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Truly Ulli (Lommel)!, Part I
June 26, 2008

Filmmaker Ulli Lommel has been making movies for nearly 40 years, first in his native Germany, then for a brief time in New York and, for the past three decades, in Hollywood. I recently spoke with the affable, L.A.-based Lommel about his latest wave of Lionsgate-distributed, low-budget movies about serial killers, and his fascinating career, which has included collaborations with Rainer Fassbinder, Andy Warhol, Richard Hell and The Voidoids and The Living Theater.

 

VB: You live in L.A. now, but I know you’ve spent some serous time in New York.

ULLI LOMMEL: Oh, yes, yes. When I first came to America in the late Seventies, I was there for a few years.

VB: When you were part of the whole Andy Warhol/Studio 54 crew.
LOMMEL: Exactly. That was from ’77, ’78 through 1980. I came to New York because I was at the Chicago Film Festival, where I showed my film The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) and Andy Warhol really loved it. He asked me what my next movie was going to be and I really didn’t have one in mind. So I quickly came up with an idea at dinner and he said, ‘Let’s make this movie,’ and I came to New York.

VB: In only a couple of years, you went form working in Germany with Fassbinder to making movies in new York with Warhol. He also produced your film Blank Generation (1980) with Richard Hell of the Voidoids, one of the earliest punk rock films.

LOMMEL: It’s funny that Blank Generation just opened theatrically three years ago in Japan--25 years after it was made—and it was very successful. Some things take time.

VB: And then you took what has to be considered a very radical turn with The Boogeyman (1980).

LOMMEL: Oh, yeah. We finished shooting The Boogeyman in late ’79 in Maryland. I took the negative and put it in my car and my wife of the time and I drive cross-country. We arrived in Los Angeles and checked in to the Tropicana Motel, which doesn’t exist anymore, and I checked the Yellow Pages and got an editing table and finished editing the movies. On Labor Day weekend in 1980, the movie came out and it was number one for four weeks.

 

Check back next week for Part II of my discussion with Ulli Lommel!

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on June 26, 2008 | Comments (0)