Whether you love Marcus Dunstan’s films or hate them, there’s no denying that he’s a filmmaker with ambition. The co-writer of Saw IV-VI and Saw 3D, four films with some of the most complicated story structures you’ll ever find outside of Last Year at Marienbad, and the co-writer and director of The Collector and The Collection was happy to talk about his goals for the horror genre in our interview over the phone last Friday, and also to reveal his own origin on the set of John Frankenheimer movies, and tease some plot points from the third film in his Collection franchise – if it gets made – called The Collected.
Oh, and for those of you wondering, Marcus Dunstan is also co-writing the God of War movie with his Collection collaborator Patrick Melton. They’ve finished their draft, and Dunstan thinks it’s going to be “terrific.” He had to keep mum, but we talked as much about the highly anticipated fantasy blockbuster as we could while still respecting his gag order.
The Collection – which we were very fond of at CraveOnline – is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. The original film, The Collector… not so much. That’s the first thing we’re going to talk about with writer/director Marcus Dunstan.
CraveOnline: How you doing?
Marcus Dunstan: I’m grateful. I’m happy. Things are good. [Laughs]
Are they good?
Yes…
Why are they so good, sir?
Well, this is a movie that I really care about getting a second chance at life, being released through Lionsgate which has done me good in the past.
It’s interesting. I saw The Collection, but I hadn’t seen The Collector because it’s actually a little hard to find on DVD.
Yes, it is. Okay, so not too long ago I didn’t have any copies myself. I had one French DVD, that was it. That’s not too cool when someone wants to see it and they end up with something they can’t understand. So I went through Best Buy. Every single Best Buy was sold out. And then I went to Best Buy online to order them, they had a limit to how many I could order. Really? Since when does a store limit how many you can order of a DVD, for Pete’s sake? So I entered my max, I think I could get three. I also took it as a compliment, like, okay… Sweet.
So is there any word on re-releasing that when The Collection comes out?
No! Not at all! I don’t have a peep on that. What I do think it kind of helps with, in a bizarre kind of silver lining prism, is when it’s not the easiest thing to find then it really helps come October, when everybody wants to put a horror film on their cable channel. And this is not a “TV Safe” movie but it is a cable safe movie, so I find that it gets more airplay on the late at night Showtime Extreme, HBO, whatnot, even Cinemax, because it’s not painted like the broadside of a barn with opportunity. It just isn’t. You have to wait, and it gives it a chance to surprise folks. Sometimes you cannot shove a nasty little horror movie down someone’s throat. You almost have to have the door cracked open and the right kind of light coming from the other side, and lure them in on their own faith.
I remember when you couldn’t find Heavy Metal, the movie. The scarcity might help you. “Oh, The Collector! The movie they don’t want you to see!”
The thing with Heavy Metal, it was all about the soundtrack! No one could unlock the rights. You had all this wonderful music, you had Devo, Sammy Hagar, and it was tied into the print. They couldn’t very well separate it, and with a movie like Heavy Metal with heavy metal music, they didn’t want to betray that. Finally when all the rights, that Gordian Knot of rights work was untied… Because home video really wasn’t an option for the film when it first came out. If anything, [it was] a possibility in the distant future. The distant future happened, and we needed our Heavy Metal at home. So with The Collector, I kind of like that it is a Video Nasty.
I have to say, having not seen The Collector and then seeing The Collection, I ended up really digging The Collection regardless.
Oh thanks!
There’s a couple things I really like about it, but I think it boils down to is, what you have here is a fairly original idea. Here’s a supervillain basically, a “slasher” if you will, and he kidnaps people, but someone actually goes after them. It’s about those rescuers, these mercenaries. It’s such a neat idea. Where did you come up with that?
Well, I wanted to… and this is a credit to Patrick Melton as well, who I’ve hadthe honor of writing with… It was Halloween weekend of 1999, and we both worked for a woman by the name of Ethel Winant, who was a live TV producer way back when. She cast the first season of “The Twilight Zone,” she cast “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and as a producer she ended up partnering with John Frankenheimer and they did what would be his last series of films, including The Path to War, which was one hell of a training ground. So I was privileged to have access to watch him work and watch her work, and what I found was… How does a person with the same mindset of “The Twilight Zone” produce Ronin and produce The Path to War? How does that all make sense? I thought, “Hmm… The bizarre story, the terrorist story, the sci-fi story allows seriously flawed characters to be the centerpiece.”
So, horror movies also do the same. The thing is, they’re usually offed so quickly, but the more someone asks for it, the more seeing them get it is acceptable, if you will. We have a supervillain. We have a gentlemen who steps in shadow, with complacent eyes, who is the human equivalent of a spider, waiting to design or make mechanisms for their own [ends]. I just wanted to take some fractured characters from a Frankenheimer ensemble, have them step over the pieces of the opening set characters – which were all about innocence, and teen stereotypes – and have them take over. And that is the junkie, […] that is the knuckle-busting cash for hire merc type, and fortunately that is also a woman who is tough and soulful and has tattoos of angel wings on her fists because there is still honor in her code. I thought, yes, that’s interesting. All following the ex-straight criminal, the guy who has been busted, hurt, and unsavory things have been done to him by this madman, and he is so pushed off by it, it’s not a confident revenge piece, even for the lead actor. He doesn’t want to be there. He’s terrified of the boogeyman, and that felt real.
So that was it, I’m sorry it was kind of a longwinded answer…
That’s okay. Longwinded is good. I’m here to listen to you, not the other way around.
[Laughs]
Here’s something that kind of fascinates me about The Collector as a character: he must have a lot of free time.
Oh, absolutely. That’s the one thing about supervillainy, is we imagine they go to Home Depot and shop for their weaponry, but this guy I thought of, “Well, what if there was all of that, but there was also an artisticness.” And really, he was making this gallery. We already wrote histories and whatnot for this guy to kind of explain how this would happen, just for our own purposes, and we just springboard off of that. But it had to come from a place of art, where art can take time, art can be instant, it’s all about the impulse to do it. There’s this lair that he has, this hotel, that has been abandoned by time for maybe even a decade, so it could have always been tweaked and built and helped and just polished, and I like that for once we’ve designated a terrain that has been unwatched, that could have all of this stuff. Whereas the first film, we took a leap and needed to create a window of about six hours where more intimate, on the fly mechanisms could be brought into a home.
