The phrase “not for the squeamish” may well have been invented for John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Although you’ll find it in the “horror” film section of the video store, it’s far more than a simple horror film. The film is a starkly realistic, almost documentary-style fictionalized look at a few days in the life of confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.
McNaughton, who went on to direct in a number of different genres including the comic-drama Mad Dog and Glory starring Robert De Niro, Bill Murray, and Uma Thurman, drew on his roots producing documentaries to construct the film. But as he admits, it was co-writer Richard Fire’s keen understanding and use of the basics of dramatic construction that helped to make Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer the milestone that it has become.
What was going on in your life and career before Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer came along?
I had a long-standing dream of wanting to make a feature film, but I'd had to put that on hold because, being that I lived in Chicago and was not connected in any way to the mainstream industry, I really didn't know how I was ever going to achieve that dream.
I was working on these small documentary projects that were being distributed by a company in the South suburbs of Chicago, called MPI. I had worked in the commercial field in Chicago, but the first time I was ever on a feature film set I was the director.
Where did the idea for the story come from?
I had done this series of documentaries for MPI, called Dealers in Death, which were about American gangsters, primarily from the Prohibition era. We had scoured the archives for a lot of public domain photographs and footage, got Broderick Crawford to narrate it for us and made a little money on that project.
I was going to produce and direct another documentary piece, based on professional wrestling, because I'd found someone who had a collection of wrestling footage from the 1950s and 1960s with Bobo Brazil and Killer Kowalski and Dick the Bruiser and Andre the Giant, from the period of wrestling before the WWF or the WWE.
MPI was owned by two brothers, Waleed and Malik Ali. I went out to meet Waleed to talk about doing these wrestling documentaries. When I got to their offices Waleed informed me that he had contacted the person who had the footage for sale. The person with the footage had quoted a price and when the Ali brothers approached him, saying, "Okay, we'll negotiate on that price," the guy realized that the brothers had money so he increased his price. The Ali brothers were not to be dealt with in that manner, so Waleed informed me, "Listen, we're not going to do business with this guy. He's a crook."
Early on in the video business -- and the brothers got in at the beginning -- the major studios weren't interested in video rights, because there just wasn't enough money involved. So they were selling off the rights to their films. A couple of companies, like Vestron and Pyramid, became wealthy for a short period of time, until the studios saw the potential in the video market and started creating their own video divisions. And then those companies went out of business.
But in the early days of video you could buy the video rights quite cheaply for low-budget horror films and since a lot of "B" horror titles hadn't been seen widely, they were very successful on video. A "B" schlock horror film that people may not have been interested in going to the theater to see, they were more than happy to rent because they're a lot of fun.
So what was happening at this time was that those titles were becoming so popular that the rights acquisitions were becoming more and more expensive. And so Waleed had determined that it would make sense for them to fund a horror film and thereby own all rights in perpetuity, rather than just buying the video rights for a limited period of time. So he proposed to me that we should join forces and make a horror film.
I went in thinking I was going to be doing these documentaries and instead, it was the day that my dream came true, completely unexpectedly. I was kind of in shock.
Down the hall was the office of an old friend of mine who I had grown up with, Gus Kavooras. Gus was always a collector of the strange and the arcane and the weird. I stopped in to see him and I was kind of in shock. I said, "Gus, Waleed just offered me $100,000 to make a horror movie. I have no idea what my subject will be." And he said, "Here, look at this."
He took a videocassette off the shelf and popped it in the machine. It was a segment from the news magazine show, 20/20, and the segment was on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole, who were serial killers. The term "serial killer" was coined in 1983 by the FBI. In 1986 I had never heard the term before and this was something new to me, the idea that there were these random murderers going around.
Most murders are committed by people previously acquainted to the victim. Husband kill wives, wives kill husbands, husbands kill wives' lovers, wives kill husbands' lovers. Most murderers are committed by people who are known by the victim. But this was a new trend in murder where there were these individuals who were just randomly murdering strangers. It was, indeed, very horrifying. There were some interviews with Henry and a lot of photographs. He was really a creepy character. And so that became the germ for the story.
Was the budget an issue while you developed the story?
The budget was written in stone. That was the mandate from Waleed, "Make me a horror film for $100,000." So the budget was always a consideration.
How did you and co-writer Richard Fire work together?
I put together a set of 3x5 index cards delineating a scene structure, but I was not an experienced dramatist, screenwriter or otherwise. But I had the money, I had the mandate to make the picture, and we had our subject: the true story of Henry Lee Lucas.
I had a friend, Steve Jones, and he was working as a director of animated commercials in Chicago, primarily doing Captain Crunch commercials. He was very well connected into the production community in Chicago and I was not. So I arranged with Steve to be the producer and I said to him, "I need a co-writer."
There was a theater company in Chicago called The Organic Theater Company. The Organic was a really wild bunch of characters who had quite a bit of success in Chicago and were a really interesting theater company. One of the company members was Richard Fire, another was Tom Towles, who would play Otis. Other members of the company were Dennis Franz, Dennis Farina and Joe Mantegna. They had worked with David Mamet, they had produced Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
They did a play called Warp that was kind of an outer space fantasy and Steve Jones had done a bunch of video projection for them and knew the group. Steve recommended Richard Fire. Richard and I met and talked about the project and I hired Richard.
What was your working process with Richard?
I would go every day to Richard's apartment and we would sit and he would type. We would knock ideas back and forth and then when we came to what we thought was something worthwhile, he would type it out.
What's so interesting about the script is that -- if you take out the violence -- it's a very traditional, well-structured story. We meet Henry, he meets his friend's sister and a romance starts and then there's a fight and then he and the sister leave together. It's almost like a classic 1950's Paddy Chayefsky television play.
I brought the exploitation elements to it and Richard brought traditional dramatic skills to it. We made a very good team, because had it been left to me it probably would have been tilted more toward pure exploitation. Whereas Richard humanized it. Paddy Chayefsky is a good example. On the DVD, Richard talks about the Aristotelian unity of time, place and action from classic dramatic writing. I think his presence certainly elevated the script.
Did you set out to make such a controversial movie?
I intended to make something very shocking. I remember, in my youth, pictures that sort of crossed the line. Back in those days there would be these incredibly lurid radio advertisements that if you listened to rock music on the radio a lot -- like most kids in my generation did -- they had these incredibly lurid campaigns for pictures like Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those pictures were sort of watersheds, alongside pictures like The Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch was incredibly shocking; up until then in a Western, if somebody got shot they fell down. There was no squib work, there was no spouting blood.
So our thought was, "Okay, we've got $100,000 and a chance to do a film and it's going to have to be a horror film, so let's make a horror film that is going to horrify." Richard Fire and I set ourselves a goal, and it was if we're charged with making a horror film, then a) Let's redefine the genre, and b) Let’s totally horrify the audience.
Like many things, the words "horror film" are like "liberal and conservative." The original meanings of the words have gotten lost. One would think that conservatives would be interested in conserving the environment, because the word comes from conservation. When you think of "horror film" now, it's a set of conventions and we meant to defy those conventions. The genre often includes monsters, creatures from outer space, ghosts, the supernatural or something beyond reality. But we didn't have a budget for any of that, so we set ourselves the goal of, "How can we most completely horrify an audience without using the traditional conventions?"
Was there any downside to ignoring the traditional conventions of the genre?
Well, when we did the home invasion scene, it was a pretty creepy feeling after finishing that scene. A lot of the stuff -- fake blood and all that stuff -- there's a certain fun factor to doing it on the set. It's kind of silly, it's fake blood and rubber heads and all that kind of thing. But when we did that scene of the slaughter of the family it left a really strange atmosphere in the room. We did two takes. It was pretty horrific stuff and we didn't know how an audience was going to react to this.
Was the use of videotape in the home invasion scene an aesthetic choice or an economic choice?
Absolutely an aesthetic choice. The video image had an immediacy that the film image did not have, so when we had them tape that home invasion we very specifically chose to use video because it does have that immediacy and that reality. It lacks that distancing and softening that film gives. Also, having grown up watching the Vietnam war on television, even though those were 16mm film cameras, there was a quality to that hand-held footage that made it more real and more shocking.
Also I had read the book Red Dragon. In Henry Lee Lucas' case, they did not photograph or videotape their crimes. But in Red Dragon, Francis Dolarhyde worked in a film processing facility and he would go out and kill these people, photograph them, then come back and process the film. That book was a couple years old and by that time you could buy a decent home video camera, you didn't need to go through a lab.
The use and intensity of violence, from the static images that open the movie to the crimes we ultimately see Henry and Otis commit, seems very planned and measured. Was that the case?
With violence and action, you have to keep topping yourself. If you go backwards, the audience is going to be disengaged. So the violence was doled out and increased as the story went along.
How did you come up with the idea of opening the film on a series of tableaux of Henry’s recent crimes?
Richard and I were sitting in his apartment and we had various materials -- this was before the Internet -- and we were quite limited as to what we could come up with compared to today. But we did have that 20/20 documentary and it did have images. One of the famous images was of a young woman who was allegedly murdered by Henry. She was a Jane Doe who was never identified. She was left in a culvert somewhere and she was nude but for a pair of orange socks. And she was always referred to as Orange Socks because there was no other way to identify her.
We were thinking, "What's our opening?" And we happened to be watching the 20/20 show and there was that photograph of Orange Socks, and Richard just went, "That's our opening."
That was indeed our opening, although we didn't have orange socks, we used pink socks. Once we established that, we decided to do a series of them.
The audience can only take so much. You'll notice that one of the bloodless ways we had them kill people was to snap their necks, which is how he kills the woman and the young boy in the home invasion. There's no overt gore.
We were borrowing from the exploitation genre but to me the movie is a character study about people who did extremely horrific things. And there's the horror. Again, not from monsters from outer space.
In the case of stabbing Otis, he's such a heinous character that he deserves it. When we stabbed him in the eye with that rat-tail comb, you can't believe how much laughter there was on the set with that silly looking head and the blood. It was kind of fun.
Each individual can create in their imagination something more horrific than the graphic expression you may be able to come up with, especially on that kind of budget. A great way to put across scenes of great mayhem is to lead the audience up, step by step, so they can see what's about to happen. It's very clear that somebody's about to get killed. If you lead the audience, shot by shot and step by step up to the deed and make it very clear what's about to happen and then give them a couple frames and then cut away to some other thing, but continue it with the graphic sound, I think it can be much more horrific. Each individual will be left to complete the horror in their own mind, from their own library of personal horror.
Again I have to credit Richard Fire for insisting that we make a serious drama rather than just a piece of pure exploitation.
The visuals are very clever, like the use of the guitar case to signal that Henry has killed the hitchhiker. Or Otis' sister's suitcase, which is used for comic effect when we first see it and then has a far grimmer use at the end of the film.
We had a fair amount of time to work on that script, which you don't often get. In Hollywood they say, "Okay, the money's here, you've got this actor, let's go!" I just shot a segment for Masters of Horrorand normally they give you a seven-day prep, but since one of my days was Canadian Thanksgiving, I got a six-day prep. It's hard to iron out the details in that amount of time.
Once you lay out your story and your script, then you start to see these connections that can be made to really strengthen that through-line, so everything connects in some way or another. If you have time, you can work on those details. If you don't, you just shoot the script and hope for the best.
Did you write with any specific actors in mind?
No. We had the Chicago theater community to draw from, which is pretty rich. A lot of young actors come to Chicago to learn their chops because there's a lot of Equity theater where you can actually make a living working in theater. Unlike Los Angeles, where most of it is non-Equity so you don't really get paid.
Chicago's a cheaper place to live, so a young actor can make their way with perhaps a bartending job or waitress job, and when they're working in theater they actually make enough money to pay their rent in the Bohemian neighborhoods of Chicago.
What was the refinement process on the script before you shot it?
The refinement process was mostly with the actors. There weren't that many people in my circle who had wide knowledge of production. Most of the experience in actual film production in Chicago was in commercials. Occasionally a movie came to town, but that was not the bread and butter of Chicago, it was commercial production. At the time Chicago was the number two market, after New York, for commercial production.
Our actors came out of theater, so the script refinement was done with the actors in rehearsal. Tom Towles came from the Organic Theater, where Richard Fire was a member and they'd known each other forever. And Tracy Arnold also came from the Organic, although Tracy was more of a new arrival, she had only been with the company for a year or two. Michael Rooker was just a lucky find.
How did you use the rehearsal process?
I've worked this way almost ever since, when I'm fortunate enough to get rehearsals. If I can get two weeks or at least ten days with them, I'll work with the actors myself for the first half of the rehearsal period. And then once we get the shape of the thing I've almost always brought the writer in, because the actors will want to make changes, like, "My character wouldn't use this word," "My character wouldn't say it this way," "I can't get my mouth around this phrase, it doesn't feel right to me."
Once the actors take on those characters, they know them in deeper way often than the creators do. But if you just open the door and say, "Sure, go ahead, change it," you're going to have a disaster on your hands because then everything will start to change. But if you bring the writer in and if the actor tells the writer the line they'd like to change and their reasoning, then if you allow the writer to tailor the line, you still have the writer's voice but you also have the actor's notes. I think when you work that way you get roles that are like custom-tailored clothing. They're tailored to the particular actor and their personality and their needs and their interpretation.
On the first day of rehearsal, Richard told the actors, "Okay, I want you to go home and write a character bio, all the backstory, all the family history." Since Tracy and Tom were both part of the Organic Theater this was common to them, but to Michael it was sort of an affront. So Michael actually went home and, truth be told, while he was sitting on the toilet he dictated his backstory into a little portable tape recorder.
They each came back to rehearsals with these backstories and a certain amount of that information then got worked into the script for each character. It was a lesson to me that I carry because it was invaluable.
How have you used this technique since then?
Well, when you're working with Bob DeNiro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman you don't necessarily send them home to write character bios. But you work with them in readings and discussions for four or five days. Then once you've really gotten the shape and everybody's in the same movie, then you bring the writer in and you use the writer to explain to them why things are the way they are. If they want dialogue changes, then you let the writer do it for them so that a voice is maintained rather than just throwing the doors open and letting everybody re-write your dialogue. You'll regret it if you do that.
Did you make any choices in the writing that you knew would save you money in shooting?
Well, a major one was setting it in Chicago. So far as anyone really knew, Henry Lee Lucas had never been near the city of Chicago. But there was no way we were going to go out on the road with a crew and house them and feed them.
What's the best advice you've ever received about screenwriting?
Probably, strangely enough, it was in Syd Fields' book. I had read other books on screenwriting and filmmaking that tended to take a more academic, ivory tower appraoch to the artistic principles involved. Syd Fields' book was just the nuts and bolts.
"Know your ending" was one thing I got out of that book. I live back and forth between Chicago and Los Angeles and I love road trips. When I come out to do a project I'll drive out and when the project is over I've drive home. It's a three-day drive and I think a lot and clear my head. It's like a chapter in my life is beginning and a chapter is ending. But I always know my destination. I know where I'm going, so I can plan my route. It's the same thing with a script. You need to know where the story's going.
One of the principles that he laid out in his second book was the midpoint. The dramatic arc goes up and it comes down. It starts at the beginning, goes up to a peak, comes down to the ending. And the midpoint is the peak.
But most movies get in trouble in the middle. Establishing a midpoint for me was like knowing that I was going to drive from Los Angeles to Chicago, but I'm going to stop in Omaha. That was really an incredibly helpful idea, because after you leave the first act you're driving to the midpoint. You're going up. Now when I'm working on a script, once I've read it, I'll go to the last page and take the page number – let's say it's 120 pages – and I'll go look at what happened on page 60. I want to see if there's a key event that sort of divides the story in half.
In good screenplays, it may not be exactly on page 60. It may be between 58 and 63. But almost always in a good story you'll go back and find a key event that takes place that divides the story in half.
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Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
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George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
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Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
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Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
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