Cinema Ferox:
An Interview with Umberto Lenzi

By Alex Ballard

Although he’s got a plethora of gialli, police thrillers, and high adventure films to his credit, Italian director Umberto Lenzi will probably always be remembered for the mondo cannibal genre he helped to create in the 1970s and 80s.

Inspired by Jacopetti and Cavara’s Mondo Cane, Lenzi set the foundation for all jungle gut-munchers to come with his 1972 film Man From Deep River before returning to the genre with Eaten Alive (1980) and blowing it wide open in 1981 with the infamous Cannibal Ferox, which went on to be banned in 30 countries.

In between the two cannibal movies, Lenzi had another first with Incubo sulla citta contaminata (or Nightmare City, 1980), which although dismissed in some quarters as just another Dawn of the Dead clone, was actually the first zombie movie to introduce fast moving, semi intelligent and virtually indestructible ghouls, setting the stage for licks such as Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), the excreable Dawn of the Dead remake and Robert Rodriguez’s equally uninspiring Planet Terror (2007).

More recently, Lenzi spent time working in television before seeming to retire from the business in the mid 90s. However he is currently spending time in Italy promoting his new book, Delitti a Cinecittà (or Murder in Cinema), a fictional tale of a serial killer who offs the cast members on the set of a movie shoot. Penny Blood tracked down the Italian giallo maestro for a few choice cuts.

PENNY BLOOD: In the 1970s you made a lot of gialli, cop movies and war movies, and then at the turn of the 1980s you moved into a very visceral type of horror.

LENZI: I have shot about 60 movies and I started when I was very, very young and I started with pirate movies and adventure movies, but my preference is to make thrillers. I started in the early 1960s with the four movies starring Carroll Baker. The first one, Paranoia, it was a unique movie. The distributor was Paramount and in the summer of 1969 we shot in a big city and it was very, very hot. After finishing the movie we shot another three with the same actor and it was a new way of doing a thriller because they were thrillers shot to a very high standard, and the critics said that these were sexy thrillers. It was my personal way of doing thrillers, not like Dario Argento or anyone else, it was my style. After these movies I started with the violent police movies and they were Milano Rovente [aka Gang War in Milan, 1973) and Napoli Violenta (aka Violent Naples, 1976, starring the legendary John Saxon], and the critics thought these were my best movies. I also worked a lot with an actor named Thomas Milian who was a Cuban actor living for many years in Italy; I then worked with him in Hollywood. Tomas was a very important actor in Italy during the 70s and 80s.

PENNY BLOOD: Then you worked in America for a time.

LENZI: I made about six or seven movies in the States. The biggest one was a war movie called The Greatest Battle in 1978 [Lenzi was credited as Humphrey Logan] that starred Stacey Keach, John Huston, Henry Fonda and many others, very, very important actors. And in 1979 I directed another war movie called From Hell to Victory [credited here as Hank Milestone], starring George Peppard. I worked with a lot of them: George Kennedy, Jack Palance – I directed Jack Palance in another war movie in Spain, in Madrid, named the Legend of Condor Legion. I shot four movies with a big star named Carroll Baker; she’s a close friend of mine.

PENNY BLOOD: So at the end of the 70s you started making horror, how did that come about?

LENZI: Yes, I changed my way of shooting movies with the horror genre, because I shot two cannibal movies, actually three, because my movie Paese del sesson selvaggio [Man From Deep River, 1972] is the first of the old movies to show a cannibal scene, it’s the first. It was an action movie where men fought in the jungle against a savage tribe, like A Man Named Horse. You remember this movie? Mine was similar.

PENNY BLOOD: Where did you film it?

LENZI: It was shot in Thailand on the border with Burma, where we could really find savage tribes.

PENNY BLOOD: I bet that was interesting.

LENZI: It was very hard.

PENNY BLOOD: Do you think films like those could be made today. Could the cannibal genre be resurrected?

LENZI: It’s very difficult if someone wants to copy the ideas from another movie, and anyway it’s nonsense to do that as you can never really achieve anything anyway. I remember some Hollywood producers wanting to do a remake of Cannibal Ferox, but that’s never going to work so I don’t think it’s something to attempt. I am a very close friend of Quentin Tarantino, and in Venice four years ago we met at a film festival and watched my movie Paranoia, and people still loved it after twenty-seven years. But you know the movie done by Robert Rodriguez and presented by Quentin Tarantino, called Planet Terror? It was robbed from my film City of the Walking Dead [Nightmare City].

PENNY BLOOD: I was wondering about that movie; did you use a lot of storyboards for Walking Dead?

LENZI: No, no, no, it was based mostly on the scenes I had in my mind.

PENNY BLOOD: Some of the scenes in the movie, such as the end sequence on the rollercoaster, they must have taken a lot of work to get right?

LENZI: We shot that scene in Lunar Park in Madrid, it was quite simple.

PENNY BLOOD: Even with the chopper hovering just above the rollercoaster?

LENZI: [laughs] It was all real. The way of shooting, not only my way but most of my Italian friends who are directors, is to improvise based on the location and tools available, because we don’t often have a lot of money to spend. This sequence with the helicopter in Lunar Park and the zombies, I shot in only one day.

PENNY BLOOD: Did you use the same methods to shoot Cannibal Ferox? Straight in and straight out?

LENZI: Look, I don’t talk about this movie because it was very, very hard and very dangerous because we shot in the area which had narcotic gangs, you understand, and we did it without the support of the police or local authorities. Today, it would be impossible to do this, to shoot in Colombia in this area. It was a very, very dangerous and hard shoot to complete. The most difficulty we had, though, was with the special effects; you remember the bit when the girl is hung up by her breasts for example? It was very hard for the girl and for me, because we shot in the real jungle without the support of a large crew. The crew was just 13 people. That was it. Me, the assistant director, cinematographer, the assistant, one or two on production, a tech man, the special effects and also three others.

PENNY BLOOD: Looking back at the film, do you feel it was worth such a test of endurance?

LENZI: It was worth it. I only did that movie because I had to pay government taxes, I didn’t really enjoy that one as much as the others, but as it turned out, we got lots of revenue back with that movie. Obviously it was a huge success, so in an economic sense it really paid off. Now, after 30 years I am still meeting fans of and being asked questions about the movie. The one I shot with Henry Fonda and John Huston, nothing! And that was a very big movie, because I shot with 40 tanks and five planes because in the seventies, there were no computer effects, it was all real. When the tanks fired, when things exploded, it was all real.

PENNY BLOOD: You’ve beaten me to my next question actually; tell me, do you prefer to see original effects in latex and real props?

LENZI: I never used computer graphics, ever.

PENNY BLOOD: Would it have been something that you would have experimented with if it was available when you were at your most prolific?

LENZI: Not really. I think the difference between today’s special effects and the ones I used, is that everything I did was real, it was the real thing. There are loads of examples I could draw as comparisons, but I remember one particular time during the shoot for The Greatest Battle, there was a scene were a tank was heading towards a cliff and the driver didn’t see the cliff edge as it came towards him, while we were filming the scene. It was a matter of seconds and a matter of pure luck that he didn’t get killed, which of course he didn’t, and we kept on filming afterwards. Stacey Keach had the tank coming at him and he had to jump onto it and plant a bomb. The man who was driving didn’t see because he had a limited field of vision within the tank, and it went straight at Keach, who did the stunt and the driver only just got out in time before the tank went over the edge. So no, I wouldn’t have used special effects done by a computer, I don’t believe in that.

PENNY BLOOD: Can you tell me a little about Demons 3? how did you get involved in that project?

LENZI: That’s not a movie I really want to talk about, as it’s not worth talking about. It’s not important.

PENNY BLOOD: Sure. Can you tell us then what inspired you to go into filmmaking?

LENZI: I was in the movie school in Rome, the famous movie school in Rome named the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia, which was the first school of cinema in the world because it started more than 70 years ago. I was a student in this school for three years. Afterwards I wrote a screenplay, and, in 1961, I started with my first movie, a pirates movie on the high seas named the Avventure di Mary Read [aka Queen of the High Seas]. I was 30, a really young director. Of course now it’s easier to do a movie because of technology and there are more cameras [laughs] but many years ago it was very difficult, very hard to start as a director. I was an assistant director for two years and worked on an American movie. The producer of this movie was Bill Alland, who was the actor playing the protagonist in Citizen Kane, you remember the story, a journalist, a newspaper man, that was Bill Alland. I started with this.

PENNY BLOOD: You’ve had a very long and distinguished career…

LENZI: My life is a novel [laughs].

PENNY BLOOD: I’d just like to conclude by asking you, do you consider yourself to be retired from filmmaking now, or do you have any future projects in the pipeline?

LENZI: My new job is novelist, that’s what I’m doing now. My book Delitti a Cinecitta [Murder in Cinema], is a hybrid of cinema, history and crime all in one book. It’s set in the 1940s in Italy during the war and it’s about a serial killer who starts killing actors during the shooting of a movie, but it’s very real. Everyone knows about it and everyone’s seen that movie, so it’s all about a serial killer. The main character is not real, he is fake, but the other ones are real. The book has been out all over Italy in the last few months and I’ve been traveling to promote it. Maybe at a later date it will be released in English language format, I don’t know when, but it might be in a year’s time. I’m now working on a sequel which is going to be set a few years after this one, and will feature the same detective from this book.

PENNY BLOOD: So you’ve kind of came full circle, from your early days as a writer?

LENZI: Ah, but I hope to do a movie based on the book if it’s possible!