‘Miami’ Was Not A Dramatic Departure For Zombie

For rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie, helming his week’s episode of CSI: Miami, “LA”, was not too different from making a horror film. (Slight spoilers after the jump.)

As CSI Files previously reported, Zombie directed “LA” after a longtime friend who works for the series convinced him to take on the job. Filming an episode of Miami can be hectic, but Zombie didn’t have trouble working at the show’s fast pace. “I’ve never had a really luxurious timeframe in which to make a movie,” Zombie told The Deadbolt. “So the way they shoot CSI is really, really fast, faster than you make a movie but not outrageously faster. So I was kind of used to that. It’s almost like run and gun, you know? Shoot it, done, moving on. Shoot it, done, moving on. So I was not that surprised by the pace, it was sort of what I was used to.”

One thing that made the experience easier—and more familiar—was working with actors he already knew. “It was great,” Zombie said. “I mean, it’s always great with people you know and friends. I had—besides my wife [Sheri Moon Zombie] and William Forsythe—Malcolm McDowell and another actor, Jeff Phillips, who was from Halloween II. So it’s always great because—especially when you have a very small timeframe—the more you don’t have any wild cards as to what’s going to happen the better. I mean, that’s why you see all directors do it. They assemble their core group of actors that they love and use a lot because it just becomes a great way of working. So, once again, it was that situation.”

Directing an episode of a crime drama was not all that different from making a horror film, Zombie said. “It wasn’t really a completely different experience because I love movies and I really love crime movies,” he explained. “I mean, if I could direct a crime style movie I would jump at the chance, because I realize that’s really a genre I love to death. So, no. In fact, I actually was hoping it would seem more different than it was. But at the same time, I think they wanted me to come in and do some of my things. So it really wasn’t that difficult of a transition because you approach everything the same. You’re just doing dramatic scenes with actors, and this and that, so it was cool.”

Zombie wanted to leave his own stamp on the established series, but he also wanted to make sure the show stayed true to itself. “Well, it’s a very odd show,” Zombie said of Miami. “What I found interesting about it, what I wanted to do with it, is it’s very stylized. It is almost campy but not quite. It sort of rides a fine line. It’s just so heavily stylized. What I found interesting about this episode by breaking out of Miami and taking the characters to [Los Angeles], I actually wanted to break some of that stylization so it would seem different. So we sort of have the Miami segments, which are very CSI stylized, and the LA segments, which are a little bit different. So yeah, that was one of the attractions to the show.”