The Blob (1988)

Hi, everybody. My name is Joe Lynch. I am a filmmaker. And I would not be here today if it were not for this film that you are watching right here. And it wasn't for this man and the other men that are in the room with me right now. Welcome to the remake of The Blob. And with me to my right is cinematographer Mark Irwin. Say hi, Mark. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the blog. We're already off to a great start. I already regret inviting you. That was my blog voice. That's all I got. And next to Mark, we have makeup effects maestro, creature effects maestro, and all-around great guy, Tony Gardner. Hello, everybody. And we also have... This is like the dating game. I know. Door number three. And the man, the myth... the man who just dropped two and a half hours of an interview that will probably be cut down to 11 minutes. I couldn't stop talking about myself. They had a million questions. And also the blob itself, co-writer and director Chuck Russell. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you all for joining us. Guys, this is a commentary. 31 years in the making for me, even before there were commentaries, I was hoping to get you guys in the room because this film is the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. I was so influenced by this film. when it came out on August 5th. I saw it at 310 at the Brookhaven Multiplex in Long Island. Oh my gosh. And it changed my life. Wow. And I'm so happy to have you guys here talking about the film. And I want to dive right in because one of my favorite misdirects in cinema history, and there's a lot of misdirects in this film, but one of my favorites coming up, and hey, there's Mark Irwin. Hey, look. Hey, appreciate it. Not too shabby. Not bad. So I want to kind of talk origins a little bit. Frank, Frank and Chuck, you guys got together back in 81, right? Like when you were doing Hell Night. We did Hell Night together. It so happens Frank was driving a camper and writing brilliant scripts even then. And I picked up on it. We began to work together. And this was intended to be my first directing contest. I remember hearing that, because you did a Q&A at the New Beverly years ago, and that was the first time that I had ever heard that. Hey! The maestro himself. Yes. And Lyle Conway, the blob maestro as well. The blobinator. The blobinator. Oh, goddammit, that's good. This is going to be a good commentary, everybody. Hoyt Yeatman, visual effects maestro as well. Dream Quest. But this was designed to be your first film, Chuck. I was looking to get that directing break, and Mark Irwin, sitting right beside us, had done The Fly with Cronenberg and proved that a really kitschy film about a human fly could become a great classic. And I'd already learned at that point in my career how commercial Hollywood, so my more original ideas, I was having a hard time breaking. I thought, let me take the blob to its furthest extent. And Jack Harris was nice enough to give me the opportunity to go out and put it together. Hey, I know those guys. There he is. Shout out to Frank. Yes. So you and Frank supposedly went off after the success of Nightmare 3. That being your first film with New Line, you had taken the Blob remake to New Line and they passed, correct? New Line passed. By the way, what an amazing misdirect here from going from Ghost Town USA to having a huge football event, like, that was designed in the script? Oh yeah, that's from the script. The whole town is at the game. It didn't, it helped the extras budget though. I didn't have to populate the town at that point. This is a lot, this is really inspired by my life in Park Ridge, Illinois and some of my crazy friends. Honestly, some of these stories are true. Some of the interactions with the kids and all this. Was ribbed part of your childhood as well? The actual ribbed event is a totally true story. I wish I could take credit for making that up because it's a good comedy gag. A guy from my high school really did go to a pharmacist before his date. It turned out right around the time the pharmacy closed, that night, after buying the prophylactic, he went home to meet the girl's father on a high school date, and that was the pharmacist he had just bought a prophylactic from. When, when, when? When the timing's right. Yeah, right. Timing's everything. Let me quickly say, Donovan Leach, amazing. Shawnee Smith, amazing. Donovan had all the charisma. I wanted to misdirect the audience that this was possibly the Steve McQueen leading man. And then you'll see... Where's Cindy? And there's Shawnee, who's absolutely awesome. One thing the audience should know... Your wife is there? Cindy, yeah, my wife. One thing everyone should know is that this is related directly to Tabasco sauce because this was all shot in Louisiana, a little town called Abbeville, Louisiana, home of the company that makes Tabasco. So this was supposed to be a New England town on a hot summer night. It was January in Abbeville, Louisiana. We were freezing our asses. It was like 33 degrees everywhere, and everyone was freezing. So these cheerleaders were... Everyone was freezing, but I did my best to make it look like summer. You never know. Well, you have to because knowing that the payoff in this film is ultimately to have the snow become the hero of the film. You needed that contrast. You needed that kind of flat contrast. Speaking of contrast, this is California with real-life sunshine and in a place called Piru with planted pine trees. It meant to be somewhere in the New England mountains, the Green Mountains or whatever. And it's got enough California in it to fall into the heading of Shooter in Griffith Park kind of thing. But I think production ended up with drilling holes in the desert and putting in palm trees, painting them green. One of the things that I love about this movie just structurally and just the way that you guys crafted it is a moment like this where you've already set up the cheering crowd. You've already set up that there's a small town, the inhabitants of the small town are all gathered together. Then we're intercutting between that and Brian Flagg, who's gonna be jumping this bridge, which is a nice setup for later on. Was that also installed in the script, that there would be this intercutting back and forth? There's a number of structural things I'd already learned at this point that Frank and I were able to incorporate and have fun with it at the same time. You know, it's a horror film It's really what I call action horror, adventure horror. Oh, absolutely. It's definitely adventure horror. It's save the girl, save the city. And honestly, Shawnee saves Kevin as much as he saves her, which is a little progressive for the 80s. You were working with casting director Joanna Ray. Correct. Who does all of David Lynch's movies and everything. I mean, her eye for talent, especially young talent. is second to none, especially back then. She's great. When you were casting the film, you were saying before how Donovan was such a great archetype for the hero, only to subvert that later on, kill him off, and then now we're left with... It's the old Psycho. ...Mulletron 2000 with Kevin Dillon. It was very purposeful on my part trying to emulate what Hitchcock did in Psycho, which is Janet Leigh's dead at the end of the first act. How did that go over with the studio, though? We were very... This was... treated like an independent film. And honestly, the release was also treated like an independent film, which is unfortunate. TriStar was changing hands, and I was very disappointed with the kind of non-opening. But the fans have supported it, and the audience has grown for this picture over the years. Well, that's the thing, too. Speaking of which, if you look back, now when you talk to any horror fan, if you go to any horror convention or go on any horror blog or on Twitter or whatever, And there's always like, what are the top three horror remakes from the 80s? This is now always in the top three. You have The Thing, you have The Fly, and you have The Blob. And I agree with you. Back when it came out, August 5th, 1988, because I was there. I was the guy. That was me. But I remember when that theater played the film and how well it played in the theater for me. I thought... as naive. Number one film of the weekend. It played great for audiences. It literally had a big changing of the guard at TriStar. And it's traditional in Hollywood. The old guard is ignored. The new guard wants to put the energy into their films. I was looking at what looked like a real estate ad for The Blobbing. You could hardly tell what it was. Now, Candy Clark and Jeffrey DeMunn, the unfortunate romance that it was never meant to be, but the seeds are planted so well here, so that by the time we get to the telephone booth later on, it's heartbreaking. Jeffrey obviously went on to work with Frank many times in the future. Was this the first time that he was kind of interacting with Jeffrey? Joanna must have brought him to me. He has such a charisma and such a solid kind of country man vibe. He was just a cop in the hitcher a year or two earlier, so he was like the perfect person for that. Again, it was a bit of a misdirect where I wanted you to assume he'd saved the day. And The phone booth scene, which is coming up, is one of the best combinations of miniature and full-scale effects I have ever done. Watch it in slow motion. It still works. It's amazing. Yeah. I remember when we had done a commentary last year when you came by for our podcast. We did a 48-hour marathon, and you came by for the mask. I think we got more information about the blob than we did for the mask at the time. Well, there was no pressure. If there's too much pressure on the mask, I talk about the blob. Yeah. We'll start talking about Jim Carrey. If you guys are here for mask trivia, you've come to the right place because we'll probably get that in about an hour. Another thing that I really admired about what Mark, what you had done, was the small town paradigm, which I think in the 80s was becoming very akin to, say, Stephen King. There's a wonderful kind of... flatness to a lot of the beginning of the film, so that by the time we get to night, it feels like you're allowing yourself to be more dynamic, especially when you get into the forest, when you have a lot of the 5Ks blasting through the trees with all these very hard shadows. Were there any films or any inspirations for you for the first third of the film? Because it has a very almost Norman Rockwell kind of feel. If anything, my outlook to horror films or thrillers is to make sure The audience sees everything in the first act. And not to make it dark and moody and creepy and scary. Because people can see in the dark. You can't scare them from that point on. If you show where everything is and then turn off the lights, then you can scare the audience as well. So you're doing aesthetic exposition. Yeah, exactly. Especially, we just established the bridge in daytime. And here's the tree, here's the thing, and here's the gully. And the can man. And now we're going to see him again at night. And now, oh, we know who this is. What's in the smoke behind him? Oh, it's creepy and scary. So you're entering the same thing as an audience that the filmmaker wants to take you on. If you introduce the scary place in a normal scene as something already scary, then you can't scare anybody beyond that point. It's more of the same. Well, it's taking the thing that you've set up, even visually, and then once you see it shrouded in darkness, and it takes on a whole new... Because you're right, the bridge scene has a whole different look and feel... when you get tonight, especially when you have explosions and fireworks and helicopters going over. It looks like the fucking Dirty Dozen and shit. It's amazing. That stunt, which is obviously coming up, it is... Still remarkable to me. Yeah. That was all in camera. That was done today. That's 17 different visual effects plates. Easily. And there's something about the real thing that makes that small stud still. Maybe because I was there and I was on the edge of my damn seat. And the sun was coming up and we gotta go, we gotta go. Worried for everybody. This was, by the way, this was kind of the first film I shot in Hollywood in Griffith Park in the classic A Tree is a Tree shooted in Griffith Park. So all these scenes took place about a quarter mile from the five freeway. This was literally a golf course, gang. Yeah. We had a tree and a golf course. You can tell right there. Where the greens department showed up and where Chuck's going, not enough trees! They were very symmetrical trees. This was a thrill for me to move from Toronto to Hollywood and then be in this classic milieu of, oh, shoot it in Griffith Park. This is Griffith Park, oh my God. And that was the great Billy Beck. Billy Beck, the can man. So this is a slice of... This is the true story, gang. In Park Ridge, Illinois, it really happened to a friend of mine. I'd be proud if it was me, but it was a famous story in our high school that this happened. Whatever happened after that? Could he be in the sequel? The real guy is now, you know... 12 kids later? Exactly. May I say, Ricky Paul Golden, the swagger this kid has is true to him, undirectable. The worst misogynistic character you could have come up with, but he still made it lovable. That's what's so interesting. And plus the Van Halen guitar glasses was a nice touch, I must say, by the costume department. And then, of course, Del Close, the formidable Del Close, who was, I didn't know this until recently, I forgot he was in Beware the Blob. How are you? He was. Yeah. I still don't know it. Yeah. There you go. Like, yeah, he had a small part in Beware the Blob, and obviously, if anybody's a fan of Second City would know that Joe Close was one of the godfathers of comedy. I got a fake ID in Chicago just to see Second City. Really? Yeah, I had to get a B-21. And I would come in, I was blown away by comedy improv, and he was one of the great coaches of comedy. Not one, but what's great about this role is not who you'd expect to play the Bible-thumping preacher in a small town. I heard a story about how he became involved. Do you remember at all? Tell me. Well, he was unavailable originally. And then it was like a commercial or something like that fell through. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, shit, I actually need a gig. And then that's how we show up. When you were casting with Joanna, was it something that she offered? Who came up with the idea? I don't know who, but the two people I loved were him and... And the guy from Eraserhead who's so wonderful. Oh, Jack Nance. Yeah, Jack Nance. Who's coming up as a doctor. Honestly, I wanted to do this hometown homespun thing. On the other hand, I wanted it to be a little unpredictable. And both of these actors bring something eerie to the performance. You really don't know where they're going to take it. But they're so... Like, the thing that I think works about this movie in terms of the casting, very much like a Coen Brothers movie, is everyone's got... amazingly interesting faces. Art LaFleur, for example. Billy Beck. Shawnee. I remember when this movie came out, Shawnee was on fire because I think within the same kind of year, she had this and Who's Harry Crumb? And I was just like, who is this? She was my crush for at least the three years. Shawnee came out of readings. She was always the best. She had a lot of heart. She had a lot of guts. I knew I had to have her with the AK at the end of the movie. So for a young gal, she pulled it off. She pulled it off brilliantly. Now we're getting into some of Tony's favorite moments of the movie, or possibly least favorite moments if you're having any knee-jerk reactions off of set. Now, the blob was, at least by this point, I remember when Fango started doing like, what, seven or eight articles about this movie, getting people excited about the film, which I was definitely one of them. You know, one of the common jokes about the original blob was, oh, here comes the grape jelly coming out of the strawberry jam. Here it comes after us. That's pretty grody looking right there. How did you guys come up with... what ended up becoming, because I remember reading about stories of, like, silk bags filled with methacil, right? Where did the design come from for the blob? Lyle Conway and Bill Corso, actually, were doing a lot of R&D for it, experimenting with silk bags. It was a little bit at a time. Yeah. Something started looking right, and we went in that direction. It was truly organic. But it started at, like, small, manageable pieces that you could hold and work with and slide down a... an incline and shoot with the camera tilted and make it look like it had life in it. So that you weren't manipulating it much. It was just naturally letting gravity do the performance. Bill was putting clear acrylic spheres in it so it had mass, but you could still see through it. And then just kept experimenting and building on that. And then... Lyle had done some great stuff inside the mouth for Audrey 2. Yeah, for Little Shop of Horrors. Where it looks wet and it looks really heavy and everything inside there is all like spandex and silk and nylon covered with mica flake glitter so that it reflects light. And feels moist. What it did not translate was the weight of methicil. Right. Which made it heavier than water. Oh, really? And that's what slowed us down during the R&D. Interesting. You could do only a certain number of reverse gags, which are easy because it's blob will roll downhill. But how do you manipulate it? Yeah. So everyone rose to the occasion, particularly Tony and his team and Bill Corso. And we were, and Mark, honestly, was a shot at a time, making it work. Oh, yeah. We figured it out, literally, like what works best for this shot. Thank God everything was storyboarded because you knew what it had to do for at least that one particular shot. Yeah. And it would be a different methodology for each thing. And if you're revealing something on the ceiling, like a body hanging, it's got to be lightweight. It can't really be methacil or it's going to pull the ceiling down. So we'd sculpt everything and then coat it all with urethane and just add methacil as a surface dressing. And we had foam tentacles and stuff like that. Other times where we wanted to take advantage of the translucency, Thank God Chuck had the foresight at the very beginning to say, okay, Donovan being attacked by the blob is literally the first time you see it, and it needs to be the best it can be. And it is. And it is. And he said, let's shoot that last so we can take everything that we've learned up to this point and put it all there and make that first time you see it amazing because whatever you show it and establish it doing right off the bat, From there on out, you're going to have everybody in the palm of your hand. And, you know, he was right. But there's a lot of miniature stuff in there because the stuff is so unwieldy. Well, like, we did a miniature of Shawnee and Donovan. Everybody ended up having to do a little bit of everything. It would suck. I feel bad that we're, like... All these great anecdotes, and we were remiss to talk about the representation of the 12-year-old audience, where you had, what was it, Eddie and Kevin. When I saw the movie, that was me. Oh, I get it. I was those two 12-year-old kids. We traumatized you. Well, look, when you're growing up in the 80s, or just growing up as a kid and cinema is kind of giving you life lessons, back in the day, kids didn't die, dogs didn't die. And you broke one of those at least. I remember killing any dogs. I didn't kill any dogs. Not in this one. But still, when you're watching a movie as you're a 12-year-old kid, kids were a safe space. And between the blob and Maximum Overdrive, killing kids off. Here it goes sometime. Oh, it's great. That was terrifying. So having that representation and setting those kids up back then was a perfect way to pull the rug out from under you. Can we just give props to Kevin Dillon for a second? We can give props to him all day long. He did a fantastic job. He was perfect casting. Was he offer only or did he come in and read? Oh, gosh, I don't remember. I think he did read for me. I don't remember. Was there something about... Because I don't remember him... He's truly not the typical even anti-hero. No. He was legitimately reminding me of a kid in my high school who was always in trouble. Very much so. So between him and Shawnee being such a great cheerleader type and Donovan being the classic... potential romantic lead, where we're going in the next few minutes in this film came as a good shock, I think, to the audience. But it's a good dynamic, too, because later when we get to the hospital and everyone's in the waiting room, there's a world where I would watch the movie with the three of them. Yeah, that's right. All the way through to the end. Yeah. Because there was that wonderful, almost love triangle dynamic. And Kevin's character had not been developed that much at this point in the film. So him having to kind of take over as a lead and him being reluctant and the level of his performance... I think helped it be a scary movie. You didn't know if you could, you can't trust this character. Because, well, you did, like you were saying before, you created a rule for the audience to know, well, if the high school hunk, who's the, for all intents and purposes, the hero of the movie, is going to get killed, and you're killing kids off, then anybody can die. And there's a maniac at the wheel. That's the message for the audience. Well, the other message is that the blob, was organic enough to keep growing. It wasn't just a threat. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah, the threat was so much that if this movie kept going, it's going to eat the world. Look, this is the weird resonant thing that I think is kind of universal. which is, it's evil, but it also is nature, and nature doesn't care. A mudslide doesn't care what a good guy you are or how much you love your kids. If it's coming down the hill, that's it. Well, one of the things that's like a great parallel from this movie to, say, something like Stephen King is, you know, and Frank's obvious connection with Stephen King is, I remember watching this going, this feels like The Stand. And by the way, Frank already had a connection with King in King's style. He had done a short film with Stephen. And, you know, Brian Flagg. You know, like, obviously the name Flag immediately, you know, sparked images from the stand. That was random. Really? Yeah, it's random. I swear to God I thought that that was intentional. It was random, because I came up with that. We never talked about Stephen, to be honest. Not that... I didn't know Frank had done a short film by Stephen. That's so interesting, because, like, you know, spoiler alert, if you're watching this now, God, I hate that conversation when someone says, if you're watching this movie now, you shouldn't be. Turn off the commentary. May I just say that... Watch what happens now in the next few minutes because it's all of our best work. Mark's best work, Tony's best work, our best work. And Dylan was really terrified. Donovan, rather, was really terrified because the sheet of blob going over his face gives you a feeling of being suffocated. It was safe, but you can't do a long take. That stuff being pulled up over his face, that's really his face being stretched. That is not Tony's effect yet. And that's stuff being shoved up his nose while it's being pulled back. He was such a good sport. We had an air tank in there for him, and he was game for all of it. There were safeties, but it's still a little bit probably like being waterboarded. It's a waterboarding visual effect. But it did elicit the shot that's in the movie, in the trailer, of Shawnee seeing him for the first time and being affected by that, right? And I also kept her off the set until that moment. So that's... the classic thing you need to do as a director when you can, which is don't let the actress watch while you're rigging all this stuff. And it was terrifying looking, for real. What really worked best here for me was that in terms of directing, everything was neutralized. The audience feels like, oh, this is calm. Yeah. Everything's fluorescent. There's no shadows. There's no contrast. So that's, for me, as a lighting cameraman, I want to make sure that that is there. But to get into this room and then introduced shadows, the threat, basically. My other problem was I had a pink blob. It was pretty, had the option to be pretty, so I wanted to make it gooey and modeled. It looked like cultured fat. That's what made it fleshy. I got to say, that blanket move was really cool. I remember it was really hard to get that move. We did that after the fact, too. That was part of the shoot at the very end. I should attribute this next gag. Oh, Jack Nance, racer head. Very, very interesting actor.

Some great work by Tony. That's the real guy's head. No, no, it's real, but it's still all the additions, the pumping and the gooey. Was that a Steadicam shot of that spinning around? Because I don't remember there being a lot of Steadicam shots in the film. It does have a very particular style to it. I'm not a Steadicam guy. This was one of the reasons I... Really? Well, because it's a lot of swim. You can see the horizon. I love it. I love what happened here. A hand injury? So this reveal... was ruined in Fango, but it didn't matter because it's the smoke that makes it. It's that steam that rises up. What was ruined about it in Fango? That was the shot, and you're sitting there going, like, I want to, it gave it away. But in Fango, that was the money shot. That ruined me from eating macaroni and cheese for two years. I'm not lying. It looks like mac and cheese with a little ketchup on it. Nope, no thanks. Oh, God, this moment is so great. So this is the same office that the doctor was in, and I was trying to make it moodier, even though it's a hospital. in business, you know, it's not haunted and shut down. But now he's all alone and slowly getting things darker and darker. But she's still in this cocoon of everything's okay, what's going on? This is not my favorite Matt, though. No. But this is the classic holy shit shot, and you have to have one. So the shot, almost like Donovan's POV shot coming up here, is that a miniature coming up here? There's a miniature. The blanket of Bob looking straight up is a miniature. Yeah, yeah. And this is acid, literally acid on a styrofoam countertop. Now, that was a rule. Like, who came up with the rules of the blob? By the way, the use of no score in this is masterful. Because when the reveal hits and the sting happens. There it is. There it is going up over his face. That shot. There's a makeup on him, but all that stretching is the real face. Yeah, there's a whole rig that he's in that's rolling across the floor. Look at that. When she's running up to him, she looks like miniature. Miniature. But when she ran up to grab his arm, she looked like she was waiting for someone to say cut. That's part of the miniature, that last face, right, Tony? That was the full-size one. And then there was a miniature as well for the over the window sill, but we never cut back to it. We shot it, but we never needed it. So that last melting face was full-size. Full-size. I always admired that. It was great work. And Mike Smithson did an amazing job as the hand on the floor. He's got his hand up through a hole. It's the vibration that's making it work. It's a guy with his hand through the floor. It works. The old trembling hand. And there's Melty Guy. I'm sure Paul does not appreciate being called Melting Guy. Well, he prefers to be Folding the Half Guy. Why are you calling him Melting Guy? From RoboCop. Because we were all like 24 years old. We knew him as the Melty Guy from RoboCop. He was the badass Emil. Yeah. It's Paul McCrane. Yeah, he was amazing. He was the wonderful, irritating second cop who you didn't know whether to trust or not. Such a good sport, too. So, just to go back... Chuck, when you and Frank and possibly the rest of the team were coming up with the kind of dynamics of the blob and the rules of the blob, who came up with those? Like the acid for whatever was dripping off of it. I think we all kind of riffed off the script. The script had many of these details. The ones that didn't work, we didn't do. And the ones that did work, we played into. Was there a style guide that, like, Jack Harris had? Like, you can do this, you can't do that. No, but there was, like, there's quotes in Fangari where... Certainly we... Horrible quotes, like me saying, it's an inside-out vampire stomach. I remember that. But trying to say it's acidic and it's like a stomach lining, but it's on the exterior and it dissolves things and melts them towards the interior, like an organ. And that's paraphrased into some stupid comment. But the idea was there was an acid that would break things down, turn... flesh into translucent material. It wouldn't kill hair or fingernails or metal because that stuff's already not organic. It would only oxidize metal. I know this. I'll tell you later. I wrote a script for The Blob 2 when I was 12. We'll get to that later. We had our own rules to follow in order to make cohesive sense out of the way that it grew and what it actually did to bodies. We actually had dead bodies that were full-size water tank puppets that didn't get shot because the tank cracked. Good going, Mark. You missed out on those awesome bodies. I know, I wanted to. But it was like translucent skeletons. It was like, it was Dr. Meadows and another body floating by. Oh, wow. And they were all strung out, sort of like their skeletons were gooey, but they were translucent and transparent. They're like glass. Do you have any pictures of those? Yeah. Oh, dude. I'm coming over to your studio. I got to see those. We've got a lot of old video, too, that maybe we could pull out and share. These are all storyboards. Oh, we have to. I got to say, these are all storyboards. Now, I firmly believe that if anyone saw the poster for It Follows, there was the poster of It Follows where it's the side shot of the car, right? That's the shot from the blob. It's right there. You're right. Erica Laniak, who, Playboy Playmate, great, great role, great moment here. And I think Not a scene that would probably make it past script phase now. Wait, wait, wait, wait. He is punished. It's the block. He's punished. Yeah. This guy's a bad guy. He's about to get his just desserts. Yet. He's still charming to the end. I don't know what it is. There's something about him. Because the actor is charming. Yeah, and he's great. It was tough to find somebody who had this kind of level of likability while he does something absolutely nasty. And he has a Fred name tag, so he can't go on. I always wondered about that shirt. Because who did the Joe Poro? I'll admit that... All the effects, this is not my... The one that worked out the best. Yeah, same here. Her collapsing face, you mean? Yeah, the collapsing face. We had better plans. With the tendrils coming out and everything? Well, the tendrils were okay, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for, while other sequences were far better than I could have imagined. So I'm not a big fan of the exact collapsing face moment. The tentacles help. It doesn't collapse enough. But then the gravity gag works great with the blob going up the window afterwards. Oh, yeah. And the reverse gag with the tentacles has a lot of... aggression, you know, you think it's going to come out slippery. No, it's true. But the first beat didn't quite go the way I'd hoped. But this quickly turns into a cautionary tale for any misogynist out there. Yes. Who came up with the idea for this particular kill, though? Was it something that was like... Joe, Frank and I wrote the whole thing. I storyboarded all of it. So... It's not like a third party, you know. These are all inspired by things that were going on in high school. Yeah, but like you were just saying, like there's four to five different uses. By the way, you're right. The tentacles were very good right there. Yeah. Those were great. So now you're looking at a sideways car in a gravity gag. What do you mean by gravity gag? When the blob comes up over him a couple of shots ago. was a very good example of a gravity gag. We had the card sideways, blob stuff poured up. That is pure liquid blob, full scale, in a gravity gag. And it worked very well in that case. It didn't always work out that way. Were there other times that you used a gravity gag and it didn't work out? Like in the truck at the end or something? I can't tell you exactly what shot, but again, the guys are sitting right here, and one of the reasons I'm glad they both came, is I would turn around to Tony or would turn around to Mark and go, okay, that didn't work. What might work? We have another half an hour. Yeah. And then there's the great Art LaFleur. Art LaFleur, one of the best character actors out there. So great. Ace Ventura is amazing in that, but not as good as he is in The Blob. When you were directing Nightmare 3, was there anything that you learned from Nightmare 3 that you feel... you kind of successfully got to employ into this? A weird overconfidence that did not serve me well here, which there was always something, whether it's an in-camera illusion, which is actually a first choice in many cases, or whether it's having a good team on my visual effects, that there's a way to take these a shot at a time and create an illusion that can help dramatize the world. And... The weight of the blob and the fact that it was so awkward to move it anywhere near full scale. Yeah. We didn't fail. No. We didn't fail. I've still not seen other things like this, rarely in film, with some of the better moments in the visual effects. And this is Sharon Spellman, right? Yeah. And what I was going to say again, the sense of the classic nuclear family and the love between the family. The actors projected it very well. They really did. They did a great job. And Shawnee's got balls and intelligence, and she's beautiful. A wonderful leading lady for this piece. And that's why a thriller works so well, when you have something that's precious, that the characters validate, and now you're going to attack it. What's nice here is we've gone for, I don't know, five or six minutes where nothing threatening has been around. So the audience, oh, they're getting calm, and this is a good thing. The balance is good, the ups and downs. Horror films are the hardest things to make. Well, this was, honestly, I knew the thing with Paul would rock the character, and I had to have her earn the next step and get over her moment. So we needed the family moments, whether we liked it or not. And they played well. They played well. So that version of Blob, that's one of the kind of meat bags that are like... This is classic Blob bag stuff. That was the ring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice little details. And this is an optical that tilted to the... And that's a matte? I think it was a model. That's a matte painting. I don't think that's a model. It's not the most successful matte painting in the shop, by the way. But the tilt-up was tied in beautifully. Was that one of those old-school mattes where they're on glass? I believe so. I think it's just a painting. By the way, this is the famous lick where Kevin believably licks the cop face. I love it. And that's the thing. He's such a wild card. There are times in the movie that you think he could just leave. You're like, peace out. I'm on my triumph. I'm going to McQueen my ass out of here. He commits at a certain point, but we're still in that zone where you don't know whether he's a bad guy or a good guy. But that's the thing. It makes the film itself dangerous because you can't trust anyone in the film or the filmmakers. And look how cool DeMunn is in this sequence. He's the last guy you can trust in this movie. who's around, and then the phone booth scene happens. Yeah, well, there's that little tick-tick behind him that I get off at 11, and we're waiting for him to, and he's a victim of the more blobular thing, so it's great. I remember having a conversation with another fan of this film, and he said that this film feels more like an ensemble, that because you're not hanging your hat on any particular name, This doesn't have a marquee name, no offense to anybody, but it's true. That's my favorite thing to do. It doesn't have Steve McQueen character. It bounces around a lot. We made it actually scary by killing the Steve McQueen character off early. And while there's a risk to that, I know that's how you make things scary. I was sure it would be. It's the blob. It can be a little too silly. You have to be careful. One of the reasons I was bold about who gets killed when is if it's not scary, it's going to be a big joke. So we had to balance the humor. That's character-based, I think, naturalistic humor with real scares. I remember you said way back when, too, that you have a killer without a face. Yeah. So you have nothing to cut to. So how do you tell the story without a reaction from that? You know, there are universal things like disease that grows. There's something that's kept the concept of the blob alive for all these years and made the first one terrific. It is evil. And there is such a thing in nature, and they don't give a shit who you are. And you have to outwit them. How many days did you guys have to shoot this? Not a lot. Because I remember reading, wasn't this shot in January of 88, and it was released in August of 88? I couldn't tell you. It was January for sure. That's a pretty crazy turnaround. These guys are eating ice cubes to keep their breath from reading, and I couldn't backlight them. Oh, I remember this was a nightmare. We were trying every trick that's urban. They're really urban legends. I don't know if the ice cube in the mouth works. It does work. It totally works. We did do that here then. We tried that. Speaking of miniature, by the way, the street outside this set is all scaled of the town itself. There's no backdrops. There's little miniature storefronts that are one-quarter scale. What? You can see them better in the day scene, but now... Anyway, just an aside for people watching. that's insane like again I've seen this movie a million times and I feel like you can like especially now like you were saying before Chuck about like seeing a mat and you know maybe we were more forgiving back then than we are now with the technology that's there but how miniatures can still trick the eye and they're better for lighting a good miniature is amazing because it literally has depth even though it's smaller it's just scale and this was in a you know this was in a warehouse in Castaic You know, it's in California, but it's in this small town as far as the story's concerned. I remember when the first trailer came out of this, and I specifically remember shots of this scene, or like, you know, later on when the blob kind of unleashes itself, that were in the trailer but didn't make the actual film. You know, like, I think chairs are flying up and everything. It was like great little sting moments. The chair bit didn't work that well. It's one of the gags that It's a little more straightforward. But it happens here where you always try to find ways to track the blob without seeing the blob. Like how you use the grass in the previous scene. Yeah, similar. And so there is a chair gag you're about to see, I think, coming up. But it was only okay. The chairs just moved around a little. They weren't quite what I had in mind. But at that point, TriStar was already making trailers, so it's not like they were worried about anything that made the final cut? There was not a lot of... between me and anybody doing marketing. Yeah, the advertising department doesn't listen to filmmakers. They just get some juicy shots, cut them together. And what follows later, well, that's not up to them. Another fun anecdote that no one but my mom will enjoy. I made my mom... I agreed to go see Chorus Line, the Chorus Line, the play in Broadway around this time, right before the movie came out. Because if you remember, or they still do it in L.A., you know, they put... posters everywhere, right? Just 10, 20 posters all up on a construction site. I specifically went to the city so that I could go and tear down a blob poster. And this was the blob poster. This wasn't the video blob poster where it was the Donovan Leach character coming towards the screen. It was that one where it was the shadow. And that fucking scared me for weeks. And unfortunately, we weren't successful because they used really good glue. So I had like about a third of the poster, which I had to put up still. But that was a great poster, though. I love that poster. It was cool. Very cool because it gives you everything but nothing. That poster was cool. We actually finished this May 26th, and it came out August. Yeah. Wow. That turnaround is nuts. And you had two editors on the film, right? That's why I don't remember Post. They did an interview with me. They asked me on Post. It's funny. I barely remember Post. It's because we were still shooting blob bits, second and third unit. While you were back here, right? Yeah, while I was editing. It was crazy. Because you worked with Terry again from Nightmare 3, right? And then you had another addition. If you don't mind my asking, was the use of an additional editor just for expedience? Yes. We were shooting and editing and doing everything after... Yeah, it's a summer movie, so you didn't want to bring it out in October. Missed the market. It's okay. It's exciting. Dessert? Oh, Frank. That sandwich busted me. On the house. Last two pieces. Eat up or I check it in the garbage. Thanks. Trust me, from the reaction I still see in audiences to some of this stuff, this easily could have been... a bigger hit upon release, but I still consider it a hit because it's quite well known. By the way, one of the setups, my two favorite scares are the one you've already seen with the Paul character and this one. There is something so creepy and so universal. It comes from my own childhood, just being fascinated with some suicidal concept of that's a disposal and I can touch it. And then actually sucking an entire human body through said pipe. There's something about this sink that scares the hell out of everybody in every country. I've heard this overseas too. People love this sink. So we know the blob is somewhere in the waterworks. He didn't come out of the sewer on the street to get flagged. But it's such a great setup. And if anything, here's a character that we just introduced, what, 30 seconds ago or whatever? He did a good job, too. Craig did a fantastic job. I remember this is the gag that they showed on Roger Ebert. By the way, a great job from Tony, a great job from Mark, a well-conceived sequence. And the hairnet gives a great performance. Good suspense. This is a big deal to me. But the music just came in now when his hand went down the drain. And it's just... So Michael, give credit. Great cut there, too. Give credit to Michael Honig. First gag there. Another one. That's for real. I don't know how they did that. That's a balloon head. With real hands, right? On each side. This shot of all the limbs hanging together. Oh. I remember when Siskel and Ebert showed it, and that was one of the shots they showed. I'm like, oh, I'm in. They call that the spin and barf because it's a real guy's arm. By the way, the most ridiculous idea I've ever thought of is a pipe that swells like that. I don't know. It didn't quite work, but the kinetics of this worked very well. This is great. That's kind of a callback to the original blob where it was massive in scale. Then the tentacles were just that much better. The matte paintings, the fast blob when it's large scale like this, didn't look at that. This is one of those films that you wish that we had all the elements of it so that you could do a true fix-up because... Think about those matte shots we just saw where you could feel the scratches and the grain because of the times. Optical printers are a thing of the past now. No one's doing those kind of effects. It's all digital. But there's a quality to it, though, that makes it feel scary. I see it as heroic. I mean, the fact that we pulled this off, really, I see it as heroic from every department. I always wondered, was this a set? Yes. So was this on a soundstage? Yeah. So it was a warehouse, but it was all right. So watch this now, folks. This is just so interesting. I have to narrate this a little bit. So full scale set. Right. But when Jeffrey DeMunn and one of Tony's better moments with the makeup prop effects comes floating up, it's well set up in that you want these two to get together, but not this way. We anticipated. She's trying to call the guy to save her. And he ends up as blob bait on her phone booth. Then Eric Allard. Did this crazy thing. I didn't think it would work. It was a phone booth about three feet tall with an articulated doll in it of Candy Clark. It looked bad, but given that we were shooting it from direct overhead, we actually shot blob stuff from air mortars on three or four sides of that. We had two takes. That's where it was projected? This is classic because it's inside a... Plexi, it's holding it together and just sliding it down. It looks like meat. It looks like fat, you know, and that's what makes it scary. This is where the concept did work of the blob prom dresses. Yeah. Now, the way this thing floats up, there's a lot of takes and a lot of luck and a wonderful design by Tony. Great claustrophobic setup. We switched to a water tank for that shot. This one? When the head goes through. Yeah. And it's... Me standing in water up to my waist with a head and shoulders puppet in front of me. I didn't have mechanics. There it is. Oh, that's so great. Yeah, because it's one of the few moments that feels like you're underwater. Look at that face, Tony. Fantastic job. Blue lives matter. This is ferocious. Mark did a great job. Now, watch this from above. It is a scaled out. We also did it full size, though. We did a full size Candy Clark, too. Really? Yeah. But that impact was the doll with air mortars. I remember that so specific. And it was 120 frames. It looked substantial because it was so small. Now that I've talked about a doll so much, it's starting to look like a doll. But it works in the cut of the film. Yeah, but if you didn't know, it's so ferocious and so violent. And knowing the power of the blob at that moment, you go, flesh is nothing to this thing. It's going to tear you apart. For a film shot this long ago, I've got to say, certain sequences, and that's one of them, I don't know how we'd do it much better. Franny! Oh, killed the blueberry jam. Because the only thing that works is story. You can have CGI monsters coming out of everyone's eardrums. It doesn't mean a thing if you don't care about the people. And we saw this restaurant with kids in the daylight, and now it's dark, and now it's even darker. And... The threat is rising even though it isn't explicit. It's more implicit that you are now with these guys all on their own. So story is who's in it and what's it about. I completely believe this character with Dallas is really weird. And the fact that he gets an arc in the film. For all intents and purposes, he's pretty peripheral in the beginning of the film. He's just part of the town. And the fact that he becomes the major threat in the cold clothes is just such a great way to bring it all in. I would say ironic threat. That's not a bad blob right there. That's a miniature. And that's a mat, right? It's a composite of something. Yeah, it's a composite that worked. So this is a miniature street with him? That's a foreground miniature. Did you have any challenges lighting the blob? You were saying before the fact that it's pink. and you know it doesn't have a face like how are you going to key hair you know well it was also it was kind of like a tumor that undulated you know so you could make it the pink was actually blood you know I could reconcile that what happened when it got on the ground at night I couldn't get light behind it so the organic shape of it was just all surface and then it became a pink blob against the dark pavement and I was trying to keep it more alive and threatening but It comes and goes. If I was going to do another blob, I would try to still feature physical effects but enhance it with CGI and do things like a lot of Tony's translucent skeletons and things inside it all the time rolling around, marking with the movement that there was reminding us that they're human beings and what's left of them in there. Couldn't do that at the time. Anyone who watches this movie now who's never seen it I think you're going to feel more of a threat knowing that it's on set, it's being lit, it's with the actors as opposed to seeing so many movies where it's in effects. Physical effects are usually a little bit scarier. I've seen wonderful CGI designs that were meant to be horror films, but you end up saying, what's a wonderful CGI creature there? It's just gorgeous. There's something about adding the physical effect that just makes it creepy. Now, that was what rock salt that was dyed purple, right? Those were, I think those were just plastic. Yeah, crystal. Yeah. Was it real crystal, though? Was it plastic crystals? They were cast resin. That's what I looked, yeah. And we added a twinkle. I think that's the only CGI in the film. That is actually a CGI twinkle. I was desperate to see if CGI would work. It wasn't ready. That's all you got. That's all I got. So I did have a CGI team, and they did the twinkle on Frozen Blob. here and at the very end of the movie. Oh, right, when it's the... When he holds up the hand. That's it. That's all they could do. It's so funny to see a Volkswagen like that's what someone would drive around 32 years ago. Well, it was meant to be her old car. No, I mean, that's the first car I ever had. It's the first car I ever had, too. Yeah. And this is back in Griffith Park, and we went to every corner. You shot out Griffith Park. Oh, yeah. The Back to the Future... To the tunnel and everything, that same road. Everyone goes there. Since probably silent films, Griffith Park has been the cheap go-to location. If you ever want to see a little bit of all the movies you've ever seen, visit Griffith Park. It's a museum of previous shoots. It kind of is. I did the big tribal camp in Scorpion King. In Griffith Park? The same place we shot Dreamscape, Bronson Canyon. That was a two. Oh, my gosh. Everyone shoots a Bronson Canyon. Everyone shoots it. You can see. It's just a gravel pit. It's mandatory. So it's up to guys like Mark and myself and Tony to make it look like something special each time. But we know it's been shot a million times, so we go in wondering, what am I going to do tonight to make it look special? My thing with the Hollywood effects guys who really had a chip on their shoulder. They had these giant smoke machines. I was just going to ask about this, because smoke is practically a character in the night scenes. Yeah, but they just did it all their own way with these giant machines. And I said, why don't you use a smoke tube, which is what we used in Canada. We still use it, which is like a 12-inch tube. Yeah, we actually smoked up a huge area to do this. And then you shot. Oh, oh, oh, you mean atmosphere smoke. That's a real helicopter. That's a real helicopter.

Joe Seneca. Speaking of all these guys in white at night, I'm thinking, this is difficult. Lighting these suits was a big deal, remember this? Here's a Trivial Pursuit question. What is the light source in their helmets? What it is is something called a chimsel light, central high-mounted light that goes in the back of a car. Like in the trunk? No, on the back deck that would The brake light that's now above the truck. Oh, okay. In the 80s, that was like a new thing. So these guys are all carrying utility belts, which are actually batteries. They're carrying their own batteries for the movies. And they're lighting their own faces, because it's a giant plastic plexi screen. Do you guys know that these costumes are still being used today at Universal? Yeah. I was there last year shooting a show, and when you walk through that costume department in Universal, it's just like walking through time. There's a whole department... with these costumes. Do they acknowledge the blob or no? I asked the lady, I'm like, do you know these are from the blob? She's like, actually, they've been from this movie, that movie, this movie. They've been in so many movies. This is like the first time. Joseph Poro did this. He should be getting residuals for about 100 movies. This was, again, a team effort. Because one of the big problems was, done wrong, they're constantly would foam up, smoke up there, mist up the inside. So Joe had to work out the science with us and mark the lighting. You can see that. The vents around his chin, they were like speaking cords or something. They were actually letting air in because they would steam up right away. They also couldn't see because of the light on the plastic right in front of their face. So it was a challenge. Bill Moseley was saying that too. He was like, I don't know what the hell is going on in this movie. But the advantage for me, usually they have a round or circular dome that means any light anywhere is in the shot. So this had two flat sides and a flat front. Which allowed you to avoid any reflections. Yeah, I could pick the sweet spot. And this was our own movie that Chuck got to direct to be a movie inside a movie. And be the star. That was kind of fun. Well, those were the good old days. And having done all these slasher films in Toronto, I was like... Real kissing. Well, I would hope so. It wasn't VFX kissing? What a great reveal. That was a real projection. That was a cool reveal. And the only thing that kind of lets it go is just that little bit of grain in the scratch that makes you go, oh, okay, I get it. These kids were terrific. They really got into it. Being in a movie theater, watching this scene, and watching everybody, when this happened, turn around and look into the... Oh, really? That's great. That was one of the moments... When I saw this movie the first time and I went, wait a second, so a director can make everyone collectively be affected like that? Where they're checking over their shoulders? Yeah, I want to be a movie director. Because that was a combination of the directing and the cinematography and the editing and getting everybody into the moment so much that they're now, it's almost like a meta moment for them because they're like, wait, oh shit, the blog could be here. There's another wonderful character. Oh, man.

When you were putting the movie together with Frank, a scene like this, the movie theater scene, which is iconic from the original McQueen film, was that one of the things for you? It's like, all right, we have to hit this moment, this moment, this moment. I knew we had to do the movie theater scene. There was actually very little else in the original that I felt like I had to do. That's what everyone remembers. I believe there's two things. There must have been a pretty good hand grab the first hand grab, because I remember that from the McQueen play. Yeah, there was something, probably a good reverse gag they did as well. Then this, parts of this sequence and the kind of epic vibe of a monster in a movie theater, there's something really classic about that. I knew I had to get that, and I think we pulled it off, but it's, the individual pieces, I love the melted people Tony did, but there's some stop motion in here that wasn't the right technique. That's why I was trying to get CGI to the point where we could do some. But just because I knew the nature of stop motion is very jittery and not, it's more, stop motion is great for insects, living statues, and robots. That's it. By the way, this gentleman became a very famous suit performer himself. Like I was saying before, It's so easy. Oh, what a great reveal with the yo-yo. There's the teaser there, yeah. So good. The wall of blob. And was that all live? Yeah. That's full scale. Yeah, it's full scale. Hey, Chuck Russell, everybody. I forgot. Holy shit, I forgot. You were back in high school for that one shot. Yeah. And here's a great example of... having practical lights in the scene, but also creating a great sense of atmosphere with all the shafts and using the trees and everything. Here's Joe Seneca doing the, trust me, I'm Morgan Freeman vibe. And it turns out, you shouldn't have trusted him. But I'm a doctor and I have a white suit. What could go wrong? When in, because obviously this twist, this biohazard twist. It was such a product of the 80s at the time, too, when everyone was afraid of nuclear holocaust and Chernobyl and toxic waste. This was more my distrust of authority. But the fact that the blob was not an alien anymore. It was created by the government. Yeah, that's correct. That twist, again, being in the theater and feeling everyone go, oh, shit. It's a conspiracy. It's worse than I thought. When did that come up in the writing process? That was the very beginning for me. That was something I knew I wanted to go for. It wasn't like, I'm going to do the blob. Were you ever worried that it was like, wait a second, I'm not delivering an alien movie, I'm delivering a government is bad movie. Yeah, a conspiracy movie. A parallax view with a big blob. For me, it was a set of ideas that started with a Kevin Dillon type character ending up being the lead instead of Steve McQueen. And the town being taken over by authority in this fashion, his mistrust of authority, this is how it pays off with that twist. So to me, I never actually doubted it. And I didn't think the audience would be upset that it wasn't an alien because it was always unclear exactly. It made it cooler. It made it scarier. Because how many alien movies have we seen and then how many biological warfare movies have we seen that have been turned into a horror sci-fi movie? If I was scared of... anything regarding authority. It was the weird science that we still do even today with chemtrails. No, we're going to put aluminum oxide in the air because it's going to help global warming. Things like this that are still very blobby to me. But the Dylan character was rebel without a blob. That's right. Smarter marketing would have taken that and ran with it. Screw the rules. I'm jumping out of here. I'm going to save the day. We always thought of Kevin as Chuck. He leaves the girl. Oh, that's true. There you go. I always thought Chuck Russell was Kevin, but Paul dressed like Chuck. Well, that's true to some extent. One guy has the fashion sense and one guy has the attitude, and they're two halves of Chuck Russell. Maybe. I don't think you would have been able to get away with that moment where Kevin just goes, fuck you, I'm out. And not lose the audience because of Shawnee, though. It's right. She's immediately strong. Shawnee is ultimately the Steve McQueen, if there is one. It's funny, we passed it a while ago, but the moment for me that made me fall in love with her, or at least know that you're going to take her into Ripley'sville, is the moment she puts the pill on the nightstand. Just by her having the fortitude to do that moment and not be... Exactly. I'm not going to go to sleep. I'm taking control of my life. That's the moment that actually, it helps Kevin's character too because you're like, ah, you know what? The rogue will be back. At least we can hang our hat on this character, Shawnee. There's hope. She did such a terrific job. So this location, this was part of town. This was in Louisiana. This was the town hall in Abbeville. The real place. And just what you don't see is all the Spanish moss and the... You know, the Mississippi trees. We're saying this is New England in a ski town, because that's what the snowblower and ice maker thing is all, and the rink. So with a shot like this in the theater, that was obviously projected, because to have the move and the rack focus would have been a nightmare if this was a plate, right? Oh, man. Great miniature, too. That was a good miniature. There's the ultimate blob for a camera guy. To burn something in the gate. Now, there's a cameo coming up. Yes, a very important cameo. That, again, was a huge effect shot in Fango, which was the unfortunate girl who gets pulled off of the popcorn-infested carpet. Oh, yeah, yeah. Such an amazing gag. And I didn't know until today. A good Tony moment. It was a great Tony moment because you ultimately married her. Yeah, that was my fiancée, and she still married me after all this. When you unstuck her from the floor, that was a romantic moment there. Now, the use of strobe is a bit of an expressionistic touch. Where did that come from? Well, because this was weak work. It needed a strobe. It needed a strobe. The strobe gave it energy and also shadows. It came and went, you know. So it literally brings it... Oh, there it is. Oh, yes. Tony. How dare you, sir. Or unless that was an expression of love, then bravo, sir. Yes, thank you. Or the original Bridezilla, one of the two. And that's the day we had the police visit set because they thought we had a real dead body. They caught Tony bringing this body out of his car and thought someone called the cops on him. So I was gluing her face into the carpeting and the police officer walked up and I had to explain what I was doing and what I was... Boy, you got a half girl in your trunk. I'm like, I didn't write it, he wrote it. Now, Jamison Newlander's coming up, who was in Lost Boys. And I remember watching this after seeing Lost Boys going... oh, that guy's not going to fare well. If we know anything from horror movies, he's not going to work out the usher. And he's great. And he's in a small part. He's Eddie's brother, right? And it's like such a small moment between them, but you totally believe that they're brothers at that moment. I love that. Now, this is set, right? Oh, yeah. This is what I love, though, in horror films. Oh, it must be safe in the attic or in the sewer. Let's go there. Don't climb through a window. No, no, we'll go in the sewer. That'll be fine. What could go wrong? Yes. So implied and explicit threat. This was my, as a cameraman, wondering, where does the light come from inside a sewer? I was going to say, this next sequence, our most ambitious set, our most ambitious lighting job. Yeah. That's actually pretty cool. Oh, it was all great. And the catacombs are more interesting. The big kind of cesspit, whatever this is, a giant pool. Also, kudos to whoever in the sound design decided to put nunchuck sounds for the tendrils coming down. That's totally nunchuck sounds. I love that. We had fun with this. Oh, Craig Stern did an amazing job with all those. Yeah. Sluices and whatever. It was a big complicated set in a warehouse by Magic Mountain, California. And it held four feet of water. And we all lost weight. If you want to lose weight, shoot for about four days in about three or four feet of water wearing waders, and you'd sweat it off. It's amazing. You had waders. I had a wetsuit. I was in that with Bobby Porter. Was the water temperature controlled? No. The first person to say it, too. Absolutely not. But it also wasn't filtered, so it started growing into a very nice shot. I always like that shot. This is my fave. When it comes out of the... Yeah, because the way that it's designed, we're going, yeah, of course, it's the meteorite. And Jesus Christ. Yeah. This was a close encounter. Goddamn Reagan. Yeah. And the sound is so great. How long did you have for the sound design, knowing that, like, obviously you guys didn't have a... I remember having fun with the sound design, but I was in kind of a crazy state of mind at that point. It was like, tick-tock, we got to get this movie out. But like what Mark was saying before, the sound design on the blob itself, it's an integral part of the character. Absolutely. Doing sound design for this and the mask were the two most challenging. But when you got it right, the whole thing jumps off the screen. You don't even have to debate. Suddenly the right sound is there. You're inventive and it pops. It's remarkable. That's what you think. It's not going to work. He has such a good, ambitious attitude. Seneca gave it a lot of warmth. I loved it. He did. And we were in basically one acre worth of trees and meadows and so on. So we just kept shooting it. Shoot it at Griffith Park and shoot it here. And right six feet and put a tree in front of the lens. But this tent, this was all from a field that E.T. had. All the plastic, yeah. Sheeting, yeah, yeah. It was a big government conspiracy. Uh-oh. So about three years ago, I got to direct a music video for my favorite band, Faith No More. There's a point to this, I trust me. And we cast all these older actors to play the band, because the band was in Brazil, and they're like, you can do a video for us, we'd love it, but you can't, you cast us. I'm like, all right. So we came up with this idea where it's a bunch of old guys in an old age home, as them, rocking out to their new song. So we kind of randomly cast these elderly actors, these golden age actors, and one of the actors shows up, and I'm like, I know that face. I know that face. It was the... I'm trying to remember his name now, but it was the guy that was just in the scene with Joe Seneca with the longer face. It was him, and he was playing the bass player. I'm like, wait, what? That's cool. They're expendable. God damn. Now that... is one of the best trailer moments that wasn't used in the trailer. Like, that line is so great. What I love is that everyone's running around with a white suit and a rebreather, and all the civilians don't have anything. But that's the way it would go down. That's why I love the box. We'll save ourselves, and you're just a taxpayer. That's the way, believe me, that's happened somewhere in this America Center. But every night I would learn. This was 17 weeks of nights. I'd learn everything. The next day we'd see dailies and then drive through rush hour traffic. You know, Kevin was pretty damn good with the bike. That's Kevin right there. It seemed like there was a lot of shots where that's not a stunt guy. You know, he's really rocking that triangle. Gary Heinze was our coordinator. Did an awesome job. And he's been for years the best bike guy in the business. And we just spent time in India with him training one of the Indian stars to ride a bike. Oh, he worked on it too. Wow. He came along too. It was not... anything like Kevin. He already knew it or he picked it up. He really looked convincing. He knew what he was doing in a lot of this. And we had a good double for death-defying stuff. Yeah, yeah, of course. All right, here's a stunt. This is a toe gag. No CGI, not even really regular visual effects. We just did this. This was a trifecta. Every element you see in the shot was in the shot. The bike, the truck, and the helicopter. The bike, the truck, and the helicopter. And gunshots. Just a couple different camera angles, shit flying around. It was terrifying. How many cameras did you have on it? Three or four, I think. Not so many. And let me tell you, when he landed, the double that did the landing, both tires blew out with the motorcycle. The kid was a circus-like performer, a young, strong guy, and he held the bike up with his upper body strength and his fucking feet. He was sliding along on his feet. He had no tires because they both exploded. The story point was that it was not supposed to wipe out. He was supposed to land. And what actually I couldn't use in the cut was even cooler than the stunt. It's like, holy shit, the tires blew out. I'm the kid from Toronto looking at this, and this is the Franklin Canyon Reservoir above Beverly Hills. And at night, it's this creepy place. I love having these slices of real estate turn into creepy places, and then Aaron Spelling's house is a quarter of a mile away. Well, it's some wonderful lighting and some great work with the art department, too. This gag worked out pretty well. I like the dynamics of this gag where our heroes end up below and the bad guys actually roll a truck over the manhole to keep them down there with the blob. We don't want to contaminate everything. However, you are expendable. Do you guys remember what was the most challenging part for each of you in making this film? Was there a particular... technical challenge or was there a thematic challenge possibly with the characters like balancing heroes? There were traditional challenges getting performances at 3 a.m. when everyone's freezing. What was unique about the film was the blob itself. I at least knew there was a risk every day of not getting the day, which you can't have on this. This was not a big budget film. And safety, just safety, water work, people slipping. I'm very, very safety conscious. When I was a kid, I was running coffee for Stunts Unlimited and learned that craft. So, water, late nights. The elements. Yeah. People can get hurt. So, from my point of view, it was Blob and the scale of some of these things. Like, the sets you're looking at now were pretty large-scale sets to light. Yeah. Come on. Let's hurry out of here.

Watch out for the rat. What rat?

Poor Eddie. Which, again, was a gag that was spoiled in Fango, because it was that shot coming up. Let me just tell you, the stuntman who did this was a famous, very heroic, very athletic little person. Bobby Porter. Bobby Porter. He was the go-to guy. Unbelievable. He did everything. I think he did Annie climbing the bridge in the Annie movie. Planet of the Apes? The Sun? Right there. He was a fantastic stuntman. And... He was heads up all the time. That was a big blob suit that he was wearing, and he pulled him back. Oh, was Billy in the suit? Yeah. Bobby, Bobby. I would never do this to a kid. Having looked at it so many times in Fango, it looked like the kid. I totally believe it. That's Tony's work and Bobby's work and all of our work together. The stunt team had him on a ratchet, and they actually pulled him under. Because you can see him yank back like that. It's actually a very daring gag. It's within stunt crafts. Now, how did you engineer this blobular thing? Was this miniature with a hand? That's a big miniature puppet. That's Mark Satrakian and his team doing a miniature animatronic that was dressed with a blob quilt. It's not really a hand. It might have been, but it was a... You mean the blob anus? It's a little anus-y. It was actually a mechanical rig on a piston that came up and had flower petals that froze. And then they dressed that with the blob coat. By the way, that's one of those nice, basic illusions where he climbs out of his set and runs down a street that worked really well. Yeah. By the way, this is a good Nightmare on Elm Street-ish moment. She really looks like she's hiding. It was tough for her to get up that time, for real. A lot of the blob juice was made out of Methicel. Oh, yeah. Unbelievably slippery. So it was easy for anyone to fall. Methicel is a thickening ingredient for milkshakes. Used in milkshakes. At the time, still used in some food. It's apparently digestible. And it's just wood pulp. I mean, what's wrong with liquefied wood pulp? So did you catch anybody eating blob on set at all? I swear to God, everybody tasted it to see what it was. Come on, you have to taste the blob once.

We built a dummy of Shawnee, a lightweight dummy that's strapped to the back of them. You can kind of make it out. Oh, wow. She's kind of in a squinted position, holding it with her arms around his waist. Yeah, it's all story at that point. Nobody's looking at it. Right, exactly. They're carried along by them. Here comes the oh, my God again. We've got to do something. I like that guy's reading. It really is good. I think we better go now. Well, it was Bill Moseley, right? Yeah. Yeah, he's amazing. This is one of his earlier roles, and we had him on the podcast, and he just loved being on this film. He's wonderful. Because this was after he was Chop Top in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. This is, again, all storyboards, gang. Yeah. All storyboards. And a good team to get them one shot at a time. It worked out well, in my opinion. That's why you've got to move fast every night, because these films are made with Shots, not with elegant, long, three-minute steadicam. You're not covering it. You're getting these guys. You're shooting the boards. Building a brick wall. It'll fall down if you don't have all the pieces. Was there ever a board that felt unachievable? There were boards that became unachievable. So, yeah. I'm sure everyone felt unachievable at one point in the day. No, no, no. I was, again, probably overconfident, but I know when to quit. You know, when something's... clearly not testing, or when we're on the set and it's just not going to happen, that's when you get to have the fun of some quick inspiration that works out well, too. Was there any gag in particular that just didn't work out? Some of the large-scale blobs I'm still uncomfortable with, when I say they didn't work out, they got the story told. But there's 25% of these big men, they're supposed to be full-scale blob. still make me uncomfortable, they don't really work. But do you think, I was saying this before, do you think that's now because in the evolution of cinema and we've gotten the cleanest mats you could possibly get thanks to digital? Well, you know, the truth is, as it gets transferred through these different media, I remember the first time I saw the first Jurassic Park was absolutely blown away in the theater. The first time I saw it in whatever that format was, was it beyond VHS already? No, it was VHS for the most part. Laserdisc, maybe. They tend to over-brighten things as they go through these transfers. All of a sudden, the CGI looks bad. So these mats probably weren't that bad originally. But as the fidelity and the definition got better. Great stunt, by the way. These stunts helped the hell out of all this. And the actors and even the extras, which were local people, really doing a good job. We whipped them into a frenzy when we needed to, and it worked. That helps... some of the large-scale blob shots that I'm not loving. The thing is, the audience, like Joe, when he saw it, he saw it once, and we would inspect these over and over again. Oh, yeah, at this point, by the time August 5th rolled around, you guys were probably sick of this movie. So we could see all the flaws, and maybe I'll... No, look, I still do, so I shouldn't be putting it on this... But kids who saw it were just jazzed. Watch Kevin in this scene. He did a very good job in this scene. Yeah. Still, he's angry enough that the performance worked. I like this sequence. I like moments in films where you really don't know where it's going to go. You know something's going to happen. You don't know who's going to make it out of this showdown. When you're watching Reservoir Dogs, you're like, I don't know who's going to make it. Also, the blob is still up there. Oh yeah, by the way, there's a blob. You guys can stand and talk all they want. What's going to come out of the sewer? But this is the smart thing about a movie like this where, yeah, you have the blob. It's a formidable threat. But the most important thing are these characters. I would love to do one of those treatments where you go back and you do CGI enhancements to some of these shots. Because I still love this movie. It's dated. It's from the 80s. But what Mark did still stands up in the cinematography. What Tony did with the makeup effects is still world class. And the cast all did a terrific job. Robert Axelrod, that's who was in my Faith No More video. Do you remember him? He was one of the scientists. There's the blob. We forgot about it. Oh, yeah, that's right. Now he's coming back behind everybody. When you have a scene like this, though, like in terms of coverage, you know. Yeah, it's tricky. There's a trick. Eyelines. There's a lot of axes. There's a lot of eyelines. Look at that reverse gag. Simple reverse gag. Yeah. Was the light, was the sun coming up in a couple of the shots? Because it started to look like... And Kevin's closer. Watch this one. This one's a great, unexpected cool effect. Yeah. Was that a balloon? Yeah. That looked amazing because he played it. It's so interesting. And guess what? They're really fucking scared. You get something like that in your face, it's not comfortable. You can't breathe. I mean, you literally can't breathe. It's the same waterboarding vibe. Yeah. It wasn't a problem making the actors seem a little scared. There we go. At last. Tony, what was the biggest challenge for you? Honestly, the materials were so unwieldy, and people's safety was always an issue. You know, whether it was somebody being engulfed in it. I mean, Donovan, to be honest, in that blob rig, we shot it last. It must have been terrifying. We knew what we were doing. Yeah, yeah. Just that there were safeties everywhere, but it didn't make it any... We're lucky the actors were good sports. It's putting them in uncomfortable situations. But you're doing something beyond what they're... They're in their comfort zone and it legitimately... They sign up for something and it's like, oh, and then we're going to shove a bunch of methicill up your nose and do all this stuff. I don't remember that in my contract. And we had people that were really up for experimenting with us to figure it out and they really made it part of a collaborative process. So it was really easy... to communicate with them and lean on each other and be very upfront about, are you comfortable with this or not? And we had puppets of Donovan as well, so we could mix and match or lean on one of those versus doing it actually with him. So we had a lot of options to play with and I think that's what enhances the scene in general. And you would not have had Shawnee's very raw moment there too. with her performance, seeing, oh, shit, that's my friend under that thing. This was pre-Jurassic Park, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. With the shaking water glass, and so this is the telltale, oh, my God, with the giant vibrations. I heard a rumor that Spielberg had a copy of the blob on set when he was coming up with the glass scene for Jurassic Park, just saying. He did. Now, wait, one of my favorite afterthought moments is in this shot coming up, you see in the background the grenades go off. I love that. It's coming up here. There it is. I love it. It's like a wet fart in the background. It's just like, oh, yeah, remember those grenades that almost went off? Yeah, fuck those guys. It's still in my stomach. This is looking old school. This is great. That's very Ray Harryhausen. But it works. Very Ray Harryhausen. It's a twofer because you get the slap and then the peel back where it's like flat man comes up. Gum on the shoe. And what about you, Mark? What do you think was your biggest challenge on this one? Well, all this stuff was really good, nuts and bolts stuff. My biggest challenge was making all that sewer stuff underground basically look like it was lit from a lonely little sewer. From somewhere, yeah. Two miles away, ricocheting off water and so on. So it's like, where does the music come from when people kiss? You know, it's a movie. There's a certain license that you can take. Yeah, and audiences, well, I don't want it to be totally dark. It's not radio. The other thing was lighting these streets to have enough depth to comp in the element that was yet to be there. Because you could shoot it with very little light and the background would be out of focus and the comp on top of it would have been in focus, in which case it wouldn't have worked. Look at Shani go up with fire. It wasn't easy on set. No, Penny is fearless at this point. She's taken the reins and she's truly the hero of the film. To the point where Flag almost becomes the sidekick. Yeah, well, she's Tarzan at this point, leaping up on tanks and going crazy. It was a little progressive, but I've always loved strong female leads. And now it's rote, you know? Yeah, it's become a subgenre unto itself at this point. It's a marketing tool. It's become the genre. When you guys were, did you test this film? Did you have time to test the film? I don't recall testing it. I would have loved to have seen it. I was going to ask that. Do you think that anything would have changed? I don't know. I've seen it with the crowd since on the big screen, and it's really a lot of fun. The good thing about the blob is it's the blob, so people kind of give it its sins. It's a popcorn movie, too. It's meant to be fun. It's a roller coaster. The fact there's a little better performances with these kind of characters is something I'm very happy with and proud of. Goodbye! Stay here. I mean, look at this. This is production value. It isn't cheap stuff, even if it's just a B+. And Tony never let us down. This thing never went away. It's always activated. That was some of the better little blob-ations. This is my favorite. Oh, yeah. The old folded... Something that could happen that you don't expect. The falafel. It's like, you leave going, I wonder if that's possible. I guess it is. His feet are still kicking. I also think that that was a great organic way of showing off the burn by having him have that little, like, internal moment of, like, it's all going to hell. And then, by the way, look at that. I know. It's a little overplayed, but hey. This is great. What do you think of that miniature? That one was great. You can see the sun coming up there in the sky. A little blue. And weirdly, some of that looks organic, too. This angry... This was all... It's a mixture of miniatures and live action. And it works. Miniatures and live action. I think this is some of Michael Honing's best work in the movie. Like at this point, you know, that percussion, like that hits for when the truck comes out. It strengthens Shawnee's part too. He did a great job, our composer. No shortage of cliffhangers at this scene. Everyone's on the edge of their seat. This is really a miniature. This one kind of feels good. This is the water tank that never happened. We had the... the budget of Jurassic Park's lunch budget. Just so people know, you know, we really stretched our abilities. Speaking of stretching, when the body gets pulled, I remember the groan the audience makes because, you know, you set the rules up that everything's going to kind of melt a little bit. And, oh, yeah! And this... That was Noble Craig, right? Right, yeah. Who was a multiple amputee, right? Right. And it's one of those... Awesome war vet. Amazing guy. Just one of those sleight of hand things that you go, how did they do that? And you go, oh, well, of course. And it makes sense. And having a real person in the moment, you go, yeah, kill me. Oh, it's great. And you don't dwell on it. You just, you move past it. Yeah. Another one of these breaking through the... Yeah, that was originally the water tank with all the bodies floating by. Oh, wow. By his windshield. Yeah, when it's upside down. And I think it was such a nice touch to have that wonderful, like, I'm taking the camera, I'm going to bring it down low to show you her in all her Tarzanian glory and having the spark in the background. Oh, yeah, we just went to town. It just works. Because now you know where everything is in the town, and now it's almost dead black, so we wanted to keep... keep splicing it up instead of just making it dark. And so the energy of the actors is, I tried to juice it up as much as I could with lighting. There's so many moving parts in this whole town square scene. Chuck, when you were putting this together, did you ever worry about like geography? Because there's a lot of moving parts going on here. Again, I really got to say, I rely on storyboards. When I first came to California, I did Crash Universal. Hitchcock was still working. went into Hitchcock's office, said, I'm here to see Mr. Hitchcock. Balls! And he was sitting. I could see him. He was working with a storyboard artist. And I just got this message, which he felt the film was almost over when he finished his storyboards and that the actors were a pain in the ass. I love actors. I come from theater. I have a different vibe. But stuff like this, I would be scared to death if I didn't have my boards. And if we go off of them, I know where I'm at. I know where I'm at. Yeah, that's geography. And honestly, it's one of Mark's strengths, too. So if I start to really get off, we're working together on where we're at with the angles and these things. But luckily, I mean, eyelines and people look at each other. It doesn't really matter where the city hall is as long as they're... You can break these rules once you have your masters. You don't really try to. But you shouldn't be scared. But then you also run the risk when you have that master, having been through this myself, you run the risk of just becoming coverage friendly instead of going like working dynamic. I was an assistant director briefly on it. I say briefly because it's the only time I was ever fired. I had to fire somebody on Bay City Blues, which was a brief baseball series. And the angles, getting the angles in that series. made the director's brain explode. Yeah. And someone had to get fired because he wasn't getting his days. So it was the... It all comes down to those eyelines, man. Those can drive a director crazy. To get the eyeline, is he going to look to the dugout? Is he going to look to the other cast members on third base and second base and to the gal in the stands? And he's pitching to the... It's like you literally start covering every possible eyeline in your screen. Yeah. Poker games and baseball games. Where was this scene shot? It was just up the road from the studio in Castaic in California. Oh, this was a California unit? Yeah. Again, wonderful background folks in all these. Nice work. Again, nice work by Tony. Subtle work. Yeah. But perfectly set up, though, with just that one shot where you go, oh, now I see where he kind of ended up. But did you guys have any plans or just anything in your head about a sequel? Sure. Not detailed, because I really... Never respected that, okay, we're doing a franchise and we're going to make three and this is number one. We're going to call it Blob One. It's up to the audience. You were in the studio going, I got a blob cinematic universe ready to go. Easily. Only three decades to wait, kids. Never grow up. So I wanted to make a hit film, but I wasn't sitting there sketching out the Game of Thrones arc for seven sequels. So the 12-year-old kid who had seen this movie and was so inspired by it. Look at this. Great work by Tony. This is actually the standards for prosthetic effects. It's something real. You can make creepy things from outer space, and okay. But if it looks real... And this shot is crazy. It's sort of classic, though. Fake hand. Fake hand. With a mechanism up through the hand, which you can see under the jar if you look for it. Yeah, between his fingers. So when you shot that plate, though, was that deliberately shot out of focus or was that defocused in post? Well, we wanted to make it feel like a foreground focus. So it was deliberately like, okay, we're going to make sure we're defocusing it on the camera. I don't know whether we did that in camera, out of focus, or did it in post, out of focus. In theory, it should have pulled sharp on him as the thing came up. Soft on him and sharp on the foreground. Then it would have sold. But you can see the grain in it. I remember a rumor that there was a disclaimer at the end of this movie. Do you remember this? And it got cut out? What? Supposedly, there was a disclaimer at the end of the titles that said, The blob contains a purely fictional account of a group of ruthless and corrupt military agents. These characters do not represent the United States government and would be erroneous and unfair to suggest they do. If it's true, and I don't think it is. Well, let's see. It's rolling right now. Oh, it's definitely not on there now. Oh, not there now. No, no, no, no. If it's true, it's the new executives who weren't that thrilled with the movie, apparently. And were a little scared. And probably thought it was... Listen, it was boldly perhaps a controversial-ish thing in the 80s. I don't know. Well, by... putting the blame on the government? Absolutely. But yeah, the vast majority of North American Armed Forces personnel have demonstrated the utmost moral sense, regard for civilian welfare, and worthiness of the public trust. Wow. All of that. Listen, I've got a big military family. Actually, my dad was quite a World War II hero. So I'm all for the military and things like this. But I think question authority. You've got to question authority. Before they question you. If guys come in white suits to your city, you better... think about jumping out of the truck before you get rounded up. Well, guys, I just want to say thank you on behalf of all the fans of The Blob. Back in the past, even today, there will be a whole new generation of people who are going to discover this movie thanks to Scream Factory. Thank you guys at Scream Factory for putting this together. Thanks, Scream Factory. I'm so glad that all my phone calls and my emails and my personal mentions at conventions going, why aren't you putting The Blob out, have finally come to pass. But again, I would not be here today, for better or for worse, who knows, without the collective work that you guys put into this film. And knowing that you make movies, you do affect people around the world. Maybe you knew that when you were making The Blob, maybe you didn't. We're lucky we get to make movies. At all. Can I just say one thing? Please. I love the remixes I'm seeing on YouTube, especially whoever did something called, I think it's called Blob Meat Harvest. It's like amazing recuts. Hey, Tony Gardner. Tony Gardner. Okay. Keep doing those, do those recuts to music to our blob desk. I love them. I love them. I've seen a few. I'll send you a link to them. I want to see them now. I might have done a few myself. But guys, thank you so much for being part of this. Any final words before we depart the blob? My final word is in a reflection of what you started with, that we are all still 12-year-old kids watching scary movies, whether it's CG and then the year 2020, which it almost is. Yeah. the story and the imagery is what takes us away. So we're all gonna be 12 years old, no matter how far we are. And we always have to remind ourselves of that. That's what got us into movies. That 12-year-old person will always remember that. I'm so honored by your enthusiasm, I gotta say. Well, as I told you, when we worked together, every day I'd be like, it's all your fault. It's your fault I'm here right now. You inspired me, and we all need to remember that, whether it's a gig or it's a passion project. Something that we do gets seen around the world and can sometimes be still seen 31 years later. This is a good example of everybody, including the guys in this room, put their hearts into this. We didn't care it was called The Blob. We knew the original wasn't held up as a classic. I would never redo Citizen Kane. The point is The Blob had room to be redone. That's how I felt about it. Well, thank you guys. Thank you guys for being part of this today. And thank all of you for purchasing this wonderful Blu-ray. and hopefully you guys got inspired about, wait a second, are all the credits pink? I never noticed that before. Well, just this ultra stereo and technical. I was clearly in some kind of pink period. Well, it was, hey, it was the 80s. And here's TriStar. Anything went in the 80s. They were in the pink in those days. Thanks for doing this.