3DFF, the 3D film festival that raged over the past weekend in Hollywood (click here to see award results), went out with a bang this past Sunday night with a screening of Joe Dante’s The Hole (my review here). Joe Dante remains one of my favorite filmmakers, in part because of the lovably impish figure he cuts in real life. He is one of those guys that is just a delight to listen to. In fact, the only upside to how criminally under-worked he has been the past decade is that he pops up at a lot of events out here in LA, even when he’s not promoting something. He loves film and clearly loves talking about it.

He also loves 3D. After the screening of his film, Dante did an excellent Q&A, which unfortunately I have no way to share other than through summation. Though, fortunately, I was able to corner Dante for a moment when the Q&A ended for a brief chat (thanks to one of 3DFF’s coordinators, Mel, for helping subdue him!). Somewhat unorthodox, I figure I’ll work in highlights of my chat with Dante within a general recap of his Q&A.

Before The Hole began Dante said that the film was an 80’s throwback. By now, such statements have almost become a red flag for many of us 80’s fans. So many new filmmakers try to ape the 80’s style, and for whatever reason seem to garner a disproportionate amount of buzz for their efforts (disproportionate to how true the statements are and certainly to how good the films are). Saying something is an “80’s throwback” generally tips me off that I’ll find the film annoying and uncreative. This is not the case with The Hole, which – and this maybe just reveals what a child of the 80’s I am – feels fairly timeless to me. So I was curious what being an “80’s throwback” or having a “retro feel,” as he said, meant to Dante. What was it about The Hole that Dante saw as being reminiscent of the 80’s?

DANTE: Well, I was there in the 80’s!

ME: Other than your presence behind the camera, of course…

DANTE: It’s, you know, there were a lot of family friendly horror pictures and action comedies during that period – Gremlins was one, Goonies, I guess, was another. And they were family friendly but they were also a little edgy. And they don’t really make those anymore, so we thought, “Hey, maybe there is room for another one.”

During the Q&A, Dante was asked how he gets such good performances out of the kids in his films. “You mean other than beating them?” Dante quipped. He also noted that back in the golden age of Hollywood they used to drug child actors to make them more manageable. Ah, Dante. Despite outward appearances, you can tell Dante never had the fascination with childhood that Spielberg did, nor a particular affinity for kids. Stories about young people aren’t something Dante is specifically drawn to, so much as they are something he kind of fell into because he was good at it. But this is what led to Dante’s specific brand of kids’ films. The kids/teens in his films always take a lot of abuse. I wondered, is this Dante acting out against always being handed films with kids in them? Sinister, payback on his part? Cause, one might conjecture that he enjoys harming children…

DANTE: I wiped out an entire summer camp in Piranha! [Dante laughs his wicked laugh] Characters have to be in jeopardy, whether they are kids or adults, so if a kid is a protagonist there has to be some stakes, you’ve got to put them in danger.

ME: I remember in Small Soldiers that kid gets his arm riddled with, uh –  

DANTE: Corn cobs holders.

ME: That was nasty. Wasn’t the studio kind of worried about stuff like that?

DANTE: They weren’t crazy about it. But on that picture there was a question about what age group we were making it for and they kept changing it while we were shooting. And then when we finally turned in the picture they decided it was too much and they wanted me to cut it back. But during production they had been saying, “No, make it more edgy, make it more edgy!” So it is a matter of what the people who are paying you want out of the movie, and how you can manage to give it some truth to what it is. To let is be what it is, without making it totally homogenized.

ME: And what about with The Hole? Everyone was on board this time?

DANTE: I think that was the kind of picture they wanted to make. They were the ones who chose the script. It was all written by the time I got there.

During the Q&A, Dante dropped a comment that he’d ripped off a gimmick in The Hole from Mario Bava. For my life I couldn’t figure out what. Though it was from Bava’s Kill Baby Kill. So what did he swipe?

DANTE: Have you seen Toby Dammit? That’s the Fellini movie [his segment from the anthology film, Spirits of the Dead] with Terrence Stamp – it’s an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, and the same trick is done there. There’s this devil character, and it’s this blond girl and it’s played by a boy. [Dante utilized the same casting trick in The Hole.] And it’s creepy. It’s just always creepier. It’s creepy in an unknown way. You don’t know what it’s creepy, it just is.

The real highlight of Dante’s Q&A was listening to him talk about 3D. Aside from James Cameron, I have never heard another filmmaker talk so smartly about the format (and minus the self-serious tone that can make Cameron a chore to listen to sometimes). Dante knows that 3D can be more than a gimmick, but he’s also not one of those “3D is the future!” guys. He said he looks forward to watching sports in 3D, but asked the audience if they could actually stand to watch TV all night in 3D. This was 3DFF so of course people yelled back “Yes!” “Even the news?” Dante asked. “That sounds awful.”

DANTE: It wanted there to be a reason [The Hole] was in 3D. You could certainly tell the story without it. All you have to do is close one eye and you can see that version. But it seemed to me that this was a story that involved a depth and emotion and that the 3D could be an enhancement. So that’s how I planned it and designed it. And that’s how we did it in post – you know, things are not necessarily where they are when you shoot them. You get to move them around in post. You can really fake 3D. You can take a guy who is far away and make him stick right out in front of the audience. We didn’t need to do that, but in dream sequences and in the dream section of the movie we did do some of that kind of stuff. Because it’s fun! That’s another tool.

Dante is clearly able to grasp the real filmmaking possibilities of 3D, and not just the gimmicks. He talked about how Hitchock used 3D in Dial M For Murder, and how in a way Hitchcock didn’t change his approach at all from 2D. Hitchcock (like Dante, I would say) always thought in three dimensions. His compositions were agonized over, almost like an animator, everything was placed in the frame for a reason. Distances between actors and furniture weren’t just a side-effect of blocking, these distances and spaces where there to great subtle moods. With 3D there is another plane to work in. So, how exactly did Dante think about 3D when he was on set?

DANTE: It’s hard to articulate because it’s more of a feeling. It’s a gut feeling that you have when you start to do the scene, and there is a way of increasing the unease just by putting things in places that you wouldn’t normally think that they would be – why do I have to look at that here? What’s this mean to the scene? There is a lot of pans around empty basements. You’ve got to plan where the eye is supposed to go. And if there’s one thing out of place, even if it’s not that noticeable, it can sort of trigger something in your mind that makes you a little more uneasy.

As a 3D aficionado, I was curious if Dante had seen the new Piranha (he had just mentioned it moments before). I knew he hadn’t thrown the film under a bus like Cameron, but had he actually seen it?

DANTE: It did not, only because I – [Dante chuckles]  I didn’t feel I had to! I saw some scenes from it. I knew what it was gonna be. I was asked to be in the movie, along with Jim Cameron. We were gonna play boat captains, but it didn’t happen. I certainly wished them well. I’ll catch up with, I just didn’t feel the need to see it opening weekend.

Dante also said that if the technology gets perfected, he welcomes 3D versions of his older films. “Why not?” is his basic feeling. But there will be no 3D Eerie, Indiana. Or a good looking DVD at any point. Dante revealed that all the film negatives of all the episodes had been destroyed long ago, which was apparently the standard practice at the time for television, and all that remains are the master tape copies. Too bad. It was a good-looking series.

Dante also remains fairly upbeat about The Hole’s future. It’ll find it’s home eventually.