Exclusive: Creative Minds Talk About Their ‘Genetic Opera’
Posted by Adam Sweeney (adam@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 5, 2008
Repo! The Genetic Opera stood out as one of the best films at this year’s Fantastic Fest. Filled with stylish visuals and a mix of talented new and cult classic actors in nearly every scene,, Repo! had the crowd’s attention from the start. To be honest, fans were cheering even before they stepped into the theater.
FSR was fortunate enough to sit down with director Darren Lynn Bousman, writer/actor Terrance Zdunich, and music producer Joseph Bishara to get some insight into the world of the film that could have fans lining up at Midnight very soon.
I started the interview off by asking how the guys felt about the love they received at Fantastic Fest, which included an added screening because people wanted to see it so much. Bousman spoke about the dedication of the fans and the ability Repo! has had to fight against the odds:
Darren Lynn Bousman: “You know, again, it’s one of these things. I guess we shouldn’t gripe so much about shit but we were basically told no one would want to see this movie. We were actually told we shouldn’t show it because we would be embarrassing ourselves, and we knew that was not the case. We knew people would want to see this movie. But I think none of us expected the type of reaction we’d get. You were at the midnight screening, you probably saw all the people dressed up. These people had never seen the movie, this movie isn’t even out yet. We had people dressed as Grave Robbers and Amber Sweets and all this other stuff, it was amazing. Not only did that amaze me but the fact that where these people came from. These people knew they weren’t going to have a chance to see Repo! in a theater so they made road trips. People came from Missouri or Indianapolis. They drove down to this theater to see this movie and that was amazing. You know what’s crazy is not only have we added an additional screening here, everywhere that we’ve shown the movie we’ve sold out. We’ve shown it in a couple of places, it’s sold out and they’re adding other screenings, and I think that goes to show that there is an interest for this movie.”
The story behind the origin of Repo! is nearly as good as the film itself. Originally written for the stage, it has made the way to movie screens. I asked Terrance about how the story evolved to where it is today as a film that pays homage to classic stories like King Lear while finding a way to carve out a new niche.
Terrance Zdunich: “It’s a hard question because mainly it’s been such a long process. Even if we had all the money in the world and somebody said “Go write Repo! 2,” we’ve learned a lot in the eight years of writing Repo! 1 about songwriting and storytelling, I think. So we could probably do it a lot quicker. We could bang out something in a year and a half if that’s all we did, but it probably wouldn’t have the layered complexity this does, which may not be intentional. It may be that you work on something for so long that you keep adding things. So I think some of the density comes from that.
Originally it started as a ten minute opera. We were doing short stories set around themes and one of these themes was an idea about fear of the dawn. One of the short stories was about a grave robber. And I think at the time I was thinking of something much more like typical macabre, an Edgar Allen Poe type of thing. Thankfully Darren Smith, my co-composer, was like “You know what, we need to do something more original than that.” I was okay with doing a Vincent Price type of thing (Zdunich puts his arm over his face to imitate Price and gives an evil laugh) set in the future. At the time Smith was a lawyer dealing with clients who were having bankruptcy issues, so we said let’s take this story, it’s about a guy whose organs are in default and so it just kind of grew and grew and grew. It’s a love for kind of archetypal characters, and just sort of big operatic themes, and rock n’ roll music.”
Even though Repo! is set in 2056 there are a lot of nods to to current social issues in the film, such as the downside of capitalism. Zdunich and Bousman touched on the issues and explained why they’re at the heart of the film.
Terrance Zdunich: “It’s definitely intentional. One of the lyrics I sing at the beginning of the movie goes “If you could have genetic perfection, would you change who you are if you could,” and I think we see all these characters trying to change themselves in some way. There are external factors identifying them as opposed to identifying themselves with who they actually are. So, as such, most of those characters fail and die brutally. (Terrance and I laugh.) So it was definitely conscious, maybe it grew along the way, and I think any good science fiction story worth its’ weight in gold has some sort of social message to it”
Darren Lynn Bousman: “What I love about it is that script itself is so layered on so many different levels. In other words you’re basically selling who you are, literally and figuratively. You have Blind Mag who signs a contract in blood. She sells her soul to get eyes, and what is that price, she becomes an indentured servant for Geneco. Nathan Wallace sells his soul to Rotti Largo, becomes an indentured servant, and must, for the rest of his life, be Repo Man. All these characters throughout the movie basically sell part of themselves to get that they want except Shilo, the one innocent, who doesn’t do that.
There’s all these great subtextual things but on top of that you look at all the things on the surface. Walk down Beverly Hills. I live in Los Angeles and if you walk down the street it is hard to find anyone that has not fucked with their body. You know what, I am included in that. I dye my hair. People go to the gym. Why? To make their body look good. People tan. Why? Because they want to have a pleasant appearance. Take that another step further, we’re all guilty of it. Take that a step further. Breast Implants. Okay, take that a step further”
Terrance Zdunich: “My penile reduction.” (Everyone laughs.)
Darren Lynn Bousman: “You take it a step further. We’re not that far away, I think. In the 1950s if you had told someone “Hey, do you want some bigger breasts. you need breast implants,” they would have thought you were insane. Now it’s common place. It is an outpatient thing, you’re in and out in an afternoon. Liver transplant, kidney transplant, heart transplant, that’s actually happening. How far fetched is what we’re talking about? Not at all. We’ve just added one little element to it. You can buy them on credit. Everything today you can buy with money, you can buy on credit. Everything. So it’s not going to be much longer that you can buy body parts on credit. And if you can then what happens if you default on that?”
The soundtrack of Repo! takes the best parts of rock operas like Tommy and modernizes it with elements of the industrial music genre. Joseph Bishara explained how he got involved on Repo! and what it was like to work with an all-star musical cast that featured Sarah Brightman, Joan Jett, Poe, and a ton of other artists.
Joseph Bishara: “These guys were all sitting around waiting to get this stuff recorded. So I came in one night, everybody was there, and we kind of hit it off right away. That was on a Thursday, by Monday we were in the studio starting right in. It was ready right when I came in. It was like “We gotta start right now, go.” But it was incredible working with all these musicians. Sarah Brightman, this unquestionably world class opera singer. Poe was great. There was Poe, Nina Bergman (Dead Rose Beauty singer), and Nancy, Darren Smith’s wife, there was one session where all three girls were doing female backing vocals. Poe actually does does the solo line. It was great, every day was fantastic.”
Darren Lynn Bousman: Another thing about how Joe got involved, it shows a lot of love for the movie. Joe’s job kind of grew from, say, on a scale of 1 to 10 you’re at a 2. We are going to need you two percent of the time. By the third day that 2 turned to a 10. I would call Joe at like four in the morning. He undertook, like, over one hundred pieces of music. That’s massive and with no money he basically made three albums in the time it would take a normal person to do one song.”
Joseph Bishara: “Yeah, it was a very small music team. There were two engineers, an assistant, and myself pretty much just holed up in a studio working seven days a week, fourteen or fifteen hours a day for months. We’re dealing with the album now, putting that together, it’s almost hard to believe that it can be finished. It’s inconceivable, it’s like how can this be done?”
When I watched Repo! one of the best parts was getting to see cult classic actors throughout the film. One of them is Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses) and I wanted to know what it was like to have the character actor on the set.
Darren Lynn Bousman: “Bill was my first choice for that character [Luigi Largo]. I called him, I was in Toronto, and I called him up. We wanted to put him in Saw but it wasn’t right. So I called him up and said “Bill, can you sing,” and he’s like “You obviously haven’t heard of Cornbugs.” (Everyone laughs.) Cornbugs is not singing. It’s mostly Bill Moseley talking very loudly. So what was cool is that eighty percent of the time you see Bill Moseley, it’s not Bill Moseley. He’s got long hair and sunken eyes, whether he’s playing Otis on Devil’s Rejects or playing Chop Top on Texas Chainsaw he always looks different, and it’s funny because in this movie he is the one character that is untouched. It’s funny because every character has something wrong with them, whether it’s Terrance who has makeup on or Pavi has someone else’s face. You kind of expect Bill Moseley to play that role and he didn’t. He played the normal looking guy and he’s awesome. I hear reviews saying Bill can’t sing good. Bill is doing exactly what I asked him to do. He’s playing an out there and crazy insane person. He’s perfect. The thing is Bill comes from an Ivy League school. Talking to Bill is awesome. You expect him to be those characters, you expect him to be Otis. But it’s like talking to a professor. He is one of the most insanely weird dudes. You’ll sit down and have a conversation with him and talk to him for an hour, and you realize like everything he has said is mindblowing. He’s great.”
If Repo! turns into a cult classic, as it looks like it will do, the question is whether there will be a Repo! prequel and sequel. I asked the guys if they were up to the challenge and what the differences were between Repo! and a bigger film franchise like Saw.
Darren Lynn Bousman: “I wasn’t joking last night when I said I want to do a sequel right away. There are certain movies that shouldn’t have sequels because the story starts and it ends. There’s nothing more that people care about. But there are so many more stories in this world of Repo! that I want to tell. I don’t think we got to do everything we wanted with this movie. We had no time, we had no budget, and we had no support. I just want to see what it would be like if we had the tools we needed to make the movie. That being said, this will never be a big budget movie. It’s not that type of thing. But I think that I learned a lot from making this movie. This was a crash course in moviemaking. I learned more from making this than I did making the last three Saw films. I think taking what I know now, both what I learned musically and dealing with the actors, I would love to go back and do another one. This is much more of a community than Saw. Saw was a popular franchise. People knew what they were getting themselves involved with. Nobody knew what to expect from Repo! and this kind of uncertainty made it a family environment. We all were involved in a labor of love because we loved what we did on this. People worked weeks and sometimes months with no money just because they loved it. Coming from a labor of love you’re immediately more connected ti the material. It’s not just a paycheck. No one made a paycheck on this movie and it made it have a more family environment. It makes me want to go back because I loved working with the people.”
Terrance Zdunich: “In terms of the whole cult classic possibility, the whole cult phenomenon, the one part of me wants immediate success and immediate gratification for all the hard work we’ve done. But then when I am honest with myself and I step back I think ‘What movies do I like? What do I watch repeatedly?” I think of things like The Warriors, I think of like Fight Club, The Big Lebowski. Some of my favorite films that I can keep viewing over and over again. They’re kind of in the same boat that we are. I mean it sucks to feel like you’ve worked so hard but then you realize that some of the best work was born out of that, so if we could achieve that sort of longevity, intentionally or not, I suppose in the long run that would be the most gratifying of all.”
All three of the guys were cordial and clearly went beyond the norm to get Repo! out. I will be checking the film out for sure a month from now when Repo! The Genetic Opera hits theaters November 7th. You can also check out the soundtrack, which makes Oklahoma! it’s bitch, at Amazon.com.
Read more articles by Adam Sweeney
