Oh he is, folks, it's show tied. People pay good money to
see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold
sodas, pop, popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth. Everyone
pretend podcasting isn't boring. Don it off my changes. It wasn't a dream.
There's a group that meets people who've seen the same sort of things you
had. Which group of aliens abductor job? We are not victims, we
are participants. I don't recall them being human. Your people, can you
sit there? You're a for one big surprise. Welcome to the Projection Booth.
I'm your host. Mike White joined me once again as mister Joseph Madri.
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me here. I've been thinking that
I need more cow bell in my life. Also back in the booth is
mister Jonathan Penner. Hi. I just came back from an alien exploration of
the far reaches of the galaxy, and I'm going to report on it.
This week, we are looking at Phelipe Mora's unusual and challenging nineteen eighty nine
film Communion, written by Whitley Strieber and adapted from his own book and his
own life. The film stars Christopher Walking as Reaper, a writer who experiences
an alien abduction. We will be spoiling this film as we go along,
so if you don't want anything ruined, not that I think we can ruin
it, please go ahead, turn off the podcast and come back after you
have seen it. We will still be here. So, Joe, when
was the first time you saw Communion and what did you think. I saw
it for the first time on home video in probably the mid nineties. This
was really a big science fiction fan or didn't watch a lot of movies about
UFOs and aliens. It wasn't really my genre, so I don't remember even
at the time knowing anything about the book or that it was based on a
book. I think. I really like the first third of the film.
I thought it was a good kind of suspenseful, dread filled horror movie,
and then I just didn't know what to make really of the rest of the
movie, the rubber aliens and Christopher Walking being Christopher Walking. There was a
lot to take in there, so it wasn't really something that made a huge
impression on me. I actually came back to it years later, in twenty
twelve, I read the book because I had an opportunity to work on a
TV show where I was actually going to be interviewing Whitley. So I read
the book and watched the movie for that and actually ended up kind of going
down the rabbit hole. And I have now read all of Whitley's Communion books
and quite a few of the novels that he's written as well, and so
I had a very different experience watching the film all those years later, having
met Whitley, having just read the book. But we can get into all
that, and Jonathan, how about yourself. Yeah, I hadn't seen the
film until you and I talked about doing and that's the reason I pinked it.
I'd never seen it, I'd heard about it, I'd seen a couple
of fleet More films, and obviously I'd seen many many Christopher Walkin films.
So I saw it quite recently. Was appalled. The first time I saw
it, I thought it was just just a garbage heap of a movie and
fascinating for all the wrong reasons. And then I saw it again. I
said, there's gotta be more to it than this, And I think there's
a little bit more to it. I think it's a better film than my
initial gut reaction was to it, but it's still a absolute clusterfuck of the
movie. It is a problematical film. This was a new film for me
as well. I don't know how I missed it the first time it was
out in nineteen eighty nine. I was going to the movies all the time.
I don't even remember this movie existing when it came out. I don't
know how I missed it, and I just kind of after a while knew
that it was around. I definitely remember the VHS cover art of the Alien
and yeah, this I guess it was just because we've had Whitley on the
show a few times now, and I said all right, And I had
been introduced to Felipe Mora via Facebook, and I said, okay, this
is perfect. We'll get Whitley, We'll get Phelipe bon here, We'll do
this, not really knowing what this movie was all about. And I don't
know if we're being punked or not when it comes to this movie. This
it is wild. This is you mentioned Christopher Walking. This is the most
Christopher Walking, Christopher Walkin has ever Christopher Walking in his entire life, Like
every impersonation of Christopher Walking where you know, you just go all out with
that. This is that times ten. I've never seen Christopher Walking as unhinged
and twitchy as he is in this movie. It's just it's remarkable. It
is a wonderful, wild performance. Maybe wonderful isn't the right world, but
it is wild. It is definitely wild. The reason I think that you
didn't see it when it first came out is barely exist. That's my memory
that whatever company put it out there was it was a disaster movie, you
know, and no one liked it, and Whitley hated it was really against
him where they wasn't gonna take his name off it, et cetera, et
cetera. And of course the picture doesn't really work because the aliens, and
we're going to get into that. But I think that he just said,
like we're doing a happening. He's the kind of director that says, this
is what I've got and I'm gonna do the best that I can. And
he had walk In and Lindsey Krauss, and they just almost literally made it
up as as they went, and he was like, you guys direct yourselves,
you know, and and walk In, who's famous for doing the player
notes in the dialogue, does that to such a degree here that it really
takes over the performance. Where he's sitting there saying what was clearly written to
be thought, is that something in the corner? He says, is that
something in the corner? Do I see something? Now? Is this real?
And so he just says everything that's written for him to say, and
it turns into a psychopathic performance. It's amazing. Christopher Walkin has talked in
at least one interview, probably more about how he said that basically he never
really gets into character. He's never playing somebody else. He's always doing Christopher
walking and so it's always him. I think, trying to figure out how
can I personalize this, how can I believe what I'm going through? And
trying to have these sort of in the moment reactions, you know, I
think some of the kind of absurdities, the more absurd moments in his performance
are really him, you know, kind of reacting to the absurdities of the
script or the absurdities of the situation, and just all he can do is
laugh or dance or I mean, you know, bow like whatever it is.
I mean, just whatever pops into his head, and so it is
completely like an improv class where it's just somebody throws something out of it,
and he's just reacting in the moment as if he doesn't know the story,
he doesn't know the context, he hasn't read the script. He's just kind
of going with it in the moment, and that's his way of kind of
bringing it alive. Like I'm Christopher walking here being Christopher walking, and you
just stuck these little blue guys in front of me, and here's what I
fucking think. It's ridiculous. That's the tone of his performance. It kind
of works because it's so insane and so absurd that most actors would try to
play that straight. He does kind of when you're talking, Joe reminds me
of like John Cassavetti's who laughed a lot, because that's a natural emotional reaction
to stress or to the kinds of shit that he put his characters through,
and so walking just giggling or grinning or dancing or laughing. It's true.
If you're facing some of the stuff that he faced on those sets and was
asked to play them straight, you couldn't do it. It would be absurd,
And so you do have this this movie about obviously very intelligent guy.
He wears hats and he makes voices and he's doing all this crap, you
know. I mean, you guys know Whitley. I've never met the man
or heard him. So does he do that while he's writing? Does he
wear goofy hats and knocking a mi rocky and brooving glax and he does all
this crazy shit? You know? I've spoken with him several times and I've
never had him act the way that he acts in this. I don't know
if things were different in the mid eighties but or when he's in the privacy
of his own home. But he seems like a very pretty put together guy.
Aliens aside, but he seems like he's got his shit together, and
I don't see him doing these things that Walkin is doing. Get up,
I'm cooking, I'm cooking, I'm on a roll. What's the matter with
you? Boom? You hi? You get Walkin? Sorry? You know?
And and apparently Strieber was Striber. Strieber was very unhappy with the movie
and with Walkin's portrayal of him. Is that is that your understanding? I
think initially he was, and I think he's been a little more positive about
it, the performance and the film, I think in recent years. But
he I know that at the time he talked about he and his wife were
on the set at least initially, that they would go while they were filming,
and he was so Actually, no, I don't think they were on
the side. I think it was that they were watching dailies. They actually
got dailies of the performances, and it was just so difficult for them because
they you know, I think Whitley has said he couldn't tell if he was
being mocked or if this was you know, this was just Christopher Walkin's way
of playing it straight, you know, or if it was just the performance.
He couldn't tell. He just couldn't tell what was going on. But
he just knew that that's not me. And it was just so stressful trying
to figure that out, figure out what was going on, that he had
to kind of say, you know, I'm working on this new novel.
You guys, go you make the movie, you know, do what you're
going to do. He just kind of cut them loose. I think at
a certain point, well, I don't know if we're being mocked. You
know, this whole movie, just the structure of it is so odd.
Characters just kind of pop in and out. Even in the beginning of the
movie, they're like, Oh, we're going to go up to the cabin,
and then suddenly I know that Walking. Well, we might as well
just call him Walking rather than Whitley when it comes to talking about the character,
because this is going to get too confusing otherwise. So Walking. When
his wife and kid comes home, he's just like, Oh, all of
these horrible things happened. My computer crashed, and I had such a terrible
day. First the computer turns off. Then the wolf paint thing jumps off
the wall. It attacks me without provocation. Then your mother calls, the
toilet explodes, but docham cooking tries to tell me how to live my life.
The computer completely erased itself when it turned off. No wonder that I
can't write my great American novel. Does this mean you're too tired to go
in the country. No, it doesn't mean that. What did you lose?
I lost, you know, I lost another day. What I lost
was gold, golden notions, erased, smoke, dreams, fentileness. What
I crave is you know, colation. All of a sudden, there's a
fire in the kitchen and then the one armed man from the Fugitive is there
and his wife and they just kind of like walk into the frame and I'm
like, where did these people come from? They didn't even come through the
front door, Like I see the front door to the apartment because the fireman
is about to come through it. Where did these people come from? And
the whole movie is edited like that, just we'll just drop into the middle
of a scene, We'll just pick up in the middle of a conversation.
And I know we've talked about movies on the show before that do that,
but this just keeps you so off balance with all of that stuff. Even
from the very beginning of the movie, where you know, the first time
we met meet Walkin's character, he just pops out at a bed and just
like someone's here, and I'm like, okay, like have we started already?
Is there an alien in the room right now? Can you show me
where the alien is? Because even when the movie is opening with the opening
credits, like it's a you know, a shot of the city in New
York and stuff, and I'm like, is this like the UFO POV.
Is that what I'm supposed to be getting from this, But there's so many
times where I'm like, I don't know if you're fucking around with me or
not. Like if you look at some of the furniture in the room and
some of the things that are going out in the room, I'm like,
well, this this is going to show up later. But in Whitley's experiences,
let's call it, I'm in Walkins's experiences. There's like a lamp behind
him at one point that is in the shape of a UFO. I'm like,
Okay, are we supposed to think that this is all just coming from
the real world? Is he like Kaiser sozeing us or I'm not sure.
So I feel like this movie's just like kind of fucking around with me while
I'm watching it. I actually hadn't noticed someone what you're saying about the people
not being sort of introduced in the scene just already being there. I hadn't
noticed that. But now that you've pointed that out, it occurs to me
that the book is actually structured differently. The narrative is structured differently, so
it starts with the abduction. December twenty sixth abduction, which is I don't
know, maybe half an hour into the movie, forty minutes in the movie
something like that, and he has this experience and he sort of vaguely remembers
the details and he wakes up I think with the pain behind the ear or
the pain in the head, I can't remember which one it is. But
then he eventually is so kind of tormented and so on edge and doesn't know
what happened that he goes and does the hypnosis sessions, and then he remembers
that there was this experience back in October and that he's had this dread for
sort of an extended period of time, and he under hypnosis has a memory
of the October experience that actually is the beginning of the film, where there
were other people there in the house. So, you know, I think
then in the hypnosis session too sort of you know, has this realization that
something's been going on for much longer than that, and so it's almost like
they kind of said, where we're going to back up the story. We're
going to show you those moments semi objectively and work our way up to where
the December twenty sixth abduction happens. Which is where the book begins. So
may but maybe maybe the structure of the screenplay was actually followed the book and
then they change that in post. That might explain some of the differences.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense what you're saying. I mean,
it does look to me like a picture that was really cobbled together almost They
just didn't have either the money or the script. If he wrote the script
himself structurally, it may they may have backed into it and realized, well,
this makes no sense if we start here and go backwards in time and
you know, what's a flash forward, what's under hypnosis, what's actually happening?
And you know, they said, well, it works a lot better
doing it in a straight narrative form, you know, the Lesser two Evils,
because it doesn't really work, you know, per se the cop of
the Fireman as this big part. It's got this juice cameo as he talks
about, Oh, you've been cited before, like what are we supposed to?
Who? What? What are we talking about here? So you know,
the whole movie really struck me as being made like on the fly they
had enough money for Christopher Walking, Francis Sternhagen got three days of work.
Lindsey Krast was just giggling the whole time, watching walk and do his thing,
and Okay, I'll, you know, I'll pretend I'm married to this
crazy guy. And the kid is out of some Pepsi commercial or something.
So the one armed man is sort of semi famous his but like his decision
to leave, they didn't have enough time to actually get coverage. So he's
sort of outside looking around and then he comes in and he says, Okay,
I gotta go. They don't work with him at all. It's like
they just ran out of time. It was an eighteen day shoot or something.
And my guess is, and you guys tell me, you know the
book, how much time is actually spent with these aliens, because they surely
didn't have the money to make the aliens that they had on the page.
I mean, they must have written unless he literally says, they cannot move
their faces. They are made of rubber and look like really bad Halloween masks.
I like the little blue guy aliens. I think that they have some
good movement in the face, as I was very surprised. But yeah,
the grays, let's call them the ones that look like the typical aliens that
you see with the almond eyes that were in South Park and stuff. Those
guys they look like balloons. They just look like balloons kind of floating around.
I'm like, am I supposed to be laughing at this? So the
first two times that you see them, it's a when he's under hypnosis.
So I'm sort of sitting there saying, Okay, maybe his memory or it's
all foggy. But then the last time it's him going and finding them somewhere
we don't even know where inside, And then he does that crazy dance routine
where he's dressed as a magician. Is that in the book? Is that
like? Or is that walking? You know what? Fuck this? I
need a mustache and a top end. That's the only way I can make
this thing make any sense to me. I will offer a theory here that
I think is supported by by the books the well I know, I know
that Phelipe Moore has said that the aliens were supposed to look kind of fake.
We're supposed to look kind of rubbery, which is a very convenient thing
to say after the fact, when you know it's a problem for everybody and
you just didn't have the budget, and you go, well, no,
that was intentional. That's very convenient. But it does kind of jive with
some of Whitley's reflections in the Communion book and in later books, which is
which is that he doesn't know what these things are, and you know,
he calls them the visitors, and he's and he's always very pointed about saying,
look, I didn't say that they were aliens. You know that that
wasn't my It's one of many possibilities that he throws out, but he kind
of keeps it more vague than that. And after Communion he started looking at
all of the work that he'd done previously, the novels he'd written, you
know, about were wolves and vampires and witches and demons and all of this
stuff, and kind of looking at how the monster creatures in there had some
similarities. And he sort of has this theory that the visitors have been with
him for his whole life and that he has kind of created different masks for
them, or they have presented themselves in different masks, and the alien mask,
whether it's the grays or the blues or whatever is. You know,
they're wearing masks. They're not showing you what they really are, the true
nature of whatever they are, that's just a mask they wear. So I
feel fairly confident in saying that, you know, the thing with the aliens
at the end taken off their faces and Christopher walking going no, No,
that's not it. You know this was actually, you know, something that
is in the book that was important to Whitley in terms of his truth,
his interpretation of what's happening, and that Felipmore did that to be accurate or
to be true to Whitley. So I don't know that that necessarily clears up
anything makes so much sense, and thank you for that. It's just unfortunately
a disastrous mistake they've made. I think right honestly, because there is potentially
a fascinating movie about a bright guy and his family who have had this inexplicable,
unexplainable thing happened to them that they may have lived with that may be
generational. I mean, that is interesting, and as a psychological horror picture
or even just psychological study, I could see that being in the hands of
it's not even a better director, and we can talk about more as a
director in the hands of a company that didn't say no, it's a fucking
scary alien movie. We need the lights outside, we need to do some
version of Poltergeist with with aliens or I don't know what what they pitched it
as what they certainly sold it that way, you know. And the real
heart of the story is not that it's a shame, because it could it
could have been a much more interesting movie. Certainly, that ending that very
Kubreckian. I would say almost the ending. It ends about five times.
But there's this crazy scene in the gallery when the two of them have these
sort of monologues to each other with these bold, beautiful paintings behind them,
total stylistic anomaly to the rest of the movie. And I sat there saying,
well, holy shit, now that suddenly I'm like in the hands of
a filmmaker who's trying to, you know, talk to the audience and make
a real movie here. So the rest of it was just christ I gotta
show some aliens and have some quote spooky stuff to get financing for this.
I don't know, it's sort of backwards movie making. I don't know.
Well, the question is what is the movie supposed to do, you know,
like, what genre is it supposed to be and what experience are we
supposed to be having, because I do think that the you know, the
cover art and the pitch, you know, it's I came at it sort
of expecting a science fiction horror movie that's going to be fairly formulaic, and
you know, to me, the formula for this type of thing. And
even when these you know, when ghost stories or stories about alien abduction or
whatever are are presented in that based on a true story or based on true
experiences, way, the formula is extremely simple. And the formula is ordinary
people in extraordinary circumstances. And there's an arc that the main character goes through
from having the shit scared out of them, being exposed to something that they
didn't know about, didn't believe existed, whatever. And there's this sort of
arc that goes through fighting it, resisting it, accepting it, and then
coming to some sort of transcendent realization at the end, learning to live with
it, learning to embrace it on some level, whatever. And that's an
arc of a story that's sort of you know, that makes sense. It's
a very simple arc. Well, this film does doesn't really have that,
partly because you start with Christopher Walkin playing the main character and it's like,
all right, well, already you fucked up the ordinary people part, because
there's nothing ordinary about Christopher Walkin. Whitley Strieber. To meet him in person
is he seems like a very down to earth guy. I mean, I
remember meeting him being like, oh, he kind of seems like, you
know, my kindly old grandfather. You know, he's better spoken, but
he's until he starts talking about aliens. You would not you know, you
would not expect him to go there. He's not like some he's not ranting,
you know, he's not eccentric, he's not waving his hands around him.
He's none of those things. He's actually a very articulate storyteller and seems
to be very down to earth. You know, you're talking about what a
mistake it is with with Walkin, because he is just so utra in this.
But they're also making this character completely incompetent. Like I said, he's
burning the duck, he's crashing his computer, but he's also telling these wild
stories. He can't figure out the code to get into the how he has
trouble a lot with electronics in this, and yeah, he just keeps screwing
stuff up. So you're like, Okay, Well, he already seems like
he's totally off kilter, so when these things happen to him, it's like,
Okay, is that real or is that just happening in his mind?
And then, like I said, there's so many things in the movie that
undercut him, Like even when it comes to all the lights that are outside
of the cabin that come on, these motion sensitive lights, and they say
like, oh yeah, even a mosquito would set this off. So it's
like when the lights, because you don't see much in the first encounter,
but you just see lights all the time, And I'm like, well,
that totally could be the case lights on the truck. It totally could be
the lights and the compound outside the cabin, because really they only see the
lights up until the very end of this movie, they only see the lights
at the cabin. So I'm like, well, you've already set up that
you've got these bright lights, and also you've also set up that Whitley's got
this whole thing set up so much that anything will trigger these lights, so
they could be going off all night long. I mean, I've got a
motion sensor on my back porch that goes off all the time. I don't
know what's out there, but you know, I'm in the city, out
in the forest. Who knows what the hell's setting this thing off? But
what you just pitched is a more interesting movie, or or even if that's
the movie that they wanted to make, they just didn't have the wherewithal to
do it, whether it was ever on the page or in their mind.
You know, the idea that Walking is already off the wall, his idea
that Mi Stripper's an artist, he's a novelist. He lives in his mind.
He's an eccentric guy, not the most down to earth guy ultimately,
because what he does is not it's down to earth because he sits alone in
a room. But you know that makes some sense to me, at least
intellectually, setting up a character like that, an incompetent guy who'd if the
aliens had been with him his whole life. You know, you can over
intellectualize it and say, well, yeah, he's a funny guy. He's
a weird guy. No one can explain why he's like that. And now
we understand it's not just this encounter, it's his whole life he's been going
through. That's that's kind of cool. What happens, what that ultimate revelation
is. It's obviously change Stribber's life, and this has become his identity.
I mean, he really owns this now. You know, he's known not
as the guy I wrote Wolfin, but as a guy who claims he was
abducted and et cetera, et cetera. So so the shame of the movie
and the reason that though the first time I really really did not like it,
it's grown on me. Though I don't still don't like it, I
find it fascinating document of sort of what could have been and why. You
know what, what's the danger of casting Christopher walking Well, you get your
movie made, but then you got the Christopher Walkin movie that's not probably the
movie that you thought you were gonna make. And you know, it's almost
to deal with the devil, you know. I take a lot of the
things that are in his books with a huge grain of salt, but I
find him to be not only fascinating, but really kind of sympathetic for the
way that he the earnestness with which he really is, you know, book
after book trying to figure things out, you know, I mean, it's
really just him trying to figure out who he is and his place in the
world and you know, does God exist? And I mean all these big,
you know questions that he's actually working through book after book, And because
he does it in such an earnest way, I find him sympathetic and I
enjoy reading him, and I don't find you know, walk In as as
Whitley Strieber. I find every bit, if not more, fascinating, certainly
fascinating. He is very watchable in this movie, probably for the wrong reasons.
But the problem I think is that he's not at all sympathetic because on
top of him doing sort of his nutty professor routine and burning the duck and
you know, wearing that silly fedora and talking to himself and singing and dancing
and you know, I mean, just on top of the goofy stuff,
which is like, okay, he's a goofy. He's a pretty shitty husband.
I mean, he almost blows his wife away with a shotgun, and
then you know, he's not like, oh sorry, you know, it's
just like he just continues to be a jerk, and she basically says,
you know, I've already got one kid. I don't know another, and
he just sort of responds with childish antics and as a father. I mean
this may just come from years of watching Christopher Walking in his on screen persona,
but I you know, I just I get nervous watching him in scenes
with the kid. I'm just like he's he's at best and aloof father and
at worst he's Jack Nicholson in The Shining. You know, he's scarier than
the aliens because he's Christopher Walking. It just doesn't it doesn't work for the
story. And I think at the end of the day, I actually think
that kind of his performances and the eccentricities that he brought to that role,
as fascinating as they are and as watchable as he is, I think that's
kind of what turned people against Whitley Stream. When he's driving them up to
the cabin the first time, I'm immediately thinking of him talking to Woody Allen
in Annie Hall. I tell you this because as an artist, I think
he'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night, I see
two headlights coming toward me fast, I have this sudden impulse to turn the
wheel quickly head on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion,
the sound of shattering glass flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. Right,
well, I have to go down, Dwayne, because I'm doing back on
the planet Earth. He brings a lot of baggage with him when it comes
to his personas you know, like even when he's with his kid, I
just keep thinking he's gonna like touch him and like suddenly have a psychic flash,
you know, like that that ice is gonna break, you know,
like those type of things. Because he plays and he will go from zero
to sixty so quickly, like when he is screaming at his computer, and
then even and I feel terrible calling the guy that one armed man. He
obviously has two arms. But when yeah, when he's like, hey,
I gotta get out of here, like all of a sudden, it's I
need to leave, and just like screams out, I'm like, whoa man
this is? We are just going for it big time. This feels almost
like like a like a local theater type of production. Sometimes when it's like,
oh, you need to get a point across, well, you better
scream to the rafters. We have two takes. We're gonna shoot it in
a master and because we because we got to get out of the cabin and
we have thirty minutes, guys, So here you go, and they they
just fucking go great, go wild. You know, there's no there's no,
they don't carve it out at all. I'm gonna lie down over here,
I'm gonna wear a hat, I'm gonna put my feet up, I'm
gonna grab the kid and hug him in a fucking crazy way. Okay,
good is he in focus and rolling? You know, I'm sorry, but
you know, I'm just assuming that this kind of picture was made in this
really really fast, almost straight to video way, and if it if it
got a release, and it did get a release, not a successful one,
and then you go to the video store and there's he had been in
what was the well, he did a series of of horror movies where he's
the demon or the anti Christ were what were those called him? Yeah,
that was later the Prophecy movies. Yeah, yeah, it was a few
years later. I want to say it was like ninety three or something like
that. That those are, you know, and and the Dead Zone had
been a couple of years before, and so he was playing and brain scan,
what's the one he did the Douglas Trumbull brainstorm. You know, so
he was he was playing in the genre fields because he was so out there.
He was good. You know, how do you how do you attain
Christopher Walking? How do you give him stuff to do that where the stakes
are high enough that he's not that he at least makes sense in the movie.
I mean, it's a fascinating kind of movie. Lindsay Kraus just hanging
on for dear life as far as I can tell, honestly, where do
they get the folks in the UFO group? They reminded me like they're coming
out of Color of Night or something with that group therapy man. You know,
it was supposed to be New York. It was not New York.
They shot some second unit or I don't know, they had the stock footage
of the helicopter stuff. Maybe they got on a rooftop for one for one
night. It was shot in California or someplace else. So it was a
very very strange product. Tell me, would you guys know about Philip Moore?
Because I'd first heard of him and seen in the theater your your sister,
my sister's a werewolf howling too, which between that and the Marsupials.
Really, I mean, he put a nail in the coffin of a very
promising franchise. Howling is fantastic. Well, what does he have to say
about that? Howling too is fantastic because you can so tell it was written
as a vampire movie and they just like a finding replace with the word vamp
or with the word WoT wear wolf. You know, it's just like it
is such a vampire movie and then suddenly they're wear wolves. But yeah,
and then the frickin' Marsupials. It is so good. I love Howling three
because it's just it takes the piss. I mean, it's such a It's
more of a comedy than a horror movie to me. He doesn't care.
He's like, Okay, I'm gonna shoot. It's the most fun to do
in the world is to be on set and shoot. And you're gonna give
me money if I change vampire to were wolf? Great? Done, I
sign up. I make them kangaroos great. To your point, Joe,
there's so many interesting things here that they could be exploring, Like when his
son comes out and says, where are we sad? And you're just like
Oh, what's going on. It's like, Oh, he's experiencing these things
too, but he doesn't really know how to process them. When he starts
talking about the little blue doctors and you're like, oh, those are the
little blue aliens. Okay, that's interesting that he's seeing these, but they
don't really explore it. And I don't know if that's just because we've got
a kid actor he's not good enough to explore the pathos or something, but
it really feels like we should be exploring that. And then later on,
Yeah, there's questions of God and existence and I'm like, wow, these
these are really good points, and like, yeah, you can explore them
in the book much more than you are in the movie. I feel in
the book you can do you can explore these things on kind of an intellectual
level and and and in a movie you really can't because you're all you're doing
is turning it into dialogue, and it's going to be long winded dialogue and
it's going you know, I mean, you have to move the story forward
in a film, which is why I say, you know, you find
your formula for this type of story that's that's about an encounter with the unknown
and and how that transforms the person who had the encounter. You know,
that's that's the story. That's a pretty simple, you know formula. And
in the book, certainly the last you know, maybe third of the Communion
book, and then you know, huge chunks of all the follow up books
are really him kind of speculating rather than being a chronicle of advents or sequence
of events or any kind of linear narrative. And so you have, you
know, with the Communion book and then with the Communion movie, you know,
you have sort of the beginning of a really good story that just kind
of you know, they had to figure out what what is our third act
going to be? What are we going to do? I mean, I
guess that's where you end up with bowing to the aliens or whatever. I
mean, you know, that whole rigm role where he's the magician, which
I have no idea where the magician thing came from. All I can figure
is that they were they were standing there going all right, we're saying that
these visitors can be anything. So that means they can disguise themselves as vampires,
where rolls aliens, what they can disguise themselves as Christopher Walkin. Christopher
Walkin is the real alien. Well that explains it now, I'm you know,
that makes all the sense in the world. Of course, Christopher Walkin
is one of the aliens. You guys know me, I'd love to pick
up on symbolism and stuff. And so when he is the magician, I'm
like, Okay, this gives him the only opportunity to have a conversation with
the aliens, because the aliens don't talk, you know, like he's constantly
responding to them as if they're having a conversation because of this whole metal rod
that they're putting against his head, and he can talk with them and all
this. And then I'm like, okay, well, as this, it's
giving him the opportunity to have a voice. It's his own voice, so
he's having conversations with himself. And then the magician thing for me is he's
got the magic wand and that's basically the metal thing that they put against this
head. So I'm like, oh, okay, well that kind of makes
sense, but at the same time, it doesn't make any sense at all,
so fuck me right, go with it. We're at the circus.
I mean, it was literally like to me no, we're you know,
this is a circus act. It's a clown show, you know, and
I'm putting it on a show, and it's as believable. It's all an
illusion. The magician is real or is it real? Is you know who's
playing who? And all that? I guess. I mean, I was
literally like, okay, sure, I'll go with it. I've gotten this
far. I was smarter and could give you the deep metaphysical take on magicians
and what they all meant. But I couldn't. It wasn't on screen,
you know, they didn't. They didn't help us at all. Mike,
you're to your point. I mean, yeah, the the in the third
act to have some kind of dialogue where we attempt to find the words to
explain what's going on, or we try to sum this up in some coherent,
semi intellectual way. I mean, you know, it shows maybe an
impulse toward that or to the need to do that. But you do have
these supporting characters. And this kind of goes back to what you were saying
about the Sun. It's like, all right, so if the Sun is
sort of having these experiences, if the two visitors to the house in October
have had, you know, at least they saw the crazy lights outside and
heard loud booming noises, you know whatever. I forget what in the book
exactly their experiences where I know that Anne Whitley's wife had she went under hypnosis
too, and she remembered some very strange things about that night the sun I
know, had a bunch of dreams at least that seemed to tie in with
things that Whitley says he actually experienced. And so there were these sort of
they were all relatively I think, relatively minor at least in that first book.
You know, people who were coming and sort of supporting what he was
saying with these you know, not confirmations, but kind of corroborations. And
you do have all these other characters and actors in the film who could have
kind of, if you give them a little more focus, could have maybe
sort of rained in the story a little bit, grounded it a little more,
and then made us feel, as viewers, like like it was a
more understandable or relatable arc that you know that the Walkin character is going through,
but he just dwarfs them. I mean, everybody kind of fades into
the back ground when Walkin is doing walking and it it ultimately I think doesn't
really serve the narrative because then it just sort of all falls apart with Christopher
Walkin going, well, it's all about me. I'm carrying this thing,
so I've just really got to go like balls out crazy at the end,
it just doesn't resolve anything. There's no resolution, and there's no resolution in
the books either. I mean, it's just a big open question. There's
actually a thing that Whitley has taken to saying in recent years, and it's
in some of his books that I actually, I really love is kind of
a philosophy where he says, beliefs are windows, questions are doors. He
actually has kind of an anti belief philosophy and who should be open minded about
everything? And I like that, you know, it's one of the things
that I find kind of sympathetic about him, about the way he approaches life.
But you know, I mean, why couldn't that be what they're talking
about in the in the you know, the art museum or up on the
roof or whatever. You know, at least that's sort of a relatable human
response, and instead kind of at the end, all we end up with
is, you know, well, they gave you a gift, and you
should do something with this. All right, Let's go write a book and
make a movie and tell people what happened. And yet, you know,
some of the decisions that went into making the movie make it I think unrelatable
in a way that sort of defeats the whole purpose of telling that story,
of getting that out there. Has there been any talk of the remake or
more faithful version, or expanding the universe of all these books that he spent
so much time and effort creating. I've never heard of that. No,
I don't. I don't. I mean, other than with the Coming Superstorm
that was turned into what is the movie? Yeah, after Tomorrow, I
mean really his other stuff since Communion, has anything else been adapted to the
screen, Not that I'm aware of. I want to say there might have
been something for like a sci fi TV show or something, But yeah,
I think you're right, and I'm trying to remember what that was. But
you know, I feel like there's a little bit of you know, for
better or worse, there's a little bit of a stigma, you know,
coming probably largely out of this this film. That thing just haven't got I
heard actually a rumor a few years ago that somebody who is fairly well established
as a as a filmmaker was trying to put together a I think it was
a mini series about Whitley's life, you know, kind of an extended biography,
And I don't know if it was going to be sort of semi documentary
format or how how they were going to sort of address the fact that all
of his work is this weird fusion of what most people perceive as fiction,
but that you know, Whitley, you know, perceives entirely as fact,
you know, although he acknowledges that his imagination plays a huge role in his
memories of experiences. I don't know how that would be addressed, but I
actually think that would be fascinating because I think you always kind of have to
look at the whole, you know, at his life story and what his
creative process is and where he's coming from and all of that. You know,
it's a big project. Obviously, it takes a lot of money to
do something like that. So will it ever happen? Is Whitley Streeber's name
big enough to you know, secure the financing to do something like that?
I don't know. I would. I would love to see it. I
would be fascinated by something like that, but I don't know that I might
not be completely in the minority there. So it's pretty funny. I was
talking with one of my co workers and I was like, oh, yeah,
I'm interviewing this guy, and I know she's very into cults and she
loves cryptozoology. She goes to like bigfoot conventions and stuff, and she's just
like, oh yeah, I don't believe any of this stuff, but I
just am fascinated by the communities, and I'm I'm right with her. Like
So, the the TVD or Blue ray comes with two commentaries. One is
pretty much a straight ahead commentary with Felipe Mora just telling stories, talking about
how this movie is put together all that. There's another commentary which I just
loved, which was I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he is some
sort of UFO expert and it's him and Maura talking with each other. And
again, I don't know if Morre's taking the piss or not, because it
feels like he just keeps feeding this other guy and it's like, no matter
what he throws out, the guy has a story. About it has facts
and figures and well, of course you know this was tied to this person
and the army and blah blah blah. And it's like there's no conspiracy theory
that Moura can talk about where this guy isn't right there with it and just
like so big into it and knows all these things. I'm just like,
are all of these like in this guy's worldview? Is everything connected? Is
it's just this big, you know, my sealed network of all these conspiracies
and stuff. And I'm surprised that Maura does and bring up Bigfoot in that
commentary because he brings up so many things, like I think there's even some
JFK stuff in there. It's just phenomenal to hear this guy just layer on
the frankly the bullshit over and over. It just gets deeper and deeper and
deeper, and I'm like, how are you keeping a straight faithfully? I
don't know how you can do it. I love that stuff. I will
completely go down the rap. I mean, I've read all of all of
Whitley's books. I've read a lot of you know, John Keel books,
Keell's books. I love Philip K. Dick including his like you know,
nine hundred paid page exsit Jesus when he's just like obsessing over you know,
everything and like wandering through alternate realities and all this stuff. And I can
so easily get sucked into that because I am. I am a genre storytelling
guy, so like what if that whole what if question, you know,
send me to the twilight Zone? I am, I am, like,
sign me up. But there is also something off putting, and this is
you know, I mean, I mean at times, I think even Whitley
Streeber, you know, goes into this where it's off putting to me,
where it's that the UFO community and the constant references to well, this case
or that case as evidence, trying so hard to campaign for this this you
know, this conspiracy. And I mean that to me goes kind of against
what I said earlier what I like about Whitley Streeber, which is this thing
of you know, but beliefs are limiting. It's like, well, but
you know, when you get that, when you get so deep into it
that you're quoting scripture to people, you know, whether it's religious scripture or
UFO scripture, you've fallen into that trap of believing and and you see this
in Whitley's books where he'll like, go, he'll dive in and he'll kind
of get sucked in, and you're just going, oh no, he's become
like he's he's preaching now. But then he'll but then he'll also he also
has his amazing abilities to some to then pull himself out and go but it's
not that and keep exploring. And that's why I found, that's why I
keep reading him, because he's still doing that. I used to be very
much like that, really enjoyed conspiracy theories. I would go to I went
to the UFO Museum in Roswell, and I was in the reading room when
they're like taking testimony from somebody and stuff. That all stopped in twenty seventeen,
that all stopped, with all of the insanity. I understand that completely.
I spent that whole year reading a lot of Philip K. Dick,
because you know, Philip K. Dick had this thing that he'd had this
experience where he said, you know, I remember an alternate version of reality.
I'm living in an alternate version of reality, and it's and it changed
with either either Watergate or Nixon's resignation or something. It was like a political
moment where he was like, there was a there was a blip here and
we got sidetracked into an alternate reality. And I read a lot of Philip
K. Dick in twenty seventeen because I was like, what the fuck is
going on? We are living in a science fiction novel? What just happened?
And that was the and that was like the only way I could explain
it to myself. I had to stop watching The Man in the High Tower
because it was right during that time, and I was like, oh,
yeah, you know, because I've read the book. You know, I
can't remember the what's the name of the book? Something about inside of the
Man in the High Tower. There's the book that tells what the real world
was the Grasshopper or something or other. Oh oh yeah, which is ironic
because there's grasshoppers throughout this whole movie with the masks and all this stuff.
But yeah, I was just like, I can't do this because this is
the world that we're living in now. The Nazis have one. But yeah,
I just had to stay away from from that stuff. But yeah,
just to that people layer these things and just keep building. I'm like,
okay, at some point that and it probably happened years ago that UFO community
and that QAnon community are going to join forces. And when JFK Junior is
that who it is that they're waiting for to come back, like obviously it's
going to be on the mothership, right, So it's yeah, it's why
it hurts my heart to hear some of the deepness that they go to and
the need to justify everything. Whitley Stribber is a tragic story, right because
either and I don't know him. You guys have met him or spoken to
him, but just listening to us the conversation, something happened to him.
Something happened, you know, whether it was a psychological break, whether he
was abused, I don't know. It sounds like he doesn't know. He's
wrestling with some disassociative memory kind of situation, and it took him down a
rabbit hole of his life and a a successful novelist men who maybe wasn't Stephen
King but was really cranking away and having a really successful career also got sidetracked
as some of this stuff emerged from his psyche and he's been wrestling with it
ever since, and now he is part of a niche community what we the
rest of us mainstream folks consider a niche community, and it's it has affected
his life, that is his identity as a member of that community. He
still writes books. Obviously, he's wrestling with his with his mind, body,
and soul, and that's the beautiful and kind of a sad story to
me. Does that Does that hold water to you guys who've read so much
of his stuff? You're right in saying that the sort of UFO community,
especially maybe the you know, sort of the community that spends a lot of
time thinking about paranormal anything, is his primary readership at this point. And
I think that he writes to them off. I mean, I think his
latest book, Them is sort of written directly to them, and I thought
it was actually less interesting than some of his other community books, because I
think that when he personalizes the story and he's making it about him and his
journey and trying to figure things out, I find that really interesting. But
then there are some books where he's really tying his experience to other similar experiences
with the paranormal or UFOs, and so he sort of attaches it to these
other people and I don't know that that you know, always serves him well,
or maybe ever serves him well, except that you know, those people
are validated by what he's saying, and so he reads their books. But
I mean they read his book. But you know, I mean, I
do kind of go back to, you know, Mike's bigger point earlier.
I mean, I do wonder, like, what is the effect of spending
so much time going down that rabbit hole. I mean, I've said that
I do it. I can be certainly sucked in, you know, but
at the end of the day, you apply, you know, a healthy
amount of critical thinking to these to these things. And you know, keeping
an open mind is one thing, and and you know, throwing these names
and dates out of people and preaching the UFO stuff as scripture is a whole
other thing. And what does that do to people? Because I think,
and there's something really interesting about a creative personality, the power of the imagination
to reshape reality, to shape our reality, which which it does for all
of us in different ways. But it's also kind of scary, you know,
the way that people's beliefs, especially like a consensus belief in something that
is hard to be objective about that doesn't stand up to the scrutiny of critical
thinking. You know what, what does the extended exposure to that and being
sort of in a community of people who are convincing that's real. What does
that do to us over time, you know, to a larger group of
people, to a culture, and so you know, these these things I
may not work for years on. You know a lot of paranormal shows,
on the True ghost story shows, all this stuff, and I have come
to really kind of wonder, like, what what is the effect? Because
you know, I think there's there's a there's a really positive side to it,
and I think there's kind of an aside to it. While I was
putting this episode together, I was thinking, a friend of mine told me
this story years and years ago, and I called him up today and I
had him tell me the story again. I was glad I had remembered most
of it. He was telling this told me this story a long time ago
that he used to torture his brother, which apparently is what brothers do to
each other. And there was one time where they had moved into a new
house and my friend Eric goes into this closet, into his brother's clouset.
Brother's name is Michael, goes into Michael's closet and he's waiting and waiting and
waiting, and finally his brother comes upstairs and he opens up the closet door
and he's like putting away things, and Eric's just trying not to laugh,
and he's just standing there, steering at his brother and just waiting for his
brother to see him and freak out. And his brother's you know, putting
stuff on hangers. Da da da da da, and then just suddenly he
goes white and collapses, and Eric of course thinks this is you know,
he's twelve years old or something. Thinks this is the most hilarious thing in
the entire world. And he goes running downstairs and he can't speak because he's
laughing so hard. He's just like, I think I killed Michael. They
go upstairs, he and his parents go upstairs, and at that time,
like the brother Michael was starting to wake up. And when Michael wakes up,
he's just like there was a gigantic eyeball in the closet and so he
had like just focused on Eric's eye, didn't know anything, and was so
completely scared that in his mind he rewrote reality and basically became like you know,
Mic from Monsters, Inc. Inside of the closet, And I'm just
I kept thinking about that because I'm like, yeah, your brain does that.
Your brain takes information it doesn't know how to comprehend and makes new stories
out of it. And I bet you you to this day if you asked
him, like put him under hip so he'd be like, yeah, there's
a fucking giant eyeball in my closet when I was eight years old. Doesn't
matter that it was his brother, you know. But I just keep thinking
about that, especially when it's like, do you keep handing us things in
this movie like masks? You know we were talking about masks before. Well,
you got Christmas pageant in here where all the kids are dressed up.
You got Halloween party where people are dressed up. It's kind of odd that
Annie Strieber in this she comes in dressed as a witch, but then when
she's at the party, she's not dressed as a witch. She looks almost
more like Harlequin or something. And I'm like, I don't know if it's
a continuity thing or if we're supposed to make something out of that, But
I'm just like, everybody in this movie is wearing a ton of I mean
Whitley walking as Whitley, of all people, is wearing the least mask because
he just has that stupid elephant nose on. And then you get that whole
thing with him screaming and carrying on about the girl who's wearing the praying mantis
head, and you get that well before he sees the woman on the bus
with the praying man his head, and then all of the praying mantis people
there, which I for me, that's the money shot of this film,
all of those people wearing those pre mantis masks staring at the camera. I
love that shot. I think that's fantastic. There are a lot of shots
in this movie. I'm like, oh, wow, that that's really cool.
I'm glad that you did that. But that's also not part of the
Halloween sequence, is it? That's later in the movie. So, I
mean, that was one movie one moment in the movie where I just said,
what what are we spoken? Because it's not something from the book.
It doesn't it wasn't a real experience that Whitley Risso are we supposed? Is
it this moment that's added to the narrative to make us assume that he's psychotic.
I mean, I just I don't. I don't know why it's there,
right, and the scare, Yeah, I mean, as you said,
the classic story is is it is it drugs? Is it a memory?
Is it actually happening? You know, all the versions that they have
to eliminate before you come to the belief that it's actually happening, you know,
or that it's all in the person's mind or when ever it is.
As we talk, and I keep coming back and I'm sorry, you guys
have read this stuff, forgive me. I'd never read his material. I
should have, of course, if I had been diligent, more diligent.
Does he ever talk about disassociation or abuse? Because we talked about the shining
and his bizillarre treatment of his son, And I'm not saying he's abused his
son at all. I don't think he's playing that. I don't, but
I do feel like there is a version of this kind of disassociation. Well,
you just talked about seeing an eyeball when it was just your brother and
recreating reality that you know, people who have been in these experiences victimized in
some ways come up with all kinds of ways that for their subconscious, unconscious
conscious minds to go God. Yeah, remember the Satanic panic and all of
the kids who were being sacrificed on the altar of Satan, and these huge
sex orgies and all these things that were all just mass hysteria manufactured memories.
All this still, this craziness is sort of where I keep coming back to
as a possible explanation for what this gentleman has been wrestling with for his whole
life. It makes as much sense as the fact that aliens have actually come
to him over the course of his whole life. Does he ever write about
that? He does address that, and it's in the later books, and
I know he talks about there's one of the books, I can't remember which
one. He took a lot about kind of the nature of memory and how
memory works, and that if you are if you have an experience, you're
exposed to something that is that is traumatizing, but it's an experience that's that
you have no frame of reference for. You've never had an experience like that,
You've never seen anything like that. You've never seen anything like that in
a movie. You know, you just have No, it's something that's you
can't put it in any box. Your memory doesn't know what to do with
it, doesn't know what it is, doesn't know how to process it.
You know, it buries that experience, it hides that experience, or or
it kind of puts a mask on that experience, It puts us you know.
He talks a lot about screen memories, the Freudian idea of screen memories,
and certainly as the books go on. I mean there's a thing that's
hinted at in the Communion book. It's something that comes up in his hypnosis
session, and I think trying to remember how much it's there, if it's
there at all in the in the movie, almost a kind of a throw
away, this idea that the visitors came to him even as a child,
and then you pass it on to your kids. That comes up in that
group's therapy session, as well as I think it comes up a little bit
before that. So he wrote an entire book about that, about these memories
that came back to him years later, about these sort of strange experiences he
had as a child. Is a book called The Secret School. You know
that he was actually in some kind of school taught by these aliens, and
so when he saw them in nineteen eighty five, he was he was actually
remembering them, you know, that this was something that had been with him
all his life. I mean, he next it to he grew up in
in in Texas. He had a uncle I believe it was actually in the
military who was actually at Roswell, which is you know, at least in
terms of you know, publicly available military record that's accurate, that's true.
You know. So there's it's this family connection and the idea of things being
you know, passed on or being in a family that was associated with with
that. That there's some kind of you know, trickle trickle down from there.
But you know, he's certainly you know, the whole question of childhood
abuse or strange experience in childhood that then is repressed, it becomes kind of
a buried trauma. I mean, that's more. That is a theme that
comes into the later books, especially the Secret School, and I think I
think even I think there's even another experience that's I can't remember which book.
There's a book after that, I think where he talks about another experience.
It's even before the Secret School experience that is doesn't deal with aliens at all,
but does deal with being abused as a child, I believe sexually abused
as a child. There's a lot there. You talked about that scene towards
the end in the art gallery where they're addressing each other, but they're really
addressing the camera, and you get that a lot in this movie. I
forgot about when even the Christmas Pageants starts, you get the little girl who's
announcing things, and you get that, you know, real good close up
of her. It's almost like he was kind of presaging some of the Jonathan
Demi close ups, you know, where you're just addressing the camera. He
keeps it more in focus in the background. It's not that tightness that you
get in things like Philadelphia. But he has a lot of that, a
lot a lot of addressing us but addressing the camera type of thing, or
sometimes it's addressing each other but you don't even know that he's talking to somebody
else, Like the walking character is like talking to us, but then he's
actually talking to an alien or talking to somebody else, and you're like,
okay, it really again. He keeps us off balance a lot with this
film, and there are moments when Walkin looks right into the camera, he
looks, he breaks the fourth wall for sure to me and says, like,
you know, do you you know I'm looking at you? Or do
you see what I'm seeing? Things like this subtle. I didn't even pick
up on it the first time, but it's there two or three times,
and maybe it was just they just you know, he looked in the camera
to say can we cut, and they just left it in there. I
don't know, but you're right, he does play with the nature of reality,
even the nature of the filmmaking reality. It ends at least three times.
There's at least three endings to this thing, right, there's the ending,
then there's oh yeah, maybe that works as an ending. Then there's
the ending, and then there's the actual ending, which is a terrible ending.
I mean, there's the weirdest rap of a movie. You know,
it's bizarre, right, I don't know, fascinating, Oh, you know,
it's fascinating to talk about and try to unpack because there really are some
very very interesting ideas, talented people wrestling with this stuff on a kind of
budget. And you got to give me more scares, and we need more
spooky shit, and you know, I think it's it's sort of a messy,
messy movie. You get those weird things like when his sun takes a
polaroid picture and the flash goes off and the whole movie just stops. It's
a freeze frame right in the middle of that flash. Like I had to
go back and watch that two or three times to say, was something wrong
with my TV or the disk or whatever? And no, it's like that
on every single version I've seen. The whole movie is a freeze frame when
that flash goes off. And again the bright light type of thing. It's
unsettling, I mean, because you don't know why it's there. Yeah,
because then he takes the camera, turns around, takes a picture of his
son. Just a flash goes off regular and you're talking about the whole idea
of like the relationship with the sun and stuff. And there's one part where
Walking and the anti character are talking to each other about the sun and the
Sun's laying right there, and I'm just like, when shod't you go out
of the room to talk about this stuff, because like, again, who
knows what is filtering into this kid sub conscious when you guys are just talking
about him and the problems he's having right next to the kid, and then
you wonder why he's having these strange dreams. Well, it could be you
know, the big insects that are hanging out at the cabin, the terrible
t Rex posters that he's got. I mean, just looking at the artwork
in this movie, because I know that Phelipe Moron loves art, and there's
art everywhere in this you know. I mentioned the wolf painting that he puts
up, this very surrealist wolf painting. The hell even the clock that he's
got is really wild, with the three d arrows that are going around.
But if you look, every single wall has a piece of art on it.
It would be interesting to just go through this whole movie and just look
at all the art and see if that's telling a story into itself. I
think you give him so much more credit. So I wish I wish I
could say, oh, yeah, absolutely, I mean, you're right,
the clock is great, and the wolf. I was like, oh,
he wrote wolf in he would have a wolf picture. Yeah, I don't
know. Philip Morris sounds like a fascinating guy who had a ball making movies
for as long as he did. And you know, I mean, if
you've seen any of the Return of Captain Invincible, which really has to be
seen to be disbelieved that's in anyone's filmography, that that movie even exists is
a gobsmacking wonder to behold. Christopher Lee singing Alan Arkins two pay not singing
It is a maze Burgers. I think the guy who did the Room two
thirty seven documentary should just do one on communion. All right, We're going
to take a break and play a pair of interviews. First up, we'll
hear from director Felipe Mora, and after that you'll hear from author Whitley Strieber.
And we'll be back with both of those right after these brief messages.
Hello, Projection Booth listeners, this is Mark Bigley, the host of Wake
Up Heavy recollections of horror. You may remember me from Projection Booth episode odes
on the Antenna, Crumbs and the Brood, and Mike White himself has appeared
on my show where we discussed Erase your Head, Taxi Driver, the Evil
Dead, and Shivers. Wake Up Heavy is a show where I talk about
movies that blew my mind as a kid, things like phantasm. This morning
Shuns are bullshit, tourist trap, You're so pretty dead and buried, Welcome
to and Halloween. Three. Other guests have included genre film journalists Anya Stanley,
Jerry Smith, Sam Panico, and Simon FitzJohn. Every once in a
while, I even convinced my own daughter Cleo to join me. Hey,
that's me usually though, It's just me a Mike and my memories of some
really wonderful horror films. So come check us out Wakeupheavy dot com, SoundCloud
dot com, slash, wake Up Heavy, or your favorite podcast platform,
and don't forget anything can happen. And when you wake up Heavy, obviously
I want to talk to you about communion, but I was really hoping you
could tell me a little bit more, just even how you got interested in
movies and making movies. The brief version is I grew up in Melbourne,
in the city, and all the cinemas were around us in the city,
and that those were the days when the studios owned the cinemas. So MGM
had an MGM Cinema, Warner Brothers, Fox, they all had their own
cinemas. So basically, as a kid, I'd see everything and I just
loved movies from that time on. What particularly got my attention because I saw
so many was really bad movies and mistakes. For example, the Greatest Story
Ever Told in sixty five mil, projected in seven in mil. I noticed
that during the sermon on the mount, an extra was looking at his watch,
and that really intrigued me. So I started looking for mistakes in movies
continuity. So that's how I really, that's how I got involved technically in
movies is by watching the mistakes. Like any kit, I loved the movies.
I love the Three Stooges. I like Suit the Man, I liked
all that stuff. And then I got a bit more sophisticated in my taste
as I got older, and I remember my mother, actually, my mother
took me to a film festival early on and they were showing Jean Cocteau's Blood
of a Poet, and I remember being freaked out by that film because there's
a scene where people are climbing on the ceiling and that was a sort of
traumatic thing for me, which got me interested in film. So, look,
there isn't one reason, many reasons. And then my dad was very
encouraging and he bought me a eight mil camera when I was very young and
I started making my own songs and then a sixteen mil camera. We still
got those films. The national archives in Australia have been and some of that
are pretty funny. I did my own version of West Side Story running up
and down the backstreets of Melbourne. So look, as I say, it's
a long answer to all of that. But I just grew up with film
now, started a film magazine, took cinema papers in Australia, and then
I made the first movie, first Australia movie that got a quite a big
release in the States, Mad Doc Morgan with Dennis Hopper, and that sort
of broke the ice for Ossie films. I'm proud of that fact. And
then I went on from there and I got a great review in the Los
Angeles Times for Mad Dog Morgan. They said the sick could signal the renaissance
of Australian film. And in New York it got trashed and the New toasted
that everyone involved with this storm should be locked up and the Keith Way.
So I naturally gravitated to La where the response was more encouraging. Gree this
story ever told, I want to say was sixty five and you were,
what sixteen when you saw that? Fifteen? Yeah, I was born in
forty nine. Yeah, yeah, in the film very early and you're making
shorts even back then. I was, Yeah, I was. And there
was a I don't know how you described the store now, but it was
a camera an old fashioned camera store, and they were selling all kinds of
camera gear. This is in Melbourne. There was a box of old film
which I bought and there was somehow I managed to screen it and it turned
out to be Australian training films for identifying enemy aircraft in World War Two,
and I think that that kind of got me in the document ent. Well,
no, that was really interesting. So yes, I thought films have
always been part of my life. Dad has art been, because my mother
was an artist and my dad was an art dealer. There's a really little
footnote to film history here, which is my dad was going to study medicine
in ninety thirty three in Berlin and his landladies turned out to be Eric Romstroheim's
sisters. And my dad told me that told me how they would get letters
from Hollywood and they'd show them to my dad and say, look, this
is Eric is doing so well. Can you tell me a little bit about
Trouble in Molopolis because I've been trying to find that one that I've not been
able to track it down. I can send you a link for it.
It hasn't been widely distributed at all, but I will. I'm going to
put out a proper version that was shot in thirty five mil Again. This
is the brief version. My roommate dicerned, I'm very good at name dropping,
by the way, And I was living at the time with Eric Clapton
in London in nineteen seventy and we were both film buffs. Eric particularly liked
Japanese movies Kurosawa, and we lived near a cinema in Kings Road, Chelsea.
But we talked about movies a lot. But anyway, when Eric did
the first cream tour in the United States, he came back to London.
There was this huge success and he got a phone call and he put the
phone down and he said, fuck, I'm rich. And then and this
all happened very quickly. And then later, like an hour later, Eric
said to me, Hey, didn't you want to make a movie? I
said yes, yeah, He said, how much would that cost, and
I said, I thought of the biggest number I could. I said,
I'll about five thousand pounds, I said, with confidence. And so he
said, okay, come on, we've got to go see We'll go and
see Steigwood. That was his manager, Robert Stigwood. We marched into Steikwood's
office in Layfair. He was already very successful because he'd had the represented the
Beaches. Eric said, Diggy Khalid wants to make a movie. Give him
a check please, for five thousand pounds, and Stigwood fed, wait a
minute, Eric, wait a minute, what's the deal. And Eric said,
to remember this is the sixties. Eric said, there's no deal,
Steggy, there's no deal. He wants to make a movie. Give him
the money. And then, grudge grudgingly, Stigwood wrote out a check for
five thousand pounds. So that was the birth of Choubling Monopolis, which was
shot him thirty five mill and I got the film stock wards. I knew
Sandy Ligerson, the producer, and he had just made Performance Start with Mick
Jagger, and in his office he had the short ends from that shoot and
he gave me the short ends of Performance thirty five mils film the Monopolis is
shot on the short ends of performance. How did you get your hands out
all of the footage for Swastika that was a bit more conventional, In other
words, we had a proper budget and so on and so forth. Sandy
Liberson was the producer with his then partner David Putnam, but it was Liberson
who was mostly behind it, and he had just brought the rights to Inside
the Third Reich, the memoirle by Outlet Spear, and I was very interested
in Third Rich because of my family background, and many of my family had
died unfortunately in World War Two. But Beavers may Sandy. I said to
Sandy, O, could I film a documentary about you making Inside the Third
Reich, which was going to be a paramount picture at that time, And
he said yeah. In other words, the film of the film. The
Hollywood production fell apart at that point, but he said, keep going on
the film of the film. And I'd already started researching and looking for film
with Lutz Becker, who had been a film historian at the Slave School in
London. So we started collaborating and we split up the huge story obviously,
all this World War two. We split it up so Luke was going to
make a film about the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and I was going
to make a film originally called the Marxification of Germany, just showing how the
Nauchis took over every aspect of life for Germany. And so that's what happened.
So I went to Germany with words and we started going through hours and
hours of Datzi footage, which to me it was astonishing. I just couldn't
believe all this stuff. We went to a old Gestafo headquarters which was then
the Archives of Germany, their storing film in dungeons, and so I went
through hours and hours of film and that's how we found the stuff. I
was always looking for private footage fitbut which we couldn't find except on one occasion.
Sandy had got into an introduction to Albert Spear, who we went to
Albert Speer's home in Heidelberg and technical notes of the Geeks the Germans throughout the
Third Reish. They're all Ovy fanatics. That they filmed in a gauge called
nine point five millimeter, which was a gauge where the spokanole was in the
center of the frame between the on the frame line. But anyway, Spear
showed us some of his home movies and I was I was waiting for the
shot of Hitler, which which never emerged, and I said to him,
didn't you film Hitler? As he said, no, I didn't film Hitler.
He was lying. By the way, as it turned out, he
was protecting his children, because as in Swastika, as it turns out,
Hitler's playing with kids and they're Aldert Spear's kids. So I understand that he
was just protecting his family. But he didn't. He wasn't straight with us
at all. But that went on for some time and then the then it
turned out just like cutting the story short because it is too long. But
the carried out that the Marine and Signal Corps, which was part of the
US Army, had an intelligence unit which was the first into Hitler's house at
the bird Core, and I had seen a photo I think a Braun filming
Hitler with a sixteen Knol camera and at one point I called up the Pentagon.
I just rang them up and said, filmmaker from Australia. There was
different times, there was no Parenoia like there is now. They are very
friendly and I said did you capture any film in Hitler's house? Because I
know you were the first in. He said, I don't know, sir,
but we'll call you back. Three months later. I do remember he
was a colonel called me back. I was then in London, and he
said, mister Moore, regarding your inquiry, I've located eight hands of sixteen
milimeter calor film captured in Eva Braun's bedroom and her private garden. Is that
what you're looking for? I was just amazing. And now every shot of
Fitley in the Endless shows on the History Channel and other sources, they're all
showing that stuff that we located, that color stuff that we located with that
phone call, and it was a sensation when we showed. But no one
had seen Hitler in color, and that's important because that the color aspect was
what made Swastika unique. The Pentagon had released black and white footage from the
home movies in newsreels when the war ended, and Lash magazine had published some
black and white photos from the home movies that no one had ever seen the
color stuff, and it just made Hitler very real, was that's the right
word. And that freaked people out when the film was shown at can in
nineteen seventy three, and one of the shots mains amazing shot really to me.
That shows Eva Braun with her camera in the window behind Hitler and you
realize that it's just the two of them on the terrors. Hitler's behaving as
if there's two Adren just two thousand people there that there's not. There's just
his girlfriend. But anyway, that caused the real stir and that still has
the whole point of swastik over. The whole point I was trying to make
is that Hitler wasn't from Jupiter or anything anywhere. He was a human being,
which made that is either worse or better, depending on the point of
view. But if you didn't realize that Hitler was human, you were not
going to see the next one coming. That was the point of showing him
playing with kids and things. That issue is still controversial. People us say
why you showed it the playing with kids. Well, the reason we did
is because Hitler did play with kids. He killed them as well. That's
another story. And that was only four years after Molopolis and you were already
playing at con. That must have been pretty astounding for you. It was
It's more astounding in retrospect. But I was very young and I was just
charging forward, and I got lucky. I got lucky seeing the photo of
Actually there's a lot obviously a lot of lucky. But the interesting thing to
me even now, and I recently spoke to the guy who was head of
the National Archives at the time in Washington. His name was William T.
Murphy. He was very helpful to me. But the interesting thing is,
no one at art for the home movies, no one had asked that question,
did you find any film in Hitler's house? And that's a life lesson
for me. It's not the answer that counts, it's the question. You
worked several times with Christopher Lee. How was he to work with It's fantastic.
We bonded really actually on the same subject matter we've been discussing because he
had been in intelligence in World War Two. He greatly liked Swastika and he
liked the whole story surrounding it. So we had a lot to talk about
because he knew more about World War Two than most people. And I'm working
on a film about him now. We're nearly done. It's a documentary,
but it's he's a fascinating character. And his cousin was Ian Fleming, and
there are various various interviews with Fleming where he says that James Bond was partly
based on what Christopher Lee told him of his adventures. When I heard that,
I thought this is incredible. James Bond was Dracula, and we just
got on and he was an amazing fellow. He spoke many languages, and
he was a full on Narchi hater. He was. He'd been involved in
catching Narchis after the war as well, and he became macabre. But he
became very friendly with the official hangman of Nuremberg, Albert Pierrepont, and he
Christopher claimed there was no reason why he was bsing me, but he said
he did help in some hangings of Nazis, including the ex acution of Ernst
Calton Brunner, who was the placement of Ryan Hard Hydrich, who was the
only top Nachi assassinated in World War two. Anyway, so we had a
lot to talk about. He was incredible. Of just repeating myself now,
it is an incredible character. He could sing Wagner operas, he knew the
operas. He could sing in German and they say that one of the unfortunate
things that could happen to you, issue were flying first class from la to
London, was to if someone asked Christopher to sing, because then you would
get the whole need belonged a opera and you trapped in first class. In
at least both Return of Captain and Its Boy and Howling Too, he seems
to be just having such a good time. It seems like he is,
let's say, in on the joke, especially with Howling Too, he just
seems so game for whatever you're having him do. I think I couldn't have
put it better. He was very game, and he had a fantastic sense
of humor, which, of course, if you didn't know him and you
just saw the Hammer Jacular movies, you wouldn't understand that this was quite a
big joke to him. After what he'd seen in the war and after the
war and being involved in executing Nazis and stuff. All this so called horror
was just a joke to him. Really. On the other hand, I
would put this note that because of what he'd seen, he did have a
gravitas, which I believe sold those Dracula movies and sold him as the greatest
Dracula because he that's something you can't act, that he'd experienced real horror,
and I think that's there in his performances. That's my private feeling about why
he will remain an horror icon. But yes, his sense of humor,
particularly also in Captain Invincible, it was very important. I knew that he
loved singing. I'd heard that story about him singing Wagnert in First Glass.
I'd heard that story. So I knew that he loved singing. And I
said, would you sing in in Captain Inventive? Lo, I'd love to.
And so I think that's a great number where he the great lyric All
the Drink that you blame did a great song with the lyric of the song
is every drink in your cocktail book. And so Christopher, he did talk
about Gleefel and being game and he loved doing that. It may be unfair,
but I think one of my favorite films of yours is Howling three.
I just love that movie and I love what you did with that series.
Obviously you're playing with the humor of the situation and just that you made it
such an Australian film with the Marsupials was just terrific. Thank you. The
origin of that is I don't want to go back to the Captain Cook Discovering
Australia. But the origin of the movie was, if you do a sequel,
you're damned. If you're a director, you're damned if you do,
and you're damned if you don't. If you don't copy the original, then
all the fans of the original say, oh, you screwed it up.
And then if you did copy the original, they say, oh, you
just copy the original. So it's a thankless task. But I needed to
make a movie. And I remember Arthur Ross, who was a friend of
mine who wrote the teature from the Black Lagoon. Yeah, he said,
the only reason I made that movie is my wife's need of the station wagon.
And I remembered that. When I was offered Howling too, I remember
that story and I thought to help it out, going to do this.
But then as we got into it, oh you're talking about Hawling three.
But as we got into it on Howling two, what was really interesting about
that is we shot it behind the Iron Curtain. That's a whole other adventure.
Howling three. I wanted to do something original and I also thought Marsupial
werewolves is something that's never been done, and being loyal to my upbringing in
Australia, I thought, well, I just had marsupial werewolves. Why not?
And then I gave the script to the financiers and they said, hey,
Felippe, he's sure this is a horror movie. I said, have
you ever seen a ma ofsupial birth? The fetus comes out of the female
and climbs up the stomach and goes into the pa. They say, stop,
that's a horror movie. So that's what that elaborate scene was about in
the in the horror movie in Hawling three, and now it's got a real
following Howling three and look they made And they offered me, Hollie four or
fives that I don't want to be. I don't do not want to be
mister were Walls. So I stopped at three, but it went on to
eight. I think it's the only series where I started this thing of making
a series where the next moves got absolutely nothing to do with the previous one.
From what I understand, you knew Whitley Streeper a long time before you
meet Communia. I did around the time of Trouble in the Lotlus that story
I told you when I was with Eric in London. Around that time,
I went to the London School of Film Technique and I went there for a
day to see whether it was going to be for me any good for me,
and I sat next to Whitley in a lecture by Stanlea Donant, and
we became friends through that. I do remember this was the time of the
Vietnam War and I was quite anti war. I still am anti wool by
the way, But I remember asking Stanley Dunnan make all these musical musicals,
and how can you make all of these lighthearted films when there's a war going
on? Well, why don't you address those issues? Typical young student question,
right. He had a great answer. It's always stuck with me.
He said, Look, there's nothing wrong with making a film that makes people
happy, that has its own function. It doesn't have to be gut wrenching
a film. But if it's entertainment and it's going to give people some happiness,
I think that's worthwhile. So I never forgot that. But anyway,
I became friendly with Whitley and he had a great such of humor, which
I was reminded of years later when we made communion. But that's how that
happened. And then years later I didn't know he became a best selling author.
Actually with all for them everything. I was in New York and I
was in the in a bookstore and I saw Whitley Streeter and I thought,
I wonder if that's the same guy from the London, from London so called
the publishers. I said, I think i'd just like to know. My
name is Felipe Moore. I met this. I think I met Whitley in
London years ago. The next day Whitley called me Whitley Jesus pretty incredible.
So we had lunch in New York and I said, what are you writing
now? The best sellers are fantastic, congratulations and really said, well,
you'll just laugh at me if I tell you what's happening to me. I
said, I won't laugh at you. And what are you doing? I
think I was abducted by the little blue guy. And I did not laugh,
but it was hard enough to. It was hard not to. I
said, what do you mean? He said, dud. Then they they
they examined me, and there were these other creatures and these brief breakdown of
what had happened to him. And we were old friends from a long time
ago, and he said, what do you think I should do? I
said, I think you do need to see a psychiatrist, and and being
a smarter so I said, and also get a publisher. And so he
did both, and he said he told me he was doing both, and
I said, I'd have to see the manuscriptive of the book when you'd finish
it. So he sent me the manuscriptive communion when he had written the first
draft of it. And I thought was obviously could make a great movie.
And I said to Whitley, let's join and collaborate on this. You'd be
involved with me because it's a true story, because I thought since this his
true story, it was important to have him involved obviously. Then a surprising
thing was we'd have turned down by every studio on the basis of I've never
heard this before in Hollywood. But they turned it down basically because they said
they don't they didn't believe in it. They didn't believe it was true.
And I can't tell you how many times I said, what do you mean
you didn't believe it? Did you believe that Greats of the Lost Ark is
true? Did you believe that Donald Duck is true? What's a true?
Got to do? What to do with it? Anyway? Then the book
came out and went the number one best Dolla, New York's best Dolla.
Now that made it feasible to raise the money independently, which is what we
did. The movie comes out in ebe nine. They made sure you're shooting
in eighty eight. How many years before that are you connecting with him?
Not long? Maybe two years? I was just guesstimating, Yeah, it
wasn't long before it all happened pretty quickly, But yeah, it all happened
pretty quickly. But it was a very tough film to make because he was
saying it was a true story. So I didn't want him to turn on
me and say, oh, Philip's screwed it up, but that's not what
happened. So I got him to approve all the way down the line.
And the most controversial thing was the anal probe. And I said to whether
you're sure you want me to put this in the movie, because Witley,
this just got I wasn't trying to be funny, this is going to follow
you around. If you say this happened, he said, no, that's
what happened once the camera started rolling. How involved was were they? Whitley
saw all that we started off seeing, For example, the anal probe.
I got him to approve it cost fifty thousand dollars to build that damn thing.
I got him to approve it that that's what it was. He I
wanted him to prove it. We went to the effects house and they brought
out the anal prov and Whitley had brought his wife along and said, oh
my god, Whitley, you didn't tell me it was that beat. And
anyway, I'll just jump to something which I think is amusing on this.
When the film came out at the time, the biggest publicity jump you could
get to be on the Johnny Carson Show. And so we got Whitley on
the Johnny Carson Show. And I'm thinking it's Johnny and asks him about the
anal probe. My career is over. People are just going to be laughing.
And anyway, Whitley is on the show. Johnny Carson says, here's
whitley'stree. You're best selling author of the Wolfburn and other books, and Whitley,
I understand the aliens gave you an anal probe. I thought, oh
my god. And Whitley says, Johnny, it was terrible. It was
terrible. And you could see Johnny Carson's face change at the sincerity. And
he said, what was it like working with Christopher Walken? Yeah, so
a lot of adventures. The book was taken very seriously by the intelligence,
militant intelligence Pentagon. I say that because I was on a flight from I
was on a flight from San Antonio to Los Angeles after the film came out,
and after seeing Whitley, I was meeting with Whitley, and I was
followed onto the plane by a guy who looked like Robert re for Cia movie.
And he sat down next to me, pre booked seats back flight,
and he started talking to me and he said, oh, what were you
doing in San Antonio? And I said, I was meeting Whitley Streeper,
my collaborator. Blah blah blah. The guy says, commun you know,
that's the best film ever made about alien abduction. And I thought, that's
just that's a strange thing to say. And then and then he said,
yeah, so how long have you known mister Streether And I said, look,
I hape, you don't mind me asking, but you were a journalist,
because the way he was asking was sounded like a journalist. And he
said, no, sir, and he opened his jacket and there's a big
badge defense in collegence agency with an eagle. And I was taken aback.
I didn't know what to say, so I blurred it at all. I
didn't know you guys had badges. He said, oh, yes, we
have badgers. And then he said, have you met any aliens? I
no, sir, that's getting creepy, man, I know I happened.
He said, has mister Streeedam met any alien? I said, I don't
know, but I believe he thinks he has. It's in the book.
And so it seemed to me in retrospect, and even at the time that
he was trying to find out whether it was a hoax, but it did
bring home to me that this was a matter that was being taken very seriously
by intelligent people. And just last week we had these hearings in Congress,
some of them in secret about UFOs now called UAPs for reasons unknown. But
that's just last week there's always stuff about. If you've been following the news,
there are these whistleblowers saying that we have recovered craft and we're doing reverse
engineering, and there's a whole field of study on all of this. But
at the time we made the film, it was getting a lot of attention.
But the attention on the issue has never really stopped. I'm sure you
have met very many interesting people that want to talk to you about this movie.
Absolutely, I have. Just this morning, I was just looking at
an article in our scientific magazine on the probability. He was a statistician.
I think it was on the probability of intelligent life in the universe. Basically,
the probability is zero that there isn't life out there. The question is
where is it and has it been here? Personally, I think if the
universe is infinite, which they say the universe is infinite, which is a
hard thing to get your head around because we're just humans, little brands.
But if in fact it is infinite, it's impossible that there's no other intelligent
life in the universe, because if the universe is infinite, it means that
everything you can ever think of has occurs, is occurring, will occur is
going to occur again. I don't think there's any doubt about the intelligent life.
Just taking it scientifically on the basis of statistics and combinations and permutations and
all those statistical things, I think it's impossible. I think that the question
is whether they've ever come here. And I've been discussing this with friends lately.
And if you consider that we have gadgets running around on Mars as you
and are speaking now, we have gadgets on Mars taking pictures right now.
If college life has existed, I think it's very possible. They're being probes
the expression after what I just said, But why wouldn't there have been probes
to Earth which solves the problem of distance and time that were diship some kind
of mechanical thing from intelligent last sumwhere else in the universe. It's no problem
if it took him one hundred years to get here. Commute me what it
was like working with Penny Perry and doing the casting for this. She was
great, She was terristic. Oh. I find casting the most difficult but
the most offential part of filmmaking. And I find it very difficult because there's
always more than one actor who's perfect to the role, and it's always heartbreaking
to turn people down, and it can get to a coin toss with Christopher
Walken really came through the agency ICM at the time. It was Sue Mangus
who I spoke to and Christopher. I cast him for the following reason that
this movie is about a writer, and a writer is not an action star.
Writers don't do in it except thinking write, So that was I thought,
that's going to be very difficult to find someone who's engaging, but I
thought Christopher is very engaging for his faith. Samuel Fuller said the human face
is the greatest landscape of all and I used that quote to describe why I
cast Christopher in this movie. His face is the whole landscape in itself.
Then I met Christopher, who, by the way, didn't buy into any
of the stuff. He was quite practical, but he could certainly act it.
Back to Petty Perry, she's just a first class casting person. I
did meet a lot of actors and ended up with that cast, which I'm
very proud of that Lindsey Krause is excellent. I didn't know it's not telling
tales out of school really because I think she mentioned it, but at the
time we made the movie, she was breaking up with her husband, her
then husband, David Mammott, and so some of her performance is about the
insecurity with those scenes when she's yelling at Christopher about are you telling me the
truth? What's going on? Do you have a lover or that was sadly
part of her She was experienced experiencing a part of that, I think,
which gave the film some incredible realism. Actually Whitley couldn't appreciate. I think
he does now, but I haven't spoken to hum but I must hear it.
But he was a bit alarmed how Christopher Walken was portraying him. And
I said to Whitley, which I believe, I said to Christopher is an
artist, this is not a documentary, and you have to let Christopher do
his own interpretation of what our film Strieber is like. And Whitley did accept
that. So that was very difficult trading real people. They Whitley elected not
to show up on Jet because he was getting discombobulated watching Christopher at these scenes.
Job anyway, just as a footnote, I read recently that I guess
it was South Park based their first episode. Inspite that phrase again the anal
probe and communion, it became a sort of iconic thing. I don't want
that to be my epitaph. By the way, walking there are times where
he just seems so unhinged, and I've spoken with Missus Streeper before and he's
never struck me as that. So I was just curious, like how his
performance came about, because it is great. It is just so out there.
If you have encountered aliens and if you've been through that experience, I
honestly I would say it would unhinge you. Was my rationale as the director
of the movie. I thought, anything goes because if that's if what's happened
to you is one of the most unique things that's ever happened to a human
being. We're not built to meet super intelligent alien beings from another species,
so what would that do to you? So I basically encouraged Christopher to go
for it. Christopher's dad is dad was German. Wait a minute, his
dad is German, one of the parents was German, and my father was
German. And while we were joking around between takes, I started talking like
this is a German accent, which I got from my father. I could
speak to German excent lexus and Christopher said, Hey, could you can you
direct me in that voice? I said sure. So of course the crew
thought I was Knaps, but I kept saying I did direct him for a
while. Okay, Kristopher, just next scene, you'll move all you sit
down's theirs aliens come in? Then you run over here. Anyway, he
loved it, but the rational for his performance, in my mind as the
director, was that it would unhinge you this experience. It just would.
I thought it was fantastic, and I also I am a great believer in
letting an actor do their thing. This wasn't a TV, this wasn't episodic
TV. Or we didn't have anyone over our shoulder saying, oh, you've
changed the script. This was a more creative enterprise. Obviously, not to
get too far into the minitia, but I'm so curious how were some of
the alien effects done? Because he had the two different types, and I
imagine you handled them completely differently. There were little people in the blue suit,
and then the other alien were they were basically puppets. And then then
again that became controversial. Pick people didn't understand that they were supposed to look
like puppets the people are used to. This is pre cgi by the way,
But I had discussed with Whitley because he was saying that it was all
very weird, and so I said to him that could they have been puppets?
There are robots And the answer is yes, including the one that which
he did describe in detail of what I call the alcazeltser Man, that dreamlike
figure and all that's very I find that all very interesting because certainly in my
life in some dreams, figures in your dreams and they're not quite inhuman,
they're not quite they're humanoid. That's a common thing in dreams. Was Whitley
dreaming, that's that's another level to this movie. Did he dream the whole
thing? And that's why I put in that scene or there where he's putting
masks on. In other words, the aliens have somehow masked themselves. And
I don't know whether logic is the right word to use here, but in
the event these intelligent beings are here on earth in some way, I can't
imagine that they would be in a form that we would recognize immediately. It
just doesn't make sense. All this is, including us, has evolved over
millions of years. There's no way at these alien beings, if they exist,
and statistically they do, there's no way they'd look like us. It'd
be weird. There'd be a strange version of it. That was my rationale
for the aliens. The special effects guy was very good and there was a
wonder misunderstanding I had with him was when I had the idea of showing the
different versions of the aliens. I said to the production maner said, I'll
tell the effects department bring all the aliens to the set and so we can
show all the aliens different forms. And unfortunately that got lost in translation,
and the effects guy thought that I'd fired him and we couldn't find him,
but he was I couldn't fire He was distressed. He thought he'd been fired,
but he hadn't been at all. Anyway, there was not a mainstream
movie in the conventional sense. It wasn't a Marble comic this one. Were
there a lot of scenes that you shot that didn't end up being in the
film. No that there's a lot of footage of the alien. There's one
DVD which has outtakes of those floating Aliens, which I thought was interesting,
so we put that in. There's them outtake of a crisp pofing around and
making joke and but no, there's no not a lot of that would cut
out if any other than the US government really apparently liking the film. How
was it received when it came out? Some great reviews and some transit it.
That's all My movies polarize. I don't know why. I'm not trying
to do it. I have no idea, but they polarized A Mad Dog
Morgan with Dennis Hopper, as I mentioned. The LA Times said this marks
arenasm for the Australian film and The New York Post said everyone involved should be
locked up. My film's polarized. I really don't know why. But anyway,
that same thing happened with Chamuleion. That's still controversial, but Communi's not
a satire that people don't understand satire and also surrealism is a difficult thing for
people to understand. I think people didn't realize that the I tried to make
it clear that the aliens like we've betrayed them. When Christopher picks a mask
up and puts the mask in front of his face. I thought that would
explain that the audience said, yeah, they're supposed to look like that because
they we don't know what they really look like. And there's a scene where
the alien Christopher pulls off the bottom of his face and Christopher says, no,
that's not it either. So I thought that would be enough to explain
what I was doing. But some people didn't get it at all and just
thought it was bad effects that's par for the course. You got was Wastika.
That was pop polarizing as well, even a film like Sniden Prejudice.
I don't imagine that everyone universally loved that film. No no, but I'll
tell you who did. He's not with it anymore. F Vsteiny terrific film
critic here. He really liked it. Swastika was the most extreme reaction from
an audience that people started fighting actually in camp, and the lights went up
and guy came out in a headwaiters bow tie and said, ladies and gentleman,
please, this is not a beer hare. This is the can Film
Festival. Please take your seats. And then again this happened to me before.
Once more, I thought this is the end of my career, and
I took off. I ran to the exit. I thought, I'm getting
mad at here and I felt a hand on my back and it was Pi
Rision, famous French PR guy, and he said what are you doing?
What are you doing? I said, I'm going to the airport. My
career is over. He said, no, this is a fantastique scandal fiasco
at the can festival. You are This will make you, This is made
your career. Don't you understand? This is incredible? And then I heard
on the laud speaker philied Moore will give a press conference in rooms such and
such and so then there was a riotous press conference. But I'll tell you
it really did like Swastika. Actually an interesting James Baldwin was at the screening
and he really liked it. And there also distinguished people because it was a
Cancil festival was even then prestigious, and Lawrence Durrell and so on, and
Robert Hughes from Time magazine stood up at the press conference and said, this
is the best movie that's being made about the boutsy thing and so on.
I don't understand the polarization thing. I guess it's because people are polarized.
Look at our society at the moment. I guess it's tart of freedom.
Part of free thinking is we can disagree assisterously. Show business is more complicated
because you're supposed to make everyone. You're supposed to appeal to everyone, which
is that's just a very difficult thing to do. Unfortunately, I think most
studio movies are white bread now. They are made by committee. You make
a horse by committee, you get a camel. Isn't that what the old
saying is a lot of camel's out there. You worked so many times with
Brian James. What was he like? Fantastic? He's what I would call
a working actor. He would do anything. When I say anything, he
was up for anything. He was game. To use their expression to describe
Christopher Lee. He loved working, he loved acting. He was very experienced.
He done all sorts of things. I can't remember the hal Ashby movie
I first saw him a forgot the title of it. But he was a
very good friend of mine, and he'd really died tragically. It was too
young. He was way too young. He had a lot of great performances
left in him. But he was a friend of heartbreaking when he passed away.
He'd been in a car accident and in his recovery they'd given him more
themee and as can hal as can have happened, tragically, people get addicted,
so there are quite a few people were addicted to painkillers because of accidents.
He's terrific and it's not and prejudice. It's just the theical. That's
another one with just an amazing cast to it. Just every actor is just
giving their all and everybody is bringing such talent to the people. The casting
person on that was a some uncle, Felicia Fadana, and she, I
must say, did a superb job on that one. She just pulled it
out, pulled out a roster of wonderful actors. All the actors knew this
was a special movie because it was unconventional, and they knew it was funny,
but they knew it was serious. So they the expression you used,
they were really gay, they're all And we shot that in eleven days.
It was an unbelievable way. That had to be done quickly because because of
the budget. It was just tough doing any It's tough to make any movie
on serious subjects, and any non formulaic movie is very hard to get funded
that's interesting. You've got that movie where a man thinks that he's ad Alf
Hitler, But then you also have I believe either I think, did you
announce it or are you still working out the man we thought he was Sellboard
or Dolly we're here still working on it with shots On says yeah, now
that's an interesting here though I never thought of it. Thank you for mentioning
that. I'll think about that. A lot of your themes are Nazism.
You made the film Three Days in Auschwitz, and but then you also have
a lot of art and modern art, and even in Studyed Prejudice, I
want to say that there was trying to remember who played Pablo Picasso is another
really great actor as well. Play around with the both of those things.
Bick Fleet, we've played the Cats, which was funny. Well, Hollywood
does not specifically Hollywood, but even movies out of Europe. When when it's
a real historical character and they're saying it's the real character like Churchill, we
know what the real Churchill looked like and it doesn't matter how good the actor
is, it's not Churchill. So for me, as when I'm writing these
things, that that's how this idea came about of doing somebody thinks he's hit
and doing someoney thinks he's Daly, because then you can there's more freedom.
I'm not saying that you can examine all the characteristics of that person, but
not saying this is a doppelganger. This is not a caricature. Actually it
is a caricature. She can explore the issues of the personality of the person,
I think with some more credibility if you're not saying that it's exactly the
person. So that's how I got to the man it thinks he's Daly and
the man it thinks he's Hitler. Did you say that the chrispher Lee film
that you're still working on that or is that out? It's not out.
It's thought. Various incarnations were stopped initially by the pandemic. I was going
to go to Prague and revisit the locations. The Christopher and I are in
Prague together for hailing too, and he took me to locations there where he
for example, the church where the Partisans were killed by the Gestapo. Eventually,
when they assassinated Ryan pard Hydrate in Prague and Christopher was involved in that,
he wanted to go there with me. He was peering up, he
was crying. When we went to the monument, there a well plaque where
these people died. And unfortunately then we had then had the pandemic, and
then Christopher passed and so on. Then I found that I had in a
preliminary scout of Prague for this. I'd filmed the the location that most of
them actually in preparation to work with Christopher. So I've got the location.
So that's we just had to reconfigure the film on how to do it.
So that's all very interesting, I think. So we're still in the middle
of it. I've got the luxury of not being a big corporation behind this
movie yet, so I've got the luxury of not having hard schedules. And
I say that because it's a luxury because if you find something that's worth going
down a little known track, I can do it. I have my own
navigator on this so anyway, at some point you have to stop. So
we're getting to the point where we're stopping. Now. Another thing that happened
on the Christopher Elite project was when I found that Ian Fleming had been his
cousin. And that's not I thought that it's not generally known, but James
is partly based on Christopher Lee. That's just child of Lord. This is
really worth examining. Then I was talking to his widow, Gita. Unfortunately
then she passed away. But there's a tremendous amount of material on Christopher and
just going through it all, at some point you have to stop. It's
like a painting. At some point you have to stop. There have been
years where you have released many films and it feels like you are always working
on things. How many projects do you have going like right now? When
you say going, I'd say seriously, sicks, I'd say seriously six.
But again I say it's a luxury. It is a luxury. I started
out as a painter. I'm still a painter, illustrator, graphics, and
in a way I approach these films in a non industrial the non industrial model,
the industrial model of filmmaking in many ways I think constricts created people.
You need it, you need it, obviously, you need to bang out
product. But I say that because I can follow things that come up as
we're in the pre production and production process. One thing that's helped me a
lot, by the way, is digital technology, because it is now much
cheaper, ironically to make a film than ever before. You can even make
it, can make a movie on your iPhone, so that's an incredible freedom.
Getting distribution, of course, is another matter, so the financial astec
becomes a marketing priority. But I think for young filmmakers, young people starting
out now, that's incredibly lucky that you can just go out and shoot a
film, literally, and that's I encourage the people. How do you get
into the move? I said, go to your local best buy or whatever
you write aid even get the cheapest camera digital camera you can find. They're
all good now basically, and start shooting a story with your girlfriend or boyfriend,
as the case may be. So there's a lot of freedom. I
don't want to sound slippid about it, because I seriously think that's the way
to learn how to make a movie is go out and shoot one, which
you can now do. Mister Moura, thank you so much for your time.
This has been so great talking with you, and I really hope we
can do it again sometime. I'd be delighted. I'd be delighted, and
thank you very much for your interest in my movies, and thank you for
pointing out something I didn't really realize. The man who thought he was Daly
and the man who thought he was Hitler, so this could be an ongoing
series. The man who thought he was Jesus. Thank you very much,
right, thank you. Can you tell me a little bit of where your
career was at before the events that took place. My career after the Wolfing
and the Hunger had its ups and downs. Then I wrote a series of
sort of foreign novels that did not do well. They did okay, not
well, not like The Wolfing in the Hunger. And then I published war
Day, which did very well and Listen. And then I had published a
book called Nature's End, which didn't do as well as War Day. I
was definitely doing well enough to survive. We were doing fine. I wouldn't
say that I was making millions. I wasn't. But there was no likelihood
of fader and ceasing to be a writer. That was quite clear. And
the sort of came into my life unexpectedly, and in terms of my writing
career was both harmful and help in that it was helpful, and I ended
up with a huge international bestseller and like anything I'd ever had before from a
writing standpoint, but harmful because of the subject matter and the fact that it
made a lot of people think I was unstable and the average person who read
the book because the cover, the face on the cover red I did them
of something that had happened to that, meaning that millions of people must have
had this experience and just assumed it was some kind of a dream until they
saw that. But the people who didn't have the experience, which seemed to
be concentrated in the sciences and the intellectual community, no, they didn't.
You do it. And that's where it stood, and where it stands now
is I'm doing fine. I published myself independently through my own company and I'm
quite successful at it, and stopped with the regular publishers because the need to
get these books out and there was a lot of They're just so slow.
You sell a book to a regular publisher, it takes a year or maybe
more, or it shows up and there's no time. There is no time.
I'm really under the gun here, and unfortunately, the self publishing business
has been very successful. Yeah, you talked about the risk of being made
to look unstable, and I'm curious what was the thought process as far as
the writing of Communion and the publishing of it, was thereever any hesitation.
No. Unfortunately, I'm glad in many ways there wasn't any hesitation because I
thought, and thought my wife that it was an absolutely fascinating story, the
wonderful story, and we thought people would just take that at face value.
The book doesn't make any claims about what happened. Couch is a series of
questions and descriptions of what I remembered, which is where I stand to this
day. I've never made a claim about it because I can't. But the
only claim I can make is that I do have this strange little object in
my ear, but that's been the attempt to remove. It is on video.
It's a fact that is there. I can describe how it came there,
but I can't tell you that's how it happened, because I can only
tell you what I remember. But that didn't don't matter. They took it.
First of all, the great majority of people who attacked me over the
book didn't read the book. They just assumed it was a book of claiming
alien abduction. They did. Therefore, I end up debating people about something
that I hadn't claimed and I would say again and again I never said that,
and that would make them furious. How soon after the book comes out,
are you talking with Felipe Mora and getting the right soul for the movie?
The right soul? That's quite a complied. No one ever paid me
for the movie rights. They didn't pay. They said they would pay,
but they did not pay. And then the movie came out. I guess
it was sometime in nineteen eighty eight. I began speaking with Felipe Mora because
something had gone wrong in Hollywood with this book. I was it should have
been a major feature for a big company. I was only allowed to show
it to one production company. I was only given one pitch, and that
was to paramount to the chief head of production there, who was already fired.
And he knew it. In other words, he was leaving in a
couple of weeks and no one else would see it. An assistant from my
agency, not the agent himself, told me that they had been asked.
The agent had been visited by people claiming to be FBI agents, the same
thing that happened with one of my doctors and some of my friends. These
people would visit them and say go easy, don't do this. And the
doctor they wanted my medical records from the doctor, he wouldn't give them to
him because it was against the law. And they wouldn't show him any credentials,
so you know, and he called me it and the nurse said,
why doctor wants to talk to you and to him and he said that these
people had come in they wouldn't identify themselves. And so that's saying that the
people in Hollywood were very intimidated. The result, I ended up doing an
independent production and mister Mora never had enough money to make the film as well
as it should have been made. He did a pretty good job with what
he had, but I was never paid for my I was paid for my
script, was I remember the writers bill, They had to do that,
But I wasn't paid the underlying money for the book. They just didn't pay
me. They in my opinion, it was a front. Oh was that
adapting your own book? Had you done that? At that point? I
had adapted the Wolfing and parts of that survived in the movie, bits and
pieces of the script. But Michael Wadley, the director, wanted some changes,
and he wanted to bring in Indians into this story and Native Americans and
a cool idea, frankly, and it does work well in the movie.
So that was only I only with bits and pieces of that, not enough
for me to get a credit. And then the Communion movie, there are
a lot of changes, basically the domestic scenes, the family life in the
movie or from my script, but all of the things about the it's all
fiction, basically the some of the close encounter experiences reminiscence, but dancing and
stuff that goes on, forget it. I can't dance a step. I'm
not Christopher Walton by any means, and I don't use I don't have big
cameras on me all the time or anything. And he created a character the
characters of work of fiction. That must have been a little surreal writing yourself
as your main character and the script. I had Anne to help me,
and she knew me as a character very well. She and I teamed up
together on that, but they didn't use that character very much. The only
scene in the film that survives, it's a scene from light that I remember,
there may be others, is the one where she comes in dressed as
a witch and I'm supposed to get dressed for HALLI waited, and she says,
get dressed. That's what was like in my life, where I was
always coming up from behind on schedules and stuff, and now that I don't
have her with me anymore, I'm coming up from behind on schedules. Even
morally. There's no one to say anything. Were you involved in the casting
process at all? Oh? Not really, I didn't make any recommendations.
Ultimately, how did you feel that the cast was? How close to real
life are these folks? Christopher Walken is kookier in the movie than I am,
actually straight laced and ordinary, and I'm not at all. I'm not
at all. I'm just a break quiet person in daily life. Lindsay Krause
portrayed Anne somewhat like Anne is, but doesn't communicate the vibrancy of Anne's personality
and her control of our life. She was really the boss, and Lindsay
was the wife of David Mammont, who was definitely not like me. I'm
a person's perfectly capable of being comfortable being told what to do and where to
go. In fact, it's belief to me. But I don't think Dave
Hemmant was like that, And so Lindsay she's acting and you can see it.
She's not in the character really, and Christopher is in his own character.
He invented that character. Yeah, I was very surprised to see the
way that he is portraying quote unquote you, just because we have talked before.
And I'm just like, I don't think that mister Streeber's a switchy and
unhinged, not at all. No. I think they wanted to make it
into a comedy. And thought that too. And she said, we're going
out there and we're going to stay there. We're going to be there every
single day on that set. Otherwise what's going to happen is they're going to
mock you withly. She said that after listening into a phone call between me
and Christopher Wall and I didn't even pick it up. And she said,
he thinks you're a joke. I said, what do you mean. He
sounded serious. She said, he's an actor. I saw right through it.
He thinks you're a joke. And then she said, we're going and
we did. We came out here and we made the production runt us a
little house, and we stayed here and we were on the set every single
day. And if we hadn't been I think it's exactly what would happened.
I think been made into a comedy. Yeah, what was that experience like
for you? Being on set every day? Hideous? The whole thing was
just appalling that not getting paid, not getting the money for the book,
which was so essential to our lives. Eventually, because of that, we
went bankrupt and lost everything. So we lost the cabin, we lost everything,
We lost our entire life because we had expected that money and it was
a lot of money, and it never came. They never paid us.
It's just such a hard thing to talk about. Can we change objects perfect
and not a problem? You have written several books regarding your experience then and
then subsequently do you continue to have experiences? Is that why I continue to
write? Or do you just dwell on this because it was such a major
incident in your life. No, I'm engaged with this. I went for
it after the experience, after I realized that there was something real going on.
Annie and I disgusted and what should we do. It was a terrible
experience that night and led to some equally horrible things that happened later, But
at the same time, it was one of the most unique human experiences anyone's
ever head. You can't turn away from a thing like that, you can't
play games with It was real and I don't know what they are, who
they are to this day, but they are. And I decided and decided
afterwards we would try to re engage with him, and I started going out
into the woods in the night, and at first I thought we would both
go out, and she said, wait a minute, quickly, I have
a little seven year old way here in the house. I'm certainly not leaving
the house with him alone asleep. You go out anyway, it's your thing.
You're the one who had the experience, and so off I went into
the woods night after night for years, and they came back into my life,
and it has been a very mixed bag. It's been very informative and
extraordinary. And I wrote two follow on books, Transformation and Breakthrough, about
the continuing experience in the eighties and the end of the early nineties, which
is very intense, and then a long period of why escence occurred and I
didn't have them in my life for a very long time, and then Annie
passed away and things changed very strongly, and it's so complex. She said,
back in back, when she was reading the letters. There were thousands
upon thousands of letters, and she would read them all. She'd open them
and read them. Anne was a very quick study. She was the most
intelligent human being I've ever known. I'm not dumb, but she was smarter
than me. She had a macro ability to see things on a very large
scale, which is something that not many people, not even many very bright
people have, And that was why she said. When the letters started to
pour in, and I mean poor and mailmen were coming and bringing them,
just dumping heaps of letters on our living room floor, and they all had
return addresses on them, and I thought, these people are pouring their hearts
out. When I read a few of them telling me all kinds of extraordinarily
private things, I said, and what are we going to do with these
letters? Because obviously we couldn't just throw them out, and I wouldn't want
to do that anyway. But they were overwhelming, the mass of them,
and she said, we're going to read them. I said, I can't
read these. Look at how many. There's thousands right here, and this
is just three days. She said, I can't, And she did.
Boy, she hired a secretary. She read them all them, and she
would put aside the ones that were just this happened to me, and wow,
I'm so glad to see the book or what an incredible story. But
the ones were the more complex story she kept, and she kept them and
they're now in a university archivey of Rice University. They're precious because their first
contact, that's first contact right there at that right there in those letters,
and people may scorn it, and they may look down their noses at it
if they've got PhDs, but because they think to themselves, it didn't happen
to me and I'm so accomplished. Perhaps it didn't happen to you because you're
sol there was no room in you for this. So the letters were there.
And then she passes on in twenty fifteen and proceeds to return in a
ways that are undnial, and I write a book about that, called the
Afterlife Revolution. Because she had been planning her return from January of twenty fifteen
and died in August of twenty fifteen. By the end of September of twenty
fifteen, it was obvious that she was back, and she did it very
cleverly by going to friends, not to me, and telling them to call
me at moments that I was just in desperate Greek, because you're married to
someone like that, a huge personality, and you're devastated. When they died,
it's like half of me, or more than half of me, had
gone. And she once was given an Indian name by a Sioue chief on
the Pine Rid reservation. He said, your Indian name is three quarters fifty.
He said why three quarters, she says, because you're three quarters of
everything that's happening between you and Whitley. I said, what's my Indian name?
And he said, you don't have one yet. And that's the truth.
That's why her picture's back there, because she didn't. In those days,
the UFA movement was mostly guys, and they have a room for Anne.
So she was in the background. And in the publishing world, I
was the writer and I was the guy, and so everyone wanted me and
not Ann. But it was Anne who was doing everything, Anne who was
making Anne thought the word communion was important and she created this. She created
contact and did But they don't like that. They don't like that. They
wanted to be Carl Sagan or some high and official that announced. It creates
contact. Not a humble woman, but from a humble marriage with a little
nobody writer. I'm not a literary lion of any kind. I'm just an
B grade writer. But here we are. Nevertheless, they liked the little
guy. Frankly, you talked about people not having room. I suppose you
think you had the room for this. Two very smart people, very tight
team. We could hold each other up under pressure. I've had lots of
experience as a child. We think Anne might have too, because she has
these vast areas in her childhood of just missing time, no memory whatsoever.
But it was a very traumatic child which her mother committed suicide when she was
seven, and Anne founder and that that is a major thing. I used
to hold her in the night and say, honey, you're not an orphan
anymore. Weird together, we're not an orphan anymore. She's a beautiful person.
Anyway, They chose us also because I think we'd do it. I
must have seen he's a good storyteller. He's innocent enough and crazy enough to
actually do this crazy thing. And they were right. But I did it,
and I've done it, and I've taken this to a level with my
more recent books, like a New World and especially Than You and Them,
that has never been taken to before by anybody. And I'm working on a
book now that they'll take it another step forward, to leap forward. Actually
we're going to understand this. And there's a courtier of people in the scientific
community, the government and the academic community who do respect me and do work
with me. And that's been very helpful. So it's not like it used
to be. But I was treated as scum of the earth by such people.
Now there's, as I say, there's this cotier of people. It's
small, but it's there, and they're very A lot of them are very
distinguished. Jeffrey Kraepel is extremely distinguished religious professor of religious Studies, wrote a
book with me, Supernatural, wrote a book with me, lessa Kinda,
Walsh Passolca, Gary Nolan, Christopher Green, asth hal Pudah, Jack Valet.
They were all good friends and respect me and my work, and they're
powerful people. So that's a big change. When did that tide start to
shift when Jacques Vallet, The tide never shifted. Jacques was on side from
the very beginning. Jacques read Communion and became my friend. He is a
very brilliant and astute man, and he saw what it was and what it
wasn't and thought that it was a very intelligent approach to this situation. That
was the first. And then Hal Pudolph came along, and Al and I
have now been friends for more than Jack, for more than thirty years,
and Hal is deeply engaged in this. He's an insider, frank. So
those are the first. But it began to really thaw when Jeff Chrit sent
me an email saying he was interested in my work and what I like.
Willing to talk to him? Then I looked up his curriculum Viti. I
thought, would I be willing to talk to him? Oh? Yes,
he's the real deal. He was at the time. He had a wonderful,
distinguished career in his field and was one of the leaders in the field.
And I prove him. I also met another great professor of religious studies,
Dinah Walsh. But Soopa, who's become a close friend as well.
It's the thlowing out a little bit. But then you have the head of
Arrow, who is called on the carpet basically by David Grush in the Congressional
hearing and said frankly that he's not being straight. Now. He's out on
the hustings saying he never saw a thing and it was all it's all a
bunch of huey. And he's got a big article now in Scientific American saying
that this guy does. I'm hopefully going to remember his name, but it's
not coming to me. He was the head of Arrow and he was one
of the ones that David Grush went to under the Whistleblower Act, and basically
he just ignored Grush because it seems to Crush, and I think I agree
with him that Arrow was there to track people who wanted to tell the truth.
It wasn't there to do what it was supposed to do at all,
and it was to find out who wanted to spill the beans and go after
them. That's my opinion. It feels like that happens fairly often. People
come out, they say that they experience something, and then they retract.
That is that pretty power For the course. David Grush is not retracted a
word, and sometimes I don't see that too much. I can't offhand think
of any cases where that happened. There may be some but mostly lately especially,
people have been sticking to their guns. And the Arrow guy was he
was there to like a fly paper. He was there to trap people.
I think I think that, as I say, I think that's what the
purpose of Arrow was. I don't think. I don't see any anyone else
within the government using the viscile blow or a direction anymore. And it's too
bad too, because I'm sure there must be people who want to do that.
But there's something deeper wrong here. Nothing could be kept this secret this
long if there wasn't some larger level of suppression going on. And I think
it comes down to the visitors and their ability to maneuverate in this context,
and how they do it. I don't know, but I think they do
it. So that's all I can say. I've asked people like how but
Hell doesn't have direct contact. Jim Semivan had direct contact with him, very
briefly. But I don't know why the secrecy is held with such veracity,
because right now the Defense Department has weathered a major effort to break this secrecy
and successfully. The Humor Amendment has been defanged. It doesn't have any real
power anymore. It's not going to do a thing, and the Defense Department
is just it's beyond. It seems to me that there's something more than government
involved. There's some other level of control. Whether it's an unseen, very
powerful level of human control or the visitors themselves, I don't know. And
if it's the visitors themselves, then there God knows how they're doing it.
They're capable a lot of things that would really surprise you. He talked about
two types of visitors, and and I'm curious, how many others have you
experienced her? Was it just those two groups? No, I can tell
you precisely. It's not something you forget. Grays and some of them shorter
and some of them taller, the little the dark blue figures who seem to
be working with them that sometimes are in brown by the way, other people
see them in brown, but they're basically workers of some sort. I have
seen the tall blonde people and one of their children who was the tall blonde
six year old. And I have seen one that looked surprisingly like a praying
madness I won. And I have seen some that had an Asian kind of
cast to them and look more human. Those are the ones that I could
identify as non human. But I have also been in the context of some
that looked humand but I don't think they were. And I think that when
we get to we circle back to this, how this whole thing is being
controlled of the Department of Defense, that could be how there could be people
in there who will learn what they've seen. And I'll tell you a story
about that. Years ago, I was the legal counsel for the Defense Select
Committee on Intelligence was asking me a lot of questions because I had written a
book called Majestic and there I can figure out where I got the information that
chance in any case, because a lot of the information dubtails with what really
happened. Simple I got it from my uncle and from General Arthur Exon,
who were involved in the Roswell incident, and they told me a lot of
stuff about it after they read Communion, So it's pretty straightforward. The Senate
Committee wasn't willing to believe it was that simple, but it was any case.
At that time, there was this. I was told that their main
fear was people who appeared to be human who were actually allied with the they
called the aliens and work in the government. That could be a big deal.
They could be running the secrecy from the inside, and we don't even
know that they're not human or that they are something else. Do they primarily
communicate telepathically or can they actually communicate verbalake the ones I'm with can't communicate,
for they can't. I've heard one or two words. I once heard have
joy and thought that was the most important thing that anyone could ever say.
And then once I was in the middle of the communion tour, I was
struggling because it came on me unexpectedly. I didn't expect it to be like
it it was, and I was having a sort of ongoing riot in my
life. And I asked that should never bothered, asked the Grays. At
that time. I could sit with them. I could sit, I could
go into a meditative state, and I could ask questions. And I'm not
a channeler, so they would try to telepathically communicate, but I didn't.
I just ignored it because who knows it's in my imagination or not. And
they finally three of them showed up, and they all spoke, and it
sounded to me like it was coming in my ears, but it might not
have been. They all said something simultaneously when I had asked the question,
how am I doing? They all said something different if I couldn't understand the
single word of it, and then they disappeared. So so that's how the
physical part of it, there's not much speech. But I think if there
are people who are either connected to them or are them, or are perhaps
it's a huge universe. Maybe there's another planet with people on it who are
already alive with them in some way, and they're coming here. These people
can talk, obviously, or they couldn't. How are they going to handle
being in the government, because that's all you do in the government's talk.
Yeah, so it's probably a mixed bag. But I don't think the little
gray people talk and the dark blue ones they can talk. And Suri I
was with an aunt at the country house in Texas where I used to see
him a lot when I was a boy, and we were together there,
just the two of us, and I was working on a New World at
the time, so We're coming up to the house every night. They'd stand
on the porch outside and communicate with me mentally as we worked on the book.
So they're there, they come up and I'm sitting in the living rooms
the big bedroom that she's in. The master bedroom is above that, and
she's up there and suddenly I hear her say, quickly, is that you?
And I say, no, it's not. What are you talking about?
He said, You're not out on the porch. There's a sleeping porch
just beside her room and flow the ceiling windows where he could walk in and
out. And I said, no, I'm downstairs in the living room.
And what had happened was she'd heard this shuffling on the porch one of because
they when they're not made to walk in this world, they shuffle along.
And then she heard this voice say, why aren't you ast It was them,
And the next afternoon she had a heart attack because she's very stressful to
be near them. You really have to get used to it. It's not
something that's easy. When Jeff Kreipel spent a night in the same room with
me at the Escellent Institute in Northern California, they showed up, and one
of them showed up, and he experienced it like he heard his own voice
from somewhere deep within him go, oh my God. And he heard what
sounded to him like crashing glass, like the whole world was collapsing. And
the reason for this is that they have a different relationship to time and we
are in the moment, and this is critical to human light. Everything for
us is always new. When you draw close to them, you begin to
see the head and your soul has bargained for this light in a constant state
of the new, because that's how we gain energy. That's why we're here,
why we put ourselves into this situation where we will live and suffer and
struggle and really find ourselves. And suddenly to have that taken from you,
it's terrifule beyond words. You have to get used to back that it's not
going to be taken from you. It all only feels like that. And
once you're used to that, it's easy to be around them. But it's
not so easy for someone who's not expecting it. So that's why the heart
attack, and that's why Jeff was so devastated. Well unless the last time
he hadn't experience that, he had a visitation of physical visitation, probably about
a year ago. Probably. I do most of it. I work with
them lots at night at three o'clock in the morning, and it's mental,
but it's very organized because the implant is there, and it's very organized.
It's not like channeling at all. I'm not going to take instructions from anyone.
It's a give and take. It's like working. It's like working with
a committee on the book. Basically, it's what it's like. And that's
been like that since New World and then first the first one was Afterlife Revolution
and a New World and them, and now this new book is all being
done that way. And Anne is in a spiritual state and non physical state
partly, and she is very much a participant as well. Do you ever
get into disagreements about the direction of a book or how things should be written?
Oh, yes, certainly do. There's lots of disagreements in a New
World. I wanted to put in some material about these terrible murders that took
place in Brooklyn in the early two thousands, and there were seventeen cases I
know about where people were mutilated like cattle and they were then they were taken
off the streets. They were street people. They were not. They never
took anyone with any connections whoever was doing this. They were taken off the
street. They were mutilated, then drowned in the ocean. Taken down so
deep their lungs collapsed, and then put back where they had been taken from
where they had been taken in the first place. Now you think that if
someone wanted to do that. And I explained in the book why this was
done and what was being done, and I'm not going to go into it
now because it's too complicated. Just suffice to say that over a lifetime,
we build up a lot of experience that can be almost like food to someone
else. And these were people who had been judged to be indifferent to their
own value. They didn't care about themselves, and therefore, as far as
the brigands who took them were concerned, they were fair game. Turned out
not to be the case. It's not happening anymore. I don't think it
will happen again. But when we were working on that, they were really
iffy about putting that in and because it made it look bad. I'm not
making you look bad. Whoever did that, it's making you look bad,
and therefore goes in. And so we went back and forth and finally they
agreed to it going in there. And I'm hoping that it's part of why
that's not happening anymore, and I hope it's not happening because worries music could
be happening in the third world all the time and we would never know.
And if they finally get smart and don't bring them back, there's a there's
a very dark side to this. It's not all sweetness and light, but
it can be very informative. And I wouldn't trade my life with them to
the world. I think it's an extraordinary to have them in my life.
They're just like us. Some of them are good, some of them are
bad, and a lot of them are just there. Do they tend to
fall in groups as far as there are bad ones and good ones? Or
is it just individual just like you and me. I think that's a good
question, and it's really very much of a living question in my own mind.
I think that there are groups that have and I suspect they think of
them as criminals who do this. I do not think it's something they want
or approve of at a higher level in their world. I think that they
draw the line. And the reason I think that is that they do that
with cattle, and it's for food, not for the kind of food we
eat, but seal for food. And they chose cattle because we do it
with cattle. In other words, must be okay to use cattle as a
food source because we use cattle as a foods. But someone who wants the
much richer content of a human soul, No, I don't think so,
And I think that there's I don't think that they want that happen. I
don't think they want people to tear out that part of a human being and
abuse it. You talked about this self publishing, and I'm curious. Is
the best place for people to get your books at your website? Unknown country?
No, the best place is Amazon. Get my books on Amazon,
and you can get them on Barnes and Noble. You can get the audiobook
on audible dot com. Everything The Communion, A New World, Afterlife,
Revolution and them are all on audio and on Kindle and in hardcover and softcover.
And I make beautiful books. The hardcovers especially are very beautiful. And
on my website you can get signed copies and we chip very fronky. Are
you still doing your podcast? I have been doing. This is my twenty
fifth year of doing Dreamland. I've been doing Dreamland every week for twenty five
years, and I do it right now on Dreamland. Is available on every
podcast app there is, and you can watch it on YouTube, although not
many people do. Mostly people listen to it, and it's not about one
hundred thousand listeners. Mister Streeber, thank you so much to this. I
was such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. I'm very grateful that
people will listen to me and that you listen to me. All Right,
we are back and we are talking about Communion and Joe. You've already talked
a little bit about these post Communion of books, but did you bread in
the notes that there was supposed to be a sequel to this movie. There
was some talk and I think this was in an interview with Philip Moore where
he he talked about turning Transformation into a movie, which was the follow up
book to Communion. You know, I think I think that idea died pretty
quickly when Communion came out, and you know, it was a disaster at
the box office, so there there was no discussion there. But apparently there
should be a biography of Christopher Walkin, and there's amazingly there's not. But
there is a book that I read years ago called Christopher Walkin a to Z.
That's just like a compilation of crazy anecdotes about Christopher Walkin. And one
of the anecdotes was that was in there was about how if they turned Transformation
into a movie, they were going to recast the role of Whitley Strieber,
it wasn't going to be Christopher Walkin. And they had two There are two
people named in this book, and I'm just going to throw these out there
and get your reaction. The first one makes sense to me, and it's
Rick moranis. The second one is televangelist Jim Baker. Now, a book
like Christopher Walkin eight is the I don't know quite how seriously to take that.
I'm giving my source because who knows. But I thought that was a
fun, a fun little anecdote. Well, do either of them look enough
like Whitley Strieber to make that work? I buy the Rick Moranus. At
that time, I could see moranis doing it. He doesn't come with all
that baggage. Yes, you're probably waiting for him to start talking about all
the Gozarians or those kind of things. Like I could see him playing this
kind of more mild mannered person and somebody more internal. You know, it
feels like there's a lot of stuff going on inside of Walkins's brain, but
at the same time, he's expressing every single thought that comes through his brain
in this movie, whereas I could see Miranus playing a little closer to the
vest and you're feeling more sympathy for him being this put upon guy who is
getting he's played by these visions or visitations. Have you heard the story about
about how Walkin was cast in in Communion Philip and Whitley when they when they
were putting their company together, they originally were going to make War Day,
which probably other than The Wolfen and the Hunger, was Whitley's biggest book at
that at that point, his biggest success and and you know, I know
that one was on the bestseller list. It was a big deal. And
so they were going to turn that into a movie. And then I think
while they were discussing turning that into a movie, you know, Whitley told
Philip about this experience that he'd had the abduction experience before he'd even written Communion,
and they had a certain point shifted over. But Christopher Walkin was going
to be in War Day. They were talking about him talking to him about
being in War Day, and he you know, I don't I don't know
who. I mean. I assume he was going to play one of the
two leads, well, basically the two lead characters in war Day, because
it's this weird kind of pseudo documentary book about posts nuclear attack, you know,
sort of a post apocalyptic world. You know, the two main characters
are the authors. You know, they use their own names. They put
themselves in the book as characters, so you have you know, Whitley and
his co author are the characters. So was Christopher walk in you know,
when he was going to do War Day, he was still going to be
playing Whitley Strieber. I mean, maybe that's how that happened. Too bad
they didn't make that movie. I guess I'm glad I made this movie because
we're having a ball talking about it. But I'd love to see Christopher walking
in a movie called war Day. What was odd? You mentioned the Prophecy
movies, and I remember that, and I was getting that mixed up the
first Prophecy movie. I was getting that mixed up with Fire in the Sky.
Do you guys remember that one? Yeah? And it was like Travis
Walton. Yeah, it was like the this was a really hot time,
which is so weird for me to say, this was a hot time for
aliens and alien abductions. This was the same year at the McPherson tape came
out. This was a few years before Firing the Sky, as I mentioned,
and the Arrival, the one with Charlie Sheen, not the one with
the Denise Villeneu film. And then it was also right around the time that
the whole alien autopsy tape came out, which was such a sensation, Like
I remember going over to her friend's house and him having a VHS of this
and just like, oh, let's watch the alien autopsy tape. And I
think, wasn't Jonathan freaks? Didn't he host that? If what you were
about to see is real, it's the most startling film footage in history.
Although we remained skeptical, some experts believe this is authentic footage of an alien
life, for real or not. We must warn you this appears to be
an actual autopsy and some of the footage you will see in the next hour
is very gruesome. Stay with us as we put the question to you,
alien autopsy fact or fiction? I only vaguely that as part of the whole
kind of X Files nineties experience, you know, he was at the same
time, right, Yeah, I mean I think Whitley really because he got
just raked over the coles after after Communion, and he he sort of disappeared
for a while. I mean, he went back and wrote, you know,
a few non alien novels in the early nineties and and just kind of
said I'm not I'm not talking about this anymore. And then eventually by the
mid nineties, you know, came back and wrote another book. And I'm
sure that that that, you know, on some level, was because the
X Files just took over the culture. Well that was this the same you
know genre, right, and that was all over it. Yeah, all
right, We're gonna take another break and play a preview for next week's show.
Ye some look at the signore I again to put up got don't come
in your cutters? Still more it move it, more on it. I
guess a rooster you book my friendly. That's right. We are kicking off
a month of discussing Japanese films with a look at our one hundred. Until
then, I want to thank this week's co host, Joe and Jonathan.
So, Jonathan, what is going on in your world? Sir? Programming
Escape from Tribeca again the visceral psychotronic sidebar that we are having a ball with.
We just booked the confirmed the twentieth anniversary of Saw with the talent's going
to come out and present that live on stage. Going to be amazing show.
We're trying to get Pam Greer to do the fiftieth anniversary of Foxy Brown,
seventieth birthday of Godzilla, and other incredible films new and old. We
hope if you're in New York, guys and listeners, if you're in New
York City June fifth through the sixteenth, please come to Tribeca Festival. Check
it out. Escape from Tribeca. It's going to be amazing, very cool.
And Joe, what's happening with you? Well, Actually, in the
next few months, I have three different books that I've worked on in some
capacity that are that are coming out. One of them is a is an
autobiography written by my friend Bruce Jail Rubin, who I know you've had on
the shows. He's great and he's he's written a book called It's Only a
Movie that is his story and I helped him out a little bit with that,
and that's going to be coming out from Sticking Place Books, and the
same publisher is putting out a book of three unproduced screenplays by Bruce from the
early I think the first one is written in sixty eight or sixty nine,
maybe it's right after two thousand and one, I know. And now then
the third one was like eighty four eighty five, so kind of spanning that
part of his his career and they're actually really really great scripts that should have
been made. And then the third thing that I've been working as it's been
kind of my pet project for four years, and that is a very in
depth biography of Wes Craven called The Soul of West Craven. And I've done
well over one hundred interviews and looked at a lot of rare manuscripts that nobody
knows about by him, and that will be coming out from Harker Press in
the next few months. Well, thank you so much guys for being on
the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more
of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that
I work on. They're all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially guitar
Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com
slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps some projection booth take over the
world. Moove up this morning with ladin line and then real lad, it
will still dark outside. It was a light coming down from the sky.
I don't know who. Ooh, it must be those strangers that come every
nine, those saucership flies, good people up tied deeply green footprints that blew
in the dark. I hope they get along all right. Hey, mister
spaceman, won't you please take me along? I won't do anything long?
Hey, mister spaceman, won't you please save me alone? Before you arrive?
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird that flies in my
bear, My toothpaste was smeared over my window. They'd written my name,
said so long you'll see you again. Pay, mister spaceman. Won't you
please take me along? I won't do anything loud? Pay mister spaceman.
Won't you please make me along for a ride? Hey, mister spaceman,
won't you please save me alone? I'll do anything long Hey, mister spaceman,
won't you please save me? Along for a ride.