The films of director Jack Arnold were well-known to moviegoers of the `50's, and some, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, Creature From the Black Lagoon, or The Mouse That Roared, have remained favorites of fans and non-fans alike. During his most prolific and successful period at Universal-International (a familiar studio with a now-discarded adjunct) he remained a “contract” director, even though his films were popular at the box office and a cut above his contemporaries' in quality. He began his career not as a director, but as an actor and perhaps it was this training, more than anything else that enhanced the dramatic intensity of his films.

Jack Arnold was born on October 14, 1912 in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Ohio University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and went on to become an actor on Broadway and in Britain until the advent of World War II. After serving in the Air Force for three years and making 25 documentaries for the State Department, he came to Universal-International Studios and directed his first film, It Came From Outer Space, in 1952. Since then, he has been primarily a director and producer, also working in television.

His film credits are diverse in theme, but his artistry is best realized in documenting the unbelievable. Jack Arnold turned to directing movies at the age of forty, but he speaks of his films with a professional assurance and the proud enthusiasm of a childhood dream come true.

MARK MCGEE: During the `50's, Universal was producing a steady flow of horror films. Your product was consistently superior, in spite of the fact that the stories were no better or worse. I have always felt that this was probably because you were the best of their directors.
JACK ARNOLD: Yes. I was.
How did you feel about the science fiction films when you were making them?
Oh, I loved them. Those were the films I had the most fun with.
How much creative freedom did Universal give you?
I had complete freedom, because the studio knew nothing about the making of science fiction films. They didn't know which end was up. So I exercised total control, final cut, everything, as long as I kept within the budgets
What were the budgets?
They were fairly high for those days, about $800-900,000. In the '50s and '60s, that was a lot of money. And the pictures made a great deal of money, so there was never any reason to reduce the budgets.
I've heard that you like The Incredible Shrinking Man best of all your films. Did you have more time to work on it?
In preparation and shooting. I shot the animals first. I spent two weeks with cats, two weeks with spiders, and then we did the normal-sized sequences, and then the over-sized sequences.
Was that really the same spider that you used in Tarantula, or was that just a studio fabrication?
No, we flew in sixty spiders that were large enough to register a depth of focus.
That was a great sequence.
People asked me at the time, “how do you direct a spider?” and my answer was, “with great difficulty!”
How did you manage to make the spider do some of those things?
We came up with the idea of using varied air jets to guide him where we wanted him to go.
Did you ever use a wire to make them raise their legs when it was necessary?
Blew air at them. We had to play that sequence to beats. We photographed the spider first, then, on counts, we'd tell Grant Williams when to turn and when to throw.
Richard Matheson once said that he felt the film could have used better performers, but I thought Grant Williams was just right.
I thought Grant Williams was an excellent choice. Most writers have a preconceived notion of what the characters should look like and they never get over it.
Did Matheson write a good script?
Dick wrote a fine script for the picture.
How do you feel about having a writer on the set?
Sometimes a scene doesn't play the way it's written, and I'm no writer. I would like to have the writer there to make the revisions. I wish he could be in an office somewhere nearby so that if I needed him, I could call him and he'd be right there. But I wouldn't want him on the set all of the time.
Did you film the script as it was written?
To a great extent. Sometimes a writer can make things awfully difficult. In The Shrinking Man, Grant Williams is living in a matchbox under a water heater. And at one point in the story the heater starts to leak. The problem: how to make giant water-drops. We tried turning a giant faucet on and off, but that didn't work. Then I remembered something I found in my father's drawer when I was a little boy. I didn't know what they were used for at the time, but what I did was filled them with water and threw them at people. So I asked around the set if anyone had one of these things. Sheepishly, someone finally admitted that he did, and I said, “give it to me.” I filled it up with water, took it up to the rafters and dropped it. It looked like a drop and splashed on impact. I said, “that's it,” and promptly ordered several gross of prophylactics, and they worked great. A few days later, when the picture was finished, I was called up to the front office and asked what the hell the prophylactics were for? I told them it was a rough picture and we had a wild party afterwards!
William Alland produced most of the Universal-International sci-fi pictures. Why didn't he do Shrinking Man?
In those days, the heads of the studios would give out assignments to contract producers and contract directors. Albert Zugsmith was just given the assignment and, really, had nothing to do with the picture. He is, in my opinion, a man of extremely bad taste.
Was he even on the set?
No. He didn't seem to understand it. He thought we were making an exploitation film.
I heard he didn't even read the book.
He never read the book; he never read the script. I told him to just stay out of my way. He's doing semi-pornographic films now, where he belongs.
To what extent did you direct the special effects and what was your working relationship with the special effects department?
I drew a storyboard myself on practically every frame of the film, and I worked very closely with the special effects department and Cliff Stine, who was my cameraman, on all the travelling mattes and process photography that was necessary to make the film.
One hears so many horror stories of directors' films being re-cut after the fact that I'm amazed you never had that trouble in all your years at Universal.
The only fight I had with them was on The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I won it. They wanted a happy ending. They wanted him to suddenly start to grow again and be reunited with his wife and I said, “Over my dead body.” So they said, “Well, let's test your ending.” And at the previews it went over so well, they agreed it was best to keep it. But I had something of a to-do with them at first, and I had to explain that this was not a film suited to a happy ending.
In Science Fiction In the Cinema, the author implies that your films show a definite affinity for the desert, calling it “Arnold country.” I always felt you chose the desert because those stories could not have taken place in a populated area. Do you especially love the desert or its isolation from society?
No, I don't personally love the desert. I can think of many places I would rather be than the desert. The location does lend kind of a mood to those films. I think in Tarantula, and especially in It Came From Outer Space, the vastness, the loneliness, the dead world. I was amazed to find sea shells. I used it to help create a mood. [Ed. note: In Tarantula, John Agar notes, “you can still find sea shells if you keep your eyes open.”] The sea has the same kind of feeling for me.
Do you agree that those stories would have been impossible to execute as successfully in another environment?
I think it would have been very difficult.
You wrote the story for Monolith Monsters, and it certainly seemed like your kind of film. Why didn't you direct it?
They were upgrading me at the time and wanted me to do a picture with Lana Turner.
I imagine then, you didn't mind not directing it, as you liked the promotion?
I liked it, sure. And they were getting cheaper with the science fiction field and phasing it out.
Returning to It Came From Outer Space, did you feel the script meandered a bit?
I think all of Bradbury's works are meandering. He's not particularly a writer for visuals.
But, he didn't write the script.
No, he wrote the story. Harry Essex wrote the script. I guess now it would be meandering. When I was assigned the script to direct, it was already in final draft and I really don't know why they brought in another writer, except that Ray Bradbury, at that time, I don't think had written any screenplays. He was strictly a novelist and had written many science fiction short stories. They felt that a screenwriter should adapt his material into a scenario and they assigned Harry Essex to do that. I think he did a fairly good job, a very good job as a matter of fact. I remember at the opening of It Came From Outer Space I met Ray Bradbury for the first time and I asked him what he had thought of the film. He said he liked it.
There were some great moments in the film, such as the sequence where Putnam follows the two linemen into the alley. Was that in the script?
Yes, I chose the location and chose how to play those scenes.
Richard Carlson has said that with It Came From Outer Space you were attempting to top the Warner Bros. hit House of Wax. Is that true?
We made It Came From Outer Space in 3-D, I suppose, because Warner's had just made House of Wax. It was a new fad and Universal wanted something to compete with it. They felt a science fiction film would be the best vehicle for a 3-D film. It was a pain in the neck technically. When we used it for It Came From Outer Space, that started the renaissance at Universal of science fiction films. Since it was one of the first 3-D movies of the fifties, no one was really an expert in the field, so I worked very closely with the special effects and the camera departments on it. We had to find out where the lines of conversion were and where in the frame you would get the three-dimensional effect. So it was a challenge, and fun in that respect, but difficult. I thought it was a very successful film, visually, in 3-D. Wearing the red and green glasses posed no problem if the audiences' eyes were all right, but if you had a stigmatism in one eye, you could come away with a pretty huge headache. But I thought it was very exciting, seeing a landslide falling upon you and all the other various devices. It helped create an atmosphere. I think it was a marvelous effect. I wish they would have found a way that you didn't have to wear glasses.
I always felt that if a movie is interesting, most will forget about the 3-D; and if he is awed by the 3-D, it is only because the picture isn't involving enough.
I don't think it defeats itself. You could say that about color. If it is a good film in color, it would be just as good in black-and-white.
The alien in It Came From Outer Space, you show only for an instant.
I debated whether I should show him at all. I had one brief cut, about a foot of film, but I knew there was nothing that supplied what the imagination would think was there. No matter how horrendous, scary or bizarre you wanted something to be, you couldn't duplicate what an audience would imagine the creature to be. Finally, I used the cut in a flash, just once. Which is really a departure from most of the films of the period which featured the alien and made him the focal point of the story. My focal point was what happened to the people, not what happened to the alien, who landed inadvertently on earth because he ran into trouble. I concentrated on our innate repulsion, hatred and paranoid fear of anything that's different from us. Good or bad, if it's different, we're afraid of it, and we hate it.
That's true of The Creature From the Black Lagoon too.
Yes, I set out to make the Creature a very sympathetic character. He's violent because he's provoked into violence.
The Creature is never conclusively killed off, you just see him drift away into the darkness.
That was done for two reasons. The studio wanted to keep him in there for a sequel, and I also loved him—I used to call him “The Beastie,” when we were making the films—and I wanted to leave it a little open, not show him destroyed.
How long did it take to create the costume?
It was a good month before we settled on the idea of it. We built a tank that still stands in the studio for testing it. We tested all kinds of things until we finally came up with the suit we liked. I remember one day I was looking at the certificate I received when I was nominated for an Academy Award. There was a picture of the Oscar statuette on it. I said, “If we put a gilled head on it, plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we're trying to get.” So they made a mold out of rubber, and gradually the costume took shape. They gave him some human characteristics, which helped to make him sympathetic.
Of the three Creature films, I thought Revenge of the Creature was superior.
We shot that in Marineland. The story had him captured and put into a tank. I asked if they'd do us a favor and put in a net and divide the dangerous fish and put them on one side, and leave the fish that looked bad but were harmless on the other. They said they would. Well, when I got there the day we were ready to shoot, I went up to look at the tank and there was no net. I said, “fellas, I gotta get actors in there.” They said not to worry, that they feed the fish every hour on the hour and that the divers go down all the time. I said that it was a diver's job, but these were actors—to get them to walk up a three-foot hill was a “stunt.” They said they couldn't use a net. Well, Ricou Browning put on the suit and dove right in, he didn't care. I looked at the cameraman and he looked at me and said, “if you want to get those actors in there, you'd better go in yourself.” I said, “what the hell do you mean I'd better?” So I put on the mask and jumped in, but I kept my eyes closed. Then I slowly opened one eye and I was looking down the gaping mouth of a shark. I wondered, what do you do? Do you move, or not move? He just went by me, it felt like sandpaper as he rubbed against me and I shot up out of the water and said, “There's nothing to it, kids.” The biggest trouble that we had was with a turtle who kept biting chunks out of the monster suit.
Did you want to shoot at night?
I would have liked to, but they said it was too dangerous.
Why didn't you direct The Creature Walks Among Us? They asked me, and I turned it down. I thought I'd just be repeating myself. There was nothing more I could add to it. John Sherwood had been my assistant director, and I thought it was a good opportunity for him to step up and become a director. I didn't particularly like the film; I thought it was the weakest of the three. It wasn't John's fault, but we had already explored every area of the Creature's personality and his relationship with the humans.
Next to Shrinking Man, Tarantula is my favorite film of yours.
I wrote it.
You mean the original story?
Yes. Because of the success of It Came From Outer Space, Universal wanted another science fiction story. I wrote it, and I was assigned to direct it. We put a screenwriter on it and I worked very closely with him and they left me quite alone. It was assigned to the same producer, Bill Alland, who produced most of the science fiction films I did. His function was more on the technical and business side of it, although we did work on the creative end together. He was very helpful, and he was a very good producer, I thought.
Although I like it very much, it does seem like a hurried project. Some dialog isn't well thought out and there's a lot of padding. Was it rushed?
It was a low-budget film. It came at the tail-end of the cycle. The Japanese were putting out a lot of product. American International started imitating our product. There were parodies of our titles, like The Abominable Growing Man. So Universal decided to make a few more, only at half the price and half the time, and you can't do that kind of a show as well with the budget and time limitations that we had.
I was surprised that you weren't chosen to direct This Island Earth, which was financially the most ambitious of the Universal science fiction films of the '50s.
I had to go in and re-shoot a great deal of it. I was on what the studio called an “A” picture, The Lady Takes A Flyer with Lana Turner. They'd finished the principal photography of This Island Earth, cut it together, and it lacked a lot of things. So they asked me if I would help them, I went in and re-shot about half of it, but I didn't take credit for it. Specifically, I re-shot most of the footage once they reached the dying planet.
The sequence where they're in the tubes and the mutant attacks them is your work?
Yes, and also the escape, through the tunnel and back to the ship. It could have been a hell of a better film right from the start, I thought. They didn't approach it the way I would have approached it. I think the whole atmosphere should have been explored. The whole idea of going back in a primeval time, into the depths of this planet and its ruins. It should have had an eerie, mystic kind of feeling, a whole tempo and atmosphere that contrasts the beginning of the film, when they begin their exploration. All the director was going for were the obvious tricks and the obvious tricks aren't enough.
I'd like to talk about Monster On the Campus.
Oh, please! Frankly, I did it as a favor for Joe Gershenson who was the head of music at Universal. I thought the script was badly written. I only did it because of my love for Joe. I tried to take a bad script and make it look good.
I thought you did.
I was fighting a lot of elements on the picture and lost perspective on it.
David Duncan, who wrote the script for the film, also wrote the charming, imaginitive fantasy The Time Machine. Did you work with Duncan at all during the scripting stages of Monster On the Campus?
I didn't work with Duncan. The script was assigned to me.We were up against a schedule. They decided to go ahead with the film rather quickly, and the “powers-that-be” liked the script although I didn't. They insisted that I go ahead, and since I was a contract director, I could either turn the script down and be put on suspension, or do it. There were a number of us at that time, maybe seven directors who were under contract to Universal and we were assigned films...some of which we liked, some of which we didn't. We did the ones we didn't like to be able to do the ones we did like. Universal was run very businesslike, and they were in the business of making films that would make money. To them, good films were the ones that made money, bad films were the ones that didn't make money. That was their yardstick, I must tell you it wasn't mine.
Did you really hate the finished product?
I'm my own worst critic. I can see dailies and cringe and ask myself why I shot it that way. I didn't really hate it, but I didn't think it was up to the other films I had done.
There are some great moments in the picture. Granted, some of the coincidences are hard to swallow, but that scene where Arthur Franz has changed into the prehistoric man, looks around the room, and smashes the window is great.
The script had him going out the door. He wouldn't know what a door was. He'd go out the first hole he could find. That was a bit of the writing that bothered me.
It seemed obvious to anyone that Franz was the creature. Do you feel it would have been better to conceal this more?
Yes.
How long did it take to shoot the film?
Twelve days. I worked hard on it.