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STARBURST spoke with co-directors MATT BETTINELLI-OLPIN & TYLER GILLETT and producer CHAD VILLELLA (otherwise known as the filmmaking collective RADIO SILENCE) about their latest movie, the critically acclaimed comedy-horror READY OR NOT…

STARBURST: We found Ready or Not hard to describe or classify genre-wise. What would be your elevator pitch of the film?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: You know, that difficulty is one of the things we really talked about. That tonally it’s a bit of a dance, and that it’s a mash-up of so many genres that we love. Typically, what we say is that this film is about a young woman who is marrying into this very wealthy and eccentric family. And on her wedding night, she realises that to be truly accepted into the family, she has to sit down with them and play a family game. And she happens to draw Hide and Seek, and Hide and Seek is the one game that you can’t win. And she spends the rest of her wedding night fighting for her life!

And despite the film defying pigeonholing, would you say that your film belongs to ‘social issue horror’ genre that’s been making noise recently?

Chad Villella: I definitely think there’s elements of that in all genre movies, and this one’s no exception. We love the way that Grace [Samara Weaving] came from a very underprivileged background, and now she’s married into this wealthy family, and how she sees the lengths the rich will go to in order to keep what they have. So yeah, I would say it fits into that category.

And what do you think makes horror the ideal vehicle for this kind of social commentary?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: I think it works well because it gives you context to talk about something you might not otherwise want to talk about. You have to create the language to talk about it. When things are uncomfortable, it might be hard to have a straightforward conversation, but a horror context gives you the jumping-off point. And all of a sudden, we’re having a discussion as a society! Horror’s always done that, but it’s especially true right now. It’s exciting to see people tap into it who aren’t strictly genre fans, and to see that hit the mainstream.

Yeah, it’s definitely a genre that’s previously been relegated to the fringes, or lacked the respect afforded to dramas and the like.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: Yeah, exactly. Like all of a sudden, it’s cool.

Oh, it’s cool. It’s getting Oscars! And would you say that your tendency to blend comedy and horror, something that’s prevalent in your filmography, is also to ease those conversations?

Tyler Gillett: That’s certainly part of it. And it’s also about letting the audience in and allowing them to relate to something that feels more emotionally grounded. The stories we love to tell are about normal characters that you see yourself in, walking into a heightened situation that they’re totally unprepared to deal with. It’s often that people think that comedy and horror are very separate, but that isn’t how real life is. They’re really compatible genres.

I think Samara Weaving’s portrayal of Grace does a huge amount to ground the film. What was it that sold you on her as the lead?

Chad Villella: She just got it right from the beginning. We knew that we needed to find a very strong Grace and base everything off her, and after our very first meeting with Samara, she was like, “I don’t want you to be scared the entire time, I want you to receive a little bit of lightness through me.” We knew that Grace had to have this punk rock image to show that rebellion, and Samara got it right from the start. She’s fantastic, and we can’t imagine having made the movie without her.

To be honest, the whole cast is amazing. How did that ensemble come together?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin:  I don’t think we ever envisioned the cast we ended up getting, and we also can’t imagine what the movie would have been without them. We feel so lucky to have gotten everyone, especially since it was such a rush process. I think we got Adam Brody maybe two weeks before shooting, maybe a week and a half? We were really lucky that everybody vibed, and everybody understood the tone and their character – which goes back to your last question about grounding it. Samara is our ‘in’ for us, the audience, but then you also need each family member to have their unique point of view. It can’t be a nebulous body of bad people. And I think everybody brought their best and went beyond anything we’d hoped for.

Did the cast have any input in creating their characters?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: The characters were incredibly well drawn on the page, and a big part of what we loved about the script. But at the same time, as we got to know the actors, we had to give them room to create their own version of it. We wanted it to have dynamism, and everybody really brought something that I think we weren’t expecting.

It’s interesting that you resist making the family uniformly bad, to the point that you start sympathising with some of them.

Chad Villella: Yeah, that’s something we talked about very early on with Guy [Busick] and Ryan [Christopher Murphy], the writers. Their approach to it was that by giving the audience an inside look at those ‘bad’ characters, you get an insight into the effects of wealth and family tradition on people. And just talking about how privilege and wealth make people complacent in where they are in life, and ask what they’re willing to do to maintain that life. And you kind of feel for them because you see that they’re doing it for their family; Andie McDowell in particular really brought a maternal instinct that inspires sympathy.

This movie is obviously a satire on wealth and privilege, was there an element of catharsis to making this film, considering the current socio-political climate?

Tyler Gillett: Yeah, that was part of what interested us from the start creatively, and to have something fanatically dense to continue to draw from throughout the process was very, very valuable. And honestly, it gave us something to keep returning. It’s a well that never runs dry! And our first meeting with the studio [Fox] was the day after Trump got elected. That certainly did light a different fire under the project, because that theme became more of a megaphone to explore something that felt very urgent and vital. We really want it to resonate with people, but we also want the movie to be, first and foremost, a fun and exciting thrill ride. But that’s what the genre does, this great magic trick of entertaining you whilst also pushing you to think more deeply and to find the commentary.

As we finish, for the horror fans reading this, what would you recommend they go watch after they’ve seen Ready or Not?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: We talked about so many different movies, everything from like, Gosford Park to Seven, Alien, to inspire different elements, from the tone to the look. We also talked a lot about those movies where you just have to make it through the night. Like After Hours, The Most Dangerous Game, Adventures in Babysitting, Into the Night. Those keep the action going. Then there’s fun ones, like The People Under the Stairs, Clue. And ones that have a sense of humour without being comedies, like The Lost Boys, Nightmare on Elm Street, the Ghostbusters films. Also Joyride! A very underrated movie from 2001, and it’s one we go to all the time. It got written off because it came out right after 9/11 so it wasn’t really the tone, but it’s a really good, thrilling type of movie that’s also very funny. So quite a list!

UK audiences can seek out READY OR NOT when it sneaks into cinemas on September 25th. You can also read our review HERE.

Writer and actor Nicholas Vince is famous for his portrayal of the Chatterer Cenobite in Hellraiser and Kinski in Nightbreed. He is about to head onto the stage for a one-man show entitled I Am Monsters!, which will be premiering at the London Horror Festival. We caught up with him to find out more…

STARBURST: Where did you fascination with monsters come from?

Nicholas Vince: Two sources: Doctor Who, I was four years old when the TV series started so I watched it from behind the sofa particularly Daleks but I knew by the age of five and a half, I was really entranced by the monsters on the programme, like the Zarbi, the giant ants. I can’t remember anything about the plot, but I remember making Zarbis out of cut offs of the pastry that because my mother was making. Then there was a book, the Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends that I read as an eight-year-old; I was fascinated with things like the Minotaur, Medusa, and the Sphinx; I vaguely remember the heroes’ names, but knew which monster they killed.

So what was the impetus to put this together into a stage show?

I’ve been telling all the stories about the makeup and so on, and the experience of making the films, which was a huge amount of fun. I just wanted to flesh out the background, and put it in a bit of social context. It’s also my personal story about being fascinated with monsters. I realised I was gay when I was 18 years old in the late ‘70s, and it wasn’t the easiest time to be gay. It got more challenging in the ‘80s with Thatcher; they were interesting times. I just wanted to share my love of monsters, I think that monsters are fun.

And they do say a lot about society today, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of a correlation there.

Yeah, absolutely.

So how did you manage to condense your whole life in to an hour?

[Laughs] With huge difficulty! There’s going to be a Q&A at the end, so I’ve got to learn about 50 minutes of me talking. When I did the first read-through, it was about an hour and 20 minutes, so it needs working on! I think it’s just concentrating on the points; I want it be about bringing home what’s important to me and make it an entertaining evening. I’m incredibly fortunate that Clive [Barker] asked me to be in Hellraiser, and then Hellbound and Nightbreed. It’s not going to be my long life! [Laughs] That would be a very long show!

Is there a structure to the show or is it more free flowing?

We’re still working on that at the moment. I’m working with a director and they keep coming up with good ideas: let’s try this, let’s do it like this. We started off kind of: ‘I was born, I fell in love with monsters, etc…’ We said that’s ok, but it’s not as interesting, so now it’s more weaving the story of making Hellraiser and then in flashback relating that to growing up and the monsters I’ve encountered and so on. There are a couple of biographical pieces in there as well. There have been times in my life when I’ve been made up to be a monster, but I’ve done things wrong in my life. Things I regret. It’s not all isn’t life lovely… there is fun, but there’s a little bit of darkness in there as well.

You have to have the light and shade.

Yeah, and I think I want to say to anybody who’s going through what I went through that it’s okay. It does get better, it’s true. There have been times in my life when I have been completely lost and not known what the hell was going on and I look back now and think ‘yeah, I’m okay’. I’ve been very lucky. From difficult times really interesting fruits can grow.

You did a couple of storybooks about monsters, did that influence you to to do this?

There’s been a couple of things. I’ve been the patron of the London Horror Festival since 2016, and I’ve been involved in it since 2013. I’ve watched a lot of their shows. I love horror theatre; there’s something very immediate it; it’s a completely different experience to being in a cinema. I was inspired by watching these people, but I’m not intending to terrify people as much as I have been in these shows! [Laughs] In terms of the books, you’re right. I’ve written short stories, and Hellraiser and Nightbreed comics back in the ‘90s. I was lucky enough to bring Clive’s characters from Nightbreed bring them back into the comics that Marvel did. The title of my first collection of short stories is What Monsters Do – the subtitle was ‘it is not our flesh but our acts which make us monsters’. Clive’s Nightbreed is about people who are strange, who are wonderful and human beings want to destroy that, because they’re different.

And very similar to the way homosexuals were treated; they were treated as monsters at one time…

Oh god, yes! When I was doing the research, a part of the show was very difficult to write – I went back to the Thatcher years, with Section 28, and there were horrible, horrible things said about gays that I found really distressing reading and listening to what politicians were prepared to say. You can see today that gay rights has come on leaps and bounds but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

A lot of what is wrong in the world is because people are scared. We saw it in the financial crash. Horrendous things were done to people in terms of losing their homes, jobs and job security. We’ve now got it that profit is everything and zero hour contracts. People are treated appallingly in the workplace. This is because power is moving towards the few rather than the many. We’ve got some tough times at the moment. You can see what happened during the last war that my parents were part of, a lot was being fought for, and you can see what was done then and how easy it is to exploit people’s fear of a group. The people who scare me the most are the bombasts who create monsters for their followers to fear.

Absolutely.

I was talking to Clive Barker about the show and he said, “It’s not that the demon’s different. It’s that difference is the demon”. We don’t handle different well. It seems we can only feel safe by oppressing another group. Those are the things that worry me.

Will there be any performances elsewhere?

We’re talking about that, I’m really hoping there will be. Either in this country or in the US. There are conversations already taking place. So Yeah, so if all goes well, that is the definite plan. It won’t just end as part of the London Horror Festival, I hope to take the show out on tour to various parts of the country and abroad.

So could it be performed at conventions and the like then?

Yes – I deliberately designed it so that it doesn’t require technical things. At the end of the day is making on stage telling stories and chatting with people. I was talking to an actor friend of mine and he said, “You’ll be fine, you’ve just got some people in your front room and you’re telling stories – that’s all it is”. I like that idea!

Nicholas Vince will be performing I Am Monsters! at the Pleasance Theatre in London as part of the London Horror Festival on October 8th to 10th at 7pm. For more information and to book tickets, head here.

Texas-born author Adrienne Young is best known for her New York Times bestselling novel Sky in the Deep. Her new book, The Girl the Sea Gave Back, comes out September 3rd. We caught up with her to find out more about it…

 

STARBURST: What’s the elevator pitch for The Girl the Sea Gave Back?

Adrienne Young: A girl with a gift to read the rune stones and see the future holds the fate of her world in her hands.

What inspired the story?

After the events of Sky in the Deep, I really wanted to explore what the evolution of this world would look like. In Sky, two warring clans are forced to find peace. But that doesn’t mean peace is permanent. We also know that those two clans aren’t the only ones that exist in this world. So I wanted to look at how this newfound peace affects the greater society outside of the mountain and the fjord that Sky focused on.

How is it different from Sky in the Deep?

The heroine in The Girl the Sea Gave Back, Tova, is really different than Eelyn was. She’s not a warrior, but she has a quiet inner strength that has kept her alive. She’s really smart and strategic, and has a deeper understanding of what’s happening around her. We also dive deep into Halvard’s story and his doubts about his own ability to lead. Where Sky was so sure and determined, Sea is much more questioning in the nature of its characters and its plot.

Now you’ve finished The Girl the Sea Gave Back, would you have done anything differently?

I don’t think so. The process for writing this book didn’t come as easily to me as Sky did. I had to dig really deep and be a better writer in order to pull it off. It’s also different than anything I’ve attempted before, in that it’s dual POV and it’s a companion novel. There was a definite learning curve there and I’m really proud of the work I did.

Which character from the novel would you most like to meet in real life? And why?

I would love to meet Halvard. I just see him as this strong, quiet, sensitive being  – I feel like he loves so fiercely and is so dedicated to his community.

What approach do you take when writing fantastic elements such as predicting the future?

I really love approaching the fantastical with a heavy dose of reality. I love that in-between place of wondering if it’s real or not real. It’s the same in Sky, when we are looking at their gods and their superstitions. There’s nothing so overtly supernatural that you couldn’t imagine it in our own world and it’s the same with the idea of fate in Sea. I feel like it keeps the fantasy elements accessible and feeling as if they could be true.

How do you approach your writing?

The most important thing to me in writing is feeling connected to what I’m working on. If I don’t feel that gut connection, then it’s probably not what I should be writing. I’m an all-in type of person, and my work is no different.

Why do you think fantasy so popular now?

I think it’s kind of a timeless genre. There’s no expiration date on fantasy so it stays relevant across generations and time periods. There’s also the overarching truth about humans that we love to escape and there’s no better way to do that than to transport to a completely different world. I think fantasy will continue to stay steady in the market for both of those reasons.

When Sky in the Deep came out, what response delighted or surprised you the most?

I was totally blown away by the reader response to Sky. I had no idea that it would strike such a chord and although every author hopes for the best, it definitely surpassed my expectations. To hear from so many people who resonated with the book was really special and I feel so fortunate to have such amazing readers.

Is it easier to get published these days?

I think it is, but only because of the amount of information that’s out there. Anyone can figure out the steps to publication with a quick google search, which means more people than ever are trying to get their work published. Publishing houses are bigger, they have bigger lists, and with the trend of books getting turned into movies and TV shows, there’s a lot of demand for content. But that’s not to say that it’s easy. Getting published is an incredibly difficult, tedious process that usually takes years. I don’t think that part is likely to change.

What’s next for you?

I just finished revisions on my next novel, Fable. It’s the first book in a two-book series and it’s coming next year!

What authors are you reading? And why?

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry this last year, probably because I’ve been drafting so much and haven’t been able to really commit to reading novels. My current favourite that I keep coming back to is Mary Oliver.

The Girl the Sea Gave Back is published by Titan Books on September 3rd.

 

SCOTT J. RAMSEY’s debut feature X, an erotic thriller about a voyeur who hosts debauched masked balls, impressed us at the STARBURST International Film festival earlier this year. We spoke with Scott about becoming a filmmaker, the ideas behind the movie, and what’s next…

STARBURST: How did you get your start as a filmmaker?

Scott J. Ramsey: I’ve been a storyteller and an artist since I was four or five and could pick up a pen and write something down. I started making movies when I was in middle school and then went to study filmmaking at San Francisco State University. When I was there, I attempted to make a feature, and everybody told me that I was crazy – that I should start small and make a short first, but I didn’t listen to any of them. Inevitably, I didn’t finish it.

How important was that film school education?

What I got from film school that enabled me to make X and to be the filmmaker I am was all of the people I met – all the other filmmakers, actors, musicians, photographers. Even the ones I’ve worked with since then who I didn’t meet in school, I met because of someone I met at school. I really enjoyed the film program, but it was not necessarily any of the classes that helped, it was the network of people. I was in a co-ed cinema fraternity and that’s how I met a lot of the filmmakers who I ended up working with on X – that’s how I met Hannah [Katherine Jost, co-writer and producer], Kevin [De Nicolo], who’s one of the producers, and Hope [Raymond], the star of X.

For those who haven’t seen it, how would you pitch X?

The movie’s about a young woman named Christian who hosts monthly masked charity balls at her beachside estate that double as sex parties. Little do her guests know that she is a voyeur and has a hidden camera in the bathroom.

That’s quite an original concept, where did this idea come from?

The story came to me all in one burst, out of nowhere. I was working on that feature in college that wasn’t going anywhere. We had shot everything and I was in post, trying to finish it. The story of X was kind of a distraction from what I was supposed to be working on. I didn’t realise this when I first thought of the idea, but later when we had already shot it and I was reflecting on it, it occurred to me that as a queer person, you grow up with internalised shame and feeling like you are a pervert, so I think that is where the idea to have a main character who is a pervert – a voyeur – came from. To neither sympathise with her nor condemn her was important to us; we wanted to tell her story as honestly and thoroughly as we could.

The characters do have various queer sexual identities, though this isn’t the focus of the story. Would you define it as a queer film?

I would define it as a queer film, because more importantly than the characters being queer, it has a queer sensibility to it, and because the filmmakers are queer. But ultimately, it wasn’t about their sexualities, so it wasn’t necessary for us to make that the focus.

So what were your first steps with developing this idea?

I wrote an 80-page story treatment for the movie with the working title Rated X. Originally, Christian was male. I knew that I wanted to make it my next movie and I wanted it to be a feature. At first, I was going to write it myself, but then I realised I should have Hannah write it with me. She’s a much better writer of dialogue and I knew I was a little too close to it – it felt like I wasn’t able to see it from an outside perspective. So I brought it to Hannah and right before I brought it to her, I had the idea that Christian should be a woman. I gave her the treatment and said, this treatment has Christian as male, so let’s switch it. The first thing she said was: I like this, but I want to change the title, Rated X sounds like a middle school boy trying to be shocking. So I said, fine, how about just X? Christian signs the invitations to her parties with an X, because it means ‘kiss’ and because it’s a shortening of her name.

Are there any particular films, or artworks in other media, that inspired you?

I saw Mulholland Drive for the first time right before we started shooting X, so that was absolutely a stylistic influence. Obviously with the masked balls, we were looking at Eyes Wide Shut; I love that movie and we always get compared to it, so that was a reference. A Clockwork Orange was a reference, especially in constructing Christian’s voiceover. The films of Xavier Dolan; his movies are visually very rich and gorgeous but still have an indie movie sensibility, they don’t feel like they’re big budget, and we knew from the beginning that we weren’t gonna be big budget, so especially cinematographically his work was an influence. In terms of other media, when I brought it to Hannah, she had the idea to structure the movie like a Shakespearean play, so that’s why it’s in five-act structure, and we talked a lot about Shakespeare while writing it.

How did you raise your budget?

We brought the movie to Kevin, one of our close friends and a producer we’d worked with in school, and his parents had invested in other films by other students while we were in school. The three of us decided to pitch to his parents, hoping that they would get it and be into it. We put together an elaborate pitch and went to them with a PowerPoint presentation. They were extremely receptive and invested in us, so we’re eternally grateful and the movie would not have been made if it were not for them. The starting budget was $30,000, the number we asked for initially. After production was finished, the production budget had become $50,000, then post was $100,000. We were extraordinarily lucky that our investors were sympathetic, trusted in us, and were willing to fund until it was complete.

Even with that generous funding, no film ever has enough money, right? Did you have to make any compromises?

We wrote the movie and planned production knowing that we probably weren’t gonna have enough. The story is about kids our age throwing these balls, so the production design and cinematography reflect that. They’re just kids and they’re messy too, so that was built into the story because we knew we weren’t gonna have the budget for big elaborate sets.

What were the biggest challenges of shooting X?

The horror story we always tell is that, on the third day of shooting, we were in a garage, and we had brought all the expensive furniture and books from the homeowners into it. We had set up lights very near the ceiling, and one of the lights triggered the sprinklers. They came down on all the expensive furniture and on all our equipment. It was raining outside, so there was nowhere to go but out into the rain, and by some miracle we didn’t damage any of the equipment and damaged only very little of their property. The nice thing about that, which set the tone for the rest of production, is that the entire cast and crew stayed to help clean up – we were all in it together.

But then, from your budget troubles, it sounds like the real difficulty came in post?

Post-production was a big challenge, because we had to ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] the entire movie. We shot on a RED, which is a noisy camera, and we were shooting right by the beach. There was wind and cars, and every sound you can imagine. We had to re-record the whole movie and there was a challenge trying to get the texture of the sound to a place where it sounded natural, not like voiceover.

How did you handle directing the sexual content, and know where to draw the line with how much you could show?

There’s two different things at play – sexual stuff and nudity – and we kept those separate. In terms of the nudity, with the hidden camera stuff in the bathroom, it was necessary to have models or actors who were willing to show as much as they could to make it realistic. From the get-go, we set out to look for models who were comfortable with that, and made sure they understood what we were doing. For the actual sex, part of the story is that Christian doesn’t enjoy sex, she only enjoys watching. So sex itself is almost beside the point, there’s not a lot of sex in the movie – there’s the implication of sex, there’s nudity, and there’s certainly an erotic undertone. The one scene that you could categorise as a sex scene in a conventional way is when Christian is fantasising about Stella in the bathtub. For that, I told the actors Hope and Eliza that I wanted them to go as far as they were comfortable going, and I let them pretty much direct themselves. We let them watch playback and the first cut before we showed it to anyone and they liked it.

You made a couple of music videos alongside X – tell us about those.

Kevin – one of the producers of X and one of the composers of the score – and I have a music duo called The Major Arcana; we made three of the songs on the score. Those shorts are music videos that we shot to the songs and have used to promote the movie. We’ve promoted X as a transmedia project, storytelling on three different levels – the feature film, the album, and the three music videos. Two of them are already released, and a third is premiering at a festival this month and will be online two weeks after that. The music videos are surreal fever dreams that remix plot elements and visual elements from the movie and from the lyrics of the songs – not conventional short films, but more narrative than a montage music video.

And X itself is picking up a good number of festival screenings – how are you finding the process of self-distributing via festivals?

An interesting thing about film festivals that I did not know going in is that there are a lot that will accept your film but won’t screen it. We’ve gotten into many that haven’t screened X but have given us awards and made us an official selection, which has been strange. But people at festivals seem to like it and I’m glad that they do. I feel like the movie is suited for a theatrical experience more than an online experience, but the reality of the world now is that most people are going to see it on their computers. Festivals are incredibly necessary, but aren’t the only thing. I think that’s the biggest misconception that festivals are the end of the road, but at this part of the distribution process, it’s just the beginning. The other problem is, festivals are expensive!

So what’s the next stage of distribution?

We’re trying to secure distribution right now, and we have a few leads. We’re just letting things play out, and trying to show it to as many people as possible via festivals and other means. We are also considering some kind of self-distribution; theatrical on demand is appealing to us.

What’s your next project?

Hannah and I are writing another feature, we are shoulder deep in that. On top of that, The Major Arcana are recording more music and playing shows, and using that music to not only promote X but to tell stories moving beyond X.

What advice would you give to aspiring independent filmmakers?

Everything should be motivated by the characters. The characters are the core around which everything else rotates – where the story comes from, where every production design choice should come from, every cinematography choice, editing, music, etc. That’s my number one thing, my number two thing is to go with your gut and know when you’re wrong and when to listen to your collaborators.

For more information on Scott and the film’s availability, head over to SCOTTJRAMSEY.COM and EVERYBODYLOVESX.COM

With the beloved ‘80s family film FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR enjoying a brand new, fully restored Blu-ray release (read our 10/10 review here), it was the perfect time to spend some time with its director RANDAL KLEISER…

STARBURST: You’d enjoyed huge success in the past, with your first feature film Grease and then later The Blue Lagoon, but stepping forward to 1987 and Flight of the Navigator, what’s your overriding memory of working on that film?

Randal Kleiser: Well, I’d always enjoyed sci-fi and I think this was my first time doing sci-fi and visual effects. Visual effects and sci-fi were always two of my great loves, so I was very excited about it. There had been a lot of movies about space and flying saucers and all of that, that were shot in a typical fashion, and I wanted to figure out a way to do something different, something that hadn’t been seen before. That was my biggest interest in it, to enter the world of visual effects and try something new.

It was certainly something new. That great ‘80s era still dominates pop culture to this day and Flight of the Navigator is right up there. I noticed during our research that your brother Jeffrey Kleiser was involved with the visual effects.

That’s right, he has always been on the cutting edge of visual effects. He went to university and there were no visual effects or computer graphics professors or courses, so he found somebody and had them convince the university to start teaching it. He worked on the original TRON, so he’s been there since the very beginning, always doing new things, so I went to see him when I was starting Flight of the Navigator to see if there were any new things he could show me. He had this commercial of a Tide bottle, for laundry, that was changing shape and I said can we make a spaceship do that and he said sure. He also showed me some other stuff where they were doing reflectance mapping, which is taking the background and wrapping it onto a wireframe computer model and turning it into a mirrored surface, so that’s how it all came about.

It’s the sweetest story, especially looking back now. How did the project come to you? Did you seek it out, did it pass by your desk, or did people come to you?

I know that I didn’t seek it out, it came to me in some way at Disney. I worked with Jeff Katzenberg on Grease. He was at Paramount and he came over to Disney, so I think they called me in to see if I’d be interested and I jumped all over it because of my interest in sci-fi.

It’s a simple enough story: an alien spaceship and a boy lost in time, but with that comes a lot of special effects. There were effects elements in Grease, as there are in most films, but how did you adapt to that, given that this was your first true sci-fi film?

Because of my brother, because he was the one leading the way and showing me how to do all of this. He was doing it in commercials, so he knew how to do all of that stuff, he was the leader of that. We also had a guy called Peter Donan who had done a lot of visual effects movies, and some of them were done the standard way with opticals, and the digital spaceship was a first.

Disney didn’t seem to be making too many live-action fantasy films in the mid ‘80s, so what made them take a chance on something like Flight of the Navigator when it wasn’t their forte?

Well, I believe they were doing a lot of live-action films, they started a company called Hollywood Pictures and Disney Pictures as well as a third unit, so there was a lot of live-action stuff coming out but they were under different names, it wasn’t all under Disney. Hollywood Pictures was doing most of the live-action.

The film was perfectly cast, with Joey Cramer as David, Paul Reubens as the voice of Max, and Sarah Jessica Parker as Carolyn. Because it’s always key to get the right people in the right roles, how did that process come together?

Yeah, the casting was by Valorie Massalas. I always rely on the casting director to bring in the best people. In this case Veronica Cartwright was in Alien, I loved her in that movie, and the great part about it was to be able to have her look so young and beautiful in the first part and then age, the same with Cliff De Young, we did some tricks to make them look older and then younger.

Sarah Jessica Parker would notably go on to great success and you also worked with Paul Reubens…

I’d met Paul and I knew him, and I asked him if he wanted to do the voice and he did, but he didn’t want to have credit for some reason. He wanted to have it be mysterious and use the name Paul Mall instead of Paul Reubens [laughs]. He sort of stayed in the background on this project, didn’t do any publicity for it. He’s an unusual guy and he has quirks and I guess that was one of them.

Now it’s available once again on a remastered Blu-ray edition, how pleased are you with the new version of the film?

It’s great, I was able to go back and polish it up, take out dirt and the ageing process of film and make the colours brighter. The extras are quite nice, we went back into the archives and found screen tests and visual effects tests to see how we slowly moved towards this way of doing the spaceship. We have tests with silver paint and with mylar, trying to find ways to do it before we discovered the digital way. All those funny tests on there look really silly, they didn’t work.

FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR is out now on a limited edition Blu-ray release from Second Sight Films, available below.