Lar­ry Cohen: The Last Interview

One of the most cel­e­brat­ed Amer­i­can genre film­mak­ers of his gen­er­a­tion, known for such exploita­tion clas­sics as Black Cae­sar, It’s Alive and The Stuff, Lar­ry Cohen passed away on 23 March at the age of 77. Through­out his leg­endary career, Cohen had a rep­u­ta­tion for being ahead of his time – in his choice of sub­ject mat­ter, his gueril­la pro­duc­tion meth­ods and his will­ing­ness to dis­re­gard long­stand­ing taboos.

It’s fit­ting, then, that King Cohen, a suit­ably irrev­er­ent new doc­u­men­tary about his life and work, arrived just before his death, inspir­ing liv­ing trib­utes and ret­ro­spec­tives all over the world. The morn­ing after one of those trib­utes, at the Fan­ta­sia Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val in Mon­tréal, Cohen grant­ed LWLies a lengthy inter­view, con­firm­ing his well-earned sta­tus as one of the industry’s most colour­ful and enthu­si­as­tic raconteurs.

LWLies: King Cohen makes it clear that you were an unusu­al­ly devot­ed film buff as a kid.

Cohen: I couldn’t wait for Sat­ur­day to come, so I could get to the movie the­atre. I’d go and car­ry gro­ceries out­side the A&P or Safe­way until I got enough mon­ey to buy my movie tick­et and then I’d just be off to the movies and be there until I was thrown out – by the man­ag­er usu­al­ly. He’d say, ​‘Hey, you got­ta go home.’ I’d say, ​‘I am home.’ I’d see the movie and some­times I’d stay to see it again.

How did that affect your approach to filmmaking?

I don’t know if I was study­ing how a movie was made, but just the whole tech­nique of mak­ing movies became embed­ded in my sub­con­scious, and I knew I want­ed to make them too. I start­ed out writ­ing, so I could make the movie up in my head and have total con­trol of it. Lat­er on, after sell­ing a lot of scripts and mak­ing a lot of mon­ey, I decid­ed, ​‘Gee, I hate the movies they’re mak­ing out of these scripts. They’re not doing a good job and the only way I can pro­tect my mate­r­i­al is if I direct it myself.’ So I start­ed direct­ing films as a kind of pro­tec­tion for the mate­r­i­al. But then I found out how much I enjoyed work­ing with the actors and how many direc­tors I know have con­fessed that they don’t like actors and have as lit­tle to do with them as possible.

Why do so many direc­tors have a hard time with actors?

They’re scared of them. They try to be author­i­tar­i­an on the set, so they can be in con­trol because they’re afraid to relax and that some­one else will try to wrest con­trol away from them, but I’m not that way at all. I know I’m in con­trol of the pic­ture because I’m the pro­duc­er and the writer and the direc­tor, so I have a good time and the actors are usu­al­ly very sur­prised. They have a good time and we come away from the pic­ture with warm mem­o­ries of the expe­ri­ence. I enjoy it. To me, it’s fun. I enjoy mak­ing pictures.

You were always dis­cov­er­ing new actors and res­ur­rect­ing for­got­ten leg­ends: giv­ing Sam Fuller a promi­nent role in A Return to Salem’s Lot was a mix of the two. Do you have a cast­ing philosophy?

In the case of Sam Fuller, I need­ed an old­er actor for the part, and Sam was a friend of mine. I knew he need­ed the mon­ey and he had nev­er real­ly act­ed in a pic­ture. He’d been in a lot of films, but usu­al­ly he had no lines or he had one or two lines and that was it. Peo­ple like Wim Wen­ders gave him things to do, but he nev­er real­ly had any­thing sig­nif­i­cant to do in a movie, and I don’t think he ever did except for my film. This was a very good part that he had and he was work­ing with [Michael] Mori­ar­ty, who’s a very fine actor. I knew that there would be an excit­ing per­for­mance there. Sam was full of ener­gy and per­fect for the part, and he was just very sup­port­ive. He nev­er tried to tell me how to direct the pic­ture or any­thing. We just had a won­der­ful time. We were friends to start with and we were even bet­ter friends when it was over.

It’s implied in King Cohen that he was a role mod­el for you as a film­mak­er and that you were the Sam Fuller of your gen­er­a­tion. Is that some­thing you ever dis­cussed with him? Did he know your films?

He saw my films after we became friends, but I don’t think he was famil­iar with them before that. I’d seen a num­ber of his pic­tures over the years. Some of them I liked, some of them I didn’t like so much. He wrote them, he direct­ed them, and very often he pro­duced them and he had a lot of tri­als and tribu­la­tions over the years – pic­tures that didn’t get prop­er dis­tri­b­u­tion, pic­tures that were not released – like he made White Dog, which they pulled out of release because some organ­i­sa­tions object­ed to it, said it was a racist pic­ture. Nobody could be less racist than Sam Fuller. He’d been using black actors in impor­tant roles for years. All the way back to The Steel Hel­met and Shock Cor­ri­dor. At a time when nobody was using black actors for any­thing but ser­vants, he was using them in prin­ci­pal roles. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a cou­ple peo­ple wrote let­ters to Para­mount say­ing that White Dog was a racist movie and they didn’t dis­trib­ute the picture.

He also had seri­ous issues a few years ear­li­er on The Big Red One.

Yeah, they took the pic­ture away and re-edit­ed it and cut about a half hour out of it, so he went through a lot and then he was liv­ing in Paris. If you live long enough, some­times you can out­live your mon­ey and he was hap­py to have that 40 or 50 thou­sand dol­lars that I was able to pay him for his part. His daugh­ter was sick. She need­ed a lot of med­ical care and, at that time, that helped a lot, so god bless him. We were friends up until the very end. Even when he had a stroke and couldn’t real­ly talk sen­si­bly, we all gath­ered around one night at the Raleigh stu­dio – Ang­ie Dick­in­son and Robert Stack and oth­er peo­ple – and we sat with him and lis­tened to him bab­ble away. We couldn’t under­stand two words he was say­ing, but we all kept smil­ing and nod­ding and shak­ing his hand and pre­tend­ing we under­stood him. Then I gave him a kiss good­bye and that’s the last time I saw him, but I’m sure glad I knew him.

You were one of the last peo­ple to work with Bernard Her­rmann. He had a rep­u­ta­tion for being very cur­mud­geon­ly, but it seems you real­ly hit it off on It’s Alive. What was your work­ing rela­tion­ship with him like?

Well, Bernard Hermann’s wife Nor­ma wrote me a let­ter last year and she said in all her rec­ol­lec­tion, I was the only per­son that he didn’t get angry with. Ever. I guess that was a dis­tinc­tion. His tantrums and his anger were often couched in humour, only oth­er peo­ple didn’t get the joke, that’s all. He could be quite insult­ing to peo­ple, but he thought it was fun­ny. I was with him at his apart­ment in Lon­don and he got a phone call from a famous com­pos­er: ​‘Hel­lo, Ben­ny. I’m here in Lon­don. How would you like to have lunch?’ He said to the guy, ​‘I wouldn’t eat with you in Los Ange­les. Why would I eat with you here?’ And he hung up the phone. I said, ​‘That was Elmer Bern­stein. How could you talk to Elmer Bern­stein like that?’ He said, ​‘Ahh, he stole that music for The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en. That was real­ly Aaron Copland’s music and he just copied it and I wouldn’t eat with him.’ And then he start­ed laugh­ing. But he was nev­er any­thing but a grand­fa­ther to me. He was just adorable.

It seems you also devel­oped a friend­ship that con­tin­ued after the film.

When we lived in Lon­don for a year, I used to see him at least twice a week, maybe more. If I didn’t call him every cou­ple days, he’d call up and say, ​‘What’s the mat­ter? How are the chil­dren? What’s going on?’ I guess he didn’t have too many friends and all of a sud­den I was one of them. We were with him the last night of his life before he died. He took us to din­ner in LA and we took him back to the Uni­ver­sal Hotel and he died in his sleep that night. We had the funer­al at my house and the recep­tion. His wife stayed with us for about 10 days after­wards and every­body came to the house to pay their respects. We had Scors­ese and De Pal­ma and De Niro and John Williams. We were feed­ing every­body for a week. We didn’t mind doing it. It was nice to do some­thing for Benny.

Some peo­ple might be sur­prised by Mar­tin Scorsese’s exten­sive pres­ence in King Cohen. What has your rela­tion­ship with him been like over the years? Have you had the chance to talk to him about your work?

Oh, yeah. We run into each oth­er once in a while. A few years ago, he was doing a pub­lic­i­ty thing in Los Ange­les for The Wolf of Wall Street. They had some kind of a par­ty and I went to it and we ran into each oth­er. We were sit­ting over in the cor­ner talk­ing and the pub­li­cist came over and said, ​‘Mar­ty, you’ve been talk­ing to this man for 40 min­utes. You’ve got to min­gle and talk to oth­er peo­ple.’ She dragged him way. Oth­er­wise, I think we’d still be sit­ting there talking.

What about your rela­tion­ship with Fred Williamson? He has pos­i­tive things to say about you in King Cohen, but there still seems to be some ani­mos­i­ty over Orig­i­nal Gangstas.

Well, that’s Fred. Fred is a con­trary per­son. He thinks he’s fun­ny if he cre­ates some kind of alter­ca­tion between you. The prob­lem with that pic­ture was that he was the pro­duc­er. When I worked with him on two oth­er pic­tures [Black Cae­sar, Hell Up in Harlem], I was in charge of every­thing. On this one, he thought he was in charge of every­thing, but it was a sham­bles. For­tu­nate­ly, he had me there to try and straight­en out the mess, and a lot of the things I did cost mon­ey that he didn’t want to spend. If the pic­ture had come in under bud­get, he could have kept the mon­ey, but I didn’t want it to come in under bud­get. I want­ed to spend all the mon­ey on the pic­ture and have it be a good movie and it was.

Are there clash­es from that film that linger in your memory?

We had a scene where a guy dri­ves by with a machine gun in a car. He machine guns some­body and dri­ves off. The next day, we were sup­posed to shoot addi­tion­al cov­er­age, but the guy’s in a dif­fer­ent car. I say to Fred, ​‘That’s not the car we used yes­ter­day.’ He says, ​‘Well, I had a fight with the guy, and he wouldn’t give me the car.’ So I said, ​‘Fred, we can’t shoot this. We’ve got to go back and get the orig­i­nal car.’ He didn’t like it, but he did. He went back and got the car. He had to pay the guy more mon­ey than he want­ed to, but I wasn’t going to shoot the scene and have two dif­fer­ent cars. It was ludi­crous. My name was on it and I want­ed to make a decent, first-class pic­ture. Fred just want­ed to fin­ish the movie and col­lect his dough. We became very good friends since. We spent New Year’s Eve togeth­er a few years ago, and I see him in Palm Springs all the time. We couldn’t be friend­lier now, but for a while, there was a lit­tle bit of agi­ta­tion between us.

Aside from your Mas­ters of Hor­ror episode, you haven’t returned to direct­ing since Orig­i­nal Gangstas. Were there oth­er projects that you tried to get made?

Oh, sure. But it’s how can you get it made and who’s going to dis­trib­ute the pic­ture and what’s going to hap­pen to the film? I like to have my pic­tures play in the­atres, and I’m very dis­ap­point­ed to see them just get dumped on Blu-ray or DVD and nev­er get the­atri­cal play. I couldn’t enjoy that expe­ri­ence. There was a pic­ture we made based on a script I sold called Mes­sages Delet­ed. They shot the pic­ture for $5 mil­lion and before they could get the pic­ture fin­ished, it appeared on the inter­net. Some­body pirat­ed the pic­ture, so that was the end of the pic­ture and the end of the com­pa­ny. They filed for bank­rupt­cy and the pic­ture just dis­ap­peared into obliv­ion. When I saw that, I said, ​‘That’s too dan­ger­ous.’ To put your time and some­body else’s mon­ey into some­thing and then it goes down the drain. I just can’t take a risk like that. It could have hap­pened to me on any of my pic­tures years ago.

Do you have any scripts sit­ting on a shelf that could be resurrected?

I’ve got a bunch of projects with JJ Abrams and his com­pa­ny Bad Robot. We’ve got 10 one-hour thrillers all writ­ten by me and they’re pack­ag­ing it to go out as a series for cable. I would direct some of them and oth­er direc­tors would come in and do some. We’ll see what hap­pens. We’re very close right now and I’m glad that JJ was enthu­si­as­tic about it. If any­body can get it made, he can.

Over the years there have been rum­blings about a God Told Me To remake.

A lot of peo­ple – both for­eign and domes­tic – have called me about doing a God Told Me To remake, but nobody has come up with enough of a cash offer to pur­chase the rights.

Where do you see your influ­ence today?

A lot of things are sub­merged in people’s sub­con­scious. Cer­tain ele­ments stick in their mind and appear in their pic­ture, even though they don’t remem­ber where they got the idea from. The oth­er day I was watch­ing The Fugi­tive with Har­ri­son Ford, and I know the direc­tor of that pic­ture (Andrew Davis) was a fan of mine because he told me that. There is a St Patrick’s Day parade scene and Har­ri­son Ford is los­ing him­self in the St Patrick’s Day parade. Well, I guess he just got that from God Told Me To, but that’s okay. I don’t own the St Patrick’s Day parade.

But a lot of stuff comes out that you think, ​‘Maybe they saw some­thing that I did and it influ­enced them.’ Cer­tain­ly Coro­net Blue – which was a series I did for CBS way back – became The Bourne Iden­ti­ty. It’s the exact same plot as The Bourne Iden­ti­ty. A guy’s found float­ing in the water, he’s got amne­sia and he’s a spy, so I think Robert Lud­lum saw that series and prob­a­bly for­got about it and wrote the book.

What is your expe­ri­ence revis­it­ing your own films?

When I look at these movies, some­times I feel like I just made them a few months ago. The expe­ri­ence is so vivid that it just seems so close. I can’t believe that these movies were made 30, 40 years ago. It’s hard to fath­om that so much time has passed. Of course, when you look at some of the oth­er peo­ple that were asso­ci­at­ed with the pic­tures, you start to believe it, par­tic­u­lar­ly when you find out that every­one in the cast is dead.

Has your per­spec­tive on any of these films changed over time?

I always find some­thing in all the movies that I like, and I don’t mind look­ing at them. I know some film­mak­ers say they nev­er look at their movies and all that stuff. I can’t imag­ine it. I get such a good kick out of see­ing these pic­tures, par­tic­u­lar­ly with an audi­ence. But you know, it’s not the movie itself, it’s the expe­ri­ence of mak­ing the movie. Some of the ones that didn’t work that well were real­ly fun to make and I met nice peo­ple that I’ve main­tained friend­ships with for years, so all in all it was a worth­while expe­ri­ence, just for the human­i­ty that came out of it – and the relationships.