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| The Primevals Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
I turned 50 just a few days before I met producer Charles Band. That’s not an age at which one expects to have conversations about films which started production before one was born and are just preparing to screen for the first time. The story behind The Primevals, showing as part of the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival, is all about defying expectations. The film itself follows bold adventurers, driven by a passion for science, who travel the Himalayas in search of yeti and get more than they bargained for when they discover a hidden world. It features stop motion animation which is itself an artefact of another age. After decades trying to complete it, director and special effects maestro David Allen sadly died, but the production team were determined to find a way of making it happen. When I ask Charlie to explain a little about what happened he laughs. So much has happened, it’s not an easy thing to condense.
“How do you tell a story that started in 1969? That's a little far back. So the shortest version – because it is a long story – is I met Dave Allen in the late Seventies. It was the first movie that I made, it was a sci fi movie, and I wanted to have some stop motion. I'm a big fan of stop motion animation. And I couldn't really afford it, but I met him and he did me a favour. It's a movie called Laserblast. It has these little aliens – it's probably, all together, four minutes of screen time. But Dave agreed to do it. He was a well known stop motion animator at the time, and he said ‘Look, if you ever fall into a lot of money, this is my pet project. I'd love you to make it for me. I'll keep helping you with your movies, but if you can afford it one day...’
“Anyway, he gave me the script for The Primevals, which is a big Lost Horizons type show, and it involves six times the amount of principal photography that we normally do and a couple of years of stop motion animation after the movie was shot. And I said ‘Well, you know, I'm making these small movies, but one day. One day.’ So for the next 15 years, Dave helped me on a number of my movies, like Puppet Master and Dolls, and those movies all have these wonderful stop motion animation scenes. And then in the early Nineties, Full Moon was distributed by Paramount, and things were looking up. It was a good period. I said ‘Dave, I think we can finally make the Primevals.’ So in 1994, we rallied the troops and we pushed the button.
“It was a 12 week shoot and partially in the Italian Dolomites, and I had a studio in Romania at that time, and all together, it was our biggest production ever. And then we wrapped photography several months later, and began the two plus year post-production schedule of doing the stop motion animation shots, which literally take days to get seconds of film. This is a very painstaking process but we were up for the the adventure. And as those shots were coming out, they looked amazing, the film was finished. Or at least photography was finished. But it was quite an experience.
“As a low budget, independent filmmaker, once you spend 80% or 90% of your budget and the movie is, as they say, in the can, done, ready, you quickly want to release it and generate some money. And here we were waiting two years. Anyway, a little over a year into that two year period, sadly, Dave Allen passed away from cancer. And it was at the exact same time when our fortunes turned for the worse again. We were no longer distributed by Paramount. And we literally boxed up the project, waiting for a time when we could afford to finish it.
“Luckily, Chris Endicott, who was Dave Allen's right arm guy and knowledgeable and a great stop motion animator himself, stuck with it, I stuck with it. And then about five years ago, things were getting a little better. The streaming world had helped us a little bit as the direct to video world vanished. And I said ‘Chris, let's finish this movie.’ So we again assembled a little team and then there it is, one shot a week, slowly, slowly over the last four, four and a half years. And the movie, finally, decades after we shot it, got finished at the end of last year.”
I tell him that I find myself wondering if it might benefit from that, simply because it’s so unusual now. There’s nothing else like it coming out.
“Yeah,” he nods. “You know, to people who love the genre or who grew up watching movies like Jason And The Argonauts and The Seven Voyages Of Sinbad, the Ray Harryhausen films, and others, it'll feel like the movie was shot in the Sixties. I mean, it was actually shot in the Nineties, which is still 30 years ago, but it has that vintage. It's beautifully shot. Each scene is, in its own way, very organic and very true to that period. It's very unlike the movies today that are very cartoony and overblown, and three hours long and all CGI. This was made frame by frame. It’s a labour of love from Dave Allen and all of us, but you know, it's all organic. It's all stop motion animation. Everything you see exists. It wasn't painted in like a cartoon. So yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how people react. The the first screening is literally a few days away, this Sunday in Montreal, at Fantasia.”
It feels like treasure, I say, because nobody is making films like this anymore. But it also reminded me a lot of early cinema matinee series.
“Oh, very much. Just because of the way the way the world has turned, movies today are edgier, darker. It's just the themes of today. But this is a clever movie, and it speaks towards the things that I think are kind of eternal. It has a much more innocent vibe. And, again, the way the story is told, even the camerawork is very old school. Today, cameras are moving around and flying in the air with drones, and this is a whole different experience. So yeah, it's definitely retro. I think kids who aren't familiar with that world will enjoy it because it's full of great visual, fun, and it's a clever story.”
It feels quite modern, in some ways, despite its history. It has an older female scientist as one of the leads, and it gives a lot of time to the Sherpas as well, who have often been pushed aside in stories like that.
“Yeah, that's true. The wonderful Juliet Mills. It's a little magic blast from the past that will finally see the light of day this weekend. Of course, we’ve got tons of fans who’ve followed us over the years saying ‘Okay, great, Fantasia, but when can we see it? When will it be released and where?’ The irony there is, we don't know. Sadly, I don't think we’ll have any kind of general release till, at the earliest, the end of the year, but probably early in 2024.”
I note that the film seems particularly ambitious for a stop motion project because it features a yeti, and Ray Harryhausen said that animating furry creatures was tricky because one has to try to keep the fur aligned the same way when repositioning them. They did a very good job.
He nods. “We're all pretty happy with how it looks. We wanted to respect Dave’s vision, and there were so many ways to cut corners and cut the thing down. I thought, you know, I don't want to spend another ten years finishing this movie. There are a few scenes in the original edit that we weren't able to finish. One in particular. There's a river creature, a sort of dinosaur type creature that attacks them when they're on the raft. That's a scene that could have taken another half a year, and the movie works beautifully without it. So what we're doing, which is kind of fun, is when the movie eventually comes out on Blu ray, it'll be in a package where it'll be the movie that we're going to be screening but for the fans who are into the genre, what we did is we will include a second edit, which will include the few scenes that we did not finish the stop motion on, and in place of that stop motion there'll be storyboards. Dave Allen kept meticulous storyboards. You'll see those scenes with the live action cut into the storyboard so that people will kind of see Dave’s full vision.”
We talk about the set design and he laments that there are things about that which will never be known because only Dave fully understood them.
“You know, I have sketches that Dave put together, how he envisioned the environment to look, that date back to the late Seventies, so he had it in his mind. Even in the Sixties, he had some stop motion test shots of prior incarnations of lizard creatures and of the yeti. Those sets came with the project from day one.”
The lizard creatures have a lot of personality. Was that intentional or an artefact of the process?
“It is intentional,” he says, “but it's also the artistry of the person animating and obviously the design of the sculpting. Every stop motion animation character has an armature inside of it. It all starts with a really, extremely well made armature, and then the rubber, latex, in the case of the Yeti the fur. Then it’s up to the animator, once this thing has been designed, to manipulate this. Anybody can imagine ‘Okay, I have this creature and I do this, and I shoot each frame at a time and the hand moves forward.’ But of course, to give that some humanity, to have the creature have whatever expression is required, and then to have to do other creatures in that same scene, all needing to have movements, it takes a patience that is unbelievable.
“When I had my first experience with Dave on Laserblast, I came to watch him animate this little alien and laser blast. I spent about an hour there and it went one frame at a time. I knew it took a while. I called him later. I said, ‘I'm heading your way. Can I can see the shot?’ He said ‘See the shot? We need three more days!’ So then I went back literally three days later and saw the first shot. That was fantastic, but I doubt it was more than five seconds long.”
So what has happened to the models now that the film is complete?
“Well, some of them I actually have on my desk,” he says, showing me a lizard creature who has been carefully encased in a glass dome. “That was part of the painstaking process of starting again – all the models that were kept pretty much disintegrated. The armatures, for the most part, were intact, but things had to be resculpted with new rubber, latex and fur. The Yeti had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and that alone took months. None of this is quick. This is a slow, painstaking art form.”
So how does he feel about having finally got to the end of this?
“I feel really happy and and I'm really looking forward to the screening. I mean, having lived with this from day one, through a lot of struggle – because as an independent we've had really good years, really bad years and years just hanging on – to be sitting in an audience in a few short days seeing this for the first time will definitely be emotional.
“Hopefully there'll be a substantial release. I think people will really enjoy it because you cannot make a movie like this again. It's a lost art, is what it is. The people with talent who are in that effects world are all basically doing CGI. That's where they all went, you know, they had to survive, and they moved into that world. So to be able to assemble a team to make another movie like The Primevals, I think, is pretty impossible.”
