Break Heads with the
DEVIL'S REJECTS

 An Interview with Rob Zombie

BY Joseph B. Mauceri

Rob Zombie made his feature film directing and writing debut last year with "House of 1000 Corpses" for Lions Gate Films. Zombie hails from Haverhill, MA where he lived until he moved to New York City to attend the Parsons School of Design as a student of Fine Arts. After being tossed out, Zombie found work as a design artist for several popular porno magazines before landing a job as a production assistant on “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.” Zombie founded the hardcore rock/punk hybrid band White Zombie in 1985, and after five independent record releases, the band signed with Geffen Records in 1990. All of White Zombie’s Geffen releases were certified multi-platinum including “La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol.1,” and “Astro-Creep: 2000.” Zombie directed dozens of high profile music videos for himself and his band White Zombie. In 1995 Zombie won an MTV Music Video Award for "More Human Than Human," becoming the first self-directed artist to win such an award. Zombie has also directed numerous music videos over the years for other artists, including most recently Ozzy Osbourne. In 1998 Zombie struck out on his own to greater success with the triple platinum “Hellbilly Deluxe,” followed by the platinum “The Sinister Urge,” and certified gold compilation “Greatest Hits: Past, Present & Future.” In addition, Zombie formed a horror based production company called Creep Entertainment with popular horror writer Steve (30 Days of Night) Niles. Creep released its first comic book series entitled “The Nail” in 2004. Another book entitled “Bigfoot,” based on the legend of the famous creature, is due in early 2005. Both books are in development to be turned into feature films. A renaissance man of the genre, his visionary ventures into filmmaking, music, and publishing places him in a unique position to surpass the accomplishments of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and KISS, combined!

FEARS: There was a piece on CNN.com that suggested “House of 1000 Corpses” started this new wave of horror. Do you thinks that’s true?

ROB ZOMBIE: I think it’s hard to judge the effects of something, but it is funny that the movie was dropped by Universal and now Universal is like the “house of horror” once again, or trying to be. It definitely kick-started the horror films for Lions Gate. I know the movie they followed mine with “Cabin Fever.” I talked to the director, Eli Roth, and he was like, “Oh man, I thought my movie was dead in the water and then your movie came out and was like this huge hit. Suddenly mine jumped up to be this priority project.” So it did do something. I don’t know what, but you can never judge.

FEARS: Had you always planned on doing a sequel to “House of 1000 Corpses”?

ROB ZOMBIE: Yes, and no. When I finished the first film, I wrote a one-line treatment for a sequel only because if the film was successful they would do a sequel and I had an option in my contract to do it. They were going to make a sequel with or without me. I didn’t want it to be without me, so I kind of had a little half-assed idea.

FEARS: In comparing “House” to REJECTS, it reminded me of what Stephen King did when he released “The Regulators” and “Desperation” at the same time. There are some big changes in the universe these two stories are set in, especially in the supernatural elements. What where you’re thoughts on taking these characters from the world of “House” to the more ground REJECTS?

ROB ZOMBIE: My thoughts were that the first film works, or exists, as its own thing. When you want to expand upon it, I decided it would just get too goofy. I thought that the only way to make this film work was to strip it down and make it real. The characters were already over the top, and boarder cartoonie. With horror movies, with each sequel the characters become more cartoonie. Freddy Kruger goes from this really scary monster to this like Henny Youngman. I would talk to the actors, especially Sid, and I say, “Sid, I know you’re very popular for doing it this way, but I want you to do it exactly the opposite.” I just didn’t want it to become this camp show.


FEARS: What did you learn from the experience of doing the first movie that you brought into this one?

ROB ZOMBIE: Everything. I mean the first movie is this calamity. You think you know what’s going to happen and you think you know how movies are made, until you are there. It’s complete insanity from day one. The biggest thing was pre-production. It’s god because once you get on set the time moves so fast. It seems like when you walk on set and the first assistant director tells you we’re already behind schedule. Then suddenly it’s lunch and everyone is lazy, because they just ate lunch, and then the sun goes down. You’re like, “Terrific. We accomplished nothing.” But on this film, pre-production was very intense. The other thing was making sure your key crewmembers are great. On the first film, I had one cinematographer who came in and I fired him after the first week. He was just not doing his job and we were falling behind schedule every day. Then the next guy came in, who was fine, and he just came in and just started shooting. There was no vibe whatsoever. Then he couldn’t return for the re-shoot, so we brought in another guy and we didn’t get along at all. We spent most of the time like fighting on set and that’s retarded. Literally people were mutinying and walking around set like “I can’t work with this guy.” For this movie, I met with a lot of cinematographers and then came back to Phil Parmet, who I just could tell from his personality that he would do whatever I wanted and would be a great guy to be around.

FEARS: If the filmmaking process is a learning experience, what did you take away from THE DEVIL’S REJECTS?

ROB ZOMBIE: Having a great crew is everything. I found some more people that I would like to continue working with, and there are some other departments where I still need to find some great people. Hey, and great actors make great things happen. William Forsythe is a great example of that. I was watching the movie the other day I realized that if I had cast the wrong guy that would not have worked on any level. It would become a cartoon. It all comes down to everything you do before you start shooting. That can make or break the movie.
FEARS: What inspires” you to create stories about such dark characters?

ROB ZOMBIE: I’ve always been a fan of darker films; whether it is “A Clockwork Orange” or “Taxi Driver.” The lines of who are the good guys and the bad guys are always very blurred in those films. Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange” has no redeeming characteristic to him whatsoever, but he’s so charismatic that you love him. The same like De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” where at the end of the movie you’re like, “Who have I been rooting for, an avenging hero or a complete nutcase that’s going to open fire in the Post Office tomorrow?”

FEARS: Did you do any research into the world of serial killers?

ROB ZOMBIE: No. There is just so much real footage and I have tons of stuff on tape. Take someone like Charles Manson. There is just so much film on that guy. That was the inspiration in the sense that I didn’t think this movie would work unless the killers were charismatic. It’s not that you have to like them. You don’t have to like Charles Manson, but he is so charismatic that he makes for an interesting interview. Whoever is interviewing him he overshadows them in about one second. Even Geraldo, who is a fairly charismatic guy himself, gets completely overshadowed and looks like a piece of wood as soon as Manson opens his mouth. That was my thought process because charisma buys you a lot of slack.


FEARS: Then there is the sheriff, who is forced to their level in seeking justice for the murder of his brother.

ROB ZOMBIE: It depends on how you want to take it. It’s a case of classic vigilante justice. You can sympathize with it though. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but I can remember seeing footage of a case where some boy was killed or molested. The accused is coming out of the courthouse and the dad runs up and kills him on the steps of the courthouse. That’s horrible, but people get it. People can be pushed to the edge. There are people who will tell you they’re not for the death penalty, but if someone killed their mother they would have no problem killing that person.

FEARS: Are we supposed to be rooting for the Firefly family?

ROB ZOMBIE: No, I feel like you’re not supposed to know what you’re doing. I’ll talk to different people and they’ll go “I was crying when they died.” Then other people will be like, “I hated them. I was rooting for the sheriff the whole way.” Everyone’s got a totally different opinion, which is what I like.

FEARS: Whom are you rooting for?

ROB ZOMBIE: For me, it goes both ways. I knew those characters were ending and I did like the characters and the actors. I knew this was never going to happen again, which is kind of sad. I’ve always been a big fan as a kid of reading about the Old West and the concept of vigilante justice and that was where the Sheriff Wydell character came from. I was never rooting for anybody.

FEARS: There are obviously a lot of influences that went into this film. What are some of your favorite films?

ROB ZOMBIE: I love classic stuff. I’m obviously a big Marx Brothers fan. I’m a big John Wayne fan, and Steve McQueen.

FEARS: And, surprisingly an Elvis fan!

ROB ZOMBIE: “King Creole” is a good movie, but the rest of them get a bit sketchy.

FEARS: Did you have directorial homages in mind?

ROB ZOMBIE: Yeah, but there were no specific moments. There were certain key things and a lot of the extreme close-ups and things are like “Once Upon a Time in the West,” the ending is like “Bonnie & Clyde,” and the general vibe to the violence is very Peckinpah.

FEARS: THE DEVIL’S REJECTS has a grittier feel to it than what audiences might expect from a typical summer movie.

ROB ZOMBIE: Everything is so perfect with movies these days that I find it boring. Every thing is over lit, over stylized, and over shot. I feel like when actors talk about their performances and they say, “That scene took three weeks to shoot,” that it seems to me like it should have taken three hours. Some times you don’t feel the energy when you watch older movies, where things where shot quickly. On REJECTS, the actors could never leave the set. We were shooting so fast that I told them that there was just no time for them to go back to their trailers to take naps, play video games, or watch TV. I told them not to go anywhere because we were already ready. They’d stay in the moment and we could pound it out. I think that it would have been really hard to keep Priscilla Barnes in that state of mind if we shot it over four days. Since we shot it in an hour she was falling apart.

FEARS: Would you consider THE DEVIL’S REJECTS a grindhouse movie?


ROB ZOMBIE: I think it taps into the spirit of those films. Is I was talking to someone else and they asked me, “Are you a big fan of bad movies?” I went, “No, I’m a fan of good movies.” In that world there are a lot of great films. Russ Meyer’s films are better than 99 percent of the great films we have to celebrate every year. “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” is an incredible movie. Jack Hill was doing great stuff. I think you’ll find a lot of directors about my age who love that stuff. If you didn’t want to go see “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” you go to some grindhouse and discover “Foxy Brown.”

FEARS: It’s such a definitive climax; did you have any alternative endings?

ROB ZOMBIE: No, that was always the ending I had in mind, and every actor had a complaint about that. I told them, Nope, you’re dead!” I wanted to do it because it seems that nobody makes a movie anymore without a sequel set up. It seems like suicide to do that and Lions Gate was worried about “The Franchise.” But that’s the problem. I feel that there’s never a definitive ending anymore. Every movie ends with the possibility of another one and it drives me crazy. I feel like, “Why did I just invest two hours? It didn’t even end.”


FEARS: Did Lions Gate let allow you uncensored creative control on the film?

ROB ZOMBIE: Lions Gate is great. They have to be the most artist friendly people I’ve ever met in my life. I gave them the script. They read it and were like, “Okay. Fine. Let’s do it. We have no changes.” They would come down to the set every once in awhile and go, “Okay we saw the dailies. We’re happy.” Then they’d disappear for a month. They never interfered while I was edited the film and they took my edit and did a preview screening in front of an audience. That went great and they were so happy afterwards. I asked them if they wanted any changes. They said, “No!” That was the end of it.

FEARS: Did you have any problems licensing the southern rock tracks?

ROB ZOMBIE: Yeah there were always problems, but what I did this time that’s very different and what people never ever do – I don’t think - is that I licensed all the songs in advance. I knew what I was going to use as I was shooting. I was going to do that whole “Freebird” thing but I couldn’t possibly risk shooting it, being in editing and then Lynyrd Skynyrd goes “I don’t think so.” What song do you replace with that? So I made sure I cleared up those problems in advance so I wouldn’t run into that.

FEARS: Did you have any trouble getting the R rating?

ROB ZOMBIE: Yeah, that was tough. The strange thing was that the R rating was mostly based on tone. They just kept saying the tone was too dark. When I asked them what they meant by that all they said was, “Well, it’s not that there’s too much violence or blood, but just the tone is too dark.” It took about eight tries. It all came down to the motel scene, the one scene with Bill Moseley and Priscilla Barnes. We cut about two minutes out of that. That was a really long scene. Still, I was like, “Well there’s no real nudity. There’s no violence. There’s no language.” But they were like “Yeah, but it’s too dark.” Basically it was like telling me, “Your comedy is too funny.” We had to go and cut it, knowingly taking some of the intensity out of it. It retained enough of it, and it’ll be restored on the DVD.

FEARS: You mentioned in a recent interview that you feel a lot of the horror movies are watered down to PG-13.

ROB ZOMBIE: That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to make a G-rated movie for kids that’s totally super nice. But if this film were rated PG-13 and watered down, then what we would be watching? It would be totally ridiculous. If a movie is PG-13, that’s fine, but you can tell that the studio is thinking that if they scale it back they can open the film wider. None of those decisions are made based on what’s best for the movie. It’s just what’s best for the marketing.

FEARS: What’s your take on all the horror remakes?

ROB ZOMBIE: I’m not really a fan of them because I liked the movies the first time. No matter how good it is, it’s never as good as the original and I would like to see something new. It’s kind of boring to sit there and watch a movie where you know how it’s going to end. It’s kind of a bummer and with some of the original movies there was just something about the time they were made and the way they were made that works.

FEARS: What if you were offered a horror remake?


ROB ZOMBIE: I’ve gotten offers to do things and I always say no. Maybe if there was a certain movie where I felt like the original idea was great but the movie was bad, but I don’t understand remaking great films. It’s not that they’re bad movies. Maybe they’re better for a new wave of kids who haven’t seen the original. I just don’t understand the reason behind remaking a great film.

FEARS: Will your next film be a horror film?

ROB ZOMBIE: I’ve got two movies I’m working on simultaneously and neither are horror movies.

FEARS: One is an animated movie?

ROB ZOMBIE: Well, there’s an animated movie that I’ve been working on for about a year. That’s in production and is called “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto,” and I’m doing it with Film Roman. It’s an adult animated comedy and it’s basically if Austin Powers was actually an over the hill alcoholic Mexican wrestler living in a world populated by people like the Munsters.

FEARS: Will it look like your animated sequence in “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America?”

ROB ZOMBIE: No, it’s very stylized. We have some created animators and I told them that I wanted to make it look like it’s a cocktail napkin from like 1968, that kind of style of illustration.

FEARS: What’s next for you musically?

ROB ZOMBIE: I had a record finished before I started shooting REJECTS. I’m actually on tour right now with Ozzfest, and I’ll be doing that this summer. I’ll come back after that to finished the record, and then I’ll probably start another movie.

The record I’m doing now is like the musical equivalent of REJECTS. I wanted to make a totally stripped down record with the guys playing live. Let there be mistakes. These days I just want everything to be raw.

FEARS: What should fans expect from you at Ozzfest this year?

ROB ZOMBIE: Well the tour this time is very stripped down because Ozzfest is outside in a summer festival and there are like a million bands so there is no production. You can only take production so far when it becomes the best thing you can do is scale it all back to nothing and then that becomes interesting. Whenever I’ve seen huge acts, whether it is Alice Cooper or KISS, in a situation with nothing, it’s ten times more interesting.

FEARS: Are you in mourning for the current state of the music industry?

ROB ZOMBIE: I felt the music industry making this horrible shift maybe like five or six years ago when it started becoming like the movie industry in the sense that it became about the opening week with a record. All the best records took a year or two years before anyone would go “Oh? What’s this band? Guns N’ Roses? I wonder who they are.” But now if it doesn’t hit the first week, they’re like, “Oh. I told you that wouldn’t work.” That’s not the way music functions. That’s not really the way movies should function either. With Halloween, it was months before it caught on and every week it would grow and grow and grow until suddenly it was this phenomenon called Halloween. Also the labels have no artist development. The Ramones would never have a record deal. They’d get dropped after their first record, as would Cheap Trick and AC/DC and everybody. The Ramones stayed on a major label for 22 years and they never sold more than 150,000 records. Now a million records, a platinum record is considered a failure. Labels have nothing but mega artists and total failures and no artist development. They have a bunch of stuff we won’t be talking about in six months.