King of Bollywood alias MacGyver-Sid alias Bill Murray von MBL
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Interview mit Don Mancini über Chucky generell
Anm.: Sorry, dass das in Englisch ist  - Wenn da Interesse bekundet wird, mach ich mir durchaus die Muehe und uebersetz das auch. Ich denk aber fast, dass "Chucky" nicht so Viele (englisch-unkundige) interessieren wird dass sich die Muehe lohnt
I've seen every Child's Play flick on the big screen and always had a soft spot for them. Child's Play was spawned from the mind of screenwriter Don Mancini who also went on to write the three sequels. Arrow caught up with Don to talk about the series and the canned "Seed Of Chucky". Here's how it went down.
Arrow: Did you go to film school?
DM: I did. I went to UCLA, I was an undergraduate.
Arrow: When did you start to write the screenplay for the original "Child’s Play"?
DM: I wrote the first Child’s Play while at I was at school at UCLA.
Arrow: Where did you get the inspiration for it? Was it “My Buddy”, ”The Cabbage Patch Kids”...?
DM: It was certainly in the wake of “The Cabbage Patch Dolls”. My father worked in advertisement and marketing when I grew up. So as a kid, I was around advertising campaigns a lot and I always wanted to write something about how advertising affected children. It’s just an interesting area, very right for satire and everything. So that was always in my head. I’d always been a horror movie fan growing up and then around that time, in the mid 80’s, “Cabbage Patch Dolls” were very popular and movies like "Gremlins" had come out so animatronics had come to a point where you could really have creatures articulate. I had seen “Twilight Zone” episodes where dolls were alive but it occurred to me that it had never been done before in such a way where you could treat the doll as a full fledged character, with lengthy dialogue, a character arc and all that stuff. And I realized that special effects had gotten to the point where you could do that. So all that came together in the mid 80’s, when I was at school and that’s what lead me to write it.
Child's Play
Arrow: Did you have any input as to how Chucky looked in the original "Child's Play"?
DM: Yes, I described the doll pretty specifically in my original script: two and a half feet tall, red hair, freckles, blue eyes, red sneakers, blue overalls...all of that was within my original script. And then David Kirshner, who produced the movie and who is also an artist, actually drew the doll based on my description and design.
Arrow: So you’re happy with the way that he came out?
DM: Yeah, more or less. David made certain refinements. In my original script, I had described the red hair as being more of a spiky Bart Simpson kind of haircut. I mean, that was before there was a Bart Simpson but that kind of spiky, punky kind of look cause that was popular at the time. David decided to go with more of a mop top kind of thing. So yes, certain little details were changed, but overall it was very close to what I had described.
Arrow: John Lafia and Tom Holland both contributed to the screenplay right?
DM: The first one, yes, but I wrote the original script.
Arrow: What did they add or change?
DM: Mainly the voodoo. The voodoo was not part of my original script. See, in my original script, instead of being possessed by a serial killer, the doll was more of an embodiment of the little boy's subconscious. And the way the doll came to life was different. One of the features of the dolls is that it had fake blood in it, a red synthetic substance so if you’re a kid and you’re playing with the doll and its latex skin breaks like a cut, then it would bleed a little bit and then you’d have to buy these “Good Guy” Band-Aids. All part of the marketing craze to get you to buy extra stuff. So you had to buy these special Band-Aids to stop the bleeding. In my original script, the little kid, like a right of brotherhood, cut his thumb and the doll's thumb and mixed the blood together…and you know how that works, right?
Arrow: Yeah, yeah...
DM: That’s how the doll came to life and was therefore an embodiment of the little boy's id. I played with the audience a little bit more; I delayed the revelation that the doll was in fact alive. I teased the audience for longer into thinking: was the doll alive or was the little boy actually a psychopath?
Arrow: That would’ve worked better, I think.
DM: I thought so, too. I thought that it was creepier really. What happens is that all the people the doll targeted: the babysitter, ultimately the boy’s mother and also the boy’s teacher (which was a set piece we wound up using in “Child’s Play 2"), were all the boy’s enemies. Enemies that children are not allowed expressing anger at. In the original script, because his mother was a busy person, always being at work because they had no father around (the father was dead), the boy had a lot of anger towards his mother since she couldn’t spend too much time with him. That was kind of the idea: the doll was going after people that the little boy felt anger at but couldn’t express.
Arrow: So it was more psychological.
DM: Absolutely, much more of a psychological thriller.
Arrow: Once they made the changes and cast Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky, were you happy with the casting?
DM: That was great. That was Tom Holland’s idea. Tom had previously worked with Brad Dourif on a movie called "Fatal Beauty".
Arrow: Yeah, with Whoopie Goldberg...
DM: Right, so I thought that was really a great idea, I thought that was brilliant. And I can’t take any credit for that at all because I had nothing to do with it. But that was really smart.
Child's Play 2
Arrow: Okay, now let's hop on to "Child’s Play 2". In the script, the Catherine Hicks and Chris Sarandon characters were excluded. Was that due to the actors being unavailable? Or did you want to take it in a different direction?
DM: In my original draft of CP2, they had cameos. If memory serves me right, it was more of a budgetary thing, they just wanted to save the money. I don’t know if either of them was ever officially approached for doing it, but I don’t think they were. I do remember that in the very first draft of CP2 there was a courtroom scene I had written, it was in the wake of the murders to determine the little boy's sanity at the hearing, and the mother and the cop were there, but in any event, I was told to take it out very early on.
Arrow: Due to pacing?
DM: No, they just didn’t want to deal with having to get those actors back, thinking that it would be too expensive or something.
Arrow: Are you happy with the way CP2 came out?
DM: Hmmm, you know certain aspects I like and certain aspects I don’t. I feel like it’s too much of a retread of the first one in retrospect. At the time when we did it I was. But with the benefit of having 10 years or whatever I think that’s its too similar to the first one for one thing, just too much of a retread. Although you see more of the doll. But I feel the most successful sequels are those that kind of reinvent the wheel to some degree.
Arrow: Kind of like "Bride Of Chucky"...
DM: Well yeah I just felt like CP2 was maybe a little bit too much of the same.
Arrow: Well, at least it brought Chucky into the limelight.
DM: Yeah, that’s true.
Arrow: The effects were better. No midgets in a suit.
DM: Definitely, yeah…
Child's Play 3
Arrow: Let's hop on to "Child’s Play 3", which is actually my least favorite of them all.
DM: As most people would agree...[/i]
Arrow: Yeah, it was released only a year after "Childs Play 2"…
DM: Actually nine months...
Arrow: Nine Months!
DM: Yeah, it was ridiculous.
Arrow: That’s crazy!
DM: I was writing CP3 before CP2 had even been released. There wasn’t enough time between the movies. You really have to give the audience time to miss the characters. You don’t want to oversaturate the market place… another term I learned from my father. Yeah, I just think it was just too much, too quickly basically.
Arrow: Did you have a hard time writing a script so fast?
DM: In a sense I had written so much between CP1 and CP2, I really would’ve preferred to do something else first. In fact, initially I was supposed to work on “The Green Hornet” and that was for Universal as well but they told me to write CP3 first. You know, I think my creative juices as far as Chucky goes were maybe a little bit low because I just had been doing it so much.
Arrow: In such a short amount of time too. You just finished CP2 and boom...CP3!
DM: Right… I tried to do different things with it by setting it in a military school, by making Andy older…stuff like that…. but again it was…you know…more of the same.
Bride of Chucky
Arrow: But then you hit the bull’s-eye with "Bride of Chucky".
DM: We had more years in between and I think I grew as writer. I also got more confident in asserting myself as a writer. I love horror movies but another thing I always loved is comedy and I felt that it was very difficult to make this concept that scary after a while.
Arrow: Yeah, especially since Chucky became the hero by the end of Part 2….
DM: Yeah, it’s a problem with any horror franchise...it's true with Freddy, it's true with Jason. The more you see these characters, the less scary they are. It’s this weird dichotomy. On one hand, the audience wants to see them more, they want them more front and center but the more you do that, the less scary they become. But I think it's particular with a character like Chucky. There’s a basic silliness to the premise anyways…it’s a doll. So you can't ask an audience to be scared of it that long. So I thought that if we were gonna bring him back, we had to go all the way with the comedy. We were allowed to that, that time. I think Bride Of Chucky is in my mind the best of the series.
Arrow: You must've had fun writing that one...?
DM: Yeah, that was a blast!
Arrow: There are a lot of movie references in there. Were they all yours?
DM: Yup.
Arrow: The whole movie was a lot of fun!
DM: And the one I wrote after that, “Seed Of Chucky” went even a little bit further in terms of comedy and had a lot more movie references and what not.
Arrow: I'm glad you brought that up. This is one thing that I've been wondering about for some time now, and I'm happy that I could actually ask you this personally. What really happened with Universal and "Seed Of Chucky"? Why did they blow it away?
DM: The head of Universal is a woman named Stacey Snider. Very smart executive, very nice, she doesn’t really like horror movies.
Arrow: Great…
DM: And she’ll be the first to say that, too. It’s not really her favorite genre. And that coupled with the sort of social and political climate right now, it’s becoming less and less politically correct. Basically Stacey is not interested in the genre right now. I’m sure you know she decided not to release Rob Zombie’s movie ("House of 1000 Corpses"). She decided not to release it but at least she’s allowing him to take it elsewhere. In our case, we’re trying for her to let us take the franchise somewhere else or work out some kind of deal where we could do the movie at another studio in a film-by-film basis, where the studio can profit in some way financially, but it's really kind of hit a wall.
She really didn’t respond to the script for "Seed Of Chucky", although a lot of people did, the coverage on the script was really good, I got a lot of jobs off the script and Jennifer Tilly loved it. Those of us who are at the core of the franchise, were all happy with it. I think Universal were a little confused with the comedy in it, one of the confusing things for us when we we’re doing "Seed Of Chucky" is that after the first draft they said: "we need to make it scarier". They wanted it to be more like the first "Child’s Play". And I think that's impossible to do and I don't even think it’s the right thing to even try! I think with "Bride Of Chucky", we showed that the audience liked it to be funny.
Arrow: It made a killing at the box-office, too...
DM: Right, our position was look, if you push the comedy here you could open up the potential for the audience. It doesn’t have to be just the horror audience; we can go after a kind of “American Pie” audience, a young teenage kind of gross-out comedy for lack of a better term. And I think they were a little confused by it. It focused on the child that Chucky and Tiffany had and it was really extremely funny. One of the things they didn’t understand is that the character of the child…you know it’s a doll…is not a killer, he’s like really sweet and innocent which Chucky hates. And he’s also gender confused…
Arrow:
DM: …because he wasn’t born anatomically correct. So he didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl. So we played with all of that. Chucky is trying to make a man of him, show him how to dress appropriately, taking him out to learn how to kill people where Tiffany at the same time is trying to be a responsible parent. Now that she has a family, she decides that she can't kill anymore, you know a bad habit they have to get over, join a twelve step program, trying to keep the kid on the straight path and also dresses the kid in little dresses wanting it to be a girl. The kid is completely confused, torn in two different directions!
Arrow: That’s hilarious, man!
DM: It was a really funny parody of the family unit and a sort of parody of the “Father Knows Best” family sitcom. And a parody of family and child rearing in the 21st century. The studio didn’t really respond to it, which was quite frustrating for us.
Arrow: You think it was the comedy aspect?
DM: At one point, I heard that someone at the studio tough it was too gay...
Arrow: Ooookay…
DM: My feeling was that "Bride Of Chucky" was kind of gay. In a certain way, it had a somewhat kind of "gay sensibility". It’s just a stupid criticism.
Arrow: Yeah, it is. Universal doesn’t make sense to me these days. I mean they release "Hannibal" where some dude feasts on some other guy’s brain, but they have trouble with Chucky or "House of 1000 Corpses".
DM: The difference is that a movie like "Hannibal" confers a lot of prestige on them because first of all, there’s a lot more money at stake. Chucky makes money but not that kind of money. Also, a movie like "Hannibal" stars big and glamorous movie stars, and directed by Ridley Scott. Studio execs like doing business with people like that, it makes them look good and they get a lot of publicity out of it. But a movie like Chucky or Zombie’s movie isn't the kind of film that's going to get a lot of prestige for them. There’s less in it for them, if you know what I mean.
Arrow: Yeah…
DM: We’re talking about people who are not fans of the genre to begin with. Some movie executives like Weinstein, Miramax,/Dimension or Michael DeLuca who was at New Line, they are genuine fans of the genre. But Stacey Snider at Universal is not, it’s not her cup of tea.
Arrow: Does Universal exclusively own the rights to the series?
DM: Yes, they do.
Arrow: I heard through the net that you were re-writing a new script for Chucky, which was…
DM: The Hannibal thing?
Arrow: Yeah…
DM: That was one idea that I had. I met with David Kirshner to see if we could come up with an idea to take some kind of action. We haven’t even gone to the studio with that idea yet. But it is a funny idea. The funny thing would be that it would focus on Chucky’s only surviving victim who is bent on revenge. Where in Hannibal it was pigs, this character would feed Chucky to a pack of ravenous toy poodles...
Arrow:
DM: It could be a really funny idea but we haven’t brought that to the studio yet. Really, we’re at this point where we’re dealing with the legalities to see if we can make some kind of deal or see if they’d want to do a movie at all...you know…
Arrow: I heard at a certain point that Universal was ashamed of the franchise. I thought that since Paramount felt the same way about the "Friday The 13th" series, and they sold it to New Line, that Universal might sell Child’s Play to a more "genre friendly" studio?
DM: I don’t know, that is one of the things that I want to look into. I don’t know if they will or not.
Arrow: Because there definitely is an audience for these movies!
DM: One way or another the movie will be made sooner or later…there’s money to be made. We have to wait and see. Right now, there are agents and lawyers involved with that to see if we can make headway.
Arrow: Okay, enough about the studios. What Child’s Play flick came closest to what you wrote?
DM: Definitely "Bride of Chucky". I was a producer on that one as well and I was more involved with that one than any of the others. I really got to be involved in every aspect of the movie, we shot it up in Canada and I was there every day, and instrumental in choosing the director and the cast.
Arrow: Great choice of director, BTW.
DM: Yeah, he did a great job.
Arrow: He brought this all-new energy to the look of the movie.
DM: I don't know if you’re aware of it, but our cinematographer Pete Pau just won an Oscar. He shot "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
Arrow: No, I didn’t know that, that’s pretty kool!
DM: "Bride Of Chucky" looks amazing…we really had to fight to get Ronny Yu and Peter Pau into doing that movie.
Arrow: It looks like a Hong Kong action flick but with Chucky in it…
DM: We really wanted to reinvent it. We reinvented it on the script level but we also wanted to reinvent it visually and really crank it up a notch from the formulaic movie people kind of expected.
Arrow: Apart from the "Child’s Play" series, you wrote a "Tales From The Crypt" episode. Do you have any other scripts that will be made and are not connected to Chucky?
DM: Like any writer in Hollywood, there are a number of things that I’ve sold and sometimes it takes a long time to get made. Sometimes it winds up sitting on a shelf somewhere. I sold one last year to Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. An idea called “The Fur Flies”, which is basically an homage to another genre that I love, which is the disaster movie. The spin on it is that it’s an airport movie that focuses on all of the pets that are traveling in the cargo hold of a 747 and there’s a disaster. You know in the disaster formula, people are all from different social strata and wouldn’t even meet.
They’re brought together by a disaster and have to toss aside their differences to work together to survive. In this case, it's different species of animals that in real life not only don’t get along, but also like to eat one another. But they have to set aside their differences to save the plane and bring it down safely. So I sold that as a pitch to “Metropolis Entertainment” and last I heard they’re going to make it as an animated movie which I think is not as good as doing it as a live action movie, but that’s not in my hands anymore. It seems to be moving forward. Then I have another horror script called "PET", which is kind of a technological version of “The Birds” about robotic dogs that run amuck and kill people.
Arrow: Didn’t John Lafia do something similar…”Man’s Best Friend”.
DM: Right, a genetically altered dog, but this is different. It’s on a much bigger scale. This is a script that I sold many, many years ago to Warner Brothers back in 1992 which predates John Lafia’s movie actually. Now it seems to be possibly resurrected.
Arrow: Kool, the horror genre is doing good these days, it's "in" and it's making money. I wouldn’t see why not. You were also set to direct "Seed Of Chucky", and I wondered if there was to be a CP5, would you still direct it?
DM: Yeah, if we could ever get it going, I believe I will be the director.
Arrow: Always wanted to direct?
DM: Oh yeah, definitely and on "Bride" I directed the second unit, directed the ending where the baby is born and various shots throughout the film. Yeah, I’m ready to do it.
Arrow: Any advice for the struggling writers out there?
DM: I guess just keep writing. So much of it in the movie business is about luck. So you have to be ready to take advantage of your strokes of luck when they come your way. That means writing as much as you can, and having as many things to show for yourself, having as many things to throw against the wall and hopefully one of them will fit.
Arrow: Thanks a lot, Don..
DM: Thank you very much.
Thanks a bundle Don and come back any time! This interview really made my week. Hopefully Universal will get their act together and let Chucky go at it for another round. Long live Chucky!!!!
Quelle & © by "The Arrow"
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