Release & marketing

in a film. But now, you know, in Approaching Phantasm, I really had this, it was like a quest, which was to offer some payoff, because I tell you, as a child, I loved horror films, and was frequently frustrated by, you'd see the ad or the trailer on TV, and they would be so, appear to be so suspenseful and terrifying, then you watch the film, and there was really nothing there.

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Don had approached me. We hadn't really talked about the tune. We talked about it this day, just before we shot it. And while they were setting the shot, I was sitting in the trailer with my guitar and Shirl Quinlan was in there, who was a lovely friend and a lovely lady. Did my makeup, her makeup every day. And I remember just playing the tune. I only had eight bars.

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Trying to sort of distort reality and having this kid having these nightmares, you know, waking up in the middle of a graveyard and really deluding the audience and thinking they're still in his bedroom. And you pull back and you find out Rory has great pains to try to match everything. There's a couple of crew members of them. And there's Rory's posture from the poster. That's right. Yeah, they used that for the original key art in the domestic release.

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Nick Pinkerton

Grilling him is Rhode Island-raised soul singer Claudia Lennear, a former Ikette who was on the road with Ike and Tina Turner. She was apparently the inspiration for both the Rolling Stones' 1971 Brown Sugar and David Bowie's 1973 The Lady Grinning Soul. And in the year after the release of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot appeared in a Playboy pictorial titled Brown Sugar, her lone solo album, Phew!,

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Nick Pinkerton

Apparently, Kennedy had a lot of difficulty getting through his go-fuck-a-duck line reading, breaking up repeatedly. Now Lightfoot gets ready to swagger back into the trailer where he and the boys are playing house, and he's going to tell the tale of the woman in the window. And when he does, the air will be thick with resentment and envy and sexual jealousy, particularly the jealousy of Redd,

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Robert Sommer

I think it was opened in 1930.

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And it's a movie that I think in some ways kind of gets better with age. I mean, I saw it the day it opened in a theater in New York. By the way, you see the wideness of the platform. The train is not as wide as it needs to be because this was, even though this is the IRT line and the trains on the IRT line were narrower, this was photographed, or a lot of the train stuff was done...

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Bruno Ganz is really great as well. All of that came together wonderfully. We had an excellent team. I always say that a director is barely needed if you have a good script and solid cast. That makes you largely redundant. But there were precise instructions for this, and it was stylized in detail as well. Naturally, everyone had to follow these instructions. I believe that strength plays a role, too. Someone has the strength and that person is the engine for all those wonderful energies. They would not have that without you. I think they have it, but it has to be channeled productively for the screen. Isabelle Adjani is a somewhat insecure person and Kinski a madman who is almost uncontrollable. You can see here that we made him taller. He is one or two inches taller. We gave him very high shoes so he would look more incorporeal. If you watch it on the big screen and you look closely, you can see that his shoes look weird. And here are the rats again. I always say about this topic that directing is like being a tour guide. Not for me, but I understand what you mean and what you want to say. It is the coordination of individual parts that have to come together at a specific point. And here the rats. Most of the time it was very cold. They just clung together to keep warm. I had to go over and separate them with my hands. On the day we shot this, I was bit 30 times or so. I was constantly being bit by rats. Everybody was kind of afraid of them. I remember we imported the rats to Holland and I had to go to the customs. They opened the trailer of the truck with 6,000 rats in it. The first customs officer passed out right way. For a whole hour we tried to bring him back to life.

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