FANGORIA #97 (1990)
ON ROBOTS AND RATINGS
by Philip Nutman
Richard Stanley's unusual life experiences helped him to
create the nightmarish visions of 'Hardware'.
It is a rainy Thursday evening and I am seated in The Nellie Dean Pub in
London's West End, reading a book on addiction while waiting for
writer/director Richard Stanley to appear. The choice of reading matter is
apt: nearly everyone in Hardware, his debut feature, is on something, and
in his bleak future vision Stanley seems to be saying, "Tune in,
turn on, drop dead." He is half an hour late.
This doesn't surprise me. He's coming from Shepperton
Studios, several miles outside the city, where for the past week or so
he's been overseeing the final dub on the movie. Also, I know from
previous experience that Stanley seems to inhabit his own world, that
time appears to have a different meaning. Aside from being a
talented twentysomething promo director, he is also a nomad, a peripatetic
wanderer who's drifted far from his South African roots where he
shot anthropological documentaries, ending up in Britain waiting tables
in a London restaurant before going to Afghanistan to film
life under the Russian occupation. There, he'd been blown up
by a Communist missile and lived - physically unscathed - to
tell the tale, and had wandered for three days
with his wounded comrade strapped to his back before finding a Red Cross
refugee camp, only to learn via a telex that Hardware had been given the
green light, necessitating his immediate return to England.
I didn't know this the first time I met him, but the encounter was a
little disconcerting. There was something otherworldly about this guy, and
the only other person I'd met whom I could draw a parallel
with was eccentric Italian director Dario Argento. Both seem
to inhabit someplace strange, and Hardware has proven to be one of the
most interesting movies I've crossed in my eight-year stint with Fango.
So here I am, waiting in a pub, frequented by media types and working Joes
for a man who, technically speaking, should have died a year ago. As if by
invocation - speak of the devil - Stanley appears, tapping me on the back.
He has a tendency to stoop his 6-foot frame, tilting his head and peering
at you from underneath the brim of his ever-present black cowboy-style
hat. Sometimes you feel like you're under a microscope and Stanley is Dr
Cyclops (the film version played by Albert Dekker, not Fango's video
phantom) about to dissect you.
I'm not expecting an apology but the director is cordial, more relaxed
than last time I'd seen him at the recent Splatterfest where a
ten-minute Hardware trailer was screened. We exchange small talk and
head for the Rosa Sayang Malaysian restaurant down the street.
"Tell me about your original plans to have Bill Paxton and Jeffery Combs
star in the movie." I say after we order a selection of exotic
foods. Hardware stars Dylan (Hamburger Hill) McDermott as Hard
Mo Baxter, future warrior, and Stacey (Phantasm III) Travis as Jill, his
sculptress girlfriend. Shades (John Lynch) is Mo's best
buddy. Together, the three of them have to
defect the prototype killing machine Mark 13 that is the movie's
Terminator-like antagonist. The final casting, however, is not quite
what Stanley wanted.
"Bill Paxton would been ideal as Mo." He confides. "He's been great
in every movie he had done; Aliens and Near Dark obviously come
to mind, but surprisingly, no one at either Palace Pictures or
Miramax, who financed the film, had heard of Near Dark. I met with Bill
when we went to LA to cast the leads - part of the cast - and he was
excellent. He loved the role. And we tried out Jeffery Combs
from Re-Animator as Shades, because I felt there'd be an interesting
chemistry between the two of them. But we lost Jeffery because we were
told we could only employ two Americans. Since Jill had to
be American, and I'd already decided on Stacey, who's excellent,
that meant Combs was out."
So what happened to Paxton?
"Because no one at Palace or Miramax has heard of him they
didn't chase his agent," Stanley sighs. "Bill was keen to do the part, but
since he didn't hear anything for a few months, he signed up to do
Navy Seals. There was a terrible period of three days when, finally, the
executive producers saw what I was getting at and tried to sign him.
Bill wanted to do Hardware so much that he had his agent try get him out
of the Navy Seals contract, and we were hanging on by our
fingertips waiting to find the outcome."
Paxton, unfortunately, was bound to the big-budget film, and
so the infinitely more interesting Hardware, which at $1.5 million
cost about as much as Seals catering budget, had to do without
him. Enter McDermott.
"I had to make the characters more sympathetic than they should have been,
the leads aren't quite as screwed up as they were originally
intended.' Stanley adds with an air of dissapointment. His expression goes
distant for a beat, as if he were thinking about how Hardware was meant to
be one hell of a cyber/splatterpunk horror movie that he described to me
during a set visit as "a bad drug trip into the future" which is
an apt description. "Aside from having to soften the characters, the rest
of it was just down to economics, we didn't have the time or the money
to make some of the material as unpleasant as I intended."
One such unpleasant moment is the death of Chief, the movie's splatter
setpiece. "It was OK," Stanley sighs. "There should've been more
blood, but on the whole it works. Vernon, the other cop,
gets the shorter-shrift, he's shot in the head, whereas originally
he was meant to get shot in the balls. This was supposed to be one
of the movie's nastiest moments. The guy's left alive, then cut up with a
chainsaw. The actor had a page in the script of screaming and begging
as his spine was severed so he couldn't move, beseeching Jill to help him.
But she can't because the droid is using him as bait to get her."
"Effects-wise, it would have taken two days to shoot, but we were
at the end of the schedule so all we could do was shoot him in the
head." This time there is no attempt to disguise his
disappointment and a sardonic smile creeps across Stanley's lips.
Like numerous other recent horror films, Hardware was beginning to sound
as if it was another well-intentioned movie that suffered production
problems, not ot mention shaping up for a fight with the censors.
"I imagine the censors are going to have a good time with this." Stanley
says, smiling at the thought.
"Even in the light of what you had to take out? The way you had to
make the characters more sympathetic?" I ask. "You told me this was going
to be a nihilistic movie without hope. A horror movie that delivers."
"It is, it is" he insists, stubbing out his cigarette for emphasis.
"But not quite as extreme a vision as I once had."
A month later. I have the opportunity to see Hardware at the cast and crew
screening held in a plush art house cinema and I am reassured. This is a
tough movie and Stanley has delivered what he promised. Director
of photography Steven Chivers makes the low budget work
in the movie's favour, its claustrophobic sets and do-it-yourself
post-apocalyptic exteriors belying financial limitations.
The good matte work mean Image Animation FX, blood, violence and cutting
edge put many current genre movies to shame.
But as we eat that night, our conversation inevitably deals with
censorship and the petty arguments espoused by the British Board Of Film
Classification and the MPAA. "The censors are going to cut Lincoln's
eye-gouging, and they'll probably trim Chief's death as it goes
on for quite some time." Stanley predicts. "You're allowed to tear people
in half so long as you kill them but if they're alive it comes under the
heading of torture."
"The only thing Palace and Miramax made me take out was the footage of
real death, which was part of a TV documentary running in the background
in one scene," he adds.
Regardless of the movies strengths he is still troubled by his
experience with McDermott. "It means I've got a lead in my movie who I
really don't like. It's an Argento situation: Dario has often said
he deliberately casts actors he has no sympathy for, but I ended up with a
square-jawed lead who believes in the family and is career military with
short hair. He reads the bible! That was Dylan's idea. I find it very hard
to like Mo now. He was meant to be more like a Hell's Angel in the
original script." But Stanley doesn't feel the changes hurt the film. "I
would have preferred Mo to be in that mould but the same terrible things
still happen. It would have been more interesting if the
characters had had deeper flaws to start off with, but I prefer to
hurt people I like."
He pauses ominously. "In movies anyway," he laughs.
Sources close to the movie believe that many of the film's character
dynamics reflect Stanley's own struggle with elements
in his background, and that there's a great deal of autobiography in the
film, particularly in the relationship between Mo and Jill.
He responds to other question in a roundabout way. "I did go to a Catholic
Military School in South Africa," he admits. "By the time I was 12 I could
strip down a rifle and put it back together again. And I was a good shot."
"I just got my gun permit the other day," he says as an aside.
"Can you imagine the authorities giving me the licence to own a gun?"
After a turbulent youth in the Dark Continent - including a trip
to a witch doctor who gave him a protective medallion he wears to
this day - Stanley decided to turn his energies to filmmaking.
"I studied filmmaking at Cape Town Film and Video school for two years
before being booted out during my final term for endangering the lives
of actors on a shoot," he says nonchalantly. "We
were filming a stunt sequence on a cliff face, using professional climbers
as doubles for the actors, and they doubled so well the faculty heads
didn't believe we didn't use the actors." Following this, Stanley signed
up with a music college to film documentary footage of tribal
customs, music and dance, a subject he was familiar with
from his anthropology studies.
He eventually decided to leave South Africa in the early '80s when
he was drafted into the Army. "Actually, it was a combination of things. I
had a bad car accident, there was trouble looming with the authorities
over something I won't go into and the Army was the last straw."
Arriving in London, Stanley worked as a waiter while
feverishly writing screenplays and shooting Super-8 shorts, which in
turn led to his directing videos for bands including Fields
Of The Nephilim, Public Image Limited and a host of unknown French groups.
During this time, Stanley started work on a Super-8 project that was
to metamorphose into Hardware. "It was the same characters, the
same setting but very laid back, more of a comedy, in fact. That
became the basis for the script, which turned increasingly
mean and evolved into another draft which was where Mark
13 first appeared. Before that it was this weird story about Mo,
Shades and these other strange dudes in Jill's apartment. I never intended
it that way, but it then made perfect sense to put the characters together
and have the droid kill them all.
This version of the script was the one that made Stephen Woolley of Palace
Picture sit up and take notice, realising that here the opportunity to
make a British movie with the same visceral, unrelenting qualities
as The Evil Dead, which Palace had successfully distributed in the early
'80s.
The economics of studio moviemaking may have changed - budgets increasing
at an enormous rate, necessitating a bigger slice of the box
office pie - but low budgets are still a
safe bet for a solid financial return. Months before its release date,
Hardware is already in profit due to healthy international presales, and
as a result Stanley is now prepping Dust Devil.
"I've been working on the first draft for the past month," he reveals,
"and we have some development money. It looks likely Palace will finance
again with Miramax, and I'm off to Namibia to do some research.
Namibia, South Africa? Yes. Stanley is going walkabout again and it
promises to be a strange trip. "Dust Devil is a werewolf story with much
more. I think of it as a road movie Western, a socio-political
romantic police procedural psychokiller movie about a cop tracking
down a shapeshifter in Africa." He exclaims with no pause for breath.
Why chose South Africa as a location, I wonder. "It's a strange, scary
place." Stanley responds. "There's nothing more viscious and wild than
Africa in the middle of the night. There's
always something lurking outside your campfire."
Stanley lights a cigarette, the smoke curling supernaturally
around his head. "The main character is a borderline demon straight out of
popular mythology." He reveals, "we're talking The Hitcher, The Man With
No Name, the Demon Gunslinger, The Walking Dude. Randall Flagg in
King's The Stand was a great character, but he wasn't used properly.
He's the basic nomad archetype, which is a figure I've always been
obsessed with. He appears in my promos, he's the nomad in Hardware who
unearths Mark 13, so Dust Devil is the next logical step."
Though it is in the earliest stages of development. Stanley is proposing a
budget of $4.5 million for Dust Devil. "We have to shoot entirely on
location in Namibia," he vows. "It's got to feel
authentic. The story revolves around a cop who is one step
from hell. That country's the closest thing to hell on Earth I've found. If
you start a story there, there's no turning back. It's
downhill all the way for the characters. If there really
is a Walking Dude, he would naturally seek out a place where life is
miserable and Namibia is it."
As we depart the restaurant. I think about the differing opinions people
who've worked with Richard Stanley have of him. Some maintain he
is a genius, others a mad con man. Is it all an
act? I don't think so. There is something definitely unusual about the
guy, but the bottom line is he's made an impressive debut feature, a
lean mean SF horror movie for the '90s. We say our farewells and head off
in opposite directions. The night is unusually quiet for central London
on a Thursday, and as I wander along an almost deserted Oxford
Street towards the subway. I could swear I hear the sound of worn-down
bootheels clicking along the sidewalk.
If there is a Walking Dude, Richard Stanley will find him.
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