Waking up with a Taylor Swift song "I wore a dress, you wore dark grey t-shirt..." is only slightly less weird than last night when I woke up with a song from Rudolph "there's Always Tomorrow..." stuck in my head. Return to the world of the working tomorrow as a server at a fun... more

Waking up with a Taylor Swift song "I wore a dress, you wore dark grey t-shirt..." is only slightly less weird than last night when I woke up with a song from Rudolph "there's Always Tomorrow..." stuck in my head.

Return to the world of the working tomorrow as a server at a fun posh place, but start on the breakfast shift- oy, is 6 am going to come soon!

Family is fucked up, the ex called this morning while the current was here but we slept through it, and I am confused as always about the current... really digging him a lot these days, and the idea of getting further involved just to have him go to LA in the fall or me go to Singapore this or next year makes me not want to bother. Army boy is due in town in a few days and I haven't written him his "Dear John" letter yet, so he expects me to hang out which I can't with the boyfriend, esp since we are meeting the parents this week, ironically, it just fell so we are meeting his on Fri and mine on Sat, without planning for it to be a crazy weekend of family. So we will see.

Highlights of recent have included extensive callbacks for a film I like, so hopefully I will get THAT role, Liberty of London lingerie from Target, painting my bathroom a happy orange sherbet color, and my new cell phone... the ghetto version of a Blackberry or something, but it is fun!

Feel like I should be going to bed NOW in order to wake up in the morning. Wish me luck!

JEM

There was a peculiar notion going around my high school in the white bread and meatloaf suburb of Akron, Ohio where I grew up that said that bands like DEVO were “wimp rock.” But seeing DEVO at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood where I had the privilege of sitting in on the final rehearsal for their... more

There was a peculiar notion going around my high school in the white bread and meatloaf suburb of Akron, Ohio where I grew up that said that bands like DEVO were “wimp rock.” But seeing DEVO at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood where I had the privilege of sitting in on the final rehearsal for their current tour gave the lie to that. Even with several members of the band having passed sixty years old and the rest closing in quick, DEVO rocks like no other band on Planet Earth.

It’s easy to forget today just what a revelation DEVO’s first album was when it came out. For a lot of people in those days, seeing the band on Saturday Night Live on October 14th 1978 (Fred Willard was the host!) was akin to the previous generation seeing The Beatles live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. DEVO’s appearance probably launched a thousand bands that night. It literally gave me a reason to live. The soul-less imitation of “rock and roll” we were force fed in the Ohio suburbs in those days was pretty much Muzak with a beat. Then along came DEVO and nothing was ever the same again.

In 1980 they even cracked the mainstream with their top ten hit Whip It. But just a few short years later their career took several wrong turns, including co-writing a song with would-be Reagan-assassin John Hinkley Jr. and signing with a label they likened to the Titanic the way every band on it sank without a trace.

In 1995, though, a funny thing happened. Girl U Want, an obscure album track from the same LP that had produced Whip It was featured in the movie Tank Girl and all of a sudden the kids wanted to know about DEVO. The band once again donned their trademark yellow industrial waste clean-up suits (originally purchased at the MF Murdock Janitorial Supply Company in Akron, Ohio) and showed them what de-evolution was all about. For the past 14 years DEVO have been playing shows consisting mainly of their earliest material.

But now something new is on the horizon. Their first and third albums are at long last available in re-mastered versions and DEVO is on the road promoting these with a series of two-night stands across America playing the first LP in its entirety on the first night and the third LP the following evening. But what’s even more exciting DEVO is recording their first album of new material since 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps. The results are set to come out some time next year with an even more extensive tour.

I spoke to DEVO’s front man and fellow Akron-ite Mark Mothersbaugh about all this stuff and about getting spit on by John Lennon.

Brad Warner: I’m about ten years younger than you and I grew up near Akron in Wadsworth, Ohio…

Mark Mothersbaugh: Oh! Where are you now?

BW: Right now I’m in St. Paul. But I live in Santa Monica.

MM: You made it out at least!

BW: Seeing you guys on Saturday Night Live in 1978 was a big deal for me. I’d already started playing guitar at the time. But I thought rock music was over. I thought I was working in a dead art form. And DEVO was something that was cool again. It really meant a lot to me.

MM: Well thank you.

BW: So I’m pretty excited that you guys are doing a tour and you’re reissuing the first album and Freedom of Choice. Is that right?

MM: Affirmative. They’ll probably reissue more of the catalogue. Those are just two that are linked up with some shows we’re gonna do.

BW: That’s cool. That first album I actually wore out. It got to where the record sounded like shit because I’d played it so many times. So what’s different about this new version? Is it re-mastered?

MM: Now that it’s almost absurd to put out records, they have some little extras that come with it. I think even the regular one’s gonna be yellow vinyl and red vinyl. They’re very high quality vinyl compared to what they used to make records out of in the old days. So they’re definitely collector’s discs. And the packages are enhanced. On some of them you can get different versions of it, DVD footage and stuff like that. (NOTE: The CD reissue of the first album contains a bonus live recording of the entire album played at London’s HMV Forum in May, 2009. The CD reissue of Freedom of Choice adds the contents of the DEVO-Live EP originally released in 1980 shortly after the LP. You can also order an Ultra Devo-luxe edition from their website that contains both re-mastered CDs, plus 2 bonus DVDs and a colored vinyl single.)

BW: Sounds great. So why are you doing this now?

MM: I think for DEVO we’ve decided that we’re shocked that no one came along to take our place. So we have to go back out there and start talking about de-evolution again and remind people what’s really wrong on planet Earth. So early next year there will be new music coming out. But for the uninitiated and those who were somewhere else when it happened we’re putting out some of the essential listening material to help bring them up to speed. And we’re doing shows to accompany the releases in a number of cities around the US. We’re literally doing album one on the first night starting on side one track one of the vinyl. Almost like you’re hearing live vinyl. We’ll play through the first side of the album and we’ll flip over and play the second side of the album.

BW: Cool!

MM: And the next night we do the same thing with Freedom of Choice. If you would’ve asked me a year ago if that sounds like I good idea I would’ve said that doesn’t sound like a great live show. What changed my mind was last May we played All Tomorrow’s Parties in London at the Forum and we did album one. I just thought, we never put them in this order and that vinyl was supposed to be act one and act two of a listening experience. It doesn’t have the same build as a live show. It’s something different.

BW: Right.

MM: I thought this is gonna have weird energy to it. But it was really great! It’s not a new concept. All Tomorrow’s Parties started a long time ago. And a lot of people are doing their albums live.

BW: Yeah, I saw Brian Wilson do Pet Sounds live.

MM: There’s a lot of people doing that. Now I finally understand it. I had never thought about it. But once I heard us do it I could think of a couple dozen bands I’d love to hear do their first album live. It made me think of when DEVO played Inland Invasion a few years ago. And Billy Idol came out and he played "White Wedding" and "Rebel Yell" and everybody was going crazy. Then he said, “Now here’s my new album!” And everybody’s kinda like… the wind went out of the sails. And the audience was kind of polite. Then after about 40 minutes of that he played "Dancing With Myself" and everybody went crazy again.

BW: That’s gotta be a weird experience, though. Cuz for you or for him it’s like this is what you did 20 years ago and it must not seem that relevant. But if the audience is into it…

MM: Yeah. But there are some things about doing that that are interesting. We play every year, though. The last 13 years we’ve done festivals, a lot of European and Asian shows, Australian shows, and a lot in the US. We played Lalapalooza a few times back like ten years ago. We’d do like three weeks a year, four weeks a year at the most and then that was it.

BW: And this time you’re putting it back together.

MM: Yeah. But there is an element where you’re going, I remember the first time we put on these yellow suits. I proudly felt like I was a McDonald’s cheeseburger in that yellow plastic box. And now 30 or 35 years later, I still feel like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. But now maybe it’s like a double patty cheeseburger!

BW: I was gonna ask you about that. Cuz it kind of surprised me. I was living in Japan in 1996 and I read about you guys putting on the yellow suits again and that was the last thing I ever expected to see DEVO do. But on the other hand it sort of made sense. Cuz you guys were never anti-commercial as such. You were trying to do it your own way.

MM: In defense of that, there aren’t any other bands that come to mind that all wear plastic yellow suits unless they’re DEVO tribute bands.

BW: That’s true!

MM: Everybody wears blue jeans. That’s the uniform of the last 50 years. People wear it and they don’t even know they’re wearing a uniform, but they are. That is the uniform. I think our yellow suits, when people call ‘em a uniform it makes me smile. Because at least ours was creative. We created it ourselves as opposed to just buying into Levi’s ads. DEVO wasn’t really about being sexy. We weren’t really anti-style. But style meant something totally different to us.

BW: Sure. That’s pretty evident.

MM: We wanted to look like a machine. We wanted to look like a team. At the time it was like Kenny Rogers…

BW: I remember! God, that was awful. Talk about denim uniforms!

MM: Or it was like Elton John and his band, or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. We wanted to look like parts of a machine on stage. We were more influenced by Agit Prop from Germany and Europe in the late 20s and 30s and Bauhaus, geometric shapes and the Italian Futurists and the Russian Suprematists. We were interested in pure art. And the yellow suits always felt to us like we were art. We thought we were in some ways much less commercial than anybody else because of that.

BW: Yeah. It’s funny that it became commercial. That’s interesting to me. You did "Whip It" and all of a sudden everybody was into it. But there was always that problem of did the mass audience really get it. Or did it even matter if they got it? There was that whole thing about "Whip It" being taken as sexual innuendo and all that.

MM: It’s only fitting that that would be the song that was most remembered in the United States and had the most airwave success. But that’s OK. People by nature don’t come to art or music to get educated or to get vitamins. They’re there cuz they’re trying to escape from the world. But DEVO managed to sneak in some vitamin-enriched information as a side feature and that was kinda good. Some people probably never got it and never would get it. But there were always those kids out there who wanted to know what it means. You might’ve been a fan of some band like that when you were a kid. Where you look at the album cover for every bit of information you can get. You’re looking for every clue. The posturing in the photographs, the type that’s picked for the title of the band and the album. All that stuff is really important to you at a certain age. It was to us too. We designed our own album covers and designed our own merchandise and costumes and stage shows. We totally understood the importance of all the areas of the aesthetic. It wasn’t just about sonic music or just trying to get on the radio. It was a lot bigger.

BW: The most brilliant piece of DEVO merchandise I saw at that shop Wacko in Los Feliz, the DEVO doll with the interchangeable heads.

MM: The company that did those, I wasn’t really into the style that they were doing the artwork in. I had plenty of arguments about it. But the big blow was that they weren’t doing a set of five. Because that’s what DEVO is. It’s a set of five guys. We went around in circles. And finally I said, we’re allowed to have accessories, right? They said, yeah. So I said I want it to have five heads so pole can change the heads on the dolls. A true DEVO fan would take the hit and buy five of them.

BW: Talking about other bands, I’m sure you must know Polysics from Japan.

MM: Yeah. We played with the last time we were over there.

BW: What do you think of them? They’re so DEVO.

MM: They are! And they do some of our stuff better than we do it. It kind of freaks me out. And their fans love it. I don’t know what their fans think of DEVO. They’re so into Polysics maybe they don’t even know. And they’re a great band live.

BW: Oh yeah. I like them a lot. One other thing I wanted to ask you about because I’m from Akron. You guys did a show at the Akron Civic Theater last November in support of the Obama campaign. How was that to go back there? I know Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders was there and The Black Keys played too.

MM: That was appropriately unpleasant and also had a lot of pleasant moments too. Of course there were members of my family who were really upset that DEVO was supporting Obama, which I could not believe. I said, you guys are in the most most depressed butt fucked part of the country. Why would you be against getting rid of blood-suckers? They could not see it.

BW: I know. I never understood how Ohio people could support the very forces that were oppressing them.

MM: But it works. On the other hand we played at a place we hadn’t played in, in 30 years. It was almost 30 years to the day of the last time we played at the Akron Civic Thetare. And we wrote a lot of our early songs in less than a mile radius from that building. So it was kind of interesting to be back there. And Chrissy, who was kind of freaky on the phone before then, when we got to the show she was a total pro. It was really pleasant to work with her. And The Black Keys, I’ve always liked them. It was my wife’s idea. She said why don’t we do something for Obama. She was worried because Ohio was a swing state in the last two votes before that and had gone Republican at the last minute. So we went back there to say, come on exert your freedom of choice. And I think that that’s what won Obama the campaign, the DEVO concert.

BW: It probably was.

MM: Well if you want to be honest about it, probably not. But it was kinda nice to play there. The energy was really good. Everybody was really great. Akron-ites were excited that we were playing there again.

BW: Yeah, you were rejected there at the time and then you come back and everybody thinks it’s great.

MM: That’s fairly common. Bands have to leave their hometowns to get discovered. Especially if you’re doing original material. There was no appreciation at all for that back in the Seventies. We would lie and say we were a Top Forty band so we could get a gig. We’d be up there going, “Here’s another song by Aerosmith. It’s called… Jocko Homo!” At that point there’d be some out of work factory guy who was bummed out anyway, some Vietnam vet who came back and the factories are all closed he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do with his life. He’d slam his beer down and go, “That’s it! You callin’ me a monkey you mother fucker?” We’d once again get paid to quit, beat up, chased out or a combination of the three.

BW: That’s amazing. Cuz I’m friends with a guy I think you know, Rod Firestone from the Rubber City Rebels.

MM: Oh yeah! God, that’s a name from the past! We spent a lot of time with Rod during the formative years. He was instrumental in DEVO having a home base in Akron cuz he had a club that he opened and he allowed DEVO to play there. Then, of course, we ended up bringing Pere Ubu down there too. That was like the cultural island in an otherwise really dark, culture-less factory town.

BW: He always likes telling stories about The Crypt (a bar that originally catered to workers at the nearby Goodyear factory which Rod Firestone and his band-mate Buzz Clic transformed into Akron’s first punk rock club).

MM: It was a cool club. I was the soundman for a while for his band.

BW: Yeah, he told me you were the soundman for the Rubber City Rebels! They still play a few times a year. I met them when they did a tour of Japan. I was reading about you in David Giffels’ book about DEVO. Do you like that book, or is that a touchy subject?

MM: We weren’t part of it. We weren’t interviewed for it. It’s got a lot of misinformation in it. My feeling about that is, whatever. There was this one guy who was tangentially connected to us for a while who got involved. And it’s definitely the story of DEVO from the point of view of this guy who didn’t get to be part of the band.

BW: The story I wanted to ask you about from that book isn’t one of those stories. It’s in there about John Lennon coming up to you…

MM: That’s true.

BW: I wanted to hear that story.

MM: When we started going to New York we turned into a phenomenon. Which was pretty cool. Every time we whether it was CBGBs or Max’s Kansas City after the first show that we played it was a mob scene. It was always packed. In New York at the time it was customary for people that were celebrities to be able to call Max’s or CBGB’s or the other clubs and say, this is Mick Jagger and I’d like to bring Charlie Watts and Keith Richards to the DEVO show tonight and Bianca my wife and a couple friends. And they’d go, OK and put them on the guest list. But then they’d charge that against DEVO’s part of the take.

BW: (laughs) That’s awful!

MM: So every night we played in New York we’d have people like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, all the filmmakers, all the actresses, all the people in bands. There’d be Frank Zappa’s band or whoever was in town. Brian Eno, Robert Fripp. They all showed up on our guest list. But that just meant we’d have to beg for gas money to drive back in our Econoline that held all the equipment and held the band. We didn’t have any place to stay. We’d have to crash inside the van.

BW: That’s like a twelve-hour drive back to Akron from New York. I’ve done that.

MM: Something like that. I don’t remember how long it was back to Akron. But I remember one night we were sitting outside of Max’s and we’d just played a set. I was waiting for everybody to leave so I could go in and finish unloading our equipment and drive back to Akron. I was in the passenger seat. And I looked around and it’s John Lennon and Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople. They’re really drunk and they come out and John Lennon stuck his head in the car. And he got up about six inches from my face and started singing “Uncontrollable Urge” really loud. He obviously understood that the “yeah yeah yeah” part was a permutation of what he’d done. And the opening of the song, I don’t know if you ever paid attention, but it goes like dah-dah-duh-DAH, dah-dah-duh-DAH.

BW: Oh yeah! Like "I Want to Hold Your Hand"!

MM: Yeah. I took it right off "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Then the “yeah yeah yeahs” come in. So he knew it was a mutation of him. And he sang it for me right there with alcohol stinking spittle right into my face. I was in shock and about as high as you can get for the rest of the night. I couldn’t believe it.

BW: That’s amazing.

MM: And him and Ian, they just kinda put their arms around each other and started wobbling down the street singing the song all the way down Park Avenue or whatever street that was.

BW: I’m really looking forward to the tour and the new album. What’s the new stuff like?

MM: It sounds like DEVO, that’s for sure. Some of it sounds like it’s early, some of it sounds like the third or fourth album. And some of it is like the later stuff with more electronics. But lyrically it’s the same as what we always did. If it has anything to do with love it’s usually kind of absurdist. Other than that, without lecturing, we talk about the issue of de-evolution and things falling apart.

BW: Are you bringing the guitars back then?

MM: Yeah there’s some really good guitar stuff. One of the things I insisted Bob 1 (lead guitarist and Mark’s younger brother) do was I told him he had to play a lead that outdoes Smart Patrol. I told him this has got to be his new signature solo. So we’ll see if other people think of it that way.

BW: I’m looking forward to it and to the tour. Good luck!

MM: And thank you, SuicideGirls!

Comic book fans are eagerly awaiting the release of The Losers. It's not just the adaptation of the Vertigo series that has readers buzzing. Chris Evans, just cast as the film incarnation of Captain America, is one of the stars of The Losers. The film also has Avatar's leading lady, Zoe Saldana,... more

Comic book fans are eagerly awaiting the release of The Losers. It's not just the adaptation of the Vertigo series that has readers buzzing. Chris Evans, just cast as the film incarnation of Captain America, is one of the stars of The Losers. The film also has Avatar's leading lady, Zoe Saldana, Thor's Idris Elba and Watchmen's Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

The eclectic cast plays a gang of black ops soldiers betrayed by a corrupt government official. Clay (Morgan) leads his gang to a life under the radar in South America. It takes a stranger named Aisha (Saldana) beating the crap out of Clay to convince The Losers to come back into the game. Yeah, The Losers takes a different sort of approach to an action movie.

Who directed this in your face action epic? Was it Michael Bay or Tony Scott? No, it was actually a filmmaker named Sylvain White. White has been working steadily on feature films for over half a decade. He really got in Hollywood's face with Stomp the Yard, a college dance film that became a blockbuster in 2007. The Losers marks White's foray into the action genre, and he's attached to the potential film of Robotech if that gets a green light.

As ecclectic as White's films are, he presents even more diversity with just his voice on a telephone. Born in France, White came to Los Angeles in 1991. He speaks a slightly accented English, more noticeable in an extreme enunciation of words. We're so used to the locals slurring everything together, it's the people who pronounce everything who stand out.

SG: Did you see The Losers as your chance to put your stamp on a big budget Hollywood action movie?

SW: That's kind of how I saw it. Unfortunately and fortunately, and contrarily to what people might think, it's actually not a big budget movie. It was done for very, very little money but I say fortunately because I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish with what we had and in fact, it prompts questions like this. It looks like a big action film but in fact it was done for very little. We shot the whole movie in Puerto Rico, although it feels like it takes place all over the world. We were able to just really maximize a lot of the costs to make it feel that way. I always wanted to do action. I love action films and I grew up with the action films from the '80s like Beverly Hills Cop and Die Hard and the Lethal Weapons. I wanted to bring back the combination of the humor and the action in an explosive cocktail.

SG: I should have said a studio action movie because I'm not necessarily talking about the money.

SW: Yeah, absolutely. The great thing is that because it's based on a comic book that was pretty original, and I mean original not by its action but by its tone, it's a pretty unique combination of hardcore gritty action with this really cool sense of humor and these really interesting comedic characters. Yeah, when I heard about the project, I jumped on it. I did everything I could so that I could land it.

SG: You mention humor. Why have action movies gotten so serious?

SW: It's kind of interesting the evolution of action. I feel like action sort of found itself in the '80s and in the '90s it kind of went over the top. It was always like how big the explosion is or how grand the building exploding can be. I think they pushed the scale of the action to the max in movies like Independence Day and Pearl Harbor. You couldn't really blow anything bigger up. After that, people wanted stuff that wasn't over the top as much but much more realistic and gritty. I think that's when we've seen the latest incarnation of what the action style is, which is very well reflected in the Bourne series for example or even in the latest James Bond. But, as you pointed out, the big difference is when you go into more gritty realism, usually it's combined with a very serious, dry tone. The movies take themselves very seriously. It's for the better. I love those movies. I love the way action has evolved in that sense, but at the same time, I felt with this film, it had a unique feel to it because it potentially did something those other movies didn't which is still have the sort of hardcore gritty action but have fun with it and have fun with the characters and have a lot of humor in it.

SG: Are audiences ready for fun action movies again?

SW: I think so because I think for the last 10 years, we've seen really hardcore gritty action from stuff. All this sort of treatment of action is pretty realistic and I think people have seen it now. I think people like it but they still want to have fun watching the movie so why not combine it. I'm hoping people are ready. I'm counting on the fact people are ready for it. I think it'll be nice because it'll be a breath of fresh air.

SG: You incorporated some of the modern shaky handheld style but not in every single scene. How did you decide when to use it?

SW: Well, you know, I like the handheld feel for some things. It sometimes makes moments feel more personal and you can capture sometimes more detail. So I use it for that but I don't use it as aggressively and as much. I use it for very specific moments and specific things that I do. I also use a lot of steadicam, I use a lot of dolly track, I use crane shots. I mix it up and I did it a little bit the same on Stomp the Yard where I really try to mix the different kind of camera styles to create an overall aesthetic envelope for the movie. The handheld thing wasn't necessarily an overall decision. It was just for specific moments, to give scenes or instances a certain feel.

SG: That's an interesting distinction. Does handheld work better in smaller intimate scenes than in big action?

SW: Yeah, because sometimes if you do it during the big action, it can be kind of messy. It can be a little bit hard to follow, especially if the editing is fast. So it really is a balance. Usually when you go handheld, my opinion is when you go handheld you have to cut slower. When you go more traditional, then it allows you to cut faster. It really depends on how you want to temporize the scenes. It's a really good device. I've always used it I was in film school for tailoring moments.

SG: That's a really smart point of view, that it has to be decided in conjunction with the editing.

SW: Absolutely, which is very true for 3-D movies as well. Now I think people are figuring that out. You have to adjust the editing to the technology. It's very important because you have so much more information to process in a frame when it's in 3-D or if it's moving really fast in a handheld shot. You have to hold on it a little bit longer.

SG: How much do you think the interest in Chris Evans as Captain America will help The Losers?

SW: In the comic book world I think it's going to be very good. I think The Losers is going to really help Chris Evans get more recognized for his role in Captain America. I think it's kind of the other way around. I think people know that he's going to be the next one, mostly in the industry or in the comic book world but I think the mainstream's not necessarily fully aware of that yet. He's a terrific actor. The role he has in The Losers is so different from everything else that he's done in the sense that he's such the comedic character in the movie. He's so good at it. Categorically, the roles are different so I don't know how much it will help but I'm certainly very happy about his success, and the success of Zoe as well. When I cast her in the movie, there was no Avatar, there was no Star Trek. People didn't really know who she was yet. I had been aware of her from some of the independent films that she had done. I really pushed to get her. Of course now we're all happy about the success she's had so if it helps the movie, it can only be a good thing.

SG: Did you make sequel deals before their other films got booked?

SW: [Laughs] Well, I don't know what she did. I'm not aware of her deal but I'm really hoping that there will be a sequel. I hope the movie does well. We based the story on the first two volumes of the comics but there's a multitude of volumes so there's also room for sequels that are already kind of laid out in the comic book. I think it'd be great but you never know.

SG: Have we gotten to the point where a man can fight a woman and it really is equal?

SW: It really depends on the individuals but that certainly was something that I feel sometimes feels fake in movies. I wanted the fight in this movie to feel real and I just counterbalanced the fighting style. He's more of a boxer/slugger style and she's more like a female Bruce Lee. She's super fast and precise but her punches have lower impact. She can punch him five times while he can only punch her once. She's moves so quick, it's hard to connect. That's how I balanced the fight between them. I like it. It feels fun but it's still believable. Typically, you shoot a scene like that, I had the assistant director from the Bourne series for example, who did Wanted as well, he would tell me, "To shoot a fight like that, normally we get five days to shoot those kind of scenes." We did it in a day and a half and I'm very proud of the result.

SG: Is it also at this point you don't have to pull the punches on her? The woman can take a fair beating in an equal fight scene in 2010 without making people uncomfortable.

SW: Oh yeah, absolutely. You can show that as long as she's tough. Aisha is a tough character but Zoe is a tough girl. She really went out there, she trained so hard. She brought on actually the same stunt coordinator she worked on Avatar with, which was a very fortunate thing for us. She worked and trained so hard, so she was really badass. Speaking of SuicideGirls, we talked a lot about her look, the piercings and the tattoos and really wanting to stay true to the look of the character in the graphic novel. It's cool because you don't see that kind of character very often, especially a multi-ethnic sort of character with that sort of aesthetic. And at the same time, she's such a badass. She really holds her own against these guys. She's probably more of a warrior than any of them. I love that about her.

SG: If you end up doing Robotech next, is the technology all there to do it?

SW: Yeah, the technology is there for sure I think. You know, I'd love to do it. Its one of those projects that I've been a fan of the anime forever, since I was a kid. I think it'd make a fantastic movie. What set it apart as a cartoon was that unlike some of the other cartoons at the time like Transformers and some of the other things that were in the same vein, is that Robotech had a very strong narrative and cinematic quality. It felt more like movie or a long series than a cartoon for kids. That was because it had the Japanese sensibility in the storytelling and that felt more adult. The themes were very adult. When I was 12, I thought this would make a fantastic movie so I'd love to do it. It's a huge movie obviously planned at Warner Bros. but that's all I know. I read it. I thought it was really good but I don't know much more about the actual project.

Last month Scott Snyder ceased being an immensely talented short story writer and teacher with degrees from Brown and Columbia and instead became one of comic’s hottest writers and a new horror-fantasy icon. American Vampire #1 created by Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque has received a lot... more

Last month Scott Snyder ceased being an immensely talented short story writer and teacher with degrees from Brown and Columbia and instead became one of comic’s hottest writers and a new horror-fantasy icon. American Vampire #1 created by Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque has received a lot more press than the typical comic series, largely because of Snyder’s friend and mentor who is writing the backup story in the first five issues, Stephen King.

Snyder’s first book, the short story collection "Voodoo Heart" was an amazing batch of stories, tales about chasing blimps across the nation, guarding Niagara Falls from would-be suicides, trust fund runaways and a pilot who crashes into a wedding and runs off with the bride. The stories were fantastic and unlikely, outlandish and improbable but never impossible. Instead, quiet tales of odd characters dealing with strange circumstances that were funny, bizarre and touching. His short story “The Thirteenth Egg” was one of the best parts of the superhero anthology “Who Will Save Us Now?” and was very much the kind of fantastic horror story that comics do so well.

Snyder is also writing the just-released “Iron Man: Noir” miniseries, a pulp take on Tony Stark set in the 1930’s. The second issue of “American Vampire” goes on sale Wednesday April 21 in which the new species, the “american vampire” of the title makes its debut, and we chatted with Snyder about the series, the evolution of monsters and his long-delayed first novel.


SCOTT SNYDER: It’s sound so creepy to be like, I love this site, but I really do.

ALEX DUEBEN: Well awesome. I’m a big fan of yours. I read your book Voodoo Heart a while back and really loved it and American Vampire is really great.

SS: Thanks. We worked really hard on that. It’s definitely been like, I feel like the luckiest guy on Long Island right now. It’s been a great ride so far.

AD: In other interviews, you’ve talked about how the idea behind the series was vampires evolving. How did you come up with this concept and what are they changing into exactly?

SS: It was several years ago when, I mean there’s always a vampire glut, but there was another glut of vampire works out there. I think it was when there a sequel to Blade and Underworld. It just seemed like all of the vampires were too cool to give you the time of day, looking like they were on their way to some neo-gothic club that happens to exists in the sewer with a chandelier overhead. The leather trenchcoats and sunglasses. That aesthetic was so boring by that point. It made me nostalgic for vampires that I grew up on. My favorite vampire movies and books are things like Salem’s Lot and Lost Boys and Near Dark and the works where vampires are not so much scary because they’re exotic and romanticized but scary because they’re your loved ones come back to kill you from the dead. They’re not scary because they’re so foreign and beautiful and so on. What’s scary about Salem’s Lot to me is that penultimate scene of Danny Glick, that little boy, scratching at his brother’s window to be let in in the middle of the night. What’s scary about Lost Boys is Michael changing into a vampire in front of his brother and his brother’s worried that his own brother is going is going to kill him. Similarly in Near Dark, the girl you fall for, who seems to be your dream girl, turns out to be a serial killing vampire.

I was in a model shops getting a Doctor Who model for a friend of mine and they had a series of busts. One of them was a zombie Confederate soldier. I had been thinking about vampires and it occurred to me, why not have a vampire that walks the kinds of landscapes you enjoy writing about? Why not make a new kind of vampire that’s indigenous to this place? From there it just took off. If I’m going to make a new kind of vampire, what’s he going to be and when’s he going to appear. Wouldn’t that mean then, as a logical extension, that there had been other species before that had branched out as well. I thought about doing it as a book for a while. I worked on it as a screenplay with my best friend for a bit. When I started working in comics, I was biding my time, thinking this was the perfect format for it.

AD: Both stories, Pearl, which is by you and Skinner Sweet, which is King’s, are set in the West. Is that the specific setting for the book?

SS: It’s not. The cycle we’re working on next also takes place in the West, but the one that I’m plotting now after that takes place on the East coast. There’s one we’re thinking about that’s going to take place in Middle America. There’s an overseas one we have in mind. The west just seemed like both a mythological place and [a place] of optimism and endless sunshine. That seemed like such an inhospitable place to the vampires we’ve seen. The perfect place to begin another species that can walk in the sun and has a kind of more muscular character to it than what came before. Plus there are certain desert qualities that really characterize the American vampire.

Our editor, Mark Doyle, who’s been amazing, we went back and forth thinking maybe we should include some teaser where it shows what the American vampire looks like. I’m really excited for people to see issue #2 where the actual new species makes it’s first appearance. It’s not some incredibly radical different thing where it doesn’t look like a vampire, but there are some notable differences. It has much more desert qualities to it. Rattlesnake fangs and an unhinging jaw and so on. We’re really trying to have it be something where we make something that’s new, not just as a gimmick, but something that’s new that’s in some way allows us to really get into inter-species relations and conflict later on in the series. Each vampire species has its own set of weaknesses and strengths and that means that the European vampires have sort of are eager to find some way to kill off this new bloodline.

AD: Why did you decide to open the book with Pearl and her story?

SS: That was an editorial decision. Originally I pitched the series as starting with Skinner in the West and Vertigo essentially rejected the pitch on the idea that if it was going to start in the West, it would be too narrow of a focus and too literal. In the pitch I had included other ideas for where it was going to go. The second cycle was going to be the 1920s it was going to be Pearl so I wrote that up as a lot more elaborate pitch for them saying, I agreed with what they said and what if we started here. They immediately jumped at that. We were actually going to save Skinner’s story for later in the series.

They knew that I knew Stephen King and could I contact him and anyone else I knew to just give a line of press for when the announcement was made. I had given him the pitch to see if he could make any suggestions and he’d been really helpful about giving me a couple tips. He was really excited for me. He said you know I really love that character Skinner and when you get to him I’ll write an issue if you want. I was like, if I tell them you’re going to write an issue or two they’re going to jump at that. I don’t want it to be something you do because you feel like it’s some favor or something and he was really adamant. He liked the character and thought it would be fun.

I went back to Vertigo and told them. It was a Friday afternoon when the office is closed and I got this Monday morning call, basically, did you say Stephen King said he would write an issue? Immediately it became, how do we do that. Steve wrote him with such exuberance and made up so many interesting things about the character. The character was developed and designed and had a history, but some of the nuances and his long standing grudges Steve elaborated on and made so much richer. He brought in this whole theme about legend versus fact and history versus folklore. Issue one was the closet thing to the outline that I had set up for him. He really takes off in issue two. You start to see the epic scope of what he wants to do.

AD: When you originally proposed this, were you thinking of having a rotating series of artists like in Brian Wood’s series Northlanders?

SS: That’s exactly what the proposed format was actually. Rafael [Albuquerque] was just the first person that auditioned for the series. Editor Will Dennis, who’s been terrific, he does Northlanders and does Scalped and he suggested Rafael. Rafael sent some sketches based on my descriptions of the characters and it was just immediate, this guy understands who they are. We actually wound up using his sketches in a couple of the promos. These are sketches before he ever saw the script.

He’s in Brazil and I contacted him on instant messenger and I talk to him literally every day. We’ve become really close friends. It was his idea to the two cycles in two different looks, one in washes to give Steve’s an antiquated feel and do the Pearl one in these real hard inks to give it an art deco 20s look. Rafael will always be our artist on the big forward moving cycles. In between what we’re going to try and do is explore a little bit of the history between different vampire species and human-vampire relations. Explore why the species we’re all so familiar with from folklore and Dracula has become the dominant species and where are all the other ones are. I just feel so lucky to get to work with him.

AD: Is the plan to jump around in time with these characters and some new ones? Do you have an endgame in mind for the series?

SS: I do have an endgame, but it’s far far in the future. I know in mind how I want the series to end, but we have so many ideas to go forward and backward and sideways with it. We’re hoping to get a good long run like some of my favorite Vertigo series. In terms of the format, we are going to explore different decades and we’ll return to different decades as well to show different perspectives on things. We are absolutely going to pick up on the characters decade to decade. It’s Skinner’s blood that we’re following, essentially. He’ll pop up in fun and surprising ways, sometimes featured centrally as an antagonist or protagonist and other times he’ll make cameos. Pearl the same. I can promise that we’re following both the bloodline and the characters that are established in this cycle so they won’t disappear after this at all.

AD: Has working at Vertigo and Marvel come about because of the short story “The Thirteenth Egg” that you wrote for the superhero anthology, Who Can Save Us Now?

SS: In terms of working in comics, all of it did. I think all the time, what if I hadn’t written that story? It’s crazy. It caught the eye of Mark [Doyle] and my editor at Marvel, Jeanine [Schaefer]. The chance to pitch for the Marvel Timely series two years ago. Then I got Iron Man: Noir, which they’re waiting to release so it coincides with the movie, and Nation X. That led to a chance to pitch a creator owned thing to Vertigo.

There’s nowhere I’d be more thrilled to be than Vertigo. I get intimidated all the time by the bar that’s set. It won’t be for lack of trying if it sucks. There’s no phoning it in. I understand how fortunate I am to be able to do this at Vertigo and to be able to have my own series as a relatively green writer. And I want to know what people think. People think I’m just saying that, but I really do want to know. Comics fans are so astute and so generous and so vicious. I want to know. I want it to be a series that people feel a part of and respond to. I’ve been on that side as a fanboy for a long time so I want people to feel like they have access to the story as well.

AD: Like I said at the beginning, I really loved your first book Voodoo Heart and I know you’re working on a novel, but I keep seeing the release date change. I don’t know how much you want to say about it or when we can expect it.

SS: I’m really not going to finish my next draft of it until at least the summer. I’m hoping 2011, but it’s a ways away. It’s actually about somebody who works in comics. It’s about a guy who’s struggling with his son who’s in an accident and he is caught in this place, psychologically, where he’s having a lot of trouble reconciling the limitations of medical science and the more fantastic possibilities that he writes about everyday. It’s called The Goodbye Suit. I want to let it sit until the summer and look it over and really rewrite it and tinker with it and then hopefully have it done before the end of the year. I love it to death and it’s very personal. I’ll definitely do it but I’m just having a lot of fun with comics right now and I like to step away from it for a while so I can be more objective when I look at it again.

My plan is to get a few cycles of Vampire done. I like to finish the whole cycle at once, so I write all the issues of a cycle together. I’m finishing cycle two and I’m going to finish cycle three hopefully and really get into four by the summer and be a good full year ahead and then take a few months over the summer to really work on the novel more and come back to Vampire in the fall. That’s the hope, that I can buy some some months to work on it without having to do both, but we’ll see.

AD: A lot of the interviews have been pretty overwhelmed by talking about Stephen King, and that’s understandable, but the heart of the comic and what makes it so awesome seems to get obscured a lot of the time.

SS: If you wanted to know what it’s like to work with Stephen King, he’s the most generous guy in the world. I’ve been wracking my brain, why is he writing so much. Is he doing this as a favor to me because we’re friendly. I loved it but I don’t want to be burdening him with this, doing it because its an obligation. What you realize quickly from talking to him, when you see the intensity of his scripts, is that he acts like a hungry exuberant young writer when he likes a story. The writing is just so fun. It’s inspiring to watch because he has no reason to be that enthusiastic about it from a pragmatic standpoint. He doesn’t need to go to the mat for five issues of this thing. He does it that way because he’s a story guy, and when he gets into something he likes he lives there entirely. For a young writer, someone like me, it was incredibly inspiring to watch. To see somebody who’s so established, it doesn’t get more established, act like somebody who’s right out of the gate and getting their first job. That was great.

He’s also the most gracious guy in the world. I keep thanking him and he’s like, I should be thanking you, this is so much fun. I’m like no no no. I’m thanking you. Mark and I got him a fun gift. We got him an Elvis Day of the Dead bust. He and I are both big Elvis fans. The funny thing is, yesterday I came home from dropping my son off and I had this big package. I opened it up and it’s this big bottle of Dom Perignon from Steve. I’ve never drank Dom Perignon. “Thanks for the wild ride. Congrats. TCB. Steve.” TCB is Elvis’ personal logo which we both use. That’s Steve King. That’s who he is and I just can’t say enough good things about him as a writer, as a person, as a mentor, as a genius storyteller. I can’t throw enough love his way.

For her forthcoming release, We Are Born, the darling of downtempo, Sia Furler, hits a distinctly upbeat groove. Indeed, the six tracks we've heard so far are decidedly funky. Just don't, whatever you do, use the F-word in the singer/songwriter's presence - it's very likely to irk... more

For her forthcoming release, We Are Born, the darling of downtempo, Sia Furler, hits a distinctly upbeat groove. Indeed, the six tracks we've heard so far are decidedly funky. Just don't, whatever you do, use the F-word in the singer/songwriter's presence - it's very likely to irk her.

Having come to the attention of the KCRW-listening, latte-sipping music intelligentsia thanks to her turns with English post-trip-hop outfit Zero 7, for a while Sia was inadvertently defined by what was initially intended as a very limited, no-strings-attached guest spot with the lush lounge combo. Thanks to the success of Zero 7's debut album Simple Things (2001), and their follow up release, When It Falls (2004), and the numerous international tours that followed, Sia's personal brand became synonymous with the downtempo pigeonhole Zero 7 prominently occupied.

Seeking to capitalize on Sia's credentials in the 90 bpm & under department, record label execs understandably pressurized her to continue in a similar vein with her solo work, despite a personal preference for something a little less languid. It was therefore no surprise when Sia's evocative track "Breathe Me," became her first breakout solo song, thanks to its prominent use at the end of the final episode of Six Feet Under. Indeed the inspired TV license earned Colour The Small One, the album on which the song was originally featured, a long overdue release in the US in 2006 (the CD was released in the UK 2 years earlier). And while her next solo album, Some People Have Real Problems, helped bridge the gap between the music Sia was expected to make and the music she wanted to make, it's her latest offering, We Are Born, that has finally allowed the Australian born (but currently New York based) artist to come into her own.

SuicideGirls caught up with Sia by phone to find out how she got her groove back, and to get the 411 on her aversion to the F-word.

NP: So you've been teasing us, so far we've only heard a handful of tracks off the new album.

SF: I know, I'm sorry. It's really weird. We've been very mysterious about it. I think that's because we don't really know what we're doing. [laughs]

NP: There's an honest answer.

SF: Because we've got this tour scheduled and of course, you know, we'd had our plan to put the record out before the tour, and now we're shooting the video for the first single. The album is definitely finished. It's been finished, it's been mastered, but we've had a bit of a bidding war between a couple of labels to license this album.

NP: Oh nice.

SF: Yeah, which is awesome, but we're just finalizing all of the paperwork so I actually still haven't signed to this major record label, even though we're proceeding as if I have. They're all doing the work that they would be doing if they were my label but I think that everyone's a little bit tentative to really either send the shit out, or to make an announcement about when it's going to be released.

NP: Right.

SF: I feel that's what the label and my management are doing right now, they're just trying to fucking turn it around really. It's already been pushed from March to April [and after this interview back to June]. They want a long lead time to do all of their ass kissing, you know. It's a tricky business.

NP: I thought it might be because they were frightened to give you access to your own album in case you tweeted it out.

SF: [laughs] Well actually, I've been warned. And even before all of these interviews they're like, "Don't talk about the album. Don't tell too much about the album. Just tell 'em a little bit about it." It's like, "Why?" And they're like, "No, this is about the tour." I'm like, "Oh! OK! You sure?" I think basically, I don't really know, but I guess maybe they're trying to create some mystique, considering I'm like the dichotomy of that.

NP: Well it's a nice turn of events because I remember when I last spoke to you, you were talking about how you couldn't even get Colour The Small One released in America until Six Feet Under used the track "Breathe Me" in their final episode.

SF: Yeah. Nobody cared. Errol [Kolosine] from Astralwerks was the only person who cared. He put it out and did exactly what this new label is doing right now. He just proceeded as if we were signed, even though we were still working out all our paperwork and all of the little tiny details.

I mean [We Are Born] is pretty awesome. I know that it's my strongest commercial record yet and I think that's probably why I'm not surprised that now we have a lot of takers. Because Colour The Small One, there was no radio singles on there. I mean, I understand how the machinery works now and it's not surprising to me that this one is more appealing.

NP: And your last album, Some People Have Real Problems, was firmly in the genre of quirky...

SF: [laughs]

NP: ...In a wonderful way. But when you go to a record store, unfortunately there isn't a quirky section.

SF: [laughs] It's weird actually, 'cause my record before Colour The Small One was like R&B, it was called "urban" in England. So you'd find my first record, which was called, Healing Is Difficult, in the urban section. Then you'd find Colour The Small One in the urban section, and like my ten fans, that bothered them immensely. They wrote to me when I had like eighty members on my message board eight years ago and I knew them all by sight and by name. That was the thing that peeved them the most, that Colour The Small One was in the urban section. It's weird.

NP: This album, it's kind of funky. You've gone funky!

SF: Yeah. I mean it's hilarious that you use that word because it was kind of a running joke that nobody is allowed to use the word "funk." [laughs]

NP: Ooops!

SF: For some reason it irks me, but I'm just going to have to accept that maybe I'm funky.

NP: What's wrong with the F-word?

SF: I don't know. I guess probably it irks because when I first started out it was like the early '90s and I was in a band that we called "a jazz / hip-hop / funk fusion explosion." Like I did trip-hop fusion, like every possible genre that was cheesy at the time. I mean I do love old funk, [but] I guess I've never really been into new funk.

I think I'm scared of being new funk. I'm a big fan of The Funk Brothers and Motown and all that sort of shit, so I don't know why it irks me, that word. Maybe it was just growing up in the '90s in Australia. Australia's never really moved on. If you go to a restaurant or a cafe´, or you're in an elevator, they're still playing Rebirth Of The Cool and Galliano and all that sort of new funk, so maybe it's just that.

It's way more uptempo this whole record. There's still a few weepies on there, you know. There's some weepies for the peepies. But I wanted to make a fun record. I want to go on tour and have some fun.

A lot of these tracks I wrote like five years ago with Greg Kirsten. At the time everyone said it would be career suicide if I put out this uptempo record. Because I'd just done the Zero 7 stuff and put out Colour The Small One. They were like, "You're known as a downtempo artist and your fans will be confused." I was like, "What fans? What are you talking about?"

I wanted to put it out and I was like, "Beck can do it. Why can't I?" And they were like, "He's an established artist and you're a nobody." So I put out Some People Have Real Problems, kind of like as a band aid to those people in my life, advisors and colleagues and people that said I would be committing career suicide.

I put out that album and then "Buttons" off that one did well so I guess it gave them the feeling that it would be OK for me to make the music that I wanted to make now. It was confusing because my first record was R&B and then I got kind of pigeon-holed after the Zero 7 stuff with my downtempo vibe, so it's nice for me to be able to make the music that I've always wanted to. I think they were albums that I needed to make, but this is one that I wanted to make.

NP: So where and when was this album recorded?

SF: Last July in L.A. in Eagle Rock. I recorded it with my usual band plus Greg Kirsten on keyboards and Nick Valensi from The Strokes on guitar.

NP: Very cool.

SF: Yeah. I love it. I like listening to it. I'm excited. I've never listened to my albums after I've finished making them before, and this one I've listened to three times.

NP: Talk about a couple of the tracks that are close to your heart.

SF: Well "The Fight" is my favorite song on the whole record. The title of the album comes from the opening lyric of that song, We Are Born. I don't know why I love that song so much, but it just feels like a victory song. There's something victorious about it. I guess I'm just really attached to it for that reason.

Then "Clap Your Hands" I just think is a really fun for dancing around. It's a pretty shallow song. It's a romantic comedy movie song. Then I guess my favorite ballad on the album is "I'm In Here." I wrote that with Sam Dixon, who I wrote a bunch of the Christina Aguilera stuff with. Those are probably my favorite songs on the record. Oh yeah, "Big Girl, Little Girl." I like that one too.

NP: You mention Christina Aguilera. You've been working with her?

SF: Yeah. I have. We wrote five songs. Four of them are going on her album and one of them is in her new movie, Burlesque.

NP: Wow. How did that come about?

SF: She's totally awesome. It's a really good collaboration. Many years ago I tried to ask her if she wanted to duet with me on "Death By Chocolate" which is on Some People Have Real Problems. My manger at the time, she wrote her an email. She cc'd me on it and said, "Sia is a big fan of Christine Aguilera." She misspelled Christina's name. I remember thinking, "Well there goes that collaboration."

I never heard back from them and it didn't surprise me at all. Then maybe a year ago, David, my current manager, was like, "Well we've got a call from Christina Aguilera's management and she's interested in writing with you, and they want to set up a call." So we tried to set up a call and it took a while to get us both online at the same time. Then eventually, I think it was on the try number three, she called and I was put through about three different people. First it was David, her manager, then it was her assistant, and then it was her husband and then it was her. It was really funny. Every time I'd be like, "Christina?" Then a male voice would come on the phone. Eventually, she was like, [puts on a high voice] "Yeah!"

She just said, "I'd like to step into your world." I said, "So you don't want me to write with your co-writer, you want me to bring one of my own?" And she said, "Yeah." So I decided who I would want out of my friends to make a million dollars, and I chose Sam Dixon, who is my bass player and who I write a lot of songs with. We've been friends for seventeen years, and I thought I would like him to make a million dollars. So we went to her house and it was really easy. We wrote the four songs there and they flew us back to write the fifth song for the movie.

NP: Over how many days did that all happen?

SF: Four days, four songs.

NP: Wow. A song per day.

SF: Yeah, I like to work fast. I like to do everything fast.

NP: What was it like working with Christina?

SF: I guess I was scared, because when you're someone's songwriter you're their bitch. You're not really in charge. I'm in charge of my job and my work. I'm the leader, I'm the boss, so it was kind of exciting to go in being somebody's employee.

I really enjoyed it. I loved it so much so that that's something that I'd like to do, you know, if I decide that touring really isn't for me. Because I'm not really comfortable with the fame aspect, and I don't like touring at this stage. That's why I'm gonna live on the bus for this tour. We're trying something different. I'm taking the dogs, and we're gonna live on the bus. I don't like hotels, I don't like being in different environments all the time.

NP: So what surprised you about working with Christina?

SF: The surprising part for me was just that she was really nice. It was really easy. The surprising part for me I think is that I liked having a boss. I liked working for somebody

NP: I guess having a set period of time where you've got to come up with songs and you've got a deadline, that can be a helpful discipline

SF: Well that's the only way I work. That's how I work for myself too. We schedule a day or we schedule days, and then I have different people come in and I work with them and write songs. We do a song a day, sometimes two. I don't ever like write unless it's scheduled.

NP: So who might be some of your dream artists to partner up with?

SF: I like pop music so I would like to write for pop artists. I'd like to write for Leona Lewis and Britney Spears. A lot of the artists whose voices I love, like Lauren Hill, I'd love to write for them as well, but they write their own music. She's one of my favorite voices. And Amy Winehouse, she writes her own stuff. So there's a lot of beautiful voices that I love but I know I couldn't write for 'cause they're writers; They don't need a top line writer. So I guess that really the only place for me is in pop music because the majority of independent artists write their own stuff...I sent Nelly Furtado a bunch of songs the other day, like about a hundred. I don't know if she'll use any of those but that'd be nice.



Sia's new album, We Are Born, is scheduled for release on June 8 via Monkey Puzzle/Jive Records. Her North American tour kicks off on April 10 in Vancouver, European dates follow in May. For more info go to SiaMusic.net/.

It's going to be the busiest summer ever. I can't believe how much work I have to do; in the next two months, I will produce more work than I did all of last year combined. Requests are pouring in for more work -- pretty cool jobs too but soon I might have to say no. Currently, I am sitting... more

It's going to be the busiest summer ever. I can't believe how much work I have to do; in the next two months, I will produce more work than I did all of last year combined. Requests are pouring in for more work -- pretty cool jobs too but soon I might have to say no.

Currently, I am sitting in my bed (my office) working on some more designs while Bexi drinks beer and eats chips and mutters things like, "I have to save the world" and "I have to travel back in time" and "if I had a dick it wouldn't go up" as she stares at the empty lot across the street.



If you like pavement, you'll probably want to pay attention to this blog over the next few weeks. There will be a lot of pavement posters.

You can buy these two now:
http://www.secretserpentsstore.com/servlet/the-551/pavement-coachella-2010-lil/Detail
http://www.secretserpentsstore.com/servlet/the-550/pavement-pomona-2010-lil/Detail

When I first saw photos of David Bruehl's work, I was amazed that I had never come across his work before. Tattooing since August 2001, mostly in Florida, it's hard to believe he hasn't received more widespread attention. Before tattooing, he attended the Savannah College of Art and Design... more

When I first saw photos of David Bruehl's work, I was amazed that I had never come across his work before. Tattooing since August 2001, mostly in Florida, it's hard to believe he hasn't received more widespread attention. Before tattooing, he attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in the Illustration department. Taking a bold, graphic approach to tattooing has really shaped his work as being able to stand the test of time without sacrificing the opportunity to add in many finer details. Like an oasis of talent tucked away in Norman, OK I can only hope his work and approach to tattooing not just as an art form but a profession gains widespread attention.



TattooSnob: Let's get the most generic question out of the way. Tell us a little about yourself!
David Bruehl: My name is David. I'm an artist. I tattoo because I love the synergy in working with another person to create pieces of art that they will wear forever. People stretch me, so to speak. I have two sons, Ezekiel and Abraham. A lot of my time off is spent with them. I also paint, do yoga, and various athletic things, and ride bicycles.

TS: Artists often refer to a time period when it all came together, could you tell us a bit about when that was for you?
DB: I can see several steps when I look back. One was when I saw Grime's work when I was first learning to tattoo, which opened my eyes to what could be approached in tattooing. Also, after around 2 1/2 years into tattooing, I moved to Tampa and started getting to do some larger custom pieces on friends, which was a big step. Every time I've gotten critiques from artists I respect my work has jumped almost immediately. Perhaps the most recent has been moving to Oklahoma and being away from so much of the "hype" of tattooing. I've withdrawn from much of any viewing of others' work and magazines and such. I'm trusting non-tattoo reference and my own instincts more than anything right now.




TS: Often the downside of being particularly skilled at any "type" of tattooing is winding up pigeonholed. Are there any types of tattoos you wish you got to do more of?
DB: I wish to work with more of my own imagery. Free reign, which will lead to more "out there" stuff. I don't think very much of what's been swirling in the back of my mind has been out there yet, minus a couple pieces, and I've only recently started exploring it in my painting work.

TS: Playing off that whole "pigeonholed" thing up there, I really like all the bird tattoos I've seen in your portfolio. Do you have any specific interest in ornithology or are they just something you found yourself tattooing frequently?
DB: When it comes to the bird thing, it originated in me incorporating them into traditional compositions and such. The imagery of a perching bird resonated with me, usually one of loneliness and unrealized potential. I think many people in modern society feel tinges of that. It was something I included in tattoos if I had some freedom. (Birds in flight, however resonate differently with me.) From there, once something relatively unique is put out into the public eye, people tend to jump on it, so it's a common request. I prefer when I get to make up a bird to work with a greater scheme rather than just tattooing some exact type of bird and that being the only image in the piece, almost like a portrait.

TS: It's obvious your work is in demand--what's the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
DB: Email (davidbruehl@gmail.com) first for consultations. Include a paragraph or two describing the tattoo you want, the size, etc. Include any reference that helps get your point across. That makes things simpler than trying to call or come in. Please be patient with a response.



TS: How long can the average client expect to wait before being able to get an appointment with you?
DB: I book out myself in 4-6 week blocks and then hold off booking until I'm mostly through those. I try to keep the wait from being too ridiculous.

TS: Is there one tattoo you've done that you'd consider a personal favorite?
DB: Man, that's like asking me which of my kids are my favorite! I did a weird lucha libre creature just recently that was definitely one of the most fun tattoos I've done. Saying one's my favorite, though? That's impossible. I guess it's the one I'm doing at that moment, as that's the one I get to see



TS: Let's talk about the last time you were tattooed - who did it, and what was it?
DB: The last tattoo I got finished is a cobra on my thigh from Phil Holt of Red Letter 1 in Tampa, FL. He started it at Skull & Sword in San Francisco. The most recent tattoo that got started and finished is a torch on my shin from Michael "Shack" Shackelford, who's one of my dearest friends.



TS: Are there any artists out there you'd like to be tattooed by, space and time permitting of course?
DB: Phew, that's a list... I want to get in with Grez and Seth Wood. My most definite plans are getting some major work from Fernando Casillas, who I work with.

TS: What are some of your favorite tattoo conventions to attend/work at? Do you have any you specifically like to work, or any new ones you'll be checking out this year?
DB: To be honest, I hate working conventions. I dislike working out of a shop element, and don't care for the time constraints inherent in convention tattooing. As far as meeting up with other artists and such, though, they can be a lot of fun. I'm about to go to the Cigar City Convention to work for the second year in a row. I really enjoy that convention, they try to keep up a high standard of artists. Also I feel the same way about The Masters of Tattooing in Dallas, but have not worked that.




TS: I've witnessed tattoo artists using head phones before while they were tattooing. Personally, I definitely feel like part of the bonding time between an tattoo artist and a client is the chatter that typically occurs during the tattoo. What is your general feeling on this?
DB: I don't personally use headphones while I tattoo. I tend to reflect the client, and thus if they are talkative, I'm talkative. If they're quiet, I'm quiet. I don't necessarily think every person wants to bond with their artist.

TS: Speaking of those conversations while being tattooed, I'm sure you have some humorous memories. Any specific ones you'd like to share?
DB: I did a cover up on a guy who had his grandpa's initials- GWM on his arm. Intrigued, I asked him why he was covering up his grandpa. He told me he kept getting hit on by men who thought the tattoo meant "Gay White Male".

TS: What are you involved with aside from tattooing?
DB: I do yoga. A lot. I go to yogalife studio with Becca Hewes. I ride bicycles; I own two--both fixed gears that I put together though Buchanan Bicycles and Give & Take. I'm starting a blog where I track my weight loss at FatTattooist.com. I'm down to muscular 250 currently... at my heaviest I was 324. My ex and I are doing t-shirts together for Fingers Crossed Design and I'm doing some design for embroidery patterns for a good friend.

TS: Any last minute plugs?
DB: Michael Shackelford! He's the great American storyteller.
Also, my friend Jason Vaughn!

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then. His latest... more

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then.

His latest film takes you deeper into his personal world than you may want to go. The Thorn in the Heart is a documentary about Gondry's aunt Suzette and her son Jean-Yves. Filming discussions with them and other family members reveals the Gondry legacy in the film industry, but also some lifelong emotional conflicts. It's like when you're at someone's house for dinner and they start fighting, only you can't leave. Gondry's camera is still there.

The documentary played at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, where Gondry was surely the only person speaking broken English in a French accent. The echo in a large meeting room way too big for a single interview, and made him sound surreal. The subject of his film led to a discussion about his very artistic process, more about the meaning of film than its literal content.

That sort of discussion seems appropriate to Gondry's body of work. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep leave a lot open to interpretation. You could analyze the themes or just marvel at the handcrafted imagery. Even the high concept comedy Be Kind Rewind turned out to be a call to arms for people to pick up cameras and make their own films. The Thorn in the Heart may be a personal exercise or it may speak to everyone, but either way, here is some insight into all the films Gondry has and will make.


Question: Do you think film was in your blood?

Michel Gondry: Oh, in my genes? I think in a way yes. I mean, I never had the ambition to become a director because I didn't really think of it. I didn't think of the director when I was watching a movie, what it took to make the film, until I bought a camera. But, my father was doing a lot of Super8 and my cousin, as you've seen in the film. Being surrounded by this and photo, I was printing my own photo when I was really young, so the technical aspect of it really attracted me. The idea that you can imprint an image with a chemical element on a piece of paper was really magical to me.

Q: Do you think it's something you can be born with, even if you don't grow up around the technique?

MG: It's hard to answer that. I think it's always a combination because you can have it and then if you are exposed to it, then the fact that you have it in you, it captures it and then it reveals it. So you can have it in you and then you're not exposed and you never knew you had it in you. Or, you can not have it in you and then by a succession of coincidences, you end up doing it and being good at it so you do it. So it's very hard. I don't know how I could identify that. I tried to remember. I remember watching Chaplin movies and liking them but never in a sense of "That's what I want to do" until I was in my '20s.

Q: What makes people need to do what they need to do, like you make films and I need to write?

MG: Well, I think it's always a combination of things, coming from inside and coming from outside. As well, there is a great deal of privilege when you can be an artist and do your hobby for a living. You have to really appreciate that because I think if you're not born in the right place in the world, then you're fucked. It's going to be a million times harder. People always say, "Oh, it's amazing. You've worked with the guy I was at school with" and see the world as small. It sound corny, but I say it's small because I don't share it. In an artistic profession, there is a sense where people get really protective to maintain their privilege. They're not really trying to share it and share the creativity with other people. I think everybody should be entitled to express themselves or have creativity or do an activity that makes them happy when they wake up.

Q: So people who work mundane jobs, like offices or factory, is that because they didn't have an interest or didn't know about it?

MG: I think most of them didn't have the opportunity. It's a social class thing. We still work on the same principal where some people have the luck to be born in the right place and some people don't have this luck. The people who are born in a place that makes their life easy, most of them don't try really to help the others or to see the unfairness. On the contrary, they try to maintain their privilege or oppress people who are already oppressed. It's just a system that's always been there and it's sort of terrible. It's what we should think of now instead of thinking how to make more automobiles because for the capitalist world, it thinks the only way that society can function is if you make more things then people buy more stuff and there are more jobs and more money to spend. It doesn't work like that anymore. We're going to have more and more crap. I'm talking a little bit above my head because I'm not really a specialist but I really feel people should look at other activities. People need to have activities I think but the production and fabrication of objects, finding an excuse, creating the desire for the buyer to buy them, it's wrong. Now we're exhausted. We're exhausted this way and should think of that.

Q: Is documentary a truer form of filmmaking to you than fiction narrative?

MG: Yeah, if not more. Some of my favorite filmmakers are making documentaries. I don't see that any lesser than a feature film. It is just amazing. The creation lays in other places. It's in the moment, not as much in the preparation, but in the moment and also the editing of course is very important. I watch mostly documentaries on my TV. I don't like to watch fiction, to be honest.

Q: Have you seen the documentary competition at SXSW?

MG: No, but you know when you go to festivals as a filmmaker, you never watch anything because I'm here doing these interviews. Lately I've seen this documentary that was amazing. It was called 51 Birch Street about this guy that puts a camera on his family and reveals all the story of his mom after she passed away and her father. It was just amazing. I watched it twice and I couldn't believe how enriching it was.

Q: Do you think it's the place of drama, whether fiction or documentary, to ask questions rather than provide answers?

MG: Well, it's not ask questions like you would ask a question to get an answer. You find more of the answer in the question in the sense that I think first of all, you don't want to ask a question if you know the answer. I think it's very important. It's like in science, if you hope too much for a result, then you're going to be biased. Your observation won't be really objective. The real discovery, and there is some intuition or truth that can be found and then proven, but a lot of discoveries are made as side effects. Somebody is looking for some experiment and then discover another property. Like they invented the transistor by complete randomness. I think that's interesting to be in a state of being observant to a point that you're going to capture something you were not looking for.

Q: In journalism they say you should know the answers to the questions you're asking.

MG: I think it's totally wrong. I cannot disagree more with that. I think if you're pressing for an answer, sometimes some journalists are trying to get me to say something and I can tell it right away. Either I'm going to tell it just to make them at peace or I'm not going to do it at all because it pisses me off. I think you go on an interview or an investigation like a conversation. You have to be curious of the person you're talking to. If you're not ready to be surprised then what's the point? You could write your article and not ask the person. Maybe you're hoping to go into some territory and discover something but you have to be ready to be completely surprised or taken by surprise. That's the beauty of it.

Q: Is that the difference between journalism and drama, that you can be more inquisitive in drama?

MG: Yeah, but you work with a screenplay. Or it depends, because some people like Mike Leigh who is one of my favorite directors, doesn't write a screenplay. He has a structure and he builds a character with his actor. A lot happening in front of the camera is not planned. There are some other directors who do a movie that's great and everything is carefully planned, but you have to have a lot of time to be able to write all the details of something that must look like life because it's very complex.

Q: I'm including documentary as drama, as a dramatic way to portray real life.

MG: Yeah, well, but when you say dramatic, it's some way to provoke emotion when you watch it for instance? I think if you connect with it, if people reveal things that they were not necessarily willing to say, not by manipulation but just by asking questions and asking what you would be shy to ask, I think that may be embarrassing a little bit but things you really wonder. I think if you do that then people reveal themselves in a way that's dramatic, meaning that's going to interest people.

Q: Has your family always known that they could be the inspiration for your personal films?

MG: Maybe not. It's hard to tell how they think. They encountered so much. Of course by doing that, I show it to them so it's sort of comforting probably. If I have any success, they are sort of part of it because they've been supportive all the time, so they're a part of it anyway but to show it, to officialize it probably gives them some pride.

Q: You weathered a lot of problems on The Green Hornet. Why was was it so hard to make?

MG: It's a little bit cursed. Even the one with Bruce Lee had just one season and was cancelled, so it doesn't have a history of success, which could be scary to say but it's challenging. It's interesting. That was what was proposed to me and I was interested in doing it, so I had a choice. I could have done it or done something else. It has not been a straight road. It's been very windy.

Q: Is it a relief to be done principal photography?

MG: Yeah, of course. Now I see all the problem. I see, "Oh, I should have shot it this way." I wish I had known, but it's always like that.

Q: Do you look at the comic book movies like The Dark Knight and Watchmen to see where the style is going?

MG: It doesn't fit very much in that style. I respect it but it's sort of a caricature of filmmaking. I always thought comic book being a much lighter art form should not be depending on film but should be leading film and be more creative. I see more of those comic books as overly filmic. Dark Knights and these serious knights are not my cup of tea. I like comic books but more like Crumb or the independent ones. I don't like genres that have so many codes. I don't like zomie movies, I don't like vampire movies. I know a lot of people like that because they're sort of in control of society with rules. Really it's not for me. I don't like for instance games that you play like Monopoly and such, because it's not creative to me to have so many rules.

Q: We're wondering what the Michel Gondry take on an action movie would be.

MG: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good I think.

The Thorn in the Heart is now playing in select theaters.

The companion to hope, "change" is perhaps the most over-used and under-executed words in the common vernacular today. With their movie, La MISSION, actor Benjamin Bratt (who is best known for playing Detective Rey Curtis in the NBC drama Law & Order) and his writer/director brother Peter... more

The companion to hope, "change" is perhaps the most over-used and under-executed words in the common vernacular today. With their movie, La MISSION, actor Benjamin Bratt (who is best known for playing Detective Rey Curtis in the NBC drama Law & Order) and his writer/director brother Peter (who previously collaborated with his famous sibling on the 1996 film Follow Me Home) explore the motivations that might transform change from an abstract concept into tangible social movement in the forward direction on an individual level.

Human beings, by their very nature, resist change. This innate intransigence is often only overcome when the consequences of maintaining the status quo are significantly more painful than personal growth and transformation. In La MISSION, the central character finds himself at such a crossroads.

Che is a tough walking and talking Latino man who has secured the position he enjoys within his local community thanks to his testosterone-charged social skills, which are prized among his peers. However, Che is himself a victim of cultural stereotypes which dictate what a man should be, and unless he can reconcile his outdated ideas of masculinity and overcome the homophobia that to this day is a very real part of his culture, he risks losing the one thing that is most important to him - his son, Jes, whom he finds out is homosexual in the film's opening act.

The story was inspired by two characters in the Bratt brothers' life: Che is based on an older schoolmate and natural born leader whom Benjamin and Peter looked up to as kids (though the real-life Che has two sons, neither of which are gay), while Jes' journey echoes that of a family member who experienced a similar struggle for acceptance when his father discovered he was gay. But the family roots in La MISSION go even deeper. The film is set in the San Francisco neighborhood in which the brothers were raised, and its underlying message of hope and transformation is a testament to the convictions of Peter and Benjamin's activist mother, Elda Bratt, who participated in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 (with her two young children in tow).

Though the subject matter of La MISSION may seem a little earnest for some, the underlying issues are handled in a sophisticated and subtle manner, which belies the power of the film. Politics take a backseat, as the viewer is immersed in the colorful lowriding culture Che reveres, and the very personal issues which father and son are fighting to overcome. Heartfelt and touching, La MISSION is all that independent filmmaking should be.

SuicideGirls spoke with Peter and Benjamin to find out more about La MISSION, and their wider calling to inspire and enact change through the ancient art of storytelling and their shared passion for film.

Question: What inspired you to specifically write about homophobia within the context of the Latino community?

Peter Bratt: Homophobia is only one of the things explored in La MISSION. What I was interested in was our ideas of masculinity and power. Benjamin's character Che is a patriarch who has really learned to negotiate life using the "might makes right" credo. He uses violence and intimidation to control his world, and in turn, holds a place of respect in the streets and in the community. I think you'll find the same thing in the dominant culture. It doesn't matter if it's a Fortune 500 executive, a star athlete, or a movie icon like Brando's Godfather -- we're conditioned to admire "powerful men" who acquire their power through domination and control. Regardless of race, these types of male figures are what most men are encouraged to emulate.

With La MISSION, my intent was to try to equalize that balance of the masculine and feminine. In that way, the film also explores issues of domestic violence perpetrated against women; it looks at homophobia, and to some degree class and race. Why? Because within a culture of domination, all those things are connected. The character Che, through the power of the love he has for his son, is ultimately forced to confront those old male identities, which he has cultivated over a lifetime. And in turn, he has to find something else within himself that is more feminine than it is masculine -- something that is perhaps more difficult to do in the Latino world than it is in the mainstream.

Directly related to all of this, of course, is how we regard the "feminine." As a culture, we look down upon feminine traits like emotion, nurturing, love, etc. In fact when we talk about those very subjects, we often apologize for doing so. I've done this several times when discussing the film. We say, "This might sound corny, but..." We apologize for those things because they are seen as "feminine" and therefore inferior and not worthy of our respect.

In the film, Che sees his gay son as "weak" and therefore feminine. And that's what's really at the heart of Che's shame -- that his son is no longer a "man," and is now a "bitch" or "pussy." The sad truth is that this speaks just as much to our culture's misogyny as it does its homophobia.

Q: Benjamin and Peter, much of your shared background went into this movie. Can you talk about your family, your mother in particular, and growing up in The Mission?

PB: Benjamin and I were born and raised in San Francisco by a single mother. We were children during the '60s and the '70s, which was a really active time for social movements. You had the Black Power movement, the Brown Berets, you had a lot of people of color asserting who they were culturally and politically. Our mother was part of that social movement that was happening all around the country and really vibrantly in San Francisco. We were raised with this kind of social activist consciousness that was very much a part of the time, and certainly a huge part of what was taking place in The Mission district, which was largely Latino and also Native American at the time.

Along with the social activism of the time there was this incredible artistic movement. The two kind of melded together. You had artists who were singing, writing poetry and painting pictures that were very political in nature and yet incorporated all these cultural artistic sensibilities. We were kind of incubated in that and I think that comes through in the film. Even today when you walk through The Mission, it's largely an immigrant Latino community. If you walk through you see murals on almost every building, and a lot of times the murals depict the struggle of immigrants, of indigenous people throughout the different stages of California history. You have all this geography and peoples interacting and growing, some leaving, some changing, and I think that comes through in the story a little bit.

Q: Definitely. The subject matter of the story is very political, but you've managed to make it an incredibly personal story, and it's incredibly moving as such.

PB: Oh thanks.

Benjamin Bratt: One thing I want to make clear is that there was an agenda of afoot when the story was written. The story, although it's very culturally and geographically specific in its examination, Peter as a writer wanted to take a broader look at archetypes that are very familiar to all of us.

PB: I think at the core of the story what I wanted to explore as a writer was the idea of change and transformation. As we know, Obama was elected on a platform of change we can believe in, and that speaks to a lot of people. At the time where we're at in human history I think everybody knows that we need to change something in the direction we're going. For me what was interesting is, what does that mean at the very individual level? What does it mean for a character like Che who finds respect and has earned his stripes through domination and often times violence? What does it mean to change that behavior or those attitudes that he's developed over a lifetime?

What I found is that that process often times is really incredibly painful and there's a certain amount of suffering involved. We have to give up something of ourselves in order to make that change. I think just as that happens on an individual level, to change like Obama is suggesting is going to take a collective burning or suffering. That's really the core of the idea that was explored in the film, watching this man motivated through love go through the fire so to speak, and lose a part of himself in order to gain something new.

BB: It's ultimately a spiritual journey that he's set upon by the catalyst of information that he's drawn from the son revealing his sexual orientation.

Q: Given the minority subject matter, was it easy to get the project funded?

BB: The number one thing that dictates what gets made in this town is money, and by and large studios, and even fairly larger independent companies, they won't take on a subject matter for a film if they can't see a marketplace for it. Surprisingly, we found when we first took the story out to what are considered more traditional forms of funding, they didn't get where they could market it, and if they can't understand where and how to market it, they're not interested because they can't make money from it.

PB: I really think it comes down to a question of perception. When Benjamin and I first took the film around, the reaction was, "Why do you want to tell a gay story? We've already dealt with this kind of content. It's kind of passé." I think the underlying assumption there is that mainstream culture has maybe dealt with it on a certain level, but it's still a relatively taboo subject within the Latino community.

BB: And in most minority groups.

PB: So actually right after going to Sundance and talking to distributors and marketing people, you find that what comes under the banner of Latino can't necessarily include an aspect or a texture that has homosexuality in it. Latino is very narrowly defined and just by having an aspect of the story that has homosexuality discussions and conversations going on takes it out of that genre. What that tells me is how Latino culture is perceived is also very narrow.

Q: How's The Mission changed over the years?

PB: When we were growing up [it] was probably Mexican American, today it's still Mexican American but it's equally Central American, there's a Brazilian population, there's African American, there's now a Southeast Asian presence in the neighborhood, and there's also young hipsters who come, and a growing white middle class because of gentrification. To me what makes it uniquely American is that [the cultures] all come together, they borrow from one another, and then sometimes there's a collision. Some people claim the neighborhood is "ours" and "you're taking it away," but if you go way back, the first human communities that lived there were Native American. So it's constantly evolving and changing and I think that's still happening today. But what I think makes The Mission so alive is this kind of social activist nature that it has, and one of the reasons why it does that is because there's still struggle.

Q: I'm told you had to negotiate a gang truce in order to shoot in The Mission. Can you talk about that process?

PB: It's actually not as glamorous as that. We worked with a Mission community member to do outreach to the different non-profits in the neighborhood. One of these was an organization that works directly with the gangs in the area of violence prevention. We were going to be filming in their "territory," so through our outreach person, we respectfully let them know that. And like anywhere, respect goes a long way.

Q: I understand that that community outreach also extended to the local kids.

PB: Well, when Benjamin and I were young, oftentimes the first exposure that we had to art was at a lot of the community centers in The Mission district. There used to be the American Indian center in the heart of The Mission where we went and did classes; There was archery, there was potlucks, powwows. There's The Mission Cultural Center which today still offers photography, silk-screening, dance, música, Capoeira -- which is an Afro-Brazilian martial art which I did for 20-years in The Mission. That still is going on. There's this incredible artistic movement within The Mission.

So we actually went to centers that still exist like that in the community to cast a lot of the young cast members who were acting in front of a camera for the first time. You can see what happens to a young person in this community, which often times is filled with struggle, the working class families and some below the poverty line. When you see a young person go, "Oh wow! These camera and lights, these are here for me," there's a light that goes on, an empowerment, and it's really electrifying to witness.

BB: I think the golden rule for all artists in general, but particularly for writers, is write what you know. So it probably makes less sense for us as filmmakers to tackle say the horror genre, or something like that, as opposed to something like a neighborhood that's near and dear to our hearts. So in answer to part of your question, it's not surprising to me that my brother is the architect of this story. It really does have universal themes, both on the heavy emotional side and in terms of what exists in real life, the levy that hangs in the balance often times in the face of struggle. [It's not surprising] that he sets it within a neighborhood that is not only familiar, but deeply meaningful, not just to us but the extended family that we still enjoy in the city, and it necessarily has a political / social justice bent to it, which is something that was instilled in us by our mother. Essentially it's storytelling from the point of view of something near and dear to our hearts.

Q: Black music dominates the film's soundtrack. Is there any reason you used that rather than traditional Mexican music?

PB: Actually I really believe that African music is the soundtrack of American music. It's at the heart of American music, not just in North America. A lot of the Latin sounds have their West African roots, the clave rhythms of Cuba, salsa, merengue, cumbias, R&B, jazz, soul, it all has freakin' heart.

This country, and a lot of the nation states in the Western hemisphere, was founded on the oppression of indigenous people, and then Africans who were brought here as slaves, so for me that African core influences all cultures -- and the lowrider culture in particular, especially [Benjamin's] character who's an OG lowrider. The lowrider culture went hand in hand with R&B oldies. When people see lowriders and cholos and vatos, and they hear that soul music, the two just seem to go together naturally...Again, it's more like cultural borrowing, and even today you see a lot of African American rappers, they actually have taken the lowrider, which is akin to the Mexican American experience, and made it their own. Again, that's also something that is uniquely American, cultures borrowing and sometimes colliding against each other.

BB: There's something very attractive about the purity if you will of a character like Che. He's almost ritualistic in every detail of his life and how he styles his life, down to the way he irons his pants, the kinds of hats he wears, the types of shoes, the cars he drives, the music that he listens to. It's a very specific choice, and from an actor's point of view, to play someone that detail orientated was really fascinating. And for us, we had the very real human touchstone of the real life Che, who was a consultant on the film. A lot of the gems that come out of his mouth [in the movie] really were generated by him.

Q: The other stars of the movie are the beautiful lowrider cars. How did you set about casting them?

PB: Ben's character, Che, is based on a person we went to school with. He came up in the Mission District and, when we were in middle school, he formed one of the first lowrider clubs in the neighborhood. He's what is considered a "to the bone OG lowrider," meaning he lives by a code, an aesthetic that is unique to the older members of the lowrider community. He was our technical consultant on the set -- which means he helped Benjamin pick out his clothes, helped me select the music, and most importantly, helped us all to find those beautiful cars.

Q: Benjamin, what kind of future do you envision for your brother as a director?

BB: I've always held my brother in the highest regard, not least because of his heart, but I love the way he thinks. I love how he marries the power of this particular medium, this particular art form, with a mind for social justice. He understands that we are our stories. It doesn't matter what culture you're from, what country you're from, what part of the world, we all live by the stories we tell about ourselves. And in those stories are the markers and the indicators for how we interpret ourselves, and it's actually an indication for what our future is too.

I see him as a visionary filmmaker because he starts with the germination of a simple idea and he carries it all the way through, filling out all the various shades of grey with vibrant colors of humanity. To take a focus of a character like Che and set it within a neighborhood that will necessarily have all these external pressures forming the friction between father and son is brave because some of the subject matter, particularly the homosexuality issue, is still very much a taboo subject within the Latino culture. But he's a provocateur as well, and all good art should provoke discussion. I think this will certainly do that.


La MISSION open on limited release on April 9. For more information on La MISSION and details on upcoming screenings go to LaMISSIONTheMovie.com/.