Let's start with your recent appearance at the San Diego ComiCon where you (along with fellow director John Carl Buechler and many of the "Jason" actors) were there to promote the upcoming box set from Paramount. Was this your first time at a convention like this, and what did you think about the experience?

Expectations are running at a fever pitch for the box set, as fans have been bombarding Paramount for years with letter and email campaigns about re-releasing the films. How do you see the box set impacting the younger generation who may have missed the films when they first came out?

I'm kind of curious to see if this box set creates any sort of stir at all, or if it's just a blip on the horror map. It really seems to be coming back around, and so many of the fans that were very young when the films first came out are just now getting into them for the first time. I got a call out of the blue from a reputable producer who was nine years old when he saw my first film One Dark Night, and his whole life he's always wanted to remake it. He contacted me, and he's putting a writer on it that I can team up with to do the screenplay, and they want to stick as close to the original as possible. I suggested some changes, and they were like "no, we have to keep it the same as it was originally" so I thought that was pretty amazing.

In addition to your commentary track, what can we expect to see on the Jason Lives DVD in regards to the much-anticipated cut footage we've all been salivating for since 1986, and how did it end up being included in this box set?

When I was doing the DVD for One Dark Night, I was asked if I had any behind the scenes stuff I could add, and during those searches I found a tape labeled "Friday the 13th Rough Cut". It was a very early version, with some shots missing and so forth, but did contain the entire back bend of Sheriff Garris, the scene where my wife Nancy (who played doomed counselor-to-be Lizbeth in the film) gets nailed with the spear, where we held much longer to watch the bubbles slowly stop. The decapitation of the three paintballer guys, which I believe I had originally cut because I didn't like the way the (effects) heads looked. Jason grabs the cop (Officer Pappas) and starts squeezing his head until the skull snaps up and popped through the hair with a horrific sound. All that's going to be in there, and what they've done is show what was released in the theatrical version and in a box above it, you see it as it was originally intended to be seen.

Rumor has it that you shot the film in three different versions in anticipation of the butchery of the MPAA. Any truth to that?

Were you prepared for the amount of cuts they (the MPAA) demanded for the final thetarical release version?

I was shocked that we had as many screenings for the motion picture ratings board, as I thought I had really did a pretty squeaky-clean Friday. But what they kept reacting to wasn't the gore, it was the overall excess…there was just so many.

But those kills and that "excessive" tone are what the series was about anyway, correct?

I originally had 13 kills, and I thought that was part of the rules: this was going to happen on Friday the 13th, this was going to have 13 kills, you're going to have someone tell you the legend, this is going to have kids you like, not stupid kids going back to Camp Crystal Lake again.

There had already been five films in the series, with Jason seemingly killed at the end of each one, only to rise again for another bout of stalk 'n slash in another sequel. When last we saw the "real" Jason, he was getting his noggin whacked repeatedly by young Tommy Jarvis in The Final Chapter. How did the idea to do another Friday flick come about?

Well, I think with every film Frank Mancuso figured "Ok, this is it, this is the death knell of the series", and then suddenly he'd decide to bring it back again. I think Part 5 was thrown together very quickly, and he (Mancuso) didn't quite know how to do it other then to say at the end that it wasn't really Jason. That kind of hurt things, but it made enough money for them to justify thinking about doing another one. He was very, very tentative about it, and was like "If you can think of some way to bring him back…" I tried to go for all the legendary horror things, the obvious nod to Frankenstein and the gothic horror things I grew up with and tried to see how much I could milk out of that $3 million.

When you decided you were going to take on Jason Lives, how did you approach writing the story in relation to the previous entries? Were you aiming for a cohesive storyline that fit in with the other films, or were you going for something totally different?

My first objective was to try and introduce some sort of legend into the movie. I couldn't think of any way to deal with part 5 other then Tommy was in a mental institution, and instead of having him get out, we'd pick just after he'd gotten out, sort of picking up where part 4 left off. From that point on, it became "Ok, I've got three million dollars - how do I make this a real movie?" Not a film, but a movie: those elements of the chase, the underwater fight and all this stuff that you usually don't find in a horror film, where it's usually just a forest, a knife, dope-smoking teens, take off the tops, and see how much blood you could splatter around, etc.