Kotaku
I was lucky enough to be asked to moderate a Q&A session with Bruce Campbell yesterday at the Denver Press Club. I think it went pretty well.
Campbell and I sat down and ate lunch prior to the Q&A and chatted a bit. He seems like a really nice, sharp guy. He's in the middle of a 44-city tour to promote his new book and film.
After the lunch I spent about 15 minutes asking him questions in front of an audience and then he took some questions from the group.
Here's some excerpts from my Q&A with him:
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
I enjoy making fun of Hollywood whever I can, because they are ripping us off. Let me tell you why, let me tell you why I make fun of Hollywood.
I jotted some names of movies down. You know, I used to apologize for making B-movies because inexperienced people worked on it, the writing is not so good, the acting is cheesy, the director is not as accomplished. But A-movies are now B-movies.
If you are bitten by a radioactive spider, that's a B-movie. If you dress up like a bat and fly around Gotham city, that's a B-movie. Even War of the Worlds, where aliens attack the planet, that is a B-movie idea. So I think we have obviously had an impact on Hollywood because now they make lots of horror films and lots of cheesy movies that they are spending $100 million on.
Hollywood has been down recently, for like 20 straight weeks they have been down and they wonder why. They think, 'Oh, it's piracy,' it must be something. Here's why they are down, because they haven't got a new idea to save their life.
War of the Worlds, 1898 the original idea. Radio play 1938, movie 1958. Every 50 years that do something new with that.
Dukes of Hazzard, a 70s crappy TV show.
Batman Begins, that's a good one. It should be Batman Begins again and again and again. I've heard people defend this version saying, 'No, this is a good one.' Well it took you five tries.
We have the lovely Bewitched based on a 60s TV show.
The Longest Yard, nothing wrong with that movie. This version is the hip, wise-cracking version of it.
We have Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Why is that movies being remade? Gene Wilder is funny, Johnny Depp is weird. I'm sorry, if I was a kid I would run from that theater.
We're remaking the Honeymooners. We have the Bad News Bears coming later, which is also a 70s movie. Earlier we had House of Wax, Guess Who, which is a take-off on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Stepford Wives. Nicole Kidman is in her second remake, she needs to fire her agent, quickly, before it's too late. The Manchurian Candidate, which was actually an excellent movie.
On top of all of that we have Herbie the Love Bug. They've done so many of these I've done a Herbie the Love Bug movie.
That's why I like to mock Hollywood, which is why I can point to the book and say 70 percent of it is true, I just changed the name to protect the guilty basically.
There you go, that's my long-winded answer.
What's it like to do voice work for a video game?
Voice work is pretty fun compared to acting in movies, because in movies you're cold, your dirty, you're sweaty, you're covered with blood whatever. With voice work you're in a nice comfortable studio, so that's the easy part.
What's weird about voicing a video game is you have to allow for what a gamer might do. So, what I recommend with any of the games I work on is go into a corner or go somewhere and keep clicking on something, keep doing something really stupid because eventually you will hear "This is nothing there." You know, "Step away from the window," or whatever. We record a lot of things most gamers would never hear.
You also have to record variations of how that character might die. So you fell off a cliff you have to do that version, you fall down the stairs you have to do that version. So you have to record a bunch of extra stuff which may or may not take place in the course of the game.
Have you had a chance to play the game?
I suck at video games so I let me son play. So he rated the first three Evil Dead games. The first one he said sucked, the second one was OK and the third one was good. Technology keeps getting better and better. Movies are becoming like video games and video games are becoming like movies. At some point they are going to merge.
My son was just at E3, the electronics expo, and they always show the new games and things like that. He said there was a racing game that just blew him away because it was looking more and more life like.
I think what's going to eventually happen is some form of interactive movies. It will all look real and you can do whatever you want in that world and you will be acting out your own, you know, your own fantasies.
If you had to choose one, doing voice work in a video game or acting in a movie, which would you pick?
Voice work is very limiting; you are only going to work two or three more days. I'm still a big fan of movies because I like the visual aspect of it as well.
Have you finished the voice work for the game?
The game is all done, you do the voice so you can do the game.
Besides the movie, the book and the video game what other projects are you working on?
We have an audio version of this book coming out, hopefully it will be coming to market in about a month. It's a six hour unabridged radio play version of it with sound effects, characters, it's all acted out the whole thing. It's a massive epic undertaking.
I live in Southern Oregon near Ashland , Oregon which nine months out of the year has the largest Shakespeare festival in the country. I just got a bunch of Shakespeare actors who were dying to do something other than Willy and we had a really good time.
Sky High, a Disney movie, is opening July 29 and then there's another film called The Woods. It's a scary movie coming out from MGM in the Fall.
And then in the Fall I'm going to start a new film for Dark Horse comics, a cool company set in Portland, they're making movies now. It's an untitled Bruce Campbell movie where I play myself. It's about a small town that is having problems with a monster and nothing's working so somebody suggests let's get the Evil Dead guy. Unfortunately, in reality I don't own a gun, I've never used a chainsaw and more die then before I got there.
Last two questions, I'll lump them together, people are always asking about the possibility of an Evil Dead 4 coming out and do you have any idea what you may be doing in Spider-Man 3?
In the Spider-Man movies, in the first movie, as you know, I named the character without my character this billion dollar franchise would be called the human spider. In the second Spider-Man I defeated him because he didn't get into the theater where I was an usher. I'm the only character who can say he defeated Spider-Man. In the third movie I think I'm going to probably be Spider-Man.
They just won't tell you because it's all very secretive. They will just send you the pages you are in, so no one's told me yet I have no idea. I think I'm going to just annoy Spider-Man that's all I know.
As far as Evil Dead (yawn) 4. Sam Raimi is too busy making wheel-barrels of money right now.
