20 Things We Learned from ‘The Lift’ Commentary
Looking for another reason to love your 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD collection? Special features like commentaries featuring filmmakers, critics, and other film fans. After living for more than a decade elsewhere on the internet, Commentary Commentary has been reborn here at Dread Central, and as is fitting for its return from the dead, it’s now all about the horror.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of Dick Maas’ “killer elevator” flick, The Lift. Well, more specifically, it’s the 40th anniversary of the film’s U.S. release. It had opened in the Netherlands two years prior to slowly spreading out around the world, finally reaching U.S. screens in 1985.
The Lift is a proper feature debut for a filmmaker who would go on to gift genre fans with gems like Amsterdamned, Saint, and Prey. A new high-rise becomes home to a series of odd deaths, all associated with a misbehaving elevator, and the result is one of cinema’s great tag lines: “Take the stairs, take the stairs, for god’s sake, take the stairs!!!”
Now, keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
The Lift (1983)
Commentators: Dick Maas (writer/director/composer), Hans van Dongen (editor), David Gregory (moderator)
1. “The first shot here, we see an homage to the Star Wars movies,” says Maas as the opening shot tracks a moving elevator like a giant starship moving towards the top of the screen. Is he serious? Unclear. More convincing, though, is his comment that the film’s structure is a direct riff on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
2. Amsterdam is pretty lacking when it comes to highrises, so they had to search for one before settling on a relatively small one—ten to twelve stories high—that they made look bigger with a wide lens.
3. One of the couples in the opening sequence is supposed to act out a well-known Aerosmith song while trapped in the elevator, but while the actress dropped her top, the actor didn’t want to drop his trousers. The actor was a last-minute replacement, and the production manager had given him a script with the specific actions removed “because a lot of actors refused to do the part because they had to lower their pants.” It took a little more money to convince the guy to enjoy some love in an elevator.
4. This is one of Huub Stapel’s earliest roles before going on to have a full career that also includes four more films with Maas.
5. Maas had to convince producer Matthijs van Heijningen to take the film on, as the man had a poor attitude towards genre films. He ultimately said yes after packaging Maas’s movie with something else, but he had low expectations for The Lift’s box office.
6. Van Heijningen hired the actor who appears at 12:56, but Maas didn’t want him. The director held his ground—and was fired by the producer who was adamant that certain known actors be cast. Maas relented and was brought back aboard within hours.
7. Maas directed the music video for Golden Earring’s hit song “Twilight Zone” shortly before moving on to The Lift.
8. “It’s pretty stupid to put an actor in danger,” says Maas after he’s asked what he learned from making a movie without any stunt performers. He didn’t go on to make that mistake again.
9. The decapitated head at 26:56 was damaged in the fall down the shaft, but enough of it survived that Maas still has it on a shelf in his home office.
10. Maas is prone to rubbing people the wrong way, and that includes his female lead, Willeke van Ammelrooy. “She didn’t like the way I was directing her,” he says, adding that once production wrapped she sent Maas an instruction tape on how to direct actors. He never listened to the tape.
11. A sound guy is visible in the back of the truck at 35:57. Maas doesn’t recall if they noticed it during editing, but it was the only shot they had and had no choice but to use it. He considered fixing it digitally for Blue Underground’s Blu-ray release in 2017, but he realized that would be silly.
12. The elevator factory they filmed in belongs to Schindler Elevator Corporation, and they all share a good laugh over the idea of “Schindler’s Lift.”
13. They brought The Lift to the Cannes marketplace in 1983, and it quickly became a hot commodity, with Warner Bros. buying its worldwide rights. That helped that the film opened in Holland to big numbers and even out-grossed the James Bond film that was in Dutch theaters at the time. It’s unclear if Maas is referring to Octopussy or Never Say Never Again on that count, as both Bond movies were released in 1983.
14. The film’s success was a minor turning point in Holland as one of the country’s first true genre efforts because most filmmakers at the time championed artsy cinema over American-style films. “You have to like Truffaut, you have to like Godard,” recalls Maas, “and I didn’t like those movies at all, and I didn’t want to make them.”
15. Maas credits Stephen King’s story “The Mangler” as another influence on his story idea for The Lift.
16. Maas isn’t really a fan of the big exposition dump scene that starts at 1:01:23, but he knows it’s necessary. The actor kept forgetting his lines and mispronouncing words, and they had to set up cue cards everywhere just outside of frame. “It is a kind of boring scene,” says Maas, adding that he tried having a fast-talking poet friend take the role, but it fell apart, meaning he was stuck with this guy explaining the whole premise about biological computer chips.
17. While Jaws is an obvious inspiration for the film’s structure, Maas also took lessons from that film’s underwater jump scare with the head popping up into frame. “Before that, I didn’t think you could scare people anymore,” he says, but the jump scare worked so well that he decided to pretty directly riff on it in his debut with the body dropping through the elevator hatch.
18. Maas is a musician and decided early on that he would score his debut, and it became a smart call as the film’s production was rushed to the point that he realized he wouldn’t have time to collaborate with a true composer. He also didn’t have the budget to hire someone, so while the producer wanted an outside hire – and actually offered the gig to a band he heard on the radio – Maas ultimately convinced him this was the best option. Maas is a big John Carpenter fan, so this all makes perfect sense.
19. The bit where Felix (Stapel) opens the elevator’s control panel, revealing the glowing and goopy interior, was the only sequence in the film shot on a soundstage. Maas is no fan of the effects used, and he kept the glimpses short to avoid scrutiny.
20. The film’s success led to requests for a sequel, but Maas resisted until a respectable budget for a U.S. remake was offered.
Quotes Without Context
“The shark is the elevator.”
“We don’t have that many actors in Holland.”
“A lot of actors in this movie are dead.”
“In this scene, we have a lot of dialogue spoken by an actor who can’t remember lines.”
“For a first movie with no money, it’s not that bad I think.”
While his later films would go on to become his best and best known, Dick Maas makes a memorable debut with The Lift. The premise is a big part of that, obviously, so much so that Maas even remade it himself in 2001 for an American studio as Down. He’s in his seventies now, but he still has plenty of memories about this film’s production and retains a sense of humor about things that maybe didn’t go as planned. Those anecdotes are paired with some technical talk, too, exploring how they managed various aspects of the film.
Categorized: Editorials
