JD: This is more people than who saw my last picture! (laughs from the audience)

AL: Joe, it's our tradition to just give a brief history of the film before it starts and how it came to you. You had just done the Howling?

JD: I had done a couple of low budget horror pictures and you never really know when you make low budget horror pictures whether anybody's watching. In fact, Piranha wasn't even reviewed because it opened during newspapers strikes all over the country which was probably good for me. But both the Howling and Piranha made some money and apparently were seen by Steven Spielberg much to my later surprise. And I didn't get any money for the Howling because it was a very cheap movie and the company went out of business before they could pay me what they owed me. So I was kind of down and in my cockroach infested office on El Centro this script came and it said "Gremlins" on it and the return address was Steven Spielberg so I figured obviously this has come to the wrong address, there was some mistake, and it turned out that Chris Columbus who as you know is now Mr. Harry Potter had written as a writing sample this little horror script which his agent was sending around town to show what Chris could write. And Steven Spielberg saw it and decided it would make a great low budget horror picture. And so since I had been doing that, he sent it to me. And I later found out that he had seen both the two pictures that I had done before, one of which was a rip-off of one of his pictures so he was kind of nice about that. We started developing this thing to make an extremely low-budget picture in Oregon where the Osmond brothers family had a studio there. As we developed it, it became more apparent that it wasn't going to be that cheap to make all these things happen in the script. Chris hadn't written it with any thought of how any of this was gonna be done, he just sort of wrote it because, you know, it was anything could happen day. So it sort of developed into something that Steven decided he needed go to Warner Bros to try to get some backing for and after a long process of them not understanding what kind of movie it was, it eventually became a studio picture which was rather a shock to all of us. It luckily never really lost its low-down, low-budget roots, but it was a somewhat unusual picture for Warner Bros to have made. And they really basically fought it kicking and screaming throughout the entire process.

AL: So as you are making this film, I noticed that there are a lot of inside jokes in there. What are some of the things the audience should be looking for that they may not otherwise catch?

JD: Well I read a lot of MAD magazines as a kid and one of the secrets of MAD comics and MAD magazine was that you could read it over and over because there were background gags. There were little jokes in the corners and the margins that you could look for and may not find the first time that you read it so you could read it over and over. And this movie took a long time to make and sometimes it was like watching paint dry. So to amuse ourselves we put in a lot of sort of little jokes for film buffs in the backgrounds of a lot of the shots. This was 20 years ago so a lot of the jokes are really dated, and I'm sure there's probably a lot of people here that are going to go "what? I don't get it, why is that shot on the screen?" But it kept us amused and it does reward repeat viewings luckily so people can tend to watch the movie more than once which is good.

AL: So what are some of the examples of these inside jokes that people might not otherwise catch?

JD: Well, there's some of the more obscure ones. There's a movie marquee with the names of working titles of two pictures that Steven had made of E.T. and Close Encounters which had different titles when they were originally announced, and that's something that really only the real hard core fans ever got. But the trick with doing that kind of thing is you can't let it ever impede the flow of the story. It's got to be something that's just something that's there and gone, you can never make it the focus of the scene. You'll find there are a lot of things like that. The tone of the movie is somewhat unusual and it just happened to be one of those remarkable coincidences where a movie comes out on the right day in the right year and people's zeitgeist just happen to be attuned to that particular kind of movie and it becomes a hit. I'm firmly convinced that this picture could've come out 3 months later or 3 months earlier or year earlier or whatever and just not even made a ripple it just happened to be the right time for it.

JD: Let me just say something about the cartoon. Which is a cartoon that I really put in the movie and it was cut out and I put it in the sequel and it was cut out (audience laughs) and I had originally wanted Warner Bros to run the cartoon with the feature but they just couldn't conceive of such a thing so it didn't happen. (more laughter) But you'll find that the concept of Gremlins did not originate with this movie or in this cartoon. It was a World War I sort of World War II phenomenon where people imagined that anything could go wrong with equipment was caused by Gremlins and there was a Disney feature that was planned called Gremlins which Roald Dahl did a book version of and which was released but by the time it came time for the feature for whatever reason it didn't make it. It was an animated cartoon feature, which featured the Gremlins that looked quite a bit like the ones in this Bob Clampett cartoon. So this is all the cartoon Gremlins we ever got and then we made
up for it a number of years later.

JD: There's one other person in the audience that should stand up who is the guy who shot this picture, the DP John Hora.

AL: So what did everybody think seeing it on the big screen? Makes a big difference rather than what you see on TV. We talked a little earlier this evening about how this project came to you. This was Chris Columbus' first sold script wasn't it?

JD: Yeah, and while we were doing re-shoots on this picture he was writing "Goonies" which he would sit down and Steven would dictate and write stuff down and then he'd go off and then make the movie right after.

AL: The tone of this picture in its original screenplay is very different from what we end up seeing on the screen it was darker, less comedy, correct?

JD: Well, Chris wrote it as a horror picture and it was very gruesome. The Gremlins killed the dog, eat him, chopped up Mom's head and bounce it down the stairs. It was a really gruesome picture. It wasn't until we started designing Gremlins that they just started to become funny to us that they sort of evolved into this sort of family sitcom with monsters in it. I think a lot of the credit of that goes to Hoyt Axton because Hoyt had a warmth that goes a long way towards humanising this kind of picture. And without his focus and charm I don't know if people would have bought the whole idea of the rules and all that nonsense because we were terrified that if people didn't go for this made-up stuff about the rules, that the picture wasn't gonna work at all. So with some trepidation we went to the first preview hoping that people weren't going to just go "What? These are so arbitrary these rules, they don't make any sense, this is ridiculous." But I found that if an audience wants to believe in something and they feel it's going to pay off for them, then they're willing to do it.

AL: Obviously, you worked with Chris to develop this script, is that correct?

JD: Yeah, but only to develop it when it was Spielberg-ized which I think we all know what that means. It just took a slightly different form, but then even when we're making the picture there was a lot of certain making things up on the spot because there were things that the puppets were supposed to do that they just weren't capable of doing. For instance, in the original version of the script, Gizmo is supposed to turn into Stripe and so Gizmo disappears from the second half of the picture. About, I don't know, 4 weeks before we were starting to shoot, Spielberg came up with the idea, he said, "you know, I like this Gizmo; I think he should stick around." And of course Chris Walas who was designing the monsters was frantic because the puppet that he'd created was only good for the first part of the movie. It didn't really do anything. It didn't walk around, it didn't move, it just turned into this monster. So we had to devise the backpack to carry him around in and we had to build a giant sized Gizmo head to be able to do close-ups then because he wasn't really more of the character in the original picture as he is in the movie. It turned out of course to be, as Steven is known for, the money idea because Gizmo is really what sold the picture.

AL: What was the evolution of the design of both Gizmo and the Gremlins? How many iterations did Chris Walas have to go through?

JD: Well, Chris actually drew a picture of a gremlin which didn't look unlike the ones in the movie, but Gizmo was more of a problem because we didn't really have a good idea. The first puppet they did looked like Peter Ustinov with hair (audience laughs), so it wasn't gonna work. And we started getting closer and closer to actually having to make the picture and Steven was just not signing off on any of these concepts and everybody was getting really worried that we weren't gonna be able to make our date. And so we got the idea, he had 2 cocker spaniels at the time which were coloured exactly like Gizmo is in the movie. And we decided that if we try to adopt the colon scheme from his pets that he would approve the design and it worked. (audience laughs)

AL: I want to point out that this movie was made long before the era of CGI so all of the effects that you see, you have what, one stop-motion animation shot?

JD: There's one stop-motion animation shot when the Gremlins are walking into town and there's the little Gremlins about so big and they made about 40 of them..

Dante talks about how with stop-motion each frame is shot one at a time and if there are any mistakes, the entire process must start over from the beginning. At one time, the crew working on the stop-motion called him up telling him that a light blew during the sequence meaning they'll have to start all over again. But Dante assures the crew that they don't have to start over. Instead, they'll just add a crash sound effect as if a gremlin had knocked out a street lamp so everything goes dark for a second. This saved time and money.

The Arclight then asks about the use of the rag for the Gremlins. They mention that Jerry Goldsmith was to appear at the Q&A but could not make it for health reasons. The audience applauds Jerry at this time as well as applauding his name during the main title of the movie. Joe goes on to say that the idea of a rag was strange to him at first. He thought he was making a horror-comedy and thought it was odd that Goldsmith approached him with a ragtime tune. In the end, Dante says he knew to just trust Jerry. Dante mentions the history behind Twilight Zone: the Movie where Spielberg hired Goldsmith to do the score to each segment of the movie, meaning that he "inherited" Goldsmith, and since then Jerry always makes his movies 100 times better, they are always a step up from where they were. Joe talks about the use of temp music which will be placed in his movies for preview audiences, but unlike the temp, Jerry gives the movie a through-line and makes it whole. In the end, Dante says that he told Jerry that he trusted him about the rag and he was right to do so.

AL: In an era of remakes, do you think anyone will remake Gremlins?

Dante comments about how no one can remake Gremlins without using CGI and a remake would not have the same feel as the original. He jokes about how Looney Tunes: Back in Action was a remake of Gremlins, and he wouldn't want to make another sequel. He's tired of "directing little creatures."

AL: When will you return to the horror genre?

He says that he never left the horror genre, it kind of left him. The projects he's approached with don't happen to be in the horror genre.

AL: How hands-on was Spielberg?

Dante says that Spielberg was actually busy during the shooting of this film and was not on the set a whole lot. He does remember Spielberg intervening when the studio wanted to cut the Phoebe Cates "hating Christmas" monologue by saying to Joe, "I don't understand it myself, but it's your movie, so you should keep it in."

AL: What is your dream movie?

Joe's dream movie was a film based on the lives of Chuck Jones when he was creating all of his famous characters. The screenplay existed and was written by Charlie Haas. However, the characters were owned by another studio, so he strongly advises never to choose a dream movie with characters owned by another studio.