Bruce LaBruce
Combining independent cinema and gay porn is just one of the things Bruce Labruce is famous for. Besides being a successful, provocative director, the 46-year-old Canadian is a photographer, journalist and theatre director based in Toronto. He is also a diva – not in terms of extravagant outfits, but in terms of attitude and self-confidence: you can literally hear his eyes roll. By day he is a bohemian and by night he tweets after having sex with men half his age.
Before becoming an underground gay icon, he had a shockingly pastoral childhood: Justin Stewart grew up in a small family farm together with his four siblings in Ontario, Canada. He approached cinema very systematically, pursuing film studies in Toronto and film theory at New York University. In the 1980s, Justin became Bruce LaBruce and launched the independent queer punk zine J.D.s, giving the finger simultaneously to the punk and the mainstream gay scenes at the time. He practically gave birth to the so-called Homocore or Queercore movement, which corrupted a whole new generation of homosexuals.
Bruce’s career as a director started with a series of short, low-budget movies. He gained international acclaim with Super 8 1/2, a bio-pic about his rise to cult stardom that became a favorite in high-profile festivals like Sundance and Berlinale. In 1996 he directed Hustler White – the flick that reinforced his initial success, proved his great talent and featured a sex scene with an amputee gigolo. The movie paid homage to classic Hollywood and combined porn industry aesthetics with classical cinema techniques. With it, Bruce LaBruce officially became a movie-genre supercollider, mashing up revolutionaries, skinheads, deaf gay hairdressers and terrorists in detailed, close-up sex scenes.
Bruce’s latest passion is the zombie-horror genre. The “melancholic gay zombie picture” Otto Or Up With Dead People premiered at Berlinale in 2008 and became his most commercially successful project to date. It was followed by LA Zombie, the story of an alien zombie (played by porn star Francois Sagat) who wanders around LA’s ghettos, fucking dead people back to life.
Oh, and by the way: every year Bruce LaBruce stages a play in Berlin. Since 1998 he has contributed as a journalist/editor/photographer to diverse magazines like Dutch, BUTT, Index Magazine, Dazed and Confused and Vice. He wrote two books and in February 2010 also debuted as a visual artist with an exhibition of silk screens from LA Zombie. This happened simultaneously with the film’s premiere at the Peres Projects Berlin gallery, where we met Bruce to talk about the future of the porn industry and his life as a married man.
How are you, what have you been up to?
These days I’ve been busy with an exhibition of photographs of François Sagate, and with organizing the premiere of my latest flick LA Zombie. I spent the last few days before I flew to Berlin editing it and preparing the canvases for the exhibition, together with Lee Wagstaff from the Rise Gallery in Berlin.
Is there a difference between your previous zombie film Otto and this one?
With Otto, I was after a wider audience. It had a few hardcore scenes but it was still shown at the Berlinale and Sundance last year, and then it was released by netfelx – the most popular on-line video streaming site in the U.S. LA Zombie is in a different category altogether and I don’t even know if we’ll be able to find a distributor. I had promised myself to make a gay hardcore zombie film, but in the process it turned into an independent, art house production. Many of the sex scenes did not make it into the final cut, which changed the focus of the film completely. Tonight I am presenting the art version, which is called LA Zombie and will be shown at independent film festivals and other art events. We are also releasing a hardcore porn version, which will be called LA Zombie Hardcore.
I saw the trailer for LA Zombie and I must say I found it too hardcore for my taste. What could be more hardcore than that?
(laughs) Then you will have a serious problem with the rest of the film. François Sagate does not simply play any kind of zombie, he is an alien zombie. On the one hand, he walks down the street in L.A. dressed as a bum to conceal his extraterrestrial identity and merge with the crowd. On the other, he is a schizophrenic who only thinks he is an extraterrestrial zombie. His mission is to seek out dead people and fuck them back to life. The difference with old zombie films is that he does not turn these people into zombies, he only fucks life back into them. He is the new savior, the new Jesus. In the art house version, François’ penis is replaced by an artificial penis that ejaculates black ink instead of semen. In the hardcore version, François fucks the dead people with his real penis. After some time they are not dead anymore and then the long sex scenes with lots of close-ups begin. These scenes were cut out of the art house version.
Is this what you think of the gay scene — people who are not quite alive and who constantly pretend they are something else?
LA Zombie is not so much a commentary on the gay scene as it is a commentary on L.A. and the social situation in the city. When I arrived in L.A. for the shooting of LA Zombie in August 2009, I was shocked to see how many homeless people there were – I had a feeling the number had tripled or quadrupled since the last time I was in town. In the original script François’ character was not a homeless bum, but when I saw what was happening in L.A., I just couldn’t turn my back on this social crisis – I wanted to document it. LA Zombie is also a commentary on the gay porn industry. In the last scene the zombie is looking through a small window at an orgy with some gay porn stars. At some point their dealer comes and murders them all. This scene is the culmination of all the violence and wild primitive sex in the film.
Since 2001 there’s been a new movie genre, torture porn. Are your films part of this trend?
LA Zombie is more of a commentary and critique on the torture porn genre than an example of it. I hate torture porn because the message is usually so flat. The victims are always women, who are tortured, disfigured and murdered in the most brutal way. What worries me is that torture porn is turning into an entertainment for the masses. Such films were underground, C-list films in the past. Only a niche audience would seek them out and watch them. Now, however, the genre is family entertainment. The crowd watching these extremely violent blockbusters has a very hypocritical attitude to film production – they don’t mind seeing women being tortured and murdered, but when they see two people having sex in a porn movie, they think it’s scandalous. Violence is accepted as entertainment, while sex is still taboo.
Are you a vegetarian?
Not now, but I went vegetarian for a good three years when I was 18. There are five kids in my family and three of us are still vegetarian. I grew up on a farm. I saw animal being slaughtered all the time. It seemed normal to me – we produced our own meat, my father was a hunter. We had a small farm and took good care of the animals. We treated them much more humanely than today’s meat industry treats them. You are right to make the link between torture porn and meat production – violence sells just as well as meat. People consume it without thinking what’s behind the industry. But don’t get me wrong, I am not an activist. My husband constantly tells me I’m a poser, that my ideas are not sufficiently radical and left-wing. He’s from Cuba, he grew up with the Revolution and he doesn’t miss a chance to accuse me of being a bourgeois who only pretends to be a radical rebel. Despite that, I do pay attention to social issues in my films.
How has your husband changed you since you’ve been together?
He grew up and lived in Cuba for the entire span of the Revolution. He fled his homeland when he was 30, in the middle of the 90s, right after the Soviet Union cut back its financial support for Cuba. The reason was simply that there was no food. He has seen a lot and he constantly points out to me that there is always another side to life. The stories he tells inspire me to write plays or make me focus on important social issues. He keeps me grounded and prevents me from building an overly idealistic idea of life.
What will be the future of the gay porn industry when the financial crisis is over?
That’s exactly what François Sagate and my producer and friend Jurgen Bruning were talking about yesterday. Years ago, Jurgen founded the porn film company Cazzo and is now the director of Wurstfilm. At the moment, porn companies are struggling with weak sales. The whole focus is on on-line distribution and counteracting the proliferation of pirate copies, which you can now download for free from the internet. The industry is in a serious stage of transition and if it’s to survive, new business models are needed to ensure its profits from on-line distribution. The sad thing for me as a director is that script and plot in the porn industry are basically dead. It’s all about linking together sequences of sex scenes. Before, porn always told stories. Jurgen’s company, which previously always focused on storytelling, now only makes individual sex scenes and sells them on-line. The hetero porn industry, on the other hand, is focusing on sumptuous, large-scale productions which are cover versions of various blockbusters. They just released a porn version of Pirates of the Caribbean, with a million dollar budget – it was filmed on a real pirate ship. Extreme sports are another trend in both gay and hetero porn – for example, a scene in which 50 men come in the mouth of a single man or woman. But again, the focus is shifting away from the artistic side of the genre. I have no intention of giving up on the art tradition in porn.
Would you consider doing vampire porn?
(laughs and then pauses for a moment) No. I know it’s the most popular aesthetic in TV series, movies and even music videos and that’s why I have no wish to enter this territory. Years ago, Buffy the Vampire Slyer was my favorite TV show. I recently got the complete series as a birthday present and I can now catch up on the episodes I missed in the past; I am starting with Episode One tomorrow evening. As a vampire series Buffy was much more non-mainstream and rebellious than the Twilight trilogy, which I consider really conventional. A new, up-and-coming trend is werewolf movies. One of them has already been released and a second one is forthcoming. The public loves to be terrorized and scared, and hence it loves the horror genre – and producers are now recycling every nuance of story that’s been done in the past.
Do you think the world will end in 2012?
No. It’ll be 2028.
What art projects do you want to complete before then?
At the moment I am working with some Canadian producers who are trying to raise funds for a script I wrote last year. The title is Gerontophilia – I’m sure you can guess what it’s about. An 18-year-old boy discovers he is fixated on very old men – really old, wrinkly men. His girlfriend finds out and that’s where the story starts. Two years ago I started directing theater shows in Berlin. My fourth show will open in 2010. Theater gives me a lot more freedom and an intimate connection with the audience, which I can’t have in film. Some friends of mine are trying to help me find funds for the production of Arnold Schoenberg’s avant-guard opera Pierrot Lunaire, which I’ve adapted and want to direct in 2011.