DSW: Tell me about writing a film, how do you come up with a story like Galaxina?
SACHS: I find the writing process very interesting for a movie and sometimes it's hard to say how you came up with this idea and how you didn't, it's kinda like the writing and the acting and the directing are very similar and the goal is to get into a place where you don't have to think. Where you get almost into a trance and it just flows from the information that you've put in. You have to think when you're getting the information, then you've got to try to unblock and sit down and write, and it flows, that's the best way for a writer, that's the best way for an actor. The whole thing with acting that I try to do with actors is not have them think and I've found the best takes are the ones when the actor finishes the take, they don't know what they did and they say "I need another one." And I say "Why do you need another one?" "I just need one." "Why?" "I don't know, I need one, it wasn't good." 'It's because they're insecure, because they were in the right place and they weren't aware of what they were doing and that's when it's the best. It's the same with directing, you have to try to block the hundreds of people that are surrounding you asking questions out and just be in that spot at that time. A lot of times when I'm writing I might not necessarily know why I thought something, it just was there. When I did Galaxina I spent a lot of time watching the Sci-Fi movies because I wanted to spoof them and I'd write a lot of notes and have cards, 3 x 5 cards and it could be one little thing that will give me a spark for an idea um, so there's not always a clear moment of when I got that idea, it's a process.
DSW: What type of person were you looking for to play the role of Galaxina? What type of woman? What type of female image? Did you have an idea in your mind originally?
SACHS: Yes…perfect……..laughs…..
DSW: Okay…..laughs
SACHS: So I started looking in Hollywood for the perfect woman. And we didn't find one for a long time. We had a casting director. I must have seen every available actress in Hollywood.
DSW: Really…
SACHS: After a while they got to be all the same. There were a few that stood out, that were different from than the others. Actually I remember Connie Selleca was one of the final choices, I don't even know if she knows that, she was different, there was a model named Patty Hanson, I think that's who it was, that was different, uh, but they weren't it. They weren't what I had in mind. And I couldn't say she has blue eyes or brown eyes, tall, short, whatever, I didn't have that, it was a feeling, when the right person came in I would know, and no one came in that was the right person. It was getting close to shooting, it was kind of a panic, and then, Dorothy Stratten appeared. I remember that when she came in we were in the back office and she had to walk through an office of maybe about 20 people and desks. I was out front when she happened to come in and she had kind of black slacks and a white semi-transparent blouse and high heels and she looked like she was over 6 feet tall with high heels, and every single person, male and female, everybody stopped working and stared. Now understand they had seen women marching through that same pathway for three months all day long and they just kept working, this was the only time that this happened and that was it.
DSW: You knew at that moment based on that reaction?
SACHS: It wasn't based on that reaction, that was just part of it, the reaction made no difference to me if I would use her or not, it was the aura that she had that made me want her, that made that reaction. And everywhere, when we would walk down the street people would stop and stare. There are plenty of beautiful women, it wasn't only that, it was something else, maybe people call it Star quality, it was an ethereal kind of thing, it was amazing, it was a perfect woman.
DSW: Now when she came in how did she introduce herself and how did you first meet her?
SACHS: She came in with her agent, David Wilder, and he introduced her and that was it, we just started talking . I do more of a conversation than an interview and we just talked about things, where she came from and the character of a robot, it was great. She came in after she got the part and she worked on what a robot would be like, she came and told me her ideas and they were great.
DSW: What was it like talking to her that first time? What was the impression that you got? You had obviously talked to a lot of actresses and maybe some seasoned actresses and so on, and she comes in and sits down, what is it like talking to her? What is the impression she gave you ? What did you feel from her?
SACHS: That she was Galaxina. There wasn't even a question, it wasn't even like do I have to make a decision or not, no, it was made, she was it.
DSW: Did you ask her to read for you at that time?
SACHS: I don't remember. I don't know that I did, I don't think I did because Galaxina didn't talk…(laughing)…..at the end of the movie she just says a few things and then she does talk. And we actually changed her voice a little bit. There was a man named Alan Hallworth who had done amazing things with sound then, now it's quite common, but no one had really done it then, it was called a vocoder and we changed the pitch of her voice, in fact if you watch the movie when she first starts talking her voice goes all over the place and it was kinda like we were trying to find a robot's voice. So we altered her voice which was very human and made it more mechanical and it changes in register as she talks sometimes. Alan Hallworth I think had done the sounds of the space ships in Star Wars or something like that, he's still around doing good interesting sound things. Um, I don't think I really read her, I just don't remember.
DSW: So you filled the lead role, now how did you go about filling in around that lead role?
SACHS: We had the other people hired before we found Dorothy, cause we found her days before the shoot, but I had a specific look in mind for everybody. For example, Thor who was played by Stephen Macht, as well as being a really good actor he also taught acting at Yale and co-starred with Charlton Heston and played a native American and had his own series, well he had a heavy metal face, the look of a heavy metal comic and that's what I wanted. I wanted the cowboy and I got that, the alien with wings. Just people that fit in with the image, and Avery Shriver for the captain was great, I had him in mind when I was writing. He was doing the Doritos commercials. He'd bite into one and the building would collapse behind him. He had his own primetime show, the Burns and Shriver show. So there were images when I was writing that were created that I fulfilled with the characters, so I went looking for the best actor that had the look that I wanted and the look was based on the characters in the different Sci Fi movies genre and the comic books.
DSW: What was it like working with the cast, how did they get along with each other, were they fairly tight on the set?
SACHS: Oh yeah, we had a great time. There was one time, the rehearsals were a lot of fun, there was a scene around a table in the end and Captain Butt/Avery Shriver opens an egg and a little monster comes out and it thinks he's it's mother and I remember we finished rehearsing and we were gonna go shoot and Avery stood up and everyone else got up, and then he quickly sat down and everyone sat down again and he got up and it was hilarious, the whole crew was laughing, so we tried to recreate that on the set and we wasted about an hour doing it because it wasn't spontaneous, we couldn't do it. If he had done that on the first take it would have been wonderful but we never got it back again, and that's part of the example I was talking about, about the trance like attitude, about letting things happen instead of planning it, it's back to Zen and the art of acting.
DSW: Uh, Paul Snider, you know it's been written and there have been rumors that he would come to the set, he would call her on the phone and bother her and upset her and mess up shooting and so on, did you ever meet him, did he ever come to the set and what was your general experience of him?
SACHS: Yes! I met him too many times, he came to the set too many times, he disrupted things too many times, every time he would come to the set she would freeze and I'd have him kicked off the set. On and on daily whenever he came I'd see her suddenly stop and freeze, either I'd turn around and see him or I'd hear him coming because occasionally he wore cowboy boots with spurs and here we're on a sound stage with a concrete floor and we hear "ching ching ching" and "oh no, here he comes" and everything would stop and he'd like wanna hang around and I'd have people usher him out the door. I went to a party once, a Christmas party I guess it was and he stood against the wall, he always had his back to the wall and he was completely evil, you look at this person, I've never seen anybody else like, he had evil coming out of his eyes, his eyes were cold there was nothing alive behind them. You know in Star 80 Eric Roberts did a great job portraying a character, but it wasn't him. He was a talkative character in Star 80 but the real Paul Snider never said anything and that was part of what was creepy about him. The T.V. movie with Bruce Weitz playing him was very close to him. Bruce Weitz did a great job of capturing the character and the producer and writer met me and talked to me. No one from Star 80 ever contacted me or anybody else I assume, because it wasn't realistic, or they chose not to go that way because he's probably a more interesting character if he talks, but it wasn't realistic. Every time I'd talk to him he'd try to pitch me this documentary he'd wanna do about Chippendales the male stripper club, and I dreaded calling Dorothy at home because sometimes I'd have to talk to him about something we were doing or something……..I dreaded it because he wouldn't let her answer the phone I assume because he always answered the phone. The phone would pick up, I'd say "Hi, Bill Sachs" and then it would be like nothing, and after a while I'd say "you know the director…." "Yea I know who you are…….." well silence again…. "Is Dorothy there?" "Yea" "Can I talk to her?" and then I'd have to listen to this pitch about the Chippendales documentary for like a half hour before he let me talk to her, so it's like I dreaded calling her up, he was unbelievable as a person, amazingly spooky.
DSW: Knowing the way you felt about him, did you ever talk to Dorothy about him, maybe you felt that you might be able to help her somehow?
SACHS: No. She would talk to me about him.
DSW: Oh really?
SACHS: Like that time I mentioned that she said he has her on a pedestal. (see the Bill Sachs sound bytes for this story) You know it's hard, a lot of years have passed and I'm not sure where I got things from sometimes, but she did say that she was very innocent, working in a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, and he came in and promised her this and that and she kind of just fell into it and was drawn into getting away from Vancouver, getting away from the Dairy Queen, coming to Hollywood and becoming a star. He wasn't a bad looking guy, if you went just by a physical shell. But inside there, that's where the bad part was, so I can see if he wanted to be charming he might have been able to be charming, but he never needed to be charming with me, thank God, so I never saw that. But she said she wasn't happy without saying it, she was probably afraid too.
DSW: Now did she seem to really enjoy working on the movie and having this opportunity to play Galaxina?
SACHS: Oh she loved it, and it was hard because in the beginning when she came in, Bogdanovich, I guess, whom she had met, something to do with Playboy, or something, wanted to say that he discovered her, and he wanted her for "They all Laughed" but it wasn't shooting until after Galaxina, so he was trying to pressure her not to do Galaxina and it was really hard on her cause he was calling David Wilder and he was calling Hugh Hefner and everybody and no one agreed with him, they all wanted her to do Galaxina, so he's had this crusade against me ever since because I discovered her and he didn't, according to him. I didn't think of me as discovering her, I just cast the role. He thinks of that, I don't.
DSW: Did she ever mention to you that she felt he was putting pressure on her.
SACHS: Oh yea, constantly complaining, I mean she was crying that she wanted to do Galaxina and he was trying to get her not to, trying to put pressure on her, trying to get everybody to tell her not to do it, it was hard on her.
DSW: Now of course in his book "The killing of the unicorn" he mentions that she did not want to do the movie, that she didn't think much of the script and that she felt she was being buffaloed into the whole project and of course from your experience that's not true at all. She seemed to truly enjoy herself.
SACHS: Look at the pictures, she's smiling and having a great time, ask anybody on the set.
DSW: Plus it's such a funny and interesting movie, it would just be fun to work on a movie like that I think, for myself anyway.
SACHS: She loved it. I think she felt comfortable because it didn't require a lot of dialogue. I mean for the first half of the movie she doesn't even talk. It was a kind of easy way for her to get into show business and she got to wear nice costumes, it was just a fun, light thing, it wasn't anything dramatic and heavy and she liked that about it. It's easy for him to say it because she's not there to defend herself. Ask anybody that ever worked on the movie and a lot of other people, I think you'll find that he's weird.
DSW: Now let me clear up one thing if I can. He mentions in his book that there's a scene when she's captured by the bikers, where she's tied to some kind of metal apparatus, he calls it a "water tower" and that she has ropes around her and there's a moment where a tear is running down her eye. He says that she was forced to be tied to this thing for hours at a time in freezing cold and that the tear she was crying was a real tear, now, what do you have to say about that?
SACHS: Was he there?…laughing….Now first of all we're in California, it gets chilly at night, but it's not freezing cold. She was not tied, first of all it was not a water tower, he says it's a water tower, it's actually a solar observatory with a telescope where you can look at the sun, we all went up there and looked at the sun, she wasn't tied to it, she had ropes tied around her wrists that were hanging lose. Just before each take we took off the fur coat, or the down coat we had for her that she had on, we'd take it off, we'd have someone warming the pole, it wasn't that cold, it was chilly, there was someone behind the tower holding the two ropes, they weren't tied together and she did it for the length of the take and as soon as we'd cut between every take the guy would drop the ropes and someone would come, the wardrobe person put the coat on her, and she was having fun. The tear was glycerin, but perhaps if she's a robot, robot's have glycerin tears? Again ask anybody that worked on the movie, we had a lot of extras, a lot of people there. And yea it was chilly, we were all chilly, I actually have some stills of that someplace.
DSW: So she was not in danger at any moment, anytime she wanted to she could have just pulled the ropes and said "drop those ropes" or "I have a cramp in my hand" or "I'm a little cold".
SACHS: Yeah, but the takes were only like, you know, a minute, it wasn't like she was up there for hours on end, so I don't even know where he gets that, she probably came back to him "boy I was chilly out there, I had to be tied to this thing" and he created this fantasy …weird.
DSW: Now one of my favorite parts of the film is the sequence where she's on Altar One and there's the very strange and interesting colors, according to the story plot the sun is different, so thus the colors are shifted, how did you do those effects? Because that was a very interesting effect.
SACHS: Well remember we didn't have a lot of money to do this movie so we needed another planet and it's hard to make something look like another planet without elaborate sets, in those days we didn't have the big special effect abilities and the computer because actually Galaxina is the very first film ever to use the computer for effects and we did that just for a few shots at the end but the rest of it we did by hand on the track with little spaceships and lights hanging in the background for stars and things like that. I had done still photography and I knew about that from my father actually, infrared Ecktachrome film, it's used by the military and it works by the absorption of heat in objects. For example they use it in war time, they fly over a jungle and when something is camouflaged like tanks they throw this thing that looks like leaves over the tank but when you have the infrared film the camouflage doesn't absorb the infrared like the leaves do, so they see the shape of a tank, they use it for that. The forestry service uses it to see if there is any disease in the plants, there was one record album, a Dylan record album in the sixties that used it and I heard that it might have been used for one flash, one shot of an explosion in Apocalypse Now, but otherwise no one's ever used it in a movie. The reasons are it's a little more expensive and you have to buy 50,000 feet minimum and it has to be frozen till 8 hours before you're ready to shoot and you have to have specific filters and you have to have special makeup otherwise you can see through the top layers of skin. Everybody tried to talk me out of it, from Kodak, to the lab, and all the labs in town because the film leaves a residue in the bath when you develop it. But we managed to find someone who would purchase 50,000 feet and didn't need it all and we bought like 3 to 6 thousand feet from them for not too much money and we got Deluxe Lab who is a great lab, I still use them, to run it through the bath. They changed the bath every 3 days or so to keep it clean so just before they dumped it they ran our film, so we couldn't get the daily's everyday which did cause a problem. The filters, each filter that you use makes a dramatic difference, you can have yellow, green, orange filters and they affect the colors you can have, green sky, red trees. The best time to use it is between 11 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon when the sun is high and we were shooting on a low budget with long days and by 7 at night it got a little muddy looking, but it's okay. The one problem that we had and we didn't know till we left that location was there was a red filter that looked just like the orange filter to the eye, and one of the cameramen accidentally put it on the second camera and was getting inserts when the chase was going through the western town and it filtered out the infrared which meant there was nothing on the film, so we only have the wide shots in the film not the inserts that would have made it a little more cutty with a little more action, but no one else to this day has ever used that film.
DSW: Now explain a little bit about the makeup, what kind of makeup had to be applied on the actors faces and why exactly was that done with this film again?
SACHS: Because the infrared film kind of removes the top layer of your skin and you see the blood vessels through it, it doesn't remove the actual skin of course, the blood vessels, the red, the heat, is affected. So we had to use a special white makeup on Dorothy, if we didn't she'd look a bit too human seeing the blood going through her face. To the eye she has white paint on her face but it recorded on film naturally so in some of the stills it looks a bit strange. (Check the western town scenes in the Premier Galaxina Pictorial for a look)