Corman In Conversation

Roger Corman, King of the Bs, reminisces about his start in movie making. In this original archival piece from Ballyhoo Motion Pictures, Corman takes the audience through his humble beginnings (he studied engineering!), and how he broke into the 'movie making' business. This featurette originally came out on the Blu-Ray release of Monster from the Ocean Floor.

Ahead of my birthday in 2013 Paul got tickets for the two of us to attend a talk at the British Film Institute: Roger Corman In Conversation.

The legendary B-movie director/producer was interviewed by renowned film critic Kim Newman in front of a packed audience of fans - and Paul had snagged us tickets just three rows back from the stage.

For an 87-year-old Corman was spritely and full of anecdotes, well-spoken and erudite, interesting and engaging - with nary a bad word to say about anybody.

It was an hour-and-three-quarter presentation, broken up with a few of trailers and clips from Corman's early movies, rounded off with the last quarter of an hour (or so) being open to questions from the floor.

As it was a flagship event in the BFI's Gothic season, the conversation between Newman and Corman concentrated largely on his Poe films (Lovecraft even got a mention, but Corman was adamant that he was a Poe fan ahead of HPL), but touched on his later works, his involvement with the American counter-culture movement and the output of some of his more famous protégés (such as Jack Nicholson and James Cameron).

As often happens after listening to such a fascinating character, I came away with a mental check list of Corman pictures I needed to add to my "viewing wish list" while ones that were already of the list got a bump up now I knew some of the behind-the-scenes stories about their making.

Massive thanks to the crew at Film Masters for making the interview featurette available for all.