Your new movie Cannibal
Messiah - in a few words, what is it about?
On
the surface the movie is about a militant pathfinder seeking revenge for
the death of his brother, who got killed by an animalistic beast. In order
to do so he kidnaps two local filmmakers and forces them to lead him deep
into the woods of Silschede. Beneath this simple twist, a whole universe -
or more correctly said - a whole multiverse of strains and topics is
opening, which range from speciesism to cannibalism, from racism to
xenophobia, from drug use to drug abuse, from refuge to betrayal, from
genuine spirituality to pseudo religious cults and from the narrow boredom
of Silschede to the unlimited possibilities of timetravel. What
were your inspirations for writing Cannibal
Messiah - and with all the weirdness going on, how much was
actually in the script, how much was made up on the spot? The
greatest inspirations come, besides from our own previous works, from the
classic Italian mondo and cannibal film era in the seventies and eighties.
It took a broad research of revisiting all the icons of that genre, in
order to catch the right flavor and to pick out some special scenes
begging for a quote or parody. The script itself was already weird enough
on its own and had much more content in it than what you find in the
actual movie. If we had filmed all of the scripted scenes, the movie would be at
least 180 minutes long and defenitely not yet finished. And it
even had a lot more weirdness in it than people would think. Of course,
some jokes were just generated by spontanious ideas on the set, and when
it comes to continuity there were a lot of sources for disturbance outside
the production process (i.e. the changing lenghts & styles of hair),
but believe us, the major madness already was set up in the script itself
and a big deal were the logical problems resulting from the time travel
experiences in the movie.
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Cannibal
movies only rarely show less than quite some blood and guts, and Cannibal
Messiah is no exception - so do talk about the gore effects in
your movie for a bit, and how were they achieved? And was there ever a
line you refused to cross?
Sebastian
Zeglarski from Moregore Pictures (creator of the movie A Fucking
Cruel Nightmare) was responsible for the largest part of splatter and gore,
assisted by Master W for the less
complicated raw pizza pastry effects (Check our behind the scenes footage
if you're curious what you can do with pizza pastry). Since we didn't have
a big budget for serious and realistic looking effects, we decided to give
the violence in the film a straight forward over the top loony toony
touch: Trying that even the most gross and disgusting brutalities still
would make you laugh or at least wonder why i.e. a squirrel would produce
massive fountains of blood.
As
a writer and director Master W always has to take the hardest parts in
acting when it comes to humiliation, so other unpaid actors would follow
his example. Still some refused to fill up their mouth with the fake vomit
we prepared for them, some did and actually started real life vomit action
on the director. Crippler Criss (who directed the movie together with
Master W) refuses to do things like this most of the time because he
doesn't like to get dirty. But in this movie even he had to do some really
gory stuff as he got disemboweled.
You of course also have to
talk about Cannibal
Messiah's brand of humour! The
humor in this movie ranges from the above mentioned cartoon violence
humor, unlogical anti-humor, slapstick, parody, satire, wordplay, and of
course the good old fecal humor. We tried to create a lot funny moments in
the movie and luckily they all worked! During the movie premiere on January
23rd 2016 we could see how people reacted to what we created for the first
time, when we were watching the movie on the big screen with the audience.
Using a lot of humor is what keeps the audience awake and interested. Some
funny stuff worked even better than exptected. The scene in which the
train passes in the background caused one of the biggest laughs during the
premiere. It was huge! Do talk about your
over-all directorial approach to your story at hand! That's
a tough question for someone without any sophisticated approach towards
directing. Basically we just planned what is realistic to shoot on one
day, beeing nice and friendly to our actors, trying that everyone has a
nice time on the set and praying for sunny weather and good performances.
You
two play versions of yourselves in Cannibal
Messiah - so how close were they to your real selves, actually,
and what did you draw upon to bring your characters to life? Yes
there are some similarites with us as private persons and the fictional
charactors in the movie, but also some big differences: In the movie
Master W has some drug abuse issues that he is working on and in real life
he quit drinking, but that was only possible for him by superseding the
booze with the herb. Also he is quite a coffein junky, but overall the
Master W from the movie got a much heavier drug abuse issue than the one
answering your questions right now. Then, we are both movie makers, but
different from the film character Master W does have a private life next
to this occupation wich includes a family and a reggae band (U-Turn) where
Master W is the lead singer. The real-life Crippler Criss is not as angry
as the one in the movie. He is more of a quiet person and would only start
yelling if someone pissed him off really badly. The jacket he's wearing in
the movie used to be his jacket in real life many years ago and you can
see him wearing it almost (or every) movie we ever made. Over the years
this jacket became his "costume". The tension between our movie
characters is also something that sometimes took place in real life, but
gladly not to the extent of tension in the motion picture... at least not
yet.
What
can you tell us about the rest of your cast, and why exactly these people?
Honestly we can't choose our cast. Our cast chooses
us. But we feel lucky that such a big number of people was willing to
donate their free time for no compensation whatsoever for our little
production... even in times when it looked like the movie might never get
finished at all. And some of the actors we used for small roles proved to
be that kind of interesting that they got big roles in our upcoming
project. And we thank each and every one of them for putting their trust
into us and after seeing the finished product they all seemed pretty happy
with the result.
With
Cannibal Messiah
being mostly an outdoors movie, you just have to talk about your locations
for a bit, and what were the advantages and challenges of filming there? The
good thing about the forest as a setting is that you don't have to
decorate the set, unless you want to let it look like a cannibal village,
you don't have to light it artifcially, as long as the sun is showing up
and you don't have to clean up the gallons of our 100% organic fake blood.
On the flip side there are owners of the forest, who evantually will
destroy your cannibal village, fires that can break out any time when the
summer is just hot enough, armies of ticks trying to suck the last drop of
blood out of your actors, hunters who don't want to share their woods with
a group of guerilla filmmakers, a lack of hygenic facilities and outbursts
of heavy rain that can ruin a valuable weekend.
What
can you tell us about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere? The
atmosphere on the set was very family like, friendly and loose, often even
a kind of party atmosphere, which from time to time could become somewhat
problematic as far as not every one's acting skills were improved by the
consumption of alcohol or other mind altering substances. In the first
year of the shooting Master W was still drinking booze which made him
unable to read the skript, unable to give the right commands and unable to
act with a minimum of decency. But there were some problematic days, too.
This was the first movie with such a big cast for us which means you need
to have the right plan when to do what and which people to tell to come to
the set and when so they won't have to get bored sitting around half the
day on set because the directors didn't get their timetable right. Mutiny
was close but we managed to keep our unpaid cast in order by giving them
free beer.
The
$64-question of course, where can your movie be seen?
The movie can be seen on your home TV-set of course.
In order to achieve that you have to order the double DVD Digipak in a
slip case with the 120 minutes long feature film plus 240 minutes of bonus
material directly from P.S.Y.C.H.O.
Productions, from the label
distributing our film Creepy Video Store, its partner Black Lava
Entertainment or just from any other good online DVD shop. Here are some
links:
http://psychoproductions.com/ shop
http://cvs.rocks/shop/de/cvs-release.html
https://blacklava.at/index.php/der-konig-der-kannibalen-double-digipack-enhoused-in-an-slipcase- cvs-001.html
Anything
you can tell us about audience and critical reception of
Cannibal
Messiah yet? Except for some
gross refusal for obvious reasons we received unexpectedly and overwhelmingly
positive responses to the movie. With a variety of reasons why people
enjoy this film: While some only focus on the gore and cannibal parody
parts, others are fascinated by the complex and confusing storyline or the
variety of different perspectives you can take towards our movie. While
some people would struggle with the length of the film, most people
reported that they were kept entertained all the way till the unexpected
ending. And really everybody thinks the movie is very funny.
Any future projects you'd like to
share? Yes,
we are already working on a new project, but it is in such an early phase
that we can't give too much information away yet. All we can say is that
it will be a horror comedy again, but without any borelliose danger for
our actors and crew and that this time we'll try to tell a story really
straight forward as minimalistic as possible, focussing on the most
important aspects of a story, which are its characters. Your/your movie's website, Facebook, whatever
else?
https://www.facebook.com/PsychoProductionsNRW
https://www.youtube.com/user/PsychoProductionsNRW
http://psychoproductions.com
Anything else you're dying to mention and I have
merely forgotten to ask?
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Most
people think our movies are all about fun and fake blood. But if you want
you can still find an underlying seriousness under all the sarcasm and
gore, which is basically concerned with the lack of sense and surprise in
our modern lives, which some people try to fill with gross consumerism,
sneaky sectarianism or just plain paranoia. Like the Master W in the
movie, the real-life one has not yet found a proper answer to this
stressfull condition of living in a society where everything seems to be
availiable in abundance, but still, one never gets to a point of beeing
really satisfied or even happy. Besides that we'd like to thank everybody
out there who supported us in any which way during the making of the film.
You're the greatest! Thank you! Thanks for the interview!
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