On a lazy afternoon back in the late 90s, I was channel surfing when I came upon a film where a dummy in a wheelchair was chasing a girl around a large, two-story house. Seeing this, I did what anyone would’ve done: I kept watching. The few minutes that I caught stuck with me over the years, but I couldn’t ever remember the name of the schizophrenic tale, in which a brother and sister cope with their parents’ untimely death, while trying to work through the psychological effect their father’s anatomical dummy had on them. In 2001, Pin was released on DVD and, by chance, found its way into my hands, satisfyingly ending my laborious quest. I recently had the chance to talk with director Sandor Stern about his cult thriller.

David: Pin is based on the novel of the same name by Andrew Neiderman, who’s also had other works adapted for the big screen, such as The Devil’s Advocate. What was it about Pin that got you interested in the property?

Sandor: Well, some years ago, probably around 1984, an agent friend of mine, who was representing Andrew, asked me to read the manuscript. I did and I loved it, so I optioned it. I met Andrew and we’ve become close friends since then. In fact, I just got back from Hawaii last week; we were there together.

David: Even though there are quite a few differences between the novel and film, which I want to touch on later, both focus on schizophrenia and how two siblings, despite growing up in the same household, can have extremely different perspectives and follow different paths in life. Did your medical background help gravitate you towards the film because of the psychological aspects?

Sandor: Yes, absolutely. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that you can have siblings, who have the same circumstances in their growth, yet go off on different paths. One of them will become a criminal and the other will become a lawyer, you know? It’s always interested me. But that’s beyond any psychological problem, like schizophrenia – that happens to be an additional thing. I’ve always been fascinated by schizophrenia, as well. When I was practicing medicine, I dealt with a few schizophrenic patients.

David: What kind of medicine did you practice?

Sandor: I was a family doctor, so general practice. I made house calls, delivered babies, and did pretty much everything.

David: One of the key scenes that encompasses the psychological aspect of the film very succinctly occurs early on, when Ursula is kissed by her father, without having to work for it, while Leon isn’t shown any affection because he couldn’t count backwards from 100 by 7s. He ends up going to bed and practicing while he falls asleep.

Sandor: I was trying to establish the influence of the parents on the kids and the fact that each child receives it differently. It’s a situation in which siblings, especially ones that are some years apart, grow up under different circumstances, almost like they had different parents. The circumstances of the parents differ with each child, even when the age difference is only two years. It’s very common that the parents are going to treat the first child differently from the second. They realize that they made mistakes with the first child and they want to correct that with the second child. The father/son relationship, I think, has more to do with the fact that he expected more out of a boy than a girl.

David: He’s very cold and clinical with his son, especially in the scene where he asks Leon to stay during Ursula’s abortion. He talks about it like it would be an educational experience and not one that would traumatize his son.

Sandor: Even though he ends up leaving, the fact that his father would even suggest that he stay shows what kind of man he was.

David: The moment where the childrens’ paths split is when Ursula sees her father’s lips moving while Pin is supposed to be speaking. Leon becomes obsessed with Pin and he ends up sneaking into his father’s office one day, right before closing, and sees a nurse having sex with Pin. In the novel, isn’t it Ursula who does that, along with Leon’s help?

Sandor: (laughs) You’re talking about something I haven’t read for over 20 years. It might have very well been that way. There was a sense of incest in the book that I didn’t want to deal with, only touching on it when [Leon] reads his poetry. I didn’t want to go in that direction. I was more interested in exploring the different psychological paths they take because of Pin. The fact is that, yes, Ursula sees her father’s lips move and realizes what’s going on. The difference is that Leon doesn’t want to do that. He has no interest in seeking it out, because his path is already clear. He firmly believes that he is dealing with an animated being that has an intellect, which works into his early symptoms of schizophrenia.

David: As the two siblings got older, they paralleled the mother/father relationship their parents had. Whenever Ursula confronts Leon about her point of view, he gets really worked up and they end up bickering like an old couple.

Sandor: Yeah, and, actually, you saw the best example of that when the parents are delivering Pin in the car. You can see that she wasn’t really a milk toast in any way. She had a shrewish side to her. You’re right, they did mirror it, and, in many ways, Leon was a replica of his dad.

David: The unaffectionate, clinical nature.

Sandor: Absolutely, even to the point where if he has to solve a problem with his sister, he feels a need to murder whoever she’s seeing. (laughs) It’s just as clinical as that.

David: Speaking of the father, Terry O’Quinn did such an incredible job in his role. How did you go about casting him? He was the only American in the film, right?

Sandor: Yeah, he was. We needed an American in the film since we had no names. It was a New World picture at the time and, in order to get exhibition in the states, we needed a name of some quality. I had remembered Terry’s work in The Stepfather and having seen that, I thought he was the right person for the role.

David: The other actor to really standout to me was David Hewlett, who went onto star in Scanners II, Cube, Stargate SG-1, and Stargate: Atlantis. His performance reminded me a lot of Norman Bates.

Sandor: David was totally unknown when he read for me. I just loved his look. There was something quirky about him. That’s what I was looking for: someone with a sense of sensitivity to him and, at the same time, someone that could be cold-blooded.

David: He’s someone you can empathize with; that’s what really sells the character. You knew what he was doing was wrong, and he was schizophrenic and liable to violently lash out at any given time, but you couldn’t help but feel bad for him. His parents died while he was young and he was traumatized, and his father is primarily responsible for his condition.

Sandor: Exactly. That’s what I was looking for: protagonists that you could empathize with, despite what was going on. You realize that he was sick and you see him through the eyes of his sister, who does everything in her power to keep him from going to a mental institute.

David: The budget for the film was around $2-3 million, right?

Sandor: Yeah, it was somewhere around $3 million Canadian.

David: How much of that went to building Pin?

Sandor: It was the most expensive thing in the movie. I think we ended up spending somewhere around $70k.

David: Pin is a very detailed piece and one of the more creepy props I’ve seen used in a thriller. It’s just this ominous anatomical dummy, sitting in a chair in a doctor’s office.

Sandor: I asked for something like an anatomy model from a medical school. As far as production was concerned, I also used a mime in the scenes where Pin moves a little.

David: His movements are among the more unsettling things in the film. It’s not that you don’t realize he’s a dummy – because everyone does – it’s that you’re seeing his movements through the eyes of characters that are unstable. When the doctor sees Pin moving around in the back of the car, he doesn’t take into account the sharp turns he’s been making. He’s coming to terms with traumatizing his son by tricking him into thinking Pin was really alive, rather than a dummy, and he’s frightened. And from Leon’s point of view, at that point in the film, you get the sense that he sees Pin as his father figure.

Sandor: Absolutely. That’s why he dressed Pin as his father and puts him in his parent’s bedroom. He feels that Pin is the father that he never knew. He sees Pin as the good part of his father that he wishes he knew growing up.

David: Over the course of the film, Pin has a neutral voice, even though the character who’s supposed to be emulating the voice changes. It only ends up changing minorly, as Pin’s grip over Leon’s sanity strengthens. You ended up going with Jonathan Banks as the voice of Pin.

Sandor: I wanted a neutral voice that was reasoning and reassuringly soft. That’s the voice that the father used in his ventriloquism because Pin was suppose to be a teaching aid. That’s the only voice that Leon knows so it’s the one he emulates.

David: Pin was sold at Cannes, with a poster, script, and tagline.

Sandor: (laughs) That’s exactly what happened. Pierre David, who was the co-producer with René Malo, took the script to Cannes, along with the poster with Pin in a wheelchair, with a blanket over him, sitting at the top of some stairs. I think the tagline was, “From the writer of The Amityville Horror.” They raised all the money, right there, for the movie.

David: I don’t know if this story is true, but I read somewhere that Pierre showed up a few days into the shoot and didn’t really like any of the dailies.

Sandor: (laughs) That’s completely true. What happened is that he was in L.A. and he hadn’t seen any dailies yet. He came up after the first week and wanted to sit in a hotel room and look at the dailies. On Monday, he came to the set and said he wasn’t happy. I asked him why not and he said, “It’s not scary enough. I sold it as a horror movie and this isn’t a horror movie.” I said, “You might have sold it as a horror movie but it was never intended that way. It was always a psychological thriller.” He wanted the lighting to be darker, so I ended up reshooting some scenes. Guy Dufaux wasn’t particularly happy about it – I thought he had done a terrific job – but we did it anyway. Dufaux took a simple approach to the cinematography, shooting it as cleanly and simply as possible.

David: I noticed that there weren’t a lot of gimmicky shots so, whenever there is a rack-focus or tracking shot, it was done to denote special significance to that particular scene.

Sandor: First of all, I’m a director who believes that my job is to capture performances and I want to be as unobtrusive as possible, which is what directors used to be. Now, directors become stars, so it’s become a matter of pointing it out yourself, with fancy stuff, most of which is the cameraman’s job anyway. I find it interesting, now, to watch films where it’s obvious that the camerawork is more important than the action.

David: What happened after you wrapped in Montreal?

Sandor: We made the movie and a couple of things happened afterwards. Right before we finished shooting the movie, New World left the feature film business. We had a screening set up in L.A., while we were still in post-production in a brand new facility in Toronto. Unfortunately, the facility was having a lot of problems and we were left sitting around for like a week, so we moved everything over to a post-production house in Berkeley. The editor was in San Francisco around the time of our screening in Century City, and he insisted on driving it up himself, arriving about an hour after the film’s 7PM starting time. No one had told him that the film had to be on platters, and he had 12 reels, so it took forever. The audience was in the theatre at 7, carrying on and joking while waiting for the film to start. It wasn’t an audience anymore – by the time the movie started it, they were a mob. We completely lost them and it was a disastrous screening.

David: They ended up taking it out on the film.

Sandor: They were really angry, but I don’t blame them because they waited for over an hour and that’s after they waited in line to get in at 7PM. They were annoyed at the film and it didn’t go well. The New World people were there and I told them that they had to put on another screening but they said they didn’t want to put up the money and that was that. It ended up going to video, but it did play theatrically in Canada and got some very nice reviews. About 2 years later, I was up in Portland, shooting a film there, and a woman called up and said that her theatre, an art house theatre, was going to show Pinfor a week. I asked how this came about, and she said one of the workers at the theatre saw the film 2 years prior in Toronto, loved it, and they had, just then, finally been able to find it. What happened was the owners at New World took the film as their own when they left and this theatre found it. They played it for a week and it got great reviews in New York. Then, I got a call from The Red Barn Theatre, another art house theatre in San Francisco. This man had seen it in New York and said that he was playing it for a week in San Francisco. I’ve gotten more calls from all over the world, from magazines and other outlets for interviews, than anything else I’ve done. A lot of these people say it’s one of their favorite movies, which I’m delighted by. But, the movie never made any money and I never made any money on it. Since it was done as a Canadian movie, I never saw a cent in residuals. It’s being purchased and shown, and I’ve never seen a single penny.

David: At the time, did you approach New World about selling the film to a distribution company that would show it theatrically?

Sandor: No, I really didn’t do anything with the film in that aspect and, certainly, the producers never did anything like that. But, I don’t know what the producer’s deal with New World was. As far as I know, they got paid for a service, so there never really was a reason for them to do that. Every once in a while I’ll get a phone call or email, like I did with you, about an interview. I think last year, someone from London called and I had someone come to my house for a film interview, so it’s kind of fun. It is, for me, the best I’ve ever done and the best experience I’ve ever had, aside from that one morning with Pierre David (laughs).

David: I know Pierre wasn’t happy with the film in the beginning, but do you know what he thought of the final cut?

Sandor: I have no idea, because we never really talked much after that, about anything. He and I had very different tastes. Actually, it took me 5 years from the time I wrote the screenplay to get it made, and I thanked Pierre for doing that. I had spoken to Pierre, when he had a deal with Universal, back in 1985. He tried to get it done at Universal, but they passed on it. Then, in ’86 or ’87, I was up in Toronto directing a movie, and René Malo was the Canadian producer. I gave him the script to read, he loved it, and then I didn’t hear anything else about it. In ’87, I went to a function for Canadian artists in Los Angeles and I bumped into René and Pierre, and it turned out they were now partners. Rene said to Pierre, “This guy has got this incredible script, Pin. You should read it.” Pierre said he had and loved it, so they agreed to do it then and there.

David: While I was watching Pin earlier today, I noticed that Ursula’s boyfriend was a jock, rather than a Vietnam veteran, like in the novel. The film has aged pretty well, with stuff like that and other pop culture references cut out.

Sandor: When I made the film, it was 1988 so it wouldn’t have worked if he was a Vietnam veteran. You’re talking about 17 years beyond Vietnam, so he would’ve been too old for her. It was all done intentionally.

David: Do you remember your reasoning for some of the other changes? Another big change was the ending, which was much darker in the novel.

Sandor: I honestly can’t tell you why I did them. I tried to be as true to the spirit of the novel as I could and I think, for me, the satisfaction was that Andrew Neiderman loved the film and the screenplay, and he was very happy with what happened. So, I felt it was true to his intentions.

David: After you finished Pin, there was another Neiderman book you were interested in adapting. Is that still something you’re interested in?

Sandor: Yeah, there was another one, called Sight Unseen. I wrote the screenplay but could never get anyone interested in it. It’s still sitting on my shelf. It’s about a boy, who, at the time he is maturing into a teenager, he’s going through a change in his life that gives him psychic powers. It’s a wonderful story. To me, Pin and Sight Unseen are the two best Neiderman books. I’ve always wanted to do Sight Unseen, but I can’t get anyone interested in it. It has much of the same feel as Stephen King’s short story that was adapted by Rob Reiner.

David: Stand By Me?

Sandor: Yeah, Stand By Me. It has that feel of kids in a small town.

David: Do you feel that the reason for not selling the script is because it’s a film for adults that features children as the main characters?

Sandor: Yes. It’s very tough to sell a story that doesn’t have an adult star, especially since it’s not a G-rated movie. A terrible thing happens in this movie, and it would probably give it an R rating. It’s a hard sell, since kids can’t go to it. I softened the edges considerably and figured out a way to tell the story as a back story, so that it has an opening and an ending with the child as a man, looking back on his life. At the time, I was looking to get Paul Newman to do it. That would’ve given me a cache, but even with that, I couldn’t get it off the ground.

David: You created a wrap-around for Pin, too. I don’t remember that being in the novel.

Sandor: I wanted to start out with a startling opening for the audience. If I had started with the kids, eating, and establishing the mother and so on, it would’ve been a slow unraveling for the story. I wanted the audience to say, “Hey there’s something going on here. Let’s find out how it happened.” It was very effective opening and at the end, we realize why he’s sitting in that window and what led him to be sitting there.

David: Looking back on Pin, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, is there anything you would’ve done differently today? Maybe something you didn’t have enough time to do or a scene that wasn’t in the budget?

Sandor: There is nothing I would’ve changed and I was very happy with the way it turned out. I’m proud of the whole piece. There were certain roles that were very hard to cast, since we had to cast out of Montreal, due to cost. At the time, it was hard to find English speaking actors, without an accent. But, everyone did a fine job on it and the production, cinematography and set design were all great.