On my very first trip to the US in 2008 I went to Monte Hellman's house in the Laurel Canyon hills and interviewed him about his two films with Jack Nicholson shot in the Philippines, Back Door To Hell and Flight To Fury (both 1964). He followed with "What else would you like to talk about?" and we chatted about his failed Hammer kung fu film, his spaghetti western, his tenure in the no-budget world of Roger Corman, EVERYthing! He then made me the best cup of coffee I'd had in the States on his espresso machine while I sat under a huge three-sheet of his 1971 counterculture classic Two-Lane Blacktop. A warm, funny, generous guy who made a star-struck film obsessive VERY happy. Vale Monty, who passed away in 2021 aged 91.
Andrew: A logical starting point would be talking about the Corman days...
Monte: I'd done a picture called Beast From Haunted Cave - Roger was one of the backers of a theatre company that I had where I did a season of four plays including the first Los Angeles production of Waiting For Godot, and at the end of our season, which was very successful, we were informed that our theatre was being torn down and converted into a movie theatre. And so Roger took that as a sign, or he thought that I should see it as a sign… he said "time to get healthy", because he knew that even though our theatre was successful, we weren't making a living at it (laughs). So he suggested that I make a film and "get healthy", and I didn't exactly get healthy (laughs) working for Roger. So that was the beginning. And then I did, he had four pictures that he sold to TV that needed to be expanded, because as theatrical features designed for the second half of a double bill, they were all sixty-minute movies, and for TV they needed to be 70 minutes. So he hired me to add ten minutes to each of four films, including the one that I had made, Beast From Haunted Cave.
These were all Filmgroup pictures?
I'm not sure if they were Filmgroup at the time, maybe, but anyway they all had different production names because he was always changing companies to evade the unions. I think Beast From Haunted Cave was Santa Clara Productions (laughs), he'd pick names of Californian towns.
British quad for The Terror (1963), paired with Eddie Romero's The Raiders Of Leyte Gulf (1961)
Big map and drawing pins?
Right! Then he needed, not ten minutes, but nearly half of a movie for a picture that he did called The Terror, which he shot for two days on a set that he hadn't torn down yet of The Raven. He had Boris Karloff for another two days, and he quickly shot half a picture without really having a script. Then he hired Francis Coppola to write a script and shoot the other half of the movie. Francis, instead of doing it in two days, spent five weeks, and wound up with maybe another ten minutes of material (laughs).
He was training for Apocalypse Now…?
Yeah! Then he hired Jack Hill and me, Jack to write and me to direct, again what was left to do with the movie, so we used a little bit of Francis' material, and all of Roger's material, obviously as it was Boris Karloff, and so we wrote another script and shot it in five days. So that became the movie.
Yeah. And then there are all kinds of other people who attribute it to part-time directors, but actually it was just Roger, Francis and me. Then came the Philippines. And that came as a result of The Terror. Because Fred Roos, who was working for Robert Lippert, had seen The Terror in Hong Kong, and he knew that Francis and I had both contributed to it. He wrote to Lippert, and said, "I want you to hire either Francis or Monte." They couldn't find Francis, so I'M the one who became rich and famous (laughs)!
Lippert at the time was working producer…
Yeah, he had a deal at Fox, and his idea going to the Philippines was really to steal a little bit in a sense that Fox was financing Back Door To Hell, and he thought that since they were basically paying for everybody to come over there and paying for all the equipment and everything, that he would then steal a second movie, Flight To Fury, that he would own. So instead of costing $50,000, it would cost $30,000.
The reason for using the Philippines is because of the jungle, that it looks like any Pacific War arena, and was incredibly cheap to shoot in?
The second part is the important part, because we made jungle movies here in various gardens in Pasadena (laughs) and they don't look the same, but Roger certainly didn't care. And I guess Lippert probably didn't either. They were great locations, I mean it was wonderful, we had a great time there.
Let's set the scene for your arrival in the Philippines, from what I understand you're still hammering out the script on the boat?
We wrote both scripts on the way - there was one script of Back Door To Hell which Dick Guttman had written, and John Hackett, who was one of the actors, rewrote that on the boat, and Jack, based on an outline that Fred Roos and I had come up with, wrote Flight To Fury. Both scripts were finished by the time we arrived, which was three weeks' time.
Jack, at this time, was setting himself up as more than an actor. Both you and Jack come out of the incredibly creatively fertile fold that Corman has around him, very film literate people. How did that creative partnership start?
It actually started on a Corman film which he hired a co-worker of mine from the theatre days named Harvey Berman, to do a picture called The Wild Ride, and Harvey was a high school teacher in Concorde, California, and Corman's idea was that Harvey would be able to cast the film from his students (laughs) and make it really cheap. Then he put Jack and Jack's girlfriend at the time, Georgianna Carter, as the leads, and everybody else was from the high school. He hired me to go along a kind of Associate Producer just to keep an eye on things, as he knew I knew a little about making movies at that time, since I'd made one movie and all these little pieces of things, so I was kinda like his security blanket - not Harvey's, but Roger's. That's when Jack and I became friends, and even though we'd known each other vaguely before. So we decided to work together, and we wrote a script together, and Corman was supposed to finance it. In the meantime this Philippine project came along. I was hired and I suggested Jack to act and also to be one of the writers. Jack agreed, but he made a deal on every level that was exactly twice as good as my deal! So if I got paid $5000, he got paid $10,000 (laughs).
But it seems like a great symbiotic relationship which continues into the next few pictures?
Then we made the other two as a kind of substitute for the one we'd written, because Roger didn't feel comfortable making that the way it turned out, he thought it was too "European" a project. Dirty word.
Three weeks on the boat, and you arrive in the Philippines in 1964. What were your first impressions of the Philippines?
I don't remember my first impressions, but I know the first task was casting. We set up offices, I don't remember where they were, and started going through the casting process. We came upon this girl, Annabelle Huggins, who was kind of a celebrity because she eloped with her high school boyfriend to get married, and everybody was very upset about it, so when they came back from their honeymoon, they got her to testify that she'd been kidnapped, and it became a huge cause celebre, and the guy went to jail - it was a horrible story. Fay Spain, there was an attempt to kidnap her as she was coming out of her hotel one night. It was like the Old West at that time - you'd go into a gas station, and the guy pumping gas would have a .45 sticking in his belt.
And it still is to a certain extent! Let's explore this idea of Manila as a frontier town - what do you remember of the chaos?
Just that we would occasionally lose one of our bit players or extras who got shot in a bar fight the night before! We didn't have the same size cast and crew when we finished as had when we started… (laughs)
Back Door To Hell is the first film you shoot. How long was the filming?
I think they were both three-week shoots, which means eighteen days. Except I remember on Back Door To Hell the film hadn't arrived on the first day so we just pretended we were shooting, just to keep everybody… so we didn't have a full eighteen days on that one!
It's quite ambitious to do a war film on a low budget - how low was Back Door To Hell?
I don't know exactly the budgets, but I think that it was more expensive just because it absorbed all of the costs of the people coming over. My guess is that it was about $60,000, and Flight To Fury was much less, maybe half that. If you put them together, they're really about $40,000 movies.
Obviously it was a tight schedule, limited resources, but that was seat-of-the-pants filmmaking?
It was no different from the Corman operation! It was seat of the pants in that it was hard to adjust to the sense of time there, time had a different meaning in the Philippines than it did in the States, even with Corman - maybe especially with Corman! If you asked for something to be done, they would say "Oh yeah…" and tomorrow, and tomorrow… you really had to stay on top of everything just to be sure that things would be ready when you needed them.
The lead actor in Back Door To Hell was a pop singer?Is it true he put money into the film?
I don't know.
But he wasn't an actor?
No, he'd never acted before.
But he does a remarkable job. He ended up with brain damage?
He fell off a ladder or something, yeah. He was a very sweet guy, and did an amazing job. I thought he was very good.
One thing I noticed was the uncharacteristically intelligent dialogue between soldiers - was this picked up on by critics at the time?
I don't recall, if there were reviews, what they consisted of, I don't even think I have any reviews from that. The DVD has been reviewed.
But from a forty-year perspective, it's one of those great existential war dramas.
I think part of it was that it was written by an actor, and of course Flight To Fury as well, and actors have a tendency to know what kind of dialogue actors can speak. So I've found that working with actors as writers has been profitable, even when I just bring them in to do a dialogue polish.
I understand that you fell ill at a certain point.
Yeah, as soon as we finished shooting Back Door To Hell I got this tropical fever that nobody could identify, and so I was in the hospital for three weeks between pictures when I should have been scouting and working on setting up for the other picture. Finally, just a couple of days before we were ready to shoot, Jack came into the hospital and he literally put his hand on my head and said, "You will get well!" The next day I jumped out of bed and I was running around in a jeep picking the locations (laughs).
Flight To Fury is another great character-driven action films. You'd remember Vic Diaz?
Oh, wonderful.
He passed away just under two years ago. Even in the Philippines he was called their Peter Lorre.
The character's name was Lorgren, which is Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet. It was a combination of the two characters.
What was he like? He comes across as pure evil! What do you remember about him?
He was a very funny guy, wonderful guy. Just the use of P for F in the dialect. He was always saying to Jack, "You see that twelve-year old girl? You want to puck her?" (laughter)
So Jack writes the script, and gives himself a great role. From his early films, I think this is the standout film for me.
I think that he had a kind of epiphany on Back Door To Hell. I think it was about the point when the plane had crashed and they were all sitting around, Vic is making his crutches, and there's a scene where Jack is sitting under a tree, and I'm sure that's the day when he came to me and said, "I think I just got it!" He understood what acting was all about!
Right. Scotch? He was funny.
He and FPJ were top of their game, yet they couldn't translate that success outside the country. At the time of Flight Of Fury, he was one of the action superstars!
He was good. Very funny also.
Are you happy with those two films?
Yeah. I was not initially happy with the way Back Door To Hell turned out, because having been in the hospital, I missed a large part of the editing process. Then while I was shooting Flight To Fury, at night I was re-editing Back Door To Hell, and really went back and almost did it from scratch again, but it was never quite the same, and so I was never really pleased with that, but now I'm more comfortable with it, I'm not so strictly…picky…
Is it true that a decision was made from higher up to insert stock footage?
Oh yeah, that was horrible.
Who said "make it more war-like"?
I'm sure that was Robert Lippert. He took out a lot of really funny stuff from Flight To Fury, because he looked at it and turned to whoever was next to him, and said, "We can't use that - people will laugh!" The other thing that happened was, we got back and all of our sound was essentially unusable, because it had been recorded at the wrong speed or something. Either we had to electronically try to adjust it and synch it up, or we had to do a lot of the equivalent there of looping, which we really just did "wild" lines - we'd go into a closet at the recording studio and just start recording stuff and hope that it would match. When we were shooting in Bicol for Back Door To Hell, first of all there was no electricity, and so I don't know where they got ice - maybe they brought it in from somewhere - but we would have warm San Miguel, and they'd put an ice cube in it (laughs). The other side of that was, if you were really thirsty, someone would just go up in a tree and cut down a pineapple and whack it open with a machete. And it was the best pineapple you've ever had.
Jack, John Hackett, and the iconic and instantly-recognizable San Miguel beer bottles
Did you get much downtime?
Not really, when you were working on those kinds of schedules, but there were a lot of funny things. Like in Flight To Fury, they created the set of the interior of the airplane, and little things like the signs would be off, only we didn't realize it until we finished shooting. Like, instead of "Emergency Exit" it would say "Emegency Exit"… It brings back a lot of fond memories when I watch it.
The other thing that was amazing on Back Door To Hell, that was a much more difficult shoot because we weren't in Manila, we were 300 miles south, and we had a typhoon, and everybody said you can't shoot, but on the third day we just decided to go out, and we shot the scene where they're crossing the river, that was during the typhoon, and the actor who swam across that was amazing, I mean he was really a strong swimmer! Anybody else would have been swept away. There was this little girl who was one of the kids in the school room, who would just follow me around every day, and whenever there was a free moment she'd come up to me and say, "Monte Hellman - take me to America!" (laughs)
You'd imagine that working in such a remote location, you'd have complete creative freedom?
We did, until the film got sent back, adding the stock footage. It was great, because we were so far away that they didn't even have time to read the scripts before we were shooting.
They assumed you'd deliver?
Yeah. It was great.
There are great images and montages, and the 360-degree shot of the soldier walking around the captured prisoner…
Looking at it now, I can't believe we got so much shot in such a short period of time. Just the coverage of that whole sequence where they capture the Japanese officer and they interrogate him, and the whole battle scene, and walking amongst the wounded and the dead - just an amazing number of shots, the kind of coverage that I don't think I've ever been able to duplicate in terms of getting so much done in a single day.
Was it because you were free?
We were free, and also there was a kind of perfectionism but you let things slip by because you just wanted to get things done, and so we just went boom, boom. The setups were so fast, and the crew was really good at moving quickly.
And you were able to that because you'd been put through the Corman factory?
Probably, yes.
Roger also allows a certain amount of freedom so long as you stay within parameters…
But Beast From Haunted Cave had no coverage at all, because it was so difficult to shoot in the snow, and that was a twelve or thirteen day shoot. But Beast From Haunted Cave compared to Back Door To Hell and Flight To Fury, it's like night and day, because on Beast From Haunted Cave there would be a master shot, and you're lucky if get a couple of shots moving in. Back Door To Hell, it was so many shots in every scene.
You can see a progression from Beast From Haunted Cave, a really intelligent genre film with a literate Charles B. Griffith script and great character actors…
I never even admitted making that for years! (laughs) Now it's fun to have all that stuff out on DVD.
Once you get back from the Philippines, then what happens?
We're editing Flight To Fury, and while we're in the midst of finishing Flight To Fury, we got back late October, so November and December we're finishing Flight To Fury, then we meet with Corman - I think on the day before Christmas, and this is when he tells us that he doesn't want to do the abortion script that Jack and I had written, but I don't want to totally renege on my promise, so if we wanted to make a western, he'd back that. So we said fine, and by the time we finish our lunch, he says, ""You know, as long as you're making one, you may as well make two, because it doesn't cost that much more…" So that's how it happened. And so on January 2nd we set up offices in Beverly Hills, with an office literally right next to Fred Astaire's office, which was a big thrill, and within I guess five weeks we had two scripts and started scouting locations, and by April…either we started shooting on April 18th or the week before we were in pre-production, but that was an important date for me because I think it was the same date that Fellini had begun 8 1/2.
You're aware that Eddie Romero went into the set of Flight To Fury and shot his own version [Cordillera]?
I knew that he had expanded - I didn't put two and two together that he'd actually worked on the same sets. I know that he'd expanded the movie into a Tagalog version. And that doesn't exist anymore, is that right?
Not at all.
So in his version I assume that Joseph Estrada became the lead?
Quite possibly (laughter).
No comments:
Post a Comment