“I’ve ended up making lowbrow movies for highbrow theatres,” wrote director John Waters in 1983 about his oeuvre, friendly to art house and grindhouse alike. Now consider Bruce LaBruce, the Toronto-based filmmaker often compared to Waters, who has become a Sundance and MoMA mainstay while receiving financing and distribution from the porn industry. LaBruce’s first three features, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8 _ (1995), and Hustler White (1996) were directly inspired by the ’90s queercore movement (an offshoot of punk), and their low-budget resources lent a documentary-style intimacy to their depictions of gay life on the fringe. While these films were sexually explicit, it wasn’t until 1999 that LaBruce received actual porn industry funds for Skin Gang. Part earnest gay porn and part gay porn parody, Skin Gang received both mainstream and pornographic distribution. A porn company also co-financed his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich, but the formally-complex experiment was much more a venue for radical politics than bump ’n’ grind eroticism.
LaBruce’s 2008 film Otto; or, Up with Dead People, about a gay zombie (or at least an alienated young guy who thinks he’s a zombie) in Berlin who stars in a left-wing underground movie, was his most polished and least sexually-explicit film to date. Those expecting a John-Waters-directing-Hairspray-style transition from the underground to the mainstream, however, may be caught off guard by his upcoming L.A. Zombie, to be released sometime in 2010—a scruffier undead film with a much lower budget and a lot more zombie lovin’.
The Varsity: You’re at the point in your career where there are starting to be retrospectives and academic writings on your work, but in your book The Reluctant Pornographer (1997) you spend a lot of the first third talking about your conflicts with the gay establishment. It seems to me that in the intervening years, you’ve become…respectable?
Bruce LaBruce: After L.A. Zombie there will be no chance of that. It’s a film I’ll be roundly ridiculed for, because it really seems like a step backwards. People always have an expectation of me to work in bigger budgets, to work with name actors, and Otto was by far my largest budget that I’ve worked with, and so I’m sure a lot of people are just going to say that this is a step backwards—“He’s going back to porn, he’s just doing the same thing over and over again”—when in fact it was just a throwaway project. I just wanted to shoot something last summer instead of just sitting around, and I shot it in a week. But it’s going in the absolute wrong direction. It’s anti-narrative, there’s no plot — I got it financed on the basis of a three-page outline, there wasn’t even a script. So I don’t think at this point I’m ready to sell out, and I’ll probably get crucified for it.
TV: Do you think people want to peg you into a convenient box: either the porn box or the art box?
BLB: In a way, but I think it’s this expectation in a capitalist society that you go on this particular narrative arc, which is you start out making these modest-budgeted films, you get a reputation, you show your films at Sundance, and then you mature and leave your silly ideals behind and start making serious, narrative films with bankable name actors. People will say I just haven’t grown up, and they’ll say it’s so boring and tedious to just go on making the same films. Well, I mean, most directors just make the same film over and over again. Robert Altman considered that he only made one big film. You just keep on making the same work, and at certain points, culture shifts, and occasionally it intersects with where you are and you become fashionable.
TV: In Otto the zombies are used as a symbol of conformity in Bush America, but they’re also a homophobe’s nightmare version of the gay community, particularly this idea that gays recruit members of their community.
BLB: And AIDS, too. In the original script of Otto there was a lot of material that I ended up having to cut out because it was way too wordy, but Medea [the leftist film director character] goes on and on about all these conspiracy theories about how AIDS might actually have been developed by the government to weed out its “undesirable” minorities, and also different viral conspiracies having to do with chemical and biological warfare.
TV: Does L.A. Zombie go after similar targets?
BLB: Yeah, L.A. Zombie’s kind of like a sequel or companion piece to Otto, but it’s way more pornographic. And it’s more about the homeless issue, which is another consequence of Bush-era economics, but it’s not as overt about it. It’s really just documenting the homeless situation in L.A. in a porn movie, which are two things that just totally do not go together. The basic plot is it’s about a schizophrenic homeless person who thinks he’s an alien zombie, who goes around and finds dead bodies and fucks them back to life.
TV: That’s a high-concept.
BLB: [Laughs] And he doesn’t fuck them into zombies. They actually come back to life as people.
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TV: A lot of the writing about you concentrates on a transition between the early queercore films and the later, more quasi-pornographic work. But would you agree that your later films are also more overtly political?
BLB: No, because my first feature-length film, No Skin Off My Ass, had very overt political content. The sister character in that film is obsessed with the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and she’s playing this Angela Davis record, which is a very pointed political diatribe about the black movement. And with the lesbian sister it’s obviously drawing parallels between the black movement and the gay movement. And in a way, Raspberry Reich kind of came out of that scene.
TV: I suppose it would be wrong to say the earlier films are apolitical, but they’re perhaps not as in-conversation with contemporary politics as the Bush-era ones.
BLB: It’s true that Raspberry Reich and Otto have, let’s say, a broader critique that goes outside the gay body politic. So that’s probably fair. Part of it, I’d say, is the sheer perversity of juxtaposing pornography and politics, because they’re two things that people wouldn’t expect to see together. I’m always trying to do things that are counterintuitive in that way. So it’s almost a perverse, sadistic thing to do to an audience: make them think about complex political ideas at the same time as being turned on sexually.
TV: Of course, pornography is a political issue.
BLB: Absolutely, and I always quote Godard’s statement, “Sex is political.” And not in a simplistic way—I mean, in a Wilhelm Reichian way. Like Gudrun [the lead character] in Raspberry Reich says, “I don’t care about all the wars raging around the world, I care about my orgasm.” She actually believes that sexual liberation has to be one of the cornerstones of revolutionary change.
TV: A lot of critics—and I’ll include myself here—are very hesitant to admit that a movie might sexually stimulate them. We tend to write about movies that contain erotic elements as if we are somehow above having erotic feelings, and approach them in a distant, intellectual way. Do you think people feel somehow threatened when pornographic and mainstream films become fluid?
BLB: It’s a very select group of people who would actually come out and say that’s why they like my films, because they engage them intellectually and sexually at the same time. That’s a minority. Most people get really angry when I sort of interfere with the porn. Like, they consider that I’m an interloper who’s spoiling their fun.
TV: I stumbled onto this weird online discussion about The Raspberry Reich where people were talking about the opening sex scene and saying things like, “This great, hot sex scene is ruined because they keep superimposing stuff over.” It was funny, people venting about how your style got in the way of their masturbation.
BLB: Right, right, which is the whole point. It’s the idea of distracting people with the camera, and making people super-conscious of the camera, and bad or erratic technique, which can be conscious or unconscious: is it out of focus on purpose, or because the director needs a new prescription for his contact lenses? But the point is, a lot of people — I call them the porn purists — don’t like the film to be self-conscious in the presentation, to draw attention to the mechanics behind it. And they think it’s “pretentious,” that’s the word they use.
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TV: I get the sense from reading your shooting diary on the L.A. Zombie website that it was an arduous production.
BLB: Ugh! Terrible! In fact, I had to tone it way, way down in the shooting diary because I couldn’t talk about a certain individual on the shoot who made it absolute hell. But it was a seven-day shoot, and that’s the only reason we were able to get through it, because if it went longer than that, it would have collapsed, or people would have just got fed up and given up on it. It was partly budgetary restraints, but it was mostly a particular individual I can’t name who had serious drug problems. And also, for the resources we had, it was actually a very ambitious project. We shot all over L.A., largely without permits—the permit system in L.A. has become so convoluted and bizarre. So it was hell, but I guess I had fun maybe three days out of seven.
Also, I was very naive thinking I could shoot this very effects-heavy production and porn on top of it, because porn takes a long time to shoot, and it’s very finicky in terms of producing an atmosphere that is conducive to sex, and has chemistry between the lead actors and whatnot. And we did pull it off, but just barely.
TV: I keep hearing that it’s hard to get a small-budget, independent film off the ground in this economy. Are you feeling that?
BLB: Well, I was lucky with Otto because I got it financed and shot before the economic collapse. So it was partly funded by the generous contributions of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, but a lot through the arts community, which at the time was in this bubble with a lot of disposable cash. If I had waited even six months I couldn’t have gotten Otto made. Then I made L.A. Zombie because I wanted to keep shooting and keep in practice, so I think that’s the trick: to be willing to make a film for half a million dollars, and then make one for $60,000 or one for $10,000.
I just did a theatre project in Berlin and part of it was video, and I used this tiny little Japanese toy camera, this plastic camera that you can buy at Urban Outfitters for a hundred and seventy bucks. And now they’ve just put out a version with sound, and it has a plastic lens, and it’s a toy … and I’m intrigued with the idea of shooting an actual feature with it. You just keep on working within the limitations of what you’re presented with.
TV: Is it easier to get films financed now on the strength of your name and reputation?
BLB: In some ways yes, of course, but it’s not like people are throwing millions of dollars at me. I think that will happen, because my confidence as a filmmaker has grown, whereas 10 years ago I probably wasn’t ready to make multimillion-dollar films. I am now. But making a film is like having sex: the foreplay is really important and really intense, and you have to really, really get into it and get motivated and stimulated, and you have to have this drive to get a film made. And in many ways the hardest part is just getting to that first day of principal photography. You have to have strong motivation to get to that.
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TV: L.A. Zombie is partly financed by a porn company, right?
BLB: Yeah, two.
TV: How do you pitch them your movies? Raspberry Reich was also partly financed by a porn company, but it certainly doesn’t have the porn aesthetic.
BLB: Well, it’s all Jürgen Brüning, who has been financing my films since No Skin Off My Ass and who actually started a porn company that became quite famous, Cazzo Film. He’s a co-founder of that company, and it was really the first porn company in Berlin. He founded that partly because he had sort of gained a reputation from producing my films, which is one of the reasons I got into making more industry porn, because my producer went in that direction and I followed. …If you actually see penetration, that’s a sign that you’ve entered into pornographic territory.
TV: I didn’t expect you to draw the line so sharply.
BLB: I call it “The Cornhole Line.”
TV: I think of your films as blurring that line. The first half hour of Skin Gang basically looks like a gay porn film, but then it gets into darker territory.
BLB: Which one did you see? [Note: the 88-minute film was also released in 67-minute soft-core version re-titled Skin Flick]
TV: I saw the soft-core version.
BLB: The reason that project was, for me, an interesting failure was that the soft-core version looks too much like an emasculated porn film. It just cuts out most of the penetration. So it looks like porn, and my idea was to shoot the video parts and make them look like actual porn, but that aesthetic somehow doesn’t work without the penetration.
TV: I found it rather easy to fill in the blanks…
BLB: Well, you should see the hard-core version. It’s very super hard-core.
TV: Do you tailor your films to the porn market?
BLB: It’s more about practicality. That’s where the money is, that’s where I have the most freedom in a way, and also I really believe in some ways that the gay movement has become so arch-conservative in the last 10 years that it’s one of the last refuges of radical gay expression.
TV: I tend to associate the gay community with liberal politics. Could you explain “arch-conservative”?
BLB: Well, for me, when a movement starts to become fixated on becoming accepted by the two most conservative institutions in America—marriage and the military—you can pretty much safely say it’s become a conservative movement. It’s not only that they want equal rights: they are ideologically becoming conservative in terms of promoting monogamy and becoming complicit with the ideals of a militarized society. So the idea that gays are somehow automatically associated with left-wing politics is wrong. When I first came to Toronto, the free gay paper was called The Body Politic, and it was a Marxist-feminist magazine, and they wrote really dense political theory in this bar rag. Things have changed.
TV: Has the movement gone more in the direction of being politically correct?
BLB: I don’t think it’s political correctness as much as it’s become assimilated into the mainstream, and in order to do that they feel like they have to disassociate themselves from their more extreme elements. So they are totally shying away from the extremes of leather culture, which used to be at the forefront of the gay movement and is now really vestigial. Or the transsexual movement, [which] is tolerated if people transition and become well-behaved, sexually conventional people.
TV: Your films are definitely confrontational towards this attitude. Would you say that “provocateur” is a fair label?
BLB: Uh … well, it’s better than “aging enfant terrible,” which they’re calling me now! But yeah, provocateur is fine. I think I’m more of a polemicist.
