Joe Dante (; born November 28, 1946) is an American film director. His films—notably Gremlins (1984) alongside its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)—often mix the 1950s-style B movie genre with 1960s radicalism and cartoon comedy.
Dante's output includes the films Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), Explorers (1985), Innerspace (1987), The 'Burbs (1989), Matinee (1993), Small Soldiers (1998), and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). His work for television and cable include the social satire The Second Civil War (1997), episodes of the anthology series Masters of Horror ("Homecoming" and "The Screwfly Solution") and Amazing Stories, as well as Police Squad! and Hawaii Five-0.
Dante was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Livingston. His father was an Italian-American professional golfer who encouraged him to play sports; however, Dante was more interested in drawing cartoons and frequenting Saturday matinees at the cinema. Dante was 12 when Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine dedicated to horror films, came onto news shelves. He soon wrote to the magazine with reviews of certain horror films, which he did for a number of years.
Dante had originally planned on becoming a cartoonist, but was told that it wasn't a real art form and that he should try something else. While attending the Philadelphia College of Art, Dante realized he was more inclined toward filmmaking:
"I was told that cartooning isn't an art form and if I was smart I would take something else. So I took film. This was back in the days when everything was black and white, 16mm, silent – we were essentially making underground art films, so I can't say my filmmaking acumen derived from my teachings at the Philadelphia College of Art. Almost all of it came from the school of Roger Corman"
In his free time as a student, Dante began assembling The Movie Orgy, an epic collection of B movie clips, 16mm films, cartoons, commercials, and trailers that was seamlessly edited together into one 7-hour compilation.
After a stint as a film reviewer, Dante began his filmmaking apprenticeship in 1974 when producer Roger Corman offered him a job in the trailer-cutting department at New World Pictures, where he edited the trailers for such films as Cover Girl Models and Amarcord. Other established directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich had already emerged from Corman's de-facto film school.
In 1975, Dante moved up to directing when he collaborated with fellow Corman school alumni Allan Arkush to make the satirical exploitation film Hollywood Boulevard. The film was conceived when Corman made a bet that he could produce a movie within ten days on a budget of only $54,000 (equivalent to $323,098 in 2025). Although producer Jon Davison reported the budget was approximately $50,000, it was the cheapest made by New World Pictures. The filmmakers achieved this by coming up with a story about a B movie studio which could incorporate footage from other movies that Corman owned.
Two years later, Dante directed Piranha, written by John Sayles. The film was shot in Texas "in a rush" on a budget of $600,000, and was considered quite ambitious for the time and cost. Dante, who was convinced the film would be a disaster, spent a month in the editing room. People came to visit him, but as Dante recalled he was in "such a fog" that he didn't even recognize who they were at first. The film won the attention of Steven Spielberg who, unbeknownst to Dante, prevented Universal from blocking the film's release, convincing them that Piranha was a parody and that it wasn't in competition with Jaws 2.
In 1979, Dante directed some scenes of Rock 'n' Roll High School when Allan Arkush fell ill due to exhaustion, but remains uncredited. Dante also helped plot the premise of the film with Arkush.
Dante again collaborated with John Sayles when he enlisted him to rewrite the previously adapted draft of Gary Brandner's werewolf tale The Howling. Sayles rewrote the script with the same self-aware, satirical tone that he gave Piranha, and his finished script bears only a slight resemblance to Brandner's novel. Dante said that at the time he made The Howling, werewolves were considered by many to be "corny and old hat". His approach was to disguise it as long as possible and make it look like a slasher film — which was a lot more popular at the time — "and then bring in the supernatural elements slowly so that the audience could get acclimated and not immediately reject it as something old-fashioned." The film's special effects, which at the time were considered state-of-the-art, were completed by Rob Bottin after Rick Baker left to work on An American Werewolf in London.
Dante had been previously offered the chance to direct Airplane! by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. Although he turned it down, Dante agreed to direct two episodes of their police procedural spoof Police Squad!, which was his first experience shooting something on a studio lot.
Due to their work on The Howling, Dante and producer Michael Finnell received the opportunity to make the film Gremlins by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg also brought Dante on as one of the directors on John Landis' Twilight Zone: The Movie. Dante's segment, a remake of the original Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", features cartoon-style special effects, revolving around a woman played by Kathleen Quinlan who is 'adopted' by an omnipotent boy. Dante also took over editing duties on George Miller's segment of the film, after he left the project feeling repulsed by the news of the fatal helicopter accident. Chris Columbus' original draft of Gremlins went through several rewrites before a shooting script was finalized. According to Dante, it was a gruelling shoot ("The whole thing was so exhausting") and once the design of the gremlins were finalized, the studio's reaction was divisive. The film follows a teenager, played by Zach Galligan, who inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town. It proved to be one of Dante's biggest hits to date, being the third highest-grossing film of 1984. "I'd never seen a reaction like that," Dante said of the film's first preview. "They thought it was the greatest thing ever and Warner Brothers was I think shocked, frankly, by how popular the picture became."
After the success of Gremlins, Dante took on the offer to direct Explorers, about a group of friends who build a working spacecraft and encounter extraterrestrial life. Dante liked the script, but felt the film needed a better third act. After being denied extra time by Paramount executives, Dante and the film's writer, Eric Luke, then improvised the story whilst filming commenced. In the spring of 1985, Paramount changed the film's initial release date from late August to early July, telling Dante and the editors to stop editing and deliver a shorter rough cut. As a result, about an hour and a half worth of footage was left on the editing room floor. Explorers marked the film debuts of both Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, and has only grown in its reputation over time, developing a cult following. Dante reflected on the film by saying that he is appreciative of the warm reception it has earned over the years, but continued by saying "the problem is for me is that the movie you'll see is not the movie I wanted to make. It's the movie I got to make up to a certain point and then had to stop. It's hard for me to look at it, cause it's not the film I quite had in mind." The missing and cut scenes are presumably lost, as Dante tried searching for them in recent years.
In the mid-1980s, Dante was offered the script of Innerspace written by Chip Proser, who called it "a rip off of Fantastic Voyage". Dante initially turned the film down until the script was later rewritten as a comedy by Jeffrey Boam. Dante said he had a "wonderful experience" making Innerspace, mainly because of the cast which included actors Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, and Meg Ryan among others. However, after one particular day of filming, Dante recalled that studio executives from Warner Brothers had invited him out to lunch and told him that what he was doing was not funny and described Short as being "not very attractive", wanting to recast the role. While this conversation left him with a lot of anxiety, Dante decided to "plow on" and just make the movie he always intended to make. Despite successful test screenings, the film ended up flopping at the box office in the summer of 1987. Dante said this was because the studio did not know how to promote it and that the original poster failed to include the movie's actors on it.