'Good puppetry is an art': how we made Gremlins

Joe Dante, director

I was down to my last few bucks before I got the Gremlins job. I’d directed The Howling, which had done well, but the company had gone out of business before they could pay me. When Steven Spielberg’s script arrived, I was convinced he’d sent it to the wrong address.

The only way to make the story believable was if it was completely stylised. I insisted on shooting it on back lots, creating a small-town setting evoking Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. We actually included a clip of that in the film, in case the audience didn’t get the message.

The original script was more gruesome, with Gizmo morphing into Stripe, the bad gremlin. But then Spielberg had the brilliant idea, which I think makes the picture remembered today, not to turn him into a monster but to have him carried around in the backpack of the hero Billy [Zach Galligan], like in a “boy and a dog” movie.

Howie Mandel, who did the voice of Gizmo, already had a baby voice in his comedy repertoire, which I think we speeded up a bit. Howie’s performance was a major part of making the creature credible. For Gizmo’s singing, we auditioned loads of professionals, including an opera singer, but ended up using this little girl with a lovely voice found by Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the score.

We were pushing the envelope with technology. It wasn’t until we made Gremlins 2 that it had advanced to the point where we could get Gizmo running and dancing. The sets were generally built up off the floor, so the puppeteers could be underneath operating the monsters. We used marionettes in a couple of scenes, but they’re not especially convincing. Good puppetry is an art. When it’s done as well as it was in Gremlins, CGI technology can’t do it any better.

At the preview, after the scene where one gremlin explodes in a microwave, a mother watching with her kid came storming up and shouted at me that it was totally unsuitable for children. The Warner Brothers studio didn’t get it at all, didn’t think it was funny. But the picture became a phenomenon, one of the biggest of the year. It came out of nowhere. It was just one of those things you’re lucky to have once in your career.

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Zach Galligan, actor

I’d already auditioned for parts with Phoebe Cates before and felt very comfortable with her. When it came to the session for Gremlins, I rested my head on her shoulder and gazed at the camera. I’m told Steven Spielberg said: “Oh my God, look at that! He’s in love with her already. I don’t need to see anything else.”

For Phoebe, it was a more innocent role than her previous movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I was just a deeply terrified, inexperienced young actor doing my best not to get sacked. Probably the most nerve-racking scene to shoot was when the cinema where the Gremlins have been watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs blows up. Safety regulations were more lax on Hollywood sets back then. When we asked the explosives guy how big the explosion would be, he said: “Well, we’ve packed it pretty good.” I thought: “What the hell does that mean?” In the event, it was deafening. And the heat was so intense, I thought it had singed my eyebrows. It blew the doors off the theatre, as you can see in the film, and it shattered windows on a building at Universal a mile away.

Acting opposite Gizmo wasn’t difficult, because pretending a lifelike puppet is a live animal is no harder than pretending a woman you’ve just met has been your wife for 15 years. It was also beneficial having practical special effects, because I was reacting to a thing that was really there in front of me, as opposed to stuff you are attempting to imagine, as you would with CGI. You can even see it in the performance of the dog, Barney, which must be one of the top 10 animal performances in movies. He was convinced the puppets were real. The affection he had for me was genuine, too, because I’d spent days playing with him and petting him. Every time he saw me I was this endless treat machine.

Recently I was at a Las Vegas convention and there were three 15ft-high slot machines. Two were The Wizard of Oz and Lord of the Rings, the other was Gremlins. I thought: “Look where this little movie has come to sit in the pantheon of films.” I used to be grumpy about being continually asked about it. Now, to have been in a film that is the 80s equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life feels pretty amazing.