Berto's Garret

a collection of historical audio interviews with top class actors and movie directors

 

Interview with John Landis

In January 1995 two important things happened. The first one is my first book was finally published, and the publisher gave me my 10 copies - wrapped in blue plastic. The second one is John Landis - who was the subject of the book - came to Rome for a big Fellini retrospective they were holding in EUR.

I had been in touch with John while researching for the book and I had only met him twice before - one in 1989 at the Venice Film Festival (he was a member of the jury), and once again in Rome (he was there to do press interviews to promote Oscar). He was extremely cooperative in my research and it only felt right that I allowed him to know what I had written about him: so I spent the whole week before he flew in translating the whole book into something close enough to english so he could understand what it was all about.

The translation was terrible, but John was very friendly anyways. This interview was recorded in some hall in the Excelsior hotel in Via Veneto and it covers at lenght a lot of things that had been left out in the book, trying to set a few things straight: we discuss the TV-series Dream On and find out about a number of projects that had ended up not happening, including the sequel to An American Werewolf in London. If you want to forget the mediocre An American Werewolf in Paris, do listen to what the original story was supposed to be at around 14' 30" into this very long podcast: John did not just tell the story, but he almost acted it out, with some amazing sound effects.

Around minute 26 some photographer walked in and after discussing the book a little he tried hopelessly to get John to pose for funny photos, and then we kept going for a while: we mentioned Schlock, his debut, that he had bought off the market (27'55"), we discuss Tim Burton's Ed Wood (29') and the original Wood that John had once met, the cuts made to the original The Blues Brothers (30') and that at the time were thought to be lost (about half of that material was actually recovered later, and re-cut into the movie for a laserdisc edition, and are now available on the DVD). We end up discussing censorship (32") and the necessity of shooting multiple versions of the risquee parts so a film can be shown in television with no cuts. This brings to a treat about the way Innocent Blood was cut in the US to get an R rating, and lenghtened again in Europe reintroducing by mistake parts of the film that were not supposed to be seen because John had edited them out the film (35'40") so that Robert Loggia speaks for hours in the final scene.

The final line (around 38') a brief line is dedicated to the project of a sequel to "The Blues Brothers". I could not expect I would have worked on it 2 years later, in Toronto, as a voluntary assistant to the director.

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Posted by: rojking a 14:40 | link | commenti |