The Funhouse interview: Marina de Van and Bertrand Bonello (on Jean-Pierre Leaud)

I’m very happy to revisit the interviews done for the Funhouse TV show, as they often involve people who are honest to a fault (as is the case with the first subject here) and other times shed light on not only the interview subject’s work, but that of their colleagues (as is the case with the second).

Marina de Van is an actress-filmmaker best known to American “arthouse” aficionados for her terrific work in films by Francois Ozon (See the Sea, Sitcom, and the script for the very moving Under the Sand). She’s written and directed three features as of this writing (the second, Don’t Look Back, has come out on DVD in the U.S.; the third remains unreleased).

Her first feature, In My Skin, is a fascinating and very disturbing character study that focuses on a woman (played by de Van) who is “losing control” of her body. As a filmmaker, she offers up some impressively stylish scenes (that owe a bit to both Cronenberg and Bunuel) and a few quite harrowing ones in which her character, feeling alienated from herself in the extreme, begins to cut herself. When I interviewed her in 2003, upon the film’s NYC debut, I asked her about this aspect of the film. Her bluntness was quite refreshing:

Bertrand Bonello had a big arthouse success recently with House of Pleasure, but that was not his first piece of cinematic erotica. His 2001 film The Pornographer is an extremely well-acted character study that includes one hardcore sex scene that made certain the film would never appear on “arts cable” in the U.S. (to think, it was only a few years ago when we did still have such a thing).

The film starred the great Jean-Pierre Leaud, perfectly cast as a former radical filmmaker who has turned to commercial sex cinema. He has several superb scenes in the film, particularly a final monologue delivered to a reporter (Catherine Mouchet). I asked Bonello in my 2002 interview with him to talk about his motivation for casting Leaud in the film and what the “New Wave” icon was really like in person. I was fascinated by his answer:

The Funhouse interview: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Gerrit Graham

There are a number of interviews that I’ve featured on the Funhouse TV show that have fallen through the cracks in terms of Net exposure. I’m aiming in the next few weeks to get clips from these chats onto that nefarious (see below) Net-nexus, YouTube. Below are two such items, one from an interview that hasn’t previously been online and one that was online and had a “worldwide block” (!) put on it by the morons at a major movie studio owned by the Murdoch Empire.

The first interview is with the charming and talented actor-author Kathryn Leigh Scott, best known for starring in Dark Shadows (the classic daytime gothic series, not the recent Tim Burton film that has already faded from memory).

In the Eighties, Ms. Scott became an independent publisher with the company Pomegranate Press. Here she speaks about the moment when Dark Shadows was transformed into a “horror soap”:

The second clip is one that was previously on YouTube and received tens of thousands of hits. The first time I uploaded it, I appended to it a 45-second clip from the film we’re discussing, The Phantom of the Paradise, that illustrated what Mr. Graham was talking about. This 45-second sliver made the Kopyright Kops at Twentieth-Century Fox, the studio that owns and distributes the film, put a “worldwide ban” on the clip.

Two facts make this a mega-moronic move: first, several other clips from the film are on YT and have stayed up for years at a time (including a ten-minute chunk of the film’s rock-opera segment); second, the clip provides promotion for, and background information about, the film.

Then again, Fox has chosen to release this hardcore cult film on DVD in the U.S. with NO extras, whereas there’s a full-length documentary about the film (in English) on the French DVD, as well as other supplements. So, in essence, they care about the film enough to ban my interview clip, but not enough to provide it with a proper DVD release….

The interview took place on the premises of the Chiller Theatre convention in 2006.