AMERICAN ZOMBIE director and co-writer Grace Lee was kind enough to chew the fat with Arbogast on Film about her new movie and her relationship to the Undead.
Arbogast: Movie critics are often accused of having their minds made up before they see a movie and writing a negative review to fit. As you know from my write-up of AMERICAN ZOMBIE, I was all set to hate the thing... and yet within a minute or two of the first frame, I was taken in. How many times have you heard that story?
Grace Lee: I haven't heard that story that often but I'm aware of the sentiment. You just have to go to the MySpace page trailer comments to see how many potential haters there are.
Arbogast: You say "potential haters" as if we all have a hate virus dormant within us, waiting to become active… as in AMERICAN ZOMBIE, where the R428 virus exists in a latent state until violent death triggers resurrection.
Grace Lee: People take their understanding and knowledge of zombies very seriously and get offended if what's presented doesn't gel with their preconceived notions of the Undead.
Arbogast: Shouldn't zombies break the rules?
Grace Lee: Exactly. I find it amusing as it provides a great set-up for the narrative premise of the film. What if you were a zombie who didn't fit in with the flesh-eating monsters known in popular culture? Marginalized and misunderstood yet again! With THE GRACE LEE PROJECT I got a lot of similar comments regarding that film - people thinking it would be pretty superficial but then getting sucked into the story and the journey and then loving the movie.
Austin Basis as skate punk zombie Ivan in AMERICAN ZOMBIE.
Arbogast: The filmmaker Larry Fessenden talks about his movies being "tweeners," caught in a limbo between genre films and what is perceived to be more serious-minded fare. Do you feel AMERICAN ZOMBIE might fall between audiences?
Grace Lee: I actually see the movie having a lot of different audiences... fans of documentaries, art house films, horror, zombies, even Asian American cinema. There have been people who come just because they liked THE GRACE LEE PROJECT. I think it's definitely on the radar of hardcore zombie or horror movie fans like yourself, who may have the highest expectations. On the other hand, because it's a 'documentary' / comedy, it also has appealed to the person who rarely watches horror or zombie movies and wants to learn something about them. The extra distance provided by the documentary format is what makes it intriguing to them...or so I've been told.
Jane Edith Wilson looking for love in all the wrong places - cemeteries- in AMERICAN ZOMBIE.
Arbogast: Implicit in AMERICAN ZOMBIE moreso than in a lot of horror movies that just want to prolong the Romero Party is the notion of social death that is the raison d'être of Caribbean voodoo, in which someone who has proven themselves problematic is made an un-person. The allusion to George Orwell shouldn't be glossed over, as Orwell had the revolutionaries of Animal Farm whisper about cannibalism among their brethren and shortly before his death Orwell himself was lashing out at what he called "big cannibal critics." And in his will he stipulated that he wanted to be cremated... as if he were afraid he might come back!
Grace Lee: Wow, this is getting deep.
Arbogast: Did you do much research into voodoo and the more (I guess you could say) classical use of zombies?
Grace Lee: We did some research into voodoo and Caribbean zombies. We read The Serpent and the Rainbow and some other texts just for reference and to see what the literature out there was. We also basically created our own history of zombies, for "Rodrigo Weiss, zombie scholar."
Wim Wenders hearts Grace Lee even though she makes cheap horror movies.
Arbogast: As a horror lifer, I'm intrigued by the idea of a genre outsider getting this idea for a movie involving zombies and immersing herself in the subject over probably what was a fairly short amount of time. You have said you were familiar with the Romero "dead" films but were you familiar with them as socio-political agit-prop or just as spooky entertainment?
Grace Lee: Both. But I watched them first as entertaining zombie movies a while back either at
Arbogast: You being you, I wouldn't have been surprised if your exposure to those films was entirely within the context of a sociology class. But then I'm getting used to being wrong about Grace Lee.
Grace Lee: You're not alone.
Arbogast: Final questions. Short list your favorite documentarians.
Grace Lee: There are too many, but off the top of my head, I always get inspired by these guys: Werner Herzog, Kazuo Hara, Pennebaker and Hegedus, Michael Moore and Borat Sagdiyev.Arbogast: Who wrote the knock-knock joke?
Grace Lee: The screenwriters get credit for that.
Arbogast: When Grace told John she loved him was she telling the truth?
Grace Lee: Yes, although she did not realize that saying so would come back to haunt her.
Grace Lee and other AMERICAN ZOMBIE personnel will return to the Laemmle Sunset 5 for another screening and Q&A tomorrow, April 1st, at 7:30 pm.
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1 Arbogasps:
Excellent interview. You and Grace have successfully heightened my anticipation for seeing this movie now.
But even more exciting I now know your identity for sure. After mentioning Orwell several times, its' now obvious: You're Christopher Hitchens.
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