DAVID THOMPSON: Caged Heat is your first collaboration with Tak Fujimoto, who is the director of photography on a lot of your movies. Over the years you've gathered together a group of people you work with quite regularly now.
JONATHAN DEMME: Well, when you work with someone who's very gifted in their area, as Tak Fujimoto is with lighting and camera, and you don't alienate them on your first experience with them, of course you want to continue it. I tried very hard to get people who are more gifted in their area than I would ever hope to be - on an ideal level - and that extends to both sides of the camera. For me, that's the key to good directing: hire eminently gifted people and let them pursue what they do.
     I think Tak's a great cameraman. I never discuss the lighting with Tak at all because I know, first of all, his ideas would be far richer than mine; second, I wouldn't understand what he was talking about. And there's another thing - when you start shooting a movie, you work so hard every day, you're up at the crack of dawn, you shoot all day, then you have to go to dailies; one of the excitements for me, one of the things that lets me end the day on a high note, is seeing what Tak did on film. So I just let him take care of that and by now he has evolved a camera approach that works for me in a very good way, that he endorses, so we don't even discuss shots any more. I watch rehearsals through my view-finder and, at a certain point, I notice that Tak has put some marks down on the floor, so that means a shot has developed, and the actors get their make-up on and he lights it up and then we start shooting.

In Caged Heat the lead actress, Erica Gavin, is well known for being in Russ Meyer films; so too is Charles Napier, who's turned up in virtually all of your movies.
As I said, the time I spent in the cinema on the island of Negros was very significant. It was also when I saw my first Russ Meyer movie - Cherry, Harry, and Raquel. Charles Napier played Harry. I just thought, 'This guy is an incredible actor.' Even while making a Russ Meyer film, he delivered this extraordinary performance.
     One way of strengthening your film is to find people - actors - who really impress you. When you're working with Corman, you have to look for inexpensive actors, so I thought, 'He's making Russ Meyer movies, we can certainly afford him.' I called Charles. He was in the next film I did, we became very good friends and we've worked together ever since.
     I keep waiting for Chuck Napier to become a really big movie actor, but it seems so far it's been slightly out of his reach. He played Sylvester Stallone's nemesis in Rambo 2, but he still hasn't gone into a regular working thing with the majors. I hope that happens. I think he's one of America's finest actors.

So working with Roger Corman was obviously a key experience in your life.
When we went to work for Roger Corman, it was incredibly exciting for someone who had loved movies as much as I had all my life to be, believe it or not, making one. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was also receiving an excellent education in film-making - maybe the best that was available in America at that time, even today. Those of us who have worked with him call it the Roger Corman School of Film Technique. Not only are you given the responsibility to make a picture, but you're being fairly besieged by Roger's various aesthetics: on a visual level, what makes a good-looking picture; on a content level, the old Corman formula, which was that your film should have a lot of action, it should have a lot of humour in it, it should have considerable nudity in it - and by that he didn't mean male nudity, either - and a subtle social message - preferably from a leftist perspective. And he felt that the titles of the films should somehow try to encapsulate all these ingredients. The subtlety of the sexual content was something he always tried to bring to bear in films like Angels Hard as They Come.
     It was a great experience. Having made sure that you accepted the rules of how to make a Corman movie, Roger then gave you an enormous amount of freedom to go ahead and do it. It wasn't until you started diverging from the formula, or from the approach, or - God forbid - went a moment over schedule, that you heard from him. And, of course, if you did stray from any of the pre-agreed conventions of making Corman movies, then you heard from him in no uncertain terms.
     Beyond that, Corman is a great guy. It was incredible to be able to hear so much stuff from him and spend time with him. He's one of my favourite people.

You did your next film for Corman, Crazy Mama, at the very last minute, didn't you?
Yes. I was working on the script for Fighting Mad at the time and was very excited about it, and Roger was preparing to make Crazy Mama with Shirley Clarke directing. Shirley Clarke had made a number of underground films, was clearly a film-maker to be reckoned with and maybe, in his mind, one desirous of a chance to do something in Hollywood - as though he was Hollywood, which he wasn't. But Shirley Clarke did start the movie - not during shooting, in pre-production - and then they had a falling-out about something, and she chose to walk out; but they had the cast booked and a release date set in about three months. That's how Roger would finance all these pictures in those days: he would go to the exhibitors with a title and he'd say, 'OK, we're going to make Crazy Mama, and it'll be ready in June, and who wants to show it?' Because Big Bad Mama would have been a great success as well as Bloody Mama, he would get an enormous amount of advances - or enormous proportionate to the budgets he shot on - and with the money in hand he would then go ahead and make the film, so there was a no-loss situation. Sometimes he'd go out with a title to the exhibitors that wouldn't get made; maybe a cycle would go too far or what have you, and he'd say we're going to have this film ready in July, and if he couldn't get the advances, then a few weeks later it would be cancelled, 'because a few people had problems with it.'
     But he had to deliver on Crazy Mama and he called me for what was supposed to be a script meeting about Fighting Mad, which I'd been working very hard on - researching and hoping to get an approval on the script, so we could start casting it and get ready to make it. He called me into this script meeting and said, 'OK, Fighting Mad is shelved, but you're directing Crazy Mama next week, and, in fact, you have a casting session for some of the smaller parts in one hour.' You know, when you're a director, you're always fighting for control of your film: control in casting, control of the script, control of the key creative elements, so that you can make the best film you're capable of making, because later, if it's poorly received, you're going to take a lot of heat, and you want to cover yourself as strongly as possible. Now he's telling me that I'm going to direct a movie that I've never even read the script of. I said, 'Roger, it's not possible. First of all, I thought we were going forward on Fighting Mad - I've got this brand-new script, it's imminent. It solves all the problems that you found the last time - you're going to love it. So thanks anyway, find someone else for Crazy Mama, but let us carry on with Fighting Mad.' He said, 'Jonathan, you don't get it. There never will be a Fighting Mad unless you direct Crazy Mama, and you've got to go to this casting meeting in one hour. I suggest you have a quick bite and get up there.' I said, 'Look, I've got to read the script.'
     And that's what happened. I told him, 'You know, Roger, I will do this because you literally leave me no choice. Besides, I like you so much. You're obviously in a jam here, I want to help you out, but I know this is going to end poorly. I know this, you can't jump in this fast on a movie, make it in three weeks, and then have two weeks for the editing, mix it in one day and hope for a good picture. It's going to be a mess, you're going to perceive it as a mess, you're going to get mad at me.' He said, 'Not at all, not at all, it's great of you to go for it. You're going to do a fine job, go ahead.'
     We made the film and all the actors hated the script - with good reason: it was lousy. It had a couple of good scenes in it, but it left a lot to be desired. It was one of those awful situations where you're trying to write it while you're shooting it. It also got shot too fast. The film was supposed to end in a bloody shoot-out where this family of women end in a bloody finale like in Bloody Mama and Big Bad Mama. This was the girl-gang genre. The grandmother, the mother, the great-grandmother, the daughter, the pregnant daughter - everyone was supposed to get shot. At this point I was starting to get a little distressed about the need for this kind of violence in those films, and wishing it could be different.
     Also, another thing Corman had said from the start was: 'You've got to make the audience like your characters or they won't like the movie. You've got to really struggle to make people get involved in your characters and like them, so they'll share the experience of the movie with them, and they'll care about them, and care about the movie.' He even said - and it's probably true - 'Your villain has to be the most fascinating, if not likeable, person in the piece. Notice how Psycho worked so effectively. Really pay attention to these things.'
     And now here we are with this Crazy Mama movie, where you have to like this family of women, and you have to experience all these things with them, including getting killed in a bloody fusillade at the end. I thought, 'Well, this is really going against Roger's primary rule. I'm fed up with these bloody shoot-outs, and I don't think it's the right way to end the film.' So when we got to the shoot-out scene, all the cops were now shooting each other. The women all escaped and drove away. Roger saw it and said, 'My God, there's no ending here. This is an outrage! What are you going to do? That was an expensive scene. We rented a country club for a day, for heaven's sake. We can't go back there.'
     A lot of thought went into this thing and we came up with this cute little tag at the end of it. I sort of liked the idea that you may not get gunned down in America for trying to rob people and get rich, but, what's worse, you may wind up never quite making it - so we showed them in their little hot-dog stand five years later, still desperately trying to make money. But Roger was furious at me. He thought I had totally ruined the movie, that this would be the first Mama film to lose money because it hadn't delivered all the elements. He was right, incidentally, it was the first to not make money, and he cancelled Fighting Mad. He said, 'You know, I thought you showed a little promise when you made Caged Heat, but this is a miserable mess. Forget it, forget Fighting Mad.'
     So I went home - but first I said, 'I told you so.' At home I thought, 'This is such a terrible thing to have happened.' I knew that the movie would not be good, and I had warned him, and sure enough here we are. So I wrote him a letter.
     There were a million things that were crazy about Crazy Mama - one was that the movie was being produced by Corman's wife, Julie Corman, who was eight and a half months pregnant when we started shooting, which was understandably occupying her thoughts. Yet she was doing a tremendously intense job of producing a movie. When we shot our big car-chase scene in the park, we had an ambulance standing by, as you always do for action scenes in case one of the drivers gets hurt flipping their car over. We had three units working that day; I was in one place, the art director was somewhere else with a camera team, somebody else was elsewhere in the park. At a certain point we heard this siren start up and go roaring away and we thought, 'Oh, my God, somebody's got hurt.' We went racing over to the meeting area and the ambulance was gone. Who was it? What had happened? They said, 'Oh, it's Julie - she's in labour.'
     So that happened. There was all kinds of chaos. But the great thing about Roger - there are many great things about him - but one is that when I wrote him a letter explaining what had happened and saying finally, 'You know, you shouldn't be cancelling this film,' I got a phone call from him the next day: 'Well, I'm still pissed off at you because I still think you could have made a better movie, but you're right about a number of things, and so we'll go ahead with Fighting Mad.' I've been very grateful to him for that.