BM: That's the fans. The fans have generated their own mythology of it. But we're not talking about what way the movie might go.
MJS: When do you think you might be able to make more general announcements?
BM: I don't know. I would think, soon. But there are so many steps to go through. There are political hurdles, there's negotiations with the studio to be worked out and that sort of thing. So I don't know the answer.
MJS: What is it that has happened now that has made Universal think of doing Tremors 3 five years after Tremors 2?
BM: For whatever reasons, it took them that long to realise that Tremors 2 was an enormous hit and that they had made a fortune.
MJS: Is this going to be a regular thing, a Tremors film every five years?
SSW: It's kind of interesting because we never ever thought of it in those terms. Tremors 2 was fun to do and it was a unique experience for us, but now trying to come up with an idea for Tremors 3, we begin to think, 'Well gee, are there going to be more of these?' If there are, it has an impact on what this story should be. It's a whole new way of looking at the franchise, if you will.
MJS: Is this a chance to expand the franchise to comics or kits or whatever?
SSW: That's very much up to Universal. They are in control of that part of the engine.
MJS: How much of Tremors is owned by Stampede and how much by Universal? Could they have done Tremors 3 without you?
SSW: I don't know all the details of the contracts but I suspect they could.
BM: I think in reality they own it. We created it but they own it; that's the way things are done.
MJS: Let's go back to the beginning of the franchise. Where did the original grain of an idea for that come from?
SSW: One of my first jobs was working as a film editor for a naval film company that worked in the desert at a naval base in California. We used to hike around the gunnery ranges out there and I was always making notes for ideas for movies. So at one point, I was hiking on these big rounded boulders which were very much like the ones that we ended up shooting in the movie, and I made the note: what if there was something under the ground like a shark and I couldn't get off this rock? That note stayed in a file folder literally for ten years I think. Somewhere along the line Brent and I sold Short Circuit and then Nancy, our agent and now the head of Stampede, after we sold Short Circuit said, 'Get out all the ideas you've ever thrown in file folders.' So one of the ones we got out was, 'things under the ground' which she dubbed land-sharks. And Brent and I went on to develop a story based on that. It developed into first a '50s monster movie, and we kept saying, 'Gee, how can we make it different from a '50s monster movie?' Brent began pushing the characters in the direction of Val and Earl. Instead of the classic characters that you always run into in those movies: it's always the sheriff or the scientist or the military guy who takes control. We thought: what were the two most unlikely guys to be faced with dealing with this problem? And that's how we came up with the two handymen, Val and Earl.
MJS: How much did the basic concept change, apart from the development of characters?
BM: Well, the storyline changed constantly, draft after draft. It's just amazing, when you finally have a shooting script, to go back and see what your first draft was, because many of the ideas you have since forgotten. I think one of the most significant changes was that the project was much more comedic in its early stages and we got to a point where, towards the end, a number of drafts in, we made the decision that we wanted the audience to take the monsters seriously. To feel that the monsters were a real threat. So we went back and we took out some of the humour. We didn't want to go so far that we were poking fun at the idea of the monsters. We went about as close to it as we could get without losing the sense of real jeopardy.
MJS: They're both still very funny films, but the humour seems rooted in the characters.
BM: I think you're right. It hurt me to take out jokes and stuff that was funny. But overall, where it is funny I think it's very funny, and I think it is coming out of a real situation rather than out of a farcical moment which I think would have damaged the overall movie.
MJS: To what extent were the graboids determined by what the effects guys were capable of doing?
SSW: That's a good question.
BM: From a design standpoint, what there was in the script was simply a basic concept. That it was cigar-shaped, and that it had these spikes on it that it moved along with. This was all based on what I knew about earthworms - which was not much, except that they have these stiff hairs on them and that the hairs point backwards and that's how they move. And the other thing that we knew we wanted was an unusual mouth. We didn't want a conventional mouth and of course the design of the script called for them not to have eyes. Then the effects team, Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis of Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated, came in and began doing drawings based on really very few lines of description in the script, and came up with what you see. They only came up with one big change: which was the graboids had a little more hair on them, and they also had what we did not recognise as looking like a foreskin, but Gale Anne Hurd looked at the first drawing and said, 'Guys, these look a little phallic.'
SSW: Giant, uncircumcised penises, lying around in the desert. A lot of symbolism, there!
BM: So the guys redid them a little bit after that. But I have on my wall one of their very first drawings which looks very much like the final monster.
SSW: We circumcised the graboids!
MJS: Some people have commented that the graboids are a little like the sandworms in Dune.
BM: We were well aware of Dune and our only concern was that people would say that. We actually tried to differentiate ourselves from Dune as much as possible. But you can only go so far because the basic shape of the creature has to be logical for moving through the earth. I'm a big fan of the book. So we were aware of it; there wasn't much we could do about it. I wouldn't say we were influenced by it so much. I don't think I had read the book all those many years ago when I wrote the original note. But it was inevitable that the comparisons would come up.