All language subtitles for Audio Recollections with Paul Morrissey

- This film I made in 1973,
called Flesh for Frankenstein,

and these stills are done by Paolo Batini,

who was hired to do the
stills for the picture.

He did a great job. Film opens
with the credits over two

children of Baron and
Baroness Frankenstein,

who hang out on the scene on
the distance and just observe.

The film is

a comedy, of course,

but all my films are comedies.

The first day of filming there,

I was at this castle outside of Rome,

which was the first
shots done in the film.

First day of filming, this
young shepherd was hired just to

play his bag pipes,

and he doesn't quite appear in
the film except for a second

or so, but he got a good
still photograph out of it.

Monique arrives at the ancestral
castle with her children

to meet her husband, of
course, Baron Frankenstein,

who just happens to be also her brother.

He's there with his assistant, Otto.

She talks on and on about
problems of raising children

and finding good schools for them,

but Baron Frankenstein has other things to

do and other places to go.

She has nice little
rooms for her children.

And this is the main characters,

Joe Dallesandro and Srdjan Zelenovic,

out in the fields.

All this done just outside
of the Cinecitta studios,

just a few feet outside
the actual sound stages.

They have a little woods and

they're used over and over again.

Nothing could be easier.

It was a wonderful place to work in Rome.

Everybody who worked on the film was so

efficient,

so hard-working,

you didn't hear them express
any enthusiasm because it was

just a job for them.

One more job,

but without getting involved,

not understanding the English language,

not even knowing what the film was about,

they did such wonderful

sets and lighting for the sets, and

any kind of work on the
costumes and everything.

All this is given to you by
Italian craftsman and the

Italian film industry,

which I've always thought was
the great film industry from

the '60's on,

when, as I said somewhere before,

the Hollywood studios closed

up shop basically,

and all the great films came
from Italy in the sixties,

seventies.

It was a period that I paid
close attention to, because I

was eager to see these films
from Italy when had the chance

and in some unconscious way,
they must've influenced me,

but I'm not very precise
about how that happened.

The story is absurd.

The Baron has a laboratory
where he keeps dead bodies,

who he bring brings to life,
and he has these crazy ideas

breeding two perfect specimens.

And...

it was important to me

to cast people who had

this great appearance,

the kind of appearance that
intelligent scientists might

want if he wanted to create a master race.

Well-bred

people

have a good appearance.

And in Udo's case, he wanted
to get some quick action

in the breeding department.

So, he later turns up at a

bordello, looking for people who

liked a lot of sexual activity,

which, I guess in his mind,
would be good for breeding.

It's hard to really
analyze or discuss films,

looking at the still photographs.

They have a meaning that is
obvious when you see the film,

but I believe that comedies are

a wonderful way of telling

stories about modern life.

Maybe the only way to really
connect to different subjects

that people don't want
to really deal with.

They avoid in more serious films,

but it can be dealt with in a
roundabout way in comedies and

fantasy films. Which is
basically what Flesh for

Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula are.

Oh, this is me behind the camera,

just looking at how it
looks to see Monique,

and I did this very rarely
because I had just great

trust in the

cameraman .

I would hardly ever look through the lens,

but sometimes at the
beginning of the shoot,

there was nothing else to do,

so I took a peek.

Talking with Monique and Udo in this

beautiful room with Gustav
Klimt-type designs on the wall.

I requested the art director,

Mr. Enrico Job,

to give me a kind of secessionist
look and the style of the

1910s and

the Stuck Villa,

a French duke in Munich, was the basic

theme of the look of

the interior of some of the rooms.

This is Srdjan Zelenovic,

who goes with Joe to visit the bordello,

but his interests lie elsewhere

and he just seems to watch.

And he appears in the film

very bored with everything.

The film is

really

very silly and the

bordello scene,

I think, is pretty silly and absurd,

as absurd as I could make it.

Anytime there's a scene where
people have their clothes off

and entering into some sexual

activity

just strikes me as always a very

good chance to do comedy and show

how people's behavior is very foolish.

This was no exception.

And...

Joe had to go through

the scene with this woman who

was not an ideal

subject for

whatever he was doing.

Somehow, the reptile enters
the scene and tried to get into

3D picture, I think.

Joe was coming home from
the bordello with Srdjan

and Dr. Frankenstein is
waiting for him, because he

saw him come out of the bordello
and he noticed what a great

nose he had.

Now, this idea of

a perfect

master race has a lot to do
with ideas that come from

classical Greece, where the
statues of classical Greece

were the most idealized in art history.

And there is a theory that has
been about for a long time,

that the Greek people
of the classical period

have disappeared from
the face of the earth

because of mixed breeding.

However, that some of them
survived in Northern Yugoslavia

and Serbia, because they
didn't intermarry with Turks

and the...

the invaders who came in and
took over those countries.

And they remained similar in
appearance to the Greek statues

with blonde hair,

not shaving and high bridges on the nose

and athletic type appearances.

Now they --

not sure whether these are
purely idealized figures

or based on real people,

but why shouldn't they
be based on real people?

So, the fact that Srdjan
Zelenovic was actually Serbian

I utilized as ideas for part
of the story of the film,

and his strange nose became

the object of Dr. Frankenstein's fixation

and led to his being decapitated.

Meanwhile, Monique is more
interested in less classical

ideas than

her brother.

And she

meets Joe, who also has
a pretty good appearance,

but not exactly the Serbian ideal

that Baron Frankenstein

is looking for, I guess.

They

look like a good couple,

except for the point that
Joe doesn't seem overjoyed at

the obligation to keep his job

and do what Monique wants.

But all that makes for some
kind of story, I suppose.

The bed that was used in this scene,

I've seen in many films,
including the Visconti film,

The Damned,

and it was a popular rental item from the

production rental houses in Rome.

Dr. Frankenstein,

in this scene,

I believe, is looking at this
female zombie all strapped up,

been sewed together,

and he takes her and the

new male creation to a dinner.

“Is a

castle, with his wife and children, and

Monique, in the meantime,
has hired Joe as her servant

to serve food, among other things.

And...

this scene at the dinner table is

just

done so that Joe can
recognize that his friend

who's had his head cut off has reappeared,

but in a different shape,
because before he was

the same size as Joe, the same height.

And now, he's a much taller person,

which mystifies Joe.

He discusses that with
Baroness Frankenstein

in the following scene.

Anyway, Joe is curious what
happened to his friend.

Monique is curious why Joe
is interested in Srdjan.

Udo is curious why his
wife is interested in Joe.

And the children

sit back

and are interested in whatever's going on.

Srdjan is sort of...

not entirely the same
person as he was before,

and presumably,

not in the best of health and
under some sort of control

from his Dr. Frankenstein,

who mentions that he never
finished medical school,

but he

nevertheless continued
his studies outside of the

university by experimenting on bodies.

I think Udo Kier is extremely

good in this part.

He's very commanding, very demonic.

You get the idea that he is
a person who's used to having

his way, gets what he
wants, does what he wants.

Bypasses the obligations of marriage by

bonding with his sister
to have two children,

so they wouldn't have to
divide the family castle,

which is the property the
brother and sister have inherited

from their parents.

So, they can maintain
control of the real estate,

which is an idea whose time is probably

going to come in the

near future, considering the
way everything else changes.

Dr. Frankenstein

has this strange

predilection for

the insides of corpses.

I thought that was sort of
something that hadn't been used

in any of these horror movies.

But the fact that it was a horror movie,

I thought, gave me a license to go

in directions nobody had gone before.

But I was never interested
in going in the direction of

really scary or frightening, or

disturbing an audience.

If I went in that direction,

which I do in this scene, I
suppose, it is rather funny.

And many people told me,

they thought it was one of the
funniest scenes in the movie,

but it combines the elements of

horror and bloodletting and disemboweling,

but all to comic effect.

And of course,

the master/servant relationship
of Baron Frankenstein and

his assistant Otto is also
a very good excuse for

a situation that's comical.

Joe is a deadly serious main character,

much like Srdjan, who doesn't
quite have the cynical edge of

Baron and Baroness Frankenstein.

And he's actually wondering
what became of his friend and

how he got to be so tall.

Why he's wearing that brace on his neck.

All of which you don't want to
ask too many questions about,

since it hardly lends itself
to any intense scrutiny and any

scientific context, it's
just a theatrical conceit.

This scene,

Joe and Monique

talking about the missing friend.

She says, why bother?

She's only interested in Joe's armpits.

They stretch out on the bed and

she's very active in his armpits.

The children watched from a
nearby, hidden two-way mirror,

just to make it look a little strange.

All this is obvious stuff.
It's not, to my mind,

something you can discuss.

That's the problem with all
comedy or humor, critics

don't respond in the ways they
do to heavy films, because

humor is either funny or it's not funny,

there's no discussion of it
possible. No analyzing of it.

Something strikes you
as funny or it doesn't.

It's...

to my mind,

that makes you a much
more interesting vehicle

for storytelling, because it's a hunch.

It's a chance. It's a gamble.

A calculation can never lead to humor.

Humor has to be very spontaneous,

very unthought about;
you have to do it and

get it over with and see if it's funny.

And the way I made these films,

which I've explained in an
earlier DVD release and an extra

in an extra package, or
bonus package, or something,

whatever they call it.

I thought it would be
improvised up to a point,

and after the first day,
nothing was improvised.

I realized I had to write
something for these people,

because they were not Americans

and they were not into improvisation,

and you couldn't improvise
with 5O people on the set and

people depending on you
to come up with something.

And I realized that improvisation
could only occur in the

situations where maybe earlier films,

where I was the only one on
the set beside my assistant on

the sound.

And by not asking them to
give me anything exactly,

they gave me so much.

You can't do that when you
have 5O people waiting for

you to come up with something.

So, when you do this humor, it's important

if you have a certain
freedom of spontaneous

just doing something,

because you think it's funny
and not having somebody looking

over your shoulder and saying,
are you sure this is funny?

Are you sure? Are you sure?

This is the attitude of almost

all American producers from the word go,

as soon as they say

they're gonna get involved
with you or whatever.

The terms they use --

because they want to question
you every step of the way,

question your casting,

question the performance,
question the music,

question the ending,

question the emphasis
on certain characters.

And if they're not satisfied,

they get what they really
want by having previews at

shopping malls for kids
to say what they want,

and to declare what they think is good

and what is not good.

And this might work and be
helpful in deadly serious movies

or psychological movies,
I don't think it does,

but it's totally impossible
to operate like that

when you're looking for
something that's humorous.

It's not to be analyzed.

It's got to have one source

it comes from,

so it has some sort of identity,
or what I like to call the

tone of voice.

The tone of voice is what gives something

a personality of its own,
an identity of its own.

And when I finished Frankenstein

and went directly into
the making of Dracula,

I had no idea they weren't
even paced together,

and when it was fit together,

if it would be watchable.

Yet, from the very beginning,

it was thought to be
amusing and people liked it,

and it was understood to be an
interesting film in some way.

It got wonderful reviews and
went on to a great, popular

success in every place,

and certainly part of
that was due to the 3D.

But the fact that I use 3D,

like I used everything else
in the movie for comedy, was

I think, the main reason why
it did as well as it did.

The director has to

be tuned to every second
when the film was made,

but he shouldn't be
interfering with the actors.

He should only sort of
psychologically, indirectly,

like child psychology almost,

suggest something to the actors

if he thinks they're not
going in the right direction.

But in my case, having cast
them, I guess, pretty well,

I almost never interfered
with what they were doing.

I can't remember ever interfering with it.

It was just a question of
logistics of where they go and

where they stand and what they do.

And by getting on with
the business directing,

you allow people to

do their own thing and perform their job,

whether it's camera or
actor or a set designer.

And that...

if at the end of that, you can

see the different works of
different people come together.

So it has some sort of personality
or identity of its own,

I think you've done something

that you should

be happy about,

which I certainly was
when I made these films.

I'm glad that I took the
challenge to make them,

I suggested they'd be
made without the scripts,

and soon as I started making them,

I realized I need the
script for the dialogue

and I had to do it each morning
on the way to the set, and

nobody was correcting me or
asking me if I thought it was

really good. And ljust
did it from my own wits.

And...

we came out okay.

I don't recommend it to anybody else.

I did it two in a row with this film,

right with Dracula following,

and for me, they both came out great,

but I don't expect anybody
to ever do a film like that

again.

And I don't know anybody ever
made a film like that before.

But the strange way in which
they were made certainly

contributes to their differences,

the differences they have

compared to all other
films that I've ever seen.

I've never seen any films
quite like these two,

and they're certainly
not like anything before,

and I've never seen anything
like them since they were made.

And I know why that is, because
they were made in such a

strange way, by what I guess

is some kind of an odd person who

wants to do it his own way,

and by some miracle was
allowed to do it a few times.

So, I hope these still photographs

have some little meaning for
the people looking at them.

And having done the film,
I enjoy looking at them.

As I said about the screen test,

I'm glad that they're attached.

I'm glad that they can sit near
the film instead of in a box

on a shelf.

And I hope people recognize that

I was very intentionally
trying to do something absurd,

but trying to use people
who were not playing to the

absurdity and people who were very young,

who had very good appearances,
so that the films,

at least in my mind,

continue that tradition of studio films

where films are meant to be
entertaining and people expected

to be good looking,

and they're expected to
have distinct personalities,

but not like every other
actor from acting class.

And that was always the big intention

in the making of any film I ever did,

and it certainly

had a bearing on the making
Flesh for Frankenstein.