Roger Corman: Interviews

Meeting with Roger Corman

83 Meeting with Roger Corman Patrick Schupp / 1973 From Séquences 78 (October 1974): 20–24. Reprinted by permission of Yves Beauregard . Translated by Gregory Laufer. Roger Corman is rather spare with his interviews. So Séquences seized the opportunity of his arrival in Montreal to preside over the 1973 Canadian Film Awards to ask a few questions of one of the masters of fantasy cinema . PS: Mr. Corman, can you tell me how you started your series on Edgar Poe? RC: I was working at the time for a studio that had us make groups of two films with a small budget—about $100,000 or $200,000—in black and white. We sold them as a group. PS: Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth? RC: Exactly. But I was more inclined toward science fiction, and I didn’t want to mix genres. All the films, however, had a common theme: horror . And then, one day, I was fed up with working like that, with a small budget and in black and white. I had been asked for two other films to be made in ten days, as usual. So I suggested that I make one instead, in color, and with fifteen days of filming, which was a lot more ambitious. I suggested a story by Poe that I like a lot, The Fall of the House of Usher. My studio, however, American International, a small company that had never done more than fifteen days of filming or put up a $200,000 budget , got scared. Finally, after several discussions, my bosses agreed and I started filming. PS: Usher’s immediate success encouraged you to keep going, and probably the studio to keep paying. Poe was a goldmine, I believe. Based on 84 roger corman: inter views his works, you directed The Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Terror, The Haunted Palace (which borrowed as much from Lovecraft as from Poe, if memory serves!), Masque of the Red Death, and Tomb of Ligeia. What connection have you drawn between films and books? I imagine that, in order to adequately translate the atmosphere created by Poe’s language in cinematographic terms, you must have run into some difficulties? RC: Indeed, that’s an excellent question. We ran into some difficulties. First, there’s the brevity of Poe’s stories, which rarely go beyond a few pages. That meant that we had to explore Poe’s psychology and recreate the atmosphere in which he worked as well as his themes. Then we went back to the story in order to check and to clarify. Do you want an example? In “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe describes only the torture chamber itself. So in a sense we invented a prologue, a first and a second act. The characters end up in the chamber, that is, in the third act. What counts is in the chamber and that’s where Poe’s story begins. That, in fact, is one of our techniques: using Poe’s story as the conclusion to a story whose premise we came up with. The second point is that, in my view, Poe worked quite a bit in terms of the unconscious, in a middle world that Freud tried to explore in Austria in the nineteenth century. Poe in America, Dostoyevsky in Russia , Maupassant in France, even other artists, in literature, music, and painting, have followed the same path—the subjective exploration of the unconscious. You see, I firmly believe that the artistic and scientific fields are tightly interwoven, that numerous, apparently contradictory or opposing facets are in fact joined together, but in a context that is not always self-evident. And yet, since Poe’s works are situated directly in terms of the unconscious, I’ve tried to recreate a completely imaginary world by using technical studio equipment. At that time, however, I tended to work in a more realistic manner, in the outdoors, etc. . . . I have no trouble saying that Poe brought me back to more intellectualized studio work. There, I had perfect control over the film’s atmosphere with lighting, scenery, accessories, photos, etc. . . . And when we had to leave the studio for certain reasons . . . PS: In the case of Tomb of Ligeia, I believe? RC: Yes! Tomb of Ligeia was my last film about Poe, and in it I proved my theory! In fact, at the beginning, I wanted to maintain that imaginary world...