PopHorror Let's Get Scared
On November 7, 2015, the world lost Gunnar Hansen – actor, writer, horror icon. Mostly known for his role as Leatherface in Tobe Hoopers 1974 masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gunnar was more than just the man behind the mask. He was a sailor, a poet, a generous soul, and, above all else, a friend to so many. Gunnar was humble, not believing that anyone would care about a documentary chronicling his fascinating life. Thankfully, he was very, very wrong.
Dinner with Leatherface is not just your standard documentary. It’s a love letter to the man so many loved and appreciated, and we’re so lucky that his close, personal friend, Michael Kallio, recognized what he’d truly been gifted with, and poured all of that love, emotion, and behind-the-scenes stories into making something truly special.
Featuring interviews with costars, friends, and fans, Dinner with Leatherface is centered around an interview with Gunnar himself. We’re treated to personal photos, anecdotes from those who knew him personally, and insight into the man who brought to life – in my opinion – the best slasher of all time.
Documentary about Gunnar Hansen, the actor who portrayed Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974). Friends, colleagues, filmmakers, and fellow actors share personal stories and discuss the dichotomy between the maniacal chainsaw-wielding character he played on-screen and the very intelligent, creative, soft-spoken man he actually was in real life.
To celebrate the release of the film, I was lucky enough to chat with director Michael, and we discussed how his friendship with Gunnar started, our love of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I loved Dinner with Leatherface. My dog’s name is Gunnar after Gunnar Hansen.
Michael Kallio: I love it!
PopHorror: It was so cool and I’m super excited to talk to you about it.
Michael Kallio: Well, thank you. I appreciate all of your kind words. Did you cry?
PopHorror: Yes! A little bit. So, what sparked the idea for the documentary and how did the project come about?
Michael Kallio: Well, honestly, he did. Before I had made my movie, I befriended him at a horror convention in Dearborn, Michigan and I don’t even think it was a horror convention per se, but it might’ve been. It wasn’t a Fangoria convention. I don’t know what kind of convention it was. I don’t remember. Savini was there, Angus Scrimm was there, Gunnar was there, but I feel like there were Star Trek people there. It was a convention. Before we started making a movie together, he was making a movie called Mosquito in Michigan, and I would pick him up from the airport and we’d go out and have dinner and drinks and hang out. And the more I picked him up, the more we hung out, the more I was just like, this guy never gets… You know, sometimes you get sick of people. It just happens. This guy never gets old. I never heard the same story twice. He always had some amazing adventurous thing, and I used to joke, “You know, you’re a walking documentary.” And he’d be like, “I know. Fucking who wants to watch that shit?” And I was like, “No, you’re a writer. You’re a poet.” I can’t imagine Leatherface sitting down and writing a haiku.
PopHorror: Right?!
Michael Kallio: Right! So, I would always joke with him, like we should be filming this every time we go out, we should be filming this. That’s really what sparked it. I had been talking about it so often and then the day he passed – small, quick story that never made the documentary – the first movie we had made together, Hatred of a Minute, which was my first movie, the rights had reverted back to me, and I was trying to get it out there again. So, I’d spent the day looking through old photos, reminiscing, putting together an ad slick, which if you don’t know what an ad slick is, it’s like an eight by 10, eight by 11, piece of cardboard with the movie poster on the front and on the back, information about the movie. And you use it for sales, it’s a sales tool. I had made an ad slick because a buddy of mine was going to the American Film Market literally the next day, so we met up at this little Tiki bar across the street from my place. I handed him off a bunch of ad slicks for him to pass out, trying to get the movie re-released. I handed off the ad slicks, my buddy Jeff left, and I got a text almost immediately after that from my friend Joyce that says, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I texted her back, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “You didn’t hear? Gunnar Hansen passed.” And it was kind of a bittersweet reminder that man, I hadn’t talked to him in a bit, but what a perfect time to start a documentary. So, like a week later, I didn’t think of it right then but like within a week, I was filming my first interview.
PopHorror: Wow!
Michael Kallio: I just pulled the trigger. I said, “I’m going to make this documentary,” because unfortunately he’s not… I was wanting him involved and unfortunately, he didn’t live to be involved, but I think I did an alright job paying tribute to him. And I got that great interview, that main Gunnar interview that’s peppered throughout the documentary, that was sent to me by the guy who directed the Reykjavík Whale Watching Massacre, known here in the States as Harpoon. He’s like, “We never used it. Here.” And it was 40 minutes of an interview. And I was like, “I can use this.” Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. So, it was his passing that really pulled the trigger, but I had always talked about doing a documentary about him, even though he didn’t think anyone would care.
PopHorror: Well, it’s too bad that he didn’t get to see how many people actually cared about it. I know that my website reviewed it and the writer loved it. And I’m so excited for more people to see this because there was just so much that I didn’t know about him, like I didn’t know that he wrote poetry. I didn’t know that he had a partner! The love for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and for Gunnar as a person, it’s so sad that he thought like this, that no one would care about a documentary about him.
Michael Kallio: Gunnar was one of those guys that was hilariously self-deprecating, which was part of his charm because he was also kind of one of those like, “Heyyyy,” – fun and flirty just for fun. An extrovert. It’s funny, he mentions how he liked to be quiet and walk into a room and be in the back because he was a big guy. But when you were sitting with him and having dinner with him or having drinks or whatever, like having a conversation, he was very outgoing, and he was very in the moment. I have to say Gunnar was a very in the moment kind of guy, which was cool.
PopHorror: I love that. I’m assuming that you were a Texas Chain Saw Massacre fan before.
Michael Kallio: I was!
PopHorror: What ignited your love for the film?
Michael Kallio: Well, I’ll tell you the story about meeting him at the convention. The first time I met him… He always had a line, but there was a lull in his line. I think because Angus Scrimm – another guy who wrote poetry – was in the main convention hall, reciting poetry and doing his, his talk. I missed that, which was fine because I wanted to meet Gunnar and Gunnar had a moment alone. I sheepishly walked up because I was a little nervous because he’s terrifying, you know, in the film. And we started to talk about the sound design of the first kill of William Vail getting hit in the head with a hammer and the door slamming shut and that drone sound. Talked about that for like half an hour to the point where I was like… He had photos to sign, various photos, and it was that moment where he was just about ready to slam the door. So I had him sign this. It’s actually upstairs in my office. That was how we started our conversation, because I loved the sound in that movie. The music was weird. The sound was weird. It was very unconventional. That’s really what started me for my love for Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And I’m not a sequel guy, but that was one of the first movies… I didn’t even like horror when I was younger. I saw Evil Dead at a party, and the only reason I stuck around for Evil Dead was because there was a girl I liked there. I was the guy that was like, “Oh, we’ll have cake and ice cream and I’m out. Screw your horror movie in a Michigan basement. I ain’t going to do that.” But this girl was like, “I want to hang out with you. I want you to watch this movie with me.” And I was freaked out. I didn’t want to watch that movie. I remember walking out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 with my mother, who was very much an influence on my filmmaking – especially when I was young – and she saw a poster for Poltergeist and was like, “Oh, that looks scary. We should see that.” And I was like, “Nope, I don’t want to see that movie.” That’s how much of a chicken shit I was. So Evil Dead starts and this girl that likes me is on me, hiding behind me. I started to laugh and it literally, like that night, the switch flipped off. The scaredy cat switch flipped off in my brain. The next day I was like, I’m going to go buy Fangoria magazines. I’m going to go rent all of the classics. And Texas Chain Saw was one of the first I watched after I desensitized from fear. That movie, it’s just so raw. It was so much different than… Cause I was grabbing a lot of like Nightmare on Elm Street and that has a fantasy element to it. The Texas Chain Saw massacre was like, oh this shit could happen, and it’s probably happening as I speak, as I watch some weirdos hacking a body up and he’s going to eat part of it, you know? So that’s how I got hooked on that. In turn, I wanted to see Texas Chain Saw 2 right after it, which of course, as we know, it’s much campier than the original. But like I said, I’m not a sequel guy so it wasn’t like, I’m going to watch all the Halloweens. No, I’m going to watch the first Halloween. Now that I’m desensitized, I’m going to watch all the classics and like, Psycho.
I saw Psycho when I was 10, and it scared the shit out of me. I would go and take a shower and shampoo my hair with my eyes burning because I wouldn’t close them because I was afraid someone was going to come in and stab me to death and I don’t look like Janet Lee. So, it was that little Evil Dead incident that I was like, I must consume all horror. Leatherface, he’s one of the original. Speaking of Psycho, Norman Bates and Bubba Sawyer, they’re connected through Ed Gein. That’s how I got that. That’s how I got infected with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
PopHorror: And finding horror, it changed your life for the better, right?
Michael Kallio: It definitely changed my life. I don’t know if it’s for better or for worse. I’ll say for better. Yeah, sure. I’ll go with that because then I discovered Bruce Campbell. I was able to befriend him, and I’m so grateful, like two of my idols I became friends with very early on in my career, my so-called career. I look back on that finally going like, wow, not a lot of first-time filmmakers can say they had Bruce Campbell helping produce and they had Gunnar Hansen who was also very… What’s the word I’m looking for? Very present in my early years as a filmmaker because when I met him, I was 17. We talked for years. That initial meeting at a convention, I was like, “I have a movie I want you to be in,” and he was like, “Here’s my address. Send me the script.”
PopHorror: Wow!
Michael Kallio: And it turned from that into a long-distance correspondence because he lived in Maine, but he was in back and forth. For some weird reason, he ended up making like six or seven movies in Michigan, starting with Demon Lover way back in the seventies, right after Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Then he did Demon Lover, and it was such a bad experience, he was like, “I’m done.” But then he was sucked back in because of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers in the mid to late eighties. But yeah, it was that cool correspondence. We would talk on the phone for hours sometimes. We’d talk about writing and politics and everything in between. Anytime he was in town, he’d call me up, “I’m coming in to shoot Mosquito this week. Can we hang out? Will you pick me up from the airport?” So, it was just kind of a cool thing that definitely did change my life for the better, because I was able to go, “Yeah, I’m friends with Leatherface.”
PopHorror: You knew him for years before he passed away.
Michael Kallio: Yeah.
PopHorror: So, after all of the interviews that you did for this documentary, was there anything that you were surprised to learn?
Michael Kallio: He always surprised me. Even after his passing, there were things I was like, “What? Huh?” I knew he sailed, but I didn’t know he was that into it and those photos in the documentary – there’s a few more that didn’t make the documentary – I was like, man, he looked natural in a boat. The guys who made Swarm of the Snakehead, they had a Hemingway project that they wanted Gunnar to be Hemingway in, and I was like, that’s frigging perfect. He looks like Ernest Hemingway. Just stuff like that. I mean, he never ceases to amaze me even to this day. Something that wasn’t part of him as we knew each other, but yet he told stories all the time about all the different things he did. There was just nothing… I was never surprised; I was always amused. I was like, “How many stories do you have?” Like Michael Felsher says in the documentary, he had stories and stories and stories. I wish he wrote them all down because they were all whimsical or fun, just like him. He was such a nice person and such a genuine human being.
PopHorror: What I like about what this documentary is going to do is it’s going to let people in on who he was as a person and the people that don’t realize that there was a big softie behind the mask. You don’t expect that when you watch a movie like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It makes you feel dirty and gritty and uncomfortable because it’s just effective filmmaking. You can feel the Texas sun and it’s just so disgusting.
Michael Kallio: Yeah!
PopHorror: People don’t really think about who’s behind the mask and to realize that he was such a nice, lovable, softie, and writer who made this movie on a whim. I think that this is going to really open the eyes of people to see who he was and I love that because I think that’s important.
Michael Kallio: Thank you. Thank you.
PopHorror: What was your favorite part about making this documentary?
Michael Kallio: Meeting everyone. Just the various walks of life. I didn’t get to meet everybody. Mike Felsher did a lot of interviews for me. He did the cast back in Ohio. He was at a Cinema Wasteland show. They had a reunion, and I was like, “Will you please interview?”
PopHorror: Ah, I know! So sad I missed that. I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Michael Kallio: Oh, Tiffany. Loaded question!
PopHorror: I know!
Michael Kallio: Which subgenre of horror would you like? I have many. I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because of the rawness. I love Evil Dead 2 because it’s so outrageous. I love Hellraiser because – especially at that time in 1987 – it was pretty taboo. I love Cronenberg’s The Fly because it’s so horrifying. That body horror is just so intense. I love Evil Dead because of the aesthetic. There’s so many. I love Jaws, even though people say that’s not… It’s a horror movie, but it’s also more of an adventure film. I love the original Pet Sematary, just the aesthetic of that kid. What was the sister’s name with the meningitis, Zelda? It’s nerve wracking. I just love movies, but the horror genre now that I’ve been desensitized, I like a lot of them. I love the original Nightmare on Elm Street because of the fantastic supernatural elements. I love From Dusk till Dawn because it’s two different movies, but not. I love Killer Klowns from Outer Space, even though it doesn’t scare me, or I don’t think anybody, unless you hate clowns. I loved IT, both versions. I love a lot of horror movies, but if I go, what’s my favorite horror movie? It’s Evil Dead 2.
Thank you so much to Michael for taking the time to speak with us. Dinner with Leatherface is now available on Tubi, and on Blu-ray and DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment!
