VFF: Up with Dead People

Queer cult director Bruce LaBruce returns with Otto

There’s a wonderful refrain in a NoMeansNo song that goes “Cats! Sex! And Nazis! That’s why they call me Mr. Happy!” After watching Bruce LaBruce’s latest film Otto; Or Up With Dead People, that song (which also fittingly features the refrain of “Zombies eat human flesh!”) kept repeating in my head, as all of these elements figure heavily into LaBruce’s collection of far-out films, the latest of which features a number of firsts for the expat Canadian director.

“It was my first film that I finished on 35mm,” LaBruce says, noting it was also his first six-figure budget and took almost twice as long to film than any of his previous films (as well as being the first time he used a crane shot and storyboards). “I’m a slow learner, but I usually figure things out eventually.”

In recent years, LaBruce has also learned that it’s easier for him to make films elsewhere compared to here in his native Canada. Even though most of us think of Canada as quite liberal in a worldwide scope, it’s not quite the truth.

“I haven’t shot a feature in Toronto since 1993,” LaBruce says after he realized it would be difficult for him to secure funding for the kind of films he wanted to make. He mentions having film developing labs call the cops on him and having to deal with various other kinds of censorship, which led LaBruce to first flee to L.A. and then eventually to Berlin to make films. “As they say, you can take the boy out of Canada, but you can’t take Canada out of the boy,” quips LaBruce. “So I think my work still contains all those endearing earmarks of Canadian cinema: alienation, identity issues, a certain Northern gloom, even a certain leftist political consciousness.”

In Germany, LaBruce found himself more free to make the films he wanted to, but also found some cultural similarities.

“I think I relate to Germans because they also suffer from this kind of crushed ego syndrome,” he says. “Canada has always had its ego crushed by its proximity to the U.S.—a certain inferiority complex—and Germany, owing to its defeats in the world wars and the humiliation and guilt over the Nazi era, has a parallel kind self-flagellating, mangled ego. That’s my theory, anyway.” LaBruce says for him it’s not so much about Germany as about Berlin, which he calls “an amazing city, a truly international hub with all sorts of dense history and creative energy coming out of so much destruction and horror.” LaBruce calls himself a very new-world kind of soul and admits to liking the lightness and relative youth of America. “So, it’s challenging to throw yourself into this old European capital with so much karma and history behind it.”

Otto has been shown the world over at approximatley 150 film festivals and LaBruce has had the chance to attend screenings in 27 different cities. “No matter where I showed it—Istanbul, Seoul, Belfast, Sao Paulo, Ljubjliana—the audiences seemed to relate quite strongly to this idea of a homeless zombie who has become deadened to an increasingly alienating world,” LaBruce says. He feels that the fact that Otto is a gay zombie was important to the gay audiences, but at the international film festivals, people also seemed to identify with the idea of a sensitive youth who has retreated into a zombie state as a result of an increasingly materialistic and soulless society. “I found that quite heartening,” LaBruce says. “Or disheartening.”

After travelling far and wide with what could be argued as his most accessible film, LaBruce says the audiences have been great and he’s seen the best response I’ve ever had to a film. “It’s the critics that have been pretty assy and cynical about it,” LaBruce says. “It’s funny, when critics aren’t into what I do in general—and there are a lot of them, and they are entitled to their opinion, no matter how wrong!—they come up with all sorts of nasty criticisms, but sometimes you get the feeling they’re not always addressing what’s really got their knickers in a twist.” LaBruce says critics often often stay away from content and he’s noticed with Otto that to one critic, it’s something well-crafted and beautifull shot, yet sloppy and technically bad as others claim. “There’s a disconnect there that’s kind of funny,” LaBruce says. “I’ve always found modern film critics pretty silly. In the ’90s, I made a feature film for a few thousand dollars, and they would try to use the same criteria to evaluate it as they would a huge Hollywood blockbuster. They have no sense of context or scale. Plus, a lot of them are homophobic in a kind of insidious way.”

But to peg LaBruce solely as a gay filmmaker is missing the point. “My rule has always been cinema first, gay second,” he explains. “I make very personal films, and I’m gay, therefore I make films with gay content. But for me if it’s not cinematic, which is a more universal way of expressing yourself, then it doesn’t make sense as art.”

Otto plays at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, January 31, at the Odeon. But first, Monday will host a pre-screening shindig at Whitebird Lounge at 8:30 p.m., so come on down, answer some zombie trivia and win a prize—including one of 10 tickets to the movie.

Web Exclusive: Bruce LaBruce On . . .

• The Conservative government and Bill C-10: “Fortunately, a lot of people really gave the Conservatives an earful about Bill C-10 and the idea of the government trying to pre-censor artistic expression in film. The Quebecois in particular let Harper know how important cultural expression is to them, and his attempt to kill arts funding in Canada may have cost him a majority. It’s reassuring to know that Canadians still won’t let their government get away with murder as it does in the States.”

• Film criticism: “The new cool, politically incorrect posture consists of supposedly ‘hip’ critics championing huge neo-liberal corporate potboilers like Ironman and The Dark Knight over more experimental or eccentric films. They like those brooding, conflicted corporate superheroes because they relate to them, or think they do: everyone wants to be a player these days. There’s no counterculture anymore. In fact, my best reviews came from the bigger, supposedly more stuffy papers like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Montreal Gazette, etc. It’s topsy-turvy. I guess all bets were off when Dennis Hopper started voting Bush. Ha! Sorry I just had to go on my little rant there.”

• Film-watching habits of Canadians: “That’s another reason I’ve had to go elsewhere to gain recognition for my work. Canada is not one of the countries that is the best for the distribution of my films. I’m much more popular in Australia, for example! (In fact, Otto was voted the third most popular film at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, after The Wackness and Persepolis!) But I do plan on shooting my next feature in the Toronto area. I’m getting development money from Telefilm for it. And actually, I did get significant completion money for Otto from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, so I am starting to get some support here.”

• On the progression from skinheads to zombies in his films: “Well, there was a segue there between Skin Flick and Otto, to extreme left wing revolutionaries in The Raspberry Reich. I think that was the logical step. In Otto, the zombies in the film-within-the-film, Up with Dead People, become political activists for the cause of the undead, who are persecuted and annihilated by the living. They write their political slogans as graffiti (Rise!) and they recruit homosexuals to their cause by turning them into gay zombies. For me, personally, I had grown tired of seeing zombies represented in most movies as worthless homeless people who could be annihilated for sport. Following the master, George A. Romero, I wanted to show that it is actually the living who have become soulless and deadened. The zombies are the disenfranchised underclass. But I guess skinheads have a zombie aspect to them as well: they all act the same, they show little emotion, they travel in packs . . .”

• On whether any of LaBruce’s cast have ever refused to do something on film: “Oh, sure. I used to have a rule, back when I starred in my own movies, that I would never ask anyone to do anything on camera that I wouldn’t do myself. In Otto, Jey (Otto) reached a limit at a certain point because we were making him do so many horrible things. We buried him in a grave on his 19th birthday. We made him walk through a field full of bees. We made him eat raw tuna in strawberry syrup out of the belly of a dead rabbit, etc. One day he finally freaked when I asked him to eat a piece of raw liver. I tried it myself, and I couldn’t blame him.”

• What he’s working on now: “I’m writing a script. The working title is Gerontophilia.”