Next week the Back to the Future trilogy gets a release on shiny Blu-ray having just completed a limited run in cinemas across the country to celebrate the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
Seeing the original film twenty-five years ago was one of my formative cinematic experiences and recently Dave and I had a sneak preview of the film on the big screen and it was a triumphant return for a film that has more than stood the test of time.
Creator, producer and co-writer of the series Bob Gale is still passionate about the trilogy and we got the chance to talk to the man whose chance discovery of his Dad’s high school yearbook provided the spark for one of the most endearing and enduring films of recent years.
HeyUGuys
It must be exciting having Back to the Future coming back into the cinemas.
Bob Gale
I tell you…I saw the movie projected eight days ago and it looks so good, so much better than it did in 1985. When they did the remastering for the Blu-ray they spent over 400 hours doing dirt cleanup, and almost another 200 hours doing colour correction, so the movie looks better than it ever did. You have the print going through the projector, it picks up dirt, gets scratched and with the digital technology these guys fixed almost all of that stuff, and it just looks breathtaking.
HeyUGuys
I saw the trailer [for the Back to the Future re-release] in the cinemas recently and got chills, I remember seeing it in 1985 and it was a seminal moment for me, I can still play Johnny B. Goode on guitar because of the film…
Bob Gale
…Well we’ve got people trying to invent hoverboards, Nike just patented the self-lacing shoes…
HeyUGuys
And people talk about it with such love. Having been the creator of all this, what do you attribute this love of the film to?
Bob Gale
Well, it was a perfect convergence of a fantastic script, of an outstanding, perfect cast, Bob Zemeckis’ great skill – all that stuff came together and at its heart it is a very human, emotional story. Past all the trappings of the special effects and the gimmicks and the action, it is a tender story about a kid and his parents. And there’s a moment we all have in our lives when we are children where we suddenly understand that our parents were children too, and that’s kind of a cosmic moment that everybody experiences, and to my knowledge no-one had ever done a movie about that. Not every joke translates into every language but that core aspect of the story that we’re all in control of our own destiny, I think that all comes together and it’s something that really touched me.
HeyUGuys
There’s a real Twilight Zone feel to the first film in particular, were you a fan of science fiction of that era?
Bob Gale
Oh, Bob Zemeckis and I were both huge Twilight Zone fans. That experience you had watching Back to the Future when you were a kid, I was having those kinds of experiences watching The Twilight Zone every week and Zemeckis too. Another movie that affected us was George Pal’s The Time Machine, so I was a huge science fiction fan, so Ray Bradbury – he helped warp my mind. So, it’s really cool for me to hear from people who say that my work did for them what The Twilight Zone or what Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein did for me, it’s great.
HeyUGuys
As a kid, I really enjoyed the action and adventure elements of the film, but there are deeper, more subversive elements and the idea at play. Did you have to compromise those at all to get the film made?
Bob Gale
No, no – we didn’t compromise anything. The movie was rejected over forty times, nobody wanted to make the movie. The time travel aspect was something people were scared off because no time travel movie had ever been a hit and while there was a very nice, sweet comedy – they wanted to do raunchier comedies, so they told us to take it to Disney. So, we heard this half a dozen times or more and finally we were out of studios and Bob and I shrugged and said ‘What the hell, let’s take it to Disney…’ So we did and the executives looked at us like we were out of our minds! They said, ‘Are you guys insane? There are kids…and the Mother in the car…We’re Disney! We can’t touch that. That’s insane.’
HeyUGuys
Just for curiousity’s sake it would be great to see what Disney would have made of the film!
Bob Gale
[Laughs] No it wouldn’t!
HeyUGuys
With the success of the first film, a sequel was inevitable and the final scene suggests you were thinking of that too?
Bob Gale
No, no no no. The end of the first movie is a joke, ‘There’s something that’s got to be done about your kids!’ It’s funny, and the characters get in the DeLorean and go off to another adventure, like the cowboys riding off into the sunset. If we had known if we were going to do a sequel, let alone two sequels, we NEVER would have put Jennifer in the car because they we had to figure what we were going to do with Jennifer! So, she gets knocked out! She’s unconscious for the two movies!
HeyUGuys
When the sequels came up for discussion did you have certain ideas you wanted to explore?
Bob Gale
Here’s what happened – when the studio said they wanted a sequel we had certain parameters. As long as we had Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd we will figure out a sequel – we didn’t know what it would be, but those guys have to be locked in. And we had to go back and get the rest of the cast and they all said yes, except for Crispin Glover. So we had Marty, Doc, Lea Thompson and Thomas Wilson had said Yes, so that was instrumental in saying ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to create an alternate world of 1985 where Geroge McFly is a tombstone and Lorraine is married to Biff?’ It’s like those Superman comics where Lois Lane is married to Lex Luthor so it was those limitations and those elements that we had to balance.
HeyUGuys
The story of Back to the Future centres around Marty but as the trilogy goes along it seems Doc Brown is at the heart of the story – his ambition, his flawed successes and then, at the end, finding true happiness – would you agree with this, or is this Marty’s story?
Bob Gale
The first is really George McFly’s story if you think about it. He’s the character that undergoes the big character arc, and part of the success is how well drawn the characters are and we thought it would be interesting if Marty and Doc changed places. So in the third movie Marty is the one giving Doc advice – he says ‘We don’t belong here,’ and ‘What’s the right thing to do in your brain, not your heart’ and it is represented where Marty says ‘Great Scott!’ and Doc says ‘This is heavy…’
HeyUGuys
We’re five years away from Jaws 19 and sequels and remakes are doing better business than ever, putting the talk of remakes aside for a moment I believe you’re moving into the video game arena?
Bob Gale
The video game thing is an interesting avenue for us to explore alternate Back to the Future realities – and the budget is obviously a whole lot less than it would take to make a new movie, so it’s a way of giving the real fans something new about Back to the Future which we hope will be in the spirit of the three movies.
HeyUGuys
So, these are all new stories?
Bob Gale
Yeah. We’re not talking about a remake, we’re not talking about a reboot, no Part 4, no 3D, no re-imagining of it…
HeyUGuys
No part for Justin Bieber?
Bob Gale
Oh God! Every once in a while those rumours go round…
HeyUGuys
I think it’s because Back to the Future is the exception where no-one is interested in seeing a remake, people may want to see more of it, but in the middle of these, predominently 80s, remakes going on at the moment, Back to the Future stands up as something which people don’t want to see touched.
Bob Gale
We’ve been so vociferous in interviews about it that people don’t even ask now. ‘No’ really means no. If we changed our minds they’d all be on us like a cheap suit…It’s laziness, in my opinion, that Hollywood is remaking or redoing everything. Wouldn’t it be better to do some original stuff? We’ve all seen those sequels where they’ve gone back to the well one too many times, I’m not going to mention any names… We all know what they are… Has there ever been a sequel made more than ten years after the original installment that really held a candle to the original – I can’t think of an example.
HeyUGuys
And what’s next?
Bob Gale
Beyond the video game stuff, I’m writing scripts but the problem of Hollywood not being so receptive to original ideas and that’s what I like to do. That why I was so delighted that Inception was such a big hit – I had some problems with the movie, but it was original and audiences want that. Maybe having Back to the Future back in the cinemas will lead people to think they need to make something original. Or maybe they’ll just think, ‘Oh MAN! We gotta REMAKE this!’
We want to thank Bob Gale for his time speaking to us.
Photo: DeLorean Time Machine
