‘The control room buttons were upside-down ice-cube trays, one space suit had a dish-drying rack on it – and the special effects guy wrote the theme tune lyrics’
In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback.
We started off with some money from my parents, shooting on 16mm. It was a very long process of shooting a scene, then pausing to raise money to shoot the next. Dan and I built the sets with help from college friends, and students also acted as cast and crew. The voice of the computer in Dark Star was Barbara “Cookie” Knapp, the wife of our cameraman.
“Dirty Space” was a choice we made because we thought that, knowing human beings, the kind of sterility you saw in science fiction such as 2001 wasn’t going to happen. Also, of course, it was cheaper. The spaceship was designed by Ron Cobb, a friend of Dan’s. The whole premise, of a spaceship in deep space bombing unstable planets, didn’t really make sense – the film was always humorous.
