Bruce La Bruce

Well, it’s a crazy world! When I started making films it was the pre-digital era, so I had a real interesting ride as I kind of started out having to be very inventive to reach people, to create things and get them seen internationally before the Internet started, showing my early experimental films in punk clubs and underground bars. It wasn’t a globalized world, but it was more fun! This massive explosion of everyone having a camera didn’t exist, neither everyone filming everything all the time, expressing themselves in that way. It was a smaller group of people making art, making films and now it’s just so over determined that anyone can just play, which is good because it has democratized film and photography but on the other hand, people can get lost…It seems that there are more festivals, filmmakers and productions than ever. The challenge is to get out there and get noticed, which I’ve never had a problem with. There is so much being made that if you don’t have a distinctive voice it is hard to stand out. It’s so much more about promotion, but for me that’s always been part of my process which has been creating a persona. I consider promoting the work, going to festivals, presenting my ideas, my philosophy and my image as part of the creative process.

It was great! My life so far has passed over kind of interesting transformations of the world and my personal life itself. Growing up in an isolated farm was very bucolic and idyllic in a way, close to nature, with lots of farmland and wide-open space. But when I started to became a teenager I was very frustrated because I was gay and it was difficult to express myself. I had to repress myself for a long time so I became very frustrated and I couldn’t wait to get to the city and when I got there it took me a while to figure out my sexuality. Once I did, it kind of came out as an explosion.

It was just a drive I always had. I don’t know where that really comes from… I had an older sister who was brilliant and super intelligent and a great poet. She was very transformative. She sophisticated me at a young age. Even growing up in this rural environment, cinema was part of it. My parents were uneducated farmers who loved Hollywood movies and they would take us to the cinema. We only got two TV channels but I would watch the movies and the late shows all the time, so that was my window to the world, that was my fantasy, my escapism.

Now it’s 24 hours a day, it’s in a thousand channels, in some ways I think it’s almost taken over from reality.

Well, that’s a good question. I think a lot of people have lost that boundary because, as I was saying, I learned how to create a fiction of myself, as a persona, as a character or as an invented name, as an idea, and that allowed me to keep my personal life, my private life more separate and based on more kind of simple grounded things. So I don’t think a lot of people have that any more. They live in some consistent fiction of themselves and the world that doesn’t really have any grounding.

I think so. I would like to think so.

It’s like a mysterious process. I don’t know exactly where it comes from. Partly it is an unconscious process and then when you are shooting a film it’s pure adrenaline, pure fear, pure emotion. It’s torturous, the writing is torturous, and the worst part is the financing, it’s always the most stressful and frustrating for me. The writing can be fun but can also be grilling when you find yourself kind of blocked or frustrated sometimes which is terrible. I enjoy shooting even though for me it’s also super difficult. I never imagined that I could be a filmmaker because I thought it was complicated. I am a bit of a technophobe and the whole process is so complex, expensive and technical that I wasn’t sure I could ever do it. So the shooting for me is also very challenging but I do enjoy it. And then editing is usually more fun but it can be torturous too… (laughs).

For me it’s part of creativity. It can be very fun, it can be very light sometimes, but sometimes it can be very heavy and very dark.

For me it wasn’t the first time that I tried to write a script that was more mainstream. It just happened to be the right script that attracted financing and I was able to make it. It had to do with a chosen story that was true to my other work and unique, but also that a lot of people could relate to it and that would be a kind of a metaphor for anybody who’s ever had a forbidden love or who’s had a transgress love that has been disapproved by society or family. It helps if it’s a kind of universal story that people can relate to.

No, because that was the idea from the beginning: to make a more mainstream movie. It wasn’t that I had a more extreme vision and then had to continually turn it down. My vision was to make a more mainstream movie on an extreme topic.

For some people is. I purposely made the age gap as wide as assumedly possible: an 18-year-old and an 81-year-old.

Yeah, but it is not easy to make it work. I had to rely not only on the writing but on the casting, because it was really important to have actors with believable chemistry. It was also very important to believe that I could create a relationship like this and make it seem not only a believable story, but romantic and emotional.

There is jealousy; I think the movie is a kind of a reversed Lolita with the old man playing the Lolita role. Like her, he is kind of aware about his desirability. Lake kind of mystifies him. He can figure out why this young man is interested in him sexually and romantically, but in some ways it amazes him, and amuses him and in some ways he plays it up, he kind of plays “the coquette”. I didn’t want to push that too far. It’s a kind of a joke in the movie that other guys would be more interested in the old man than in the beautiful young boy. It’s an inversion of all kinds of expectations and conventions, which is what Desirée articulates for Lake. He says: “You are going against nature; you are going against everything that society says about what makes someone desirable or sexually attractive, you are going against it. You are a revolutionary.”

Lake is an exceptional boy. He is very angelic and kind of pure as you say, but I don’t know how common that is. His “gerontophilia” probably comes out of empathy for the elderly and he witnesses first hand in the institution how they are treated and how they are regarded as disposable.

It’s something that is getting worse and worse because people are living longer, there is less money to take care of them, in a lot of societies it’s almost becomig an epidemic. They are over medicated, they are forgotten by their families and for a gay man in an institution like this, he is not even able to properly express his homosexuality. So when Lake brings him back to life — which is a theme in my other movies like L.A. Zombie or Otto, he is allowing him to come back fully to the person he once was, his sexuality, his desires, his self respect, his image, his sense of style... everything comes back!

Well, you have to run into a “gerontophile” I suppose… (laughs).

Film is the most collaborative form of art. For instance, Pierrot Lunaire, my other new film I presented here in Sitges Film Festival, was something that was brought to me by Susanne Sachsse, an actor I have worked with many times on film and doing theatre in Berlin. She brought this project to me with a conductor, Premil Petrovic, a friend of hers from Belgrade, and they suggested I should direct a version of Schönberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” with her in the lead and him conducting, so that was a completely different process for me. It was a project in which I directed someone else’s material for the first time, and it was great. It was a completely different process but it was really challenging. We did it on stage first and then I adapted it into an experimental film.

With Gerontophilia I was little apprehensive, because it is my first non-sexually explicit film and I felt there might be some sort of backlash but there hasn’t been very much of that at all. People are totally charmed about the film in general. Wherever I show it around the world I get the same response — it’s very warm, which is also an experiment for me because I am usually more provocative and I am even used to have hostile reactions to my work. So it’s kind of a nice change. It’s my charm offense. (laughs).

That show came out at a sensitive moment in the Spanish political climate — when the severe economic constrains were starting to have their effect— which always creates a kind of conservative backlash in cultural terms. I was using very well known Spanish personalities, which always brings attention to the show. Even though the show wasn’t that extreme, it was kind of a turn down for me.

No, it wasn’t about that. It was what I chose to do. For me, the show wasn’t about shocking in an obvious way — it wasn’t even sacrilegious, it wasn’t intended to be so. I use the 'holy' as a very complex symbol. It could be a symbol of censorship, on the way religion censures sexuality, or it could be turned into these blind prophets who transcend these kinds of cultural restrictions and morality. For me the show was about the intersection of religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy. I really don’t see why there should be any sort of contradiction there. I think the sexual can be spiritual and there is no reason why the spiritual cannot be sexual as well.

It’s complicated because sometimes there are advances, sometimes there are set backs in different cultures. I presented L.A. Zombie in Moscow in 2010 and did a master class showing a lot of my gay pornographic work, and in that environment at that time I didn’t feel that I was threatened. It felt like transgressive but not dangerous in a way. But then within a year and a half they passed this ridiculous law and I don’t think I could get away with that today. With the gay liberation movement it’s a bit more complicated because every country advances as its own pace so it’s never kind of a monolithic movement. But the advances that have been made in America and Europe sometimes have been at the expense of certain extremes of expression or a kind of a tendency to discourage the more extreme elements, the more fringe elements that are kind of swept under the carpet sometimes. I find that kind of disappointing because these are the people that led the liberation movement in the beginning and it was also a very anti-capitalist movement — and now its really capitulated to the capitalism and the conservative institutions and I think that is a bad strategy in the long run because your tolerance is based on conformity. It’s based on how well you conform to the dominant ideology, how well behaved you are, how domesticated you are and then you get your rights, which for me is never a quid pro quo. It’s like you sacrifice something integral to your identity, to your spirit.

No, for me it's really kind of the same process, because I am still making independent films. I regard my self more as an artist who works in film and just in terms of my lifestyle. It hasn’t changed so drastically to the point it feels like a betrayal, or me becoming a bourgeois…

No, I don’t think that way. For me punk had its moment because it’s more of a youth movement and it was also amazingly strong in the eighties because it was about reacting against the kind of emergent reactionary forces at the time and conservatism. It was very stylish and very extreme but then it became co-opted — it hadn’t the same impact and I wasn’t interested so much in it any more — but I keep that kind of punk ethos in my work for sure. I love what they say about Pierrot Lunaire in the Sitges catalogue, that it presents this very traditional piece of music with a furious queer core sensibility that I haven’t lost at all.

For me art, cinema, is a way of interpreting life, of making sense of it. For me it’s largely a drive related to cinema. If I don’t have the prospect of making a movie, there is like a void.

To produce, just to create, it doesn’t really matter what the form is or what the budget is.

Maybe in my youth I was a little more idealistic about exactly how much you can expect to change things. A lot of my films have turned out to be about revolutionaries who’ve become necessarily kind of disappointed, or who find themselves ensnared in a lot of contradictions because in some ways being a revolutionary is always due to failure of a certain kind. I think because you see the changes that you’ve made come at a cost or in the worst scenario the oppressed become the oppressors — so I always think about Jean Genet who said that he just supports the idea of revolution in general and when he finds an interesting revolutionary moment he goes to it and supports it, but at the moment that it shows any sign of being co-opted or institutionalised, he not only abandons it but turns against it. So I have more a kind of anarchist principle in that regard, at least philosophically. I embrace the contradictions and the paradoxes of revolution.

No entirely so because specially in the gay movement there is this moral backlash against extreme sexual expression so in some ways the porn stars remain the ultimately sexual idols. When I went through the decades of gay liberation, a lot of gay men lived their ordinary lives as if they were porn stars on a certain level.

It’s just the idea of challenging sex in a very unapologetic way. There are still a lot of people who judge people who make porn or appear in porn even though they watch porn themselves; they just think it gets magically made somehow, but the people who make it they look down their nose at it thinking that they are morally inferior — that is something that I’ve always tried to avoid. I have solidarity for pornographers and I call myself a pornographer. It’s always important to have these people who are unapologetic especially about homosexuality.

Yes, but as long as you are conscious of it you can at least comment on it or critique it or try to avoid it…

I live in Canada, my dear! (laughs).
Canada is still a little more civilised than America. The thing about Canada and America or CanAmerica is that I like it because it is very contemporary, it’s seems a little lighter somehow. For me Europe can be very weighted down by History. I always compare Canada and America like teenagers and Europe is like a Middle Age whore. (laughs). So I enjoy the company of both!

Even if you make a genre movie, if it is interesting, you are still injecting your own style, your own personality and philosophy. That’s what makes it interesting. If you just follow the conventions that you have no connection to then it’s not so interesting for me. DH Lawrence said “Never trust the artist, trust the tale”. It’s all there in the work of art or in the piece of cinema. It’s a combination of the auteur and the genre.

I think if you find your place in the world, you are in trouble. Like one of my characters says: “A well adjusted individual in a sick society is himself sick”. You have to be careful about being too complacent and well adjusted in this world.