The Human Comedy: Louise Weard on Castration Movie, Part 1

BLEEDING EDGE sits down with the director and star of the massively ambitious CASTRATION MOVIE project.

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.