Communion An Interview with Writer Director Philippe Mora

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To many, writer-director Philippe Mora’s name is often linked such exploitation films as the horror opuses The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf and The Howling III: The Marsupials. The link became even more prominent with Not Quite Hollywood!, the rousing 2009  documentary about the Australian “B” and “C” movie industry in the 1970s and 1980s.  Clips were showcased of the two films, while Mora spoke about their production, as well as his work on Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper.

As it turns out, however, the Paris-born, Australia-raised Mora is more than an exploitation director. Much more. He has a background in painting, and has worked regularly as a newspaper columnist, cartoonist, investigative journalist, magazine publisher and documentary filmmaker. In many ways, Mora is something of a Renaissance man, delving into all sorts of ways to express himself when his artistic juices start flowing.

In the late 1960s, Mora had met novelist Whitley Streiber in London when he was studying at film school. They caught up with each other again in the 1980s in New York City after Streiber had become a successful writer, penning such books as The Hunger and Wolfen, which were turned into movies.

“He told me about his strange experiences and asked me not to laugh at him,” recalls Mora, 61, from his West Hollywood home, which once belonged to Cary Grant. “He asked me not to laugh at his story. And he told me he ought to get a psychiatrist, and I told him he should get a publisher as well.”

Streiber explained to Mora that in December 1985, he was had been abducted from an upstate New York cabin by aliens. The beings performed medical experiments on him, and Streiber later recounted his harrowing experiences under hypnosis with the help of a psychiatrist.

“I thought he was disturbed at first, but it was clear he was sincere. Since I wasn’t there (when the supposed abductions took place) I couldn’t say if they took place or not.”

Streiber had decided to write a book about these abductions called Communion. Mora read the galleys and decided he wanted to make the film. But the movie studios wanted to either fictionalize the story or make it an all-out horror movie. So the director and author got independent partners to bring Communion to the screen on their own, without studio interference.

At first, Mora had a problem casting his lead. “Writers don’t do anything,” notes Mora. “Watching writers write and think can be awfully boring. But Christopher Walken has such an interesting face. It all reminded me of Samuel Fuller’s remark that the greatest landscape is the human face.

“You could buy him (Walken) as a writer.  I didn’t want Whitley to say it wasn’t like that. Sure, there was stuff that turned out to be notorious like the ‘anal probe’ and ‘little blue midgets.’  I wanted a checklist to make sure he (Streiber) was OK with it.

“I can’t say it was tough to make,” says Mora about Communion’s production. “Walken was fantastic to work with. It was great having an actor like that. It was like I was the pilot with an incredible plane and I could go anywhere I wanted.”

Did Walken believe in Streiber’s abduction claims?

“Chris didn’t believe in any of it, but he thought it was possible,” says Mora. “I took him to a meeting where he met abductees. And he met Whitley quite a few times and did quite a bit of research.”

The 1989 film, which features an appropriately eerie score from Mora’s friend Eric Clapton, was made in Southern California on a shooting schedule that lasted about six weeks. “The fact we made it pre-CGI turned out to be a blessing,” Mora says. “We had to do all the effects in the camera. And it has a certain atmosphere that makes it feel photo realistic. I wanted to make it creepy, or question mark creepy like, so you say, ‘What’s going on?’ When an alien sticks his head out, it creeps people out. That is like a childhood scary thing. And I do remember having similar visions from my childhood.”

Mora, who provides a fresh commentary for a new DVD release of Communion that’s loaded with extras, also spent some time at the cabin in upstate New York where the alien abduction was said to have occurred.

“I had some vivid nightmares there, with lights and alien faces,” says Mora. “Whitley claims these were actual events I experienced, not just nightmares.”

Mora had an interest in UFOs before he even met Streiber. “When I lived in London, I got something called Flying Saucer Review. I had also gone through the files through the Freedom of Information Act.”

The director has written about the subject in his column for the Sydney Morning Herald. “Some people believe that the whole thing was a psychological warfare project (conceived by the U.S. government) to freak the Russians out. There’s lots of literature on this. The government took the subject very seriously and periodically they will again. But until the proverbial flying saucer lands on the White House lawn, many will remain skeptical.

“It’s a fascinating phenomenon, whether it’s psychological or real,” says Mora about the reports of UFO sightings. “In a court of law, eyewitnesses are essential and people have been executed based on eyewitness accounts. On that basis, they (UFOs) exist. If you use the standards of the courts, they’re real, but that’s not good enough for science. If there’s one account of the millions that’s true—if one is real—then it happened. So, you know, what can I say? The statistic probability is that they exist, based on eyewitness accounts.”

The way to handle Streiber’s story, Mora believes, was to present it objectively. “The movie is agnostic,” he says, referring to its stand on the existence of life on other planets.

Philippe Mora

Philippe Mora Communion Director

Mora started making movies when he was 15 years old. In 1969, when he was 20, he directed an underground film called Trouble in Megalopolis featuring feminist author Germaine Greer. He went on to co-direct Swastika in 1973, a documentary on the Nazis that featured never-seen home movies of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun, which was banned in Germany for decades and played at the 2009 Biberach Film Festival. He even worked for a time with Peter Sellers on a film in which the late British comic actor was to play Adolph Hitler at the age of 80.

Working with Sellers was an experience Mora will likely never forget, especially since the director—a movie enthusiast who published the film magazine Cinema Papers for years—claims Dr. Strangelove is his favorite film of all time.

“During our first meeting, he came dressed as Hitler!” recalls Mora, whose mother was an artist and whose father founded Australia’s Museum of Modern Art. “After two weeks, the producer asks ‘How’s it going?’ I said, ‘He’s dressed as Hitler.’

“Sellers was an incredible person. He wasn’t trying to do a gimmick. He would start talking back to you in your own voice. He was just so studied and he would talk to people in my voice. He would answer the phone and speak back to them in their own voice. It was crazy.”

Mora gained acclaim for his 1975 documentary Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, an entertaining look at the Great Depression that features amazing film clips, period songs and newsreel footage. At that time, Australia was getting lots of attention in the film world, with its young film industry gaining popularity and directors such as Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock), Donald Crombie (Caddie), Bruce Beresford (Don’s Party), Fred Schepisi (The Devil’s Playgrund) and Roger Donaldson (Sleeping Dogs) finding international notice.

It was Mora, however, who became the first Australian filmmaker to get a movie released in American theaters when his western Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper, got to these shores in 1976. “It’s funny, but I introduced Hopper to Christopher Walken, and later the two have that great scene together in True Romance,” says Mora. “They were similar in different ways.”

For the title character, Mora first considered Martin Sheen, then Stacy Keach. The filmmaker settled on Hopper after producer Jeremy Thomas met him in Taos, New Mexico, where he was living and edited The Last Movie, his trippy, disastrous 1971 followup to Easy Rider.  “Dennis said making the film (Mad Dog Morgan) was one the best film experiences he ever had. At that time he was unemployable in Hollywood, because he told Lew Wasserman (head of Universal) to go f**k himself after The Last Movie. You can’t do that.

“We rang his agent up from Melbourne. When he heard we wanted to hire Dennis, his hand almost came through the phone like a Tim Burton movie.

“The Mad Dog Morgan stuff has been overemphasized about him (Hopper) drinking. There are thousands of people who did drug and alcohol, particularly in those days, and didn’t end up with 50 film credits. Booze has nothing to do with anything. Give Dennis a bottle of rum and see what he can do; then give Joe Whomever a bottle of rum, and he can’t do anything.”

The violent western, concerning the mid-19th century Ireland-born outlaw whose criminal acts found favor with the Australian public, helped shine a light on the continent’s burgeoning film industry in general and Mora in particular.  And while it only was put on 30 or 40 American screens, it helped Mora become the first Down Under director to get an assignment from an American studio. The project was The Beast Within for MGM, a werewolf saga with ample gore, starring Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch.

Following such offbeat efforts as the superhero musical-satire spoof The Return of Captain Invincible (with songs by Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, featuring Alan Arkin and a singing Christopher Lee) and the conservationist-meets-widow romance A Breed Apart with Rutger Hauer and Kathleen Turner, Mora went back to the fur fold with his Howling opuses, in-name-only sequels to Joe Dante’s 1981 hit.

The connection between Mora’s two Howling movies and the original (or the others, for that matter) are flimsy at best. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” says Mora regarding the sequels’ connection to the original film. “If you copy the first one, they say ‘Big deal.’ If you don’t, they say ‘Why did you do it?’ With The Howling series, every single film is different. I intended 3 to be a parody of the whole genre. I am proud that these films are still actively available and distributed around the world.”

Both Howling projects were done on miniscule budgets. Howling II, in which reporter Annie McEnroe and supernatural expert Christopher Lee join Reb Brown to fight werewolf priestess Sybil Danning in Transylvania, cost $2 million. Howling 3, perhaps the only film ever to be made with marsupial ballerina werewolves and marsupial werewolf nuns, was produced for only $1 million.

Mora relates the movies to artwork: “Some movies are sketches and others are paintings. These two are definitely sketches. But I’ll never forget the making of The Howling II.

“It was shot in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain,” says Mora.   “Prague was an occupied city at the time. We had KGB spies on the set. When I got out of the city, I was thrilled to see a billboard. That’s how oppressive it was. I’d like to make a movie about the making of that movie.”

Mora’s other efforts have included Precious Find, a sci-fi saga with Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen, Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills, in which Beverly D’Angelo becomes a walking dinosaur, and Burning Down the House, a Hollywood satire. He’s also completed a “docufiction” about writer-art patron-Alice B. Toklas lover Gertrude Stein, is editing a thriller, and is working on a new personal documentary on the Holocaust. In his, uh, spare time, Mora is planning a feature film on artist Salvador Dali.

So the creative juices continue to flow for the ever-busy Mora, who has pretty much managed to steer clear of Hollywood studio work during his forty years of making films.

Does he feel like he’s missing out, not directing a bigger-budgeted film from a Hollywood major?

“It would be very difficult for me to do a studio picture,” says Mora. “It’s all corporate, and there are lots of hands in there. Besides, I could do a independent picture for half the price. (Being independent), it’s always difficult to raise money. But the cost of production is cheaper than ever, and because of digital, it’s getting cheaper and better every day. Getting distribution, of course, is another matter. But I encourage people to go out and make movies.”