Reel Girly

Canadian director Andrew Currie had a great chat with me when his film opened SF Indie Fest back in February. Always kindly his tongue was firmly planted in his cheek. His film Fido – an unparalleled crossbreeding of Romero, Lassie, Lynch and Sirk, Fido is a bracing commentary as subversive as it’s methods and the film is a candy colored cocktail party from beginning to end. Fido’s website is a great place to start nosing about and I particularly encourage visiting the ZomCom site. The interview below might also entice. Andrew sure was a sweetie.

Fido is the story of a boy and his zombie slave. The story takes place in a post-Zombie-War North American Town of Willard and tracks the story of a family after they’ve acquired their own zombie servant. Your film was made in Canada but where in the world does the story take place?
I think people will assume its somewhere in North America. What I wanted to do was set Fido in a fable like place that didn’t define a location. Regimes spread fear are all over the world and different governments treat their people in different ways so I wanted it to be open to wider interpretation. I didn’t want to say “This is American in 1950.” or “This is Canada 1950.” I played Fido in France, Spain, Canada and they all see it from their own viewpoint and I find that interesting.

Feral and unkempt zombies live in the aptly named “Wild Zones” outside of Willard’s steel gates. These gates and “wild zones” polarize the township and create a strong distinction between civilized and unruly conduct. Tell me how your 1950’s imagery fits into this dichotomy.
I love “feral” – you don’t hear that enough. The whole film is a series of dichotomies and contrasts. And that’s what I wanted. What they did after the zombie wars was put gates up around the towns and just started killing off the zombies. Then they found a way to control them. So they kept the fences up and took the ones that weren’t completely mangled, put control collars on them and put them to work, creating this sort of slave class of zombies. So Fido contains obvious references to xenophobia and ‘the other.’ The situation creates an over dichotomy through that. Aesthetically, I love the juxtaposition of the idyllic world with the zombies and the sudden shocks of violence that can come out of that. I find that really exciting.

What I think is wonderful about a well managed premise is how every question or topic we discuss will in some way address another issue because all the motifs and themes are intertwined in the context of the story.
I really like that you described it as a “well managed premise.” I wrote with two other writers. My company, Anagram pictures spent a painful amount of hours in the story room. It’s nice that someone understands that. We spent so much time on character and theme. The theme of Fido is “love, not fear, makes us more alive.” That’s what we wrote to. If you look to the characters you can see that theme in action. For example, Bill (played by Dylan Baker) the father is absolutely terrified of zombies, but more than that he’s terrified of human emotions and intimacy. His idea of being a great father is to buy his kid a handgun, even though he shouldn’t. The irony is, of course, that this zombie –who is dead – comes into the family and he’s more emotionally alive than Bill. Bill’s journey, in a way, proves the theme.

You had the towns contained by steel gates, the citizens contained by codes of acceptable conduct, (my favorite detail) legions of “untrustworthy” old people contained in re-appropriated prisons. There were a lot of ways you could have dealt with the universal zombie issue. I was wondering why containment made the most sense for this story?
It’s a good question and I have a good answer. It comes from the idea of personal rights and freedoms. The first draft of the script was written in 1994 and then shelved. In 1996 I took it to the Canadian Film Center, which is Norman Jewison’s Film School in Toronto. I reworked it and then – this is the boring part – a company optioned it and we didn’t get along creatively. They left and then 911 happened. I was traveling and the fear in Canada was palpable…it was probably even greater in the States. We’re like America’s little brother they don’t even know they have. When America does something we feel it strongly. Canada is a kind of sensitive country like that. There’s a great love for Americans in Canada but there’s also this sense that if you do something too outrageous that people will get really upset and it’s like…“Don’t!” So anyway, after 911, there was a sense of containment. Everything was being locked down. Right now Bush is pushing for a 700-mile wall in Northern Mexico to separate Mexico and the US. That is palpable and real. There are gated communities. A lot of the containment is about keeping others out. When you see or think of containment, you have to ask yourself: containing for what purpose? And I’m hoping that Fido gives that sense, especially at the end. A friend told me that Fido is almost a film for promoting alternate lifestyles. It’s meant to be a very liberal film. It’s comedy but it does stick barbs into the notion of Homeland Security and containment and what that does to us. On a subtler lever there is the containment of emotion. Fido falls for Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss) and she recognizes it and maybe she falls in love with him – in a different way. And the Zombies, they have to kill when their collars malfunction but his heart is changed and Fido is kind of evolved as a zombie, I guess, and there’s a moment in the car when Helen asks him, “Why aren’t you killing me?” And he just looks over at her and she knows he’s in love with her and she’s like “this isn’t the time, gotta rescue Timmy.” - so there’s that kind of containment too.

The corporation responsible for securing the borders and homes of Willard is ZomCon. They are ubiquitous and central to the survival of the town. I saw a gentle parallel between the zombies and their owners who have been overtaken by this corporation. Is there any Dawn of the Dead corporate commentary going on here?
The idea was really more modern. Corporate America and the government are starting to blend and, like Haliburton, the lines are starting to blur. This takes it one step further. The corporation has become so powerful that the government just blends into it. In Fido even the bible is branded with a zed. That’s certainly an important element.

Tell me about the issue of trust in Fido. ZomCon markets surveillance as a comfort not a danger and “You can’t trust the elderly” because they could go dead and monstrous at any moment. You’re really confronted with the absence of extended family.
Trust is hard to come by in this world. When Timmy (K’Sun Ray) comes to his mom and she says “Timmy why’s your shirt dirty?” and he says “these bullies pushed me down.” Her response is: “Did anyone see you like that?” She sees he needs some attention so she gives him a half-second hug and then pushes him away. What he wanted in that scene was nurturing but his mom did just the opposite. That’s kind of a seed to the issue of trust. Timmy can’t really trust that his mom is gonna be a good mother or react as she should because this is world where fear has pushed emotion down and forced the issue of trust to the forefront. Trust then becomes earned in this world when genuine love is present. Fido starts to love Timmy and when Timmy can see Fido won’t eat him it begins to look like Fido is the most trustworthy character in the story.

When I see a fecund, ‘50’s era represented I personally can’t help looking for the insurgence or the counterculture. In the last few scenes in the film we see some footage that, well – is it the seeds of Revolution?
It is a reference to what is coming but the strongest seeds come from gender differences. I see this film as dealing a lot with extended family. I feel that xenophobia really should be wiped out. It always exists when the walls are up and when containment is happening. As soon as you break that down, coexistence creates harmony. There’s pain sometimes when groups come together at the start but most problems and most fear comes from not knowing ‘the other.’ In the end, the men in the film are either dead or on a chain and I wanted that. The film begins with a fairly misogynistic view of women and I wanted to have that in there so that there’s a shift at the end. I think that’s a seed. Mr. Theopolis (Tim Blake Nelson) has learned to respect Tammy (Sonja Bennet) as opposed to just using her as a sex toy. I’m not saying he’s highly evolved but he’s a dirt bag with a heart of gold. He does come to awareness about her feelings and he begins to serve her.

You have many references to films in Fido. Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows- though I thought of Haynes’ remake Far From Heaven. Tell me about your influences and the ways those influences infiltrated this project.
Watching Fido you can see references but I don’t really go after planting specific references. I made homage to Blue Velvet because I love the film and respect Lynch so much.

And it’s such a relevant parallel.
In terms of Douglas Sirk, I didn’t try to shoot Fido like Sirk shot his films but I’ve always admired the way he has this sort of socio-political level at play that people don’t often notice. All that Heaven Allows is fairly obvious about what is being said but it’s done in an almost gentle way. It very much comes out of the characters. His aesthetic has always struck me as powerful. Sirk influenced me for Fido but I don’t really have any hardcore influences. Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter was primary to me. The cadence of the language and how dialogue was written was important too. Far From Heaven includes some “golly gee” kind of language that I didn’t really feel was that prominent back then and so Fido was written in a world like our own but not specifically ours.

The Curiosity of Chance is a high-school coming of age comedy that also takes from the traditions of New Queer Cinema. Chance is Russell Marleau’s directorial debut. After a few years working in TV, Marleau sold a script to Sony that was produced and released under the title Three Way (Gina Gershon, Dwight Yokum and Dominic Purcell). Marleau is well read and charming: two decidedly winning traits for a man responsible for a film that sweetly, and intelligently plums the depths of teen comedy and queer-core simultaneously.

You can see The Curiosity of Chance June 23, at the Castro ($9 member/$10 general) as part of Frameline 31 Film Festival.

Which was your priority to represent: teen comedy or queer-core?
Initially teen comedy. I always wanted a gay lead so I started with that conceit and those conventions and as I was writing it the conventions of coming of age films and queer films in general kind of came into play but first and foremost I wrote it as a genre teen comedy with a gay lead. Chance is gay but I wanted his story to be universal and I definitely did not want to do a coming out story. They’ve been done well and to death and I felt I had nothing new to add.

Where does Superman factor in? Chance has a flamboyant secret identity, his friends are like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson…
That’s interesting and you’re actually the first to bring that up. Everything is a costume to Chance: it’s Halloween every day. But costume changes are part of him and also part of the teen experience. You’re looking for your identity and you try on different things. Part of that is your clothing and style – you try to create a personal style but also borrow from other places. I think of Chance as an old soul who doesn’t just take from current fashion but from everywhere. I never thought of him as super-hero like.

He’s even got a little swoop of hair in the front.
Well now you say that, I think Tad (Hilgenbrinck) even auditioned for the Jimmy Olson character in Superman Returns. It’s funny.

Your story takes place in the 80’s and at an international school. When you ask an audience to make a leap like that it makes the characters that much easier to identify with. So, why Belgium, and why the 80’s?
It was a condition of our financing. I was working with Bigfoot Entertainment, the company that made this film and the executive producer on another script I’d been hired to write. Working with Michael (Gleissner) he mentioned he wanted to do a gay script. He was living in Belgium at the time and he said, “I want to shoot a film here in Belgium.” I told him I wrote this script and it’s something I want to direct, and the company liked it. The original script was set in Northern California and Michaels said he’d be willing to have the company make this movie but ‘you have to make it in Belgium’. I thought about it and tried to figure out how that would work and in every draft, Chance’s father had been in the military and that kind of made sense he’d be traveling around a lot. I had gone to an international school for a while and I had some experience with that. So I thought “this could work.” The script didn’t change a lot with that shift and I think it enhanced the fish-out-of-water aspect of the film. As far as setting it in the 80’s, there were two reasons for that. First, I wanted to use a lot of Journey songs to touch upon Chance’s journey.

That’s like taking the kitsch sincerely.
Yeah and the songs are emotional and the teen angst in those songs – when you look back at the angst you’re like ‘that wasn’t a big deal’ but when you’re a teenager it’s a big deal. Journey’s music hammered that home but I felt like with all that Journey music in the movie, it’d be better if the music were current to the movie you were watching. Also, I felt that if Chance is an out gay student that it was harder to be like that in the 80’s and the persecution would be heightened and more believable - not that it wouldn’t be believable in this day and age but - I had the liberty to push it and still make it believable. You know, people who read the script liked the idea that it was in the 80’s. People also said we could make it current - which I agree with – and for money reasons we only ended up using one Journey song.

I wanted to ask about music licensing. Your film is packed with 80’s hits.
Right now we have festival license and we’ll see what we can keep when we go for distribution. All the songs that are performed on screen and the drag performances we have license for. I had a really good music supervisor [Cathy Duncan] and we had a really great time picking out just the right song for each scene.

I was really impressed with the way you managed the ambiguity of identity in the story. You have a happy, healthy conclusion but at the same time, certain major issues that seemed to cause a lot of tension stay with only a modicum of resolution.
I agree and I guess I was just trying to find the right emotional ending for a film with that sort of emotional conflict. I also wanted to communicate that you haven’t seen all of Chance’s story yet. He’s got a lot more to go through and all those characters too and that’s high school – there’s so much more to come. With Chance, there’s the added thing he’s out and he still has a lot of work on that issue. I’d hoped that came through but I also hope that when people watch the movie they feel like they had a good emotional resolution and could walk away feeling satisfied.

I was also impressed you dealt with fantasy because that’s important to the character of Chance and his phase in life. It also seems like a nod to films of the period and the tendency popular in that time frame to dissect classic films with a queer lens. I feel like you were using fantasies as a convention to deal with identity. The kiss, for example –
That was tough. I intentionally wrote and shot the kiss in a way that I could make it seem either an unambiguous fantasy, an obvious reality or somewhere in the middle. It was interesting working with Brett Chukerman who played Levi and Tad who played Chance and we talked a lot about that scene because they came to it with questions. And they needed to know everything behind it in order to play it. When we finally put it all together I didn’t want to go into a total fantasy. I felt like this was going to be a nice moment and people will want it or not know they want it until they see it and I felt playing it as a complete fantasy, would be a cop out. But I also didn’t want to present Levi as this straight character and then not be true to who he is. I thought the best way to deal with that was to make it ambiguous and plant the question in the audience that Levi might turn or maybe he’s giving it to Chance because Chance deserved it and they’re friends, but I like there to be different interpretations for it. It was a tricky thing and it’s been interesting to see the response. The first scene where you see Levi stripping is obviously a fantasy and the issue of Chance’s fantasy life and what’s real is a line you have to walk because people have to finally invest in these characters.

Photo by Mark Schieron - Set

You also gave a good bit of time to the management of fantasy and the management of reality that made me feel like you were consciously not presenting one as an escape from the other. That became really valid in the scenes when he enters drag – he’s not doing it as a life long commitment.
My original idea was that drag was going to be huge but as I wrote more and these other characters came in and Chance had to go through more, the drag became less and less. But then it became a centerpiece for the Brad (Maxim Maes) story. I always felt like Chance would ultimately be a professional drag queen but he’s trying things on and he has that curiosity so I think drag ultimately has the right amount of weight in the final story.

Director Alex Orr said, “If you’re making something for anybody, you’re making nothing for nobody.” Though his feature Blood Car, playing at SF Hole Head tonight at 9:30 (Roxie, 6/7), is uncompromising Orr and his compadres were far from abrasive. They were warm and made it quickly clear that their film was not the work of one depraved lunatic, rather the concerted effort of many who shared the deluded vision.

These guys gave a lot away in our recorded conversation - they’re fearless I tell you - so when spoilers were present in the text, I included a link to the podcast.

Blood Car could easily be confused for a spoof made by slumming Hwd bad boys. The low video quality is quickly overcome because of the film’s brilliant/fucked up, but incredibly well managed premise.

An intensely collaborative event, Blood Car is the accomplishment of a clutch of filmmakers from Atlanta. In hiatus from their “day jobs” making commercials, Alex Orr (director/writer/producer), Adam Pinney (DP/editor/writer/producer), Tony Holley (producer/1st AD), Katie Rowlett (plays Denise) and Mike Brune (plays Archie), came all the way from Georgia just to watch San Jose love up their subversive master stroke. If the value of their journey could be judged against audience response, they could have walked from Atlanta to San Jose and it still would have been worth the trip.

Where did the premise come from?
Alex Orr: We were doing what filmmakers do, working in the film industry, shooting carpet commercials and things that aren’t as much fun and we were complaining about wanting to go out and shoot our first feature. Hugh Braselton (not present), Adam Pinney and myself were riding around in the car, talking about a horror movie and what would be fun or funny and somebody said “a car that runs on blood” and we ran with that. Adam and I wrote the script fairly quickly: our only rule was it needed to be pretty retarded. You know, really silly; push the envelope. We jammed out the script and ran to production as fast as we could.

It’s interesting that when you introduce or describe your film, you never use the words “satire” or “politics.”
AO: Those words don’t make people think they’re about to go laugh.
Adam Pinney: It’s really a movie about a guy who kills people to go have sex with a girl. Overall. And the politics are there as a tongue in cheek thing. To end the movie as ridiculously as we did (spoiler available in the podcast) –it is a joke and that’s the whole point. We made it political at the end and maybe people are thinking “they’re taking this and themselves seriously” but we’re not.

I see what you’re saying but what I thought you guys were going to talk about… how did you describe it? ‘The FBI fuck-tard whose monologue should have been like Ned Beatty’s diatribe from Network?’
AO: You know the blood for oil thing is there and towards the end we come out and say it, but instead of giving you the grand speech about the evil government we like to give more jokes and nonsense.
AP: We don’t want to browbeat people with political purpose, it’s an underlying tone but it doesn’t drive the film at all, the fact that the government is evil -
Mike Brune: Blood drives the film…Heh?! Funny?!

Oh, come on, not just blood: blood and cum. That was the goopiest movie I’ve seen in a while and I’ve seen a lot!
Tony Holley: (sheepishly) Can we say cum?

I think we should be able to.
TH: Cum!
(pause)
AO: And there are some things that need to happen in that sort of movie. The main character needs to be conflicted about whether to keep killing for sex or quit and what better thing to persuade him than a giant wet spot? He should eventually get together with Loraine, the audience should expect the good girl to finally get in there, but for no other reason than to not do what is expected, we (spoiler available in podcast). We all watch a lot of movies. We’re movie geeks so whenever we’d talk about doing something, one of us would say, “No, because they did that in this.” And we’d say, “What else we got?” We didn’t want anyone to watch the movie and feel like, “Here comes A, B, and C and soon they’ll tie up that other thing.” We definitely wanted to keep people on their toes. Originally we wanted the bed to talk, to be like a vagina.
Katie Rowlett: A talking vagina. The set guy said he could do it.
AO: We were gonna do it with the computer but someone said it was a little too Cronenberg. It was disgusting! Wonderful!

You just referenced your influences and before I asked about your respective influences –
AP: You said Tokaishi Miike, Scorcese
AO: Scorcese, Allen.

Hitchcock…the shower bit.
AP: I’m obsessed with that scene.
AO: He is! Adam Pinney likes to kill women and be in a bathroom.
AP: I’ve killed three women in bathrooms, or injured them greatly. In my three films, I’ve made two short films: a girl dies in a bathroom in one of them and in another she dry heaves and is a wreck, and in this one she (spoiler available in the podcast).
AO: He loves bathrooms, how they’re small and difficult.

You talked about pushing the envelope.
TH: There’s no other way to go for us.

The way of violence on children?
TH: Yeah. But they’re all jokes and people laugh at them because they don’t expect it to go that far. And I know that’s really going to hinder us when we go out for –
MB: -Lots of filmmakers want to go for that but they have this block that says they can’t get this scene by this audience. So they never even consider the possibility past that first spark. Whereas we just said, “Fuck it.”
AO: If you’re making something for anybody, you’re making nothing for nobody.
AP: It’s catching on now. Several people have said it’s very Borat-esque just because in a movie like that they take jokes just a little too far. Based on the response it works and I hope more people do stuff like that. Every joke that was going too far people were shocked but they were clapping, they were like “Yes, you did this!”
AO: We’re not all like this. We make other films, but we don’t want to pride ourselves on something someone already did – no one wants to make the next Karate Kid.

Exceptional choice of films to mimic!
TH: Are you kidding? Get that out of my face! (Under breath) Three?!

Bloggers tend to lean towards the obscure, the local, and the arty for their reviews. I think this is wise given that the obscure and the arty are generally a part of the media enclave most needing word of mouth, and what is a blog but a running word of mouth? I know it needs no added WOM but (call me a fan-girl) I wanted to write about the tiny breaths of genius present in summer comedy Knocked Up. I found a fun bit with flat questions from ABC.

Not one for ambiguous humor (or titles) Apatow is being critically championed as the man to revive mainstream comedy, the “Mayor of Comedy”. He is impressive. He never strays from his flock of loyal companion (including wife Leslie Mann, the casts from both his sitcoms Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks, even his kids are in Knocked Up) but what interests me most is something that seems consistent in all his films. Everyone, in the world of Judd Apatow, is nice. There aren’t any outright bastards in his films. Even the bitchy people are endearing. SNL’s Kristin Wiig kicks ass as an insecure, needy, and biting junior exec. and even Steve Carrell, Apatow’s long standing comrade and a famously nice guy, walks away from Katherine Heigl’s super pregnant E! Correspondent saying “I’m not an ass hole.” Granted, Carrell wasn’t nice to her, but still, no one’s actually an ass hole, they’re just insecure, or confused, or dumb or even vaguely gross. The latter abject category is of specific interest in Knocked Up, where gross and sweet are odd bedfellows…just like Ben (Seth Rogel) and Allison (Katherine Heigl). Mainstream comedy usually delves into baud, or slapstick, or plain potty humor, and Knocked Up does that too. I particularly liked a portion where Leslie Mann’s character, Debbie tells Allison that her husband Pete (Paul Rudd in like the role of his life!) has been jerking off into their new towels and even after she washes them they’re never soft again. The film’s absence of slapstick is not really proof of its intelligence but where else has bodily humor ever been endearing? I mean seriously, it’s more cute than gross that those towels will never be soft again. Makes sense gross is okay, what with the film revolving around impending birth. What else is gross and sweet? Not much!

So if I’m going to be a fan-girl, I’m not itching for Ratatouille but a recent comrade in the universe of film journalism, Alex Vo of Rottentomatoes.com, wrote a researched, cute, fun, get-you-excited-about-the-movie, interview with Patton Oswald, a.k.a. Remy the culinary rodent, from Pixar’s Ratatouille.

I loved Alex’s references to stand up comics and to Home Movies, one of the best shows to ever grace the flickering screen of Adult Swim. I learned about Patton Oswald from Erik Blevin’s Kick-Ass Movie Pitches a few years ago and if I had the chances, it’d be the first thing on my list of quesitons. Perhaps it’s too five minutes ago…eh. if you haven’t read it before, I hope you also laugh until you need your inhaler:-)