Latest:
Auf bösem Boden/On Evil
Grounds
will be released on DVD Halloween 2008. Click
here to get it from amazon.de
(German language, English subtitles).
You are about to release your debut feature film, Auf bösem Boden/On Evil
Grounds. Can you tell us in a few words what the film is actually about ?
Romeo and Juliet, a couple
that has a very odd perception of their relationship, decide to buy a loft
situated in a run-down factory. What they don’t know is that the owner of
the factory and his real estate agent are a couple of deranged serial killers
who usually torture and kill off any potential buyers. Problem is that Romeo
and Juliet refuse to act like the usual victims in your average slasher film
and everything goes bonk. OEG is sort of a very dark humored
Tom & Jerry meet Hostel cartoon violence mayhem flick with the
look of a spaghetti western.
The film contains plenty of rape, torture, bondage, murder. What
would you answer people who accuse you of using gratuitous violence to
sell your film ? It’s a movie. It’s
not real. If people cannot tell a movie from reality I cannot help them.
The film is frequently advertised as Sergio Leone meets Tom & Jerry.
Would you like to comment on that ?
What I aimed for was to cartoonize that gritty real violence that was shown in movies
from Last House on the Left to the recent Hostel movies. I
find the repetition in the average slashermovie quite boring, the behaviour of the victims, how they get killed off in the same way
everytime – I understand part of it is just playing by the rules of the
horror genre, but it became way too predictable over the years. So I set
out to make a new kind of slashermovie that I would like to see myself,
something that would entertain me. And being a huge fan of Sergio
Leone I found the combination of OEG with his look quite tempting and
fitting since his westerns are also postmodern: They also parodize and
(in a different way from OEG)
cartoonize the American western. He
was doing over-the-top westerns.
A question directly linked to the last one: Your main influences on On Evil
Grounds ?
Looks: Leone. Mood:
Takeshi Kitano. And then the Warner Bros cartoons. What I did not recognize at
first was the influence of Belgian cartoonist Franquin’s Gaston
LaGaffe-cartoons, but after having finished the movie for a while now I
begin to see that there are many more influences that went into it
unconsciously: Bud Spencer & Terrence Hill, Cronenberg, Takashi Miike,
there is always something new that I can point to a certain inspiration.
You made the movie on a rather low budget and shot it on miniDV.
Did you ever feel bothered by the budgetary and technical restraints, or
did you rather feel it as a challenge and an opportunity to improvise ?
Definitely the second. I
think no matter how much money you get for a movie, the budget will always
be tight. Even on big movies no one is throwing money out of the window.
Needs to be tight, because those restraints force you to be creative – this
pressure helps making a better movie. Having tons of more money than you
actually need would just lead to lazyness, I guess.
How long did it take you to make the film from first day of shooting
to rough cut ?
August 2005 to February
2006… 7 months. And then an additional 12 months to finish it
completely.
And how hard was/is it to get the film released ?
It takes a lot of time,
there are countless movies out there and if you don’t have an A-list
cast you are in the middle of the competition, like being in the middle
bulk of a Formula One race. It’s tough.
But I guess in the long run it pays off, but you do need to be able to go
quite a distance.
How easy/hard is it to make such a film in - of all countries -
Austria, and what can you tell us about the Austrian independent movie
scene ?
Well, no one stands in
your way, in this regard I think it is not any easier or more difficult to
make a low-budget movie here or anywhere else. There is an independent
scene in Austria but it is so independent that even the indies don’t
know that it exits. No, seriously: The official film business in
Austria is tiny and the independent scene's even smaller.
Is it hard to get actors and actresses to star in a
rather unusual film like yours ?
No, there are a hundred
times more actresses/actors than movies are being made and if
a movie comes along that is off the beaten path ... no, it was rather simple
finding the actors. A nice script finds them itself.
Making its rounds on the festival circuit, On Evil Grounds won
Best Film and Best Director at the Buenos Aires Rojo
Sangre Filmfestival. How much do awards like this mean to you ?
Personally I find it
nice, especially if the award comes from a small hardcore genre festival
where the audience really digs that kind of movie. Business-wise it also
help, more publicity more exposure, more open doors.
When and where will the film
be released ? The DVD will be released
in Austria/Germany/Switzerland at Oct 31th 2008, and in France we even
will have a theatrical release late 2008.
The film's website and/or mySpace and/or whatever
?
www.onevilgrounds.com
and on mySpace just look up my name, I’m there.
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What made you go into directing in the first place, and can
you tell us a bit about your previous experiences ?
I grew up watching
movies. First influences were Star Wars and Indiana Jones when I was ten
years old and from there I started to dig deeper, but the decision to make
movies was made when I was a kid. That magic caught me early on.
Movies you really liked, both recent releases and all-time favourites ?
Recently … didn’t see so much, but the French Dead End was fun,
Aachi and Sssipak almost killed me so funny was it, and even Hancock 2
days ago was worth its time.
All time favorites ... that’s a difficult one, I am
more a director’s fan, so any movie from John Carpenter, James Cameron,
David Cronenberg, Sergio Leone, Takeshi Kitano, Johnny To and some others
would in some parts show up on such a list.
... and
some movies you really deplored ? Recently? The Incredible
Hulk, Doomsday, 30
Days of Night, the Saw-series ... I have quite a
rejection against poorly written stuff that could be great if someone
would have switched his brain on when making those films.
Anything else I've forgotten
to ask but you are just dying to tell us ?
Yeah. Buy the DVD when it’s out. We are just working our asses off for the making-of features so I want everybody to see our sweat on it. Thanks for the
interview !
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