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Interview: Bruce LaBruce Talks L.A. Zombie, Stirring Controversy, and More

Slant chatted with LaBruce about L.A. Zombie, his follow-up to Otto; or, Up with Dead People.

Interview: Bruce LaBruce Talks L.A. Zombie, Stirring Controversy, and More
Photo: Strand Releasing

Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce follows up Otto; or, Up with Dead People with L.A. Zombie, coming out on DVD from Strand Releasing this Tuesday. The mostly wordless, hour-long film stars French porn star François Sagat as an alien who arrives in Los Angeles and resurrects various guys he meets by penetrating them with his elephantine alien penis. LaBruce chatted with Slant about his film.

The last time we talked was for Otto; or, Up with Dead People. Now we’re discussing L.A. Zombie. So, I’m curious, why another zombie film?

[laughs] It’s just a phase I’m going through. I think now that I’ve made two and traveled around with them, for me it was an attempt to explore a more popular genre, but interpret it with my usual obsessions and techniques and strategies. [Zombie films] are a more popular form, so it allows me to reach a wider audience and comment on a lot of issues in my work, like the representation of violence in mass media and the relationship between sex and violence and power relations.

You made two versions of L.A. Zombie—an hour-long DVD, which played the festival circuit, and a hardcore edition. Did you have concerns about distribution of this film?

L.A. Zombie Hardcore is the long version, which is being marketed and distributed as porn. It has long, explicit sex scenes, and strangely has a lot of scenes of Francois Sagat having sex with his real “human” dick rather than with his “alien” dick. It’s been selling very well for my porn co-producer, Dark Alley, in the States. L.A. Zombie, the shorter version, is intended for festival audiences, and it must have played over a hundred of them by now. It has limited theatrical potential, although it is being released theatrically soon in France. In Italy, the softcore version and Otto have been released together as a zombie box set, which has also been selling very well for them.

What is your impression of L.A., especially as a Canadian/foreigner?

I always really relate to L.A. I’m not sure why. When I first went there in 1991, I wrote about how it was like finding my spiritual homeland, which I meant kind of ironically, because most find it a spiritual wasteland. But as a cinephile, I’m a devotee of classic Hollywood—modern Hollywood not so much. The landscape is emblazoned in your mind and you recognize all these locations, cityscapes, and landmarks. It’s vast, and changes, but not in a way that New York changes; it’s not constantly transmuting. L.A. has a certain aspect of it that remains unchanged. I lived there for a year as I was making Hustler White. I love the insanity of it—the fact that it’s so different for me, coming from Canada, with the changing of the seasons and the cold. A sunny day every day for nine months is like a bizarre dream.

Why did you cast and how did you work with Sagat on the role?

I had missed a few opportunities to work with Sagat before for various reasons. I had wanted to work with him even before he was well known. I knew him from a porn company that had Arab models. Even though he wasn’t Arab, he passed for it. I was aware of him, and when he blew up, I was thinking about him, watching his YouTube videos, which were cool, personal, and transgressive. I came up with L.A. Zombie with him in mind, and as a vehicle for him. I ran into him at Chi Chi LaRue’s birthday party in Paris. I talked to him about the project, he was in to it, and that was it.

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As the alien, Sagat pisses, vomits, and fucks. Was there anything Sagat wouldn’t do, or did he ever do something that surprised you?

Once François committed to the character, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do within the framework of the character. And there isn’t a lot of limits for an alien zombie who fucks dead people back to life. It’s completely bizarre and otherworldly. It’s all done, on a certain level, very tongue in cheek, or satirical—even though it’s very serious. I’m not particularly interested in necrophilia. But the conceit of the film is reverse necrophilia—a technical point, perhaps. In terms of the actual character, it’s done in a gay context; the people he saved—they are not victims—were gay men. But there were a few things—endurance things [that tested Sagat]. We shot in seven days and some of those were 14-to-16 hours long and grueling for a micro-budget film. We had to drive to Zuma Beach, where the final scene of Hustler White and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? were filmed. We were trying to beat the sun. We had to shoot the opening scene at dusk. He had already had a sex scene that day, and when we go to the ocean and it was freezing and I asked for an extra take, he was like, “No! I’m done!” But it was a symbolic “no.” He has to say “no” once to something!

Can you discuss the makeup, colors, and special effects? They are all very vivid.

The palette is really cool. Joe Castro did the special effects. He’s a mad-genius type. He’s done tons of special effects for low-budget horror and porn films. We came up with the design of the creature together, the prosthetic cock, the contact lenses, everything. The palate was tricky. Blue was tricky because of Avatar, Blue Man Group, etc., so I didn’t want to stick with just blue. Then we got the idea of him becoming more of a chameleon and changing color. Changing the color of the parts of the body was a necessity because we didn’t have the ability to paint his entire body, so we came up with the idea of him being a homeless schizophrenic who sketches this alien identity in his mind. Or if he is a real alien, he has a chameleon identity. Whatever color we painted him had weird consistencies with his environment. He’s in a Pasadena graveyard, and the color of his skin matches the tombstones. It looks intentional, but it wasn’t! It was synchronicity.

How did you develop the social commentary about the homeless, gangbangers, and bondage, and so on?

In terms of the spectrum of the people he has sex with, I was thinking of getting a cross-section of Los Angeles. Class, white-collar criminals, gangbangers, but also porn clichés, like the guy in the suit, or the surfer guy, or the gangbanger. The homeless guy in that element became more of a focus of the film as we shot it. When I arrived [in L.A. after so many years], the homeless population grew exponentially. We shot extra scenes of [the alien] hanging out with the homeless. There’s a sincere element about the homeless and the situation of this character. Eighty percent of the people living on the street are schizophrenic. So it has a sociological/documentary element to it. But it’s a porn movie as well. So people won’t take the political element seriously, but I liked to juxtapose two really different elements and seemingly inconsistent genres/concepts/ideas and see what meaning is produced. Political porn is unusual.

You feature one extremely sensational scene in each movie. Do you do this to create controversy?

I guess you could even identify it in No Skin Off Your Ass, where I have dream sequence in which a skinhead licks a toilet. There’s something about my interest as a filmmaker to explore taboos, and territory that isn’t supposed to be represented. Where is the boundary of what you can and cannot get away with? That has something to do with it, but some of it is kind of serendipitous. The infamous stump-fucking scene was because my collaborator for Hustler White knew a guy who was an ex-hustler who used a stump for pleasuring his customers. We didn’t make it up, and found it fascinating. But it’s true, in most of my films I kind of try to look for an image a strong scene that distills the meaning of the film into one [moment]. In Skin Flick, a neo-Nazi porn film, the skinhead jerks off onto a copy of Mein Kampf. It’s an ambiguous image: Is he doing it because it’s his ultimate fetish, or is he defiling it in some way? It’s something strong that nails the essence of the film. But also as a low-budget filmmaker, to draw attention to your work, it’s necessary to make these big gestures.

What went into the idea and creation of Sagat’s elephantine penis and why does it spurt an inky black substance?

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I had discussion with Joe Castro about what the cum would look like. The original idea was to cum blood, because he cries tears of blood. Joe said he’d done that a number of times already, so I said we should try something different. So we came up with the idea of a black, liquid-y substance, and visually, that was interesting. But I was intrigued by Joe’s idea to put a scorpion stinger on the end of it. The cock is incompatible with human sex, so it becomes absurd on some level. In the hardcore version, it’s a different movie, so he can’t fuck with the alien cock, so he fucks with his own cock and wears a condom. Which is absurd as well, unless you see him as homeless schizophrenic; it expands your imagination.

Why did you decide to eschew dialogue in this film?

It’s almost the same story as Otto, which can be described as a film about a real “zombie” or a mixed-up alienated gay kid who is homeless and possibly schizophrenic who thinks/perceives himself as a zombie. Because the films were so similar, I conceived them as differently as possible. Los Angeles versus Berlin, light versus dark, skinny emo versus big muscle; Otto is wordy, so L.A. Zombie is silent. Otto talks, reasons like human, so I went the opposite with L.A. Zombie, where [the main character is] non-verbal, emblematic and symbolic, and more purely visual, without explaining what was going on with voiceover or dialogue.

Can you discuss your visual approach/style for the film—the sped-up observational/documentary style footage and other techniques throughout?

L.A. Zombie has more in common with Hustler White in how it was made: guerrilla shooting without permits. Sometimes we found a location spontaneously and tried to shoot there, though some were scouted. The locations would have to be quite spectacular and emblematic of L.A.: the L.A. river, Topanga Canyon, Zuma Beach, East L.A. freeway overpass….all quintessentially L.A. And we had to give a strong visual impact. We shot on a Canon 5D camera, which is a still camera with HD video functions, so it’s 35mm, so it gives it a real depth of field, so it has more of a filmic quality.

The film shows controversial aspects of queer sexual culture, from watersports and bondage to barebacking and more. How has the gay community responded to your work?

I think specifically in L.A. Zombie and Hustler White, the way I use the S&M community/subculture is very…I have an ambivalence towards it. And it’s presented in the film in an ambivalent way. I had four of the biggest porn names involved in that scene, and it’s a heavy S&M scene, and of course they all get slaughtered, but is it meant to be a critique or a condemnation of that scene? I don’t see it as a condemnation, but it’s not mindlessly reinforcing it. The funny thing about those porn guys is that they all love gore. They are into extreme representation and they think it’s fun; they are like kids playing. They were totally into it. But you have to put it into a modern context. When I made Hustler White in the mid ’90s, the scene was different. Now it’s more conservative. Gays who were mainstream, or assimilationist, are not happy with extreme representations, and disassociate themselves from extreme elements. I’m pushing those buttons, because that’s a root of gay culture, and as a gay filmmaker, I’ve never held back from representing that or censored myself. I think it’s important to continue that tradition of avant garde gay filmmaking—Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, the Kuchar brothers, Paul Morrissey, and all the great porn directors.

You open with the Zombie born of water and end with him digging a grave. Why did you choose this narrative arc to frame the story?

These are elemental things, and water and earth and the sun of L.A.—the ritual bath. But when I premiered L.A. Zombie at Locarno a year ago, the Italian film critics explained the film to me: The whole film is a reversal theme. Most zombie films start with them coming out of the ground. They bring the dead back to life. reversed this negative idea of AIDS, or gay sex as toxic, poisonous, etc. If you want to know what it all means, you have to ask the Italians!

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Gary Kramer

Gary M. Kramer is a writer and film critic based in Philadelphia.

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