Our resident radio gal Shannon had the privilege of conducting an interview with legendary Director Greg Lamberson, the guy responsible for one of our favourite sleeze, splatter classics Slime City! Greg’s been busy writing novels and working on the follow up to Slime City – Slime City Massacre!
Click the link below to listen to the full interview:
Gregory Lamberson Interview
SHANNON: Hey everyone it’s Shannon Medaglia from Graveside Studios. I’m talking to Greg Lamberson today, you know him from Slime City. Well, he’s got a brand new movie Slime City Massacre that’s coming out. Welcome Greg!
GREG LAMBERSON: Thanks for having me Shannon.
S: Now why did you wait so long to do the sequel to Slime City? The original was back in 1988!
GL: The original film was not a huge hit by any means. It played as a Midnight Movie in New York City and was released on video a couple of times. I did a couple of movies after that, that were even more obscure, and then I turned to writing novels, and I’ve had some success as a horror novelist. I’ve had three novels published so far, and have three more on the way. When you have the film-making bug it never quite leaves you and I’ve always felt that I had more to offer as a film-maker than my early films showed. I basically considered those early films, including Slime City, as sort of the equivalent to my film school education. Over the years, some ideas for a sequel fermented, and it ultimately became a story that I just felt I had to tell.
S: Now, we’ll get back to your novels in just a second, but since the original was done in 1988 that’s over ten years, what are we almost twenty years into that?!
GL: Yeah over Twenty!
S: Oh my gosh, I feel so old now! (laughs)
GL: Now you know how I feel! (laughing)
S: What was your budget in comparison to the original movie? You must have had way more money to do this one.
GL: I’m going to give you an exclusive here. We made the original film in 1986 dollars, for Fifty Thousand Dollars.
S: Wow!
GL: All of these years later making a much bigger film, with a much bigger scope and a much bigger cast, thanks to digital technology we made the sequel for Fifty Thousand Dollars.
S: Get outta here!!
GL: Yep. It’s true (laughs)
S: Can you come do my grocery budgeting for me?! (laughing)
GL: I’m not as good with the food unfortunately.
S: That’s incredible!
GL: Well, it’s really due to a lot of people volunteering to work on the film out of love for the first one. I mean, other than hiring a professional cinematographer and sound person, and a few of the actors, everybody volunteered their time. So really our only expenses were flying the actors out not only from around the US but also Debbie Rochon from Canada, putting them up and feeding them and so on. It really is the equivalent of a film that should have cost two or three times as much, and would not have been possible without the dedication of so many people.
S: Now mentioning the digital technology and all that kind of stuff, do you feel that you were limited because there is more technology now and you couldn’t do as much, or did you get to do more with the special effects and stuff like that in your movie now?
GL: Digital technology and other video formats enable you to do much more than shooting on film. When we shot the first film, as a rule, we only did two takes of everything. So if an actor fumbled his line, we would do a second take but we shot as little as possible and had as little as coverage as possible. By coverage I mean the number of shots that we use in a single scene. Slime City is sort of a coverage-less film. The scenes tend to be a shot of two people and then the individual close-ups. Shooting on the digital stuff allowed us to do twenty takes if we wanted to, and to shoot from many different angles. Really the only thing preventing a film-maker using this material from shooting properly is a lack of time.
S: You had to have a lot of fun with the special effects.
GL: A lot of fun, and also a lot of stress.
S: Really?!
GL: It takes a long time to prepare and shoot a special effect and because it takes so long to get the gag, as we call them, ready. If it doesn’t work the first time, you have to clean everything up and re set everything up. It can cause hours of delays. That never actually happened on our film, but there is always that clawing anxiety. I’ll just tell you one anecdote about a trippy effect and how difficult it can be. The character that Debbie Rochon plays literally melts into a bathtub full of slime and her disembodied face is floating on the surface of the slime talking to the other actors. To do that scene we had to take a cast iron tub with a bottom and cut out the base so she could lie down in it, cover her with a long piece of foam to make it look like slime with just her face sticking out, and then build her creature appliance on her face. While this is going on we’re shooting in a train station and the clock is ticking until the trains start coming, long cargo trains. Debbie had a pillow under her back to protect it from the very sharp edges that we cut into the metal and that pillow came loose and there was no way to adjust it. So on top of everything else, she was in a lot of pain. So we had to shoot the scene much faster than I would have liked to get the coverage.
S: Wow! God bless your volunteer actors!
GL: Well Debbie’s a pro. She’s not a volunteer but she was really good. I’d get the take that we needed and I would say “Can we do just one more angle” and she would say “yes, just get it”. She was totally devoted to the project and that’s what really makes a difference on this kind of film I think.
S: Of course that makes it so much easier when everybody is right into it.
GL: Yeah, absolutely.
S: Now making this movie did you have complete freedom to make it exactly as you wanted?
GL: Yep, Yep. One thing about being an indie filmmaker is you’re limited by resources but you don’t have anyone else telling you what you can and cannot do. It’s really up to the person making the movie and how well they pull things together, whether or not they are able to do everything they want. I tell you, of the films I’ve done this is the first one that I’m perfectly happy with watching on screen. It is actually just what I wanted it to be.
S: Out of all the films, this is the first one that you are perfectly happy with?
GL: Yes.
S: Wow…
GL: I was a young guy when I made the other one. Film-making is really about learning from your mistakes and I’ve had twenty years to learn from my mistakes watching the same films over and over.
S: You were mentioning to me earlier that you will be screening the film at the Festival of Fear and at a festival in Calgary as well. How are audiences responding to it so far?
GL: We’ve had about four screenings and obviously it’s sort of a planted audience because you are inviting people that like the genre or are familiar with the film or with the actors who are in it, but it’s been great. They’ve been laughing and cheering in all of the right places and there seems to be a genuine appreciating for this film and the fact that this film is specifically a throwback to the type of film from the 1980’s that really hasn’t been seen since.
S: I was watching the trailer for it, has anyone gagged in the theatres yet?
GL: (Laughs) You know it’s funny when you get the film in front of the right audience and they have seen the first film and it features a character who’s head gets chopped off and it splits open and a brain comes crawling across the floor, you kind of know what they are looking for and when the key moments happened, cheers and applause!
S: (Laughing)
GL: Obviously what I was aiming for.
S: I was talking about when they were eating out of those jars. Just in the trailer alone, I was like “oh god!”.
GL: (Laughs) You know it’s funny, what you are referring to is “Himalayan Yogurt”…
S: That’s right! Yeah! (Laughing)
GL: …which is one of the two elements that characters eat that turns them into slime monsters, and for twenty years people have been saying “What did you make the yogurt out of?”, and I hate to disappoint them but it’s just yogurt with food colouring. However, one of the actresses was a vegan so we had to hunt for a specific kind of yogurt this time, which we didn’t have to do twenty years ago.
S: You know what, that actually makes me a lot happier because I thought it was mayonnaise, which is why I gagged through the whole thing. (Laughing)
GL: We shot in an abandoned train terminal in Buffalo. This huge complex of buildings that haven’t been used for anything productive in thirty years, and there was no running water and no electricity. So if we had used mayonnaise…
S: (Laughing & Groaning in Disgust)
GL: …that would have been like…
S: Oh my god!
GL: …they would have gagged for sure!
(Both Laughing)
S: Now the music in it is absolutely great, you sent me the theme song, absolutely love it! How did you meet the Ontario couple that came up with your theme song?
GL: You know I’m from Buffalo so…
S: You’re quite close!
GL:…I’m a neighbour of Ontario. I’m closer to Toronto than I am to New York City and because I am a horror novelist, I’m friends with a lot of the horror writers just over the border. Marcy Italiano is a fellow horror writer and her husband Giasoni is a musician and he’s always done sort of folk songs, but he’s a big fan of horror films so we actually got together on a previous project, a rock CD “Gruesome”, which was based on my Johnny Gruesome. They did a whole album of Alice Cooper type music for that. When the film got a green light, meaning I raised the money, I asked them to do a song for the film.
S: It’s a great song.
GL: I’m really happy with it. I actually wanted to have a song like that in the first film, but I just didn’t have the resources or know anyone to do anything quite that good. This song touches on what I referred to. It touches on all of those 80’s films like Street Trash and Basket Case and the films that Slime City is typically lumped in with.
S: It’s got such a great hair metal sound to it.
GL: Absolutely. He tends to write a lot of ballads, but he’s a great guitarist, and he loves that Heavy Metal feeling, and we’re obviously going for a retro 80’s style.
S: Do you think you’ll use them again?
GL: If a project allows me to, absolutely. They are good friends of mine and we look for reasons to work together.
S: Now talking about your novels, in 2008 you wrote a book about film-making called “Cheap Scares”. Are you going to be adding on to that as well, now that you’ve done Slime City Massacre, are you going to do a sequel to that book maybe?
GL: You know I kind of closed the door on that because in the book I actually criticize people who write how to books, like how to write a screenplay, or how to make a low budget movie and have success with that book. So to keep repeating the same book over and over…
S: Right.
GL: So I kinda cut off my own foot with that comment.
(Both Laughing)
S: Speaking of that, Lloyd Kaufman is in this movie and he has written book and does seminars on how to do film-making and stuff like that. Did he influence you in any way or give you a push to write your own book?
GL: Not really. It’s kind of funny when I made my early films I was in New York City, where Lloyd was making all of those Troma films. So I guess there was sort of a friendly rivalry between us even though we had no contact with each other. I’m certainly aware of who he is because when I go to conventions, I can often be doing very well at a table and then Lloyd shows up and the fans all flock to him.
S: (Laughing) Awww….
GL: (Laughing) I’ve always sort of knew who he was. He’s actually very good friends with Debbie Rochon and when I brought her out her to do the film, she actually told him and she was really enthusiastic about the script, and he volunteered at his own expense to come up here and shoot the cameo, which I then wrote for, it wasn’t part of the original script. What’s funny about when he was here, he carries a camcorder with him, wherever he goes and he’s always shooting footage for these little documentaries. His screen was shot with him against a green screen so we could add in the special effects background in post-production and in between takes he’s asking me to comment on the green screen process, and when he didn’t like what I had to say he would say “No, no, no, say it like this”. So on the set of my own movie, Lloyd was directing me!
S: (Laughing) Well I guess that’s Lloyd isn’t it?
(Both Laughing)
GL: He’s a charmer!
S: He is, he’ll direct anybody! Now you said you’ve written other novels, do you have any plans to turn any of them into big screen films?
GL: Actually, all three of the novels that have been published so far, “Johnny Gruesome”, “Personal Demons” and “The Frenzy Way” which just came out are novelizations of screenplays that I wrote when I was much younger, that were scripts written to be big budget movies, that I just never knew how to go about selling them. So it’s sorta my hope, that Hollywood will option the rights to them and make a big budget movie out of them. They are certainly not films I could ever make on the type of budgets I get.
S: Okay, so you’re hoping that everyone will do a big push for ya!
GL: So far the reviews have been great. It’s funny, the film Slime City, it took about twenty years for the love for it to begin to show and that was largely due to the birth of the internet, but the books have been very well received from the get go, so you never know, Hollywood.
S: Now do you have any idea when Slime City Massacre will be released for everyone, not just the festival circuits, but for everyone to see?
GL: Yeah the film festival circuit for horror films is obviously around Halloween, so we have a lot of screenings coming up through then. We are talking to a DVD distributor right now, a good company, that’s interested in it. I’m hoping that the DVD will be available in the US and Canada probably in January.
S: And last but not least, because I’ve taken up so much of your time, what is your all-time favourite horror movie?
GL: This changes from day to day, obviously, I’m a human being and we are all subject to whims. I’m gonna stick with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
S: Really?!
GL: Yeah I love that movie, I think it’s almost the perfect combination of an art film and a hardcore exploitation film and it’s one of the few films I saw in the theatre that scared the heck out of me!
S: Yeah, it creeped you out right?!
GL: It had me on the edge of my seat, I have to say.
S: (Laughing)
GL: I don’t like to get scared, and it doesn’t happen often.
S: You don’t like to get scared?! But you like to scare other people!
GL: Absolutely!
S: Oh, I see how you work now!
(Both Laughing)
GL: I’m a total hypocrite.
S: That’s right. Well Greg, thank you so much for spending your time with us, and thank you for letting us in on Slime City Massacre. It looks like it’s going to be a great movie.
GL: Thanks so much, Shannon.
(Queue up The Slime City Massacre Hair Metal!)
Many thanks to Greg for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to us and many thanks to our girl Shannon for the excellent interview and production!
