"The only and appropriate movie genre during wartime is the horror"

KINEMATRIX: Let’s focus on "Homecoming" and one thing I’d like to say about which is the appropriate “wartime-movie-genre” . War is always hell&horror, like it’s often said in the movie, and it’s no means to an end: it’s just Horror come true. So it comes easy and plain to state that the only and appropriate movie genre during wartime is the horror.

JOE DANTE: Well, yeah, I do agree with that. When we did "Homecoming" in 2003/2004 there was no other material being done about the situation and it actually shocked a lot of people, because they didn’t  expect anybody to do a polemic to the degree that this was. But since then, there’s been a number of attempts recently, lots of attempts to deal with the problem.

KMX: REDACTED, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH…

JD: Yes…and LIONS FOR THE LAMBS and the public has been without exception turning away from them. They don’t want to see’em, they don’t want to have to deal with it, they feel that they do it on television, they do it in the newspapers, they do it in their collective guilt  and they just don’t want to confront with it. Certainly they don’t want to pay 11 dollars to be confronting with it! And so, none of them have really gained any traction. You surely know that in Vietnam it took a number of years after the war for people to start examining the situation, usually with a little bit more hindsight; but now I think people like the filmmakers, the creative people, feel so frustrated that they HAVE to get these feelings out and probably that’s not what the public is still ready for.

KMX: So you do agree with horror being the only and appropriate movie genre during wartime, because only years after the end of A war, of ANY war, you can have A PERSPECTIVE, so much so to be allowed to make a war-movie like, let’s say, PATHS OF GLORY… 

JD: Yeah, because there’s been a history of horror films coding certain political messages, which makes ‘em a lot more powerful for people to watch, because it doesn’t seem to be about what it’s about and so during World War II and the Thirties all of these social problems were kind of reduced into the horror films, that spoke a lot about how people felt without actually saying it. Actually "Homecoming" is a little different in that : it’s both a horror film and a contemporary die-hard try. I think it’s the first time everybody’s done that after J’ACCUSE (Abel Gance, 1939)… Did he do it twice, with a different title?

KMX: Yes, the other was THAT THEY MAY LIVE.

JD: Right! Anyway, I certainly do agree that the right form of protest during the war is to not be specific about it and certainly this movie, "Homecoming", is a zombie-movie, first and foremost but I think zombies are very metaphorical anyway and have been since the Thirties. In fact the word “zombie”, I was discussing it just the other day, doesn’t really appear until the late Twenties: it’s a haitian word…

KMX: Murnau’s NOSFERATU was shot in 1922, only four years after the german defeat in World War I.

JD: Right.

KMX: And you’ve been even more courageous than that, shooting during the war…

JD: Yeah, but it just came out of frustration. My friends and I were just sick of not  having any power and the worst  of all was thinking that we were all sitting there acquiescing to the way things were without protesting and so it was a protest movie.

KMX: I remember when we met in Venice, 2004, just a couple of months before the elections, we were all sure that a change was about to come and that it meant senator Kerry being elected and after all it was so frustrating… 

JD: It turned out that he wasn’t the best candidate and there’s some question about how that election was held anyway but…

KMX: So now, let’s not say anything about 2008!

JD: (Sighing) Oh, If you really want to be depressed you can talk about american politics! In 2008, if the choice is between Clinton and Giuliani, it’s a sad choice… (all laughing)…

KMX: New York, New York, New York…

JD: New York, New York, I know…and neither of them are really newyorkers! And them aside, Obama is not very experienced and I don’t think he can win…Hillary IS very experienced, but she’s so hated by over half the country and so has been for years and plus I think the other side would love to see her win (among the Democrats) because they’ve got so much hate ready to spring, that they know they want to go against her…and the fact that she’s a woman doesn’t help and a lot of people won’t vote for a woman. Obama’s black as lot of people won’t vote for black people. The worst thing we can imagine is Clinton versus Obama, because everybody won’t for them…you know…and the irony is that, considering the disasters, treason and mistakes of the current administration, he would think that there would be an issue and to get rid of them and to get new people in there, but the choice is a weak one, I think… It’s what I call the american deathwish.

KMX: Can you tell us more about the new “Masters of Horror”, who’s involved?

JD: The “M.O.H” program went on for two seasons, then the financers decided that they didn’t want to go on with it but all the people involved wanted to continue so it went from being a cable show to a network show aired by Nbc, still made in Canada and I’m told actually co-owned by the Province of Manitoba, which is where they going to shoot this and that they invested in the show,but the writers’strike has put a krimp on that, because most scripts aren’t finished and I don’t know how that will impact, when it will be shown, whether it will be made or not at this point. We’ll also have less freedom, ‘cause that’s the way american networks work and they have sponsors and the sponsors rightly don’t want to be sponsoring things that will make people not buy their products. Also, unfortunately, because it’s a network, now we have 41 minutes to tell our stories instead of the previous hour. Fortyone minutes out of an hour, all the rest are of these commercials, so to do a story…

KMX: I can imagine what kind of commercials…

JD: Well, usually for rectile disfunctions: that’s how used to be our major commercials in L.A. and New York. It’s very hard to tell a story in 41 minutes in three act, so I have found one yet, but I’m not sure what I would do. Most of the same characters will be same: obviously Mick Garris, the producer, Guillermo (Del Toro), I heard, this time maybe wants to do one, although I would think he would find that format restrictive, but it depends on what story is. Argento is not going to be on this new one.

KMX: "Homecoming" also deals with the overwhelming power of media: cable-TV, Radio and the Press.

What we see in the wonderful "Marty Clark Show" (that should not be a show, as long as it deals with the old notion of "information") is actually what we can see in the whole OUTFOXED movie, or the one about the Enron crack, or the recent Jonathan Demme’s MAN FROM PLAINS, on last Jimmy Carter’s book, “Palestine, freedom not apartheid”.

The truth is faked, as you clearly state with the "Marty Clarke" example: guests being interrupted during live transmission, heartless and flat introduction to harsh and serious matters (“WHY DID MY SON DIE…” - “SUBVERSION!, “ANTI-WAR T-SHIRTS…”, a stroke of genius on yours part ), like the character of the private’s mother. So, I believe now’s the time when:

a) Cable-TV, Radio & the Press are definetely and completely fake and tell the opposite of the truth;

b) Cinema, which used to be the entertaining part of the Media, is now, once more split in 2:

- 1/ the funny, computerized versions of the old novels and tales, coming from the big Studios, are nowadays supposed not to make you think, where once they were simply spots of happiness in everyone’s ordinary life;

- 2/ the so-called independent filmmakers, producing fiction or doc & mockumentaries or genre movies, which are the only ones to try and tell the truth;

c) Internet is still the land of the free, after more than 10 years now of struggle and resistence against any attempt to normalize the web.

It’s weird in someway and shocking that internet and ½ of the Showbiz are now playing the part of the Media, in a possibly endless war. What about the scheme I tried to picture?

JD: The problem is that the media now are owned by giant corporations and it’s extremely difficult to trust what they say.

KMX: As we see in OUTFOXED, the movie.

JD: Exactly: Fox is a channel which is devoted entirely to present one point of view, which is the administration’s point of view. It’s very 1984.

The other Stud… The other Channels are also owned by big conglomerates, some are more all-broad than others, but there’s always a reason to take everything they say with a grain of salt and it’s what they don’t cover rather than what they do cover…the stories they leave out…the stories that, you know, will end up on page 92 of the newspaper, but actually are huge stories. The only place there’s…that you can get those stories, is on the Internet. Now the problem of the Internet of course is that - it’s a strange there’s no one who have monitored it yet - it’s weakness. It’s also the same thing, because anything you can say you can write. We have in Wikipedia”, which is an on line encyclopedia: you can go and you can change the entries: anybody, any person can write in anything.

KMX: And I also do believe, intellectually speaking, that there’s also a lot of dishonesty and “racism” in WP, ‘cause if you make a search for keywords like “Janis Joplin”, “Jim Morrison” or so, there’s always the same sort of “oriented biography” coming out, like putting them down.

JD: Exactly: there’s a lot of anger on the Internet and a lot of the bloggers. Well, people have bad things to be angry about, but everybody’s angry about something different and the WP entry can change from week to week depending on how many people don’t like you and what are writing are negative things, maybe most of which are not true!

But still the Internet is an astounding development. I know, personally, I’m in contact with people that I have known for years, but I saw all of them and ever talked to them on the telephone, but I have an instant communication with them by email, so I’m actually more connected now than I was before I got my computer.

End of Part#1.

Part#2 and #3 will be published during the following days. 

Hotel Continentale, Trieste, 17^th November 2007