PIRANHA
F L A S H B AC K
PIRANHA
FLASHBACK
CONSIDERED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG TO BE “THE BEST JAWS RIPOFF”, JOE DANTE’S ORIGINAL SCI-FI HORROR PIRANHA STANDS
OUT FROM THE COUNTLESS ARRAY OF NATURE-BITES-BACK
FLICKS THANKS TO ITS IN-YOUR-FACE AND UNAPOLOGETIC
ODE TO GENRE FILMMAKING. WE CHAT TO JOE DANTE ABOUT
DIRECTING A B-MOVIE CLASSIC…
WORDS OLIVER PFEIFFER
Just when audiences thought it was safe
to go back in the water, Piranha came
along to give them yet another reason to
stay away from the sea. Spurred on by the
success of Jaws, B-movie maestro Roger
Corman was keen to capitalise on the
fear of the deep phenomenon, which was
already being marred by a wave of spineless
cash-ins like Tentacles, Mako: The Jaws Of
Death and Barracuda. “[With Piranha] we
decided to do the exact opposite. Instead of
something giant, this was very tiny fish so that
we wouldn’t be accused of copying Jaws,” said
the exploitation master.
Japanese actress and producer Chako van
Leeuwen held the rights to Richard Robinson’s
original Piranha story, which had the hokey premise
of bathers drawn into piranha-infested waters by a
grizzly bear following a forest fire. What attracted
Corman’s interest, however, was a rewrite by budding
scribe John Sayles. The future Oscar-nominated
screenplay writer and indie filmmaker was able to
bring better plausibility to the premise by reworking
the story around the accidental release of scientifically
contained mutant predators into summer resort waters.
He also introduced a shrewdly satirical element that
distinguished itself from the relentless slew of creature
features that took themselves too seriously. Appealing
to Corman’s left-wing sensibilities was a political back
story that suggested the mutant piranhas were being
bred for Vietnamese warfare. Having cut his teeth editing trailers for Corman
movies, serving as the editor on Ron Howard’s
directorial debut Grand Theft Auto and co-directing
Corman cheapie Hollywood Boulevard, B-movie
graduate Joe Dante was an inspired choice to
helm Piranha. “We had all the things you’re not
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supposed to have in one movie – shooting underwater,
special effects, dogs and children,” says the filmmaker.
“You’re not supposed to do all those things at once, but
we didn’t know any better.”
Principle photography took place over a 20day period in and around Griffith Park in Texas,
eight days of which were allocated to underwater
shooting. Legendary science fiction filmmaker Jack
Arnold became an advantageous presence onset.
“His daughter was the casting director on the film,
and had been an actress before, so Jack was very
interested in the movie,” explains Dante regarding the
director behind Fifties classic Creature From The Black
Lagoon, which was a film Piranha aspired to. “Of
course, I was a huge fan, having been brought up on
his movies, and he had some advice about shooting
horror movies and filming underwater, all of which we
took on.”
The presence of another icon came with the hiring
of veteran actor Kevin McCarthy, famed for playing the
raving lead in the original 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion
Of The Body Snatchers. “I’d always been a big fan
of Kevin’s,” says Dante, who would subsequently
cast McCarthy for significant roles in The Howling, a
segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie and as one of
the main antagonists in Innerspace. “He was the first
method actor I’d ever worked with, and the first thing he
had to do was have this big fight with Bradford Dillman.
“WE HAD THE THINGS YOU’RE NOT MEANT
TO HAVE: SHOOTING UNDERWATER,
SPECIAL EFFECTS, DOGS, CHILDREN” JOE DANTE
Bradford Dillman and Heather
Menzies-Urich starred in Piranha.
Piranha represented Joe Dante’s attempt
to capitalise on the success of Jaws.
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PIRANHA
FLASHBACK
PIRANHA
Being low budget, we didn’t have stunt doubles, and he
took the role very seriously and almost killed him!”
Other familiar genre faces included Mario Bava
screen queen Barbara Steele (who had previously
featured in Corman’s classic Edgar Allan Poe
adaptation The Pit And The Pendulum ) and Corman
regular Dick Miller, who would equally become a
future Dante mainstay, and in Piranha played a corrupt
mayor caricature in an overt nod to Murray Hamilton’s
character in Jaws. With casting secured, the biggest challenge facing
production was dramatising the titular threat in a
convincing manner on such a tight budget. Though
piranhas had featured in a clutch of films before,
including 1962 Hammer Studios swashbuckler The
Pirates Of Blood River, this would be the first time the
carnivorous creatures took centre stage. “There was
famous footage of piranhas eating a cow underwater,
which was the textbook example of what a piranha
looked like in action, but we realised there was no
way we were going to use that on our budget,” reveals
Dante. “Ultimately, we come up with a concept of fish
puppets that could be rammed into a shot, which we
filmed at eight frames a second to make them look like
they were travelling really fast.” Fresh from their groundbreaking work on Star
Wars: A New Hope, future Academy award-winning
FX maestros Phil Tippett and Rob Bottin were employed
to work on the intricate creature design and special
make-up effects on Piranha. Subsequently, the superbly
makeshift trick of having rubber piranhas on rods with
trigger handles to operate their mouths was used for
the underwater attack scenes, including the particularly
tense struggle on a dismantling raft, where the rods
were inserted down the throats of the fish and cleverly
operated from above to hide the mechanisms. In
addition, the fish were fitted with steel teeth that could
easily tear through prosthetic limbs, while air blasters
were used underwater to produce the vigorous bloody
water-bubble effect during the attacks.
“We managed to get pretty convincing shots of
the piranhas eating people underwater,” observes
Dante. “What we couldn’t master was a group shot,
because we didn’t have the ability to make the piranhas
look like they were massing in an individual way – so
their relations to one another in the water were always
the same.”
Despite the largely successful low-budget
innovations, once principle photography had wrapped
and Dante had assembled all the filmed footage in
the editing room he became convinced that he had a
disaster on his hands. “I looked at it, and thought that it
was the worst movie that had ever been made,” admits
the director, who consequently lived in the editing suite,
editing around the clock in an attempt to ‘save the
movie’. “I was spending all my time trying to figure out
whether it was better we show the piranhas for four
frames or for eight frames? Was it better we speed them
up or better we do opticals? I couldn’t see the forest for
the trees!” But an even bigger problem was surfacing in
the form of the return of an infamous great white,
which threatened the entire release of Piranha.
“When Universal discovered that Roger Corman was
creating Piranha and that it would be released within the
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F L A S H B AC K
“IN THE REMAKE
THE PIRANHAS ARE
EATING PEOPLE’S
PENISES!” JOE DANTE
PIRANHA II:
THE SPAWNING
TITANIC DIRECTOR JAMES
CAMERON CUT HIS
DIRECTORIAL TEETH ON THIS
DECIDEDLY FISHY SEQUEL
Notably, Piranha’s ending is far
more bittersweet than that of Jaws.
Dick Turner is memorable as Buck Gardner – a
nod to Murray Hamilton’s Mayor Vaughn in Jaws.
same time frame as Jaws 2, they got very worried and
tried to get an injunction to keep the picture from being
released,” reveals Dante. “They had successfully done
this with another movie called Great White (aka The
Last Shark), which they managed to keep off the market
in America.”
Ironically, it was Steven Spielberg, the director of
the original summer blockbuster, who subsequently
reassured Universal that Piranha was a parody of giant
fish movies. “He told them it didn’t have anything to do
with Jaws, and they were told to lay off, so even though
I didn’t know him at the time, Spielberg was partially
reasonable for letting them have the movie.” And just like Jaws, all the blood, sweat and tears
paid off at the box office when Piranha became New
World Pictures’ most successful movie release, and an
even greater success for co-financer United Artists, who
released it in South America, where piranhas were a
known threat. “Luckily, it turned out fine, and was very
successful for Roger. It ended up being my last Roger
Corman movie,” acknowledges Dante. For the filmmaker, who would go on to direct
The Howling, two Gremlins films and Matinee, the
experience and economical lessons learned on Piranha would, like other graduates from the infamous
Roger Corman School of filmmaking, prove invaluable.
“They were pretty much the lessons you learn on any
Corman film: how you can maximise the amount of
screen time you’re shooting, how you can put down
a dolly track and shoot three scenes off it… tricks that
you use to save time when you don’t have any time,
then when you get on a real movie you find yourself still
using the same tricks because they work, and you find
yourself having time to do other things better.”
Commencing with a fearsome Jaws-inspired pre-title
opener where skinny-dipping teens are attacked in a
pool that obscures the horror lurking below, Piranha is
a superbly satirical shocker that doubles up as a loving
tribute to B-movie cinema. Particularly memorable
moments include a Ray Harryhausen-esque stopmotion creature homage in a laboratory, the mauling
of a swimming instructor who is dragged away into
oblivion by a school of piranhas, and an unexpectedly
climatic bloodbath on a group of kids at a Summer
school camp. “I think that was really surprising, as
nobody thought we’d actually have those kids eaten
by piranhas, but Corman insisted on as much gore as
possible!” reveals Dante. A fight scene involving Dillman and fellow
actor Kevin McCarthy nearly got out of hand.
For Dante, Piranha proved to be a
masterclass in shooting a low-budget film.
Three years later, the inevitable sequel surfaced in
the form of James Cameron’s infamously misguided
directorial debut Piranha 2: The Spawning (see box out).
But apart from a humourless Corman-produced madefor-TV remake in 1995 (which stole piranha footage from
Dante’s film wholesale), it would be several decades
before the flesh-eating fish would strike again in the
form of Alexandre Aja’s entertainingly playful 3D remake
starring Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future).
“He offered me a part, but it turned out I couldn’t do
it,” reveals Dante, who admits to not having seen the
film. “I saw the trailer, and understood exactly what they
were doing. It shows how times have changed, because
in our movie the big thing was that the piranhas were
eating people’s breasts, but in the [remake] the piranhas
are eating people’s penises!”
It’s ironic that James Cameron, one of today’s
most notoriously controlling filmmakers,
started his directing career having his debut
feature film taken away from him. Cameron
was a replacement director for Miller Drake,
the head of Roger Corman’s post-production. Drake had suggested an ill-received story
that resurrected Kevin McCarthy’s heavily
mutilated mad scientist from Dante’s original
film and had him work on an abandoned oil
rig where, fuelled by revenge, he develops
a breed of flying killer piranhas. Drake also
toyed with bringing back genre icon Barbara
Steele, who ended up having her head
smashed into a fish tank. Another Corman graduate, Cameron had
worked as a miniature model maker, and
was originally hired as the SFX supervisor
on the sequel before he replaced Drake as
director. He re-wrote the screenplay under a
pseudonym, which had events take place at
a Caribbean island resort where guests are
attacked by a new breed of flying piranhas.
However, production soon turned sour
when producer Ovidio G Assonitis clashed
with Cameron over the majority of his artistic
decisions, which culminated in the director
being effectively ‘fired’ after only a couple
of weeks on production, and Cameron was
barred from seeing his footage. Allegedly,
Cameron later broke into the editing room
to re-cut the film, and struck a deal with a
distributor to buy his re-cut version, which
received a limited region release on video. Notable for the casting of future Aliens actor
Lance Henriksen, the official Piranha II: The
Spawning release received abysmal reviews,
and was considered a contender for one of
the worst movies ever made. Even though
Cameron stressed that they contractually
couldn’t remove his name from the film, he
would sarcastically comment that it was the
‘best flying piranha film ever made!’ The Roger Corman-produced film
ultimately achieved impressive results.
The piranhas themselves required some
creative filming in order to be realised.
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