Roger Corman: interview

Wally Hammond talks to 82-year-old writer-director-producer Roger Corman, as he prepares to fly to London to pick up a career award

‘Hollywood’s Last Maverick’, ‘King of the Bs’, ‘Godfather of the Guerrilla Filmmaker’ – according to Jonathan Demme, Roger Corman is ‘the greatest independent filmmaker the American film industry has ever seen, and will probably ever see’.

With Corman’s career stretching from the youth-orientated 1950s drive-in era to our present cyber-world of video-on-demand, few genres haven’t benefited from his low-budget, fast-shooting and inventive approach.

He’s embraced race-car opera (‘Highway Dragnet’, 1954), beatnik existentialism (‘A Bucket of Blood’, 1959), Poe-faced Gothic horror (‘The Raven’, 1963), inventive sci-fi (‘The Man with the X-Ray Eyes’, 1963), the nihilistic biker movie (‘The Wild Angels’, 1966), swirling, pop-eyed psychedelia (‘The Trip’ 1967) and exploitative sleaze (‘Attack of the 60-Foot Centrefold’, 1996).

On the phone from LA, coursing over his six-decade, 383-film career, he makes me laugh. I start listing some of the 40-odd Oscar-winners his ‘can-do’ approach has influenced – Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, James Cameron…

‘I’m particularly proud of Jim,’ he interrupts. ‘He started as a model-maker at our studio. His wife, Gale Hurd, was my assistant. When they made ‘Terminator’, they invited me to a screening of the second final cut. I asked them: “How did you make this film on this small budget?” And Jim said, “We just did everything we did for you, but we had a little more money to spend.” ’

Unlike Cameron, Corman never went on to direct for the majors. He tells me it’s his sole cause of regret. Exploitation king he may be, but among the movies he churned out for American International Pictures from the mid-’50s onwards were some enduring classics – not least his delightful ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’, shot in two days in 1960, or his moving 1962 anti-segregation piece with William Shatner ‘The Intruder’. But by 1970, shooting ‘The Red Baron’ in Ireland, he was close to exhaustion.

‘I had directed or produced close to 60 pictures in 15 years and I felt I needed a rest. I remember driving to this airport in County Kildare, there was a fork in the road that said to the right Galway Bay, and to the left the airport. Each day I was tempted to turn the car and just go to Galway Bay and sit on the beach.’

Since his disappointing comeback in 1990, ‘Frankenstein Unbound’, he has stuck, via a succession of companies (New World Pictures, Concorde), to production and distribution. ‘It’s still exciting, but not as exciting as being an active producer-director,’ he muses.

How would he sum up his unique approach to filmmaking? ‘I never thought of this before,’ he ponders, ‘but maybe I was thinking of myself unconsciously as an efficient artist.

I have always thought that motion pictures are a somewhat compromised art form – because of the money involved. And I was trying to bring to the films as much efficiency, yet at the same time as much artistry, as I could.’

The ICA’s conference on global cult film, Ciné-Excess II, runs May 1-3. Corman will introduce a late show double of ‘The Intruder’ and 'The Masque of the Red Death’ at Curzon Soho on May 2.

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