SACHS: This wasn't one of them, this was the ONE. We were the very first people to ever use computers for special effects. Two guys Bill Tondru and John Sheelie, John was an effects guy he did Tron after Galaxina, Bill was the computer guy who developed this, I guess they worked on it together. We had been doing our effects the old fashioned way, a track with space ships on it, and we'd move them one frame at a time which is very frustrating sometimes when you work all day moving a space ship a few frames. Once we were in this old warehouse and we didn't know there was a door that went into the far wall, so suddenly in outer space this door opens and someone comes in, so we had to start over! And someone who worked on our effects had heard about this computer and they wanted to try it so we did and we took some shots, the computer basically moved the ship instead of people, they wanted to try it and we let them. We did it and it worked great, but most of the film was done by hand the old fashioned way.

DSW: Now I noticed some of the sound effects of the ship, it sounded like you used the War of the Worlds heat ray from the War of the Worlds film of 1953?

SACHS: Possibly, remember we were spoofing sci-fi films, I really don't remember we might have, or duplicated it, not necessarily used the same one, or within the same kind of vein, but we also have the engine of the ship starting as a model A Ford. It goes 'arrrrrr aaarrrrrrrrr arrrrrrrrrr" and then catches, that's one of the big laughs that the audience got in the movie, that one and the toilet paper roll on the toilet in the prison cell.

DSW: Now the scene in the beginning when the Infinity is first shown, it's that loooong pan, it seems like the ship is so long and it goes on forever, was that kind of like spoofing Star Wars in the beginning where that Star Destroyer first comes over and it takes forever…

SACHS: Yes …laughs…and also we did the titles that way, going off into infinity, that was on purpose and then we have Star Trek where the captain is doing his Galaxy date, it's funny, I like that, at one point he goes "Galaxy date……oh never mind." Things like that, we were just trying to spoof, and then there are lines like "In space no one can hear your siren." We were trying to have fun with it.

DSW: What about the bartender Mr. Spot, if I got it right it seemed like his ears were the reverse of Mr. Spock and they looked like they were dog's ears or something?

SACHS: Yes …….laughs……

DSW: Okay what breed of dog was he supposed to be?

SACHS: A beagle…laughs…

DSW: Okay that's what I thought. I thought that was good.

SACHS: And if you look carefully his insignia is upside down as well, and I got someone that I felt looked a lot like Leonard Nimoy so it was like the reverse Leonard Nimoy character.

DSW: In the movie, Galaxina sits in her command chair which is kind of like a throne and at times it would light up with a great brilliance and it was a very interesting effect, how did you do that?

SACHS: Really hard, (laughing) you know when you drive on the freeway and there are these little cat's eyes things that light up when your headlight hits them, Scotch Light paint, we used that. And this was actually Dean Cundy the director of photography's idea, who has since gone on and done things like Jurassic Park, all the Back to the Futures, Death Becomes Her and Hook, he's very technical. And he came up with this plan to paint the chair with scotch light paint and you have a mirror in front of the camera, it's actually a piece of glass at a 45 degree angle in front of the lens, the cameras right behind this and there's a little light right next to it and every time we wanted the chair to light up we'd turn that light on and it would be aimed right at the piece of glass in front of the lens and get reflected straight forward onto the chair and the chair would light up, and people thought it was a special computer thing.

DSW: Yeah, it almost seemed like the light was coming from within the chair, as if there was something inside illuminating it, but it was just reflective material like what is used to mark the dividing lines on the highway.

SACHS: Yeah, it was beautiful, it worked great. Then we had the chair molded to her body so it would fit her perfectly.

DSW: Now how did you do that?

SACHS: She sat in some stuff, (laughs)…….I wasn't there when they did that so I'm not sure, but the effects guys did that.

DSW: They musta had a lot of fun with that particular molding job…

SACHS: She musta had fun sitting in that……but I'm not sure how they did that cause again I wasn't there, but what I remember is it was a latex thing like makeup or fiberglass, she sat on something.

DSW: Some of my favorite scenes of the movie are when she's sitting alone in her chair and you're just doing those interesting close ups on her face where she has no expression, but yet in that there's so much emotion, now how did you conceive of that type of thing, where did you get the idea for those type of shots cause those were very moving to me considering the nature of what the movie was about.

SACHS: I don't know, it's just part of directing, you just feel it, but I'll tell you an interesting story, it's the famous Russian experiment, I forgot who did it but they told an actor to sit by a window and look out, and they shot him from outside the window looking out the window. He said "what do you want me to do?" "just look out the window", and they intercut that with different scenes of what he was supposedly looking at, they had him looking at a field of cows, they had him looking at a lake, they had him looking at a war scene with people getting murdered and intercut it and showed it to different people, and each time the people said "that guys a fantastic actor, he reacted so perfectly to what was going on outside." But yet, he was just sitting there. That's back to the Zen thing, back to the not trying to act, he was just looking. If you look at something and you "act" horrified it's not real, but if you look and people connect the eyes, I can't say it can always work, but that's not really connected to your question. I just shot that it was the period of her changing, learning to become human from a robot, she's becoming that and she's getting her feelings but it's something to do with that experiment because if you don't try to do something. I didn't really tell her to think you're changing into this or that, just sit there. She's a natural and that's what comes across, that's what comes through. I've studied acting and I don't even like the word "acting" it sounds artificial. It's "being," being real, everyone else uses acting and it's real hard not to use it and to have a conversation. There's this story a teacher told us, this woman has a date to go to the movies, so she goes to the street corner across the street from the movie theatre and she's waiting for her boyfriend, she's standing there and everything's fine and it looks like she's waiting for someone, suddenly she decides that maybe people think because I'm standing on the street corner that I'm a hooker, so then she starts pacing, looking annoyed, looking at her watch, looking at this, wandering around, then suddenly she didn't look anymore like anyone waiting for someone, she was performing, she looked like a hooker. She looked like this, she looked like that, and that's the whole idea, trying to be real. Just looking at your watch every 2 seconds doesn't help and that's back to her (Dorothy's) reactions sitting there, very real and natural and it works.

DSW: In the very beginning of the movie when we see her for the first time sitting in her chair and she gets up and walks out of the chair kind of with her head down, she almost seems sad in the very beginning before anything had developed yet in the movie, was that scene originally shot for the opening or was that something shot later that you thought would work for the beginning.

SACHS: No, everything is where it is supposed to be , I didn't switch it around, I don't think she was happy being a robot, she wanted to be more, but that's really part of what annoys me on the DVD and the tapes, they didn't Widescreen it. I really should have been asked to be there, but of course this was done 20 years after we made the movie. They squeezed that scene to get the titles in and she's like tall and thin, that drives me crazy to see that.

DSW: The recent DVD release of it by Rhino in my opinion is a very horrible transfer of the film, because first of all it's just your normal television aspect ratio, it's not even pan and scan, it's just the center, they cut the top and bottom off.

SACHS: No, not the top and bottoms, they cut the sides off. The academy frame is 1:33 which is what the DVD's in, it's what they did the early silent movies in basically and television. Galaxina was shot in anamorphic scope which is 2:33 so you've lost both sides. There's a scene with Dorothy and Steve Macht when they're walking around a chair and he touches her and gets sparks. I had them at opposite ends of the frame with the chair in the middle, you watch the DVD and you don't see the actors, you just look at the chair and occasionally one of the actors will pop in a little bit into the frame. It's the most anti-film making DVD I've ever seen, it's unbelievable, it should be illegal! I had one of the best cinematographers in the world, we used special film stock and you don't see most of the movie on the DVD, it's unbelievable, it's like everyone else's DVD's have Widescreen, why couldn't they have done it for this? Mark Tenser at Crown is upset with Rhino for doing that. The foreign DVD's are being made now and they're being made correct. Again they didn't call me, I've put that in my contract since those days, it was new then, you didn't really know about DVD's, they didn't have them, but now it's in my contract, I have to be there. The new one for foreign will be the 2:33 Widescreen, and that's another thing, I have to get this off my chest, Widescreen is really 1:85, there's the academy that's 1:33, 1:85 is what you see in theaters if it's not anamorphic, anamorphic is the really wide cinemascope kind of frame, they're starting to call that Widescreen, but technically it's the 1:85 that used to be considered Widescreen, it's a little confusing at times.

DSW: So if we're talking about a 2:33 or 2:35 what would be the term we'd use for that?

SACHS: Anamorphic, or Scope, or Cinemascope, but that's a specific kind, or Panavision but now that's the Panavision camera, there's a lot of different stuff.

DSW: Did you and Dorothy ever sit down and talk about her character, how the character should develop and what were those conversations like?

SACHS: Yes, she came to me with this whole thing as I said before and it was all worked out so we didn't have to talk a lot, but as it went along we talked about her changes and how she'd change and how she'd react sitting in that chair, but not too much. Yea we talked all the time, she was very into it, she was having a great time even though Bogdanovich doesn't think so, maybe it was he that wasn't having the great time?

DSW: I remember reading that when the film premiered it premiered on Aug 14, 1980 which was also the day Dorothy was killed, is it true that the movie premiered on that day and how did you first find out about her murder and how did you feel about that whole thing?

SACHS: I was in a meeting at a company called Intervision, a special effects company, the phone rang it might have been Margaret, I'm not sure who called me and told me what happened to Dorothy. It was interesting though because they pulled the movie because of that and Bogdanovich accuses them of capitalizing on her murder. I don't think capitalizing on murder is when you take the movies out of the theatres because of what happened. They waited about 3 months before they opened it again, he's the one that's capitalizing because he wrote books about her and it was all over T.V. about her, I refused interviews, I didn't want to talk about it in public, I don't think anybody on our side capitalized on that.

DSW: How did you feel when you were told the news of her death?

SACHS: It was horrible, I didn't believe it. I'll tell you what I still don't believe, I can believe that he killed her, I cannot believe that he killed himself. And I don't know if that means that there was someone else there that no one knows about, I don't know. I never investigated the case, but knowing what I know about him, he was too self-centered and selfish to kill himself, unless he lost his temper and killed her, then realized what he did and was crazy, I don't know, it just wasn't his personality.

DSW: It just seemed out of character for him because he was so much into his image, his ideal of himself?

SACHS: Totally, I still can't buy that, I don't know, I never studied it…strange.

DSW: Since those days have you ever had any contact with any of the cast since then, talked about those old days and events, do you stay in touch?

SACHS: The last couple of years I've been busy and out of the country, but for years I've stayed in touch with them, with Steven Macht. I've gone to his house many times, he's come to our house, I've actually worked with his son on something. Avery Shriver, I went up to his cabin in the mountains, I haven't seen him in the last few years but we stay in touch, David Hinton, Lionel Smith who played the alien with the wings, I haven't seen him again in the last few years. The last few years I've been so tied up out of the country working on Spooky House, and some other things before that, I haven't really socialized with anybody, Lionel's in a lot of David Mammoth films now, He's a friend of David's, yea I try to stay in touch. I actually spoke to the producers from Crown a few days ago, so I try to keep in touch with everybody, Dean Cundy director of photography, it was a short shoot but we were tight, and the editor as well.

SACHS: One thing, Everybody thinks her license plate was STAR 80, but it wasn't, the car I think she got for being playmate of the year was a Mercedes, Paul used to drive that, he wouldn't let her drive it, and he got the license plate STAR 80 for that car about her, she had an old yellow Mercury, some old thing that they drove down from Canada and her license plate was Galaxina, they don't mention that in the book, and it's an example. Now if she didn't want to do the movie why did she have the license plate Galaxina?

DSW: In the movie I'm assuming she's wearing a wig, because I don't think that's her normal hair, why did you determine that she should wear a wig, rather than use her normal hair and style it like a robot?

SACHS: Because her hair was destroyed, it was falling out in patches because so many people had done so many things to it for her photo sessions and for whatever else she was doing, it was over bleached and over dyed and twisted and permed and whatever so that it was actually thin and was not looking good. So we didn't even have to decide if we needed a wig or not, it was obvious. She was upset about that, it's kind of interesting, it's what happened to her isn't it? What happened to her hair was a hint of what was to come.

DSW: People using her for their own purposes and in the end, that was the end of her, very sad.

DSW: Now the movie was rated R, of course that was 1980 so a couple of bad words would probably get you that rating back then, but there was no nudity in the film, and considering the fact that this was a Playboy Playmate in the leading role, I'm sure a lot of people were disappointed, why wasn't there any nudity?

SACHS: Well first of all there wasn't any in the script, and secondly I didn't cast her because she was a Playmate I cast her because she came in and she was Dorothy. It made no difference if she was a Playmate of the year or not. The third reason, which was an important reason, but really wasn't the reason we didn't have any nudity, was she had a contract with Playboy that for the year she was Playmate of the year she couldn't pose nude for anybody else. The R rating is interesting because we had two versions and the distributor kept trying to decide if they wanted an R or a lesser rating. Every time we shot something with a swear word we'd have to shoot it without the swear word, one day we'd have no swear words in the movie and the next day they would come "no we want it to be R because R rated movies are doing well" so we'd take out all the non-swear words and put in all the takes with the swear words. So the rating daily went back and forth and they finally decided they wanted it for the young adult audience so they should put the swearing in.

DSW: There is one scene in the film where there is what you would consider some nudity, admittedly it is a hologram in the film so it isn't true nudity, it's when the girl is talking to Thor and Buzz on the communication screen, she gives them a little treat because the poor boys have been out in space so long.

SACHS: With only a robot! ( laughs) Yea that was in the script, but it wasn't for Dorothy, it was the other girl and it's not her whole body, it's distorted a bit. A holograms interesting, I wanted a hologram and I was really into holograms because they're true 3D images and I did a lot of research on holograms and you can't put them on film. I really tried to do new things like the infrared and the computer, but you can't put a hologram on film because it has to be shot on a glass plate and it's hard to run the glass plates through the camera (laughing) so then one day I'm trying to figure out how to do it and I'm talking to Dean Cundy I guess and I went, "wait a minute a hologram is a 3D image, film is 2 dimensional, so what's the difference, let's not worry about doing a 3D image because it won't be 3D because it's going onto film that's 2D." So what we did is we shot the characters that had to be in the hologram against a black drape and we took them to a video place and screwed them up on video and then used that same 45 degree angle mirror and put that in front of the camera and we put a monitor with the video playing on it aiming at the mirror and we covered the camera, the T.V. and us with a black drape so no light would come in. So you turn on the T.V. the mirror places it right in front of the lens and there it is, floating in the sky, and we even had a monitor on the set for the actors to see what it looked like so they could talk directly in the right direction for the image, it was very simple, sometimes the most complicated things are the simplest to do.