After a 33mm screening of Dagon in the RISD auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, during NecronomiCon weekend, director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli fielded questions from the audience. The following is transcribed from an audio recording.
Gordon: That was a scary screening- when the film breaks, it
scares the crap out of me! I don’t know how many prints are left of this movie,
so I hope it’s okay.
Q: How was the film site selected?
Gordon: I went location scouting, and that town is called Combarro,
and it really exists and on a sunny day it’s really picturesque… we made it
look worse than it really was! It’s a medieval fishing village.
Paoli: They have great oysters, too!
Gordon: They also have a dish called Pulpo Gallego, which is
octopus, and when we were working on preproduction, one of the things that
occurred to me was trying to come up with a look for the Deep Ones and their
half-human offspring, and everything we did kept coming up like The Creature
from the Black Lagoon. Earlier today we had a panel on Lovecraftian films, and
that was one we should’ve talked about because it has a Deep One in it – the
creature has a distinctive makeup design that is hard to avoid repeating. It
struck me that maybe the way to go with this movie was to go with the idea that
the people were turning into some sort of octopus-like creatures, which in a
way, ties in with Lovecraft and all his tentacles, so that was the direction we
went.
Q: Why was there no domestic theatrical release of Dagon?
Gordon: It was released directly to video/DVD, which really
upset me. Lion’s Gate released it in the States, and I think their feeling was
that it didn’t have any big names in it, although Francisco Paco Rabal is an
incredibly legendary actor in Spain, and the fact that he wanted to do this
movie astonished me- it would be like getting Sean Connery to be in your film!
It turned out that the reason Paco wanted to do the movie was he was a
Lovecraft fan and he liked the script.
Q: Can you talk about some of the creature effects in the
film?
Gordon: The company that did the effects, DDT, won the
academy award a few years ago for Pan’s Labyrinth, and they’re brilliant. Our
budget for this movie was not huge and they were able to do so much for so
little. They were incredibly creative. I remember walking in one day and they
were xeroxing a real octopus! They had this octopus sitting on the xerox
machine to get the textures of its skin. They were amazing. David Marti is the
name of the guy who runs the company.
Q: Was it difficult to work under so heavy rainfall?
Gordon: It was. Dennis and I had the idea that the movie
should be as wet as possible, and when we were shooting it, it was the middle
of winter and we were all freezing our asses off in the rain, and all I could
think was, “what were we thinking?” In retrospect, I’m glad that we did,
because it really gives the movie an oppressive atmosphere, which was
appropriate for the subject. But yes, it was difficult to do all that latex in
water.
Paoli: One of the other things that I think creates the
atmosphere in the movie is there’s no music other than in the dream sequence
and the credits; except for chanting from time to time, there’s no background
music in the rest of the film. You only hear what the characters hear, and Stuart
and the crew really succeeded in having you feel very much as the characters
felt, and that’s what gives the movie the overall effect it has. I know it’s
hot in here tonight, but that movie makes me feel cold whenever I see it, so I
think it evened out the temperature in here.
Gordon: The music was by Carles Cases, an amazing composer.
I also think the sound design is perfect in this film, too- they used a lot of
natural sounds: sea creatures, whales, seals, and dolphins, and so forth. The
idea I told the producers of people turning into fish, it sounds absurd, but
really what Lovecraft was talking about is a sort of reverse evolution- that we
all came out of the water originally, and some stayed in the water, like the
whales and the dolphins and other marine mammals, so the idea of going
backwards, of regressing- he makes us believe it.
Q: What kind of direction did you need to give the extras to
have them act in the fishy and jerky way they did?
Gordon: We actually had a troupe of mimes employed to play most
of the extras, and they worked for a long time on the body movements. We talked
about the different stages of the transformations- the ones who are most human
are the ones who are visible, like the guy who runs the hotel and the priest.
The idea in the story is that the more fishlike they become, the more they have
to be hidden away, so we referred to them as level one, level two, and level
three, and the movement guys developed ideas on how each would move.
Q: Have you considered filming a Lovecraft movie in his own
city of Providence?
Gordon: The last time that Dennis and I were here together
was when we were location scouting to film “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
They took us on a tour of Providence and brought us to the house that Lovecraft
grew up in and I noticed there was no plaque on the house, there was nothing to
indicate he’d ever lived there. I mentioned that to the film commission guy,
and he said, “If you make a film here, we’ll put a plaque on the house.” We
didn’t make the movie here and I believe they tore down the house.
Paoli: I thought they did a very good job of staying close
to the original script for a location in Spain; originally, of course, I wrote
the script for a location in the Northeast, either here or we were looking at a
town in Maine, where it would’ve worked perfectly. We did have to make some
adaptations to the script, but actually very few. Stuart and Brian (Yuzna), who
we worked famously with before, were dedicated to shooting that script, and I
actually thought that the fact that there was Spanish spoken in the film- lines
originally written in English- made it more alienating and disturbing, in a
way, and just as there were level one, level two, and level three movements,
there were three levels of language: English, Spanish, and Lovecraftian; you
know, “Ia, ia!” I thought that ultimately lent something to the film, as well.
Gordon: The language actually is not Spanish, it’s called
Galego. In Spain they speak five different languages. We were funded by the
Galician Film Arts Commission, and I got a call one day that they had a couple
of problems with the script, and I was going, “Oh, boy, here it goes…” and they
said, “in your script you refer to Galego as a dialect, and it’s actually a
language; it’s not a dialect.” And I said, “yeah, okay…” and I was waiting for
the rest and there were nothing else, that was it! The thing that was
interesting was that if we’d shot this film in America, it’s hard to imagine a
community today would be so cut off from the world that you could have
something like this going on, so the idea of setting it in a remote part of
Spain, for us, somehow made it seem more real. Although, I have to say, to the Spaniards,
they thought it was ridiculous there could be such a place in their country.
Paoli: There’s a long-standing Welch tradition in Galicia.
If you notice, especially early in the film, there’s some Celtic influences in
the music- Galicians are the Celts of Spain. They play bagpipes, they wear kilts
from time to time… they are Celtic in origin and so partly is their language.
Q: Can you talk a little about how they skinned their
victims, since that wasn’t in the original story?
Gordon: No, it’s not in Lovecraft’s story, at all. Lovecraft,
being who he is, talks about the horrible things that were done to the people
in the village, but doesn’t tell us
what those horrible things are. When we
were doing research on this- the thing I should tell you and I think some of
you probably already know this- is unlike Cthulhu, Dagon is a real god. Dagon
is the god of the Philistines and he appears in the Bible several times as the
opposition’s god. There were a lot of battles between the god of the Jews and
the god of the Philistines, Dagon, and he was, as Lovecraft must have known, a
sea god- half human, half fish- and when Christianity came into being- you know
they have a fish symbol? One of the reasons they did that was to bring in the
Dagon worshippers. The whole thing about eating fish on Fridays- that was part
of the Dagon religion! And the hat the Pope wears? It’s the fish head the Dagon
priests wore, with the skins of the fish down their backs, like a cape, so if
you‘ve ever wondered why the Pope wears such a strange hat, it’s actually a
fish head that comes from the Dagon worshippers. We decided to take that idea
and flip it; instead of skinning fish and wearing them, they’re skinning humans
and wearing them.
Paoli: And then, of course, the idea is they shed their skin
when they go into the sea for eternity- they shed their human skin. I thought
of it as anthropological- it’s a tribal thing. Sometimes when you’re doing an
adaptation, you have to find things that are faithful to the ideas of the story that reach back to
the roots, as we did reaching back to the imagery of the mythology; to find not
perfectly-faithful, but faithful-in-idea concepts that will feed the story, and
we thought this worked. Plus, it’s horrible!
Q: What’s your favorite movie of yours?
Gordon: What’s mine? You know, it’s like saying which is
your favorite child, because you love them all for different reasons, but I
have to say that Dennis and I have collaborated together on all of the
Lovecraft films and it’s hard for me to imagine doing Lovecraft with anyone
else besides my old pal Dennis here. We have a Lovecraft script we’ve been
trying to make for twenty years. When Billy Wilder was asked what his favorite
film was, he would always say, “my next one,” so I guess my favorite film would
then be The Thing on the Doorstep, yet to be made.
Q: Any plans on as to when that would be made?
Paoli: No… do you know anybody? I’m kind of partial to From
Beyond, too. If you look at Dagon and Reanimator, they are really full-tilt start-to-finish
stories, they have structure and they tell a mythologically-sized tale. From
Beyond was the craziest movie we could make for the budget we had; it was
no-holds-barred. From Beyond is a very short story- we had gotten through the
short story by the credits, so we just went on from there had had some fun.
While the story is short, the idea is gigantic, that there are other dimensions
out there that we impinge upon, and if we open that door, this can happen; the
story simply opens the door we walk through.
Gordon: Also, the thing about Lovecraft, he never believed
in the supernatural; if anything, he would’ve considered himself a science
fiction writer because there’s always a scientific basis for everything in his
stories. From Beyond is one of those stories where the idea is that the five
senses are limited, that there’s so much more going on than we can perceive;
it’s a brilliant concept. When Lovecraft first started writing, his stories
were very short, and "From Beyond" is one of his earliest ones- it’s only, like,
seven pages long. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," which is one of his last stories,
is a novella at sixty or seventy pages, and I think it’s one of his most
accomplished stories.
Realizing my drawing of the high priest resembled author Wilum Pugmire, I continued with caricatures of other convention guests as a little tribute to the individuals who have given so much to fans of Lovecraft over the years. In the end, I opted for a more serious approach to the illustration, redrawing and resizing it from a quarter page digest to the standard half-page zine. Even though the tone and style changed, the high priest, Cthulhu altar, and Lovecraft statue remained. (I call this the "final illustration" for now, as I'm working on a larger color version I hope to make available as a print in the future.)
