Mancini, Don (Seed of Chucky)
College boy does good. In so few words that’s how you can accurately sum up Seed of Chucky writer/director Don Mancini’s start in Hollywood. As you’ll read below, Mancini made his mark by introducing the horror world to a malevolent Good Guy doll named Chucky back in ’88. The rest is history. Since Child’s Play he has held ol’ Chuck’s hand through, now, five sequels. Devoted? You may say that. And you’d be hard pressed to find a talent in this genre who has stuck so closely to his creation. Freddy. Jason. They each became bastard children in their own right, passed from hand to hand away from their creators, molded by a sundry of outside influences. Chucky never suffered that misfortune. The little punk has always been shepherded by his father and now, in Seed, he faces fatherhood himself. Dread Central had the pleasure of speaking to Mancini via phone a week prior to the release of Rogue Pictures’ film.
Ryan Rotten: What did Chucky, or I should say Child’s Play mean to you back in ’88, and what does he mean to you now, five films later?
Don Mancini: When I wrote the original script [for Child’s Play], I was a junior at UCLA and I didn’t really have any expectations about it at all other than hoping that maybe it would get me an agent. I was very luck and hit the jackpot. With that script I ascended and went past so many of the important plateaus that you have to scale as a writer in Hollywood. I got the agent, sold the script, it was made into a movie and became a franchise. It was just the sort of thing one can never plan on. I didn’t have any expectations, initially, about it other than it would be a great writing sample for me to get an agent. And now Chucky has, for me, been a tool with which I was able to grow as a filmmaker over the years. I’ve made a consistent living as a screenwriter for almost twenty years now, but Chucky has allowed me – when he resurfaces every few years – to dip my toe into an ever-growing pond. I got to flex other muscles each time, learn about filmmaking, producing, second unit directing, post-production and now directing itself. So it’s been this great asset to me. Plus it’s like being, like yourself, a huge horror fan all my life – it’s very gratifying to me that this thing I’ve created when I was a student has become this cultural icon. I’m very proud of that. It’s funny because people in the so-called mainstream community often have a condescending attitude towards horror and I’ve had people say to me, “You’re doing another one of those movies, don’t you want to do anything else? Can’t you do anything else? Are you a one trick pony?” It’s like, “Fuck you.” [laughs] It’s a really good trick! I mean, it has allowed me to do other things, and will hopefully allow me to do more new things.
RR: Bride of Chucky comes out in ’98 – did you have a vague notion of what the plot for Seed would be about?
DM: Oh yeah, I had started putting together the story for Seed even before Bride of Chucky came out. In fact the movie opened really well and became a success so Universal put it into development immediately. The movie came out in October of ’98 and I was having meetings, pitching, doing the outline before the end of the year. I knew I wanted to continue in the horror/comedy vein that we had established with Bride…
RR: Something you thought the series obviously needed.
DM: Yeah, it was completely necessary. We had fully tapped the concept’s truly horrific potential with the first three movies. Many would argue that we had tapped it out before we finished. One of the things I say all the time is that any of these horror icons – Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, Pinhead, Leprechaun, whatever it is – you’re always in this quandary when you’re doing sequels because for a sequel, by it’s very nature, audiences are always demanding to see more. They want to see more of that character, but the more you bring that character center stage, the less frightening it becomes. It loses its mystery. So much of horror really depends on that kind of mystery which is one of the reasons the first Child’s Play is so effective as a straight forward horror movie. You don’t really see Chucky that much in that movie at all as compared to the new ones. The primary characters are the mother, the little boy and the cop, we don’t even show the doll alive until forty-five minutes into the film. That’s why it’s creepy, mysterious and oblique. And it’s a necessity for scaring people. But the more you bring these characters out, the more you see them up close, hear them talk, they become less frightening. And it’s a specifically difficult problem for Chucky because he’s a doll. It’s already absurd. With Child’s Play 2 and 3 certainly, in retrospect, I look at those movies and they feel like retreads to me of the first movie. Kind of repeating the concept of the first movie to some degree. But I was showing him more and people were responding positively to Chucky’s personality. With Bride of Chucky, we – meaning my producing partners David Kirschner, Corey Sienega and I – really just embraced the idea of swimming out to that wave. Acknowledging and embracing the absurdity of that concept, but at the same time taking full advantage of the opportunity that it gave us to explore Chucky. The idea was: let’s make him the main character, just literally turn it upside down, and we continue that even more with Seed of Chucky, you know, with the three dolls. They’re the main characters and even though the tone is completely different, this movie has more in common with Interview with the Vampire than it does The Grudge because the identification figures are the monsters, not the victims.
RR: For a writer how hard is it to inject some semblance of fright where your main characters are the bad guys?
DM: It’s tough, always, but there are human characters that are providing the context for this whole story to take place in. One of the things I’m always careful of is to have at least one character that grounds the movie and occupy the real world, so to speak. My prescription for both Bride and Seed was that there had to be at least one killing where, rather than being primarily really funny and something the audience experiences as an exultation along with Chucky, that you feel dread about it and sorry that the character is gone – just to remind the audience that the dolls are capable of doing horrible things that we don’t like. In Bride that character was the gay friend, in this movie it’s this character named Joan played by Hannah Spearritt who plays Jennifer Tilly’s assistant. And, you know, I try my best in individual set pieces to cook up suspense and do the things you do in a horror movie where you try to create misdirection, subvert expectation, shock the audience. You know, make them think the threat is coming from over here but it happens from over there. I do attempt to do that, but it’s tricky.
RR: It’s tougher for you now because you’re in the director’s chair now. Had this opportunity, throughout the franchise, come to you before? Did you ever have a chance to direct installment two or three?
DM: I had, over the years, had a couple of development deals on scripts that I had written and sold to other studios. There was one project called Miss Malicious that was set up over at Sony that I was supposed to direct. Like so many things in Hollywood, it didn’t pan out. We went through the development process, but it gets watered down. These things in Hollywood – they need momentum to move forward and unfortunately through the development process most projects lose momentum. And people in Hollywood are always looking for the next new thing. So that was one example. I’ve had directing aspirations from the beginning. I wanted to direct Bride of Chucky – the studio felt I wasn’t ready. David Kirschner, who has produced all of these films and been a mentor for me in allowing me to be around and be a presence on the set, he said, “Okay, they won’t let you direct this one, but we’ll make you a producer on this and we’ll prep you for the next one.” In fact, the situation transpired in a way he didn’t expect because Ronny Yu, because of immigration problems that he had, when we wrapped principal photography on Bride he had to go home to Sydney and never came back. I inherited the movie from that point on – I did several days worth of re-shooting, I ran the entire post-production process, editing, sound, spotting the film with the composer, all of that. So that really, more than anything else, aided me in showing the studio that I was ready to do it.
RR: And to clarify some of the things that Ronny Yu has said over the years about passing on an offer to direct Seed…
DM: Yu had never seen the Seed script. He’s full of shit. Even if you don’t want to take my word for it, talk to David and Cory, he never saw the script and it was never an issue. Ronny, who is really a nice guy and did a really good job on Bride – it’s also in his commentary on the Bride DVD – takes credit for casting Jennifer Tilly when he didn’t even know who she was!
RR: Talk a bit about where the Chucky/Glen relationship stems from in Seed and why you wanted to explore that.
DM: It was just that with Bride of Chucky, introducing Tiffany into the mix it allowed us to explore Chucky as a more fully-rounded character. And, it just seemed like a natural progression, to take it from where the movie ended and this baby is born, to carry it on. With the introduction of Glen we now see another side of Chucky’s character. I thought it would be fun to do a parody of domestic dramas with the dolls. With Bride of Chucky we parodied romantic comedies. I structured that whole script like a romantic comedy that goes through all of the stages of a relationship. And with this one, it’s the same sort’ve thing. I’ve structured it like Ordinary People or Kramer vs. Kramer. I wanted it to be very character-driven and dialogue-driven and the scenes you see in that genre with the family members screaming at each other and stalking around the room, but doing it with dolls is hilarious and weird. With the character of Glen I think, as a writer, you always want to subvert expectation. I think the initial expectation when you think a movie is coming about the child of Chucky, the initial expectation is that he would be another killer doll. I just thought that was not interesting. We already have two killer dolls in the story, much more interesting to have the character be Chucky’s polar opposite and to be sweet and innocent and have nothing to do with violence. That’s conflict right there. And so it provides you with drama, story and a direction and it also provides you the opportunity to do this hilarious yet kind of valid exploration of the family dynamic. It’s extreme but it does mirror any kind of conflict that happens between a parent and child and we can all identify with that.
RR: And in being so extreme Universal must’ve have first looked at the script and went freaked.
DM: Universal did, yeah, that’s one of the reasons it didn’t move forward. We were also stymied by Columbine and that just put the brakes on a lot of projects in Hollywood, but particularly at Universal. They became skittish about this stuff but, yeah, when I turned in my script Columbine had already happened, but there was already this wary atmosphere about it. But they didn’t really get it. They thought it was too comedic, too gay and they thought it was just too weird. But my feeling was that I didn’t want to repeat myself. Literally, one of the things they said was that Chucky’s kid should be another killer. And at one point they even proposed doing the movie without Chucky. That it would be about this new character and not about Chucky. They really just sort’ve wanted to go back and redo the first Child’s Play…
RR: But just with the new kid.
DM: Right, and it’s just not something I wanted to do. But the way things worked out I was really lucky because it did sit dormant for five years but on the other hand Focus Features – which is a division of Universal and is it’s own autonimous entity headed by this guy David Linde who headed Good Machine and released Bride of Chucky overseas. He really was a fan of the series, read the script and really liked it. Last year when horror started to surge again with Freddy vs. Jason, Cabin Fever and whatnot – and we always knew this was going to happen, particularly with Freddy vs. Jason – we said, “If that movie finally gets made and does well, they’ll want to do another Chucky movie.” Sure enough, on the Monday after Freddy vs. Jason came out we got a phone call. But we were really lucky that David Linde really did like the script and embraced how weird it was. I think he saw that it was original and, except for a few sequences that we had to cut for schedule and time, we got to make that script.
RR: Finally, to touch on the music for a moment here, you snagged Pino Donaggio to do the score – which I thought was cool because I’m a big fan of his work on The Howling.
DM: Yeah, in fact I temped a couple of scenes in Seed to music from The Howling. It was absolutely a dream come true [working with Pino] and was literally one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. Sometimes you get to meet your heroes from childhood and it could be disappointing for whatever reason, and Pino turned out to be the greatest guy. He was so into the movie, he did this amazing job and we recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra – he had never worked with them before so that was utterly thrilling to him. It’s an amazing score. Everyone who has seen Seed up to this point has remarked about how amazing Pino’s work is. I’m a huge Brian DePalma fan and there are a few scenes in the movie that parody Brian DePalma films. And there are a couple of sequences where I asked Pino to parody his own music. I mean, very inside jokes but for people like yourself who are fans, you’ll get it. There’s this whole sequence with John Waters that’s a parody of Body Double as he lurks outside Jennifer Tilly’s house trying to take pictures of her in compromising positions. Pino’s music is a parody of that music from Body Double, but it’s tweaked.
RR: Who’s going to release the score?
DM: Varese Sarabande. It’ll come out in conjunction with the DVD release. In December I’m going to the Sitges Film Festival in Spain because the movie showing there, but from there I’m going to Venice where Pino lives and will do an on camera interview with him about the score. One of the features I hope we can get on the DVD is, with any movie when you do the sound mix you end up losing a few music cues for whatever reason. When I did this movie I selfishly had Pino do wall-to-wall music for this entire movie, and he obliged, but there are three or four cues I ended up not using. What I would like to do on the DVD is be able to access the unused music and compare how the scene plays with the music and without. One of the sequences in question is this scene where Chucky attacks Jennifer Tilly and she’s flailing about, but it was always intended to be largely comical. In fact it was funny without the music because without it it seemed somehow banal in a way, but in a really funny way. With the music it felt like a typical horror movie moment but with having Jennifer in her Hollywood mansion, attacked by this doll and running around her bedroom, without the music, was just…funny. [laughs]
Special thanks to Don, Denise and everyone at Rogue Pictures for their cooperation. All photos copyright 2004, Rogue Pictures.
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