Director Darren Lynn Bousman is the master of extreme horror who helmed the Saw franchise through films II, III and IV. He stepped away from the director's chair for Saw V to chase a long held dream to place a musical on the big screen. That dream became a reality with the release of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a bloodthirsty futuristic nightmare set to a relentless rock/goth/industrial soundtrack.
Buffy's Anthony Head plays the film's grim reaper, an organ repossession man doing the bidding of an out of control biotech company called GeneCo. The Phantom of The Opera's original Christine, Sarah Brightman, is GeneCo's most prominent (and endangered) client, Blind Meg. And press darling Paris Hilton is Amber Sweet, GeneCo's spoilt heiress, a role you could say she was born for.
"This is not your parents' opera. This is blood and violence, and killing and death, and sex and singing and opera," cautions Bousman, who stopped by the Suicide Girls' office to talk about his labor of love, its unlikely cast, and how he's using grassroots enthusiasm as the final piece in his jigsaw puzzle to plug the gap where his marketing budget should be.
Nicole Powers: People know you from the Saw movies so it's unexpected for you to produce a musical, but you have a whole other side to your personality.
Darren Lynn Bousman: Yeah. I grew up idolizing Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, which is kind of weird. I think people would expect me growing up watching all horror movies and wanting to do gross and disgusting things, but Jesus Christ Superstar and The Who's Tommy, Rocky Horror Picture Show, these are the movies that spoke to me and inspired me. I always knew that's what I wanted to do. But making musicals is a very hard thing to do, so when I came to Los Angeles I went to another one of my loves, which is horror. It's a much easier field to break into.
NP: They're traditionally low budget, whereas musicals tend to be high budget.
DLB: So I started doing the Saw movies. But before I actually did Saw II, I directed the first stage production of Repo. I did it in the Little Black Box Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It only fit ninety-nine people in the theater, and we were doing Repo as this little stage production. Then I went on to do Saw II, Repo went on to Off-Broadway. Because of the success of the Saw films, I went back and said, "I have to do this as a movie."
NP: I read that after the success of your Saw movies you were offered a blank check, but when you asked if that blank check would extend to a musical they turned you down.
DLB: I don't think anyone was at all excited about making Repo originally. I tried to get it made after Saw II and I was told, "No." I tried to get it made after Saw III and I was told, "No." Then they came to me with Saw IV and I said, "No. I want to make Repo." I think that I had a little bit of clout at that point. At that point Saw II and Saw III were very successful. I was attached at the time to a first look deal with Dimension for three or four years, and I knew if I did not make Repo right then, I was not going to be able to make Repo for five years, and at that point someone else would have made it. There would have been another director to make a rock opera, and I had to beat everyone out. I had to make this movie. So basically I said, "Listen, I'd love to do Saw IV but not unless we're doing Repo." It was a bargaining chip. I mean I love the Saw franchise, and I feel lucky to be a part of it, but I've never strayed off the path that Repo was the movie I had to do.
NP: What makes Repo so special for you?
DLB: It's different. I mean a lot of people are going to hate Repo. It's not for everybody. I don't claim it to be. But Repo is so different than the majority of movies that are out there. If you looked at the paper right now, or go on Moviefone, all the movies are carbon copy cut outs. They're the same movie repackaged with a new title and a new star. But they're the same movies we've seen. They're popcorn movies, and I love those movies. I go to the theater. I watch them. But Repo is something that, compared to something in the last ten years, well it's kind of like Sweeney Todd, but it's really not. Sweeney Todd's a musical. They break out in song in Sweeney Todd. This is an opera, a 21st century opera. There is no talking. It's all singing from the beginning to the very end. I wanted to do something that was unique, and something that was more creative for me as an artist.
NP: So the budget for Repo, you made it for around $8 million, which is cheap for a movie, never mind a musical.
DLB: This was not a paycheck for anyone. No one made money on this. No one! You look at Sarah Brightman, who sells out massive arenas, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands per show, she can make so much more money in one night than she made for three months' worth of work on Repo, but she did Repo anyway. Paris Hilton could do a cameo in a spoof movie and make more money than she made for three months of working on Repo.
Everyone did it because they believed in the movie. And that extends to the crew as well. The special effects company did it because they believed in the movie, and you see that on the screen. I mean, here's this little movie that had less money in special effects than Saw II or Saw III or Saw IV, and those are low budget movies, but we had less money than that. To put it in perspective, a normal musical has two to three days to pull off one song -- we were doing three songs a day. We had no time to shoot this. Not only did we not have money, we shot everything in thirty days, thirty-one when it was all said and done. It was insane. It was guerilla filmmaking at its finest.
NP: The casting is amazing. You have Alex Vega, a relative unknown from Spy Kids in the lead. How did you even come across her?
DLB: We were looking for someone who could look seventeen years old, be innocent, and yet be sexy and hot. And on top of that pull-off the goth look. Alexa looks young, she was sexy, and she completely pulled of that Shilo look which we were going for in the movie.
NP: Now Sarah Brightman, this was her first film role.
DLB: I actually had dinner with her two nights ago and we were talking about that. I mean if you look at her body of work, her career, from becoming this massive superstar singer to doing Christine in Phantom of the Opera, and now performing at the Beijing Olympics at the opening ceremony, she's a massive superstar and her first movie role, and she's been offered other movies, what she chose to do was a little independent rock opera. I mean she's awesome. I think that Sarah Brightman's one of the coolest people to hang out with because I think you have a perception of her that she's this big diva. She's so awesome, and down to earth, and cool. She's become one of my new favorite people.
NP: How did you get the material to her?
DLB: It was crazy. She was the only person that I never went after. Because I never thought we had a chance with her...So we had another person cast and I was having some creative differences with the person. The other person was just being very diva-ish. So we ended up letting the other person go, and we're maybe a week away from recording the album and we're like, "We don't have an opera star. We need an opera star." And the music producer, Jonathan McHugh, goes, "What about Sarah Brightman?" And I was like, "Like Sarah Brightman would ever return our phone calls."
They overnighted her the script, and the next day I'm on the phone with her and she goes, "I'll do it. Lovely. I'll do it!" There was no convincing, there was no trying to talk her into it. She was excited because it helped her break that perception of who people think Sarah Brightman is. I mean, in reality, Sarah Brightman is dark and goth. She is, and this was a chance for her to play that.
NP: And Anthony Head. It was amazing watching the raw audition footage on the Repo website, his un-produced, unrefined audition.
DLB: Yeah. And he got that material only about an hour before, so that was the first time he was ever even looking at that. He didn't have days and days to practice. He just looked at it and did it. Anthony Head was my number one choice for Repo Man from the very beginning. We really lucked out because I got everyone I wanted, but Anthony Head, after I'd seen the episode of Once More With Feeling, the Buffy musical, I was in love. I was like, "This is the guy. This is Repo Man. Because he had to be able to play fatherly, yet a monster at the same time.
NP: I love his brother too, Murray Head.
DLB: He's great. Again, going back to one of my favorite albums ever, Jesus Christ Superstar, he played the original Judas. So it's exciting to have the Heads in the movie I just did.
NP: You were talking about how you got everyone you originally wanted, but ironically one of the people you didn't want was Paris Hilton. I understand you refused to audition her at first.
DLB: Well because I think the media has a warped perception of her, and so did I, because my perception of Paris was done through the media. And so everything I thought Paris would be was because I read it on Perez Hilton, or TMZ, or any of these other websites I'm addicted to. But the fact is that's not who she is. She finally came in, I broke down and I met with her, and immediately she charmed everyone in the room. There was something about her that made me uncomfortable, and it was because I realized that she was not at all who I though she was going to be. I was kind of stand-off-ish in the very beginning, and then I realized she was smart, she was articulate, she knew the script.
But that's one thing. Can she act? That's the next question. And so we gave her some music and said, "You have one day to come back and perform this." She came back the next day, memorized everything, was pitch-perfect, I mean she was awesome. I was like, "Ok, that's a fluke. Let's give her another harder thing." We gave her something else, which was harder. The next day she comes back, and she worked for it...
She's not the person people think she is in the media. Those are snapshots of a life that are spun to look a certain way. And I think that I realize that now after knowing her, seeing what she goes through on a daily basis, paparazzi following her everywhere, all of that. She ended up being the biggest surprise for me.
NP: She plays the spoilt daughter of a business magnate, who wants daddy to buy her way into a singing career and has one too many plastic surgeries. Did you change any of that role to match her character?
DLB: Not at all. That's how she was written. But I think that says something about Paris Hilton as an actress. She did not play Paris Hilton...If you write down on a piece of paper: heiress, spoiled, addicted to her looks, media starlet -- are we talking about Amber Sweet or Paris Hilton? They're the same thing. So it would have been very easy for Paris Hilton to play Paris Hilton. But she doesn't; she acts in the move. And I think she does it very well.
NP: It's actually quite a subtle performance, which shocked the hell out of me.
DLB: Exactly.
NP: I understand she was so keen to get the part she had someone smuggle the script into her while she was in jail.
DLB: Yes she did.
NP: A little rehearsal time there.
DLB: She had a lot of rehearsal time in there. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall while she was rehearsing. She's the most dedicated, passionate person. I still have books that she sent me. She sent me collage books, and I'm not talking about a collage like ten pictures put together, I'm talking about books of thirty pages of concepts that she had for her character. I would get these in the mail on a weekly basis. So she put a lot of time and a lot of thought into what she looked like and how she acted in this movie.
NP: I first heard of Repo when she got out of jail and it was leaked on Perez Hilton and a few other sites that she'd got the part. Do you regret that it was leaked then, because the first taste people had of Repo was in a very tabloid sense?
DLB: You know what, no, because Paris Hilton's been a blessing. We don't have a marketing budget, we don't. If you look outside now you can see billboards of Saw V, you can see bus ads of Saw V. Have you seen a billboard of Repo? No. Have you seen a trailer of Repo? Not really. We have none of that. We have no money. This movie is all done though word of mouth, and Paris Hilton has made that word of mouth go everywhere...
Her name is a stick of dynamite. It could explode on you, but I think it's been done very well. I've not read a negative review from a legitimate source on Paris Hilton in this movie. Every single person, whether it be a New York Post article or New York Times, or Rolling Stone, everyone talking about the movie talks about Paris in a very positive light, because she does great, she holds her own in this. I think she'll turn a lot of heads in this movie.
NP: Because of necessity, you're doing a grassroots promotion to get people to put pressure on the cinemas to show the movie.
DLB: And it's working. I mean we were a straight to DVD movie. We got one theater, New York. Then we got two theaters, New York and L.A., and then they gave me four theaters, New York, L.A., San Francisco and Berkeley. Now we've expanded that. How we've expanded that is the fans.
I don't have a marketing budget. There's no money to promote this movie. I have two options. I sit back and I take that, OK, let's throw it in the wind and see where the cards fall. Or I say let's go to the people who buy the tickets, who make movies work. Let's go to them and put the movie in their hands. So I reach out to my fans on a daily basis, on the website, and I say if you want to help here's the things you can do. And I think they feel empowered now because they're at the bottom of a huge campaign that is all run by fans.
The fans are the ones who are putting up posters around town, they're stickering things, they're going on blogs and writing things about Repo, they're going to college campuses and handing out stuff, they're performing skits on Hollywood Boulevard. Someone forwarded me a YouTube clip of a bunch of Repo fans that drove hours to go to Hollywood Boulevard and perform "Zytrate Anatomy." This is what the kids are doing. It's amazing.
NP: One of the devices you use in the film is comic strip animation to link the scenes, which is really cool. Who drew that?
DLB: Terrance Zdunich, the guy who plays Grave Robber, is the co-writer, co-creator, lead actor, did all the music, and drew all the images. He did everything basically, because, when I say we had no money, I don't think you realize how little money we had. We couldn't hire an artist. That was someone else's job, but we didn't have the money to do it so it went to Terrance. So a normal day for Terrance would be, get up in the morning at five o' clock, finish whatever music needed to be done, go to set and do a twelve hour day on set, and then go home from midnight to four a.m. and draw, and then go back to set again the next day. Making the movie was the most trying, hard, horrific, event ever. Again, the reason it looks so good, the reason it doesn't look cheap, I think is because every single person wanted to be there. This is not a paycheck job. This was a "we love this movie" job, and I think that's why it looks the way it does.
NP: One of the reasons I didn't contact you right away after seeing Repo at the screening is that you see the movie and it's almost too much. You need to sit back and let it filter through. I thought I'm being indecisive, and "how strange," but I went online and went on the blogs and found mine was a common reaction.
DLB: Yes. It's an assault on the senses....I think one of the problems is people walk into Repo not knowing what they're going to get. They walk into Repo thinking, "Ah, it's the director of Saw, it's Paris Hilton." And they're bombarded with sights, colors, images, bam, bam, bam. And they walk out of the movie and it takes them three or four days to figure out, "Wow, that was actually really cool."
Also with this movie is the re-watch value. Let's say you watch the movie twice. The next time you see the movie, you'll know the songs and so you'll [start to] look forward to songs, you'll know some of the lyrics to the songs. I've noticed that. We've screened the movie seven or eight times all across America, people are coming to all the screenings -- the same people. And every time they're going, they're becoming more active, more involved in the movie. It's like any song you hear on the radio. You hear a new song on the radio, you'll bop your head a little bit. The next time you hear it, you'll start singing with the song. I encourage people to be loud in the movie. I encourage you to be obnoxious in this movie because it is a movie that is a carnival. It's supposed to be a fun time. And I hope that again, people embrace that as they start to learn what the movie is.
NP: Talk a bit about the music, because you've got some incredible people on the soundtrack: Richard Patrick from Filter, Stephen Perkins from Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros, Daniel Ash and David J. from Bauhaus, and you've got Poe singing...
DLB: Backing vocals, I know, it's crazy. The script was so weird and eclectic and out of the box, my vision was weird and out of the box, and so the casting had to be out of the box. And that goes past the Sarah Brightmans and Paris Hiltons, that goes to the session players. This could easily have been done by five guys with guitars, trumpets, or anything like that, but we knew that we wanted to have an eclectic group of out there singers, out there musicians. So you have Bauhaus with Rasputina, you have Slipknot with Perkins, you have these people playing that would never play on an album, yet they've all come together to be in this weird mish-mash of music.
NP: Who produced it?
DLB: Joseph Bishara is the main producer. Joseph, is an amazing music producer. And another guy by the name of Yoshiki Hayashi. Yoshiki is a big Japanese rock & roll star. And it was crazy, it was like a real rock & roll album. We were in the studio everyday, 25 hours a day, I mean there's only 24 in a day but...
NP: There's fifty-seven songs?
DLB: I think there's sixty-four different pieces of music. So this is the most music that's been in a musical that I'm aware of. If you look at a movie like Rocky Horror Picture Show, it has like seventeen tracks. If you look at Rent, it's got like thirty. Here we have sixty-four different pieces of music, because we never let up. It starts and it never stops until the very last frame. We cut out a lot too. There was a lot more music in it than that. We had to cut it out for budgetary reasons.
NP: What were the main changes you had to make moving it from stage to screen?
DLB: We made it a lot more edgy for the movie. There were some bad Broadway songs in the stage play with jazz hands, it was bad. So the first thing we did is try to make it more edgy, more industrial, more goth. I think that the musicians did a great job doing that, because again, we set out to make the anti-Rent, the anti-Dreamgirls, not saying those are bad movies, but the majority of people that would never see Dreamgirls or Rent would go see this, because we're a different type of musical. That's what we set out to do, is take the stage story about a Repo man, and make it a lot darker, a lot more beautiful to look at, and make it the anti-Rent.
NP: So what's next for you?
DLB: I'm working on a movie with Twisted Pictures right now. Everything I've done so far has been with [Twisted Pictures' producer] Mark Burg. It's a dark, unrelenting true story. It's abrasive and brash and hard to watch. I can't say the name of it just yet, but it's violent. But, you know what, I want to get away from doing the Saw movies, and do something more along the lines of Repo. Repo was more me than Saw was.
I just love the fantastical, whimsical, I think that Repo is that. It's like this dark fairy tale for adults. That's how we kind of structured Repo, like an Alice in Wonderland story. Shilo's Alice, she goes down the rabbit hole at the very beginning.
NP: Is there a Darren Bousman movie without blood?
DLB: No. I don't know. I have an idea for a children's story, but it's a very dark children's story, very, very dark. And kids die in it, so I guess there's blood in that too. I've always been more attracted to the darker side of things, the more macabre. It's just who I am. I can't get away from that. You'll never see the Darren Bousman romantic comedy -- that's never coming.
NP: Talking of romantic comedies, they did the sing-a-long version of Momma Mia with the lyrics. Are you going to?
DLB: Well I hope so. Again, I encourage people to have a good time at the movie. The movie is not intended to be taken seriously. There's drama, there's a lot of drama, but there's a lot of camp, and people watch the movie and don't realize it's OK to laugh at the movie. We're bigger than life because opera's bigger than life. I mean you've got Paul Sorvino in a limo going [sings "arhhhh" operatically -- and rather well], it's not meant to be serious. I hope that people understand it's OK to have fun, it's OK to sing along with the movie, it's OK to make fun of the movie. That's what the movie's there for.
I'm not some pretentious, uptight, asshole, that going to be monitoring the movies going, "Oh, you can't talk! Sssshhhhh! Cell phones off!" I'm not, because, again, I love the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I love going to the Nuart and seeing the insanity that takes place inside that theater. I think Rocky Horror Picture Show gave people a shelter to feel safe. If you were a freak, if you were a weirdo, if you were fat, if you were skinny, if you were goth, if you were a transvestite, it was OK, come to Rocky Horror Picture Show, you're fine here. And people went there and they embraced it, and everyone felt comfortable, and everyone kind of acted weird and strange and they were comfortable with that, and I grew up in that environment. That's how I basically learned it was OK to be artistic, it's OK to have weird ideas. And I hope that people continue to understand that about Repo.
We've had some screenings in Austin, and Montreal, people came dressed up like the characters. People were singing at the screen. They were dancing in the isles. It makes all the fighting, all the bridge-burning, all the sacrificing worthwhile, because we're seeing that it's connecting with a certain group of people.
NP: I also think that you can't fake a cult experience, so if they were to blow this up out of the bag as a blockbuster that might not do you any long term favors anyway. Because the thing about a cult is people need to feel like...
DLB: They've discovered it. Well the great thing that's happened for us is it's not commercialized. We don't have that corporate sponsor. Everything is home grown, everything is grassroots.
NP: It's forcing you to go the true cult route rather than taking a commercial short cut.
DLB: I think you're right. I think people are discovering a sense of community around it because they are the ones in charge of promoting the movie, and it's given them responsibility, that has turned this into something I never could have hoped for.
NP: Because Rocky Horror wasn't a success overnight.
BLD: No it wasn't. It took years to start the midnight screenings and all of that. But we have a one-week time span, that's all we have, one week. We have one week in the theatres. Imagine if Rocky Horror went straight to video. Imagine watching Rocky Horror Picture Show on a laptop computer. It kills the experience. What made Rocky Horror Picture Show is that prints of the movie stayed around, and people started watching the prints in movie theaters with like-minded people. We don't have that. We are going to go straight to video within a week or two if this movie doesn't open in those nine cities, we're out, we're gone, and the movie will die.
Buffy's Anthony Head plays the film's grim reaper, an organ repossession man doing the bidding of an out of control biotech company called GeneCo. The Phantom of The Opera's original Christine, Sarah Brightman, is GeneCo's most prominent (and endangered) client, Blind Meg. And press darling Paris Hilton is Amber Sweet, GeneCo's spoilt heiress, a role you could say she was born for.
"This is not your parents' opera. This is blood and violence, and killing and death, and sex and singing and opera," cautions Bousman, who stopped by the Suicide Girls' office to talk about his labor of love, its unlikely cast, and how he's using grassroots enthusiasm as the final piece in his jigsaw puzzle to plug the gap where his marketing budget should be.
Nicole Powers: People know you from the Saw movies so it's unexpected for you to produce a musical, but you have a whole other side to your personality.
Darren Lynn Bousman: Yeah. I grew up idolizing Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, which is kind of weird. I think people would expect me growing up watching all horror movies and wanting to do gross and disgusting things, but Jesus Christ Superstar and The Who's Tommy, Rocky Horror Picture Show, these are the movies that spoke to me and inspired me. I always knew that's what I wanted to do. But making musicals is a very hard thing to do, so when I came to Los Angeles I went to another one of my loves, which is horror. It's a much easier field to break into.
NP: They're traditionally low budget, whereas musicals tend to be high budget.
DLB: So I started doing the Saw movies. But before I actually did Saw II, I directed the first stage production of Repo. I did it in the Little Black Box Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It only fit ninety-nine people in the theater, and we were doing Repo as this little stage production. Then I went on to do Saw II, Repo went on to Off-Broadway. Because of the success of the Saw films, I went back and said, "I have to do this as a movie."
NP: I read that after the success of your Saw movies you were offered a blank check, but when you asked if that blank check would extend to a musical they turned you down.
DLB: I don't think anyone was at all excited about making Repo originally. I tried to get it made after Saw II and I was told, "No." I tried to get it made after Saw III and I was told, "No." Then they came to me with Saw IV and I said, "No. I want to make Repo." I think that I had a little bit of clout at that point. At that point Saw II and Saw III were very successful. I was attached at the time to a first look deal with Dimension for three or four years, and I knew if I did not make Repo right then, I was not going to be able to make Repo for five years, and at that point someone else would have made it. There would have been another director to make a rock opera, and I had to beat everyone out. I had to make this movie. So basically I said, "Listen, I'd love to do Saw IV but not unless we're doing Repo." It was a bargaining chip. I mean I love the Saw franchise, and I feel lucky to be a part of it, but I've never strayed off the path that Repo was the movie I had to do.
NP: What makes Repo so special for you?
DLB: It's different. I mean a lot of people are going to hate Repo. It's not for everybody. I don't claim it to be. But Repo is so different than the majority of movies that are out there. If you looked at the paper right now, or go on Moviefone, all the movies are carbon copy cut outs. They're the same movie repackaged with a new title and a new star. But they're the same movies we've seen. They're popcorn movies, and I love those movies. I go to the theater. I watch them. But Repo is something that, compared to something in the last ten years, well it's kind of like Sweeney Todd, but it's really not. Sweeney Todd's a musical. They break out in song in Sweeney Todd. This is an opera, a 21st century opera. There is no talking. It's all singing from the beginning to the very end. I wanted to do something that was unique, and something that was more creative for me as an artist.
NP: So the budget for Repo, you made it for around $8 million, which is cheap for a movie, never mind a musical.
DLB: This was not a paycheck for anyone. No one made money on this. No one! You look at Sarah Brightman, who sells out massive arenas, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands per show, she can make so much more money in one night than she made for three months' worth of work on Repo, but she did Repo anyway. Paris Hilton could do a cameo in a spoof movie and make more money than she made for three months of working on Repo.
Everyone did it because they believed in the movie. And that extends to the crew as well. The special effects company did it because they believed in the movie, and you see that on the screen. I mean, here's this little movie that had less money in special effects than Saw II or Saw III or Saw IV, and those are low budget movies, but we had less money than that. To put it in perspective, a normal musical has two to three days to pull off one song -- we were doing three songs a day. We had no time to shoot this. Not only did we not have money, we shot everything in thirty days, thirty-one when it was all said and done. It was insane. It was guerilla filmmaking at its finest.
NP: The casting is amazing. You have Alex Vega, a relative unknown from Spy Kids in the lead. How did you even come across her?
DLB: We were looking for someone who could look seventeen years old, be innocent, and yet be sexy and hot. And on top of that pull-off the goth look. Alexa looks young, she was sexy, and she completely pulled of that Shilo look which we were going for in the movie.
NP: Now Sarah Brightman, this was her first film role.
DLB: I actually had dinner with her two nights ago and we were talking about that. I mean if you look at her body of work, her career, from becoming this massive superstar singer to doing Christine in Phantom of the Opera, and now performing at the Beijing Olympics at the opening ceremony, she's a massive superstar and her first movie role, and she's been offered other movies, what she chose to do was a little independent rock opera. I mean she's awesome. I think that Sarah Brightman's one of the coolest people to hang out with because I think you have a perception of her that she's this big diva. She's so awesome, and down to earth, and cool. She's become one of my new favorite people.
NP: How did you get the material to her?
DLB: It was crazy. She was the only person that I never went after. Because I never thought we had a chance with her...So we had another person cast and I was having some creative differences with the person. The other person was just being very diva-ish. So we ended up letting the other person go, and we're maybe a week away from recording the album and we're like, "We don't have an opera star. We need an opera star." And the music producer, Jonathan McHugh, goes, "What about Sarah Brightman?" And I was like, "Like Sarah Brightman would ever return our phone calls."
They overnighted her the script, and the next day I'm on the phone with her and she goes, "I'll do it. Lovely. I'll do it!" There was no convincing, there was no trying to talk her into it. She was excited because it helped her break that perception of who people think Sarah Brightman is. I mean, in reality, Sarah Brightman is dark and goth. She is, and this was a chance for her to play that.
NP: And Anthony Head. It was amazing watching the raw audition footage on the Repo website, his un-produced, unrefined audition.
DLB: Yeah. And he got that material only about an hour before, so that was the first time he was ever even looking at that. He didn't have days and days to practice. He just looked at it and did it. Anthony Head was my number one choice for Repo Man from the very beginning. We really lucked out because I got everyone I wanted, but Anthony Head, after I'd seen the episode of Once More With Feeling, the Buffy musical, I was in love. I was like, "This is the guy. This is Repo Man. Because he had to be able to play fatherly, yet a monster at the same time.
NP: I love his brother too, Murray Head.
DLB: He's great. Again, going back to one of my favorite albums ever, Jesus Christ Superstar, he played the original Judas. So it's exciting to have the Heads in the movie I just did.
NP: You were talking about how you got everyone you originally wanted, but ironically one of the people you didn't want was Paris Hilton. I understand you refused to audition her at first.
DLB: Well because I think the media has a warped perception of her, and so did I, because my perception of Paris was done through the media. And so everything I thought Paris would be was because I read it on Perez Hilton, or TMZ, or any of these other websites I'm addicted to. But the fact is that's not who she is. She finally came in, I broke down and I met with her, and immediately she charmed everyone in the room. There was something about her that made me uncomfortable, and it was because I realized that she was not at all who I though she was going to be. I was kind of stand-off-ish in the very beginning, and then I realized she was smart, she was articulate, she knew the script.
But that's one thing. Can she act? That's the next question. And so we gave her some music and said, "You have one day to come back and perform this." She came back the next day, memorized everything, was pitch-perfect, I mean she was awesome. I was like, "Ok, that's a fluke. Let's give her another harder thing." We gave her something else, which was harder. The next day she comes back, and she worked for it...
She's not the person people think she is in the media. Those are snapshots of a life that are spun to look a certain way. And I think that I realize that now after knowing her, seeing what she goes through on a daily basis, paparazzi following her everywhere, all of that. She ended up being the biggest surprise for me.
NP: She plays the spoilt daughter of a business magnate, who wants daddy to buy her way into a singing career and has one too many plastic surgeries. Did you change any of that role to match her character?
DLB: Not at all. That's how she was written. But I think that says something about Paris Hilton as an actress. She did not play Paris Hilton...If you write down on a piece of paper: heiress, spoiled, addicted to her looks, media starlet -- are we talking about Amber Sweet or Paris Hilton? They're the same thing. So it would have been very easy for Paris Hilton to play Paris Hilton. But she doesn't; she acts in the move. And I think she does it very well.
NP: It's actually quite a subtle performance, which shocked the hell out of me.
DLB: Exactly.
NP: I understand she was so keen to get the part she had someone smuggle the script into her while she was in jail.
DLB: Yes she did.
NP: A little rehearsal time there.
DLB: She had a lot of rehearsal time in there. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall while she was rehearsing. She's the most dedicated, passionate person. I still have books that she sent me. She sent me collage books, and I'm not talking about a collage like ten pictures put together, I'm talking about books of thirty pages of concepts that she had for her character. I would get these in the mail on a weekly basis. So she put a lot of time and a lot of thought into what she looked like and how she acted in this movie.
NP: I first heard of Repo when she got out of jail and it was leaked on Perez Hilton and a few other sites that she'd got the part. Do you regret that it was leaked then, because the first taste people had of Repo was in a very tabloid sense?
DLB: You know what, no, because Paris Hilton's been a blessing. We don't have a marketing budget, we don't. If you look outside now you can see billboards of Saw V, you can see bus ads of Saw V. Have you seen a billboard of Repo? No. Have you seen a trailer of Repo? Not really. We have none of that. We have no money. This movie is all done though word of mouth, and Paris Hilton has made that word of mouth go everywhere...
Her name is a stick of dynamite. It could explode on you, but I think it's been done very well. I've not read a negative review from a legitimate source on Paris Hilton in this movie. Every single person, whether it be a New York Post article or New York Times, or Rolling Stone, everyone talking about the movie talks about Paris in a very positive light, because she does great, she holds her own in this. I think she'll turn a lot of heads in this movie.
NP: Because of necessity, you're doing a grassroots promotion to get people to put pressure on the cinemas to show the movie.
DLB: And it's working. I mean we were a straight to DVD movie. We got one theater, New York. Then we got two theaters, New York and L.A., and then they gave me four theaters, New York, L.A., San Francisco and Berkeley. Now we've expanded that. How we've expanded that is the fans.
I don't have a marketing budget. There's no money to promote this movie. I have two options. I sit back and I take that, OK, let's throw it in the wind and see where the cards fall. Or I say let's go to the people who buy the tickets, who make movies work. Let's go to them and put the movie in their hands. So I reach out to my fans on a daily basis, on the website, and I say if you want to help here's the things you can do. And I think they feel empowered now because they're at the bottom of a huge campaign that is all run by fans.
The fans are the ones who are putting up posters around town, they're stickering things, they're going on blogs and writing things about Repo, they're going to college campuses and handing out stuff, they're performing skits on Hollywood Boulevard. Someone forwarded me a YouTube clip of a bunch of Repo fans that drove hours to go to Hollywood Boulevard and perform "Zytrate Anatomy." This is what the kids are doing. It's amazing.
NP: One of the devices you use in the film is comic strip animation to link the scenes, which is really cool. Who drew that?
DLB: Terrance Zdunich, the guy who plays Grave Robber, is the co-writer, co-creator, lead actor, did all the music, and drew all the images. He did everything basically, because, when I say we had no money, I don't think you realize how little money we had. We couldn't hire an artist. That was someone else's job, but we didn't have the money to do it so it went to Terrance. So a normal day for Terrance would be, get up in the morning at five o' clock, finish whatever music needed to be done, go to set and do a twelve hour day on set, and then go home from midnight to four a.m. and draw, and then go back to set again the next day. Making the movie was the most trying, hard, horrific, event ever. Again, the reason it looks so good, the reason it doesn't look cheap, I think is because every single person wanted to be there. This is not a paycheck job. This was a "we love this movie" job, and I think that's why it looks the way it does.
NP: One of the reasons I didn't contact you right away after seeing Repo at the screening is that you see the movie and it's almost too much. You need to sit back and let it filter through. I thought I'm being indecisive, and "how strange," but I went online and went on the blogs and found mine was a common reaction.
DLB: Yes. It's an assault on the senses....I think one of the problems is people walk into Repo not knowing what they're going to get. They walk into Repo thinking, "Ah, it's the director of Saw, it's Paris Hilton." And they're bombarded with sights, colors, images, bam, bam, bam. And they walk out of the movie and it takes them three or four days to figure out, "Wow, that was actually really cool."
Also with this movie is the re-watch value. Let's say you watch the movie twice. The next time you see the movie, you'll know the songs and so you'll [start to] look forward to songs, you'll know some of the lyrics to the songs. I've noticed that. We've screened the movie seven or eight times all across America, people are coming to all the screenings -- the same people. And every time they're going, they're becoming more active, more involved in the movie. It's like any song you hear on the radio. You hear a new song on the radio, you'll bop your head a little bit. The next time you hear it, you'll start singing with the song. I encourage people to be loud in the movie. I encourage you to be obnoxious in this movie because it is a movie that is a carnival. It's supposed to be a fun time. And I hope that again, people embrace that as they start to learn what the movie is.
NP: Talk a bit about the music, because you've got some incredible people on the soundtrack: Richard Patrick from Filter, Stephen Perkins from Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros, Daniel Ash and David J. from Bauhaus, and you've got Poe singing...
DLB: Backing vocals, I know, it's crazy. The script was so weird and eclectic and out of the box, my vision was weird and out of the box, and so the casting had to be out of the box. And that goes past the Sarah Brightmans and Paris Hiltons, that goes to the session players. This could easily have been done by five guys with guitars, trumpets, or anything like that, but we knew that we wanted to have an eclectic group of out there singers, out there musicians. So you have Bauhaus with Rasputina, you have Slipknot with Perkins, you have these people playing that would never play on an album, yet they've all come together to be in this weird mish-mash of music.
NP: Who produced it?
DLB: Joseph Bishara is the main producer. Joseph, is an amazing music producer. And another guy by the name of Yoshiki Hayashi. Yoshiki is a big Japanese rock & roll star. And it was crazy, it was like a real rock & roll album. We were in the studio everyday, 25 hours a day, I mean there's only 24 in a day but...
NP: There's fifty-seven songs?
DLB: I think there's sixty-four different pieces of music. So this is the most music that's been in a musical that I'm aware of. If you look at a movie like Rocky Horror Picture Show, it has like seventeen tracks. If you look at Rent, it's got like thirty. Here we have sixty-four different pieces of music, because we never let up. It starts and it never stops until the very last frame. We cut out a lot too. There was a lot more music in it than that. We had to cut it out for budgetary reasons.
NP: What were the main changes you had to make moving it from stage to screen?
DLB: We made it a lot more edgy for the movie. There were some bad Broadway songs in the stage play with jazz hands, it was bad. So the first thing we did is try to make it more edgy, more industrial, more goth. I think that the musicians did a great job doing that, because again, we set out to make the anti-Rent, the anti-Dreamgirls, not saying those are bad movies, but the majority of people that would never see Dreamgirls or Rent would go see this, because we're a different type of musical. That's what we set out to do, is take the stage story about a Repo man, and make it a lot darker, a lot more beautiful to look at, and make it the anti-Rent.
NP: So what's next for you?
DLB: I'm working on a movie with Twisted Pictures right now. Everything I've done so far has been with [Twisted Pictures' producer] Mark Burg. It's a dark, unrelenting true story. It's abrasive and brash and hard to watch. I can't say the name of it just yet, but it's violent. But, you know what, I want to get away from doing the Saw movies, and do something more along the lines of Repo. Repo was more me than Saw was.
I just love the fantastical, whimsical, I think that Repo is that. It's like this dark fairy tale for adults. That's how we kind of structured Repo, like an Alice in Wonderland story. Shilo's Alice, she goes down the rabbit hole at the very beginning.
NP: Is there a Darren Bousman movie without blood?
DLB: No. I don't know. I have an idea for a children's story, but it's a very dark children's story, very, very dark. And kids die in it, so I guess there's blood in that too. I've always been more attracted to the darker side of things, the more macabre. It's just who I am. I can't get away from that. You'll never see the Darren Bousman romantic comedy -- that's never coming.
NP: Talking of romantic comedies, they did the sing-a-long version of Momma Mia with the lyrics. Are you going to?
DLB: Well I hope so. Again, I encourage people to have a good time at the movie. The movie is not intended to be taken seriously. There's drama, there's a lot of drama, but there's a lot of camp, and people watch the movie and don't realize it's OK to laugh at the movie. We're bigger than life because opera's bigger than life. I mean you've got Paul Sorvino in a limo going [sings "arhhhh" operatically -- and rather well], it's not meant to be serious. I hope that people understand it's OK to have fun, it's OK to sing along with the movie, it's OK to make fun of the movie. That's what the movie's there for.
I'm not some pretentious, uptight, asshole, that going to be monitoring the movies going, "Oh, you can't talk! Sssshhhhh! Cell phones off!" I'm not, because, again, I love the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I love going to the Nuart and seeing the insanity that takes place inside that theater. I think Rocky Horror Picture Show gave people a shelter to feel safe. If you were a freak, if you were a weirdo, if you were fat, if you were skinny, if you were goth, if you were a transvestite, it was OK, come to Rocky Horror Picture Show, you're fine here. And people went there and they embraced it, and everyone felt comfortable, and everyone kind of acted weird and strange and they were comfortable with that, and I grew up in that environment. That's how I basically learned it was OK to be artistic, it's OK to have weird ideas. And I hope that people continue to understand that about Repo.
We've had some screenings in Austin, and Montreal, people came dressed up like the characters. People were singing at the screen. They were dancing in the isles. It makes all the fighting, all the bridge-burning, all the sacrificing worthwhile, because we're seeing that it's connecting with a certain group of people.
NP: I also think that you can't fake a cult experience, so if they were to blow this up out of the bag as a blockbuster that might not do you any long term favors anyway. Because the thing about a cult is people need to feel like...
DLB: They've discovered it. Well the great thing that's happened for us is it's not commercialized. We don't have that corporate sponsor. Everything is home grown, everything is grassroots.
NP: It's forcing you to go the true cult route rather than taking a commercial short cut.
DLB: I think you're right. I think people are discovering a sense of community around it because they are the ones in charge of promoting the movie, and it's given them responsibility, that has turned this into something I never could have hoped for.
NP: Because Rocky Horror wasn't a success overnight.
BLD: No it wasn't. It took years to start the midnight screenings and all of that. But we have a one-week time span, that's all we have, one week. We have one week in the theatres. Imagine if Rocky Horror went straight to video. Imagine watching Rocky Horror Picture Show on a laptop computer. It kills the experience. What made Rocky Horror Picture Show is that prints of the movie stayed around, and people started watching the prints in movie theaters with like-minded people. We don't have that. We are going to go straight to video within a week or two if this movie doesn't open in those nine cities, we're out, we're gone, and the movie will die.
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
The first time i heard about it was from word of mouth from Bill. (Luigi Largo) and i have been obsessed with it ever since