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Interview: Darren Lynn Bousman Talks "Repo: The Genetic Opera," Paris Hilton and The Merits of Torture Porn
from: bigpicture.fancast.com
by Andy Hunsaker, Fancast Movies
"There is an audience that has embraced this movie and are showing up in droves, dressed as the characters, singing the songs. ThereÕs no money to market this movie. We have no one behind us. We're doing everything. I encourage, I urge and I plead with everyone out there to give it a chance. If you hate it, that's great, tell everyone how bad it is. If you love it, tell everyone how great it is. Just talk about the movie. If you don't, it's going to disappear."
Repo: The Genetic Opera one of the weirder movies you'll ever see. A goth rock horror opera about organ harvesting starring Alexa Vega from Spy Kids, Paul Sorvino, Anthony Stewart Head from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Bill Moseley from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, opera star Sarah Brightman and Paris Hilton. Yes, that Paris Hilton. All in a movie directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who cut his teeth on Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV, but has always had a love in his heart for this passion project, which has finally come to fruition. It opens this weekend in selected cities, and it is getting a lot of interesting buzz in many different corners, and there's even a recommended accompanying dinner menu over at FoodVu. He's devoted his entire life of late to the single-minded goal of promoting this movie so it can find the passionate cult following it is destined to have. We talked to him recently about the passion of the Repo Man, the craziness of the cast and the torture porn milieu.
Tell us a bit of the crazy turmoil that this intense promotional process has been for you.
Darren Lynn Bousman: It's been crazy. It's been a grassroots marketing campaign. It's been myself and the writer, every single day, all day out promoting this thing. Without calling people out, I just think that there's not a clear idea what this movie is to some people. I've been in the thick of it. I've been in the forest, and I've seen trees falling, but if no one else is there, did the trees make any sound? That's kind of what it is. I feel that I'm seeing the fan reaction to this thing and it motivates me, it drives me, but the fact is more people need to see what's happening to this movie. There is an audience that has embraced this movie and are showing up in droves, dressed as the characters, singing the songs. Every single morning at 7am, I'm up and I don't go to bed until midnight all promoting just this movie.
How did you get involved with this project in the first place?
DLB: It happened about seven years ago. I was in Los Angeles and I made it very known to all the people that I hung out with that I was looking to do a rock opera. It's kind of a weird thing to want to do, and this was before Saw or any of the other movies that I've worked on. Finally, this script came across my desk Ð actually, it wasn't even a script, it was a libretto. It was this play called Repo and I read it and heard three songs from it, and I fell in love. I begged the writer to give me a chance to direct this thing as a stage show. I've been following it ever since and promoting it ever since to make this thing into a movie. Finally, after years of struggling, I've got a movie of it.
What was it that made you want a rock opera in the first place?
DLB: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is a musical, but still in the same vein. What that movie did was it gave me a place that I felt normal. Normally, I didn't feel normal, I was kind of an outcast, I really didn't belong in anything. There was that, and then Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy; these movies all inspired me to want to make these types of movies. Finally, I'm given a chance now with Repo.
Now what brought you to consider Alexa Vega for the lead role of Shilo?
DLB: We were looking for a girl. I say girl and not woman, because this person had to be able to play an innocent 17-year-old girl but also be extremely sexy at the same time. I'd either get the sexy or the little girl, but to find someone that could portray both was an extremely hard task. I was looking everywhere. Finally, my girlfriend said Ôhey, check this out.' She handed me a newspaper article of Alexa Vega in Hairspray in New York. I said Ôwho is that?' and she said Ôthat's the girl from Spy Kids.' I said Ôno way!' I flew out to New York and met with her, and immediately she had all the qualities I was looking for. She was sexy, she was innocent, she was young and she had everything. She was the first person that I really got attached to the project.
Was it hard to get her interested?
DLB: Her reps turned it down. Everyone around her turned it down, which is why I ended up going to MySpace to find her. I emailed her maybe 15 times off her MySpace before I finally got a response back from her. I don't think she believed I was who I said I was. Finally, after cutting through all that bullshit, she realized I was who I said I was. I sent her a short film Ð I directed a short film to try to raise awareness Ð and after she saw that, she was in. "People don't know Paris Hilton. They think they do. They have an idea of who Paris Hilton is, but no one really knows Paris Hilton."
Did the goth scene feel like something she was actually interested in?
DLB: No. One thing I tried to do with this movie was to make an eclectic group of people you would never expect to see together in a movie. That's the main reason I went with Paris Hilton as well. Who would ever expect to see Paris Hilton and Sarah Brightman in a movie together? I don't think it gets more polar opposite than that. That was the whole reason to do it. I wanted to have a cast that, when you saw it, you kinda scratched your head with a Ôwhat the fuck?' factor. I needed that Ôwhat the fuck?' factor because the movie was so Ôwhat the fuck?' If I tried to cast this thing safe, it would have been a colossal failure. I would have been nominated for every Razzie in the world. In fact, I still might be, I don't know, but I needed to have the casting reflect what the movie was Ð out there and different.
We hear horror stories about Paris Hilton all the time. How was she to work with?
DLB: She was great. People don't know Paris Hilton. They think they do. They have an idea of who Paris Hilton is, but no one really knows Paris Hilton. I didn't know who Paris Hilton was Ð I thought I did Ð until I actually met her. She is not the person everybody thinks she is. She is professional, she is smart, she's adorable. I think the media portrays her in this kind of fucked up light, and that's not who she is. Casting her was probably the smartest thing that Repo ever did. Everyone was like Ôwhat the fuck?' and that is exactly the reaction that I sought out in doing the casting. It ended up that not only did I get that reaction out of Paris Hilton, but she was great in the part.
Her character really gelled with the general perception of her.
DLB: That's what we sought out to do. We tried to make everyone play outside of who they are, but at the same time, caricatures of themselves. I mean, Bill Moseley and Sarah Brightman. Look at Sarah Brightman Ð she's an opera star, so she was cast as an opera star, but this really out there, goth opera star. Paris Hilton is this heiress, and so is Amber Sweet. That was the whole purpose of this movie, and I think we attained that in the casting of it.
Ogre from Skinny Puppy seems like an absolute perfect fit.
DLB: Ogre, I did not know about until he came into audition. I'd heard of Skinny Puppy, but I didn't know who Ogre was, and he ended up being one of our greatest casting choices. That guy is amazing. He's fantastic.
How did you come to the choice of Anthony Stewart Head?
DLB: Anthony, I don't think I could've lucked out anymore. He was the first choice for Repo Man since the very beginning. I can't believe that we ended up actually getting him. Usually when you make a list of the top people, you never get them, but in Repo's case, everyone that I wanted, I got. There was no one that I wanted that I didn't get. We went after one person to play Rotti Largo and we got him. We went after one person to play Repo Man and we got him. That says a lot about it.
Were you a big Buffy fan?
DLB: I was, but more than being a Buffy fan, I was a fan of Once More With Feeling, the musical episode. He's so incredible in that episode. I knew he could sing. He had an album called Music for Elevators, but I needed someone that could play a very attractive man - he needed to be able to play a sex symbol and at the same time a monster. I think he does it well. He's a father in one scene and a monster in the next scene.
Was Paul Sorvino a hard sell on this style of project?
DLB: Paul Sorvino is an amazing actor, and he was an easy choice to cast, because he is a classically trained opera singer. No bullshit there, that's what he does. He happens to be cast in movies where he plays mob bosses and gangsters and hitmen, but his true calling is an opera singer. He was an easy person to get involved in the movie. I had long conversations with Paul about the style of the movie, though. This was not a traditional opera. This was a 21st Century opera. That was very interesting, to take an old school actor and throw him into a very up-to-date modern hipster music video kind of mentality. It was a challenge, but he embraced it. Paul loved the idea that he'd be able to sing in a movie. That's his big dream. Every actor has goals or dreams for their career, and Paul's was to being a musical where it showcased his singing. Getting him in a musical was not hard at all. I don't think Paul was used to our style of filmmaking, because it was very Ôrun and gun it'. This was a very independent movie. We had less money than we did on any of the Saw movies, and they were independent movies. So that was tricky, only because we had no time. To put it in perspective, a normal musical has two to three days to complete a song, and we were doing two to three songs a day. That was horrific. That was enough to drive some people insane.
The JOAN JETT cameo seems perfect.
DLB: It was all about female power. Originally, we were going to go with Slash or someone else iconic, that spelled out rebellion, and then we thought JOAN JETT was perfect. We really lucked out with JOAN JETT. That's become one of the crowd's favorite scenes in the movie, and that was the one scene everyone told me I had to cut, and I refused to cut it, and I'm glad I didn't.
Is there anything you did have to cut that you regret?
DLB: Yeah, a lot. We probably cut 30, 35 minutes, numerous songs. That being said, is it a better movie? Yeah, it's a better movie because we cut it, but that doesn't make it any easier to cut. Maybe at some point in the next couple years, hopefully I can do another cut of the movie, like how Ridley Scott or whoever always puts 17 versions of his movies out. There are 15 different copies of Brazil out there. For a movie which is a passion project, you are never really finished with the movie. You're just finished with the budget at the time. We ran out of money, and so a lot of the visual effects scenes, I had to cut. There was an entire sequence that was shot on green screen that never made it because we didn't have the budget to finish it.
Could that show up on the DVD?
DLB: If it does well enough at the box office, I'd hope they'd give me more money to finish the movie and put those scenes back in, but that's probably ten years down the road, before it becomes something where audiences would demand that kind of redo of the movie.
The comic book influences are blatantly obvious and cool and I couldn't help but think that the Repo Man's costume looked a bit like Marvel's A.I.M. agents, if you know what I'm talking about.
DLB: Yeah, I do. I collect comic books. That's actually not where it came from, but that's a cool thing you thought of. First off, Terrance Zdunich not only co-wrote the movie and starred in the movie as Graverobber, but he did all of the comics. It was done for a couple of different reasons. Number one, budgetary reasons. A lot of the story we wanted to tell, we didn't have the money to tell. What we couldn't shoot, we drew. Number two, it acted as a break from the opera itself. There's only so much people can do listening to a musical and trying to decipher all of the lyrics. The comics were a nice break. If you didn't get it the first time, we'll re-emphasize the important plot points through comic-book narrative. The movie is bigger than life and kind of comic-booky as well, so that's why we did that.
Turning to the rest of your career for a moment, would you return to the Saw franchise?
DLB: I don't know. I love the Saw franchise. It did very well by me. That being said, I don't know what would bring me back. I left the Saw franchise to expound my creativity and show that I was more than just that guy. Repo was kind of a rebellion against that. Love it or hate it, Repo is something you've never seen before. It's completely different. You can't really compare it to anything. You can't compare it to Rocky Horror Picture Show because it's not Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's really not been a movie in a while that you can compare Repo to, and that's why I made it. I wanted to do something that was wholeheartedly unique and original. Again I'm not saying you're going to like Repo, I'm just saying that it's totally different from the majority of the shit that you're seeing out there. That kind of goes against me doing another sequel or a remake. That's just putting me into that stereotype that I'm trying to break out of.
Can you tell us a little about Wichita?
DLB: Wichita is not dead. It died for four years, and now it's reared it's head again. Wichita is an extremely vicious violent horrific horrible beautiful movie that I hope we get a chance to make very soon. It's based on a true story of a horrific crime that happened in Wichita, Kansas, years ago. I want to make that movie as kind of a farewell to the torture movies. I can't really explain without you actually seeing the movie, but it's a very different take on a very, very, very, very horrific movie. I want to do it to show that you can do these types of movies in a different way than you did the Saw movies. Time will tell if I get to make the movie, but it would be something that I would love to make.
What response do you give to the people who dismiss these movies as torture porn?
DLB: They're not watching the same movie I am. It's easy to dismiss a movie because it's violent and say Ôoh, there's nothing redeeming about that movie, that movie's nothing more than torture' or whatever. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but I don't think they're watching the same movie. They're seeing what they want to see. I don't think the Saw movies can be dismissed as violent, horrible movies. There's a message in them. The majority of the critics that criticize them for being too violent are only looking at one aspect. They're not looking at the redemption aspect, or the Ôappreciate your life' aspect, or the Ôlearning to forgive' aspect. A lot of these movies are either making social messages or very personal messages, and it's sad that more people don't see that.
Are you still involved in a Scanners remake?
DLB: No, no Scanners remake. No remakes in the near future that I foresee Ð I say that and watch, tomorrow I'll be attached to some remake. The only thing that I have in the near future is promoting Repo. If there's anything I'd like to leave your readers with, it's that Repo is in desperate need of your help. If you dug it, I encourage you to spread the word, or the movie is going to die. The movie will disappear and nobody will ever see the thing in a theater. This movie is meant to be seen in a theatrical environment. We're only in a handful of theaters, and the only way this movie is going to succeed is if other people talk about it and they bring their friends to see it and their friends bring their friends. There's no money to market this movie. Anything you've seen thus far about Repo is us putting it out. We have no one behind us. We're doing everything. I encourage, I urge and I plead with everyone out there to give it a chance. If you hate it, that's great, tell everyone how bad it is. If you love it, tell everyone how great it is. Just talk about the movie. If you don't, it's going to disappear.
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