Interviewing Xtro director Harry Bromley-Davenport is not for the faint-hearted. As he admits freely, “I digress a lot” and a good part of our half hour chat is spent discussing death, the problems of technology and the insanely busy life of a rich film director: “I’m just so busy setting up Skype and feeding my dogs – things like that! – going into supermarkets buying a packet of sugar, that sort of thing.  You can’t get to the cash register for the crush!” Based in Los Angeles, he’s very honest about his work on Xtro, now out in a new edition from Second Sight…

 

Xtro reminded me at the time of [the TV series] Hammer House of Horror on speed.

[laughs] I’m supposed to respond to that? Hammer House of Horror was shit, actually. Stuffy old stories made by men who should have retired long ago. It was a great disappointment, except for people who liked stuffy old movies in the Christopher Lee genre – although I quite like Christopher Lee. An admirable guy who got away with the most appalling dialogue: “I’m from Transylvania come to take your children,” “I’m from another planet of the Zog people”.

Christopher Lee used to play golf with my father; he was a nice man. My father said having him in this golf club was rather like having a crocodile there!

Are you surprised that a film from 35 years still has this life in it?

I thought for a minute you said 75 years! I had to check my diary!

Of course I’m astonished. The whole thing was very odd because I never really thought much of the film in the first place and didn’t think I did a good job. The film should have been much better, should have been more frightening.

It has astonished me that every few years it will be rereleased on DVD or whatever the hell it happens to be. I would go in these bloody video shops and the first thing you do is look for your own film – and there it would be, the dreaded Xtro, sitting on the shelf. I’d have to go down to the bottom shelf as it was in the Xs.

It has seriously astonished me. I’ve come around to it over the last few months because I’ve had to see it again and because I’ve had to talk to people about it. I do see now that there is a sort of odd atmosphere about it, and I don’t quite know what that atmosphere is – it’s probably an atmosphere of complete moronity and incapability, stupidity – but there is something odd.

It’s like a lovely film called Phantasm – that made no sense, and it was kind of boring too, because people all walked very slowly. It had this wonderful metal ball effect that would fly around everywhere hitting people in the head then it would cut to some man standing there and he would walk across the room and disappear in a mirror gag. It had an atmosphere, it held its own – it was absolute nonsense but it did hold its own – and I never thought that Xtro had that. I always thought it was kind of clumsy.

I did the restoration on it. I said, “If you’re going to put this out on Blu-ray, I don’t want it going out in the condition it is in.” The print I saw that they were going to use to make it was terrible, it was unbelievable – all the colours were washed out.

And yes it does astonish me, because I don’t think I did a good job. It was the first time I had worked with a full union crew, and that was a little intimidating, although they were very nice people. We worked from nine to five; there were no independent hours in those days. On an independent film you do ten hours a day at least – and you don’t ask if you can do overtime. You just do it, it’s in the deal, and they know they’ll get a bump or a free lunch at Denny’s. On this it was a bit intimidating – you had to plead, “Can I please shoot till six o’clock?” “Well, I don’t know, we’ll have to have a shops stewards meeting about it.” [muttered expletives about that idea]

And there were executives as well, who were also very nice people. From time to time I was taken into the rubber room and beaten with rubber mallets and things because I was over time, over budget. I remember the first time I was over schedule, Mark Forstater – smashing fellow who produced the film, and produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail – came to me and said “We’re a day behind” and I realised on an eight week shoot [what that meant]. I remember being taken out to dinner a couple of times, particularly with Bob Shaye at New Line, who tore me to pieces in front of all these people – he said, “It’s shit. I can sell shit but I need T’n’A with that girl, Maryam.” He was suffering from terrible jet lag at the time and apologised later – he’s another of these rather loveable rogues.

I was terrified – Bob is a very strong personality and I was in awe of them at New Line. I was very much in awe of that because we had American distribution. We had partial money from America! This was staggering to us. It was what everybody wanted. Bob had come in and said yes; this was all Mark Forstater’s doing, he was really fantastic.

Did you end up going over time?

I didn’t realise the power the director had with the executives and people like that. I thought I could just be beaten up or fired. I think they knew that I was competent but I didn’t realise the power that I had. I said, “We’re going to continue shooting the film but we’re not going to shoot any special effects during the filming.” They all stood there and said, “right okay”, and I recovered from the shock of them agreeing, and I said, “That way I can finish it, bring this puppy home, then we’ll worry about the effects.”

We finished the film and there was an old man who ran a chipboard factory who’d invested in it, a gazillionaire who wanted to do something different with his money. There was this meeting, with everybody’s lawyer there, and the old man came to me and said, “’Arry?” (he was from oop north). I said, “Unless we do something about it, these special effects are not going to be up to industry standards.” I thought that was a very good phrase, because chipboard could be up to industry standard – he’d understand. I made my little speech and said I didn’t think we were cutting it – think of The Thing, the effects in that were really good. I sat down, and he said, “Right well, if that’s the way ’Arry says, that’s the way it’s gonna be.” Bang. Fantastic. And we suddenly had an extra week shooting, trying to get some reshoots.

We did go over – it had been foretold in the stars. The associate producer, James Crawford, an awfully nice man who’d previously associate produced Chariots of Fire, had done the budget for the film and it came up at the number the executives wanted. He took me aside and said, “Look here, you are going to have to make compromises but don’t make compromises on your compromises” – and that was a very good piece of advice. Take one step but then try and put your foot down. Further and further generations that you get away from the idea, it gets so watered down that you might as well have someone sitting there having a cup of tea rather than eaten by aliens.

How much were you doing the effects with the actors on set?

All of them were there. Everyone was there. There aren’t that many scenes. I think the only time someone wasn’t was a chap called David Cardy who had to be attacked by a black panther – for no reason! No reason at all…

The reason it was in there was I was in New Line’s offices in New York trying to rewrite the screenplay and I would have a drink with Bob Shaye in the evening. He had a fantastic wine cellar – 1962 Chateauneuf du Pape – and he said, “You’ve got to be off the wall.” (I didn’t know what that meant – I had to go and look it up.) He kept saying it. “Why don’t you have something like a black panther jumps up and kills someone?” I said, “Great idea, Bob,” so we had a black panther jump out.

It does have some vague relation to the story – a very tenuous relation: there’s a little circus set up in the bedroom and the clown comes out of it. If you look very very carefully there’s a very very small ceramic toy panther there! I think that was inserted there afterwards!

Shooting the panther scene was very expensive. The panther itself was £2,000 although it was only needed for one shot.

We had to get it to jump up and attack the actor, who wasn’t there. Part of the camera crew, four people including me, were stuck inside this little cage – we were caged up, the panther was not – and the panther was supposed to jump over the camera box. Above us was the trainer, Mary Chipperfield (at vast expense). They’d drugged this panther, it was very obvious, so we had to wait for it to wake. Chipperfield was as tough as nails, and she stood on top of our box with a dead chicken, with feathers and everything. She shook it – “here’s din-dins”. The panther stirred from its stoned sleep. We had the camera rolling and it went [whoosh!] and got the damned chicken. That worked well except that you can still see in the film, as it jumps forward and up over the camera, little chicken feathers falling down in front of the panther.

I don’t honestly think in Xtro people are going to query some chicken feathers!

[laughs] I see it, and it’s just another surreal moment.

So the panther had eaten the chicken and went back to sleep for half an hour – and we’re trapped in this cage. There was a man standing off at 45 degrees, with a shotgun aimed at the panther. It woke you up and I remember one of the camera people reaching through the bars of the cage and pulling the panther’s tail. It didn’t like that – he pulled his hand in very quickly! The shotgun man said nothing; he stood there in the background very quietly, he didn’t want to scare people with his 12 bore shotgun and kept this fucking thing aimed at the poor panther. The panther wasn’t going anywhere.

I did get in addition what I think is the best shot in the film: I had the art department paint a corridor completely white. I didn’t know where it was going to go, and we ended up using it at the end. I should have held the shot longer – in the Blu-ray I think I managed to slow motion the panther and double the length of the shot, it just looked so beautiful. We set the panther at the end of the road and then had it walk towards us about ten times. You know they are untrainable? Lions are trainable, panthers are not. We did that shot later in the day – we were paying for the panther, we were going to use it.

Did you make other tweaks for the Blu-ray?

Yes, I changed the lighting a lot, because we had to shoot at 90 mph. While you’re shooting you don’t really have time to do lots of lighting effects, not like Ridley Scott spending three hours lighting. Johnny Metcalfe did very well for us but I only had him relight a scene once – we had to move on all the time.

This time I was able to go in with the digital stuff and put shadows in to make things scarier, and smoke to improve some of the scenes. The whole thing was much too bright – it looked like it was taking place in a fish and chip shop. My contribution was a lot to the effects scenes, certainly the Action Man scene where he blows up the door. I put shadows all over the place. There wasn’t time to do that sort of chiaroscuro lighting.

Xtro is available now from Second Sight. Read our review here

Thanks to Debbie Murray at AIM for her help in organising this interview.