John McNaughton Rejoins the MASTERS
By NICANOR LORETI
Most genre fans know John McNaughton best for his impressive directing debut HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, which set a new standard for horror and true-murder films two decades ago. HENRY was a breath of fresh air for the genre back then and made a star of his main actor, Michael Rooker. After THE BORROWER, his next fright opus, McNaughton kept on applying his personal touch to different genres, turning out a series of interesting and sometimes thought-provoking films. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the production of the film which gave him his big break, he’s returning to the genre with HAECKEL’S TALE, the last episode of the first season of MASTERS OF HORROR (premiering Friday, January 27 on Showtime).
The director says that helming HAECKEL’S TALE couldn’t have been more rewarding, even if he came on board at the last minute to replace none other than Roger Corman. “The experience was very good,” McNaughton recalls. “I talked to some of the other directors, and they all had wonderful experiences too. Tobe Hooper, Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon all told me that they were very happy. It was really a director’s show—the kind of experience that you normally have in features as opposed to working on television.”
Helping to keep him excited throughout the process was the free hand he was given in directing his episode, which was scripted by MASTERS creator/executive producer Mick Garris from a story by Clive Barker. The tale follows a man named Ernest Haeckel as he takes shelter in a cabin in the New England woods, and is given one warning: No matter what, he should not venture outside. When he disobeys the order to investigate the cries of an unseen baby, he finds himself confronting the living dead. “We had 98 percent creative freedom, which is as much as you can get on this kind of thing,” McNaughton says. “Because of it being a cable-network show, there were a couple of things that we could not do. For example, children being killed or killing other children. Aside from that, we could do whatever we wanted.”
Even if he was a last-minute addition to the MASTERS lineup, McNaughton had enough time to make this particular segment his own. “When they called me in, the story was already chosen,” he recalls. “Clive Barker had written the short story and gave it to Mick Garris, who wrote the screenplay. I made some notes on the script and there were a few minor changes, but it was already in good shape. I chose the actors; in fact, I brought in two actors I had worked with before. Because we shot in Vancouver, most of the cast came from Canada, and my episode was in fact the last one shot there; the other one [Takashi Miike’s IMPRINT, recently dropped from the Showtime lineup] was filmed in Japan.”
Having also directed thrillers like MAD DOG AND GLORY with Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman and WILD THINGS with Matt Dillon and Neve Campbell, McNaughton insists that the basis for a solid movie starts with the screenplay, whatever type it is. “To me, a good story is a good story,” he says. “I try very hard not to get stuck in any genre, which can happen easily in Hollywood. When I read a script that works, it doesn’t matter to me what genre it is. I do my work and I work in it when I get a good screenplay. But I enjoy drama, I like characters very much. So to me, finding a good script within this genre is the key to me doing it.”
The director acknowledges that that can be hard give the genre remake-happy climate in Hollywood. “It gets more and more difficult,” he says. “Every once in a while I think I have to make a more commercial movie to keep everybody happy and continue being a name. Like in the case of WILD THINGS, which was the most commercial thing I’ve done. But I had a lot of fun with that movie. I enjoyed making it very much; it was a very clever script. It also combined a lot of sex, violence, greed, money… But it gets increasingly difficult to get an interesting project approved. I have several going on right now. There’s one that’s a lot like WILD THINGS, a very commercial, very dark noir picture. I’ve got a second one, which is also a very commercial noir picture [laughs]. But you have to keep many projects going, because it gets very difficult to find the financing for them.”
With its quick, down-and-dirty shoot, McNaughton positively compares his MASTERS stint with the filming of the independent HENRY all those years ago. “I had to watch HENRY recently for the 20th-anniversary DVD [released last year by Dark Sky Films], because it had to be remastered and color-corrected. They did a great job with that. The case of HENRY is very special. Sometimes when you make a movie, your luck is good and everything happens the way you hope it will. HENRY kind of worked like that. But sometimes everything goes wrong, and in those cases you think, ‘Oh my God, I hope this or that could change and it would be so much better.’ The situation with THE BORROWER was pretty horrible, because the company we made it for was going bankrupt and it always seemed that the world was collapsing around us. It reminded me of the fall of Saigon [laughs]. Money was disappearing, the company was going out of business—I mean, it was shit.
“It’s funny, because when your luck is going well, the right people come to the project and it’s a magic that you can’t control,” he continues. “And when a project is going bad, once it starts going that way, it only gets worse. But when it came to MASTERS OF HORROR, although it was a very small project, it was one of those situations where everything went really well. The Canadian crew was fantastic, the cinematographer was great, the production designer was terrific, even the makeup people were superb. The luck was running good.”
The director promises that his MASTERS installment is distinct from his previous genre work. “Pretty much—it’s different from anything I’ve done,” he says. “We have a scene in a graveyard with this naked dead woman who’s surrounded by dozens of zombies. When I look at the episode, there are a number of scenes that really remind me of paintings I like, because art is a great influence in my style as a director and storyteller. So I have a whole store of paintings in my head, and I look at them when I need an influence for a certain scene.”
He has also been pleased with the other directors’ MASTERS that he’s been able to see. For him, a good deal of the series’ success has to do with the general rebirth of horror that has taken place recently. “Overall, I like MASTERS very much, and I’m very glad they’re doing this,” he says. “Horror directors’ careers have ups and downs over the years. Several years ago, the genre appeared to be dead. But over the last few years, there have been some really successful horror pictures, and the genre seems to be very viable right now.”