Brendon Small's career has taken him from music student and aspiring guitar hero to creator of some of the best animated comedies on TV. His first show, Home Movies, was part of the original lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Although Brendon wrote the music for Home Movies, he didn't... more

Brendon Small's career has taken him from music student and aspiring guitar hero to creator of some of the best animated comedies on TV. His first show, Home Movies, was part of the original lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Although Brendon wrote the music for Home Movies, he didn't find an outlet for his love of wicked guitar shredding until he created Metalocalypse.

Metalocalypse is the saga of Dethklok, the biggest and most brutal metal band in the world. When they're not fighting amongst themselves, the five members of Dethklok play absurd, elaborate concerts that usually result in death and carnage for the audience. Naturally, Brendon had to take this show on the road.

He put together an all-star metal lineup, with himself on guitar and doing the vocals of lead singer Nathan Explosion, to record full versions of songs like "I Tamper with the Evidence at the Murder Site of Odin." Now Dethklok isn't just the world's most popular metal band on TV. Their latest album, The Dethalbum II, is the best-selling death metal record ever, and they've co-headlined a tour with Mastodon.

Season 3 of Metalocalypse is currently airing on Adult Swim, and Dethklok's song "Laser Cannon Deth Sentence" was just added to Guitar Hero 5.

Jay Hathaway: How did you decide to get into TV instead of becoming a professional musician or joining a band?

Brendon Small: When I went through music school, I went to Berklee College of Music‚ I entered thinking I knew what I was doing or I knew what I wanted out of music school, and I left being very confused by what I wanted out of music. The music I cared about wasn't really being played. Guitar-driven music kind of wasn't cool anymore. In the meantime, I was being drawn toward this world of comedy, and I was hanging out with kids that were at Emerson College in Boston. Everything that they were doing sounded cooler, because you could still do music, you could score stuff, you could write it and you could act in it yourself. So, I think they had a better idea than what my music school was offering, which was basically, "Hey, here's a wedding gig. Learn some old standards and you might scrape by this month."

It wasn't a financial reason, it was because if I can do music and I can do all this other stuff, why wouldn't I do that? Also, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I interned at jingle houses in New York, where they do music for commercials and stuff like that. The musicians were the last people to have a say, creatively. You could come up with something great and have some dildo ad exec come in there and crush the whole thing. I thought, "Whatever I do, I don't want to be in post-production. I want to be in charge of the project." I was probably around 20 or 21 at the time.

JH: Do you find that it's easier to break into doing your own projects in music or in TV, in comedy?

BS: Well, first of all, to have a personality on the guitar is a very difficult thing. There are a handful of people, maybe seven people, where they play three notes and you go "Oh! That's Brian May from Queen," or "That's Jeff Beck," or whoever. But in comedy, your own personality and whatever makes you yourself, no one can actually compete with that. I just thought it made more sense to go with your personality first and add all of the other stuff later. People are looking for a person with a new comedic voice. Not a lot of people are looking for the next new guitar virtuoso. What would you rather hear: someone who's going to make you laugh, or the new guitar player who's going to break all the rules? Most people just want to laugh.

JH: Does that explain why Dethklok has outsold so many other metal bands? Because people just want to laugh?

BS: That may be part of the reason. The records, especially the second record, aren't necessarily funny records. I'm not going for jokes. There are a couple smart-ass and sarcastic things we do in there, but nothing too terribly funny. I think the reason is that it's got a TV show. That why it outsells other metal, because other metal doesn't have a TV show. I really believe that.

JH: When you were a kid, did you want to be in the biggest band in the world?

BS: When I was a kid ... for a while, I wanted to be a dentist. I thought it would be interesting to be a carpenter, for a while, and then I thought it would be interesting to be a toymaker. Then I thought it would be interesting to make monsters in movies. Then I discovered guitar, and thought it would be cool to be a guitarist. Then I went back to the dentist thing, and that's where I am now.

JH: That's your career aspiration at the moment?

BS: I am going to DeVry.

JH: Wow, awesome.

BS: No, when I was 14 years old and I had a guitar, all I did was fantasize about being able to play like Eddie Van Halen or whatever. I didn't know that there was any reality attached to that. I knew that I could study guitar and trick people into letting me go and hang out with this guitar for a long time. Beyond that, I didn't know what the reality of putting a band together was. I was too naive.

JH: Have you run into any metal bands who don't get Metalocalypse or don't like it?

BS: No. I'm sure that there are plenty out there who think it's lame and horribly-written. I'm sure that there are people who don't get the joke, but I don't meet those guys. I think it's good that I don't. Why would we want to hang out with each other? Look at each other, have a weird, stilted conversation, get mad at each other.

JH: Yeah, for sure.

BS: Actually, now I want to do that. I want to have a fancy dinner with one of those guys who doesn't like the show. We'll probably end up going dutch, because they're not going to pick up the bill. I'm not going to pick up the bill. I mean, if they don't respect the show, why would I?

JH: You'd have no reason.

BS: No reason.

JH: Since one of the themes of the show is how bored and jaded the world's biggest celebrities are, what's your own attitude toward getting more well-known? Have you developed a casual disregard for human life?

BS: First of all, you have to understand I work in cartoons. I consider it to be pretend show business. My face isn't plastered everywhere, so I walk down the street and I'm not harmed by or accosted by people. Nobody gives me a better seat at a restaurant. At Starbucks, no one's like, "Hey man, this one's on me." I pay full price for things. Nobody bothers me. I like that I can walk past the line of people that are lining up to see the Dethklok show, and nobody stops their conversation or looks at me. Everything else is Internet bullshit, and that's all fake. That doesn't mean you're really popular. It means people have a lot of curiosity for stupid shit.

JH: I was just reading some of those sites, and people really get into the most minute bits of trivia about Metalocalypse. Did you see that coming at all when you started writing the show?

BS: No, I wasn't expecting that. I'm glad that people enjoy all that stuff, but it doesn't really affect what I end up doing too much. People try to make sense of a lot of the small things like, "Who are these characters all based on?" And the answer is, aside from the singer, nobody. They like to concoct all these thing themselves, but no one seems to be getting hurt, so let 'em do it.

JH: Including all the other voice acting that you've done outside of Metalocalypse, what's the toughest voice you've had to do?

BS: That's an interesting question, because voiceover is the easiest job in the world. The only time it's tough is when you have a director who's bad, who can't really get his point across, and uses absurd metaphors. "Ok, you just got back from Sunday School and you have a very vague notion about you, and you don't know whether you're excited or not. Go!" I've had a couple of bad direction sessions‚ I'm sure I've given them, as well. Doing voiceover is the easiest job in the world if you know how to read. Even if you don't know how to read, someone can tell you the words you should say. I had to create a TV show to get voiceover work, 'cause everyone else figured out it's the easiest thing in the world. I'll tell you the easiest job I ever did ...

JH: Okay.

BS: It was for the Honda Fit campaign. I was like their voice for their car campaign, this big national ad thing. The guy who hired me was a super-nice guy who was a fan of the show, and hired me because of that. They put so many effects on my voice, there's no way you'd ever be able to tell it was me. They asked me to speak like Vicki from Small Wonder. Like a robot lady. [robot voice] But they asked. me. to. talk. like. this. [normal voice] I swear to God, that's exactly what I did. [robot voice] New. from. Honda. The. Honda. Fit. [normal voice] And that was it. The amount of money they pay for that kind of money is just stupid. It's like, the IRS is gonna come down on somebody here, 'cause this is bullshit. Sounding out words and saying them? Not too tough.

JH: What's the most brutal thing that you've done in your personal life?

BS: I know what the most brutal thing I've had to experience is, and that's taxes. I get the feeling of just flopping over and crying, you know? Taxes. Easy. Summer colds would be second. It's the little things.

JH: You're doing longer episodes for Season 3 of Metalocalypse. What was your plan for using the extra time?

BS: There's no one way to do that. If we have a story idea, we try to make it make sense within the thing. Sometimes concluding an episode is ... the Sopranos started doing it a lot time ago. They'd finish, they'd conclude, but they wouldn't totally bookend or stop. It would end in a precarious place. You don't need to know how it's going to finish in order for the episode to be done. You're going to assume that, yes, that thing's going to smash that guy and all those things are going to be released, you know? Aside from the last episode of last season, I think the audience knows what's going on. As far as what we use the time for, it's just trying to develop story. I think, past the first episode, you'll see that it's basically used for comedy.

That's what you're doing when you're working in TV, especially with half-hours. Just trying to make sure that you and the audience both know what your story's about. It's actually very tedious. What is this story about? What does this character want? Simple stuff they teach you in film school.

JH: Metalocalypse is nothing like your previous show, Home Movies. How did you decide to make something so completely different?

BS: Even if Home Movies was successful‚ we consider it a creative success, although it didn't get great numbers ‚ I don't understand why I would want to redo what I did already. Ultimately, I'm doing these weird, absurd little passion projects, and this one seems to have gotten popular. It's stuff that I care about, and if the audience likes it, hey, that's great, but ultimately it's for me. I understand that when networks put a lot of money behind something, they want to let everyone know that This is from the same guy that gave you That. That's fine, but I think it's more fun to be creative and do different stuff.

JH: What's your favorite Dethklok lyric? Is there a line you're particularly proud of writing?

BS: I honestly haven't been particularly proud of any of the lyrics I've written for Dethklok. But I do smirk every night when I sing the "Fan Song" for the kids out there. It's just a direct insult, and they're singing along. I don't truly feel this way, but I think it's very funny to say this to them: "You're a bunch of banks that I'd like to rob / you're my online cash transaction / you're my future stocks." And there are other lyrics, like, "You punched and blinded eunuchs / living in chatrooms / you masturbate on the sheets / your mothers clean for you." I think that's fun. I don't necessarily mean any of that stuff, but I think it's funny to sing that to them, and have them sing it along with me, at the very end of of the night.

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable. Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's... more

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.

Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.

Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.

SuicideGirls spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Camille Rose Garcia: I'm in Northern California. I lived in LA forever but we moved up here a few years ago, and I live in the middle of the woods.

NP: In your own Wonderland.

CRG: Yes, in my own Wonderland. We're almost to Oregon, seven hours north of San Francisco.

NP: What made you want to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland?

CRG: Actually, the editor from Harper Collins, Liz [Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan], gave me a call. It was kind of her idea. It was already in my head from a couple of years ago, I'd been talking with Disney about doing something with Alice In Wonderland. So it made it a lot easier since I already had an idea of the characters I wanted to do. When she called me I thought that's perfect timing to do the book. I had some other projects lined up but I was like, I can swing it. I can do it. I can pull some late nights.

NP: What do you personally see down the rabbit hole in Carroll's story? And what wasn't fulfilled for you by the original illustrations?

CRG: Well the original illustrations by [John] Tenniel have always been some of my favorites. I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations. Because you got a little bit of a hint of the stuff that was going on, but not really [a sense] of the extent of it. There's a lot of drug references as well, so I wanted this one to be psychedelic referencing that.

NP: Talk about some of the visual vocabulary used in the illustrations.

CRG: Well I did want to reference '60s psychedelia. I'm not sure where that comes from, although it's probably the mushrooms.

NP: There are mushrooms in virtually all of your images.

CRG: Yeah. I think a lot of bands and things in the '60s seemed to reference Alice In Wonderland -- I guess Jefferson Airplane, the famous song "White Rabbit." There seemed to be a lot of '60s crossover with the psychedelic imagery, so the colors were very bright, kind of really happy, a lot of purples and pinks and yellows.

I was listening to T-Rex and David Bowie. They're more '70s, but to me I think of the '70s Bowie as very psychedelic. I wanted those colors, but then the characters themselves are a little darker, a little meaner, a little more severe. You have this contrast of the really super bright drug references with this more gothic element.

NP: The way you depict Alice, she could be a kid or she could be a 35-year old. I'm looking at the frame for the opening poem "All In A Golden Afternoon." You've got Alice looking beyond drowsy, almost like she's suffering the aftereffects of a party the night before, and she's surrounded by love hearts and you've drawn a bottle near her, nestled in the grass, that looks suspiciously like booze.

CRG: Yeah, she's definitely a substance abuser. But that was something I found interesting from the original illustrations, you can't really figure out how old she is, and in a lot of different illustrations of Alice over the years they've made her a little girl, they've made her older. In the animated Disney version she is more like 18, she's a lot older. I was kind of playing with that. In one version I had her older and a little more tarted up, a little sexier. But I didn't want to get into those issues.

NP: Sexualizing a children's story.

CRG: Yeah. I do have a lot of child fans. I thought there's going to be a lot of 7-year olds looking at this. I wanted to keep the drug and alcohol references in there because I thought it was important, but not [go] totally over-the-top. I made her kind of 12, on the verge of being an older person, but it comes down to 'Do you give her boobs or not?'

NP: She's got quite a puffy top on her dress so you can't really tell.

CRG: Yeah, 'cause when I was drawing that I thought, 'Would she have cleavage?' Not really. That was the ultimate problem; would she have boobs or not? But she's definitely drinking, so I guess she's like a 12-year old boozer.

NP: It is the interesting dichotomy with Carroll's story. On the surface it's a fairytale for children, but it works on another level as a drug-fueled nightmare for adults. And the perception of the story changes as you grow. Do you remember the time when you saw it through more innocent eyes? And how did your perception change?

CRG: I do remember. I remember reading the story and looking at the original illustrations, and it was one perception, like, "This is weird." I loved the rabbit from a very child-like perspective. Then being a teenager and listening to a lot of music and taking mushrooms and doing all this stuff, and also going to Disneyland, they have a whole Alice in Wonderland ride, there's all these layered references from my druggy teen years. Also realizing how many bands and other people are referencing the darker stuff.

But only upon when I took this project on, and re-read this story again, very intimately, trying to find more visual clues, [did I] realize really how dark it is. It's like a really bad trip. The Queen threatens to behead her at one pint, and they're drugging her, really there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So from an adult perspective it kind of reminds me more of the old Germanic folk tales where the kids were always getting killed or ran off into the forest or actual bad things happened to them.

NP: In America, we tend to want to wrap our kids up in petal pink and powder blue and tell them fluffy fairy tales, but in reality children's own tastes are far more macabre, which I think is part of the appeal of Alice. The reality of Alice's Wonderland is quite nightmarish, but kids will happily giggle as the queen shouts, "Off with their heads." But you never get to see the consequences. I always wondered about the resulting pile of decapitated bodies.

CRG: I feel like American culture in general is very much afraid to show children anything outside of a puppy/marshmallow SpongeBob world. But in the fairytales throughout history it was very important to teach people consequences. Oftentimes kids would die at the end or they'd get shoved in the oven, or they'd be beheaded or turned into a frog. There were always these much darker things happening and I feel like in the American versions of a lot of children's stories, that element is sanitized out.

And I think the time we're living in now, it's really important for kids to be aware of [the fact that] there a bad things in the world happening. There are things to be scared of, but that's how you grow and mature. You have to face your fears, so I wanted to keep some of that darkness in there...People underestimate kids a lot in terms of what they can handle. I know there are things that are appropriate and not, but I think American culture in particular is very sterilized when it comes to children's literature.

NP: But we also mollycoddle our adults. Take for example the gulf war and the policy of hiding the dead and the wounded from us. We don't see the consequences, the bodies of those we've killed. Nor do we see the bodies of our own troops.

CRG: I think again with American culture we're really infantilized. We're like an infantile culture that has an inability to deal with bad news, and that is prevalent across the board in America. Even talking about anything real, or showing somebody an image of something real that's happening in the world, people don't want to deal with it. They don't want to see it, they don't want to talk about it, and I think it's really kind of psychotic to not address everything that's actually happening in the world, to not even want to know about it.

NP: Yeah, I was watching a clip today of the cast of Jersey Shore being interviewed on a so-called news show.

CRG: Oooh, I was just looking at that and I was thinking I can't believe that this guy is somebody that has to be in my consciousness...

NP: That's all a part of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry in general being this Wonderland for the world that distracts us from the dark stuff that's going on that we should actually be paying attention to.

CRG: It seems too that the darker the world gets the more people really do have a need for that distraction. I mean Michael Jackson's death went on for three or four months on CNN to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. And that's just not very balanced.

NP: I know you grew up not far from Disneyland, which itself has many parallels to Carroll's story. On the surface it's this world famous wonderland, but the flipside is, if you grew up near it, it just became this place for bored local kids to go and get fucked up on drugs.

CRG: It was really the best place to take acid. And the contrast here I think is this idea of suburbia as the safest place, the happiest place. That's the thing to achieve in Western culture, Disneyland being at the pinnacle, the cherry on top of the happiest, best, safest place to be. When, in reality, to have a world that is paved over in concrete with all indigenous plants and animals removed and replaced by fake plants and animals, that's not something the world should strive towards as a collective goal. So there definitely are two sides to that.

NP: Throughout your various books, collections and exhibitions (The Saddest Place On Earth, Tragic Kingdom, etc.), your work has very much been influenced by growing up in the shadow of Disneyland. And it seems to have had a profound effect on a whole generation of kids from Orange County. How did the OC, this perfect vision of 1950's suburbia, become such a Tragic Kingdom?

CRG: For a longtime I had real strong ideas about relationships between suburbia and fascism, having this über perfect goal to be cleansed of anything strange or different. There's a real xenophobia in Orange County that's very dark.

NP: But then you look at Disney movies, it's taken until 2010 for them to release a movie starring a black princess.

CRG: The image of perfection in fantasy and fairytales is it completely removed of multicultural things. In the '70s we had Sesame Street that was trying to introduce that, but I think for the most part, especially in Disney and Southern California and the white middle class, their idea of perfection didn't involve any other cultures. Disney did travel to other cultures, but you can see how we sort of worship Germanic castles and all these European influences.

NP: And if you look at most of the set-in-suburbia dramas and soap operas on TV, they set up very unreal expectations. For example in Desperate Housewives, Mike Delfino is a plumber yet he lives in this gorgeous, million dollar plus suburban home. Kids have grown up with this promise of what suburban life should afford that they have no way of attaining for themselves.

CRG: Yes, and it's already crumbling because their parents are now in foreclosure and can't afford those houses. It's kind of like the collective fantasy of suburbia. It's not real. It's not working. This façade is falling apart. These kids that have grown up in those cultures aren't prepared at all for what's coming, for fighting over resources globally and global economic collapse. They're just not prepared at all for any of that.

NP: Talking of the American fairytale that's come crashing down, I was reading an interview you did that was first published on Sept 16, 2006 on a website called Crown Dozen where you very specifically predicted the global economic crash:

CRG: Well I had a lot of other people I was reading that were talking about it long before it happened. All these bankers, now the big lie is "Oh, we didn't know." They knew. It was written about extensively. They knew exactly what was happening and they knew how they were going to get their money out. It just becomes part of the collective lie. That's the thing, I think American culture is just a series of collective lies presented to us.

NP: I agree. When people were signing these mortgages that they never had any prospect of being able to afford, they were signing on the back of a fairytale. They were sold a fairytale.

CRG: Yeah, and along with the mortgage you get the anti-depressant drugs. It kind of reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick stories where the characters, they're taking these drugs because they're living on Mars and they want to pretend they're living on earth. It's like you need the drug to continue the fantasy of the lie. You can't have the lie without the anti-depressants.

NP: I guess that's what you explored in your 2008 Ambien Somnambulants show.

CRG: Yeah, exactly. The sleepwalking. Interestingly, going back to Alice, I found it actually really amazing when I thought about it, why there are so few female heroes in literature and children's literature - especially of that time period. Here was this young girl that had an opinion, had her ideas about things, and wasn't being railroaded over by adults or anyone in the story. I hadn't really though about that before. And that's really an interesting perspective. I bet it didn't come out of that period very often. Young girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, and not have opinions.

NP: That's part of Alice's charm, she doesn't say what's she expected to say. The big end is that she stands up to the kangaroo court and tells her elders and those in authority that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards."

CRG: Yeah, and flips them over, creates anarchy and runs off.

NP: The saddest thing about that ending for me is that that play on words is lost because most people today don't realize that "card" back then was another word for "joker" or "fool."

CRG: Yes, the puns are very specific, and a lot of them are English specific. Like I didn't know what "whiting" was, that it was also a fish. Certain things are very English and from the Victorian era. Upon re-reading it closer it was like, "Oh, OK! I never got that part." Re-reading it very closely was a joy, to think about it on a deeper level, of all those other themes going on.

NP: Children are taught to blindly respect authority, and the great thing about Alice is that she doesn't. We need to encourage that more. Going back to your Ambien Somnambulants idea that many of us sleepwalk through life, I always consider apathy to be the greatest facilitator of evil.

CRG: Wow, yeah. Just doing nothing.

NP: But then kids are taught that as long as something is presented by someone in authority, you're not really supposed to challenge it.

CRG: Yeah. That's the thing, again going back to her challenging and being so opinionated, it kind of ties into the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s. All that, all of the bra-burning and now we're at this point where young people, they don't have a lot of role models still. Even if you're great singer you still have to be half naked. You have to have that thing too to be famous. That is the message.

NP: I guess if Mattel made Alice she would have impossibly large breasts.

CRG: She's have huge boobs, but she'd be 12. [laughs] It's like, non-threatening but hot. She would never be a '50s buxom kind of [female]. That's the other thing, thinking of the females of the '50s that were powerful but bigger, now there's this cult of petite, harmless females. It becomes very confusing when drawing boobs or not drawing boobs, 'cause the size of the boob in relation to the rest of the body is like an indicator of power.

NP: But is that indicative of physical power over mental power?

CRG: I don't know. I was just thinking about anytime I'm confronted with having to draw boobs or no boobs. It determines how old I'm making a character. It's always a very confusing issue because I don't want to make them too big, because that plays into this weird like Japanese manga fetishization of the boob. But then you make them too small and she's 10 or 12, and it gets into the weird pedophile grey area. So I never know what to do with the boobs when I'm drawing them.

NP: It's kind of sad that that was your biggest issue when drawing Alice.

CRG: Yeah, because it's like, should she be older? But then it's totally wrong to have her too sexy. It was distracting. Her character in the story is mentally powerful and mentally challenging. I mean, I wanted to make her interesting, but sexy is sort of a one-note thing.

NP: But then that plays into the stereotype that you can't be blonde with big boobs and have intellectually powerful arguments.

CRG: Yeah, that you can't have both. It's a conundrum right? But then she can't be ugly right? You can't have an ugly little girl, that's totally not allowed. It's funny, just drawing these things and amending them, and thinking about all these visual clues.

NP: Obviously LA and the OC has provided a massive amount of inspiration for your work, but now you live in the middle of the woods not far from Oregon. What effects have your new surroundings had on your work?

CRG: I was born and raised in LA, and I don't it's a great idea to live all your life in one place. I think it's good to scare yourself, and, if you have the means, to try out new situations. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to live in nature - like really in it - and not be surrounded by convenience all the time.

The area we live in, it's really beautiful. It's within the boundaries of National Forest and National Park, so it is a preserved area. That's really inspiring because there's intact eco-systems and giant redwood trees, all these things that just seem other-worldly. In a way it makes me sad because I feel that there's not many of these places left anymore. We're destroyed a lot of them...I don't know how much longer we're going to last here in society, and I want to be able to live in this before it gets destroyed.


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. An exhibition of original art from the book will be held at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens on March 6th with a special book release party. Garcia will subsequently embark on a West Coast book signing tour. Go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/ for further details.

Getting Academy Award winner Benicio del Toro to play The Wolfman was a big coup for the horror remake. It was in fact the star and producer's clout that convinced Universal Pictures to raid their classic monster library and remake the Lon Chaney Jr. original. Then they got Academy Award winner and... more

Getting Academy Award winner Benicio del Toro to play The Wolfman was a big coup for the horror remake. It was in fact the star and producer's clout that convinced Universal Pictures to raid their classic monster library and remake the Lon Chaney Jr. original. Then they got Academy Award winner and knight Sir Anthony Hopkins to play his dad.

Sir Anthony plays John Talbot, patriarch of the tragic Talbot family in Victorian era England. He welcomes his son Lawrence (del Toro) home for the funeral of his other son, this after the loss of his wife while the boys were just lads. You know how the story goes. The same monster that terrorized the departed Talbot bites Lawrence and curses him to transform in the full moon. What's a father to do?

When Hopkins appeared at a press conference to promote The Wolfman, he was already looking like his next character. While playing Odin in the Marvel Studios production of Thor, Hopkins sports a bushy white beard and slicked back hair. Though imposingly godlike, Hopkins was disarming to any reporter who posed a question.

Known for responding only to the simplest directions of "faster" or "slower," Hopkins again took the B.S. out of the craft of acting for which he is so acclaimed. He downplayed the more in-depth analytical suggestions of subtext, and instead opened up about just what makes Sir Anthony so good.

Question: Did you have any concerns about the action scenes you had with Benicio?

Anthony Hopkins: No. I did all my own stunts. [Laughs]

Q: It seems like John Talbot has one thing in common with Hannibal Lecter, that sense of confidence that he projects. For you, is that where aggression begins? Is that sort of a foundation, that confidence, and is that something that you build on when you're sculpting a character?

AH: No. It comes out of expediency, I think a certain coldness. I mean, the relationship between fathers and sons, for example. Hannibal Lecter, that's a long time ago, but fathers and sons are very interesting because through the whole of literature, from Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman to D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, that coldness, that harsh, brutal business of being a father and a son. Most men know about the pain of that, the wound as they call it, the Oedipal wound. My own father was a tough man. He was a pretty red hot guy but he was also cold. He was also slightly disappointed in me because I was not a good kid as a school boy, but I learned from it. I liked that coldness because it was harsh and he taught me to be tough. So I know how to be tough. I know how to be strong. I know how to be ruthless. It's part of my nature. I wouldn't be an actor if I wasn't that. You have to be pretty tough to be an actor and you have to be pretty certain what you want. You can't waffle through this business. I use all that power in me as an actor, so it comes to be easy but I'm not evil and I'm not a cruel person but I don't have much time for wimps and people who just say. "Oh, I can't do it." Forget it. The "yes, but" merchants of the world. "Yes, but.. Oh, shut up!" And there's people who have a sense of entitlement, "Oh yes, it's all very well for you." I don't have any time for that. I've no time. Life's too short to screw around like that. So I understand that personality trait. When he says, "Your brother's body was found in a ditch. Have you got the right clothes [for the funeral]?," he doesn't waste time saying "I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry your brother's dead." He's dead. Dead is dead. So it's an interesting foundation to build from and I am drawn to those kinds of characters, those hard characters, Dostoyevsky-like characters. I've played a few of those, not Hannibal Lecters, but people who are like that. And, in a way, I admire it because we are living in such a nanny age now. Everyone's so cockled and we've lost strength. I came from Wales and it is a strong, butch society. We win the war and all that. People didn't waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is "Get on with it!" I don't waste time being soft. I'm not cold but I don't like wasting my time. Life's too short.

Q: You not only play characters who really embrace their darker, primal urges. You also played very repressed characters like in The Remains of the Day.

AH: That's what happens if you don't address the darkness in you. You become repressed and depressed and suicidal.

Q: Which one is more challenging to play?

AH: They're all pretty easy. I played The Remains of the Day, all I did was not move much. See, you're playing the butler. You can't bang doors and say, "My Lord, would you like a cup of tea?" People say, "How'd you stay so so still?" I don't move! Michael Winner was directing Death Wish with Charles Bronson who plays the guy who takes out the killers. Michael went and directed it and he's one of these very outrageous British directors and the studio said, "Michael, you can't give it to Charles Bronson. He doesn't look like a lawyer" because he's supposed to be one. I say, "Why? Stick a pencil in his hand and he's a lawyer, isn't he? And a gun in his pocket." Everyone has stereotypes about it all. How do you play a butler? Just don't move too much. Move gently and quietly. How do you play Hannibal Lecter? Don't move. Just scare people by being still. How do you play the Wolfman? Learn your lines, show up and do it and snarl a bit. Acting is very easy. If you ask John Wayne, how do you do it? Well you just go to Monument Valley and get on a horse and you become John Wayne. Acting is very, very simple when you've been doing it a long time anyway. So, no acting required.

Q: Do you have any advice for a younger generation of students and people who are coming up through the ranks that aspire to do what you've done in acting?

AH: Well, I do. Sometimes I've taught and I've taken classes at UCLA and various other places and I say to young actors, I get a camera in front of them, I say, "Okay, just get up and do it. Don't do all this preparation." I joke with them. I do it with humor. I say, "Don't waste time doing it. Just get up and do it." They do audition pieces from Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, or Arthur Miller or whatever. "Let's just do it! Done!" They do it and I say, "There you are. You can do it. Don't waste time worrying about it and looking over your shoulder." But when you're young, it's not easy to do that because you always want to analyze. So when you're young, you're very insecure. If I could learn with the other kids and revisit my own past, I could say to myself, "Don't think too much. Just get on and do it!" So that's what I tell young actors. "Do it! Have the courage to do it. If you're going to make mistakes, who cares? Don't worry so much." You know, we're always looking over our shoulder at what they will think, what the press will think, am I making the right career move. When you're young, you have to do all that to survive, I suppose. You get to a certain point and you think, ah, to hell with it! Just work and be lucky that you're in work. That's my general philosophy about everything. I'm a lucky guy to be around, you know, 72 years of age, still there fighting for this. Power of personality. Give out the energy and it will come back to you in abundance. But if you go in [wavering], it will all fold. You may as well die. I knew an actor who was quarreling for years and years. He was absolutely eaten up because another actor wouldn't do his off lines in a famous movie called On the Waterfront. "That was 50 years ago," I said, "and you're still going on about it? It's over. It's done. It's over." My life is over. I've done that side. I don't go back to Hannibal Lecter or any of that stuff. I'm here, and that's a tremendous power.

Q: Talking about a metaphorical transformation, and we're in the middle of awards season right now, how much did winning the Oscar and being knighted transform your own life and your career?

AH: Well, I still have to look in the shaving mirror in the morning and see the same old face there so it doesn't change your life that much. But no, it was fun to get the Oscar. It was fun to get a Knighthood. But, you know, you wake up in the morning and the reality is still there. You're still mortal. It's fun to have an Oscar. I remember getting up on the podium and thanking people and saying, "Thank you very much." I thought I can make some bad movies now and it doesn't matter. I've reached to top. But then you go on making more movies. You wake up a few days later and the Oscar's there. I've got it at home in Malibu and it's there. I don't look at it every day and worship it. Sometimes, "Oh there it is." And people say "This is an Oscar." But no, it's nice. It's a great symbol of success or whatever you want to call it. But you can't become the Oscar. You can't become what you think you have to become when you get the Oscar. If you do that, that's the road to madness and the movie industry is full of crazy people who think that they are God. If you look around, you go, "Ooooohhhh." Hide them from sharp objects, you know. There are some lunatic people in this business and I've witnessed them. You go to the Oscars and you see something when you're there. You think these people are nuts. So you have to take it with a sense of humor and stay sane.

Q: How much has knighthood and being called Sir Anthony transformed your life?

AH: Well, I get a good table in the restaurant. I don't use it over here. I'm an American citizen, although it was a great honor. It really was a true honor. I've forgotten it. When people call me Sir Anthony, I just think, "Oh, that's a bit odd." But I'm not cynical about it. I just feel more comfortable being called Tony or Mr. Hopkins, whatever they want to call me. Somehow I come into a restaurant and it's Sir Anthony and I say okay. When they say Sir Hopkins, I say no because that's wrong. The Americans tend to get it wrong. Americans are funny. They always say, "Oh I want to call you Sir Anthony" and I say, "Okay, be my guest." It doesn't transform your life.

Q: We see you looking like Odin already. What can you tell us about Thor?

AH: I'm supposed to be talking about Wolfman. Just a little side note, I'm enjoying working with Kenneth Branagh very much, a terrific young director. Well he's not that young. He's younger than me. Anyone's younger than me, but he's terrific and I'm really enjoying that.

Q: Have you been reading the comic books?

AH: No. I'm not a great researcher, although I've got the whole Marvel Comics book but I haven't read it yet. It's very dense. I'm not into that culture. Like Wolfman, this is a big cultural thing, isn't it? I mean, these monster movies. I've never been caught up with that.

Q: What about Norse mythology though?

AH: Yeah, I know a little bit about it, not much though. I'm not well read in Norse mythology, more in Greek mythology and Roman mythology but not [Norse]. I'm learning a bit through comic strips now about Odin and all those guys. I know that Thursday is named after Thor and Wednesday is names after Woden/Odin. Interesting stuff. The history of the Vikings is very interesting and the Viking invasions of Europe.

Q: When you read a script, do you make changes often, at least to your own character?

AH: With all appreciation and respect to the writer, there are certain things they may miss because they're on schedule, they've got to rewrite their stuff, so I'm not taking the shine from them. But, there was a scene I'm in the asylum with my son and there were lines that were sort of up in the air, and I thought, "What's the background to this?" So I said to Joe, "I'd like to just rewrite something in that so when I describe to my son how I knocked out my Sikh manservant. I'd like to just build a history into it that Sir John Talbot has been all over the world." He's like the Walter Huston character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He's been everywhere: Australia, New Zealand. He's been up in the mountains of the Andes. He's fought on the waterfronts of Boston Harbor and then San Francisco as a pugilist and bare boxer so he's a man who is scarred by life and has been everywhere. He's a killer. He's a tough, tough man like those Victorians were, those great pioneers who pioneered the West. They were tough. There were killings in the saloons in the great Midwest, those bare knuckle boxers like Bob Fitzsimmons and all those guys. They were tough. So I built that into the script and I said, "That's what I want to do is to build this raucous, vicious man who just survived through sheer will and muscle." My grandfather was like that. My father's father was like that, muscle man, just sheer muscle and tenacity. So I based some of this on my grandfather as well. I think I did that in a scene. I don't know if it's been cut. They may have cut some of the lines. So I built up a historical biography for myself just to give it a bit of dimension.

The Wolfman opens February 12.

The best horror films are always the simple ones, and Frozen is simplicity itself. Pretty college student Parker (newcomer Emma Bell ) flirts her way into one last ski-lift ride just as the slopes are closing for the night (and the week) and sets off on the lift with her boyfriend Dan (Kevin Zegers)... more

The best horror films are always the simple ones, and Frozen is simplicity itself. Pretty college student Parker (newcomer Emma Bell ) flirts her way into one last ski-lift ride just as the slopes are closing for the night (and the week) and sets off on the lift with her boyfriend Dan (Kevin Zegers) and his best friend Lynch (Shawn Ashmore). A shift-change mishap later, the three of them are stuck a hundred feet in the air, watching helplessly as the ski lodge’s lights are being shut off, the temperature is falling by the minute, and no one is responding to their screams for help. The film, which deftly explores a number of common fears, including extreme cold, perilous heights, being alone in the dark, and a final one that should remain a surprise, comes from lifelong skier and indie film wunderkind Adam Green, whose 2006 horror debut, the deliberately old-school boobs-and-blood slasher film Hatchet, stands as one of the most profitable films of its kind, ever. Green is currently in the midst of filming Hatchet 2 and recently called up SuicideGirls from the Sundance Film Festival, where Frozen is playing to sold out shows and critical raves.


Ryan Stewart: Let me tell you my solution to the main characters’ dilemma, and you can tell me if you’ve heard it before.
Adam Green: Tie the clothes together, right?
RS: Right! They should take off their clothes and tie their undergarments together like bed sheets, and use that as a rope to climb down.
AG: You know, we spoke to some Army Rangers about it, trying to shoot holes in the thing, and they said that’s actually the worst thing you could do. First of all, just trying to undress up there? Trying to even get your clothes off when you’re in a seated position like that? You could try it, but even if you did get them off the exposure to the elements would mean you wouldn’t make it. Even if you did get to the bottom, you’re then talking about at least a twenty to forty minute walk until you find anybody. Any people who are left up there with no clothes on aren’t going to make it, either. They said that’s the last thing they would try to do. These were military people, and they said their first choice would be to jump, although you have to jump a certain way. You’re going to break your bones, but you have to just hope that you don’t break them so badly that you can’t then drag yourself down the hill. That’s what Dan says in the movie, “Even if I hurt myself, I might still be able to make it down to the bottom.” But if you fall in a way that results in a compound fracture of both your legs, that’s kind of out.
The other option is to climb the cables, but in reality if you know anything about those cables you wouldn’t even try climbing them, because they are so sharp – they have to be, so that these metallic things can fit through the rungs and not come apart. They look like rope, but they’re really metal. MythBusters actually did an episode on this once, where they asked how you would get off a chair lift, and they tried climbing it and sliding on it with a jacket and it was impossible – it slices right through it. In the movie there’s a little bit of suspension of disbelief there, because Lynch actually does make it to the next chair, and in real life he probably wouldn’t have. It would have cut into his hands and he would’ve fallen and died, but nobody wants to see that ending!
RS: Speaking of Lynch, I noticed the character’s full name is identical to that of your fellow indie-horror director Joe Lynch. Joe must have been thrilled.
AG: [laughs] He was! So was my friend Dave Parker, who directed The Hills Run Red, and also my friend Dan Walker. I’m just really bad with names when I’m writing, and I’ll stick in my friends’ names all the time with the intention that sometime before we actually shoot I’ll go through it and come up with other names, but this time it was like, eh, why not? For the handful of people who get it, it’s kind of a funny joke when you hear those names go by, but the average person watching it obviously has no idea about that connection.
RS: Was there a real ski-lift tragedy that inspired you to write this, or did you just sit down and come up with something?
AG: I kind of just came up with the situation, because it’s a big fear of mine as someone who used to ski. The mountains I skied at, these places in Boston, they’re only open Friday through Sunday, and they’re really kind of crappy mountains compared to, like, what we have here in Park City. They don’t really get a lot of business and you kind of feel like you’re going on a carnival ride. There’s always that dude who’s just standing there smoking a cigarette as he’s sending you up. When we were scouting mountains we would ask them “Could this happen here?” and they would get very angry and defensive and say “Not at our mountain, we take precautions, we do this, we do that.” But if you persisted with could it, then they would say, “Well, it could, because there’s such a thing as human error.” You could have a guy who just isn’t doing his job right. I mean, how many times have you read stories about airline pilots that were drunk? How much trust do we put in strangers that they’re not going to do something that would kill us, you know? If you search online for stories of people being trapped, there are hundreds of stories every year. In fact, right here in Utah, one of the ski mountain people who came to our screening this afternoon said a kid recently fell fifty feet off of one of them – he just slipped off. While we were shooting Frozen a gondola fell in British Columbia, killing about seven people. There was also a group of cross-country skiers in British Columbia that went off the beaten path, got lost, and wolves ate this guy’s wife. So, all of the things in the film could happen, though they’re not very likely. “Likely” is people getting stuck in an elevator. Movies should always be worst-case scenario. I think because the concept and the trailer seem to be getting under people’s skin, there’s a knee-jerk reaction on the part of some to say “Well, this is ridiculous, it could never happen.” The fact of the matter is, it could.
RS: I was surprised to learn the whole film was done with practical effects, outdoors, and not on a stage. I’m sure the producers weren’t thrilled about having no sets.
AG: Well, there were four different production companies that wanted to make Frozen, but the only one willing to let me do it this way was Peter Block’s company, A Bigger Boat. He understood that if you’re going to make a survival thriller, it has to be real. You just can’t expect the audience to be scared if they know they’re looking at a soundstage. So that was the first thing. The bond company that had to insure the film was not happy about this at all, because we didn’t even have a single covered set in the original script. The compromise made was for me to move some of the dialogue into the lodge and have at least one scene that was on a covered set, so in case there was a blizzard or something we’d at least have something to shoot that day. The other compromise was that the producers and I agreed to defer our pay, so that if we went to the contingency, it was our own money. So, that made the bond company happy, and the last thing we shot was that stupid lodge scene that they demanded we have as a safety. We finished on time, on budget, and never went into the contingency. But there were blizzards and hailstorms all through the movie, and we just shot through it. I lucked out, actually, because the weather actually cooperated. In the script it’s like ‘a big storm starts’ and then it happened when we shot.
RS: You mentioned Peter Block – he also produced the abandoned-in-the-ocean thriller Open Water. You’re probably already sick of hearing Frozen be compared to that movie.
AG: Not at all. I like Open Water, and I take that as a compliment. This definitely is a kind of Open Water, worst-case scenario, what-would-you-do movie. Some directors get pissy about that kind of thing, they always want to think that their movie is the most original thing ever and no one’s ever done anything like it. Well, no one’s ever done Frozen before -- no one’s ever done a ski-lift horror movie -- but at the same time, just like with every movie, you get some degree of it being “like” this or that. With Hatchet, my God, everyone was like, this is a rip-off of Friday the 13th! Well, no, it was actually a rip-off of Fright Night and An American Werewolf in London, but people were too stupid to realize that. They just saw woods and Kane Hodder. With this, nobody’s really called it a rip-off of Open Water, but I have heard the comparisons. Where I see it as being different, aside from the obvious things, is that Frozen is a very hopeful movie and it’s really a character movie, a performance movie, whereas Open Water, to me, was a gimmick of real people and real sharks. Once they were left behind, the whole time you’re just waiting to watch them die. And then, in the end, they die. I liked the movie, and I think sharks are everyone’s worst nightmare, but I do feel like Frozen is that concept taken to a whole other intellectual level. I think there’s a lot more going on in Frozen than they had going on in Open Water.
RS: When you were auditioning actors for this film, did you sit them down and drive home what a physical ordeal this would be? God forbid they get out there and then bail on you.
AG: Oh, yeah. Everyone who came in to audition, the whole first five minutes of it was me explaining what this was, and many of them walked out right then. Some said “Oh, my agent told me only a portion of this would be practical and the rest would be soundstage.” And I was like, “No, none of that, and also, you can’t come down. That chair only moves forward, so if you decide to come down, that’s an hour out of our shooting day, so you can’t go to the bathroom and you can’t eat.” Thankfully, the people I had were down for it, and even embraced it. It’s a great opportunity for an actor – ninety minutes of your face and the whole movie hinges on your performance. There’s no horror gags, no action sequences, it’s all about you. Because of that, we actually ended up getting the cream of the crop of young Hollywood coming in to audition for this. It got competitive. Some people wanted to be in this movie badly. I’m sure that by night three our actors were kind of regretting it a little bit, but they never once complained and they never broke their stride or gave up, and now they’re seeing the rewards of that. To have every show at Sundance be sold out? To have a screening where someone faints? We had a screening this morning where two people vomited. The reviews have also been tremendous. It’s all been worth it. The fact that we’re getting a theatrical release in this day and age – that’s not easy for an independent movie, so we’re very fortunate, and I’m really grateful for all of it.
RS: What was Emma’s audition piece? She really gives a raw performance. Did you coach her through the heavy emotional stuff?
AG: Her audition piece was the "starving dog" story. And no, she needed no coaching with the tears, she's that good. In fact, Emma was the very first person to audition for Frozen, for any role! I was so sold that I didn't even want to waste time seeing anyone else, but of course the powers that be made me do my due diligence. So, four weeks and a hundred actresses later, Emma Bell got the part. How's that for a Hollywood rarity?
RS: All the actors get chances to shine, I felt. I liked that little scene at the beginning where Lynch meets a girl, Shannon, and tries to memorize her phone number because he doesn’t carry his phone with his ski suit. It turned a necessary “cell-phone explanation” scene into a little plot that may or may not get paid off.
AG: Yeah, that was two-fold. One, it gives Lynch something to focus on and remain hopeful for. He has his line about how if he ever gets off that chair he’s going to just call her up and ask her to marry him. And of course it was there to explain away the cell-phone thing without resorting to “Oh no, we can’t get a signal!” Most skiers that we spoke to said that whether or not they really bring their cell phone with them depends on the mountain. But with most ski mountains you don’t get any reception while you’re up there, so most skiers – because phones these days are expensive iPhones and BlackBerrys – they’ll put them in the locker and go do a couple of runs, and then come back and check their messages. They generally don’t ski with them when there’s a chance they’ll get broken. In fact, one of our actors had gone snowboarding about a month before we shot and he destroyed his iPhone. So, in my opinion that scene was a smarter way to get around the whole “Why don’t they just call somebody?” thing. If one of them had pulled out a cell-phone up there and then it said ‘no service’ you’d be like, oh God, this is terrible. I don’t know if you noticed, but we also got around the whole 555 thing by actually buying that phone number. We didn’t include the area code, but if people go and figure out that Boston area code and call that number, they’ll actually get that actress, Rileah Vanderbilt, saying “Hi, you’ve reached Shannon, leave a message.”
RS: There are a few scenes in the film where I noticed that you could have gone crazy with the gore, but you pull back a bit. Are you gun shy from your ordeal trying to get an R-rating for Hatchet?
AG: Hatchet 2 will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I'll go as far as I want with gore, with no regard for the MPAA and their bullshit. Nowadays, with the coveted unrated DVD release, no matter how much the MPAA castrates and abuses indie films, our vision still gets out there eventually. With Frozen, excessive gore would have ruined the film. It had no place in it and this was just not that kind of movie. Much like with Jaws, my biggest inspiration in Frozen, it was what you don’t see that really scares you. Hatchet may have been super gory and violent, but Frozen is a million times more terrifying and, quite frankly, a much better film. With Hatchet we had cheers, laughs, and applause. With Frozenwe're having fainting and puking from the tension.
RS: How’s the Hatchet 2 shoot going? I’ve heard Dark Sky is mapping out a franchise plan for even more films. Are we going to see “Victor Takes Manhattan”?
AG: It’s going better than we ever hoped. It's gonna blow people away. We have the time and resources that we never had when we made the first one, plus the story is so much darker and bigger. Way more kills, way more gore. We used fifty-five gallons of blood on the first and have already gone through a hundred and twenty on this one. It’s a better story, and has more suspense than the first. It's still a Hatchet movie and has humor and the same Adam Green tone of being fun and entertaining rather than morbid and depraved, but goddamn did we pull off some crazy shit that will blow your mind. Dark Sky is plotting many more films, much more theatrical support, and they are all having a blast working with us and becoming part of my Ariescope family. Victor Takes Manhattan? Hmmm, that's a great idea! No, so long as they let me steer I will try and do Victor and his fans justice. That's why I directed the sequel. I refuse to let someone make a shitty Hatchet movie after all the fighting we’ve done to get here.
RS: Have you seen a positive wind change for indie-horror after Paranormal Activity? Is there a bit more openness now than there was six months ago?
AG: Paranormal Activity was a huge victory for all indie genre filmmakers, but it hasn't really changed the playing field at all. If anything, it's now made things frustrating because now every studio wants their own "Paranormal Activity" and every meeting you go on has producers asking "Why spend money on a film when Paranormal Activity didn't and made a ton?" Much like with The Blair Witch Project, we'll see a few years of knock-offs that don't work and then it will go away. But goddamn, did I love Paranormal Activity. I was lucky to see it at home, years ago, and it scared the shit out of me. Best way to have seen it!
RS: As a horror fan, I'm as curious about the things a director in your position turns down as the things he takes. Have you had any wacky remake/sequel offers lately that you can share?
AG: I can't get specific, because to be totally honest, I'm flattered and honored that the big studios doing these remakes even know who I am or call me in to meet on their projects. I don’t want to burn bridges by making fun of what I've turned down. But that being said, I've turned down a lot or used the "I'm unavailable, sorry!" excuse for all of them. I am not anti-remake, but when they give you parameters that make it so that you don't even have a chance at doing it right, why take the job? For example, it's like being called in for a remake of Hatchet and having them tell you not to use Victor Crowley in it. Fuck that. I feel bad for some of the directors who've received such backlash from the fans for their remakes -- if you knew what they were put through by the studio you would feel bad, too. Thankfully, I've had great success with my original projects to date and I now have my own production company, Ariescope Pictures, so I do what I want and what I'm inspired to do. I don't need to take jobs for the money and if and when I accept a studio project it's going to be something I really am excited about and something I want to do. I'm discussing a few now, so we'll see what the next few years bring.

Frozen opens in select cities on February 5, 2010

Eerie Von is best known as musician as bass player and founding member of Samhain and Danzig, two bands founded by his old friend Glenn Danzig, who taught him to play the bass. Since leaving Danzig, he’s released five albums under his own name most recently last fall’s “Kinda Country” in addition... more

Eerie Von is best known as musician as bass player and founding member of Samhain and Danzig, two bands founded by his old friend Glenn Danzig, who taught him to play the bass. Since leaving Danzig, he’s released five albums under his own name most recently last fall’s “Kinda Country” in addition to painting “Fiend art,” hundreds of paintings that exhibit much the same sensibility of his recordings.

He’s also been a prolific photographer for decades. His first photoshoot was in high school when he photographed the band The Misfits. The Misfits were never a huge band and were together only a few years, but they were influential, straddling horror metal and punk rock and creating a new sound.

“Misery Obscura” is Von’s first book, a collection of three decades of photographs of the bands he was in, the musicians he knew and a great look at the music scene. We talked with him recently about the book.


ALEX DUEBEN: You're primarily known as a musician, but which came first for you, photography or music?

EERIE VON: Music was always first. I didn't take my first photos until 8-9 years old, and didn't get into in for real until 12-13. I was listening to music and signing along since 5.

AD: Do you have a preference as far as black and white vs color?
 
EV: Very few people are beautiful enough to warrant a color photo. I like the spookiness, and light and shadow thing you get from black and white. You have to try harder to get what you want to come across.

I'll shoot color, if I need to, and for a while, it was hard to get black and white processed, on Tour, so I shot almost all the Danzig stuff in color, but just for convenience.

AD: Have you gone digital or still working old school, film and all?

EV: I shoot the paintings digital, for the auctions, but back it up with film. All the myspace, and facebook stuff is crappy digital, and if there's gonna be porn, or anything, digital is much safer.

But if I wanna be serious, I'll go back to film, take my time, and get it right, and not rely on fixing it after on the computer. I shot some great black and white film stuff, in Indiana the last year or so I lived there.
 
AD: You start out early in the book writing “I'm a 16 year old punk and my first photo shoot is The Misfits.” At the time did you know how big a deal that was?

EV: It was a big deal for me just because, I thought those guys were kool. I was already friends with Jerry and Doyle, and they were fun to hang out with. The band was an underground thing, didn't sell a lot of records, or draw huge crowds, they were just KOOL, and only a select group of people around the Country knew about them.
 
AD: Was a struggle to get airplay on the radio and on TV? There are a few Danzig songs that have gotten some airplay, but otherwise--

EV: If you're talking about The Misfits and Samhain, they only got played on college radio, and that was maybe once a week, on Punk/Hardcore shows that were sometimes only an hour long. Danzig got airplay all over the country. I still hear the old songs where ever I live.

MTV was another story. We didn't make the kinds of videos they were gonna play at that time. We alienated them right away with the original "Mother" video, and that hurt record sales from then on. As soon as we did the "Live" Mother video in ‘93 it was played a few times a day for a month straight, and the record went Gold. Go figure.

AD: Looking back at the Misfits and Samhain and Danzig, do you feel like the groups and the movement had an impact on music and culture today?

EV: I would say so. I can't go anywhere, where I don't see a band, or some kid who looks like he could have been back there in the old days in Lodi. There's like a hundred Horror Rock bands, and I get email everyday from someone who says if it wasn't for those bands they wouldn't have done this, or that.

Look at all the mega rich and famous bands who claim the same thing, so I would say yes.

AD: How did you end up putting together the book. Is this something you've been trying to do for a while?

EV: Yeah, I was talking about putting out a book back in the Danzig days. I always knew I'd do it sometime. I would have put it out long ago, but I guess it was meant to come out now. As you get older, all the people who were influenced start occupying positions of power, and the guys at Dark Horse were all fans, so it was a "No Brainer"

AD: The book being published by Dark Horse, which mostly publishes comics, and that may seem odd but I remember the Danzig albums from the 90s with H.R. Giger and Simon Bisley and Martin Emond artwork. Was that kind of imagery and tone of old comics an influence?
 
EV: Glenn's the comic guy. I have a descent collection, but the art side has always been his passion. The fact that the book found a home at a comic company is purely coincidental. I knew they were pretty big, so it seemed like a good move.

AD: The book felt like a real backstage tour, was that what you were going for?

EV: I was looking for a "Scrap book" kinda feel. Some of it reminds me of a high school yearbook for Fiends. Not much is known about any of those bands, so I wanted to shed some light on the subject.

AD: It’s interesting because the book feels almost like a companion to the liner notes you wrote in the Misfits box set from years back as far as chronicling the band.
 
EV: That could be the way some people see it, but I approach each thing separately, and just do what feels right. At the time, I didn't know I was going to get a chance to do the book, so the liner notes, may have the same sort of feel.

AD: Was there a particular image or something you really wanted in the book but couldn't fit?

EV: Yeah about a Hundred! We only had a budget for 160 pages, so we did the Best we could with limited space. I hope to do an expanded version or a Part 2, but I'm very happy with the end result, and judging by the emails I'm getting the fans like it too!

AD: When putting it together was there anything that stood out because you wish you could have shot it but didn't for whatever reason?
 
EV: Yeah, the whole Samhain period, on tour. I didn't own my own camera, and I was afraid to borrow my father's Nikon, so I went without. I did take it a few times, but didn't shoot like I did later on. Maybe there wasn't as much down time then. Also the month we did with Type O I didn't take a camera. I regret that.

AD: To promote the book you did an acoustic set with Lyle Preslar and Mike D’Antonio at Generation Records in New York. How did you did this come together and how did you connect with Lyle and Mike?

EV: They Both wrote forwards for the Book. Lyle is an old friend from the Hardcore days, who played on the first Samhain record, and did our first show. Mike D is one of those guys who was influenced, and we had him tell his story, and when the signing came up we just asked him to come down, and he said yes. Getting Lyle out of the house was a bigger deal.

AD: We're talking about the music days as if it’s all in the past but you released a new album in the fall. Kinda Country.  I've listened to it a few times and I really love but, it is a very different album for you. What was the influence on this sound?
 
EV: I've been writing songs now seriously for more than twenty years. I learned a lot from everyone who has written, and is writing, and I'm getting pretty good at it. I am a big Elvis fan, and his roots were country, and his later albums, almost all country, so the influence was always there.

I don't listen to a lot of modern anything, and my country influences are limited, but all my other influences are vast. A lot of people are telling me it's not that different for me. I just write songs, and when I have enough of them that might fit together, I put them on an "album", which still means a collection of something.
 

AD: It’s interesting because your previous album That’s All There Is was different from your other solo albums and more of a punk album and now you're going in a whole other direction, but it still felt like you. Is the kind of music you want to make changing or are you just want to keep trying something new?
 
EV: I'm going in whatever direction my mood, and the songs take me. I don't force it. I'll  be a Punk Rock guy until I die. and there will always be blues in everything I do. It'll always be dark, that's just how it is.

Everything I do is a part of a body of work.  I figure if you're going to be around and put out records for twenty-seven years, you have keep it interesting. I don't know what the next record, or next painting is gonna be like. I do what I wanna do, and try to please myself first, and If people like it, that's great, but I'll do it. whether anyone buys it or not.

AD: You grew up in Jersey and I know you moved back a few years ago. You spend your days making music and painting and taking photos. Looking back through decades of work to assemble this, what do you think your sixteen year old would say if he could see what you've done and where you are now?
 
EV: If I had a kid? They would make fun of me, like they're supposed to. They'd say "How come we're not rich?" They wouldn't think their dad was kool. They'd laugh, at those old photos, and the way we dressed. Later on they would realize I had a pretty kool life up till that point.
 
I just figure there's another book yet to be written, so I gotta get out there and keep doing my thing. The last 10 years I wasn't on the road, I've been painting. Every day. A couple hundred paintings, 5 records, and a book, ain't bad, in that time.

Can't wait to see what happens next.

Brendon Small's career has taken him from music student and aspiring guitar hero to creator of some of the best animated comedies on TV. His first show, Home Movies, was part of the original lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Although Brendon wrote the music for Home Movies, he didn't... more

Brendon Small's career has taken him from music student and aspiring guitar hero to creator of some of the best animated comedies on TV. His first show, Home Movies, was part of the original lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Although Brendon wrote the music for Home Movies, he didn't find an outlet for his love of wicked guitar shredding until he created Metalocalypse.

Metalocalypse is the saga of Dethklok, the biggest and most brutal metal band in the world. When they're not fighting amongst themselves, the five members of Dethklok play absurd, elaborate concerts that usually result in death and carnage for the audience. Naturally, Brendon had to take this show on the road.

He put together an all-star metal lineup, with himself on guitar and doing the vocals of lead singer Nathan Explosion, to record full versions of songs like "I Tamper with the Evidence at the Murder Site of Odin." Now Dethklok isn't just the world's most popular metal band on TV. Their latest album, The Dethalbum II, is the best-selling death metal record ever, and they've co-headlined a tour with Mastodon.

Season 3 of Metalocalypse is currently airing on Adult Swim, and Dethklok's song "Laser Cannon Deth Sentence" was just added to Guitar Hero 5.

Jay Hathaway: How did you decide to get into TV instead of becoming a professional musician or joining a band?

Brendon Small: When I went through music school, I went to Berklee College of Music‚ I entered thinking I knew what I was doing or I knew what I wanted out of music school, and I left being very confused by what I wanted out of music. The music I cared about wasn't really being played. Guitar-driven music kind of wasn't cool anymore. In the meantime, I was being drawn toward this world of comedy, and I was hanging out with kids that were at Emerson College in Boston. Everything that they were doing sounded cooler, because you could still do music, you could score stuff, you could write it and you could act in it yourself. So, I think they had a better idea than what my music school was offering, which was basically, "Hey, here's a wedding gig. Learn some old standards and you might scrape by this month."

It wasn't a financial reason, it was because if I can do music and I can do all this other stuff, why wouldn't I do that? Also, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I interned at jingle houses in New York, where they do music for commercials and stuff like that. The musicians were the last people to have a say, creatively. You could come up with something great and have some dildo ad exec come in there and crush the whole thing. I thought, "Whatever I do, I don't want to be in post-production. I want to be in charge of the project." I was probably around 20 or 21 at the time.

JH: Do you find that it's easier to break into doing your own projects in music or in TV, in comedy?

BS: Well, first of all, to have a personality on the guitar is a very difficult thing. There are a handful of people, maybe seven people, where they play three notes and you go "Oh! That's Brian May from Queen," or "That's Jeff Beck," or whoever. But in comedy, your own personality and whatever makes you yourself, no one can actually compete with that. I just thought it made more sense to go with your personality first and add all of the other stuff later. People are looking for a person with a new comedic voice. Not a lot of people are looking for the next new guitar virtuoso. What would you rather hear: someone who's going to make you laugh, or the new guitar player who's going to break all the rules? Most people just want to laugh.

JH: Does that explain why Dethklok has outsold so many other metal bands? Because people just want to laugh?

BS: That may be part of the reason. The records, especially the second record, aren't necessarily funny records. I'm not going for jokes. There are a couple smart-ass and sarcastic things we do in there, but nothing too terribly funny. I think the reason is that it's got a TV show. That why it outsells other metal, because other metal doesn't have a TV show. I really believe that.

JH: When you were a kid, did you want to be in the biggest band in the world?

BS: When I was a kid ... for a while, I wanted to be a dentist. I thought it would be interesting to be a carpenter, for a while, and then I thought it would be interesting to be a toymaker. Then I thought it would be interesting to make monsters in movies. Then I discovered guitar, and thought it would be cool to be a guitarist. Then I went back to the dentist thing, and that's where I am now.

JH: That's your career aspiration at the moment?

BS: I am going to DeVry.

JH: Wow, awesome.

BS: No, when I was 14 years old and I had a guitar, all I did was fantasize about being able to play like Eddie Van Halen or whatever. I didn't know that there was any reality attached to that. I knew that I could study guitar and trick people into letting me go and hang out with this guitar for a long time. Beyond that, I didn't know what the reality of putting a band together was. I was too naive.

JH: Have you run into any metal bands who don't get Metalocalypse or don't like it?

BS: No. I'm sure that there are plenty out there who think it's lame and horribly-written. I'm sure that there are people who don't get the joke, but I don't meet those guys. I think it's good that I don't. Why would we want to hang out with each other? Look at each other, have a weird, stilted conversation, get mad at each other.

JH: Yeah, for sure.

BS: Actually, now I want to do that. I want to have a fancy dinner with one of those guys who doesn't like the show. We'll probably end up going dutch, because they're not going to pick up the bill. I'm not going to pick up the bill. I mean, if they don't respect the show, why would I?

JH: You'd have no reason.

BS: No reason.

JH: Since one of the themes of the show is how bored and jaded the world's biggest celebrities are, what's your own attitude toward getting more well-known? Have you developed a casual disregard for human life?

BS: First of all, you have to understand I work in cartoons. I consider it to be pretend show business. My face isn't plastered everywhere, so I walk down the street and I'm not harmed by or accosted by people. Nobody gives me a better seat at a restaurant. At Starbucks, no one's like, "Hey man, this one's on me." I pay full price for things. Nobody bothers me. I like that I can walk past the line of people that are lining up to see the Dethklok show, and nobody stops their conversation or looks at me. Everything else is Internet bullshit, and that's all fake. That doesn't mean you're really popular. It means people have a lot of curiosity for stupid shit.

JH: I was just reading some of those sites, and people really get into the most minute bits of trivia about Metalocalypse. Did you see that coming at all when you started writing the show?

BS: No, I wasn't expecting that. I'm glad that people enjoy all that stuff, but it doesn't really affect what I end up doing too much. People try to make sense of a lot of the small things like, "Who are these characters all based on?" And the answer is, aside from the singer, nobody. They like to concoct all these thing themselves, but no one seems to be getting hurt, so let 'em do it.

JH: Including all the other voice acting that you've done outside of Metalocalypse, what's the toughest voice you've had to do?

BS: That's an interesting question, because voiceover is the easiest job in the world. The only time it's tough is when you have a director who's bad, who can't really get his point across, and uses absurd metaphors. "Ok, you just got back from Sunday School and you have a very vague notion about you, and you don't know whether you're excited or not. Go!" I've had a couple of bad direction sessions‚ I'm sure I've given them, as well. Doing voiceover is the easiest job in the world if you know how to read. Even if you don't know how to read, someone can tell you the words you should say. I had to create a TV show to get voiceover work, 'cause everyone else figured out it's the easiest thing in the world. I'll tell you the easiest job I ever did ...

JH: Okay.

BS: It was for the Honda Fit campaign. I was like their voice for their car campaign, this big national ad thing. The guy who hired me was a super-nice guy who was a fan of the show, and hired me because of that. They put so many effects on my voice, there's no way you'd ever be able to tell it was me. They asked me to speak like Vicki from Small Wonder. Like a robot lady. [robot voice] But they asked. me. to. talk. like. this. [normal voice] I swear to God, that's exactly what I did. [robot voice] New. from. Honda. The. Honda. Fit. [normal voice] And that was it. The amount of money they pay for that kind of money is just stupid. It's like, the IRS is gonna come down on somebody here, 'cause this is bullshit. Sounding out words and saying them? Not too tough.

JH: What's the most brutal thing that you've done in your personal life?

BS: I know what the most brutal thing I've had to experience is, and that's taxes. I get the feeling of just flopping over and crying, you know? Taxes. Easy. Summer colds would be second. It's the little things.

JH: You're doing longer episodes for Season 3 of Metalocalypse. What was your plan for using the extra time?

BS: There's no one way to do that. If we have a story idea, we try to make it make sense within the thing. Sometimes concluding an episode is ... the Sopranos started doing it a lot time ago. They'd finish, they'd conclude, but they wouldn't totally bookend or stop. It would end in a precarious place. You don't need to know how it's going to finish in order for the episode to be done. You're going to assume that, yes, that thing's going to smash that guy and all those things are going to be released, you know? Aside from the last episode of last season, I think the audience knows what's going on. As far as what we use the time for, it's just trying to develop story. I think, past the first episode, you'll see that it's basically used for comedy.

That's what you're doing when you're working in TV, especially with half-hours. Just trying to make sure that you and the audience both know what your story's about. It's actually very tedious. What is this story about? What does this character want? Simple stuff they teach you in film school.

JH: Metalocalypse is nothing like your previous show, Home Movies. How did you decide to make something so completely different?

BS: Even if Home Movies was successful‚ we consider it a creative success, although it didn't get great numbers ‚ I don't understand why I would want to redo what I did already. Ultimately, I'm doing these weird, absurd little passion projects, and this one seems to have gotten popular. It's stuff that I care about, and if the audience likes it, hey, that's great, but ultimately it's for me. I understand that when networks put a lot of money behind something, they want to let everyone know that This is from the same guy that gave you That. That's fine, but I think it's more fun to be creative and do different stuff.

JH: What's your favorite Dethklok lyric? Is there a line you're particularly proud of writing?

BS: I honestly haven't been particularly proud of any of the lyrics I've written for Dethklok. But I do smirk every night when I sing the "Fan Song" for the kids out there. It's just a direct insult, and they're singing along. I don't truly feel this way, but I think it's very funny to say this to them: "You're a bunch of banks that I'd like to rob / you're my online cash transaction / you're my future stocks." And there are other lyrics, like, "You punched and blinded eunuchs / living in chatrooms / you masturbate on the sheets / your mothers clean for you." I think that's fun. I don't necessarily mean any of that stuff, but I think it's funny to sing that to them, and have them sing it along with me, at the very end of of the night.