Mark L. Lester interview — THE FLASHBACK FILES (2025)

What is your professional life like these days?

I’m still directing movies. Still excited about gearing up to do new movies. I just completed one in November. It’s in post-production now, it’s called DRAGONS OF CAMELOT. King Arthur dies and the knights of the round table have to fight to reclaim Camelot. They have to fight the dragons of the wicked queen. And then I did one earlier this year called POSEIDON REX, a sea creature movie in the vein of GODZILLA. I’m about to shoot some new movies. One called TRAIN WRECK, a train disaster movie. That’s the next one up.

I had the impression that you quit directing in favor of producing. Did you find your creative energy again?

Yes, I did. Also, my kids are grown up now. So I don’t have the issue of traveling overseas all the time. I did produce a lot of movies for quite a while, but now I’m looking forward to directing more pictures again. I’m constantly looking for material. I’ll just keep going until… I saw Alain Resnais in Cannes last year… You know? Alain Resnais? LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD?

Yes, I know who he is.

Yeah, so he showed his last movie there. He was 91! Bertolucci was there, also with a new film. He was 80. So I got a long way to go. [Laughs]

Directing gives you a lot more creative freedom than producing. Right now I’m looking to do something that harks back to my early days in exploitation movies. A movie like THE WOLF OF WALL STREET reminded me very much of the seventies. It had all the sex and nudity and crazy, wild scenes that we used to do in the seventies, like when I did TRUCK STOP WOMEN.

A lot of movie fans look back on that era of drive-in movies and B-pictures with a lot of nostalgia. You lived it. You made your first movies in that era. Was it really a magical time?

Completely magical. I don’t really know how to explain it. It was the most freedom oriented time in film history. You could basically film any outrageous idea you had. The crazier the better. It could be R-rated or X-rated. The scenes in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are pretty tame compared to what we used to do, but now they are considered controversial. I ran into Jon Voight the other day in a deli and we had lunch. We both agreed that MIDNIGHT EXPRESS would not be made today. But back then the studio’s gave a lot more freedom and drive-ins didn’t even care what you made, as long as you brought in customers. That whole women-in-prison type of exploitation movie, like CHAINED HEAT that Jonathan Demme did, you could not do today.

So yeah, the seventies were a great training ground. A lot of directors learned film making in that whole exploitation thing. Scorsese even did BOXCAR BERTHA. But now, these young film makers all make slow moving drama’s. I get to see a lot of them, because we are a distribution company, but most have no value to me whatsoever. Of course, occasionally there’s a BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD that’s brilliant. Now people want to make films to get into festivals, we made films to get into drive-ins. There were no festivals back then. But we did have six thousand drive-ins.

Those drive-ins are gone now. So how does distribution today compare to back then?

Well, it’s much more difficult. When I made BOBBIE JO AND THE OUTLAW you could make all your money in theatres and drive-ins. I made it for three hundred thousand dollars, which was still a lot of money back in 1976, and it grossed five million dollars. Then you had some money from foreign sales, to places like Australia. And if your movie wasn’t too outrageous you could also sell it to television. But now, DVD has taken a big hit these last couple of years, which is bad news for the independents. VOD is taking its place, but there’s really not much revenue. If you’re doing an independent movie, your best chances are to sell it to television, which we are doing with DRAGONS OF CAMELOT. There’s still a little bit of the DVD market left, in places like Germany.

You did quite the 180 degree turn when you went from ROLLER BOOGIE, which is quite sweet and innocent, to CLASS OF 1984. What inspired you to do that film?

Well, I’m a fan of all movies. I always wanted to be like Howard Hawks. He did comedy, western, gangster movies. He did everything, right? Somebody once wrote about me: he just makes movies. Well, yeah. I make movies.

You should take it as a compliment.

Yeah! Now, with ROLLER BOOGIE I wanted to do a Busby Berkeley type musical, you know? And CLASS OF 1984 came about because of my love for BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. I thought: what if you did a film like that today, with gangs and guns in school. Back then, you would read about one kid who took a gun to school somewhere and I projected that out. In the beginning of the film there’s a warning that if we don’t take note of this violence in schools, it’s going to get worse and worse.

That was prophetic.

Yeah, completely. I couldn’t even imagine where it would be going. I was thinking more of gangs and guns. Not these individual shootings.

In the early eighties there were some films that were really pushing the envelope in terms of movie violence. CLASS OF 1984 does that also. Was that a conscious decision on your part? Or did you feel the story required it?

I felt the story required it. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of pushing the envelope. Of course, it was a violent movie. It got an X-rating initially and there were some trims done in the scene where he saws the arm off. In some places the movie got banned altogether, like Scandinavia. Another film of mine, EXTREME JUSTICE, also got an X-rating initially. But I fought the ratings board and won. We didn’t have to make any cuts on that one.

After the success of CLASS OF 1984 you did a big studio film with FIRESTARTER. Did you get many offers?

No, that was the only offer I got. Dino De Laurentiis called me up after having seen CLASS OF 1984. Initially he was going to let me direct YEAR OF THE DRAGON, but then John Carpenter got fired off of FIRESTARTER. He never even got started on the picture, but there was a script and they were ready to go.

You were an independent film maker. Was it a big transition, making a studio movie?

No, but I did have a lot more money and support. More days to shoot, and that kind of stuff. But I missed the freedom. It was difficult, because all the effects were done practically. All the fires that she starts were real. When you see fire moving over the ground, it was all pipes that we put in the ground. Big fireballs in the air. We did all of that on the set.

Did your experience as an independent help you stay in budget?

We had fifty days to shoot, which was a lot. But still, at the end of the shooting day the crew would start taking the lights away. They’d say to me: You have to stop now. [Laughs] I was used to keep filming, but Drew Barrymore was only eight years old. She had limited hours that she could work. We had to double some of her stuff with another little girl. When you see her from the back, that’s probably the other girl.

Stephen King was especially harsh when criticizing FIRESTARTER. I never understood why he picked on your film as much as he did.

I don’t either. I knew he hated THE SHINING, because that movie was not his book. But in case of FIRESTARTER he had approved the script, he even worked on it, he was on the set and we talked about everything we were doing. He loved everything. The one thing that he especially criticized – the wind blowing through Drew Barrymore’s hair – that was his idea to begin with! At that time he practically hated every movie that was made from any of his books. Finally, Dino got so fed up with him that he said: Okay, you direct your own movie. Well, that was the absolute worst Stephen King film ever. So there you go. But he’s a great writer and I don’t want to get into a fight with him. [Laughs]

King still talks about how much he hates Kubrick’s THE SHINING. It’s like an obsession.

Yeah, it’s really weird. Probably because it’s considered a great film. But you know, you can’t take this stuff personally.

After that you did COMMANDO, which was one of the first Hollywood action movies to have a sense of self-awareness.

When I made that film, I was thinking about a James Bond movie. And they wanted to put some comedy in, because of 48 HRS. It was the same producer [Joel Silver]. He said: The action won’t work as well if you don’t have some funny lines in the movie. So we started to make them up as we went along. They worked really well. It was the first Schwarzenegger movie to do that, but they basically came out of my love for James Bond movies.

How was Schwarzenegger to work with at the time?

He was great. A lot of fun. It was only his third big movie, I think. He wasn’t a superstar yet, really.

I would have expected Hollywood to throw other action movies your way, because COMMANDO was so well made. But you did the comedy ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

Well, I kinda jumped into the next one. It was ready to go. But I’m not really a comedy director. The movie came out okay, but I wasn’t used to working with comedians. I was trying to tell the story and put in some good action scenes, but they didn’t care about any of that. They just wanted to be funny. It was John Candy and Dan Aykroyd originally, and then just before we started filming they switched to Eugene Levy.

Did you consciously move away from big studio movies after that?

No, I did CLASS OF 1999 because I had been developing it for quite some time, and after that I did SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO for Warner. It was after that one, that I decided to set up my own company and make my own movies. It was at the beginning of the DVD era. Lions Gate was starting out. They needed lots of movies. I said I would make them ten films. And I did. I made ten films in a three year period: THE EX, MISBEGOTTEN, DOUBLE TAKE, THE BASE, BLOWBACK and others. I made all these films for Lions Gate when they started out. It was a lot of fun, because it went back to my early days, when I didn’t have a studio telling me what to do.

SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO is somewhat of a cult classic now. People are having a ball watching that movie, it’s so over the top. At the time Warner Brothers was less enthusiastic about it.

Yeah, I was going for exaggerated reality. Kind of a pop art thing or a comic book. But Warner took about ten minutes out of the film, which were pretty good actually. They changed it all around. They didn’t do a big release, but I guess people liked it. The studio interference was good inspiration to start my own company.

What I like about CLASS OF 1999 is that it’s not a rehash of the first. It’s a much more humorous film.

I wanted to project in even further into the future, like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK or something.

I love the cyborg at the end.

Yeah, that was before CGI. It was a puppet and it took a long time to do. Nowadays it would be easy to shoot something like that.

Are you still working on a remake op CLASS OF 1984?

Yes, I’m working on the script. It’s still not right.

How do you envision that movie?

Ultraviolent. I have to hype everything up compared to the original. Because the original is pretty dated in terms of what’s possible. That’s the challenge.

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