CM McCambridge
Film Obsessive: How would you define the Castration Movie anthology for an audience that knows nothing about it?
Weard: I like to say it’s a movie about the current moment. It’s a horror movie for a world poisoned by so many horrors that we’re exposed to constantly as we exist online and as the online and the real have merged into one thing. It’s a movie that directly engages with the horror and the humor of having to exist in this modern world that we find ourselves in. The lens by which it explores that is our characters’ relationships to gender and how gender as a sort of like unifying struggle that all people have to deal with.
Film Obsessive: That was very concise, thank you.
Weard: I mean, a 20-hour movie is so funny because it kind of has the effect of becoming about everything, you know? Like, it’s impossible to look at Castration Movie and say it’s just about one thing or one character, one idea. So, I think that speaking more broadly is always going to be the strongest way to get that across. The thing is though, the thing that people connect to the most in American cinema, or North American cinema, is character, and I feel that description sort of eliminates that, so the way I would describe the movie is, it’s about a tremendously lonely person trying to find someone to connect with—and that can describe every character that we face within this movie.
Film Obsessive: So, I’m sure you have other projects you’ve been wanting to make, what led you to dedicating years of your life to Castration Movie specifically?
Weard: You know what? I think as a trans filmmaker, there’s not a lot of opportunities out there, so I think Castration Movie became the kind of catch-all kitchen sink project of ‘I might only get the chance to make one movie, let’s put everything in here,’ you know? ‘Let’s try to do as much as we can with this.’ It’s funny because there’s so many other projects I would love to do, and Castration Movie sort of had this interesting effect where, like, the reason why I think Castration Movie feels so clear in its vision is because it basically was me taking every good idea I’d every had out of every script I’ve started and putting them all together into one super project. So, it’s basically curating ten years of all of my best ideas into one thing. So, you get like a strength of vision there, I think, because it’s like all the things that I love the most about what I was coming up with through my artistic voice and then, like, really just lining all of those elements up as this, like, one very strong project, or to make this very strong project. So I think that that’s, I don’t know, yeah—what was the question there?
Film Obsessive: What led to you dedicating years of your life to this specifically?
Weard: Yeah, so I think it’s just that idea of, like, on the one end, if I’m going to make a movie, I’m going to want to do the strongest possible things, it’s going to do all the things that I want to see in a movie—I like to think I’m trying to make my own favorite movie of all time, at a time where I think a lot of cinema is not, like, exciting me or degrading me in the way I wish it would. So I’d say, “I’m going to make my own favorite movie, I’m going to make my own number one of the year” or whatever. And then the scale of it is just because I am a filmmaker who, or I guess more broadly, like a storyteller, who just loves like big stories. I love something that has like an epic quality to it. It’s like, I kind of always knew if I started trying to go make a feature film project it would turn into my Ulysses or my Infinite Jest or something, just an absolutely massive unruly work of postmodernism.
And so, those are where my strongest influences are in terms of, like, my narrative construction, you know, if I’m going to sit down and make a work like this, it’s going to be probably closer to Gravity’s Rainbow than like anything in the cinema landscape. So, I’m trying to do that on a budget and as independently as possible, create some insane work of postmodernism in film form. So, would I like to work on other projects? How do I feel about this taking everything over? I mean, I’m having a hell of a lot of fun making this movie, so I think that it’s okay, and I already have an amazing script for an adaptation of Little Fish that I would love to do at any moment.
Film Obsessive: I saw you mention that on your Substack.
Weard: So, yeah, the writer of Little Fish, Casey Plett, wrote an incredible screenplay adaptation, it’d be the perfect movie or mini-series—either a 4 and a half hour movie or a mini-series, whatever makes the most sense. It would be so in line with the work I’ve been doing with Castration Movie but, you know it’s hard to get films produced so as it stands right now, I’m in the Castration Movie business, that’s what feels sustainable as funny as that might seem.
Film Obsessive: And I’m sure you’ve gotten a wide range of reactions to the film so far. Can you talk about what it’s been like? Has anything really stood out to you?
Weard: You know what, I was actually just joking about this last night. I was at a friend’s show here in Vancouver and two girls had driven up from Bellingham and they told me, like, “Oh yeah, we were at the Castration Movie ii screening there” and my first response was, I said “Oh my god, that was the most hostile screening that I’ve had.” They were like, “Oh, they’re not all like that?” I was like—a lot of times I’ll get the question of “Why would you do this? Why would you make this movie? Is it socially or politically responsible to make these movies?” And I would say that’s like the most interesting reaction I get, is the people who want to put me in the hot seat to kind of, like, question my political motivations.
Like, I think that the thing about the movie and what makes it interesting and transgressive is that I, you know, within the film, I leave it up to the viewer’s relationship to the material as well as their degree of media literacy, stuff like that. There’s no clear didacticism, you know? Like, I think that Castration Movie part one and part two both end without, like, a didactic lesson to take away, it’s more of a feeling. I think that they’re movies that make you feel bad about the situation these characters are in. And it’s very interesting because I think it’s kind of a litmus test where someone will feel bad having watched the movie, and they’ll either get angry at me because they’ll think that I’ve made them feel bad because of some sort of like sadistic urge or something—like I’ve created this kind of bad political movie that’s made them feel bad.
Or, there’s people who really understand and connect with me on a more empathetic humanist principle of just like, ‘Oh, whoever made this feels really bad and I feel bad too,’ like, you know? So it is very interesting, the kind of, like, audience response is always very polarized, I would say more people have that empathetic reaction of, like, they connect with it and understand that I probably couldn’t make this work if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m very much so an empathetic person who’s thinking very hard about all the things that we’re doing in these movies. But, I also love the conversation with people who have a more hostile approach and want to like challenge the choices that are being made, because they are transgressive, subversive—perhaps they are politically dangerous or something. I’m happy to have those conversations with people. So, the audience I would say skews more positive, but I’m always really open to that, like, one negative voice who can show up at some of these screenings and really want to really challenge me on what the politics of these movies are.
Film Obsessive: So, to lighten it up a little bit, what or who would you say are some of your biggest influences as a filmmaker?
Weard: Oh, that’s a really good question. I try to always try to mix up the answers to this. I’m really a huge fan of silent cinema, or maybe more appropriately, early cinema, like pre-sound-era cinema. I mean, there was always sound, people played music, so silent isn’t an appropriate term. But, G.W. Pabst’s adaption of Pandora’s Box is phenomenal, I’m also a huge huge fan of his movie Diary of a Lost Girl starring Louise Brooks, where I took my first name from her. She’s one of my favorite actresses of all time. I’m a huge fan of those because they’re very intimate human portrayals of sex workers. Both as movies from 1929, it’s honestly just, like, phenomenally beautiful to see something, especially, like, Louise Brook’s performance as the lead characters in both of those are just kind of awe inspiring, and I try to match her acting prowess in my own performances and I think that the way that Pabst frames the close up in those movies really gets to the heart of the character’s soul.
In those movies, where you’re in the era pre-sound and all you can really gaze upon is the expression on an actor’s face, and that becomes so important to the close-up cinematic language of Castration Movie. I would say there’s like a lot of those early filmmakers—there’s a lot of early cinema filmmakers who do that same thing that I’m talking about, like there’s a great film called A Man There Was by Victor Sjöström that is like another one of those movies I’m just like so blown away with. I think it’s like an Ibsen adaptation or something? Which I was definitely reading a lot of—I took a great class on Scandinavian literature and theatre when I was in university, so I became very enmeshed in, like, the sort of very dreary, sad, upsetting sort of tradition of Scandinavian storytelling, that, like, brutal realism. And, you know, silent cinema or early cinema I’m happy to talk about as an influence, because when we cut Lex’s hair at the end of Castration Movie Part ii, that’s such a Dreyer shot, that’s me trying to make Lex like fucking Joan of Arc you know?
I would say those are my biggest film inclinations on one end, and then in terms of, like, the personality around Castration Movie, I’m a big fan of Matthew Barney, the abstract filmmaker and visual artist who’s work in the 90’s like The Cremaster Cycle was like, or like Drawing Restraints, were really, really influential on me in terms of how to approach gender as, like, a construct that you can then find film language to depict. Like his series of films The Cremaster Cycle are exceptionally important to me. This, like, ten hours of content that are fully around using cinematic form to interrogate concepts around masculinity, so that film language is very important to me. So is his imagery, and that’s very important to me.
And then I would say Andy Warhol is a big inspiration to me, both in terms of the community building that you do, in terms of like pulling together all these cool marginalized artists who don’t really have, like, a platform elsewhere—let’s get all these freaks together and let’s make some crazy stuff, it’s really exciting to me. And also, like, his work is very durational, very improvisational. I would say we defer the most in that my work has very clean, almost, like, mythological structure to it. I have very traditional structure to my work where his doesn’t. I was a big Joseph Campbell fan, I love the idea of, like, monomyths and sort of like what I’m trying to tap into in terms of the storytelling of Castration Movie is like, you know, taking a story about a sad, lonely trans sex worker and making it like something that has, like, an Odyssean quality to it.
Or, you know, Part ii is very like an orphic tradition, like Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso and stuff like that. I have high literary benchmarks, and my cinematic benchmarks are moreso from the more experimental art world and early cinema. I think those are the cleanest answers to that question. You know, actually? I will add I’m such a bottomless pit of hunger for art, like the influences on this are, like, everything I’ve ever seen or read, or every conversation I’ve encountered on a street or heard in a coffee shop. It’s like I want to take in everything and it’s about that, like, just relationship to life and all the art contained therein that is an inspiration on this project. Which is easy to say when it’s like 25 hours long, I can just say that everything’s an influence on it.
Film Obsessive: So you mentioned Louise Brooks’ performance as a sex worker, did that kind of lead to you making Traps a sex worker in Part i?
Weard: No, I mean actually that’s part of it. I think that there’s something about the idea of the sex worker with the heart of gold—it’s just such a classic suffering woman archetype. I see that in Leaving Las Vegas, which is one of my favorite movies. It’s, like, probably one you can draw really direct influences to. I mean, even the idea of women just in any sort of position by which they are, like, selling their body or using their body, even beyond sex work, it’s such a common trope in cinema, like the depressed circus performer, like La Strada or Wings of Desire, any of these sorts of projects, there’s so many. You know, the suffering woman is the perfect archetype, the ‘woman in trouble’ as David Lynch would put it. And I think that goes all the way back to at least Louise Brooks. I mean, we have damsels in distress, like Lillian Gish in The Wind, that’s another Victor Sjöström movie.
We’ve always had like women in distress, and not just like damsels in distress, I mean, like women in distress in the way of their interiority—they’re not just an object to be saved it’s like, no, within the history of cinema, because early cinema is all immigrants and women, we’ve always had a great interiority towards female characters, even in movies directed by men. I feel it’s very linked to what the cinematic form is capable of, and where a lot of its language comes from is the interrogation of the mind of the suffering woman. To me, it’s something universal. It’s like, to have my character be a suffering sex worker on one end, it’s like what other character could she be, she’s a woman in a movie. But, in terms of the history of trans cinematic representation and of trans feminine cinematic representation, it’s so often expressed as, like, a trope of the trans woman sex worker who’s, like, a dead body on a CSI or whatever, SVU type show.
This idea of like the dead trans sex worker’s body as an object of fixation within the cinema is very interesting. And I think that, for me, it was really important to pull that character more towards something in real life that humanizes her and deepens her and makes the sex work the least interesting or significant part of her identity. It’s kind of a way of, like, interrogating the existing images of trans feminine bodies on screen and also presenting something that’s very real. You know, like, lots of my friends are sex workers, that’s a community I’ve been a part of, why not make a film that depicts it in a way that’s sophisticated and mature.
Film Obsessive: So, you’ve said on your Substack that depictions of trans women fall kind of into two categories: pity and revulsion. Have you tried to break free of that dichotomy in your own work?
Weard: Yeah, so when I talk about the pity and revulsion, it’s interesting because that’s what I would say is the sort of outsider’s or tourist’s gaze. That’s like, the lens is either viewing them as the freak or as like—a lot of times, a movie like Dallas Buyer’s Club, where you start as the shock of, like, the trans person, the trans body as a sort of sideshow act, it’s sort of like spectacle. And then by the end you pity them, they can’t help it, they must die, like whatever. So for me, the rejection of it was to make unlikable trans characters where it’s—to make unlikable trans characters is the way to get around the pity, and to get around the revulsion is to normalize the trans body. So, I’m trying to do both of those things at the same time, where you’re taking the power out of the revulsion by making—I mean there are so many naked trans bodies on screen in these movies that I think most people forget that there’s any distinction at all by the end of these films. Like, I think that a non-trans audience member is going to be so bombarded by the makeup of the trans body and the differences in the trans bodies that they’re going to go like “Yeah, it’s just like a universal human body,” they’re going to stop thinking about it because the thing is that all human bodies are equally different. We’re all of the same kind so it’s so silly to draw all these comparisons.
By showing it like it is, without this, like, leering or tourist gaze as I call it, you get used to seeing Michaela’s body on screen, and I think you stop thinking about it as a trans body. By the time you’re four and a half hours into the movie, I think you’re just done thinking about it in that way. So that’s part of the goal on that, to disarm that revolting gaze. And, when it comes to the pity, I think that the thing about it is, I think there’s a difference between pity and antipathy. So, when you pity a character who’s, like, the poor trans woman doomed to death through her situation, there’s something that’s so unreal and like disconnected and it’s, like, as I said, the hooker with a heart of gold sort of trope or something, it just doesn’t feel real, there’s no depth to the characters. So for me, when I write trans characters who are unlikable, it’s not like I’m writing them to be like, “Oh, I hate this person,” I’m writing them to—I’ve said before, to suck is to be human. Like, everyone has shades of themselves that are unlikable because people are complicated. Everyone is going to have moments where they act selfishly or say the wrong thing or behave awkwardly or pry too much for information, because that’s just the way people work.
So, I’m trying to write real people out of these characters, I want them to feel full, and in doing so, that’s to allow them to also like, you know, be mean to their friends and do all these things that, like, as an audience member, you probably would relate to but you don’t want to relate to. You know, it’s interesting, because they’re like fully realized people, you’re going to both like cringe alongside them and also cringe at them, right? There’s empathy and also, like, understanding in this way that I think gets past this pity side of it, where it’s like, you know, you understand Michaela as a full person and what her wants and needs are, along with every other character in the movie.
Film Obsessive: So you’ve talked a little about this before, but what led to you filming everything with a Hi8 camcorder instead of something maybe easier to work with or that had a different feel to it?
Weard: Oh, because I hate digital cinematography, and when I say digital, I mean like a non-tactile form of filming. Like, I don’t think movies should exist—I like film moving through a camera, I like tape moving through a camera. I like the tactile functionality of that. And also, it provides hard limits, you know? Like a real 16mm film, I can shoot for 15 minutes, a Hi8 tape, I can shoot for one hour—those feel good you know? It feels traditional to me in a way that I really connect to. It provides, like, a certain degree of planning or barriers to the actual production, like, “Okay, we have one hour of tape today, so that’s what we’re shooting.” It gives, like, soft limits in a way that other digital filmmaking doesn’t really match. So, I guess on that note, the Hi8 to me, beyond the connection to it being my childhood home video camera, and stylistic considerations of starting with square one with building film form to shoot trans people, I think that, like, for me, the general impulse is that I think the image feels more alive and more organic even though it is like a digital signal.
It’s like, there’s just something about the look of it that contrasts so heavily with how clean digital cinematography looks, and it’s a movie that I think needs to have that life brought into it by the digital grain that you get on it. I think that without the noise and the way it looks in low light and all this stuff, it wouldn’t be the same movie. The low quality of it makes it just feel that much more alive and more immediate as well, more like the audience is in the room because they sort of have that association with the language of home video as like, “Oh, I was there,” or something.
Film Obsessive: I was talking to a friend about it and I was like, “It’s very Skinamarink in that way”. Where it’s like a little grainy at all times, you have to kind of lean in a little bit.
Weard: Yeah, no, and another filmmaker from the same home province as me. I don’t know what it was about Alberta, but me and Kyle both ended up with hyper-grainy work out of it. Maybe it’s all the snow, we were seeing life through it as a sort of grain.
Film Obsessive: So, has working with Hi8 changed your directing style at all?
Weard: No actually, it’s really funny, I think it was, like, making my earlier work in much more traditional ways was like—I don’t know, it wasn’t getting the performances across in a way I wanted to, it felt too truncated, where we’re focused on a shot to shot basis. Which is good, I love movies that are heavily composed, and it is one mode I can work in, especially when we’re doing special effects sequences or something like that. It was when me and Dion started working together on some of her short, it felt like the cinematic language was going to be a lot of oners, it kind of started with her film Inferno, where I just kind of got in my head with her and we got into a conversation of “Let’s not do coverage, let’s do everything as kind of one shot, let’s make the whole movie feel like it’s one clean camera movement.”
I just realized it’s just such a better environment because you get to live in the moment as something that feels real, even if it’s a fully scripted sequence, and I think that the thing Hi8 unlocked that was so great is that it’s such a light camera. I think the camera only weighs like one pound or two pounds. So I can hold and film with that camera for one hour straight, keeping my arm up. It’s not like a super heavy camera rig or anything like that so it’s very versatile. I can also, you know, spin it all around me with my wrist or whatever, it’s such an easy thing. I can kick it along the ground, I can do anything with that camcorder. So, it’s like there’s an immense freedom to having something like that. And also, I can replace it. There’s one of them I tossed off of a balcony because we bought a few extras, and, like, I can sacrifice them for whatever shots we want. Unfortunately, the tape exploded, but I did toss one of them off the balcony just to see what it would look like, and I think that’s the thing that’s fun and versatile about these cameras.
Film Obsessive: Getting a bit more broad, in a world where trans rights are increasingly under attack, what does the continued production and release of Castration Movie mean to you?
Weard: I mean honestly, I think that—you know, it’s really fascinating. Castration Movie got in at a time, and I’ve made this joke before—it’s not really a joke as much as an observation, I’ve made this observation before, that the wave of trans filmmakers that came in in, like, 2022 felt like the last year where you got a little bump from being one of the few trans filmmakers. You know, looking at the Sundance program from 2023, there was a ton of trans filmmakers on there. Like, you had films like Kokomo City and The Stroll and I Saw The TV Glow coming in those handful of years, and it felt like a moment was really happening. And you compare it to now, there wasn’t a single trans movie at Sundance. Like, the moment has passed, the politics have changed in a way where you’re not going to see the discovery of new trans filmmakers right now.
So, the thing is, Castration Movie was never part of that. I rode a slight wave in the sense of, like, I knew– basically we had I Saw The TV Glow, The People’s Joker, Stress Positions and T-Blockers all came out within like a three-month span of each other. I kind of—Castration Movie too, and then we kind of threw the first Castration Movie out online at the same time so I could kind of, like—all my film critic friends would have to include it with their discussion of that little collection of movies, now all of a sudden you have to bring up Castration Movie because it came out too. So that was kind of like a little bit cynical in terms of, like, marketing, and just, like, I need to get this movie out and see if anyone was going to care about this massive art project I was undertaking. I think that my biggest concern is, when I look at this framework of, like, who are the current trans filmmakers, and obviously all these other filmmakers have appeared in Castration Movie, every single one of that group of three movies the filmmaker has appeared in Castration Movie.
Film Obsessive: I was doing the mental checklist here.
Weard: But, I think the biggest problem I have looking at it is that’s not the most diverse group of filmmakers. I think that there’s clearly something very wrong in terms of the narrative filmmakers face. Even when I name films by black directors, for example, it’s often in, like, a documentary space, there’s something very fundamentally different from, like, the DIY sort of like—whatever this, like, trans canon that might be getting establishe—I would hesitate to call anything a trans canon, but obviously something’s going on in terms of trans filmmakers and how we can group them together. So, for me, with the industry overall contracting because of politics, and the first things to get dismantled were DEI programs because of that boogeyman in the US, you end up in a situation where we’ve seen the biggest contraction of trans and queer filmmakers and also, like, black and other POC filmmakers. So for me, I think that me and a lot of these other filmmakers got in just under the wire, right? Jane has a new movie coming out this year, you know, every one of us is working on our projects, right? And we are established names.
Castration Movie, as small and fiercely independent as it is, still broke through in a way where it has a dedicated audience and we can hit our modest crowdfunding goals very quickly and I can keep Castration Movie a sustainable project. But, the thing that does very much worry me about the modern trans filmmaking is that lack of diversity among the directors. And, you know, the problem I have with it when I talk with my director friends is, ‘Okay, are we just not—am I in such a bubble that I’m just not seeing black trans directors doing similar work to us, or is it an institutional problem where there’s additional barriers preventing those movies from being made in the first place?’
So, my goal, I think, is more than worrying—Castration Movie is getting made under the current political environment, right? Like, I’m not worried, we’re still doing it. For me, it’s more like, ‘How can I use the success of my platform to make sure that we can widen the tent?’ How can we make sure that we can increase the opportunities for the filmmakers who we’re not seeing in this current trans film movement? So, I think one of my big priorities for this year is figuring out the way to encourage movies that fit into this DIY trans filmmaking scene that are from more diverse voices. So that’s my priority under the current political moment, because honestly, like, I’m an optimist. As much as my work is very upsetting, I’m an optimist. I think that trans people are in community with each other, we’re going for each other, we’ll get through these bad political times, and honestly everything swung so far over ten years, and now it’s swinging back over ten years, like, we will get out the other side of this just fine. And like, it is still easier to transition than when I first considered transitioning when I was 19, and that’s with the move forward and move back like globally.
So, I think that we’re all going to be okay. I just want to make sure that within the current film movement we’re building, because that’s the community I’m most tied to and that I have the most influence and control in, I just want to make sure that when we look back on this era, that I want it to be more diverse than the new queer cinema of the 90’s. Where, you know, if you’re only lifting up like one or two black filmmakers or indigenous filmmakers or something, that feels like such a failure to me of a film movement. So, if what we’re doing right now with all these trans filmmakers is creating something that’s going to be considered a new movement within independent queer film, one of my priorities is figuring out how we can, like, make sure that these other perspectives aren’t getting lost in both the attention economy, if these movies do exist and I’m just not finding them or they’re not getting sent to me, or if, on the other hand, if there’s additional gaps to them getting made—whether that be as a black trans woman, maybe you can’t do the same level of like guerrilla shooting that I’m doing or whatever, right? Like, if those extra barriers exist, then, well, how can we carve those down and make sure that this other work is getting made, because, like, I want to make sure that whatever the new movement of trans filmmakers is is more reflective of the diversity of the community than, let’s say, like the 90’s new queer cinema movement.
Film Obsessive: So, for these over 4-hour films, how difficult is it for you to decide what gets cut and what stays? Is the process different from a shorter feature? What becomes the bonus content?
Weard: It’s really funny because, for Part i, I had enough other good scenes I cut out of it that I was able to, like, make kind of my own deleted scenes movie out of it. Whereas with Part ii, there was, like, nothing that was really cut out of it. It’s exactly the movie I shot was the movie I sought to make, and knew what scenes wanted to be from, like, basically rolling on action to cut is exactly what that movie is, just like in order. To me, it was kind of finding the style of the movie, was kind of the first, like, little part of shooting. What’s funny is actually the deleted scenes feature that we made is basically just stuff that was shot during the first, like, 6 months of production, from, like, January 2023 to, like, July 2023. So, that was where we were finding the style and where I was honing in on what this movie would be and what this project was, and then from that point on everything is much more specific and curated on the day, and really like much less room for improv and much less room for sort of like—there’s always room for intense collaboration on the projects, but it stopped being like, ‘Oh let’s shoot this like three ways, let’s try different versions of it,’ it became much more honed in on ‘this is specifically what we want to do.’
So yeah, it’s funny, because a shorter movie requires a much greater deal of curation, but because these are art films that are also trying to do a lot on, like, an exploratory nature of, like, the relationship between the audience and, like, the apparatus of the camera and cinema itself and all this stuff, because we’re trying to build this trans film language, and all these heady things that require all this extra time, I actually think that it’s less about curation and more about when we’re actually shooting, we have to be so aware of our relationship to time and the structure of the overall piece and the pacing and all these things. A lot of people like to think that editing is all about being able to make things short and concise, but editing is really about pacing. To have a five hour movie that is, like, watchable is so much harder than a 90 minute movie that’s watchable. You know, it’s very difficult to maintain something where someone’s attention is maintained for this long of an amount of time. It’s always really funny to me when people criticise, saying the movie should be shorter, or that I need to hire an editor, because I’m like, ‘You know, I got you to watch this for five hours, like, you could’ve turned it off. Clearly if you watched it for five hours, like, something was done right here.’ So that’s kind of my thoughts on it.
Film Obsessive: So, it feels like there’s a bit of an escalation that happens in each part so far, can we expect more of that in the next one, or are you kind of reeling it back?
Weard: So, it’s kind of funny, like the idea of Castration Movie Anthology was like a joke non-sequitor. I’m starting to, like, open up about this now. I viewed the movie as this great, like, post-modern story where we’re setting up all these different disparate characters and we’re going to have everything come together. To me, the whole idea of “Anthology” was just a way to frame the first movie so people weren’t looking for those direct story crossovers within the first film or the second film. Since I knew I’d have to release these as like five hour parts for just like the logistics of putting movies out there, it kind of framed it in a way where the audience was more open to stuff that wasn’t connecting right away by giving it that naming structure. Where we’re going in terms of escalation is, I think that the next movie, for lack of a better description, I think it’s going to be viewed as like the Empire Strikes Back of the series, it is the darkest one, probably until the next one.
It’s definitely the bleakest of any of these movies so far, it’s the midpoint of our story, so it is the point where we’re starting to see these connections start to get formed between all these different parts that we’ve been setting up, so we’re laying the groundwork for all of these stories to start crossing over. On top of that, being the middle chapter, it’s all of the character’s lowest moments before we begin to work towards our climax, so I think it’s a very strong midpoint, but I think that in terms of an audience that’s expecting any degree of escalation towards a climax in terms of like bigger emotions—like, yes, we are building on the last film, but we still have so much more room left to go. So we’re not gonna hit the peak yet, we’re gonna keep slowly climbing up towards that.
Film Obsessive: Music, and especially performances, seem to be really central to these films. Is that an intentional decision or something that came more from casting decisions that you already made?
Weard: Very intentional. I mean, music to me is so closely linked with cinema. I mean, I grew up and my introduction to, let’s say, like, cinema was through my dad. Where my dad was, like, doing work on this cabin he was fixing up, I would be, when I was two years old, his buddy to come with him out into the woods. This being the mid-90’s, like 1995-96, the only entertainment when you’re in the middle of nowhere is a VCR and a TV. And my dad would have, like, a handful of movies appropriate for kids, where he would only put on like a kids movie if it was one where he especially liked the soundtrack of it, if it was a movie with a good soundtrack. So that actually like shielded me from watching any Disney movies as a kid. My dad was much more interested in stuff that was a little more out there and different.
The thing is, my dad would also get very bored of the kids movies very quickly, so I’d be two years old and my dad would throw on Reservoir Dogs or Goodfellas or these movies where they’re so powered by the soundtrack. That was what my dad connected with and that was my entryway to cinema, was this 90’s cinema of cool, where it’s all about merging the image with this beautiful music and all this stuff. So that was my introduction to movies, was movies that were so closely related to musical performance and needle drops and stuff like that, and so I think that just in my soul, my relationship to movies is also a relationship to music. And so, making a film—Castration Movie was never conceptualized without music being a huge part of it. To me, that is just like what a movie is, that was just, like, part of what my relationship to cinema is. So, to include all these, like, big musical performances, it’s like Castration Movie to me is a musical. It’s an opera. That is what the form of cinema is to me, so closely related to music that I couldn’t make a movie that didn’t have those elements to it.
Film Obsessive: You touched on this a little bit, but there are a few very notable trans women in this anthology. How do you make those casting decisions? What’s your process like in that stage of production?
Weard: You know what’s really funny is, there’s two ways. Where sometimes there’s someone who where I come up with a conceptualization of a character and know like a person who has to be in it. Like, for example, the character of Kellar was so closely linked to Ivy Wolk in my mind that me and Ivy actually hadn’t met yet, and when I came up with that character I was like, “It has to be Ivy,” like, that was the only person I could imagine in this role. And so I talked with Ivy about it and she was very excited to do the movie. So there’s times where I write a character and it kind of immediately jumps into my head who would play them, same with like Hesse as the cult leader or like Theda as the other YouTuber and stuff like that, where I have the character and I’m like “Oh, that’s the perfect person for it,” Vera as Persephone the DIY HRT dealer. I came up with the idea for that character, immediately asked Vera. I mean, Alice as the screaming girl, it’s, like, perfect. There’s such a synergy there where like the character comes into my head and the person to play them gets linked so closely.
And on the other side, there’s like the more collaborative, like, kind of character designs, where I’ll have someone I want to work with and then we’ll start talking through who their character might be. So I’ll have, like, a rough sketch of someone who’s needed for a sequence or for one of the stories in here, and then we will start kind of ‘yes, and’-ing each other as we start to kind of build the character out. So, like all of the cult members with the exception of Circle and Casper, Betsey Brown’s character, all of those cult members were built with the exception of those two in a process of basically me knowing these were people I wanted to work with, and then we would start the conversation of me saying “Why do you think someone would join a cult?” And then they would give me this very true to them answer of why they think someone would join a cult, and every single person had a different answer. And that was how we were able to build out such distinct personalities for each of those characters, because everyone would have their own relationship in terms of, like, their life experience that would make them think of why someone would join a cult, then we could start with there being a sort of personal connection to the character. Because, it’s not a question of why they would join a cult, it’s a question of, like, ‘Who’s this third person that is like a combination of me and them,’ we’re going to have this third person, the character, we’re going to build that together based on both of our collaboration. So, that was very exciting and one of the best sort of experiences in terms of building those characters out.
And then, like, with the first part, it’d be like we had our whole community of artists and that much like the cult one, it was very collaborative. It was like, “Oh my god, let’s lean into these, like, very silly tropes or personality traits or whatever.” One of the ways I would pitch to people is, I would say, like, “What’s the worst trait you’re worried you come off as having?” So it’d be, like, someone really worried that they come across as too annoying or something and it’s like, ‘okay, let’s play into that. Let’s make your character talk in this way that’s extremely annoying or something’, right? It was like trying to build the character out of people’s own neuroses or worries where, like, in real life, that’s not a reflection of who they actually are, but that idea of sort of spectre, this sort of third—the character as this sort of thing to project all of these, like, insecurities or worries to was a very fun—in a way, it was an exorcism for a lot of people who worked on the project, because you can put everything off into this character and then there’s something very cathartic about then playing out these anxieties or insecurities one person might have. Where you make it a nightmare for the audience to then endure but you’ve got it out of your own system, so that was always like a really—with every actor it’s been different, but those are like some of the highlights of how we’ve built these characters up.
