On April 24 at 8:30pm, Bleeding Edge presents the Ontario premiere of Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS, Tickets available here!

Earlier this year, Bleeding Edge presented the Toronto premiere of Anything That Moves, a funny, horny, genre-defying thriller that came from the depths of Chicago’s underground filmmaking scene. This week, we’re screening the Ontario debut of $POSITIONS, an equally hilarious and exciting thriller from fellow Chicago boy Brandon Daley (featuring Anything That Moves director Alex Phillips in an extremely gross cameo that’s too funny to spoil).

Since debuting at SXSW last year, $POSITIONS has been described as Safdie brothers in the Midwest for its fast-paced, anxiety-inducing pacing, but it also owes great deal the kinds of “dumb guy” comedies that Daley was raised on in the 90s and 2000s, with lead actor Michael Kunicki bearing more than a striking resemblance to Canadian comedy legend Tom Green. Kunicki plays mild-mannered Mike, a mild-mannered working class guy with a factory job and a developmentally disabled brother (Vinny Kress). Sensing an escape from his mundane surroundings, Mike bets it all on a volatile new cryptocurrency as his life crumbles around him.

Few movies can claim to be as propulsive and entertaining as $POSITIONS. As Mike’s crypto portfolio rises and falls, the choices he makes compound his problems, eventually dragging his girlfriend, his newly sober cousin, and his father into the mix. Daley has a comedian’s eye for finding the laughs in a tragic situation, and an old-school screenwriter’s knack for raising the stakes of his main characters to dizzying heights.

We chatted with Daley about his new film, making movies in Chicago, and the perils of making indie movies in this day and age.

Bleeding Edge: Just to start things off, what’s your portfolio looking like? What kind of crypto are you investing in these days?

Brandon Daley: I currently think I have about $10,000 in Fartcoin. Do you know much about Fartcoin?

BE: No, but I can imagine.

BD: In 2020 and 2021 when I was originally really into crypto everyone was all like, “yo, this is gonna change the future, cause it’s Web3, and there’s technological implications.” It makes it all really confusing to navigate, because you do start to buy into some of these narratives. What I like about crypto in 2025 and 2026 is that that shit is off the table and we all realize what it is now, which is just player versus player gambling. I do think that there may be some sort of use cases for Web3, Bitcoin, things like that. I’m not by any means totally against it. I have a very “chaotic neutral” standpoint on crypto. I think it’s very fun to gamble on the internet. So I like Fartcoin because it’s just the stupidest shit possible. Ultimately all of these are just leveraged Bitcoin options trading or something, like when Bitcoin goes up 1% these all go up 20%. So, I have a bunch of Fartcoin right now, to answer your question.

BE: It seems like everybody has just sort of accepted that all of the most unscrupulous celebrities are just gonna do a rugpull cryptocurrency at some point. And that’s fine! They’re not gonna face any consequences for it. Maybe the president, too?

BD: Yes, the president really changes things. I think there was much more of a legal gray area prior to Trump doing it, and now that the president has done it, I think all bets are off.

BE: So how did you start making this movie? Was it an interest in crypto or was it something else?

BD: I think with most of my movies that I end up following through with and making, usually I will have two ideas for two separate movies, and then I will realize that neither of those ideas is enough to warrant a full script, so I will then merge those ideas into one. I do that with shorts, I’ve done that with other features, and this one--I got really into day trading stocks originally, like on r/WallStreetBets, before the GameStop shit. So I was in GameStop early. I put $5,000 into that, I rode it up to $25,000, and sold. So I did good on GameStop, and then I rolled that slowly into crypto. That was when we were all locked up. Rode the crypto up to $65k, and then rode it down to $9,000. I exited that cycle at around $20-25k, so I was still net positive if you count the GameStop, but crypto alone probably even or negative if I had to say.

I was so constantly enthralled with checking my phone. I would wake up at 3am, check my phone. I’d be at dinner with friends and family and not be paying attention to what’s going on. At this same time, my uncle Danny had died of COVID, and my mom was mourning him very hard. She was in Kansas, I was in Chicago, and she would be calling me crying, and I would be checking Fartcoin or whatever while I had her on the phone. And then there’s a level of guilt with that.

I wanted to explore crypto and stock investing from the perspective of the retail investor, because I don’t think there’s been a movie like that before. And most Bitcoin movies are, like, talking head documentaries on Netflix that aren’t very interesting to watch. So I wanted to do something from the retail perspective because I think it creates a cool propulsion of the plot; it’s a very simple device that you can follow throughout the movie. On top of that, I’d always wanted to make a movie about growing up in Kansas. I don’t think that the Midwest is very accurately portrayed in movies. A lot of movies are getting made in LA and New York. I purposefully stayed out of those cities in order to keep making movies outside of those systems, and to stay true to where I came from. So I wanted to make a movie about the Midwest, and I specifically wanted to make a movie about this period of time where I was coming home from Chicago. I was smoking a ton of weed at the time, and I was thinking I had to go a week or two without weed, and that was kind of freaking me out. And then at the same time my cousin was home, and I hadn’t seen him in like ten years. He was there getting clean off of heroin. We hung out for the first time in a long time and reconnected. We were good buds when we were kids, but we just led very different lifestyles. I had the greatest time hanging out with him. All that said, I had always wanted to make a movie about that, and then I wanted to make a movie about crypto and investing. And I thought, especially with my mom and my uncle Danny dying, it had me thinking about the connection of those two things. And so I merged the two ideas into one movie that would explore my childhood and also scratch this itch of this subject matter I was really interested in.

BE: The movie’s obviously set in the Midwest. Various critics have called it a “Midwest movie”. You’re based in Chicago now, did you go down and film in Kansas? How did you make it authentic to the Midwest experience?

BD: I wrote this movie because I had scripts I was trying to fund and nobody would fund any of them, and it was hard to get people excited. I was like “I’m going to write one last movie, and then just stop making movies probably.” So I wrote this movie with the idea that I could fund it myself for no money, and I would go back to Kansas, shoot it for free in free locations, and cast my actual family to be in it. I was going forward with that, and then I had investors in Illinois approach me and say “we want to be involved in this movie, would you want to do it here in Illinois?” Because there’s a large Illinois tax credit, and there’s infrastructure here. So I was able to do it at a larger scale than I originally intended. But I still wanted it to feel like the Midwest, and not Chicago. Luckily, you drive 20 minutes outside Chicago and everything looks exactly like Kansas. We shot in the burbs, a lot in Chicago Heights, a lot in the south side. We tried to make it feel as midwestern as possible, just in the locations.

BE: In terms of pulling together the cast, where did you find your actors for the most part? There’s some unique faces that you see in this movie.

BD: Michael Kunicki auditioned for one of the side characters, and I really liked him. I thought maybe he could be the lead. We ended up casting him about two weeks out from our production start date, so it was very tight. For Vinny, his brother, I had been going through Special Olympics and different special needs theatre groups, and I was working with all of these different families who were auditioning for the role. I also had just randomly made a post on Craigslist. It cost me eight dollars and I was like, “I shouldn’t pay eight dollars, nothing’s gonna come from this, but I guess I might as well do it.” We ended up finding Vinny through that post. Somebody saw it and sent it to his family. So I auditioned Mike and Vinny together about two weeks out from production, and I liked their chemistry.

Aside from them, all of the supporting characters are people I found on location scouts and people my producer Jake Bloom had recommended just as interesting personalities. Like the dad character, he’s not an actor, we met him on the location scout for the house we ended up shooting in. I was like, “do you maybe want to read for the dad character in this?” I really like Andrea Arnold and the way that she works, where she’ll take one or two actual actors and throw them into a situation with a lot of non-actors. I wanted to build that kind of environment on our set as well. I think it makes it feel very lived-in. I also think as much as the locations add to the Midwestern energy, so does the casting of non-actors. Just having people be themselves on camera. A lot of people have never acted before. They did a good job!

BE: To zero in on Vinny: to have an actor with disabilities play this large of a role, especially on such a low-budget movie, is pretty unusual. How important was it for you to have that role in the movie? And what were some of the challenges and rewards that come with working with somebody with disabilities like that?

BD: I think I approached that role on a screenplay level as just being more of a plot device. I left it very open-ended because I wanted to mend that role to whatever the specific disabilities of the actor we ended up casting were. I had auditioned people with autism, fragile X, and lots of different genetic disorders. I was very open to what that disability would be. I did just think, from a narrative standpoint, I think it rings true that people have random hard things happen to them in their life. And you have no control over it. You randomly have a brother who has this kind of thing. That just narratively spoke to me because I see that with my friends and family who are living these types of lives where there’s just this random thing that happened that they have to deal with. I think the decision to have a developmentally disabled brother was because I wanted to talk about this idea of God putting obstacles in your life. Well, I approached it like that, but then the other thing is you meet these families and it really doesn’t feel like an obstacle. Certainly they have to change their lives to be able to support this. But these people are incredibly happy, their families are very close. Vinny’s dad is always saying “don’t call it a disability, we’re the people who are disabled. They have superpowers that we don’t have, because we’re so wrapped up in life.”

I was very nervous about it originally. During the camera tests, he would look directly into camera and yell “action” a lot, so there’s a ton of outtakes where he’s looking directly into camera and yelling “action”, which is very charming, but it’s hard to make a film production around that. I was a little worried about it working. On the very first day of production I purposefully included a very heavy scene between Mike and Vinny. It was a lighter day, but we had this insanely heavy scene, which in the movie is where Mike returns and the computer is missing. And he’s pulling Vinny to get out of the house, and he’s yelling and frantic in front of Vinny. We did a lot of stuff with body doubles where Mike could scream and yell really loud without freaking Vinny out, but then we realized as production went on that Vinny did not care at all, he thought it was funny. But early on, we structured it so Vinny wouldn’t look at the camera, we have a body double so Vinny’s not scared, I set up my Xbox in the garage so Vinny could watch movies and play Xbox in between his takes. We built the operation around working with him, but it was a little overkill because he was just so down to hang. By the end of production he was just, like, hanging out. And he also really came full circle as an actor. At the beginning he’s yelling “action” and stuff, and by the end he’s like “okay, we’re gonna do another take, I’m gonna do it again.”

BE: How has he been since the movie’s played? Has he seen the movie?

BD: He loves the movie. We just did cast and crew interviews on Wednesday, where I did some live commentary of scenes. I had Vinny watch his scenes on camera. For sound purposes we had the scenes muted, and he was watching it and saying his lines along with the video. And he was saying the lines of the other actors, too. He goes around saying he’s a movie star now, which is cool.

It’s a tricky line to toe, because on the script level you want the character to be a dependant. It needs to come off as though they’re dependent on Mike in order for the stakes to work. But then in production, you want somebody who can play a dependant without asking them to ham up their disability or something. But you also want them to be able to consent to being in a movie and be “with it” enough to be on set for six hours a day. So all of that is tricky ethical and moral territory for one thing, so that you’re not taking advantage of somebody. But also, representation matters too. Being able to have people from that community portray themselves on camera is important. Finding the balance there is something I thought a lot about in the lead-up to and during production.

BE: You’ve made shorts before this. You mentioned earlier that you got funding for this movie, it definitely seems like a level up in terms of the mode of production. How did you approach moving from micro-budget territory to this?

BD: I believe strongly in working with your team. As certain people level up they’ll abandon members of their team in order to please investors and things of that nature. I’m pretty firmly against that, I really think you should be bringing your squad up together. Not only for the sake of helping them but also for the sake of helping you, where you’re not all of a sudden stuck with some DP you’ve never worked with and you have some sort of weird problem with.

I think the only real difference was that I paid my crew and my cast. It was the same kind of production level as all of my shorts, but back then people were just doing me favours. I self-funded my shorts, each of them was like $4 or 5k, and that mainly went to food and camera rentals. But we were younger and scrappier back then, now we’re all 35 and we need money. Plus, a short you can do in two or three days, a feature’s a little different. I’m really glad I didn’t have to self-fund in Kansas, because I would have had to ask people to work for free. I was going to ask them... but I’m glad I didn’t have to. I’m glad we could pay people at least somewhat of a living wage.

BE: I know that the movie got a great reception at Fantasia. I’m wondering what the rollout has been like, hitting all these festivals.

BD: It’s been good. I’m really famous now. All my problems are kind of solved. No, it’s been cool. It’s crazy to see the number of good feature films being made, especially in the landscape of 2026, and the way that distribution and streaming work. Streaming used to be indie filmmakers’ friends, in 2015-2021 maybe, but now I kind of think that’s over. I don’t think that they’re going and buying random Sundance and SXSW titles anymore. So it’s a bummer, because I think the movie’s so good, and I think we did as good as we possibly could have done, and I see so many other movies on the festival circuit that are in the exact same position. It’s such a blessing that they even exist, but it’s hard to see if in this current landscape all this stuff manages to find an audience. The festival run was amazing, it’s so fun to watch a movie in a packed house, and I’m very grateful for all the festivals that had us. Getting into SXSW, like, changed my life. I was really just afraid nobody would see the movie and getting that acceptance email was such a relief to me.

BE: One last thing. The main character Mike, he has some real low lows. His life really goes to shit. Did you ever look at it and think “man, this character is too pathetic”? Is he going to give the audience the ick?

BD: I grew up on ‘90s dumb guy comedies. They’re my main reference. Everyone’s always like, “oh, he’s ripping off the Safdie brothers”. I would like to think that I would make this movie with or without the Safdie brothers existing. I’m a ball of anxiety at all points of my life, and I like movies that make me feel anxious. It makes me feel seen as an audience member. To be like, anxious from the movie and not because I’m thinking about what I said at the party or whatever. I want to make dumb guy comedies and dumb girl comedies. But I do think they need kind of a facelift. In the ‘90s you had these characters that were in these same sorts of situations that Mike is, where there’s no hope, they’re very stupid, but the tone of the movie didn’t treat it with that much sincerity, which I do think makes those movies fall off in the third act a little bit. I wanted to approach it like: we do all of the American Pie type of shit, but we have real stakes, so that stuff actually resonates with the character and feels dramatic, but it’s still funny. That’s the thesis of the whole project, I would say.

BE: The actors and the people around him, they look like real people. Which just adds to the verisimilitude of it, I guess.

BD: The way that we approached the shooting of it was like, let’s rip off Andrea Arnold but do it with comedy. There’s not a lot of handheld comedy. Let’s try a ‘90s comedy but handheld and with close-ups and gritty stuff like that. And then the character goes through these moments where he’s at his high, so let’s change the language to be more in line with these ‘90s comedies. The dance sequence for example, we switch to tripod, we switch to steady cam. It’s shot more in the way a comedy would be shot. And then as that degrades we fall back into the handheld language. So we’re going back and forth between those worlds.

BE: My friend Matt’s review from Fantasia was like “it’s kind of like a Safdie movie but if the main guy was Tom Green.”

BD: For sure. That’s why I cast Mike, he reminded me of Tom Green. I was like “I get to make Freddie Got Fingered, dude.”

Director Brandon Daley will be in attendance to answer your questions after the screening!

Blue-collar Midwesterner Mike Alvarado attempts to save his family from the throes of poverty by investing their savings into speculative cryptocurrencies. However, as his investment strategy decays into a full blown gambling addiction, he sends his life into a nightmarish anxiety-inducing downward spiral, compromising his relationships with his girlfriend, his developmentally disabled brother, and his recovering addict cousin. A twitchy, hyper-contemporary with equal doses of laughs and panic attacks.

BLEEDING EDGE honours its roots with a screening of exciting new short films from Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond.

Tickets available HERE!

The programme includes:

HOMEMADE GATORADE (Carter Amelia Davis)

DEAR MR. EVERETT (Ryan Falconer)

0RSON (Alan Jones)

WINTER AFTER WINTER (Brandon Kaufman)

THE CHASTITY SWEATER (Emery Matson)

CAMERINO (Maisha Rahman)

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES (Blake James Reid)

friends&: “MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW” (Nate Wilson & Dozzy Chroma)

+ 3 secret films

NOTE: The final film of the evening contains sequences of flashing lights and strobe effects that may affect viewers with photosensitive epilepsy or light sensitivity.

Doors Open 30 Minutes Before Showtime.

On March 10 at 8pm, Bleeding Edge presents the Canadian premiere of Devon Daniel Green’s Mid/Evil Times, preceded by Matthew Chan and Jack Loyello’s A Watched Pot Never Boils. Tickets available here! Message us on Instagram for instructions on how to get to the venue!

Described by its director as “anarchic and crazy” in its formal strategy and inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive post-New Wave period working in French television, Devon Daniel Green’s Mid/Evil Times functions not only as an energetic and entertaining piece of lo-fi entertainment but also as a testament to working outside the system and making movies with your friends.

Shot in beautiful Los Angeles, California, but divorced from the fashions and fads of the industry closeby, Green’s comedy is set in a future where criminals are sentenced to act in art movies rather than to serve jail sentences, but this is merely a jumping off point for a rules-defying, scattershot, largely shot-on-video approach to cinema that picks up where Godard left off.

Lest that sound too high-falutin’, we assure you that Green is a funny and acerbic filmmaker, filling his standard definition frames with faces that our audience might recognize, including Toronto-to-LA transplant Robert Dayton, filmmaker Tucker Bennett and Noah Brockman, star of Adrian Anderson and Patrick Gray’s Pomp & Circumstance.

Having premiered his film at WHAMMY! Analog Media’s SOV September in the fall, Mid/Evil Times arrives at Market Video on March 10 just after its New York premiere at Roxy Cinema on March 9. We chatted with Devon about making his film, shooting on video, and the DIY filmmaking scene in LA.

BLEEDING EDGE: Why don’t you give us the rundown on the original idea for this film and how it came to be.

DEVON DANIEL GREEN: For the longest time, I was trying to make an actual documentary. I wanted to make a documentary about the Ren Faire. And I was imagining it being a Frederick Wiseman–style, observational, day-in-the-life documentary. But obviously you need a huge amount of access to be able to do that, and I had none. I tried to just bring my DV camera into the Ren Faire two or three years in a row, and they stopped me every time. Well, they didn’t confiscate it, but they stopped me at the door. These security guards were essentially just like, “You can’t bring that in there.” My first question after this every time was, “Every single person who walks in the door right now has a phone with a camera on it. Everyone’s filming this. Why is this any different?” And they’re just like, “People are gonna be uncomfortable if they see you with that,” which is maybe a whole other conversation to have. So I kind of gave up on the idea of a documentary about the Ren Faire. At the time I was watching a lot of post-1968 Godard movies, and there’s this one called Joy of Learning that really took hold of me. It just struck me as a really interesting format to present a bunch of ideas. It’s sort of an essay film, sort of a documentary, but it’s very presentational. I pulled that for the first 15 minutes of Mid/Evil Times, and was truly thinking: all right, this will be what the movie is. I’m just gonna make a short. But then we shot that footage of the punk show that happens in the middle of the film, and the drummer for that band approached me after filming and was like, “Just so you know, if you ever need anything else from me, I’m an actor, and I always play a shaman.” I was like, okay, that’s interesting. I was already thinking, just because the day went really well and I felt like there was more creative juice left in this idea, “maybe I can film some more for this.” And when he said that, this idea of a shaman who’s pulling the strings of this whole world presented itself. And I slowly started coming up with the rest of it piece-by-piece.

BE: Can you talk a bit about Joy of Learning, the Godard movie you’re pulling from?

DDG: It’s the movie that I’m most heavily directly quoting. It’s two actors in a black-box studio giving these didactic, discursive monologues about the idea of learning. But then Godard is slipping in all of this incendiary stuff that he usually does. I don’t know enough about what was going on in French PBS or French public access at the time, but it almost feels like him talking some shit, trolling that format. Making something that’s supposed to be packaged in the form of a PSA, but he’s putting in all these subversive Marxist ideas that at the time were probably really playing with fire. All of the stuff in the beginning with the two criminals who are being forced to perform in a movie called “The Medieval Times,” the aesthetic and format of that is inspired by Joy of Learning.

BE: In your time researching the Ren Faire, what ended up seeping into the movie from that period? Was there anything specific you felt you had to say something about?

DDG: When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to actually film in the Ren Faire, it stopped being about the Ren Faire and more about Renaissance aesthetics. Cosplaying, the idea of recreation in culture, copies of copies. But I wanted to stick to it because it’s also an aesthetic that I’m really drawn to. As far as what’s being directly pulled for the movie, there’s a couple sequences where I just have still photographs from the Ren Faire, because that’s all that I could get. There was no lesson that I pulled from my time at the Ren Faire other than just soaking up the vibes. They hit all of the archetypes. There’s a jousting section, there’s wenches, there’s trolls, there’s performers rolling around in the mud. The only thing that they don’t have is anything devoted to the idea of medieval torture, probably for obvious reasons. But personally, I want to see that. Maybe I can push that and make it my entryway into a sequel.

The other thing I’ll mention about going to the Ren Faire is that there was a point during shooting all this when I was in regular conversation with a performer at the Ren Faire that we go to here in southern California called Pleasure Faire Irwindale. This guy’s whole shtick is that he lights whips on fire and then flips them around in the air and cracks them. He’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most flaming whip cracks of all time. I had talked to this guy for like four or five months. I was messaging him all the time. I thought he would be my access into the fair and he’d have a part in the movie. I had a whole section written for him, and at the last second he was like, “Uh, I’ve decided this doesn’t sound appealing to me at all. I’m just gonna go perform on a cruise ship.” I was like, “Great. Okay.” It’s strange too, because I feel like he was with me when I was being vague. But as soon as I started showing him the cast and letting him know that I’m a real filmmaker, that he can trust me, that’s when he got suspicious.

BE: Seems like once it was clear he’d have a responsibility to do something, he backed out.

DDG: He had to be doing the math in his head. “Is this weird guy’s project worth me compromising some aspect of my job, which I’m setting world records in?” It makes sense that he said no, but I was pretty disappointed.

BE: This was shot on video. You seem to be very keen on stuff that’s shot on video. Why is that? Were there challenges that came with shooting on video?

DDG: I’m 100% a shooting-on-video enthusiast. And a watching-things-on-VHS enthusiast. Everything about the production of this movie was informed by necessity, including shooting on video. It’s an incredibly accessible, easy-to-work-with format. Very pleasurable, dynamic. I personally prefer the image-making that comes from video. Sometimes it feels like a caveat that you have to sell to people. I understand that’s a reality, but it’s not my reality. I like to try to point out that it’s a movie that’s shot on video, but it’s also shot on multiple formats. There’s still photography, several different video cameras, there are some hi-def cameras in it. I feel like that’s more reflective of the movie in a way that’s easier to talk about. The text of the movie is kind of anarchic and crazy — fourth-wall breaking, not saying no to any specific ideas. If we used the video cameras and the hi-def cameras in a way where we differentiated them by some sort of diegetic rationalization, that wouldn’t fit with the text of the movie itself. You never know what the context is. There’s stuff that’s surreal, stuff that jumps around in the future, there’s fourth-wall breaking. Throwing tons of different formats into the mix really captured the spirit of the story I was trying to tell. More than saying, “This is shot on video because we’re making an SOV horror movie,” or “It’s shot on hi-def because we’re making a comedy.” It felt like it made sense to make a kind of mosaic. But it’s also a happy accident because it was born of necessity. We had access to different cameras and audio equipment every time we shot. So let’s just say yes to all of this. Otherwise we won’t do it.

BE: When we were talking to Josh Heaps, who directed City Wide Fever, he was talking about how when you shoot something on video, somebody who doesn’t know a lot might just assume that you can’t shoot any better than that. Even though your phone has higher definition than a video camera. Did you face any questions like that from people you were working with?

DDG: Luckily not. It probably just speaks to the kind of people I surround myself with. Maybe my DP, who tried to have a more serious conversation with me early on about camera motivation and what diegetic cameras are in this world. And I was kind of averse to that because I knew it would be an extra logistical challenge. I had one programmer watch it and they responded with a message that made it clear to me that they thought a lot of the footage was supposed to be CCTV footage, which is not the case at all. I didn’t correct them. If that’s what you see, then that’s your truth!

BE: Yeah, that’s mentally what you might associate it with right now.

BBG: 100%, it totally makes sense they said that. But for me it’s just a cinema camera in this world that’s being used to collect this footage and tell this story. Shooting on video thus far has only helped me, I think. I have friends that I talk to all the time about the way that high-definition cameras have sort of plateaued, where they all look the same no matter how much they’re progressing technically. The only way to differentiate yourself in that landscape as a filmmaker is to do something that’s completely outside of that box, which is something I think a lot of people are gravitating toward and is a really positive thing.

BE: There’s difficulty if you don’t have enough light, but you can kind of shoot as you go. You don’t need big setups or anything.

DDG: That’s totally true. It really just depends on the movie you’re making. There’s some stuff where it wouldn’t work. I’ve shot interiors that weren’t lit with the same cameras we shot Mid/Evil Times on. I would argue there’s an advantage even doing that. If you have to shoot in a location without a real gaffer, without professional lighting, I would almost prefer the video camera because you can crank up the exposure and fuck around with the colour to get yourself out of the darkness in a way that’s more permissible with video than you can with hi-def stuff. If you’re in a situation where your shot is underlit and you’re on a 4K camera or something, you’re pretty fucked. But if you’re doing it on video you just crank it the hell up and you’re like, “Hey, guess what? The shot’s weird, just like the last one.” And everyone’s like, “Cool, I’ve never seen that before.” The way that all this started was that I got into SOV September at Whammy!. I think there’s a growing audience for this.

BE: Well maybe there’s an increasing fatigue with what you were talking about — the way that when you turn on Netflix everything kind of looks the same.

DDG: I think viewers are naturally going to judge things based on images first and foremost. If you’re shooting your art film on the same camera that television commercials are shot on, you’re unconsciously evoking an aesthetic that maybe you don’t want to be associating yourself with. Maybe you can get out of that. Maybe the editing, the story, the acting are all really good. But I don’t know why you’d want to fight that uphill battle if you don’t need to.

BE: Maybe we can talk about the premise of the movie. Prisoners being sentenced to star in an art film — where did that come from?

DDG: That is something I literally have no memory of. And it’s crazy, because that feels like a eureka moment. I’m only saying that because every time I describe the movie I use that as the elevator pitch, and everybody responds so positively that I just knew it was a good idea. But the Joy of Learning thing came first, and I’m pretty sure when I was writing those scenes I just came up with that framing device to explain why they’re there. That first 15 minutes of the movie — everything the criminal actors say is dialogue that I had written down as notes while I was reading whatever books I was reading at the time. Then it was translated into dialogue, then pared down so that it’s actually speakable dialogue, and then I came up with a justifiable comedic premise as to why this would all be happening. I worked completely backwards. I don’t have a specific moment where it came to me, but it felt right. It felt like something that would happen in our world right now. There are many things that happen in the plot of the movie that I wrote two or three years ago that have kind of come true. A lot of people have pointed out to me that the kidnapping scenes really resemble ICE kidnapping videos, which is obviously pretty horrifying. And also the whole bit about how the Criterion Channel in the future becomes a weapons manufacturer company. That was just a joke that I wrote in, and then a year later it came out that the company that owns MUBI is owned by a company that produces weapons for Israel. So I don’t know if there’s gonna be a ton of stuff like that. We’ll see what happens next.

BE: There are some familiar faces in the movie — Tucker Bennett, Robert Dayton. I’m wondering what your attachment to this Los Angeles DIY scene is, and how it all came together.

DDG: Yeah, I’m very attached to them. The lifeblood of my whole creative process depends on having access to this group of people that want to do stuff just for the love of it. I’m lucky that that’s really thriving here right now. I knew Tucker beforehand, and some of the cast members I met from working on his film In the Glow of Darkness. So there’s a little bit of crossover. There are tons of people in this movie that I cast just from meeting them at movie theatres. Robert Dayton specifically was just someone that I sat next to at Whammy! over and over again because he was always at the screenings. Getting to know his personality, I thought it would be interesting to have him and Noah Brockman [who also starred in past Bleeding Edge screening Pomp & Circumstance] — who’s his scene partner in the framing structure of the movie — opposite each other. Noah is a very didactic, cerebral thinker and Robert is an earthy, emotional, instinctively funny person. And so I created this whole scene based entirely off seeing their dynamics contrast against each other. All of this is to say that there are portions of this movie that are not only practically dependent on access to the DIY scene, but informed by it. Because there are screenings to go to every night really, so I’m able to get to know these people really well, and it helps inform the movie on a personal level.

BE: What are your SOV movie influences?

DDG: I’m definitely inspired by the SOV horror that has a big following now. It’s kind of at the centre of a boom. A lot of theatres here like Whammy! and Video Archives play a lot of SOV horror. But also a ton of Godard movies that were shot on SOV, specifically his 80s and 90s stuff when he was sort of kicked out of the industry. The only way he could finance movies was by working in basically TV, but he would 100% just use that format as a way to sneak a Godard movie through the back door, just in an SOV format. Another movie I wanted to shout out was Personal Problems by Bill Gunn. That movie is incredible. It’s over three hours long, it’s an all-Black cast and I believe an all-Black crew, and it’s shot on video. I really feel like Bill Gunn was the first one to establish how classic Hollywood melodrama would look and feel on tape. That movie really built the language of how to take grandiose, bursting-at-the-heart emotion out of Hollywood and put it onto a consumer format and make it work. I stole a ton of stuff from that for the strands of Mid/Evil Times with the theatre kids who are in the process of breaking up. It’s on Kanopy. Find it however you can. It’s really good. Even just watch the trailer.

On January 21 at 7pm, Bleeding Edge presents the Toronto premiere of Alex Phillips’ Anything That Moves at the Paradise Theatre. Phillips will be in attendance for a live Q&A with writer and performer Andrea Werhun. Get your tickets HERE!

Anything That Moves, the second feature from Chicago director Alex Phillips, follows Liam (Hal Baum), a delivery boy-cum-sex worker, as he travels around Chicago selling his body and finding himself in hot water when a serial killer starts targeting his customers. As one might gather from that description, Phillips’ new film is full of sex (and violence, too), but a plot summary probably doesn’t do justice to the raucously funny, one-of-a-kind spirit that Phillips captures with his film.

Inspired by his own short-lived career in the gig economy, Phillips was inspired to make this film by considering the lonely, eccentric people he encountered as a delivery man himself, and what it would mean to fulfill their needs, sexually and emotionally. The characters in Anything That Moves (as well as Phillips’ previous film, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms) approach the world with curiosity and emotional acceptance. Despite the transgressive subject matter and the obvious influence of exploitation movies of the past, the sexuality of Anything That Moves feels counter-intuitively positive, a utopian vision of “people loving each other and having fun and understanding their own quirks and weirdness.”

Before the Toronto premiere of Anything That Moves this week, we got a chance to chat with Alex Phillips.

Bleeding Edge: So this movie is about a food delivery guy who’s also a sex worker. Those are two very topical jobs to have these days. Why did you want to combine those two things?

Alex Phillips: I worked in food delivery a while ago now, like fresh out of college. I was a philosophy major. That got me into the wonderful world of food service and fast food. I was kind of bumming around and delivering sandwiches to people, and I found that a lot of the clients that I was delivering to were shut-ins and, like, extremely horny. And I was a nubile 22 year old. I was in a weird position where I was objectified and it was new to me, leaving an environment and my peers and being ogled by different people out in the real world. It threw me for a loop and I started writing about it. And also taking it further, like, imagining what it would be like to actually fuck these people… it’s not my desire, it would be for them. But then what would it be like to give them what they wanted and needed? But I also saw that they were very lonely, and I was also especially lonely at this time. Like, you bring them food, and they’re shut-ins a lot of the time, so it’s like bringing the outside world to them and making them feel less lonely. So it’s not just about sex, I wasn’t just thinking about it in a pizza delivery, big sausage pizza, porn way. It was like, what would it be like to make these people feel emotionally complete? In giving them food and company and all that? And then cranking it up a notch for Liam in the movie, where it’s almost a holy experience.

BE: I guess you might be the only person they’re interacting with that day, so it might be something they’re really looking forward to.

AP: Yeah, and I’ve been sort of toying with this for a long time. And that was before the COVID lockdowns and stuff like that. So when I started writing it more, that also amped up the desperation and need for someone to enter their lives.

BE: Were there any specific experiences from your time as a courier that made it into the movie?

AP: I think I tried to relate a lot of this stuff to my own encounters in life. Specifically, like, in the woods, there’s that lawyer guy, and we’re dealing with him. I had an experience where I was with a close friend where they interpreted something going on that wasn’t going on, and it got physical and weird and I was like, okay, I have to write about this. Yeah, just trying to be careful, and specific, but also capture the idiosyncrasies of people. I like to heighten real life with the genre so you get to this real sort of explosive emotional place. So it’s theatrical, and visual, to really hit audiences with what the internal world of that experience feels like.

BE: In this movie and in All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, they have these absurd things going on but at the same time all the characters seem very emotionally open. What are you aiming for when you create these absurd scenarios?

AP: I find that a lot of movies have static two-dimensional characters. The way that we deal with characters a lot in storytelling is like, we understand this idea of a person. And I like to create characters that are extremely open. And then let them deal with the absurdity of life. Because I feel like a lot of the people I know, and everybody, we don’t approach the world with a fixed idea of how to deal with things. I find that that makes the characters more human, it lets us in a little bit more, exposing them to absurd stuff but then just letting them deal with it, and learn and grow from it.

BE: There’s an interesting mix of actors, including the main guys, there’s also adult film stars like Ginger Lynn Allen and Nina Hartley and filmmakers, Jack Dunphy and Frank V. Ross. I’m wondering how you put this cast together.

AP: Because we were dealing with sex and nudity, and since it’s a low-budget endeavour, we’re gonna be really running and gunning, so I like involving other filmmakers who kind of know what the hell is going on, so that they’re collaborators. So they’re not like “where’s my trailer?” Like, we’re all getting dirty in this. And it was amazing to be able to reach Ginger and Nina and to have their professional expertise on set. When Nina showed up we had been shooting sex and nudity scenes, and she was just a total pro in that she was so complimentary of Hal [Baum] and Maxton [Koc] in that van scene. She was like, “you guys are so brave,” and she also kind of took care of them and talked to them about her experience. We didn’t have an intimacy coordinator, but having these women that work in the industry talk about their lives and how this art was intersecting with it… it was really nice to hear their perspective and their philosophy on all of it. And how they also both seemed to not have any regrets working in the sex industry, and how they aligned it with their own personal views in the world and stuff. So it was really cool to have them. But yeah, casting was just all about figuring out who fit the role best, who was going to take the characters and run, but also who would work with me and go on this crazy adventure at the same time.

BE: And just to come back to shooting those sex scenes, can you talk a bit about the complications of doing that? Or how you approached it, you just mentioned that there weren’t intimacy coordinators.

AP: I try to be up front in casting, where it’s like, “there’s gonna be sex and nudity, there’s gonna be blood and guts.” I want to, not frighten people, but be very up front and serious about what’s gonna happen on set so that there’s no waffling when we get there. I don’t want to have to coerce someone into doing something that they don’t want to do. So I wanted to find people that were really enthusiastic and down to do it. So then when we got there on the day it was just about where their bodies go and how the camera moves, and just choreographing these sex scenes. Like that–I call it the dead guy orgy–it’s right after the club, we rehearsed that ten times maybe where they’re all climbing over each other and stuff, and I’m talking through every single take of it. There was no room for them to experiment and put each other at risk. It was like, no, we’re going for cool imagery and intensity but it’s all planned out and we know where we’re going with this.

BE: You shot this on 16mm. Hunter Zimny (What Doesn’t Float) was the cinematographer. Can you talk about why you wanted to shoot on film and if that’s important to your process?

AP: On All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, and also my short film Who’s a Good Boy, we shot on Super 16 gate digitally with Super 16 zoom lenses. Financially it made the most sense in terms of, this is the glass that we can afford. These are the cinema lenses that we can get. I think my visual language is definitely built around that sort of cropped-in closer look on things. The way that Super 16 works, there’s not a lot of shallow depth of field, so you block the whole frame and you move people through stuff and I’m always really into that. Also on Worms and Who’s a Good Boy we were trying to go for a filmic look, whatever that means. Especially Worms, the colorist, Dan Stuyck, who also worked on Anything That Moves, it was cool to work with him and figure out what film stock we’re trying to emulate. Like, are we putting film grain in the highlights? What are we doing to the blacks to make it look film-like? He talks a lot about putting blue grain into the shadows and stuff like that. He’s got all these tricks. And also all my references are shot on film for the most part. Honestly it was just really cool to have Vinegar Syndrome and to have them be able to provide film. Instead of doing it to emulate it, actually being able to shoot the movie the way I want it to look on the stock that I want it to look like. It was just a no-brainer at the end of the day.

BE: How did Vinegar Syndrome get involved?

AP: After All Jacked Up and Full of Worms premiered at Fantasia I met with Liane Cunji who produced Anything That Moves. I met and I pitched her this movie and I just sort of continued to pitch it to her and talk to her about it at Fantastic Fest, and then I met with the team at Vinegar Syndrome and talked to them and sent them the script and stuff. And it was cool, once they were interested it was just a series of meetings, and pulling together the plan and the financing and stuff like that, and it just came together really nicely. I think they were really hoping to expand on their production side of things, and like, get movies out into the world that kind of fit what their original mission was with Vinegar Syndrome. So I think my sensibilities and theirs really aligned for this thing.

BE: And there was no pushback over the content? Or questions of if anything went too far, anything like that?

AP: No, no, it was really cool. And my executive producer Eddie Linker who’s been working in Chicago for a while, he’s like the best guy you could ask for, where once he trusts you to make the movie then he’s just sort of like “do your thing.” And really everyone is just supportive. Going into the project with an open mind and thinking of everyone involved as collaborators lends itself to a positive experience as opposed to me being, like, “I’m the auteur and you guys are the suits, and we’re at odds.” No one was trying to push me in any way. Because I trusted them they trusted me. And I got to kind of go crazy.

BE: That’s awesome. I was reading the press release, and I thought it was interesting that you talked about wanting to display intimacy and you actually brought up a political element where you said the open intimacy itself “attacks the cultural conservatism of the United States.” I was just wondering if you could expand on that, on the sort of political import of the film.

AP: I guess the United States is pretty puritanical in a lot of ways. It’s really weird, on one end of the spectrum all audiences are kind of fried to what is transgressive. We can’t really be surprised. But at the same time, there’s a lot of outrage. It’s like a weird worst-of-both-worlds type of thing. Yeah, I don’t know, like, yesterday I was looking at Elon Musk tweeting some Nazi stuff. He said something like “white people need to band together,” that was the gist of whatever he was retweeting. And it’s like, this is some shit that the cop would say at the end of Anything That Moves. I mean, I was going off when I was writing that, I was like “young white men have turned into sluts! They should be Vikings in the sky!” I was just having fun but there’s this guy who worked at the highest level of the United States’ government basically saying this stuff. So, I don’t know. The most ridiculous thing that I could come up with is going on in the U.S. I think showing people loving each other and having fun and understanding their own quirks and weirdness is a very local, interpersonal thing that can ground people and make them good to each other. That’s my political stance.

BE: That’s nice. So you’ve been showing this around different festivals and screens. I saw it at Fantasia in July. I’m wondering if there’s been any surprises in terms of what people are responding to, anything that you haven’t expected in terms of how people are receiving it?

AP: I’m trying to think, I’ve just been really excited that it’s reached as far as it has. I feel like with All Jacked Up and Full of Worms it was intentionally, and also received as, like, look at this freaky-ass thing that shouldn’t exist. And I feel like this one, I was able to shoot all the way through. Like, I have a full shoot. Worms was shot in tiny little chunks over months. And this was like, let’s all shoot in succession and with a plan. And that was pretty cool. I love trash and underground cinema and the sleaze of it all, but also to have a festival like Sitges that’s a little bit fancier, to have some real critical minds respond well to it and run with the content and aesthetics of it and really read into it and, like, extrapolate. There was just a lot of cool writing that came out of it. And to win Lausanne Underground, the stuff that the jury said about the film was beautiful, and having our Fangoria write-up… to be in Fangoria was pretty amazing. Also then to have this theatrical run, it’s bigger than what we were able to do with Worms. And to be able to play with you guys, and play at the New Beverly was really fucking cool. The movie was a real labour of love. We had a lot of support in our tiny labour of love with Vinegar Syndrome, but it’s still a very freaky tiny thing. To have larger institutions and people actually engage with it is pretty cool.

BE: Awesome. You were talking about some of your reference points that are all shot on film. I’m kind of wondering with the content, this sort of underground, transgressive cinema, what are the sort of influences and reference points that you would point to as something that helps you figure out that this is something that could be a movie, you know?

AP: I’ll start in the opposite direction with like, high-end stuff. Accattone and Teorama, the Pasolini films. Those feel really charged. And deal with sexuality and like, poetic wayward souls and all this. That’s sort of the high water mark. And in the opposite direction, looking at trash like the Morrissey films… I guess I don’t discriminate in terms of what’s high art and what’s low. There’s just like a ton of reference points that we went through. I just rewatched The Paperboy, the Lee Daniels film. It’s so good, and so gnarly. And there’s a lot of A-List actors in it. And Friedkin, we watched Cruising…

BE: It’s kind of funny you bring up that high art/low art thing. I saw somebody sharing the poster for the American release of Contempt. And it was just Bardot’s ass. That was the entire selling point. So many of those old art movies were just sold on sex appeal at the time.

AP: Yeah, it’s actually really funny. And now I feel like sex can sometimes eliminate the possibility of it being high art. It’s like we’re the other way around now. Are we using high art to smuggle in sex, or sex to smuggle in high art?

BE: We’ve done a lot of movies from people who were in the New York independent filmmaking scene, but not a whole lot from Chicago. We played The Becomers.

AP: Oh yeah. I did sound for one day on that movie.

BE: Oh nice. I guess I’m just curious, what is the scene like in Chicago? Are there exciting things happening? Does it feel like there’s a cohesive thing there?

AP: Yeah, definitely. Maybe you’ve noticed this year there’s more films coming out of Chicago, I feel like we have a little thing going on. My good friend Brandon Daley just came out with this movie $POSITIONS.

BE: Yeah, I’ve seen it. Just watched it a couple weeks ago, actually, it was really fun.

AP: Yeah, it’s great. And my penis is in that movie, I’m one of the people peeing into the…

BE: I noticed, yeah.

AP: You noticed, great! His producer, Ben Gojer, produced a ton of movies in Chicago, he produced Worms as well. And also their producer Jake Bloom is doing cool stuff around here. My guy, Spencer Parsons, who produced Anything That Moves, he’s been in Chicago for a while–he’s a professor at Northwestern. He’s been in the scene for a while. And then also Eddie Linker who executive produced Anything That Moves, a lot of cool stuff goes through him. Chicago is a very small, tight-knit scene that is, I think, doing really cool stuff now. Going to the New/Next Festival in Baltimore, there was a big group of Chicagoans. It was cool to all run around together. It wasn’t just the east coast kids or the LA kids, it was like “oh yeah, look, there’s these Chicago guys.” I think something’s happening, I don’t know where it’ll go, but I’m excited. We’ve all been working each other’s movies and shorts for a long time. And have been reading each other’s scripts and stuff. So it’s cool to, like, grow together.

On October 16 at 8pm, Bleeding Edge presents the Canadian premiere of Josh Heaps’ City Wide Fever at Market Video. Message us on Instagram for instructions on how to get to the venue.

Shot with a tiny budget on digital video, Josh Heaps’ City Wide Fever is a loving homage to the deliriously irrational pleasures of giallo films. Heaps’ first foray into filmmaking demonstrates an impressive grasp on the genre. Not only does it capture the dreamy, off-kilter tone of giallo, but keeps the audience entertained with killer shot-on-video visuals and an endearing sense of humour.

Heaps’ debut feature follows a young film student in New York City as she tracks down the whereabouts of a forgotten Italian horror director, embedding herself in an unsolved mystery surrounding his disappearance.

Having just premiered at the Downtown Film Festival in New York on Oct 13, Bleeding Edge is proud to host the Canadian premiere at Market Video. We had a chance to chat with Heaps about his film, shooting it on a shoestring budget, and using the same camera that David Lynch used to make Inland Empire.

Bleeding Edge: What is the origin of this movie? Why did you want to make it in the style of giallo movies?

Josh Heaps: I was getting my PhD in film studies for many years in North Carolina, and then I dropped out. I was introduced to this company that was doing PR distribution in New York City, and academia wasn’t doing it for me, so I moved back to New York, where I’m primarily from. I was starting this job and I was meeting a bunch of people, and then there was this Dario Argento retrospective at the Lincoln Center. I was going to a bunch of them, I’d always loved giallo and Italian cinema, and I was buddies with Mike Bilandic already, and his movie Hellaware was really inspiring to me. I was like, what if I took that low-budget ethos and tried to do an art Euro sleaze movie? Instead of doing the mumblecore route that so many low-budget films go for, why not try to do something bigger?

So I saw these Argento movies, and I got really stoned after, and I came up with this plot of a girl looking for this director who she finds in a USB in an alleyway off of Canal Street in New York, whatever. Weirdly, the next morning, I saw this print of Dog Day Afternoon. I was walking through Brooklyn, and this old woman was giving away these books on her stoop, and I was looking, and she had this book that was The Films of Pupi Avati. He’s this obscure Italian filmmaker who made this film called The House with Laughing Windows, this really weird giallo movie that’s only getting rediscovered now. For some reason, I took that as a sign that I had to make this movie. What are the odds that I would see this woman?

I’ve never filmed anything before, but my friend Ethan is a very talented cinematographer. I wrote a half-page treatment, and we just started shooting. There was never a script for the movie, really. I think you can tell that when you watch it. The lead actor left the movie halfway through, which is why we have two different actresses in the film. Then I met Dilly [Diletta Guglielmi], who’s the blonde Italian girl, and she is Italian, and I was like, oh, that’s kind of funny. Anyway, the movie took a year and a half to make, two years, and a lot of crazy shooting on weekends, and doing this and that. Then we finally got it done in January, we finished all the sound mixing and shit, and then it got rejected from every festival, and now I’m here!

BE: What kind of camera were you shooting it on? Because it’s got a very shot-on-video look to it.

JH: Yeah, yeah, we shot it on the same camera that Mike Bilandic shot Happy Life on, that David Lynch shot Inland Empire on, the Sony DSR-PD150. I don’t regret using it, but I don’t think I’ll use it again, because for my friends who aren’t into really obscure shot-on-video stuff, who aren’t in production, they see it and they assume, oh, this is the best he could do, which is something that I’ve had to cope with. I’m fine with it, but Ethan owns a Sony Venice, he owns Red cameras. We had the option to shoot in 6K or whatever, but I really wanted this grungy look and I didn’t want to go film, I couldn’t afford that. So how else to make this stand out?

And then we decided to use this Sony camera, and Ethan was so good about it. I think he brought things out that I’ve never seen someone bring out in that sort of camera before. It was literally me and Ethan who did the movie. We didn’t have a crew. We had different sound guys every time and Ethan lit everything. The fact that we used such a shitty camera, it’s pretty impressive what we did in terms of the colors and stuff like that. I bought it for $150 online. So, I’m glad I used it. It definitely makes it look distinct.

BE: There’s an out-of-the-box digital look that basically every short film you see, if you go to a film festival, they all kind of look like that, so it’s nice to get a different texture.

JH: Dude, one hundred percent. The way I sold it to Ethan, was saying that there is a general sheen that low-budget movies have, where you can tell they’re trying to look pro, but in doing so, they’re relegated back to this. I was like, I want to avoid that entirely. I don’t want to look like a cheap digital trying to emulate 16mm grain or whatever thing. Let’s fucking lean into the fact that we have no money and do it up!

BE: Did you want to say anything else about having two actors play the main character, and what were some of the difficulties around that?

JH: I thought of several films, like Persona, obviously, but the one that I was really thinking of was The Obscure Object of Desire, which is a wonderful film in which the actress is switching throughout. But yeah, I found Dilly, she’s fantastic. She’s the exact opposite of Nancy [Kimball], the other actress. I think Nancy played really sullen and Dilly, just because of the person she is, is very bubbly and happy all the time, so there is this nice counterpoint, and it is funny to me that she’s Italian, and that there’s a scene where her mom is a New York Italian, an Italian-American.

And by the way, the mom, if you didn’t know, is Carolyn Farina, who, the star of Metropolitan. Honestly, I think the movie’s better because of it. Not because Dilly’s better than Nancy, but because it brings it to that dreamy, otherworldly, bonkers thing. Certainly, though, we did have to do a lot of things like, she’s gonna open her eyes here, and then that’s gonna transform it from this character to this… you know what I mean?

BE: You said it took a year and a half to shoot, so can you talk about planning or trying to shoot over this long of a period?

JH: Yeah, I had a full-time job and Ethan is a cameraman. He works a lot of union jobs, so he’s busy, and then, having to figure out locations, I did all of that stuff. So we had to figure out, first of all, what the next thing we were shooting was gonna be about, because the plot, like I said, was very loose. So, okay, we want to do this scene where they meet Rutania Alda, this old Hollywood actor. How are we gonna do that? So, Ethan and I would spend the weekends driving around upstate New York. Okay, now we have to find an Airbnb that I can rent that’ll look like a place that can be within our budget range. It took a long time because this was a two-person operation. It was literally me and Ethan, and then we brought on a producer around halfway who was very helpful, Chenzy [Vincent ‘Chenzy’ Graziano].

Doing it all ourselves was really difficult, but I’m glad it took that long. It was something to look forward to. A lot of sleepless nights, me getting excited for what we were gonna do, long fucking shoot days. Sometimes Ethan and I would get very angry at each other, but we had a really good time. For the first time in my life this past summer, I actually was on a set for a movie that was straight through. It was a 15-day shoot, as they normally are, but I preferred my method, because I really got to plan in a better way. I never want to shoot like that again, but it was a real learning process.

BE: You mentioned that you had never shot anything before, so I’m wondering why you wanted to jump straight into making a full feature.

JH: No offense to people who make shorts, but I’ve worked in distribution, I’ve worked in PR, I’ve worked for film festivals, I worked for Telluride for a while, I’ve been someone at festivals who watches submissions and stuff like that. Shorts are a road to nowhere, you know? Of course, if you have a passion for short filmmaking, and it’s a wonderful art form, I think you should go for it. And by the way, since wrapping City Wide Fever, I’ve made several shorts for fun while I’m trying to raise money for a feature. I was talking to Mike Bilandic about this once, and he was like, dude, if you’re gonna make a short for $10,000 or whatever, find $20,000 and make a fucking feature. It’s gonna be cooler. And he’s totally right. I think people should make more features. Seventy minute features, by the way, that’s the sweet spot. At the Downtown Film Festival, where City Wide Fever is playing, I think all the features playing are in the 75 to 90 minute range, which is really cool. I like that length of movie.

BE: I think it was actually Eugene Kotlyarenko and Mike Bilandic on Eugene’s podcast, who were saying that when you’re making a film, it’s like you’re putting together a business, and if you’re gonna put all that work into it, whether it’s a short or a feature, a lot of it’s the same amount of work. So you might as well do a little bit extra and make the feature.

JH: For that talk between Eugene and Mike, Mike was in my house in North Carolina. I got money from the school to fly Mike down to do a retrospective and the tagline was “Real New York Director Mike Bilandic!”

BE: Can you tell me how the Guy Maddin connection happened?

JH: Yeah, I worked for a PR company last year, and I worked on Rumours at Cannes, at TIFF, and at the New York Film Festival, so I got to be friends with Guy and Evan and Galen [Johnson]. So last year, during a press junket in New York, which is Guy, Evan, and Galen, the directors sit in a room and you shuffle in journalists to ask the same fucking questions, and we were talking about City Wide Fever, which I hadn’t finished yet, and they were like, Oh, cool! That’s independent filmmaking! That’s fucking awesome! And I was like, Guy, you should fucking just give me your name to hop on the movie! And he was like, I would! So I fucking went on ChatGPT, asked it to make me an executive producer form, I went to the hotel front desk, they printed it out for me. Three minutes later, I was like, Guy, I have it, and he was like, really? And then they were like, Guy, you gotta sign it now, and then he fucking signed it, and I was like, sweet!

He’s the nicest guy, a true lover of indie cinema, so cool and so sweet. Too kind. Sometimes I feel like I took advantage of him, but he’s the homie, I love him, and he’s been really supportive and helpful still. I do think having his name on has opened doors, and it was so easy for him to do. I really owe him a lot.

BE: You also have Mike Belandic, obviously, but Larry Fessenden also shows up in the movie, so I’m wondering with the whole New York indie filmmaking scene, what’s your relationship to the other stuff going on there.

JH: Yeah, Mike’s the homie. I’m buddies with Mike and that whole clique. I really love those people, and they’re doing cool stuff. Mike is doing the Q&A for this movie with me at The Roxy for the world premiere. And Larry… how did I meet Larry? Well, I’m buddies with Doug Buck, who played the other sex shop owner with Larry. He lives in Montreal, even though he’s American. He did the Family Portrait trilogy, but he did a movie called Sisters, a remake of Brian De Palma’s movie with Chloe Sevigny in 2006. Last year, because Doug had a print of it, I hooked Doug up with the Roxy, and they played Sisters, and Mike was there. I did the Q&A with Doug, and it was really cool. So Doug and Larry are buddies. So he connected me with Larry, and Larry did it. It took two hours.

There’s some other notable people, like Ian Fidance, a pretty well-known comedian, he’s in it. That took half a day. Stan Oh, who runs Posteritati here in the city. He’s the guy who dies. Onur Tukel, I feel like he’s a New York guy. He plays the professor.

And then some cool bands we got… I’m really into hardcore, so there’s this band Criminal Instinct, this band Angel Dust, and we got some cool tracks. And for the score, there’s this great company called Four Flies Records in Italy, who have this huge, massive back catalog of 60s and 70s Italian crime movies and horror and shit, and I became friendly with them via email, and they gave me a really great deal on buying tracks from them. So, that’s why so much of the score in City Wide Fever is interesting, because it’s old 60s and 70s songs that I’m repurposing.

BE: One last question, you have a lot of interesting costumes… like the visually striking ski mask thing and all that stuff, so I’m wondering where that stuff came from.

JH: They came from sex shops! I used to live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, and the last real sex shops in New York where we shot in are on 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s this really grungy place with jerk off booths in the back and owned by dudes who clearly don’t care about the things they sell

So I spent a rainy afternoon going to all of those, and then I went to Manhattan, and I went to all the bougier ones that are the kink-positive ones, or whatever, and I spent way too much. It’s at my parents’ house, but I have so many masks right now that weren’t used in the movie, and so much weird kink stuff. I spent way too much money on these fucking weird sex masks, and I would bring them to work. There are so many photos of me at my old distribution PR film job, sitting in a corner on my computer wearing the masks, freaking people out.

Photo taken by Estelle Hanania, courtesy Dennis Cooper’s blog.

Legendary novelist Dennis Cooper (The Sluts, Closer, The Marbled Swarm) had always been influenced by cinema, but could never find a way into directing. Yet upon meeting acclaimed visual artist Zac Farley, a film duo was instantly formed. The writer had finally managed to translate his queer, transgressive sensibility to the moving image under the collaboration of Farley, a rigorous formalist who could always find new things to do with the camera.

Their previous collaborations, Like Cattle Towards Glow and Permanent Green Light, earned them fans, but their newest feature, Room Temperature, represents what can only be described as a major breakthrough. Set in the Southern California desert, we hone in on an isolated family led by a patriarch who has a near dangerous obsession with pulling off a home haunt in time for Halloween. As his mission nears the October 31st date, things get more and more disturbing. This probably makes the film sound strictly like a horror picture, and while it is very scary, the duo will be sure to note they see it as a dark comedy first.

BLEEDING EDGE was lucky enough to chat with both Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley ahead of the film’s Canadian premiere on Wednesday, September 24th.

Bleeding Edge: The first question I can ask is, how did you two first meet, and when did you click and realize you wanted to be artistic collaborators?

ZF: We first met twelve or fourteen years ago, something like that. I had known Dennis' work for years before that; I was a devotee of his literature. But as soon as we met, we started working on projects together. We started working on a book about theme parks where Dennis would adopt these fairy tales. We had these fairy tales where the rides became characters. I made these photographs and videos of some of the rides. We still haven't finished that book, but at some point, we started making films. The first one was an experiment, like, can we do something with a script that Dennis had written years earlier? And gradually it turned into this. It's kind of addictive, making films.

DC: This [first] film, it was like a porn film, but it was like an anti-porn, well maybe not anti-porn, but it wasn't sexy. It was sort of weird. Anyway, no one would touch it. But this producer in Germany somehow heard about it and said he'd like to look at it. I should mention this guy actually did a lot of Bruce LaBruce’s films. And he, for some reason, liked it, and so we made this next weird film. It was $40,000, so it was really shoestring. But it was so much fun, and people liked it, so we started making actual films.

Both of you started out in other mediums, like visual art and literature. Was there something you each felt was missing from your own artistic pursuits that made you want to turn to cinema?

ZF: I was always really interested and excited about film. When I was young, I thought I'd like to make films. But every film school was super hands-on, and the way a lot of filmmaking is taught just didn't seem like it would appeal to me. So I went to art school for that reason, but I always worked with video and film in my practice. I was always in the visual art field, but really interested in video and film. And I guess you could say that our films might be a little bit closer to whatever people refer to as video art than some people refer to as film in certain ways.

DC: When I was a teenager, I was really obsessed with experimental film. It was the late 60s and my friends and I would go watch Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, and all those guys, because they had a series in L.A.. So I really wanted to make films, in addition to writing, when I was really young. But then I went to a film class in college and realized I had no talent for it. So, it had always been this kind of dream. So I met Zach, and he has a visual sense that I don't have. And since we worked so well together, it was just like, oh, I can finally make films?

And what were the origins of Room Temperature specifically? What were you two thinking about and kicking around at the time?

DC: We both are obsessed with home haunts. I used to make them as a kid, so I had a really lifelong obsession, and Zach had a pretty lifelong obsession too. We find them really fascinating because of how both amateurish and ambitious they are, also how much they fail. They're kind of like outsider art. People who make them are really inventive, but it's not like a school kind of art. They try to find new ways to make you feel disoriented or have fun or get you scared so we were just really interested in that form.

You brought it up that you were interested in home haunts as a kid, so I mean, maybe this is a weird word to use in relation to this film, which is so dark, but does any kind of nostalgia animate it in a certain way?

DC: No, I hate nostalgia, it’s my enemy. Not nostalgia. No, like I said, it's a really vital form. I mean, in Los Angeles, there are hundreds of them every Halloween. We usually go to LA every Halloween and see 30 or 40 of them. The home haunts I’d make in my parents' basement were really terrible. So I don't have any nostalgia for that. No, it's really about the form.

ZF: I grew up in France, so I didn't have Halloween as a kid. I never even dressed up, so my interest in it actually came much later. I got excited by it when in the U.S., it's the ideal form of collaboration because oftentimes the kind of people who get together and make these home haunts, they're strange bedfellows in a way. Some of them are more interested in the acting and theater aspect of it. Some of them are architecture geeks who are just really excited about reconfiguring the confines of the garage to become a maze. Some of them are really into animatronics. One of the things that excites me about them is that there are all these mistakes or in-between things happening. It’s like when one person is putting on this really sincere theater play, but it's happening in the middle of an avant-garde structure. I come at it from these places that have the potential to reveal themselves or to fail.

Dennis mentioned he's from Southern California, and you originally grew up in France, and that's an interesting tension. I think I was looking at another interview you two did for this film, and you were saying that you'd initially conceived of doing the film in France, but just realized it had to be very culturally specific. And I mean, did the cultural specificity go to the extent of like, we have to get just the actual Southern California desert itself. Like you couldn’t just Wes Anderson-style shoot in Spain and simulate it there. It had to be very specific, I assume?

DC: We were going to make it in France initially because I really liked the idea that the people around the family would have absolutely no idea what they were doing and think they were completely insane. That interested me, but then it was just not possible, since nobody there knows what home haunts are, no one would give us any money, because no one understood what we were trying to do. We did it in Southern California basically because we know a lot of people there, we already had a producer there, and it would be much, much easier because we didn’t have a lot of money, and we could reach out to people we knew. Many of the people in the movie are artists, or visual artists, students at the art school, or the children of artists. And the desert was the setting because we had to rent a house for two months and dig a swamp in the backyard, and it wasn’t easy to find, so the desert was affordable. There we could find this weird house, and it ended up being a lucky thing because having them live in the desert worked really well. But also because we could do it without people bothering us. We could make as much noise as we wanted. So really, the decision about the desert was actually just a practical one that worked out really fortuitously.

ZF: The place where we shot, like the high desert, I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time there when I was younger. And it's fascinating because it's really spread out, but there's also a sense of community there that's based on survival. Because if your electricity runs out, you could die within hours. There are all these weird characters from survivalists, and also just like extreme drug-washed-out people. It just seemed like the right place for the kind of film that we were making.

Did that setting help in terms of creating the images of the film and expanding your vision?

ZF: Oh yeah. I mean, that's the way that we work in general. We write out this script, but it’s always a pretty imprecise map. Then, when we start casting, we adapt it to fit with the people we want to work with, and then when we figure out where it's going to happen, that all becomes really, really generative throughout the process. And sometimes something to fight with. I remember shooting in full sun, which is something that's not by itself appealing, but being forced to do it, like being a little bit uncomfortable, actually ends up being really, really productive.

You brought up that a lot of the cast of the film are artists, and you said partly it's because those are the people you know in Southern California. But did you also just find them more appealing to work with than regular actors? I know Dennis is a big fan of Robert Bresson, who always used non-actors. And I'm just curious if you two find non-actors just genuinely easier to work with than professionals?

DC: We've only worked with non-actors. I mean, actually, Ange [Dargent], who plays Extra, he's been making films since he was a kid. But that's pretty much it, and he's not a traditional actor. We like the idea of people who don't know how to look sad, they don't know how to look angry, they don't know what they look like when they're being emotional, or when they're thinking, or when they're whatever. Whereas actors are trained to know what that's going to look like. So non-actors are really open and raw material. And it's fun to work with non-actors and these people we know. Some of them we knew already, and some of them were just in our world. And you build the character with them. We don't do traditional auditions; rather, we talk with them for an hour. We have them do a few line readings, but it's mostly just like, who are they? And it's like we can work with this and that. And then you just fine-tune who they are, because all the people in the films are basically being themselves, they're just fine-tuned. Like, oh, bring this up a little bit. Keep that away. Don't do that thing you do, but this thing you do is really fascinating. It’s really great, because it makes that part of the film as vital and creative as editing it or writing it or anything, working with the actors or the non-actors. It's very collaborative, and the performers feel very into the material and into the project because they're actually bringing a lot themselves. We're saying like, this scene, you're supposed to look sad, so what do you think? And then they'll do it, and it'll be like, they made it up, not us, not us, saying that you have to have your head turned this way or you have to have a tear coming out of your eye. And we don't use score, because we don't like music manipulating the viewer.

ZF: There is a score.

DC: Yeah, but I mean, the music in the films always has to be heard by the characters. There's nothing that only the viewer hears. So you get these performances that are like if they're sad, they're sad the way they are in real life. You don't have this score going like, this is the sad moment. This is the tense moment, you know? So it's nice because the performances are really real and pure in a certain way. And the viewer just sees that.

How do you feel your filmmaking ambitions have grown in the time since your collaboration began?

ZF: With every new project, we always try to set ourselves up with something that seems like it's a little bit more than just barely out of reach. I think that we're both really interested in learning how to achieve some kind of project that seems like it's impossible. That's how we stay engaged with the work over the long periods of time that it takes us to put these projects together. And yeah, this one was a real jump. I mean, we shot it in a different place than we're used to. In our other films, the performances are actually very sincere, but they're very flat. They're very kind of like one-to-one. It's like there's no kind of composition. In this film, all of the performers are actually building characters and acting in a way that I think we've never really dealt with before, and this is the first time we've made a film that has any camera movement, like we just hadn't worked with camera movements up until that point. We set ourselves up with all these challenges and tried to figure out how we want to go about them. I do think the films are really evolving, and our ambitions definitely are.

DC: That's the way I write books. I always start from scratch, and I always try to do something new with all my novels. Each one is me trying to do something where I don't know if I can do it. And then working really, really hard to try to pull it off. And our films are actually about that. I mean, the film's about this father's ambition for his haunted house, which is just an impossible ambition, and then ends up being a shitty haunted house that's not scary. The last one was about a guy who wanted to use his death as the ultimate magic trick, and that didn’t work either. We’re interested in overreach, ambition, and then the inevitable failure that comes with it. What do you do when things fail? How do you make it work anyway?

And I guess maybe this will be my last question, but we have Derek McCormick doing the Q&A for the screening next week. I know he's a friend of both of yours, and you did an afterward for his book Castle Faggot. Could you say a little bit about how you feel Derek is kind of a kindred spirit of yours?

ZF: I'm just like a huge fan, basically. I think he's one of the greatest writers there is. He's been influential to the way I think about literature and art.

DC: Yeah, I've known him for a long time. Well, I mean, we only met like two or three times, but he wrote to me when he did his first book, he sent it to me because he liked my books, so I’ve been following him. I published two of his books with an imprint that I had for a while. I've always thought he was great. I think Castle Faggot is one of the greatest novels ever in the world. He's very funny, he's very clever, and he gets it. I think he really gets what we're doing., I think there’s a strong aesthetic connection between Derek and what we're trying to do that makes him a really good person to draw things out of us. He’s kind of a weird genius, Derek.

BLEEDING EDGE will be hosting the Canadian premiere of Room Temperature on Wednesday, September 24th at The Paradise Theatre. Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley will be joining us in person for a Q&A afterwards.

Tickets are still on sale, as we recommend using promo code BLEEDINGEDGE10 for a discount.

Louise Weard, it can be said, has a lot of gumption. The Vancouver-based filmmaker has been making headlines with her four-and-a-half-hour epic, Castration Movie, Part 1, which is, if anything, an absolutely killer match of runtime and title.

The chutzpah of making a work that long isn’t the sole defining feature of her film, though. There’s a risky structural gambit at play of centering the first ninety or so minutes of her saga on a sexually frustrated cis male production assistant before venturing to Weard herself as Michaela, a sex worker who functions as the centering force of a trans friend group in Canada’s west coast metropolis. The connection between the cringe comedy of the first chapter and the transgressive nature of the second isn’t initially apparent, but the director’s humanistic statement on millennial and zoomer life begins to gradually form as the lengthy runtime progresses.

After all, Weard’s lead character is equally a mother figure whose empathy deep as she is a foul–mouthed provocateur, and that similar impulse runs throughout the film. The complexity of the character is only beginning to unfold in this entry, the first of what promises to be a quadrilogy (the second part is finished, the third and fourth are in production). Weard’s gritty Sony Handycam-shot images provide a complementary sense of immediacy and also a rethinking of the cinematic form to her ambitious storytelling.

This is why Bleeding Edge is beyond excited to be teaming up with fellow series Sleaze Factory to present the film on August 31st at the Paradise Theatre. BE chatted with Weard virtually to get some more info on the project’s origins, production, and ultimate ambition.

BLEEDING EDGE: Generally, I start with pretty boilerplate questions to introduce the subject, so my first inquiry would be asking you to talk about your path to filmmaking.

Louise Weard: I was definitely one of those kids who had a camera at any family reunion or wedding. I was immediately drawn to having a camera in my hands. My dad was also what I would call a '90s cinephile in the sense that he was really into a lot of those filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Like cool sort of filmmakers. So if my mom was out of town or something, he’d be like “Oh, hey Louise, I'm gonna show you Reservoir Dogs”. So from a really young age, I was getting exposed to movies that just had that kind of oomph that makes you feel like, oh, movies are really fucking cool. So ever since I was really young, I was really interested in movies. That stayed with me in school, trying to do stuff DIY. I was coming up alongside early internet filmmaking. So it was this really amazing time where I could shoot something on a home computer, edit it in iMovie, and then upload it to YouTube. So there was this whole platform from initial concept to distribution that was immediately accessible to me when I was growing up. So I just stayed in that zone.

And when I was 19, back in 2013, I made my first actually produced short film called Computer Hearts, which was like a mumblecore body horror movie, and we had the same process were it was released through the internet and at first it was never really caught on but then it built up a cult following over ten years. So even though that was the one thing I had directed, and I’d then switched over into producing and cinematography, that film built such a cult following that it gave me the confidence after ten years to be like, okay, I should finally make my feature debut. And that's where Castration Movie came from.

BE: What were the origins of the project in terms of the things you were thinking about or feeling at the time?

LW: It was a mix of stuff. I mean, I had just seen my friend Betsey Brown's Actors, and had thought, oh shit, we can do this more problematic representation. And I got thinking about that a lot because I was very defensive of that movie. I was really curious about why people had a problem with it, whereas I connected with the film, so I started writing the Michaela character from that perspective. The other thing was I was working on this project that I was presenting at Fantastic Fest called 100 Best Kills: Dick Destruction and it was a clip show of all these different dick mutilation scenes from movies. I had a really interesting experience showing that as I turned it into what starts off fun, becomes miserable very quickly for the audience. I was reflecting images back at them that maybe played into the fun of the current political climate. They’re like, “Oh, we want to go see some guys get their dick kicked,” but then all of a sudden, I added some different political layers to it that complicated it. So because of that, I had all these ideas about castration going on, and then I kind of molded those two things into Castration Movie, where it was like, I wanted to do something that was dealing with these political themes I was handling in that 100 Best Kills show at Fantastic Fest. But I also wanted to do something with trans representation that was like what I was seeing with Betsy's film.

I guess the third factor was on a stylistic front. I had been spending the previous year digitizing home videos that my mom would give me with the old Hi8 camcorder and watching videos that I had shot when I was six years old from 1999 or whatever. I was taken aback by the freedom of expression and the style. This was as someone who had been getting burnt out on these questions of like, how do you represent this stuff? And that's covered in my movie. So it was those three things that were the big major events for Castration Movie. But there were so many other things that were going on at the time. It's a big film project, and we're still in production on it after three years. So I would say there's always more and more influences being added to the pile as we continue working on the project.

BE: People who are going to see the film on the 31st are likely aware that it’s a four-and-a-half-hour film with an intermission, but this is just part one. It's really just the beginning of a grand saga. And in terms of the scope and structure of the film, I was thinking of a lot of things. Again, I haven’t seen the future parts yet, but I was almost thinking this feels in many ways more like literature than film in terms of just the narrative ambition.

But even within part one, again, there's this highly interesting structure of being essentially two separate stories. Chapter one is Incel Superman, which I think is about an hour and a half, then we get to your group of friends, which takes up the next three hours. But in terms of film influences, and maybe you won’t agree with this, but because of all the Twin Peaks paraphernalia I spotted in the film, I was thinking of the structure of Fire Walk With Me. It has that bifurcated narrative of beginning with Dear Meadow, the town that functions as the anti-Twin Peaks for the first 20, 30 minutes of the movie, then you have a narrative break, and you finally arrive at Twin Peaks a year later. That's almost like what the structure of the film felt like to me.

LW: I think for me it’s hard not to be influenced by Twin Peaks. I think that with this movie, there was definitely a degree to which I didn't want to go into it with any clear influences where I was thinking in terms of pastiche or, oh, I'm going to do it like that project. That was because I really feel like a lot of modern filmmakers use pastiche as a shorthand to try to solve problems in their script writing and style, like they use it to fill gaps as opposed to actually trying to solve the problem. So I really try not to do pastiche or think of it in those ways, but I mean, I’m a huge Twin Peaks fan, it's one of the things that means the most to me in the entire world, so it's hard for it not to be inspirational to me.

It's great that you bring up literature, because I think the funny thing about this project was that when I designed it, it was never supposed to be like this. Now we've already shot over 15 hours, and we're not even done with the third out of four parts. So it's going to be a long project. But when I first conceptualized it, it was supposed to be just an 80-minute film. And with basically a similar structure to the movie that currently exists, where it had the same part one, it started with the incel, moves to Michaela, then introduces these other characters, and then we have everything come together at the end. And I thought, oh, I'm going to make this quick 80-minute film. But I hadn't actually been watching a lot of movies the last couple of years; I've been more engaged with literature. I'm a huge postmodern lit fan. I also really love trans literature. There's a Canadian writer, Casey Plett, whom I was reading a lot of in the year leading up to this project. So the second I started, I think my ambitions with this project were more literary. And I didn't even realize until about a month into shooting that we were going to end up making a long movie.

Basically, when I was doing a screening of Actors in Chicago, my buddy, whom I helped set up the screening, and I were both just chilling, and I was like, “Hey, do you want to see what I have so far for my film?” And we had about 40 minutes, and shot like three or four scenes. And one of the scenes we had shot was the going-away party for the guy's tits, where they're all sitting at the table and the guy takes his top off. And basically, I was just going to scrub through, being like, hey, there's like 40 minutes of footage, but in the final film, it's probably going to be like three minutes total or something. And my buddy stops me. He's like, “No, I want to watch the whole thing.” Because he was so captivated, even only a minute in. And so we end up watching 40 minutes of all this footage. And he says to me, “Louise, you can't cut a second of this. This is gold.” And my friend Will Morris, who gave me that advice, was one of my most trusted film confidants. So when he said that you can't cut a second of it, I trusted him. And I'm very grateful he gave me that advice. So it has become a thing of its own. But yeah, I think those literary influences were definitely the key to its length.

BE: You brought up earlier the idea of representation. Do you find that a lot of modern queer or trans representation on screen is sanitized?

LW: Yeah, that was where a lot of this came from. I remember I was at Sundance one year, and there was a panel discussion thing during this breakfast, and they were talking about trans representation. The moderator and all these filmmakers were all going on like “we shouldn't be letting our trans characters be in totally bad situations all the time” and this and that, and they're going on about how here's how to do trans representation right. And it was so far from my friends’ experiences back at home, so when I got back I was like I'm gonna start shooting in the gross DIY clubs on East Hastings where me and my pals hang out and also filming them in our gross apartments, and just have them say heinous shit that a lot of us aren't saying in real life, because the whole movie is like putting horrible intrusive thoughts of things you would never want to say into people's mouths and then getting to to have some fun with that.

So when I wrote Michaela, it was like I'm gonna write a trans woman who had a Nazi phase, where she was maybe very alt-right, maybe involved in gamergate shit before transitioning, and now she's not acknowledging that past, but it comes out in the way she behaves. With the project, I like to grab characters who maybe are bad representation or who on the surface fit into these archetypes of what you expect in a queer film, like the trans sex worker or the suicidal friend or any of these sorts of things but I think the thing about Castration Movie the length really benefits is I get to fully round out these characters and make them very empathetic. Like I wanted to give people the ability to empathize with them, where you're living in their experiences to such an extent that it makes them real people as opposed to edgy jokes or cheap melodrama.

BE: I really felt like the friend group dynamic on screen in the second chapter was like something I'd never seen in a movie before.

LW: Oh, that's really sweet. To me, it was just one of those things where I don't think I thought when I was making it that I was the first person to do this; these big ensemble scenes with all these trans people hanging out. I hate the idea of being first anything when it's in the queer and trans world, just because I'm not a historian. There are even other Canadian stories; trans filmmakers who were filming them and their friends back in the 90s on video, like Mirha-Soleil Ross in Montreal. But I think what's important about it was recognizing that there was something about the makeup of my friends and me, and knowing that if I put this on camera, we would have a natural chemistry with each other. And I think that was one of the things that I got luckiest about; everyone who was in my immediate life, a lot of whom are non-actors, were very good at acting, and it allows these scenes to play out in the ways it does. I guess you get to exist in these worlds in a way that feels very natural because everyone was able to get past whatever anxieties they would have about acting in a movie for the first time and really just embrace something that allowed for a high degree of authenticity. And I think that authenticity is what people really connect to.

BE: And in terms of the character in the first chapter, talking to people about the film, do they feel bad for that character? Are they disgusted by him, or are they sympathetic?

LW: The incel character? Yeah. What I think is really interesting is that I never wrote that character as a closeted trans woman or someone who was pre-transition or anything. I always thought of him as this archetypal incel who can then be a foil to how we engage with Michaela's story. And so what surprised me the most out of responses to that character was a lot of people assuming he would be meeting Michaela, and she might try to talk him into transitioning or something like that in the second half. Which I think is another thing where you can see the trans literature influence. Or since the movie is so influenced by trans literature, there's a famous trans novel called Nevada, which has that sort of dialectic approach of like, here's the trans woman character, here's the guy who hasn't transitioned yet character, they meet, and then the trans woman is trying to convince them to transition. So I think a lot of people think that's where that character is going, but it was mostly one of those things where I wanted an open heart with his character as a way to frame Michaela's chapter because I felt that if the audience spends the first 90 minutes of this really long epic project with a cis guy, then it's a good entryway for them to then connect with the trans woman character, like it's an easier lifeline for your empathy.

BE: And maybe I'll end off here, but what can we expect from Part Two? I mean, I know so far it looks very star-studded.

LW: All of this stuff has been in production just on top of each other. We've shot over fifteen and a half hours of this movie. But the ramifications of making an indie project of this scale mean that in order to keep getting little bouts of financing, I need to release a movie a year out of the series, so otherwise I would ideally have waited until it was all done to release it. The funny thing with Part One though was I really struggled to maintain the cast and get people involved in it because when you're making this movie that's really long, like it's gonna be a fifteen hour long movie and we're shooting it on a Hi8 camera, and it's got all this crazy stuff in it, people are a little skeptical, so I will say it's hard to to keep them engaged in the project. When Part One came out, it was funny because even some of my friends who had acted in the film, when they saw it, went, “Oh, now I get what you're doing, Louise.” It kind of clicked into place for them. The casting of Part Two was pretty much who wants to come out, like looking at my pool of friends and seeing who wants to be involved. So it's really funny how I've seen a lot of comments about how crazy the cast is, when to me it was just a bunch of friends going out to New York and seeing who was available.

But what can people expect from part two? Jeez, it's like a kick to the head. I have no idea how you're gonna feel about Part Two, but it is such a different beast. I would say it is equally as funny as the first one, if not more so. But instead of a drama, it's like a horror movie. I would say it's like if Channel Awesome made an adaptation of the 120 Days of Sodom. That would be my best descriptor if Pasolini made YouTube review content in the late 2000s.

The Toronto premiere of Castration Movie, Part 1 will be at the Paradise Theatre on August 31st. You can grab tickets here.

BLEEDING EDGE FEST 2 begins today!

The second iteration of Bleeding Edge fest kicks off tonight with an opening night party at Houndstooth, DJ’d by Lydia Ogwang, with a lineup of cutting-edge films from local and international filmmakers, playing at the beautiful Paradise Theatre on Bloor.

Tickets are still available. Evening and weekend packages can be purchased HERE!

The schedule is as follows:

Thursday, August 21 at Houndstooth (818 College St).

9PM: Opening Night Party, with DJ Lydia Ogwang, PWYC

Friday, August 22 at Paradise Theatre

6:45PM: A Grand Mockery (dir. Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon).

Tickets available here!

9:15PM: Reveries: The Mind Prison (dir. Graham Mason), with Tastemaker (dir. Eli Spiegel)

Followed by virtual Q&A with director Graham Mason and writers/stars Anthony Oberbeck and Matt Barats.

Tickets available here!

Saturday, August 23 at Paradise Theatre

6:00PM: In the Glow of Darkness (dir. Tucker Bennett), with Duvet (dir. Kat Toledo) and Terry’s Calendar (dir. Chris Connor)

Followed by a live Q&A with all three filmmakers, along with ITGOD producer/composer Chris Corrente!

Tickets available here!

9:15PM: BE Shorts

• Pussy (dir. Ryan Falconer)

• Sing Our Song When the World Ends (dir. Andrea Florens & Tanner D. Masseth)

• Angel Baby (dir. James Kolsby & Claire Forgarty)

• Head Rush (dir. Ariana Molly)

• Fort Gary Lions Pool (dir. Ryan Steel)

• Workers Comp (dir. Philip Steiger)

• I Killed Osama!? (dir. Carl Fry & Maxwell Nalevansky)

• The Shampoo (Brandon Kaufman)

• Steal My Life (Annie Wren)

Tickets available here!

In the Glow of Darkness has its world premiere at Paradise Cinema on August 23 as a part of BE Fest 2, with the filmmaker and members of the cast present. It will be preceded by the short films Duvet (directed by Kat Toledo) and Terry’s Calendar (directed by Chris Connor). Individual tickets and packages available HERE!

In August of 2022, for our second event ever, Bleeding Edge hosted the Toronto premiere of Tucker Bennett’s Planet Heaven, a 56-minute DIY psychedelic freakout of a movie about a “Chakra-balancing” smartphone app with devastating side effects. At once a showcase for Bennett’s outré aesthetic sensibilities and a satire about the technological monopolization of the “wellness” industry, Planet Heaven had the audience, contained in the second floor of The Pilot, in stitches.

Three years later, we’re excited to invite Tucker back to Toronto, this time to the beautiful Paradise Cinema, for the world premiere of In the Glow of Darkness, a cyberpunk epic set in San Zokyo, “a 1080p metropolis running at 30 frames per second, 15 minutes into the future and 10 years in the past.” Tucker, fresh off editing Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (with Sabrina Greco), takes on the future once again with this futuristic tale about a tech corporation invading people’s pscyhes to fill their brain with hyper-specific, AI-generated advertisements.

Once again, Tucker and his collaborators bring their DIY sensibility to this sci-fi epic, showcasing an ingenuity he learned from legendary underground filmmaker George Kuchar and various tricks developed while putting together no-budget features like Why Are You Weird?, Candelabra, and Bloodrape.

We chatted with Tucker and producer/composer Chris Corrente about making In the Glow of Darkness and bringing it to Toronto for its world premiere.

BE: Tucker, you recently shared a photo of a 10-year-old script or outline for the movie. How far back does the idea for In the Glow of Darkness go? How long have you been working on it?

TB: 2014-15 is when I wrote it with one of my teenage buddies, named Evan Sokal, and this was the time that I noticed this particular type of architecture, and it seemed to be the only type of buildings being constructed anymore. I lived in the Bay Area, right next to Pixar Studios, and across the street from Pixar, there was this apartment community with these blocky mid-rise apartments, and they shared the same parking lot with a Target, Best Buy, a grocery store and a discount department store. I was like, “Wow, this is such a great city of the future!” You know, you work at Pixar, you have your computer job, and then you walk across the street and you have everything you need. This is the town square of the future!

When you think of “cyberpunk,” you think of Blade Runner, you think of wet-down streets, the holograms, the neon, the hovercrafts, but I think the more accurate vision of a cyberpunk future is that everybody lives at Target, and your brains are being monetized by everything. There's a dark irony and tragic beauty to that kind of thing that I thought nobody is talking about. These are the only types of apartments you see in the world now, but you never see them in movies or anything, because a Victorian house or whatever is obviously much more beautiful.

BE: You have these establishing shots of San Zokyo in the film, which show these buildings… I don't know how you would describe those architecturally, they're very plain, but they come in different colors.

TB: Yeah, we've learned that they're called mid-rise apartments. It's so clearly a generation of architecture that's purely designed by a computer, that's purely designed within CAD. They take the human element out and it's optimized for the best usage of space, with the cheapest materials, with a finish that looks the same as everything else. It's interesting to me. It's an automated world. Chris calls it… Standard Land?

Chris Corrente: Standard World. yeah.

TB: I feel like the vision of the future is a government-issued house. Everybody lives in the same 3D-printed apartment, shops at the same store, and has issued clothes, and maybe even babies. That's a funny, darkly ironic, vision of a future world or a contemporary bizarro world. There’s a certain tragic beauty about contemporary time that I think is interesting. You definitely don't need me to tell you that you should have been here yesterday, you know? Everybody knows the 70s were cool, there were bell bottoms and vinyl and whatever. But maybe you might need a little help seeing the tragic beauty of Target and mid-rise apartments, and of AI and stuff like that.

BE: Speaking of AI, there are these AI ads interspersed in the movie, so obviously, the vision of this movie has changed somewhat since 10 years ago when you initially wrote the script, I'm what has changed since then.

TB: I should clarify that it wasn't a 10-year process of trying to do it. After we wrote it with these grandiose ideas, I was like, “Hollywood's gonna take one look at this screenplay and give me all the money! This is the most brilliant thing ever written!” And then I couldn't get it off the ground at that moment, so I put it away, but it was the sort of thing where the world doesn't care at all if you write your novel, or if you release your bedroom rock album, or if you make that movie. But if you really feel that you have something to say, then it's not gonna go away, and it's gonna eat at you.

So finally, after doing Planet Heaven, I had a little confidence and I was like, “Okay, I gotta do this, I gotta go back to that movie.” Because one day, somebody's gonna have a similar idea, and they're gonna have mid-rise apartments in it, and I'm gonna be devastated, you know? You have to make this stuff real, because it also becomes bitterness, you know? And what I like to say is, you gotta do it so the bummer doesn't become bitter. Like, how many haters do you know that didn't make their movie or whatever, and so now they hate all movies, and they just talk shit? That eats away at you.

CC: Coming into the project like 5 years ago or whatever, I think a lot of what we had to do was reimagine this. Even with a dystopian-style film, there's still an element of people projecting the future we wish we would have, and I think In the Glow of Darkness centres around the future that's right the fuck in front of us, that feels vaguely inevitable. I think things like the AI and some of the more modern corporations that wouldn't have been around a decade ago were a natural through-line for this mid-rise apartment version of technology? Like, what's this future that is right there for the taking in front of us, that if we approach this projection with honesty, feels like what it would be, and so these shitty AI-driven ads generated from mining your brain feels about right. It feels like a natural fit to the future we're stuck with, rather than the one we wish we would have.

BE: Yeah, I have this thought every time it seems like Neuromancer is gonna finally get turned into a movie, where it's like, that book is a dystopian vision of the future from the 1980s, but anything that gets made now with that much money behind it, is ironically gonna be a nostalgic look at 80s aesthetics, with the neon and everything.

TB: Yeah, you can't unsee Blade Runner, you know? Blade Runner is such an amazing visualization of that. You can't help but associate cyberpunk with that kind of thing.

BE: What's actually scary would be like, what does Silicon Valley look like now? How do you show people how close you are to the dystopia right now, and I think your movie does a great job of doing just that.

CC: We made a conscious effort to avoid vaporwave aesthetics. Like, musically, no vaporwave was definitely one of the rules. No vaporwave, no hyperpop, let's avoid these tropes that I think are super common in sci-fi and indie filmmaking right now.

TB: The AI is supposed to be AI. Like, it's consciously AI. People get so pissed off when they feel that they've been tricked, and feel like that's not real. Like, “they tried to pass off AI smoke as real smoke!” or something. People get all up in arms, but this is supposed to draw attention to the jankiness and inhumanity of AI. It’s used for comedic, and also, thematic effect. That these advertisements would be generated from your subconscious. There's an interesting through-line between dream imagery and AI-generated imagery, and the way they can't have digits, whether they be fingers or numbers on a clock or something.

CC: When we started making the AI component of the movie, we were doing about as well as we could on home machines, but by the end, it's like, oh, we could make this more convincing. The current state of AI has improved, but we had to continuously try to walk the shittier line. Everything's trying to look better, but San Zokyo’s AI is stuck here. So making sure that, even though in our reality the technology improved, we committed to the bit of, like, this is where it's at here.

BE: Yeah, I like that it’s a capsule moment, because AI is only that shitty for a few months, and then it's just gonna get better from there.

TB: Absolutely. Next year it will be indistinguishable between what's real and whatever, so at least this one is trying to draw attention to it. It also fits, because San Zokyo is a 1080p world, you know? They don't have 4K.

BE: When you talked to me about this movie before, you called it your “cyberpunk epic,” but it's still made with a very DIY spirit. So for both of you, how did this version of the movie get off the ground, and who were your collaborators that helped you put it together?

TB: Well, in revisiting the old script, it was taking things away and thinking logistically on how to pull this off. Like, “Okay, let me combine these characters, get rid of some locations.” There's still, like, 40 locations. My first script had the editing written into it, in terms of, like, split screen here, and then dissolve to this, and then, you know, wing-wong, boom bam. Because to me, I'm like, I want everyone to see the vision, you know? And of course my freak friends could be like, “Wow, that's amazing!” But that stuff is distracting for an actor, or a producer, someone who's coming at it from, like, “What is the story of the movie?” So I was like, oh, let me get rid of all that and just have the emotional story and character stuff, which is the only way you could understand the thing, because it jumps around so much, and you have to make it easier for the reader and not try to wow them with all your visionary shit.

CC: As far as the collaborator part, Tucker and I are willing to take on anything, so some little bits of collaboration, plus our willingness to solve the problem was good. I would say one of the biggest folks who helped was Adrian Anderson [director of Pomp & Circumstance]. He was a great producer, because he was able to rally people around the cause and get them excited. He was great at hyping up Tuck's vision and hyping up the project and getting people involved. The head camera person worked on trade, and I think that was huge. Like, obviously, it's lo-fi aesthetics, but we do what we can to have a lot of captivating shots and try to make it look as good as we can within the context. And I think, Tuck, that freed you up to play director, right? Where in the past films, not having someone you trusted behind the camera meant that it was always you, which I know you love, and I know you like your moves and everything, but having somebody else to man the camera so Tuck could focus on creating the vibe of both the set and the direction, I think, was hugely important. His name is Neal Wynne [director of The Trick].

TB: Chris and I's San Francisco buddy, David Borengasser, was also an active camera guy, if Neal couldn't make it. On a great day, we'd have both of them so we could really cover stuff. It was definitely useful to have someone to get the “good” shot, so that I could still have my camera and do weird zooms and wobbles and stuff.

I do feel like even though this is my fifth feature, it's the first one I've actually directed, in terms of being able to communicate what was happening in the scene. I feel like before I would always be like, “Oh, just do this, and I'm gonna film.” Just watching people squirm and figure it out for themselves while I wobbled the camera around. But for this time, I felt like, because it is so crazy, and a lot of the language is stylized and full of alliteration and cyber jargon, that I had to set the stakes for people and say, like, why you're saying this, and come up with actual comfortable ways of saying these things. So yeah, after shooting things, I would be like, “Wow, I feel like I'm finally a director and able to communicate my vision!” But then I go in and I watch the footage and I'm still mumbling and incoherent, so I don't know, I would love to hear what the actors thought.

CC: Tucker's brother, Lucas Bennett, has been involved heavily. Li Ming Hu, who plays Bunny, being able to do the singing and just being game, like, “Fuck it, I'll do it!” I think, goes a long way, too.

TB: I would also say that PeerSpace is something that really made it possible. Pretty much all the locations, except for a few donations, were PeerSpace, which is essentially an Airbnb for sets or venues, spaces, I just go on the app and be like, “oh, I want a recording studio! I want a fake strip club! I need a 50s diner!” For many of them, you don't need production insurance, and a bunch of them have lights built in. So sometimes you might have to bring your own lights and put them on the grid or whatever, but a lot of the ones I did had lights already there, so it's really me and two other people, let's rent this thing for two hours, go and film this conversation on a rooftop or something.

CC: They're not meant for cinema. They're meant for Instagram shoots and stuff, so they wouldn't probably hold up under a 4K lens, but for what we're doing, it fits. This cookie-cutter, generic look and feel.

TB: They're essentially made out of cardboard, but if your movie takes place in cardboard world, they make sense. Since shooting there, I see them all the time on Instagram or YouTube. Little DIY rap videos that are shot in the same little spaces and stuff. It’s awesome. I want it to be recognizable locations, because this is Standard World. So it's like, that's what a restaurant is now. Because there's no art director or production designer or anything. It's Chris and I and some friends made our props. So it’s like we'll print the coasters, and bring them into this set, and that's our art direction. Having all these ready-made things, which, again, aren't appropriate for a “real” movie, but for this movie, it makes sense. That was a lifesaver, and that's largely where the budget went, was to renting these sets for a couple hours at a time. And also having food for the first time, going out to dinner and having snacks on set. We've only ever ran on favors until now, which we still cashed in like a gazillion dollars worth of favors for this, too, but at least we had a bit of food.

BE: How would you compare the experience of working on this to a more professional film? You were editor of The Code, for example. I don't know if you were on set for that film, but were there any distinctive differences that you can point to?

TB: I was on set for The Code. There were way more people, there were five producers and wardrobe people and stuff like that. Because of the unconventional quality of that, shot using GoPros and hidden cameras and all this stuff, it definitely did not feel like showing up to a studio lot and filming.

But this feels like it was a million dollar movie! We really did attempt to do Total Recall, you know? And this is what came out. It's conceived as this huge Philip K. Dick extravaganza, but we did it in the way that we knew how, in a way that made sense. It's this style of incorporating any limitations into the aesthetic and humor of the movie. Just having a little bit of money made me feel like I was doing a multi-million dollar movie. Just to be on these sets and to have money for some props and stuff like that, and to get a lot of people together, and to have a bunch of real story threads keeping it all together. It definitely felt like a huge level-up in my work.

BE: If you go back and compare this to Why Are You Weird?, for example, this is definitely much more distinctive in its style. It carries on from at least Planet Heaven in terms of being full of bright colours and characters talking in this technobabble-y kind of way. When did your style start to veer in that direction and can you pinpoint any reason why it went that way?

TB: I think naturally, you pick up new tricks as you get older and want to do bigger things. During the time where I lost my confidence and dropped out from trying to make features, I largely did video diaries and music videos and little short-form things. Chris and I are both compulsive tinkerers. We're going to be doodling away, whether there's a project or not, because it feels good. That's where we find our joy, is messing with material, making sounds, making art, making images and stuff. So I refined this style from making my video diaries and YouTube videos. When I came back to doing stuff, it seemed natural that I would apply this language.

I would say that Chris and I are both true disciples of our teacher [and legendary underground filmmaker] George Kuchar, and working on his class movies is the best editing lesson you could ever have, because you're privy to seeing this crazy footage being shot. It's total chaos, and then you come back the next week, and he's shown you what he's done with it, and you're like, wow, that is the only way you could have made sense of that footage, but also the coolest possible way you could have put it together. That is such an amazing lesson in how to construct your thing through the editing, through incorporating weird little models, or weird, bizarre transitions and stuff. So, yeah, it seemed appropriate for this new kind of sci-fi movie.

Chris and I wanted this to be in conversation with what we call the “hybrid movies” of 15 years ago. Like these movies from 2009 and 2010. Scott Pilgrim, Gamer, Speed Racer. There was really something happening there, and then it stopped. Maybe it became video games or something. That goes with our nostalgic future thing, too. We're looking back to that 15-year-old movie language and trying to do something like that, but first and foremost, it's stuff that makes sense. What is gonna crack me up when I'm putting it together? I love painting with things and finding out what's the funniest way I can put this scene together while getting to the point of it, but also salvaging the footage that I got. It's like, okay, this shot doesn't really hold up on its own, but what if I crammed it together with five other shots and made a grid out of it? Like, how can you get the most out of the very DIY footage that you got. A lot of times your fuck-ups as a director makes you have to do some creative shit as an editor.

BE: Chris, how did you get involved in this film and what direction did you take in terms of making the music for it?

CC: Tuck and I have worked together on a number of films. I did a lot of the music for Planet Heaven, and I've been a cast member in many of his past films, we've made some shorts in the past, and we played in a band together, which is to say there's a long-standing artistic, collaborative relationship. Largely the way I work with Tuck is he sends me inspiration, I usually grab exactly the wrong thing from it. He's like, “Oh, something like this!” And then I hear some element of that song that had nothing to do with what he liked about it, but I send back something inspired by it anyway, and he's a great collaborator, so he's usually like “Not what I was thinking, but fucking awesome,” or “The melancholy part is what I was attracted to.”

I tried to set some rules to make it distinct and unique. I didn't want it to be vaporwave. There are hints of hyperpop, because I work on a computer, but there's certain nuances of hyperpop, including the sample-based stuff that I made sure to leave out. First, we set the San Zokyo vibe, which is one part Mark Mothersbaugh Rugrats, one part Tetsuo the Iron Man. You weave it all together to figure out what the San Zokyo vibe is. The later stuff is more classical-sounding things, the more conventionally “cinematic” sounds and whatnot that get layered in to make it feel like a movie. But we like to have a lot of the music done prior to the shooting, so that Tucker can vibe on it, listen in his free time, start to inhabit the world of San Zokyo and then hopefully play it on set, get people in the mood.

TB: Yeah, I need it to start seeing it in my head. I like having it on when I'm making a call sheet or, like doing a script revision, or working in that world. It's like, “Okay, let me turn on the playlist so I can get my mind into that zone.”

BE: So once this movie premieres, what are your future plans for it? You got anything else lined up?

TB: I need my friends in every city to start film festivals! I'm hoping to have one screening down, and hopefully some good feedback from it will help someone else take the risk, because it's not something that established institutions are quick to endorse because it's probably not what your preconception of what a film festival movie is. For a lot of people, it breaks their brain. Like, wait, is this video art, or a YouTube video, or a movie? Because you know immediately that it looks different, and it looks fucked up.

My analogy I've been using is that we made this new flavor of soda, where we went to the machine and we got a little bit of everything, and then we sprinkled coffee, and then energy drink, and then LSD and all this stuff. So, yeah, freaks are gonna be like, “Wow, this is amazing!” But you can't expect everyone on Earth to take a sip of this and think it's good and want to drink the rest, you know? But hopefully if you are an adventurous soda drinker, you'll be like, “Okay, this is different, I'll drink the rest of this and see where this goes!”

We here at BLEEDING EDGE are elated to open up the second annual BE FEST’s film screenings with the Toronto premiere of A GRAND MOCKERY. Showing our first-ever film from Australia would be a big enough deal, but it’s truly exciting to highlight such a genuinely strange film, both in terms of its tone and form. Wowing audiences both in its homeland and at festivals like Fantasia, Aussie maverick filmmakers Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs collaborated on directing for the first time to make something as deeply personal as it is experimental. The aforementioned Dixon stars as Josie, a Brisbane cinema employee coasting his way through a dull life of work, hard drinking, and his small social circle. Gradually, the mundanity of his existence begins to be punctured by a Kafka-esque transformation, captured in equally grotesque and hilarious ways via gorgeous 8mm photography.

BLEEDING EDGE was lucky enough to chat with Dixon over Zoom (despite the 14-hour time-zone difference between Toronto and Brisbane, it should be said).

Bleeding Edge: Can you talk about how you and Adam C. Briggs met and became a filmmaking duo?

Sam Dixon: Adam and I had known each other for a long time. We were aware of each other's work. Brisbane is a relatively small town. We've both been making films since we were kids. We were aware of each other and liked each other's work and slowly became friends, but we weren't [collaborators]. We were just acquaintances with mutual respect for one another. Then I moved away from Brisbane for a number of years. I lived in Melbourne and Sydney. And Adam continued to work with people whom I also worked with from Queensland. Then I moved back to Brisbane a number of years ago, which led to Adam and me becoming closer, especially when he had just finished Paris Funeral, his first feature, and he was a little bit cooked from that experience. I had just made a short film with Screen Queensland, and I was feeling a little bit cooked after that.

We both felt like we still wanted to do something free from the shackles that we felt. We wanted to make something together. There were a lot of things happening in Brisbane at the time that informed the ideas behind the film. We didn't initially set out to even make a film together. We just started writing together. The cemetery postal system that's in the film is based on something that we did do when we first started writing the film. Neither of us sort of set out to write, direct, and produce with someone else, but just all happened very organically, and it felt like the right way to do it. There were pretty much no disagreements amongst us, even during the creation of it. It was just one of those instances where the film felt like it made itself.

BE: You mentioned the cemetery postal system, but besides that, what were the general origins of this project: the feelings, the settings, the inspirations, etc.?

SD: Well, I was genuinely working at a cinema, at the cinema that we shot in as well. And I lived directly next to a cemetery. I was going through a weird time of readjustment when I moved back to Brisbane initially. And this was around the time that Adam and I were wanting to make something together. It was informed by stuff that I was going through at the time, but then very much exaggerated to the degree of insanity that it reaches in the film. I also think we really wanted to represent Brisbane as a character in and of itself. And I haven't really seen Brisbane represented the way that we have in A Grand Mockery, which has a slightly hallucinatory quality to it, the city. We wanted to try and capture that quality in the film, which is a lot of the reasoning behind the use of the Super 8 mm as well. We thought it would give it a dreamlike quality.

BE: You mentioned the movie theater job. I feel like one of the things that's really great about the film is how it's very honest about the deadening nature of those working-class jobs. So definitely that cinema worker position you had was influential in the film, but are there even other past jobs you'd had in your life that influenced the film? Were you and Adam both deliberately conjuring the feeling of being stuck in this sort of deadening cycle?

SD: Yeah, for sure. Every day is the same as the last; it's like Groundhog Day. I've worked in an infinite number of jobs like that. That's very much a thing that I think everybody can identify with, that crippling monotony of day-to-day working-class life. I worked at bottle shops for many years; it was the same thing, customer service [too]. I think all of that feeds into what ends up coming through in your work. But yes, I feel like a lot of people have identified with that particular aspect of the film, especially cinema employees have been like yeah, that's what it feels like to work at one.

BE: You also mentioned your depiction of Brisbane. Something interesting I noticed from browsing the Letterboxd reviews, and I'm guessing a lot of these were from the film's initial Australian premiere last year, but a lot of them were saying this film really accurately portrays the city, and even Australia in general, in a way that hasn't been seen on screen before. When I think of Australian films I've seen, even pessimistic genre films, I feel like it's always still sunny onscreen. Instantly, this film sets itself apart with just how dark it looks throughout. So, what were the specific haunted qualities of Brisbane that both you and Adam wanted to portray?

SD: A lot of people have spoken about the sounds and the sound design. The Super 8 mm is something that people jump to talk about first for obvious reasons, because it is a unique way to shoot a feature film. But we put a lot of effort into that sound design. I feel like the Super 8 gives it a kind of haunted visual quality, but I feel like our sound design really brought that home. All the sounds that you hear in the film are very quintessentially Brisbane sounds. Like the particular crow sounds, the particular bird sounds. We have a possum here that sounds like a deranged cat. You don't hear those sounds in other cities, at least. And I've been around. They're uniquely Brisbane sounds. We built a soundscape around Brisbane, and a lot of people who have spoken to us about the film feel like that's one of the things that really reinforces that quality of ringing true of Brisbane. We put a lot of effort into that sound design.

BE: That's an interesting thing, because I feel like when people talk about movies depicting people going mad in New York, like say Abel Ferrera’s The Driller Killer, it's about the sounds of New York, of urban living in general, driving people crazy; just the people on the street, construction, cars, etc. But you saying it’s nature that's its own soundscape, that's a really unique thing that sets the film apart in terms of depicting a different kind of maddening urban center.

You've brought up 8mm, and I'm sure people are asking you a ton of questions about why you two used it. But what are the biggest challenges of shooting on 8mm? And were like people on the film, like producers, or financiers, discouraging you from using it?

SD: No one was discouraging us because there was no one above us in the making of it. We very much called all the shots, and we decided that we wanted to do that from very early on. And if anything, people were incredibly supportive of that decision because what kind of crazy person makes a whole feature film on Super 8? People were like, that sounds cool. Our cinematographer signed himself up purely because we were like, we want to make this feature film on Super 8. I think that was an attractive element that brought a lot of people and intrigue to the project. But the Super 8 itself did bring many challenges. We did our test shoots and all of that in the lead-up, and we felt like we had a good grasp on it. Also, Adam and I, just as a side note, have primarily made films on 16mm, each of us separately. So we're both very familiar with working with film. Anyway, another positive to Super 8 was that we thought it would be cheaper than shooting on 16mm, but it was not. It was no cheaper in the end. The cartridges last about two and a half minutes, so we couldn't do a take longer than two and a half minutes. And the cameras emit an incredibly loud whirring sound as soon as you roll it. So a lot of the sound of the film was bugging when we were recording location sound. So that took a lot of post-sound trickery to get that to sit well, and a lot of it's still in there. It just washes over you after a while.

The Super 8 cameras themselves were all like curmudgeonly individuals that had their own strange quirks. We went through three different cameras while we were shooting. We gave them all names. It was Schneider, Schwartz, and Schwaartz. Each of them had their own strange faults and defects, and one would need another. We needed one camera to prime the film for another camera. All kinds of eccentricities came with it; we had to be adaptable, essentially. Sometimes the cameras would just stop working whilst we were shooting a scene, and we'd have to fuck around with it for however long and figure something new out to do, and then it would burst back into life almost as though it was like dictating the scene to us in some way.

BE: What you said about the sound from 8mm is interesting, that it made it hard to shoot scenes, because I feel like that was like the line with IMAX cameras, that it was impossible to shoot dialogue scenes with them because they're so loud. I like that the two extremes, 8mm and IMAX film, both have the same problem at the end of the day.

SD: Exactly, but we did very little ADR, somehow. There's a tiny bit of ADR in the film, but somehow we got away with it. Most of it is the location sound. We also recorded, because we wanted the whole film to have a kind of analogue feel to it, a lot of the sound on cassette tape whilst we were shooting as well. Some of that cassette tape sound is what's used in the film. It's melded together in a way that's supposed to wash over you in the same way that the film itself begins to disintegrate.

BE: In terms of you and Adam's kind of working dynamic on set, being that you're the star of the film, how did that affect the directing dynamic?

SD: This was the first time either of us had co-directed something, and we fell into it quite easily. We were both just on the same page the whole time with what we wanted from the scenes. There was very little debate or disagreement amongst us as we were going. It was a very free-flowing experience. When it came to myself performing and directing, I would have Adam to defer to on where we were going with the scene. I've done a fair bit of acting, but it's not my [pursuit] in life. But I love acting, and this is the first time I've been the lead of anything, so I don't think I could have directed myself as the lead in a whole film, so it was good for Adam and me to be doing it together in that sense, where we could bounce off each other. But also, I've spoken to other actors/directors, and I feel like you just have a feeling when you've got it or not. And we couldn't fuck around much because we had very little money and very little film [to shoot on]. So a lot of the film we did barely more than a couple of takes of anything. And then a lot of it is just one take of stuff that was improvised. So it was a very unique experience. We made the film with people that we knew and friends; it was a very community-oriented creation. And it was easy for everyone to fall into the atmosphere as we were going along. So it all came quite organically.

BE: I mentioned earlier browsing Letterbox reviews, and something I've noticed as a running theme in them is people pointing out that there've been really interesting, rowdy Q&As for this film. Just out of curiosity, what have been some of these fun Q&A experiences you've had?

SD: I don't know why our Q&As keep ending up being so bizarre, but we've had some surreal ones. I guess it’s because it's a film that can create interesting discussions. I don't really know how to answer that yet. We've definitely had some rowdy Q&As. We had some late sessions in Montreal, and I feel like everybody's had a few drinks under their belt and then goes and watches a film like that, and they have things to say in a fun way. But we like to have fun with the Q&As, and I'd like to think we don't take ourselves too seriously. We like to have a laugh up there.

A GRAND MOCKERY will have its Toronto premiere at The Paradise on Friday, August 22nd at 6:45 PM. You can grab individual tickets or as part of the BE FEST packages.

On August 22. Reveries: The Mind Prison will have its Toronto premiere as part of BE Fest 2 at the Paradise Theatre. Tickets available here!

On August 12, Bleeding Edge is screening Reveries and Reveries: Going Deeper at 7pm in collaboration with H.E.A.D., a new DIY space located at 932 College St. (accessible from the rear). PWYC.

In 2018, comedians Anthony Oberbeck (Dad & Step-Dad) and Matt Barats (Cash Cow) teamed up with filmmaker Graham Mason (Inspector Ike) to make a 46-minute “comedy art film” called Reveries. Inspired by the surreal cult comedy of Chris Morris and the monologues of Joe Frank, Reveries largely consisted of the two comedians delivering loose, joke-heavy riffs over an ambient soundscape and deceptively amateurish camcorder video montages (shot by Barats and edited by Oberbeck). Mason’s role was to establish the two main “characters” (always wearing sunglasses, often smoking cigarettes, around 40-years-old) in a handful of interstitial scenes.

In 2020, the team returned with Reveries: Going Deeper, slightly more ambitious at 60 minutes, with a wraparound story about the two protagonists living in an underground, post-apocalyptic bunker (fitting, for a movie made during the COVID pandemic), but still leaning heavily on riffs and abstract visual montage.

The team has returned once again with Reveries: The Mind Prison, the most ambitious entry in the series, which brings the characters to a desert setting, but still leaves room for the surreal, abstract “tone poem” qualities of the earlier films.

Bleeding Edge is excited to bring Reveries: The Mind Palace to Toronto for the first time. We chatted with the filmmakers about the evolution of the Reveries series and how best to describe the films to the uninitiated.

Bleeding Edge: I've struggled to find ways to describe these movies to people when they ask what it is. When you read descriptions on festival websites, there's a lot of, “It's an ayahuasca trip narrated by Stephen Wright!” That kind of thing. So I'm wondering, do you guys have an elevator pitch or a short way that you would describe the movie to other people?

Anthony Oberbeck: We landed on “comedy art film.”

Matt Barats: We never really found a clear way, because they're all a little different. We jokingly referred to it as a tone poem, because after we made the first one, someone was like, “Hey, nice tone poem,” and we ran with that for a long time.

GM: When we made the first one, a lot of things were being described as tone poems, Spring Breakers was like, “Harmony Korine’s latest tone poem is out.”

BE: I have been saying it's just two guys and sunglasses vibing and I feel that it gets the feel of it across a bit more. Have you seen any more of these “it's X meets X!” descriptions out there?

AO: Yeah, there's a Letterboxd one that I think is Guy Maddin and… Stephen Wright, maybe? I think that would hit especially hard in Canada.

MB: It's like a Atom Egoyan meets Geddy Lee.

AO: It's like Mike Myers…

MB: No, maybe Norm, maybe Norm.

AO: It’s very Kids in the Hall-esque, to be honest.

GM: We could talk about the actual art influences too, like Chris Morris, Blue Jam radio and the early Aki Kaurismäki movies like Leningrad Cowboys, that kind of deadpan art movie.

AO: Matt was really into Joe Frank and Ken Nordine and I was really into Chris Morris, the UK comedian, and his late night radio show Blue Jam. Me and Matt were coincidentally walking home from a show one night and, independently, each had been wanting to do something in that vein. So we're like, let's do it together. We had our friend Tim Joyce make us some music, and we did a 3 minute track of going back and forth on weird lines.

We didn't know how to put it out. Matt had sent me some Joe Frank YouTube videos where it was random video art looking footage, basically as a way to have it on YouTube. So we were like we should shoot some random footage of us looking cool and artistic, and make it screen saver-y, just as a way that we can put this audio track on YouTube.

BE: I noticed there was an audio version of the first Reveries available on one of your websites, so I guess making it more cinematic was something that developed over time.

MB: Yeah, that really started it. We were like, “Oh, it's gonna be this audio thing.” And then maybe we'll have this visual element.” I think the first document of ideas I had for it was labeled “word jazz ideas” and it was from 2015. “Word jazz” was Ken Nordine’s thing.

We were both writing things that we didn't really know where it would go as early as a full decade ago, basically. When we started shooting I had this little camcorder that I still use. I got it probably in 2013 or 2014. I went to film school, but then I did comedy, and it felt like a fun reemergence of what it feels like when people that are at the quality-level of really self-serious film school students who really want to make something. We were trying to get what looks badass to us like: They're at a diner! There's an hourglass! There's a clock in the gutter!

AO: All the video montages I edit and I think it's been important to the aesthetic that it's me that does it because I don't know how to use Premiere very well. I need to capture the essence of a 40-year-old man who thinks he's very artistic, but barely understands the technology he's using.

BE: I wanted to ask about the the division of labour, because I saw that Matt, you shoot the stuff with the camcorder. Anthony, you edit it. So what is the role of director on a movie like this? And what are your roles as the writers and performers?

GM: Well, I do the interstitial, more cinematic stuff. And then I also have a role in overall pacing or structure. More so in the later ones. That's directed by me and edited by me, and then the camcorder jam stuff is edited by Anthony and shot by both Matt and Anthony, but I'd say mostly Matt.

AO: Matt has the patience to always be taking a camcorder everywhere and constantly be getting shots. As soon as we finish every Reveries movie, I don't want to think about Reveries again. It takes a year to be like, maybe we'll do another. And I feel like Matt, the second it's done, he’s gotta start getting footage for the next one.

MB: I'm not necessarily getting footage of me in the outfit in the world, but it is like, hey, if I'm going somewhere interesting, I might as well shoot some stuff. As far as the division of labour goes, Anthony and I write all the jokes for those montage sections, basically. When we originally came to Graham, we had this idea for these interstitials and other things, and then it got carried away and became this elevated thing where we discovered that it's like we have these two separate things going on where our camcorder stuff looks like a choice because of it.

AO: The first one, I had worked with Graham, and we wanted to bring him on. And we had the idea that instead of presenting it as Matt and Anthony doing jokes over music, what if there were characters that are saying this? And we made this thing where it introduces you to these particular guys who are having these thoughts. Then Graham came in, and it was all Graham that had the idea to shoot it in his studio, like all rear projection. We bonded over Aki Kaurismäki a lot. I think we we all share a similar aesthetic. But the idea of very simply painting a scene, like me at my desk, and then lighting it and holding Venetian blinds in front of the light to make it seem like I'm in an office. That's a very Graham aesthetic, to be like, what are two or three little elements that give you the whole story?

GM: I used to have this office studio space that I shared with ten people in a really big room and you could take over the whole room for a weekend. I shot so much stuff there, and it was really rare to be able to do that in New York. I think it's more normal in other cities, even LA, to have that amount of space. But it actually created a whole creative era for me of being able to have more designed spaces to film in. I don't have it anymore, which is kind of sad.

The first one was shot in my studio space basically with colored backdrops and projected backdrops. And then the second one we shot in a single car garage. For the third one we flipped it and shot in these ultra expansive desert locations, which couldn't be more different. It forced us out of our comfort zone

AO: It's a funny arc, I just realized, for Graham to go from shooting in his own studio space in the most controlled environment possible to being like “We're gonna take you out to the middle of the desert and see what happens!”

BE: You touched on using Premiere and the abstract visual stuff and you also mentioned that it was supposed to be the kind of thing you might see from a guy who doesn't really know what he's doing, and that that might be reflective of your skill level. But I'm curious how you come up with those patterns.

AO: Whatever the most simple tools are, if you go to the effects dropdown, and you just go for the most simple ones, but use them more than anyone has ever used them, to a degree where it feels like I must be an idiot for just dragging the same effect onto the same clip 90 times. It's the kind of stuff you would be taught out of if you were trained to be a editor.

MB: I feel like in the second one it reaches critical mass or something. We had a little more time to work on those because of COVID.

AO: I used to smoke a lot of weed when I did it. The third one, I quit smoking weed. So I think Going Deeper was the peak of that.

BE: It makes me think of when you're a teenager and you're playing around with iMovie, and you're just using whatever effects that they have out of the box as much as possible.

GM: Yeah, trying to channel that energy in every way on this project.

MB: I always think of it as, like, hey, we may not have other resources at our disposal, but we do have our own time to fully dig into something to a degree that no one has done. “How did you do that?” Well, we just spent way too much time on this thing.

AO: The way that I crossfade from one clip to another one is I line them up, and then on the one clip on the opacity, I do a marker where it's like, okay, this is a hundred percent. And then at the end of the clip, I manually change it to 0%, and then on the other clip, I manually change it from 0% to 100%. And I have to take time lining up the changes. And then a year into doing that, I realize there's a crossfade thing that you can drag onto the timeline.

BE: I had never heard of these movies until the most recent one was recommended to us, and I loved it. I'm wondering how the first two movies were released and what was the reception to them at the time.

MB: Beloved!

AO: The first one is a 45 minute, very abstract comedy art film. I think we submitted to Sundance and got rejected, then gave up.

GM: Did we really submit it to Sundance?

MB: We didn't, really. We just put it on the Internet the day it was done.

BE: Festivals are not really clamoring for those 46 minute comedy art movies, unfortunately.

MB: We came up in the comedy scene, and that wasn't really the culture at the time. Everyone was making videos and short videos were the thing. So part of what was interesting to us was that a 46 minute visual album or comedy thing seemed so shocking. No one was doing this at the time in our community. I feel like, retroactively, we've embraced it more as a film. But it wasn't like, “Oh, we got this thing! Of course we're gonna do all these screenings with it.” It was like, no, we’re gonna put it on the Internet and then we just decided to make another one later. And that one was during COVID, so we did virtual screenings with Spectacle and some other places. It was just like the Internet was the only place at the time. So I feel like with this new one, we're like, okay, we have to do ourselves a favor. And it's at a length that makes sense to show it.

BE: You already touched on this with regard to the more ambitious filming locations in the third film, but how would you say that the movies have evolved since the first one?

AO: The first one we really did not know what we were making at all, other than that there's gonna be these video segments where it's me and Matt's voiceover. We knew there'd be an intro part, and then the way I remember piecing it together is we would think of other stuff we could do in Graham's studio. And kinda on the fly, I remember, in the middle of the process, realizing it could be pieced together in a coherent arc.

MB: I think Graham took a crucial thing that we thought was gonna come later and he's like, “well, what if we put the intro thing here?” And then what we thought was gonna be the intro a little later, and then and we're like, “Oh, this has a narrative, right?”

AO: But yeah, the first one, we were making it as we go. Also, we thought it would be 20 to 30 minutes. We were kind of shocked to realize we've got this 45 minute mid-length movie. It had turned into something way cooler and more complex than we thought.

All of them in general, but especially the first one, are very three-headed collaborations. We definitely each bring something to the table and have specific roles. Like, the three of us are the creative heads, and we're making something that couldn't come from any of us individually. It's the only thing I've made where I'm like, this couldn't have came from somewhere else. It's a weird ritual of the 3 of us circling up and conjuring something in the middle of us. Each of them we've finished and been like “How did we make this? How did it turn into this? What is it even?”

MB: After we made the first one, it's like, okay, how can we recapture this? We still want to feel like we can get lost. We don't know exactly what we're making, but we do have the first one now as a roadmap. In the second one we wanted to introduce a little more of a narrative, but didn't want to tip the scale too hard. And then in the third one, we were like, okay, what are the elements of the first two that we liked? And how can we make it feel like it's a true trilogy? We can pay homage back to elements of the first two. I do think we did that well, in a way where I think the second one is a little more tight, narratively, and the third one has stuff like that, but also feels like it goes back to this art installation, anything-can-happen vibe.

The other difference is that it was less of a bit to us. The characters we were playing, we matured into them or something. We became more of the people that we were trying to satirize.

AO: We gave ourselves permission to be like, what if we just get in the headspace of these guys. The first one is cool and weird, but I feel like it leans toward extended sketch comedy about weird artist guys… that undersells it, but it’s maybe leaning more in that direction. And the third one felt more like, what if we just were these guys making a movie? Maybe.

BE: So The Mind Prison has played at a few festivals, and it's premiered at a few places. But I'm curious how the rollout has been so far, and what the future plans are for it.

GM: Yeah, it's been good. It's such a weird ask, even to write a little capsule description at a film festival, but I feel like it's worked in our favor and people have come out for it. We're touring it around and we'll put it out digitally. And then… have we announced that it's gonna be a Blu-ray yet? Or is that is that a secret?

AO: I think we can say, but not the date.

GM: It will eventually come out on. There's gonna be a Blu-ray of the whole trilogy.

AO: Later this year.

MB: Earlier this year this organization, Hollywood Entertainment in Los Angeles, knew that we were coming out with the new one and asked if they could show the first two so in 2025 of February we got to do a premiere of the first two Reveries, which had never been shown like that before, and the reception was so great for that.

AO: An exciting thing for me about how it's being received is that, in this one, we're like, what if it veers away from comedy? The first two were going for laughs front to back. And this one we were like, what if it evolves into a more thoughtful thing? And there's been a lot of comments from people that are like “It gets weirdly moving at the end.”

AO: It starts out as just back to back laughs, and then catches you by surprise that it's a little something else.

BE: Cool. That's all the questions I have. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention or or plug before I let you guys go?

MB: Just want to mention that Reveries: The Mind Prison will be at the Music Box in Chicago on September 12th!

The Show About the Show began with a simple, but alluring, premise. Each episode of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi’s low budget television show would be about the making of the previous episode. In the hands of a different filmmaker, The Show could have easily been a charming, but ultimately unremarkable, bit of programming for the small community-focused television channel that commissioned it. Instead, Zahedi took the premise to its logical conclusion with his unrelentingly honest filmmaking style, opening fissures in his personal relationships and putting strain on his marriage in the pursuit of creating something meaningful.

In Season 2, Zahedi dropped the initial premise of The Show to focus on the dissolution of his marriage after the events of the first season. He gets involved with a younger woman, Ashley, who admires his work, while his wife, Mandy, starts a sexual relationship with a mutual friend. At a certain point, both Mandy and Ashley, who had been playing themselves, quit The Show, to be replaced by other actors.

In the years since the second season, which aired way back in 2019, The Show was dropped by BRIC and Mandy mounted various legal challenges to prevent its further release in the midst of an ugly divorce. Regardless, Zahedi forged ahead with a somewhat confusingly labelled “Season 4,” which documented his efforts to crowdfund money to complete Season 3, about the making of the second season and the ultimate breakdown of both his marriage to Mandy and the relationship he developed with Ashley.

Finally, nearly 10 years after the series debuted, Season 3 of The Show About the Show has arrived, and Bleeding Edge is excited to premiere it in Toronto on July 16 at the Paradise Theatre. If anything, the new season is even more brutally honest than previous seasons. More time is given to candid footage of Caveh and Mandy’s marital disputes captured during the filming of Season 2, while Ashley is given an episode to provide her side of her relationship with Zahedi, allowing the audience to see a side of him that doesn’t come out during his trademark camera addresses.

We talked to Zahedi about this new season, whether he has any doubts about the unflinching, radical honesty at the heart of it, and how things currently stand between him and the women at the heart of The Show.

Bleeding Edge: So it’s been a while since the last season of the show, and a lot has changed in your life since. Where does Mandy stand on The Show at this point?

CZ: She refuses to make any kind of deal or negotiate anything. I've offered her the house, and like all the money from The Show, and she refuses to take it. And she's quite broke so I think she likes the idea of having the power to sue me at any time. But I also don't know that she has the capacity to keep actually trying to sue me financially. So it's like a hovering sword of Damocles over the whole thing at all times. She hasn't done anything I'm aware of to try to block Season 3 yet.

BE: In the episode “The Show According to Ashley,” Ashley asks something like, “Why do you care more about The Show than your wife and your kids?” That might be a bit extreme, but I do think that's a response a lot of viewers have to the series. Why are you willing to risk these relationships on behalf of completing this project?

CZ: I think there are two parts to that. One is how much I value the project, and the other is how little I value the relationship, I guess? My feeling is, with the marriage, a lot of people say, “Oh, you destroyed your marriage!” And I always say my marriage was already not doing well. It was going to end, anyway. [The Show] just sped it up. I think that honesty, but also the pressure of a camera, has a similar function. It tends to make things that would happen anyway, happen sooner. So, to me, it's not like I did something that was avoidable. I just got to where I was going faster, which I think was a good thing, really. My marriage had lots of fault lines already.

It’s not clear in The Show, because people always read it as like, “Oh, I did this.” But in that scene I say, “Okay, fine. I'll stop putting you in The Show.” And then she still starts seeing somebody else, and then we end up breaking up anyway. So in reality I didn't make that choice. I actually made the other choice. It was either too late, or that wasn't the issue.

BE: But beyond the breakup. There's the conflict about whether or not your kids are going to appear in The Show, and I guess you don't put the kids in The Show after that, but it feels like you could make this conflict go away by just giving up The Show at some point.

CZ: Yes, I could, but it's my life's work. I had been making films about my life before I met my wife and she was in every single one of them for 20 years. I've been going through all my old archives for this project I'm doing. I'm doing a channel and I'm putting all my work on as a loop. You can go to it and see whatever it is, and it's all in chronological order. But I've been finding little things to put in that I've never released, and I'm shocked by the number of things that my wife agreed to be part of for years and years and years. Her stopping was the weird thing, not her being involved. That was just what we've done since I met her.

Her narrative is like, “I don't want to do it!” But she wanted to do it until a certain point, and then when she wanted to stop, she stopped. It’s not like she was forced into anything, ever. It would be like if there was somebody and their whole thing is they paint flowers, and then someone says you can no longer paint flowers because I don't like it. I guess they could start painting something else, but it's weird to make films about my life and not to include the conflicts I'm having with my ex and things around my kids. It just seems to me like it’s beyond castration. It would completely defang my work.

BE: There is definitely some integrity to your devotion to this project, especially given that you've never received serious financial backing, and this current season was crowdfunded. How often do you reflect on the absurdity of devoting so much of your life to this show?

CZ: Never. It doesn't seem absurd to me. What else am I going to do? Make films about gangsters? That would be absurd!

BE: I’d love to see a Caveh gangster movie!

CZ: I believe that what I'm doing is important beyond its commercial viability and even beyond my lifetime, and it's not done. It's an ongoing thing that ends when I die. So to me, to abort my life's work because one person has decided that she doesn't like it… to me, would be absurd, and would be a weird kind of codependence or something.

BE: So this season includes a lot more behind the scenes, candid footage of you and Mandy than the previous seasons, and it's quite raw and emotional. It struck me that it sometimes feels like there's a discrepancy between the version of yourself that you present in your camera addresses, which is smiling and amiable, and the version behind the camera, which, in the fragments that we see, can be quite angry. And there's a lot of yelling involved. So is that something you consciously wanted to bring out more in this season?

CZ: I wasn't trying to do anything, I just had good footage of me being very upset, and it was spellbinding and transgressive and complicated. I don't think I'm that way very often. We were breaking up, and things were very dark and very ugly in that period. But I also think it's important to document every aspect of the self that doesn't get documented much by anybody, and so I was really happy to have it. I always try to make myself look as bad as possible with whatever footage I have. I was just fortunate to have had those moments captured on camera. My ex had similar moments, if not worse ones, but they just weren't captured on camera. If they were, I would have used them, too. I just used what I had.

BE: I also think about, in the episode with Ashley, she says that when she first met you she was surprised that you were actually quite reserved in person, and that's actually something that I felt when we met last year. I thought this is not quite the same person who's on camera, and I understand why you perform for the camera when you're doing the camera addresses, but is there a sense in which that is somehow dishonest to present yourself in that way?

CZ: If somebody said that I wouldn't argue with them. I think that it's no more dishonest than meeting someone at a party and being friendly. It's the face you put on to be welcoming to another person. From years and years of talking to the camera, I feel like I've figured out what tone is the right one to bring someone in. It's probably more who I really am than the reserved one that people meet when they see me for the first time on the street or whatever, because that's just me being shy and insecure and awkward. When I'm with someone that I feel close to, or I feel loved by, I don't have to put up a defense. I think I'm probably more like that guy.

I tell my students this, too, when they're talking to a camera “Talk as if you're talking to a friend who likes you. Don't talk as if you're talking to a stranger who's trying to decide if they like you or not.” You tend to be more engaging and winning if you're not worrying about how they're reading you and have a certain confidence or comfort with yourself. It's just more charming, I think.

BE: There is something about this season where those two things, the behind-the scenes-footage, and the episode with Ashley, make it feel like you've opened up the perspective on you to other people, and it shows how the first two seasons are more guided by your perspective. Particularly with the Ashley episode, what was the idea behind doing that, and how did it come about?

CZ: I've been wanting other perspectives. I really wanted Mandy to do it for a long time and she wouldn't. And I thought that it would be really great for the viewer to see all the stuff that I wasn't saying and get a whole other perspective on it, and I know that a lot of her frustration is that that wasn’t there. And it wasn't because I didn't want to put it there, it was because she refused to put it there or to participate in making that available to the viewers. So when Ashley came over one night after we had broken up and things had been strained, I asked her, “Hey, we got cameras here, and I was thinking it might be nice if you talk to the camera about your perspective.” And she said okay. And then she just did that whole thing. It was in one take. And it was very clear to me, as it was happening, that this was really good footage.

She says things that are troubling and damning and I like the idea, artistically, of not defending myself or responding to those things. But whenever I would have a test screening and people would see it, they would say, “What the hell? That's terrible!” And I would explain to them what actually happened, or just give them more details or more background about what happened, and they'd be like, “Oh, okay, well, that makes sense.” A lot of people were saying, “You got to put that in The Show.” People said “You could get canceled! You might lose your job! People are going to hate you!” And I was like, well, maybe, but I don't know how I would even defend myself, because once you start down this slope of defending yourself from these accusations, it's a bad look. It’s almost like a trap or something. I think it's better to not defend yourself and just let it hang there.

But on most Q&A’s I'll be asked about it, and I have no problem explaining what happened. And invariably their opinion changes 180 degrees once they hear what really happened, or what was behind that. I know it sounds really bad, but it's not. I have no problem with what I did. My conscience is clean, but it's true that if you just take what she says at face value, it sounds really bad. I don’t like it being wrapped up neatly like, “Oh, no, he's a good guy,” or “That's not how it was.” It's nice to have this hovering thing. It sticks in your throat or something.

I think art should be like that. It shouldn't be digestible. I like art that's indigestible. And this feels indigestible. And some people say it's misleading, which it is, but whenever anyone tells a story about somebody else, it's always misleading. Arguably a lot of what I say about Mandy is misleading, she would say. And she would say there's all these extenuating circumstances which make her actions seem less reprehensible. And there are.

I think that in any conflict or disagreement there is a way to look at it where the person seems really wrong or morally problematic, and there's a way where they don't. And you can see that right now with, I mean… it's hard to justify what's happening in Gaza, but the Israelis justify it, and in their version, the Palestinians are horrible and the Israelis are virtuous. And the fact that they could do that and get away with it to the extent that it's happening is, I think, a really important thing about story, and about how there's always another side. And it's very easy to leave things out that make the other person look reprehensible, whereas, in fact, we're all completely human, and almost everything anyone does is kind of understandable for the most part.

To me it seemed important and strong. It seemed strong, and The Show is so much about moralism and an attack on moralism that it seemed nice to have this thing. I tried to address it by putting in that Q&A from the London screening, which didn't really address it very much, but at least it acknowledged the shockingness of the thing that had just happened. Before, it wasn't addressed, and it just felt really tone deaf. I never felt like I totally figured out how to address that thing. I'm happy to tell you, or to tell anyone what happened if you want me to, but in terms of the thinking around not doing it in The Show, that's why I didn't.

BE: I think we can leave that story for the Q&A. Early on in the season you discuss the Ibsen play The Wild Duck, where I suppose there's some truth and honesty and it leads to a tragic end in some way, and it does seem like you're having a moment of reckoning with this idea of radical honesty, and I'm just wondering if you've had any further revelations or made any further conclusions on that topic.

CZ: Nietzsche says whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and it's kind of my basic operating principle. In life, a lot of people feel like being comfortable or not in pain or not being hurt is some kind of moral terminus where that's the end goal. And if you make someone uncomfortable, somehow you've acted immorally towards them. I've always found that absurd. I don't think the goal of life is to be comfortable or not to suffer. Life is suffering, and almost nothing but suffering, and the idea that you could somehow avoid that, or that it's even good to avoid that, seems puerile and really entitled.

I think we're here to grow, spiritually, and I think we're here to grow spiritually through suffering. I don't think we should inflict suffering unnecessarily or arbitrarily to help people grow. There's a story about Truffaut, I don't know if it's true or not, seems impossible to believe, but supposedly he had two daughters and when one of them was bad, he would punish the other one, and he would tell them, “I'm doing this to show you that the world's not fair.” And it's such an interesting thing to do. It goes against every instinct that I have, but he's got a point that the world is not fair. It's just an interesting thing to do.

But the problem is, when somebody kills themselves, like suicide… Nietzsche says whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. If it kills you, it doesn't make you stronger. There's this metaphysical question of, well, is suicide necessarily a bad thing? And people debate this. Most people say “Yeah,” but some people say, “Well, it's up to each person, and you can't really blame other people for another people's suicide, can you?” And that's a whole other thing, right? Like, I've been bullied on the Internet and people say, “You should kill yourself.” And then there's this whole legal thing like, is it the fault of the person who said that? Obviously, morally, it's not very evolved to tell someone that they should kill themselves, and you know somebody who saw Season 3 posted a thing about it afterwards saying that I should kill myself. And it was interesting to be mad at me for doing something that perhaps contributed to somebody feeling more suicidal, and then to be indignant about that, and then to say, “I promote suicide for you.” That kind of hypocrisy is exactly the kind of thing that I think The Show is so much against.

But I had a girlfriend more recently who was suicidal. She had a hard time with life, and my work was making it harder, and for someone who's already suicidal before they met me, to then become involved with me, it's hard, and maybe not a good idea. Like, there should be a surgeon general warning on me.

BE: On your dating profile.

CZ: Yeah, if you have had thoughts of suicide, Maybe swipe left. But I did stop doing a project that I was doing that I put a lot of effort and time into, that I believed in, because she felt like it was making her more suicidal. I didn’t want to have that in my conscience, and I didn’t want her to kill herself, and it didn't seem worth it. If she was really going to kill herself because of my work, then OK, fine, I will abort it. People have said, “Where's your moral line?” I think it's right there. I think it's death. I don't want anyone to die because of my work. So if I could save a life by not doing the work, I guess that's worth it. But again, was that even going to save her life? And would she have killed herself anyway, even if I stopped doing it? You never know. But I do think that is a line at which I myself don't have any certainty about and therefore would rather play it safe and not go there if I can. You know, if my ex was suicidal, I probably would take her out of The Show.

BE: Well, it does come up with Ashley. There's the issue of whether or not she is suicidal in The Show, and I am curious where things now stand between you two.

CZ: They're pretty good, actually. Ashley was always somebody who refused to try to censor The Show. I've had 3 girlfriends who all tried to censor The Show at some point. They wanted to be in it, and then they didn't want to be anymore, and they wanted me to take them out of it and try to block it in some way. But Ashley never did. She always believed in the work, or believed in art, or believed in the importance of free speech or expression. So I always appreciated that about her, and even though it made her uncomfortable, she was never pushing or threatening about it, and was ultimately supportive.

I think that episode makes her really uncomfortable. I think she doesn't like that people hate me who watch it. She wouldn't say some of that stuff now. If you asked her what happened she wouldn't phrase it that way anymore. So it's a snapshot of a moment in time of her psyche, and it was a moment when she was in a lot of pain and distress, and seeing things in a very black and white way. So she's always said, “Don't include it. Get rid of that episode. You don't need that. I don't need that.” And I've always said, “No, it's the best episode. I'm not going to not put it in because it makes me look worse than I am. It's just too good!”

I haven't talked to her in a little while. People were telling me I needed to address this thing more, and some people were like, “Well, if you address it, no one's going to believe you,” or “It's not going to be effective. You really need her to address it.” So at one point I said, “Would you be open to addressing this yourself?” And she didn't really want to, and she said, “Just get rid of the whole episode, and I was like, I don’t want to.” But then I did the Q&A thing and I felt like that was probably enough. We did do a conversation for my podcast Conversations I Want to Have Before We Both Die. And in that we talk about this at length, and that was done a few years after the episode of The Show. So I think anyone who hears that can see that, one, we're on good terms and, two, there's a lot more nuance around what happened that gets discussed. I thought at one point of using some of that in The Show, and I tried, but it's a one-hour long conversation, so it didn’t feel organic. It felt like I was trying to obviate attacks, so it felt stronger not to.

BE: In that episode, there is this sense of whiplash when you realize that from Ashley's perspective, getting involved in this relationship involved a lot of doubt and concern about the impact it might have on your marriage. Obviously, she was going through a very hard time and had a lot of doubts, and wasn't necessarily looking for a romantic relationship with you. I'm curious how much of that you knew at the time, or how much of it came as a surprise to you.

CZ: My belief, which is just mine, is that she's not being totally honest there with herself. I mean, she definitely had doubts, but she also had the other thing. But when she told us that, she just completely focused on the doubts. I could tell you several examples of things that she did, that contradicted what she says happened there, and I think if I told you those things you'd be like, “Oh, okay, well, that's different.” And it is. But people tend to, especially if they feel guilty about something, they tend to want to justify their actions by focusing on the things that make their actions seem more excusable and ignoring the things that make their actions seem less excusable. It's a very human thing. I do it, too, and it's also because I do it, too, that I felt like it was important to let her say it her way. It felt like it would be unfair for me to retort or to respond to these things that she says about me where other people can't really retort to the things I say about them throughout The Show, and everybody had things they would have wanted to say that would have made them look a little better or something, and I'm sure that they tell their friends when their friends bring it up. But I didn't give people that opportunity or courtesy, so I didn't feel like it would be right for me to have it either. I think she leaves out quite a bit there. So it's true what she's saying, but it's also not the whole truth.

BE: But were you aware of the doubts at all before the episode was filmed?

CZ: One of the things is, I'll just say now, when I met her, she was seeing Robert, but she didn't tell me that. She withheld it. All she had to do was tell me I have a boyfriend, and none of this would have happened! And not only that, but when I went to hers the first time, Robert was there right before I got there, and he got the flowers that she gave me. She sent him out to get flowers to give to me. He wanted to stay and meet me because he was a fan, and she was like, “No, no, no, I don't want you here! It's going to make him uncomfortable if he sees that I have a boyfriend!” And that's ridiculous that it would make me uncomfortable. I'd never met her! For me to walk in there, and she's got a boyfriend. It would have been like, “Okay, this is somebody. And this is the boyfriend.” So it's because she doesn't seem to have a boyfriend, and she gives me flowers, and she says I love you, that I start thinking she's available.

Whatever doubt she was having, she wasn't really expressing to me. On the contrary, she was hiding the fact that she was unavailable, and it was a long time before she finally told me that she had a boyfriend, and when she did, she talked about how they were breaking up, and how it wasn't working out. So for me, a lot of the doubts she had, I thought, were about that. They were about feeling guilty towards her boyfriend that she wanted to break up with but was having trouble breaking up with.

So that's how I read it. It was like she needed help breaking up with the guy whether she ended up with me or not. She seemed like she was in a bad relationship for herself, this is the way she told the story, and that she was only in it because she felt bad for him. And I was like, that's not a good reason to stay with somebody. So no, I didn't really know. And now that I do know, I don't think that's the whole truth, but it's definitely part of the truth and part of what I didn't know.

BE: Going back to the ending, there isn't a lot of resolution to the story, which I think is by design, at least in this project. But you also say that you're done with The Show. You're “breaking up” with The Show, but given that your life project is this self documentation, I am wondering where you're going to go in future film projects. How do you think the story of Caveh will reemerge in another project at some point?

CZ: Well, I am continuing the story of Caveh. The main thing I'm working on right now is this Ulysses project, which is about a day in the life of me and seven actors on June 16, 2022. But that's a 24 hour project that encompasses my whole life and it's very complicated and very, very vast. But that is the really the sequel to The Show at this point. It takes place several years after Season 2 ended and after the events of Season 3.

And then I've been doing other projects since then that have continued the story of my life. I shot a couple other films that I'm still working on. One of the reasons I ended The Show is because it was The Show, particularly, that my ex was trying to block. She’s not trying to block my Ulysses film, and she might, but she's not very involved in it. It was a period when we weren't together and she's not a part of it.

The ongoing project has not changed, but just the part that's The Show, which was the most problematic part legally. I stopped that part because she was suing me and it was very hard to get anyone to see it, and it was hard to sell it, and people were quitting. It felt like it was no longer what it had been. I just needed to end it and start something new. And I did.

After a trio of American indies we’ve recently hosted the Toronto premiere of, it’s nice for Bleeding Edge to return to its roots and showcase local talent. This is the case with Zachary Lacosse’s IMPERIAL GREEN, a compact yet ambitious experimental drama that bridges Ontario and British Columbia. With the film, the director both bravely dramatizes elements of his own life onscreen (even including family members) and pushes the boundaries of cinema, shooting in 60 frames per second, a format usually reserved for a handful of blockbuster directors like Ang Lee and James Cameron. We were lucky to sit down with Lacosse and discuss the important context going into the film as well as his thoughts on cinema in general.

BLEEDING EDGE: I always ask everyone this, but what was the genesis of the project?

Zachary Lacosse: The genesis of the project came from the last couple of years of my life living in Vancouver with my long-term partner Katie and some feelings I had about the area in Burnaby, BC called Metro Town, which for a long time was a site of great interest to me as a young Jehovah's Witness boy.

Anytime I'd go and visit my dad over the weekends, he'd usually take me there and just drop me off or walk me around. I'd go to West 49 and beg him to get me those two for $15 t-shirts and dream of being a cool skater that wasn't a Jehovah's Witness. Yeah, so the genesis of the project just came from those memories of wanting to be part of the world and coming to Vancouver and thinking about how I had changed over the years, how Metro Town had changed and how my relationship was starting to fracture in a way that I felt was similar to the way of my parents.

There's a lot of ways to contextualize the film, we’ve been trying to do it by sharing the music video, which was kind of a predecessor, and we’ll be showing the short you made, Rockglenn, SK, beforehand to provide even more. Do you see this film as a culmination of your work in some way?

That was always the goal. I always wanted to have a ledger, to weave some great tapestry, even though that seems a little, I don't want to say ambitious, why would somebody care really, but I always just wanted to be able to look back and be able to chart everything together and make the whole entire catalog amount to something. If that something is some mosaic of who I am as a person, then maybe I've succeeded.

When you were starting to get the impulse to be a filmmaker, I don't know what age that would have been, was autobiography always your intention?

No, when I first started making movies, I just fucking loved Lego, you know. I think if there was any link to how I started making films when I was 10, it was just the patience that's involved with doing like stop-motion, that's pretty much it. There was the painstaking process of animating, taking each frame, and adjusting things. I think that level of patience has stuck with me for a long time. But no, I never really wanted to chart my life like that through my art, but that's something that came around in high school because I had a lot of issues with how to present myself as I was about to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses, because I had been in it since birth.

There’s that intense period in your late teens where you have to decide who you are, which was exacerbated by the fact that I was purposely letting go of my belief system, and at the time, I was very worried about losing my whole family as well. I remember very distinctly there was a moment where I was called in front of some Jehovah's Witness elders and my mom and they laid their charges before me and this sounds like a silly movie moment, but I felt that the only way I could explain myself and the sins that they had revealed to me was that I did have some sort of belief. I didn't want to just be a worldly person, as they would say, I wanted to believe in two things. I wanted to believe in expressing myself and using art as a way to have faith and just faith in love. So I think that decision and that argument that I made to them, well, that rationale has become the guiding force for everything that I've done.

It's such an interesting prism through which to view the world, including art. I remember when I saw Donnie Darko with you and you talked to me about how personal that film felt to you as a young man because of the faith you were raised in.

Oh yeah. I think I told you this before, when the apocalypse is on your back, when it’s just on the horizon, it’s easy to feel like you’re important or something.

Can you talk a bit about actually incorporating your family members into the film? I mean, your dad plays the mentor role in Imperial Green. Did you know it always had to be him from the very beginning?

Yeah. I've always wanted to make a movie with my dad in it, or just like my dad as a character, because I always thought he was the most interesting character I’ve ever met. He has his frustrations, he has his compensations, but he nonetheless has always remained such an interesting figure in my life. They used to think he was like Carmen Sandiego, like I could never know where in the world he was. And I used to have dreams about him on the lam or something. But when the time came for me to actually put him in something, I had this short that I was working on in 2017, and I thought, well, I could cast him, I guess, but maybe that's too much, like I was too scared to do it.

So I went around auditioning people, and everyone I auditioned for the most part was not mixed First Nations. In Vancouver, there were a lot of Italian men. Then it dawned on me that it doesn’t really make sense, as it was gonna be very difficult for me to find a person who is just like my dad, and that also does not provoke who he actually is and what his history is. So it became important to me that whatever I made with him, I could use his love for the spotlight and the truth of his complicated ethnicity, and what that means to me. So it made sense to just always have him in there, because who else is gonna play my dad just as well? I mean, he loves to do it!

The two stars of this film, Joseph Logelin and Kate Boutilier, are from your music video mentioned earlier. What are the qualities about them that you like as performers?

They're just really sweet, wonderful people. Kate has been a good friend for a long time, and I think, at least in this film and in all my experiences with her, there's a certain meekness to her that I find in her style of performance, which was just what I was looking for. It was something I could just as easily associate with my own partner. As far as Joseph's concerned, he’s just one of the funniest guys I know. I think he's an exceptionally talented actor. I remember when I went and talked to him about the movie. I went back to Vancouver, or it was right before I was moving to Toronto, I got dinner with him, and we talked about the film. I talked about why I wanted him to be in it, and suddenly I was struck by something Tsai Ming-liang said about Lee Kang-shen. I think it was from early when he first met him when they were working on that TV movie that he made about Taiwanese youth. Well he said that he had to learn Lee Kang-sheng's rhythm, that he was so frustrated by the fact that he took things slowly and he didn't move his head in the speed that he wanted and that he had learned that sometimes people and their rhythms are the things that can actually challenge you and you can learn a way to listen to someone's performance as a director versus shaping it. I'd say Joseph had that quality during our first meeting, especially because I was finally actually recording his voice this time, you know, instead of a music video. Something I love about the film and his role in it is that he has this gait. I said, just watch a bit of a Takeshi Kitano movie and see his lumbering gait, and just think about that. Honestly, I didn’t really guide them that much, I just liked who they were as people.

Obviously, I mean one of the big things about this film is that it's shot in the high frame rate of 60 per second, as opposed to 24. Can you talk about what drew you to the format?

I think I've just always been at different times, at least formally, interested in falsity and how much you can actually believe in something. I think that's just been a problem that's followed me my entire life. I think I've always been in a state of constant doubt whether that was as a Jehovah's Witness or as a worldly person, or as a filmmaker. I think it's just something that's flagged me for a long time and personally, as much as I would like to not just be an image maker I find my suspicions with the image have been at the forefront of my mind for a very long time, almost as much as my suspicions, which I think are intertwined, but my suspicions

for example of how to be a good Jehovah's Witness or how to hide that I am one. So I think for me at this juncture, or at the time that I was making the film and developing it, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to use a texture that was sort of perverse. You know, when you hear people complain about the soap opera effect on your parents' Smart TVs or whatever, like when people stick their nose up at The Hobbit or Gemini Man or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, what have you. The revulsion that people feel towards that and the physiological sort of reaction because it’s highlighting the artifice of the movie-making process just felt like, well, I'm interested in auto fiction, I'm interested in quote-unquote blurring the lines as they say. But it seemed like, while I was doing that textually, why wouldn't I use something like a high frame rate that instantly does that for you? The hyper reality is sort of the joy of it. It makes you question what I'm telling you and even the process of making it. When I'm trying to make my shitty tripod move and I point the camera in a different way, you'll feel that normally with 24 frames, but in 60, I feel like you can really sense that I'm there.

The other night, when I was over at your place we were watching a bunch of Ang Lee interviews he had done for Billy Lynn and I think he was talking about in one of them how with the high frame rate, you had to rethink every element of cinema, be it where you place the camera, what makeup actors wear, the sets, etc. A part of me is like, why wouldn’t more filmmakers want to do that? Why don’t more filmmakers want to rethink the entire concept of cinema, especially when so many people think it’s dying?

I’m not really sure, I don’t have a manifesto to go along with what I’m doing. I'm suspicious of progress, I’m suspicious of nostalgia, I’m suspicious of conservatism, and it seems like it's very simple to just change the way something as simple as the speed at which you consume something, shooting at a higher frame rate, while it may seem like a sort of a gimmick I think it it does significantly change your relationship to what you're watching. Maybe I was just being reactionary in using it, but I had my reasons. I feel like just from my experiences back in Vancouver, you know, god bless Vancouver, but I found that there was a surprising lack of interest in alternative forms especially in as far as formats are considered and I do truly appreciate beauty but you know, there are other ways to go about getting that instead of harkening back to the past and propping up celluloid. I think this is a larger problem. I think that there's just generally less immediacy in cinema.

How are you feeling about showing so personal a film in front of a crowd at a 200-plus seat movie theater?

It feels fucking awesome [laughs]. I’m very happy and excited, of course. I mean, it’s my dream.

IMPERIAL GREEN has its world premiere on Wednesday, May 21st at The Paradise on Bloor. Tickets are on sale.

In November of 2021, filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko travelled to Toronto present a mini-retrospective of his work to date curated by K-Fab, including a smattering of the highly-improvised, microbudget films with which he established himself, as well as the then-recently released Spree, a found-footage horror-comedy about an influencer-slash-rideshare driver going on a murder, uh, spree. Titled URL:IRL, the retrospective highlighted Kotlyarenko’s authorial obsession with “screen” life and how human interactions are affected by digital connectivity.

That weekend became a fruitful period for the city’s independent filmmaking scene. Kotlyarenko himself collaborated with Nate Wilson and several other Torontonians on the short film The Straight Ball, shot in a single day with no script and virtually no time for preparation, while his lively Q&A sessions, replete with stories about shooting entire feature films in less than week, inspired a wave of no-budget filmmaking in the city, from Nate Wilson’s The All Golden, to Braden Sitter, Sr.’s The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man. To steal and mangle a famous quote about The Velvet Underground, one might say that everyone who went to the Eugene retrospective made their own New Toronto Bizarre movie.

On May 2, Kotlyarenko returns to Toronto to present his latest film, The Code, which plays on the filmmaker’s obsessions with surveillance technology, the omnipresence of cameras, and various aspects of internet culture. Describing the film as a “synthesis” of his earlier DIY films and the “mania” of the more ambitious Spree, The Code is a found footage rom-com about Jay and Celine, two artist-types who rent a house during COVID to rekindle their dwindling, sexless relationship. Celine’s desire to make a documentary about the situation triggers a cat-and-mouse war of surveillance involving various types of spy cameras, screen-record apps, and other technological ways to keep track of each other.

The Code is a crowd-pleasing experiment in using found footage in a non-horror context. Dasha Nekrasova (cohost of Red Scare) and Peter Vack (director of www.RachelOrmont.com) star as the couple, with Anora scene-stealer Ivy Wolk and Kotlyarenko regular Vishwam Velandy in supporting roles. We chatted with the filmmaker about making the film, the challenges of shooting a found footage in this way, and what it was like to lose the star of the film just a few days before production began.

Bleeding Edge: So I remember a few years ago, you were posting on Instagram with your spy glasses. I was curious if that was part of the development of the film, or was that something that you thought was cool and eventually worked into the movie?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: No, I had already written that into the script and I wanted to do tests. I bought a pair off Amazon. Actually, I bought a few different pairs and I tested them out. There were a bunch of things I had written into a script that I had never personally experienced. I didn't actually ever engage in lo-fi anxiety surveillance of my girlfriends or whatever.

Also, I had never been to an escape room when I wrote the escape room sequence, and originally it was in an ancient Egyptian room, with tombs and queens and kings. So after the script was done, I said, I should probably check out an escape room to make sure, and what I found out was that one, I did nail it, that my satirical, imagined escape room was exactly how it is in real life, and two, that I actually love escape rooms, and since then I have become an escape room-aholic.

BE: I've only been to one escape room, and it was over Zoom. It was during the pandemic.

EK: That's extremely odd. Because the entire fun of it is that you're in a physical space, and you're trying to, quote unquote, “escape.”

BE: It was a work thing.

EK: Team-building, I guess they call it. But that is the sickness of COVID. That they could even foist that upon you.

BE: To go back to the spyglasses and all the different sorts of cameras that you ended up using, was there any point where you were struggling to know which camera you would use for a given scene? Or was there any point where you didn't really know what you were gonna do, and you had to go out and look for something?

EK: Once Bart Cortright, the director of photography, came on board, which was a month before we shot the movie, we put together a spreadsheet, like, Here are all the possible kinds of spy cameras, and then I was like, This fits in with this scene, this fits in this scene. Oh, that's interesting! A spy pen. How could we use a spy pen? And Okay, we can't figure it out. So we don't need a pen. Some things I had researched, like the spy glasses or the two-way app. That was all scripted, that there's gonna be an app on the phone that's gonna surreptitiously record you and your screen behaviour. But other things, Bart found them. Then we went through the script, scene by scene, through a spreadsheet, and plotted out all of the cameras that we were going to use per scene.

BE: That leads into my next question. You have Barton Cortright, who also did www.RachelOrmont.com, as director of photography, but what does a DP actually do on a movie like this?

EK: Unfortunately, I have to say that one of our most fertile creative periods was what I was just describing, which is the prepping and analysis of scenes, and the arc of the camera as a character. Because once we got on set, this is a pretty low-budget movie. The entire camera department, including lighting, electric, gaffing, was three people, and initially it was just two. It was Bart and a guy named Jake Garcia, and then we got a guy named Newton Ward after day three, because we realized that this was a very challenging environment to maintain technically, to keep all the cameras running and monitoring them and keeping track of what's going on, and making sure you're getting, not even a pristine image, but any image at all.

Bart's main job, sadly, throughout the shoot itself, once we established the framing that we liked for the surveillance cams, or the directions that we wanted to give, for the actors for their handheld cameras and stuff, was just camera babysitting. Obviously, he controlled all the practical lights, and we put in cinema-friendly bulbs and stuff like that. But because it has a reality TV-surveillance aesthetic, the use of expressionistic lighting would have felt antithetical. But there is camera choreography throughout that I'm proud of, and I think is interesting. For instance, the scene where Jay and Celine go up the hiking trail after their COVID shot, and they swap cameras, and then there's that shot, I guess it's a bit of a spoiler, where Celine vomits off camera. That was very complicated thing to arrange. There's fun stuff that happens, but yeah, Bart's not operating a camera for most of the movie.

BE: In terms of collecting footage, you would have had all these cameras running all the time. So what was the editing process like?

EK: Really hard! We had two great editors because this is a movie that required two beautiful brains on top of my own to make sense of it. During the shoot we had Tucker Bennett [director of Planet Heaven] daily editing what we had shot one or two days before, and we had Sabrina Greco [director of Lockjaw] editing and logging as an assistant editor. It depended on the setup, but sometimes she worked through the night and Tucker would edit through the day, or Tucker would edit at night and Sabrina would wake up and log all this stuff that we shot overnight.

Those were very long days for both of them. It was super time-consuming, and then, luckily, Sabrina was available after the shoot was over, so we asked if she would join us as an editor. They're both editing beasts. They have different styles, and I've always enjoyed synthesizing the styles of different voices in my work because my work is so maximalist, and I have a lot of variety in the type of humour or the type of aesthetic approaches I have. So working with a bunch of different filmmakers on this, from Sabrina to Tucker, to Dasha [Nekrasova], to Peter [Vack], to Nick Corirossi. A lot of different voices on this project were directors with a vision.

BE: You mentioned the COVID vaccine gag, and this movie is obviously set during the pandemic, so I'm wondering how important that was to the conception of the movie?

EK: This is a movie that's been in gestation, kicking around in my mind for a really long time, two decades. This concept of a couple duking it out over user-generated found footage and getting different perspectives on a relationship. I've been mapping it out over the years through blog posts, etc., Maybe I keep it all on social media between all the different platforms and blah blah, and this and that, but I could never quite, quote unquote, “crack” The Code. When COVID came around, that was the final little push. Okay, it has to be within this milieu where they're stuck in the house together. If it wasn't for COVID they probably would have broken up, but can they come out the other side? Could we use all this surveillance stuff that I'm interested in?

In the context of COVID, everyone became an existential, depressed homebody artist and had to embody that for a little while. At a certain point, everyone was living on hope. I hope I don't die. I hope people I love don't die. I hope this ends soon, I hope I can go to a movie theatre or a museum or whatever. I thought that milieu pushed me over the edge, so I really started getting more and more into this as my next project during late COVID. I finished the script a year after COVID, and we filmed it pretty soon after that.

It felt like the right context for a paranoid couple. I am like Celine, in the movie, who says this is literally an Earth-shattering event that is happening to everyone around the world and we're gonna forget about it when it's over. In a way, I think that did happen. I'm in Atlanta, and I walked by an awesome old art deco sign that says “Open 24 Hours” and it's a beautiful diner. And I'm like, Okay, cool. It's 9 o'clock, I'm gonna go have a late dinner after the movie, but it's closed at 6pm. When I go to other cities, I'm like, Oh, yeah, do you have a cool bookstore? They're like, Yeah, we did, but it died during COVID. There are images from COVID that are interesting. Images such as all the masks littered on the ground, and I always thought that was pretty funny and interesting, so when Celine drops her mask in the film, I don't think that was intentional. I said to Dasha Oh, that's awesome, do that every take, please.

BE: One of my favourite stories from that period is that I have a friend who got the COVID shot because he had insomnia, and he thought it would make him fall asleep.

EK: Not that I'm some sort of anti-masker person, but it had an effect on me. COVID had an effect on the world, and the shot had an effect on me. It gave me a lot of energy, and then it made me sick, and I had really weird dreams, so I thought, Okay, better put this in a movie before even I forget that this all happened to me.

BE: So you have said that your biggest inspiration for the movie was the Japanese writer, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm wondering if you could give us the rundown.

EK: He's one of the giants of a 20th Century Japanese literature. A lot of his work deals with the gamesmanship and destabilization of romantic situations, or characters who have hidden motivations when it comes to their intentions towards other characters. Usually, the narrator is always wondering about the reality of the intentions of other characters that they're lusting after. The easiest comparison would be to Nabokov because he has a proto-Lolita book called Naomi about an older man falling for a young girl who is Japanese, but very Westernized.

He also wrote a book called The Key, about a couple that keeps diaries. Each chapter alternates between the husband and wife, and they have different perspectives on what goes down between them in their twisted love life. I always thought that was a really cool form for storytelling. These dueling perspectives via diary, and that's why for two decades I've been trying to figure out how I can use that inspiration from the novel to make a film where a couple could offer different perspectives of their reality.

I really wanted to do something radical. And then ultimately I had to go with the whole, Okay, we're making a documentary, as the backbone structure, and then from Celine's documentary I could build out all of the Eugene-y type things I like with the Phone and the GoPros and the spy cams and all that other stuff. Before, I was like How can I make it all just from social media platforms? Can I just jump between the different apps? Also, during COVID, Zoom came along and that was pretty obvious.

There's one key moment, a “key” moment in The Key, where it becomes clear to the husband and wife that the other person has found their diary and is now reading it. At that point, you start thinking how much of this is being written to manipulate the other person's perspective. Which is not something that really happens in The Code, but I did want to foreground this concept of the edit as the final stage of writing a film, and really interrogate how the edit works, and how the edit is the final voice of narrative authority.

BE: I want to touch on the fact that Shia LaBeouf was supposed to be in the movie, but dropped out just before production began. What were the challenges in terms of replacing him at such short notice, and having Peter Vack take over the role?

EK: That was a really interesting period for me. We got through the hurdles of Will we work together? Are we on the same page? Are you ready for this? because he's a very complicated person and has a complicated backstory. Once came to the same page and accepted each other as collaborators, he was an amazing collaborator. We spent many, many hours filming him and Dasha falling in love and coming up with a backstory for where this movie begins. That, I have to say, is one of the most joyful and interesting filmmaking periods of my life, the pre-Code filmmaking, because there are many, many hours of footage of that. Fifty, sixty, seventy hours of them falling for each other.

Along the way, there were a lot of questions from Shia about the character and about why he was such a cuck and such a beta, and how he could possibly have gotten there and not cut it off, and I think those were some of the red flags to me that I should have taken it more seriously, like, Hey, man, you have to accept this. I think, ultimately, that impasse, amongst a bunch of other things, made it clear that maybe Shia wasn't right. He was the right person to play Jay falling in love, but maybe he wasn't the right person to play Jay at the state we find him in this film.

When he dropped out, we looked far and wide as quickly as we could for other actors, and then it became super duper, obvious that the only person who could really fill the shoes of this role was Peter, because, not only is he a great actor, but he also has a relationship with Dasha. They're very close friends, and I'm very close with Peter, and they wouldn't struggle to get into a backstory that involved intimacy, or knowing each other, or knowing each other's little quirks.

Obviously, putting Dasha and Peter in the same movie creates an impression, like, This is the fucking New York shitpost movie, this is the Dime Square movie! That wasn't necessarily my original intention with the film, in terms of the extra-textual meaning behind it or context for it, but it is what it is, and I think it's important to capture cultural moments. I was just with some friends of mine that I hadn't seen in a long time, and one of them had rewatched A Wonderful Cloud, and they were saying to me Oh, I'm so happy you made that because that was our lives in LA in the early 2010s. I forgot all that stuff and half of that stuff isn't there anymore.

For better or worse, with Peter and Dasha being the stars of the film, it captures a certain part of the New York zeitgeist and the larger, extremely online, cultural zeitgeist that happened at the end of the 2010s and into the 2020s. Very COVID. Actually, Dime Square is a very COVID type of product and project. Ultimately, everything in a movie happens the way it's supposed to, and Peter was slotted right in. In the course of four days, Peter had to memorize and learn all the lines, and there were a lot of lines. A lot of things didn't make the cut, and he had to adapt himself to the idea. Peter and I had talked about working together for a long time, and he was really into the idea of doing a Eugene improv movie. But from the jump, I wanted this to be very faithful to the script for a lot of different reasons, including the fact that there's a schematic, logistical puzzle embedded within the film. There was a little bit of friction in that Peter was like, Yeah, the Eugene Improv movie I'm in, and he was going off script a lot, but we ultimately found the sweet spot between the improvisatory instincts that he had and the script.

BE: Is there a distinction in your head between this movie and Spree, which are a bit more scripted than the micro-budget, improvised movies that you've done?

EK: Yeah, this is the synthesis of all my work in a way. Something I realized was that probably most people who had seen Spree had and would not see any of my other films, and most of the people who are into Wobble Palace or my earlier work actually didn't see Spree. There's very little overlap between those. Why? Because one is very much a genre film with known actors, and the other ones are more underground, personal films. I wanted to combine those two interests and make something that had the approach and mania of Spree, and then place it in the romantic underground context of my earlier films, and try to make a new form. Because found footage in the context of horror, people understand what that is, but extremely online found footage in the context of a rom-com, no one knows what that is. I was excited to synthesize things I've done before into something new

BE: A lot of your films have these recurring themes around found footage or social media, or surveillance stuff, and I'm wondering if you have it in your mind to make something that's a little more traditional? Or is this your mode going forward?

EK: No, no, my next movie will be way more traditional. Whatever the stories require. I am, of course, interested in innovating cinematically and exploring different grammar, and reflecting the approach that contemporary viewers have towards “content,” and toward screens, and finding new forms of voyeurism through formal ideas that seem relevant.

But I love cinema and the history of cinema. I am interested in doing something more traditional and “conventionally” cinematic. My next film will be like that with a few little elements of live streaming and an internet detective sleuth thing. But I want to get in, like everybody, my Scorsese Dolly track push-in shots. I look forward to that and figuring out ways to innovate within the more traditional frameworks of cinema.

BE: Any last words to people who might be coming out?

EK: Yeah, come on out! Let's fill the theater. It's a comedy and I've seen it with packed, sold-out crowds, and it plays really well, and a lot of people are laughing!

BE: Oh, I did want to ask about the IMAX screening. Was it Tallahassee?

EK: That was a really strange screening. The context of it was funny, because it was at a planetarium-style kids centre where kids watch videos about how the comet killed the dinosaurs and stuff like that. And that's why the screen is huge, because it's supposed to be immersive with these educational videos. And there's even a bench there that looks like a film slate, and on it said, “Director: Edu-tainment.”

Unfortunately, the screening was immediately after a very American thing, which is a school shooting. There was a shooting on the campus in Tallahassee at FSU and what I didn't realize was that the theatre is on campus. So what would have normally been a very lively and thriving uh environment was really dour. It was understandably dour, but the screening itself had a contradictory vibe. It is definitely going to be the biggest screen that the movie ever plays on, and it looked and sounded amazing. I watched the first ten minutes and was like Holy shit! This is incredible! But the crowd was not as lively or packed as it would have been in other circumstances.

As with all film buffs. I have definitely been in a largely empty theater, watching a movie that deeply affected me, so that was the tack I took towards it, not to be disappointed and understand the context of something really tragic that happened here. If these people are out here, maybe the movie could deeply affect them, and I don't know if it did, but I've sat in empty movie theaters with 15 other people been rocked by a movie.

BE: Sometimes I prefer it.

EK: Yeah, sometimes I prefer it, and it makes total sense when it's something esoteric or experimental or whatever. But The Code is a goddamn fun ass movie! It's really a lot of fun with the crowd. So Ihope people fill up The Paradise, and we have a nice night.

By the time you see the Toronto premiere of Eephus, Carson Lund and Nate Fisher will have been in the thick of a tour that’s taken them across the United States. Despite the heavily American subject matter of their film, it initially debuted in France last year, where it was met with equal raves from European and English-speaking critics alike. Bleeding Edge was lucky enough to catch up with the team behind the film over Zoom to discuss the genesis of the project, the physical challenges of making it as well as what sports movies make them cry.

Bleeding Edge: First off, how’s the tour going?

Carson Lund: Well, we just got off a week of the Barnstorming tour. We screened the film in six different places, mostly small towns. We did hit Boston on the way at my alma mater. So that was more like an alumni screening. But everything else was small-town movie houses, like the only one surviving in a 40-mile radius [laughs]. And it was extremely gratifying, in the way that I got a sense that we were screening the film for people who probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise and they came out because Bill Lee was there or because they saw that there was an event tied to it. Every screening had at least 50 people there and it went really well and people had a very emotional experience with the movie. For a lot of them, it reminded them of their playing days. I say this because most of the people there were over 60 years old [laughs]. They’ve been very different screenings than what we've been having on the festival circuit. There’s a different tone to everything. The Q&As were mostly questions directed at Bill [Lee] more so than me about the filmmaking.

Nate Fisher: I have nothing to add about the tour. Obviously, I've been sitting here ensconced in work. But I will say, that is the most gratifying aspect of getting this movie out in front of people, it registers with both A24 tote bag zoomers and people who haven't been to the movie theater since Titanic. If we can get both of those polls, that's a job well done. And it's a challenge for us to get that second group to actually know about the movie, because we've got to send them The Pony Express or something.

CL: We might have to just tour it everywhere. That's what we might have to do.

NF: I would love to do that. Like, get a van, go every day. If our lives and the life status of independent movie theaters allowed for it, that would be the most rewarding way to spend a year. But sadly we live in precarious times.

BE: When the film premiered at the Cannes sidebar Quinzane des cinéastes, how did the French audience respond? I can imagine a lot of them weren't familiar with the game of baseball. Did they jump to viewing the movie as a representation of America in a certain way?

CL: It's tough to read any kind of global meaning on all that stuff because there are people from everywhere [seeing it]. I didn't get too many people asking me “Is this how you feel about America” or “is this about the political situation in America?” We get the occasional question that's about that. And actually, one of the funniest ones was when, I think it was in Spain, someone asked about the red and blue jerseys and said, “Is that about the Democrats and the Republicans?” But no, a lot of people have told me that they connect to the movie because of its themes of loss and change and time passing and getting older, mortality. They see those aspects, even if they don't understand a thing about baseball.

NF: As far as the French audience goes, what I've noticed is it kind of goes in three directions. The first direction is probably the most predominant, which is them going [exaggerated French accent] “Oh, America, baseball, hot dog”. And they love that stuff. That's why they love John Wayne and all that. Our movie being so American probably helped us get at least some sort of a foothold in the French sphere. The other slightly smaller subsection of their audience is I've noticed are the European art house movie snobs who are still culturally 10 years behind us where they don't know that it's okay to like sports. So all their Letterboxd reviews are like “Ugh, I hate sports, why would I watch a sports movie? I didn't like this because it's about sports, which is bad”. And then the third, my personal favorite subsection of French viewers that watched our movie is French baseball enthusiasts, who I didn't know existed. But they have a very robust, if not large, dedicated community. And there were like group outings and stuff, like they would bring all their teams or a local community rec team somewhere [to see the film]. I don't know where there are baseball fields in France, but they have them and they were doing organized outings.

CL: I forgot about that, it's amazing. There were random parts of the South of France that would have theaters filled up for one night because the local league was there.

NF: I mean, can you imagine being in the South of France and you get to go to a baseball game, but you get to tuck in a nice 93 Bordeaux, and perhaps a little tiny sausage or something. Oh my God, that'd be great. Best of both worlds!

BE: Nate, I remember when the film did premiere last year, you had a Letterboxd capsule you wrote where you said the film was about how hard it is for men to be friends with each other. Is doing so much of this press together kind of reinforcing that idea?

NF: I think for me there's nothing better in the world. I mean, this is probably the easiest environment to stay friends with people. Everybody's slapping each other on the back and going “Hey, remember that thing we did 30 months ago? Gosh that was swell”.

That actually makes it perennially rewarding to just constantly talk to each other about how much fun you had shooting this. So I would say that it's the coming storm that worries me more. It's gonna be harder to keep and sustain the friendships when we're 55 versus when we're 30. It’s going to be like when the fanfare and the hullaballoo go away, are people going to be willing to still hang out and reminisce and put all the work into that kind of thing? I'd like to think that I'm immune to the ills of time passing but we’ll see.

CL: Well I think we’ll all just need to make a movie again, which is my plan at least. I really think that the production itself was like a mirror for what's happening in the film. I mean, we created a big team and spent every day with each other on a field, and those bonds are unbreakable. On the tour this week I had cast members coming out to every screening and driving three hours to the furthest part of western Maine to carry boxes of merch into the theater and wait until the end. I guess in the hellscape that is 21st-century America, it can be hard to maintain friendships, but you have to fight against the tide and form some sort of collective experience, whether it's making a film or having a rec league or whatever.

NF: If anything, our movie is an ode to the toil of sustaining friendships, rather than throwing up our hands and saying, friendship is impossible in this alienated time. No, it's doable, it just takes some elbow grease. I will also say, Carson, I am devastated more than anything that I couldn't make the 15-person baseball player/actor DVD commentary that you guys did, that looked so fun.

CL: Oh, man. I wish we could have had everyone, but we had a great opportunity to record in a studio in Boston and we had to take it. However, I'm thinking we could just put like five different commentaries on this thing. We could just take all the other actors and do another commentary. The actors who weren't in that one put them in another one. We could just do it somewhere else. I think it's possible.

NF: We still gotta do the 9-9-9 challenge though. That's my big proposition. Do you know about the 9-9-9 challenge?

CL: I think you mentioned it to me.

NF: It's nine innings of baseball, nine beers, nine hot dogs. That's it. People around the country, go to say the Tigers game and do the 99--9 challenge to get the most plastered they’ve ever been in their life. I would love to see how many beers and hot dogs I could finish in a 98-minute movie. You might have to start before the commentary.

BE: Can you each talk about your relationship to cinema and baseball? Did they ever intersect before?

CL: Probably the first time they really intersected was when Nate and I first started hanging out and talking about it. We both stumbled upon the idea that our tastes were aligned and that some of the qualities of slow cinema that we love are also inherent to baseball. It's not something I think I had considered in a really tangible way before that. But I think they're both major pastimes that define the 20th century and are now in a place where they're in crisis in some way. And the opportunities to indulge in either passion are dwindling. So I definitely see the relationship there, but also just in terms of the pace of it, the rhythm of it, there's a similarity and we just knew we wanted to make a movie that would tie those things together.

NF: I can safely say that we can take credit for seven years ago, those conversations spearheading the cultural shift where it became okay for American snobs to say that sports are good again. We brought it back. It's been our mission to return the joy of sports to the art house nerd masses. And I think that's something we've been talking about. We talked about the cinematic qualities of baseball since time immemorial. We've had to defend why we like it so much in comparison to the more exciting sports. Like no, the boredom is the point and anybody that's ever watched the films of Lisandro Alonso can kind of get where we're coming from with that.

CL: The problem is that most of the good baseball movies never really capture the game in a way that feels like it's true to its rhythm and its spirit. Because they don't want to capture the boredom.

NF: The good baseball movies, at least I find, are about really weird guys. Probably like 40% of what is interesting about the history of baseball is the just demented nutjobs that play the game, especially at a high level. I was listening to an episode of [podcast] The Dollop, which has done a ton of great episodes about old baseball players, and there's a guy in the 1880s who was one of the best baseball players, and he referred to his eyes as his lamps. And he talked about how he would rub weird oils on his eyeballs before the game, because it was going to help him see better. it's very, very strange stuff so there are a lot of great baseball movies in that tradition and we try to sort of pay homage to that by having a bunch of weird-looking freaks in our movies which I think is very, very important if you're gonna talk about baseball.

CL: So we did that but again we felt like no other baseball film actually captured the way it’s played.

NF: Yeah, they never actually bothered to do the visual component of it.

CL: The visual component, the temporal component of it, the slowness, all the distractedness of it, the fact that half the time you're just watching, and not doing anything, you're powerless.

NF: I will lastly say that the time, apart from our conversations, when I most understood the goldmine that was the cinematic potential of baseball was when I started watching the baseball documentaries by John Bois. I mean this is a guy doing something very different from what we do, but it’s just tremendous baseball storytelling, taking the statistics and the meta-narratives of the game and turning them into things that are incredibly funny and poignant in equal measure. So that was probably my first brush with people being like, oh wow, there's, this sport, more than any that has this weird, poetic quality to it.

BE: As director and actor, what are some of the real technical challenges of shooting baseball scenes?

NF: The technical challenge as an actor is throwing a curveball. It is not easy. It is really, really hard to make a ball not go to the plate but also start to break as it's at the plate to get that sort of 12 to 6 vertical movement. It is unbelievably hard. Anytime I was on set and we weren't shooting most of the time I was going up to people and being like “Will you please go stand out there and be my catcher I'm gonna huck balls at you not very accurately and I'm gonna throw ninety pitches a day until I can look almost serviceable”. That is so hard especially when the camera's rolling and you know you have to not just throw a good pitch but throw a pitch that looks good being thrown.

CL: Yeah and then factor in a very long shoot and bodies that weren't meant to be playing every single day, or just aren't conditioned to do that, and then you have a bunch of aging guys who are falling apart by week two.

NF: My elbow, I need a Tommy John, it hurts so bad.

CF: Like all of that is hard enough to begin with, right? But add to that the fact that I wanted to capture this film in a lot of master shots, moving master shots sometimes, like some of the actual gameplay. I was very adamant about that because I think a lot of baseball films cut up all the action into montage, and you lose the rhythm of it, you lose the convincing quality of it. So I wanted to see everything in one shot, but then you have to rely on four, five, six guys to get a ball to go exactly where you want it. And that's extremely hard. It just means a lot of takes. So we would schedule this film in such a way that we gave ourselves a lot of time to handle some of the more complicated plays of baseball action. And of course, we're shooting this digitally, so we can kind of just keep rolling, we're not burning film. And oftentimes, I would know that the first ten takes were useless, so we could delete them if we had to. And then in terms of actually deciding when you have a shot that works, It wasn't really about finding the play that actually had the right snap to it or was proficiently executed. It was really just about finding a certain comedy in it. And sometimes it was just like the right kind of fumbling, sloppy quality that produced something humorous or elegant. And then we'd move on. But a lot of the time, if you see a ball fly from off-screen, that's because I'm throwing it because I needed it to go exactly to a certain spot in the frame. And it's also like, as you go on, and you shoot for longer, you sometimes have to adjust the script, and you realize that certain actors can't achieve certain things, so you have to change the script a little bit or move someone to a different position. You just keep adapting as you go. But it's a miracle that we didn't have more challenges related to that.

NF: It in microcosm, was like having to run an entire 162-game baseball season and be like, all right, we got to stash this guy that can't field somewhere over here for this shot. We have to make sure this person's elbow is okay and good to go. It's just like getting over the line, executing on as many of the things we wanted to shoot or as we wanted to do and just being happy with getting 100 out of the 162 things, that's still a huge success, I think.

CL: The other thing is that, I think it's very important that everybody really wanted to be there. They were there for the whole month because the film is shot in sequence, there needs to be that continuity. So pretty much everyone was there every day and there was always that group camaraderie. People really enjoyed it. I think if people were fighting through it it would have been really hard to get them to achieve those athletic things. So anytime we might be busy with something else or we're having lunch or let's just finish, people would go out and do some drills, they’d get in a batting cage and I could teach someone how to try to hit to right field in between takes because we needed that for the next shot or something. So there was a lot of actual baseball practice happening in the margins of the shoot.

BE: How hard was casting the ensemble of the film? Because after all, in this film, all these actors have to be very believable as people who've known and been playing with each other for years.

CL: It took a long time. But I didn't find it that hard, because I knew right away when I got the right weirdo freak, to Nate's point. Like, I’d see the face and I’d hear the voice and I’d go, that's someone who belongs in this world. Because there's a lot of actors who just don't have that sauce, you know? They just don't speak to you. I'm looking for a certain type of person who looks like they're from this region, who’s lived a life, who has a sense of history and a common sense of humor. And then the big question is have you played baseball before? When was the last time you played? What's your relationship to the game? That was kind of the final hurdle. And sometimes I got some guys who had fairly recently played, and other times it was like decades since they had and I had to ask myself if it's still worth casting this person. And that's a big challenge when you know you think they're right for that character and that's where some of the revisions to the script had to come in, because we'd fall in love with a person and then realize that they couldn't throw a ball more than five feet. We were just always having to adapt. But I mean, the film is cast with locals that we found from casting websites in the Boston area and also friends of mine and people from my hometown that I remembered and thought that they would be great in a film. So it's a real ragtag group. There are also people from New York and people from L.A. as well. Maybe only a few of them had worked together before. So everything was like building this camaraderie from the ground up.

BE: Maybe I can end on this question, but what are some of your favorite sports movies, outside of the obvious?

NF: The one that comes to mind, if I'm trying to be Mr. I-Know-Everything and have this cool movie that you've never heard of, the one that always comes to mind for me is …All the Marbles, which is Robert Aldrich's last movie. It's about these two low-tier, rust-belt, female professional wrestlers and their manager, Peter Falk, taking them on from show to show through the dregs and humiliations of being a small-time athlete. It is funny, gross, ugly, awesome. It's the best.

CL: It’s a real litany of ugly late winter excerpts. It's such a grey, brown movie, it's beautiful. It's really great. But yeah, I really like Downhill Racer. I think [director] Michael Ritchie's very underrated. He's got a very up-and-down career, but that film is really special. I really love American Dreams: Lost and Found by James Benning, which I'm going to introduce I think two days before I'll be in Toronto. You could argue it’s not really a sports movie, but I think it also is in a very deep way. I wish there were more great sports movies, to be honest. I think The Longest Yard, which is another Aldrich film, is quite good, actually.

NF: Should we give more? Are we being interviewed by Letterboxd?

BE: Yeah, we’re on the red carpet right now and doing the *ding-ding* thing.

NF: Like doing the top four.

BE: Yeah, and you’re doing the top four fed by your publicist, like *ding-ding* Baby Driver *ding-ding* Andrei Rublev.

NF: Which sports movie should we pick to prove that we're actually approachable and quirky and fun?

BE: If you're in Canada it has to be a hockey movie.

CL: We'll give you a hockey movie. I haven't seen Slapshot in ages, but I've been told that it's a good comparison with Eephus because of its working-class characters. I'm not sure. Have you guys seen it recently?

NF: I actually don't think I have seen a single hockey movie ever in my life.

BE: Nate, aren’t you a huge Russell Crowe fan though? I thought you would have seen Mystery, Alaska for that reason alone.

NF: I shamefully have to admit that I don’t even know if I’ve heard of that movie. I gotta look this up now.

BE: It’s a Jay Roach movie, I think he made it and The Spy Who Shagged Me in the same year. 1999 was like the Jay Roach twofer.

NF: Wow, what a run. I’ll save some face by saying that Jon Bois’ four-part documentary about Blue Jays legend Dave Steib has made me cry more than once. It is a total masterpiece and one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

CL: It’s great. I also love The History of the Seattle Mariners. So definitely Jon Bois.

Join us for the Toronto premiere of Eephus on Sunday, March 23rd at The Paradise Theatre. Tickets on sale here.

Bleeding Edge presents the Canadian premiere of www.RachelOrmont.com on January 22nd at Paradise Cinema at 7:30pm. Featuring a Q & A with director Peter Vack. BUY TICKETS HERE!

In 2017, filmmaker and actor Peter Vack brought Assholes to SXSW. In an environment where festivals had been accused of going corporate, or used as launching pads for established filmmakers rather than places to discover new cinema, Assholes offered a defiantly independent vision of two anatomy-obsessed popper-addicts (one of whom is Vack’s real-life sister Betsey Brown, playing a fictional version of herself) partaking in increasingly disgusting behaviour. The title, you see, is more literal than audiences may have expected. The film was declared “one of the most disgusting movies ever made” by Indiewire but also won the Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award “in honor of a filmmaker whose work strives to be wholly its own, without regard for norms or desire to conform.”

A few years later and both Vack and Brown had become prominent figures in the NYC’s much-discussed Dimes Square art scene. In addition to starring as a Prince Andrew obsessed nymphomaniac in Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-First, Betsey Brown also directed herself and her brother in the controversial Actors, a spiritual sequel to Assholes in which Vack, playing a version of himself, transitions to a woman to aid his flagging acting career.

It was around the time of the self-distributed rollout of Actors that Vack started production on his directorial followup, www.RachelOrmont.com. Starring Brown as Rachel, the infantilized property of an advertising agency who grows up in captivity, with only a computerized personality, @poorspigga, as a friend, Vack’s film imagines the internet and social media as an auditorium full of people screaming at each other, a nifty visual interpretation of the toxic dynamics that became all the more heightened during a worldwide pandemic that left many people trapped in their homes. the film also co-stars porn star Chloe Cherry as a pre-packaged corporate pop star called Mommy 6.0 and Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova as another chronically online personality that Rachel interacts with. Compared even to Vack’s previous film, www.RachelOrmont.com is a visually disorienting, hyper-stimulating work of art that draws from a culture of meme-making and provocation. Toronto filmmaker Nate Wilson (The All Golden) contributed to the film by provided meme-ified subtitles, adding text to the screen and heightening the feeling that this is part film, part shitpost.

It was during the filming of these scenes that Mike Crumplar (a.k.a. Crumps), a New York Substacker who had previously criticized Actors, wrote a newsletter that came to define the Dimes Square arts scene. Apparently accosted on camera by Vack and Brown for his criticism of their work, the newsletter described the experience as his own “Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual.” Anyone looking for footage of this event in the film may be disappointed, but we discussed that event, and many other things, with the filmmaker.

Bleeding Edge: So watching the film, it feels like a pandemic movie, in terms of the cultural references and the formal conceit of it all, but I remember at the end of Assholes, your character references the making of this movie by name. So I'm just wondering if you could talk about the road to getting this movie made, and how the idea of it has changed over that time?

Peter Vack: I think you actually mean that in the beginning of Actors, my sister's film. My character says that he's working on a project called RachelOrmont.com and that he has decided he'll play the title character of Rachel, which is part of what catalyzes that character making a cynical transition. So, yeah, it was a long road to getting it made. In 2014, I made a short film called Send, starring Julia Garner, and in that movie, the internet was conceived of as a theatre space where content was posted on a stage in front of an audience. While that movie was in post, in late 2013, I started writing a feature that would continue that conceit. And it was RachelOrmont.com, but so much happened between then and now.

In the beginning of the process, I was really coming at internet culture as an outsider. I just had this intuition that the idea of the internet was underrepresented in cinema. Since then, there's been much more representation of online communication and online culture, but at the time, there was far less. Also, I was not yet a fan of post-internet art. In the making of the movie, I became a fan of post-internet art and internet art, so that also influenced the making of it. When I was writing the early drafts, I read this book by Jaron Lanier called You Are Not a Gadget, that was about some of the problems he saw with Web 2.0–being like social media websites–and my early stabs of the script were very theoretical. So some of the story carried through, but it went through so many revisions. In that time, I also made Assholes, I wrote my novel [Sillyboy], I acted in so many things. So it was always a project I kept returning to and then discarding because it felt like something that wouldn't get made. It almost got made in 2015, but what's interesting to note is that in 2015 there wasn't even such a thing as "going live," but the characters in the script were live-streaming themselves. I remember having to explain to producers because I really thought, Well, in the future, this will happen. But I would be met with a blank stare, because, really, the true mechanics of the internet had to catch up to some of these ideas for it to work.

So even though it was a long road, I'm glad that we waited so long, because also in that time, I became a content creator myself. I'm pretty deep in the world of making memes, and so that added a whole other level of personal experience that I could bring to it. The thing about making a movie about the internet is that it's an impossible task because the internet is different for every user. When it was time to make it, I thought, well, the best I can do is just hope to get something of my personal experience with the internet, and that's why I included so many very niche references to 2020 online culture like the Trad Cath references, the Milady references, Angelicism references, Dimes Square references. These are admittedly all very personal fixations of mine, but I felt that because it was impossible to represent the internet as something for everyone, the best I could do was, in certain moments, to be as specific as possible, to capture the flavor of what one chronically online user or my own feed might look like in the year 2022.

BE: Yeah, I was gonna touch on the @themasterofcum Instagram account and whatever other Instagram handles that you're in control of at the moment. Do you think there's overlap between your career as a filmmaker and your career as a shitposter?

PV: This movie is the overlap. When we were in pre-production, I would draw a Venn diagram and I would say here's one circle: “cinema.” This other circle is “memes,” and I want our movie to land somewhere in the middle, but it was a long and challenging road to make the movie feel that way. And part of what really brought it there in the end was working with Toronto filmmaker extraordinaire, Nate Wilson. When I saw the text in The All Golden, It was right near the end when we were deep in post, and I had in mind that we would subtitle the movie for a couple reasons: Betsey's character in the beginning is a little hard to understand. So is the character played by @poorspigga. Also, some of the language we use is hard to parse because it's hyper-niche slang that not everyone's familiar with. So there was this idea that if we subtitled the movie, it would ease all those things. And also the film is pretty bleak, so it adds a level of legibility and of sweetness that is like the sugar that helps the medicine go down. But we didn't have anybody to do that, but there's some really spiritual aspect of filmmaking where things fall into your lap at the right moment. Right when I needed to find the right designer was when I met Nate, saw The All Golden and felt like what he was doing with text was so innovative. It wound up being a match made in heaven. It has become one of the gestures that has defined the film, and it is the gesture that does directly speak to meme culture, because we were able to use fonts that we use in meme culture.

BE: There's also the very recent development where young people now watch everything with subtitles, which kind of surprises me...

PV: They do! Part of what that is, too, is the other element in the frame promotes concentration. We are in this over-stimulated, multi-screen reality. People have joked on Letterboxd that this movie should be split-screened with, like, Subway Surfers content the way they would do on TikTok. But in a way, I would love to see someone make that. I think it is our challenge as filmmakers, that this isn't the 20th century, and we aren't the only game in town. We have to find ways of making our frames exciting and stimulating so that they truly do take precedent over the phone screen. So the text on the screen, it's a fun gesture, but that's another purpose it serves for the ADD mind, which I definitely have. Being able to read helps you lock into focus even more.

BE: So this formal idea where everybody's in an auditorium and they're engaging with each other face to face, but in the confrontational way that you might find an online message board. What inspired that idea?

PV: That idea has been with me for a while. It was in my film Send and my background is in the theatre. I was an actor before I was a filmmaker, and before I did television and movies, I did theatre. I have a great love for the theatre. You know, it's like the oldest art form that we still have. It's a place where people have always come together to grapple with what is going on in society and with humanity. Part of the problem cinema has right now is that it is very formally confusing or challenging to figure out how to represent online communications, and it's why so many filmmakers don't even attempt it. But if we are going to have cinema remain a valuable medium, we have to find ways.

So even way back when I thought, well, there is something so theatrical about posting, because you really are crafting your identity the same way an actor would craft the monologue on stage. It's not like chatting to your friends. It is more like declaring a soliloquy in front of an audience. And you're not just focusing on one or two friends or calling a friend. You are potentially having all your friends and all your enemies and maybe your family members and then maybe some strangers be in the audience. But what I didn't realize in 2014 because I wasn't as deeply entrenched in chronically online culture and content creation myself, is that the comments are as valuable, if not more valuable, than the content. You can't really separate out content from comments, and we all know that great content produces interesting comments, or really sometimes horrible content produces interesting comments, but the two things are really holding hands. So that was a discovery I made in life, in the time it took to make the movie.

One other thing I'll say as a parenthetical, but it's very important, and it's part of why I'm so grateful the movie didn't happen before 2022, is because 2022 was an interesting year. People being chronically online became more mainstream. Meme culture became more mainstream. People had to go online because the only way they could stay connected. So some of these things that felt like subcultural activities became more mainstream cultural activities. Also, my profile as a meme-r increased. My producers, the Ion Pack, had an odd, very online audience. Dasha [Nekrasova] has an extremely online audience. So when we were casting this wide net of Come be an extra in this movie! Play a member of a personified message board! When I said that to a room full of people in 2022, they came! All I said was, Hey guys, so what we're doing here is, you're embodying a message board. Go! And I gave them some prompts, but people were ready to go. If we had made it in 2017 I'm not sure they would have come with as much material. I remember one guy said during the process, which went so many different places and was so fascinating and harrowing and emotional and funny and obscene and beautiful, and it really contained everything. He said "This was almost like an exorcism, because we all have these personalities in us, these online demons that we were able to purge."

I prompted people to do lines that were like a shitpost, lines that were like a brag, lines that were like a sincere admission, I tried to stoke conflict, so many things, just to try to get as much from the audience as possible to attempt to capture something of this chorus of voices that is discordant that you see online. The only way to do that, or even attempt that, was to trust that group of people and I was lucky enough that at the time that we made it, because it was my followers, Dasha's followers, Ion Pack's followers, they were there. They were possessed by the right voices, and they were ready to play and experiment with this character of the message board user, in a way that I'm not sure would work so well now, because maybe we're a little past it, and it wouldn't have worked so well before it. So again, I don't know what to make of it other than just good luck.

BE: I think a lot of people are at least aware of the the Crumpcident from the production, and maybe even know about the movie because of the whole debate that it created, but the way you're talking, it almost sounds like that that incident happened as part of the design of how you filmed that scene.

PV: I'll give you a little more context around that, because Crumps, his article, got so much attention, and for a period of time, I did feel a lot of people misunderstood what we were doing. I think even Mike himself misunderstood what we were doing. Mike and I are friendly now, by the way. The hardest thing to capture, I realized two days into shooting with the audience, was like a personal grievance of sorts, because that is usually something that people need to be shielded by the screen to engage with, or shielded by an anonymous identity to engage with. And no one had that luxury. I think Crumplar thought at the time that we were diabolical and premeditated and that just wasn't the case. In fact, he wasn't even that much of an enemy. He was just an online character that had most recently come out negatively against my sister's film. It wouldn't have been truthful to just have fans or acolytes, we had to also invite people we thought were very much against us creatively. Because when you post, you post not only to your fans, but also to your haters. He was the closest that we could get at that time to that character, which is why we had him.

At a certain moment, after we had done a scene with Ivy Wolk where we did about 60 or 70 takes, I realized that if anybody was going to risk a very personal confrontation, it would have to be me, because no one else would do it, because they weren't safe in the way that you are safe behind the screen. So I did say, Michael, why did you give my sister's movie this negative review? I felt like you did a bait and switch. It seemed like you liked it. Did you, in fact, do this journalistic thing of like, luring us in as friends only to do a hit piece? And I did provoke my sister to engage with him. None of that material made it into the movie because it derailed the story, but it was very interesting. It remains very interesting footage of people having a very hard discussion about things that are very personal to them, disagreeing and not coming to agreement. In a way, it does remind me of what happens every day on X.com where people are quote-tweeting each other, vehemently disagreeing, not really listening to each other, very much stuck in their own opinions.

The way Mike framed it was very good for his narrative, but he would have you believe that the whole movie was about a public humiliation for him. And for a time, I think people believed that's what it was. As time has passed, I think people understand that it wasn't quite that. We were trying to simulate an internet pile-on for a movie. And we did, and Crumplar did, very valiantly, bear the brunt of that. But interestingly enough, his article created a real internet pile-on for me and my sister, which was not seen as in the realm of art or creativity, but was seen as genuine. People that believed him at face value at the time felt that he was genuinely calling out fascists, which is, you know, that's a fiction. People believed that he was a journalist at that time, but I think what he does is actually much closer to auto-fiction than journalism. So I just think it's interesting that even in trying to represent this thing creatively in a cinema, for whatever reason, it actually inspired the real thing on the internet. For myself.

BE: The whole fascism thing was very present in the debates of the time, this idea that Dimes Square is populated with fascist artists or whatever. With a few years of hindsight, that debate seems to have died down, but do you have a grand take on it, or any thoughts that you'd want to share at this point?

PV: That idea felt similar to the way some people believe in QAnon. I think it's really exciting for people to believe there is a very intense evil lurking behind the surface. It almost speaks to a fantasy people have that they want to believe that things are more villainous than they actually are. I think there's an aspect of any artist that is quote-unquote “fascistic.” You have to be very dedicated to your vision in a myopic way, but to take that quality of a filmmaker that reminds you of a fascist dictator, and to call it literal fascism is a huge mistake, because there's nothing about an indie movie that's going to actually influence policy. There's nothing about this movie that even seeks to influence policy. We don't actually have any fascist sympathies whatsoever. But I think that the internet does something to us, where it infantilizes us, which is in the film, it arrests us developmentally, and it creates in you a desire to see patterns that aren't there, to almost become a conspiracy theorist, because we're just getting these curated glimpses at people and and we're just getting the sign without the substance behind it. But I'm not exactly against the internet, either. I think the internet can do great things. I've seen some of the most creative voices flourish online, and beautiful art happens, and great community, great connections that wouldn't happen otherwise have happened for me because of the internet. But the negative is you can project really distorted and grotesque things onto people who you don't know. And I believe that the fascist panic of that time was part of a grand sort of mass formation psychosis projection.

BE: Could you also talk about the three projects you've done with your sister: Assholes, Actors and this. What is it that keeps bringing you back to this collaboration with her and do you plan on continuing it past this movie?

PV: Betsey is really my favourite actor alive. When that person's your sibling, it's a big plus. She is in a league of her own when it comes to fearlessness in her work and lack of modesty in her work. When I made Assholes, actually, I didn't realize how good she was, I just thought I was interested in making a movie where the relationships were mostly real. So the sibling relationship was real. We were capitalizing on our real relationships. But she really showed me something about her work as an actor that I couldn't unlearn. Betsey and I both have a fascination with boundary-pushing, transgressive material, and it's becoming harder and harder to ask actors who you don't know very well to do that, because we are in a more sensitive time, so these asks have become even harder. So it is a shortcut if your sibling happens to be somebody who shares your creative ethic, is willing to give their all to a role, and you also don't have to run the risk of transgressing on someone's boundaries. It becomes a very obvious choice.

It's the greatest thing when you can work with family. We love each other so much, we respect each other so much. It's like the greatest gift of all time to get to be creative with your family. I think it's something that raises eyebrows, because we are comfortable with obscene and perverse material. There's a projection that happens. What they're not seeing is we're able to do that because we actually are so close, and we're so open with each other, and we see each other as equals and adults, and we don't have these deep grievances that we haven't worked out. We're artists who respect each other, so it's such a privilege to get to work together, and the familial love and the familial closeness allows the work to go deeper, right off the jump. It gives us a sort of shorthand that would take years to develop with other collaborators. We're just so lucky. Will it always happen? I don't know. I think perhaps this could be the end for now. I think Betsey and I both have plans to not do exactly this in the future. I know both of us just are so grateful that we've been able to do this with each other.

BE: Prior to making Assholes, you were on an Amazon series, and you did some more mild-mannered indie movies. Why do you think your own filmmaking output, and Betsey's as well, has tended towards the more extreme?

PV: I think it has to do with our upbringing so close to psychoanalysis. Our mother has been a psychoanalyst for almost 50 years now. That's not to say that we were constantly discussing taboo material in the family. We weren't, but there was this feeling, an idea that we all were in psychoanalysis, and I have a psychoanalyst that I've had for a long time. And there was this sensibility that things shouldn't be off limits, and that taboos can be discussed and looked at without fear or shame. So I think that growing up in this environment, Betsey and I just see art as a place to express the extremes.

I was saying this last night in a Q&A, someone was asking about the "edgelord-y" moments, and I said, we did let things be very “edgelordy” on set, and the movie has some edgelord elements. I think what is not always understood, because an edgelord expression can be like a magnet that draws everything to it, we weren't doing it just to be provocative. When I'm working with actors, with creative people, I want them to feel like what I could express, the range could go all the way to edgelord, perversion, provocation, or all the way to sincere, open heart, utterly beyond moved to tears, to excitement. I want people to feel like nothing is off limits, because I want to get the range of expression and work. It can seem to some like it's this reaction to a bland culture, and in a way, it is, but it's also just growing up with this mentality that art is a place where you can say the unsayable.

But psychoanalysis doesn't always prepare you for people not understanding that, and for the consequences of other people not wanting that from art. When you make art that deals with taboos or transgressive material, what you immediately realize is that some people want that, but some people really don't, and that's just the reality. As an actor, I love to work, and I'll do anything. But I think our impulse to make these movies isn't so much based on the work we've done as actors outside of our own work, but more just with this sensibility that we've grown up with.

BE: Your parents, they're in all of these movies. What do they think about it and what kind of feedback do you get from them?

PV: Our parents are very supportive. I think that there's an element to these works that is a subtle satire of very supportive parents, and you're only able to subtly satirize supportive parents because of their support. So that's an interesting riddle. They love to act. Do they love the movies? I think they find the movies disturbing because there are disturbing elements to the films. If you're a parent watching the movies that your kids make that have these dark elements, I don't think any parent is thrilled about that, but on set, it's very fun, because they love being a part of something that we're all doing. They're very talented actors. They're brilliant, and they love, just like any actor, the opportunity to perform. But are these their favourite movies? No, of course not. My mom does not like watching these movies, but she doesn't like extreme cinema. That's a taste thing.

BE: Do you have anything coming up, like, what's in the works for PV, the filmmaker, at the moment,

PV: Nothing really worth talking about yet, honestly. Buy my book! Sillyboy! If you've seen RachelOrmont and you like it, tell your friends!

On December 4th, Bleeding Edge presents the Toronto debut of Me and My Victim, a film that provoked controversy at its debut at the Fantasia Film Festival this summer, at Market Video.

Maurane, a Montreal-based artist, and Billy Pedlow, a New York-based poet, discuss the history of their relationship over a period of several months. The discussions are overlayed with absurd visuals, a digital debris of text messages and dating app profiles, along with absurd visuals provided by Maurane that highlight the conflict playing out between the two not-quite-lovers.

A gripping examination of 21st century relationships and a fascinating document of post-cinematic screen culture, please join us for the film with a Q & A from Maurane!

Bleeding Edge: When did you first decide to create something out of this story, and was it always going to be a film, or were there other ideas for how to approach it?

Billy Pedlow: Yeah, we decided off the cuff at a poetry reading, we were just drinking together and hanging out, and I said to Maurane, We should make a movie out of our relationship…

Maurane: Yeah. I said yes immediately, but it was always a movie from the beginning. At one point of the process, because, like, the movie was really long, we were talking about making a series, but it didn't make sense.

BP: Really? We were talking about making it a series?

Maurane: I mean, I did, and you were like…

BP: No, it's gonna be a long movie.

BE: Does that mean there's a four hour super cut out there somewhere?

Maurane: Well, the recording of the audio lasts seven hours.

BP: And that that's what we started with. We started with this idea of, like, oh, we should just get in the studio and record audio, like a dialog between us, and that'll be the easiest way to build off of that into a low budget, easy movie that will be narratively compelling.

BE: It’s been compared to a podcast, which is why I was asking if it was always going to be a movie. Was it inspired at all by podcasts with visual elements?

Maurane: It's not that we were inspired by podcasts. It's more like it was what was accessible to us. So we started to record the audio, because we had a studio at Billy’s place where we could do that.

BP: It made movie making incredibly accessible. I think it sort of flattens the medium. It's very accessible and also very timely. It came together as Oh, this will all be like modern shit, but also make it really easy to make a movie. So we dove into it for that reason. But we weren’t like, Oh, we should make a podcast movie. It was like, Wait, it would be easy to make a podcast movie, and we'd be able to get the story that we want out of it.

BE: Before we dive into the content of the story. I want to ask, from a formal perspective—Maurane, you're an artist and Billy, you're a poet among other things—what did each of you bring to the final project, artistically speaking?

Maurane: We really did this movie together, so we both touch everything, like every part of it. But I guess what I bring the most to the movie is all the video editing. But we really did everything together.

BP: I guess it was my concept in a way, but there's a lot of push and pull at every step of the way. Like, I'm gonna have ideas and she's gonna be like, Oh, maybe not that. And then she's gonna have some visuals and I'm gonna be like, Oh, maybe not that. We say yes a lot, too. I mean, enough to make the movie. But for sure we had our own little domains…

BE: Was the visual stuff primarily coming from you, Maurane? The designs and stuff that are filling up the frame while you're talking.

Maurane: Yes and no. A lot of them yes, but also, Billy came up with concepts and visuals or ideas that he would share with me and I would try stuff.

BP: Also, we planned out the shots together, in terms of when we actually did shooting together, and then my one visual contribution is the red thing. I had the red thing idea. That was my idea. I think she probably did everything else, but I did that one thing. Maurane did a lot of the absurdist visuals, like the zebras, the Olympic skater, stuff like that.

Maurane: Because that makes me laugh!

BP: I love that shit.

BE: And the stuff that you actually filmed, how much work went into the reenactments and other stuff that you actually had to go out and shoot?

BP: How many days of actual filming? Probably four or five actual days of filming, right?

Maurane: I mean, probably more than that.

BP: We dragged it out because I'm always working. So we had to sneak it between my work schedule and it was usually just us. We had a couple people working with us on and off.

Maurane: But the way the movie is done visually, sometimes we filmed for one day, but we just use, like, 10 seconds of it.

BP: Or we didn't get anything the whole day, like the day the of the park date. We did so much filming for every single shot, and then, like, Fuck that. This shit sucks.

Maurane: We had a second date scene when we go to the park. We filmed a lot, but Billy's hair didn't look good...

BP: For the actual filming, I was always filming without my glasses because I was trying to differentiate myself from my character by taking my glasses off.

BE: Like Clark Kent.

BP: She always thought it was really funny. I would take my glass off and so I couldn't see anything. I'd be mad disoriented and we would just do the shot in one take. Because I couldn't see I would be a little frustrated and I wouldn't even necessarily watch the shot over because I didn't want to put the glasses on. I'd be like, Let's just go to the next shot! So we would just go through a day of shooting where I didn't watch any of the footage, and it was all like, first take, and I was super frustrated the whole time. Some of those days were terrible, but some of those days were good! It was pretty unprofessional shit.

BE: Did you reenact the the poetry readings, or were those just actual poetry readings that you went to?

Maurane: That's the only part that we didn't reenact. It's a real event that we did to have footage of us reading the poems. Also, when the subtitles are yellow, often it means that it's real…

BE: One thing that comes up in the movie a lot is the Caveh Zahedi influence and the connection there. Can you talk about that and how you see Caveh now and his whole philosophy about total honesty?

Maurane: It really changed over the year. We met him and showed the movie in his class [at The New School]. But at first, it's really that Billy knew Caveh’s work, and he talked about it at our first date, or maybe the second one, and the honesty and Caveh’s work really affected the way I acted with Billy in real life. So I was, like, really direct or even rude sometimes, or straightforward. My point of view about honesty changes a lot each week. I think honesty in art makes art super good, but in real life, I think I believe in honesty, but I don't think it's a good thing when you use honesty to be mean or cruel, if that makes sense. I think that's my point of view for now.

BP: That's the thing, honesty does lead to meanness. It does lead to transgression of autonomy from one into another. In general, what makes honesty good in art is that it's mean, it creates drama, it creates conflict. So I think, Maurane, you're hitting the nail on the head in terms of identifying those things. I think that that's why, in life, I don't think honesty is a great ideal, but we did go into it for this piece of art, and I think we both felt that the consequences are pretty unpredictable and dramatic.

BE: This is the thing about Caveh and his work. It's definitely very compelling, but at the end of the day, the fruits of this philosophy is that his life is falling apart, and all these people hate him, which is entertaining for the audience, of course…

Maurane: In Caveh’s work, he's honest, but honesty is not necessarily the reality. It's his perception that he puts out into the world. It's really interesting for his work, but you have to be able to see the difference between your honesty and the reality, if that makes sense…

BP: I like being able to dip my toes into that radical honesty when I decide to, and then to get out of the water and dry off.

BE: How was it screening the film for his class? What was the response like from the students?

Maurane: It was so fun, but mainly the class didn't like the movie. We entered the class and Caveh said that 70% of the class didn't like it, but that was super interesting. And I think a lot of people in the class did like it, but they were too shy to say it out loud.

BP: We thought it was going to be like 15 people. But instead of an intensive film class, it was a Gen Ed class, so it had like 100 people, and not all of them really gave a shit about film. We walked in and I shook hands with Caveh. I was like, Caveh, pleasure to meet you. He's like, Hey, 70% of the class hated your film. Why don't you sit there? We'll do the interview. So then we did the interview, and we got dinner with him. But then, afterwards, there was a bunch of shit-talking on Letterboxd. And I got really drunk at this dinner with Caveh, so I immediately started talking shit about the New School students on my Instagram. Then the next day, I got a message from a girl who's in the class that they put up my Instagram story in their class on the board. They reacted to my reaction.

Maurane: When we do a Q&A, sometimes we perform a bit, or a lot. That one, we really performed...

BP: Yeah, we were like, We created a genre! I compared myself to Jesus, evidently. I just said that Jesus was the first canceled man and they were like, Oh, this guy thinks he's Jesus. I was being really arrogant.

Maurane: Because Caveh was around, it created an energy.

BP: Caveh had a very chill, quiet energy. So I doubled down on being really arrogant.

BE: I guess we can get into the parts of the movie that have upset people and are more controversial. Without being too specific, the film gets into matters of consent and an incident that happened between the two of you. What were you hoping to accomplish by bringing that into the film?

Maurane: At first we did the movie for ourselves, so we were just trying to get into that relationship and go date by date, and that was part of what we lived through together, and that’s why we decided to keep it in the movie the way we did. For myself, it was to trying to show what is sexual assault in a real way, because I don't think we see that in a lot of movies. But also it was to show two different points of view from two people that don't agree, and even when the movie ends we still don't agree, and that happened in life.

BP: For me personally, I don't make art with a moral intention, generally. If anything, I like to do more investigative work. But why do it? Because we thought it'd make a compelling narrative. That's just the first level. We're like, Oh, this is beautiful, this is interesting, it's romantic! And it's also an ambiguity that is rarely displayed on film. Lately I’ve been comparing it to looking at the picture of the rabbit or the duck, and you can see a rabbit if you want to, you can see a duck if you want with this movie. A lot of these #MeToo, narratives, like, for example, the Aziz Ansari #MeToo moment, reading that article about what happened to him, putting aside how you feel about it morally, is just incredibly compelling, narratively. You're like, This is so juicy! Do I think it's bad? Do I think it's not bad? I'm going to get into it! People do fixate on that. You can see it on the internet, you can see the interest, and it is a sick, perverse interest, but is one that I do have. I do love those narratives that get really into the nitty gritty of something, where you're not sure how you feel, and maybe it's a little sick and gross, but you're just fixated on it because of that. And I felt like it was one of those narratives. In reality, all the time, you have these things that happen where they could be a rabbit or a duck, it could be a false accusation or a really bad action. It's rarely shown in a movie where you can actually see it both ways, depending on what you believe or what your interpretation is. I felt that the narrative in our film struck like a perfectly 50/50 line, where I feel pretty comfortable with how anybody feels about any of it. I'm like, Oh, I get it, that's probably in there. I get it. And on all sides. And a lot of people feel different ways. And to me, that's what art should do, where you dig into yourself and dig into how you feel about the world, and learn how you feel about the world from how you feel about a movie.

Maurane: Yeah, also we got to dig into ourselves that way. I think it helped me, and I think it helped to not recreate that in life with other people I’m gonna meet in the future. It really was like a therapy to do the movie, and to analyze the way we act with others.

BP: We wanted to get closer to each other through it, too. We weren't ideological about it, and if we were ideological about it, we didn't have the same intentions, necessarily, but we knew that it was a story that we found compelling, that we felt making it would bring us closer together.

BE: Just from browsing Letterboxd reviews, particularly after it screened at the Fantasia Film Festival, there's an insinuation that Billy, you made Maurane do all the editing and stuff on it, which I find disrespectful to Maurane, because it's taking her agency away. So I’m wondering, Maurane, what's your perspective on that? Do you feel that you have agency in this endeavour?

Maurane: I was really surprised about this reaction. I expected people to be shocked, but to remove the credit or my work in it… I was aware of what I was doing, and I was doing it because I wanted to do it. And really, at no point did Billy push me to do this movie. I really wanted to do it and I'm really proud of it, and I know why I did this movie. I understand why some people think that. Like, after seeing Billy and I in a Q & A and Billy takes more space than me, just in general. So it's confronting for people. So that's like an easy way of thinking to say that I'm manipulated by doing this movie, but that's not true.

BP: It's sick that people think I'm so clever and manipulative. They watch this movie where I'm kind of like a bumbling romantic, and they're like, He's so manipulative! I was so offended by it because it was such a collaboration. I think, honestly, that is why the movie makes people freak out a little bit is because of the cognitive dissonance. Like, if the movie was made by just me, by a man, like they could just discount it, but because it's made by us together, they they don't really know how to wrap their heads around it. If their response to this movie is just to discard it because I'm evil and Maurane is a victim they're confronted by, first of all, the title, and the narrative and like the the question of victimhood in the movie. But also, on top of that, they're confronted by the fact that Maurane made the movie too, and we're both responsible for each other's depictions in the movie.

Maurane: That's what I'm the most proud and what is the most strong about the movie is that we did it together. This movie doesn't exist without me. And without Billy. Not a lot of people would have been able to do it because of the subject of the movie, so to remove that from the movie, it's kind of to remove the beauty of the movie.

BP: I think it's the way to shut it down. It's the cognitive dissonance to shut Maurane out of the movie. Don't confront the whole complexity of what's going on. Don't look at the whole picture that way. I can discard it. It makes sense, but it is frustrating.

BE: Have there been any reactions to the movie from people that you know and respect that have been hostile to it?

Maurane: Some of some of my friends were really shocked by it, and have a hard time to love Billy and understand why I would be friends with him. That's a really strange thing to receive from people I like because I really care for Billy and people that come to me and say not nice things about him, but that makes sense, because that's that's what we showed in the movie. But that's really hard to deal with emotionally.

BP: It's hard to be like, This is real, but I’m also kind of playing character, we showed bad things, because I'm the villain or whatever. It's okay you can maybe at some point consider hating the character and not me, but, you know, do what you want. For me personally, I had problems with personal relationships that were a little difficult, but not friendships. My friends either like the movie or they don't.

Maurane: Your family didn't watch it.

BP: Yeah, there's this really cool movie theater in my hometown, and I think about the fact, like, Oh, I made this sick indie movie, it makes a lot of sense to show in the sick indie movie theatre in my hometown. But it's also like putting the scarlet letter on my chest. I don't know

Maurane: I don’t know if it's a good idea.

BP: Every inch of success the movie has, it's like, Yes!… Ohhhh. I just get more and more negative attention. But it's fine. I knew what I was asking for, I knew what I was doing.

BE: You do seem to embrace the negative attention, like you were saying with the Instagram stories…

BP: I can't help it. It's not like a strategy so much as it's just what's natural to me. I don't know. I've got problems.

BE: I wanted to ask Maurane, I've seen you posting on Instagram about making another autobiographical film, Can you tell us anything about that?

Maurane: I’m really in the beginning of the process. So it's going to be super different. But I still want to use my character, because I'm really into autofiction, but I don't think I'm going to say it too much.

BE: Can you talk at all about what you're working on, Billy?

BP: We originally were going to work on my second movie together, and Maurane departed the film to work on her own movies. So there's a little drama, a little juicy drama. But my movie is called Beautiful Blackmail and it's about some friends giving me consensual blackmail in their lives to help me fix their lives. And it's about friendship and group chats. I'm planning to make a trilogy in the style of Me and My Victim.

BE: All right, I think that's all I have. I'm excited for the screening next Wednesday!

Having showcased Kalil Haddad’s work throughout Bleeding Edge’s history (Vampires Drink Blood…I Drink Sorrow in August 2022, His Smell before the Toronto premiere of The All Golden and The Taking of Jordan at our first New York event), we’re proud to present the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in the city. On Monday, October 28th, Bleeding Edge will be returning to Innis Town Hall to screen eight of his shorts, culminating in the world premiere of his newest work, Victim of Circumstance.

One of the most important new voices in both queer and avant-garde cinema, Haddad’s work can alternate between languid and truly abrasive rhythms, often inhabiting a POV that feels truly dangerous in a filmmaking landscape for young directors so encouraging of “niceness”. Bleeding Edge sat down with Haddad to discuss his practice and body of work before Monday screening, which BTW, you can get tickets for here.

Bleeding Edge: So my first question is what do your parents think of your work? No, I'm joking. My actual first question, can you talk about the first exposure to images you had and when you felt the impulse initially to become a filmmaker?

Kalil Haddad: That's so funny. I actually think it was the summer that I was nine years old. My cousins were visiting and they had just gotten this toy camcorder and so we would film ourselves playing around basically, making up little skits. It was right after we had gone to the theatre to see Michael Bay's Transformers. 

BE: So you owe a lot to Michael Bay?

KH: I actually owe a lot to Michael Bay. 

BE: What was some of the first queer representation you'd noticed as a kid? Maybe it was more subliminal?

KH: That's a good question. I feel like probably the first gay film I ever saw was The Birdcage with Robin Williams. So I think especially growing up, that was my idea of what gay people were based on that movie. Probably that and The Simpsons. And then when I was a bit older, I think fourteen, in the same weekend, I watched both Mysterious Skin and Bad Education. And those two films really showed me the kinds of stories gay films could portray and what they can do on screen, as well that queerness doesn't have to be represented as something light or comedic. It can be treated seriously and it can get into these much more complex issues of identity. Seeing those two back to back really set me off in terms of wanting to explore more transgressive films. 

BE: Has queer respectability politics ever been an issue you've run into? Meaning, have you ever gotten kind of negative feedback over maybe not showing more positive images per se?

KH: I have, but for me, and I guess that's the thing that I try and fight against in my work, that queerness always has to be represented in a positive or soft way. Like I'm so over stories like Love, Simon that are just these safe coming out narratives, right? Films that aren't really dealing with the ideas of social identity or really sexuality in any kind of complex way. Queer film historically has been challenging. It should remain challenging. I think queerness becoming more mainstream in and of itself is a great thing, but we shouldn't also lose track of who we are beyond acceptance narratives and lose the ideas that are important to us interpersonally and politically, ideas that we should be tackling and addressing, because being gay, it doesn't start and stop with coming out, it's a lot more complex than that. So for me when I see a film like Love, Simon, it feels like it's just telling the sanitised version or the prologue to the real story of this person's life.

BE: I feel like through a lot of the films you’ve made, there's almost a historical responsibility in some ways, in how the stories you're choosing to showcase present the reality for a lot of people of a certain age of a certain sexuality at a certain time?

KH: That's the thing. And I feel like a lot of queer media that I grew up consuming as a teenager, and wanting to explore, were these films like Flesh or Querelle or Tennesse Williams plays, that deal more with the darkness of the queer experience. That's why I think as it does become more mainstream, not to lose track of the history that we're built upon. Because yeah, talking about the historical aspects in my work, these aren't stories that took place that long ago. Like we're talking about forty years ago, just one generation, maybe two generations removed, and to not lose sight of the actual struggles and challenges of being what society doesn't want you to be, and the kind of isolation and pain that’s created historically. 

And I think that's an important expression too, like queer pain, queer rage, that it can't all be sunshine and rainbows and treating the experiences of gay people as a punchline. Even if I think The Birdcage is fun, it's a very one dimensional version of what that is, and it's very much like a palatable version of that too. That's why I think it's interesting, for these historical works to take what we think of queer people in the 80s or 90s and kind of subvert that in terms of what the actual reality of what that experience was. Even that movie [The Birdcage], it's scenario is all played as a joke. We have to pretend we're straight or whatever, right? But it's like, okay, what's the actual pain inherent to these societal limitations and having to form your identity around other people's expectations of you? And that's also why with my work, I don't want to feed into expectations of what a gay movie is, what it should be like. It's like, no, I think queerness has always been confrontational, it should remain that way and should speak to those real issues. 

BE: In terms of your filmmaking process, how beneficial has the film school process such as York University been to your films? 

KH: Yeah, I'll say even when I was an undergraduate student, York didn’t really have, with the exception of John Greyson, any openly gay film professors working. In that time too, when I was making my film Farm Boy, which was my fourth year thesis film, I got a lot of pushback. And I think that there's something to being able to make films within this kind of context and to learn from these professors, but I also think that for me film school is about being able to learn enough to know when you should follow your own vision. 

When I was working with one professor, he was constantly trying to get me to [go against my instincts]. I had shot Farm Boy in a way where I knew exactly what my vision was and the kind of film I wanted to make, full of long takes and ambience, and he wanted me to re-edit it into a much more narratively driven, direct kind of work, much more of a love story than the film is intended to be. The film is about the pain of wanting someone that you can't have and the burden of regret. Especially life regrets for older gay men. And he wanted me to make it a lot sunnier, a lot more romantic, and I fought against that, and made what I had set out to make. I feel very proud of that film. I think, ultimately, film school should be about teaching you when to trust in and follow your own instincts. 

BE: With this event we're showcasing your new film, Victim of Circumstance. Can you talk about the origins of this film?

KH: The genesis of this film came right after I made The Taking of Jordan. I wanted to explore making more of these found footage, almost horror adjacent works. I was doing research and looking through all of these gay porn magazines from the 70s and 80s. What struck me initially were that these pages were the entire gay experience condensed into one little package. One of the only forms of representation gay people had of themselves at that time was through porn, whether on screen or on the page. And it made me think, how does that shape your sense of self when this is your only portrayal, this overly sexualized image of yourself, not a humanised version in any way. And then going through these pages and seeing the scope of what they truly represent, they weren’t just porn. There's political articles in them, personal ads, there's advertisements for very specific things, like completely non-sexual things, but very specifically for a gay audience. And so approaching this material as an entire history synthesised on the page, I wanted to find a way to bring that to the screen. How do I turn the gay experience as represented within this magazine into one grand statement on what this world was during this time and place. So initially it started off as really just the magazine pages being used to tell the story. And through editing, implying these different kinds of experiential meanings. What does it mean to cut from personal ads looking for love to an ad for poppers? And then as it went on, it became much more of a visual collage, much more sprawling in its scope, where it was no longer just magazine pages, it was about how to bring these pages to life, how to represent these experiences through additional footage and other historical material.

BE: Something very noticeable about your films, and especially in this one is sound. In making your films, are you conceiving of the sound alongside the images, or is it something that comes to you later in the process?

KH: No, I’m definitely conceiving them alongside the images. For me, the sound design is an integral part of forming the film and discovering the tone that I'm really trying to hit. Because that's the thing, the magazine pages in and of themselves are simply magazine pages, right? I can just open up a magazine and I can see them. So how do we really portray these still images, as it were, on screen in an emotive way? So as I'm editing the scenes, I'm constantly going back and forth with the sound and visuals, and they're being formed in tandem to find the true experience of what they really represent. 

BE: What do you envision as your artistic journey of sorts? Because I think that's part of the point of doing this screening is to show a progression of your films. What do you think in a way you've been building up to, artistically speaking?

KH: I think my work has always been concerned with gay themes and ideas of masculinity, but I think especially in my earlier works, they were addressed much softer. We look at a film like Muscle Monsters, which was shot in 2017 along with Honeypot and The Boys of Summer, and they're very much about gender and sexuality, but in a way that's more about heterosexual masculinity. Or the queer relationship to heterosexuality, really. Even one of my earliest films As I Sat In His Car, though explicitly queer, is a much more tender kind of work. I’d say my journey has been about speaking on these ideas and experiences in a much more direct way, with all their inherent beauty and ugliness. I think the way that I'm addressing queer issues now is much more blunt and unapologetic. And I think that's what great films, queer or otherwise, should be. Films should be challenging, they should be uncompromising and uncomfortable to an extent, especially queer films. We live in a world now where most people see the issues faced by queer people as issues of the past. I’m here to address what people would rather ignore, or worse, what they’d like to forget. 

For the past three decades, Caveh Zahedi has worked on the margins of American independent cinema, making highly idiosyncratic and personal films that generate their power from his personal belief in total honesty. In I Am a Sex Addict, Zahedi details his history with sex addiction through diaristic first person camera addresses and shockingly candid reenactments of his interactions with sex workers.

In similar fashion, Zahedi’s The Sheik and I follows the filmmaker and his family to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates for a Biennal, where he was commissioned to make a film for the festival with only one rule: Don’t make fun of the Sheik. Unable to work under the constraints given to him, Zahedi runs afoul of the Arts Foundation and faces both legal challenges from Sharjah and an alleged blacklisting from the North American festival circuit by Toronto International Film Festival and DOC NYC programmer Thom Powers.

More recently, Zahedi has developed a fanbase from the TV/web series The Show About The Show. Originally airing on Brooklyn community channel BRIC, The Show began as a clever, self-reflexive experiment that fits with Zahedi’s unique style: each episode would be a reenactment of the making of the previous episode. By the second season, however, The Show becomes a fascinating document of Zahedi’s failing marriage, complete with reenactments of that period, starring himself, his wife, her new boyfriend and his new girlfriend as themselves (at least, until most of them quit and are replaced by different actors).

This week, Caveh Zahedi will be in Toronto for a four-part screening of The Class About the Class, presented by Bleeding Edge. On August 27 & 28, Higher Learning 1, 2, & 3 will be screening at Paradise Theatre along with How to Overthrow the US Government (Legally). All four films are the product of a class at the New School in which students, under the tutelage of Zahedi, are tasked with producing a web series about the class. In the process, the students fight with each other, with their teacher and with the school itself. The chaotic atmosphere reaches its peak in the second film after a student accuses Zahedi of treating her differently based on her race and gender, causing a rift in the class. It’s a fascinating series of films, none of which are finished, according to Zahedi, and audiences will get a chance to see his pedagogical methods at work.

We chatted with Zahedi about his films, his philosophy of total honesty and where things stand with the films right now.

Bleeding Edge: How did the idea for this class and the accompanying web series come about?

Caveh Zahedi: I think I got the idea from George Kuchar, who taught a class at San Francisco Art Institute. I knew people who had taken it and they all really liked it, and it sounded fun. I thought it would be fun to teach a class where we're making something together and that it would be more more helpful, really, to participate in an class where you make something that you try to put out into the world. So that was the idea, really, just to make a good production class that seemed relevant. And also, it seemed like web shows are like this thing that anyone can do now without permission and without, you know, gatekeeper kind of stuff. So it seemed like, Let's do this DIY web show and see how it goes. I actually did it a few times before I found a way to do it that worked. I think there were two or three previous iterations that didn't really work.

BE: What was the initial intended viewing format? In the film, you see some clips from screenings that were held at the school itself, but were they supposed to be online in some format?

CZ: Originally I thought we could post them online as we were doing it, and we would get feedback and stuff, but in practice, it was just not possible to do them that quickly. So we would do an end-of-the-semester screening. And, in reality, a semester wasn't enough to pull it off correctly. So we would have a cut and we'd screen it, but then it'd be like, Oh, we still need to do a sound mix, and we still have to tweak things. So that's why they're all works in progress, because I never was able to really finish all of them.

BE: Do the students stay involved as you continue working on them?

CZ: No, they just go off and do their thing. For the first the first year, maybe, a few of the students would come over to my apartment, like once a week and try to keep working on it. And you know, they were finding it and making it better. But then the semester ended, and they all went their separate ways. Everyone eventually just disappears.

BE: Obviously, some of the things that happen in the series or in the films result in some turmoil between you and your students and the school itself. Is that something that you expected when you started to make these?

CZ: No, I didn't, but it became clear very quickly that it causes a lot of problems. I actually stopped doing it because I feel like I was getting in too much trouble, and it was like jeopardizing my situation. So I just said, Okay, it's not worth it. So I stopped, but I really like them, and I think it's kind of a shame, and I'm tempted to redo them now that I've just got renewed for another five years.

BE: How do things stand between you and The New School, not just because of this, but also because of stuff that came up in The Show About The Show about smoking pot with the students?

CZ: I think they see me as a troublemaker, and they're trying to constantly discipline me and make me behave better. So they're constantly giving me a slap on the wrist. Like, I applied for a promotion and they were like, No, we're not promoting you because you're too much trouble. Yeah, they don't like trouble or controversy or anything.

BE: We see part of a contentious Q & A from one of these screenings in the aftermath of the second film, which relates to conflict that occurred in that class. But generally speaking, how do the screenings go? And do the students appreciate what they've created in your class?

CZ: Yeah, I think that that one was special because it was so divisive. But generally, yeah, they love it. And, you know, people enjoy it and are pleased and but then, they have no discipline, these students, they're not good collaborators, for any kind of long-term thing. If you don't get them in that one semester where you're grading them, it's over pretty much.

BE: Do you think that's something specific to The New School and the private university experience, or do you think that would be the case with anybody in that age group?

CZ: I think it's an age and culture thing. I mean, they're not that invested in it. Some people are more than others, and sometimes people will offer to keep working on it after the class. But it's hard to keep doing that, you know, when you're not getting any monetary reward or grade for it. It's such a slow, tedious process, of course, and students don't have that kind of patience. They just don't.

BE: In the second film, the class gets into some sensitive issues concerning race and gender, and you express an attitude about it that might be at odds with the school and with certain students in your class. Do you ever fear that putting this stuff in public will affect your job, or even outside of that, that being labeled a racist or being labeled a misogynist might have more professional consequences? What kind of things do you weigh in your head when you put this stuff out into the world?

CZ: Well, I have it put out into the world because of all this stuff. I mean, these accusations, I find them so ridiculous, and just everything about them is wrong. Like, I'm about as anti-racist as you can be, and as anti-misogynist as you can be. It just feels like it's racist to see race, and all these people who are making such a big deal about race, to me, that seems racist. We're all just people, and we're all the same, it's just stupid. And I know that's not popular, but that's what I think.

There's this thing where you can just call anybody racist or a misogynist and it somehow seems to stick easily. And it doesn't it mean anything. Like, what does that mean? It used to mean something. It used to mean you thought black people were inferior, or you thought women were inferior, but I don't think that! And yet, people are like, No, no, that's what it means anymore. It means nothing. It means that maybe you're not totally on board with a certain kind of hypocrisy that's going on or dishonesty that's happening in the culture. Like, there's some weird emperor has no clothes thing that's happening.

But I've seen a shift happening culturally. Like there was a time a few years ago when you couldn't say those things, and that's when that film really was made. And now I've seen people really reacting against it. like, the whole cancel culture thing is kind of out. And even feminism is kind of, like, out. People are really critical of it now and seeing all the problems with a certain kind of feminism, or a certain way of thinking about that. It's always like a pendulum swing, and it's just going the other direction right now. So I think it's becoming less like that than it used to be.

It's fascistic to reduce everybody to these very simplistic categories and to just condemn them without any kind of description, even, of like, What is it exactly you're accusing this person of? I mean, in that movie, she basically calls me racist and sexist because I don't let her interrupt everyone in the class and call them all racist. Like “That's racist!” No, it's not! That's just a human attempt to be fair to the other people in the class. But people throw that around recklessly. And I think there's been so much of that happening that people are sick of it. The rock is having a lot of ripples. It's complicated, but I don't agree with those accusations.

BE: In a university setting, you have young people who are trying to form their opinions and form their identities, and it almost becomes more dangerous for the teacher to speak out about certain things because of that. But you have this tendency to poke the bear a little bit, in a way that a lot of teachers probably wouldn't. Is there something courageous in doing that, or is that just who you are?

CZ: I think I'm courageous. I mean, I don't think I'm a great filmmaker, but I'm a courageous filmmaker. It takes courage. I think it also takes a certain personality, or a certain set of allergies to hypocrisy, which a lot of people don't have to the same extent that I do. So it's not just courage, it's also some kind of, I don't know, neurosis or something. But, yeah, I think there's been an atmosphere of fear, and there's been a lot of people are acting out of fear. And I just don't believe that people should act out of fear. That's not how you make a better world.

BE: I saw three of them. I haven't watched the third.

CZ: That one was also an attempt to not offend anyone. It's the least controversial. But do you feel like they're problematic?

BE: No, but I would say, watching the second one, in particular, I did have the thought of, What are people going to think about this? Are we going to get in trouble? I'm not proud that I had that thought, but it's definitely there.

CZ: I had it too. I mean, it's incendiary in a lot of ways.

BE: Have you had any contact with that student since the class?

CZ: I haven't. My main worry, really, is she threatened to sue The New School if this film was released. So if I release it and she sues them, they're not going to be happy about that. So I've been keeping it under wraps, but, yeah, I don't know. She has no legal grounds to see them. It's just an empty threat. But people cave to empty threats all the time.

BE: Seeing the chaos that follows your work sometimes, for example with that particular class, or with The Show About the Show, do you ever question your commitment to total honesty?

CZ: I push everything as much as I can without it becoming dangerous. You're always trying to find like, how far can you go before it's dangerous either to your livelihood or, you know, actual danger. It's hard to know sometimes what that limit is, and I think the further you push it, the braver and the more kind of amazing the work is. But if you push it too far, you know it's gonna all collapse on you, and then you aren't making anything anymore.

BE: Do you think that's what happened with The Show? Did you push it just a bit too far?

CZ: I did in the sense that everybody quit and there's no more money, and The Show became impossible to keep going. So I guess I did. Same with The Sheik and I, I pushed that until the whole thing collapsed. But the collapse is part of the film, or a part of The Show. So I think that's still successful. I didn't even know this term when I made The Sheik and I, but people use the term institutional critique to describe certain kind of art, and it basically fits in that tradition, I think. You can criticize an institution until they basically ban you, and then you're outside of it. And that's the art. It's like, here's a piece that got banned, but that's interesting, I think, and worth doing.

BE: You talk a bit about it in the movie itself, but what made you bring Jacques Servin, one of the Yes Men, in as a fellow teacher in the last movie of the cycle, How to Overthrow the US Government (Legally)?

CZ: Well, I felt like I'd gotten in trouble, and I was trying to do something that wouldn't get me in trouble, really. I thought maybe if we co-teach a class, and we focus it not on the classroom dynamics so much as on the external world, it would somehow protect me, and I though that would be fun to teach it with someone else, and I like Jacques. So it was like those three things together. Also we were trying to make a film together, actually, and trying to think of what we could do about the Trump problem, and we were having no luck. And then I thought, Oh, why don't we just teach this class that'll be the film we make. It killed two birds with one stone.

BE: We had KJ Rothweiler up here to screen his movie a few months ago, and he was a former student of yours, but you seem to have collected a sort of community of indie filmmakers who really look up to you. How cognizant are you of that whole DIY, independent scene that's happening in New York, and how involved are you are with it?

CZ: I teach a class where I invite a filmmaker every week to show a film and talk about it. And one of the things I like about that class is I meet all these filmmakers. It's like a community thing. I like that aspect, and I don't have much time to watch things, so I get to watch movies I would want to see, and then I get to hang out with the filmmakers afterwards and get to know them a little bit. So I like doing that. I've met a lot of people through that. And then just from making films, I meet people. I'm not trying very hard to be part of anything. I've noticed some people seem to like my films, but I'm not really an insider. I think I'm an outsider. I don't feel like I'm really part of anything. I just do my thing.

BE: I've been rewatching The Show About The Show recently, and there are some parts where you talk about your relative lack of success as a filmmaker. Is that something that you've come to terms with over the years, or is it something where you appreciate the trade-offs, where you get to teach instead, for example. I'm just wondering sort of what your mindset is on success, and whether you've become a success in your in your own mind.

CZ: I'm of several minds. Part of me is resentful, I wish that I made more money and had more acclaim and could make more of my films. It's frustrating to have a film project you can't make or finish because you don't have enough money. So I definitely am frustrated at my lack of success. At the same time, I think I'm more successful now than I've ever been. So I'm also shifting a little bit, and I'm enjoying that shift, but at the same time, not succeeding has been very growthful. It's really taught me a lot. And being successful has its own traps, obviously.

BE: As a viewer, I think if you had been able to make maybe more conventional films and become successful making more conventional films, then we wouldn't have something like The Show About the Show, which is very unique and something that only you could make.

CZ: I mean, I never wanted to be more successful making more conventional films. I want to be successful making the films that I want to make. That's my only ambition, but I have come to terms with it, and I'm pretty okay with my life. I mean, I wish I had more money. It would make my life easier and I could get more films made. I could hire people, and I could be more prolific. It's really the main thing. There's a film I want to make now that needs some money. I don't have money to make it without funding. But I've pretty much done things on my own terms, which has felt good. And, you know, if I died today, I would die pretty much at peace.

BE: You mentioned that you might do more classes like this, because you got your contract renewed. Do you have any ideas to ensure that it doesn't sort of devolve into chaos?

CZ: You can't control that! I've been teaching these classes recently where we've been doing a play, I'm really into theater right now, and we just did one. It was so good. It was a class on Brecht, and I was like, We're going to do a play at the end of the semester. So I wrote a play in the semester, and we performed it, and, you know, there wasn't enough time to get it right, so it was completely nerve wracking, but it went so well. It was so successful. And it was about the class. We made a play about the class. Basically, it's the film The Class About the Class, but it was a play version of it. I was like, that's a really interesting thing to do, to have people reenact things that happened in the class. I want to do that more, but I want to film these. So I'm trying to get The New School to let me do a thing where I have three classes at once, and one is: we're re-enacting the class, one is: people are filming all the classes, and someone else is editing the footage. So that's kind of a slight variation on this, but that's what I'm thinking I'm going to do next.

BE: Do you have any plans for these four movies going forward? You mentioned that there's obviously a legal threat possibly looming. But do you have any plans to put them out or make them available?

CZ: I really would like to put them out. I'm not sure what the best way to do it is. None of them are quite done, and because of this gray zone around the issues, I haven't put them on the top of the list of priorities, but I think they're really interesting and valuable documents of a time and a place. I'm partly doing the screening because I just wanted to watch them again, I haven't seen them in a long time, and see what they need, and think about how to finish them. And then once I finish them, I guess I'll take the temperature of the culture and maybe put my toes in the water. It's sad, because they're good films, and the one that's most controversial is the best one, I think. And it would be very valuable for society to grapple with this, but it's dangerous to do that for me.