There have been many directors in the horror genre that have made such an
impact that their work is considered a blueprint for all others who follow - Director Tom
Holland is one of those masters. The mind behind such legendary films like Fright
Night, Child's Play and Stephen King's The Langoliers (not to
mention writing the brilliant Psycho II!), Holland virtually disappeared from the
scene after 1996's Thinner, the film adaptation of the Stephen King novel, much
to the dismay of horror fans around the world. But in 2006, Holland resurfaced and has
gotten back behind the camera, directing a Masters of Horror episode for Showtime called
“We All Scream for Ice Cream” and is currently working on a new Internet series
called Tom Holland's Driven, which will be available soon. So I sought out the
iconic writer/director (being a rabid fan!), as I had a million burning questions I was dying
to ask. (Sorry about the barrage of the questions Tom!) What follows is what I consider to
be a horror fan's dream, an honest, frank and completely candid interview unlike any
you've ever read before, in short, THE definitive Tom Holland interview, with the renowned
director talking about everything from what he was doing during the ten year absence to a
fully comprehensive inside look at his entire writing/directing career that you will only
read here at The213.net! Welcome to Fright Night...
(213): So Tom, it has been over 10 years of silence from the man who brought us
some of the most revered horror classics of all time - where were you and what happened?
Tom Holland: That's a question actually that a lot of people have been too polite
to ask. I got Bell's Palsy at the end of Thinner. Nobody took me to a fucking
doctor, okay? Do you know what Bell's Palsy is? It's a virus near as they can figure out; it
puts an almost perfect direct line down your face and it causes half of your face to lose all
muscle tone - and it drops. It's not life threatening I learned later, it was not a marker for
any further medical problems, but they really don't know what the hell it is. Anyway, what
it does is it swells, it destroys the muscles on one side of the face, it could be either left or
right and the way to treat it is to get steroids into the person like immediately. And in my
case, I was in production and instead I was flying up to Canada to meet with a
cinematographer and they didn't get me to a doctor; the production didn't get me to a
doctor for almost forty-eight hours, at which point, I'd lost control of half my face.
(213): And now?
TH: Ten or eleven years later, the muscles around my left eye are
still dead and the muscles around the left corner of my mouth are still dead. In other
words, I have no control over them. So my left eye is sleepier then my right; with the onset
of the attack and about six months after, I couldn't close my left eye, I could not eat
anything, I couldn't hold water in my mouth and had to drink out of a straw and I would
say it took about two years for some kind of muscular control to come back into the left
side of my face. Now I don't know how much of that was psychological, but I looked like
Quasimodo. You can look at pictures of me, there's one with Stephen King that's even on
the web, and if you look carefully, you can see the one side of the face doesn't look right.
(213): What were your thoughts during this time?
TH: On the one hand it scared me and on the other hand it had a terrible
psychological effect - I didn't want to go outside and have people see me like that. And
the other side was I was also aware that I'd sacrificed my health to make it easier for a
fucking movie company, you know, to make a fucking movie. And if the line producer had
cared at all about my health, he would have gotten me immediately to a doctor and if I had
gotten on steroids immediately I could have mitigated the damage by something like
ninety percent. And the reason I know this is because I had a second attack about nine or
ten months ago and I got steroids and I knocked it out in a day or two without any
damage.
(213): Did this affliction just hit you out of nowhere?
TH: Out of fucking nowhere, man. So you know I have no idea, you can Google
it; you'll find they don't know. It's a virus; they think it's sitting next to air-conditioning,
it's riding with the windows open in the car - they don't know.
(213): What are your thoughts about the your die-hard fan base and their excitement
to have you back working?
TH: I think it's terrific and I hope I work more and I hope I stay in contact with
my friends. I've met so many people now in the last year, year and a half, ever since I did
the Masters of Horror because people started contacting me again. I pushed everybody
away when I had the Bell's Palsy. I mean I looked like fucking Quasimodo and I'm not over-
exaggerating this - I haven't told anybody this ever I don't think. So I pushed everybody
away for two years until after I looked like a human being again. And you know, I turned
everything down, the offers were less; psychologically, I wasn't the same way I'd been. So I
started to reconnect, which started with the Masters of Horror. And I have a Facebook
page now...and you can (laughs) put that in there by the way...and it's given me a way to
keep in contact with my fans!
(213): What was it like being back in the saddle directing for Masters of Horror?
TH: Well, I'd already shot Driven. I shot that in Hi
Def with the DVX-200, which is the little cameras with the P2 cards - I think maybe they
weigh eleven pounds! I mean I had just been out on the outer edges of what was
technicalogically possible, so to going back and working on the Masters of Horror where I
two and three Arriflex's, you know shooting film - that was easy! (Laughs)
(213): Can you talk a bit about casting the great William Forsythe in your episode
”We All Scream for Ice Cream?“
TH: I can't say enough positive about William, he's become a friend and he's a
great guy. He's a very, very talented actor and very exacting because he knows so much
about the craft - I think it probably intimidates younger directors. Nice man, but he's got a
fire in the belly, you know, there's an anger simmering beneath there too.
(213): And of course he acted in a film you wrote way back in 1984 - Cloak &
Dagger playing the weaselly Morris!
TH: Well that was amazing - I didn't know that, I didn't know that he was Morris
in Cloak & Dagger! We were sitting up in Vancouver and he told me that and I
almost fell over! He didn't know I wrote it! I think it was the first of his performances
where he totally changed his physical appearance. But as much as Christian Bale can lose
ninety pounds or De Niro can change shape for Raging Bull, William Forsythe is
the same kind of actor - I really would put him in that class. And at the same time of
course he's very volatile (laughs), but he's volatile about the work.
(213): The Beast Within - was that your first major writing gig and how did
you get it?
TH: I think that I had the Initiation of Sarah, which was a movie of the
week, which they just re-made recently believe it or not, once again as a movie of the
week - I think that was my first credit, but certainly The Beast Within was my first
movie. I had written an original screenplay and the producer who was a man called Harvey
Bernhard really liked it. He had bought a proposal for a book called “The Beast Within”; the
writer was in a divorce and hadn't written the book, had never followed through with the
book! So what I had was a title and I wrote an original screenplay off it and later on, after I
had written the screenplay, the book writer finally finished the book! (Laughs) They didn't
have anything to do with each other from what I remember!
(213): Having written the story for Class of 1984, what did Director Mark L.
Lester and credited writer John Saxton then bring to the screenplay?
TH: I knew that somebody else had re-written me on that, but who is John
Saxton? I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a well-known writer with a pseudonym. Now
I can't tell you why, but my memory is that Mark paid a pro, a really good pro, cause you
gotta remember at the time I was like 28 or something. I think he hired a pro who used a
pseudonym to come across the top of me, but that's so long ago I can't remember who did
what. The Beast Within was totally mine - nobody fucked with the script.
(213): What did you think of the final film?
TH: I thought it was terrific; Mark is a terrific exploitation filmmaker. In it's time,
that film was way ahead of its time in terms of the idea of how they were going to
militarize high schools. Then you had Michael Fox and you had a terrific performance from
Roddy McDowall. What it was, was an exploitation remake of Blackboard Jungle,
that's what it was designed to be - updating Blackboard Jungle for the eighties!
(213): So how did you get the gig writing Psycho II?
TH: Well because what had happened was I got it because of a script called
The Crystal Tower, which Richard [Franklin, Director of Psycho II]
absolutely loved. And we met and we got along. And that was also a different time;
Richard was part of that whole USC crowd and had come out, you know, around George
Lucas - I think he was a couple of years behind George Lucas. That was a moment in time
when it was good to be young and have graduated from USC or UCLA in Hollywood. He
really liked my work, we really got along and we had an overwhelming respect for Alfred
Hitchcock. Richard was undervalued because he had a dry, bookish, stiff upper-lip
personality, but what he was among many things was a great student of Hitchcock and I
thought he made a terrific movie. We were really trying to do something that was not
exploitive, but was respectful of the first one - as well as make a successful show. You
have to remember that Psycho II started out as a cable movie, not a feature film!
(213): What?
TH: That was the story of Universal being dragged along by our work. It was Oak
Communication, that was the cable company - it was like one of the first. They were going
to do what essentially was a cable movie or a movie-of-the-week for the Psycho
sequel. They didn't think anybody would be interested; who cares, it was twenty-two years
since Psycho! The script was good enough that it got Tony Perkins, okay? Then it
got Tony Perkins, now Universal is saying, “Hmm...maybe we got more then a cable movie
here?!” - but they still weren't sure. So we started to shoot and the movie direct without
the studio overhead on it was something - I could be off on this by a million - but it was
something insanely small like three-nine or four-nine million, without the twenty-five
percent distribution overhead bullshit the studio adds. When we started filming, we
received so much worldwide press and Universal was pressed so much for interviews with
Tony, there was so much interest in Psycho that Universal had no idea about, that
they started to think that they'd better release it as a theatrical. So Universal backed into
Psycho II, which has to be one of the most astoundingly lucrative movies ever
made because it was so cheap and it made like ninety million dollars worldwide! But it was
a total mistake on Universal's part; they had no idea they were making a movie and when
they finally committed to making the movie, they still did it at movie-of-the-week prices
because it had been set up like that - I had written it like that.
(213): Did you feel any sort of pressure following up the original?
TH: Yes. I mean we really did - both Richard and I both did. I mean Hitchcock
was GOD! He'd met him, I hadn't, but I'd seen him, I think he was still around when I was
first getting in the business cause I graduated UCLA in '73. I don't think there's anything
illogical in Psycho II that's illogical for the first one. I mean I really built it upon
the logic of the first one. It's a totally different story and everything else, but I mean it was
not meant as an exploitation picture; it was meant as a homage or a continuation of what
we thought was a truly breathtaking cinematic story. I mean there's no way of quite
properly trying to understand the effect of the original Psycho in cinema history,
but obviously it changed horror, it changed cutting techniques, it changed everything, you
know?
(213): Did actor Anthony Perkins have any subsequent input into the script, either
before or during shooting?
TH: During shooting he asked for one scene and it's that toasted cheese scene
with Meg [Tilly, who played Mary Loomis]. And he wanted that to give a little bit more
humanity or softness to the character. He wanted to have a moment where you see the
pathos in the character and I wrote that scene, I think it's like a page and a half or
something, while we were shooting. Otherwise that was his sole contribution to script.
(213): Did Director Richard Franklin, who did Psycho II, have anything to do
with you writing Cloak & Dagger or had you already written it?
TH: No, this was after Psycho II, that had been a success and we were
asked to do a remake of The Window, which was like a 1949 film, Cornell
Woolrich short story. There wasn't enough there, even though interestingly enough that's
what Disturbia is. The Window is the boy's version of Rear Window if you
will, okay? In the lexicon of psychological suspense writing, Cornell Woolrich is God - he
has more movie credits than almost any other man alive. I mean like forty-five movies
were made off of his books and short stories, including Rear Window. Anyway, it
wasn't enough, it didn't have enough, there wasn't enough substance there. So I came up
with Jack Flack, the imaginary character and I think Cloak & Dagger is an
underrated film that should be considered a classic.
(213): Was there a soft push for the film theatrically?
TH: Well, Universal did not know what to do - the regimes had just changed. It
was new guys who had just come in, they were not responsible for the movie, I don't think
that they liked it and they dumped it theatrically because it wasn't under their regime.
They also thought at the time, and this gives you an idea of how times have changed, any
PG film was gonna suck wind because everybody was making R's and everybody was
making money with R. So they thought we were too soft and who wanted a kids film - and
who wanted a kids film with an imaginary character? So they dumped it and then what
happened is it went on to have a HUGE afterlife on cable and on videocassette - and that's
where it got it's fame. And I think that the script and the concept and everything from
Cloak & Dagger is just great and it should be remade. I mean that's one that they
should re-make; they tried to rip it off, The Last Action Hero is an attempt to rip
it off. I've seen any number of attempts - three or four very, very bold rip-offs! (laughs) I
mean nothing subtle about them at all!
(213): Cloak & Dagger was huge with kids at the time - did you write it with
them in mind?
TH: I wrote it FOR kids, I wrote it, I wrote it, I wrote it, yes! Sure, I
mean those things like Fright Night and Cloak & Dagger, you know
they're my homage to my own childhood. I think that maybe Cloak & Dagger,
even more then any of the rest, comes out of my heart. I mean the idea of...nobody
believes that he has an imaginary friend that helps him out of tough situations and you
know, that's really his projection of his father or what he'd like his father to be. At the end
of course, his father does step up to it and at that point the boy grows up and loses the
imaginary friend and has the real father.
(213): What gave you the itch to want to direct?
TH: I wrote a script called Scream for Help, which Lorimar made with
MichaelWinner directing and it was so bad it was never released. And I just thought, “I've
got to protect the writing”, it came from a desire to protect the writing.
(213): Who were some of your directing influences?
TH: Oh God! Everybody that did anything that was any good! (Laughs)
(213): You used actor Chris Sarandon, who became infamous from his
Oscar nominated role as the gender confused lover of Al Pacino in Dog Day
Afternoon, as a seductive vampire in Fright Night and a tough detective in
Child's Play - any resistance from the studio in casting him?
TH: I don't remember any. I mean he's always been a respected actor, a terrific
actor. I always felt very comfortable with him. The role in Child's Play for instance
was thin, (laughs) and I wrote that, but I just wanted to use him cause I was so comfortable
with him. He did a terrific job in that movie-of-the-week I did with Ricky Schroder
(The Stranger Within), you know there was more there but it's sort of the same
character in some ways, there was more there as a character.
(213): After having done three films together, will we ever see you and Chris Sarandon
work together in a film again?
TH: Sure, if I can come up with a part for him - in a second I would.
(213): What made you make Fright Night your directorial debut?
TH: Well, Fright Night was my homage to growing up and watching the
Friday Night Frights. When we were kids and when I was a kid, you'd stay up and at eleven
o'clock the horror movie would come on, on Friday night. And it would always have some
hokey host, which were usually hammer horror films, you know? And Fright Night
really is my memory of that and I think that it's a common enough experience that a lot
of people related to it. We certainly all saw horror hosts that were sort of (laughs) corny
and terrible, which is what Peter Vincent, the Roddy McDowall character is.
(213): Did you have Roddy McDowall in mind when you wrote the part of Peter
Vincent?
TH: No I didn't. Roddy McDowall came through Guy McElwaine, who was then
head of the studio and Guy called and suggested I see him. He thought Roddy would be
right, but he and Roddy were also good and old time friends, showing that connections do
matter. Especially if you're Roddy McDowall, I mean Roddy was loved by everybody, Roddy
was everybody's friend pretty much.
(213): After Fright Night, did you feel at all confined by the TV format
working on Amazing Stories?
TH: No, but I do remember there was a shot where the gal who played the
giantess bent over and you could see her cleavage - and I don't mean nipples or anything,
just the fact that she had breasts - and they cut it out, or Spielberg cut it out. So the show
was squeaky clean, which was beyond reasonable, you know what I mean?
(213): Fatal Beauty was a film you directed but didn't write - why did you
want to make it and did it turn out the way you wanted?
TH: Yeah, the film generally speaking did and it was excoriated by the critics;
they hated it because they hated Whoopi in that role. The critics wouldn't accept her in
anything that wasn't The Color Purple and I don't know if I've ever had higher
ratings in a preview than Fatal Beauty. But the film was just killed by all the critics,
so I think that muted the network push on it as a feature, but it did huge business in
videocassette.
(213): What was your thought on a kissing scene between Whoopi Goldberg and co-
star Sam Elliot that was ultimately cut from the film?
TH: That was like nonsense. What really happened was, I'll never know why, but
she insisted on doing this God awful scene extemporized with Sam, implying that they had
slept together and she insisted that we test it. We did and the audience rejection of the
moment was overwhelming and I insisted that the scene be cut.
(213): After working with Brad Dourif on Fatal Beauty, what made you want to
cast him as the voice of Chucky in Child's Play?
TH: He was perfect (laughs) - he could do it! It's just a judgment call, great crazy
villain, also great actor, he's really a talented guy, undervalued I think.
(213): Your film had a very dark and somber tone, while the other Child's Play films
focused more on camp - how important was making Child's Play, a film
essentially about a killer doll, more reality based?
TH: Look, mine was the first one. If my original Child's Play
hadn't succeeded, you never would have seen a sequel. The farce, satire, winking at the
audience is what you go to when you can't get the terror out of the moment. It usually
indicates that the genre is bankrupt - it's the end. Love At First Bite was the end
of the vampire genre in 1982, Scream, the parodies, they were the end of that
particular...it would be very hard to do a teenage summer camp today without people on
the floor laughing.
(213): When you were making the film, did you realize the Chucky doll would go on to
be such a huge horror icon?
TH: No I didn't, I really didn't because it turned into a mask for Halloween and
everything! But it was Chucky's personality that did it; probably the moment that sealed it
was his saying “Fuck you!” in the elevator cause it was one of the biggest laughs I've ever
heard.
(213): Would you attribute a lot of it to Brad?
TH: Yeah, I guess. It was a combination of very distinctive personality - a
(laughs) mean doll, with a mean sense of humor. I mean he took fiendish delight in killing
everybody, so I think there was something delightful as well as scary in it.
(213): Did you feel more freedom as a director making Amazing Stories or
Tales from the Crypt?
TH: Probably Tales from the Crypt.
(213): Using a then still raw and young Brad Pitt, what made you cast him as Raymond
J. Barry's foil in your Tales from the Crypt episode “King of the Road”?
TH: Oh God man, you couldn't miss it. I was in Minnesota doing The Stranger
Within and they sent me tapes of the actors who read and Brad come across on one of
the tapes. I mean I thought you could never have missed it - I mean he was a fucking
movie star. Seemed to me he just jumped off the screen, he had this lazy smile that was
charming and to work with, he was a lovely guy. He was a nice young man from the
Midwest and he was talented - he was always talented. I think I was about halfway through
the first day and I said forget the girl, start giving HIM the beauty lighting! It was so
obvious when he smiled how attractive he was and it was so obvious how it was going to
affect women - he had sex appeal. I told him that he was going to be a major movie star. I
told him to give me a ring and to remember that I did this for him! (Laughs)
(213): Will we ever see any special editions of Fright Night or Child's
Play, complete with a full length Tom Holland running commentary?
TH: God, you and everybody else are asking - I have never been contacted by
the studios.
(213): Really?
TH: Yes! It just furthers my sense that the majors are so bureaucratized and
corporatized they can't respond to their fans and have no sense of what the fan world out
there wants. I mean I went to a party and it was full of young directors and I ran into a
writer who told me that he had done a draft of the re-make of Fright Night! He
had done one draft himself and another writer had done another draft earlier, so there
have been two (laughs) drafts on Fright Night and no one ever called me! But
anyway the point is no, I don't know about any special editions, but I think those things
would just be terrific!
(213): Any “Director's Cuts” or would you say those are your cuts?
TH: Not on Child's Play or Fright Night. The one that's really a
disaster that the studio interfered with horribly was The Temp at Paramount. And
the second one where they interfered with the ending was Thinner. So
Thinner I would put the old ending back on, but The Temp would need a
major reconstruction to begin to approximate anything that I intended. I mean that film
was really butchered.
(213): Can you talk about your turbulent experience making The Temp?
TH: It was absolutely destroyed by the guy who does the numerical testing. He
came in with the results of the test screening, an on-studio test screening, and the results
were mediocre and he said to the executives it was because of the end - I never thought
the studio would take it seriously. And they insisted that I change the ending and I said
there was no other ending, given the configuration of the story that will work. And the
ending of course in the original was that it is the girl, Lara Flynn Boyle, she is the murderer
and she's revealed at the end and she tries to kill the Tim Hutton character and in the fight
she dies herself. They tell me they're going to substitute a new ending and it's sure to
work because they had huge success with the Michael Douglas movie Fatal
Attraction.
(213): That's a horrible parallel since Adrian Lyne's original ending was just so much
better...
TH: There's no parallel at all! In my case it did not work. They made me shoot
this God fucking awful ending - it didn't work at all. They put it up there, they tested it, it
wrecked the movie, it got lower test scores then the original test. So they insisted that I
use this ending that made no sense; here I had this whole film built on the original ending
and I was stuck with this other ending, which was incomprehensible. And I had to re-cut
the entire film, throw out a ton of good shit to try to make some kind of sense out of this
non-sensicle ending that they had tacked onto the film. So the film turned into a huge
disaster and nobody taking responsibility or anything. I mean it was really the worst
experience I've ever had with a major studio - nothing has been as bad as the destruction
that internal politics caused to The Temp, it just wrecked the movie.
(213): Your ordeal sounds a lot like the one that director/writer Brian Helgeland went
through with Paramount when he did Payback, which he just re-cut for a new
Straight Up: Director's Cut edition. If they offered you a chance to come back and re-edit
The Temp the way you want, in a Director's Cut version, would you do it?
TH: Yes and that's probably the one where I really would because there's a much,
much better film lying on the cutting room floor.
(213): Which would you choose if you could do only one - writing, directing, or acting?
TH: Well the hardest and the most creative is writing. The one that gets the most
glory is directing or acting I guess. I don't know - writing or directing - it would probably
depend on my mood!
(213): What is your personal favorite Tom Holland film?
TH: Probably Fright Night - it's so innocent. I mean it was the first one I
ever did and it was just done with a lot of joy is all. You can feel the comedy in it; you can
feel the fun in it. Literally it was the first film, nobody was paying attention - the studio I
mean - so (laughs) nobody bothered me! And it was the first film and I thought it was
always going to be like that and of course it never was again!
(213): Any horror directors working today that you particularly like?
TH: I like them all - I just want to support the genre.
(213): So Tom Holland's Driven - can you tell me about it and where to fans
can go to see it?
TH: We're talking to ad agencies right now and I expect that as soon as we find
the advertisers, we're gonna get it out on the Internet. It's a story about a down and out
limo driver who gets hired to drive a crazy heiress to a mental institution. And they're out
of Miami and she gets into a fight with this nurse in the back of the limo that's supposed
to keep her drugged and she throws the nurse out of the car at eighty miles per hour and
kills her. And so you got this down and out limo driver who is stuck with this crazy heiress
in the middle of the everglades - with a dead body. And the girl says that the guy who
hired him is not her father, it's her stepfather and that he's gonna kill her for her trust
fund and the limo driver is set up to take the fall for it. And that's the beginning of it.
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