Currently underway at the the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park, “Portraits of Wild Things: The Films of John McNaughton” is a long overdue retrospective of the Chicago-based filmmaker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), I’ve always felt that the most exploitative aspect of McNaughton’s film was its title—it sounds like something you shouldn’t take joy in watching even if you’re even depraved enough to seek it out in the first place. Critically praised upon its (much delayed) release, Henry provided McNaughton with a path to mainstream success, even as the filmmaker simultaneously fought not to be typecast in genre fare. Along the way, the soft-spoken director worked with everyone from Robert De Niro (Mad Dog and Glory) to Luke Perry (Normal Life), Neve Campbell (Wild Things), Rae Dawn Chong (The Borrower), Eric Bogosian (Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll), Samantha Morton (The Harvest) and many more.

I’ve met McNaughton in person only once, at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2015 when he was pitching a project with the eye-catching logline, “A carnival owner turns up dead with a knife in his back. His wife happens to be a knife thrower whose ex-husband shows up the day before the murder.” That film was ultimately never made and the Michael Shannon-starring The Harvest, released in 2013, remains McNaughton’s most recent feature. Now in his mid-70s, I caught up with McNaughton over the phone recently to discuss the retrospective and the many memories he’s accumulated over the last 35 years. 

“Portraits of Wild Things: The Films of John McNaughton” runs through October 7th. 

Filmmaker: Do you enjoy revisiting your old work?

McNaughton: It’s case by case. If [a studio] is going to restore a film of mine, especially if it’s going to Blu-ray or whatever the new format is, I like to sit there in the color correction [process] and when the audio is being worked on. I’ve got a whole library of stuff [of mine] and I’m getting to the point in my life where I’m thinking about re-transferring this stuff and correcting it, getting it ready for the archives. Steve Jones—my producer on so many films—and I did the color correction and the audio [remastering] here in Chicago for the latest Henry re-release, for the 30th anniversary. The original elements had been lost, of course, so we couldn’t do a stereo remix, but that was okay with me because the original was in mono and the quality was still good. The Borrower (1991) was originally shot in 1:85, but for all of its home video releases back then was reformatted to the 1:33 format for television. The DVD release years later was the first time it was ever presented in 1:85. It was wonderful to sit in and do the color correction [for the DVD release] and make sure everything was correct. That also goes for the recent [re-]release of Mad Dog and Glory (1993). When Sony re-released Wild Things (1998) recently, they were too cheap to fly me out [to California], so what they did was FedEx me a super hi-def iPad back and forth. They’d make a new correction and then send it to me; I’d make extensive notes and send it right back. In the end, it turned out pretty well, because on their first pass [of the restoration], they got it wrong. I wish they would’ve just brought me out there.

Filmmaker: In revisiting your films, a name that appears often in the credits is Elena Magnini, your longtime editor. When did that working relationship start? With Henry?

McNaughton: Yes, and years later Elena would go on to win an Emmy Award for the Showtime series Dexter, and why did she get [hired] to work on Dexter? Because she had an old hand in the serial killer [genre with me], a real expertise [laughs]. 

When we made Henry, I hadn’t lived in Chicago for a while, but eventually I’d come back here and went to work for the Ali brothers [Malik and Waleed] who founded a company that’s still in existence, now called MPI, but back then was called Maljack. Only one of the brothers is still alive and he’s retired. I went to work for them, and eventually when they started making money in the home video distribution business, it became a good idea for them, financially, to make a horror film where they owned all of the rights.

Filmmaker: Why was that?

McNaughton: Because horror films were getting more and more expensive for them to buy the rights to to duplicate and [license], so it became a wise investment to make one of their own. I then got connected with Steve Jones, who was a producer and director of animated commercials here in Chicago for a company called Sinnott and Associates that used to make Cap’n Crunch cereal commercials for television. The editor there was Elena Magnini, and Steve had worked with her and was very familiar with her work. Henry was her first [time working on a] feature film, and simultaneously she was still working full-time, cutting Cap’n Crunch commercials during the day and working all night cutting 16mm footage of Henry on a flatbed in her apartment. She was pretty wasted by the end of the whole ordeal, but she’s a great editor and I love working with her. She’s got a great sense of humor and is really smart.

Filmmaker: Another long relationship you’ve had is with the Music Box in Chicago, a movie theater instrumental in the success of your early films—and, would you say, your career beginnings as a filmmaker?

McNaughton: The Music Box is the preeminent arthouse theater here in Chicago—has been for a very long time—and the first public screening of Henry was at the Music Box on a Saturday afternoon at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1986. My former college roommate and I printed up a thousand handbills on regular 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper to [promote the film], went out bar-hopping one night and in between each bar would paste these handbills all around town. We papered the town with a thousand of these on lampposts and mailboxes and everywhere else [laughs]. The film festival booked Henry there, but we hadn’t done the blow-up to 35mm [yet] and didn’t have any film prints, just three-quarter-inch video cassettes. The Music Box wouldn’t provide us with a projector to screen [the film that way], so Michael Rooker [the actor playing the title role] and I had to go rent a projector for 175 bucks, out of pocket, and set it up in the center aisle of the Music Box. Neither of us are technicians, but fortunately it came out okay. That was Henry’s very first public screening. 

I have another interesting anecdote, this one for The Borrower. After the film had its initial theatrical release in 1991 in first-run theaters, the Music Box gave it a special screening for one week, at midnight or something like that. A week or two later I get a phone call from them: “We still have the print. Nobody’s picked it up. What do you want to do with it?” I didn’t personally own a print of the film and—in what is one of the greatest regrets of my life as, unfortunately I was raised by honest parents and didn’t technically own the print—said, “Gee, I’m sure somebody eventually will come get it.” In retrospect, I should have said “Thanks! I’ll pick it up!” But I didn’t, and it’s one of my films I still don’t own a print of. I’ve been searching [across] the world for decades! I was fortunate that at the Nitehawk Cinema, their programmer, Cristina Cacioppo, tracked down a print at the Library of Congress. They won’t let us use it, but I’m just so happy to know that one exists and that it’s in good [hands]. But [decades] ago, when the Music Box called me to pick it up, apparently somebody else did. The Music Box gave me the long rundown of the series of events that led up to and followed the person who did eventually take the print home with them. I think they even know who the person is, but next they heard, the print had somehow gotten to Europe and nobody knows where it is now. We had another screening of The Borrower [at the Music Box] on Halloween night a few years ago and I had to bring my own laserdisc player to screen it on! 

Filmmaker: Your work in television is pretty extensive. You directed a few episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets in the early ’90s, an NBC series that tends to find a new generation of appreciative viewers every few years. How was that experience?

McNaughton: That was a great show to work on. I love Baltimore because it reminds me of where I grew up, the South Side of Chicago, which is a very funky place. The first season was shot with a super-jerky cam–they wanted me to [direct] an episode of the first season, but I didn’t want to do it.  I don’t know who the cinematographer was, but I didn’t like looking at it. But with the second season, when they called me again, I told them, “I just don’t like the camera work,” and they go, “Well, we hired a new camera person, Jean de Segonzac.” That was funny because I knew Jean really well. When I was in graduate school for one semester, there was a fabulous documentary filmmaker named Marian Marzyński teaching there. I think he had also taught at the School for Visual Arts in New York, and he had brought along one of his students to be his cameraperson and assistant, and it was Jean de fucking Segonzac! That’s how we became friends, by working on some small projects together. I love working with Jean. I just talked to him the other day, actually. He shot my feature, Normal Life (1996) too and did a fantastic job. Anyway, when they said, “Jean de Segonzac is the guy,” I said, “OK then, sign me up.” I directed one episode for season two, three episodes for season three and one episode for season four. That’s as far as I got.

Filmmaker: I know some of the backstory pertaining to how you were brought on to direct Mad Dog and Glory: Martin Scorsese had seen Henry and was looking for someone to direct the screen adaptation of the 1963 Jim Thompson novel, The Grifters. While that didn’t work out, you eventually met with him and De Niro about a script by Richard Price, which would become Mad Dog and Glory. And Al Pacino was also in that meeting before Bill Murray was eventually cast instead, right?

McNaughton: That’s right. We hadn’t cast Bill [Murray] yet but we had cast Bob. It was great working with Martin Scorsese, as he was so generous and so fucking smart. When I first went to meet Marty, I knew that he did dealings with Armani [including directing the 1990 short documentary Made in Milan about the life of Giorgio Armani], so I went out and bought a beautiful Armani suit, because you only have one chance to make a first impression, right? After seeing Henry, I think Marty was expecting to see someone drooling at the corners of his mouth or whatever, but I walked into the room in this Armani suit and we had our first meeting. It was great. Marty was talking about casting, and he said, “Well John, Bob De Niro has read the script and he likes it. Now, I don’t want to push him on you, but he’s very interested in working on this film. You think you’d be interested in working with Bob?” As if I was going to say “Fuck no, Marty, I don’t want to work with that guy!” [laughs] “Yeah, that’s okay, Marty! Thanks. Sign him up.”

That was an easy decision to make, then we went looking for [someone to play] the Frank Milo character and Pacino was interested. We all had a meeting together [Scorsese, De Niro, McNaughton and Pacino] and we talked to Pacino for a while. So now here I was, this guy from the South Side of Chicago who’s only made one movie, sitting in the room with Martin Scorsese and Bob De Niro and Al Pacino, and there’s a knock at the door and who’s there but George Lucas [laughs]. We all sat around and talked. For some reason, the conversation turned to a mockumentary about the Battle of Culloden, a famous 18th century battle in Scotland between the Scots and the English, where Bonnie Prince Charlie (who was an idiot!) was the prince of the Scots and marched into an uneven conflict and got walloped. People often think I’m Irish, but I’m not, I’m Scottish. Anyway, there was a great documentary or “mockumentary,” so to speak, made around the time of the Vietnam War, where they re-staged the whole Battle of Culloden. In the movie, they have a guy covering the battle with his camera and a sound crew as if they were covering an actual battle. Lucas mentioned it in our conversation that day, so we yakked about that for a while.

Filmmaker: But Mad Dog and Glory didn’t go into production right away. 

McNaughton: We had shut down our production because Marty had been waiting on a script for High and Low, a remake of the Akira Kurosawa movie from 1963. David Mamet had written the script and it was going to be Marty’s next picture. During our prep, he got the script from Mamet and it was 300 pages or something. I don’t know the exact details, but it turned out that Marty couldn’t make the movie. He had previously, I’m told, turned down Cape Fear (1991), but then changed his mind because he needed to work, so he took that on and obviously Bob was [attached to be] in it, so we had to shut down our pre-production period for six months or something. Around this time, I fortunately got a telephone call from someone whose [name] I can’t remember, a request to film Eric Bogosian’s one-man stage show Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (1991) in the interim period that I now had free. It wound up fitting perfectly into the empty slot.

Filmmaker: What was it like working with De Niro and Murray when the film finally went into production? Of course, you went on to work with Murray again pretty prominently in Wild Things—

McNaughton: —and then in Speaking of Sex in 2001.

Filmmaker: That’s right. Did working with the two of them teach you anything new about how to direct actors? They’re very different personalities.

McNaughton: De Niro is very Method. In the fight scene [late in Mad Dog and Glory] where he had to appear winded, really worn out, before each take Bob would get down on the sidewalk and do 25 push-ups. Murray, on the other hand, his training came from improvisation at The Second City, where, funny enough, I wound up teaching a couple of years ago for the hell of it. When it comes to improvisation—I mean, put Murray at gunpoint and you still couldn’t get him to give you the same performance in another take. It’s fresh every time, it’s new and always in the moment. Working with two actors coming from such different technical backgrounds was an education.

Filmmaker: How did your next feature, Normal Life, get off the ground? Did the screenplay by Peg Haller and Bob Schneider come your way?

McNaughton: Yes, but I had already been pursuing that subject with my producer Steve Jones. Jeffrey and Jill Erickson was a big story in Chicago, maybe not so much nationally. I don’t know how many banks they robbed over 18 months or so, but their total take was like $30,000 or something. They would rob a bank and get only $7,000, but they were famous. They would rob a bank and there would be security video of them and on the news every so often. Newscasters would be like, “Ha ha, Joe, it looks like the bearded bandit has robbed another bank! Now let’s go to the footage,” and there would be the Ericksons—Jeffrey with the beard and the Chicago Cubs hat and the trench coat, Jill with her wig. Then boom, one day they’re dead, separately gunned down. It was a huge story and a lengthy article was eventually published in the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday Magazine about it by a writer whose name I forget, but she wrote a great piece. In conducting her research, she met [Jeffrey] while he was in prison, before he escaped—that’s how he died, trying to escape—and after writing the article, left the Tribune. We were trying to track her down to get access to the article, to make a deal with her [for the screen rights], because it was such a great story. But during that process, a finished script came to us, I think from the William Morris Agency, who represented me at the time, and they wanted Luke [Perry] for the film. We were sent the script [by Peg and Haller and Bob Schneider], liked it, and they did some rewriting. We met with Luke, then we were off to the races.

Filmmaker: Is that how Aaron Spelling Productions were involved? [Spelling was the producer of Beverly Hills, 90210, in which Luke Perry starred.]

McNaughton: Yeah, I think they were trying to push Luke’s career a bit more.

Filmmaker: But then Fine Line Pictures [a specialty division of New Line Cinema] pivoted to not wanting to release the film in theaters, threatening to just air it directly on HBO, a choice that feels oddly in step with our current, “just throw it on MAX” streaming era.

McNaughton: Yes, I had received a phone call while working on Normal Life in a post-production facility here in Chicago to tell me that the film wasn’t [going to be released in theaters]. I walked into a big common area to take that call and remember calling my agent some really foul names at a very high volume. For the next few days, I remember people really tiptoeing around me over there, but my agent somehow did get them to release it in a few [theaters]. Actually, I don’t know if it was due to my agent but I will say that what happened was that it was a film for Fine Line Features and I think the guy that founded Fine Line, Ira Deutchman, really liked and was behind the project but eventually got removed from his own company. Somebody else, whose name I shall not mention, then came in and took his place as head of production. This person, upon just hearing the name “Luke Perry,” would say “Luke Perry’s not a movie star. I don’t want any part of that,” so there wasn’t any support for the film left. Their marketing person, who left the company soon after our movie was released, was also not very supportive and—well, that’s showbiz.

Filmmaker: Was choosing to direct Wild Things—which was also youth-focused, albeit in much sexier and bankable ways— a way to make something that was guaranteed to be easier to market while still implementing an off-kilter narrative? 

McNaughton: At that point, yeah. To me, it was like, “I’ve got to make a commercial movie now.” Even so, [my previous] films were often telling people what they didn’t want to hear. With Normal Life, I came to the conclusion after a while that the film didn’t get much of a theatrical release because the middle class was under a lot of stress at the time. I knew a lot of people in similar straits and life was really tough for them. They wanted to see people like Brad Pitt where he was doing the Bonnie and Clyde thing…Kalifornia (1993). They want that fantasy. If they wanted to see something like Normal Life, all they had to do was walk out their front door and there it was. So, after that film, I felt it was time for me to do a commercial movie. 

I got the script [by Stephen Peters] for Wild Things and went through it while I was lying in bed and—well, I was not impressed. I was lying in bed, thinking, “OK, I’m going to read this and probably fall asleep.” So, I read about 25 pages. Regarding the Matt Dillon character, Sam Lombardo, it got to the point where he gets accused of rape, but I knew right away that there’s no story there if he really did it. Therefore, they’re leading the audience along, and it’s going to end like, “Oh, this poor guy, he’s been falsely accused and they’re going to throw him in jail, even though he really didn’t do it.” Movie of the week, no thank you. But out of a sense of duty, I got down to doing what I usually do, where I read the first few pages and last two pages of a script. [I] can almost always tell you what is going to happen in the last two pages by reading the first five. So, I skipped to the end [laughs] and went, “What the…wait a minute. How did we get from page 20 to this?” I had no idea, so I had to go and read the whole thing. I felt it needed a little finessing in terms of style, but plot-wise it was fabulous. They let me bring on [another] writer named Kem Nunn, a novelist and friend of mine and a National Book Award nominee [for the 1984 novel Tapping the Source] and also a screenwriter. [CEO of Mandalay Entertainment] Peter Guber graciously sent us to Miami for 10 days on a whirlwind scouting tour, which was really good for us, then we came back [home] and did nine rewrites, just to give the script a sense of place that it didn’t previously have.

I saw the film again recently, at the Music Box, and I [realized] that so many of my films, Henry, Mad Dog and Glory, etc., become so much more comedic with age. It’s like the shock wears off and the humor shines through. With Wild Things, I kept saying, “Oh, what trash! We really like it, but it’s trash.” But I didn’t go to film school, I went to art school, and the job of the artist is to disrupt. You define the line of good taste, then cross it as fast as you can. That’s what artists are supposed to do, be subversive. Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey made a film called Trash (1970), and it’s a great work of art for the ages, but to this day, I still see the shared opinion that Wild Things turned out to be good by accident because what it really is is a piece of trash. Well, believe me: if you knew how much work went into that script, it was [filmed] exactly as written, performed exactly as written and with a lot of really gifted people having worked on it.