Original subtitles

- 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.