Bruce LaBruce: ‘Such a wasteland’

I recently interviewed Bruce LaBruce for the Vancouver Sun about his new film, Saint-Narcisse. Set in early 1970s Quebec, the movie revolves around a young man (Félix-Antoine Duval) who visits his mother in the woods and finds out he has a twin brother. This being a BLB film, at least one taboo must be broken, in this case, twincest. The following are excerpts of our chat that didn’t make it into the Sun piece, mostly for reasons mostly of space—and also, because a deep-dive into the career of Geneviève Bujold may be of limited interest in 2021.

Sex and Death

Q: You were just in Los Angeles for a signing of your book Death Book. Do people come expecting to see a live sex act? 

A: (laughs) Not at the book signing. But some of the photos in the book are from performances I’ve done at gallery openings. I wouldn’t call them live sex acts but there’s nudity involved in these scenarios of terrorist abductions or zombie terrorists. I stage abduction videos and splatter everyone with blood and members of the audience participate. And sometimes they voluntarily get naked. I’m taking a cue from the Viennese Actionists. And also it’s a comment on modern entertainment where you can see horrible slaughter and sexualized violence on TV every day now, on HBO.

‘Every filmmaker should make a zombie movie’

Q: You’ve made a couple of zombie films. It seems like if an independent filmmaker stays in the game long enough, sooner or later they’ll make a zombie movie.

A: I think every filmmaker should make a zombie movie. With Saint-Narcisse, I threw in everything but the kitchen sink. There’s a character who drives a motorcycle—I think everyone should make a motorcycle movie. There are lesbians living in the woods, which is kind of an interesting genre that everyone should tackle. There’s an exploitative Catholic priest. Those issues are always relevant. The Catholic exploitation of boys in the church has not gone away. It’s still being swept under the carpet.

These are topics that are fair game for film makers. And zombies will always be a good metaphor for culture, whether it be the consumerism that George Romero was talking about in Dawn of the Dead (2004) or conformity. They’re also like the return of the repressed anxiety and fear of authoritarian culture. In fact I want to make a third zombie movie, a remake of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), that would be about terrorist zombies.  

Nerding out on Geneviève Bujold

Q: You’ve said that Saint-Narcisse is partly an homage to Quebecois filmmaker Paul Almond, whose 1970 movie The Act of the Heart had a profound impact on you when you first saw it. Almond was married to Geneviève Bujold, who was in Act of the Heart with Donald Sutherland. I think my introduction to Bujold was her as the lead in the big American medical drama Coma (1978).

A: Which I watched recently. Not a great film. But she was huge. She made Earthquake (1974) with Charlton Heston, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) with Richard Burton which she’s great in and was nominated for an Oscar. But I love her European films. My favourite is Alain Resnais‘ The War is Over (La Guerre est finie) (1966) with Yves Montand.

Q: Did you watch Coma because you were going down a Bujold rabbit-hole while making Saint-Narcisse?

A: I do tend to do that. During lockdown I would have my own mini-film festival. So I watched 10 Kurosawa films at one point. TCM had a retrospective. Or I do my own. I went through a Carol Baker phase. Then I did a Genevieve Bujold. But that was before the pandemic, actually. I cast Alexandra Pastrachek, who plays Irene in the film, I kind of cast her because she had a little bit of a Bujold quality with her big eyes and upturned nose.

Not to mention Girl on a Motorcycle

Q: You mentioned throwing in the kitchen sink with motorcycle scenes, and I flashed on Girl on a Motorcycle (1968). 

A: Fantastic film. I love all those genre films. I reference them quite often. One of my recent films was The Misandrists (2017), which referenced all the ’70s sexploitation movies like Bilitis (1977) and Emmanuelle (1974).

Q: Did you rewatch Girl on a Motorcycle for Saint-Narcisse? 

A: I did. I watched some motorcycle movies. Easy Rider is the mother of all motorcycle movies and a pretty great movie.

I don’t even know the names of them, but there are Canadian films about people going on journeys, going into the heart of darkness up into vast nature. Even just road trip movies like Vanishing Point (1971) or Five Easy Pieces (1970) where he goes up north to see his family in the woods. There are always secrets revealed in nature. That’s when all the repressed sexual desires come out, as part of the force of Mother Nature.

Getting that ’70s movie vibe

Q: There’s a scene set in a town that is quite striking where the main character, Dominic, approaches a group of priests in the town.

A: In terms of the art direction, we tried to be authentic in terms of the period. Michel (La Veaux) the DP and I also decided to do everything in-camera to get that vibe. There were no post-production filters. La Veaux has worked with a lot of the great Quebec filmmakers. We did it with original lenses that he would have used in the ’70s, and he lit it that way. And we tried to stay away from CGI for the twin effects. Which are quite beautifully done, if I do say so myself. We only used eight or nine CGI face replacement shots. It’s all split-screen and body doubles, the old-school way of doing it.

Bujold also, incidentally, was in a twins movie—Dead Ringers (1988). I totally rewatched that movie.

Q: At one point a character says something about what curiosity killing the cat, and a cat walks by. Was that intentional?

A: The cat was an accident.

Bruce LaBruce’s punk beginnings

Q: You’ve mentioned some of the movies that informed Saint-Narcisse. Would you say that this is in line with how you’ve always approached your art?

A: For sure, I started out as a punk making experimental films where I would shoot scenes from movies off the TV using Super 8 and splice them into my films. I would find found footage from other films as well. It was all constructed in the editing. Shooting my friends and doing crazy things and taking scenes off the TV. My first feature film was a remake of Robert Altman‘s That Cold Day in the Park (1969), which was shot in Vancouver, actually. It was a remake of the movie but I also shot scenes from the movie and put them in my movie.

Q: In a recent interview you said that when you started out that “The idea of being an artist was still pretty rarefied on a certain level, and now it seems like such a wasteland.”

Warhol had it right

A: Yeah. I was talking about NFTs. When you look at sites that have NFTs on them, it’s like a vast wasteland of irrelevance—disposable, bad graphic design. There’s way way way too much art in the world right now. I always say that there are more people in the entertainment industry than are not in the entertainment industry.

Q: Especially now, when you can be on TikTok and have millions of followers.

A: Which I understand, and there’s an interesting aspect of it, which is the democratization of entertainment and monetizing your work without middle people who take all the money. I guess more power to them if they can do that.

On the downside, when Warhol said that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, I think he kind of meant it in a dystopian way. Everyone is interchangeable. It’s product. His whole art scheme was this idea of churning out product like a factory. When he did it, it was new and interesting and glamourous. Now that everyone’s doing it, you don’t know how to wade through everything. For younger filmmakers, I wonder how they even begin to establish themselves in this cacophony, in this overdetermined field of images and photographs and music.

Old fogey time

Q: For younger creative types, it must be a question of, Where do I direct that energy?

A: What’s the generation now? Gen Z? They’re wired completely differently. They see the world in a completely different way. My early punk work, it was totally anti-corporate and off-the-grid. It was underground. There is no real underground anymore. It was autonomous. You didn’t have Instagram, which censors everything, and Facebook as well. The only platform where you can still go crazy is Twitter since Tumblr went away.

It’s a different mindset. Children now are born into corporate reality. We were totally anti-corporate. That was the enemy. Now you have corporations making these liberal commercials about embracing same-sex marriage or whatever. They’re don’t give a shit. They’re just trying to move product. Their whole reason for existing is to make profit. However they can exploit social issues to make a buck, they will.

But that’s the reality they’re born into. They don’t know anything else. They’re brains are also hardwired for accelerated culture. They can process a lot of these images faster. And they’re also dead in a certain way. They’re zombified. That’s my old-fogey take on it.