Interview: The NeverEnding Story’s Tami Stronach on New Indie Fantasy Movie Man and Witch

ComingSoon Senior Movie News Editor Brandon Schreur spoke with Tami Stronach about the new indie fantasy movie Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps. Having played the Childlike Empress in 1984’s The NeverEnding Story, Stronach, who produces and stars in Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps, discussed making the movie with her husband, Greg Steinbruner, and the importance of indie filmmaking.

“Tami Stronach, the iconic Childlike Empress in The NeverEnding Story (celebrating its 40th Anniversary this year), makes her long-awaited return to the big screen in the new fantasy film Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps,” the synopsis for the film reads. “When a lonely goatherd discovers that he has been cursed at birth to never take a wife, he makes a bargain with a reclusive witch to reverse the spell, only to find that if he can’t complete her three impossible tasks, he will never find true love.”

Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps will play in United States theaters on July 28 and July 30 courtesy of Fathom Events.

Brandon Schreur: I just wanted to say congratulations on Man and Witch. I got the chance to watch it this past weekend and I really enjoyed it. It’s a whole lot of fun.

Tami Stronach: I am so happy to hear that!

I have a bunch of questions for you about Man and Witch, but before we get to that I just wanted to ask you about The NeverEnding Story a little bit. Obviously, it’s a huge movie, it’s now back in theaters for its 40th anniversary. When I found out I was going to be talking to you, I rewatched it last week and it still totally holds up. So great and charming and everything. What’s it like now, 40 years later, looking back at that movie and reflecting on the impact and legacy it made?

It’s really remarkable the kind of impact and legacy it’s made. I’m just sort of overwhelmed by the fact that it’s still around. People are always like, ‘Why do you think that happened?’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know!’ I think that the story is just really deep. I think people — there is a kind of nostalgia wave going on right now and people want to feel hopeful. They want to feel connected to things that make them feel like there are some solutions, some goodness out there. I think it’s great, that’s what stories do for us. They make us drop out of our regular life and consider what’s important, and then come back into reality with hopefully just a little bit more strength.

Definitely. So, after The NeverEnding Story, I know you kind of stepped away from acting for a bit and were doing a bunch of other stuff. I’m wondering if you can kind of just tell me, in your own words, your journey to Man and Witch.

I started dancing a lot. I went to a dance conservatory, I founded a dance company. I wasn’t entirely free of acting, I did always have the acting bug. It was a dance theater company, so I was directing little theater vignettes inside of the dance world. Then I joined a theater company for several years called Flying Machine. We were the resident theater company at Soho Rep for a couple of years, we made a bunch of original shows together. Then I just jumped in and out of other plays in the downtown theater scene. So it’s not entirely accurate that I stopped acting, I just didn’t go to Hollywood, I didn’t get an agent, and I wasn’t pursuing film, but I was acting a lot, along with dancing and choreographing.

Then I had my daughter and I needed health insurance, so I became a university dance professor. I was teaching choreography. It was really interesting to kind of slow down and think about art-making from a teacher’s perspective.

I started thinking a lot about what my daughter was watching and seeing as a young person. I started wanting to make family-friendly content. My husband is a director, a writer, and an actor. We decided that we’d form Paper Canoe to create stories that made kids feel like grown-ups and grown-ups feel like kids. Everything we took our daughter to, she wanted to be treated like she could think for herself and understand things. When things were dumbed down for her, like when kids’ shows were dumbed down for her, she’d get upset. She’d stand up in the theater and be like, ‘I don’t like this.’ So we were like, ‘How do we make shows that she’ll like?’ That’s really, really, really the aim.

After a while, we got more opportunities with Paper Canoe. We made music and some plays, and then when the film came up, I left the university and dove fully into Paper Canoe and making Man and Witch. I really credit my husband for the really big push to get back. He felt really strongly that it’d be sad if I didn’t try to act in a few more films. My dance career had wound down and there was space for new things. We were already making family-friendly content, so it just felt like the next natural progression.

So, he wrote a script. Then the script was given to me on my birthday. It was a lot. It was like, ‘Okay, are you ready for this?’ I was like, ‘How are we going to make this? How are we ever going to make this?’ It’s funny, when something is finished, it kind of feels like the path to making it was inevitable or that we somehow knew how things would go. We absolutely didn’t. Every step of the way, it was like, ‘How do we do it? Oh, that door is closed. Okay, you go around and there’s a side door. Oh, I know someone over there, maybe they have the answer.’ It was just a really, really intense process to make an indie film, and it took four years. Now it’s finally in theaters.

For people out there who are reading this, I can’t overstate how impossible it is for true indie to get into theaters. With this current market, it’s just all blockbusters. I love blockbusters, they’re great, but do we also want to have some other stories and other worlds to explore? We’re just so thrilled that Fathom Events took us under their wing and are allowing people to see it in the theater, the way that we had dreamed of it being seen.

Sure. I was going to ask you about that, too — It’s not just an indie film, but an indie fantasy film. I feel like that’s even more rare.

Sometimes it’s good to not know what you don’t know. Now I’m like, ‘Now I know why nobody would ever make an indie fantasy film because it’s really hard.’ You need a lot of world-building, castles, and budget. It was just a bananas endeavor. I do feel like we got so lucky and I feel so grateful for the breaks that we got. This is going to sound really strange, but the pandemic, in some ways — it was obviously a really difficult time, and so many terrible things came out of it. For us, it sort of helped us because a lot of the actors we wanted to work with were not busy. They would’ve never done a film like ours, such a small movie — it’s not such a small movie, it’s a big movie, it’s just small compared to these giant fantasy movies.

We were able to work with these incredible people because, at that point, their schedules were open and they loved the script. Then we got these amazing castles because all the castles were shut down. They didn’t have any revenue because nobody was coming to visit the castles. Jim Henson Creature Shop was like, ‘Normally, we wouldn’t necessarily make puppets for someone like you, but we’re just so bored and we’re sitting in our garages, we’ll make them.’ We just got really lucky in some really key ways. I’m just so grateful to the people that took a chance and came on board with us. Everyone that signed on was excited to work on the project. It was with a spirit of, ‘This is awesome, let’s make this.’ It was a labor of love from everyone, and I think you can feel that when you watch the film.

Yup, definitely. I think you definitely can. I was going to ask you about the cast, too. It’s probably on me for not doing my homework, but I did not know that Christopher Lloyd was in the movie until I was watching it. He showed up and I was there yelling to myself, ‘It’s Doc Brown!’

He’s just, like, amazing. He’s hilarious. We just had the premiere yesterday, and in his scene, people were dying. They were just dying laughing. He just steals the scene, he’s so good.

He’s a lot of fun, and you can tell that you all had a lot of fun making it, which I think really translates. You get to dance in the movie, too. That was really cool to see.

That was really fun. The Dance of a Thousand Steps — like, 1980s films had a lot of dance. There was Flashdance, there was Dirty Dancing, and there was Footloose. There was a lot of dance in the 1980s. We haven’t really seen a film where, instead of a giant battle with so much blood and gore, the hardest thing that this man has to do is the dance number. I just think that’s so funny. It was really fun to have that big dance number in it. I insisted that it be as long as it is. In the editing process, they wanted to trim it, but I was like, ‘No no no. We’ve got to watch it.’

Did you come up with choreography for it and everything, given your background? And I know that you’re working with your husband when you’re doing it. What was rehearsing that like?

My husband does not like to be pulled into a dance rehearsal. It was really fun to choreograph it. We had kind of two stages [of production]. There was the first phase of the film that started in New York. Then all filming shut down, we moved the whole production to Scotland and basically had to start over again. In the New York phase, I initially hired a wonderful choreographer named Chase Brock to make the Dance of a Thousand Steps. It had a very different directive, at the time. Then the Scottish director, Michael Hines, really wanted me to choreograph it. I ended up making a new version of it.

Chase Brock was kind enough to lend me a few really cute sections. Irish Jig, he’s really good at Irish Jig, that was him, and his wonderful finger section. He didn’t want credit, but I’m giving him credit now. But, yes, I choreographed it with some help from Chase Brock. My husband, I think, does a great job dancing in it despite his protestations.

Another thing I really enjoyed about the movie is the practical effects. I know it’s an indie film, but it’s a fantasy movie and you kind of expect all this big CGI, green screen. It really just speaks to the tone and the kind of warmth the movie gives off where everything is practical. It looks great and I thought that was really cool, too.

Thank you so much for saying that, I really appreciate it. It was honestly out of necessity, but I have to say that there’s something about using practical effects that sometimes is better. It has a kind of warmth to it — the chi of the human person operating the puppet and the fact that we were on-location, with the puppets. They weren’t on a green screen, everything is real. I do think that sort of contributes to the charm of the film. We did do a wee bit of green screen in there because of the flying scene, but it’s so 1980s. We just wanted to put the story front and center and have some fun by paying homage to those older techniques and the craft in them. I love the magic of some of the bigger effects and the 3D effects that exist, but I think it’s important not to throw out what works with some of the old-school techniques because they have power. How to blend the two is really the way to go so you’re not just throwing things away that still work.

Totally. It really just gives it a vibe where, obviously, I was reminded of The NeverEnding Story, but I also kept thinking about Hocus Pocus while I was watching it. It just kind of fits right in the same vein.

If people come to see the film in theaters on July 28 and 30, there is a little featurette that I made with my husband. Fathom asked us to make some exclusive content, so there’s a small little film where we do some behind-the-scenes and we talk about how we found the Jim Henson Creature Shop and how we worked with the puppets. There’s also some information on Renato Casaro, who made The NeverEnding Story poster. He made like 2,000 hand-painted 1980s posters, he was just this incredible artist. He created our vintage Man and Witch poster. It’s a story of how we found him and it kind of delves into, tonally, everything we were trying to do, like everything you’re saying. It’s a little behind-the-scenes in-depth look at how we created that vibe and the people we reached out to to create that vibe. You can only see it if you go to theaters.

Oh, interesting. Now I’m going to have to go see Man and Witch again when it’s in theaters.

You’ve got to go see it in theaters! It played really well; like, we’d never put it in front of an audience until we had the premiere yesterday. It was really nice. A bunch of people came up to us and they were like, ‘We really enjoyed the featurette, we felt like we got to understand more about who you are and how you made it.’ We really wanted to open the door. This is a true indie. I feel like, for us, the process of making stories, you want to share them with people and you want to inspire other people to make stories. The more people that make and create in the world, the better it is. The more worlds we can all explore and the more heads we can get inside of, then the better we’ll all understand each other.