Recently we had the chance to talk with Gregory Lamberson, who discussed his love of movies, directing, writing, and his new film Widow’s Point.
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Horror Geek Life: Were you always interested in making movies or did that interest grow over time?
Gregory Lamberson: I always loved movies, I was obsessed with monsters and watching cartoons as a tyke and as soon as I started thinking about a career, once you outgrow the idea of being an astronaut or a police officer, I knew I wanted to do some sort of storytelling. At first I thought about being a comic book artist, then I started gravitating more towards film, thought about doing stop-motion animation, and then Star Wars came out. I was in 6th grade and that literally changed my perspective on everything. That is when I began to pay attention to the directors, not just the makeup and special effects artists, and realized that was really where the storytelling was for movies.
HGL: Once you decided you wanted to work in film, was it always directing you wanted to do or were there other areas that interested you as well?
GL: It was writing and directing. Interestingly, around the same time that Star Wars opened my eyes, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution came out, the Sherlock Holmes movie, and I had actually read the novel first and it was the first time, in a short span of time, I was able to compare fiction to a film adaptation and think about the changes they had to make. Even though it was the same author, Nicholas Meyer wrote the novel and also wrote and directed the movie, so really those two things told me writing and directing together were the way to go.
HGL: You have written many novels over the years as well. How have you found juggling the two- writing books and directing movies?
GL: Well, it’s interesting. When I moved from New York City to Buffalo, I’m originally from Western New York, it was specifically to give up making movies- I really hadn’t had any financial success with the ones I’ve made in New York City at that time- to start writing novels. I had these screenplays I had written for big-budget movies that I thought oh, I can turn these into novels, I won’t have to spend years of my life and untold dollars trying to get them made. However, at that same time that I started to have a little bit of success as a novelist after my first one was published, that’s when the digital technology came out and really changed the way independent films were made. It wasn’t something I could pass up, I kind of had to get back into filmmaking at the same time.
There was a period there where I was writing two novels a year and making a movie every two or three years, developing them concurrently, so for me it really wasn’t switching back and forth, just keeping different irons in the fire at the same time. Movies take a long time to make if you’re an independent filmmaker. For me, there’s writing the script, looking for the money, which takes a while, and you’re in pre-production for a few months, then production, then you have anywhere from six months to a year of post-production, then you have to decide if you are going to look for distribution right away or spend six months to a year on the film festival circuit, so it really is a long life. At least when I was writing novels, Medallion Press was my publisher, and I knew I could tell them what I wanted to write, they’d give me an advance. I’d write it, it would get published, they’d promote it, they would take me to Fan Expo there in Toronto and so forth, so there was a definite shorter time span for the whole process.
HGL: You’ve been in the writing and film making business for a while now. How have things changed for you, from when you began to where you are now?
GL: The publishing industry changed radically. It’s funny, when I was first signed to Medallion they put out Personal Demons as a mass-market paperback, something you can walk into a drugstore and see, and that was really my goal. Right after that book, they looked at the state of the business and said, “You know, between returns and a marginal profit on a little book like this, we can’t publish these anymore, we have to do only trade paperback.” That was the model that most publishers move to, ultimately Medallion went out of business, I guess it’s been three years now, I haven’t even got a new publisher. I have been concentrating on film the last few years, just because here in Buffalo there’s been a real explosion of film work, so I’ve worked on a lot of films as a crew person in addition to doing my own, so we’ll have to see what happens with the novels. I’m definitely going to do more, I just don’t know when and I don’t know if I’ll be going with a publisher or going the Kindle route like so many other people I know.
HGL: Let’s talk about your new movie, Widow’s Point. Why did you pick this book to turn into a movie?
GL: I had finished Johnny Gruesome and actually had another project of my own that I wanted to do next but Richard Chizmar, he’s somebody I’ve known for a few years- he’s invested in some of my other films, and I know him from the publishing world- owns Cemetery Dance (Publications) and has done his own work. His son, Billy, is in college now, studying film, and we screened one of Billy’s films at my film festival. He and Richard came out together and it was our first time meeting face to face, and right after that, he sent me an advanced copy of the novella, with the idea of maybe turning this into a low budget film. I saw right away that it was all set in one lighthouse, so it was feasible, and I said to him, “If you really want to do this, why don’t you let me write the script?” because he’s so busy. He had just co-written a book with Stephen King, has his own promotion to do, and run his own company. I actually wrote the first script in two weeks, he liked it, so we started raising the money for it.
HGL: It was great to see Craig Sheffer back on screen as the lead. He left Hollywood for a while, how did you get him to come on board your film?
GL: I met Craig about eight years ago, in Buffalo, on a film called Battledogs, which was a sci-fi TV action film about werewolves. He was the lead in that, with Wes Studi, Ernie Hudson and Dennis Haysbert; it was a pretty big shoot. While on set, I was the assistant director so I dealt with the talent, and I gave him a copy of my novella Carnage Road. He loved it and he optioned it, we spent nearly a year developing it as either a movie or a TV series, and then his family had a series of serious setbacks. First, his mother got sick and he had to take care of her and then his brother, who was an Emmy-winning TV writer got seriously ill, and Craig actually left Hollywood for about six years to become his brother’s caregiver in Pennsylvania, in the town where they grew up.
We stayed in touch fairly regularly because we had this project we were working on together, and when Widow’s Point came along, I wanted a real lead in that part. I knew we wouldn’t have any success with distribution if I cast one of my friends, as I often do, so I called him up and said, “I know you’re really busy, but if you can get away for a couple of weeks, I would love to have you play this part,” so he read the script that night and said yes. It’s interesting because when he came out to Buffalo, his daughter Willow, she plays the ghost in the bride gown, and my daughter Kaelin are in the film, so we had two families. In addition, some of the other cast had siblings, the crew had siblings. I’ve never been on a set where there were so many family members involved, so it was a very unique and super warm shooting situation.
HGL: There are some great storylines and flashbacks to go with the main story surrounding Craig Sheffer’s character, Thomas Livingston. Was that all in the book, or did you have to make some changes along the way?
GL: I actually had to make a number of changes. The novella, which has a real dedicated following, is a first-person; it’s stream of consciousness and was written as a found footage film. It describes camera angles and things like that. That’s an interesting technique for a book, but we’ve seen a million found footage films at this point so I didn’t want to do that. I reconfigured the story as a somewhat more traditional ghost story, but the novella also had a lot more flashbacks than what is in the film. We have three or four and the novella had probably ten or twelve, and they were all told piecemeal like spread out, and I knew if we had too many of them it would be an anthology film. I wanted the first half to be Craig Sheffer’s character relating to these stories and the second half to be just his story.
The other notable change was the novella had a very ambiguous ending, where the character disappears and you’re not sure what happened to him. I came up with an actual climax, based on an element that they introduced. In the movie, there’s a scene where my daughter’s character discovers cave paintings of a creature, so that creature exists in the novel but you never see it again. I wanted to make that a bigger part of the story but I also wanted to bring the different ghosts from the flashbacks together. I wanted to unify it all somehow.
HGL: As the director, what were the challenges you faced making Widow’s Point? Was it difficult with the lighthouse to be so important to the film?
GL: Ironically, the lighthouse was the nicest location I’ve ever been on. You know, I like to make movies in the summer, it’s just the way it’s been for me ever since Slime City. For me that’s part of the process, to make it part of the summer vacation, and because of that, we always wind up in locations where there is no air conditioning. In fact, the house that we used as a double for the lighthouse keeper quarters, the bedrooms and stuff, that’s a different room. With that one, the windows wouldn’t even open, there was no air conditioning, and because the house had just been purchased, it reeked of days of cat piss. That’s the type of location we typically shoot in. The lighthouse is a museum park with a fence around it, so we had the run of the whole compound, with a nice breeze coming in off the lake, it was just the coolest place to shoot.
Thankfully, they were willing to give us as much time as we needed to shoot. We scheduled to shoot and paid for six days, and finished in five days, but there are always time constraints of a different kind on a low budget film. I had a sixteen-day shooting schedule and ended up cutting it down to fifteen days just to stay on budget, which we did do. You always want more time, whether it’s a small film or a big-budget film, to be able to do things.
HGL: What projects do you have coming up, or projects that have been on hold because of the pandemic?
GL: It’s very frustrating, Jeff. I’m sitting on three scripts right now, one is the Carnage Road project with Craig, which they want to pitch around Hollywood but Hollywood is shut down. The other two projects I have, one is a horror script and an action script, a sort of female First Blood and they are the best scripts I’ve ever written. Either one of those two could be the one for me, I say that every film (laughs), but I can’t even go out and look for money because of the questions the pandemic brings in terms of when these projects could or would be done. Ironically, there is a lot of room right now, for anyone who does put together the money, to make a film that could really take off, the buyers are dying for anything, and I think about it every day. I wake up thinking about it, I think about it during the day. My wife will ask me if there’s something wrong but this is all it is, I’m dying to make these films and I just don’t see anyway right now to do it.
I want to thank Gregory for taking the time to talk with us.
Widow’s Point will be released on DVD on September 1st from Amazon, Walmart.com and DeepDiscount DVD.
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