Considered by Steven Spielberg to be ‘the best Jaws rip-off’, Joe Dante’s original sci-fi horror Piranha stands out from the countless array of nature-bites-back flicks thanks to its in-your-face and unapologetic ode to genre filmmaking. We chat to Joe Dante about directing a B-movie classic…
Just when audiences thought it was safe to go back in the water, Piranha came along to give them yet another reason to stay away from the sea. Spurred on by the success of Jaws, B-movie maestro Roger Corman was keen to capitalise on the fear of the deep phenomenon, which was already being marred by a wave of spineless cash-ins like Tentacles, Make: The Jaws Of Death and Barracuda. “[With Piranha] we decided to do the exact opposite. Instead of something giant, this was very tiny fish so that we wouldn’t be accused of copying Jaws,” said the exploitation master.
Japanese actress and producer Chako van Leeuwen held the rights to Richard Robinson’s original Piranha story, which had the hokey premise of bathers drawn into piranha-infested waters by a grizzly bear following a forest fire. What attracted Corman’s interest, however, was a rewrite by budding scribe John Sayles. The future Oscar-nominated screenplay writer and indie filmmaker was able to bring better plausibility to the premise by reworking the story around the accidental release of scientifically contained mutant predators into summer resort waters. He also introduced a shrewdly satirical element that distinguished itself from the relentless slew of creature features that took themselves too seriously. Appealing to Corman’s left-wing sensibilities was a political back story that suggested the mutant piranhas were being bred for Vietnamese warfare.
Having cut his teeth editing trailers for Corman movies, serving as the editor on Ron Howard’s directorial debut Grand Theft Auto and co-directing Corman cheapie Hollywood Boulevard, B-movie graduate Joe Dante was an inspired choice to helm Piranha. “We had all the things you’re not supposed to have in one movie – shooting underwater, special effects, dogs and children,” says the filmmaker. “You’re not supposed to do all those things at once, but we didn’t know any better.”
Principle photography took place over a 20- day period in and around Griffith Park in Texas, eight days of which were allocated to underwater shooting. Legendary science fiction filmmaker Jack Arnold became an advantageous presence onset. “His daughter was the casting director on the film, and had been an actress before, so Jack was very interested in the movie,” explains Dante regarding the director behind the Fifties classic Creature From The Black Lagoon, which was a film Piranha aspired to. “Of course, I was a huge fan, having been brought up on his movies, and he had some advice about shooting horror movies and filming underwater, all of which we took on.”
The presence of another icon came with the hiring of veteran actor Kevin McCarthy, famed for playing the raving lead in the original 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. “I’d always been a big fan of Kevin’s,” says Dante, who would subsequently cast McCarthy for significant roles in The Howling, a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie and as one of the main antagonists in Innerspace. “He was the first method actor I’d ever worked with, and the first thing he had to do was have this big fight with Bradford Dillman. Being low budget, we didn’t have stunt doubles, and he took the role very seriously and almost killed him!” Other familiar genre faces included Mario Bava screen queen Barbara Steele (who had previously featured in Corman’s classic Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Pit And The Pendulum) and Corman regular Dick Miller, who would equally become a future Dante mainstay, and in Piranha played a corrupt mayor caricature in an overt nod to Murray Hamilton’s character in Jaws.
With casting secured, the biggest challenge facing production was dramatising the titular threat in a convincing manner on such a tight budget. Though piranhas had featured in a clutch of films before, including 1962 Hammer Studios swashbuckler The Pirates Of Blood River, this would be the first time the carnivorous creatures took centre stage. “There was famous footage of piranhas eating a cow underwater, which was the textbook example of what a piranha looked like in action, but we realised there was no way we were going to use that on our budget,” reveals Dante. “Ultimately, we come up with a concept of fish puppets that could be rammed into a shot, which we filmed at eight frames a second to make them look like they were travelling really fast.”
Fresh from their groundbreaking work on Star Wars: A New Hope, future Academy award-winning FX maestros Phil Tippett and Rob Bottin were employed to work on the intricate creature design and special make-up effects on Piranha. Subsequently, the superbly makeshift trick of having rubber piranhas on rods with trigger handles to operate their mouths was used for the underwater attack scenes, including the particularly tense struggle on a dismantling raft, where the rods were inserted down the throats of the fish and cleverly operated from above to hide the mechanisms. In addition, the fish were fitted with steel teeth that could easily tear through prosthetic limbs, while air plasters were used underwater to produce the vigorous bloody water-bubble effect during the attacks.
“We managed to get pretty convincing shots of the piranhas eating people underwater,” observes Dante. “What we couldn’t master was a group shot, because we didn’t have the ability to make the piranhas look like they were massing in an individual way – so their relations to one another in the water were always the same.”
Despite the largely successful low-budget innovations, once principle photography had wrapped and Dante had assembled all the filmed footage in the editing room he became convinced that he had a disaster on his hands. “I looked at it, and thought that it was the worst movie that had ever been made,” admits the director, who consequently lived in the editing suite, editing around the clock in an attempt to ‘save the movie’. “I was spending all my time trying to figure out whether it was better we show the piranhas for four frames or for eight frames? Was it better we speed them up or better we do opticals? I couldn’t see the forest for the trees!”
But an even bigger problem was surfacing in the form of the return of an infamous great white, which threatened the entire release of Piranha. “When Universal discovered that Roger Corman was creating Piranha and that it would be released within the same time frame as Jaws 2, they got every worried and tried to get an injunction to keep the picture from being released,” reveals Dante. “They had successfully done this with another movie called Great White (aka The Last Shark), which they managed to keep off the market in America.”
Ironically, it was Steven Spielberg, the director of the original summer blockbuster, who subsequently reassured Universal that Piranha was a parody of giant fish movies. “He told them it didn’t have anything to do with Jaws, and they were told to lay off, so even though I didn’t know him at the time, Spielberg was partially reasonable for letting them have the movie.”
And just like Jaws, all the blood, sweat and tears paid off at the box office when Piranha became New World Pictures’ most successful movie release, and an even greater success for co-financer United Artists, who released it in South America, where piranhas were a known threat. “Luckily, it turned out fine, and was very successful for Roger. It ended up being my last Roger Corman movie,” acknowledges Dante.
For the filmmaker, who would go on to direct The Howling, two Gremlins films and Matinee, the experience and economical lessons learned on Piranha would, like other graduated from infamous Roger Corman School of filmmaking, prove invaluable. “They were pretty much the lessons you learn on any Corman film: how you can maximise the amount of screen time you’re shooting, how you can put down a dolly track and shoot three scenes off it… tricks that you use to save time when you don’t have any time, then when you get on a real movie you find yourself still using the same tricks because they work, and you find yourself having time to do other things better.”
Commencing with a fearsome Jaws-inspired pre-title opener where skinny-dipping teens are attacked in a pool that obscures the horror lurking below, Piranha is a superbly satirical shocker that doubles up as a loving tribute to B-movie cinema. Particularly memorable moments include a Ray Harryhausen-esque stop-motion creature homage in a laboratory, the mauling of a swimming instructor who is dragged away into oblivion by a school of piranhas, and an unexpectedly climatic bloodbath on a group of kids at a Summer school camps. “I think that was really surprising, as nobody thought we’d actually have those kids eaten by piranhas, but Corman insisted on as much gore as possible!” reveals Dante.
Three years later, the inevitable sequel surfaced in the form of James Cameron’s infamously misguided directorial debut Piranha 2: The Spawning. But apart from a humourless Corman-produced made-for-TV remake in 1995 (which stole piranha footage from Dante’s film wholesale), it would be several decades before the flesh-eating fish would strike again in the form of Alexandre Aja’s entertainingly playful 3D remake starring Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future).
“He offered me a part, but it turned out I couldn’t do it,” reveals Dante, who admits to not having seen the film. “I saw the trailer, and understood exactly what they were doing. It shows how times have changed, because in our movie the big thing was that the piranhas were eating people’s breasts, but in the [remake] the piranhas are eating people’s penises!”
This article first appeared in SciFiNow issue 102.
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