These days, I think the only people I�m really excited to meet are musicians from various bands I like. For instance, I met Elliot Smith one night at three in the morning at Ralph�s supermarket. He�d just had a fight with his girlfriend, whom I already knew, and for some reason he went out to buy ice-cream and we just started talking about doing heroin right there in the check-out line at Ralph�s supermarket! And only two nights ago I was in the same room with Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. Now that was a thrill! I mean actors don�t really change things very much, but Ian Mackaye has played a huge role in completely redesigning the underground music landscape. He wasn�t disappointing, either, and looked exactly the same as he has for the last fifteen years. But I suppose I�m wandering away from the subject here.
8. Of all the projects you have been involved with, do you have a favorite?
Well, I�ve been working on a novel for the last four and a half years, which is very nearly finished. That�s really my baby. I was drawn to writing a novel in part by my love of literature but, also, because I�ve been so badly served by the movies I�ve done and, call it vanity, but I have a great need to establish that I�m a talented person, which I know I haven�t. I�ve been torn apart by critics ever since I first started and I can�t help it, it really hurts when someone calls my work �dire� or �pathetic� or they throw in a reference to Emmanuelle or Friday the 13th as a way of saying I deserve no respect at all. In fact, I wrote one critic a letter telling him I was going to track him down and break every bone in his body and if I couldn�t do it myself, I was going to hire someone to do it for me! I�ve since calmed down, but I think it�s just revolting the way people get up and think they can insult people and just walk away like it was nothing. No, I�m a human being, okay?, and if you did that at a party you�d better believe there�d be some consequences! But because they�re hiding behind their newspapers or web pages or what-have-you, there�s a sense of immunity, and there�s also a presumption that we�re all going to be �civilized� about it. Well, I�m not always so civilized!
Anyway, if I had to name a project, I�d say it�s this thing I did as an actor in Serbia called Rat Uzivo, which means War Live. I was torn apart by critics for that one too. I can�t really claim it�s a great film, but then I�ve never made a great film. That was the second movie I did in Serbia. I had really bad panic attacks on the first one and came back a complete basket case and when the chance came to make War Live I decided to go back and see if I couldn�t lick these panic attacks once and for all. It was sort of like returning to the scene of the crime. Well, it worked! I loved Belgrade so much that time I actually moved back for another six months. It�s a real rock & roll society over there � sex, drugs and nihilism! Every other I�d wake up to a brand new assassination or go to a party where people shot guns at the sky or I�d walk around at night and see the most beautiful people in the world promenading past me. It�s really astonishing that Serbia doesn�t have a bigger reputation for beauty. They�ve got a mix of Slavic and Turkish blood that make a lot of the young look like Latin film stars! So, yes, I�d name War Live just because I had such a great time making it.
9. In both your acting and writing career you've worked in many horror
films. What is it about the horror genre that appeals to you?
Actually, I�m not really much of a horror fan. I work a lot in low-budget, and low-budget often means horror just because horror movies stand a reasonably good chance of turning a profit and, that way, a company can begin to establish itself. Some companies stick with what they know and just keep making horror movies. But they�re generally a stepping stone and that�s what they were supposed to be for me. They haven�t been, but � a minor victory � I�ve at least been able to continue working.
I was a big horror fan up to the age of, say, fourteen, and I�d say that�s your primary horror audience: young, sexually frustrated males. I imagine that�s going to antagonize some of your readers, but that�s the conclusion I�ve drawn. I think horror has a lot to do with sexual apprehension. The hairy transformations of movie monsters, these sudden animal urges, liquids spurting out of the body � it�s very much about adolescence and the fear of sexual maturity. I remember being a little kid and thinking, �Man, that�s just disgusting! Hair in your armpits?! Hair around your penis?! I don�t want that to ever happen to me!� Actually, throughout our lives our bodies keep changing, and I think we all have misgivings about that, and I think that�s part of what horror movies express. And a lot of the victims are young, beautiful females, and the overwhelming majority of movie monsters are these lonely, disfigured males who�re longing for some kind of denied sexual contact and so they�ve substituted murder for sex. They�re basically revenge killings, and I think they�re acting as proxies for young male audiences who likewise have a lot of rage about sex. The girls on-screen are the kind who�d never date the guys in the audience in a million years, so it�s kind of like, �Yeah, bitch, you got yours!� And I just don�t have that rage, personally. I have other kinds of rage, but not that one. I�m much more interested in sexual success than sexual anxiety, so these movies just don�t speak to me.
Of course, that�s just one reading. I think we all have buried sadism and a natural interest in cruelty and bloodshed � how can I not think that after reading Nietzsche?! So I think horror movies, much like nightmares, may act as a safe means of releasing those things. Of course, if somebody�s sick, they�re going to have the opposite effect, but I don�t think horror movies are ever the cause of that sickness, they�re a symptom. Those people would be sick no matter what. And if there�s more of them, well, I don�t think there�s any question that American society�s getting more and more alienated. People increasingly have nothing to do with each other, they work ten and fifteen hour days and run right home and shut the door and fixate on one kind of screen or the other and the next day wake up and do it all over again. I don�t think it�s any accident that horror movies have gotten progressively more sadistic over the last few decades. I think we all have a lot more buried rage � in fact, more buried everything!