Inspired by a real-life crime spree in which a man terrorised Toronto by dumping buckets of excrement over unsuspecting folk, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is the feature debut of director Braden Sitter Sr, who told us all about it…
STARBURST: What’s your background, and how did you get into filmmaking?
Braden Sitter Sr: Like lots of people in my age range, I got into film through making movies at school and getting hooked on it. iMovie, you know, pretty standard stuff. Then I went to Ottawa to study scriptwriting – a year-long program.
After that, I was just working whatever jobs. I’ve probably had 50 or 60 jobs in the last 10 years, just trying to keep the work hours low so I could have more time to do my own thing. I did a lot of medical studies too – they pay you a couple thousand dollars to spend the weekend in a facility, take whatever drug they’re testing, be a human guinea pig.
I did work on a lot of film sets as a location guy or production assistant, but it’s kind of a drag. They say the most simple, straightforward path to get to make movies is to work at the lowest level, and then slowly, over 20 years, claw your way up. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that. So the second path was: just make something. And so I made short films, web series, freelance corporate stuff.
Tell us about the real-life story behind The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man and how you came to adapt it.
This happened in Toronto in November 2019. It was a weird story. This guy went on a bit of a crime spree, dumping buckets of piss and shit on students. I think he got six students over the course of three days before they caught him. I didn’t really think about it as a movie at the time.
But three years later, I’d just rewatched the Alan Clarke film Elephant. I really liked the structure of repetition – the same thing iterated, but each one kind of different – and wanted to do something like that, but I wasn’t sure what the repeated action was going to be. My girlfriend had just moved to Toronto, and she didn’t know about the Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, and then it came up in conversation and got into my head.
In terms of the relationship the movie has with the true life story, it’s more inspired by it than based on it. The only things that they really have in common are the hard hat, Toronto, dumping buckets of piss and shit on people. Everything else is totally made up.
You mentioned Elephant; were there any other filmmakers who particularly inspired you when making this?
The filmmaker who actually influenced it the most in terms of the spirit of making it was Robert Rodriguez. I’d read his book Rebel Without a Crew when I was a teenager, and it always stayed with me, the attitude of doing it yourself and doing it cheap, and you can control everything. You don’t have to justify yourself to anybody.
we love that indie spirit! Let’s talk about the poop-dumping scenes… With members of the public around, what kind of reactions did you get?
We were never doing a dump and thinking, let’s wait for somebody to walk by and see how they react. It wasn’t that calculated. But we would show up and when we were ready and there were no cops around, we would do it. And people would happen to walk by, and I realised, oh, this is a lot more exciting when you see somebody react to it in the background.
One of the funniest ones is when the guy busking gets dumped on. There’s a guy going into the drug store behind who’s really horrified. And I felt so bad. We had four people standing within 10 feet of that with cameras and sound gear, and I thought, for sure he knows that it’s a movie. But it’s like a magic trick, sleight of hand – they just look at the most exciting thing.
What was the poo made of?
It was chocolate ice cream. You can get a big tub of four litres of it for five dollars. For a couple of years, I always had some on my counter, waiting for it to melt enough to put it in a bucket. And sometimes I would put a can of corn in it for texture. We had one guy who was vegan, so we used coconut milk for that with cocoa powder.
As well as seeing these guys getting dumped on, we spend a lot of time with the characters before and after, observing their lives in a very natural manner. What was the thinking behind that?
Yeah, this was part of the improvised approach I wanted to take. Originally, I thought it could be this three and a half hour epic, with all these storylines of these characters. We shot so much more than what is in the movie, like the love triangle with the couple and their breaking up. There’s an hour of just their story – it’s very mumblecore, lots of hanging out and not much happening. And then I realised, what am I doing? Making a movie three and a half hours long would have been a mistake.
Probably, yes! What kind of budget were you working with, and how did you raise it?
The first year, the budget was about a thousand dollars, and most of that was spent on ice cream. But after that, I was starting to believe in the movie more and I was ready to spend a bit more money.
So then the second year of shooting, we spent a lot more, and at the end of the day, it was about eight thousand dollars. And that was for everything, including the sound mix, the music, the dinosaur animation – I paid a thousand bucks for that one animated scene. It was all paid for with medical studies. I did a one-month medical study and they paid me thirteen thousand dollars for it!
THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN is available to stream via www.peepeepoopooman.com. A longer version of this interview, in which Braden tells us about the film’s poo-themed parody songs and how he’s self-distributing the movie, will be printed in STARBURST 492, available from starburstmagazine.store from November 29th.
