By Travis Johnson
They call him the Pope of Pop Cinema. At the venerable age of 90, Roger Corman has a truly staggering number of films under his belt, having amassed 55 directorial credits and produced somewhere in the vicinity of 385 pictures in the course of his 62 year career. He’s the king of the cult classics: we have the Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe cycle because of him, not to mention Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Piranha, It Conquered the World, Machine Gun Kelly, Little Shop of Horrors, and Death Race 2000. His no-frills production house, American International Pictures, served as a training ground for the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard, giving the future auteurs their first break in the industry. The man is, to put it bluntly, a living legend.
And he is not slowing down. The nonagenarian impresario has just produced yet another film, an update of his 1975 classic, Death Race 2000. Starring New Zealand actor, Manu Bennett (Arrow) as the murderous motorist, Frankenstein, Death Race 2050 reclaims the brand from the big-budget powers that be and returns it to its schlocky, sexy and satirical roots. It’s a low-budget, high concept blast of violence and brazen humour that will either keep you enthralled from go to whoa, or else offend you to the core of your being. In other words, it’s classic Corman. FilmInk was lucky enough to steal a few minutes with the elder statesman of the indies.
Since the 2008 remake starring Jason Statham, we’ve had three films in an all-new series of Death Race films. Why start again with Death Race 2050 now?
Well, the reason is this: the original Death Race 2000 was a futuristic car-racing action film with a little bit of social commentary, a little bit of humour and certain themes within it. The remakes that Universal did were very good films, but they were straight car-racing – they didn’t have these other elements that I had in the original and that I thought were important. I happened to be talking to some people at Universal because I was involved in various other things, and I mentioned that and they picked up on it and said, ‘Would you like to go back to your original and update it – take the ideas you had in the first picture and update it for a second picture. And I said ‘Actually, I would like to do that very much.’ I think the culture of today contains some of the elements of the culture of 1975, but enough has changed so that I can take the same basic themes and rework them into the year 2050 and get a significant film that still has the action, the car racing and everything else; that still has a little bit of social comment and is funny – there’s humour in this version of Death Race.
What was happening in contemporary culture and politics that made you want to satirise it in this manner?
Well, I wrote the original treatment and then worked with a writer, Matt Yamashita, on the script. I generally write a four or five page treatment. I changed the name of the United States in the year 2050 to the United Corporations of America – the President is the Chairman of the Board of the United Corporations. And then here’s something that happened that I didn’t plan: while shooting, just for a laugh, we patterned the Chairman [played by the great Malcolm McDowell] a little bit after Trump, with the same pompadour hairdo and everything. We had no idea that he would go on to be President – we just thought he was one of the candidates and we thought it would be fun to make him the Chairman. So we’ve ended up with, I believe, the first picture with Donald Trump as President. That is something we did not anticipate.
That’s quite prescient, but maybe you wish you weren’t quite so accurate.
(laughs) Well, I would agree with that.
How quickly did the project come together?
It came together very fast. It’s one of those things that was almost too fast. I was talking to the executives at Universal about this idea, and I said I had formerly owned a studio in Ireland and had sold it, but I still had the rights to use the studio and there are certain subsidies in Ireland, and I said I could shoot this picture in the spring in Ireland, take advantage of the subsidies and really make a big picture on a smaller budget. And they said, ‘We’ll let you know in a week or so.’ They called the next day and said, ‘Roger, that’s it, we agree with you, let’s go straight ahead, we’ll make the picture in the spring in Ireland.’ They called the next day and said, ‘We’ve changed our minds… we want the picture right away – can you shoot immediately?’ I wasn’t gonna say no to Universal! I said sure! Then I hung up the phone and I said, ‘Wait a minute, my studio is in Galway on the northwest of Ireland, where, if I have to shoot in the middle of winter, those storms come off the North Atlantic – it’s impossible to shoot in Ireland in January and February! But I told Universal I would do it – what could I do? Then I realised it’s summer in South America, so we shot the movie in Peru.
How did you settle on G.J. Echternkamp as director?
He co-wrote with Max Imashida from the treatment that I had. G.J. is a very good director – he directed an action picture in the Philippines for me earlier [2013’s Virtually Heroes] and did a very good job. The film went to Sundance and got very good, very nice reviews. I knew we could handle the action and he was able to work very well with the actors as well, and was able to get together the action of the picture with the fast cars and everything else, with the comedy. It was essential to me that I had a car racing, fast action picture with certain social statements and themes , but those themes should be underneath – it should be comedy on the surface, which is a difficult thing to combine, and G.J. I think did an excellent job.
People these days don’t react well to being satirised, yet this film satirises everyone…
Everything we can think of! One of the ways to win, as it were, I think, is to go against the prevailing norms; to satirise, to make fun of today’s culture.
For instance, the drivers. Each driver represents some aspect of our culture. The first driver that came to me, I was thinking of terrorism and just from nowhere, out of the blue, the name Tammy the Terrorist came to me, and I thought, now what would Tammy the Terrorist be? So it ends up Tammy the Terrorist is the woman pope of a pop culture, bomb-throwing religion with saints like Saint Elvis Presley, Saint Justin Bieber and so forth. Each of the drivers represents some aspect. For instance, Jed Perfectus is the perfect man – he’s the product of genetic engineering, which is going around now. And one of the cars doesn’t even have a driver – it’s a self-driving car, which is also in the developmental stage. So I was taking certain aspects of society and imprinting them into each character.
You came up making low budget science fiction, action and horror films back when that wasn’t respectable, and now those genres are the studio tentpole films being made for hundreds of millions of dollars. Could you comment on that?
Well, I would go back to when I was younger and doing science fiction and horror films. These were the product of low budget independent filmmakers. The major studios were not dealing with that – every so often they would make a science fiction or a horror film, but in general they stayed away from it. I remember when Jaws came out, the New York Times lead critic said, ‘What is Jaws but a big budget Roger Corman film?’ He was right, but with one additional thing: it was not only bigger, it was better. And I thought, the major studios have caught on – they’ve learned what we low budget filmmakers have been doing, and they’re doing it bigger and better. And shortly after Jaws out came Star Wars and I thought, we’re in a lot of trouble here! And now that type of science fiction and horror film are the mainstays, along with comic book characters, for 100, 200 million dollar pictures today.
But you surely have more freedom operating in the low budget realm.
Yes, I think that’s right, when you’re dealing with that kind of money. I’ve always thought of motion pictures as a combination of art and business. When you’re dealing with that kind of money the business end of the equation begins to take over. It’s tough to gamble with 200 million dollars – you pretty much have to play it safe. Whereas with a picture like Death Race 2050, which to me is a big budget picture but to Universal is a low budget film simply because of the different way they operate, I’m able to satirise, to make comments about society, to joke about things in society, while I combine it with the action of the fast car racing. So I and other people working this way do have greater freedom to play around and to experiment.
And what are you working on now?
I’m in the midst of writing a treatment based on something that’s happening in reality, not in the United States but in a small foreign country. My treatment again is a science fiction picture in a post-apocalyptic world where the president of a country loses faith in the judicial system, feeling it’s all corrupt and the guilty people are getting off. He decides that he doesn’t need the courts any more, he’s just gonna decide who’s a criminal and kill ‘em. That should be the start of an action thriller film with a little bit of social comment, because you don’t generally expect a president to go out killing people who he thinks are criminals.
And yet we’re seeing that now in the Philippines.
(laughs) Well, you’ve named the country.
Roger Corman Presents: Death Race 2050 is out on DVD from February 22, 2017.