HOW DARE YOU?

John McNaughton will always be remembered for his masterpiece HENRY:PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. As a director he doesn’t like to repeat himself, which is the reason he never chose the easy path. After WILD THINGS he walked away from a fat pay check turning down movies like 8MM (‘really dreadful, ugly script’). His last feature is the excellent THE HARVEST, but at the time of our talk, in late 2017, McNaughton was in talks to make A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, which would re-unite him with HENRY star Michael Rooker.

Let me start with the present: you have multiple projects in development at the moment. Which one is closest to becoming a movie?

Well, which have you heard about?

 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, the Flannery O’Connor story.

Yeah, that’s probably the closest.

That would reunite you with Michael Rooker. What attracted you in the story?

I was rereading Flannery O’Connor recently and I was standing by my book shelf and I realized I have everything she has written. I bought those books years ago and now I’m rereading them. I’ve been a fan of hers for years. That particular story is probably her most famous, also her darkest story. It also has her most famous line, which the Misfit character, which would be played by Michael Rooker, utters at the end. It never occurred to me that it could be a movie, because it’s only a fifteen page story.

Now, about a year ago they rereleased HENRY for the 57th time and they did a 4K restoration and made a pretty big event out of it. And Michael and I attended the Chicago International Film Festival. We spend some time hanging out. He went back to LA and later called and said he was approached by a producer about doing this story. And he asked if I knew it. I said I knew it quite well. Would I be interested? I said of course. It’s a great story and I would love to work with Michael again.

There’s this producer named Ed Richardson who is from Georgia, which is where Flannery O’Connor is from, and he managed to secure the rights from the estate. They are not easy to deal with, very particular. At any rate, there’s only one other Flannery O’Connor film that I know of and that is WISE BLOOD, directed by John Huston. The man who wrote the screenplay for that film was Benedict Fitzgerald and Ed Richardson managed to find him and got him to write the screenplay for  A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND. I wasn’t sure how any writer could expand on the story and turn fifteen pages into a 115 page script and be of a quality that matched hers. But he has really done it. Interestingly, when Fitzgerald was a boy Flannery O’Connor lived with his family. His father was a scholar who translated the Odyssey and the Iliad into English back in the sixties and Benedict’s father mentored O’Connor when she came to live with them in Connecticut. She was Benedict’s babysitter. So that’s very good lineage.

Your last movie THE HARVEST was an absolute pleasure. I enjoyed the mystery and the twist in the story, but I also enjoyed it as a the character study. Could you tell me how you approached that screenplay?

I think it works on a lot of levels. To me it’s almost like a fairy tale, like Hansel and Gretel, the little boy and the little girl chased through the woods by a wicked witch. It has the bones of a fairy tale. It’s about growing up and having to break free from your parents. Your parents want your heart and you can’t let them take it. You have to break away and make your own life. That’s what fairy tales are often about: growing up.

It’s interesting. I made a promise that I would deliver a movie with no overt violence, no bad language, no sex, no nudity. But the concept was so dark that when the censors came, they wouldn’t give us the PG rating I wanted. Nothing you can really point to except, as with HENRY, the overall moral tone. I’m proud to say that when HENRY was rereleased last year they submitted it again to the MPAA and it came back with an X. They still won’t cave [laughs].

HENRY hasn’t lost any of its power, but these days I tend to enjoy the humor much more than when it first came out. Years ago I thought it was something I as a viewer brought to the picture, but now I feel that you put it there intentionally.

Whenever I’m writing, I’m kind of sequestered from the world and I just take every chance I get to make it funny, no matter how dark the story is. Especially when Richard [Fire] and I were writing HENRY, we were amusing ourselves with how oblivious these characters were.

For the last six months or so I’ve been teaching at Second City, which is an institution in Chicago. It’s improv comedy. They’ve been doing it for fifty years and at least half of all the great American comedy stars have come off of Second City. It’s the preeminent training ground for comic talent, at least in the English language world. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell, John Candy, John Belushi, Harold Ramis: the list goes on and on. Now, just last year they started a one year intensive film school: the Harold Ramis Film School. He endowed them with the money to start the training program for young film makers, not just comedic performers. So anyway, I agreed to teach a course there. I basically show them the pieces I’ve made and try to prepare them for what it’s like out there. School is supposed to be a safe space – which is a big thing now – but once you walk out the door you will no longer be in a safe space. All you young ladies out there, the Harvey Weinsteins will be waiting for you. So, anyway, the first thing I show them is HENRY. Now, because of political correctness and safe spaces I was a little worried I was going be attacked. I remember the first screening 32 years ago. Nobody laughed. Not once. And when it was over, there was no applause. People didn’t talk for the next few minutes. But with this class, they laughed quite a bit. My films, as they grow older, they tend to become more comedic, I guess. At first they may be shocking, and because I don’t like to do stuff that’s been done, they tend to be original and throw people off when they first see them. But there was a good deal of laughter, which I was glad to see happen. So, yes, very intentional. But maybe it’s also that violence in movies has become so extreme that people are desensitized or easily able to laugh. I don’t know. 

What always strikes me is how tragic the ending is: you hope that there’s some redemption for Henry and Becky. In that sense HENRY reminds me somewhat of movies from the sixties and seventies, in which lost souls, living on the margins of society, drift together. Movies like SCARECROW or MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Did films like that influence you by any chance?

Well, everything influences me in some way. All the good movies I’ve seen, and some of the bad. But I’m not like Tarantino who makes pastiches of other things and movies about movies. I’ve never seen SCARECROW, I’ve certainly seen MIDNIGHT COWBOY. One film that influenced me while I was making HENRY was THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, a very touching film about a young couple on the run. And of course there was Terrence Malick’s movie BADLANDS. But mostly I like to paint from life, not from other paintings. It was based on a true story, although it’s my contention that in order to tell a good story, you have to change the true story. Take SELMA, the movie by Ava DuVarney, about the civil rights struggle. They made LBJ into the villain when indeed there was no one who did more for the movement in terms of passing legislation than he did. Although he was probably a racist deep in his soul, he certainly was not an enemy to Martin Luther King. If anything he was a great champion. But they needed a villain and he was from Texas so…

When you made the film, did you at the time believe the stories Henry Lee Lucas told about his murderous exploits?

Ron Rosenbaum, who writes for Vanity Fair and published a number of books, somehow took a great dislike to me and my film – so fuck him – and he wrote of my film that Henry Lee Lucas didn’t do this and didn’t do that. Well, I don’t give a fuck! It’s a work of fiction. Henry was never in Chicago, he was in Texas. We based the movie on parts of his character and life. He served time for killing his mother – he did that – and I’m pretty sure he killed Becky. And then there are some others he may have killed. But once they captured him, this man who had been living on the very bottom of society, he discovered that there is nothing cops like better than someone clearing their books for them. They started this task force, housed him in a separate building, and he started making these demands: I don’t want to eat hamburgers anymore, I want steak. And a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes waiting for me. It was the best his life had ever become. He became a celebrity. Richard and I wanted to make a sequel about Henry’s life after he’d been captured. We already had a title: HENRY 2: SUPERSTAR OF CRIME. But unfortunately our relationship with MPI soured.

Was there ever a time you considered doing another serial killer story?

You know, only if it’s as good as or better than HENRY. Otherwise I’m not interested, unless I’m really broke and I need to eat [laughs]. In the years between making HENRY and the release of the film,  there were no other serial killer movies. But I got horror scripts sent to me. The kind I really don’t like, what I call ooga-booga scrips. Full of jump scares and monsters. I was never interested in doing that.

Well, you did THE BORROWER, but that is also a very strange picture. It’s funny, it’s gross but it also has some really interesting moments where you take us inside the mind of the alien. Letting us look at the world through his eyes, and it really makes you feel as lost as he is. I’m talking about the scenes with Antonio Fargas on the beach.

Such a wonderful actor. As I said: most horror scripts are dreadful. You read the first page and you know how it ends, ‘cause you’ve seen it a thousand times. It’s always the same old crap. But when I got the script for THE BORROWER I was broke. Talk about broke! I was living on the charity of my cousin who’s now deceased, living in his house, on credit cards. And I got sent bad script after bad script and then came THE BORROWER, which in some sense was also a bad script, but the conceit that this creature takes the heads off of people and somehow occupies their lives, to me it was like a metaphor for what actors do. That gave me something to take a hold of, other than just the monster that jumps up from behind a tree to scare you and eat you.

There’s an old theater here called The Music Box and they had this Halloween marathon a few years ago, 24 hours of just horror movies. And they asked me to play HENRY and I said: Listen, I’d love to be part of your event, but how about if we play THE BORROWER instead. Nobody’s has seen that in forever and everybody’s seen HENRY. Unfortunately, I don’t have a print of that movie. There was one, but it was left in the projector somewhere and got stolen. I can’t find a print of that movie anywhere. So I brought my laser disc player and they hooked it up. And we played it in this big, old theater and people liked it, but it too has almost become a comedy.

Also a great role for Tom Towles. What kind of man was he?

He was a great guy. Like myself from the South Side of Chicago. He was racially mixed. His mom was black and his dad was white. In the days he grew up that was difficult, especially in the South Side, but he was in great shape when he was young and you wouldn’t want to mess with him. He died two years ago and we scattered his ashes on Lake Michigan. Afterwards we had a party and his sister assembled this slide presentation of his theatre work. Because in movies he always played knuckleheads and lowlifes and criminals, but in theatre he played all these classical roles and fantasy creatures. It was wonderful to see that he had an entirely different career going in theatre. Brilliant guy, loveable guy. Very funny, a lot of fun to hang around with. I miss him.

Tom Towles also studied at Second City, doing improve comedy. And I’ve shown HENRY to three classes now, so I’ve watched three times in the last six months. And I realized that Tommy is playing the buffoon, he’s playing a comic character basically. It’s low comedy, but still… [laughs].

It was a brilliant thing you did, making Otis even more revolting and having Henry step in every time Otis goes over the line, thereby essentially forcing the audience to take Henry’s side.

That was exactly the point. He makes Henry look good. It makes Henry the moral force and that makes the audience really uncomfortable. When we go the movies we always look for someone to identify with, someone who is – a horrible word they keep using in Hollywood – relatable. The thing with HENRY is that it pulls the rug out from under you. You’re waiting for the sympathetic character to show up and suddenly you realize it’s Henry and you think: Wait a minute, what am I doing here? This is wrong!

I know HENRY opened a door for you, through Martin Scorsese who hired you to do MAD DOG AND GLORY. But I was wondering: did the movie ever close any doors for you? People who were just too appalled by the film that they didn’t even want to meet you?

Well, it’s interesting the way it got to Marty. I read in the trades paper that Marty was getting ready to produce the Jim Thompson book THE GRIFTERS, which I had read and liked. So I said to my agent: Gee, why don’t you send a copy of HENRY to Marty’s office and maybe there’s a chance I can get hired to do THE GRIFTERS. So he sent it. And Marty had an assistant – I forget who she was – but she saw it and when my agent called her, she said: How dare you? Later she got fired and Marty hired Melanie Frieson and she saw HENRY somewhere, showed it to Marty and he loved it. That’s how I got called. So, there were a couple of times HENRY worked against me, but overall it didn’t hurt me, it helped me immensely. Gave me a career.

But for Tracy [Arnold], who played Becky, it was different. She moved out to LA after making the movie, thinking it would be her calling card. But she wound up working as a hostess or waitress in a restaurant, you know, to pay the rent. It was a famous hamburger restaurant called Hamptons. Some writer for the LA Times came in there and he looks up from the table and says: Wait a minute! You’re that girl from HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. He did an article about her. Her experience was that everybody saw the movie, everybody knew who she was, but she wasn’t getting any parts because in the end they were just a little bit afraid of her, because she was in HENRY. They couldn’t get passed that.

With NORMAL LIFE you tackled another true crime story. It’s probably you darkest movie. Am I right to say that?

I don’t know what my darkest movie is. HARVEST is pretty dark as well.

But NORMAL LIFE is just so hopeless. You see these two people spiraling out of control and their situation is getting worse and worse until they’re both dead.

Well, it’s probably the closest adherence to a true story I’ve ever done. We actually shot in one of the banks they robbed. The manager was there when they robbed it, so we talked to him for quite a bit. And I have a friend who is a Chicago police officer, a crime scene cop, and when we did MAD DOG AND GLORY he gave Robert De Niro all the equipment, told him all the stories. His name is John Redmond and he’s still a good friend. We hired him again as a consultant on NORMAL LIFE and he showed up on the day we filmed the scene where Luke Perry gets gunned down at the end, while he’s trying to escape from the court room. And he hands me this envelope and it was photographs of the real Erickson, that was the guy’s name in real life, lying dead on the ramp leading out of the federal building. Next to him was an ice cream cone. Now, where could that have come from? Well, above the ramp was a railing and there was a crowd staring at the dead body down below and I figured some kid or maybe an adult dropped their ice cream. So I put that in. Just one of those touches.

Anyway, it was a true story and I had followed it because it was so sad. But it was also played for laughs in Chicago. They called him the bearded bandit, because he would wear this fake beard and a Chicago Cubs hat, and he would rob these small banks and get a few thousand dollars. And the TV would go: The bearded bandit struck again today, ha ha ha. But I thought the story was prophetic for what was to come for the American middle class. They just ran out of options and the situation became bleak and hopeless.

Speaking of bleak and hopeless. The setting of the movie, with all the malls, shopping centers, parking lots and suburban homes. That is one depressing place.

It’s where the story took place in real life, and yes, it’s depressing. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and it was pretty violent. We didn’t have guns at the time, but you got beat up every once in a while. I don’t live where I grew up, because I wouldn’t be talking to you if I did. I would have been shot dead years ago. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood. I hate to put it in such bleak terms, but if you’re white you’re probably not going to see any of the gun violence we have in this city. It’s still divided into quadrants: the South Side is crime central and the West Side is drugs and gangs and violence, but the rest of the city is gorgeous. A beautiful architectural capitol of the world, because the city burned to the ground in 1871 and all the great modern architects built here. It’s a gorgeous city in the gorgeous parts, and a terrible ghetto in the ghetto parts. And then there’s the suburbs. I got stuck there for a couple of years and I hated it, especially the new suburbs. And where the characters in NORMAL LIFE lived, is out by the airport and it was all built after the airport was built. It’s horrible, just horrible. The parking lot where Pam got shot is where we filmed the scene.

You know, it was a tremendous time in America, in the fifties and early sixties, because the lower middle class made decent livings, they were in unions, they had benefits, insurance and health care. And when you went to college you didn’t have to go into debt. I was able to pay my way through by working. You can’t do that today. Kids come out of college and they’re basically debt peons. I joined a traveling carnival after college, but kids can’t do that now unless they’re wealthy. Ronald Reagan started it, the complete inequality. They’re taking everything from the middle class and giving it to the wealthy. And they’re probably going to get away with it, hard to say. But NORMAL LIFE is about that. They were both working and still couldn’t get their heads above water.

With WILD THINGS you probably made your most commercial feature.

I’d say. It’s also my most political.

How’s that?

Who wins? The girl from the trailer park! She’s all alone on the ninety foot sail boat, out on the Caribbean. Pretty much everyone else is dead. That was the nineties, with the concentration of wealth. But the girl from the trailer park takes ‘m all down. You know, I’m from the striving working class. A lot of the kids I grew up with, the parents didn’t care if their kid dropped out of school. But some of us had parents who insisted their children have an education, go to college, escape all that. So that’s where my heart always lies. But in WILD THINGS there’s virtually no sympathetic character, except maybe the female cop played by Daphne Rubin-Vega. She is the only decent human being in the film.

Did WILD THINGS lead to any more offers from studio’s? Because it was quite successful.

Yes, it was. Especially in Europe. Unfortunately, Peter Guber, who owned Mandalay Pictures, had a break with Sony and to punish him Sony released WILD THINGS against TITANIC, which was about the worst you could hope for because TITANIC was sucking every dime out of the US box office at that point. But it still did well in America, but it was number one in France, Italy, Spain and it did well all over the world. I got sent a lot of scripts of studio pictures. One of the things I turned down was 8MM. Really dreadful, ugly script. I probably made a career mistake by choosing a really good script by David Mamet, called LANSKY. Really good, but it was an HBO movie. At the time that was still considered just television. I probably should have made another studio movie, make myself at least a couple of million bucks [laughs].

SPEAKING OF SEX, which you made after LANSKY, is really funny. But it never got widely released, I believe.

The movies I make are mostly not like something else. They don’t know how to market them. This one especially wasn’t handled well. It was originally set up at Fox and there was this executive named Pierre Edelman who worked with Canal Plus in France. Canal Plus funded it and Fox would distribute it. And then Pierre, who was really crazy, got into this huge fight with Fox. And he said [mimics French accent]: John, you make this wonderful picture and they only offer this much. I will get you twice that much. Bla bla bla! So, we had the Fox deal, and then we had no deal. It was a unique picture, but it didn’t get distributed well. I can’t even remember who distributed it. Not much you can do about that in this business, once you finish the movie.

That’s always a possibility if you make unusual films in the United States. Unless you made ‘m for Harvey Weinstein, but we got into a fight very early in my career, so I never worked with him. There were two projects I talked to him about, but I knew it would not have gone well with us. Those are abusive, horrible people. I was not willing to take any shit from those guys. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, people in Hollywood try to play tough guy with you. I said: Hey, go fuck yourself. I know tough guys and you’re not one of ‘em [laughs].

But THE HARVEST was a completely different experience. It’s the most independent film I’ve ever made. There was just one guy, a wonderful man named Gerry Kessler who died since the movie was completed, who wrote one check out of his own pocket, for 6,5 million dollars. The State of New York put up about 3 million in subsidies. There was no company. But when it was done, there was no one to distribute it. We had to go out and try to sell it. It was eventually bought by IFC, the Independent Film Channel, and they put it on Netflix and Apple Movie and all that stuff, but they have never put it on their own channel. And they own it. I don’t know what’s going on with that. But anyway, I learned about distribution because I had to. One of the things I did was to call Robert Fischer, who befriended me years ago and who brought me to the Munich International Film Festival, and he booked the picture into Munich and after that it went to all these places, like Neuchâtel, Fantasia, FrightFest in the UK and a big festival in Finland. I went out there with no PR firm, just me trying to promote the film. I sure got sick of airplanes, but I loved being at those festivals.

I have one last question for you. I have to ask. I was watching SPEAKING OF SEX and I was trying to figure out why you would put this chanting on the soundtrack. What does it mean?

Oh, you mean the Tuvan throat singing? I’ve worked with the composer, George S. Clinton, a number of times and he always tries to do something different. In the film, when Melora Walters is getting counseled by James Spader she refers to her husband’s penis as Mr. Happy. George Clinton put on this Tuvan throat singing and said: That’s the voice of Mr. Happy!

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.