Special Episode: Andrew Fleming, Director & Co-Writer, 'The Craft'

We have a real treat for you today, film aficionados! hosts Steven Pierce and Matt Mundy sat down with Andrew Fleming, the visionary mind behind the iconic 90's movie, The Craft. Let him take you on a journey through his versatile career that has seen him work on a range of projects from the Michael J Fox Show and Younger to Dolly Parton's Heartstrings. Get ready to hear about the extensive research he conducted into Wicca and paganism to infuse a sense of realism into The Craft. And brace yourself for his hilarious anecdote about filming 10,000 cold and uncooperative snakes!

This episode is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes secrets. Fleming walks us through his time in film school, his early projects, and the nail-biting process of casting The Craft. We talk the trials of working within a tight schedule and the challenges he encountered during production.

Finally, we tip our hats to The Craft, a cult movie that made an indelible mark on pop culture. Fleming shares his thoughts on the movie's success and the unexpected reactions it stirred. From his early career to the casting process, and the standout elements that made The Craft a hit, this is a conversation that every movie buff will appreciate. Tune in and join us for a deep dive into the creative mind of Andrew Fleming.

HAPPY HOUR FLIX is a podcast all about the movies you love and love to talk about. A nostalgic look at what we grew up watching and how they still impact us today.

Hey all, a quick reminder, no matter where you are listening to us, if you could rate us and drop us a review on Apple Podcasts, we’d be so grateful - it really helps us spread the good vibes. Thank you!

HAPPY HOUR FLIX is produced by James Allerdyce and Lori Kay, and hosted by Steven Pierce and Matt Mundy.

Main Title is by Johnny Mineo.

Happy Hour Flix | Movies You Love

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, happy hour, friends. In likening to DVD bonus material, today we have an episode for you. Recently, we released the Craft with Gin Wexler and Heather Buckley. Our friends go check that out on our feed for the full episode. But we got a special treat for you today. In this little episode, we speak with Andrew Fleming, who happens to be the writer and director of the Craft. So check it out.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Okay, matt, we have a very exciting guest here. It is truly, truly my honor to get to speak today with the director and co-writer of the Craft, andrew Fleming. And I mean Andrew, you've had such a diverse career. I mean starting. You did films before the Craft, but obviously the Craft kind of goes to a new stratosphere of a sort of you know, like, you know viability and like seeing into, like eyes, getting on it in the world. But you've also worked on a rest of development Michael J Fox show, younger I mean so many episodes of Emily in Paris and, honestly, personally my favorite. That I think, just shows your your range. So much the Craft and Dolly Parton's Heartstrings on Netflix in 2019.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Yeah, I mean, I look some surface like multiple personality disorder. Yeah, I do, I just did some. I look back, I wasn't the plan I. I just, if you've done one kind of thing, I kind of want to do something else. Like the first movie I did was a horror movie and then the second one was a comedy and then the third one was the Craft, which is a horror movie to a certain degree and then after that I only made comedy. So it was really very. I remember one one of my agents once is no longer my agent saying boy, andy, you really don't make it easy. Nobody ever say well, that's what Andy does. It was always. I was always evading any kind of pigeonholing.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Yeah, absolutely, how did it is so? I mean, we obviously you're talking very much about the Craft on our podcast and it seems like, from everything I've learned, urban legend sort of surrounds this film, you know, like the stories in the process of the witchcraft and everything that was happening, and kind of mirroring the story in some elements, or not. I mean, do you remember any of the craziness and were you aware of it at the time you were making the film?

Speaker 2: 2:27

Oh yeah, I mean I don't know specifically what you're talking about, but it was really while we were shooting it that some strange things happened. But I know they've often reported. But it was a complicated process getting the movie made. I was sent it originally just to do a rewrite and I said if you're interested in directing it, you can direct it. But I didn't want to do another horror movie so I said I would just do the rewrite on it and it did the work.

Speaker 2: 2:57

And in the process of rewriting I did a lot of research about paganism and witchcraft and you know all of that, and met a lot of witches and pagans and went to ceremonies and things and it was suddenly like what I was seeing, the reality of Wicca was so much more interesting than whatever, whatever I'd ever seen in a movie. So I thought there was an opportunity to do something that felt you know real on some level, that you could buy it, because my favorite horror movies are things like Rosemary's Baby, oh yes, kind of a basis of folklore and reality. There's a baseline of reality and then you sort of gradually get taken into this, you know magical nightmare, and so, yeah, that was, that was sort of the idea behind it. But at a certain point I was so into it that I said I wanted to direct it. It was right when they said, well, we're going to start going out to directors. So they said, well, maybe I want to direct it.

Speaker 1: 4:01

So you talk yourself into it over the process.

Speaker 3: 4:05

I did, yeah, wow, and I was going to on that. I wanted to ask I guess it's again is this the lore of it and the reality of like the in the end, with the, with the, the bugs and the maggots and the snakes and everything the practicals of that, and like the house being sealed and roaches being bred not being able to reproduce? Is this, is this right?

Speaker 2: 4:37

Yes, there were. There was a bunch of roaches but they were sterile so that they wouldn't if they got away they wouldn't reproduce and infest the stage. The most of the house was on a stage Right but there was a real house that matched a practical house. That matched the front hallway and the living room, I believe, was the location, whereas the stairs and her bedroom upstairs were the set. But there was some overlap. But you know, we had all those critters in both locations.

Speaker 2: 5:19

The the one real mishap was we had the snakes outside of the stairs and the annual regular, Boon Narr, who's like a gonzo guy, a great guy. He wanted to have a record amount of snakes, so he brought 10,000 snakes, a lot of them, anyone. So he had them in buckets. He had these giant buckets of snakes, like oil barrel sized buckets, and I just look, you take the lid off and say, yeah, there's like a thousand snakes in there. But it was very strange, but it was a cold night and so when we put them on the ground he says, by the way, when snakes get cold they just freeze up, they just stay still to conserve energy. And I said, ok, great, so we put all these snakes everywhere and they just look like rubber snakes. So we ended up having to shoot that. But then we shot snakes against the green screen that we're moving. We matted them on top of the real snakes.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Oh, that's hilarious. So like, in the end it probably was more work to have the real snakes they would have just been to rubber.

Speaker 2: 6:26

But we've got the record.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Well, that reminds years ago. Matt and I were making a short film that I was directing, and it was just a little thing we had butterflies, oh my God that featured in it and it was in the middle of the night. In this awesome location in New York called Fort Tottenham. We're like in this old, like tunnel, like this concrete, like you know, where they used to store cannonballs and stuff in the Civil War, and it's freezing cold and we've got all these damn butterflies.

Speaker 1: 6:52

And they do the same thing when it's cold. They don't move. So we got like a heater in there and you're like trying to warm up and then quick, quick get the shot.

Speaker 3: 6:58

I'm literally blowing on these butterflies to give them some hot air. That would wake them up.

Speaker 2: 7:05

I remember now there was a question of should we use real butterflies in the scene where the girls are in the forest and the butterflies swarm around them and and the animal ring. I said it's just impossible, they're impossible, you can't, can't work with butterflies. So we're making a movie at Sony and they had to start at this visual effects company, sony Imageworks and they. We talked to them and they said they were interested in writing proprietary software to map butterflies, movement and, you know, to create software, because none of it existed and that was really the beginning of digital effects. So they wrote software specifically for those butterflies of the movie.

Speaker 1: 7:42

Oh, that's a great scene.

Speaker 3: 7:43

I mean, it's so beautiful, you have so many like forward thinking kind of effects.

Speaker 1: 7:47

I mean. I think even the end, like the snakes and everything I mean it goes nuts at the end where you know things are changing and she's becoming snakes and all that I mean when you're filming that her mouth.

Speaker 3: 7:57

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:57

And a lot of that was digital effects right.

Speaker 2: 8:01

Yeah, yes, at the end when she's when Farooza kind of turns into Maduza and that's her. That that was all digital, yes, and in that sequence we didn't have any real bugs or snakes with. Everything was digitized and it was. It was not a very big budget movie, so the effects that are throughout it my, my theory was it should really be something you haven't seen before, because if it's sort of just you know, if we're spending money putting clouds outside a window or something like that, then it's a point to it. It should really be. Everything should be magical. And the.

Speaker 2: 8:40

We really didn't have enough money to do the ending of the movie properly. So we kind of did everything right except the ending. We kind of gave it short shrifts. It was a fight between Sarah and Nancy, but it was kind of quicker and not as messy and my theory was like let's get a good preview. And then the. The series was very reluctant the whole time we were making the movie so and they really said you can only have this much money and we were really struggling against the budget. But when we had a preview, we had the first preview. It was Off the charts. The only thing is people were a little bit disappointed by the ending, and the studio had this really brilliant idea Like why don't we spend some more money on the ending when we shot that scene where her hair turns into snakes and that that little part of the fight we added?

Speaker 1: 9:29

Oh yeah, I think what is it? George Lucas says like you know it's, you know not, filmmaking is not like it's not making the best film, it's making the best film under the circumstances.

Speaker 2: 9:40

Yeah, and that feeling I know. It's no matter how big your budget is or how little it is, it's the same thing. You're doing the most with the, the money in the time that you have, and that's really all you can do.

Speaker 1: 9:54

Yeah, of course I mean it doesn't tell me to your credit. This is like when I think, watch, watching this, I'm like God. This takes me right back to, you know, high school in the 90s. I mean, it is just, it feels like quintessential, and that's not that's not a fact. You know what I mean? That's not a fact. That's that's texture and tone, tone and just it. In my opinion you really nailed it like you really feel that time and place in that film so much.

Speaker 2: 10:24

It was a. It was weird because the I when I got the script it was about four girls in witchcraft, but a lot of the storylines were different. I Added the bird scar thing, for Bonnie Was a character, was a girl in college who apparently had Stars all over her body but she wore a lot of clothing so you never saw them and it was more disturbing to not see them. And the the, the racist thing with the racial character, wasn't black in the original script and I I said there has to be somebody who's not a white person in the four and was some mirror, something that happened in my high school. That is not that, but it was.

Speaker 2: 11:07

It was a form of kind of you know or I'm a bullying, and so I personalized, I brought in a lot of Things that had happened to me because my, my experience in high school was not John Hughes, it was not, you know right, you know, flirting, it was really it was. It was a very academic school and it was an all-boys school and it was religious school. It was very intense and a lot of people Buckled under the stress of it and it was. It was like dark, it was very Gothic and I thought like I want to see that. I've never seen high school. You know scary high school, so we were just yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:46

So we were just in Frightfest in London and, yeah, and I was mentioned to somebody I can't remember where we were having a pint somewhere and we're talking about the craft, and I was like, hey, we just did this podcast, you know, on the craft and the. The response was like immediate, they're like, oh my god, the hair in the shower. They're just like, and that, I think, is probably one of the most lasting, because it is man, it's pretty gruesome like, it's very very.

Speaker 3: 12:10

Yeah, the Christine Taylor moment with in the.

Speaker 1: 12:13

Yeah, the scars on the scar in the blood, like with her hair. It's like, ooh, it's just so tangible.

Speaker 2: 12:21

I think that that's really funny and laugh about it and and I will say when we, when we shot that I was, it's like evil, like laughs and going on. People like I thought I was a horrible person, but it was, you know. Yeah, I guess I'm a horrible Trying to stay in the shower. So I love her. She's great. I've worked with her a couple of times since then.

Speaker 1: 12:47

So let me ask, do you ever go back and like watch your earlier work, at this point, like having gone through such a storied and varied career, like is this something that just lives in memory for you, or do you? Is this continually come up?

Speaker 2: 13:00

I haven't seen it in a long time. But it's, it's the movie that comes back into my life continuously. I, you know people talk to you about things you've done, but it's like I don't think a day goes by where somebody doesn't say something to be, or send me a message or DM me or comment on something constantly. So it's like it's alive. It just never goes away in my brain. But I don't, I don't know, I, I think I remember at the end of it thinking the script was, it's skip was pretty good, but it was, it was flawed, and that once we saw the movie cut together we had to kind of rearrange things and re-shoot and restructure it a little bit. But I wish the script had been sharper to begin with. But it ended up being okay. But I, I remember thinking it was pretty well directed. I don't know I, it's I. When I watched something back, I just think like, oh, I would have done that differently.

Speaker 2: 13:58

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. I think that's probably most directors. Yeah, we're going back.

Speaker 3: 14:10

One. This was your third right.

Speaker 2: 14:15

The third movie I did. But the thing is I started making movies when I was like a little kid. I played a bunch of high school and then I went to film school where I made somewhere about 30 short films, right. So I was very busy. Yeah, it was a. It was a. I was very type A when I was very, very young. I'm a little bit more relaxed now. I was, to be honest, things go and take it easy and let to have fun. But it was a. It was an intense experience. It was also very intense because it was really half day, half night, the whole thing. So that meant that we were constantly going back and forth. We would start on days on Monday and we'd end up shooting all Friday night and Saturday morning. So it was, everybody was jet lagged constantly, like every single week was that schedule, except the few weeks were on the stage.

Speaker 1: 15:10

Yeah, those are, those are the most brutal weeks. So you start like at 4 am and then you end up with an overnight Friday night, the Friday day, it like that's a, that's a, that's rough, rough for everybody.

Speaker 2: 15:21

Our earliest call I ever had was on the craft I think it was 2 am because we wanted to be shooting at LAX at dawn to do this shot of the theme building and her getting out of getting into a car, and we had to be there before the ready to shoot, before the sun came up. It was brutal, brutal, brutal, wow.

Speaker 1: 15:43

How did the cast come about on this Cause it was quite, I think. From what I read, it seems like it was quite a process to like get this up and going.

Speaker 2: 15:51

It was. It was actually the most difficult part of the whole thing was casting it, because I went in and as soon as I was directing it I said like I just don't want, you know, just every celebrity girl that's on TV to be in this movie. And you know, at the time there wasn't a whole generation of young actors that was really just like Winona Ryder, right, and we knew that she was not interested and she was, she was too big of a star and she just wasn't interested. So it was we really had to go find people and the studio kept suggesting like celebrity that's on this sitcom and I was like you know, I'm not emotionally invested in that person and I would bring in you know indie actor who'd only done one thing and there was just a lot of friction about it. And it went on for eight or nine months, the casting part, and we made test deals with, I think, 85 young women, wow, and they came into audition and then we would go to a, we would go to an office or somewhere and put them on tape properly and we did that. I think it was 85 people and everybody. That's that generation I saw they came in and I don't like listing them, but like people who went on to win Oscars, sure, and I could get them approved and it was a.

Speaker 2: 17:11

It was a process, but early on in the process I saw I'd seen Caruza in gas food lodging and then I met with her and she was practicing and Pagan and she was just so I got this as the person. And actually before that Rachel True came in and she was just so funny and she was. She'd such a great look and she's very, very smart and I she was the first one cast and then for is a and then the other two parts were very elusive. Originally Robin Tiny was playing the part that Ned Campbell plays and then we asked her if she would be interested in the lead and she didn't really want to do it. I kind of had to twist her arm to be the lead of the movie and she eventually said yes.

Speaker 3: 18:03

That's amazing. I mean, that is quite the process. And yeah, you did indeed see everyone of the generation that's, and that's incredible.

Speaker 1: 18:11

So, andrew, I want to ask, like last question here, is we really appreciate you taking the time?

Speaker 3: 18:15

I last and half. Last and half.

Speaker 1: 18:17

OK, I was going to say, like you know, over having done so many different things and having such a journey here, what have you learned? You know what I mean, Because we're like you know, we're early on our filmmaking career here. We have one feature film out, we're moving on, so to the next one. What have you learned, kind of over time, that you know if you'd known when you were younger, you know would have been useful for you.

Speaker 2: 18:40

Well it's, you know, it's all changed so much. So much because I won't even say how long I've been doing this, but I think the thing, the thing that has been my guiding principle from the beginning and I didn't really understand it was that for the most part, I felt like pursuing projects where I where you say I haven't seen that before, or or or or or haven't seen a version of that in a long time, or I haven't seen the best version of that, like you know, at the time that the craft was coming about, there were no teen horror movies. There had been, years before, you know, slasher movies, but that had kind of run its course and horror movies had kind of become about pretty Cougar and they were, they were, they were very much one thing, and there weren't movies about teenage girls. I think there had only been, maybe Clueless I think this came out while we were prepping but there wasn't a genre of, of of teenage movies and and so I felt, you know, and this was kind of crass, but I felt like there was a need in the marketplace, like I feel like nobody, nobody's making that movie, do that, pursue that. And it's harder because people say, well, that's not what's popular now, but it did fulfill a deed and it was. You know, it was a popular movie out of nowhere, and so I feel like everything that I've done, I feel like it's really important to try to be original, to do something that you really haven't seen before. People say, well, I need to check that out because it's it's different, and then at least, at the very least, then you've been original.

Speaker 2: 20:25

Horror movies are hard because it's such a code to them. It's like these are the rules, this is how it works, and we really tried to break them. You know, not very many people die in the movie. It's really like one person to, and it doesn't follow the rules of most horror movies. It's kind of, and it's also. I think one of the things about it is that it was I is no accident that I became a comedy director. I think the movie is kind of funny. It was a lot of. It was to be fun and funny, which I think is really important in a horror movie. But anyway, be original, that was be my number one.

Speaker 3: 21:08

Yeah, now that's, that's fantastic. I think my last one is kind of along that which would just be one of the biggest surprises from the reaction to the movie, whether it be an immediate reaction, that after its release, or just now, that we're, you know, some years beyond it just one of the biggest surprises to the that you've had, to the reaction of this film.

Speaker 2: 21:32

Well, I was a surprise that it was number one at the box office that week. It was. I wasn't expecting that, I wasn't even. I didn't even think that was on the, the in the cards. I mean I'd done two other movies and they, I think one. It opened at three and another one at four. One was two and three, I don't know, but that was a surprise. But I was out of town.

Speaker 2: 21:53

Whenever a movie comes out or show premieres or something, I try to be out in nature or somewhere like separate and living my life and not, you know, waiting for the box office number. But I do remember the first time we previewed the movie or the last time we previewed it and some of the trailers have been playing and people had sort of understood what it was and we showed up at this preview was actually here in the Shokes in Sherman Oaks, and half of the people in the line for the theater were dressed like those girls. They were kind of goth and we're goth didn't even exist and I was like, ok, I guess there's an audience for this. That's they. They all look like the characters in the movie.

Speaker 1: 22:38

Well, I think that there's definitely proven over time there's an audience for this. I mean, I know I thoroughly enjoyed it. I know every you know so many people that have watched it that really swear that this movie was unique. Exactly what you were trying to do.

Speaker 1: 22:53

And I mean one of the greatest 90s movies of all time, Absolutely and thank you very much again for making the film and thank you for taking the time here to come shot with us for a few minutes. Andrew, Absolutely, it was a pleasure. All right then. Well, thanks again. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk to you soon.