Source: Fangoria #111

The Darking lot at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, CA, is curiously filled with employees and spectators standing around in conservative 'three-piece suits, hashing through casual conversation and generally acting as if the evacuation from the building moments earlier was only a fire drill. As it happens, the Chocolat factory next door had a gas leak, and a cloud of highly flammable vapor was thrown into the atmosphere only to be sucked into the Film Center's air conditioning unit, leaving the building a sitting gas bomb. A few yards away, dressed casually in a jacket and T-shirt, Chris Walas -monster maker turned filmmaker- is very concerned with the potential danger. Resting comfortably inside the just-abandoned structure is the final work print of his latest directorial effort, The Vagrant, which is just a day away from going to the negative cutter. But the bespectacled Walas, looking a little like a clean-shaven Kiefer Sutherland, is also quite collected about the whole matter and even jokes, "I just saw Backdraft last night, so I have faith in the firedepartment. "It’s a calm within a potential storm, appearing to be in control, there is the looming fear that if disaster strikes, he’ll have to edit his film all over again (the negatives, though, are safe at the MGM studios in LA).“It could be reconstructed, but it would mean really starting from scratch –now will you stop scaring me,” he says half-jokingly.Though a situation such as this might send any other director frantically running through the building trying to rescue his baby from immiment distruction, Walas has learned to take these little examples of Murphy’s law in stride. The entire production of The Vagrant has been plagued from it’s start, so this latest event is just a footnote. “Let me put it this way,” begins Walas, now sitting in a small pastry shop a few blocks away. “We had a camera operator come in halfway through the show, and after a week he took me aside and said, “You know, Chris, I’ve seen more bad luck in one week on this show than in 10 years of operating on other pictures, ”And I said, “I feel excactly the same way.”

Though a situation such as this might send any other director frantically running through the building trying to rescue his baby from immiment distruction, Walas has learned to take these little examples of Murphy’s law in stride. The entire production of The Vagrant has been plagued from it’s start, so this latest event is just a footnote. “Let me put it this way,” begins Walas, now sitting in a small pastry shop a few blocks away. “We had a camera operator come in halfway through the show, and after a week he took me aside and said, “You know, Chris, I’ve seen more bad luck in one week on this show than in 10 years of operating on other pictures, ”And I said, “I feel excactly the same way.”At first glance, The Vagrant would seem to be like any other film with the expected production problems; it was a 45-day shoot in Phoenix, Arizona on a modest $9.5-million budget. But Walas confirms that the rough times did roll continuously. They had to replace the director of photography once, the focus puller three times and there were huge scratches on the film's negative during some dailies, which meant going back and reshooting entire scenes all over again. There was also an incident where actor Teddy Wilson hit his head on the camera dolly and had to get stitches. "He then had a heart attack and passed away during postproduction," Walas adds.
Even distributor MGM/UA was on shaky financial ground for a while, which could have left the Richard (Scarecrows) Jefferies scripted film caught up in bankruptcy proceedings that would have prevented the movie from seeing the light of day for years. Luckily, the company has tentatively waded through their problems and are back on firm ground, with Walas assuring that they're behind The Vagrant 100 percent. "It was the kind of production where every day brought the wrong kind of problem,” the director sighs. "It wasn’t like we’d get on the set and it would be, 'We don't have the cars to do this,' so we'd have to do it with fewer cars and just restage it or something. It was elemental problems. The rumor going around was that the studio we were shooting at was built on indian burial grounds, and the forefathers of the Indians were seeking their vengeance on us." All production problems aside when the finishing touches are put on The Vagrant and it’s shipped out to theaters this Easter, it just might prove to be the savior of a stagnant horror genre looking for a new direction to shoot off in."'This story could have easily been told as a very straightforward horror movie, but that's not what I wanted to do," asserts Walas. "I wanted to do something with a bit of a twist to it, and the comedy element really gives it social value."

Graham Krakowski (Bill Paxton), the vagrant's hero, leads a quiet, normal life. He's a junior excecutive with a beautiful girlfriend and a newly purchased home. Order is essential - the unexpected must make an appointment with his secretary. However, things take a creepy detour for Graham. The unexpected is impatient and watching him through the eyes of a mysterious, grotesque transient (Marshall Bell) who resides in the abandoned lot across from his home. Sensing a need to disrupt Graham's life, the mouse games with him, until this once well-balanced young man is teetering on the edge onto sanity and trying to hold onto everything that he thought really mattered to him.

"It's basicly your classical Greek myth setup, where the hero has to go through tests," relates actor Bell. "In that sense, it's like a hero's journey for Graham. He'll get through one thing and then there's another, and I'm a big time test for him in the movie. It's a metaphor for all the shit people have to go through in their lives, except it's a real guy who does horrible things.
At 6-feet-2, Bell is an impposing figure who carved out an acting carrier playing villains who are "really happy in their work - perfectly content, jovial guys who like to do shitty things to people and don't worry about it." He played the creepy gym teacher in A nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's revenge, the slimy husband who ends up with a poker in his head in Robert Zemeckis' "And all through the house" episode of Tales from the crypt, the mutant underground leader in Total recall and the abusive (???) father in Stand by me.

For Bell though, the vagrant role was the first chance for him to portray all-out evil -and entailed another huge makeup chore, something he'd become accustomed to in his previous genre work. "Wearing rubber doesn't drive me crazy," claims Bell, "but I had a beard glued onto me that drove me nuts." The makeup process transforming him into the Vagrant took an average of two to three hours. It was designed by Walas, sculpted and molded by Stephan Dupuis and applied on the set by Mike (Scanners II) Smithson. Walas notes that the final makeup design wasn't extremely elaborate, consisting of "a fake wig, contact lenses, colored teeth and a swollen hand. There are no groundbreaking effects on The Vagrant," he admits. "It's not Jason with his huge deformed head. He's a repulsive human being who has a hell of an active mind."

"He's really a gnarly-looking: if he has an ugly side, he would turn that side to you." adds Bell. You take some of these beatup looking homeless people and imagine that their face was run over by a tank or something. Much like the Vagrant’s appearance, specific plot pointsand key FX sequences are being kept under wraps, but Walas does hint, 'Basically, Barfus dies at the hands of the Vagrant and there’s a little bit of effects there, and there's something interesting found in a refrigerator." With the FX downplayed, Walas felt the story and suspense would have more time to develop. Though Smithson was the only on set makeup person, he says he was kept busy throughout the show, from applying makeup to Bell to creating spur-of-the-moment prostheties when needed. But his most controversial work didn't involve any of the actors. "We did a dog carcass that everyone was real nervous about, discloses Smithson, concerning a sequenee that was eventually pared down considerably during editing. "The animal rights groups and Humane Society were really concerned that we were going to mutilate a dog, so they actually had someone on the set watching us." The film's location, Arizona, might seem like a peculiar place to film a major-studio horror film, but Walas contends that it was the only place they could find that met the script’s requirements.

His neighbor hopes that Graham will remember to return her meat cleaver when he's finished with it. “We found the magical configuration that was in the sereenplay that we couldn't find anywhere else," explains Walas. "The particular situation in the story was that Graham buys his house across from a vacant lot which is a block away from downtown buildings. Now, in most major cities, you cannot go a block downtown and find vacant lots. Land is pretty valuable and it's all built up in most areas, but Phoenix was the place. lt also had a trailer park, which was very difficult to find. Actually, you'd think every place would be full of them, but most of them are just too well maintained or too close to a park or housing. I really needed a trailer park in the middle of nowhere." In addition, the city proved to be something of a playground for the cast and crew. Bell took the titular role to heart on occasion, and always reveled in freaking out unsuspecting victims. "Marshall was always hilarious -he refused to wash his coat, so it just stunk terribly, and he really got used to people being repulsed by him," Wallace recalls. There was also this instance where a visitor came to the set, turned around and saw Marshall in full makeup and screamed, "Oh my God!" and Marshall just looked at her with a straight face and without a second's delay he said, "Oh, don't worry, I'm going to fix all of this." And he just walked right off.But the most specific object of torment was actor Paxton. Not only did Bell get a chance to taunt him on screen, he also managed to get under his skin off camera as well. "I kind of knew where to put my finger on his neuroses and I started to psychologically pick on him,"Bell grins. I used to call his room and then hang up on him. I put one of those paper bags fiilled with dog shit on his doorstep, set it on fire and he had to stomp it out. And i used to wake him up at 4.00 in the morning to ask him if the Cardinals had won."

Walas was one of the first to pick up on this and noticed how their relationship as actors closely matched their relationship as characters. "Marshall would really get onto Bill's case and dig into him," the director smiles. "I'd yell cut, and Bill would look over at Marshall and he would just stare at Bill and say "I'm going to get you". He just fed Bill's paranoia, which worked great. And Bill definitly caught on and they started to play back and forth with each other."
Casting for the film seemed to be one of the easier aspects of production. MGM initially sought a name actor for the lead villain. “It’s the same as it would have been if a really known actor had played Freddy , muses Walas. "lt doesn't work. You want to see the charaeters as new and fresh as you possibly can. You don't want to get a recognizable name who brings a lot of baggage. Marquee value is definitely a consideration, but we were also on a limited budget, and if you go for a big name it eats away a tenth of your money."lt's been a few years since Walas first spread his directorial wings with The Fly II. "After Fly II, I knew I had to pick my subject matter very carefully," Walas confirms. 'There were a lot of other projects I knew I could handle, but what attracted me to The Vagrant was that it was a little weird." Soon thereafter, the project found a home at Brooks films, Mel Brooks' company, which years earlier gave Walas the chance to film The Fly II. Mel is a patron of enjoyable pictures and if could, he'd be doing horror features," Walas speculaties.

The next project on CWI's agenda is an adaptation of the fantasy novel A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter. The book takes place in Scotland during the 1800s, and concerns a mystical sea creature called a Selkie who takes human form to steal little girls for their red hair. This project would once again team up Walas with his wife, Gillian Richardson, who was the producer of The Vagrant and associate producer on The Fly II.

For now, at least, Walas doesn't plan to leave the genre to direct any sweeping romantic eimages: he's perfectly happy finding projects that can allow him to both direct and stay close to his second love of designing and creating what he calls "rubber monster makeup."
"I miss it considerably," he muses. "It's very difficult to not get involved hands -on while directing, because I find working with my hands to be very satisfying. 'You immediately see the product of your efforts. If you want a big eye here, you just make a big eye and it's there, as opposed to directing, where you have to sit there with your hands folded and talk to 10 people and say, 'What I'd like you to do is go over here and sort of put that over there.' It's frustrating, because the product of your labors comes a few times removed.'

Walking back to the Saul Zaentz Film Center, the parking lot is no longer crammed with people -they've all been allowed back into the building temporarily, causing a great sigh of relief from Walas. The Vagrant has been saved from doom. Before leaving, Walas ponders the possibility of a rumored sequel but says only the audience's response will determine the Vagrant's future film fate.

"The Vagrant is a great character, and so is Graham," he enthuses. "There's a lot of room to take it in many different directions. I'd like to pursue other stuff, but I'd love a chance to do it again and try to get through it without so many problems."

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