InkyWinks: For Dawn Of An Evil Millennium, a lot of the crazy head explosions and blood-washes happen off-screen, i.e. you never see the heads or the bodies actually explode, which in my eyes is a huge part of the style of the film. Was this a conscious choice, or more because of budgetary restrictions?
DP: Definitely budgetary restrictions. I can remember throwing water balloons filled with red food coloring against white walls. I was experimenting a lot with pixelation (single frame photography with frame blurs) and in-camera speed ramping then as well. Of course if the budget was there I'd have full bodies exploding
2. InkyWinks: A lot of your films seem to have general inspiration from cult horror classics (Evil Dead and Scanners for Millennium, 70s Satansploitation for The Early 70s Horror Movie Trailer, ect.) but take wildly different directions with the cinematography, script, dialogue, and effects. What/who are your inspirations on the technical side of things? Do you have sources for the kind of crazy camerawork and exaggerated characters you conjure up, or are these just things particular to yourself that come out in your filmmaking?
DP: With the The early 70s Horror Trailer that was certainly a precursor to Reflections of Evil. The dreamy, haunting aesthetic which came out of late 60s / early 70s film & TV. It's a very particular tone unlike any other era. I wouldn't say it necessarily had specifically to do with "Satansploitation", though that was certainly en vogue at the time. As was anything occult, witchcraft, etc. Satan and the devil which are all symbols of fear. The dark corners of the unknown and fear is always illusion. Locations and Atmosphere are merely the giant soundstage of Earth (either natural or artificial) where these illusions can be captured. As I recall with The Early 70s Horror Trailer (1999) I was merely trying to make a haunting music video set to Jerry Goldsmith's The Mephisto Waltz filled with all those archetype images from the era. Dawn of an Evil Millennium (1988) was a blend of different things that started as a chase film. In fact it was two or three experimental short films fused together.
3. What’s your usual process when writing and directing? DP: It starts with inspiration for an idea, an idea that hopefully holds up over time. Inspiration which isn't always there by the way, in fact rarely is because as time goes by and more and more ideas are explored. As more ideas are exhausted and carbon copied to death they feel less interesting and worthy to persue. I'm not sure they were worthy to explore 20 years ago, and certainly at this stage in what we call "time" (dimensional evolvement of experience) I'm not sure ANYTHING is "worthy" enough to explore. So it's an odd predicament. Life is still continuing, we're all still waking up, we're still here, so people need to keep doing SOMETHING. We have to do SOMETHING, right? There is a lot of wasteful "spinning of wheels" happening in my opinion, mostly from younger generations who just need to do it and haven't reached that ultra jaded stage of their life. I think the boundless energy of innocence and naive ambition meant more at one time. That energy had a purpose to serve.
So much of the world (and what's left of what you might barely still call the "film industry") is in a kind of extremely delusional state of denial of what really is "worthy and interesting" enough to explore. Delusion, denial and cognitive dissonance is really how one could sum up this particular phase of the 21st century. Because for the most part (to me) it ALL feels unnecessary, uninspired, unimaginative and exhausted. Even the occasional minor exceptions. Which are a bit of a miracle in way, yet few see that miracle. You can apply the same 'inverted reality' logic to many things now. It's all subjective. I don't know how to justify it. I don't know what kind of "future" (if any) is left. At least for me. If the miracle I see is not shared by many others, how can the circumstances ever manifest to create that miracle?
What I'm saying is the kind of films I make just don't have a large enough audience and never will. They never have and never will. As the Audrey Hepburn character in Spielberg's "Always" said "you've had your life for better or for worse." But at the same time I'm a firm believer that audiences don't KNOW what they're interested in or want. That has to be manipulated through marketing, hype, buzz and curiosity, and LACK OF CHOICE, regardless of how many people "love" or "hate" it, which means NOTHING. You could release an experimental film with nothing but black leader or a two hour shot of a white wall with a hand in front of it and get it to be the next profitable sensation for people to debate with the right marketing and hype or lack of choice.
This is the art of reality manipulation and the power of money. But then you have these delusional maniacs like the director of the Birdemic franchise who become a big sensation just based on their delusional drive that tapped into some kind of camp novelty which I'll never understand. I mean for christ sake we had a ridiculous delusional narcissist become president of the USA, which isn't to say most people in positions of power and politics aren't either the worst kind of humans imaginable, profiteers, delusional narcissists, comatose zombies kept alive by formaldehyde or clueless lackeys following other clueless lackeys. I don't want to give the wrong impression, I'm definitely no "leftist" or "democrat" or right winger or middle winger or upper winger or whatever stupid label you want to put on it. Or one of those idiots who do nothing but rail about how horrible Trump is, he is an incarnation of a reality YOU created and a label reality YOU fall for. As is any other PR Puppet on the world's stage. The only party should be the party of common sense and intuition, which many seem to have a problem with.
4. How do you achieve the surreal effects typically associated with your filmography? Any special rigs or ‘secret sauce’ techniques you swear by while directing? (Your secrets are safe with me; I won’t tell anyone)
DP: A lot of it is shaped by budget and what I have to work with. One thing I will say is I have this improv approach to storytelling, too much so I think. Where I build entire scenes on after-thoughts and inserts. So I may go out and spontaneously shoot some images or scenes for a short with either NO story or barely one to work with. Then either adapt, re-shape, expand or add things I didn't think of in advance. A lot of filmmakers do this and of course ones like Altman and Cassavetes embrace it, but in their case they still had a solid script, good cast and decent enough budget to work with
5. What got you started as a filmmaker/what made you want to get into the business of directing films? Were there any movies you saw before you were a filmmaker that immediately made you want to direct your own? DP: Of course many, too many to list and they changed, as the years went by. In the early days (late 70s / early 80s) as a kid it was mostly the American mainstream films that kindled that inspiration. Early Spielberg, John Landis, Hitchcock, Richard Donner, John Carpenter, George Miller, William Friedkin, Ralph Bakshi, De Palma, so on and so on. As the years went by and mainstream films got lousier and lousier (and I got older) I discovered world & art cinema more and more. All the great Russian, Polish, German, French, Czech and Japanese films, etc I think it was early Ken Russell that really kickstarted that as THE DEVILS was such a huge influence and childhood favorite, as was Boormans ZARDOZ. These are profound films that say a lot of about life and the perception of reality.
6. How did you pull off that trippy magnified effect in Fatal Pulse after the brother-in-law catcalls the woman in the neon-dripped streets?
DP: Oh that was just simple mask distortion stuff, easy to do. I think using an older Boris displacement filter in FCP 7, scaled, masked and tracked
7. Your films usually seem to be themed around repetition, the mind, and simulacra, where certain phrases are repeated and reality is treated as a blank slate for pure surreality. Do you believe in alternate dimensions, the organization of the Illuminati, aliens, or the idea that the universe is merely a Plato’s Cave reflection of something bigger than itself and other kinds of ‘conspiratorial’ ideas, or are these things you just wanted to explore within your films?
DP: I believe in everything, except most of what we're told. I guess the simplest way to answer that is, anything that teaches fear is illusion. Anything that teaches you 'follow this way or ELSE.., do it this way or ELSE is false! There is nothing to fear in the universe and we are the creators of our own reality. There are many aspects of the countless power structures, organizations, profiteers and lackeys which monopolize control of information through each century. Much of the world and the reality we are educated with is misguided and rooted in fear, profit and pseudoscience. It's all about the SCAM. And getting in on the SCAM. We are in a very interesting phase of that experience now. It all seems painfully obvious to me, but I guess others have some difficulty with that. People will eventually figure it out
8. Favorite horror movie?
DP: Too many to list but almost anything that came out of the 70s and early 80s in particular has merits, both aesthetically, atmospherically and in guilty pleasure. Whether you're talking high brow Studio films (The Exorcist, American Werewolf in London, The Thing, etc,--which are all masterpieces) or sleazy low budget exploitation grindhouse
9. Anything new or dream projects in the works?
DP: An Untitled Ancient Ireland project which is certainly a dream project. About how Ireland is the heart of the world, the place so many are drawn to. The dielectric universe which is seeding the earth
To purchase newly released blu-rays contact DP at
spacedisco1@yahoo.com
