CraveOnline: One of my favorite films is Back to the Future and you’ve done very detailed interviews about your trouble with that film and the sequels. So I won’t make you repeat your argument with Robert Zemeckis over showing the McFlys’ monetary success and how SAG created rules to prevent using prosthetics to double another actor’s likeness and use footage of you without permission. But you worked with Zemeckis again on Beowulf, so did you smooth things over eventually?
Crispin Glover: Well, I had a very good working experience with Zemeckis on Beowulf. You know, if there wasn’t all of the things with what happened with the sequel, ultimately I had a good working experience with Robert Zemeckis on Back to the Future as well. As the director and the material and the performances I’ve been able to do with Zemeckis, I’ve had what I would call two good working experiences with Robert Zemeckis, two for two.
What happened with the sequels in Back to the Future, that’s something else, but I read the book How to Be a Gentleman. It says, “Don’t bring up sore subjects.” So I never brought up anything having to do with the Back to the Future sequel. Actually, I like the content specifically of Beowulf. I had a question about the reward that was in Back to the Future being basically I see there can be an interpretation that money equals happiness which I think is a bad message to send out. There’s nothing wrong with making money but to put it in the world, the message I think there is something.
What’s interesting about Beowulf, which was written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who are two excellent writers, and Zemeckis very much understands, as did they, story structure. The moral of that film was essentially that lying is bad which is something I very much agree with. So I liked the moral of that film. I had a really good time working on that.
On the last Back to the Future release, they finally showed a few scenes Eric Stoltz shot before he was replaced. Did you shoot some significant scenes from the film with Eric, like when he’s telling you to say, “Get your damn hands off her” in the backyard?
I’m forgetting, it’s 30 years ago that we shot it, and I only saw it once after that, but I’m thinking that might have been the scene I auditioned with. I’m forgetting but in any case, I shot I think it was five weeks with Eric Stoltz. By the time he was fired, I was at the place of almost being done with the film. We had not too much more to shoot and we were about to be done. Then we had to reshoot, I had to reshoot most of what I had done. So it was significant.
Of course, there’s a difficulty in that. I actually felt good about what had been shot and then you have to recreate it and make sure it’s good again, which is hard to do. Some of the off camera that we had shot with me, close-ups, etc. were used from the original shoot. But then you have to do masters and two shots. Yeah, it was a significant amount of reshooting. I haven’t ever really calculated it before, but it might be that I would’ve had more reshooting than anybody. I’m not sure about that.
Next time I watch it, I’m going to imagine every time they cut to a close-up, you might be working with Eric.
It’s quite likely.
