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Having burst onto the scene with Hedwig and the Angry Inch and continuing to shock with Shortbus, writer/director John Cameron Mitchell is back with an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story How to Talk to Girls at Parties. We caught up with him to find out more about the boy-meets-alien film set in the punk rock suburbia of Croydon in the seventies…

STARBURST: What drew you to Neil Gaiman’s short story?

John Cameron Mitchell: It was really my producer who got the rights – he produced my film Shortbus – and he wooed me over a couple of years. At first, I was like ‘I don’t want to do someone else’s story’. But Philippa Goslett, the first writer, really created such a beautiful world and extrapolated the story into a larger story that was becoming more of a Romeo and Juliet story. Bringing the punk element in, which was really Neil’s youth, the comic book artist element, all of that stuff started drawing me in. I grew up partially in the UK in the early ‘70s, my mother’s Scottish, and I was having memories and always wanted to do a story in the UK. My sense of humour springs from my years there and I was just drawn in – I fell in love. About two years into being wooed, I committed – just like a lover.

That’s some courtship!

Yeah – then it took a while to finance it because it’s not necessarily a genre film; it’s not the kind of film that is easily marketed. It’s more like a ‘70s midnight movie and a fairy tale, a YA romance. Things that have formulas today. In the ‘70s, you could make hybrids and it wasn’t a big deal; nowadays we’re a bit more rigid in our categories, and we need to have stars and things like that.

Were you a fan of punk back when you were growing up?

I wasn’t, because it was the glam period when I was there – so I was a fan of Bowie and The Sweet and in the punk years, I was in Kansas and we didn’t really get much punk. It was only in the ‘80s that I discovered the ‘70s punk. Oddly, it was coming out as gay that opened me up to all kinds of music – punk stuff especially. Being queer, certainly in the ‘80s and even now, was an oppositional orientation. It was the time of AIDS, and ACT UP was kind of punk organisation trying to fight AIDS and fight government inaction so it felt kind of punk to be queer at that time. I developed my character of Hedwig in a queer-punk scene – a club called Squeezebox – in New York in the ‘90s so my punk life came later.

Did you have to do a lot of research into the UK scene then?

I did! I worshiped the Buzzcocks and knew a lot about Sex Pistols and such but it was really fun to go through all the histories of the Roxy club and find out about all the characters, the Bromley Contingent, Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and get more details. There are a few lines in the film that came out of that research. At one point, our character Enn tells the story about picking tomatoes over by the sewage plant because tomato seeds don’t digest so they go right through the sewage and lots of tomatoes grow where there’s shit. They pick them to get money for photocopying. I thought that was a great punk thing to do – to sell the fruit of shit to make your ‘zine. So I loved going through all that history to find detail for our admittedly fairy tale punk scene. The punk enclave in Croydon that we create, ruled over by a fictional Queen Boadicea is a less patriarchal one. As she says, Boadicea was the first punk so that has a more matriarchal and queer setting – more of a Peter Shelley/Steve Strange punk than the macho versions of The Clash and such.

There is a heavy female presence in your punk scene, much like there was back in the day…

Yeah, we have a lot of queen mother figures. Ruth Wilson, Nicole [Kidman], Elle [Fanning], even Edward Petherbridge, who plays our Trans-Queen Elizabeth of the aliens, is a kind of matriarchal figure too. So I like our matriarchal punk.

Since the film was made, there has been a real surge of youth rebellion again, which is very much like the ‘70s, is that something you could see coming or just hope for?

Yeah, thank god! I was hoping for it because we shot this before Trump, before Brexit, but we have an accidental Brexit metaphor with the aliens wearing Union Jacks jumping off a building to avoid contamination. It’s taken Trump, Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Putin, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary to see the budding of a new kind of punk. It’s best exemplified by the Parkland teenagers in Florida who are incredibly articulate and are saying ‘no!’ Rather than just smashing the system, it’s about tearing down the NRA and other structures in order to correct the ills. As Enn says ‘to fix what your parents fucked up’. Sometimes that can come out in a political correctness sort of way, punk did disintegrate into a system of rules: ‘that’s not punk, that’s punk’ – it was an anti-conformist music that became kind of conformist, and that’s always a danger when you have a movement. It’s certainly coming from the right place. Punk never really died, it went dormant for some; it’s always rediscovered in a new way and redefined. So I’m really hoping they get more done and demand more change than the millennials did.

You got Nicole Kidman in again [she appeared in Rabbit Hole], did she really throw herself into the part?

She said that she hadn’t played a role like this and she had a good time with me, so let’s do it’. It was a bit of a rush job because she was coming off a West End play, and she was sick on our first day – vomiting everywhere, it was very punk! But I had to send her home. She came back and did two day’s work in one day and really killed it. We were moving so quickly that there’s wasn’t always safety concerns, she got hit with a guitar in the head and spat on by some of the punk actors – by accident! But it kept happening, so she smacked the actor across the face and I kept in the film so it was all good.

There’s been a rise in younger protagonists in TV and film – such as Stranger Things – since you made the movie, do you think this will reach that sort of audience as well?

Oh, I don’t know; that’s for someone else to decide. I can only make it for myself and my friends. If I made Hedwig thinking about the audience, I would have cast a star or something or when making Shortbus, I’d have cut out the sex to broaden the audience, but then it wouldn’t have been the same film. I do want them to be liked by people who are like-minded, which is why I’m very open to comments and input when I’m making the film. I also don’t want to kowtow to the current trends or tastes. I’m making the kind of films that I grew up with in the ‘70s. I’m making a midnight movie teenage love story, a punk fairy tale and if people come, they come. All my other films were not easily marketable because they didn’t fit into perfect genre slots but they were discovered later over time. I’d rather have a film that people want to make a tattoo of, than one that ten million people saw. It’s really more important to me how strongly people felt about it than how many people saw it or paid for it.

I have good feelings about the UK but I’m not sure about the US. I think people might come but then sort of pass it along later when it’s visible on other forms. I really do want it to be for the teenage Goth girl in all of us.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES IN CINEMAS FRIDAY MAY 11TH, 2018

Following the huge success of his first two feature films as director – the searing BEFORE DAWN and the brutal BAIT – EMMERDALE star DOMINIC BRUNT is back this year with his third full-length movie. We spoke to Dominic and his wife, actor/co-producer JOANNE MITCHELL, about their latest project – prepare for the ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES…

STARBURST: Zombies, ruthless debt-collectors… and now Adult Babies! How? Why?

Dominic Brunt: Well, I was hired by a company called Radar Pictures in America to do their next film in Puerto Rico. I got all the visas sorted out and two weeks before, a few problems arose so they said ‘look, we’re going to put this one back a little bit’ – and I’d taken four or five months off work! We already had the idea of Adult Babies and the script was ready to go and a producer we knew really wanted to do it so we thought ‘why don’t we go with that?’ and as I had the time, rather than being a mad rush, it just fell perfectly so we had three and a half to four months to prep it and film it.

Joanne Mitchell: Dominic and I came up with the idea, we went away and worked on the story back and forth and then we gave it to Paul Shrimpton and he did a fantastic job and we were very happy with what he came up with. Because Paul did Inbred – amongst other things – he just suited this type of horror.

DB: I really like Paul’s way of working and I know he can deal with that side of things. It’s more Jo’s story, actually; I did little bits of it but Jo really broke it down scene-by-scene and then we passed it to Paul Shrimpton. He stuck rigidly to the storyline; he changed some of the ending and the dialogue, he put a few jokes in. He brought a fantastic pace to it and a shape that was far better than it had been. He wasn’t just a ‘writer for hire’; putting his dialogue over the top, he very much coloured it in.

So what’s the story behind Adult Babies?

JM: The actual story is about a group of white, middle-aged businessmen who go to this beautiful big mansion in the countryside – almost Masonic, in a sense – which is where they relax and take refuge from the world and their high powered jobs. It’s a very stress-free environment, they’re looked after by nurses and they regress into adult babies. The story kicks off when three intruders disturb their peace and tranquillity because they’re searching for a top secret document that is being held in the mansion and from then on, the chase begins and it tumbles towards this rollercoaster of bizarre and horrifying events, which basically goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the babies are determined to make sure that no-one leaves alive!

DB: I wanted to tell a wider story about the banking system and the people in charge; the corrupt politicians and MPs and people in authority who seemingly have the power to tell us and everybody else what to do whereas they’re actually human beings too and more often or not, they are where the stories are because they’re corrupt. I’m sure there are good people in these positions, but they’re still human beings and it’s just a question of whether they should be there to tell everybody else what to do. It’s all to do with poking fun at that, not being too serious, trying to make a political point but putting it across satirically because nobody wants to listen to a political point anymore, certainly not over an hour and a half in a film. So we get to do it within the genre that we love, telling stories in the way that we know with loads of gore and special effects, which I love! Adult Babies is really about bringing very important men down to that level and poking fun at them that way. The imagery of an adult baby is great; once you’ve got the image across that it’s big fat men running around dressed in nappies chased by sexy nurses in suspenders – that image would carry me through an hour-and-a-half of any movie, to be honest with you!

Memories of The Benny Hill Show comes to mind and they really probably shouldn’t…

DB: It’s really dark. There may be humour in there but it’s as dark as anything. It’s very sombre, not farcical in any way, it’s the opposite of any Benny Hill you’ve ever seen so I’d get well away from any notion of it being anything like Benny Hill! It’s pretty gory and pretty serious. It’s not a Shaun of the Dead-type thing. There’s humour in there but it’s not presented as humour, it’s not like comedy actors acting in a comedy way or anything like that. Everyone plays it absolutely straight. In tone, it’s a bit like The Lobster where everything’s very strange and the funny things are ignored; it’s not played for laughs at all.

How difficult was it to find a cast willing to perform as ‘adult babies’?

JM: It wasn’t the easiest thing to cast as you can probably imagine because not many people want to be an adult baby – not that there’s anything wrong with being an adult baby – but it was difficult to entice actors to walk around in nappies all day! But the cast we got were all fantastic and all really up for it, which is so important in an indie film. We’d used Andy Dunn in Bait; he’s a great team player, which is great because there’s quite a big cast in this one, much more so than Bait and Before Dawn. Then we had Sally Dexter on board and when we saw her name we thought ‘we’ve got to have her’ because I know of her. She does a lot of stage work and I really respect her acting so we managed to get her which was fantastic – she loved the script and she’s outstanding in it. We had to go through the auditioning process for the two youngsters; we saw a lot of young actors and it was really hard because there are some great actors out there but for this sort of scenario, as with every film or production, you’ve got to get the chemistry right between the characters, so Mica Proctor and Kurtis Lowe hit it off together, they looked right so we chose them and it all worked out well.

DB: Casting eight men who would be willing to run around in nappies was the toughest challenge! We got Laurence R. Harvey, who just went ‘yeah, of course, I will!’  He looks great in a nappy! But we auditioned loads of people and then we asked directly for a lot of people we’d worked with before like Andy and Charlie Chuck and as Jo says we wanted to get Sally Dexter in anyway, so it was sort of half-and-half between people we auditioned and people we asked specifically to be part of it.

Would you say that Adult Babies is a step up in the scale of your films as Bait was a step up from Before Dawn?

DB: Definitely. The scale of this one is enormous, just bringing in all the different ways of telling the story with animation and Claymation, and I think that’s exciting. It was great because it was all in one location, so it was just a joy to do. I think we realise what we’re doing now and we’ve learned from our mistakes. There was a lot of pre-production because there’s a large cast in this one. It’s set in a massive manor house so we had to find one that we could all stay at and film in every day. We found one about sixty miles away called Broughton Hall, so we managed to live there and eat there as well so we could just get up in the morning and start filming and stop when we dropped. It was a relief because Bait was twenty-six locations and it was a nightmare dragging these massive lorries and seventy-three crew around.

JM: We’ve learned a lot more from doing Bait, which was itself a massive step up from Before Dawn in terms of scope and scale. But even though this is another step up it seemed a lot easier because we’re all reading from the same page now, we all know what we’re about. Dominic knows his cinematographer, he knows his ADs, his camera operator and all that gives you extra confidence, too. You want it to be a happy ship and I think it was and that’s a credit to Dominic as well. As a director, he’s very friendly, he gets on with everybody but at the same time he commands respect as a director and I think he did incredibly well with only three weeks to shoot it in!

There always seem to be ‘themes’ to your films, something a little bit deeper than the usual stalk-and-slash horror fare. Are you keen to make your films ‘about something’ rather than just random blood-letting and cheap scares?

DB: I was asked to do something where there was a monster after a group of kids staying in a house and I said ‘look, this is about a monster getting some kids in a house, the monster doesn’t represent anything, the kids don’t represent anything.’ I wouldn’t be interested in doing a straight story; even from seeing Romero’s stuff very early on I was thinking ‘Yeah, that’s really multi-layered and clever’ and I’d rather intelligently tell a story and put a point across within the genre where the monsters aren’t just monsters and the people aren’t just people and you’re not just telling these awful tales  and showing off the next piece of neck being cut. It’s got to be cleverer than that.

JM: It’s the same sort of approach as with Bait and Before Dawn in that we wanted it to be more than just a horror film, we wanted to tell a sort of political story without being wanky about it! I do think this does have that. Running alongside all the ridiculousness of what’s going on, we have a social commentary in the film.

But still with plenty of blood being spilt! How gory is Attack of the Adult Babies – on a scale of one to ten?

DB: I’d say an easy nine; yeah, it’s bonkers. The story’s really twisted, very unusual with some very odd imagery and the tone is very unsettling at times in what people are saying and doing but it’s not spiteful in any way. I’ve never liked films like Saw or Hostel, which look like they’ve come from some perverted 15-year-old’s mind – let’s torture people and kill women! – it’s not like that at all.

JM: I think I’ve said before that Dominic is the king of blood and gore, much more than I am, so he and Paul had lots of fun thinking up those sorts of scenarios and how far they could take them. I think it’ll really appeal to fans of the genre who like that kind of thing. It’s not nasty, though, it’s not torture porn; it’s very tongue-in-cheek.

We’ve still got a while to wait for the movie so how would you sum it up at this point?

DB: It’s about people getting out of their depth and it’s about tradition. It’s about greed and hypocrisy and I would say it’s very British in its outlook and maybe playing on what the world sees as British with its many traditions and the way that white, fat, middle-class or upper-class men rule from afar and these cabals that are running things. Although there are a lot of themes, I think it has its own identity and it does make sense with a very satisfying arc from beginning, middle to end. Without trying to be highbrow at all, we just had fun with it!

ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES is released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 11th.

Since his debut movie GATTACA (1997) warned over the use of advanced eugenics, writer and director Andrew Niccol has continued to question the human and moral implications of advancements in technology with movies including THE TRUMAN SHOW (1999 – as writer), SIMONE (1992) and IN TIME (2011). His latest is ANON, a remarkably timely SF noir thriller about a society where everyone’s point of view experience is recorded and anonymity is a dirty word. Clive Owen – a detective on the verge of a nervous breakdown if ever we’ve seen one – stars as Sal Friedland, on the trail of a mysterious stranger played by Amanda Seyfried who  has found a way to opt out of this tyrannical system and use the power of her anonymity in a unique and profitable way…

STARBURST: Like most of your writing, this feels like a very short jump into the future.

Andrew Niccol: That’s what I call a parallel presence. You’re going to go out on the street right now and you’re going to see people looking down at devices. You’re going to go to a concert and you’ll seeing nothing but people videoing the concert. They’re never going to look back at those videos, by the way, but it doesn’t matter, they still have to have evidence. We are life-logging.

In line with your previous work, there’s a very explicit warning message in this movie, but you’re also looking to tell an entertaining story. How do you walk that line?

I think you can see this film on a number of levels. On one level, it’s a serial killer film, if that’s what you want. There’s also sex, drugs, and violence! But if you go for ideas, that’s always my aim. Just in researching it, this word ‘de-anonymising’ [data mining in which anonymous data is cross-referenced with other sources of data to re-identify the anonymous data source] is such a horrendous concept.

A key part of ANON’s futurism is the POV text and graphics we see from Clive Owen’s bio-implanted viewpoint. How did it evolve?

It was a nightmare for me because I had to write all of it myself, but for once in my life, I won’t mind if someone freezes the film because a lot of work went into writing it! All of it is legible and all of it makes its own sense in terms of biography. So, for example, the prostitute’s biography is very interesting because she gives a ‘military discount’, amongst other things. So when you just look at her for a second you can freeze the frame and find out. There are lots of nuggets in there.

Another cool aspect is the futuristic cars. We do love futuristic cars!

I love cars, too. It all goes back to Gattaca because on that I never had enough money, you know, I didn’t have the budget to build my ideal car of the future. So here, I thought, well, I’ll take the best of the past and drag it screaming and kicking into the future and just update it. My favourite vehicle in this is a Facel Vega, which now has a hydrogen cell in it and other updates. Again, that’s all POV information seen that you can freeze-frame.

  

The movie has a very specific, stylised visual look to it.

I went with two different aspect ratios. Interestingly enough, nobody really seems to have minded. I thought that might be jarring to some people, but it’s not. So, when it’s a subjective point of view it’s more square, its 16:9, full of clutter and shot with spherical lenses. And then in that same scene, when I look at it from an objective point of view, it’s 2:40:1, which is much more cinematic, the camera doesn’t move as much and there’s no clutter. I had to do some very weird things to make it work. He’s walking down the street, there’s a parking lot there with a physical sign, so I have to remove it. I removed all signage from the film, physically and digitally, because I knew that from a story point of view, it’s absolutely superfluous. Why would you have street signs when people get street signs automatically popping up in their mind’s eye?

 

How is your relationship with technology these days?

My relationship with technology is as it’s always been – dysfunctional. But I do think there’s hope. You just need to find the right countermeasures.

ANON has a limited theatrical release and can be seen exclusively on Sky Cinema from May 11th and Netflix in the US. You can read out review here.