April 10, 2005
The Making of Alien Apocalypse
The story of the making of Alien Apocalypse actually begins seventeen years ago, in 1988, in Los Angeles. I came up with the idea for the story of Alien Apocalypse and jotted it down. Soon thereafter, I ran into Lawrence Bender, who has since gone on to produce Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and all the rest of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, but at that point had yet to do anything. He and Quentin used to hang out at the bungalow where I was living in Hollywood with my writing partner, Scott Spiegel. Lawrence said he had met some Texas investors who wanted to finance a film and did I have any scripts that could be made very cheaply? I said I had just come up with a science fiction story that I thought was pretty good, sort of like Spartacus in the future. He said to give him the treatment. I said, “What are you offering?” He said he’d pay $10,000 for the script and that I would get to direct it. I said okay, went home and wrote the treatment, which I entitled Humans in Chains. I gave it to Lawrence, he read it, said he liked it, then immediately added that he would now only pay $5,000 for the script and I wouldn’t get to direct it. I grabbed the treatment right back out of his hands and said, “Forget it.” He replied, “Fine, fuck you.” I retorted something witty like, “No, fuck you,” and left.
Two years later, right after I had made my second feature film, Lunatics: A Love Story, I pitched the executive producer, Rob Tapert, the story for Humans in Chains. He said he liked it and thought that it would make a good follow-up project to Lunatics. I really ought to write the script. I had moved back to Detroit at that point and was living in my family’s house, which was vacant since my mom and dad were in the midst of a divorce and both of them had moved out. The house was too big and quiet to work in, so I drove up to the nearby Tel-12 Mall, sat in the food court and wrote the script by hand on yellow legal pads. This took several weeks of daily work. I’d arrive right when the mall opened at 10:00 AM, get a cup of coffee and a Cinnebon cinnamon roll (Mmmmm, cinnamon rolls), sit down by myself among the 100 or so tables and start writing. In the course of the next two hours every table would fill up with people eating lunch, then an hour or so later almost everyone would leave and it would just be me by myself writing again. This always seemed like a perfect fast-motion shot for a film. Once the script was written by hand, I began slowly typing it into my computer. I moved back to LA at this point and began moving from one friend’s couch to another. For a short time I was crashing in the garage at Sam Raimi’s house in Silverlake, which he was then subletting to: Joel and Ethan Coen, Fran McDormand, Holly Hunter, and Kathy Baker, all of whom have subsequently gone on to win Oscars (perhaps if I had been paying rent, instead of just mooching, I too would have an Oscar by now). I remember trying to work on the script for Humans in Chains there and it was just too damn noisy. I finally completed the first draft of the script and it came out very long at about 150 pages. I gave it to Rob, he read it, didn’t like most of it and made extensive notes, which I found quite perceptive and very helpful. So I began the rewrite. This took a couple of months, and when I was finished I thought it had turned out very well. Rob’s notes had been incredibly useful so I gave him co-story credit, also thinking that this would inspire him to get the film financed. Rob, however, had moved onto other projects (Army of Darkness, and Time Cop, with Jean-Claude Van Damme), had completely lost interest in my script and wouldn’t even bother to read it. (Rob finally got around to reading the rewrite in 2000, called me up and said, “Hey, that’s a helluva good rewrite”). The hands of time slowly crept forward and twelve years went by. I moved up to Jacksonville, Oregon in October of 2001, a mile up the road from my pal, Bruce Campbell, and into a single-wide trailer truly in the middle of nowhere (it was seven miles to the nearest store—not a town, which was fourteen more miles—just a store). A herd of deer and a flock of wild turkeys wandered though my yard every day. I fed them and they became my friends. Meanwhile, Bruce and I had signed up with new sales agency to sell our various movies, since our original sales agent, Irvin Shapiro, had died a number of years earlier. These guys are a bunch of young hustlers who had an in at the SciFi Channel, where Bruce had already starred in a
film (Terminal Invasion) which had rated very well and SciFi really liked him. So Creative Light asked Bruce and I if we had any scripts suitable for SciFi that Bruce could star in. Bruce dug out his sixteen-year-old script, The Man With the Screaming Brain, and I dug out my twelve-year-old script, Humans in Chains, and we sent them in to the sales agent who in turn sent them into SciFi Channel. This was when the title Humans in Chains became Alien Apocalypse, compliments of the sales agent. Two or three months went by and Bruce and I both asked the agent, “So, what’s up with SciFi?” The agent replied, “They love it.” “Oh, great.” Two or three more months went by. “So, what’s up with SciFi?” “They’re high on it.” “Oh, terrific.” Three or four more months went by. “Anything with SciFi?” “Yeah, they really want to do it?” “No kidding.” Six more months went by. I moved back to Michigan, to a small house on an acre of land in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield. Finally, SciFi called Bruce and asked, “What’s up with those scripts you sent in? We want to make them.” Bruce said, “I don’t know.” SciFi told Bruce to call Jeff Franklin, a producer they had worked with before (Jeff produced the film Raptor Island for them). Bruce called Jeff and said, “Hi, I’m Bruce Campbell.” Jeff Franklin replied in his dry, tough-guy tone, “Yeah, I know who you are.” Bruce said, “SciFi has two scripts they want to do with me.” Jeff said, “I know.” Bruce said, “So, you want to produce them?” Jeff said, “Sure.” Six months later I was in Bulgaria in pre-production. Now that’s what I call a producer! If anything else I say in this essay comes off as the slightest bit critical of Jeff Franklin, and some of it will, please know that I mean in it in the fondest way and that he impressed the hell out of me by putting the film together as quickly as he did.
In that six month interim, as all of the contracts were going back and forth, I decided that the most constructive thing I could do was to first, storyboard all of the special effects—since this script contained more digital effects than I had ever had to contend with before—then second, storyboard the entire film. The digital effects company, Unreal Productions, in Keyport, New Jersey, was just finishing a job which had begun with an estimate of 150 separate effects shots, and ended up with over 250 shots (there were no storyboards of any kind on that film). On the other hand, Unreal ended up doing almost exactly as many effects as I originally storyboarded, which was a first for them. Also during this six month interim period I fought my two most important battles, both of which I won. I demanded that my buddy Gary Jones not only be hired as the special effects supervisor and creature designer, but that he also be hired as 2nd unit director. Jeff Franklin was against both of these things, but I simply wouldn’t let up, and Jeff finally relented. Jeff was subsequently so pleased with Gary and his work that he has since hired him as the main unit director on another film (RaptorIsland 2).
I knew what I wanted the aliens to basically look like, which was Ray Harryhausen’s moon men in The First Men in the Moon (1964). My buddy, Paul Harris, who can draw, made the first sketches of the ‘Mites. I then bopped around on the internet and found many photographs of real insects. I found some with cool-looking mandibles, and others with interesting coloring. I sent the sketches and photos to Gary, who then came up with six different heads and six different bodies, and I was allowed to play mix and match. We stuck all of the pieces together and had a design we liked. Gary immediately began building the full-sized rubber puppet version, even though no money had been released yet. By the time the money was finally released, Gary was almost done casting the creature. He did all of the final painting and finishing work in Bulgaria. It was a heroic effort and I thank him for it.
Upon my arrival in Sofia, Bulgaria on April 28, 2004, my first impression was that the city looked like a former communist shit-hole, the skyline dominated by decaying high-rise apartment buildings desperately in need of a paint-job. Pretty quickly, though, I grew to really like Sofia, and the longer I was there the more I appreciated it. First impressions can be wrong. I was met at the airport by the co-producer, Bob Perkis, a seasoned professional from New York City, who’s in his early 60s and talks like he’s a member of the cast of “The Sopranos.” Bob would say things like, “The Bank of Bob is closed!” Every day of exterior shooting Bob would be on location at call time, which is a tad unusual for a producer, and frowning up at the sky he would declare, “It’s gonna fuckin’ piss on you today.” Half the time he was right, half the time he was wrong. But given the short schedule with no elbow room, whether it rained or not I was still shooting, so what was the difference? Quite frankly, I enjoy shooting in the rain. And it only rained hard enough once to actually stop us from shooting and make us go hide in the trucks, and that only lasted for a few hours.
Meanwhile, I thought I would find a production office set up and running when I got there, considering we were to start shooting in four weeks, but in fact there was no production office and nothing was up and running. There were only two crew members working: Joel Morales, a top-notch 1st Assistant Director (who’s from LA, but now lives in Sofia), and Alexander Peytchev, the sharp and funny Bulgarian production manager, and a few days later Ina Holevich, the very professional production coordinator (who smoked cigarettes in a long white holder), arrived. Within a week Bob, Joel, Alexander and Ina had hired a hundred people and had put together anentire film crew.
We got offices at the old state television compound, a bunker-like complex of ugly, featureless, low-lying gray concrete buildings, a parking lot filled with a dozen rusty military generator trucks, none of which had been used in at least 20 years, and a pack of about a ten stray dogs. I saw George Costello, the 74-year-old, 6’5” production designer (who designed most of Russ Meyers’s movies, including Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which impressed me) bring a bag of sausages and feed the stray dogs in the morning, then I made sure to have sausages everyday, too. I could get this whole pack of completely different-looking dogs to excitedly line up in front of me, then I would toss each one a bite-sized hunk of sausage that they would catch in their mouths. There was no fighting, no barking, it was always very orderly. At the back of the compound there was a long path through a huge empty lot leading to a McDonald’s located on the side of the main motorway. And even though it was spring and getting warm in Sofia, it was freezing cold inside our cement building and most people had space heaters in their offices. There were also actual armed policemen at the gate and everyone had to prove who they were every single time we entered, with a lot of glaring suspicious looks and pointless delays from these grim-faced officials. There were several large soundstages located in that complex, but we weren’t allowed to use them. Instead, we built our sets in the dark, scary, equipment-littered basement, where for no explicable reason we had to be accompanied by frowning armed policemen, as though we might try to steal some of the multi-ton, quarter-of-a-century old heating and cooling equipment rotting down there. And once you’d made your way all the way down into the basement, you then realized that an entire wall was busted out leading directly outside into a mountain of concrete and rebar rubble. Anybody could go in and out at any time. This is where the slave extras hung out and smoked between shots.
97% of everybody in the crew and cast smoked cigarettes, and smoking was allowed everywhere. I suddenly felt like I was in the civilized world again. The main production office was always engulfed in a thick blue cloud of smoke, with 25 people nervously smoking at the same time, just like it ought to be, as far as I’m concerned. I must admit that I found this very comforting. My apartment was smack in the center of downtown Sofia, on the same street as the American Embassy and J. J. Murphy’s, the big Irish pub in town, which I turned into a bit of a hang-out. Late one night an entire shit-faced drunk soccer team, in uniform, came staggering out of the pub at 2:00 AM all singing with thick accents (“You’re just too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off of you . . .”), several team member stopping to urinate against buildings. Across the street from the embassy was Mango, a large women’s fashion store, and across the main street from there was my real hang-out, Pizza Troll, which had one truly gorgeous waitress, and it opened very early and served breakfast, which most places there didn’t do. It was also just down the street from Sofia’s one and only Dunkin’ Donuts, which was an important landmark.
Since all of the street signs are in Cyrillic, like Russian, every street sign is as foreign and meaningless as every other. So, instead of street names, one had to work with landmarks, like the Dunkin’ Donuts or Mango or J.J. Murphy’s, and still I frequently couldn’t communicate where I lived to cab drivers. Bring sharp, Bruce had “cheat-sheets” made for both of us with our addresses, and the office’s address, written in Cyrillic, so we could just point and grunt. No cab drivers, by the way, ever had any change, and got angry when you didn’t offer them the exact change. There were several stray dogs per block, and apparently there are no dog-catchers or any kind of humane society in Bulgaria. On my block, among others, there was a stray big black Doberman, which somehow seemed weird, and a cute, scruffy little mutt. One night as Bruce, his wife Ida, and I were walking past the corner of my block we saw the cute little mutt chewing on a bone. Bruce said, “What a cute little doggy” and went to pet it. The dog obviously thought Bruce was trying to steal its bone, went berserk barking madly
and attacked Bruce. It nipped at Bruce’s ankles and yipping and growling chased him about a block. Ida and I thought we would convulse we laughed so hard. About two weeks later the three of us walked past the same corner, there was the cute little mutt in exactly the same place, sans bone. Bruce pointed and said, “That’s the dog that attacked me.” The dog looked up, clearly recognized Bruce as the bone thief, began barking madly and attacked him again. This time the dog actually managed to bite his ankle, too. Ida and I nearly died laughing yet again. On the tech-scout at the end of pre- production, where the whole crew goes out to every location and the director talks them through every scene, it was raining and very muddy. At the first location, as I explained the action in the
rain, I slipped and fell on my ass in the mud, which got a big laugh out of the 25 or so crew people there. At the second location, as I explained the action I once again slipped and fell in the mud. At the third location I did not slip and fall in the mud. As I got in the car, Bruce’s very funny driver said, “Now you must fall twice at the next location.” The next day I awoke with a cold, all stuffy, congested and sneezing. I managed to remain sick for the entire shoot, and I lost my voice, too. I’ve never been sick before while directing (I have been sick while working on a shoot as a PA, and that totally sucked). It certainly added a new challenge to an already challenging situation. I had to depend a lot more on the bullhorn, and I went through two of them during the shoot. I also ate cold pills every couple of hours for three straight weeks, as well as non-stop throat lozenges. And of course cigarettes and coffee.
Bulgaria is not in the European Union, and their highly-devalued currency is the Leva, and most people there don’t even make very many of those. Instead of buying or renting a coffeemaker, it was apparently cheaper to hire a woman full-time to make everybody plastic cups of instant coffee, with six spoonfuls of instant coffee in each cup. Sometimes there was milk, often there wasn’t. I began casting the many speaking roles in the script with the hope of finding American actors for all of the parts. After the first casting session it became apparent to me that almost all of the Americans they could round up were not actors, just Americans living in Bulgaria for one reason or another (many were there with the Peace Corps). I quickly realized that being American could not be the criteria for being cast, it would have to be acting ability and experience in front of a camera. Talent trumps nationality. So I ended up casting mostly good Bulgarian actors with thick accents that made them sound like Boris and Natasha from “Rocky & Bullwinkle,” whose voices would later have to be replaced by American actors.
One of the few American actors I was able to cast there was Michael Corey Davis, who played the astronaut, Captain Chuck Burkes (it was originally Burke, by the way, but a law firm for the bonding company read the script and offered an opinion that the only thing or name that needed to be changed in the whole script was Burke to Burkes). I’ll bet Michael is the most popular actor in Sofia, and he gets cast in everything. He’s handsome, ripped and has a good voice. Within five minutes of meeting him, without any sort of reading or casting session, I offered him the part, and then I asked, “Oh, will you cut off your dreads, I mean, you are supposed to be an astronaut.” Michael said flatly, “No, I won’t.” I said, “Okay, fine. I guess astronauts in the future have dreads.” Michael will have to forgive me for repeating this story, but I think it’s funny. One day on the set, Michael stated authoritatively that although it doesn’t mention his character’s ethnicity in the script, it was clearly written for a white guy. I asked, “Why?” “Because,” said Michael, “No black people are from Minnesota, and no black men are named Chuck.” I immediately said, “Prince is from Minnesota,” and Bob Perkis said, “And what about Chuck Berry?” Anyway, I changed Minnesota to Michigan, which is where I live, and can personally vouch that African-Americans do live here. Rosi Chernogorova, the very beautiful girl who played Bizzy, is probably the top model in Bulgaria. She appeared on the cover of their big magazine while we were there. She’s also about six feet tall, and seemed to look straight through me without seeing me (which may be common to all beautiful women), but I think she did it to everyone, which may be common to super-models. I personally think Rosi did a good job in the film. She knew her lines, she paid attention, and she gave it everything she had. I ask no more of anyone. At the end of one day of shooting I said to her, “You were good today.” She smiled at me and said with her thick accent, “You think maybe I should practice?” This was the first time that she had bothered to smile at me, or really even acknowledge me, and it was making my knees weak and my heart flutter, and I said, “Practicing is good.” Luckily, Bruce overheard and laughed at my behavior later. Remy Franklin played the part of Alex. Remy, or Remington, is executive producer Jeff Franklin’s 20-year-old son, and this was his first film. I was more than a bit concerned before I actually met him that he might be a prima dona and be difficult to work with, but in reality he’s a
very nice guy and I liked him a lot. He too gave it everything he had, but his first day, like anyone’s first day, was rough. When I went in for his first reaction shot, and said, “Okay, you’re horrified,” he did nothing. I said, “Now you’re grossed out.” Nothing. “Now you’re dog just got killed.” Deadpan. I cut and took Remy aside. I said, “Remy, first, you’re being out-acted by the model. Second, when I go in for a reaction shot, you must do something. Anything. Bite your lip, scrunch up your face, turn away, something, but you’re not allowed to do nothing.” The next take he bit his lip, scrunched up his face, then turned away. And from there on out he always did something, and his learning curve was steep and rather fun to watch. By the end I thought he too was doing a good job. Todor Nikolev played Bob the Fisherman (based on Rob Tapert). I ended up having to shoot his first scene very quickly at the end of a day. We grabbed the actors and equipment we needed, which included some live fish, and ran off into the center of the enormous wooded park in the middle of Sofia, which is where we shot a lot of the film. The scene with Bob the Fisherman fishing, then meeting up with Dr. Hood and his merry men all fell together rather quickly and Bruce and Todor did a great job. The next morning when Bruce saw Todor on the set he said, “You were very good in that scene yesterday.” Todor replied, “Yes, I was.” Renee showed up for the last week of the shoot. I enjoyed every moment working with her, and every scene we shot was fun. In her love scenes with Bruce, the two of them constantly had the giggles, which gave me the giggles, too. Every time I said cut, Renee burst out laughing. When I first saw her in her astronaut jumpsuit, I asked, “Would you mind if it was taken in a bit more in the butt?” She shrugged, “No, not at all.” So it was taken in in the seat, and I must say I think it looks really good. I asked Renee to play the part with a Texas accent (she’s from Austin), with the idea that her character, Lt. Kelly Lanahan, grew up in Houston, and every boy or girl growing up in Houston must consider being an astronaut at some point. Anyway, Renee played the part with a Texas twang for one day, then dropped it and never did it again. It’s in the scene when she and Bruce first enter the slave cellar, sit down and speak with Jeff, where she says, “Let’s go sit by the far” (meaning fire). I guess she just wasn’t comfortable with it, and it’s barely noticeable in
the one scene, so it didn’t really matter. But Renee is just a wonderful, positive influence on a film, and she makes everybody feel better having her around. Thank you, Renee. Bruce on the other hand is just a pain in the ass. I jest. Bruce is one of my very best friends, has been for most of my life, and makes me laugh harder than anyone else in the universe. Every time I did an unintentional pratfall, fell on my ass, hit my head, caught my pants on a nail and tore a big hole, I’d look up and Bruce would always have seen it and would be laughing his head off. Bruce intentionally makes me laugh, my very existence makes him laugh. I love his wife, Ida, too, and I wish I was hanging out with them right now. As a single man I’ve always got my eyes peeled for the cute, available gals. The only woman I felt any connection with during my two months in Bulgaria was Kalina, the video assist technician. She had short, boyish hair, a serious demeanor (everyone I asked about her suspected she was gay), was very alert and completely on top of her job, which was keeping the TV monitor and the camera connected and working, often not an easy task because it’s always under the gun when it fails. Anyway, she wore tight-fitting cargo-pants with lots of pockets, all stuffed with
electronic connectors. Kalina spoke very little English, so we often fell back on discussing our cats. She said her cat was 12 kilos—26.4 pounds. That’s a big cat. She lived in a third floor apartment and her enormous cat got in and out by jumping from balcony to balcony. Anyway, nothing ever developed. Jeff Franklin arrived in Bulgaria during the shoot and it was the first time I had actually met him in person. Jeff offhandedly said, “Don’t you think there ought to be some aliens earlier in the story?” And I offhandedly replied, “No,” and didn’t give it another thought. As I was getting ready to leave Bulgaria, Gary Jones came over and said that Jeff told him to get some shots of aliens for earlier in the movie. I said, “There’s no place for them! That’s absurd!” Gary smiled, calmly puffed on his Cuban cigar and looked at me like I was insane, or just a silly child. “The executive producer told me to get shots of aliens. Is there something you’d specifically like, or are you just leaving it up to me?” I said, “No, you handle it. He gave you the job, you do it. I don’t want to think about it.” Gary shrugged, “Fine.”
My best line during the whole shoot, I think, was to David Worth, the director of photography. David’s about 60, has been a DP for nearly 30 years, and is a very seriously opinionated movie buff, perhaps even more so than myself, which is saying something. David and I had plenty of spirited movie talks (movies he didn’t like were termed “Hammered-shit”). Anyway, 25 years ago David shot two films for Clint Eastwood, Bronco Billy and Any Which Way You Can, for which his assistant cameraman was Jack N. Green, who then went on to shoot every Clint Eastwood film for the next 20 years. So, I was telling David about my film Running Time, and how it’s a black and white heist picture all in real-time and in one continuous shot. David said, “That sounds great. It sounds better than Reservoir Dogs.” Then he added in a rather snotty tone, “So why aren’t you as big as Quentin Tarantino?” I casually replied, “Why aren’t you as big as Jack Green? He was your assistant, wasn’t he?” David went, “Oooooohhh” like he’d been punched in the gut, then said, “Good one.” It was initially supposed to be an 18-day shoot, but we got ahead of ourselves, and due to the scheduling of Peter Jason, who played President Demsky, as well as the availability of a location, days # 17 & 18 became one day. I ended up shooting a lot of various crucial bits in a
variety of places, including everything with the President, as well as everything with all the senators, one of whom turned out to be one of the worst actors I’ve ever worked with. It was also raining all day, and for me the last day of shooting was the single most difficult day of the whole shoot, and I’d already had a couple tough days. (I didn’t do any overtime, by the way). The wrap party, at the Alcohol Club, was for me one of the rungs of Dante’s hell. The shitty disco/rap music was way too loud, the room was much too warm for my liking or comfort, it was too dark, there was an enormous line at the bar, and there were too few bartenders. There were many, many people I would have liked to talk to, but the music was too loud, I still had laryngitis, and most of the people had thick accents, and the combination made communication impossible. Kalina was there looking very attractive, but by the time I saw her I was in a panic, gave her hug and quickly split. I got home to America and literally slept for 48 hours. I was still sick, had no voice and has been running on cold pills, coffee and cigarettes for a month. At some point during that 48 hours I got up, made a cup of coffee with the filter-drip contraption I’d been using for years, took one sip, grimaced, poured it out, drove up to Sears, bought a Krups espresso maker, came home, made a cup of espresso, took a few sips, then went back to sleep for another 24 hours. The very nice and incredibly fast editor, Shawn Paper, had an editor’s assembly done in just a few weeks, and it all seemed to go together pretty well, I thought. I spent the next six weeks doing my director’s cut, which wasn’t all that difficult to get to, and I turned it in feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Well, as is certainly his right as the executive producer, Jeff Franklin re-cut the picture (even if it took me several days to calm down and accept the situation). He put in the entire front tree montage and put the main titles over it, which were supposed to go over the next scene of the astronauts walking and talking in the desert. The aliens Gary Jones shot were cut into the desert scene spying on the astronauts. In the script and in the director’s cut the kid, Alex, narrates the film; now it’s an adult, which I guess is supposed to be Alex grown up, but I’m not sure. There are a variety of other things, too, like every act break was changed. Whatever the case may be, when the film was shown on March 26th it received a 2.28 rating, making it the highest-rated stand-alone movie (meaning not the first of a series or a mini-series) for ScFi Channel ever. So, however it went together, I guess that’s how it should’ve gone together. For me the biggest relief is getting to download the script out of my head after fifteen years. All in all, it was a very good experience.
Josh Becker
|
