Berks Film Fest 2008: Bruce LaBruce Interview

By Patty Mahlon
Reading Eagle Internet Services

Members of the film festival selection committee describe "Otto; or Up With Dead People" as "The 'Citizen Kane' of gay zombie movies," and there's really no better way to sum up the film. Written and directed by Toronto-based writer/filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, "Otto" is a little bit (early) John Waters, a little bit Warhol, and lots of bits of other unique independent films.

I caught up with Bruce LaBruce by telephone last week, and he was kind enough to let me pick (not eat) his brain about his gay zombie tour de force.

"Otto; or Up with Dead People" is intended for mature audiences only, and plays at the R/C Theaters Reading Movies 11 & IMAX Thursday Oct. 2 at 11 pm as part of the Berks Movie Madness Film Festival. Admission is $7.

Patty Mahlon: I went into “Otto” expecting a typical underground B-movie, but I was pleasantly surprised to see many different influences. I think the most obvious influences were Warhol and Waters, but I also saw some Todd Haynes,“An Andalusian Dog,” and Kurt Kren, among many others. Given your impressive knowledge of film, why did you choose to make a zombie B-movie?

Bruce LaBruce: I was partly influenced by three films in particular that are classic American B-movies. Curtis Harrington’s “Night Tide” with Dennis Hopper, which is about a mermaid. Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls,” and George Romero’s “Martin,” which is about a vampire. They’re more heartfelt, whimsical horror films. Each of those films is really about people’s perceptions of the myths of monsters. You don’t know if the main characters are really monsters, or if they’re just perceived as outsiders. Everything’s ambiguous. That’s what I wanted to bring to the zombie genre.

Also, I’m really tired of seeing zombies treated like worthless homeless people that you can just hit over the head with a shovel. It started bugging me that the “new’ monster is presented without any compassion or sympathy or political context.

PM: That sort of goes back to the old Famous Monsters of Filmland idea, where the monsters were repackaged as heroes instead of bad guys...

Bruce LaBruce: Yeah. I like monsters that are either heroes, or characters you can identify with. Otto is like Frankenstein’s monster, who’s a very sympathetic character even though he ends up killing a child.

PM: Is Otto your favorite character in the film?

Bruce LaBruce: I love Medea, too. Some people find her kind of obnoxious. I guess Otto is sort of a representation of me when I was a kid and was feeling that sort of alienation and fear from being gay in a city when you’re first coming out. I found myself in situations like Otto finds himself… with nasty people threatening you and trying to beat you up because you’re gay or different.

I really identify with all that, but Medea is more like me right now. She’s this underground filmmaker who pontificates a lot about political things and is very passionate about filmmaking. So I sort of relate to both.

PM: I found myself enjoying Medea’s films within Otto. There’s one film within the film that’s supposed to be laughably pretentious, but it kind of reminded me of a Jodorowsky movie.

Bruce LaBruce: It was a lot of fun making all those films within “Otto.” Medea Yarn is actually an anagram for Maya Deren, the director who made all those classic experimental black-and-white films that really became the template for the avant-garde film. So Medea is sort of my affectionate tribute to Maya Deren.

PM: How did you end up filming “Otto” in Germany?

Bruce LaBruce: My last two films were shot in Berlin. It’s sort of by happenstance, because my producer for all six of my feature films is based in Berlin. He was the visiting film and studio curator at the Hallways Art Gallery and Museum in Buffalo in the late ’80s. He came to Toronto to scout for new work to show, and he saw some of my experimental short films. And then he started producing me. So I’ve had this connection with Berlin ever since then. I spend a lot of time there, and just last year I directed my first theatre piece. So I have a very strong connection to that city, and the city sort of has a gothic horror feel to it that I thought would be the perfect backdrop to “Otto.”

PM: How did you cast the role of Otto?

Bruce LaBruce: That was sort of interesting, because I found him on MySpace. I have a pretty popular MySpace page, and I get a lot of kids in their early 20s who like my work. So I was going through my contacts looking for a very specific physical type, because I wanted the character to look like a late teen, and I knew I wanted him to read as a vulnerable kid who’s putting up barriers to the intimidating world around him. So I had to find someone who was very young and delicate looking who’d still look like a teenager even with makeup that would age him. I found Jey had the fragile quality I wanted. He’s from Brussels. He’s also an art student and he’s interested in the whole filmmaking process.

PM: This might be a no-brainer question: were the roadkill and raw meat eating scenes real?

Bruce LaBruce: (laughs) There are vegans who are very upset with me over those scenes!

We went to a farmers’ market and bought a hare or a rabbit, which is eaten quite commonly in Germany. So yeah, it was a real rabbit, but we cleaned it and filled it with raw tuna and strawberry syrup. I argue with the vegans that it’s no different than seeing a turkey dressed for a Thanksgiving dinner scene in a movie.

I was born on a farm, and my father was a hunter and a trapper, so I was around a lot of animal killings as a kid. Three of my siblings are vegetarians, but I’m not.

PM: So the scene where Otto is chomping on raw chicken... I take it that was really raw chicken?

Bruce LaBruce: Yeah. One of the nice things about shooting in Berlin is that we had access to all these great locations. It was an actual meat plant and they allowed us to shoot in there. We had to sterilize ourselves and wear white suits. The plant employees were working the whole time we shot, so it was almost like shooting a documentary.

PM: The scene where Otto is standing on top of the pile of trash: was that filmed at some kind of recycling center? It looks amazing.

Bruce LaBruce: When I was writing the film, that scene was more like an American garbage dump where you’d see some giant piles of trash with seagulls flying over. But when we looked for locations like that in Germany, we couldn’t find anything because they ship their trash out to – actually, I don’t know where they ship it to – but they ship it outside the city. So the best we could find was that paper recycling site. The funny thing is: I’ve found out that since we shot, that site is no longer there.

PM: On a different note, I thought the sound design of “Otto” was impressive...

Bruce LaBruce: Jörn Hartmann is my sound designer. Sound is really important to me in my films. Again, I found a lot of people on MySpace. I sort of sent out word that I was looking for some melancholy sounds, and I received hundreds upon hundreds of submissions. I ended up with 23 hours of material, and I think in the final film we use like 76 different tracks. Since everyone was donating their material for free, I tried to give credit to as much of it as I could. And I found this sort of avant-garde, experimental subgenre of music or noise that I didn’t really know too much about. Some of it is sort of industrial, some of it is goth. And within each track there was a lot of experimentation, but then my editor and I put our own distortion over everything. We manipulated the sound and overlaid it, or ran it backwards. We wanted to have this kind of weird, disturbing soundtrack going on in Otto’s head , because he could be just a screwed up kid with psychological problems, and we wanted to demonstrate that through sound.

PM: I liked that “Otto” was open-ended, and I wasn’t sure if he was really a zombie, or was just a heartbroken emo kid

Bruce LaBruce: About halfway through shooting, my production manager took me aside and said, “I don’t think a real zombie would act that way.” And I said, “First of all, what’s a real zombie?” And secondly, “He’s not a zombie!” My production manager was totally shocked that I said that. But I don’t commit one way or the other. I left it open to interpretation. And you know, I loved the original version of “Donnie Darko” where you don’t know whether the time travel wormhole thing is happening literally, or if it’s a representation of a schizophrenic kid.

PM: Yeah, I thought the director’s cut of “Donnie Darko” kind of ruined the mystery I liked so much in the original.

Bruce LaBruce: I really didn’t like the director’s cut at all.

PM: So anyway, “Otto” screened at Sundance and has screened at lots of other festivals. How has it been received so far?

Bruce LaBruce: You know, sometimes I think audiences like “Otto” better than critics, though it got really good reviews when it was released in Berlin. I’ve had the opportunity to go with it to Istanbul and Seoul, Korea. It’s pretty interesting that it plays pretty much the same everywhere I show it, and I’ve been pretty happy that it’s drawing diverse audiences. Not just a gay crowd or a male crowd. It’s always pretty mixed. Younger and older crowds see it. Men and women see it. It seems to play universally in some ways.

PM: Now that you have a zombie film under your belt, what’s next? Would you consider doing another genre film?

Bruce LaBruce: I don’t think it will be my next project, but at some point I’d like to do a woman’s melodrama. I’d love to actually make a real or more of a classic horror film that’s maybe not so much about filmmaking, but try to make something really scary. Because I love really scary movies like the original “Halloween” or Polanski’s “Repulsion” or “Rosemary’s Baby.”

PM: Well, “Otto” is the first film I’ve seen of yours, and I really enjoyed it, so I hope you return to horror at some point. Thanks so much for talking to me.

Bruce LaBruce: Thank you. And thanks for comparing “Otto" to John Waters and Warhol. Both are influences on my work, and it’s nice to be compared to them.

<< Return to news page