I feel like I thrive in the red light.
I might actually be allergic to testosterone. Whenever I've felt a testosterone rush I get, like, sick afterwards, and I feel exhausted and terrible.
Just making 'Black Rainbow' was like my minimum requirement before death, so that I could die with some honour and not in total shame.
Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.
1984 is such an iconic, loaded year in so many ways.
I think most religious belief structures are essentially like mind viruses.
Motley Crue was actually my gateway to heavy metal.
We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.
I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.
A huge part of my writing process is listening to music as I write, almost creating an unofficial soundtrack to the film I'm working on, a sort of playlist. But the specific songs change rapidly as I write.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with heavy metal, Van Halen, Motley Crue. The older I got, my tastes widened. I always felt an attraction to the attitudes of punk; also punk filmmakers, like Richard Kern.
I was, like, 'I really wanna see an Eric Rohmer movie take place in a Bert I. Gordon universe.' Where there's a story going on that's about, you know, loss and desire, but with a giganticized-animal element.
Mandy' came from grief and depression. I wanted this to be an outward volcanic expulsion of the emotion of my first film.
In the '90s, I kind of put aside all those things I loved in the '80s and I got really into watching foreign films and art films and stuff like that, and sort of soaking those up.
You write a character, but in essence, it's just a concept of what it could be, and then actors come in and they have their own sort of interpretations and thoughts. If you respond to those and then go forward with them, then it's kind of like magic to see the idea you had become alive and in the flesh.
I feel happy working in the low-budget realm, doing stuff that is a little bit more esoteric, and personal.
I'm too neurotic to ever feel good. If I ever felt good, I think something horrible would happen.
Mythologies are violent things, and to be true to them, you have to go to primal territory.
My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.
I'd been drifting and in a very self-destructive bent ever since my mother died and as soon as I dealt with the grief, for the first time in 10 years, I had clarity and I realized: 'I need to make a movie, now, cause if I don't make it now, I might never do it.' That's what pushed me forward, and I immediately moved to Vancouver.
