MJS: When Tremors was released, what was the reaction to it?
BM: It was interesting because the studio made a decision, although I can't say that we were smart enough to disagree with it because we weren't. They decided to sell it as a straight monster movie. Their pitch was: if you get the monster movie crowd, you're golden; if you get any more crossover after that, it's just gravy. And it didn't really work. The movie did well for an average movie. It did better than break even, which most movies don't. But it wasn't the hit that everybody thought it should be.
SSW: The reality was that most of the movie-going audience, when they looked at the one-sheet, when they looked at the billboards and the advertisements, they felt that well, this isn't the kind of movie I'm interested in. I actually had friends who came up to me later and said, 'Oh, that's Tremors. I saw the poster but I didn't think that was the movie you were making.' It had this very big campaign that went for the B-movie audience. They made it look and feel like a low-budget monster movie and you had no sense of the comedy or the sophistication that was built into it.
BM: It's just a judgement call on the part of the publicity department. They admitted it was hard for them to figure out: 'Is this a horror movie or is it a comedy adventure? What is this?' In a sense, it's between the two. Well, when any film is between any two categories it makes it really hard for them to know what to do with it. So it was really discovered, thankfully, on video. In its initial release, while it was successful, it wasn't considered a runaway hit. Then, people began to find it, thanks to video and ancillary markets. It began to build and build and build until the video division began clamouring for a sequel. When the feature division kept waffling over whether or not to make this, the video division came to us and said, 'We will do anything to get you guys to make a sequel.' Nancy said, 'Does that include letting Steve direct it?' and they said, 'Absolutely. Anything, anything...'
SSW: Even that was not enough to put them off!
MJS: During the intervening five years, had you been pushing for a sequel or toying with ideas for one?
SSW: Ironically, for whatever reason, somewhere after the first one came out, Universal did commission a script. They actually asked us to write Tremors 2, so the script already existed. Then they got cold feet about making the movie.
BM: We had written a theatrical release film. Where did we set it? Was it Australia?
SSW: It was set in Australia
BM: The script was ready to go. So the actual shooting script for Tremors 2 was a scaled-down version.
SSW: It was budgeted at $17 million, set in Australia, with both Val and Earl. We approached Kevin Bacon about coming back and he thought about it for a while, but then he got his role in Apollo 13. His career was going in a very different direction. He was very nice about it, but from his perspective, what people liked about Tremors was those big worms and not him.
MJS: Apart from Fred Ward and Michael Gross, did you consider getting any of the other cast back?
BM: You know, I can't remember who we talked to.
SSW: Since we decided to do a movie that was not set in Perfection, it left all those characters behind, the ones who survived in the first film. And we also made the decision that in the second film, if there was going to be a love interest of any sort then it ought to be Fred Ward's turn. So we weren't thinking of having Fin Carter come back in the role of Rhonda.
MJS: How much did you have to adapt the younger character to allow for Christopher Gartin rather than Kevin Bacon?
SSW: Well, we simply changed the whole idea. We stepped back and we said, 'Alright.' We revised the script to fit within the $4 million budget that the video division allowed. That was a huge amount of work in itself. We simply stepped back and started over in terms of relationships and so forth. The reason that they went on the adventure was the same: that in a foreign land the creatures had returned and they asked the only experts in the world to come and help out. But we went as far from the basic relationship that Val and Earl had and made it the naive apprentice relationship.
BM: To some extent it maybe makes it easier to write with standard characters in these kinds of films. The person who doesn't know a lot, to whom you can deliver information that the audience needs. So I think maybe that helped a bit.
MJS: The opening of Tremors 2 is a bit cynical. Was all the merchandise a dig at Universal for not properly exploiting the first film?
SSW: Not just Universal, we take shots at all of Hollywood.
BM: Our films career is all missed opportunities of cashing in on merchandising. Our first film was Short Circuit and the studio did nothing about it. If ever there was a movie about a toy... But it's not a big thing with us.
SSW: The original studio that made Short Circuit was not a studio, it was a film company. They only made a few films then they went out of business, Short Circuit being their only hit. So the rights to Short Circuit became muddled. And yet there was a time that Number Five, the robot, was the third best known kid's character, behind Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, when they did their surveys, whoever does these sort of things. It was always frustrating to us, when there was a Land Before Time dinosaur in every McDonalds in America, that there were no little Number Fives running around. We couldn't believe it.
BM: It's a crime. It's a crime. But really, this whole sense of merchandising and commercialising everything, that was in Tremors 2, it will be in Tremors 3 to some degree. We're throwing around some ideas. That's the reality of the times we live in, that everything is turned into a product. Basically it's in there because it's funny. We think it's funny when something horrific or extremely strange is turned into something you can buy or make a buck off of.
