Indie film darling Greta Gerwig already has two movies out this year, one of them being Damsels in Distress, in which she starred. I actually got to meet her for that film when I was interviewing Whit Stillman. While they were paired, Sillman commented on her character in the Arthur remake, as an example... more

Indie film darling Greta Gerwig already has two movies out this year, one of them being Damsels in Distress, in which she starred. I actually got to meet her for that film when I was interviewing Whit Stillman. While they were paired, Sillman commented on her character in the Arthur remake, as an example of how studio movies give characters silly traits.

In Lola Versus Gerwig stars as Lola, a woman whose fiancé (Joel Kinnaman) cancels their wedding sending her on a spiral of casual sex, dating, drinking and disaster. This is not one of your Kate Hudson wedding movies.

The impressive credentials of Greta Gerwig include a magna cum laude honor from Barnard College. As an actor, she starred in notable indies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and The Duplass Brothers’ Baghead. Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg got her enough notice to land big Hollywood movies like No Strings Attached and Arthur.

Curled up in a hotel chair, Gerwig remembered me, since we’d only met two months prior. We sort of continued the conversation where Damsels in Distress left off. Durning our conversation, Gerwig got us thinking about how awesome it is to be bored, which was a most exciting and unexpected twist.

SuicideGirls: Are you concerned with the images of women movies put out?

Greta Gerwig: Meaning is it something I worry about?

SG: When you’re taking movies and looking at other movies in the industry.

GG: Well, I think we’re in the middle of a really exciting time for women in film. Largely it’s women generating parts for themselves. I think we’ve gotten a lot more interesting female characters within film and television. But I think typically when you’re given a script to read, the majority of scripts I read, women are ciphers. They’re not really full characters a lot of the time. That being said, neither are a lot of the men. I mean, truth be told, there’s just a lot of bad writing out there. There’s also a lot of good writing but of course everybody’s fighting to get the good writing. I’m on a long list of people but I do think about it. I’ve been very, very fortunate with it. I feel like I’ve looked for women who seem like they’re dynamic human beings in movies, and I’ve been lucky enough to play parts like that that seem like dynamic human beings who aren’t just a stand-in for a pretty girl or something.

SG: Whit Stillman was amused that your character in Arthur gave tours of train stations. Did that seem far fetched to you?

GG: She was a tour guide, yeah. I got the best e-mail that I’ve ever gotten from anyone from Whit after he saw Arthur. He said, “All the departments executed their jobs well and the projection was very good.” I said, “Thank you, Whit, for seeing the film.” Yeah, that seems slightly far fetched but I think Arthur is a fairy tale movie. It doesn’t exist in reality. I think it’s like an archetype. It’s a fairy tale of the prince and the pauper almost.

SG: What was it about this perspective on marriage falling apart and women in relationships in Lola Versus that appealed to you?

GG: Well, she’s the gal moving the story forward. She’s the one making all these mistakes. I really liked how big she messes up. She doesn’t mess up little. She messes up in this grand way and she really screws up her friendships and relationships and is selfish and not really thinking about other people. There was something exciting about that. It was just incredibly fun to do and I knew when I was reading it “This will be really fun to act and I can really get into this.” It was, I was right.

SG: Lola is writing a dissertation on silence. Do you feel we have a fear of silence?

GG: Yes, I do. I think we have a fear of silence and a fear of boredom which is maybe the same thing.

SG: God, it shouldn’t be.

GG: Silence and boredom? I think boredom’s great. I think boredom’s so useful. Raymond Chandler wrote about writing when he said that he would give himself four hours every day and he had to sit at his desk and he didn’t have to write but he couldn’t do anything else. Eventually you get bored enough you start writing. I think boredom covers up for something else. I think boredom covers up anxiety about being alone or being quiet and not having anything to fill your brain or your hands or your eyes or your ears with. I think that creates anxiety which we interpret to be boredom but is actually anxiety.

SG: I would have thought boredom is something to be avoided but silence can be lovely.

GG: I think boredom is to be embraced. I think boredom can create really wonderful things. I think there’s a lack of boredom in the world right now. I think there’s a total lack of boredom. If you’re on the train or on the bus in New York, everybody’s on their phones or on their tablets and they’re entertaining themselves to fucking death. It’s literally like a David Foster Wallace book. And I’m part of it too. I’m not better than it. I’m a human. Of course I love a screen that talks to me. It’s the best thing in the world. You don’t have to sit with yourself anymore. But I think it’s so dangerous. Those moments of boredom on a plane or at the doctor’s office don’t exist anymore and maybe good thinking got done then. Maybe nothing got done then but maybe something got done. I don't think we can really assess the loss of that.

SG: They might be watching some of your movies on those phones and tablets.

GG: I know, they might be. I might be feeding the beast. I probably am feeding the beast. I’m part of it. I’m part of the problem.

SG: As someone who works as much as you do and develops your own projects, when do you get to be bored?

GG: I’m bored all the time. It’s a weird combination because I try to stay off the internet and the television and the media enough that I can have time and space to think and work, but at the same time, I’m involved in making content so I can’t be totally removed from it. It’s a weird balance to strike. It’s somewhere in the middle but it’s very easy to get sucked into the internet as everybody knows.

SG: That’s why I’m employed. I produce a lot of that.

GG: I know, it’s great. I mean, it’s totally beguiling but it’s weird. I have Google Chrome and you can look at your search history. For me, looking at my search history it’s like you can see the machinations of your mind going, “Oh, I wonder if he made this movie with this person. Oh, then that led me over here. Then I wonder what is arsenic anyway?” It’s really indulging all these stone skipping thoughts but I don't know. Maybe I just have this reaction because I’m secretly addicted to the internet.

SG: Well I learned something from one of your movies, also written by a woman, No Strings Attached. I learned about tea for your vag. I didn’t know that was a thing.

GG: Yeah, that line made it in. I love Liz Meriwether. She’s hilarious. I love her show too, New Girl. I think she’s really funny and great. I hope I get to make another movie with her.

SG: So tea for your vag is a thing and that helps women.

GG: Tea for your vag, yeah, totally.

SG: With all of the avenues available now in indie films, is it easier as an artist to reach an audience, via social media or these devices?

GG: I don’t really use a lot of those. I don’t tweet. I don’t do that stuff but yeah, I think it is easier. I don't know that I’m taking advantage of it though but it is easier.

SG: When you’re trying to raise financing, do these options, including VOD and downloading, help you get the money to make a movie?

GG: I actually stay far away from those kinds of decision making moments because it’s thinks I have no real aptitude to think about. The VOD stuff or the different ways you’re going to raise money, I just want to make the movie. Then however it gets to people, I let that happen however it happens.

SG: How have your educational studies of acting been important to your work?

GG: I didn’t go to conservatory. I got to take from some amazing teachers who were actually teaching at Julliard but I was at Barnard College at Columbia and I majored in English and philosophy. I was doing a lot of theater and taking a lot of acting classes and I guess I’ve always seen it as filling my toolbox. I feel like it’s all kind of haphazard because I didn’t have a full on four year conservatory training program. But I think the benefit of it is I never lost how fun it is and I’ve never lost that feeling of it’s all play. It’s never felt like work or drudgery, writing and acting. It has always felt free and exciting and it makes me happy. I think part of that has been preserved because I didn’t overwork it.

SG: Is it your type of music on the Lola Versus soundtrack?

GG: No, my type of music, I like big ‘70s rock, I like Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music type stuff. I like Patti Smith. I like David Bowie. I like rock n’ roll. Lola Versus is in theaters June 8.

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing... more

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing on one of the best televisions shows ever, Family Guy. Borstein’s main role on the show is Lois, the matriarch of the Griffin family. At first Lois was just a foil for Peter Griffin’s insane antics but soon Lois developed some very interesting quirks of her own, shepherded along by Borstein who has written some of Lois’ best moments.

But Drop Dead Gorgeous is another side to Borstein, one that is totally and completely filthy when liberated from television’s rigid standards and practices. Borstein speaks freely about her cunt, the impossible ideals that Hollywood insists upon and performs of series of amazing impressions from Renée Zellweger to Charlize Theron in Monster.

Buy the DVD of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Daniel Robert Epstein: I just saw the new Renée Zellweger movie yesterday and thanks to you I couldn’t stop picturing your impression of her.

Alex Borstein: What new movie is she in?

DRE: Miss Potter about Beatrix Potter.

Alex: Good Lord.

DRE: It was good, though [laughs].

Alex: She drives me a little nuts, I can’t help it.

DRE: It seems like a few people at Family Guy have it in for her. You guys are always making fun of her.

Alex: It’s fun to make fun of everyone, that’s our motto.

DRE: Why so much on Renée Zellweger not that I have any special love for her?

Alex: I think that her voice and “I’m going to gain five pounds to play a fat lady,” annoyed everybody. Then watching her chew the scenery in Cold Mountain. My husband said that the way she gained the weight for Bridget Jones was by chewing the scenery in Cold Mountain.

DRE: Have you always been able to imitate her?

Alex: Yeah. I always say some of the best impersonations come from people that somehow permeate your head. For some reason you get stuck on them whether you like them or hate them. There’s just something about them that’s very listenable or watchable and then you start emulating it and all of a sudden you’ve got an impersonation.

DRE: Did you ever do her on Madtv?

Alex: I didn’t. A lot of the time on Madtv we were relegated to doing people that they thought we visually most looked like. That was probably one of the weaknesses. They were very in love with the makeup and hair department. They would sometimes prefer to spend five hours with prosthetics and have someone look exactly like someone as opposed to, “Is this the best possible sketch we could do for this?”

DRE: What’s always funny about stuff like that is, do they really think people are going to believe you are those people?

Alex: Right we’re not trying to cash one of their checks at the bank. We just want to make some comedy. Sometimes I wouldn’t get to do a lot of those people. Being short and pudgy, they would never think of me first to play someone like Renée Zellweger.

DRE: I thought that Drop Dead Gorgeous would be pretty dirty but it was certainly a lot dirtier than I ever imagined.

Alex: Yeah, it’s definitely a filthy little show. I can’t help it, I have a bit of a potty mouth.

DRE: I know you were in comedy troupes but were you ever a standup comedian?

Alex: The first time I ever did standup I was 16 at a little club in southern California. My parents had to be there because I was under 21. I did standup there for the first time and then a couple more times. Then I abandoned it. In college at San Francisco State I revisited it a few times and I did this little comedy competition and Certs breath mints sponsored it. The people who were the celebrity sponsors were The Kids in the Hall so I was very excited.

DRE: That’s pretty cool.

Alex: That was really cool. I did not win but Margaret Cho did. But what’s funny is that she didn’t really go to our school. I think she signed up for an extension class just so she could be a ringer in the competition.

DRE: That’s so funny.

Alex: Yeah, then I abandoned it and got more into sketch with some people in college. Standup is just very lonely particularly if you’re a woman. If you go to those clubs, none of those guys really want to talk to you or hang out with you or think you’re funny.

DRE: My best friend is a woman and she’s one of the funniest people I know. We’ve had many conversations about whether women are funny in general. She agreed that women might not be as funny simply because the world doesn’t allow women to be funny, for the most part

Alex: I think so. That’s part of it. Most women see it as, either you’re going to be beautiful and attractive and have the male gaze upon you and attract lots of men or you’re going to be funny and be one of the guys. The world doesn’t like to allow for both. There are some people that cross over. Look at Lucille Ball. She was such a huge phenomenon because she was wildly attractive, really funny and accessible at all angles. Somehow she was able to make it work.

DRE: I hope you’re not thinking I’m a big misogynist now.

Alex: Oh no, it’s absolutely true. I often wonder that if I was a guy and had done the same amount of work that I’ve done could I be at the level of a Will Ferrell or Jack Black or Dane Cook. It could be the fact that I’m a woman has kept me back or maybe I’m just not funny.

DRE: [laughs] No, that’s definitely not true.

Alex: I think my career would be really different if I was a guy, but then again maybe I would blend into the crowd too much because there are so many men. Maybe I stand out more being a woman. We’ll never know because I don’t have a cock.

DRE: [laughs] Do you find that people in Hollywood are still surprised when a woman is funny?

Alex: Yes. I was in Montreal hosting the comedy festival there and you definitely get guys going, “Hey, you’re really funny.” I think it really still surprises people and all of a sudden they look at you with new eyes like, “Wait a minute, she’s not just a woman, she’s a funny woman.”

DRE: I read that you and your husband basically put together Drop Dead Gorgeous by yourselves.

Alex: Yeah, we did. It was really a fun thing to do together. We’ve always tried to work together. We both were members of Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles.

DRE: Wasn’t [Family Guy writer/producer] Steve Callaghan was part of that too?

Alex: That’s right. Also Adam Carolla and Will Ferrell did some stuff occasionally with Scott Wainio who was a writer on SNL. Then my husband and I tried writing together and we almost stabbed each other in the fucking face with pencils. It was not a good thing for us to write together. So this seemed like a really cool opportunity where we could work together and do something creative and have fun. He’s a director so he knows a lot about cinematography so it was a neat opportunity for him to shoot it. We just wanted to see if it’s possible to move outside of the system because most of your options are to sell your special to HBO or Comedy Central. Then they own it and that’s the end of it. They have the right to edit it how they want and even to air it or not. I just didn’t want to do that. I was at the point in my career where I had visibility from Madtv, movies and Family Guy so I didn’t need to get my name out there, which most comics do when they do a special like that. I don’t really need to have my name bandied about Comedy Central every five minutes. I don’t need the money up front. It’s been a really fun experiment and so far, knock on wood, very successful.

DRE: So it’s been selling pretty good?

Alex: It’s been slow, but it’s been steady. There has been zero publicity. FOX figured, and they’re probably right, that all we really need to do is put something Family Guy related on this and have it on the shelves next to Family Guy and put a flier in the Family Guy DVD and that should take care of all the sales. So far the DVD has been very successful. It hasn’t had the normal decay of sales after the first week. The first week of a DVD’s release is usually pretty much all it’s going to sell but this DVD is different. It’s one of those titles where it’s been slow, steady and growing.

But also we’re doing this tour to Apple stores all over the country doing something called Made on a Mac Presentation since the special was edited on Final Cut Pro. We basically tell the story of how we made it. I started touring this in 2002 and then we shot it in 2004 and it has taken this long for it to hit the streets. So it’s a fun and interesting story and it’s also really informative for people who are trying to take back some control from Hollywood and make their own projects and be very self-sufficient. A lot of people are doing that now like that sitcom on FX called It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

DRE: Everyone says that’s really good but I haven’t watched it yet.

Alex: To be honest I’ve only seen a couple. But those people got together and made their own pilot presentation. They just were like, “Fuck it. We’re sick of waiting for a break and waiting for this giant machine to notice us.” So they just went ahead and did it. Another friend of ours did it with a show called Sons and Daughters that was on ABC.

Made on a Mac Presentation is like a take back the night thing to show how you can take control of your own career.

DRE: Did you have to give up any rights when FOX agreed to put it out?

Alex: No, I was going to distribute it on my own last year. I was going to release it in February as a birthday present to myself [laughs]. I was spending some time with the people from FOX in Montreal. One of the people at home entertainment was like, “Oh my God, you should bring that in. You should talk to us about it. Maybe we can release it. Maybe we can do it as something that goes along with Family Guy.” I thought, “That’s not a bad idea.” So I pitched them in January and they said yes pretty quickly. I do have all the ownership of the whole piece. They get a percentage for distributing it but this way I managed to really hold onto a lot of it, which is rare. The downside is that maybe if they had a bigger chunk of it they would work harder at publicizing it. But I prefer a slow and steady tortoise to a hare that may not finish the race.

DRE: Was anyone offended by your act when you took it on the road?

Alex: Not really. I’ve never really had any negative response from anyone about my standup because most people coming to see me know what they’re in for. Also I’m pretty careful about where I perform. For instance, we have a house right near downtown Seattle. They had the Seattle International Comedy Competition recently and they asked me to be a judge at one of the finals and my husband to be a judge at one of the other finals. They had five nights of finals and they asked me to perform. I knew it wasn’t going to work in this small community where there are only 10,000 people and I have to see all of them at the market the next day. I think it is important to know your venue and know your audience.

DRE: I loved the bits in Drop Dead Gorgeous where you read the breakdowns of character descriptions. Are you still sent stuff like that?

Alex: For the most part I get 98 percent less auditions than someone that could fit any of those descriptions. A lot of the times I hear nothing about it because they don’t call if it’s something that I’m not right for. But sometimes you’ll lose faith and you’ll be like “Let me see. Let me take a look at the breakdowns” and it is so dismal. But I’m developing some TV stuff for myself and writing a feature and you find yourself falling into the same traps. You find yourself saying, “Oh maybe they’ll have this girlfriend,” and then you’ll find yourself not really developing the girlfriend character so much. You just know she’s going to be cute and that’s all that matters. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now I’m just as bad as the enemy.” It’s easy to see why it happens because it’s shorthand, laziness and it’s easier than spending the time developing a real human person.

DRE: You seem about as pop culture savvy as anyone but is it still difficult to keep up with Seth MacFarlane?

Alex: Yeah, it is. But Seth’s pop culture knowledge is very retro. Seth doesn’t own a computer and he doesn’t really watch television. Everything that Seth knows has already happened.

DRE: I knew he didn’t have email. But I didn’t know he didn’t have a computer.

Alex: He has one at work but he doesn’t have one at home and he doesn’t want one. He doesn’t understand MySpace and he despises most new music.

DRE: It is so strange because he is certainly at the right age to be into newer stuff.

Alex: He’s in his early 30’s but he’s just got an old soul. He’s got that Rat Pack soul but the great thing about that writer’s room is that we have 15 writers and everyone brings something different. We’ve got ages ranging from like 27 to 55 so you’ve got all these different references. There is such a cool mixed bag of people bringing in bizarro references. I certainly don’t have my hands on the pulse in terms of the pop culture. My husband and I just went to the Billboard Music Awards in Vegas a couple days ago and half of the people nominated we were like, “Who? What?” Someone named Chris Brown won everything. Never heard of him.

DRE: I don’t know who he is either.

Alex: But you certainly can’t help but know about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Gwen Stefani or Fergie.

DRE: How is a decision made to include something like the Tim Curry character from Legend in a Family Guy bit?

Alex: We all sit around a big table together and people bark pitches. It is as though you’re at a party with cocktails and frankly sometimes cocktails are involved. I remember one of the episodes that I wrote was called Deep Throat. Peter and Lois created a folk group and Brian is going after Mayor West in a Watergate parody. In the script we had Mayor West sitting in a hotel room watching TV. I wrote that he was just watching cartoons. Then the only other female writer, Cherry [Chevapravatdumrong], had him commenting that he was watching a cartoon called Jem. I didn’t know what Jem was but everyone else cracked up and I was like, “Ok, put that in. It’s weird and interesting.” That’s pretty much how it goes. If a lot of the people in the room respond or even if it’s just one person responding in a huge way, they’ll go for it.

DRE: How did you end up joining the Family Guy writing staff?

Alex: When I first started I started just doing voices. I was doing Lois and everything grew. I would start doing more voices and then I would ad-lib a lot. When Seth created the show he was 25 years old. I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend and the only women he knew were his mom and his sister. So he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and he will admit that in a heartbeat, like, “Ok what do girls wear? They wear hats. Ok, Meg will have a hat.” That’s pretty much how he decided things so it was freeing for them when I’d come in to do voices and I would change things to make it a little more like something a female character might say. One of the executive producers, Chris Sheridan, said, “Would you ever write for us?” At that time I was writing for myself on Madtv and before that I had written for cartoons like Casper and Pinky and the Brain. I told them that I would love to do it but that it is just a matter of schedule because I was working for Madtv at the same time. So what we did is that I started working at Family Guy on the summer hiatus from Madtv. Then when Madtv went back to shooting, I would just come into Family Guy as a writer on the days we didn’t shoot. I was getting to split my time all over the place and I learned so much. Madtv and Family Guy together really was comedy boot camp.

DRE: Seth has obviously changed his look since he first started Family Guy. He lost the glasses, got some cool looking hair and my wife said he’s hot now.

Alex: He thinks he is. I don’t want to crush any dreams, he usually does wear glasses but when he goes out for events he takes them off to be cool. But he’s still wildly insecure and has absolutely no idea who he is and he doesn’t understand even an iota of the opposite sex like most of the writers on television. But he started at 25 and now he’s edging on 35 so he’s a very different person.

DRE: Especially when you have money to buy nice clothes.

Alex: Exactly and he has people to tell him what to wear now. People that can say, “You know what? What if you could wear this vintage t-shirt and your button down shirt open?”

DRE: I asked [Family Guy writer/producer/voice actor] Mike Henry what offends him and he said that he doesn’t like stuff about kids like the Cancer boy character from Family Guy. What offends you?

Alex: Oh nothing, really. See, that’s what happens. All of a sudden when people have kids they change their tune about what offends them. It’s very interesting.

DRE: I get worried about that too. I don’t get offended very easily and I don’t want that to ever change.

Alex: It’s very interesting how it will change a person but I don’t think it’s definitive. They have a kid and for the first two years of the kid’s life they’re not cool with any of those jokes anymore then maybe after a few years they start to mellow.

But not much offends me. I’ve always been heavy and I’ve always thought that a lot of fat jokes were hilarious. I’m a Jew and I think Jew jokes are hilarious. I laugh the hardest at a lot of our Holocaust stuff on the show. I was just raised with laughing in the face of everything.

DRE: What about Mel Gibson?

Alex: I find him to be an idiot. He clearly is anti-Semitic to some degree but I think a lot of people forget that one of the things about living in this country is that you’re allowed to be anti-Semitic, you’re allowed to hate Jews, you’re allowed to hate white people and you’re allowed to hate black people. It may not be politically correct and cool but if the Nazis can march in Skokie then Mel Gibson has every right to say Jews are whatever. We don’t have to like it, I certainly won’t go to his movies and I don’t want to support him as an artist. Not that I was that interested in his work anyway. But I think people forget that there’s a difference between being like-minded and having the freedom to say what you want.

DRE: You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that he is allowed to say whatever the hell he wants.

Alex: Yeah, everyone forgets that just because you shouldn’t say something doesn’t mean you can’t. I think he’s a moron especially if you’re a public figure and you want to sell tickets so because of that I think he’s an idiot. But for me it only solidifies the fact that anyone would have to be stupid to be anti-Semitic or racist.

DRE: What’s your favorite Lois storyline that’s been on Family Guy?

Alex: We have an episode that is coming up that I wrote called; It Takes a Village Idiot and I Married One. Lois runs for mayor of Quahog and wins. It stemmed from another one woman show I was working on called Women and Jews: Why We'll Never Be President. I was in this headspace where I felt that a woman will never be president. So this storyline came out of that. I had these fantasies about a woman president that would be fair and there’d be no corruption. That’s a bunch of bullshit fantasy. In the episode Lois gets just as bitten by the corruption bug as anyone. We liked what happened so much in the episode that we wrote a book that’s going to come out in April to coincide with the episode.

DRE: Cool! Did you work with any of the other writers on it?

Alex: Yeah, Cherry and I wrote it together. We always laugh at these memoirs people release. It always makes us laugh when anybody assumes the rest of the world cares to read about their lives. We took a look at It Takes a Village, My Living History, Ann Coulter’s Godless and blah, blah, blah. We had this idea to write a book that looks at Lois’s time in office and the book has Lois pontificating her views and telling her story. What’s fun about it is that it has chapters by all the characters in the show where they chime in on her time in office and how they think she did. Of course it has a lot of rambling tangents with a lot of poop jokes.

DRE: Are you guys planning on responding within the show to what South Park did about Family Guy?

Alex: I don’t know. I’m not sure where everyone is on that. I just know that none of us really cared; we were just excited to be mentioned [laughs]. It is that excitement of, “I murdered a person, now I’m famous.” I think Seth was annoyed but I think Seth just gets that way. It’s almost like someone took a swipe at his child. I think we have made some slams back but I don’t know if they made it into the final draft of any of the scripts. We are able to do that because in the nine month process that it takes to make an episode, when we get right toward the end where it’s going to air we do last minute rewrites so we have the opportunity to change things. For instance if we have a Britney and K-Fed marriage joke, when that comes up now it will no longer going to be appropriate so we’ll have a last minute opportunity to alter it or to replace it completely but we would have to use the existing animation. Sometimes that’s how we can slip things in that are very timely because we have that last minute pull cord where we can slip something in.

DRE: Are you still working on the cartoon Angry Little Girls?

Alex: I worked on Angry Little Girls for a little while but not anymore. There was just too much going on. I’m doing some other live action TV development so I helped develop Angry Little Girls and even did an outline. Then at that stage, unfortunately I was like, “Uh-oh, I’m not going to be able to do all of this.”

DRE: Is it still going to air?

Alex: I think so. I think someone else is picking up where I left off and going to be developing it through completion.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

Alex: My husband told me that he knows what SuicideGirls is but I know very little.

DRE: The fact that your husband knows is good enough.

Alex: But that reminds me I would really like to have Lois do a totally nude layout for Playboy.

DRE: [laughs] That’d be great. Do you remember when Jessica Rabbit did one for Penthouse?

Alex: She did? Well I think Seth enjoys Playboy more than Penthouse.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

The Contest: Submit your best SFW fall themed photos (think fall colors, pumpkins, leaves, etc.) to contest@suicidegirls.com for your chance to be featured in our Facebook gallery and win a NEW SuicideGirls T-shirt. Start: Friday, 10/12 9am End: Monday, 10/15 5pm Rules for Weekly Social Contest: 1. more

The Contest: Submit your best SFW fall themed photos (think fall colors, pumpkins, leaves, etc.) to contest@suicidegirls.com for your chance to be featured in our Facebook gallery and win a NEW SuicideGirls T-shirt.

Start: Friday, 10/12 9am
End: Monday, 10/15 5pm

Rules for Weekly Social Contest:
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5. We will post the photos we choose in a Facebook Album on our Facebook Page.
6. Once your photo has been posted on our Facebook page, promote it via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. in order to get more Facebook Shares. The photo with the most share will win the brand new SuicideGirls tee.

by Nahp A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Ryker Suicide in Sassy] This week Ryker tells us why she loves what's cookin' in The Kitchen. Members: 4,135 / Comments: 37,03 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Honestly it is one of the first places I go when I’m needing... more

by Nahp

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Ryker Suicide in Sassy]

This week Ryker tells us why she loves what's cookin' in The Kitchen.

Members: 4,135 / Comments: 37,03

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Honestly it is one of the first places I go when I’m needing some creative ideas for new dishes. Some of the stuff people whip up in that group is incredible! Plus, the food porn is bonerific.

DISCUSSION TIP: Don't come into the thread hungry unless you have time to cook You will literally need to eat immediately after reading some of the threads!

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: I don't think there is really any heated discussions, foodies are generally pretty happy people

BEST RANDOM QUOTE: "Warning: the food stuffs behind the link may cause sudden hunger and no responsibility will be taken for those who attempt to recreate any of the food stuffs there in.....especially the tequila and chicken pie."

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Anyone! Everyone! Whether you love to cook or eat, this is a great group to be in.


***
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(image) by ChrisSick (image) [Source: Mashable] Hey there, lil' tyke, wassa matter? Did the President let you down? Break your heart when he blew away his five-point lead in ninety minutes of sad-ass debate performance last week? Well, guess what, your uncle Joe is here to cheer you all up, he's... more

by ChrisSick


[Source: Mashable]

Hey there, lil' tyke, wassa matter? Did the President let you down? Break your heart when he blew away his five-point lead in ninety minutes of sad-ass debate performance last week? Well, guess what, your uncle Joe is here to cheer you all up, he's got a treat for you and its called FACTS.

For the last week I've endured nothing but endless triumphalism from the Right and sky-is-falling inanity from the Left. Following President Obama's lifeless (and bloodless, by comparison) debate performance against Gov. Romney, the polls favored the challenger for the first time since he captured the nomination in June of this year. This resulted in a brutal media cycle that asked such important political questions as “Does the President even give a shit?” and “How bad will a Romney presidency be?”

Joe Biden emailed me, personally — along with every one else on the Obama 2012 mailing list — to ask for money and promise me that he had one job tonight:

Well, according to a quick scan of Politfact's instant debate factcheck, he pretty handily accomplished that. In fact, if all you're looking for is a quick summary of the debate, here it is:

Ryan read prepared (and well-worn) attack lines straight from his stump speeches, while Biden laughed himself sick every time Ryan opened his mouth and once actually rubbed his hands together in anticipation of responding while Ryan was speaking. Biden seized FACTS as punctuation for all his points early in the debate, and after looking a little shaky on the Benghazi Embassy debacle, pretty much bludgeoned Ryan to death with them from there on out.

I knew the debate was won by Biden forty-five minutes in as I watched all the conservative Twitter accounts I follow harp on #Bidengrin, which quickly got seized upon by liberals (and myself) as a triumphant tag, so they quickly switched to #Bidenunhinged. Harping on the oppositions facial expressions during the debate is usually a sign that you've ceded the salient point ground.

But for a second, let's talk about this and — hopefully, in the process — put both the debates into perspective. You judge the winner of a debate in one easy way. You turn off the sound and watch the body language and facial expressions. Fucking tragic, I know, that such an analysis matters more than any actual points that get stated or rebuttals delivered, but there it is. As a smarter man than me once opined — the game is the game.

And by such a metric President Obama lost the first Presidential debate about as badly as Congressman Ryan did tonight. Joe Biden was relaxed, comfortable, confident, and seemed to be enjoying himself, while Ryan looked overly-serious, humorless, stiff, more than a little disturbingly dead-eyed.

I spent most of the week following the Presidential debate patiently — okay, not so patiently more than once — explaining to dissatisfied liberals why their firm conviction that Mitt Romney did nothing but lie through his perfect teeth didn't matter even a little bit. Because the correct response to such a tactic isn't to stare at your note cards on the podium, it is to do precisely what Joe Biden did tonight, hammer on the facts, corner your opponent in their own words, and never let up.

You don't win debates because Politifact says you told less lies after the fact.

And despite Biden's emailed promise to tell the truth, he really only had one job tonight, and that was to create a new media narrative. If early indications that I'm seeing are any sign, he's successfully accomplished that. Conservatives will tell you — and anyone who will listen, much less believe them — that the moderator was biased (because the President attended her wedding twenty years ago as a guest of her now-divorced husband), that the Veep debate was a draw (already seeing this on TwitteR), or that it doesn't matter nearly as much as Obama's performance.

But, an interesting fact is that the initial polling that included post-debate reaction didn't show a substantial bounce for Romney. The media and most viewers were in agreement that the President lost, and badly. In fact, by the largest margin in history. But it didn't shift the polls very quickly. The massive shift didn't take place until after the media narrative coalesced. And you can forget all that “liberal media bias” horseshit. The media doesn't love a liberal half as much as they love a dogfight race.

Expecting the Veep Debate to change the stakes and dramatically shift the needle in the polls is wishful thinking, at best and outright liberal delusion, at worst. But what Biden may have accomplished tonight is to staunch the bleeding, and — more importantly — change the narrative. The next few days will be highly instructive but thus far, anything is possible as the debates have broken most of the historical precedents for affecting a race.


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In the past few months I’ve spoken with a number of incredibly talented and iconic musicians including Mike Patton, Les Claypool and Page Hamilton. All three of these men have made their nut and name with super cool yet somehow popular music, oftentimes carving out their niche by paying for their music... more

In the past few months I’ve spoken with a number of incredibly talented and iconic musicians including Mike Patton, Les Claypool and Page Hamilton. All three of these men have made their nut and name with super cool yet somehow popular music, oftentimes carving out their niche by paying for their music themselves. Frank Black definitely ranks right up there with these unique performers. Black first cracked the music scene wide open with his preeminent band, The Pixies. In addition to making music with The Pixies, Black has had a exceptional solo career. His newest album, Fast Man Raider Man, is a bit more chill than previous endeavors, but it is certainly no less dynamic.

Buy Fast Man Raider Man

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up?

Frank Black: I’m just driving my son Julian to camp.

DRE: How old is he?

FB: He’s eight.

DRE: Does he know how cool you are?

FB: Yeah he does [laughs]. He likes to be around sometimes when the press is involved especially photographers. I think he might have ambitions of his own.

DRE: Does he play music yet?

FB: No, we’re going to drama camp today just to give you an idea. He dances and stuff but he is in the Pixies movie.

DRE: I was really surprised when I popped your new album in and found out how mellow it is.

FB: What do you mean? I’ve done mellow before.

DRE: Sure, but I was just surprised that every track seemed mellow. Not in a bad way or anything.

FB: I don’t know, I mean, I’m just, I just feel that you. Well you know…you’re right, it’s mellow. It’s mellow [laughs].

DRE: Did you just not want to put something on there that wouldn’t be as recognizable as a Frank Black song?

FB: No, it doesn’t really work like that. I just write a bunch of songs. The Nashville guys rock more like the Rolling Stones than they realize. But the difference is that they’re all of the same vintage, the same generation. Heck we had Ian McLagan who was almost a Rolling Stone himself. But a lot of these guys, especially the American guys, play with a certain amount of restraint. It’s just the way they play rock music as opposed to people like the Rolling Stones who play things a little more blown out, a little more amped up. So if I like something a bit more restrained or a bit on the mellower side, I think of that situation as extra restrained or extra mellow. But to generalize what they’re actually playing I don’t think it’s dainty or anything like that.

DRE: Right, it is not going to be played on any soft rock stations if that’s what you thought I was saying [laughs].

FB: It is that end of the palette. It has a certain je ne se quoi. Pick something from the really rock end of my career like the record Doolittle. In reference to those records, yes there are songs that are played in an up tempo aggressive style but mixed in among those songs are also mellow songs and songs that are downright silly. So your observation is right, there are not any heavy rock songs on this album. Maybe except a song like Johnny Barleycorn or something but to me a song like End of The Summer is more of a Leonard Cohen-y vibe. Those kinds of songs are truly the heaviest of all. Leonard Cohen doesn’t have to yell at you to get his point across. He just has to say it very calmly and very coolly. It’s macho in a much different way.

DRE: Do you feel like you’re less aggressive personally?

FB: One would hope. One would hope that as a person when you’re 40 years old that you don’t have the same knee jerk spontaneous stupid reactions that you had when you were 25. So hopefully you gain some worldly wisdom and that’s why when you meet an older person and when I say older I mean someone 50 years old and they’re flying off the handle and aggressive and intense, it’s extra awkward [laughs]. You just go “Wow, what’s up with that dude?” If you’re at the mall and you run into some older person who has got all this aggression it feels wrong. As opposed to some younger doofus who belongs to a fraternity. You cut him a lot of slack because you just go, “There’s a guy who doesn’t know a thing about life.”

DRE: For your next project will you swing the other way and do something more aggressive?

FB: Well I don’t have a lot of vision. I just write songs and they come out the way they come out. But I suppose that there might be something in the air before I start to make a record. I might go, “Yeah, I think it’s time to rock out a little bit” or “I think it’s time to not worry about whether or not it’s going to rock and let these dudes play what they’re going to play.” But you don’t necessarily just sit around and make a concentrated effort. You don’t analyze everything that far, you just do it. It’s still rigid and music is still rubbing the muse so you don’t want to pigeonhole the muse.

DRE: I read that you recorded this album in Nashville. Was that important to get certain people to play on the album or did you want a Nashville mindset?

FB: Certainly the engineers and the studios itself have a certain atmosphere which is different than say, LA, London or New York. It is not so much about city but it’s indirectly about the city. Making records is not about ambience. You’re in a room that has four walls and a roof. Frequently it’s an industrial space. In the case of Nashville there are studios in other people’s homes, which is not that uncommon these days, but whatever ambience is at Cowboy Jack’s place is because of Cowboy Jack not because it’s downtown Nashville. Maybe it would be different if I were in New Orleans or something. For me, making records is very much about work. Sometimes the studio will be prepare for your arrival and the assistants will roll out the oriental rugs and start lighting incense and be burning Jesus candles to try to create a vibe, an atmosphere. Some people like working in atmospheres like that but as soon as I arrive, I go “What the heck is going on here? Blow out all these candles and turn on some frigging lights.” I don’t want ambience, I want the ambience to be in my record and I need to see what I’m doing here so I can capture it with my microphone plus the incense dries out your throat. The mood is on the record. It is in the way the people play. It’s not external stimuli, in fact, the less external stimuli you have the better. The less drugs and alcohol the better, maybe some coffee but you don’t want to have lots of stimuli. The muse is a mysterious thing, but then there is also all the practical mechanics of using all of your muscle memory and your knowledge about the way that you play, about the way that the other people play and keeping that heightened. Long gone are the days where the band sits around and says, “Hold on we need another five minutes with the bong here before we can get in the mood to play our art.” That’s just a crock of shit.

So you start to have a more serious approach. A lot of people say, “Oh yeah, you’ve been recording in Paris. There must be something about that city that really helps it be creative.” I would want it to be that way like it is in the movies but truly when you arrive you could be anywhere. There’s the tape machine, there’s the bathroom, there’s the drum room, there’s the control booth so it’s got nothing to do with Paris. You got to be tuned into the record.

DRE: I read that you did the last Pixies tour to pay for Faster Man, is that true?

FB: No. well I guess in a literal sense, maybe. I make money from a variety of sources but I can’t say I’ve ever done a tour to pay for something specifically. You just try to run around and make as much as you can. Sometimes you have good years and sometimes you have bad years.

DRE: You mentioned the Rolling Stones before and very often it seems they will record a new album just to get out there on tour.

FB: They go through a tour to make money and they don’t necessarily need to make a new record. But if the Rolling Stones don’t put out a new record that maybe just a 100,000 people are going to go buy it’s symbolically bad because you’re not a viable premium band, you’re county fair. That’s what The Pixies have to do at this point, we’re at that junction where we’ve got to decide if we a creative viable force now or are we county fair. Right now we’re still getting away with playing a few gigs under the guise of a reunion. That’s worked great but it can only last so long.

DRE: Can you clarify whether or not The Pixies are doing any new work?

FB: The thing is, I can say things and people can interpret what I say however they usually have some preconceived notion that they want to be confirmed. So if I say “Gee, I don’t know if we’re going to make a record.” Then, The Pixies Will Never Record Again is the headline. If I say we might record then the headline is Pixies to Record a New Album. I’m not a politician or Kofi Annan but you guys or your editors, if you’re in the mood, will just make stuff up. Even if it’s not in the interview. It happens to me all the time.

DRE: I’m sure it does.

FB: The British are the worst of all. The other day I did an interview and they even had the nerve to print the interview in a question and answer format to give the illusion that this is what I said verbatim. They actually printed all my responses verbatim, which would be fine, but the clever part was they didn’t change what I said; they changed what the questions were. That cast my answers in a whole different light. I had been thinking about writing to the editor saying “Shame on you! I know I’m just some rock dude and you’re just some goofy rock magazine, but you’re giving everyone the impression that I’m responding to question x but you didn’t give me question x you gave me question y. You’re deceiving everybody. You could have just asked me the question and now you’ll never know the real answer.”

It could be termed as a “juicy question” but they didn’t say it to me in a really juicy way, they phrased it to me in a dull way. So I gave them a little answer when they could have had the juicy answer to the juicy question. Now they’ll never know because they didn’t have the guts to just ask me the question because they assumed that I would get all thrown in a tizzy and hang the phone up or something. That isn’t true. I’ve only hung a phone up once in my life on a journalist and I’ve never restricted a journalist ever from asking me anything.

DRE: Would you like to do more Pixies material?

FB: I would love to.

DRE: What do the other people in the band want to do?

FB: The main thing the band is wrestling with is that we haven’t put out a record in 12 years but the records that we did put out are held in fairly high esteem. They’re all still in print and you don’t want to mess with that necessarily. You don’t want to screw it up by putting out a bad record or even a record that’s really great but everyone says it’s bad. So there’s a lot of hesitation, if there weren’t a lot of hesitation maybe we would have made a record three years ago. But here it is three years into the reunion and we’re going “Yeah, I think I’d like to make a new record. Should we?” We haven’t had any reason to make a new record until about now.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Laura Dern is the talented and beautiful muse of many of David Lynch’s best films. Dern has starred in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and most recently, Inland Empire. In Lynch’s three hour, shot on video opus Dern plays multiple characters all orbiting her main character of an actor who lands her first... more

Laura Dern is the talented and beautiful muse of many of David Lynch’s best films. Dern has starred in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and most recently, Inland Empire. In Lynch’s three hour, shot on video opus Dern plays multiple characters all orbiting her main character of an actor who lands her first really great part in a long time. Dern has not only supported many independent filmmakers throughout her career, she produced Alexander Payne’s first film Citizen Ruth, scored an Oscar nomination for Rambling Rose and even changed herself into a femme fatale for Novocaine. I got a chance to talk with Dern about Inland Empire from an undisclosed place in Manhattan.

Check out the official website for Inland Empire

Daniel Robert Epstein: So have you and David have kept in contact over the years?

Laura Dern: Yeah. We both got busy in different directions for a while which is part of why we didn’t work together for a period of time. But we always remain friends and keep finding each other in the course of life.

DRE: I asked David if there is a narrative in Inland Empire and he said “Yes there is.” What did you ask him about when you were shooting this?

LD: I only remember a couple of times where I really had to pinpoint him down and say “I need more.” That’s over a three year period so that’s pretty amazing considering there wasn’t a script. If I could say anything to someone who’s going to his film; I would want them to know about David before they entered the theatre. There’s nothing about David that is elitist. He hasn’t figured out the plot and is sitting back waiting for you to fail his test. He believes in the visual arts and he is a painter who’s start was about creating something on canvas and having interpretations be intuitive and completely different than anyone else’s. That’s how he created art and then cinema took off from there. David believes in the intelligence of an audience. He believes in an audience going into the experience and discovering it for themselves. He knows what it is for him but he doesn’t need it to be the same for you and I love him for that. I want people to know that because I had the same experience making it that they had watching it. I didn’t know what the plot was but I had to feel my way through it and consider behaviorally what the character is walking through in each scene as we did it because I didn’t know what was coming after or what had come before. I had no script to guide me. But David is so specific about the feeling he wants you to have. Even when he speaks in code, he gives you a word or a feeling or the mood that he wants then you can run with that for a long time. He told me at the beginning of shooting that it is about a woman in trouble. That really helped me. For me it became about many aspects of a woman going through a dismantling and maybe even a resurrection at some point. So I never saw it as these different characters and these different pieces. That’s a very exciting way to work.

DRE: Obviously you understand your interpretation of the film but do you feel that you and David were in sync?

LD: Emotionally yes. I think most of people who see it, probably could get all the same feelings from it. But even though I figured it out for me, I don’t necessarily know what the rabbits mean or what does 47 mean or am I killing myself, is the guy my husband and what is the Polish connection? Is that woman me from a past life? Is it me in an altered state and I’m finding myself? There’s so many ways people are talking to me about it and they’re all pretty fantastic ideas. So I can’t wait to see it again to figure it out more and see what it makes me feel. The first time you see it you’re watching yourself and seeing what you all did and how it came together. So it takes a couple times before you just sit and witness the movie.

DRE: Would you have done this film if it had been any other filmmaker but David?

LD: There are only a few filmmakers that I would take a three year journey with. But I would trust them because I either know them personally or because I love their work. But to have no script and to play several people takes the length of familial relationship. Also it wasn’t just me trusting him but also knowing how much he trusts me. That was an incredible gift. The greatest thing a director can learn from David is that he believes so much in his actors. That confidence and faith forces you to take risks in a much greater way.

DRE: Do you remember your first audition for David?

LD: Yeah, it was for Blue Velvet. I was 17 and I went in figuring I’d do what is always done at auditions which is sit down and be asked to read a scene. I’m sitting on a floor in the hallway when David came out of the office and said “I got to take a leak.” He ran to the bathroom and afterwards he invited me into his office with the casting director and we spoke about life for 30 minutes. I remember us discussing trees and meditation. He mentioned something about being a mediator. We talked about him growing up in the Northwest and me growing up in LA and that we lived near each other in LA when he was making Eraserhead. We never mentioned acting or movies. I don’t think he’d ever seen me in a movie but he’d been told something about me. Then he asked me to come to Bob’s Big Boy with him to meet Kyle MacLachlan for French fries.

DRE: So he really does like Bob’s Big Boy.

LD: That’s real. We went to Bob’s and he was drawing on a napkin and then he asked me to go do Blue Velvet. That was my audition process. So I should have known then that I’d end up doing Inland Empire because already it was going to be an unusual journey.

DRE: Is part of the fun of doing a David Lynch movie seeing what he does with all these disparate parts?

LD: What’s incredible is that it’s only as fun or maybe even less fun than the journey itself. David is so much fun. He wants it to be such a good time. He’s a nice man. He wants everybody to have fun which is unbelievably rare to have on a movie set. He cares deeply about this spontaneous, fun, experimental feeling. Being pushed towards bravery is a blast. He had a camera operator working with us and he needed something like a dolly shot but we had no equipment. So he put the camera operator on rollerblades. That can only be paralleled by seeing it. It’s exhilarating, it’s scary, it’s exciting and you don’t know what to expect. That’s what everyday at work was like.

DRE: David also loves Los Angeles. You grew up there and your parents are actors. Do you love Los Angeles?

LD: In some ways. I think he has more of a love of it than I but the parts of LA that I love, he loves equally. He loves old school Hollywood like Grauman's Chinese, the old Hamburger Hamlet restaurant on Beverly and places like the Beverly Hills Amusement Park. Those are things that I love too because they were my childhood and he has an appreciation for it on a whole other level and I love that about him.

DRE: Since you and David have worked together so much, do you have a shorthand on set?

LD: Yeah, we talk a lot about everything but the movie. I think he’s a believer in not over talking, just like he’s a believer in not over plotting. Everything becomes an intuitive, feeling experience and that’s the way he describes it.

DRE: Have you ever shot a movie on video before?

LD: No.

DRE: Was it a different experience?

LD: Wildly different. Nothing like shooting a 35mm movie. With a 12 hour day on a regular movie, you hope for an hour’s worth of great footage. On a 12 hour day on this movie, we’d come away with probably ten hours of great footage. We shot all the time. We’d get to work and start shooting. The Sony PD-150 is so lightweight that we were close together the entire time. It wasn’t like he was in his tented little place watching a monitor. There are certain kinds of movies that require that, but there are other kinds of movies that are about human behavior and to have your director right there with you watching what you’re doing and pushing you to try different things or go to a different place is the way it should be.

DRE: One of the last scenes has Laura [Harring] blowing a kiss and then there’s all the other actors. Do you have a shorthand with the other actors since most of you have worked with David before?

LD: Not really oddly enough. David has a different language with each person. He gets his own feeling with each person. Each experience is so unique with David. I’m friends with Naomi Watts and she and I did a movie together [We Don't Live Here Anymore] and we talked about how much we loved David and loved working with David, but it is still it’s own experience. But there are a couple of catchphrases we all know. He’s the most unique person and such a brilliant and extraordinary gift to film. I just feel really lucky to work with him.

DRE: Your two previous films with David are so beautiful and lush, do you feel like we are losing that now that David is only going to be working with video?

LD: I don’t know the answer to that because I haven’t seen that much digital video being transferred. I thought I would hate it because I love film. But what David did with the transfer process and how he transferred it and how he works with color and light and sound and mixing and matching them all together is so beautiful. The crudeness of the film that he was working with becomes its own art. I don’t know if in somebody else’s hand I would feel the same way but somehow the nastiness of it was the beauty. But David certainly feels like it’s his future and I’m sure it is the way of the future.

DRE: I love the scenes with you, Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux. How was doing those?

LD: Great. That was the most like making a regular movie. The scenes with Jeremy and Harry Dean Stanton were done all together in five days. There was more crew as well. But we still were moving so fast which I think all the actors loved.

DRE: I know you’ve done like a dozen pictures with your mom including this one.

LD: Something crazy like that at this point. But there are only two where I felt like we were really working together, Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart.

DRE: Is it coincidence when the both of you are on a picture?

LD: Oh, total coincidence. Rambling Rose is the only time we actually sought out doing it together. I was involved in the movie and the director [Martha Coolidge] and my mom were very good friends because they had done another film. She really wanted my mom but mom and I also wanted to do it together. But David asked my mom to do Inland Empire without me even knowing.

DRE: I heard you might be in Jurassic Park 4.

LD: I heard that too. I don’t even know. People have asked me if I’m going to be in it so I don’t know if that means they’re writing it and my character is in it.

DRE: Would you be interested?

LD: Well if Steven [Spielberg] were there I’d always be interested because I love him.

DRE: What if he were just producing because I don’t think he’s going to direct it?

LD: You never know. I guess it depends on where they take the dinosaurs and me.

DRE: It has been almost ten years since your appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom. It had a big impact at the time but it seems like it has faded.

LD: It had an impact on people who were ready to listen. That’s the good news. But it did not have an impact on the Bush administration. So Ellen’s show didn’t make it any different. But what did excite me is that I’ve never received more fan mail for anything in my life. A lot of it was parents thanking me for being part of something that helped them to honor their children’s choices. That moved me so much. At the time, it was huge because these huge sponsors were pulling out and we were in the middle of shooting and it was becoming a huge controversy. It wasn’t just that she mentioned being gay but I was also playing a gay woman that she was coming out to and potentially coming on to. The whole thing was amazing and it seemed to be radical in this day and age, but it was at the moment. Unfortunately not quite huge enough to shift the tide of unconscious idiocy.

DRE: Did you have a big part in Year of the Dog?

LD: I don’t have a big part. It’s very much an ensemble. I had a hilarious time doing it and it was a hilarious character that I loved playing. I really wanted to do it because I think Mike White is totally brilliant. Mike is a born director. We tried to do a movie together a long time ago that he had written and that he wanted to direct. It never came to be so I wanted to support him when he finally got to direct.

DRE: Do you know what you’re doing next?

LD: I don’t. I had a small part in a movie with Russell Crowe [called Tenderness] and there’s a movie with John Travolta and James Gandolfini that’s supposed to come out called Lonely Hearts. But I don’t know when that movie’s coming even though we did about a year ago.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do after this. I feel so liberated from doing Inland Empire that I’m like “Gosh, what do you do when you get to be three totally different people.” But I’ve been lucky enough to run the gamut so hopefully something fun will come up.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

A.J. Focht Avengers 2 has started casting and Emily Blunt and Ruth Wilson are both up for the new female role. The current rumor is the part will be Ms. Marvel, the Marvel movie universe’s first ‘super powered female’ (as Black Widow was just a master assassin). While the Marvel movie properties... more

A.J. Focht

Avengers 2 has started casting and Emily Blunt and Ruth Wilson are both up for the new female role. The current rumor is the part will be Ms. Marvel, the Marvel movie universe’s first ‘super powered female’ (as Black Widow was just a master assassin). While the Marvel movie properties are currently divided between several companies, the X-Men producer would love to see a compromise made between Disney and Fox so the X-Men and the Avengers movies can crossover.

Iron Man 3 has resumed production in Miami, Florida. With only about seven months left until its release, the first trailer will premiere on the internet on October 23. Iron Man 3 will be the first of the movies in Marvel’s phase two, premiering on May 3, 2013.

Guardians of the Galaxy will be the next franchise Marvel launches into its cinematic universe. One of the most recognizable characters from the series is a fury little fellow with an affinity for explosions, Rocket Raccoon. Michael Rooker, who plays Merle in The Walking Dead, has tossed his name in the hat for the role. He pitched his case in a recent interview, having experience both doing motion capture and working with director, James Gunn.

Amazing Spider-Man 2, has already begun casting, and it looks like the part of Mary Jane Watson is up for grabs. Shailene Woodley is currently in talks to play Spidey’s girl next door. The movie is set to hit theaters on May 2, 2014.

Mary Jane isn’t the only important comic movie roll rumored to be filled. The Justice League may be set to feature Armie Hammer as the next Batman. The movie will supposedly start off a few years into Batman’s crime fighting career and is looking to be in theaters sometime in 2015.

The first look at Deadshot from the new TV series Arrow based on the Green Arrow has hit the internet. Unlike the loose take used in Smallville, it looks like Arrow’s Deadshot is going to be sticking with a more comic look. Arrow premiered this week on the WB.

Dr. Horrible 2 is moving forward. Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon gave an update saying they intended to finish the script and everything else this year so they can start shooting next year. There is no current release date set for the second movie, although the TV debut of Dr. Horribles Sing-Along was on the CW this week.

This Sunday October 14, The Walking Dead premiers its third season on AMC. The newest trailer has turned up the action, and sets a promising tone for the new season. The Walking Dead magazine will debut later this month. Check back in a few weeks for more coverage and review of the first issue.

Last week, I reported the NBC Munster’s remake, Mockingbird Lane has been put on ice. That might not be entirely the case. NBC is now trying to salvage the $10 million put into the project and they are looking at a made for TV movie.

Some legal issues in the comic world, Stan Lee’s former company, Stan Lee Media, Inc. has filed a claim against Disney for rights to some of the Marvel characters. It’s not clear yet what properties are tied up in the mix, the statement given mentions hundreds of characters created by Stan Lee:

A new web series, Batgirl: Spoiled premiered its first webisode this week. The series is a fan web-series not affiliated with DC or Warner Bros. at all. It follows the adventures of Stephanie Brown Batgirl, and her life in Gotham after a close call and a falling out with Oracle and Batman. The first episode is a great watch that I’d highly recommend you view.

Chantal Claret is a very satisfied pleasure seeker. The Morningwood front lady, who admits she was once “a very naughty girl,” has just released the album she's always wanted to make – The One, The Only… her solo debut – and is currently being gratified by a residency at the Hard Rock’s... more

Chantal Claret is a very satisfied pleasure seeker. The Morningwood front lady, who admits she was once “a very naughty girl,” has just released the album she's always wanted to make – The One, The Only… her solo debut – and is currently being gratified by a residency at the Hard Rock’s swanky Vinyl club in Las Vegas and by a husband (Jimmy Urine of Mndless Self Indulgence) whom she tells us is “one of the good ones.”

Her freshly minted music – which might come as quite a surprise to those used to the pop-infused rock of Morningwood – is perfect for Sin City, being a glamorous and gutsy mix of ‘60s inspired retro rock & soul.

A longtime friend of SuicideGirls, we thought is was about time we caught up with the sexy chanteuse and kick-ass woman’s woman. During the course of our conversation she shared her recipe for finding love, and spoke about the wonders of real women (with real asses) and the joy of making out.

Nicole Powers: I’m just turning the tape recorder on so everything you say can be taken down as evidence and used against you.

Chantal Claret: Although I have a fear that that’s what happens with every phone call I’m on...I have to tell you though, I met one of my best friends ever, who is still one of my best friends to this day, she used to work for SuicideGirls, and we met via phone when she interviewed me about six years ago.

NP: Oh, very cool. Who would that be?

CC: Lauren Clark [a.k.a. Auren Suicide].

NP: Oh, oh my gosh, Lauren is amazing. I love her.

CC: She’s going to be there this weekend in Las Vegas too…We actually met for the first time at a SuicideGirls event on New Year’s and she’s still one of my BFFs.

NP: Oh, I love that. SuicideGirls is awesome for bringing like-minded folks together.

CC: Yeah.

NP: So that was in the days when you were Ms. Morningwood. This album is quite the departure, but it’s a glorious departure too.

CC: Thank you so much.

NP: I’ve just been rocking out all morning to “Real Girls” – that’s everything that SuicideGirls is about in one badass phat track.

CC: I wanted to write a song for girls. There’s a lot of songs – like by Beyoncé and “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” – all that stuff is talking to guys, telling them about how a big girl is all right. But I wanted to write a song from a girl with a big fat ass to another girl with a big fat ass. You know, girl to girl, let’s be proud of ourselves. It’s not only for girls with big fat asses. I don’t want to exclude girls if they don’t have the natural goods, but, you know, be proud of yourself and shake your shit.

NP: But, as you say in the song, do you think “real girls get the boys”?

CC: I do. You know what, my husband loves some “tig ol’ bitties” as I call them. Even though men think they want like supermodels, that shit doesn’t keep you warm at night. I’m telling you, secretly, guys like a little bit of stuff. The good ones like that. I mean, I’ve never had a problem getting dudes and I’ve always had a little meat on the bones. So if I can do it anybody can do it.

NP: Good to know. So where did the inspiration for this album come from? Because it’s complete left of field for people that are used to hearing you as Ms. Morningwood.

CC: This is me. Morningwood was actually hard for me. That was sort of out of my comfort zone. I love rock & roll but I always say what you sing in the shower is really what you love to sing, and this is the stuff that I sing in the shower – upbeat ‘60s music, I grew up [listening to that]. Everybody gravitates towards one type of music when they’re young and they’re discovering music on their own, and the music of the ‘60s – be it girl groups or soul or British invasion or garage – that was the stuff that really I ate up. I couldn’t get enough of it. That was what I always wanted to make. Finally it got to the point where I was just like, I better shit or get off the pot, because if I don’t do exactly what I want to do somebody else is going to do it and I’m going to sit there kicking myself. Plus, you know, you have to do what you believe in whole-heartedly otherwise what the fuck is the point?

NP: You’ve got such an authentic retro vibe on this album. As a shower singer, what’s on your Top 10 list of tracks to let rip to?

CC: My go-to shower songs would probably be “A Fool In Love” by Ike and Tina, The Exciters’ “He’s Got The Power,” “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone’s “Wild Is The Wind” – there’s a lot of soulful stuff in there. “Why Keep On Breaking My Heart” by Nina Simone. I like to fancy myself as a strong black woman when I’m in the shower.

NP: Your neighbors must have a great front row seat to your shower covers concerts.

CC: I’m always so curious if they hear me, and then I’m like, they must be impressed because it sounds good. The acoustics in the shower are awesome. That’s the best place to sing. I want to record a whole record in the shower with water running and everything. That’s also where I write a lot too. Stuff comes to you in the shower and then you have to keep singing it over and over and over again while you dry yourself off so you can go record it.

NP: That’s why I loved being in London because the acoustics in the Underground are like that too, and when you were coming back from a club at stupid o’clock in the morning, you could just let it rip in those long tunnels.

CC: Are you in London?

NP: No, but I spent my college years there.

CC: Oh, I love it there. I want to sing in the tube. I love London. I miss it there. I want to go back.

NP: Well, you’re going to be in Vegas. I understand you did your first show already.

CC: Yeah, I did it in June at the Troubadour, and now I’m going to start a residency at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, which is mind-blowing. It’s a three-month residency for ten dates and it’s all ages and free. It’s at this new club they have called Vinyl, which is a 650 person venue that they just opened. I’m their first residency and it’s pretty fucking amazing that they took a chance on me.

NP: This album, with its 60s swagger, was built for Vegas.

CC: Yeah, it feels like old Vegas. It feels like we’re bringing back the Rat Pack and all that stuff. It feels classic. It’s such an amazing concept to do. I mean, every musician’s dream is to be in one place and have people come to see you, and what better place than in Las Vegas? That’s so fucking cool. And the Hard Rock, which is the only hotel there that’s based on the idea of music….I’ve always been a Vegas-y performer in that regard. I like to entertain people. I consider myself more of an entertainer than I do necessarily a musician, and I think that’s what Vegas loves.

NP: I was chatting to Dita Von Tease about Vegas, and, you’ll appreciate this, she was mourning the loss of the Liberace Museum.

CC: Oh, yeah. I tried to go to it last time I was in Vegas. I was so beyond excited, and we got there and it was shut down. I couldn’t believe it! So I’ve never gotten to see it.

NP: What do you like to do in Vegas?

CC: I do Vegas like an 80-year old. There’s different kinds of Vegas for different people. There’s the Ghostbar and crazy Vegas, and then there’s grandma Vegas, which is the way that I usually do it. We go play 5 cent Keno, go eat an $11 buffet, and then [go to] a discount show. We do old people Vegas.

NP: That’s hilarious.

CC: I’m a mega-great Bingo player. I’m a huge fan of Bingo. I’ll go play Bingo for a couple of hours. I won like $152 at 5 cent Keno…Like 5 cents into $152 is mind-blowing. If I had been playing with dollars I’d be talking to you from my private plane that never lands. That’s the only kind of gambling I can allow, Bingo and Keno, in my mind, because otherwise I’d just lose all my money.

NP: Talking of potentially destructive but enjoyable pastimes, you have a really interesting track on the album about your father, “Pleasure Seeker.” It’s a very complex track. I’m guessing that you had quite a complex relationship with your dad.

CC: Not only did, still do. We have an interesting relationship. I’m a momma’s girl I guess you could say, so I definitely have a hard time with him. I didn’t realize how therapeutic that song was until even after I played it for him. I think the first time I really realized how intense it was was at the first show when he was there and I sang it to him. I brought him up to the front and I was like holding on to him and singing it. It felt so cathartic. It really was. Because I just heard the bad things that I was saying about him, even though I wrote what I ultimately felt, that I still do love him.

NP: Right, because you’re calling him "a lying, stealing cheater...[I’m just like him, I’m a pleasure seeker]."

CC: Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is really not very becoming. When I first played it for him, I was sick to my stomach. Honestly, I was going to poop my pants. I was so nervous. I thought this could end my relationship with my dad. I honestly did. I said, this could go either way. This could either open a dialogue or I could never talk to my dad again, I have no idea how this is going to go. I sat him down and was like, “Hey, want to hear some new music I’m writing?” He said, “Yeah,” and I was like, “I wrote this song about you” [and pressed] play. And then I just watched him listening to it and I was shaking. Afterwards he was ecstatic. He was like, “I love it! It’s amazing.” He plays it for all of his friends. He’s like, “I want to be in the video.” He loves it. Where I was seeing only that I wrote the bad stuff, he really saw the bigger picture from the first moment he heard it – that, regardless of everything, I love him. It’s a love letter. No relationship is easy, so I still do.

NP: I think that you’ve got to love someone in spite of their faults. If you’re in love with someone and in denial of them, then you’re not really in love with that person, you’re in love with your idea of them.

CC: Totally. And believe me, I see all of my dad’s faults, as are listed variously in the song. I see a tremendous amount of faults, and he saw past that, and I’m so grateful for that because honestly, this song really did make us closer which is incredible.

NP: The song also brings up that dichotomy that women have; we do love the bad boys but then there’s the reality of that too.

CC: Well, fortunately I am lucky, because I had my father as an example, I do not love bad boys. I only love nice guys. If somebody is bad to me or something, I’m out the door. I, luckily, was not blessed with that bad boy gene of going after guys who are not nice.

NP: You’ve seen the reality of it.

CC: I’ve seen what it can do to a woman and I never want that in my entire life. I was lucky enough to find one of the good ones and married that mo-fo.

NP: Awe. He sounds like an awesome dude.

CC: He’s a sweetheart and an incredible performer as well. He’s the singer of this band, Mindless Self Indulgence. He’ll be my hype man for the shows that he’s in [town for].

NP: Ah, so he’s going to be involved”

CC: Yeah, he’s does the intro on the record….so he’s going to be doing my intro in Las Vegas.

NP: That’s awesome, you get to like hang out in Las Vegas together.

CC: Yeah, but then he has to go to Europe to go on tour for a little while.

NP: You also have a couple of tracks on the album about the flip side of love, “Black Widow” and “Can’t Save Her.” Talk a bit about those.

CC: “Black Widow” is about a bitch who’s looking for money. I am not a gold digger by any means, but while I was writing it I was like, the only way I’m going to remember these details – 5’9” and five inch heels, red hair, big brown eyes – is if I make it about me. So I had to make all the details about me. That’s just about a gold digging woman, which I am not by any means. That’s the only song where I tweaked it to make it easier, honestly, to remember.

“Can’t Save Her” – that’s pretty self-referential. I write a lot about myself, I guess I’m a super narcissist. I apologize. That one is about a girl who has sowed her wild oats there and back again, and has been around the block, and is afraid of not being able to come out of that dark, dark shit. I’ve definitely been there before. I’m a happy go lucky person, but I’ve done a lot of dark, dirty shit in my life.

NP: Are you on the other side of the dark and dirty shit now?

CC: Oh, yeah. I’m the most well trained house cat in the entire world. I’m so domesticated. I just like to cook and watch TV. That was a long time ago, when I was young.

NP: Are you the total Suzy Homemaker then?

CC: Oh, it’s ridiculous. Yeah. Yesterday I made brownies and bacon and cookies and stuff like that. I’m like the Paula Dean of Los Angeles. But when everybody’s young, you go through it. You do all of your stuff. I was a naughty girl. A very naughty girl.

NP: I think that you have to get that out of your system so you can settle down and have some sort of peace of mind.

CC: Exactly. I got that all out of my system. If I hadn’t, I bet you at some point in my life I would freak out and want to do all that stuff. That’s when all of that stuff happens to people where they have their midlife crisis and they go buck wild. I’ve gone buck wild, there and back again, so I’m good. I don’t miss it, I just like to write about it.

NP: What did your buck wild days entail?

CC: Oooh! [laughs]

NP: Dare I ask?

CC: You know, hard partying ways in New York City, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of boys. I was a player. I was really a conquistadora as I like to say. If I had a bedpost and I put notches in, it would’ve been broken off because I would’ve whittled it to the bone.

NP: How did your man capture your heart?

CC: He’s incredible. I met him on tour when my band was opening for his band. I thought he was weird. I thought he was super nice. Then we ended up on a drunken evening making out in Philadelphia on a pier and then in a stairwell for about 8 hours and we talked. I honestly think the trick in finding love and somebody that you love, is somebody who makes you laugh and makes you cum. That’s my love recipe.

NP: I love that you said that you made out for 8 hours. I think making out is so underrated.

CC: It is. The other secret is not having sex on the first date. Honestly. Some people wait months, some people wait days, but as long as you don’t do it on the first date, then you have a chance to talk. That took me a long time to learn. Like a long time to learn. I was just like, “Want to have sex? Okay, let’s have sex. I want it, you want it, why wait?” But, honestly, you need to wait a little bit. We happened to have to wait for a month, just because of circumstances, but we made out all over the place, all over the country, and then when we finally got together, it was on.

NP: That’s awesome. Because you never get the making out bit of life back if you jump straight in the sack. Making out in itself is so awesome, and then you have all of the anticipation of more.

CC: That feeling, that tingly feeling when somebody touches you and kisses you is the most incredible feeling you can ever get. And it’s fleeting, so you really have to make it last as long as you can.

NP: It really, really is, that make-out moment is fleeting. I always think it’s like watching one of those TV shows like Moonlighting, where once Bruce Willis and Cybill Sheppard got together it kind of jumped the shark.

CC: I love your Moonlighting reference. 100% yes. Once you have sex you jump the shark.

NP: You either jump the shark or you get married.

CC: Yeah and then you get married. I mean, we still got the goods going on in our house but it’s definitely different. The lucky part is he goes on tour for a little while and so you get a little bit of it back because you don’t see him for three weeks etc.

NP: Right. You get the anticipation of seeing him all over again.

CC: Mmmm.

NP: So, we have actually some questions from the internets because the internets were very excited when they heard that we were going to be chatting to you today.

CC: Awesome.

NP: I know you’ve kind of answered this, but for the benefit of @CrashDiamond_23 and @Kiri_Kutthroat, who both had similar questions, do you prefer the rock stuff from Morningwood or the retro solo stuff?

CC: I prefer this stuff. I mean, it’s different singing-wise. I like to sing this more. I can’t forget everything I learned; I performed for 10 years with my old band so I grew up as a rock performer, so to me this is sort of rock & soul. I want to bring the energy and excitement of a rock show to a retro-soul show. I think a lot of those old performers that you love, like Tina Turner and James Brown, had this guttural thing that you didn’t know what was going to happen and it was very rock & roll. Tina Turner could sing rock and soul and anything she wanted, but it still always had that grit to it. So I think I’ll always have that rock in me, my voice is a very rock voice, and when you bring that to classic music, it always gets a little bit of that rock tinge.

NP: The second question is from @ToBeQuiteFrank who wants to know what advice you would give to girls/teenagers about fame and the pressure to be famous in today's society?

CC: Oh, I don’t know, I’m not famous.

NP: But you’ve had hit songs.

CC: Mild success, but I don’t think I’m in the place where I have to really worry about the pressures of fame. I worry about the pressures of paying my mortgage and things like that. I have very everyday problems. I’m not a person who’s out to chase the dragon of fame. I don’t want to be famous. Unfortunately I’ve chosen a profession where fame is a measure of your career success. I’m not in it for fame. I’m in it to support myself and do what I love…I have been fortunate enough where I don’t have to really check myself all the time. I always say as long as I can still go get my eyebrows waxed at the outdoor kiosk in the mall and sometimes pick my nose in my car, then I know that I’m not at [an uncomfortable] level of fame. I don’t want to get above that level of fame where I can’t do those things….I know people who are really famous who have to go places with body guards and hide where they live and things like that and protect their kids. That’s sad. I feel bad. They can’t post pictures of stuff and that’s really scary. I hope I never get to that point. But I know they’re also at that point because there’s a flip side – it’s really a double-edged sword. They also have huge houses and can afford cars and do whatever they want. They pay for the other side of that…I don’t get all those perks. There’s perks and downsides to it.

NP: Last question from the internet: If you had a child, what would you name it?

CC: That is a secret. I know it. If it’s a boy or a girl, we know our names, our friends know the answer to that because we just had to put dibs on them, but that’s not for the internet to know. Dammit you saucy little internet, you’re not going to get that answer.

NP: That would be @Noelle_Horn who’s going to be very unhappy with that answer.

CC: Oh no @Noelle_Horn, you’re just going to have to wait until James puts a baby in me at some point down the line when I’m good and ready, and then you’ll find out.

NP: So, that’s already in the plans and on the cards.

CC: We plan on having kids, but not any time in the very near future. I’ve got to go to Vegas. I’ve got shit to do.

by Symbol (image) [Bracket in Heart In Cage] Life is short: Be respectful. Take healthy risks. You only have one life to live… I seem to have lived life as a serial monogamist. I'm not sure how, or why, this has happened. Anyone who knew me in my sexually "formative" years, would probably... more

by Symbol


[Bracket in Heart In Cage]

Life is short: Be respectful. Take healthy risks. You only have one life to live…

I seem to have lived life as a serial monogamist. I'm not sure how, or why, this has happened. Anyone who knew me in my sexually "formative" years, would probably have voted me most likely to be non-committal – a perpetual bachelor.



But the truth of it is, shortly after my explosive "experimental" phase (which is a very polite way of saying "when I stopped being a slut") I got roped down, tamed and branded into a series of perpetually never-ending longterm relationships; Eight, actually. Eight longterm relationships, two engagements, though I never married. 



I think, for me at least, love strikes when least expected. I can't actually remember ever thinking, "Okay, today I'm going to go out and find someone to fall in love with." I mean, sure, we all go out looking, right? But it's still a surprise when it actually starts to happen.



There's really nothing sadder to me though, than when you fall in love alone. I have several friends who seem to perpetually carry torches for other people who will, let's be honest, never return their affections – at least not at a comparable level of intensity.



Keeping yourself in check, at least to some degree, is definitely a skill set that they don’t teach you in high school. When I fall for someone, and that is rare, I fall hard and fast. I fall like someone who thought they were going sky-diving and accidentally packed their laundry instead of a parachute.



Intensity like that can be really scary for someone new and finding matched intensity is always preferable. But chemistry like that doesn’t work or happen for everyone. That’s why we develop phrases and codes that we use to communicate to one another – in part to spare each other’s feelings.



I had a friend recently tell me that she “can’t” say no to guys when they ask her out, she just feels too bad. No matter how disinterested she might be, she is willing to go out (at least for coffee) with anyone brave enough to ask. This kind of boggles me, because I’m far pickier about who I will entertain.



Even though I’ve been a serial monogamist, I’ve had an unreasonably high number of relationships in my lifetime. I think, however, this enables me to really quickly process what I am, and am not, interested in – with reasonably decent accuracy. It also means that when things aren’t right I don’t fuck around, I bail.



I find myself barreling towards the end of the year – rapidly living out the last days of summer, awaiting the oncoming winter and all that that entails. I’m finally in a place where I love my job, I have a reasonably enjoyable life, too many side projects to possibly handle at one time – and a hole.


I’m not a codependent person, far from it. I’ve taken care of my own needs for longer than I haven’t in life, but I think I tend to notice things like my “hole” far more readily when things are good, than when they are bad. When I’m happy, it’s natural for me to want to share that happiness and watch it spread.



When you’re single, it’s a very different dynamic – sharing happiness. You trickle it out, piece by piece, to those who you’re closest too, but never really share it the way you might with someone you truly love. I don’t mean to imply that you can’t love your friends – I just mean it’s a different type of love.



Near the end of the summer I “met someone.” Of course I wasn’t expecting too, I wasn’t prepared – I certainly wasn’t looking. There’s massive chemistry there for me, which is scary; scary because although I know she’s interested – it still feels a little like a one-sided romance.



She’s told me she’s not ready.
 Not ready to me means a variety of different things. They each reflect a different level of ego and/or confidence, I suppose. I won’t go into great detail, I’m sure you can project your own perspective on that phrase – but it leads to a three-way conflict of possible behaviurs, each with their own dangers.



The first choice, the most obvious, is patience. The danger in this option is reflected in the phrase “waiting in vain.” What exactly are you waiting for? Things to suddenly become right? Moons to align? A change in the stars? For them to wake up one morning and go, “Ooooooh. I get it now”?



Waiting may work for some, and if it does, great! But life experience tells me that, for most, the longer you wait the more danger rises – danger of falling into the “friend zone,” danger of either parties meeting someone else, danger of interest shifting and missing out on the chance for something at all.



The second choice, which I really don’t recommend, is to push. By this I mean simply acknowledging that the person isn’t ready, but forging ahead anyway as though they were. I’ve never seen this work. I’ve only ever seen it backfire, and I’ve seen it countless times. Be really careful, consider this a warning.



Sometimes it’s okay to push a little, especially if the intended party isn’t very forthright in communicating whether they’re honestly interested or just keeping you around until something more ideal comes along. But as soon as you get a clear idea of that, it’s best to change to a more respectful strategy.



The third choice, which most of you won’t like, is simply to bail. If you, like me, don’t have time to wait around for someone, or for them to come around to your way of thinking, then it probably wasn’t mean to be in the first place. The best love, the strongest, should burn brightly, from both sides.



Ask yourself one simple question: If the roles were reversed, how would you feel? If your answer is, honestly, “This wouldn’t bother me at all.” So be it. But if you get even remotely squiggly about being treated the way you’re acting towards someone else? It’s time to reconsider your behavior.



For many, a balanced approach of all three is usually what happens. Thought problems arise when people get tired of one and switch to two – or when they can’t seem to accept that maybe it’s time to switch to three.



But in the end, if you really are interested, then you really are going to be waiting. Waiting for trust to grow, waiting for whatever gives them pause to transform – maybe even vanish – waiting for them to realize that they do, in fact, like you as much as you like them. And that that’s okay.



Unless you know, for certain, what their reasons are (and realistically, I'm not sure how you could possibly know that since I've never met anyone who was that transparent and open with their feelings, especially to someone new, that they're interested in) you're waiting. Patiently or impatiently, is up to you.



So back to me. As I said, I met someone. Boom. Head-shot. Caught me completely unaware. It's that "brand-spanking-new-want-to-see-them-all-the-time" sensation, butting up firmly against a "whoa-things-are-moving-too-quickly-wall." At this point I'm just lucky that I've met her, and that she likes me.



So I’m waiting, for now. I’m taking the time to fully determine if what I’m feeling is infatuation, or something more. If that bursting sensation, the one I can barely contain sometimes, is something that will fade with time, or if it will consume me. I’m waiting, and hoping, that she'll realize it's worth the risk.

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing... more

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing on one of the best televisions shows ever, Family Guy. Borstein’s main role on the show is Lois, the matriarch of the Griffin family. At first Lois was just a foil for Peter Griffin’s insane antics but soon Lois developed some very interesting quirks of her own, shepherded along by Borstein who has written some of Lois’ best moments.

But Drop Dead Gorgeous is another side to Borstein, one that is totally and completely filthy when liberated from television’s rigid standards and practices. Borstein speaks freely about her cunt, the impossible ideals that Hollywood insists upon and performs of series of amazing impressions from Renée Zellweger to Charlize Theron in Monster.

Buy the DVD of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Daniel Robert Epstein: I just saw the new Renée Zellweger movie yesterday and thanks to you I couldn’t stop picturing your impression of her.

Alex Borstein: What new movie is she in?

DRE: Miss Potter about Beatrix Potter.

Alex: Good Lord.

DRE: It was good, though [laughs].

Alex: She drives me a little nuts, I can’t help it.

DRE: It seems like a few people at Family Guy have it in for her. You guys are always making fun of her.

Alex: It’s fun to make fun of everyone, that’s our motto.

DRE: Why so much on Renée Zellweger not that I have any special love for her?

Alex: I think that her voice and “I’m going to gain five pounds to play a fat lady,” annoyed everybody. Then watching her chew the scenery in Cold Mountain. My husband said that the way she gained the weight for Bridget Jones was by chewing the scenery in Cold Mountain.

DRE: Have you always been able to imitate her?

Alex: Yeah. I always say some of the best impersonations come from people that somehow permeate your head. For some reason you get stuck on them whether you like them or hate them. There’s just something about them that’s very listenable or watchable and then you start emulating it and all of a sudden you’ve got an impersonation.

DRE: Did you ever do her on Madtv?

Alex: I didn’t. A lot of the time on Madtv we were relegated to doing people that they thought we visually most looked like. That was probably one of the weaknesses. They were very in love with the makeup and hair department. They would sometimes prefer to spend five hours with prosthetics and have someone look exactly like someone as opposed to, “Is this the best possible sketch we could do for this?”

DRE: What’s always funny about stuff like that is, do they really think people are going to believe you are those people?

Alex: Right we’re not trying to cash one of their checks at the bank. We just want to make some comedy. Sometimes I wouldn’t get to do a lot of those people. Being short and pudgy, they would never think of me first to play someone like Renée Zellweger.

DRE: I thought that Drop Dead Gorgeous would be pretty dirty but it was certainly a lot dirtier than I ever imagined.

Alex: Yeah, it’s definitely a filthy little show. I can’t help it, I have a bit of a potty mouth.

DRE: I know you were in comedy troupes but were you ever a standup comedian?

Alex: The first time I ever did standup I was 16 at a little club in southern California. My parents had to be there because I was under 21. I did standup there for the first time and then a couple more times. Then I abandoned it. In college at San Francisco State I revisited it a few times and I did this little comedy competition and Certs breath mints sponsored it. The people who were the celebrity sponsors were The Kids in the Hall so I was very excited.

DRE: That’s pretty cool.

Alex: That was really cool. I did not win but Margaret Cho did. But what’s funny is that she didn’t really go to our school. I think she signed up for an extension class just so she could be a ringer in the competition.

DRE: That’s so funny.

Alex: Yeah, then I abandoned it and got more into sketch with some people in college. Standup is just very lonely particularly if you’re a woman. If you go to those clubs, none of those guys really want to talk to you or hang out with you or think you’re funny.

DRE: My best friend is a woman and she’s one of the funniest people I know. We’ve had many conversations about whether women are funny in general. She agreed that women might not be as funny simply because the world doesn’t allow women to be funny, for the most part

Alex: I think so. That’s part of it. Most women see it as, either you’re going to be beautiful and attractive and have the male gaze upon you and attract lots of men or you’re going to be funny and be one of the guys. The world doesn’t like to allow for both. There are some people that cross over. Look at Lucille Ball. She was such a huge phenomenon because she was wildly attractive, really funny and accessible at all angles. Somehow she was able to make it work.

DRE: I hope you’re not thinking I’m a big misogynist now.

Alex: Oh no, it’s absolutely true. I often wonder that if I was a guy and had done the same amount of work that I’ve done could I be at the level of a Will Ferrell or Jack Black or Dane Cook. It could be the fact that I’m a woman has kept me back or maybe I’m just not funny.

DRE: [laughs] No, that’s definitely not true.

Alex: I think my career would be really different if I was a guy, but then again maybe I would blend into the crowd too much because there are so many men. Maybe I stand out more being a woman. We’ll never know because I don’t have a cock.

DRE: [laughs] Do you find that people in Hollywood are still surprised when a woman is funny?

Alex: Yes. I was in Montreal hosting the comedy festival there and you definitely get guys going, “Hey, you’re really funny.” I think it really still surprises people and all of a sudden they look at you with new eyes like, “Wait a minute, she’s not just a woman, she’s a funny woman.”

DRE: I read that you and your husband basically put together Drop Dead Gorgeous by yourselves.

Alex: Yeah, we did. It was really a fun thing to do together. We’ve always tried to work together. We both were members of Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles.

DRE: Wasn’t [Family Guy writer/producer] Steve Callaghan was part of that too?

Alex: That’s right. Also Adam Carolla and Will Ferrell did some stuff occasionally with Scott Wainio who was a writer on SNL. Then my husband and I tried writing together and we almost stabbed each other in the fucking face with pencils. It was not a good thing for us to write together. So this seemed like a really cool opportunity where we could work together and do something creative and have fun. He’s a director so he knows a lot about cinematography so it was a neat opportunity for him to shoot it. We just wanted to see if it’s possible to move outside of the system because most of your options are to sell your special to HBO or Comedy Central. Then they own it and that’s the end of it. They have the right to edit it how they want and even to air it or not. I just didn’t want to do that. I was at the point in my career where I had visibility from Madtv, movies and Family Guy so I didn’t need to get my name out there, which most comics do when they do a special like that. I don’t really need to have my name bandied about Comedy Central every five minutes. I don’t need the money up front. It’s been a really fun experiment and so far, knock on wood, very successful.

DRE: So it’s been selling pretty good?

Alex: It’s been slow, but it’s been steady. There has been zero publicity. FOX figured, and they’re probably right, that all we really need to do is put something Family Guy related on this and have it on the shelves next to Family Guy and put a flier in the Family Guy DVD and that should take care of all the sales. So far the DVD has been very successful. It hasn’t had the normal decay of sales after the first week. The first week of a DVD’s release is usually pretty much all it’s going to sell but this DVD is different. It’s one of those titles where it’s been slow, steady and growing.

But also we’re doing this tour to Apple stores all over the country doing something called Made on a Mac Presentation since the special was edited on Final Cut Pro. We basically tell the story of how we made it. I started touring this in 2002 and then we shot it in 2004 and it has taken this long for it to hit the streets. So it’s a fun and interesting story and it’s also really informative for people who are trying to take back some control from Hollywood and make their own projects and be very self-sufficient. A lot of people are doing that now like that sitcom on FX called It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

DRE: Everyone says that’s really good but I haven’t watched it yet.

Alex: To be honest I’ve only seen a couple. But those people got together and made their own pilot presentation. They just were like, “Fuck it. We’re sick of waiting for a break and waiting for this giant machine to notice us.” So they just went ahead and did it. Another friend of ours did it with a show called Sons and Daughters that was on ABC.

Made on a Mac Presentation is like a take back the night thing to show how you can take control of your own career.

DRE: Did you have to give up any rights when FOX agreed to put it out?

Alex: No, I was going to distribute it on my own last year. I was going to release it in February as a birthday present to myself [laughs]. I was spending some time with the people from FOX in Montreal. One of the people at home entertainment was like, “Oh my God, you should bring that in. You should talk to us about it. Maybe we can release it. Maybe we can do it as something that goes along with Family Guy.” I thought, “That’s not a bad idea.” So I pitched them in January and they said yes pretty quickly. I do have all the ownership of the whole piece. They get a percentage for distributing it but this way I managed to really hold onto a lot of it, which is rare. The downside is that maybe if they had a bigger chunk of it they would work harder at publicizing it. But I prefer a slow and steady tortoise to a hare that may not finish the race.

DRE: Was anyone offended by your act when you took it on the road?

Alex: Not really. I’ve never really had any negative response from anyone about my standup because most people coming to see me know what they’re in for. Also I’m pretty careful about where I perform. For instance, we have a house right near downtown Seattle. They had the Seattle International Comedy Competition recently and they asked me to be a judge at one of the finals and my husband to be a judge at one of the other finals. They had five nights of finals and they asked me to perform. I knew it wasn’t going to work in this small community where there are only 10,000 people and I have to see all of them at the market the next day. I think it is important to know your venue and know your audience.

DRE: I loved the bits in Drop Dead Gorgeous where you read the breakdowns of character descriptions. Are you still sent stuff like that?

Alex: For the most part I get 98 percent less auditions than someone that could fit any of those descriptions. A lot of the times I hear nothing about it because they don’t call if it’s something that I’m not right for. But sometimes you’ll lose faith and you’ll be like “Let me see. Let me take a look at the breakdowns” and it is so dismal. But I’m developing some TV stuff for myself and writing a feature and you find yourself falling into the same traps. You find yourself saying, “Oh maybe they’ll have this girlfriend,” and then you’ll find yourself not really developing the girlfriend character so much. You just know she’s going to be cute and that’s all that matters. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now I’m just as bad as the enemy.” It’s easy to see why it happens because it’s shorthand, laziness and it’s easier than spending the time developing a real human person.

DRE: You seem about as pop culture savvy as anyone but is it still difficult to keep up with Seth MacFarlane?

Alex: Yeah, it is. But Seth’s pop culture knowledge is very retro. Seth doesn’t own a computer and he doesn’t really watch television. Everything that Seth knows has already happened.

DRE: I knew he didn’t have email. But I didn’t know he didn’t have a computer.

Alex: He has one at work but he doesn’t have one at home and he doesn’t want one. He doesn’t understand MySpace and he despises most new music.

DRE: It is so strange because he is certainly at the right age to be into newer stuff.

Alex: He’s in his early 30’s but he’s just got an old soul. He’s got that Rat Pack soul but the great thing about that writer’s room is that we have 15 writers and everyone brings something different. We’ve got ages ranging from like 27 to 55 so you’ve got all these different references. There is such a cool mixed bag of people bringing in bizarro references. I certainly don’t have my hands on the pulse in terms of the pop culture. My husband and I just went to the Billboard Music Awards in Vegas a couple days ago and half of the people nominated we were like, “Who? What?” Someone named Chris Brown won everything. Never heard of him.

DRE: I don’t know who he is either.

Alex: But you certainly can’t help but know about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Gwen Stefani or Fergie.

DRE: How is a decision made to include something like the Tim Curry character from Legend in a Family Guy bit?

Alex: We all sit around a big table together and people bark pitches. It is as though you’re at a party with cocktails and frankly sometimes cocktails are involved. I remember one of the episodes that I wrote was called Deep Throat. Peter and Lois created a folk group and Brian is going after Mayor West in a Watergate parody. In the script we had Mayor West sitting in a hotel room watching TV. I wrote that he was just watching cartoons. Then the only other female writer, Cherry [Chevapravatdumrong], had him commenting that he was watching a cartoon called Jem. I didn’t know what Jem was but everyone else cracked up and I was like, “Ok, put that in. It’s weird and interesting.” That’s pretty much how it goes. If a lot of the people in the room respond or even if it’s just one person responding in a huge way, they’ll go for it.

DRE: How did you end up joining the Family Guy writing staff?

Alex: When I first started I started just doing voices. I was doing Lois and everything grew. I would start doing more voices and then I would ad-lib a lot. When Seth created the show he was 25 years old. I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend and the only women he knew were his mom and his sister. So he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and he will admit that in a heartbeat, like, “Ok what do girls wear? They wear hats. Ok, Meg will have a hat.” That’s pretty much how he decided things so it was freeing for them when I’d come in to do voices and I would change things to make it a little more like something a female character might say. One of the executive producers, Chris Sheridan, said, “Would you ever write for us?” At that time I was writing for myself on Madtv and before that I had written for cartoons like Casper and Pinky and the Brain. I told them that I would love to do it but that it is just a matter of schedule because I was working for Madtv at the same time. So what we did is that I started working at Family Guy on the summer hiatus from Madtv. Then when Madtv went back to shooting, I would just come into Family Guy as a writer on the days we didn’t shoot. I was getting to split my time all over the place and I learned so much. Madtv and Family Guy together really was comedy boot camp.

DRE: Seth has obviously changed his look since he first started Family Guy. He lost the glasses, got some cool looking hair and my wife said he’s hot now.

Alex: He thinks he is. I don’t want to crush any dreams, he usually does wear glasses but when he goes out for events he takes them off to be cool. But he’s still wildly insecure and has absolutely no idea who he is and he doesn’t understand even an iota of the opposite sex like most of the writers on television. But he started at 25 and now he’s edging on 35 so he’s a very different person.

DRE: Especially when you have money to buy nice clothes.

Alex: Exactly and he has people to tell him what to wear now. People that can say, “You know what? What if you could wear this vintage t-shirt and your button down shirt open?”

DRE: I asked [Family Guy writer/producer/voice actor] Mike Henry what offends him and he said that he doesn’t like stuff about kids like the Cancer boy character from Family Guy. What offends you?

Alex: Oh nothing, really. See, that’s what happens. All of a sudden when people have kids they change their tune about what offends them. It’s very interesting.

DRE: I get worried about that too. I don’t get offended very easily and I don’t want that to ever change.

Alex: It’s very interesting how it will change a person but I don’t think it’s definitive. They have a kid and for the first two years of the kid’s life they’re not cool with any of those jokes anymore then maybe after a few years they start to mellow.

But not much offends me. I’ve always been heavy and I’ve always thought that a lot of fat jokes were hilarious. I’m a Jew and I think Jew jokes are hilarious. I laugh the hardest at a lot of our Holocaust stuff on the show. I was just raised with laughing in the face of everything.

DRE: What about Mel Gibson?

Alex: I find him to be an idiot. He clearly is anti-Semitic to some degree but I think a lot of people forget that one of the things about living in this country is that you’re allowed to be anti-Semitic, you’re allowed to hate Jews, you’re allowed to hate white people and you’re allowed to hate black people. It may not be politically correct and cool but if the Nazis can march in Skokie then Mel Gibson has every right to say Jews are whatever. We don’t have to like it, I certainly won’t go to his movies and I don’t want to support him as an artist. Not that I was that interested in his work anyway. But I think people forget that there’s a difference between being like-minded and having the freedom to say what you want.

DRE: You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that he is allowed to say whatever the hell he wants.

Alex: Yeah, everyone forgets that just because you shouldn’t say something doesn’t mean you can’t. I think he’s a moron especially if you’re a public figure and you want to sell tickets so because of that I think he’s an idiot. But for me it only solidifies the fact that anyone would have to be stupid to be anti-Semitic or racist.

DRE: What’s your favorite Lois storyline that’s been on Family Guy?

Alex: We have an episode that is coming up that I wrote called; It Takes a Village Idiot and I Married One. Lois runs for mayor of Quahog and wins. It stemmed from another one woman show I was working on called Women and Jews: Why We'll Never Be President. I was in this headspace where I felt that a woman will never be president. So this storyline came out of that. I had these fantasies about a woman president that would be fair and there’d be no corruption. That’s a bunch of bullshit fantasy. In the episode Lois gets just as bitten by the corruption bug as anyone. We liked what happened so much in the episode that we wrote a book that’s going to come out in April to coincide with the episode.

DRE: Cool! Did you work with any of the other writers on it?

Alex: Yeah, Cherry and I wrote it together. We always laugh at these memoirs people release. It always makes us laugh when anybody assumes the rest of the world cares to read about their lives. We took a look at It Takes a Village, My Living History, Ann Coulter’s Godless and blah, blah, blah. We had this idea to write a book that looks at Lois’s time in office and the book has Lois pontificating her views and telling her story. What’s fun about it is that it has chapters by all the characters in the show where they chime in on her time in office and how they think she did. Of course it has a lot of rambling tangents with a lot of poop jokes.

DRE: Are you guys planning on responding within the show to what South Park did about Family Guy?

Alex: I don’t know. I’m not sure where everyone is on that. I just know that none of us really cared; we were just excited to be mentioned [laughs]. It is that excitement of, “I murdered a person, now I’m famous.” I think Seth was annoyed but I think Seth just gets that way. It’s almost like someone took a swipe at his child. I think we have made some slams back but I don’t know if they made it into the final draft of any of the scripts. We are able to do that because in the nine month process that it takes to make an episode, when we get right toward the end where it’s going to air we do last minute rewrites so we have the opportunity to change things. For instance if we have a Britney and K-Fed marriage joke, when that comes up now it will no longer going to be appropriate so we’ll have a last minute opportunity to alter it or to replace it completely but we would have to use the existing animation. Sometimes that’s how we can slip things in that are very timely because we have that last minute pull cord where we can slip something in.

DRE: Are you still working on the cartoon Angry Little Girls?

Alex: I worked on Angry Little Girls for a little while but not anymore. There was just too much going on. I’m doing some other live action TV development so I helped develop Angry Little Girls and even did an outline. Then at that stage, unfortunately I was like, “Uh-oh, I’m not going to be able to do all of this.”

DRE: Is it still going to air?

Alex: I think so. I think someone else is picking up where I left off and going to be developing it through completion.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

Alex: My husband told me that he knows what SuicideGirls is but I know very little.

DRE: The fact that your husband knows is good enough.

Alex: But that reminds me I would really like to have Lois do a totally nude layout for Playboy.

DRE: [laughs] That’d be great. Do you remember when Jessica Rabbit did one for Penthouse?

Alex: She did? Well I think Seth enjoys Playboy more than Penthouse.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Real Time comedian Bill Maher and Borat director Larry Charles are men on a mission: to destroy society’s blind faith in God. The medium they chose to convey their doctrine is not a dusty old book, but an entertaining documentary which highlights the ridiculous aspects of religion, hence its name, Religulous. more

Real Time comedian Bill Maher and Borat director Larry Charles are men on a mission: to destroy society’s blind faith in God. The medium they chose to convey their doctrine is not a dusty old book, but an entertaining documentary which highlights the ridiculous aspects of religion, hence its name, Religulous.

In an effort to spread their brand of enlightenment, Charles and Maher embarked on a romp around the world, questioning religious beliefs in the places they began and the palaces they paid for. The duo returned from their three-month pilgrimage with oodles of often-funny footage, much of it shot guerrilla-style as with Borat. Stringing interviews together with biting commentary and incisive footnotes, (to quote Kazakhstan's most famous fake export) they present their "cultural learnings" which they ultimately hope may "make benefit" of our "glorious" globe.

We chatted with Charles, who mastered absurdity while working on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and took the opportunity to challenge a few beliefs of his own.

Nicole Powers: Before we talk about the film, tell me a little about your religious background.

Larry Charles: My parents were secular Jews. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. New York has a very high density Jewish population, and I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood, and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were very secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions but I was completely discouraged by everyone around me to explore that. That wasn't what it was about, it was about getting bar mitzvahed, getting the money and getting out, you know. The metaphysical questions continued to plague me over the years and I've done a lot of reading and thinking about the subject. So it was kind of a fortuitous meeting when I finally hooked up with Bill. He had a lot of the same issues and questions, and a similar background in terms of age, generation and cultural reference points, and it just seemed like it was God's will that it happened.

NP So how would you describe yourself now? Atheist or agnostic?

LC: Those two words have come to mean so many weird things. I don't like the word atheist for two reasons: First of all it's a pejorative word that religious people put on people who may not believe in their god, and so it's almost like an oppressive word. And agnostic has also just come to mean something so vague, I don't even know what that means anymore.

What I would say is I don't believe in the god of the Old Testament. I don't believe in the god of modern theism. I think that god is a constructed god in the same way that Zeus was, in the same way that all gods that preceded him were. Monotheism is a movement, before that there was polytheism, and there was animism, and there was Norse, Greek and Roman mythology. These were all the religions of their time, and they all eventually served their purpose and then died out, and that's what I think needs to happen with monotheism. I think it's in its end game essentially. I think that end game could take a long time to play itself out, or it can result in the destruction of the species, but that's what I believe. I believe there's many, many questions to ask about the universe, about where we are, where we're from, and where we're going.

NP That's the classic paradox with religion. If God exists, he made us intelligent, yet religion doesn't really encourage us to use our intelligence. 93% of scientists don't believe in God, and these are a group of some of the most intelligent people on the planet.

LC: That's correct. We have that statistic in the movie in fact, and, yes, I think there's a correlation for the most part. You see exceptions to this quite often, but there's obviously a correlation between education and religious belief. For instance, in our movie we talked to two Vatican priests, and both of them debunk a lot of the commonly held beliefs about religion, about the birth of Jesus, and evolution, and a lot of issues that are very iconoclastic. They're both Ph.D.s, and you realize the Vatican's full of these very, very learned people -- the Pope is a history professor -- so they know, but what they don't do is disseminate that information to the masses because it would be shattering.

Their job is to perpetuate the institution of the church, not necessarily to profligate peace with religion. So you see that a lot, the more educated people in society, or the more progressive societies like Europe, London, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, cities like that, you see a progressive society where basically the churches are now empty and most people consider themselves to be non-religious. Of course in those societies what's happened is there's been this immigration of a very fringe radical element of Islam into these societies, which is changing those societies also.

NP Your research on the multitude of almost identical precursors to Christ really changed my opinion about whether he even existed. Why aren't we taught that part of history in school? Isn't it kind of an important bit to leave out?

LC: It's almost like imagine the New York Times tomorrow printing the headline "Jesus Didn't Exist!" There would be a real cataclysmic impact on the world, because, first of all, it would send Christianity into disarray, into chaos. Secondly, Islam, which is locked in this great battle, this world battle with Christianity, would sink upon that as well, obviously. In a way, that truth is evident, that truth is obvious. There is simply no evidence that Jesus existed -- there's not -- and yet, that information is essentially suppressed in a society with the passive approval of the society itself of course. Because the society itself would in some ways probably have to disintegrate on some level, and then if we survive that we might come out the other side in a very healthy way, but that would have to happen first. We'd have a certain kind of rapture ironically I would think.

NP And so, ironically, if this movie is successful you're maybe contributing towards a disintegration of society?

LC: I remember this great Ian Hunter song called "All American Alien Boy." He says the future's got to change but it means you have to destroy, and I think, to some degree, if religion was to start to lose its importance in society, and out of it came a higher level of consciousness where we evolved to our potential as a species, then that would be a positive thing of course, but I think it's probably unrealistic to expect something like that to occur without there being some price, some consequences to it.

NP In the film you also explore this idea that Christianity is somehow American, despite the fact that the birth of it couldn't be further from our shores. Somehow America has managed to hijack Christianity.

LC: Yes. Again that's fodder for me because it's so ridiculous and absurd, and yet it's taken totally seriously you know. I mean the man we spoke to, Ray Suarez, who I happened to go to high school with by coincidence, he wrote that book about the Founding Fathers, and you learn, again, these were revelations to me and hopefully they're revelations to the audience also, but the fact is the separation of church and state was essential to the formation of the country, and that's all been blurred now.

That really started with Jimmy Carter in 1976. Up until then you never saw religion creep into the campaign, into the political process. Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate in the wake of Watergate to profess his religion, his born again Christianity, his faith in Jesus, etc., etc. When he lost the presidency the Republicans saw a voting block that was untapped, and they seized upon that in a ruthless fashion, and the moral majority emerged, and certainly a religious right voice emerged which has remained very strong in the political process all these years.

NP In England, they don't really tolerate religion in the same way in their politics. Tony Blair was forced to keep a lid on his religious beliefs while he was Prime Minister, and the English certainly wouldn't tolerate a politician who believed in creationism. I love that quote you have from Senator Mark Pryor, who is a creationist, who says, without any sense of irony, "You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate."

LC: Exactly. It's very scary. I mean the Scopes Trial was eighty years ago, like 1925, and here we are today in 2008 talking about putting Creationism back into the school system, and being taught alongside evolution. It's like teaching magic alongside chemistry. It's shocking that society has disintegrated to that level, that we have regressed so badly to the point where we've become, out of all the Western industrialized nations, the most religious nation.

NP Part of it is this idea that you explore in the film, that free speech doesn't apply to religion. As essentially a non-believer, I tap dance around and am mindful of those with beliefs, not wanting to offend, but the believers have no compunction about offending non-believers.

LC: That's one of the things that the movie could potentially change. If people come out of this movie laughing and realizing the silliness of a lot of this stuff, I think that the onus might fall on the believers to defend the absurdity of their beliefs. And that would be a very interesting shift in the paradigm.

NP But that goes back to education and intelligence. People need to have a certain level of intelligence to appreciate the absurdities in the first place.

LC: That's interesting that you say that, because maybe the end result of having creationism taught next to evolution will be that the students themselves will recognize the absurdity of creation science versus the science of evolution, and maybe, inadvertently, the attempt to insinuate it back into the public school system will have the opposite effect, and kids will start to reject it, and on a foundational level it will end up being rejected all over again.

NP It was staggering how poorly many of the people of faith defended their beliefs in the film. Ironically, the fake Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida was able to articulate and defend his beliefs far better than many of the men of cloth you interviewed.

LC: Yes. I think that's very true. You know why? Because he's a regular guy. He was trying to be cool. He was kind of like Jesus Lobowski to me. He was a very laid back Jesus.

NP With that interview you were fighting the theme park officials, who, when they realized what you were about, wanted to halt the interview and throw you off their property, so there were some Borat elements to this movie. You were having to use a little subterfuge to get the footage, and had to be prepared to run from the scene.

LC: Right. In my opinion, one of the things that excited me about making this movie was that we had to make it that way. I think that is a very dynamic and spontaneous lightening-in-a-bottle form of filmmaking. I like to go places where no one else has gone if possible, and so we keep stepping deeper and deeper into these situations, and we keep shooting and shooting and shooting until someone tries to stop us, and then we keep shooting even as we're being taken out. I wind up just trying to capture these single moments that can only exist in this one moment. You have to capture it, because if it passes you're never going to get it back again. That gives the movie a certain urgency, which I think adds to the entertainment value.

NP It's very similar to Borat in a way; Bill Maher is Borat. Borat used humor and the documentary format to challenge ideas of sexism, racism and homophobia, and Bill's essentially using the same device to challenge people's beliefs about religion.

LC: That's very true. The main difference is the level of artifice necessary, the alternate reality that is created, that's the main difference. But yes, they both are sort of enquiring amongst people about their belief systems, about their values, and hopefully painting a portrait of a society in the process.

NP I guess the one major difference is that Bill doesn't have a sister who's a whore who he plays husband and wife with.

LC: [laughs] Not that I know of. His sister's a very demure, very sweet woman actually.

NP What was a surprise to you as the movie unfolded?

LC: One of the things that people point at a lot, and was a revelation for me, was Father Foster in front of the Vatican; I had no idea that he was going to say the things that he ended up saying. We were all taken aback. I think, of all the things that were said in the movie, I think to have a high level Vatican priest basically say that Jesus being born on December 25th, and hell, and all these Christian Catholic concepts are all a bunch of nonsense was pretty shocking and revelatory.

NP Do you know if there's been any consequences for him?

LC: You know what? I think he could become a hero actually. Again, I don't think he's saying anything that other priests, other high level Ph.D. Vatican priests don't believe. Pope John Paul himself has written that evolution is no longer a theory. So if you want to go in and look at Vatican writing, which is available if you go look for it, you probably will see a lot of this kind of thought in there. It's like the Dalai Lama; The Dalai Lama talks about quantum mechanics and science, and he's reconciled it with his religion, and the Pope and his crew probably have as well, but they just don't really talk about it for public consumption.

NP When I visited the Vatican, one of the most shocking things for me was seeing a bunch of nuns selling tacky souvenirs in a hut on the roof. I know Jesus wasn't a big fan of people turning his dad's house into a marketplace [John 2:16]. It's was a graphic illustration of how the Pope picks and chooses what he wants to take from the Bible.

LC: Well that's right. We open up that section of the movie with Bill saying "do you think this is at all what Jesus had in mind?" And you realize right there in that one image, and that one question, how absurd that whole thing is. It's unavoidable.

NP There's one statistic that worries me though. They say that people who have religion in their lives are happier. I guess it's that faith that there's someone warm and fuzzy looking after you.

LC: See I question that statistic. First of all, what does happy mean? How's happy defined? How deep are these people talking about their happiness? Are they talking worldwide? What about all the Christians, Catholics and Muslims in the world who live in abject poverty? Are they really happier? I don't know if I even accept that statistic on the surface.

NP You said a lot of things that needed to be said in the film. What kind of response have you been getting -- from both sides?

LC: Well, first of all, wherever we've played it, we've played to packed houses and gotten standing ovations, like at the Toronto Film Festival, so it plays really well. Underneath it all, I wanted to make a Saturday night date movie about religion. I wanted to make a rock & roll, rollercoaster ride through religion, and so on that level it works. It's a really fun movie strangely enough. It's entertainment and it's the kind of movie that should be able to compete with any movie in the mall on Saturday night. So on that level it's very satisfying.

As far as the controversy and all that kind of stuff, I'm hoping that the people you're describing, the religious right, people who might normally be aghast or offended by the movie, wind up in the mall on a Saturday night looking for something to see, and choose this, and find themselves laughing despite themselves. I think that would be the most controversial thing that could happen.

by SG's Team Agony feat. Yulia Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Yulia in Don't Panic] Q: Last summer my wife and I split up simply because she felt lonely, which is my fault completely. We did end up getting back... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Yulia

Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Yulia in Don't Panic]

Q: Last summer my wife and I split up simply because she felt lonely, which is my fault completely. We did end up getting back together, but my problem is sex, which was once great has died away. She never feels like having it any more. She doesn't even want oral sex either. Sex is not the most important thing to me, but I feel it is definitely hurting the relationship. I have tried everything in and out of the book, but have come up empty and am having thoughts about exploring my options. Is there anything I can do to restart my sex life back with my wife? I miss the fun we had.

A: Kudos to you for recognizing that your past behavior may have caused or contributed to your current situation. It's also very brave of you both to give your relationship a second chance. This shows you each recognized a strong connection and believe it's worth saving.

Since you say you're not having much sex anymore, I'm going to assume you had sex more regularly pre-breakup. Your wife may be concerned that renewing your sex life together will begin a slippery slope back down to the loneliness she felt before your time apart. I don't know how long you two have been back together, but even if it's been months, you may still be rebuilding trust. Because sex is the most intimate act, it can be easy to assume that just because you're sleeping with someone you know them well and are spending quality time together. And you are, but it's often not enough. I have friends I've never kissed that I know more deeply than people I have slept with. It's likely that this is the level of connection that your wife wants, and she may be trying hard to build a strong foundation first before she will let loose.

You need to make your wife feel special and special to YOU, like you want her and not just sex, period. But don't just treat her to the traditional stuff (flowers, and restaurants), try branching out and giving her quality time where you can enjoy each other's company as well as each other's bodies.

Most of all, be patient. Your wife wouldn't have gotten back together with you if she didn't hope to rekindle the old fire. She might just be trying a different method this time to see if the bond will be stronger.

Best of luck.

Yulia

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

In his 30 year career of writing, directing and producing movies, John Carpenter has made more people mess their pants than Billy Madison. He is best known for directing the original Halloween, The Thing and more recently he was unofficially “inducted” into the Masters of Horror by directing two episodes... more

In his 30 year career of writing, directing and producing movies, John Carpenter has made more people mess their pants than Billy Madison. He is best known for directing the original Halloween, The Thing and more recently he was unofficially “inducted” into the Masters of Horror by directing two episodes in the first two seasons. For his latest episode Pro-Life, recently released on DVD, Carpenter again teamed with the writing duo that penned his first episode, Cigarette Burns. Pro-Life tackles the sensitive issue of abortion and whether there is a right situation for having one but puts it into a horror movie context with terrifying and gross results.

Buy the DVD of Pro-Life

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

John Carpenter: I’m waiting for basketball to start. I’m a big basketball fan.

DRE: I’ve heard.

John: I’m going to play a couple of videogames. I’m finishing up one so I can make room for God of War 2.

DRE: It’s funny, I told a friend of mine that I was going to be talking to you and he said, “Ask him about basketball and videogames.”

John: Well, it’s March Madness so that’s always fun. I watch that out of the corner of my eye. But I’m a real big NBA fan. Right now, the Phoenix Suns and the Dallas Mavericks are just great. They had a great game the other night.

DRE: What’s your favorite team?

John: You got to love your home team. You got to be true to your home team but the Los Angeles Lakers suck. We’re just in awful shape right now. But I like the Phoenix Suns. I like the Dallas Mavericks.

DRE: Have you always been into videogames?

John: No, my son and his friends actually got me hooked on them. I guess it was in the 90’s. As my son grew up and became interested in videogames, I played along with him. I really loved it so I had my second childhood through him.

DRE: What systems do you have?

John: I have PlayStation 3, I have Xbox 360, I have PlayStation 2 but I don’t use it much anymore. I’ve got GameCube that I just don’t use. I’ve got basically everything.

DRE: I don’t know if you’ve seen 300 yet…

John: Not yet. I’m anxious to see it.

DRE: Often when film critics don’t like the story in a movie they will say it is comic-like but since 300 is already based on a comic book they started comparing 300 to a videogame. But they seem to forget that videogames, like comics, have some pretty complex stories. Would you say that videogames are starting to get close to being as complex as films?

John: With some videogames, because you’re involved in the action yourself, are truly exciting. You get lost in it. Whereas a movie is really a passive experience. You’re sitting, eating popcorn. If you’re at home, you’re drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, whatever you’re doing. That’s a different experience. That’s what I grew up with, movies as passive entertainment. When critics compare 300 to a videogame, I’m not quite sure what they’re talking about. I think they’re talking about computer generated graphics. I think that’s a way in to attack a movie on the grounds that it’s more of a videogame or a comic book or something.

DRE: They can’t insult it by calling it a comic book-like movie. They just come up with something else they don’t really understand to compare it too.

John: Well, it’s all an insult, like this is not important enough. That’s the way it always happens.

DRE: I read about some videogame you were involved with a couple of years ago, Psychopath.

John: Yeah, that’s still percolating away. I’ll be involved with anything if it pays me money.

DRE: [laughs] With Pro-Life, was it just a coincidence that you decided to film another script by Drew [McWeeny] and Scott [Swan] or did you help them with it?

John: The first project that we did on Masters of Horror was a Drew and Scott original that I read [Cigarette Burns] and I thought, “This is great. Let me do this. I want to do this.” Then the second season came up and they pitched me, “We have this idea about a monster movie in an abortion clinic.” I said, “That’s great!” I love working with those boys. They’re just really talented. As writers, they’re very open and we worked it up a little bit. They just do a great job for me.

DRE: Since Cigarette Burns is all about film buffs did you connect on that level?

John: Yeah, we connected in the sense of loving horror, loving science fiction, that kind of a thing. Drew and Scott are very talented writers. They’re very knowledgeable about the genre. That always helps you when you’re doing something like an hour cable show. I suppose we’re all geeks in our own way. My brand of geekdom goes all the way back to the 50’s and 60’s. I’m the older geek.

DRE: You’ve got a couple of years on them.

John: Yeah I do, quite a few actually.

DRE: I thought that Cigarette Burns had an interesting look to it, cinematography-wise and production design-wise while Pro-Life was a bit more straightforward.

John: It was the same crew but it’s a different story. So your look and the way it feels is always going to be dependent on the story. The story and the look of Pro-Life is very different. It is set in a clinic so you can’t really apply the same techniques.

DRE: Had you known Ron Perlman before casting him in Pro-Life?

John: I met Ron for the first time at the very end of Cigarette Burns. There’s a famous hotel in Vancouver, where everybody who’s shooting there stays, called the Sutton Place. I met him in the bar one night and I said, “I really like your work and The Name of The Rose is one of my favorites.” We started talking and then he accepted the role in Pro-Life. It was very cool.

DRE: I read that you’re not a big fan of method actors. Is that true?

John: It doesn’t matter. It depends on how much work I have to do. Some actors come prepared and ready to go. I can give you a list of those, Kurt Russell, Sam Neill, Jeff Bridges. We work ahead of time on the rehearsals and we come ready to go on the set. Some actors need emotional stimulation and support and sometimes intellectual stimulation and support right on the set as we’re doing the work. That’s a little hard. So it’s all about my comfort.

DRE: I read that Ron was a bit of a method actor, but I’m sure you guys got along.

John: I didn’t see method in him at all. We talked real briefly about how to play the character in the beginning. I just said, “Play him as a hero. Play him as a good guy. He’s a strong man. Don’t have one moment of doubt about what you’re doing except for at the end.” That was it. We just did the work. It was fun.

DRE: I shouldn’t have, but I got stoned before I watched Pro-Life.

John: I got stoned while making it.

DRE: [laughs] I really almost got sick when it Ron was aborting the male doctor’s insides.

John: Actually that was a more elaborate scene originally in the script. The boys wrote something I’ve never seen. I said, “You can’t do this, okay? We have to tone this down a little bit.”

DRE: That was toned down?

John: That was really toned down. Oh man, it went on and on. Page after page of it and it was rough.

DRE: I don’t know how much of this new trend in horror, the torture porn, you’ve seen, but it seemed like that sequence was making a comment on that just because it was so outrageous.

John: It is but you don’t see anything. It’s all implied, which is just the reverse. Torture porn is what you see, the close-up. You get to see all the grotesque stuff. Listen I’m a big fan of the Saw movies. I love that shit. I don’t know if I’d want to do it but it’s great fun to watch. It is like the zombie movies in the 60’s and 70’s, with biting chunks out of people and all that stuff. It’s all great.

DRE: I got a chance to interview Drew [McWeeny] last year. He said that you’d never be able to guess his politics from watching Pro-Life. Was it important to keep the points of view a bit murky and not make something more pointed like what Joe Dante did with his Masters of Horror episodes?

John: That’s just not me as a director. Joe did a great job with his show. He did it out of passion. That’s not the way I approach things. I didn’t want to make a political statement though I have before. In the movie called They Live, I made a pretty strong political statement. In this one I can unfortunately see both sides of it so I can understand it. If you want to know my politics, I’m a pro-choice guy because it’s none of my business as a male. That’s a decision a woman has to make. But I understand how pro-life folks feel. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. I think Ron did a good job being that guy.

DRE: He was terrifying and almost sympathetic until he sucked out the guy’s guts.

John: That’s where he goes over the top. He’s motivated and getting revenge.

DRE: I know you’ve done plenty of television in the past, including your own show. Have you ever had as much freedom script-wise and content-wise as you did with these Masters of Horrors?

John: Yeah, I’ve pretty much always had freedom. I’ve never really experienced too much censorship or lack of freedom in that area. I’ve been lucky. Actually that’s my whole career. Staggered into it. Staggered through it. Staggered to the chair. It’s always been great.

DRE: These Masters of Horror episodes just seem so personal. Is that the result of the scripts or was it the lower budget that makes things seem a bit more intimate?

John: Every director makes a movie in a different way. Takes his ten days of shooting, which is what we had, and takes it to where he wants it to go. Some people write their own scripts. Some folks have scripts written for them. Everybody’s different. But it’s fun to see everybody work.

DRE: Don Coscarelli told me he didn’t want to do an episode for the second season because he says with all the time and energy he put into making it, he feels like he could have made a feature film. Do you have the same attitude?

John: Hell, it’s fine. Look, it’s great to be able to go and prep for a few days and shoot for ten days and go home. You don’t have the physical and emotional pain of a feature. So it’s a vacation time. I still hate to get up in the morning. God, getting up is really rough. But other than that, it’s pretty much fun.

DRE: With Pro-Life, you could have taken the choice to not show the monster, what made you decide to do that?

John: Well, it would be pretty hard not to see him. He’s a pretty good monster. He’s reminiscent of an old movie that I saw when I was a kid called Curse of the Demon [directed by Jacques Tourneur]. That’s what he’s based on, sort of. Drew and Scott had a hand in fashioning him and I said, “I want him to look like your dreams too.” But we kept him in the dark. I think he’s got a big mouth. He roars a lot. Monsters are fun so why keep him in the dark? I remember once this actress and I were having lunch and she was lecturing me like, “You never show the devil. That’s just not done in movies.” I said, “Well, why not? If you could really have a great devil, show him. Where does that rule come down?” So sometimes it’s good not to see, but hell, we love watching monsters. Show me my monster.

DRE: Obviously you’re a big music fan and you do a lot of the music for your projects. How was it working with your son Cody on the music?

John: He was at the right age and he had the right talent. It worked out. It was fabulous. I’m really proud of him.

DRE: I interviewed your ex-wife [Adrienne Barbeau] last year and she said Cody’s band is wonderful.

John: He’s involved in music. He’s also in Japan right now finishing up his degree in Asian studies. He’s a Japanophile.

DRE: Did he capture the John Carpenter music flair that you wanted or did the two of you work on it together?

John: The themes are his. They’re very different than mine. They have their own unique feel to it. I’m just so delighted. It’s also really fun to see him get paid and I don’t have to worry about it.

DRE: I talked to Norman Reedus and I asked why his character in Cigarette Burns didn’t really have any reaction when he saw the angel. Norman said, “Well, what do you do when you see an angel? No one knows.” Was that what your thinking was?

John: If I walked in and saw an angel there and I had somebody like Udo Kier talking to me out of my side, I would think, “This whole thing is ridiculous. This is a fake.” I don’t know what I would think. Norman played it perfectly. I would go with what he said. No one knows.

DRE: I spoke with Will O'Neil who wrote one of those Snake Plissken comic books a few years ago. He had said that you, Kurt [Russell] and [producer] Debra Hill owned the character of Snake. Is that true?

John: Yes, but we share it with Canal Plus. It’s a long story, but the movie was originally made for a company called Avco Embassy. Avco Embassy was sold to Dino De Laurentiis. Dino De Laurentiis sold his share to Canal Plus.

DRE: So in this remake they’re talking about...

John: I don’t know that it’s a remake. I think it’s a lot about Snake before he gets to New York.

DRE: But it just made me think that maybe the remake rights might be different than the rights to the character Snake Plissken because none of the articles mentioned you guys being involved with the project. Are you guys going to be credited producers?

John: Executive producer.

DRE: Do you have any desire to be more involved?

John: My main involvement is I read the scripts and make sure the character is the same character that we wrote originally. I think that would be cool. My other main involvement in this project is to extend my hand and have a check placed in it.

DRE: It’s always nice when you don’t have to do anything, right?

John: You’re right. After 30 odd years of being in the fucking business, it’s nice to not have to do anything and get paid. That’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life.

DRE: Then the past few years must have been pretty good for you.

John: Not bad. Not bad.

DRE: Obviously Snake was a character that was perfect for the time he was in, so do you think Snake will lose the faux mullet?

John: I don’t know what to do about that. That’s not my decision. Snake is a character who was born out of the 1970’s when New York was having real problems. He came out of a post-Vietnam era and he was an anti-authoritarian. He was a really unique type of character back then. He’ll probably be reinvented for his time. But we’ll see. I don’t know if he will be mullet-less or with the mullet.

DRE: Have you ever seen any of Gerard Butler’s previous movies?

John: Yes, I like his work.

DRE: I think you’ll be very impressed after you see 300.

John: I can’t wait to see 300. It sounds really exciting. It looks great.

DRE: You don’t seem to mind these remakes, is that a result of you directing remakes yourself?

John: Well, if I’m not directing a movie, it’s not really mine. I’m flattered when somebody wants to take an old film of mine or a story of mine and rework it. I think that’s nice. I’m not trying to protect golden calf or something. It just isn’t that way. It’s just a damn movie, man.

DRE: On the other side, I don’t think you’re involved with the Halloween remake.

John: No, I bailed out of that after a while. But Rob [Zombie] has been a friend of mine for years. He did a song for me way back when [for Escape from LA]. He’s a real nice guy. He called me up when they were going to make it and I said, “Just make it your own. Hell. That’s the most important thing. Make it yours.”

DRE: If they re-use a piece of your music, will you get a check then?

John: Oh yeah. Big time. There was an agreement made, I can’t remember when it was finalized, but every time a sequel is made there are certain payments. I encourage more and more sequels.

DRE: I heard about this his project that you might be doing next, L.A. Gothic.

John: Well, I’m involved in a couple of things right now. I just don’t know. The script for L.A. Gothic is very good. I’d like to tweak it a little bit, but we’ll see. When it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, there’s always basketball.

DRE: From what I’ve heard, you might not have been too happy with your last feature film [Ghosts of Mars].

John: The experience was pretty grim for a number of different reasons. But I have to take responsibility for it. It’s probably my fault. Look, when one gets burned out on the business, it really can be destructive to you, emotionally, physically, in all sorts of ways. It’s easier when you’re young, but as you get older, it’s more and more difficult. So I decided, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take some time off.” Now it’s been the best time in my life.

DRE: Does doing the Masters of Horror episodes make you think, “Maybe I could spend two years on a feature again.”?

John: Oh sure. I love making movies. I love directing. It’s always been the love of my life. But I do have other issues. Myself. My own happiness. My parents. My mom died a couple of years ago. I went through that.

DRE: It’s interesting that both of your parents were still around with you for so long because you think that a guy who made the films that you made that maybe...

John: I didn’t have parents, right?

DRE: [laughs] Oh, I really screwed this one up.

John: Yeah, I really didn’t have any parents. I was left on a doorstep.

DRE: [laughs] Do you see doing something as personal as dealing with your mother’s death in a film?

John: In this business, I’ve learned to never say never. I’m attracted to stories. If I create the story or if someone else does and it is good, I’d be interested in it. But movies are really about fake life, not real life. Fake life is more fun. Drama, comedy, horror and all those things are fun to do. That’s what I’ve been involved with, in my career so I’ll probably keep doing it.

DRE: I was actually on the set of the prequel to the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When we were interviewing the producers, I asked them why didn’t they ask Tobe Hooper to direct and they said, “Tobe Hooper doesn't have anything to learn from me. He's done it all a million times.” To me that was just insane.

John: But there’s a grain of truth in what he said. They’re not going to be able to control Tobe like they can some young guy. They can control you better when you’re green and starting out.

DRE: So that’s what it comes down to?

John: Partially it does. If you have a commercial background or a music video background or some tricky background, you bring your panache to the project. So you run around and get a bunch of trick shots and you’re not demanding final cut, so in the end it brings a breath of fresh air to the project. Tobe’s already done his movie. He doesn’t want to do it again.

DRE: What would happen if someone wanted you to remake one of your films?

John: That’s happened. I don’t want to do that. I’ve done it. You’d be treading the same ground. Especially with the Halloweens. That’s where it came up. We finished the story off. But that’s my personal opinion.

DRE: How soon do you think you want to get a project up and running again?

John: I don’t know. Whenever it happens. If I get a project going, that’s fine. If I don’t, that’s fine. It’s not life and death.

DRE: Have you heard of SuicideGirls before?

John: I know all about you. I know everything.

DRE: It’s got tattooed, naked girls who like your films.

John: That’s my idea of heaven. Tattooed naked girls who enjoy horror movies. There’s nothing better than that.

DRE: Have you ever seen a John Carpenter related tattoo on someone?

John: I haven’t.

DRE: I’ll have to email you one.

John: Would you? I think I need to see that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck