Episode 9 : Nightbreed and Occupy Midian with Anne Bobby

Jose Leitao, Ryan Danhauser, Roger Boyes and special guest Anne Bobby talk about Nightbreed and Occupy Midian.

Read Full article for Show Notes:

Show Notes:

1) When I refer to my Cabal book cover, this is it:  -> (JL)

2) Anne Bobby’s books are Love me or Leash Me, and Best Friend for Life.

3) Occupy Midian on facebook is: Occupy Midian, and the petition is here. Please sign it!

4) Clive’s recent Revelatory interview: “A Light, Hidden”.

5) The picture with Babette’s father is this one. ->

6) The playbill from Broadway’s play “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change…” with Anne Bobby

7)  Anne Bobby’s Pasta Recipe: Take a bunch of tomatoes, chop them up, put them in a bowl.  Add Olive Oil. Add fresh Basil, Salt, Pepper. Add some cubed smoked mozzarelle [sp], cube progiutto [sp].  Let it sit on the counter for an hour.  Add some pasta.  Toss it up and serve it.  I’ll fix the spelling when I get some help.

8)  Correction:  Mark Miller is getting married next week! Oops!  We still mean our congratulations.

9)  Song:  Weird Al Yankovic, “Lasagna”

Transcript Below

DANHAUSER: Hi everybody. Welcome again to the Clive Barker Podcast. Today we have Roger  Boyes, our co-host, Jose Leitao, I’m Ryan Danhauser, and today we have a super-special guest, Anne Bobby, the co-star of the movie Nightbreed.

BOBBY: Hey, what’s up?

DANHAUSER: So today we’re talking about Nightbreed and the Occupy Midian movement. I would say let’s start out with, what is our first memory of Nightbreed?  Roger, what about you?

BOYES: You know, I can’t really tell. It’s just like, always been there. I don’t remember where I first saw it, but I just remember all those monsters and stuff, and I don’t know really. It’s weird. 

DANHAUSER: Jose, what about you?

LEITAO: Oh yeah, I’ve got a good story to tell about that. Well I started out, I think by seeing pictures of the movie, because this came out in 1990 so I was like 14 years old at the time. I didn’t get to see the movie at first, but I saw pictures in magazines. Then I read the comic books that came out and in ’93 I think, I was vacationing in Canada, and that’s where I bought the Cabal book. My copy actually has a beautiful cover, I might scan it for the show notes, ’cause it’s got like Lori and Boone escaping from Midian, and it’s burning behind them. And then I read the book and I was like completely surrendered to the story, and after that I saw the movie, and I bought the tape. 

DANHAUSER: Well for me it was a friend… I was sort of sheltered growing up so I didn’t really see any horror movies at all but I went over to a friend’s house and he had rented Nightbreed and the VHS back then, this was like right when it first came out and had that intro by Clive Barker…

LEITAO: Oh yeah…

BOYES: Love that…

DANHAUSER: And I had always had this sort of secret love for monsters, and seeing him do that introduction and talk about monsters as the good guys and I was just totally engrossed the whole way through the movie. And even though obviously the movie has left a lot of things out, I think that we’re all here because we loved, even the original movie and when we get the extended cut, we’ll love it even more. So from there I started buying..  I bought Cabal because I had to know more about Clive Barker, and I bought the Books of Blood and my whole collecting binge started there. I was about the same age as you Jose, I was 14 [Ryan was actually16], I think, or 15. I’,m 37 now, so I don’t know how that works out. 

LEITAO: Cabal was my first Clive Barker book, actually. After that it was the Great and Secret Show. But, you know, that’s for another episode. 

DANHAUSER: So Anne, we saved yours for last, because you probably have a way better story than all of us. 

BOBBY: (Laughing) Well actually my very first experience with Nightbreed was my very first meeting with Clive and we met at a casting agent’s office on 57th Street in New York City. I’d read the script and was completely pulled in. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to New York, but New Yorkers always seem a little bit removed from the rest of the world and as a New Yorker I was pulled into the mythology of people who are isolated from what you would consider the rest of the world — the normal world, and that just pulled me right in. I was always a fan of Clive’s and I was a huge fan of the Books of Blood, which I had read many years prior, and I just walked into this meeting and Clive was in this tiny little room with poor Todd smoking a Cigar, killing poor Todd in this tiny little room. Of course I immediately started smoking, and we just started talking about the script and the air got thicker and thicker in more ways than one and we just had such an awesome time talking about these ideas for the creatures and the sort of parallels to Greek mythology which was I was really very into at the time. I actually went on to study classics and so we just got on like a house on fire and after that I sat down and read Cabal. I was completely captivated. What a mind he’s got. I knew that no matter what, I really had to do this movie. 

DANHAUSER: Wow, so you were involved in it pretty early on. 

BOBBY: Yeah, very early on.

DANHAUSER: So this is a question that Jose and I were just talking about, I just noticed on IMDB that it credits Lori as Lori Deschinger, but in the movie they call you Ms. Winston. 

BOBBY: Yeah, isn’t that weird? I was watching the movie at Mad Monster two weeks ago and I went, “What is that?” I don’t know, maybe that was some sort of later thing. Has anyone every dropped that over to Clive and see what he says?

DANHAUSER: No, that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll ask Mark about that. 

BOBBY: Yeah, that’s actually a really good idea.

DANHAUSER: So for you it was always Winston?

BOBBY: Yeah, it was Winston to me, but I knew in the book, as the singer, and again in the mythology one of the clarion callers of this it always made sense to me and then in the script I remember actually when we were shooting it, “It’s Lori Winston now.. All right.” When you’re doing a film you’re going, there’s gotta be a reason for everything. 

LEITAO: I was just reading the script and it says Winston in the script, so yeah, I don’t know where Deschinger came from. 

BOBBY: Winston, that’s in the interview scene with… 

DANHAUSER: With Joyce and Decker, right… 

BOBBY: Yeah, with Joyce and Decker, of course. 

DANHAUSER: On the last podcast when I was talking about new characters and the character that had met up with Joyce at the crime scene, I was actually wrong, he’s not a new character, he’s the same guy that performs the autopsy, we’re just not used to seeing him talking to the camera and up close like that, I guess. 

BOBBY: Oh my god, I think you’re right. Oh my gosh. 

DANHAUSER: Morton, I think is his name…

BOBBY: Yes! Yes!

DANHAUSER: Isn’t his scene pulling the bullets out of Boone, concurrent with your interview scene, which is actually a lot longer in the Cabal Cut. 

BOBBY: Everything is so much longer in the Cabal Cut, I mean everything. I couldn’t believe. I actually showed it to Chris Clairmont as soon as I got back and he couldn’t believe the difference in the film. He was freaking out. He was like, “It’s totally a different movie.”

DANHAUSER: Yeah, you know seeing this I feel like your character was robbed a little.

BOBBY: (Laughing) I was robbed!

DANHAUSER: Yeah, you know in the original movie it seemed like Lori was more kind of chasing Boone around and there’s not as much development of the relationship and trying to be careful with Boone’s fragile state of mind and then the connection to the Nightbreed. 

BOBBY: And Ryan, you know I never even intended this to be like some sort of clumsy segue but actually it makes sense now. You know we’re talking about getting the Cabal Cut viewable to people, getting it screened, getting it seen. Doing the Occupy Midian movement. In a way, you think about the Occupy movement that has been born over the last year, and you see, you know a party, you see people in power sort of looking at this movement and saying, you know, “We don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to react to people who just saying this is what we want. We no longer want what was in front of us, we want what we know is out there for us. And that’s kind of like what happened with the movie, they were kind of like, ‘We don’t really know what to do with this idea of misfits as heroes.’ 

DANHAUSER: Yeah, it’s like they felt like the world wasn’t ready for that. 

LEITAO: In some ways Nightbreed the movie was a movie which was a little before its time because in the early ’90’s (well this was filmed in ’89 right?) the concept of movies with monsters where the monsters were the good guys, that just came into popularity in the mid-90’s. So Nightbreed was the one that opened the door for that whole, monsters can be good guys.  And so that’s what I think about the movie. 

BOBBY: There’ve certainly been references to that in the past. I mean there’s no greater example, I mean, you know, look at Frankenstein. Look at Freaks. I mean, the idea of that. The idea, what Clive did was Clive just sort of elaborated on that and it wasn’t just one monster, one creature or a group of traveling freaks, it’s an entire city that draws people from all over the world. 

LEITAO: I usually refer to Midian as like wonderland in an ossuary. 

BOBBY: That’s fantastic! I love that.  It’s wonderful. 

DANHAUSER: There’s a little bit more of a feel of that as Lori is walking in the Cabal Cut, across the bridges and through Midian to get to Boone at the tabernacle… It’s like in the original cut she just gets straight there almost. I mean there’s a little bit of seeing the monsters, but it’s way longer and you get more of a feel of how vast Midian is in the Cabal Cut. 

BOBBY: I wish that everyone could see what that was like… What that stage was like over at Pinewood Studios. It was extraordinary.  That set and all their little individual carvings that were around it, you wouldn’t believe what that place was like.  And actually when I first got there the very first thing that happened was everything was put on hold right away because there was a fire on the stage. 

DANHAUSER: Oh, jeez!

LEITAO: Oh!

BOBBY: Yeah, so I showed up in London and the producer Christopher Figg said, “Well enjoy London because we have to rebuild part of your set.”

DANHAUSER: Oh wow!

LEITAO:I think one of the Sons of the Free got to the set. 

BOBBY: (Laughs) And that was amazing — the Sons of the Free outside of the police station. We made more use of the exteriors of Pinewood Studios and our production offices. 

DANHAUSER: So how much time was spent in England filming, I mean because people have said that it was filmed in Canada, or at least parts of it were filmed in Canada. 

BOBBY: I would say 95%, 97% of the film was shot in London. Some of the exteriors were shot in Canada. All the approaches to Midian, the death of Boone, Decker, the death of Cheryl-Anne, all of that was shot in London. 

DANHAUSER: Oh! Okay. 

BOBBY: On back lots at Pinewood studios and the driving shots were shot in Canada, in Calgary. There were a few. You know we used some helicopter shots and things like that. All of that was shot in Canada. Whenever you see mountains and forests and stuff, that’s Canada. It’s not a lot, really. In fact at principal shooting when principal shooting wrapped, Craig didn’t even come to Canada. I was the only actor to go to Canada. 

DANHAUSER: So were the actors American or Canadian, you know the guys with buffalo hats and stuff? 

BOBBY: They were all in England. Just like there is in America, there’s a very large American ex-patriot community in England. Catherine Chevalier, I believe was American. She might have been Canadian. 

DANHAUSER: She’s Rachel, right?

BOBBY: Rachel, yeah. 

DANHAUSER: I had never even known her voice was dubbed until I saw The Cabal Cut. 

BOBBY: Isn’t that amazing? 

DANHAUSER: Yeah, three quarters of that cut of the movie has her natural voice, and then the stuff they used from the existing movie went back to that voice and that story you told was funny about the coffee lady. 

BOBBY: The crazy coffee lady! Yeah, at the time she was one of the most popular voice artists in the UK. She was the voice of this coffee commercial, and there were several, and she had a very exotic accent and they got her to dub Catherine.. dub Rachel and it was crazy when I first saw a screening of it, I was going, “What happened to Catherine”?

LEITAO: Yeah.

BOBBY: Shortly followed by “What happened to Doug?”

LEITAO: And here’s a little-known piece of trivia, which is that Catherine Chevalier also played in Hellraiser II. She played the mother of Tiffany.

BOBBY: Yes she was, she was Tiffany’s mom. There were like two shots, it was just like a quick shot of her, wasn’t it?

DANHAUSER: She says, “Help my daugher.”

BOBBY: Another doctor, that’s right! Watching that movie made me feel very grateful that I said I wouldn’t work with maggots, because I saw that Clive was serious about maggots. 

DANHAUSER, LEITAO, BOYES (Laughing)

BOBBY: I’ve never been so specific about things that I wouldn’t work with – roaches, maggots. 

DANHAUSER: (Laughing) That reminds me, in the QA panel at Mad Monster Party you had said they were going to have you transforming into a creature, but you had trouble with the prosthetics. What was that supposed to look like? 

BOBBY: I believe it’s supposed to be, not a mirror image, but a reference to Boone / Cabal. 

LEITAO: Like a female counterpart? 

BOBBY: Like a female counterpart, yeah. Sort of these frilled whorls and swirls.

DANHAUSER: Oh, wow. 

LEITAO: I noticed this recently, watching the movie again. You can actually tell those swirls are on Peloquin’s face and his chest. Sometimes it’s hard to notice, but it’s there. Another one of those references — Peloquin bites Cabal and he also gets the same kind of markings. 

BOBBY: That’s really intense, I never noticed that. There was so much going with that. I mean, my god, on Ollie’s face, it was crazy. 

DANHAUSER: I have an early draft of the screenplay and I didn’t get to read it all again last night, but I stopped at the part where Lori is leaving Cheryl at the car and just starting to walk towards Midian, and Lori makes a joke, she says, “With my luck, I’ll end up buying some Real Estate.” Was that ever in the version that you had? 

BOBBY: Oh my god, of course it was! Now that you’ve said that, of course it was! I totally remember saying that line. 

DANHAUSER: I wonder if maybe they thought that didn’t fit with the tone? 

BOBBY: You know it’s such a crazy thing, what actually gets thrown under the bus of time constraints in a film is astonishing. But as you said that, I remember even saying that line. So much gets cut. I wish that you could see everything that vanishes from a film. But I’m remembering that completely, I remember walking toward the car – that station wagon that broke down every other take. 

LEITAO: (Laughing) Really?

BOBBY: Oh god, I remember walking up to a guy, ‘How the hell is this American station wagon, that had to get somehow brought over to the UK., going to ever start?’ And of course it broke down constantly. 

DANHAUSER: Oh, because the steering wheel had to be on the left side? 

BOBBY: Of course! And, you know, there it was in the middle of Bukinghamshire and breaking down every other take. We spent more time just waiting for someone to fix that car.  

BOYES: Was it actually shown driving?

BOBBY: Oh yeah, there were moments where it’s basically… Well this is where you go to continuity. There’s an overhead shot of me driving in Canada and I’m pulling up. Basically you’ll see cars pulling up. You don’t know this but basically the actor is driving the car to a spot where there are like five-thousand sand bags where you know to stop the car and that’s the mark where the camera is picking up on you. 

DANHAUSER: And also there’s a scene that was cut out where Lori comes out pick up Cheryl, and Cheryl says, “Can we stop for aspirin?” 

BOBBY: Yeah! Oh yeah! I remember that. 

LEITAO: There’s a lot of little cuts that they did.. I remember ultimately the scenes that got cut, because Ryan was saying that was reading the script last night, and I also read the script, but Ryan’s is the second draft, mine is the one that was in the “Making of the Film” book, which is full of ‘scene deleted’ lines.

DANHAUSER: There are some that are even in the earliest drafts that were deleted. 

LEITAO: But I think ultimately in the scenes that got cut Lori was a much better character, I mean she had much more characterization, I mean I can’t believe that they left out the “Johnny Get Angry” musical number. That would tell us what she actually does and show us Lori being more of herself and her daily life and we never really know what she does in the movie. And just like Boone, I know Boone shows up welding, but we don’t really know what they do in the movie.  They’re in the room, they’re at their house, they’re like, kissing, and what do they do? Who are they?

DANHAUSER: Yeah, it was like somebody decided that the back story of these characters wasn’t that important. 

LEITAO: Right. 

BOBBY: And actually, in doing that, what I also found so wonderful is in expanding the Cabal Cut and seeing them at their work and seeing them together and just sort of being present, not just advancing plot, and laying down establishing points, you really get to see that Lori is passionately in love with this man. 

DANHAUSER: I would imagine it would be pretty difficult. 

LEITAO: In the book Lori walks on eggshells around Boone because.. I think that Lori in the movie plays a strong kind of woman that can save a man from himself, despite all odds. She loves Boone because he has something special about himself. He’s a little haunted but he’s the sanest man she ever met. So I think that in the book “The Nightbreed Chronicles” Clive Barker wrote for Lori’s back-story that she’s obsessed by a dead man, drawn into the darkness of Midian by that obsession, and finally she is lost to it. 

BOBBY: I think there is something really powerful, and a friend of mine who was with me at the screening pointed out the fact that if you consider the eastern philosophy yin and yang we have masculine and feminine energy going through us at all times, there’s a really wonderful counter-balance between Lori and Boone. In some ways in their relationship Lori is very masculine. She takes on the rescuer, she goes and rescues Boone… So that Boone can rescue his people. 

LEITAO: And she rescues him several times. The first of which is from his bad dreams of Midian – she rescues him when she wakes him up. She recues him from Midian, and then finally from taking on the inaccessible role of the lone messiah. 

DANHAUSER: When he’s in jail, feeling sorry for himself. 

BOBBY: I think that’s something that Clive really sort of covered in the Cabal Cut that I think they just sort of wanted to avoid at all costs. It was certainly one of the first things to go on the chopping block in the original cut. Just this idea of Lori taking on a very proactive role. She’s Boone’s protector. 

LEITAO: Absolutely, she drives all the way to Midian to find his body because she thinks some pervert is using it as a plaything, she goes all the way to Midian so she can find Boone’s body and then she finds Boone. 

BOBBY: Yeah, and I think that’s a great parallel to people who are finding their own inner sources of strength. So I think that’s something that Clive really touched on in a big way and I got to really see in that director’s cut, and I’ve never been able to fully see drawn out. You know, she is a hero. At least she is in this cut.

LEITAO: And if I can say something.. In the wall of prophecy, which was supposed to be in the movie in a more extended form, at the end of the movie she was supposed to show up in the wall with Boone on a hilltop as the couple Boone and his lover and they were both in the prophecy, so Lori would also be in the prophecy so she is much more important. Now that you mention that, they were going to put some makeup on you to make you a little counterpart of Boone — that would have been wonderful. It would’ve come together. 

BOBBY: And we actually did do some painted makeup, but you know that still hasn’t made its way into the final. Boy, I really need to have a talk with Clive. I need to talk to him and find out what all else is missing (laughing). 

DANHAUSER: There was also something I’d noticed, even in the Cabal Cut, in the script Boone tries to kill himself, right? He throws himself right into the truck, and even in the Cabal Cut that wasn’t clear. 

BOBBY: No, it wasn’t. I thought that was interesting too. 

LEITAO: Yeah, in the book we get a much more obvious suicide attempt. Boone goes home after talking to Decker, he burns everything, he burns the pictures Decker gave him…

DANHAUSER: That’s in the Cabal Cut. 

LEITAO: Oh, it is? Oh, fantastic.

DANHAUSER: So he leaves a note saying, “All wrong, keep this, burn the rest.” And then he goes and throws himself in front of a truck. 

BOBBY: That’s there. The fire is there. And he’s tripping as he’s doing it, but what’s missing is the sense that he’s consciously ending his life… That he’s attempting to end his life. 

DANHAUSER: It felt more like this drug-induced weird kind of freaking out kind of thing. 

LEITAO: I think there’s a certain look of determination in his eyes though, in that last second when he’s facing the truck and the headlights are blasting on his face. I think there’s a certain look of determination like he knows what’s coming and he wants it to happen. But yeah, it’s not as obvious., of course. 

DANHAUSER: And in the script he tells the nurse, “I can’t even kill myself.”

BOBBY: Right.

LEITAO: Oh, in the Cabal Cut?

DANHAUSER: No, it’s in the script, but it wasn’t in [the Cabal Cut]

BOBBY: Right, I remember that. 

LEITAO: So yeah, The Cabal Cut. Ryan is the only one here that has seen the Cabal Cut, and of course Anne Bobby. Me and Roger haven’t seen it yet. I really can’t wait. It’s fueling my desire to be part of Occupy Midian. It’s what’s making me do my best to help out the cause. But yeah, I can’t wait for it to have more screenings. 

BOBBY: One other thing that I would say is that there’s a lot of things that we could do, I mean maybe we could put together a little video of people putting clips up about themselves. Putting a video and getting people to post their pleas on the site, saying, this is why. 

LEITAO: I’ve seen a couple people who did that on YouTube actually. I need to post those videos on the wall. 

DANHAUSER: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. 

LEITAO: Yeah, one of the members of the group called Oliver Lowther, he’s English, he made a video and I just saw that last night, he’s asking for people to sign the petition and he’s asking for more awareness of the Cabal Cut. And I’m going to post that on the wall. 

DANHAUSER: You know, as of this recording there are 885 members in that group.

BOBBY: Oh my god, wow!

DANHAUSER: There was one time when I checked in and it said that there were 116 people waiting to be added. So I was like, “okay, accept, accept, accept, accept, accept”, you know and then other people were doing it too so I only had to do like 15 of them.

LEITAO: I’ve been doing that all day. 

DANHAUSER: So 407 people have signed the petition also. 

BOBBY: Wow!

DANHAUSER: Yeah, so considering a couple years ago there was 1000 people signed a petition over the course of three years. 

LEITAO: It was like 900 people that had signed it from 2009 to the present date and then I talked to Revelations about it and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t really send people to that petition because it’s too old. Would you like to try your hand at starting a new petition, and I was like, yeah sure, let’s do it. So I talked to you guys, and I went on iPetition and I got that text going and we put it up, and in less than 2 weeks, how many people Ryan?

DANHAUSER: 885. You mean as of right now?  Oh, 407.

BOBBY: I think it would be a really awesome idea for people to post images of themselves. You know, follow the Occupy Wall Street movement, post of a photo of you with a sign saying why Nightbreed should be back. Put it up!

DANHAUSER: And it seems to me like a lot of things are really falling into place right now to make this work. I think first of all it was great when I was there when you came up with the name. I think that name really kind of resonates…

BOBBY: I have to say I am deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement: it is a movement that is dear to my heart. I cook for Occupy Wall Street. It was born in my back yard, and I’m so impressed… Politics aside, no matter what you feel about what’s happening in the world, the fact that this disparate group of people has got the passion for an idea that they can change the world is just the most empowering. Delicious, powerful! The idea when I sat at Mad Monster and talked to people who were like, “we really want to see this” it just sort of synced up with me and I said ‘well then Occupy.’  Occupy, make it happen. We have never been more powerful… In this age of technology to make things happen that we want to see happen.

DANHAUSER: And Mark Miller reviving this whole movement with getting the footage together and the people at Revelations helping out with the footage and sorting through all of Clive’s stuff and we’ve got Russell…

BOBBY: Russell is cutting away as we speak. I have absolutely no doubt. He has foregone dinner and is sitting working stuff out as we speak.

DANHAUSER: He’s put so much of his own time into that movie and you can tell that he took something that was really difficult to put all together to make that for us, which was incredible. 

BOYES: And that’s a physical thing. 

BOBBY: He and Mark are just warriors.. Complete warriors and we owe them all so much gratitude. 

DANHAUSER: I couldn’t believe how well the sound all married together, because…

BOBBY: Can you believe!  I know! 

DANHAUSER: Because I was expecting, ‘Oh god, I’m going to have to strain my ears whenever all of those VHS scenes come in.’ If you had your eyes closed you wouldn’t even know the difference. 

BOBBY: And it was odd because you know the film was very watery and not adjusted but damn if that sound wasn’t amazing!

DANHAUSER: Yeah! I mean I don’t know if they could do surround sound with it or anything but it was incredible. 

BOBBY: It’s a real testament to the very, very dear man who was running sound while we were filming that, his name is John Hitchley. And John was fantastic and that was a very very difficult film to record sound on for so many reasons, not least of which is PInewood Studios is about fifteen minutes away from Heathrow Airport. 

DANHAUSER: And Simon told us a really funny story when they were doing Hellraiser there there were ducks in a pond that kept quacking when they were trying to record. 

BOBBY: (Lauging)

LEITAO: Can you imagine the cenobites going like “We’ll take your soul to hell” and the ducks are going like “quack quack quack”. 

BOBBY: Quack, quack, quack! So much for instilling everyone with a sense of fear. (Laughing) That’s fantastic!  I love it. 

DANHAUSER: He said that mysteriously one day the ducks were gone. 

BOBBY: Yes, that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. I’m sure. 

DANHAUSER: So you didn’t have any duck problems there for Nightbreed?

BOBBY: God, I loved hanging with Simon and Frank. 

LEITAO: Frank the dog. 

BOBBY: Beautiful, beautiful Frank. He was so great. 

LEITAO: For people who don’t know who Frank is, Frank was the little dog that Simon Bamford had as Ohnaka. 

BOBBY: Yes, and he belonged to a second AD. 

DANHAUSER: He’s like a Boston Terrier, right?

BOBBY: He’s a Boston Terrier, and he belonged to one of the Assistant Directors and everyone loved him, and he got into that movie and he became one of the Nightbreed. He was sensational.  We loved Frank. 

DANHAUSER: Yeah, I noticed that he’s not in the script. 

BOBBY: He didn’t have a credit at the end?

DANHAUSER: Well, I don’t know, but in the screenplay he’s not in there. 

BOBBY: Oh no! Frank was just one of those happy coincidences. 

DANHAUSER: That added a lot of personality to Midian. 

BOBBY: And a lot of humanity, actually, oddly enough. A dog added humanity to the film, but isn’t that always the case? We cry for animals more than we cry for people. 

DANHAUSER: You wrote two books about dogs, right? 

BOBBY: I sure have. 

DANHAUSER: Love me or Leash me, Best Friend For Life?

BOBBY:  Absolutely. I’ve devoted a lot of my life. That was the thing that made me cry so friggin’ hard at Mad Monster [Party]. Years after I did Nightbreed, I became very involved in animal rescue, which I’m still very involved in. Seeing myself in that extended cut, rescuing Babette. It was like I found myself watching myself doing something that five years later was going to become an extremely important part of my life. I was rescuing an animal. 

DANHAUSER: It was really moving. And for those who haven’t seen it, Babette was, of course, lying there suffering in the sun and Lori comes up to Babette and is trying to figure out how she can help, but it doesn’t occur to her that it’s because she’s in the sun. She’s asking her questions. ‘What can I do? What is it? What do you need?  And I don’t remember. I wish I’d seen it more than once. 

BOBBY: No, you’ve actually nailed it. And literally this is what happens now when I find myself dealing with a wild dog, or a feral cat. I now do this on a regular basis. It’s become such a part of me that I’ve written books on my experiences. But watching that. Watching myself, like a 20-year old doing something that ten years later… It broke me apart. 

LEITAO: What’s really interesting is that the making of the film book has a picture of Babette’s father. Babette’s father was a werewolf, and there’s actually a picture here in black and white in the book. I’m looking at it right now. That after the Sons of the Free invade Midian, they shoot him and we see the picture of Babette sitting next to her dead father, who’s a werewolf. And I think he’s the same one that shows up in the opening credits of Nightbreed.

DANHAUSER: With his eyes flashing. 

LEITAO: Yeah, with his eyes flashing. 

BOYES: At the very end of the credits?

LEITAO: No, in the beginning.  In the opening credits when you see the wall of prophesy and then you see a spider in a jar, and there’s a wolf-man there. 

BOBBY: And that’s Babette’s father! Oh my god, you guys!

LEITAO: Yeah, she was supposed to be half werewolf, half smoke creature.

BOBBY: That’s right, half werewolf, half smoke creature. Which was what always kind of freaked me out that she was walking around with kittens. Like a werewolf would never have anything to do with a kitten — unless in the story they’re like popcorn shrimp or something. 

LEITAO: And in the Nightbreed Chronicles she’s holding a doll that’s got the body of a girl., but then she’s got one arm and one head that are a dog arm and a dog head. And there were two girls playing Babette. 

BOBBY: Those little girls were wonderful. They were twins. Babette was played by two girls. One was a bit more outgoing and energetic, and sort of up to a challenge and she was the one who wore all the prosthetics. And the other was more soulful and mournful and she was the one who was sort of there for book scenes.

DANHAUSER: Well, Anne, I think if you’re getting low on time we did have some people that had some questions for you. 

BOBBY: Okay, absolutely. Fire away. 

DANHAUSER: So, David, the one that you sang for in the last [interview].

BOBBY: Oh, yes!

DANHAUSER: He says, I’d like to know if Clive told you anything about your character’s history to help. And what was Clive like as a director? 

BOBBY: Well Clive didn’t tell me a whole lot about her that we weren’t already on a similar wavelength about. Once he told me that he loved that I was a singer. He wanted someone who was very strong. Clive and I both come from a theater background and I think that that was really how he was speaking to me as a director. And it was almost like we were doing a play except there happened to be cameras in the room and I loved that so much because it was such a deeply theatrical film. And we both knew when there were moments to do film acting, but most of the moments were just genuinely theatrically extraordinary and he and I communicated on that wavelength completely. It was interesting because if you really think about it, these characters were all in prosthetics, so while they were extraordinary to look at, the humanity of them had to communicated from the outside in a lot of ways. It was in our perception of them, and Lori spoke for the audience. So much of what I was doing was just experiencing it. In some ways as a theatrical actor and in some ways as a member of the audience. 

DANHAUSER: Simon Bamford, when we talked to him, he had mentioned that Clive told him that he had plans for the sequel to where Simon would play Ohnaka’s twin sister. Did he have anything that he told you about a sequel for the character, Lori? 

BOBBY: No. You know, I knew that there was always talk of a sequel because it was just so incredible. And my whole feeling about Clive, and it still is,  is one of complete trust. Whatever is meant to happen, whatever he puts together he’s going to put together. Oh god, poor Simon. The day those condoms exploded, that was the most insane moment. He did such a great job. 

DANHAUSER: What was that?

BOBBY: He didn’t tell you about the exploding condoms? 

LEITAO: No. 

DANHAUSER: No. 

BOBBY: Okay, you know how Ohnaka dies. He was dragged in from the sun. And he has to explode into clouds of dust. Well the only way to make that dust happen (this is before the days of CGI, kids) it actually had to happen on him, was to have the earth packed in him, the dust. And what they did was they lined his back with these condoms that were filled with fuller’s earth, which is like dust. And they had little chargers and he got in the sun and he finally exploded and the condoms exploded and the dust exploded. He didn’t tell you that? Simon!

DANHAUSER: Wow, he’s really brave. 

BOYES: Wow, he had no shirt or anything, either. Did he?

BOBBY: No. Well here’s the thing, I mean basically what would happen is there were various stages and these actors were not just wonderful actors, but very patient people because they all had to go through various stages of makeup. He went through a stage of being healthy and in pain writhing in the sun, then he went through a stage of makeup showing him burned and charred, and then there was probably a thing where they lined these condoms on his back and you never really saw them because all you saw in the final cut was the moment of explosion. But yeah, that’s how they did it. And this is the thing about me doing Nightbreed. All these guys were getting up at three in the morning and getting these prosthetics on. I just had to show up. So I got to see what was really going on. I watched everything. I wasn’t sleep deprived or covered in prosthesis. I was basically watching everything happening. 

DANHAUSER: Simon felt that way too, ’cause he had been so heavily made-up and costumed in Hellraiser that he felt such a releif to be Ohnaka. 

BOBBY: It was kind of a thrill and you’ve just reminded me of something that I can’t believe I’ve forgotten, but one of the very last days of filming Nightbreed I had spent so much time on set and learned so much about how to compose a shot, what angles would be  necessary, how to light the shot. One of the very last days Robin Vigeon, our extraordinary director of photography turned to me and said, “How would you like this shot?” and I told him, because I had learned so much just being present on that set–watching things happen (it was a very magical time). I don’t like to use the word ‘lucky’ because lucky implies that you’re not contributing — that you’re somehow an unwitting participant.

DANHAUSER: Right, like you just kind of fall into it.

BOBBY: Yeah. But you know what? When it comes to Nightbreed and filming it, I was lucky. A very, very lucky girl. 

LEITAO: Well we were lucky too, to have you in the movie. 

DANHAUSER: So he also asks, “Do you plan to go to any more conventions if they have more?”

BOBBY: I actually am. This was my very first convention, you know, Mad Monster [Party] was my very first as a panelist. I’ve been for friends.  I’ve gone and visited lots of my friends. Thanks to Clive I’ve gotten to know so many wonderful horor, sci-fi, comics, fantasy, writers, authors, artists…  But yeah, I am planning to go to… I know Clive is planning to do a couple cons this year, and I plan to go to those. Certainly it’s a start. 

DANHAUSER: OK. A friend of mine that I grew up with, I just found out that he’s also really into Nightbreed and he wrote to me and said I’ve been listening to your podcast, and do you think you could ever get Christine McCorkindale, who played Shuna Sassi. I guess he’s got kind of a thing for her. I mean, nobody has been able to find her, or knows where she is. Do you know anything about her? 

BOBBY: Not a clue. I know she was British. She came in at the end of the shoot. Not a clue, really. Wow! Wasn’t she a remarkable character! But now, I haven’t kept in touch with her. I’ve kept in touch with several people. Oddly enough, with Nick Vince, who played Kinski. And I just did Mad Monster, re-connected with Simon Bamford. And I’ve stayed in touch with Pete, and of course Clive. But no. No, I haven’t kept in touch with her. Not a clue. 

DANHAUSER: And Jonathan Kui, who’s been a host sometimes on this podcast. He wanted to ask, He was delighted to see you in “Love, Loss and What I Wore” off-Broadway a few years ago and he wanted to know what your thoughts were on the experience. 

BOBBY: I don’t think he saw me in “Love, Loss and What I Wore.” I think what he saw me in was, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”  which was in the same theater. I love theater, and I think Clive loves theater actors. I think that he is at heart a theater director and theater is about the most immediate form of connection that an artist can have. There’s no one in charge but you. You can get on that stage and it doesn’t matter who wrote the words. If you change the words, you’re changing them. It depends on how the audience responds to them. 

DANHAUSER: And they can’t take 100 takes of the scene and pick out which one they like the best. 

BOBBY: Absolutely not. And you know that’s something that’s actually something really cool about Clive. In directing film, he was a three-take man. He was… a couple of takes and move-on — unless it was something for a special effect. When it was book scenes. When it was interactions, he knew. He just really trusted his actors, and theater is kind of the Olympics of acting, and for film it’s all about then just tempering your skills with just trusting yourself and revealing who you are in a quiet way. All the skills are there though. If I could continue to do theater all my life and be found dead in the middle of the stage like Dick Shawn, you know, he was in The Producers, he played LSD? You guys are so young. He was doing a stage production, he was doing his act and he feigned a heart attack. He fell down and died. 

LEITAO: On stage? That’s quite shocking!

BOBBY: Yeah!

DANHAUSER: We have one more question for you. Claudi Glazzard wants to know, what’s your favorite pasta recipe? 

BOBBY: Oh, god! My favorite pasta recipe? Okay, you ready? This is actually easy. And if you guys want to really impress somebody, here you go. Here’s the easiest pasta recipe in the world. Take a bunch of tomatos, chop them up, put them in a bowl, add olive oil. Add some fresh basil, add some salt, add some pepper, add some huge smoked mozzerelle. Cube up a little bit of Progiuitto [sp] and just let it sit on your counter for about an hour. Then boil some pasta, throw it in the bowl. It’s going to be really hot, it’s going to soften up the mozzerelle, it’s going to warm up the proguitto, just toss it up and serve it. You will have sex that night! 

LEITAO: Wow, you just opened up my appetite. 

BOBBY: (Lauging) It’s really easy! And it’s foolproof. 

DANHAUSER: We’re going to have to write that down. 

LEITAO: We’ll put it on the show notes. 

DANHAUSER: All right!  So we didn’t make you miss your train, did we?

BOBBY: Oh, no. There’s really no worry. Oh, it’s 3:00.  Don’t worry, I’ve got 45 minutes, I’ll make it. You take it easy!

DANHAUSER: Thanks Anne!

BOYES: Thanks!

LEITAO: Thank you! It was wonderful. 

BOBBY: You know what? This was really fun. 

DANHAUSER: Well we were really honored to have you! 

BOBBY: I’ll see you guys soon. I’ll see you at the premiere!  

DANHAUSER: Ah Yes!

LEITAO: Maybe this time if they re-cut the movie, if they re-cut the Cabal Cut, maybe Frank gets a credit. 

BOBBY: I’d love that. We’ll work on that. Okay, You take care, guys. Be well, bye!