Stout on Princess of Mars

ARCUDI: There were a bunch of films you worked on that didn't pan out; I remember one in particular: Princess of Mars.

STOUT: I'm almost happy that one didn't pan out. That was the right project in the wrong hands at the wrong time. I was first approached to work on Princess of Mars in early 1990. I was called by Hollywood Pictures (a subsidiary arm of Disney) to show my work and be interviewed. As with most job interviews for the film business, they never really tell you for what job you're being interviewed. It's always been a mystery to me. I don't know why they just don't come out and say, "We're considering you for production designer or creature designer." But they don't. That was probably the single worst interview I've ever had in my life. The two producers were a man and a woman. After talking to them for five minutes I could tell that these two clueless individuals had never produced anything in their lives. Plus, they were idiots. They began by asking me if I was familiar with the [Edgar Rice] Burroughs books. "Yeah. I've read all of the Martian books about three times apiece. I'm currently re-reading them all to my kids." They said, "You know those creatures that Burroughs described in the books?" I said, "Yeah. The tharks, the thoats, the zitidars -- I'm very familiar with those animals and characters." They said, "Yes; well, we want to see something different." At that point I thought, "Oh my god. Right off the bat they're already tampering with what may be the very thing that has kept these books alive for a hundred years. They're just going to throw that great stuff out the window from the get-go." The interview rapidly went south from there. They had real issues with my artist's rights and concerns; getting my originals back and things like that. Anyway, I didn't get hired. It was very clear about 15 minutes into the interview that there was no way on Earth that they would hire me to work on this film. So I forgot about it. I was kind of relieved; I felt in their hands it couldn't be anything less than a total disaster.

About a month or two later I got a call from Buzz Feitshans, my line producer on Conan the Barbarian and First Blood. He asked me if I wanted to work on Princess of Mars. I said, "I thought it was Disney's?" He said, "No. Disney sort of figured out that they couldn't do it; they passed it on to Cinergi and are functioning as co-producers." Basically, Cinergi was going to do the work; Disney would do the distribution. I said, "Is there a problem with me getting my original art back?" He said, "Why would there be?" So I came on board. John McTiernan was the director. He had directed Die Hard and Hunt for Red October -- a terrific director. I had worked with him on Predator. He was at the top of his game. Two days into that job had me in the middle of a huge depression. I was designing suits for camels and elephants. That's what the creatures were going to be. They were going to use camels and elephants in creature suits. I've worked with animals in film -- it's difficult to work with animals under the best conditions. Having an animal wear a costume makes a big problem worse -- it does not ingratiate you to the animal. Plus the fact that there was no way that you could get any of this stuff to look like the Burroughs stuff. People were going to see it and immediately say, "Oh, that's just an elephant." Or, "That's a camel in a suit." I was fighting an impossible battle, at least in my mind. Maybe I was the wrong man for the job. I thought this was the stupidest approach I could possibly imagine. Plus, there was the other problem of showing the four-armed tharks who are prominent in the story and making them convincing. So those were my problems. I called up an old friend of mine who is a huge Burroughs fan: Bob Barrett. After describing what I was going through, I asked, "Quite frankly Bob, should I quit this project?" And he said, "Well, if you quit then Burroughs won't have anyone in his corner." I hadn't thought of it that way; that was a fair assessment. So I stayed on.

After awhile I began to get excited about the project and its possibilities. I thought about taking what had previously been done design-wise with the Burroughs Martian series and going beyond that. I started to really think hard about these Martian peoples as real cultures. That's what flipped my switches on. I began to think about Helium, princess Dejah Thoris' city, and about the decades and decades of fighting. In terms of design Helium was analagous to Beirut, but with even more intensity -- almost everyone in Helium is employed as a warrior. There are very few maintenance people or regular jobs. The farther you can get away from Helium, the closer you are to the dangerous and wartorn outskirts, the more in ruins that city is. Krenkel always drew Martian ruins -- here was why. The outskirts would always get attacked first as forces tried to move farther in with their artillery. I drew pictures of the land and sands overtaking the city's outskirts. There aren't a lot of people wanting to do custodial work on the edge of Helium, so the outskirts are not in great shape. That kind of thinking began to make the culture real for me. So I'm happily humming away on this and from the other room I hear McTiernan say, "Virginia. Does John Carter have to be from Virginia? Why can't he be from Alaska? Alaska's much more butch -- and we wouldn't have to deal with those touchy race issues." I set down the pencil and walk into the next room and say, "John, John. There are really great reasons why John Carter is from Virginia. He was a Captain in the Civil War, but he fought on the wrong side -- the South. And he lost. He didn't own slaves; he was a warrior his entire life. This was a very personal crisis. He was unsuccessful in the defense of his culture. He didn't know how to deal with it, so he did what a lot of people do when they're faced with failure. He tried to escape. He went West, where, while trying to just be alone and mine for gold, he's engulfed in another warrior situation. Americans there are fighting the Indians. Then, he ends up on Mars in the midst of a huge, worldwide Civil War. He is back to Square One but now he's in a world he was born for. The more he tries to run away from himself the more he finds he has to confront himself. So you have this incredibly rich character, history and past to deal with, which, if he's from Alaska, you completely lose." That was my pitch to keep John Carter a Virginian captain in the Confederacy. I started to reconsider the other cultures. I thought about the Tharks and the fact that they're a nomadic culture. I researched what nomadic cultures have in common. They tend to carry all of their wealth with them. They don't use banks or have a place like a home where they leave everything. Nomadic cultures tend to wear a lot of their personal wealth and decorate themselves. Those gave me good design directions. I had the Tharks, who have these big tusks, I had their tusks covered with scrimshaw-like, Maori-like carvings. I thought it was cool because it took the notion of what had been done visually in the past with Burroughs creatures to the next level, a deeper level. It went beyond what Burroughs had described without really violating what Burroughs had described -- just adding to the richness of it.

ARCUDI: How was the script?

STOUT: There were several different scripts. One had John Carter as a sort of wise-cracking guy from Brooklyn. That was like, "Oh, man."

ARCUDI: That'll work [sarcastically].

STOUT: Okay. I can understand why the writer did that -- it's really easy to do. It's much easier to write humor if you're writing jokes. It's much harder to do what Burroughs did -- he had humor all through the story in the form of reflective irony. Irony is much harder to write than wisecracks. But hey, that's why you're paid the Big Bucks. I fought against John Carter as a wisecracker. John McTiernan also wanted to do most of the effects as CGI (computer generated imagery). That's fine now, but at that time CGI was in its infancy. Jurassic Park had just come out; to people not involved in effects CGI seemed like the answer to everything. I would never say that John was a naive director, but by the way he talked about CGI I knew he hadn't done his homework in that area. He didn't realise that most of the dinosaur effects work in Jurassic Park was done live with puppets and mechanicals; there was a maximum of about 12 minutes of CGI dinosaur footage in that movie. People think there's a lot more because the CGI aspects of that film were heavily promoted and you see the dinosaurs a lot. Most of that, though, was Stan Winston's dinosaurs -- not ILM's CGI creatures. Because effects films were my specialty I also knew that those 12 minutes took two years to do. John was talking about doing CGI all through the film. I told him, "You're talking six years if you're lucky but more likely eight or ten to do the effects for this movie. That's how long it takes to do this stuff right now." A budget was done for the film; my friend Buzz's face was ashen. If we had made the film as written and budgeted it would have been the most expensive film in movie history.

ARCUDI: A lot of the stuff you're talking about, like, "Why does he have to be from Virginia?" -- not to let anybody off the hook -- is inherent to adapting material from one medium to another.

STOUT: I understand that completely. I'm not so naive as to think that a straight adaptation of Burroughs' novel would be effective or successful. It wouldn't. Burroughs did not write screenplays. His novels are not structured the way films are structured. If you adapted Princess of Mars exactly the way it was written, the audience would be way ahead of you from the start and drop you shortly thereafter. You have to make changes. But the changes I was suggesting were changes in the structure, not in the inherent qualities of the material that get you excited about doing the project in the first place.

And before I forget, in regards to John Carter of Mars -- it's already been made into a movie; a really successful one. So why do we need to make another? That film's called Return of the Jedi. Princess Leia is dressed as Deja Thoris throughout the film; you've got Martian fliers as ERB described them; the main characters sword fight throughout the movie. If you look at it, it's the essence of John Carter. So if you make a John Carter movie, your audience, who are mostly unaware of the Burroughs books, is going to think you're ripping off a Star Wars film.

ARCUDI: What finally happened?

STOUT: John McTiernan had a pay-or-play deal. For our readers who may be unaware of the meaning of that particular bit of show biz lingo, allow me to explain: You have it in your contract that if the project is not a go project by a certain date you get paid regardless and then you're free to leave. They did not have the money in place to go into production by the time John's pay-or-play time period ended, so he took the money and...

ARCUDI: So, you still have big problems with the film biz.

STOUT: When I first got into the film business it was a really exciting time to be in that world. Working on Conan the Barbarian with Ron Cobb; Raiders of the Lost Ark with Steven [Spielberg]; Return of the Living Dead with Dan O'Bannon; Invaders From Mars and Masters of the Universe with Cannon Films. Most of the films that I did early in my career were shot out of the country. There I was in my wild youth traveling around the world on somebody else's dime, experiencing all of these different cultures; living in Spain, Yugoslavia, Rome, Mexico, and Canada. I was working hard, having a really great time with this tremendous family of filmmakers. I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a very special quality to the people that the DeLaurentis family would put together to make their movies. Okay, there was Carlo Rimbaldi, too -- there's always gonna be some fly in the ointment. I became very close to those people. That began to change dramatically in the 1990s. Most of the really nice people I knew in the business got out of the business. Because the expense of making movies had risen dramatically, fewer films were being made. Because of the greater costs involved in producing each film, more hung in the balance for the studios for each film. The studios also got extremely greedy. A healthy profit was no longer enough; the profits on each film had to be obscene or the film was considered a failure. In a climate like that studios tend to play it safe. They do less adventurous projects. They do lots of sequels. They give the creators much less freedom. Most of the nice people got out of the business and the sharks and the really reptilian people took over -- with apologies to my friends the snakes and lizards...

Each film project started to become less and less fun as a job. I started doing less production design and more of what I call emergency design surgery -- design E.R., or design paramedic services. If you need a creature or something special designed or if you have a particularly hard design problem in your motion picture, come to me and I'll work on it for a couple of days or weeks and solve it. In. Out. That usually works out pretty well. I get a taste of the business again, enough to make me realize why I don't want to be in it permanently, and I get another credit on the resume. It's a nice hit-and-run and I don't have to deal with the politics.

ARCUDI: Working extensively in the industry as you were before you struck this "script doctor" type relationship you have with it, did you feel that film design stunted your artistic growth?

STOUT: Oh, absolutely. Working in the film business is weird. You'll never work harder in your life than working on a film. If you're not working seven days a week, 12 to 18 hours a day, you're not doing your job -- and there's someone ready to take your place. On the other hand, it makes you really lazy both as a writer and as an artist. When I write screenplays, I don't have to use the precise language that I would use if I were writing prose. That's not important to what you want to convey in the screenplay. It's the opposite, in fact. You also want as little variation as possible in your descriptions of recurring people, things, and events so as not to confuse the reader, to let him or her know that you haven't just created someone or something new, but instead you're returning to something previously mentioned in the script. So writing screenplays over a period of time can make you lazy with your choice of words. As a designer, you are only asked for finished work in the very first stages of the film. That early finished work is mostly to set a visual direction for the production and to inspire investors. The closer you get to production, the shooting of the film, the faster you have to turn out the art, the less finished you get, until finally, using Conan the Destroyer for example, I was scribbling designs on the backs of envelopes and then handing it to the model maker so he could run back to his shop and start building it for a shot later that week! You're not really producing what anyone would call "art." You're doing designs in service of the final art, which is the motion picture itself. It makes you sloppy as an artist. If you're not careful you can lose the skills and disciplines that you have honed over the years. If I'd have stayed strictly with production design I would have lost my ability to do the fine brush inking that I do or the detail work that I can achieve in oil paint. 'Cause it's "Use it or lose it." I spend about a year each on most of my films. That's a year away from my easel perfecting my oil painting skills. That's a year away from the table perfecting my drawing and inking abilities. Things don't have to be drawn perfectly for film. They just have to be drawn clear enough so that someone can understand how to make or build it.

ARCUDI: Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a film, you're really doing all of these things, no matter how creative you are, in furtherance of someone else's ideas. Do you find your imagination sapping away when you come away from a film as well? Are you at a loss for concocting your own imagery for your paintings?

STOUT: No. Actually, I think it's the opposite of that. I think filmmaking is incredibly stimulating because you're working with some of the smartest people you'll ever encounter in your life and constantly solving really difficult problems on the fly. Like visually recreating the ERB Martian culture. Prior to my involvement with the film, as an ERB illustrator I'd never thought of that stuff with the same amount of depth. My illustrations all stopped with Frazetta, Krenkel, and Williamson. Going beyond what they had done never occurred to me. There was never that demand. But in the film, there has to be a certain level of richness and realism that goes deep below the surface. Plus, as an illustrator you can get away with vaguery. You can't, designing a film. Someone's going to build whatever you've drawn so your drawings have to be quite specific. You also compress a lot of visual information into that hour and a half. I find that kind of thinking really inspiring.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special Edition.]

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