Exclusive: Talkin’ DREAM WARRIORS, DREAM MASTER, and More With Production Designer Mick Strawn
Mike Sprague
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I’ve had the opportunity to interview quite a few people at this point here on Dread Central and the interviews usually go about the same way. I come up with a list of 8-10 questions, and my guest of honor and I go through them easy-peasy.
But this one was different.
Yes, when I got the call to interview legendary production designer Mick Strawn (The Hidden, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Mortal Kombat, and much more!) I leapt at the chance. Little did I know this particular sit down would take up the better part of my month.
Yes, once Mick and I got to talking the ball seemingly never stopped rolling and below you will find the first part of our epic 2-part interview with Mick Strawn. Give it a look-see below and then make sure to tune in tomorrow for part 2!
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Dread Central: I guess the best way to start this out is telling people who might not be familiar what a production designer does.
Mick Strawn: Okay. Well, I can give you the technical and then I can give you the real. [chuckles] Technically, the production designer’s purview is everything… It’s the overall look of a film. Now, the easiest way to tell what an overall look of a film is, in general, is this: If you look at Batman, you know that every part of that, every part of the screen is manipulated in some way. Now, you’re in a different future and you’re in a different world, and somebody has filled all that world… Somebody has to make it look a particular way. And that’s the production designer’s job. It includes overlooking the art department, wardrobe, props, to a certain extent — in fact, to a very big extent in my case, the special effects… I mean, even locations. All of that. It’s so that you can give a film a feel. In reality, what it is in the beginning, you determine what direction you’re gonna go, and by hook or by crook, making people do what you want them to. And that includes lying, all sorts of head games. Oh, and it includes to a certain extent art. But it’s kind of a mental exercise, to say the least. [laughter]
So to give you an example, there is a certain amount of manipulation to it. I can give you — I did a job, and the director kept saying, “Oh, we don’t need production designers!” He was sort of like when he talked, he talked like Tobe Hooper, except for he actually made sense. Yeah, “You don’t need a production designer, because I’m just gonna pick everything that we’re gonna do!” And then by the end, he said, “See, I picked everything! You’re such a piece of shit!” And it’s like, oh really? Yeah, okay. So you picked all the locations yourself? And he goes, “Yeah, I sure did.” And I said, “How did you do that?” “Well, you know, the location manager comes to me with a folder.” “And it had three choices in there, didn’t it?” “Yeah.” I said, “Two of them were obviously the worst choices in the world, and one of them was the only one that you would have picked, right?” “Uh, yeah.” “Who the hell do you think set those folders up?” “…oh.” [laughter]
DC: Nice. That was a really good Toby Hooper impression.
MS: No, no no — The Tobe Hooper impression goes like this: “So anyway, Mick, [incoherent mumbling].”
DC: That’s classic
MS: That’s Tobe Hooper.
DC: The first movie you did as production designer was Jack Sholder’s The Hidden. What was that like?
MS: That was an interesting show. I’d just come off of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and we were working with Jack Sholder. And Jack had this really, really interesting way of saying his name when you introduced him. You would introduce yourself and he would go, “Yeah, I’m Jack [SLAP!] Sholder.” And he would hit you in the shoulder.
Remember the sequence of hunting the zoned-out stripper on the rooftop? One of the problems that we had up there was that we were trying to get the motivation from light. And she goes past a whole series of skylights, which were not actually skylights. Those were all lightboxes disguised as skylights so that we could film the scene and we’d have her going in and out of the light, which was planned to get that film noir kind of vibe.
So that gives you an idea of trying to be a production designer and pulling the looks together. And we had a very green look on that film. And we actually built the entire mannequin factory that she’s going through. Every mannequin that was shot in that factory is made out of foam. So we actually made a little factory in that location. We had a little factory that would build mannequins out of foam, and we were all through prep and all through the first part of filming, we were building over in the corner of that, that we dressed as a mannequin factory, I had a group that was constantly making those mannequins so that we could put squibs in them, we could blow the heads up and we could get parts and stuff exploding off the mannequins.
DC: DC: Very cool. I’m especially fond of The Hidden. In fact, no matter what he’ll ever do, Kyle MacLachlan will always be the guy from The Hidden to me.
MS: Yeah, totally. And you know that shot where Kyle goes up to the mirror and looks into it, and the camera dollies all the way back around him and comes from one side and dollies all the way back around until we see him, and the image in his mirror, and then we come back and see his other side. And suddenly we know, because of that shot, because of Kyle MacLachlan’s acting in it, because of him looking at his own face, we know that he’s a creature. You know what I’m saying?
DC: Right.
MS: That film was just so great. It’s such a hidden gem of the 80s, you know?
DC: It truly is. I tell people about it all the time. It’s just crazy how much of a classic it is but people don’t have the love for it.
MS: I think part of the problem is the monster was the size of a carton of milk.
DC: That was effective when I was a little kid. I’ve seen it recently and it’s a little bit furry or whatever, but other than that, I thought that was a really good monster.
MS: I think in a way, it had this low-key edge when the monster comes out because it’s more of… There’s a psychological edge all through it, you know what I’m saying? And the ending is just one of the finest endings of a film that’s ever come along. Horror films and science fiction films always have a hard time with endings. I mean, really, there is only, like, 1 out 20 horror films, to me, has a fine ending. And the ending of that one is one of the 1 out of 20. For sure.
DC: You were the art director on Nightmare on Elm Street 3. What’s the difference between an art director and a production designer?
MS: You know, the funny thing is in reality, the production designer would have an art director underneath him that would deal specifically with the locations and sets, and manipulation of location, while the production designer was involved also in the lighting and the overall look. But the weird thing about Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was that they didn’t really want to give me the production designer.
I got the job and then I brought CJ, my sister, on, and we didn’t even have the experience to ask for the position of the production designer. And up until that point, an awful lot of films, the term “art director” and “production designer” could be interchanged. So there is no difference. The only thing is, I think, that when you’re called “production designer”, you can go kick the DP’s ass too.
DC: [chuckles] Nice. So it really comes down to labels and budgets.
MS: Yeah, yeah. It really did. I mean, we didn’t have the money to have a production designer and an art director, anyway. [laughter]
DC: For Dream Warriors?
MS: Right.
DC: Yeah. Well, I guess those were relatively low-budget, weren’t they?
MS: Yeah. Well, it was a hell of a budget for what we did.
DC: Yeah, no kidding.
MS: The thing you’ve got to understand is that until then, a horror film was all filmed on location, maybe one set somewhere because you needed an elevated floor or something up in the air or something like that. But we went to the stage for a different reason, because Nightmare on Elm Street 3, you have to understand, there was a certain character arc to how films — to the money they made and how they were released. If you had the first film out and it was a successful horror film, then you made a second and the second one made about a quarter as much money, then that was it. [chuckles] There weren’t that many thirds out there.
DC: Right.
MS: So Bob Shaye had this concept of, he’s gonna take this baby of his and he’s gonna do a third one, but he and Wes were going to turn everything on the end, and instead of having the evil guy in the dreams picking off everybody one by one and not having them affiliated as a group, he said, you know what? Let’s put a group together to battle him. So that gives you a little bit more back and forth, a little bit of power.
The second thing that it did was we need to create a character. I mean, we have Vincent Price as the banner guy that up until that point, the voice of horror that was still alive was Vincent Price. He was the lead character actor in horror, right? And I think that the concept was that we had done the dream thing twice and we needed to expand the whole thing. And so along with that insight to go with Robert Englund’s personality. Because Freddy becomes this flamboyant comedian, right? Well, there’s no more flamboyant comedy person in the world than Robert Englund, if you’ve ever met him. He’s the nicest, funniest, just fastest-talking guy in the world. And so he brought some of that character into the role. And that was written in.
And then the next thing is we have this story with more of a group concept. We have Freddy being more of a standard comedian, and I said let’s pull everything onto the stage, and let’s blow this sucker out. I mean, let’s not just build things because it has to be on a platform so that I can have the puppet skeleton standing here. Let’s just blow it out. Let’s do forced-perspective metal staircases, and let’s do Freddy’s hell. And let’s do this snake and this really whacked-out house. And that’s what we did.
DC: I see you worked on Dream Master too, right?
MS: Yeah. Now the thing is, we had blown everything out on Nightmare on Elm Street 3. By the time we got to Nightmare on Elm Street 4, now we had nobody to beat but ourselves and we had all this stuff going wrong. I mean, with the script, and there’s was the writer’s strike in the middle of it. Oh my God, we had problems left and problems right.
You know, I say this all the time, but I think that anybody could have stepped into Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and directed it because it was basically the crew that did it. And it was basically Rachel [Talday]. [chuckles]
DC: Really?
MS: Well, that’s just my opinion, but I was there.
DC: I think Dream Master is just amazing. I get into trouble with some of my horror friends sometimes, because I say I like Dream Master better than Dream Warriors.
MS: Yeah. I talked to an interviewer that wanted to know how we did Alice being sucked into the screen. And I went through that whole sequence for him, and he was like “I can’t believe you guys did it that way!” [laughter] Basically, we built a theater. We started over at the Rialto Theatre down in LA, and we filmed her and we got an idea of what the theater looked like, and we did a wide shot, a really wide shot. Then we also did a wide shot on the set, and the set was that balcony. Complete. And it was built on a couple of load lifters, and we literally belted everybody but her into their seats, gave her some popcorn, and raised the whole set, camera, and lights up and tilted them.
DC: Nice.
MS: By the way, did you catch that Bright had exactly the same gag that I pulled for the first time on Nightmare 4? The truck that hits nothing.
DC: Oh yeah! You’re absolutely right.
MS: [laughter] They copped exactly the same gag. Talk about watching a little homage to myself. Remember I was telling you yesterday about the meeting where that came up? Where I came up with that concept? [laughter] Well, Dream Master was one of my favorite things to work on, ever. By the time we hit Nightmare on Elm Street 4, we really had nobody to beat but ourselves. But we also didn’t have a script. And because of that, we kind of just… There was nobody there that could say no, we’re not going to do that idea because there wasn’t anything else but the ideas that you came up with. You know what I’m saying? [laughter]
DC: Right.
MS: I’ll give you an example. The tube, the kaleidoscope tube. That was a dream of mine one month before that. The tube was not in there at the beginning of the filming. I had a dream when we started filming, I had a dream about… And I know this is going to sound weird, but I had a dream about the sequence with the cockroach, right? And when we turned around and we were looking at Freddy’s eye, in the reverse of Freddy’s eye in my dream, he was looking at the cockroach, but for some reason, I imagined it was a kaleidoscope. That was just my dream. And I took that dream because I thought “Oh, this kaleidoscope. Why don’t I have a kaleidoscope in here?” So that was kind of our representation of the kaleidoscope in my dream.
DC: Very cool.
MS: But there was so much stuff that was written by the crew, and I’ll tell you about a meeting that we had. Now, we were in this dream loop, right?
DC: I love the dream loop.
MS: The problem is that we had the concept for it, and we had actually already filmed the beginning of it. But we didn’t have any way to get out of it. Which is kind of funny, because, in a certain respect, that’s the problem of a dream loop. [laughter] So you’re trying to get out of it, right? And we were in it, so it was meta 30 years before meta became hip.
DC: Right.
MS: So we’re kind of like, heading towards this and we were sure we had had another meeting about it and had gotten absolutely nowhere. So now it was me and Rachel, Bob Shaye, and Renny Harland, all of the important people were all lined up. And we’re sitting around this table, and we had been going on for two hours. And God, I’m telling you, in two hours, we had really managed to just dig our own graves. I mean literally, this is the point that we were at.
After two hours of meetings, somehow or another the pick-up truck had turned into an airliner, and in this airliner, we were honestly having an argument about which character in the airliner was Freddy, was turning into Freddy. Was it the stewardess, or was it the pilot? And so we were getting into these arguments about, like, “Well, it can’t be the stewardess, because the pilot’s the one that’s going to have to crash the plane,” and then somebody else is going, “Well, that’s too obvious.” And honestly, you know that feeling where you just sit there, and you’re in a meeting, and you just know that this going nowhere, right? And you just tune out. And somebody asked me something, and I just blurted out, “Oh God, I just we just hit nothing.” And everything was silent. And it was one of these meetings were you sit around an enormous table, right? And then around the outside of the table are all of your assistants, you know what I mean?
DC: Sure.
MS: And it’s just kind of like, and I said really low, I’m like, “Well, why don’t we just hit nothing?” And for me, it was a combination of daydreaming, not caring, and just the very, very beginnings of an idea. And all those things smashed together to make me say that, and one of the PA’s that was sitting over against the wall goes, “Well, what would that look like?”
And so I went, “Well, I think what it would be like if you took a vehicle and you tied an enormous cable to the front bumper, and you just put a camera at the end of where the cable is, and then drove the vehicle to the end of the cable. And that would be like you would have a wreck with nothing. And that’s what we did. We weren’t flipping it. That’s a modern thing because everybody flips cars like that, right? [laughter] No, what we did is we crushed it at the end of the cable. In other words, we put a loop in the body so that it wouldn’t up-end itself. It was just going to crush itself against it.
And that’s what we did. And that’s how you had that look of it looked like it hit a tree. Because it was just one point, tied to the front bumper, and it just wrapped around that point.
It is a motherfucker of a shot. It is one of the things that I am super proud of.
DC: There’s so much imagination in that movie.
MS: Oh, I considered it this. And people kind of hammer me on this, but when the concept of 3 came to me, and I got it in an unusual way, and then I had to sit down and think about it, what I wanted to do, how I wanted it to look, and the concept that I went with was that it was going to be like a carnival ride. And then when we did 4, I remember distinctly saying this several times. I said, well, you know, if three was a carnival that you set up in the parking lot of Kmart, then 4 is going to be Disneyland.
And if you actually look at it, that’s exactly what it was. Now, when we started on the fifth, and I started on the fifth, and I did not get along with the director. And I had been doing Nightmare on Elm Streets for a while then, and that included all the videos and the TV series. But then by the time we got to 5, I was burnt out and all I wanted to do was argue. [laughter]
So yeah, he wanted to jump into all the more modern ways of doing effects, and I really didn’t that much agree with it. And he liked to kind of point to me and go, “Well, this is the old Nightmare.” He would look at me and go, “His vision is a vision of the old Nightmares, and mine is a vision of the new Nightmares.” And so my sister kind of took over and went from there. Because she wasn’t exactly a person to argue with anybody. Not like I was.
DC: Were you asked to come back for Rachel’s?
MS: No, I wasn’t. By that time, I think everybody had kind of moved on. I think I was in New Zealand at the time. I’m not sure.
DC: I’ll backtrack to Freddy, just because we’ve been talking about that quite a bit. Two of the things that you brought up that you were clearly very passionate about were Mortal Kombat and Mantis, so do you have a preference on which one you’d like to cover first?
MS: Let’s do the Mortal Kombat, and then we’ll launch into Mantis.
DC: Nice. Okay.
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Thank for sitting down and chatting with us, Mick! Make sure to check back tomorrow for the second part of our epic interview with production Designer Mick Strawn.
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