Joe Dante on why Grem­lins is the movie he’ll be remem­bered for

“My first thought was that it had come to the wrong address,” recalls Joe Dante on receiv­ing the script for Grem­lins, the small town mon­ster movie that would ulti­mate­ly become his call­ing card. Hav­ing brought a trio of ter­rors to life start­ing with schlock hor­ror Piran­ha in 1978, were­wolf tale The Howl­ing in 1981 and a colour­ful seg­ment in 1983’s ill-fat­ed resur­fac­ing of The Twi­light Zone, Dante was carv­ing out a curi­ous niche for him­self as a Roger Cor­man kid with dev­il­ish flair. That’s when Steven Spiel­berg came knocking.

“I had no idea that Spiel­berg would know who I was or would have seen any­thing I’d done,” reflects Dante. ​“I was unaware that there was a lit­tle legal brouha­ha at Uni­ver­sal about Piran­ha because they were upset that it was going to com­pete with Jaws 2. Spiel­berg appar­ent­ly saw the movie and said, ​‘No, it’s a spoof, it’s okay’, and we got to release our pic­ture with­out legal trou­ble but dur­ing that peri­od appar­ent­ly he became aware of me. He saw The Howl­ing, from which he hired Dee Wal­lace to play Elliott’s moth­er in ET, so I was on his radar.”

Mean­while, a spec script from then-fledg­ling screen­writer Chris Colum­bus land­ed on Spielberg’s desk. In it, he’d found the per­fect shoe­string fan­ta­sy to kick­start his new fam­i­ly-friend­ly ven­ture, Amblin Enter­tain­ment. All he need­ed now was a direc­tor. ​“I don’t know how many oth­er peo­ple he sent the script to or if he sent it to any­body,” admits Dante. ​“The Howl­ing had been a rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive movie and I think he fig­ured we’ll make this pic­ture as a real­ly low-bud­get hor­ror film. Spiel­berg thought it was the per­fect pic­ture to start his com­pa­ny with.”

But when pro­duc­tion got under­way it became clear that their lit­tle mon­ster movie was a much big­ger beast than either had con­sid­ered. ​“It became appar­ent that it was going to cost more to make this pic­ture more palat­able,” explains Dante. ​“The impres­sion was we’ve got to make this for a wider audi­ence than just hor­ror fans, so it’s not going to be so grue­some and the mother’s not going to have her head cut off and have it bounce down the stairs and the Grem­lins aren’t going to eat the dog.”

These pre-pro­duc­tion tweaks not only impact­ed the direc­tion of Colum­bus’ script but also its over­all tone. ​“It became some­what more whim­si­cal, at least in the Giz­mo char­ac­ter, who was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to bite the dust after the first cou­ple of reels and become the head Grem­lin. But Steven liked the design of the char­ac­ter so much he want­ed it to stay around for the whole movie, which made it much more of a kids movie than it was intend­ed to be. In Chris’ orig­i­nal script the lead char­ac­ter is 12 years old, and in an effort to get teenagers we bumped his age to 18 – but his best friend is still 11.”

The next chal­lenge Dante faced was the daunt­ing task of bring­ing his crea­tures to life. First stop: Giz­mo. ​“We had a num­ber of dif­fer­ent designs,” Dante says. ​“Chris Colum­bus drew some draw­ings with the script. The Grem­lin draw­ings were par­tic­u­lar­ly sim­i­lar to the Grem­lins in the movie, but the Giz­mo draw­ings were kind of all over the place. Steven would con­stant­ly say, ​‘No, it’s not quite right,’ and we were get­ting close to the dead­line where we real­ly had to have some­thing to shoot. So we had the idea to make Giz­mo the same colour as Steven’s cock­er spaniel and that seemed to get us over the hump. He approved that and it became the design that went into the movie.”

With Giz­mo in the bag, all Dante had to do now was teach his Mog­wai co-star how to act. ​“When he was orig­i­nal­ly designed he could do cer­tain things that were asked for in the script, but he was very small and mechan­i­cal and had all these lit­tle gears in him. That was fine for a lim­it­ed amount of scenes, but once he had to car­ry the movie, have reac­tions and be a char­ac­ter, there was no way a pup­pet that small was ever going to be manip­u­lat­ed into big close-ups. So we had to build a giant Giz­mo head which was real­ly kind of fright­en­ing to see. It was very expres­sive and we were able to use it quite a bit. I don’t think we could have ever made this work if we hadn’t spent a lit­tle extra time and mon­ey to make that char­ac­ter a lit­tle more believable.”

As for bring­ing the Grem­lins to life? All ideas were wel­come. ​“We did briefly flirt with the idea of hav­ing a mon­key play a Grem­lin. We had a research mon­key brought in. They put a Grem­lin head on it and he went beserk, jumped all over the room and shat all over every­thing. At the time there was no CGI, there were just pup­pets and there was no way any live ani­mal was going to be able to do all the things these char­ac­ters were sup­pose to do. We did have a very good live ani­mal. We had a great dog who was con­vinced the Giz­mo pup­pet was real. He couldn’t fig­ure it out and was fas­ci­nat­ed with it. The dog gives one of the best per­for­mances in the picture.”

Accord­ing to Dante, it was a gru­elling shoot (“The whole thing was so exhaust­ing”) and once Grem­lins was in the can, the reac­tion was divi­sive. ​“The Stu­dio real­ly didn’t quite get it,” he remem­bers. ​“They were say­ing, ​‘Why are the Grem­lins so gross?’ Why are there so many of them? Steven said, ​‘Well, we could cut them all out and call it ​“Peo­ple” but I don’t think anybody’s going to come.’” Luck­i­ly, audi­ences had a dif­fer­ent reac­tion. ​“It was phe­nom­e­nal. I’d nev­er seen a reac­tion like that,” Dante says of the film’s first pre­view. ​“They thought it was the great­est thing ever and Warn­er Broth­ers was I think shocked, frankly, by how pop­u­lar the pic­ture became.”

Today the lega­cy of Grem­lins is alive and well. ​“It’s the movie I’m going to be remem­bered for,” Dante admits can­did­ly. ​“If I get hit by a bus tomor­row the head­line is going to be ​‘Grem­lins Direc­tor Hit By Bus’. I’ll nev­er do some­thing that’ll out­last that in terms of the pub­lic image of who I am – which is fine with me. It’s not my favourite movie that I’ve ever made, but I’m per­fect­ly hap­py with it and I think it does what it was sup­pose to do. It’s strange that it’s out­last­ed so many oth­er pic­tures that were much more pres­ti­gious at the time. It express­es my per­son­al­i­ty too, which is the one thing that’s the most dif­fi­cult to get across in an expen­sive film.”