HELLO MARS ROBERGE, WELCOME TO BLACKBIRDNEWS! WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO CREATE THE FILM “RUFUS” AND DELVE INTO THE HORROR ANTHOLOGY GENRE?
I have always been a fan of the bizarre, going back to my love for The Twilight Zone where all the stories seemed unique, filled with originality. The stories bordered between horror, fantasy and suspense and I felt like there aren’t enough films that fall into this category today. However, what really made me want to dive into the horror genre was after my visit to Sweden when my feature film “Scumbag” played at Lund International Fantastic Film Festival back in 2017. It was my first stop at a horror film festival (after touring film festivals since 2013 with my doc “The Little House That Could”) and I saw how die hard their movie audiences were: we all watched shark movies one night in a very deep, unattended olympic pool in the dark and I thought, “wow, these must be my people.” It was then I told myself I have to make an actual horror film (not just a dark comedy) and see how I fare with this audience when I give it my all in horror. I knew at Lund that this wasn’t going to be my last time stepping into horror but I wanted to have the right film to do.
As for how I came up with “Rufus”, it was strictly from nightmares. I found that if I am cold at night, I have nightmares. So I specifically made myself freeze at night (sometimes catching a cold) so that I would wake up with more awful nightmares, most of them not making much sense until I continued the nightmares on a nightly basis. Eventually, those nightmares became 4 of the 5 stories in Rufus. The 5th story was adapted from the play “Climbing Vegetables” by Israeli playwright Erez Majerantz who is based in Berlin and was referred to me from Doron Braunshtein, the playwright who wrote the play “Stars” which I adapted into my last film. BTW, “Rufus” is not just the name of my narrator (played by Freeway Rick Ross) but it stands for “Really Unusual Fucked Up Shit” and is basically Mars’ version of the Twilight Zone.
CAN YOU SHARE MORE ABOUT THE CASTING PROCESS FOR “RUFUS” AND WHAT IT WAS LIKE WORKING WITH SUCH A DIVERSE AND TALENTED CAST?
As someone who has cast all my films by myself, I have accumulated a cast of over 500 people who I work with. I always like to work with my friends and of course go for the people who are easiest to work with. Having worked at Patricia Field in NYC for so long, it was the center hub for creative types and I can safely say that most of my friends are creative where I don’t have to second guess what they are going to do. Rufus is the first film though that I didn’t require to use any sort of casting sites or cold auditions. I’ve reached a point in my career that when I write I know exactly who the role is for. I also, of course, have a love for music (from djing for 30+ years and playing in bands) that I like to cast a lot of famous musicians who are willing to give their all for acting. It becomes fun for both of us and I’m lucky to know many famous musicians at this point in my life. I do get pretty demanding with my actors where we rehearse a lot. For the “Climbing Vegetables” story of the movie, I rehearsed with the cast for a few months so that they would be able to perform 55 pages in one take just like they would if they were on stage. So my cast were basically ready to perform the movie as a play at the drop of a hat.
HOW DID THE COLLABORATION WITH EX-DRUG KINGPIN FREEWAY RICK ROSS COME ABOUT FOR HIS FIRST ACTING ROLE IN THE FILM?
If I told you, I’d have to kill you.
WHAT CHALLENGES DID YOU FACE WHILE FILMING “RUFUS” AND HOW DID YOU OVERCOME THEM?
After filming the first day of Rufus, I lost my day job and then spent a year without a job while trying to make a movie. It was a very strange time for me where I put filmmaking above being homeless and was more determined to finish this movie than I was landing a job. Usually, making an indie film is not your go to thing when you lose your income but it was for me because I had this determination that the movie would happen somehow no matter what. I guess that’s why I lead the Hellawood movement. So I pulled a few investors together and got the film done bit by bit. The other big challenges for me was working with production designer Artie Hach (Sex and the City) and a VFX department (Jeff Riley, Debra Haden, Josh Kirschenbaum) and giving them enough insight as to what I want so they could run for months and create genius works of art. I really couldn’t have done the movie without such a talented crew and cast because they all brought something unique to the table which enhanced the overall product. Lastly, and it still makes me angry to think about it, I had a post sound production place in Brooklyn (who’ will remain unnamed) that handed me back my film 2 weeks after starting on it because they said it went against their morals.
They actually said something to me like “in the hundreds of movies we’ve worked on, we’ve never rejected a film because of our moral principles but we have to reject your film.” I honestly, cannot believe how woke some people can be but I was like, in my head, what were you expecting from a movie called Really Unusual Fucked Up Shit? Disney? It actually made a much cooler post sound house jump at working with me and they said this movie is their favorite film they have seen in the past 12 years. I guess sometimes people say I make “punk films” and I take that as a compliment because I was never trying to satisfy anyone in the first place. In fact, the poster for my feature film “Scumbag” (2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam) had a warning label on which read: May offend the mundane. You either get me or you don’t but my audience has found me over the past decade.
CAN YOU ELABORATE ON THE CONCEPT OF “ROCKTOPIA” AND HOW IT INFLUENCES THE THEMES AND NARRATIVE OF YOUR FILMS?
“Rocktopia” was a genre I created with my feature “Scumbag” which is defined as “the struggles of a protagonist against the ideals of a Utopian society where the only form of escape is to rock out.” Basically, I got tired of people asking me dumb questions like “how can you have singing in your films and it not be a musical?” My answers was usually “I have singing in my films because I want singing in my films.” I grew up as an editor during the music video revolution and music has always played a pivotal role in my filmmaking: I usually start my scripts from a vision I see from hearing a song. For “Rufus” I was listening to my wife, Debra Haden’s music project Skunk in the Roses over and over again where this one song called “Catch me If You Can” stuck in my head. I knew I would use that song eventually but for horror, I knew it couldn’t be a pop song so I asked my last composer, Michael Cashmore (of Current 93) who scored “Stars” to reinterpret the song in a much darker way.
He did what I asked and created magick with it where I knew this movie will be what I want since it had this song. With “Mister Sister”, I felt that way with the cover of old friend, the late Brett Smiley’s “Space Ace”, with “Stars” it was the song “Streets” by Coby Koehl, etc. Music is always an integral part to my films and always will be. When I get a feeling so strong, it has to be done and I’m not going to wait for the mainstream to define what I am doing. I always hated conventions and rules. Hollywood has tons of schools where you can act like this, do comedy like that, film like this, etc. and they don’t understand going outside of that box so all you get are copycats everywhere who are afraid of taking risks. I look for film inspiration from Europe, directors like Gaspar Noé; I could care less about Hollywood. That’s why it’s crumbling because of that very lack of originality or dare to take risks.
HOW DOES YOUR BACKGROUND AS A DJ AND RUNNING A VINYL RECORD LABEL INFLUENCE YOUR WORK AS A FILMMAKER?
I’m from the old school of beat matching with my head (not computers) so I always oversee the music in my films and keep a tempo as if I’m djing in a club where I take the audience on a journey. Djing also helps my editing (I edit all my films) because I cut between my multicam edits like a quick cutter or beat juggler would. It just becomes natural and I actually don’t have to do too many revisions because I became one with the footage. I definitely credit that skill to my years of being a dj where I would practice my sets at home for a week before my gigs.
WHAT DO YOU HOPE AUDIENCES TAKE AWAY FROM “RUFUS” AND YOUR UNIQUE APPROACH TO STORYTELLING IN THE HORROR GENRE?
I put my filmmaking life on the line with this one and gave it my all: every blood sweat and tear. It would be great if people like it, if it inspires them, makes them laugh or cry and takes you out of your head for 90s mins to go somewhere you never thought you’d go before. I want the people talking about this: good or bad but talking. I’m always down to do sequels for this (or a tv show) because I have endless odd ideas. You want weird? I know weird! I’m also hoping to put art back into horror as I do take the art of filmmaking very serious. I definitely don’t make B Movies and I feel like horror is inundated with B movie mentalities where they keep using cliches, one-dimensional scripts, bad acting, bad cinematography and assume the audience are morons. I miss the days of Hitchcock or films like Rosemary’s Baby and hope to push other horror filmmakers to step up their game with original stories, better cinematography, better acting and scripts that actually have in-depth characters that you can feel for.
CAN YOU DISCUSS THE HELLAWOOD MOVEMENT AND HOW IT AIMS TO BREAK TRADITIONAL CONVENTIONS IN FILMMAKING?
You want to see me do something? Tell me I can’t. That’s how it started when people told me you can’t have over 200 characters in a movie–so I did it with Scumbag (223 characters). Back in the 90s, during York University Film School (Toronto), I was inspired by filmmakers like Harmony Korine who would utilize experimental filmmaking within the context of their traditional drama story telling. That style of Dogme 95 combined with the French New Wave filmmakers that often wrote sub stories that had nothing to do with the plot, play an integral role in my development for the Hellawood movement (which was coined from Bruno Wizard of UK punk legends The Homosexuals when introducing me to the U.K. audiences). I write from the gut and see where it takes me but I don’t feel the need to follow a path because life itself is interesting if you can take a moment to look at it.
Life doesn’t have to be constantly moving to be interesting. As a filmmaker, I feel more inspired by art installations by people like Matthew Barney or David LaChappelle or Paul McCarthy or the music concerts of the Residents, Tuxedo Moon, etc. than I do from mainstream movies because people need to take chances. Art is a risk not a path. I wouldn’t have chosen a play to adapt into a film where my main actors are lying in a coma if I didn’t want to push myself as a filmmaker to take risks. At one point, I had a bunch of my actors give me improvised lines and then I edited a story around it for Rufus. Most watching won’t have any idea where I did it either. I don’t think I could stay in the filmmaking game if I wasn’t constantly pushing myself to do something out of the box.
WHAT FUTURE PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON AND HOW DO YOU PLAN TO CONTINUE PUSHING BOUNDARIES IN THE FILM INDUSTRY?
I have a lot of screenplays that I wrote that I want to turn into a movie but one that I’m really passionate about is a biopic involving the Italian Mafia where someone who is on the run trusted me with their life story. I just feel I can’t do it justice unless I have a much bigger Hollywood-ish budget for that one. My main character rubs shoulders with a lot of legendary celebs from back in the day so it’s a very good history piece as well.
HOW DO YOU BALANCE YOUR VARIOUS CREATIVE ENDEAVORS, FROM FILMMAKING TO DJING AND RUNNING A RECORD LABEL?
Honestly, it’s very difficult. In the past it was easy for me to be a dj and musician at the same time but filmmaking takes up ALL of my life. There is no way around it taking up an entire 2 to 4 years of my life when I get started on a project so the djing and record label really only take up 5% of my life (or we’d have a lot more releases, tour support, dj gigs, etc.). I wish I had a clone to do this but maybe one day we’ll branch out more. Between Debra and myself, we have about 40 music releases we just can’t get to right now. As for djing these days, Die J! Mars comes out to spin at my movie premieres or the occasional NYC/Toronto dj reunion gig.
I don’t even have the time to run a Twitch show from home any more. Because when I make a film, I am the writer, director, producer, location manager, casting agent, first assistant director, craft service, editor, music supervisor, fight choreographer, stunt choreographer, production manager and line producer… Ok, I admit, I’m a control freak but that’s how I’ve been able to make 5 feature films in 10 years. It’s a love-hate situation for me too but I’m slowly letting go of the reins and letting people into my creative circle. I can’t see how I could do all those things while djing full time. Even when I was jobless for the past 10 months, I didn’t have the urge to go dj full time in Los Angeles because I know I’m going to need ALL my time for my filmmaking in the future. It’s all or nothing with me and that’s what my tattoo reads on my arm.
