Roger Corman in Conversation - BFI Gothic

This evening has been one of the greatest and most thrilling experiences of my life so far. I got to meet one of my myth: the legendary Roger Corman.

LIFE AND CAREER
For those of you who are not familiar with his work, here's a little background:
"Roger William Corman is an Academy Award-winning American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Much of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Admired by members of the French New Wave and Cahiers du Cinéma, Corman was the youngest filmmaker to have a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Francaise, as well as the BFI and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award. Corman mentored and gave a start to many young film directors such as Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. He helped launch the career of actor Peter Fonda. Corman has occasionally taken minor acting roles in the films of directors who started with him, including The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather Part II, Apollo 13, The Manchurian Candidate, and Philadelphia. A documentary about Corman's life and career entitled Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel premiered at Sundance and Cannes Film Festival in 2011, directed by Alex Stapleton. In total, Roger Corman has produced over 300 movies and directed more than 50."

INTERVIEW - The Gothic and the Edgar Allan Poe Cycle
Mr. Corman talked about his childhood experience of the Gothic, in terms of films he was a big fan of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, but the big infatuation came when he was 12 and was assigned a work on an Edgar Allan Poe's short story for school. After that he asked his parents for the whole collection of Poe's works. 
When he started working as a filmmaker Gothic genre was out of fashion.
Producing films for the American International Pictures (AIP) meant having a very low-budget, working on a double bill over 10 days and shooting in black and white. Mr. Corman suggested to use colour for the adaptation of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. Since they were complaining about the lack of monsters in the story, Corman clarified that the house is actually the monster.
Going back to his first big experiences with horror The Undead was his first horror picture (1956), we then moved to a clip from A Bucket of Blood, the opening credits sequence.
Corman explained that the character's speech was meant to be meaningless in order to represent a pretentious and fake artist. This was his first comedy-horror film and it was shot in 5 days. The setting is a beat cafè of the time, it was also one of the first films to have such a contemporary setting, and to be a very innovative approach to an "house of wax" story.
As you will notice by watching it the opening is shot in long take with a frequent use of dollies, he wanted the camera to wander around and show the space while the fake artist's speech went on.
We then moved to one of his most interesting works: the Poe Cycle:

1. House of Usher (1960)

2. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

3. The Premature Burial (1962)

4. Tales of Terror (1962)

5. The Raven (1963)

6. The Haunted Palace (1963)

7. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

8. The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

We watched House of Usher's trailer, the title is different from the original story because the company wanted to put emphasis on the "house".
Corman thought about the most clichè way of opening a picture regarding a classic, so he brought in the idea of the book opening on the story as a kind of joke to open the film.
Since the AIP was a very small company, having 15 days for the making of a film was a gamble, but also meant a step forward for them.
He was then asked about the use of Cinemascope and widescreen in the cycle, since all Poe's stories are very claustrophobic. That was again the company's idea since Cinemascope was selling very well, and it fortunately was a success for the House.
After that he really wanted to make The Masque of the Red Death, but Bergman's The Seventh Seal had just come out. So, he made The Pit and the Pendulum first.
He started using horror stars from the earlier period such as Boris Karloff, bringing in better and good actors was a great improvement for the pictures also. 
There's an anecdote about the making of The Raven that I found very interesting. The film starred Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Three great and very different actors. On the second day of shooting Karloff went to Roger to tell him Lorre was improvising the whole script and he had no idea on what to do. This problem between the actors was connected to their training: Lorre, German actor, studied with Bertolt Brecht and the Stanislavsky method, whereas Karloff, had an English background. They finally managed to solve everything. I haven't seen the film yet, but the interviewer quoted the wine-tasting scene of which Corman is very pleased, especially for the idea of introducing humour in the picture, because in that way they were always trying to vary from one production to the other.
We continued with the trailer of Tomb of Ligeia, shot in England. The Poe films were doing very well there, and by shooting in England they could also get a subsidy and obtain a longer schedule, plus the casting of very good British actors.
For The Masque of the Red Death he explained that the script looked too simple for him, so, together with a writer, they incorporated another Poe's short-story as a subplot to make it more complex.
In 1961 he had faced his first failure: The Intruder. 
A film I was waiting to hear about was The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). The film is sci-fi/horror story, an attempt to combine these two genres. The original idea saw the protagonist as a man having x-ray visions, he then changed the character into a doctor working on vision. The ending of the film is also a religious moment: we see the doctor seeing through the centre of the universe, being blindened by the powerful vision of God. Stephen King actually wrote an alternative ending to the film. He thought of redoing it in the future since it would improve a lot thanks to the new technologies.
The Terror (1963) has a very intricate story concerning its making rather than the actual film plot. He shot it in two days shooting 15 pages a day with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. The latter saying that Corman would be the only person to hire him for 10 years. He always believed in his talent, and said that Nicholson is always a great writer, who wrote many things for him too.
For the last Poe picture, Tomb of Ligeia, he tried to work with the unconscious mind as both Poe and Freud did, without being aware of external influences. He tried to work on an hermeneutic environment. 
An interesting common element in his films are the figures of heroines who become monstrous, which is also a theme that ran through Poe. He often took a story and turned the lead into a woman, because it brings more dramatic value and complexity. 

INTERVIEW: The street films and the New World Pictures
Being a member of the counterculture in the 60s he wanted to take some time apart from the studio and actually go shoot on the streets.
So he made the first biker movie: The Wild Angels (1966). The producers wanted a story in which the "monsters" were the Hell's Angels, he wanted the opposite: he wanted them to be the main focus, the heroes or antiheroes, his identification being with the "bad guys".
In 1970 he decided to turn to producing by funding his company: New World Pictures. He was a bit tired of the genre and was more interested in contemporary subjects.

INTERVIEW: What about Jaws? The coming of the blockbuster.
The big come-back of the monster movie actually happened in 1975 with Spielberg's Jaws about which a scholar said: "What is Jaws but a big-budget Roger Corman's film?"
Corman explained that the big studios were starting to understand. And then there was Star Wars. These pictures were bigger and better. This was a big problem for B-movies and smaller companies. He actually talked to both Spielberg and Lucas and they both watched his films and the old monster movies when they were young.
Even with these complications, Roger Corman managed to stay, and still be, in the business.

Q&A

• What's next in the monster world?                     
• He is now looking back, working on Greek mythology, with a subject like Medusa, for example.
• 3D in the 50s and today.
• 3D is great when naturally and intelligently used such as Cameron did with Avatar. On the other hand, there are films which are not as good which damage the concept. Gravity is another recent and excellent example of 3D use. 
• Can you talk about the making of The Trip?
• Joe Dante is working on a documentary about the making of this film. The purpose of the film was to shoot a long LSD trip, with the help of Nicholson and many others. The funny thing is that Bruce Dern, the main character, had no experience with LSD.
• Are there today actors of the caliber of Karloff, etc.? 
• Yes, there are good equivalents today. 
• Contemporary filmmakers he admires.
• Coppola, Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuàron. 
• How do you manage to work on a very small budget?
• The small budget is a challenge, and it allows you to use intelligence and creativity more.
• Which filmmakers influenced you the most?
• He has been influenced by every film he saw, he particularly admires Eisenstein (The Battleship Potemkin staircase scene), Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford. He said: "I was absorbing the world around me."
• What about women directors?
• He worked with quite a few great women: Tina Hursh, Amy Jones, but even if we did not have so many great women directors we have a great number of women producers. Usually the most successful and richest. 

Last, but not least, I bought the book about his career (Crab monsters, teenage cavemen and candy stripe nurses. Roger Corman: King of the B Movie, Chris Nashawaty) 

and got his autograph and the picture with him. It was a great moment, a unique chance probably, I am glad I did not miss it.

p.s: Corman keeps a pencil and a pad near his bed because he happens to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas to write down. (I should start doing that too.)