Revenge of the Stolen Stars

Director Ulli Lommel was unsure about casting Klaus Kinski, but he met him and Kinski was very nice, according to Lommel. But when the filming started, Kinski was very hard to work with. He complained about the lights and microphones, so eventually they had only few soft lights and very small microphones in the Kinski scenes, which is the reason why the sound quality changes much in different shots. Kinski also didn't want to sit on a chair when camera crew was about to shoot from different angle, so continuity wasn't possible. Because of that Lommel decided to change Kinski's character to a ghost, which was a brilliant idea in Kinski's opinion. Later he was so happy with the director that he said he doesn't work in the future with anyone else than Lommel, but Lommel's answer was simply "Yeah, right".

Ulli Lommel always intended the uncle as a ghost. The only difference was the character was also supposed to be a guy with a great sense of Irish humor, to give the movie a more comical feeling. Lommel wanted the film to be more of a slapstick comedy as it was originally supposed to be an upbeat adventure yarn. But when Klaus Kinski was brought on to portray the character, his take on the uncle totally turned the mood of the picture, making it more darker. With the short budget and tight deadline to finish the film, Lomell was stuck with the new approach to take.

When the producers hired Ulli Lommel to make the film, they told him they wanted a film in the style of Romancing the Stone (1984). Lommel initially went along with their wishes but halfway through filming he began to grow bored with making a routine adventure movie and decided to add supernatural elements and gory deaths into the film, all in the same vein of his earlier film The Boogey Man (1980) but restrained to fit the PG-13 rating, as well as throw in a martial arts sequence to make the movie stand out as a whole.

It was Barry Hickey's first movie and he said he didn't know what he was doing. He was just taking directions and feeding it back. He was also trying to carry his character over from scene to scene but the scenes kept changing in tone. He wasn't sure what his character was supposed to do anymore. Barry's character was supposed to be the glue holding the story together but director Ulli Lommel kept creating new events around him. Barry felt that in the end, the film was neither an adventure film nor a horror film, it was a botch.

Everything in the movie was done in one take, which made it difficult for the actors to work with, especially if they screwed a scene up.