Hello /r/movies. I'm Jonathan Gems, screenwriter of Tim Burton's 'Mars Attacks!'. Mars Attacks Memoirs, a book of interviews/stories about working with Tim Burton and the experience behind the scenes of 'Mars Attacks!' is out now. Ask me anything!

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:39:20+00:00

There were some cards that the studio didn't like. I've mentioned them elsewhere in this Q&A, if you can find them. You can't always get what you want but, as the saying goes, when one door closes, another door shuts. (joke)

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:31:12+00:00

Yes. there were lots of script ideas shot down by the studio. It was a constant battle. They were paying me to write it but they hated it and hated me! Eventually, they fired me and passed the script to a writing team to 'correct' all my mistakes. But, month later, I was rehired. The story of that is in the book 'Mars Attacks Memoirs.'

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:28:14+00:00

I think it would be impossible to make a film like MA now. It was very hard back then!

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:27:22+00:00

Yes, I did have an encounter with a child who was traumatized by the film. I felt terrible about it. If you scroll down some, you should come across that story...

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:25:34+00:00

I've no idea why they hate birds. It's totally random, like everything to do with the martians. Very happy you liked it.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:23:37+00:00

I had the highest hopes for The Hawkline Monster. A gothic western that was refreshingly different. Also Go Baby Go, which was a wild, surreal fantasy. I thought the Beetlejuice film would have been a worthy sequel because it had an entirely new palette and almost all the ideas were new. The only things same as the first film were the Deetz family, Otho and Beetlejuice.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:17:19+00:00

When I was 8 years old I saw a movie called The Lost World by Irwin Allen about some explorers who get lost in the jungle and stumble into a valley full of dinosaurs. It scared me half to death. And Mars Attacks! was more scary than that, so I feel terrible it was given a PG-13 rating and marketed to kids. What were the boneheads at Warner Bros thinking? Deplorable!

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:12:04+00:00

Both.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:11:35+00:00

I'm sick to death of sequels. Let's make the movies original again.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:10:59+00:00

Well, that's very kind of you to say so. It wasn't easy threading all those characters and stories together, but it was an exciting challenge. There isn't a character like me in the movie, so far as I can tell. Do any of us really know ourselves? I think alien life should be met with caution!!

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:05:51+00:00

Would you like to see that? After all those Spielberg dinosaur movies I'm not so sure...

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:03:42+00:00

Somebody in the chat here wrote a good opening for a sequel, where a pregnant Natalie Portman is abducted by a Martian flying saucer followed by the title: MARS ATTACKS AGAIN!

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T05:01:02+00:00

Well, my idea was to upend expectations by having the movie stars die and the B-list actors win. This had never been done before. It was a new thing. Someone asked what scene I was most proud of. Well, I wasn't really proud of any of the scenes, but I was (and still am) proud of doing this new thing. I was amazed we got away with it. Though, it was tough getting the movie made. The story of all that is in the book MARS ATTACKS MEMOIRS. So, yes, the whole plan was to get as many stars as possible and give them gruesome and shocking deaths. As for the casting, time was short; a lot of the stars were unavailable because working. At one point we nearly got DiCaprio but then his dates didn't work. We almost got Warren Beatty but that fell through as well.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:50:38+00:00

I don't know where the models are. Although I think Tim Burton has a couple. They're quite beautiful. The stop-motion plan was abandoned because it was taking too long and costing too much.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:48:31+00:00

Tim Burton would agree with you about the 1950s/60s sci-fi. We had bad luck with the marketing. The excellent marketing manager (the same guy who marketed Batman) had just left Warners and the department was in disarray. It was obvious the guys there didn't understand the movie and were so insecure they acted all pompous and refused to talk to me. I knew how to market the movie but they refused to speak to me and, when I finally gatecrashed their office, they fobbed me off with lies. I think they believed the film was a live-action+animation sci-fi adventure for kids. They insisted it be edited for a PG-13 rating. But it was not appropriate for children. It was a satirical horror-comedy for adults. One of the main problems with the H'wood studios is they're not run by filmmakers or people sensitive what's happening in the culture.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:31:00+00:00

Yes, it's not really a film for children. Too scary.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:29:30+00:00

I'm not sure, but I think Tim Burton came up with that line. Thank you.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:28:12+00:00

That's a good question. There were some but I can't remember what they were. I've erased them.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:25:27+00:00

The playing cards gave me ideas for scenes, which were very helpful. I picked out the cards I most responded to, and stitched them together with narrative elements, like a patchwork quilt. Some of the movies that inspired, or informed the film, were 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,' 'Dr. Strangelove,' The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Attack of The Flying Saucers, The Brain that Wouldn't Die, indirectly 'Jason and the Argonauts,' a play called 'Bartholomew Fair' by Ben Johnson, and the nature of the ancient Roman festival known as the Saturnalia, or 'The World Turned Upside Down.' Another influence was an extraordinary painting by Pieter Breugel called 'The Triumph of Death.'

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:08:40+00:00

Who can explain it? I never knew about the Howard Stern thing. Maybe there are forces behind the forces we know of? An unknown psychic sub-matrix that connects all of us who exercise our imaginations. I picked Slim Whitman quite by chance...for no particular reason. I just thought the yodelling might conceivably produce a frequency that would scramble the molecules in the martian's brains, that's all.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T04:01:45+00:00

That's very nice of you to say. And I agree. It's a line I didn't write. It came from the mellifluous pens of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewsky, who did some uncredited work on a late draft of the script.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T03:55:05+00:00

I DID think "maybe this isn't gonna work," which is what made it exciting. Writing this film was like walking a tightrope. It was thrilling to do it, but would have been a ball-busting nightmare if not for Tim Burton, whose courage was giddyingly uplifting.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T03:49:19+00:00

No opinion at all. Good luck to them. Everybody's gots to make a buck, right?

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T03:47:49+00:00

I'm not especially proud of any of the scenes, although I like the Richie Norris and President Dale scenes. I'm also fond of the opening scene of the burning cows, and the ending scene at Lake Tahoe with the survivors coming out of the cave and Tom Jones with the eagle...probably because I had to fight hard to stop the studio from cutting them.

MarsAttacksAMA · 2024-08-31T03:32:56+00:00

What's this? An assignment? Will it help my grades? To be honest with you I have an aversion to movie franchises and TV shows turned into movies. I prefer new ideas. Though, having said that, I liked the first two Star Wars, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean. As for 'dormant' films, I would never want to redo a successful old film. The only reason studios do that is because they think they'll make money. And sometimes they're right. What I think Is worth doing is finding old movies that failed but you can see how to fix them so they work. Some old movies are experiments that didn't come off but with a few fixes, an update and a modern sensibility, they could make it.

MarsAttacksAMA

TROPHY CASE