Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1

by Carnell, Thom

  How much slime, blood and urine do you go through every show?

  O: Scott? How many gallons?

  Scott: Seventy.

  Really? Do you ever have trouble with venues having to clean up?

  O: Constantly. Not really at the show. They pretty much resign themselves to fate. They have to clean it up the night of the show, but next year when you try to book the venue again…

  Is that what happened at The Warfield in San Francisco?

  O: That’s why we don’t play The Warfield anymore. It’s not because we couldn’t sell tickets. That’s why we can’t play The Ritz in Los Angeles. That’s why we can’t play The Roseland in New York City. One of the reasons William Morris said when they dropped us from their fucked up company… (thank god,) “You’re too messy, there’s too much blood.” GWAR’s made out of blood. You have to have blood. We want to fill the club with blood and have people rowing boats around in it, fighting each other with oars.

  Are GWAR more cappuccino or latte drinkers?

  S: It’s hard to say if I like mine white and creamy or hard and black. [laughs]

  At a certain point, GWAR is going to have done everything, debased every icon. What’s next?

  O: I think we did that a few years ago. So we just keep fucking them over and over again.

  If a major television station offered you a weekly show, would you take it?

  B: In a heart beat.

  O: As long as they paid us the ludicrous sums of money.

  B: As long as we could stick with what we do.

  Not have to dilute it.

  O: Right, that means fucking The Pope in the ass on public television.

  S: Well, hey, what can we say? Hero with a thousand faces. It’s been done for centuries, buddy. They still aren’t bored with it. They’re still tellin’ and sellin’ the same god damn story, aren’t they? [laughs] Maybe we’ll go back to Pre-Hellenistic myth, how about that?

  Slymenstra, how would GWAR bring peace to the planet?

  S: First, I’d line up all the men…

  Is that PIECE or PEACE?

  S: PIECE

  Slymenstra, tell us as much as you can about you.

  S: Can I talk out of character? I’ll tell you about my character and how I came up with her. For instance, with the name, I liked the Greek tragedy Clymenstra, y’know, she was one of my favorites. So, I tried to use that as a base. I was a sly woman and then menstruation, I wanted to have involved somehow. So…Slymenstra was what I came up with and Hymen because I wanted it to sound kind of German. I just constantly tried to play different female icons the whole time. I used Medusa or use a snake in my mythology because that’s so heavy in Christian iconography. Just little things like that. I did a whole calendar series where I did all these different things like mermaids and junk like that. I got to sit in the Geiger chair and do a photo shoot. I do this fire dance where I try to make it like a voodoo ceremony or a Wiccan ritual. I try to bring out the primordial element. I try to bring out all these things in my character and get it into GWAR in different ways. I’m always tackling the problem about how men have depicted women in art all these years as an object they’re scared of, yet fascinated with. So, I always play up on that in my dialogue, comics or different things I get to do in character.

  You are the only woman in the band, is it like being around a bunch of brothers?

  S: I really know what men are like now. That’s a real problem in my relationships. I get to hear it all, see it all, and I know what they do when they go out on the road. [laughs] I get to hear the way they really talk. They don’t even know I’m there anymore. They’ll say anything in front of me. It is like having brothers. If any guys try to hit on me, they usually get booted out the door.

  I understand you have a new website…

  O:Yeah. It’s on SonicNet. There are several different GWAR Web Sites now, some are made by our fans. We had one on Iuma for a while, now we’re working with SonicNet. It’s basically you’re in a GWAR fan’s room, and you can click on different objects in the room and go different directions. If you click on the CD Player, you can listen to music, etc. etc. I see it as a forerunner for something like a GWAR CD ROM game, which is something, along with a feature length film, we’d like to do next year.

  Who would you like have direct it?

  O: Me.

  Could you work with anyone else?

  O: Sure. I would work with Clive Barker or a respected horror director or even a disrespected one, as long as we liked the way he or she made films, it would be cool. We’re open to any ideas. We try not to box ourselves in. “Oh, we’re in GWAR and we have to do everything ourselves.” We like to work with different artists. We have to have final control over what goes on.

  How did you guys all meet?

  O: The majority of us met because we were all living in one city at the same time and basically got together through the music/art college scene. We were all hanging around in a big abandoned building and making music and art and started doing it at the same time and GWAR was born. It was about eight years ago. A lot of other people drifted in and out since then. We’ve gone through lots of different people. New people have come in, old people have left, the people that have left the band come back and join it again, been murdered, thrown out of buses in desolate parts of the United States, run over repeatedly. It’s a sordid tale.

  So, the new album’s out and you’re touring. What’s next?

  O: More touring, more touring, more touring, for a little while.

  How much do you tour a year?

  B: Last year, we toured X-Cops and GWAR, and then came back and did a whole other GWAR tour. We’ll tour with GWAR until the end of ’96, and then we’ll probably go to Europe with X-Cops and by then, we’ll be able to lock ourselves in the studio for a few months and write an album. Balanced against touring is continually making new product.

  On the GWAR/X-Cops tour, did people know who X-Cops were?

  B: Not many. You could watch the crowd and tell who did, because they’d be grabbing their buddies going “Oh, that’s Oderus!” Most people didn’t get it. They didn’t know what to think of it. They were like, “What the fuck is this?” They were just stunned. Other people would be shouting “Fuck you! We want GWAR!” They’d be yelling, “You suck! We want GWAR!” After the GWAR show, people would realize or had been told and the same people you’d seen hating X-Cops would come up later and go, “X-Cops were the greatest thing I ever saw! You guys rule!” The second tour there were a lot of GWAR fans. It was different the second time around, because everyone knew. The first time we were more in their face and brutal and they didn’t know how to take it. It was cooler in a way because we were getting away with being a lot meaner.

  What is your average fan like?

  O: There isn’t any such thing as an average GWAR fan. They’re all either way above average or way below.

  B: Mostly young boys. The occasional young boy’s girlfriend…

  …who gets dragged along.

  O: Malcontented suburbanites.

  B: You get all kinds. You get older guys who come out and get the joke. Monty Python fans. Other bands seem like they really get the joke. It’s like GWAR is a living Spinal Tap. Not enough girls come to the shows.

  Do you think that most of your fans “get it” or do they come because it’s loud?

  O: I think they come because it’s loud and gross and violent and fun. It’s cool to look at and all their friends are there. It’s the closest thing to a tribal fertility rite this society offers, unless you have your own Satanic cult. I think the vast majority of our fans do get it. They understand that GWAR is a joke. You’d have to be pretty fucking retarded to think it’s anything other than a joke. Jokes can be very dangerous. Humor can be dangerous. It’s all about what we’re allowed to laugh at, right?

  I understand that at one point there was a show canceled so you could go to a Microsoft party.

  O: Oh, no, we didn’t cancel it, we just po
stponed it. The Microsoft party had a huge haunted house they built as a part of a big P.R. event based on the Windows ’95 thing to launch the new game platform. We basically got sub-contracted out to design one of the rooms and deal with the groups of people who would come through there. These young executives in groups of ten would go through and we would attack them and the flesh column would come out. Argh! Arrrrrgh! Totally terrify the shit out of them and they’d run out of the room screaming. We were going to play a show in Toledo, but, months in advance we knew and the guy just had to reschedule the show until December. We got to a place near Toledo and there’s this big story in the paper saying “GWAR canceled the show because they are selling out to Microsoft” and all this shit. They paid us up the ass to do that. More than that, it’s a great opportunity to finally get GWAR into the computer gaming realm where it must be. The GWAR game… pack it up!

  Robert Rodriguez

  When From Dusk Till Dawn was about to come out, we were invited to Los Angeles to be a part of the film’s Press Junket. After a screening at Glenn Glenn Sound, (with the likes of Jay Leno in attendance,) we met the following day at a nearby hotel. The junket was made up of Rodriguez, producer Elizabeth Avelon, and Salma Hayek. In most press junkets, journalists are put into one room and the interviewees are brought in one at a time. Any questions asked and answered are free game that anyone can use in their respective articles. It means that if you have the most insightful questions on the planet, anyone can use them.

  I soon found myself in a room with about ten people; most of them part of the Latino press. As the filmmakers were brought in, journalists began asking questions in Spanish (which I don’t speak or understand). Many were bilingual and I found myself at a distinct disadvantage, since they could also use my questions in their articles, but I could not use theirs. I managed to get my questions in and was able to get a solid interview out of Rodriguez who was really a nice guy; very giving with his knowledge base. Due to space restrictions, we were only able to use the interview with Robert. Sadly, the talks with Avelon and Hayek were lost.

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  “Let’s Play…” – Volume III, Issue 1

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  It could almost be a Hollywood cliché. A young man who grew up loving films signs himself up for a series of medical experiments in an effort to raise some capital to finance his first movie. Upon completion, the film is shopped around to Hollywood, and after some small disappointments, the young filmmaker soon finds the Film Industry at his feet. Big contracts. Bigger films. It’s a dream come true. The fact of the matter is this is pretty much how Robert Rodriguez made a name for himself. His first film, El Mariachi, took the film world by storm, winning virtually every competition it was entered in, and he soon released its sequel, Desperado, to glowing reviews, favorable box office receipts, and the cementing of his role as cinematic auteur. His latest film, the genre twisting From Dusk Till Dawn, has moved his career further along, proving that his talent is not genre specific, but one which can adapt itself quickly and neatly as the project demands it. Rodriguez is making quite a name for himself. Whispers of how he is able to get 40 camera set-ups a day completed have become legend among filmmakers. The fact that he is a one man film crew who not only is able to move a camera with an assured sense, but who is already cutting and piecing the film together as he is shooting the raw footage. Now, with From Dusk Till Dawn he has cemented his market by working with a producer who knows him almost better than he knows himself: his wife Elizabeth Avelon. Together they have completed the film which has served as the shot in the arm a lot of horror fans desired, and they now look forward to their next project: the Steven Spielberg driven re-telling of the classic tale of Zorro set to again team this talented director with Antonio Banderas. Carpe Noctem was invited to the press junket for the release of From Dusk Till Dawn and we were delighted to meet the unassuming young man who is quietly, yet deliberately, turning Hollywood on its ear.

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  As the script for From Dusk Till Dawn was being developed, was there always going to be that “genre splitting”?

  Oh yeah, that was always there. Quentin did a re-write, but that seems misleading because he really only changed about ten percent of it. He just enriched some of the characters and changed, most dramatically, his own character. He really took a lot of the cool lines he said and gave them to George and brought himself back and made himself a lot more unlikable. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same script that was there. It always had that split in it. That was kind of the reason I wanted to do it, because it was all the genres we liked thrown in together. It had Texas, Mexico, and Mexican vampires… I couldn’t pass that up. That’s the script I should have written myself. [Tarantino] didn’t want to direct it. It’s the only script Quentin ever wrote that he never intended to direct. He really wanted to see me do it after seeing Mariachi and seeing my Texas-Mexico thing. He thought I could do a good job with it. He was starting to cannibalize it. That’s why I wanted to do it, too. [Quentin] cannibalizes all his old ideas that don’t get made. And he already took the Ezekiel speech that was in From Dusk Till Dawn that Harvey Keitel was supposed to say to keep the vampires back and put it in Pulp Fiction. When you go back and read the old Dusk script there were so many great scenes, I knew he was going to start stealing them and putting them in his new movies. So, I wanted to make it before any of the other good stuff got used. I mean, why let good ideas sit around? He didn’t think that movie would ever get made. Nobody wanted to make it, because it was two movies in one. And then once we got involved and we got George Clooney and Harvey Keitel, suddenly everybody wanted it. “It’s like two movies in one!” So, suddenly that became a positive spin and there was like a bidding war for it for a while.

  Did you take the ending and run with it? Was that pretty close to what Quentin had written?

  The script is out. You can see the script and that’s the best way to know what exactly I added to it because it was pretty skeletal. It was originally about eighty pages. [Quentin] was hired by Robert Kurtzman (of KNB FX Group), so he knew they were going to add in all kinds of stuff to the second half.

  There’s a lot of talk with hard-core horror fans that this is the film that is going to revitalize the Horror genre. Do you feel any of that pressure, and do you think that this film will do that?

  There really wasn’t anything else coming out; even Interview with the Vampire was pretty tame by the horror fans. They loved that movie so we thought, “Wow! If we really give them some of the real knock’em-sock’em that people don’t really get into making these days, I think they’d be happy and we’d be happy. We would have wanted to make those kind of movies, the ones that we enjoyed watching growing up. We wished we could have made those. So, this is our way of making them.

  Was part of the decision to make this film the fact that vampirism-chic nowadays is a commodity?

  No, that was one of the things that turned me off about it. What made it kind of dated was the fact that he had written it several years back and since then there’s been a glut of vampire movies. The only thing that got me excited about it was that it was the Mexican vampire myth and that’s different from all of the Transylvanian stuff. We could just rip people to pieces and not have to worry about putting fangs through the necks and not make them look like vampires and just do anything we wanted because it was a different myth. It was more of the idea of the genre twisting and having much better characters than you would normally have in an exploitation film go through the picture, and it became the whole package idea. We tried to get away from the idea of it just being a vampire film. We call it that because we don’t know what else to call it. There’s no other classification for it.

  What age group do you think most of your films appeal to?

  It’s a younger age group, definitely. I know when I’m a little older I probably won’t be able to get into them that much. It’s like when rock and roll first came out, all the adults thought it was really dangerous and
couldn’t get into it, but the kids loved it. It’s that sort of thing. I still got that kind of sense about the movies I make.

  How about Zorro? Is Zorro going to be also skewed to a younger group?

  In that they haven’t really seen a definitive Zorro, yet. So, they don’t really know what it is. We’ve taken a lot more liberties with the story. Zorro will just have a bandanna pulled down over his eyes like a street kid. [laughs] It’s a different story than Steven Spielberg came up with, so it’s not the Zorro you’re used to seeing, which is good. You don’t want to go see that again, but it keeps all the spirit. [Zorro] is much more of a family film. It’s not as hard-core as this stuff.

  What did Juliette Lewis bring to Dusk?

  It was strange. Juliette called Quentin. Pulp had just hit and the girls we had in mind for the part were regular young actresses, sixteen-seventeen year old girls, and Juliette called Quentin and said that she’d read the part and she wanted to be in it. The part was even smaller before. And I was like, “Why does she want to be in it?” I didn’t want her to be in it because I thought all her fans will wonder why I had her in the movie when she was not even doing anything. So, I was under pressure to come up with cool stuff for her to do so we could take advantage of having her in there. She’s in every scene because she’s with the family, but I didn’t want her just sitting around. So, we tried to give her more to do. She liked that, also. It was just fun having her on the set. I wasn’t sure how she was going to be. You always hear stories about young actors being crazy and stuff, and I’m a pretty calm guy. She was delightful. She was the biggest surprise on the movie as far as pre-conceived ideas that I had of how people were. I thought she was a lot of fun. Everyone loved her on the set. Very funny. She’s actually very funny.