P:  You’ve got to be so used to doing interviews about The Onion that it’s got to be kind of refreshing to do one for something else.
D: It is, actually, because I’m so much more passionate and interested in my movie career.  The Onion was always sort of a sidetrack for me.  I went to USC film school and I’d always intended to make movies, and then fell into The Onion, and it just became this successful thing, like you suddenly realized you were piloting a rocket ship.  There’s really nothing you can do about it.
P: You’d made some short films before Spaceman.
D:  Yeah.
P:  At USC?
D:  No, actually before USC (University of Southern California) . I dropped out of USC pretty quickly.  It just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  The main thing about USC is that it’s basically a vocational school.  They teach you the science of filmmaking; how to run a camera, how to use the machines, and I guess they do a little bit about screenwriting and story, but I really didn’t want to be one of those people in the film school generation.  They grew up watching movies, they go to film school, they study movies, then they come out and make movies; well, what do they have to say?  All their life has been is watching movies.  So I dropped out and moved across the country and decided to live a life as opposed to focus on learning how to make movies.  So I made some shorts in high school, and then after USC I made a few shorts, and I moved to Madison and continued to make shorts on occasion.
The idea for Spaceman popped in my head about ‘95.
P:  Where did the idea come from?
D:  I don’t know.  It was just sort of there.  I had this notion of a guy dressed in kind of a space gladiator suit as sort of a fish-out-of-water in the current day.  It struck me as kind of amusing, so I started writing it to see where it would go, and it became the movie.
P:  It kind of has a ’50s AIP movie feel.
D:  Yeah, that was definitely part of the intent.  I knew I didn’t have any money to do it.  I had do use that to my advantage, and the only way I could do that was to make it seem like one of those antiquated types of movies.
P:  How did you get up the money?
D:  About half of it was my own.  Just various investors or people I knew would throw in a thousand or two, and that’s pretty much how it got made.
P:  The score is actually the most expensive single attribute of the film, isn’t it?
D:  That is true.  But it was still a fraction of what you’d pay for the score on a real movie.  I knew the composer, I knew the guys who recorded the orchestra.  We got the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, which was an orchestra the recorder that I knew had worked with.  If you called the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and told them you were doing an independent film, could you please do the music, they’d say no, even if you had the money.  For them it’s kind of a prestige thing.  Even the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra which, you figure, they’re Milwaukee, they’re local, we can get ‘em, it was kind of a tough sell.  But it paid off.  The director of the orchestra gave me a phone call after the movie was done and I could hear the pure shock in his voice; he probably thought he’d never hear from us again.  And he just said, “”I just couldn’t believe it, the music was wonderful and the movie was entertaining and fun, and it just worked so well!”  And that was really delightful.
P:   Why did you decide to shoot the film in Chicago when you were living in Madison at the time?
D:  Just wanted it to take place in the big city.
P:  Wasn’t it difficult to commute?  You were still with The Onion at the time.
D:  I took a little sabbatical.  The other thing was, most of the actors were there, the crew was there, it was easier to get equipment there.  We did some interiors in Madison because it’s cheaper.
P:  A lot of the violence in the film that could be gory takes place off-screen.  Was that a directorial decision or a restriction of the budget?
D:  Restriction of the budget.  Absolutely.
P:  If you’d had the budget, would you have gone for more of a splattery, almost Troma-like film?
D:  I don’t know about that, I’m not a big fan of those movies.  It would have been a totally different movie.  The budget really defined the type of movie it is.  A $50,000 movie is such an unheard-of thing.  It really does have to be a certain type of movie.  A lot of people are confused by it because they haven’t seen anything like it, or because they haven’t seen anything like it in fifty years.  Money means everything in movies.  There’s so many little subtle things that add up that could make a totally movie.
P:  Was it a conscious decision not to give the spaceman a specific name?
D:  Yeah.  I’ve never been a big fan of character names.  “Spaceman” is funny because it’s what the bad guys call him—they can’t think of anything else to call him.
P:  He’s got a neat outfit, too.  He kind of looks like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
D:  Yeah, a little bit.  I love that movie.  My brother designed that costume, with the little helmet and anything.
P:  Are you going to be closely involved with The Onion’s movie deal?
D:  Yeah, I’ve left The Onion for good to focus entirely on the movie career.  I’m peripherally related to the movie deal, but I’m not really interested in doing “Onion Brand” movies.
P:  So you don’t want to do what Mad Magazine did with Up the Academy.
D:  Yeah.  The guys from The Onion when I was there, our primary concern was that we didn’t want to be another National Lampoon.  They knew exactly how to completely destroy the name after attaching themselves to too many terrible movies.  I find the branding to be limiting.  The Onion never wanted to be like National Lampoon, which is sort of a general humor publication.  It wanted to be a very specific niche kind of humor that was pretending to be a major news organization.  We get a lot of other projects, like radio and TV, and that stuff all worked because news exists in all those media.  But news doesn’t exist in movies, so in order to do an Onion movie, it would have to completely break out of the Onion mold.  It so much easier to do comedy with a straight face, like when you’re pretending to be a newspaper.  Once you admit you’re comedy, it becomes ten times harder..
P:  Spaceman is a completely different kind of humor than The Onion, and then there’s “Jim’s Journal,” which is this bizarre version of anti-humor.
D:  Yeah.  To me it’s pretty obvious why these things exist, because while doing The Onion all the time, these other things don’t have an outlet, so they have to come out in other forms.  And after doing it for twelve years, I’m finally ready to not do it at all anymore.  I like exploring other types of comedy.  Spaceman is different.  One of my favorite comedies ever is The King of Comedy.  It’s so funny and I think it had a huge impact of Spaceman.  You’re not quite sure if you’re supposed to laugh or be uncomfortable or not.
P:  The lead character in Spaceman is killing people.
D:  Right.  In the first draft of the script, he’d just kill people and you’d have no reason to like him, and I got enough comments saying, “You’ve got to do something to make him likable.”  So we made sure that all bad guys were more evil, like they killed people for no reason where Spaceman at least had a code.  And them making him a little boy at the beginning solves everything because then you're thinking he's more of a boy.  I’ve always liked that trick of “How do you make a character likable if they’re just totally unredeemable?”
The next movie that I’m doing is a big, overt comedy.  Spaceman is the sort of comedy that only certain people get, and this next one is something more people will get.
P:   The comic nature of the film if it wasn’t for the performance of the lead.  David Ghilardi just nailed that tone.
D:  It was kind of scary because when I was writing the movie I thought that my friends and I would play the parts, but as the character evolved, I started to realize I didn’t know anyone who could pull this off.  So we went down to Chicago and had auditions and had a lot of really good people read, but nobody really got it until David came in.
I’d seen him in a play about a year or two earlier, playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  He was really good, lively and kind of menacing, but also understood the comedy.  We brought him in and he read for it and totally nailed it. It was really lucky.  He brought a lot to the part.
P:  The lead character reminded me of RoboCop;  He’s violent but sympathetic, trying to remember his past…
D:  Kind of like a baby, yeah.  Clearly those movies were all influences.  I loved RoboCop, loved The Terminator.

Spaceman is now on video and DVD from Palm Pictures.  The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic sci-fi film that you really should watch as there’s references to it in other movies all the time.  The King of Comedy is one of Martin Scorcese’s most under-appreciated films, along with After Hours.