The Dark Fantastic Interview with Director Michael Pressman (Exclusive)

Director/Writer/Producer Michael Pressman has been working in Hollywood for over forty years. He's done it all: from TV movies, to weekly dramas, to mini-series, to features. His work is always visually stylish and energetic, no matter the genre he is working in (and he's worked in almost every conceivable genre).

I had a chance to ask Michael a number of questions about his work, especially the TV movie Final Jeopardy (1985) starring Richard Thomas and Mary Crosby, one of the most suspenseful and underrated American TV movies ever made, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (1991), and what he's working on at the moment.

Final Jeopardy is, in my humble opinion, one of the best American TV movies ever made. It looks and plays like a feature. How did you manage to achieve that with what I assume was a small budget and mostly location shooting in Chicago and Los Angeles?

Thank you for the compliments. I so enjoyed making that film because it was like shooting a movie. I was completely left alone to make it visual and exciting. We were also quite short in the first cut, and I personally wrote two additional scenes that were my favorite - one was finding the dead body in the empty theater and the other was the drugged out girls in the abandoned church who thought it was a hospital.  

We only shot for one week in Chicago, and we used the sewers and the subways and the ending with Denis Farina, and that was pretty much it. The rest was shot in Los Angeles at night, of course.

I am a huge fan of the vastly underrated Richard Thomas. What was it like working with him?

Richard Thomas was totally dedicated and fully invested and a lot of fun. He had a tremendous sense of humor, and I remember many times if we were shooting past midnight he would go into a foreign accent and rehearse with a French or an Italian accent and crack everyone up. I also adored Mary Crosby who was a dream to work with. The most exciting actor was the famous late Jeff Corey whom I became very close to in his last years, and he was brilliant in a very underwritten role of the man who lived in the underground. He had a whole backstory and point of view and if you watch closely, he played the role like a rat who lived under ground and would scrounge. He added all his lines about “you got any food ?", lines like that. 

How did you get involved with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (1991), and what was it like working on such an effects heavy film?

That was a complete left field surprise that I just said "Yes". They were looking for a director for the sequel and someone who knew how to work under pressure and handle TV-like schedules, and because of Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), I had also directed a successful children’s movie that was also a sequel, so I was the perfect person for the job. I learned so much on that film about puppetry and effects, and little did the producers know my theater background came in very handy with the movement and staging of mimes playing the Turtles, and puppeteers off screen doing the facial expressions. I loved that experience, but it was stressful and demanding. I was offered to do the third one and turned it down, because I felt there wasn’t a learning curve.  

You’re an extremely versatile director. Doing everything, from thrillers, to one-hour TV dramas, to big-budgeted features like Ninja Turtles II. How do you choose your projects, and what do you enjoy more, working on features or TV? 

Michael Pressman

It's hard to answer that. Movies are my first love, and take a very long time, and sometimes you spend most of your time raising money or interesting a star that helps you get the money. And if it doesn’t make money, the director is always blamed. Television is a good friend. I am in demand if the work is good, and its fast and is always a challenge and keeps me going. And it pays well. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I am producing/directing Chicago Med [the Dick Wolf medical drama which airs on NBC] and enjoying it very much, though at the moment we are in a holding pattern due to the coronavirus, as is the rest of the industry and the country in fact.

* Special thanks to Craig Safan, for making this interview possible.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.