I sat down with "REPO! The Genetic Opera" Director Darren Lynn Bousman and writer/actor Terrance Zdunich at the ENZIAN Theatre in Orlando, FL on their Florida stop of the film tour to find out why the film was having so much trouble getting a proper release despite its rabid and growing cult status.

M – So, tell me what the heck is going on with Lions Gate, why can't we get this thing to open?

Terrence – Do you have a couple of hours!?!

Darren – I, well, we have actually boiled it down because we have been asked that so many times, and I love talking about it. So, it’s a movie business, we are on the movie side of it and the business side of it. On the movie side of it, this is an amazing endeavor which we’ve done. Whether you love it or hate it, you have never seen anything like it. It's crazy, it's different, it's wild, it's out there, it's out of the box. On the business side of it, it’s a movie with Paris Hilton and it’s a Rock Opera. And seriously, it comes down to two things. There’s no audience for this. Who wants to go see a rock opera? They haven’t been popular since the Seventies. The fact is, on the movie side of it, we’re going to prove them wrong. But also the fact is, they're not the bad guys. And that’s definitely something I want to say off the bat; Lions Gate is not the bad guy. Lions Gate are scientists, as we say.

Terrence – They are waiting for the evidence and they are coming at it from the head. We are coming at it from the heart. If you went with the normal way that movies are written and released, putting "Repo" in a thousand theaters, nobody’s going to go see "Repo" at four in the afternoon on Monday. It's an evening type show, it’s a weekend type show, and it’s a community type show. When we first got the news that "Repo" was headed straight to DVD, there was no market for this, we were like, "We’ve done the impossible and somehow managed to get financing for this wacky idea, a 21st century opera," and this news was really kind of devastating. But, every time we’ve played it with an audience… By the way, no one at Lions Gate has ever actually seen it with an audience.

Darren – You want to hear a true story? We have done seven road cities, we’ve done two separate premieres, one in Vegas, and one in Los Angeles, not once was any exec from Lions Gate there.



Max – How is this happening though, that’s what I want to know? You have stocked this thing with so many great people and so many familiar faces that I can’t imagine looking at it as not being a draw.

Darren – Our entire perceptions of "Repo" changed in the last three or four days. We were going about it the completely wrong way. I wanted mainstream. I wanted it to be in AMC theaters. I wanted it to be in multiplexes. I wanted Burger King cups with Grave Robber’s face on it. Then I realized, we’re never going to appeal to the mainstream nor do I want to. What’s made this so cool is, look out at the audience: it’s the freaks, the losers, the dweebs, the dorks, the Goths, the steampunk types, ohhhh, the weird people. Where else do they have to go? The reason I got into film making was the "Rocky Horror Picture Show." When I was a kid, I got beat up, I was made fun of. Terrence can attest, he’s seen pictures of me as a kid.

Terrence - One of the road stops went by the town he grew up in so I got to see pictures of little Darren and, yeah, I wanted to beat him up.

Darren – I know! I didn’t fit in any group, I had no group that I fit in with and all of a sudden I get introduced to theatre and that introduced me to "Rocky Horror." Now here’s a place that I could be fat, I could be a loser, I could be a dork, I could laugh, I could cry, I could sing, and I could dance.

Terrence – Put on Lederhosen if I fuckin’ feel like it…

Darren - And not be laughed at, and I think that basically it embraced everyone. We don’t care who you are. Now, if half of our audience was at an AMC on a Saturday afternoon, they would be stared at, they would be laughed at, they would be ridiculed. That’s why I say, "Fuck that man." If Lion’s Gate called me tomorrow and said, "Darren, we are offering you five thousand screens." I would say no. Give me fifty screens, and I would go to all of the art houses. Because that is who this audience is; that’s who I was when I was growing up. I’m still that way. I’m still a fucking dork. And that’s why it has become such a passion for us, to be so hands-on. I didn’t realize this, I was wrong, you know. I was fighting for the wrong thing.

Terrence – And I think what is also unique about "Repo" and what is different than most movie campaigns is that the DVD is not the end with "Repo" in the way it is with many movies. Like Darren, I would much rather have us on fifty select screens, maybe just weekend showings. And then take the prints and go to another fifty. And that could be happening well after it’s on DVD. Unlike most movies, where you watch it on DVD and you have one experience, you watch "Repo" with a crowd full of people dressed up, going nutso, being part of a community of the disenfranchised, the outsiders, whatever, you’re going to have a totally different experience. We are meeting fans every day. We’re in personal contact with a lot of people on our message boards. People are meeting each other, finding each other through "Repo," dating each other, having meet-ups when they live hundreds of miles away from each other.

Darren – I have two great stories for you. Last night we see this guy come out, he’s really swooning over "Repo," maybe in his middle forties, has a "Repo" t-shirt on, and then another guy comes up and stands next to him, also wearing a "Repo" t-shirt. And I said, "Oh, you guys know each other?" And he goes, "We’re brothers." I was like, ah, that’s cool. He says, "No, you don’t understand, we haven’t talked in four years." I guess they had a house, it was destroyed by a hurricane. They became angry with each other and had not talked in four years and they just recently started emailing each other. And through the emails, they both mentioned "Repo." He was like, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm going to see Repo." "I want to see Repo!" So, they got back together and did a road trip together.
And we are finding these stories all over the place. The second story, which is my favorite story, is when we went to the Bousman household for our Kansas City stop. And my parents, they are right-wing, they are very conservative, but they’re cool. My mother and father aren’t- they go to every movie, listen to every kind of music- but the majority of my family comes from a very religious background. So, we’re all there, and we are having a cocktail reception before the movie, and there’s like fifty of the Bousman clan, all people in their nice button-down, oxford shirts with their ties and their sports jackets, sipping on wine, and there is a knock at the door. My mom goes to the door and then says, "Darren, there are some friends outside for you." And I walk outside and, I don’t know if you remember the scene from "Weird Science" where they are having this house party and there is a knock at the door and they open the door and there is a sea of people, it was like that. So we open the door up and it’s a sea of "Repo" fans. The goth community, and basically we had invited them. We had said, "Come on, my mom’s having a party," never even thinking that they were going to show up. Oh, they showed up!

Terrence – And they were dressed up!

Darren – They had the black hair, the white face, the long trenchcoats. But it was awesome. So they walk in and there was silence. It was the Bousman clan on one side, the "disenfranchised" on the other, and my mother and father in the middle. And my dad looks at the Bousman Clan, and then looks over here, and is like, "We have some cheese!" And all of a sudden, everyone came over to the cheese tray. Again, it proves my point, that cheese can unite people! And the next thing we know, my parents were hanging out with them, they were hanging out with my parents, and it's weird because most movies never unite people. You go to a movie, you watch, you pay your eight to ten bucks and you leave. With "Repo," they come back numerous times. They buy the soundtrack. They dress as the characters. The go on the message boards. They plan road trips. They reunite with family. And that’s why we did this movie.



Max - Is it a little crazy to you that most of these people have never seen the movie before and they are already, like, you’ve seen the homemade t-shirts out there? This is really amazing. They are playing the soundtrack at the bar over the loudspeaker and everybody is singing along. And they haven’t even... they've just been hearing it online.

Darren – I mean, I don’t want to say that we were right, but they were wrong. I can say that. And again I am not even talking about Lions Gate, I'm talking about the mainstream critics who have torn the movie apart, saying that there is no fanbase for this. We received many reviews that said it was the worst movie of all time. FOX’s "At the Movies," which took over for Ebert and Roeper, the quote was, "I have never been more disgusted or offended that I wasted two hours of my life. I want a shower..."

Terrence – He said he wanted to take a rape shower at the end of it. He said he wanted to take a shower to wipe the filth off!

Max – Well, what’s frustrating for me is that I run a goth night in Jacksonville, and I do movie parties constantly for all of these horror movies or whatever that comes out. I have been knocking down doors trying to get anything from Repo just to give out. I had a link on our web page, the main page for Movement Magazine, trying to get people involved and built up for this. I had been working with my reps in Ft. Lauderdale to get some posters! I talked to OhGr and said that I would mail him out some posters to autograph and give away the autographed posters online through the magazine just to promote this thing. So, what happened that the brakes got put on it?

Darren – We had a horrible test screening, that’s what it was. We tested the movie in this suburb of Los Angeles before the movie was finished. It was maybe an hour and fifty-eight minutes, the version that tested. It was unfinished effects with no music mixing and the crowd was recruited with the promise that it was "Darren Bousman's, the director of Saws II, III, and IV, new experiment in terror." There is nothing scary about "Repo," there is nothing scary in "Repo." All of these fans showed up thinking that they were going to see another "Saw" flick. And what do they see? They see opera. You know? They tore it apart. They gave us an F, we made the lowest test scores in the world. However, never was it said that it was a musical, never was it said that it was opera. Then when they couldn’t get people in the theatre they went back and said, "A musical starring Paris Hilton!" And then you had more people there that never would have showed up at this thing and the brakes got put on. And everyone was like, "You know what, no one will see this, Darren. You tested poorly and you couldn’t get people in the audience." And that’s why I said, "You guys are doing this wrong. This is not the way that we market this movie."

Terrence – What we should add, though, is for this theatre, that three hundred people were there to watch this movie and the responses were exactly the kind of thing that you would expect. It was like seventy-five percent were deeply opposed to it. Didn’t get it, didn’t like it. And some of the scenes which, amongst the fans, are the most popular, were the least popular amongst these people. And if we had listened to them we would have hacked it all apart. Which is another reason why we are fighting now. But, there were twenty-five percent there that came, for whatever reason, whether they knew about the movie or not, that said, "I really fucking like this." And some of those people that sat there have stayed in touch with us, in contact with us on MySpace, and have just been constantly saying, "This is just the best thing. How come I didn’t know about this? How come there aren’t any ads anywhere?" And I think that we are tapping into, maybe it's twenty-five percent, maybe it's five percent, maybe it's one percent, but that one percent seems pretty loyal to the idea of what we are doing. We run the website for "Repo," so as such we are able to control the content. And I think the website would probably suck otherwise. It would be your typical Hollywood thing with the trailer, then a little bit of info. But we are actually like, it’s a world.



Max – It is. I have looked at that stuff, it’s great. Now, the first time that I met OhGr was in Atlanta when he was touring with Pigface and I walked backstage and he was sitting there with a script for The Crow. He was reading for Fun Boy. And we were all excited about him being in this movie. In fact, back then, no one had ever heard of "The Crow" and it was, you know, a comic. We were really excited about it. I have always been excited about him doing film roles, but of course, he failed miserably in his screen test. He still talked about doing movies over the years, so I was happy when he finally landed a role and got into this film.

Darren – I thought, and I think, that so will all of the people that see him in this. He is such a character. Even a caricature. He is amazing. He deserves to be in more movies after this.

Max – When did the concept for the tour come up? Was it just frustration that sparked it off?

Darren – Well, it came up when I decided that I would not take this sitting down. I will not allow myself to be stepped on and walked over. I won't. I’m not that guy. That’s why I was fired from every job that I ever had, because I refused to accept mediocrity. I will not allow someone to tell me what to do. I am just not wired for that. When I heard that we were going straight to DVD, I said, "No we are not. No, we’re absolutely not." And then I started on the message boards. And I said, "I am calling for an army. If you want something different, if you want something unique, help us." And this little army of a few people went from four to eight to sixteen and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Because there were others out there like me. There were others out there that didn’t want to be walked on. To say that there is not an audience for this, I say there is; scream at the top of your lungs and let them hear your voice. And then I thought, you know what? If they are not going to move this through cities, we will. We will take this print, we will carry it on a plane with us, we will sleep in dirtbag motels, and we will do it. And that’s what we’ve done.



Max – So you guys are funding this all on your own dime, you are not getting any help from the studios on this one?

Terrence – No, we booked our own tickets. I mean, obviously we are getting a cut from the door, which will hopefully cover our costs. We couldn’t stand the idea that people would only be seeing it on the DVD, and we were like, even if it's just a one night screening. And believe it or not, people on our message boards started popping up, saying let's organize and let's try to show them where the most fans are so we can bring the film there. And giving us links to theatres to screen it at and such. We didn’t know that it would be as successful as it is. We’ve sold out every tour stop and for the next one, I think we are planning a second one, we are going to do bigger theatres because we’ve sold out every one. And we were worried that we would have empty houses, it was going to be kind of depressing, and it simply hasn’t been the case.

Max – Well I was worried about seeing stuff like the poster where it says, "An instant cult classic!" That’s sort of a big thing to have to live up to. It builds up this expectation…

Terrence – Well we deliver on the expectation, but I will tell you...
Darren – I also disagree with the quote on the poster. If there is one fatal flaw that I think we made was using the word "cult." And maybe the words "Rocky Horror" should never have been used. We’re not the "Rocky Horror Picture Show." That was camp. This is not camp. It’s comedy. And people, when they hear we’re the next "Rocky Horror Picture Show," they have a mentality, like, "Oh, it's going to be fun." This movie is not fun. This movie is dramatic, it's serious, it's drama, it's horror. But if you sit through the movie and you are waiting for that "Rocky Horror" experience, it might only come once or twice. Now, as an audience member, as a critic, if I think that I am trying to aspire to be the next "Rocky Horror," I fail dismally. It’s a horrible failure. Now about the "cult classic" quote. That was from an early review and we were trying to find a quote at a time when we had no reviews. And looking back on it now, I think a lot of people look at us and think that we are trying to manufacture a cult film. That we are a studio and we are saying, "We’re cult!" and "This is Big!" But we are not "manufacturing" anything. It's two guys and a film print going across America. Imagine going to Chicago and seven-hundred seats selling out, everyone dressed up, everyone singing, everyone dancing in the aisles. You can’t manufacture that. But I agree, it was a quote that I was not...
Max – It is something where I was wondering if it was getting fans almost too worked up and how they reacted to you after the film. What’s your feedback from them, overall? Not the critics, because obviously the critics kind of downed it to an extent, but the fan base. Have they reacted to you positively?

Darren – I just got an email from a fan that says, "FYI, seen the movie eight times." So, it’s crazy. They are going back again and again and again. People down there have seen us, a lot of people we don’t know have traveled to Austin to see it, traveled to Las Vegas. People keep traveling with it as well.



Max - I have seen a few people from Jacksonville here and I came down (to Orlando) for it.

Darren – I think that one reason that people are embracing us is because when they see us out there signing autographs and talking to the fans and taking pictures with them, we are them. We're dealing with the same shit. We're getting looked at weirdly by Lion's Gate and looked at weirdly by guys in golf shirts. I think that unites us all. This is such an important movie that says, ‘It’s okay to be like this.’

Terrence – It is a celebration of that.

Max – We don’t have much time left, so one more really quick question, going back to the beginning, what first turned you on to "Repo?" What made you decide to give up doing another "Saw" movie, which is obviously a huge success?

Darren – Well, this is a two-part answer. First part of it is that I was doing "Repo" before I was doing "Saw." I started the stage show in 2002, and then I got "Saw" in 2005. So I was doing the stage show for many years. But why I did it… because I was offered a lot of money to do a "Saw" film and I was offered other movies where I would not be struggling right now, and I am struggling right now to pay bills and do all of this because of one reason. I did three "Saw" sequels, I am attached to a remake, I am the King of Unoriginality right now and that’s not why I got into filmmaking. I got into filmmaking to be like my idols David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. These are guys that took risks and took chances. Fuck the mainstream. And that’s what inspired me. Here I am, wit three sequels, and I am very blessed and lucky to be a part of those films, but I need to do something original. I need to show people that you can still be original. There is a quote that I always use, "Originality is not dead, it’s just not rewarded." And I am here to show that you can be original and you can still be rewarded. You can still have success and be original.


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