INQ: Who is Lee Demarbre?

LEE: I'm a french newfie. My mother was a newfie, my father is a frog, so I've got no hope in hell. Nothing's really happened in my life, you know, like a lot of artists who are taken seriously have something going on their life that gives them a voice, something special that they can bring to their art that makes it really deep. I've got none of that. That's why I make stupid movies for teenaged boys. I'm inspired by my love for movies. Nothing's happened yet; maybe something's going to happen to me. Maybe my son is going to come out of the closet some day. Right now I don't really have anything to say, but I like movies too much not to make them.

INQ: Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter is such a great film. Looking back, what are your favourite things about it?

LEE: I think back with fondness of all the film festivals we attended, and the awards it picked up, and the filmmaking friends I met all around the world. I really liked shooting the film. We spent two years filming that movie. The way I make films, Ian starts writing the script, I start shooting before he's finished writing, and while I'm shooting I'm editing, so there's no fine line between pre-production, production, and post-roduction. It all sort of happens at once. So it takes an average of two years to make any movie, but we're always constantly in production during that two years. Thinking back, I didn't set out to make a vampire movie, but that's the kind of audience that seems to appreciate it most. If I had to redo it, I might have focused a little more on the vampirism, and maybe made it a little more sexy. Making a feature-length film was fun, editing it was fun, but I would have to say the film festivals were the best part of it for me.

INQ: Phil Caracas runs on awesome. When did you decide he was the perfect man to star in your films?

LEE: Good question, because he wasn't my first idea for Harry Knuckles. I remember when I graduated from IFCO program and learned everything about how to shoot on 16mm film. I graduated in '96 and we started shooting Harry Knuckles in October of '96. And I would say in September I didn't have Phil pegged as Harry Knuckles; I had this other guy in the role. But then I started working at the Bytown and started working with Phil, and we started hanging out at bars after work, and I realized that I didn't want to hire my friends anymore. I kept hiring friends, kids, children, in movies. That's the one thing about young people who make movies: they have their friends in there. There are always kids playing adult roles. And here's Phil, he's got a lot of character, and said he was really inspired to act because he met Don McKellar, and hung out one night, and Don McKellar told him he should be in front of a camera. So he was inspired to act, and I thought, you know, I'm going to ask Phil. Because there's something about Phil that's, you know, he's lived a life, or, you know, that you can't get from a teenager.

INQ: Right. He's gritty.

LEE: Yeah, gritty. He'd hate for me to say this, but there's something like what you see in Harrison Ford, Steve McQueen, or Paul Newman where you don't need a lot of character build-up to get it.

INQ: When did you first come up with the character of Harry Knuckles?

LEE: Well, it's funny, because Harry Knuckles, when we started shooting in October '96, Harry Knuckles was not the name of the movie, nor was it the name of the character. We were in production for a year and we didn't have a title. I just wanted to film action scenes, and cut it like a Hong Kong action movie if I could. We would shoot every weekend for two years, and then I asked Ian to write a narrative. And then I thought of the title. I looked at my own hand and I said, at first we were going to call him Spanish Fly, but I said we should call him Harry Knuckles, because there was a really good American exploitatin film in the '70s called Bare Knuckles. So what if, instead of Bare Knuckles, we call him Harry Knuckles. Then I filmed the scene with the wooden boards. I shot that last. It's the only time in the movie where he actually has hair on his knuckles.

INQ: Some of your plot devices are so bizarre, like a cyborg bigfoot who needs a radioactive pearl necklace to function. Where do you come up with this stuff?

LEE: That particular idea has a lot to do with the title coming before the movie. I wanted to make a movie called "Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace" which would sound maybe like a porno but it isn't. Like "Harry Knuckles and the Golden Shower" is another one. So how do you make a movie called "Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace" not a porno. You make it about a real pearl necklace. A valuable pearl necklace; it gets stolen. Why does it get stolen? I always wanted to make a movie with the bigfoot, or more or less the bionic bigfoot from the Six Million Dollar Man movies, where the bionic bigfoot was a recurring character on the show. And I thought he'd be a really good villain in a movie. What if he stole the pearl necklace? But why would he steal the pearl necklace? So Ian invented this whole thing about how these pearls were in the museum in Nagasaki when the Hydrogen bomb dropped, it became radioactive, and the bigfoot uses that to rejuvenate his powers. So all these ideas work kind of backwards, and they're kind of convoluted, and the more convoluted the better, sometimes. Like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, a movie about vampires who use lesbian skin transplants to live during the daylight. We just thought of the most absurd thing we could think of.

INQ: You managed to get Lloyd Kaufman to play The Man In The Hat. What was it like directing one of your heros?

LEE: It was great! We did it right here, right. He always said that he wanted to be in one of my movies, and he didn't want any money to be in it. And he was working on his documentary, "Make Your Own Damn Movie" and the making of Harry Knuckles is a 45 minute documentary on that DVD. Which is pretty cool. He was really easy to work with. I just wanted him to sit there and be Lloyd Kauffman, and I think he felt a little disappointed that his character wasn't wild enough. Originally he was supposed to play a man in diapers in the trunk of a car. He was going to play a gimp, which is a big wild Lloyd Kauffman thing for him to do, but by the time he finally got to Ottawa, all I had left for him was The Man In The Hat and I think he might have felt disappointed that it was such a low-key character. But then he said, what if I have money in my mouth, and every time I talk, money fell out of my mouth. And we were like, okay, this is a Harry Knuckles film, let's do it. Look at these floors. This is the new carpet. You should have seen the carpet that was here before that. Picture this but a hundred times more gum and - can you imagine what's on the floor of the Dominion Tavern? And Lloyd Kauffman would spit out the toonies and loonies on to the floor, and every time, pick them up and put them back in his mouth. And we shot all day long. It was really fun, and I have a lot of respect for him.

INQ: The new 2-disc set features about eight hours of content if you include the commentary tracks. What special features are included?

LEE: I'm a big fan of the documentary, which I had nothing to do with. I asked my good friend Casey to do Pearls of Wisdom: Harry Knuckles Unclasped. I'm a big fan of the documentary, mainly because I'm a big fan of Peter Piening. He did the documentary of the Jesus DVD, and I thought fans would demand another documentary by him. So I really like Peter and I like watching him work. We were shooting Bzzzzzzz while we were doing most of the documentary, so I was always off directing Bzzzzzzz while he was doing these interviews. And I find Peter is funnier when I'm not around, and if you notice when you're watching the documentary, any time he's interviewing me or I'm around, he's really nervous. You can really tell, it's funny. I also really like the fact that Bzzzzzzz is on the DVD, hidden, so you have to go searching for Bzzzzzzz our new short film. I really like the trailer for Bzzzzzzz, too. It's like a two minute trailer that I thought almost turned out better than the movie, because the music is so funny, it really feels like a Florida film from the sixties. The commentaries are funny, but censored; I ended up having to censor a lot of the cast commentary because Josh and Jeff went a little too crazy with some of the jokes. And then the deleted scenes. You know, most deleted scenes, when you're watching a movie on a DVD, it's like "I can see why they cut those out." Although the movie Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace I'll admit is too long as it is, there's one deleted scene that I wish was in the movie which is "Geeks and Chicks" which I didn't produce until recently for the DVD. I just kinda had it cut, and I looked at it, and it's like, I'm going to leave it out. But when I finally put all the dialogue in and the effects, I'm like, ah, it should be in the movie. But at least now there's a reason to watch the deleted scenes.

INQ: Speaking of Bzzzzzzz, tell us a bit about your latest film.

LEE: I made Bzzzzzzz as a digital video challenge. I was asked by the Digi60 film people to take part in a Digi60 challenge which is to make a movie in sixty days. You have to write it, shoot it, and completely edit it in sixty day period. And we did Bzzzzzzz really quick, like I had it finished before thirty days I think. The only thing that took so long were the digital effects.

INQ: Yeah, I can't believe you got it done in thirty days!

LEE: I had it edited in thirty days, and ready to go. The digital effects came down to the wire, I should say. I wanted to shoot it quick and have it done quick so we could spend the most time on the digital bees. Steve Legge started it, and Vince Tourangeau from Toronto finished it. It was neat, you know, it's the first time I've worked so seriously in the digital medium, and I have ICQ and my digital effects guy lives in Toronto, and I was ICQing him files and he'd send them back to me with bees in them. I was pretty amazed, I was like, ah digital cinema is kinda cool.

INQ: You pay homage to a B-movie tradition by having big boobies in this film. Why have you waited until Bzzzzzzz to bare your soul?

LEE: Well, you know, it's funny, I think a lot of my movies look like Russ Meyer movies, but without any nudity. I take a lot from Russ Meyer; I knew him a little bit, too. I try to shoot his films, and edit his films. But mostly I try to keep the pacing. I'm really impressed by how a lot happens really quick in a short amount of time. I always try to have mt scenes really short; have a lot of scenes in one movie, and really short scenes, and just fill up the movie like Russ Meyer would. So I felt like I was making Russ Meyer movies without any boobies. And there's a fan in Ottawa, by the name of Andrew Lapointe, and he really likes my movies, but he said to me one time, "You've got no nudity in your movies, and me and my friend are going to make a movie this summer and we're going to have nudity and we're going to beat you to the nipple." And I was like, whatever, at first it was like, okay I don't have any nudity, you know, it's never really bugged me before. But it bugged me when he said it, so I was like, okay, I've got to put tits in a movie. Just because I can't let this little kid beat me to the nipple. By the way, he never made that movie. But anyway I said okay, I'm going to put tits in Digi60. I wanted to too, because I wanted Digi60 to be a little more... have a little bit more... Like I went to the festival the year before and all the movies seemed like G movies, and I thought, there should have been at least one movie where there was swearing, or something. And the wife of the programmer hates gratuitous nudity, and I wanted to put it in just to piss her off. So I was trying to think, what's more gratuitous than a naked girl who has no dialogue in a scene and you keep cutting to her when you don't need to. So I found a couple of girls that were all very interesting, but Gabrielle had aspirations to be an actress, young girl, which I thought was important because I wanted people to really hate the mayor. Not only was he having sex on his wife, but it's a very young girl. And she looked good naked, I thought, so... She seems like a Russ Meyer girl, because she has this baby face, and big natural breasts.

INQ: You also have a radio show called Drunken Master on CKCU. How do you select what to review?

LEE: It's hard. I watch a lot of movies. I've watched over 520 this year. I've seen over 120 theatrical, and everything else I've seen on video. So when I go to prepare my show, a lot of people don't think it's prepared, but I do prepare. And I keep a diary of what I've watched, so I look at what I've watched recently. I just try to keep the show funny and entertaining, but I'm really interested in talking about the movies. Because there's all these shows on TV, like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, that are all entertainment shows, but they're not talking about entertainment. It's all gossip. It's all about who's dating who, who's cheating on who, who's anorexic, who's on drugs, what paparazzi just slammed into her, and I just hate all that gossip. So I make sure that our show is not about that, and that we talk about the movie. But you know, keep it fun and entertaining, because a lot of these shows are so pompous. It's just like, going to see movies is fun, guys; have fun talking about it.

INQ: What's the next project at Odessa Filmworks?

LEE: Hopefully in March and April we'll be in Jamaica filming Black Kissinger. And then hopefully in the spring or summer we'll be in Italy filming a documentary about a Mexican wrestler from Thunder Bay named Vampiro. He's the biggest thing in Lucha libre, which is Mexican wrestling. He tried to make it big in the WWE and failed, and he went to Mexico City and is the biggest thing in Lucha libre. All over the world, he's considered a god. He's kind of like what Jackie Chan was before he came to Hollywood; the biggest star in the world but no one knew him in North America. The final fight of the documentary, he wants to do this fight in Mexico City: a cage match, barbed wire instead of ropes, broken glass, thumb tacks all over, and he's going to strap the ring full of dynamite. He's done it once before, but it's a real risk, because it's real padlocks on the gate and it's real fighting, and it's like, we might capture his death, but that's what he wants it to be, he wants us to go all out like that.

INQ: What does Anna think of Daddy and his movies?

LEE: Anna listened to the show last week. She knows that I'm on the radio, and she sees me on TV in the documentaries and stuff. She knows who Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is, the posters, she knows who Harry Knuckles is, and she knows that Phil is Harry Knuckles. But I don't know if she really knows that I do that for a living. She's in Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace. I don't think I can really show her any of these movies. Maybe Aztec Mummy she can watch and the original Harry Knuckles. Maybe Leopard Lady, but how do explain to a little kid about gerbiling? Although Rayna, who plays Harry Knuckles' daughter in Harry Knuckles and the Curse of the Aztec Mummy, she's like, 10 or 11 and she's watched them. Bzzzzzzz might be a little bit too far. Like there's kids on a bus who make fun of retarded kids, and I'd hate for her to think that's okay. It was all about seeing pleasure in seeing these people finally dying. Bzzzzzzz might be the last one I show her at this point. Black Kissinger and the Vampiro movie might be fine, although I think there might be a lot of drug use in the Vampiro movie. Apparantly there's a big drug culture, and a lot of his friends are serious criminals in Mexico City, and he wants us to be all there for it, he wants us to be right in his face doing all that stuff.

INQ: How many atheists can you fit into a Jeep, anyway?

LEE: That's a good question. Five. And then you just keep shooting them coming out five at a time. We had thrity -they were mostly bouncers- but thirty guys came out that day, and we did five at a time from different angles, you know? We could've had both doors open at one end and I could have framed and just had them coming out. But I had to break up the fight, I couldn't choreograph- because everyone showed up and we hadn't met, we had nothing choreographed, so I had to break it up into groups of five. Because I didn't have all day to choreograph something with thirty people. It's funny, the atheist scene really stands out for a lot of people. Personally, it's one of my least favourite scenes in the movie, just because none of it was choreographed, so it was all sort of done on the fly, and I like to have things choreographed a little bit more than that. But maybe that's why people like it so much, because you can tell we were improvising.

INQ: That's awesome. Thanks, Lee.

LEE: Thank you!

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Many thanks to Lee Demarbre for an incredible interview, and congratuations on the birth of your son, Max.
Interviewed Dec. 30, 2005, by Victor Couwenbergh.

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