10 Year Retrospect: Brian Yuzna on the Making of The Dentist
I was digging through my archives of interviews and articles I've written over the years and I came across an interview I did with genre veteran Brian Yuzna on the making of The Dentist. It's been 10 years, so as a 10 year anniversary, I thought I'd share this article with you. So here it is:
Brian Yuzna on the Making of The Dentist
Interviewed and transcribed by Attila Juhasz
The actual genesis of the project came about when I was finishing Return of the Living Dead III for Trimark and they were very happy with it. Mark Amin, the CEO of Trimark, was also a big fan of Society so he basically took me to lunch one day and said "Why don't we do another movie? What do you want to do?" and (chuckling) I've been doing this long enough to know that I should never worry about what I want to do, I said I want to do what you want to do, otherwise you end up working on a lot of things that never get made. It's a big push thing.
He said that he had this idea to make a movie called The Dentist which at first sounded to me like Dr. Giggles, and I was really kind of concerned but of course I said, "Great Idea!!!!" He had already made up a little poster for it and all he had was a title. So what he wanted to do was develop it into a thriller and not really a horror movie; he didn't want it to be fantastical - he wanted to keep it in the thriller genre and not sci-fi or horror. Which is actually where I'm more comfortable. So I was happy to try to do it although I saw it as a daunting task and they basically made a deal with me to develop it and make it.
What happened then was we had to try to find a story. First of course I went to John Penney because he's the guy who did Return of the Living Dead III with me. Well, they (Trimark) weren't sold on his story. Then they started having writers come, this was while I was making Necronomicon. They must have gone through thirty (30) writers and it got kind of frustrating; nothing was going for them. Mark Amin really wanted something very direct and very much about being in the chair. And you can imagine, that's like trying to tell a baseball story and pushing everything at the plate. Usually baseball stories take place off the field and yet we were trying to tell a baseball story where everything happens on the field.
It was really frustrating and it went around for a while. About a 6 months to a year later, it came to a point where I needed to go to Vancouver because I was producing Crying Freeman
Finally the executive over at Trimark had met with Stuart Gordon and he had shown great interest in the project, but they told him that there was already a director on it and he said he was interested in writing it. Of course I was really hot for that, I told them that well that's great if you can get Stuart on this then we'll get a really good story. So he (Gordon) and Dennis Paoli had a great pitch which was about this dentist who is cuckold in the beginning and then goes to work and sort of deteriorates and does bad things; this all took place over a four hour period.
So what I did to try to make that sort of work for me, because I've never done a body count movie, and didn't want to do a comedy sort of like Dr. Giggles which it's just for fun...so what I tried to do was focus on the idea of getting inside the guy's head and seeing the world from his point of view. So we can distort reality.
And in that way I thought that that's something I can get behind, because that's one of things I love about horror movies is portrayal of madness, the best moment of Psycho is the end when we see him being mad, and that's absolutely chilling, the idea that your mad. So that's sort of what we started focusing on which is something I've dealt with in the past trying to deal with simulacra, which is the way people project images onto natural objects. So that was kind of where it was of going.
Then somehow, the executive over there wasn't real happy with Stuarts and Dennis's script. It's still basically Stuart's script, most of it is still in there but there was a feeling that not enough happened. By that time I was on may way out the door for Vancouver for a year. They (Trimark) started talking about bringing in another writer and I told them that I really think this script can work, but do what you will and please, the money you already paid me put it up against another movie; if you want to do this somebody else, fine, because I realize that I'm running out of town.
Well, what happened is the executive at Trimark left the company and the project went on to a stack of projects. When I was back in town nine months later, it turns out that Mark Amin made a deal with Pierre David (Producer of Scanners). Pierre has a company called "Image Organization" and they said that he had seen this and he makes movies that are sort of profession based like The Nurse, The Paperboy and said "well I'll do this!".
Then they got another writer, Charles Finch, the son of Peter Finch, who is quite a good writer, he's a totally different writer than Stuart or Dennis, totally different sensibility. He came in and did a rewrite. He never really did what is called a Page One rewrite, where you go through and actually rewrite the entire script. What he did was try to add some things that they were concerned about, they said let's make it take place over 2 days. In Stuart's version the wife is killed in the beginning, so now the wife being killed is in his imagination. So now all of a sudden it changes the whole dynamic, and yet Stuart's story, all his events are still in sticking in there. So there was quite a tension between the two but Charles brought a lot of good stuff to it.
Meanwhile I came back in town and then they sprung on Pierre that by the way, we have a director which they had never told him before. To his credit, he didn't get flustered about it and said "that's neat and fine with me, I can work with this."
There was a fly in the ointment though, a complication, which was one that one of the writers that I had mentioned the project to with the idea that he can come in and do a script for them because they couldn't find one, was a friend of mine, Brent Friedman, who worked with me on Necronomicon and also wrote The Resurrected (Dan O'Bannon's Lovecraft movie), and the creator of NBC's Dark Skies. I described an idea for an opening to this, and he went out and wrote a treatment.
I looked at it and it was Sci-Fi thing about aliens sticking weird little things into peoples teeth. I said don't even bother taking this in to Trimark because they want something reality based and this is Sci-Fi. He went on anyway and wrote up a script and showed it to me and it was going to be produced by Mark Boardy, the producer of The Resurrected and had a distribution company called Legacy. Mark and Brent showed it to me and said they can get financing if I wanted to direct it and of course he could get more money for it than Trimark could. But being a Dentist movie, Mark would never talk to me again.
Even though it's totally different and as much as I would like to because I liked it, I really couldn't do that. So then I said, please change the name. Well of course somehow Brent didn't really remember to do that. I don't think Mark ever understood the genesis of it, and they got Tobe Hooper to agree to direct it and Christopher Lloyd willing to star in it and they set it up to shoot it Vancouver the same summer as when I was coming back from Vancouver with a much bigger budget.
So at that point Trimark got cold feet and they cut back on our budget tremendously and so at that time, because they were afraid of the competition, so then at that time Peirre David said that we can't afford to do this unless I go to Montreal to do it. At that point they still would have still had to pay me for it but then they said "you know what, if you want to do it, we'll pay more to have it done in L.A. if I'll do it, if I want to just because they're nice guys, which is true, that's exactly the only reason. And so I kind of said, "you know what I don't care what the budget is, let's do it, let's make a movie and that's how it kind of got going.
So it's an interesting story to it, and it was very interesting working with Pierre David, and also was real interesting working with Stuart (Gordon) in a totally different relationship because I've always been the producer. Then of course it was really a struggle for me because it was such a different kind of thing for me, I'm use to being able to have a lot of weird stuff happening and I don't even really bother so much or get so concerned about the style because I feel like I'd try to follow the weird stuff, whereas in this case everything was so limited and so ordinary that it really forced me into getting very, very controlled about the shooting of it. In the long run I think it was a good thing for me.
I hoped you enjoyed that look back.
Attila
Brian Yuzna on the Making of The Dentist
Interviewed and transcribed by Attila Juhasz
The actual genesis of the project came about when I was finishing Return of the Living Dead III for Trimark and they were very happy with it. Mark Amin, the CEO of Trimark, was also a big fan of Society so he basically took me to lunch one day and said "Why don't we do another movie? What do you want to do?" and (chuckling) I've been doing this long enough to know that I should never worry about what I want to do, I said I want to do what you want to do, otherwise you end up working on a lot of things that never get made. It's a big push thing.He said that he had this idea to make a movie called The Dentist which at first sounded to me like Dr. Giggles, and I was really kind of concerned but of course I said, "Great Idea!!!!" He had already made up a little poster for it and all he had was a title. So what he wanted to do was develop it into a thriller and not really a horror movie; he didn't want it to be fantastical - he wanted to keep it in the thriller genre and not sci-fi or horror. Which is actually where I'm more comfortable. So I was happy to try to do it although I saw it as a daunting task and they basically made a deal with me to develop it and make it.
What happened then was we had to try to find a story. First of course I went to John Penney because he's the guy who did Return of the Living Dead III with me. Well, they (Trimark) weren't sold on his story. Then they started having writers come, this was while I was making Necronomicon. They must have gone through thirty (30) writers and it got kind of frustrating; nothing was going for them. Mark Amin really wanted something very direct and very much about being in the chair. And you can imagine, that's like trying to tell a baseball story and pushing everything at the plate. Usually baseball stories take place off the field and yet we were trying to tell a baseball story where everything happens on the field.
It was really frustrating and it went around for a while. About a 6 months to a year later, it came to a point where I needed to go to Vancouver because I was producing Crying Freeman
Finally the executive over at Trimark had met with Stuart Gordon and he had shown great interest in the project, but they told him that there was already a director on it and he said he was interested in writing it. Of course I was really hot for that, I told them that well that's great if you can get Stuart on this then we'll get a really good story. So he (Gordon) and Dennis Paoli had a great pitch which was about this dentist who is cuckold in the beginning and then goes to work and sort of deteriorates and does bad things; this all took place over a four hour period.
So what I did to try to make that sort of work for me, because I've never done a body count movie, and didn't want to do a comedy sort of like Dr. Giggles which it's just for fun...so what I tried to do was focus on the idea of getting inside the guy's head and seeing the world from his point of view. So we can distort reality.
And in that way I thought that that's something I can get behind, because that's one of things I love about horror movies is portrayal of madness, the best moment of Psycho is the end when we see him being mad, and that's absolutely chilling, the idea that your mad. So that's sort of what we started focusing on which is something I've dealt with in the past trying to deal with simulacra, which is the way people project images onto natural objects. So that was kind of where it was of going.
Then somehow, the executive over there wasn't real happy with Stuarts and Dennis's script. It's still basically Stuart's script, most of it is still in there but there was a feeling that not enough happened. By that time I was on may way out the door for Vancouver for a year. They (Trimark) started talking about bringing in another writer and I told them that I really think this script can work, but do what you will and please, the money you already paid me put it up against another movie; if you want to do this somebody else, fine, because I realize that I'm running out of town.
Well, what happened is the executive at Trimark left the company and the project went on to a stack of projects. When I was back in town nine months later, it turns out that Mark Amin made a deal with Pierre David (Producer of Scanners). Pierre has a company called "Image Organization" and they said that he had seen this and he makes movies that are sort of profession based like The Nurse, The Paperboy and said "well I'll do this!".
Then they got another writer, Charles Finch, the son of Peter Finch, who is quite a good writer, he's a totally different writer than Stuart or Dennis, totally different sensibility. He came in and did a rewrite. He never really did what is called a Page One rewrite, where you go through and actually rewrite the entire script. What he did was try to add some things that they were concerned about, they said let's make it take place over 2 days. In Stuart's version the wife is killed in the beginning, so now the wife being killed is in his imagination. So now all of a sudden it changes the whole dynamic, and yet Stuart's story, all his events are still in sticking in there. So there was quite a tension between the two but Charles brought a lot of good stuff to it.
Meanwhile I came back in town and then they sprung on Pierre that by the way, we have a director which they had never told him before. To his credit, he didn't get flustered about it and said "that's neat and fine with me, I can work with this."
There was a fly in the ointment though, a complication, which was one that one of the writers that I had mentioned the project to with the idea that he can come in and do a script for them because they couldn't find one, was a friend of mine, Brent Friedman, who worked with me on Necronomicon and also wrote The Resurrected (Dan O'Bannon's Lovecraft movie), and the creator of NBC's Dark Skies. I described an idea for an opening to this, and he went out and wrote a treatment.
I looked at it and it was Sci-Fi thing about aliens sticking weird little things into peoples teeth. I said don't even bother taking this in to Trimark because they want something reality based and this is Sci-Fi. He went on anyway and wrote up a script and showed it to me and it was going to be produced by Mark Boardy, the producer of The Resurrected and had a distribution company called Legacy. Mark and Brent showed it to me and said they can get financing if I wanted to direct it and of course he could get more money for it than Trimark could. But being a Dentist movie, Mark would never talk to me again.
Even though it's totally different and as much as I would like to because I liked it, I really couldn't do that. So then I said, please change the name. Well of course somehow Brent didn't really remember to do that. I don't think Mark ever understood the genesis of it, and they got Tobe Hooper to agree to direct it and Christopher Lloyd willing to star in it and they set it up to shoot it Vancouver the same summer as when I was coming back from Vancouver with a much bigger budget.
So at that point Trimark got cold feet and they cut back on our budget tremendously and so at that time, because they were afraid of the competition, so then at that time Peirre David said that we can't afford to do this unless I go to Montreal to do it. At that point they still would have still had to pay me for it but then they said "you know what, if you want to do it, we'll pay more to have it done in L.A. if I'll do it, if I want to just because they're nice guys, which is true, that's exactly the only reason. And so I kind of said, "you know what I don't care what the budget is, let's do it, let's make a movie and that's how it kind of got going.
So it's an interesting story to it, and it was very interesting working with Pierre David, and also was real interesting working with Stuart (Gordon) in a totally different relationship because I've always been the producer. Then of course it was really a struggle for me because it was such a different kind of thing for me, I'm use to being able to have a lot of weird stuff happening and I don't even really bother so much or get so concerned about the style because I feel like I'd try to follow the weird stuff, whereas in this case everything was so limited and so ordinary that it really forced me into getting very, very controlled about the shooting of it. In the long run I think it was a good thing for me.
I hoped you enjoyed that look back.
Attila
