Congratulations on the Teddy Award, do you think of Nasty Baby as a “queer film” necessarily?
My producers and I were making an effort not to box this movie into a “gay film” or “queer film”, just because my own experience with “gay movies” is something that has never felt entirely satisfying. The two main characters in the film are gay, but they are human beings before being gay, just because they happen to be gay doesn’t make it a “gay movie”, I find that to be limiting. For me it’s an honor and I do appreciate the validation of Out Fest and the Berlin Film Festival, but I think it’s a sign that they give the prize to a movie that’s not centered on the sexual drive of the characters, but on the story. What made this movie a “gay movie”? They’re fighting to have a family, which is not a “gay thing”, gay people can also make families, this is not a movie about a gay problem. I don’t think so. Despite the fact that we tried to keep this movie from being identified as a queer film, it’s what ended happening, but if you asked me this is not how I’d describe it.
You also show people of different ethnicities, races and sexual orientations, yet it never feels like you’re fulfilling quotas when it comes to diversity. Would it bother you that people also thought of your film as “diverse”?
It wouldn’t bother me, I’m not that anal, but I find that in America, people have a thirst for identifying things and labeling them. They feel so safe when things have a name: oh yeah, this is a queer dramedy with diversity casting. Fuck you man, it’s just a movie called Nasty Baby with characters some of which are black, some of which are white. That’s the movie, you don’t need to identify it past that, once you talk about diversity or queer you create ideas about the film, and people have their own ideas of what those mean, so instead of having the audience care about the storytelling and the emotions of your characters, they are counting how many black people are onscreen to see if the movie is balanced. Why would you want to put that on people’s minds when what you really want to do is tell them a weird moral fable? For me this movie is about how the movie ends morally, and how my audience feels morally torn at the end.
Indeed, the third act of the film feels like a slap to the face of people who have spent the two previous acts believing they know where the film will take them based on preconceptions.
Exactly.
Do you find it surprising that people are so turned off or shocked by the last act? There’s even talks of people leaving the film at festivals.
I’m not that surprised really, but it’s also unfair to the film, because if you pay attention we’d been setting up the tension between the characters from the very start. By minute 10 you have the first incident that only makes the tension escalate, so it would be unfair not to have a payoff with the story involving Bishop (Reg E. Cathey). I don’t care so much about people’s expectations and you mentioned the “people walked out of the movie thing”, but that’s also another very American notion. Because one person left the screening at Sundance, now it’s become the movie people walk out of because it’s so scary and terrifying and it betrays you in the end. I never saw another person leave the theater, I don’t want people to think my movie is like The Human Centipede, it’s nothing like that. People watch the craziest, most gruesome shit on TV all the time, Nasty Baby is pretty soft for the kind of content out there. It’s not my intention to shock people just for the sake of it, the movie has a moral intention, I’m making people feel morally confused and torn.
I thought of it as an allegory for gentrification, how millennials try to remove the ugly parts of society.
I was not necessarily thinking about gentrification, I was more concerned about the storytelling, I feel all the politics the movie carries have more to do with what’s going on now, for me it was always more of a slow build thriller that contains this element, but it wasn’t a political statement about gentrification. Politics are intrinsic to life, but I wasn’t trying to make a political movie.
From Catalina Saavedra in The Maid, to Kristen Wiig in Nasty Baby I like how you use actors usually regarded as comedians and have them in serious, powerful roles. What elements about them catch your eye in the way they don’t seem to catch other filmmakers’ mind?
When I met Kristen I liked her so much as a friend that I wanted to be with her in a room pretending we were going to have a baby together, I was not dissecting her performances on YouTube trying to see what she could do. It was the human connection that made me want to put her in the film.
What was your relationship like with DP Sergio Armstrong? He must’ve had to direct you in some scenes, right?
This is the fourth film I’ve made with him and I brought him along for the same reason: he has a really good eye for bad acting, so I wanted to have him on set because he would never hesitate to point out if I was making an ass of myself. He’s also such an easygoing person to work with, not precious at all. When you’re shooting a movie on a tight budget and schedule, he’s great to be with. He never has a long face.
Nasty Baby essentially sums up the circle of life, people die and people are born all the time, and it also has some very Dostoevskian elements about the meaning of existence, is mortality something you spend a lot of time thinking about?
(Laughs) I love this question. Yeah, I’m always thinking about it. I think about it in many different ways, from doing meditation to trying other Westernized practices, I have mortality present 24/7, but I try to live with death poking me on the shoulder constantly.
Do you think of your art as a way to gain immortality or is it more about having fun till you get to the end?
Yeah, it’s more like destructing myself till I get to the end, because sometimes art isn’t even fun. That’s a good question, I don’t really care so much about the stuff that I do, but about the process of making it. If I have to pick between a or b to answer your question, I’ll go with b. I don’t care what happens to my things when I die.
Nasty Baby opens in theaters on October 23.
