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"Amazing Turds"
Death Ray #18 is out now, and includes an interview with 'Did he just do that?!" B-movie master Frank Henenlotter, director of such appallingly brilliant films as Basket Case, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker. We spoke with Frank for far longer than we had space for in the magazine, so here's the interview in full. His latest film – Bad Biology – is available now on DVD. It's the story of two antsy, sexually abnormal lovers – she's a homicidal nymphomaniac with extra (umm…) organs downstairs, and he's lugging a two foot dong with a mind of its own. Frank, where do you come up with this stuff? Who give you the money to do it? And why? Why god why? Answers under the jump (contains spoilers and, er, venereal topics)…
Death Ray
Hi Frank, it's Death Ray.
Frank Henenlotter
That's the best title of any magazine I've ever heard. I wish I had a Death Ray. Mounted on my bedroom window.
Death Ray
Do you have many enemies?
Frank Henenlotter
Most of humanity? But I'll leave a few!
Death Ray
You haven't made a film in 16 years. Were you aware you had this hefty fanbase?
Frank Henenlotter
I didn't realise. I honestly thought all those films were forgotten. It was a different vibe when I was making them. Nobody seemed to care. They were well received, they made money, but no one really gave a shit.
Death Ray
Was Bad Biology made for Frank Henenlotter fans?
Frank Henenlotter
I have no idea. Each film finds its own fanbase., The people that loved Basket Case did not flock to Brain Damage. And Frankenhooker has its own feel. I just figured Bad Biology would find its own crowd.
Death Ray
Do you pay attention to the critics?
Frank Henenlotter
I'll read them but I don't necessarily believe it, even if it's a good review. I don't take what they're saying as gospel. When Brain Damage opened in New York City, the New York Post gave it zero stars and said that whoever made it was obviously brain dead. Ha! Years later, they're reviewing Basket Case 2. They give it three stars saying, "As good as it is, it doesn't measure up to Henenlotter's cult classic Brain Damage.' Which one do I believe?
Death Ray
You seem to be aiming for every genre at once in Bad Biology: horror, comedy, romance…
Frank Henenlotter
R.A. [Thorburn, Henenlotter's co-writer and producer] and I did that deliberately, very aware that we were mixing it up. That's what we got excited about, writing it.
Death Ray
What idea came first – the girl with seven clitorises, or the boy with the demon penis?
Frank Henenlotter
What came first was the budget, and that's the truth. I always write from the budget. R.A.'s one of my oldest and closest friends, and we had always talked about doing a film together. In 2006 he says, "I can get a small amount of money – can we do a film?" It was so small, I said, "Money's going to cripple us, but if we do something really strange and really offbeat and really offensive or startling, it'll get noticed." I made a list of offensive moments. The first thing I came up with was, "I was born with six clits." Very wisely, R.A. said, "Six could be associated with something demonic; let's use seven, which is more biblical." That was a much smarter idea. I also had a scene where a guy sticks a hypodermic needle in his dick, and a couple of other things like that. There was just the matter of threading a story through it. And we were surprised by how nicely it threaded. We were already chuckling inwardly, thinking, "This is really gonna fuck people up."
Death Ray
Who likes it better, the boys or the girls?
Frank Henenlotter
Oddly enough, some of the best reviews of the film come from women. I think they identify with the Jennifer character.
Death Ray
Was the stop-motion penis a budget thing?
Frank Henenlotter
We had a couple of ways of doing it, but Gabe Bartalos, who did our effects, agreed that it was such a goofy moment in the film, to use stopmotion would have resonance with all the stop motion monsters we've ever seen. It was a great touch for that one shot.
Death Ray
Is working with small budgets your preference?
Frank Henenlotter
I love it. When I did Frankenhooker and Basket Case 2, I had a 65-man crew, and it's a little overwhelming. It doesn't necessarily speed things up – in some ways it slows the film down. With Bad Biology, it was basically a six man crew. And we were able to move very quickly. I like being in the trenches. I like being next to the camera every minute, focussing from 9am until midnight on shot after shot after shot. It was gruelling; I'm not a young man any more. But that's the fun of it!
Death Ray
Are you keen to make more films?
Frank Henenlotter
You know what? It doesn't matter one way or the other, so that's good. Because if it really mattered, I'd probably screw it up.
Death Ray
We understand you've collaborated with R.A. on a few scripts…
Frank Henenlotter
They weren't horror films. Well, one of them was. An early version of Bad Biology that was more of a comedy – it had the unlikely title of The Captain and His Magic Penis. We thought it'd be funnier if we played it straight…
Death Ray
For a low budget exploitation film, the photography is very upmarket…
Frank Henenlotter
We shot at 35mm. And that's the bulk of the money. And the house we used lent itself to a more formal style of photography. There are very few flashys hots in it, butsomehow it feels right. I tried to make it look and behave like a real movie, so that the content would be much more objectionable.
Death Ray
It's a beautiful yellow house, a bit like Frank Black's in Millennium…
Frank Henenlotter
We were shocked as hell! I was appalled. When we pulled up in a cab I went, "Holy shit, it's yellow! How am I going to put a yellow house in a horror film?" I was ready to turn around and leave. As soon as we went inside I saw the potential. It was 154 years old, and there was a big stink midway through the shoot. After just two weeks, he called us up and said, "Can you guys leave? We're going to start tearing it down next week." We had this marathon rush. Four days to get everything done. But the community must've gotten wind of it and took it to the landmark preservation committee. It was turned into an official New York City landmark in the middle of our shooting. One day we're filming somewhere set for demolition, the next it's an official landmark!
Death Ray
These are the perils of low budget filmmaking…
Frank Henenlotter
It's like guerrilla warfare but it's very exciting.The only problem we had with the house then was that we set it on fire. There's a couple of scenes that are supposed to happen in daylight, but Tina Krause could only work in the evenings so we had to have extra lights on the side of the house to pump in fake daylight, and we had to have a generator. Someone pushed the generator too close to the house. Within seconds there were flames going up the side of the house. We freaked. We had no running water, we were punching the wood off the side of the house to stomp on it. People were coming up with bottled water, coffee and tea. At one point I'm told, "Frank: there's no more liquid!" I'm a soda drink junkie, so I had cans of Diet Pepsi hidden all over the house, so I took out a 12 pack of Pepsi and squirted it on the house. When the fireman came up he wasn't amused, and then he looked down at the empty soda cans and said, "Congratulations!" Everyone's hands were still shaking, hours later…
Death Ray
So everything that could have gone wrong, did?
Frank Henenlotter
Three weeks before we started shooting, I found out I had cancer. Suddenly your perspective changes. It was prostate cancer, and immdiately they had me in treatment, because it was so advanced. Every morning I would go to St Vincent's Hospital, lie down and get radiation treatment, then take a subway and be on the set in Brooklyn at 9am. And I did that every morning. I'm off all medication now, and they can't find any trace of it left in my blood. It didn't change anything about the film. I didn't let anyone know about it. I didn't want people to think I was sick, because I wasn't. I just had a slight case of cancer.
Death Ray
So what happened to the exploitation scene?
Frank Henenlotter
I grew up on 42nd Street. There were A-films and B-films and then there were exploitation films. Now exploitation films are made by Hollywood on $100 million budgets. That's not really exploitation! I had no interest in seeing Grindhouse. I really thought it was a missed opportunity. I would have liked to see what these talented directors could do with 40 bucks and a handful of props, which is how most exploitation films were made.
Death Ray
What films are you watching at the moment?
Frank Henenlotter
I don't go to movies! I spend my time watching all the stuff that was made in the past and I still haven't seen yet. If I never saw another modern movie in my life, I would still spend everyday seeing amazing stuff. You can't believe what's out there – what nobody noticed or what's been forgotten about. For the past 16 years I've been working with Something Weird Video in finding and restoring these things. Amazing turds that we had no idea were ever done. You clean off a turd and polish it off and it's a bright shiny wonderful turd!
Death Ray
When do you reckon we'll see another Henenlotter film?
Frank Henenlotter
Bad Biology cost so little that we didn't need anybody's permission. It was one of the few times other than Basket Case and Brain Damage when I was my own boss. And it's how I intend to work. I'm not going to do a film just to make a movie. We have other projects, but everyone's waiting to see if the economy will let us or not. Maybe films will prosper in this economy, or maybe they'll be another casualty. It's got to be money that I or my friends can find. Who knows?
Bad Biology is out now on DVD!
Administrator March 12, 2009, 2:20:52 pm GMT
