. Now, I do feel like I’m twenty-five again. I’m talking to filmmakers and audiences who are the age that I was back then. It doesn’t mean I’m going back in time, it means I’m plugged into the present.

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This interviewed first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full talk, edited only for clarity.

Since the interview took place, Jeff Lieberman has written a memoir: Day of the Living Me - Adventures of a Cult Filmmaker from the Golden Age. You can find it on his website.

Special thanks to Jan Willem Steenmijer for letting us use use wonderful photograph. Be sure to visit his website.