Ray Harryhausen

Interview by: Evil Andy To readers of this site, Ray Harryhausen needs no introduction. Not only have we been weaned on his incredible fantasy films like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, but many of today’s best loved genre filmmakers were inspired to make movies because of Harryhausen’s work. I had the good fortune to be able to sit down with Mr. Harryhausen and ask him a few questions while he was in town for the 2005 Fantasia Film Festvial to receive a lifetime achievement award. Evil Andy: You’re here in Montreal to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Fantasia Film Festival. I can’t imagine that it’ll compare to your Oscar, but how do you feel about receiving this award from a festival that respects fantasy films? Ray Harryhausen: Oh splendid, I’m delighted. I think our pictures are more respected today than when they were first released. Many times, films such as Gwangi were just dumped on the market, which is unfortunate, because most people that see the picture and admire it. It has a great fandom. EA: Why do you think it is that your films are more appreciated today than they were in their day? RH: Because back then nobody knew much about stop motion and trick photography. Over the years it’s been tooted up in magazines like Cinefex and others. People are more aware now of that type of thing. Too aware I think because it spoils it, I always feel, if you concentrate on just the special effects rather than the story. EA: Which is why your films were live action combined with stop motion, and not strictly puppet films? RH: Yes, our films were a distinctly different type of film not the obvious puppet film, which is usually stylized. I like to separate the two because we followed in the steps of Willis 'O Brien who made dinosaurs stars in the Lost World in 1925. Do you remember who starred in the picture? EA: RH: No, but you do remember the dinosaurs! He glamorized the dinosaurs to a degree that no longer exists. That’s part of the fantasy element of these types of films. EA: The interesting thing for so many people about you is that your work spans so many disciplines over your career. From producing, to storyboarding, to writing, not too mention the puppets and animation that you’re most well known for. Of all those disciplines, of all those things you did, which one gave you the most satisfaction? RH: In the early days I was very modest. I’ve shed that modesty I’m afraid, because I found after fifty years, that modesty in Hollywood is a dirty word. I always worked with the script right from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Even as far back as Mighty Joe Young I worked with Obie on his interpretation of the script, I was his assistant. That was the highlight of my life to be able to work with my mentor. King Kong was the film that set me in the frame of mind to worship stop motion animation. EA: The mentorship thing was something I wanted to ask you about. There’s a long history of mentorship in special effects, like Dick Smith and Rick Baker, yourself and Willis 'O Brien...Why do you think these famous mentorships have produced the best artists and the most phenomenal work? RH: Well I think that because everyone that’s partaken in that has a love for the subject, it’s not just a means of making a living. Rick Baker was a fanatic about makeup, Denis Muren was a fanatic about special effects. They were all wonderful fans in the early days when they saw our films. I’m grateful that our films have introduced these people who have spread the word, and created the concept of being aware of special effects. However, they shouldn’t dominate the scene. EA: I’ve always thought of you and Dick Smith as the elder statesmen of your respective fields, people that pioneered makeup effects and stop-motion. Have you ever met Dick, and what’s your relationship been with the other special effects disciplines? RH: No, I’ve never met him unfortunately. I know of him and respect everything he’s done. There’s also the gentleman from Universal, who made up Frankenstein, and departed from this world a short time ago. In those days we didn’t have any books to refer to. The young people today have so many books on special effects, so many articles on stop motion. They even sell armatures today. You couldn’t get them made in my day; I had to make them myself. I couldn’t find another kindred soul when I started out, outside of Ray Bradbury and Forry Ackerman, who had intense interests. I think it demands a certain fanaticism, otherwise it just becomes a means of making money. EA: Even though all your films were directed by someone else, collectively, over the years, all the films you’ve touched have become known as "Ray Harryhausen" films. In the history of cinema, I’m not sure I can think of another case where a "technician" (not my term) has been so closely linked to the identity of a film. Why do you think you were able to achieve this distinction, and why do you think others have not? RH: I don’t analyze these things the way people on the outside do. You can analyze things out of existence. I’ve never stopped to think about it, I just enjoyed doing it. I’m grateful that we have the following we do today. When Charles and I started out making these pictures, we made them on very tight budgets, which is uncommon today. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms only cost 200,000 dollars, you can hardly buy a costume for that today. It’s a different world than I’m used to. I sometimes feel I came from another planet. EA: There’s an innocent quality to your films. Is that something you tried to instill, or is it a bi-product of the era in which they were made? RH: A lot of it is the bi-product of the era. King Kong has an innocence and a naïve quality that is hard to capture with a sophisticated audience. People today have seen everything, you’re bombarded with visual images, so the visual image is no longer startling. CGI can create anything; in a 30 second commercial, you see the most amazing things, so when you see it in a feature, it’s no longer as startling as it used to be. EA: I saw a lecture by Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam (on the Lost in LaMancha DVD), where Rushdie states, memorably I thought, "computer graphics look real, but feel fake, whereas stop motion looks fake but feels real." What do you make of his statement? RH: I get a lot of fan mail from people, even today, who are jaded over CGI, and they prefer stop motion. I remember when I first saw King Kong at Grauman’s Chinese in 1933, the startling effect was that I didn’t know how it was done. I didn’t even know about stop motion for six months afterwards. It hypnotized me in such a way that I had to find out how it was made, and I finally found out. The quality of Kong, unlike The Lost World, is the wonderful score by Max Steiner. It was the first time music had been adopted to the visual image on the screen, in an almost operatic way. He gave each character leitmotifs and identifications you could follow throughout the whole film. His music was very Wagnerian in a sense. There was no music in the first half hour, and then all of the sudden when they reach the island, and the fantasy element, it really sticks in your mind. I think stop-motion contributes that nightmare quality. You know it’s not real, and yet it looks real. Kong, in spite of his jerkiness, and the hair moving all the time, you can rationalize it as the wind blowing through his hair, because he’s so big. Stop motion adds to the concept of theatre, where, if you try to make things too real, you bring it down to the mundane. EA: Do you think there’s a place today for the type of stop motion film you made, mixed with live action? Not puppet films? RH: I’ve always felt that CGI is a tool, nothing more. It’s a wonderful tool, it can save time, but it has to be operated by a group of people. One person does the head, on person does the tail, another person does the character. It’s a combination, rather than the point of view of one individual. EA: Why is that single vision so important? RH: Well it focuses on somebody’s point of view who’s interested in fantasy, I think that shows through. I’ve had a lot of fan mail saying they can feel the importance of a single mind, rather than a group of industrial manufacturing. Which it has to be to produce so much footage. EA: Are you involved in the Kong remake, have you seen any footage, what did you think? RH: Well, I never wanted to interfere. Jackson has a wonderful track record, he’ll do his version. There will always be only one original King Kong. He’ll do a much more faithful version of his interpretation than the 1972 release where they left all the fantasy out. Peter loves Kong as much as I do, so I look forward to his version. I’ve seen some sketches of it, and they looked very impressive. EA: Have there been any recent fantasy films that have captured your imagination? RH: I have to go back, I’m afraid to Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET. In Greek mythology, you can’t have an explosion every five minutes. This seems to be what they think the young people demand, because their attention span is so short that you have to have an exciting car chase or gun fight every five minutes. The type of story we were telling takes a little while to develop. Story telling, I’ve always thought, has a beginning, middle and an end. You’re telling a story, that’s the whole point of making the film. Some people can communicate, and some cannot. We have that little class of so-called pseudo-intellectuals that are so obscure that they don’t project their ideas on film so that other people can understand them. You have to guess about what it’s about. I think in the early days the fact that there was censorship meant directors had to dream up other ways of suggesting, rather than showing somebody’s guts being torn out and running all over the floor, which they seem to enjoy doing today. EA: Do you despair for the state of modern cinema? RH: I think it’s gone overboard in graphic quality. The golden age of Hollywood has a lot to be desired, despite all the criticism it’s had in recent years. I think Ayn Rand touched the spot in The Fountainhead when she says "mediocrity is worshipped rather than greatness." EA: RH: You don’t agree I see. EA: No I do, I just got tingles actually...reality TV sure is worshipping mediocrity... RH: Our films are worshipped today, and I don’t like them to be categorized as mediocre. The same is true in music, and art. An ape can make a painting and somebody praises it to high heaven. Where do we go from there? The same thing is happening in sculpture, and abstract film. I once saw an unmade bed presented as a piece of art. The lady who did that got $25,000 for having a dirty unmade bed, and they call it art! EA: Who was the last painter or sculptor that you admired? RH: I’d have to go back many years, perhaps as far as Michaelangelo. EA: A lot of your drawings have been compared to Gustave Dore... RH: They have been, because Dore was my sort of my mentor along with Willis 'O Brien. Obie had a lot of Gustave Dore in King Kong. I always call Dore the first art director of motion pictures. Cecile B. Demile used to group his biblical stories based upon Dore’s wonderful bible drawings. I think Dore had that cinematic quality that can be transferred to motion pictures. O’ Brien’s technique was to have a dark foreground, a paler middle ground, and a paler background, so you had depth in the film. That was portrayed quite extensively in King Kong. EA: You’ve said before that your favorite film was Jason and the Argonauts. Is this still the case? RH: Well, it's the most complete. We were at a disadvantage in having to make our pictures on really tight budgets. The budget has to be considered as primary. After Mighty Joe Young nobody was knocking on Willis 'O Brien’s door, because he made big expensive films. I admired him for that, but you need to come down to brass tacks. Producers are afraid to spend money. You have to have a conglomerate to finance a picture today, because it runs in the hundreds of millions. So, unfortunately, I got trapped in the low budge films. They used to call them B-pictures because of the low budget. It gives one a little more strength of imagination to put something on the screen for so little money. It takes sacrifices, and I had my share. EA: There’s a whole wealth of artists and filmmaker's I admire who seem to have gotten where they did, based not only on their talent, but on hard work and determination. What was the role of your work ethic in your success? RH: Well, I think it borders on fanaticism. Maybe I have a Zeus complex, because my actors do exactly as I want. I don't have any temperamental leading lady or leading man who wants to be directing the picture. I admire Betty Davis, but what I've read, she dominated directors. Our pictures were never considered a director's picture, in the European sense of the word. The directors in our films were brought in to get the best out of the actors. Charles Schneer, the writer, and myself formulated the basic stories. All the Sinbad films started as a twenty-page outline and some drawings, because they’re visual. We worked a little different way, even as far back as the fairy tales. Have you seen the fairy tales? EA: Ya, I saw them for the first time this week. They blew me away. RH: They were originally designed to be made, as simple as possible, for visual education in schools. I remember going to the different schools and asking the principals what they’d like to see. I got so many different answers, I just said to heck with it, I’m going to do what I like. Young people need to not ask too many people their opinion. Do it, and if you have a following great, if not, you have to turn to something else. It’s simple really. EA: How have you managed to maintain all your foam latex puppets all these years? Foam doesn’t last all that long today, and when you were using it, the process was even less refined... RH: I know, it rots. It’s a fine material, but it rots. Well, we’re fine material, but we rot too, in time. The latex was very unstable, and most of my characters in the early days had to be cannibalized, because you never had time to rebuild a new figure. I’ve restored some in bronze over the years. I have a one and a half times life size bronze that was based off one of my maquettes, of David Livingston being attacked by a lion. Unless a comet hits the earth, I think bronze will last longer than we will. EA: What was the process for painting your models? RH: There was very little back then. It was mostly trial and error. I got rubber tire paint and mixed color in it. Sometimes I would use rubber cement. I tried many things to avoid the paint cracking. I had to wear cutters gloves so that the oil of my fingers wouldn’t make the paint shiny. I got the reputation of animating in a top hat, tails, and white gloves! EA: How did you hair the models? I heard something about using bugs and some kind of paste, to remove the hide? RH: I didn’t make the models on Mighty Joe Young. We had a young man, George, who was a taxidermist by trade. He found a process to take the hides off the hair, without losing the pattern of the hair, and substituting rubber, so it would stretch, and when you handled it, wouldn’t move as much as Kong. King Kong was covered with rabbit fur, and every time the animator touched it, 24 frames per second, the hair would shift. This gave it that quivering quality, which you could rationalize, by saying it’s wind blowing. EA: No bugs involved? RH: Yes, maggots would eat the hide. The hides didn’t last that long afterwards, but they served their purpose for Mighty Joe Young. We used unborn calf for Mighty Joe, so that the hair was in miniature size, and matched the model. EA: My two favourite sequences from all of your films are the Gwangi roping sequence, and the Medusa sequence. I’ve always wondered how you animated the flame flicker on her face? RH: I had a color wheel. If you don’t use that, then she would have looked pasted on. The color wheel had different colored gelatins. Each frame of film, I would move the wheel, creating the flicker on her face. The skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts were another problem. That took almost four months to put together. Originally, in Mighty Joe Young, the roping sequence came out of Gwangi, which Willis 'O Brien was preparing. Instead of roping a dinosaur, we roped a gorilla. We put the roping sequence back when we made Gwangi, and we were accused of taking the roping sequence out of Mighty Joe Young! EA: On the Early Years DVD (review) there’s a sequence in Baron Munchausen where you use rods and levers to animate a face. You abandoned this technique, but do you think it might have more possibilities now? RH: It was too time consuming for one person. It worked quite well for lip sync, and things of that nature. But it had possibilities. They’re using a similar process on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. My wife and I visited the studio where they’re making it. They’ve got wonderful little creatures, and they use little levers to push the face up, and make all different expressions. I think they’re trying to use the same process on our new Poe series that we’re going to make in the future. That was one of the subjects that never reached production. I think they’re using a very flexible face for that sequence. EA: Last question. Are you still drawing, or sculpting, or... RH: You mean, am I on a busman’s holiday (laughs>? Well I like to have a goal in mind. I haven’t drawn for years. Most of the drawings I did 20 years ago. I do sculpt a bit still. We are releasing a portfolio of my early drawings though. It’s being released through an art gallery in Santa Monica. (note: you can find more information at Every Picture.com) EA: It was a distinct pleasure to meet you. Thank you for all your work! RH: You’re welcome. I’m grateful for all the technology that is allowing our movies to be brought to the forefront again. So many films these days are reinventions of the wheel. Remakes, remakes, remakes. It gets a little discouraging, so I’m glad people still enjoy our movies! A great big thank you to Tamu Townsend and all the fine folks at Frames Per Second magazine and Fantasia, for bringing Ray to town and presenting him with yet another well deserved lifetime achievement award. Tamu assures us she's a big fan of Dread Central, so Tamu, if you're reading this, you rock! And of course, thanks must go out to the amazing Ray Harryhausen, not only for being such a kind and gracious interviewee, but also for being so tirelessly appreciative of his fans. Harryhausen's work continues to be an inspiration to movie lovers and movie makers alike; a reminder of the bygone days of cinema when a single man breathed life into his creations, and astounded generations. Thanks Ray (you rock too!). Discuss the masterwork of Ray Harryhausen in our forums!

Interview by: Evil Andy Mitch Davis, the man, the legend, the Director of International Programming for the Fantasia Festival managed to peel himself away from Concordia’s Hall building for a while to speak with our man on the scene, Evil Andy. Mitch fills us in on the history of the festival, gives some of his horror picks, and reveals why he’s scared of Joe Coleman... Evil Andy: So Mitch, what's it like being the most popular guy in Montreal for the next three weeks? Mitch Davis: No idea, man. You'd have to find that guy and ask him. I'm just an ostrich with a sleep disorder! EA: It seems to me that Fantasia has really been building momentum over the last couple of years, ever since that horrible, horrible summer of 2002 when Fantasia was cancelled. Why don't you tell our readers a little bit about how Fantasia came into existence, and what you do, and what this year holds? MD: Jesus! How do I keep the answer to that one below novel-length? To frame the very short version, Fantasia was founded in 1996 by a great friend of film by the name of Pierre Corbeil, who remains the festival president to this day. The inaugural year initially designed as a one-off blowout showcase of the last several years of Hong Kong filmmaking with several Japanese Kaiju and anime titles peppered through the calendar, courtesy of electric mojo monster programmer Andre Dubois, who is also still with us at the fest. This was during the huge HK new wave period, when everyone had bootlegs of Ringo Lam and John Woo films and so many of us were dying to actually see these films in 35mm on the big screen with an audience, which was about as realistic a wish as hoping to see a grasshopper turn into a watermelon - and let's be honest, who WOULDN'T want to see a grasshopper turn into a watermelon, yes? But I'm getting off-topic. Anyway, Pierre four-walled the biggest cinema in Montreal for a full month of Asian action, fantasy and horror films. Every industry player thought he was out of his mind but the crowds were extraordinary and by the end of the first weekend, armies of people were grouping together on the street after screenings to talk about Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh etc. It was completely surreal and dream-like. As for my own involvement, at this point in the festival's history, I was just one of the legion who were hanging out at the festival. Since Pierre and I had mutual friends and were already talking, the moment he decided to make the festival an annual, continuing event that was now to focus on new releases, with an expanded scope to include productions of interest from all corners of the globe, he brought me on board along with Mi-Jeong Lee and my friends Karim Hussain and Julien Fonfrede (who have since retired from the festival to focus on active film production). During my first year at the festival, Fangoria editor Tony Timpone came down to cover the festival for his magazine and we all hit it off so well that by the time he returned to New York, he was officially part of our programming team. Now he and I are co-directors of international programming for the festival. EA: Anyone who's ever attended Fantasia knows that it is the most fan friendly, and least pretentious and corporate-ized film festival, anywhere. How do you guys manage to create this atmosphere year after year? Tell the losers, not in Montreal (Hi Johnny!) why they need to quit their jobs, and sell off their blood (Hi Garry!) to get their asses to Montreal. MD: Aw shucks. No seriously, thanks for saying that. We would never want the festival to take on any airs of bourgeois exclusivity. Culture belongs to everyone and one of Fantasia's most central missions is to encourage people to take risks on new kinds of filmmakers and filmmaking that might otherwise seem a bit intimidating to the uninitiated. As for the laid-back atmosphere I think this is mostly because it's one of those lunatics-taking-over-the-asylum scenarios. The biggest payoff for everyone on the team is when a so-called small, unknown film that we adore gets thunderous applause from 700 people who will now never forget it. Those moments are nothing short of rapturous for us. When we fly filmmakers in for their screenings, we make sure that there will be no barriers between artist and audience. We feature extended and intentionally loosely-structured Q & A sessions after screenings - loosely-structured in the sense that audience members can ask questions right from their seats without lining up at a microphone and being pre-screened, there are no roped-off sections at our parties, filmmakers are not surrounded by security people and everyone is accessible all the time. EA: There seems to be fewer North American & European horror films with a buzz behind them this year. Notable exceptions would be The Devil's Rejects, The Roost, and 2001 Maniacs. MD: It's true. We'd tried to get films like Wolf Creek, the Dark Water remake etc., but things just didn't work out. MGM were going to give us the World Premiere of Lucky McKee's The Wood but once they were bought by Sony, the film's release date was dropped and the studio can't make any commitments with the film until they decide how they're going to put it out, which makes perfect sense. So it was just an unfortunate series of fateful turns, but it doesn't reflect any significant drop in interesting European/North-South American horror production. Actually, I'm happy to say that we just added the Canadian Premiere of David Payne's Reeker to our closing night lineup. If you haven't heard of this one yet, let me tell you man, Reeker is a total blast. After it's premiere at South By Southwest earlier this year, it was aclaimed everywhere from Bloody Disgusting and Film Threat to Variety and The Austin Chronicle! EA: What countries/continets are picking up the horror slack for this edition of the festival? MD: It's so hard to answer that with any real degree of authority. We've got really interesting genre productions from Belgium, Japan, Spain, South Korea, Germany, Hong Kong, Argentina, Brazil, the UK and Thailand, among other countries. I don't think that any one territory is dominating over the others, both in terms of what we secured for the festival or in the realm of the past year of international film production. One thing I CAN safely say is that the Japanese horror wave is winding down in a very big way, as more and more films are being made for Western export, playing safely within formula parameters and with a weak if not sometimes nonexistent national identity. It was bound to happen. Still, some of my favourite films of the last year are from Japan, they're just not conventional horror films - I'm awestruck by films like Survive Style 5+ and Karaoke Terror. EA: One of the cooler things at this year's Fantasia Festival is the inclusion of 4 spoken word/multimedia shows including Ray Harryhausen, Joe Coleman, Loyd Kaufman, and Stephen Bisette. Tell us a bit about this awesome new inclusion to the festival. Any chance of getting Loyd to arm wrestle Joe? MD: That would be... interesting, but the dates are too far apart for it to be possible, I'm afraid. I'm really excited about Joe Coleman coming. I've loved his work since I was a tiny apocalypse kid and I've always wanted to see him perform live. His work is so extraordinarily powerful and shattering. He's absolutely one of the world's greatest living surrealists. He's one of the only artists I've ever been afraid to call. When I initially contacted him, I was genuinely intimated until we finally spoke. I can't think of anyone else that Joe can even be compared to, though many like to say that he's this era's Salvador Dali. I can easily imagine some people losing consciousness at his show. As for Lloyd, what can I say? I love that man. He's been coming here almost every year since the beginning so in a sense he's like the grandpa Munster of Fantasia. Bissette's going to be doing a slideshow history of horror comics and Ray Harryhausen is coming down to do a giant spoken word show where he will discuss his career, screen rare clips, do an extended Q&A session and then present a restored 35mm print of Jason and the Argonauts. Harryhausen will also be the first-ever recipient of a Fantasia lifetime achievement award. But for me, Coleman is the biggest rush of the entire festival! EA: Apart from the aforementioned appearances, I've always been suprised that Fantasia doesn't draw more genre heavyweights every year. Can we expect to bask in any genre star power attending the 2005 festival? What's this about Tarantino...? MD: The QT thing was last year, when we were trying to get Hero for our opening film. Tarantino expressed interest in coming down to host the screening on opening night, but that film's Canadian distributor, in their infinitely astounding wisdom, refused to give us the movie. Tarantino's been very aware of Fantasia for quite a few years and hopefully we'll be able to get him down some time. We tried to get Rob Zombie for Devil's Rejects but he's going to be getting ready for Ozzfest and already hosted a screening of the film in Vegas. We usually prefer to bring in filmmakers who have huge names elsewhere but not in this part of the world, or who are just starting to make their names, because they always prove to be the the most interesting to have around. Bringing in people like Nacho Cerda, Hideo Nakata, Jaume Balaguero, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Michael Almereyda, Douglas Buck, Satoshi Kon, Larry Fessenden or Agustin Villaronga is so much more exciting. By focusing our energies in this direction, we've sometimes been able to take an active part in helping shape the career trajectories of filmmakers we admire. Having said that, we've also brought in well-established heavy-hitters like say, John Carpenter, Don Coscarelli, Malcolm McDowell and Bill Plympton, and that's always very, very fun too. We try to get at least one or two well-known names in each year's lineup, but our priority is to help bring the gifted underdogs out and get them the attention they so rightly deserve. I think it's also what's sometimes kept us ahead of the trends. EA: What's your pick for the goriest film of the festival? MD: Probably Izo. EA: What's your pick for the scariest film of the festival? MD: That one's hard to quantify. So few films are truly, genuinely scary. Moments of Shutter are eerie as hell. If I had to choose one title in our lineup that i actually found to be frightening, it would be the true crime film Zero Day, which is actually several year's old and has just recently been released on home video. We're playing it anyway, because it's an amazing film - one we were going after back in 2002 before we were forced to cancel that year's fest. Somehow, we had totally forgotten about that film in the last two years and this year, it came up again and we all said, to hell with it, this has to get shown! On the other end of things, the most unsettling film of the festival is definitely The Dark Hours, which is oddly enough, a Canadian film that came from out of nowhere and has been blowing people to pieces wherever its been seen. I can't begin to convey the atmosphere of trauma that this film manages to achieve. In essence, it's about a criminal psychiatrist and her family being held hostage by a cruel former patient and while that synopsis might give you flashes of the Huouse on the Edge of the Park/Death Weekend type of subgenre, this one hits so much harder, and with genuine anguished ferocity. It's got fantastic characters, razor calculated direction and devastatingly intense performances across the board. The film's director, Paul Fox, is a huge emerging talent and a name I think we'll be hearing a lot of in the very near future. This film has so much respect for its characters, not to mention for the intellect of its audience. I think People are really going to be amazed when they see it here. It' sso amazingly engrossing and its definitely in my top 3 of the 70+ films in our 2005 lineup. The German film Antibodies has some tremendously disturbing moments as well and I actually find the last reel of The Birthday to be scary in a theatrical but very visceral and nightmarish way. EA: What's your pick for the most subversive film of the festival? MD: Almost definitely Karaoke Terror, a brutal social satire based on a novel by Ryu Murakami that depicts a growing urban war between disaffected young teens and wealthy middle aged women. . It's an almost ultimate cultural hand grenade of a film, and a absolutely nothing like what the title might lead you to expect - it's very smart, very poetic and unbelievably confrontational and nihilistic. EA: If any film stands a chance of offending and/or otherwise horrifying the admittedly thick skinned Fantasia audience this year, which one do you think it'll be? MD: Live Freaky! Die Freaky! without a doubt. It's a stop-motion animation pornographic comedy musical retelling of the Charles Manson crimes, voiced by members of Green Day, The Lunachicks, Rancid, Blink 182, The Go-Go's etc. It's just unreal. Operation Ivy / Rancid vocalist Tim Armstrong produced it and a witty sick fuck by the name of John Roecker wrote and directed it. This film is really going to freak people out, no matter how jaded they might be. I'm talking menstrual puppet penetration shots, sadistic jokes about child abuse, oh man, this thing is volatile. EA: On a personal note, what's going on at Infliction Films, and when can the rest of the world expect to see Subconscious Cruelty? MD: Well, Subconcious and Zero recently came out in Austria, Germany, Switzerland & Holland in a deluxe double DVD box set from Sazuma that's jam packed with extras, almost to the point of surrealisim. I can't see the films ever getting better releases anywhere in the world. As for a Region 1 NTSC release, one will happen eventually, but we're in no hurry. We've had many offers over the years but the prices have been so low it made no real sense. I totally understand how such an extreme film is very difficult for any label to sell in US stores, but at the same time, we can't sell the world's 2nd largest territory for peanuts. I'm in talks with several companies at the moment in large part due to the renewed interest and recent waves of press that the Sazuma release has sparked, so who knows. As far as future productions go, eventually, yes, but it's not something I'm putting that much energy into at the moment, although I have several scripts that I'd eventually love to make. Shooting 16mm non-union on weekends with literally no money is incredibly fun and rewarding in its own special ways, but at the same time the constant compromises and disappointments that go along with that manor of working are so heartbreaking that I was literally getting sick whenever I was too deeply in the heat of the process. I mean, not sleeping, not eating, constant headaches and nausea, the whole nine yards. I think that doing film full-time on a professional scale would lead me to a very early grave. At the same time, I love helping other people get their projects together. Last year I produced an animated short for underground cartoonist Rick Trembles (Rick Trebmles' Goopy Spasms Live Cartoon Show) and I'm an associate producer on Phillippe Spurrell's 35mm feature debut The Descendent. I've also got a short I directed from two year's back that I've shot and cut but have yet to finish sound on - each time we start up again, something gigantic happens in my personal life that forces me to stop. It's always something different but it's always something that is impossible to ignore - a death in the family, a flood... Very troubling. I've been gearing up to finally finish the damn thing when this year's fest is over, so I'm kind of waiting for an anvil to drop on my head! But in general, I think film production will always be a kind of underground on-again-off--again side project for me, at least for the next few years if I want to keep doing the festival and Cinema Du Parc work, not to mention if I want to keep my sanity! EA: For those visitors wanting to talk movies, get drunk and pick up French girls, where are the after festival drinking holes at? MD: Really, all over the place depending on where the majority want to go. It often ends up being Cine Express (for the super great staff, amazing menu, insomniac-friendly operating hours and outdoor terrace) or Brewtopia (because we've got a beer sponsorship there), but we sometime go to Foufounes Electriques, Luba Lounge and when Scooter McCrae's influence inspires us all, to Cleopatra's! EA: Thanks for taking the time out of your rockstar schedule Mitch. Can I touch your velvet coat ;) ? MD: Nah, trust me, the velvet experience is an overrated one! Mitch is probably one of the nicest, most approachable guys you could ever imagine running a film festival, and it was a great pleasure to talk to him. Fantasia is on from July 7th to the 25th, so make sure you set aside some time and get thine ass to Montreal!