Part one of the interview.
One of the great qualities of the film is that there's real pathos in the film, in the Martha Dumptruck story, for example.
You
don't want to have it where everything is a big joke. Having said
that, Lehmann and I have that gene where we always want to add humor
to a dramatic scene. When he added the 'Fe Fi Fo Fum' music to Martha
walking down the corridor I said ''Michael, what are you doing?'' And
he answered ''I can't help it!'' We both still have the court jester
sides of our personalities that we can't get rid of.
Do
the killer lines come easily to you?
The
first draft of HEATHERS was done on a typewriter, which was before I
could even afford a computer. It makes me feel like I wrote HIS GIRL
FRIDAY (1940). I wasn't walking around my desk going ''I gotta come
up with some great lines!'' The great lines come first very slowly,
so when I sit down to write a scene I already have this arsenal of
stuff that I have come up with. When the actual writing is getting
done, I have these weapons that I can use, which are notebooks full
of stuff I have come up with. You remember in THE KARATE KID (1984)
where Daniel has to learn how to wax on and wax off and paint the
fence and all that before he can actually do the karate moves? I
think there's a lot of that with my writing. There is a lot of
'pre-writing' – turns of phrases and little ideas like Veronica
putting a car lighter into her hand and then J.D. lighting a
cigarette off the burn. Something like that doesn't come on the day
of the game. It comes way before I start writing.
Did
you do extra work on the film during shooting?
Now
I often have to do quite an amount of work on a screenplay whilst the
movie is shooting, but on HEATHERS once we started shooting I didn't
do any work at all.
How
did Michael Lehmann get involved?
Michael
did this short film when he was at the USC called The Beaver Gets a
Boner (1985). Larry Karaszewski worked on it, a friend of mine edited
it, and one of my roommates shot it. So it was easy to get the script
to him. Michael was the up-and-coming director at USC that all my
friends there knew.
I
had to go through an evolution. At first I was like ''Who is this
schmuck?'' But eventually I realised that he really knew how to make
a movie. He had worked at Zoetrope, so when he started dropping
Francis Ford Coppola's name I would get into line! We also have such
a similar sense of humor too. Sometimes when you work with people you
can tell when someone doesn't like something and understand why they
don't like it. Maybe their ideas for changes are not better in your
opinion, but you know they are not lying when they say they didn't
get something, so you go back and rework things. I find a lot of
writers when they get notes they just make the changes word for word,
and nobody is happy. With Michael I could reinvent what he was saying
and he would know exactly what I meant.
In
what ways were your visions different?
It
goes back to the reviewer saying I was ''chilling for what I saw as
common ground''. Michael would bring me back down to Earth. I had the
Veronica character much more complicit in what was going on. One of
the things that he would always sit on top of me about was that he
wanted Veronica to be more of an audience surrogate who is drawn into
the homicide of it all, and an unwilling collaborator in the deeply
dark stuff. I had her as almost like Travis Bickle with a vagina. I
fought with Michael over it at the time, but as I worked with Winona
a bit more I could see it working better Michael's way because she is
not the slick femme fatale with the cigarette hanging at the corner
of her mouth, like Rita Hayworth. She's more Elizabeth Taylor. We can
relate to her more. At the time I thought softening anything was a
defeat but certainly to this day I appreciate that softening the
Veronica character was very helpful.
Now
that I have directed, I have had fantasies about what it would have
been like to have directed HEATHERS, but I also realise how little I
knew at that time. Not in the grand scheme of things like coming up
with a look for the film and working with actors, but certainly as a
25 year old boy from Indiana I was just not prepared for the grind of
it. Back then the idea of me directing it was almost like me doing
open heart surgery. There are still things I tease Michael Lehmann
about. I went to a screening of it and I hadn't seen it in a while.
There's the chase where JD and Veronica are trying to shoot the jocks
in the forest, and all of a sudden Christian Slater chases one guy
for like 20 minutes. But Michael did a great job on the film.
How
do you feel about the ending to the film?
I
am more at peace with the 'happy ending' in the finished film than I
was before. As a viewer, after you have gone through such pain and
hostility, you do want some catharsis at the end. And I don't think
the ending is completely on the level. There is something ironic
about it. It's a different flavour at the end of the movie, which I
don't mind. I don't think anyone wants to see Veronica dead at the
end. The ending that I miss never made it into a shooting script.
Veronica says to Martha ''Do you want to come over to my house?, and
Martha says ''Fuck you, Heather'' and takes a knife and stabs
Veronica in the chest. Veronica is lying on the floor bleeding and
repeating ''My name is not Heather. My name is not Heather.'' Martha
gets up out of the wheelchair, like DR. STRANGELOVE, and says ''I can
walk! I can walk!'' I've gone back and forth over the years about
which ending would have been the best but now I am just grateful the
film got made. Thinking about what could have been just seems silly
now.
At
the time I was the screenwriter who said ''I never wanna direct. '' I
was embracing my status as a crazy, eccentric writer guy who doesn't
have to work with people.'' The first day of shooting was Ash
Wednesday and I came to the set with a black ash cross on my
forehead. None of the cast had met me so they thought I was this
crazy monk who wrote the script and comes out three days a year. I
embraced that, and Michael Lehmann enjoyed it because he got to be
the sane guy that everybody talked to. It was more my other movies
where I realised I had to start paying attention. Michael did such a
seamless job on HEATHERS. He was plugged in and he knew what I
wanted. I thought ''Great. I obviously write scripts that direct
themselves. '' It was only on my second film, THE ADVENTURES OF FORD
FAIRLANE, which Renny Harlin directed, that I realised that
you really had to pay attention and make sure that the right tone was
being gone after. I saw that directing was really like writing in a
way in terms of crafting something into a movie.
Was
HEATHERS your happiest experience making a film?
Yes,
I'd say so, although I had a great time making SEX AND DEATH 101, which I also directed, even though it seems everyone was out
of the town the weekend it opened. The first film I directed, HAPPY
CAMPERS, was almost like me going to film school. I spent most
of the 90s at Sony developing a project called The Model Daughter. It
was an original script of mine and much more HEATHERS in tone. I
spent so much time on a film that never saw the light of day that I
realised how lucky I had been to get HEATHERS made.
Now
I realise that I should have been more worried than I was! I didn't
know how precarious a script was and how precarious making a movie
was. I really thought nothing could go wrong with HEATHERS because
Michael really seemed to get the script. If it was today I would be
freaking out a bit more.
What
did you hope teenagers would get from the movie?
I
thought that the movie was like showing a funhouse mirror of
themselves back to them, and that it would be too close to home for
them to be tickled by it. There are a lot of people who come up to me
and tell me that they saw HEATHERS as a teenager and hated it, but
that they now love it. I think my films get more of that kind of
response than other writers or filmmakers. I've learned to wear it as
a badge of honor that the first time you see my movie you're going to
be queasy and uncomfortable but with a little more perspective you're
really going to like it. It's never my initial intention but I'll
take it.
How
did you feel about the reaction HEATHERS got at Sundance?
The
first review the film ever got was by Variety and you couldn't have
written a better review. That said, there were people in the audience
who found the film very insulting and irresponsible, but even that
was like a minor victory and the best negative experience you could
ask for. I remember that the writer Anthony Shaffer said ''Is
HEATHERS a movie that people are watching and really liking? This is
amazing. America is much different than I thought it was.'' I had to
explain to him that although he got the movie, the rest of America
was not going to see it in droves. Part of it also was that New World
didn't have much money to release the movie and so it didn't do as
well as we hoped.
There
were people that didn't like the movie, but even those had to reckon
with me as a force. I established myself as an original voice but I
was still living in Silver Lake, barely out of the video store. When
I went out to get work after HEATHERS, it was clear nobody wanted me
to do something dark and original. They wanted me to bring my fresh
voice to something they had developed. The plan was to do one for me
and one for them. I remember getting pitched a comedy with Whitney
Houston as a genie who moves in with a suburban family. People who
read my original script for FORD FAIRLANE thought it was a really
great dark comedy that was a parody of the detective movie and a
satire of the music industry, but once Andrew Dice Clay and others
got involved, it was never going to be that movie. I remember the
first day of shooting and the comedian Gilbert Gottfried came to the
set. He was sweaty and nervous, and hadn't read the script. He just
started ad-libbing, and I realised ''What have I done?''
Do
you see the legacy of HEATHERS in other movies?
All
of the teenagers suddenly became more articulate and slangy after
HEATHERS. It was a very influential movie for younger writers. It's
like I'm the guy who wrote CASABLANCA (1942) and HIS GIRL FRIDAY to
them. In some ways the film has been too influential because now we
have adult characters in movies speaking like high school characters.
The story might be set in a law firm but the dialogue has that
HEATHERS cruelty and cadence to it. The fact though, is that what
sounds cool for teenagers to say just comes across as glib when
adults speak that way.
I've
been to a couple of screenings over the years and I always try to
remember it as my Stanley Kubrick film, but it's more of a cultish
80s movie than I remember. It has a lot of cheap humour that makes me
think ''I can't believe we were so shamelessly vulgar there.'' I
always think of it as more of a hoity toity movie than it actually
is. There's a lot of silliness in it which I always seem to have
amnesia about. I think Michael and I's need to constantly entertain
protected us from being too pretentious.
The
movie hasn't lost its power, either.
It
still has bite to it. It makes me realise that especially in music
now, instead of it getting harsher and more out there, its starting
to draw back. We had Joy Division and HEATHERS in the 80s, and now
its going back the other way. At the time there were a lot of R-rated
teen films but now they are so rare. The PG-13 rating has ruined
everything. Things that should have just been family fun now have
pointless blowjob jokes, and films that should have been rated R are
now just watered down.
Right
after the movie came out, when Winona was really bugging me about
doing a sequel, I came up with the idea of Veronica being a page
working for a Senator played by Meryl Streep and having to kill the
President by the end of the story. I remember that a year later
Winona came up to me and said ''I talked to Meryl and she's in. ''
Even that wasn't enough to make me want to write it.
I spoke to Dan by telephone and would like to thank him for his time.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2016. All rights reserved.
I spoke to Dan by telephone and would like to thank him for his time.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2016. All rights reserved.
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