A Conversation with Rob Zombie – HuffPost 5.23.11

Mike Ragogna: Hey, Rob, how are you?

Rob Zombie: I’m good. How are you doing?

MR: I’m pretty good. What have you been up to lately?

RZ: Well, I’ve been up to a lot of things. Last week, I finished shooting a special for Comedy Central, starring my friend Tom Papa. It’s his first stand-up comedy special that he’s doing live in New York. So, I just wrapped that up last week, and a couple of weeks before that, I was in Vancouver to direct a commercial for, of all things, Woolite. Before that, I had just gotten back from Australia, where I was doing some touring with Iron Maiden–yeah, I’m busy.

MR: You have drummer Ginger Fish with you?

RZ: Yes. Ginger has not actually toured or played with us yet. He did a couple of warm-up shows a couple of months ago, right before we left for Europe, but our other drummer, Joey Jordison, who was on load from Slipknot, was our drummer at the time. The dates got crossed and Ginger was just filling in, but since that time–I don’t know if it’s just because Ginger had so much fun with us when we were on tour–he quit Marilyn Manson, and was free. Our other drummer, Joey, had to go back to Slipknot, so–1,2,3.

MR: You have this major European tour coming up, right?

RZ: Yeah, it starts June 1st in Germany.

MR: How long is that tour going to last?

RZ: It’s not that long, only about five weeks or so.

MR: You tour pretty often, but you’re also way busy. How do you fit in all–the recording, touring, film making, and commercial shooting?

RZ: Well, it’s not easy. What’s happening right now is that as soon as we’re done touring, I’ll start my next film. Since there is a long lead time, I’ve been working with the effects departments and stuff between my tours, so they’re sort of prepping. Then, I’ll go off and tour, and then I’ll come back from a tour, do a little more prep and location scouting, then finish my tour and start full-blown pre-production on the movie. That will take me through the rest of the year. Once that is wrapped up, I’ll probably go right into making a record, and by next summer, I’ll probably be right back out on tour. As soon as one thing ends, I just start in on the next thing.

MR: The movie you were talking about is The Lords Of Salem?

RZ: Correct.

MR: Can you give us any hints or clues about it?

RZ: Sure. That will be something that I will probably start towards the end of August. It’s a horror movie, but it’s a very different kind of horror movie than the films I’ve done in the past. Everything I’ve done in the past has been a very physically violent type of film, and this is more of a dark, psychological, sort of Roman Polanski-style film. It’s very different for me, so I’m very excited about it. It’s more of a ghost story based around the mythology of the Salem witch trials.

MR: When you direct, do you take your script and edit it to what you think you need in the film as you go along?

RZ: Not really because I’ve written all the scripts I’ve ever directed, so I guess I’m kind of doing that as I’m writing. I’ve never directed anything from someone else’s material.

MR: Is that something you see yourself doing?

RZ: I would. There have been very few times that a script has come to me and I was like, “Yes, that’s something that I want to do,” but for whatever reason, it didn’t work out. Most of the time, I get scripts that I’m just not interested in or I don’t see the point of doing. A lot of times in Hollywood, they hire a certain director, but then put them with material that doesn’t really showcase what is great about the director. I’m not opposed to it–I just haven’t found the right project, I guess.

MR: I imagine you’re one of those people that studios would have gone to over and over again because of the success of your films and also because of your visual style.

RZ: I’ve had a lot of meetings and a lot of dealings with people on different things, but maybe because all of my movies are written by me, they just assume that’s the way it is.

MR: You also have the “Hell On Earth” tour, that’s going to be hitting North America with Slayer, right?

RZ: Correct, yeah.

MR: Might you record that tour for a future live album?

RZ: Probably not. We put out a live record not that long ago, and I don’t think we would do another one until we have at least another album’s worth of new material. For some reason, over the years, I’ve never been that big on recording things. I should have been, but we never made a live DVD either.

MR: Now, you also directed that commercial for Woolite. How did that come about?

RZ: Just one of those things. I was in Australia, on tour, and the ad agency called my manager saying that they had this commercial they were pitching to Woolite and they were really interested to see if I would be the director for the commercial. It wasn’t something that I had ever thought about or searched out, it was just something that came to me. I took a look at the material and thought it would be cool. I like the idea of doing different projects, like when I did the episode of CSI. You always want to get these different types of things under your belt for the experience, and I had never done a TV commercial, so I figured why not start now?

MR: What did you do with it?

RZ: Well, it was a very weird commercial to begin with. They wanted a commercial that seemed as if it was a horror movie trailer. Their plan was to play it in theaters also, so the beginning of the commercial sounds like a horror movie with this sort of mysterious guy in the woods and it seems like he’s dragging a dead body around. You find out he’s dragging laundry, and he’s torturing clothes. Then, this whole thing comes in about, “Don’t let detergents torture your clothes.” At the end of the spot, there are these nice scenes of women shopping, doing yoga, and stuff. I actually had more fun doing the nice scenes because it was something really different and something I found interesting. The beginning part of the commercial is not that odd–it’s very odd for Woolite, but it’s not odd for me. I wanted people to see the back half of the commercial and think, “Oh my God. I wouldn’t think that he could or would do that stuff.”

MR: Let’s discuss your friend’s comedy special, Tom Papa in New York City. It seems like a lot of comedy specials are pretty generic or formulaic, so how did you add Rob Zombie-ness to it?

RZ: That was Tom’s thing too. Tom said he wanted to make a comedy special that looks how he remembered Richard Prior on Sunset Strip looking or an old Steve Martin concert. You can only do so much–it is a concert, and it’s about Tom’s performance. We were watching stuff and went, “Well, the way they shoot comedy specials now, they’re so bright and so clean. They overlight the audience, they overlight everything, there is no mystery.” We wanted it to look like the old days–the audience was dark, you could see them a little bit, it was smoky because everybody was still smoking, and he’s in a spotlight beam–a big concert, vintage feel. We kind of went backwards in our approach to it and it turned out great. It looked like this big concert and it feels very old school. Even within that, though, we had these wraparound bits we did of Tom walking to the stage, passing these other vaudevillian performers–we wanted to make it feel like we shot it in the ’60s or something. It was sort of a Broadway Danny Rose approach to the beginning part.

MR: Who are some of your favorite directors out there?

RZ: There are so many genius directors…I go through phases. You kind of get caught up on people. I love Werner Herzog, who is one of my favorite directors because the things he’s done are so insanely out there. I love Stanley Kubrick because I think that there is nobody who is more meticulous in creating films. I love John Huston, I love Akira Kurosawa, I love Russ Meyer. I don’t know–Fellini, Spielberg, Scorsese. I love so many different directors.

MR: Do you have a favorite film?

RZ: My favorite film is A Clockwork Orange.

MR: Beautiful. Rob, I have a radio broadcast journalist student in the room with me and he slipped me a question–feel free to answer it or not–he asks, “What was your childhood like?”

RZ: Pretty wide open question. My childhood was not unlike my movies, in a certain sense. I usually draw on the way I remember things as a kid. I had a pretty crazy family. All my relatives were pretty nuts, and the line of work that everybody was in when I was a kid in the ’70s–I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen that movie, Carny, with Gary Busey, but that was essentially my childhood. My family worked on these traveling carnivals for a living. My parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles…they were all the people that ran the concession stands, rides, the gambling tents, and everything. So, that was the childhood that I remember in the ’70s. As I got older, we didn’t do it anymore, but as a kid, that’s where we were spending all of our time. As a kid, I loved that movie because that is just what it was like.

MR: Terrific movie. The freakish moments of it aren’t scary, just uncomfortable, you know?

RZ: That’s what I like about it. That’s just a weird snapshot of that time period. So, that’s how I remember growing up, going on the ferris wheel a million times, or the haunted house because your family is who runs everything. Then, when I was in fourth grade, I had to work there, and stuff. You know, it was crazy.

MR: Rob, what advice do you have for new artists?

RZ: That depends what field they are entering.

MR: Well, how about a field like what you’re doing?

RZ: Well, my only advice to anybody is don’t quit, and f**k everybody else. Every single person will tell you you’re terrible, that what you want to do is a bad idea, that it will never work, and that it will never happen, so why even bother? That’s because everyone’s biggest fear is that you will become a success, and they will try everything within their power to try to dissuade you from doing it. I think, for the most part, all the people I know who are successful are the ones who just sort of blocked that out and did it anyway. I know a lot of people who are super talented, but just never did anything with their lives because for whatever reason they just didn’t do it. You know these musicians or artists, and they work in a show store. You just go, “Well, what happened?” You just have to have a bizarre work ethic to push forward.

MR: One more question, what’s different in how you see Rob Zombie now and the Rob Zombie of White Zombie?

RZ: I don’t know if there is a major difference. The more experience you have with things, the more relaxed you get with them because you’ve done it. When you’re going through things, everything seems like the end of the world when you’re going through your first video, tour, or other thing. You tend to relax and trust your instincts more as you get older because you’ve done it many times. Say you’re shooting a movie. Someone who is inexperienced might be like, “Oh my God. I need to do another take, and another take, and another take,” because they’re so unsure of themselves. But once you’ve done it a few times, you get that feeling in your gut and you know. So, you go, “We got it. We’re moving on.” It’s just sort of the basic feeling of that, you know?

MR: Beautiful. Rob, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

RZ: No problem.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney