HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED

WILLIAM LUSTIG

These days he’s known as the head honcho of Blue Underground, the BluRay and DVD label that caters to the needs of cult movie fans all over the world. But in the eighties, William Lustig was one of those film makers that guaranteed a good time when you saw his name on a video box, whether it be VIGILANTE, HIT LIST, RELENTLESS, MANIAC COP or his (in)famous classic psychological slasher movie MANIAC which still packs a punch after almost forty years. Roel Haanen talked to him in March 2019.

When you were working on THE SEVEN UPS and DEATH WISH, were you already in film school? Or how did you get those jobs?

Well, actually those jobs preceded me going to film school. I just kind of plunged into film production and took a class twice a week at NYU for two semesters. I never did the full four years. Film school never played a pivotal role in my beginning in the film business. I was working on movies from, I think, probably 1971. I was in high school and I was not a very studious person. I would run out and go to the movies a lot. What happened was: I was able to get a job as a production assistant working on various adult films. At that time, adult movies were made on 35 mm, with professional crews who also worked on other movies. The first movie I worked on was called HYPNOROTICA.

Was that a production of Peter Savage, the friend of your uncle Jake LaMotta?

Yes. Not only did he produce and direct it, he was also in it, playing a psychiatrist. Not in a sexual role. And it was through Pete that I met the people that gave me jobs on other movies.

So all those people worked on adult movies and other movies at the same time?

I’ll tell you something funny. The people that were working on HYPNOROTICA – they kind of worked together as a team – were all complaining about a movie they just finished shooting. They hadn’t gotten fully paid. The conditions were terrible. And it turned out that movie was SUPERFLY! The best of the black exploitation movies.

Better than the two films Larry Cohen did? BLACK CAESAR and HELL UP IN HARLEM?

Much better. What I liked about SUPERFLY is its authenticity. That was one of the things they complained about: that the people in the movie were real drug dealers, real criminals. Whereas Larry’s movie, BLACK CAESAR, was essentially an updated Warner Brothers movie. It was a fantasy. I don’t dislike it. But the music in SUPERFLY… There has never been a better soundtrack.

So when you started directing the adult movies, weren’t you afraid that you would never get out of that business again?

I just took any opportunity. Remember that when I did my first adult movie, THE VIOLATION OF CLAUDIA, which I produced and directed, I was only 21 years old. I didn’t sit there plotting a career. I just thought: Great! I get to make a movie! I tried to make it as commercial as possible. I wasn’t happy to do a second one, but I did the best job I could. That’s how I looked at life. When I did MANIAC at 24 I never thought I was making a movie that would turn out to be a classic. I didn’t know. I was just trying to make our money back and at the same time make the scariest movie that I could.

The scary scenes work extremely well in MANIAC. What were your examples at the time?

Bear in mind: I had one advantage over other film makers at the time and that was an insatiable appetite to watch  every film that was ever made. It was a great period in New York – in the late sixties, the seventies and starting to dwindle in the early eighties – where there were repertory theaters that played double features of classic movies. So, I really got to see a lot of movies. I would go seven days a week. I would skip school and see movies during the day. My influences at the time were ROSEMARY’S BABY, the Dario Argento movies, Lucio Fulci. All of these directors I was aware of before they became popular. THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE was a big influence. DEEP RED a big influence. I thought of Hitchcock quite a bit. If I were to dissect MANIAC with you I could tell you what was going through my mind in various scenes and certain shots.

Years ago I spoke to Caroline Munro and she told me you took her to see HALLOWEEN to show her what kind of movie you wanted to make.

Exactly. That was very popular at the time. I wanted her to know. Because I didn’t think her background in Hammer films was going to prepare her for what I was doing. I think I just told her to go see it. I don’t remember accompanying her, but it’s possible.

Caroline Munro also said there were a lot of scenes that were shot, deepening the relationship between her character and Joe Spinell’s, and that the footage subsequently got lost.

Uhm… Honestly, that’s not true. What you see is what we shot. Everything we shot with Caroline and Joe is in the movie. There were no scenes that were cut. We obviously trimmed some of them a little bit. A line or a couple of lines, but nothing of great consequence. The reason I can say that with certainty is that when we did the 4K of MANIAC, I had to scan every bit of negative of the original film. And the original was never cut. So I got to revisit the movie and I know exactly what we cut and what we didn’t.

Let’s talk about MANIAC and the charge of misogyny. A lot of feminists were up in arms against your film. I always felt that your movie, in contrast to some of the other slashers, didn’t sexualize the victims and the murders as much as other slashers did.

I think a lot of it had to do with the poster. I don’t believe that the people who protested even saw the movie. It had more to do with the perception of the movie than the movie itself.

Nowadays people seem to appreciate it more. When the remake came out, Variety called the original ‘the TAXI DRIVER of slasher movies’.

Did they? That’s great. That’s amazing.

When you made MANIAC there were other independent New York film makers like Abel Ferrara and James Glickenhaus. Did you know each other? Was there some kind of fraternity?

I can’t really say there was a fraternity. We all knew each other. We crossed paths and helped each other out sometimes. I did at one time share offices with Jim Glickenhaus.

He later co-produced MANIAC COP.

Yes, he financed it.

There’s an actor in THE VIOLATION OF CLAUDIA whom I recognized, but I didn’t know from where. I looked it up and turned out it was David Lipman who played the sadistic senator in Glickenhaus’ THE EXTERMINATOR.

Yes, well, in the end the New York film community is kind of small. It’s not shocking that he would be in my movie as well as in Jim’s.

No, but it surprised me that he did an adult role.

I’ve seen him on LAW & ORDER.

Yes, he played the judge.

Right. At the time there wasn’t a lot of negativity about doing adult movies. It wasn’t a stigma.

You cast Sharon Mitchell in a small role in MANIAC. She did some other non adult movies around that time. Did she have aspirations to get out of porn?

No. She was also in NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER. She just liked to pop up in mainstream movies.

How did you hook up with Tom Savini for MANIAC?

I had seen an advance screening of DAWN OF THE DEAD and I was completely blown away by Tom’s work. So when we were getting ready to do MANIAC I contacted DAWN’s producer Richard Rubinstein who put me in contact with Tom Savini. He was shooting FRIDAY THE 13TH at the time in New Jersey. So, Andy Garroni, Joe Spinell and myself arranged to meet Tom on the set of FRIDAY THE 13TH and asked him if he would do our movie. His one request that was we would provide him with an apartment as soon as he finished FRIDAY THE 13TH. He had a relationship in Pittsburgh that had just broken up and he didn’t want to go home.

That was it?

Well, not all of it. But it was the most essential.

What Tom Savini did with his effects around that time really left its mark on the genre.

What he did was amazing. But the most amazing to me was its simplicity. It wasn’t complicated. It was very simple. That was the key to his work.

So, what did he use?

Just stuff out of a box, you know? A lot of mortician’s wax. Tubes. Syringes. That simplicity makes those practical effects more interesting than the perfection of cgi.

Were you happy with the remake of MANIAC?

For the most I was. My only disappointment was the pov. They put that in the script, that they wanted to shoot it from the point of view of the killer. But once Elijah came aboard, I would have urged them to discourage that. I was disappointed I didn’t see enough of Elijah, frankly. He was very good, but you hardly ever see him. I think if they had put more of him in, it would have made the movie stronger. But that’s me. Just my opinion. But it was a very well made movie. And besides, directors all have an individual vision. If I would have agreed with everything they did, then what would be the point of doing the remake? The whole idea is to tell the story from a different perspective.

How did you come up with VIGILANTE?

I’ll tell you what it was. I always wanted to do a real gritty street movie, like THE FRENCH CONNECTION. The idea came about through a true story of a group of blue collar workers in southern New Jersey who had organized to fight crime in their neighborhood. That was the starting point.

It’s pretty brutal what you put the main character and his family through in VIGILANTE. What were the reactions at the time?

Some people were pretty horrified and rightfully so. You’re driving a narrative where you want the audience to want revenge. You want them to viscerally feel what Bob Forster feels. That’s the whole idea of it. In the original DEATH WISH you see the family being raped and all that. It’s the ritual of that genre. You’re going to show it in the most graphic, most gut turning way so that you wanna root for the demise of the bad guys.

How was it working with Fred Williamson?

Wonderful. Great guy. Really helpful. Had great suggestions. Couldn’t ask for better.

He seemed to be everywhere in the seventies and eighties.

Well, Fred liked to work.

I love the way VIGILANTE is shot.

The cameraman was Jim Lemmo who had just done Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. I had seen that film and thought the photography was spectacular. So I asked him to do VIGILANTE and we did many movies together.

Larry Cohen is pretty proud of the fact he used to shoot in New York without a permit. Did you do that as well?

No. There might have been a shot here or there, but for the most part we had permits. Even on MANIAC. We may not have had full permission to do the scene with the shotgun. And on the subway scene we had partial permission. When the girl goes down the stairs and through the turnstile, that part we had permission for. But once she gets further down the subway and near the train, that we had absolutely no permission for. But on VIGILANTE we shot almost everything with permits. The reason for that is that getting permission to shoot in New York wasn’t that complicated back then. In fact, it was very simple. All you had to do was have insurance, and then they would provide free police and all that.

So why would Larry Cohen shoot without permits?

Well… You know… It’s unlikely that he did it that way. You see, he might not have had permission to run the taxi cab on the sidewalk like he did in BLACK CAESAR – in fact, I doubt he had permission to do that – but he probably had a permit that allowed him to shoot on that street.

Between VIGILANTE and MANIAC COP there were about six years where you didn’t make a movie. What happened there?

Well, I worked on various projects that never came to fruition. The reality is that I really wanted to stay in New York, while the business was in California. And I really didn’t want to move there. I had a nice apartment in New York. At some point I had to give that up. The moment I moved to California, which was in 1985, I was able to start getting things going.

How did you meet up with Larry Cohen?

There was a lab in New York called TVC, which no longer exists, and the president of that company was a great guy named Dan Sandberg. One day he said to me: You know, you and Larry Cohen are very similar. I think he used the expression two peas in a pod. He looked at both of us as being mavericks. And he said: You guys have got to get together. I was in California and Larry and I met for breakfast and we started a relationship.

And how did you guys come up with the idea of MANIAC COP?

Larry was in New York shooting a movie – I think it starred Billy Dee Williams – and he had a falling out with the producers. So he left the project before it was finished. It was a snowy February in 1987, I’ll never forget it, and I was closing my apartment in New York. I had sublet it for a couple of years and now I was emptying it out. He calls me and says: let’s have lunch. And during that lunch the idea of MANIAC COP came up. Larry asked me how come I never did a sequel to MANIAC. And I told him I didn’t think it could be sequalized. At the time you had all these movies with COP in the title: BEVERLY HILLS COP, ROBOCOP, so Larry asked me: what about MANIAC COP? So I said: Oooh, that sounds good! Then with that title and the copy line – You have the right to remain silent… forever! – but without a script or anything I started shooting the St. Patrick’s Day Parade the next month.

So you got Bruce Campbell to star in the movie only with the title and copy line?

I called Bruce and told him: Look, I’m doing a movie called MANIAC COP. I’d like you to star in it. I  don’t have script, but I would like for you to fly to New York and I wanna shoot some footage of you against the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. And I said: bring clothes that we can later duplicate. And that’s how it worked. While Larry wrote the script I put together the financing and everything. We shot the rest of the movie in August.

How did you find Robert Z’Dar?

I saw him in a movie called THE NIGHT STALKER and I thought he was terrifying in that. And so I asked the casting director to find him and he came in to audition and I was very impressed. We hired him.

I have to ask you about Jan-Michael Vincent whose death was announced just two days ago. You worked with him on HIT LIST. Was he already going through a downward spiral at that point?

He was already going through a downward spiral when he was doing AIRWOLF. He was notorious during AIRWOLF for being drunk and difficult to work with. That reputation preceded him. But when we met him to do HIT LIST he had been in a recovery program and he was telling us that his drinking days were finished. And he looked great. At the time he was young enough that when he stopped drinking he immediately looked good again. He came in, he looked good, he assured us he wasn’t drinking, so we hired him. Literally the very first day of shooting I smelled alcohol on his breath. But I have to say, for the most part he was a functioning alcoholic. We went back to do some pick up shots, mostly close-ups, and if you look carefully at the wide shot and then the close-up, you see the difference. In the close-up he wasn’t drinking. And he looks amazing.

Did you do the pick-up shots because he was drunk at the time of the other shots?

No. It was just scheduled that way. When you do these close-ups you don’t have to be on location. You could do ‘em in the parking lot somewhere.

You also worked with Leo Rossi a couple of times. He had some good parts around that time, but his role in MANIAC COP 2 is probably one of his best.

I agree. Leo’s great. I worked with him several times. I just saw him a couple of months ago. He’s a terrific actor. We had fun working together. A lot of laughs.

He was also pretty intense in that Jodie Foster movie THE ACCUSED.

I loved him. I first saw him in a movie called HEART LIKE A WHEEL by Jonathan Kaplan. I don’t know if it played in Europe. It was with Bonnie Bedelia. Great movie. It was through Leo that I got to meet Kaplan.

You worked again with Larry Cohen on UNCLE SAM, which was released right before slashers became fashionable again.

I don’t know if we were really aware of any trends when we made UNCLE SAM. It’s not something we ever talked about on that film.

You were talking about the political angle.

Yes, that’s what attracted me. I was working on a movie in Nashville. When I was there I got to see how middle America celebrated the Fourth of July. You know, in New York and LA nobody really cares much about the Fourth of July. It’s mostly just seen as a day off. But in other parts of the country they take the holiday really seriously.

What was the movie you were working on in Nashville.

Oh, just an ill fated movie with… Oh god, who starred in it? It was called BRUTE FORCE when we shot it. Later it was called THE EXPERT.

What happened on MANIAC COP 3? I read that you handed in a version of the film that was only about 50 minutes long.

Here’s what happened. Larry wrote a script with a black detective who was investigating a series of murders in a hospital in Harlem, New York. Later he gets involved in voodoo, which was part of his background. It was a different movie. The important part of the movie was that the detective was black and had a history, going back to his childhood, of voodoo. The sales agent who was financing the film was not able to close a deal with Japan, which was a very important part of the financing. They were putting op 800.000 dollars. A lot of money. And he was having trouble closing it. We had already started pre-production. I had flown to New York, found locations there. We were casting, I had found the actors for it. Everything. It was like we were on a train that was going forward, but the financing still hadn’t closed. To make a long story short: it turned out the Japanese did not feel comfortable with us having a black lead in the movie. I guess it’s a cultural thing. They asked: why can’t we have Robert Davi? I said: the script wouldn’t make any sense with Robert Davi. Anyway, in order to get the movie going forward, and to close the financing, - I mean, we were already building sets! It was ridiculous! – we had to cast Robert Davi who was available. Suddenly, we had a script that didn’t make any sense. So we started cutting the scenes out of the script that didn’t make any sense. And then Larry got angry. He said: I wrote a script, everybody agreed on it, and now you suddenly want an entirely new script! He wanted to get paid to write it. But the producers, the financiers, didn’t want to pay him. It became making it up as we came along. When you have a situation like that, you can’t recover from it. It’s a disaster. We got to a point where we shot all the scenes we could shoot, after cutting all the other stuff out of the script, and it came out to be like an hour long movie. So they had to go out and shoot scenes that were just filler. Stuff that really did not advance the story or anything. Just filled out the movie. I really didn’t want to be a part of it. I said: this is no way to make a movie, this is terrible! And I left it up to the guys. I washed my hands of it. In the end it really wasn’t anybody’s fault. Honestly, if I had to do it over again, I would have said: OK, we have to shut the movie down and rewrite the script. Whether with Larry or somebody else, we had to rewrite it. But that would have meant putting a lot of people out of work, but it really would have been the right thing to do.

I think the movie came out alright under those circumstances.

It’s hard for me to say. I’ve only seen it in its entirety one time and I just came out of it so disappointed. I knew that what we were going to do was far more interesting than what was there.

Is the MANIAC COP remake still on the horizon?

Very much so! Nic [Nicolas Winding Refn] was in town a couple of weeks ago and we met several times regarding it. It is still in the works. Problem was: Nic got a series with Amazon with twelve or thirteen episodes and he directed all of them. He was totally in production from August 2017 until November of last year, so the project had to be put on hold. But I think it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

How did he get on board with this remake?

Well, Nic and I have been friends for many years. At one time we actually shared an apartment in New York. He was living in Copenhagen and I was living in LA. When we would come to New York separately, we would go to hotels. In the late nineties, the hotels in New York started to raise their prices. So we found an apartment in the East Village and we decided to share it. We were rarely there at the same time, but we avoided the hotel rates. I met him because he licensed some clips of MANIAC and VIGILANTE for his second movie, BLEEDER. There’s a clip from MANIAC which plays a pivotal role in the movie. We liked a lot of the same movies, so we became friends.

I have one last question, it’s about your uncle Jake LaMotta. I always wondered how the portrait of him in RAGING BULL was received by the family and his friends in the neighborhood.

I can tell you the funny part. His mother, my grandmother, went to the premiere of RAGING BULL. She watched the movie and her only reaction was: Jake never cursed like that. And it’s true: my Uncle Jake doesn’t curse. In fact if you use curses in his presence, he frowns on that. When I watched the movie, I mean, it had such authenticity to it. Not that everything in the movie happened the way it happened, but the whole authenticity of that world is there. Nothing about it felt fake or phony. It’s an incredible movie.

But you can’t deny that Jake LaMotta is a really tragic figure in the movie. So did his family and friends already think of him in those terms before the movie came out? Or was that some sort of revelation when they saw the film?

Well, when you say tragic, everything that happened with him going to jail and the divorces and all that, the reaction of most of the family was: he brought all of that on himself. So there was not a lot of sympathy for my uncle Jake. The tragedy of his life is really after the movie when he was picking up garbage in Central Park to make a living. He really had a tremendous downfall that you don’t see in the movie.

But you put him in MANIAC COP, right?

Yeah. The thing about my uncle Jake was, he would say things like: you make all these movies and you don’t put me in them. So, we were shooting not far from where he lived in New York and I asked him to come in early in the morning to shoot a scene. That was it.

Related talks

• James Glickenhaus

• Caroline Munro

• Larry Cohen

• Fred Williamson

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