3/11/2023 0 Comments Tammy and the trexI was just trying to figure out how to make a movie from $8 million! It wasn’t my concept. Was this a result of studio interference? What tone were you trying to go for? Ice Pirates is a strange film as on one hand, it feels like it’s trying to be a family-friendly “Errol Flynn in space”, but on the other hand, there are a lot of adult-themed jokes about castration. Turns out the producer was a close friend of Paul Newman’s and the studio head had said something derogatory about Paul Newman’s wife and so the producer had punched him! We’d hired people and were building sets, so I went to the producer to find out what the problem was. MGM also hired a new studio head three weeks before we began shooting the film and he hated our producer and tried to cancel the whole movie after we’d spent 18 months putting it together. It takes a year just so everyone can say they contributed. It’s like every dog has to piss on the lamp post. When you work in the studio system though, you have to please so many people. I said we’d have to completely re-write it and make it a comedy, which I thought would make it more fun than playing it for real and so I got hired! I’d always made independent films, so they came to me and asked if I could make it for $8 million. The studio was having financial trouble, so there was only $8 million to make the movie, which was budgeted for $17-18 million. I’d done High Risk with Anthony Quinn and James Brolin and the producers from MGM were trying to make this movie called The Water Planet. How did you get involved in that project? I think the first film I saw of yours was The Ice Pirates which has a very strong cult following these days. I was on set so much watching all the film-makers, so I started making my own movies and made my first film at 22. I used to work on the Tarzan movies and was even the stunt double several times. I used to work with horses in England as I always wanted to be a jockey, but I’m 6″ 7′. It was a long time ago and the first job I got was training animals for the movie business. So how did you end up moving out to the States? When I made Snow Tigers, the two tigers we used, I rented from Tippi. I wasn’t there all the time, but I visited the set because I used to be involved in animal training when I was younger. How were you involved in the production of Roar?! While this was primarily what we wanted to talk about, Stewart’s love of nature, such as his first film, Napoleon and Samantha, which was based on Stewart’s own lion, Major, and other projects like Snow Tigers and Lost in Africaled to a BBFC crossover in that he knows Tippi Hedren, star of Roar, her menagerie of wild cats and visited the set a number of times. Stewart also made a number of cult genre films including The Ice Pirates, Mac and Me, Tammy and the T-Rex and The Philadelphia Experiment, a film about the alleged and infamous military experiment. Over the years, Stewart has directed a number of films including The Sea Gypsies, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and Across the Great Divide. Originally from Coventry, Stewart Raffill moved to the United States to pursue a career in screenwriting and directing. With such a number of unique films to his name, we tracked down British-born director Stewart Raffill to talk about crazy product placement, Paul Rudd using your films to troll talk show hosts and putting Paul Walker’s brain into a robotic dinosaur.
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