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Dante's Pick: Director Joe Dante Selects His 13 Favourite Films
Ian Schultz , September 16th, 2016 08:40

To coincide with the release of his cult classic Matinee on Blu-Ray, the director of Gremlins, The Burbs and Explorers, Joe Dante, picks a Baker's Dozen of his favourite films for The Quietus


The Intruder (Roger Corman, 1963)

Roger Corman’s best movie is probably The Intruder. It's a move that he made with his own money - which he made sure didn’t happen again - because it was about something he believed in. He went down to the real locations with a film crew who obviously had to tell the locals that they were making something a little different than what they were really doing. It’s a movie about racism and it’s based on a real guy named John Casper who used to forment racial unrest in various small Southern towns. So when William Shatner would do his big harangue speeches, he would say something completely different when the camera was on his back in order to get the crowds there, and then once the crowds had left, he could turn around and say the volatile race-baiting dialogue that he was supposed to be really saying. It's a kind of crude movie in the sense that there’s not a lot of money and they had to keep moving all the time because if people found out what the movie was about they would chase them out of town—hence the climactic scene of the movie, which is centred around a pair of children’s swings, actually was shot in three different locations. If you are eagle-eyed, you can spot that. But actually for a normal viewer you just don't get that, because it's the same actors and the same movie, they just happen to be in different places. But I bow to no one in my admiration for his Edgar Allen Poe movies and his science fiction movies. Roger was one of my favourite filmmakers before I even met him! But I think probably even he would say that the best thing he ever did was The Intruder.
