While there is a beauty in the decision to come out and live as one’s truest self, there is a certain horror within the process as well, a horror that many choose to ignore. Our media is oversaturated with harmonious and tender coming out stories that are easily digestible, refusing to expound upon the potential dark side of coming out.
“Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii: Junior Ghosts- Premorphic Drift” exists to diametrically oppose those narratives, and remind us that the gentle, cis-centered filmmaking that’s been widely accepted isn’t a universal truth.
This film is the latest installment in filmmaker Louise Weard’s queer anthology series. In this chapter, we follow Izzy (Avalon Fast), a suicide hotline operator in an inauspicious relationship with her partner Travis (Henri Gillespi). When Travis begins to transition, starts presenting femme, and takes the name Tiffany, Izzy’s discontentment in her relationship morphs into a refusal and rejection of Tiffany’s transition.
Unflinching and unrestrained in it’s approach, “Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii: Junior Ghosts- Premorphic Drift” confronts the audience’s comfortability and morals, while also pushing the viewer’s empathetic bandwidth. Unfiltered and agonizingly honest performances from Gillespi and Fast combine with Weard’s progressive approach to the horror genre to create an unforgettable cinematic experience.
Weard’s series has quickly become a cultural phenomenon, capturing the attention of fans for it’s intrepid approach to filmmaking and queer storytelling. This newest chapter played in Chicago as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival’s OutLook program.
Cinema Femme had the honor to sit down with Weard and Fast to discuss experimental filmmaking, the director-actor relationship, and how empathy played a role in the film.
Starting off simple, I’d love to hear about both of your journeys as creatives. How did you begin your career?
Louise Weard: I started in Vancouver, Canada. I came out here basically pursuing a desire to make crazy horror movies and had met a lot of people who were doing it out here who said, “Come out, the water’s warm,” so to speak. And so I came and got engaged in that community. And then through a lot of crazy happenstance and working on film sets and all sorts of stuff, I somehow stuck in this industry for the last 12 years. And now we have “Castration Movie.”
Avalon Fast: I shot my first feature like out of high school in Vancouver called “Honeycomb.” I made it with my friends. We took it to a bunch of festivals. We did Slamdance, and Fantasia. Fantasia is where I met Louise. After that, I made “Camp,” which was my budget feature. And then somewhere in between that and making my third feature, “Drinking and Driving,” I was involved in shooting “Castration Movie.” I think the first time we hung out, maybe I heard about it, and the second time we hung out, I was shooting part of it. And now I get to have a lead role in it.
Louise, this film is the third in a series you’ve created. Tell me about the inspiration behind the trilogy, and how you got the idea for this third instillation in particular?
LW: I think of “Castration Movie” as all one movie that we’re just kind of having to release one part at a time just as they’re done. I think that with this one, the chapter that makes up this current film is very much so inspired by the sort of liberal feel-good coming out narratives that are very predominant in film festival culture and stuff like that. That’s where you have the sort of perspective of the queer trans persons coming out really being about the emphasis on the family members coming to some sort of like greater understanding of, you know, of themselves and their ability to empathize with the poor trans person or whatever. So I kind of want to twist that on its head and make something that took that structure but kind of made it into like the evil thing that I see it as much more directly.
So the film is shot on a handheld camera. For both of you, what were some benefits as well as some challenges to shooting on a camera that lacks a lot of control?
AF: I think for me I have this moment I remember very specifically. When we shot the majority of that footage, it was really within— it was like 2 days. On the first day, Louise and Hazel come over and we’re talking through the scene and there was this moment where I was like, “Okay, I want to do it right now.” And I was just like amped up and like, I actually haven’t, as an actor, felt that— it was like a foreign feeling to me. I was really excited. And then within 5 minutes, we were shooting, which doesn’t exist unless the system is so simple, like ours. From the moment there’s energy and inspiration, we can be shooting moments later. That just doesn’t exist in any other setup I’ve ever seen. I do think that that is why I was able to give the performance I give in the film.
LW: I don’t think there’s any drawbacks to it. If we were trying to make something that was more formalist with like, you know, it would just be a completely different movie. This is what this movie needs. And so I think that that’s kind of…it’s kind of a perfect style for what these movies are.
One element I liked the most in this film was the lack of a traditional score. Instead, there’s a sort of low humming throughout the film as well as an emphasis on natural noise. What was behind that decision?
LW: It is trying to not use these crutches that we’re so used to in contemporary cinema. I think that what “Castration Movie” does is very oppositional to the sort of like house styles of big studio movies that we’re so used to, all this very glossy presentation. Even in our independent films, you know, everyone’s trying to make the next A24 kind of lookalike, right?
So what I wanted to do is something completely different and something that says, “Hey, we don’t need all those tools to tell a good story.” So we look at “Castration Movie” as like this cinema of subtraction where it’s like, “Let’s take away an HD camera. Let’s take away music.” And we just kind of go through that list and think about it. And it’s not like there’s no music in the film. We don’t lean on score because it wouldn’t make any sense for a score to be in these spaces that we’re occupying. But we do lean into some cathartic music in a montage-type nature or in a scene where it makes sense. So we still do use those tools, but just much more sparingly and intentionally.
The film is very confrontational, like in the up close shots, as well as focusing on what most people would consider a transphobic character. How did you develop that tension and confrontational lens in the film?
AF: The nature of the tension and the way that Henri and I are able to argue is that way. I think Louise picks things about people that can be exaggerated or twisted, but they are things that are, like, inherent to a person’s nature. I’ve thought about this a lot because my morals have nothing to do with the way that I view the world in the film. It’s nowhere similar to this character whatsoever. So like, what are the things about me that were picked for this role? I do think that it could have been the relationship that Henri and I have. We were so comfortable with each other that we were able to and did often have these conflicts and they would play out in these ways, which to shoot it was traumatic. I mean, like, you go through an experience like that, but you catch it on camera and then you have all these experiences of watching it in the cinema with your friends and with fans. And it’s interesting. But I think where did that come from? I don’t know. It’s not something that we looked at. This is a concept and an idea that was brought to us. I think that that tension and the way that Henri and I handle conflict existed already, and it was just about being able to recreate it for Louise.
LW: I mean, these are exploitation movies in the sense that I’m a very bad person who exploits my best friends to do all this stuff for me.
AF: At the same time, neither Henri and I ever do anything we don’t want to do. So it’s very exciting to us.
LW: It’s all of us kind of agreeing to have a bad time together.
AF: And I think that- I mean, we’re choosing to exploit ourselves. And I think that’s interesting.
LW: There is something about it where the second we start rolling, it becomes this thing I’ve never really experienced on any other film sets, really. I’m getting exactly what I want to out of this scene, but there’s some, like, ephemeral quality I can never place on how we got there. It’s just circumstantial in this way that’s just like very hard to pin down. I think the best answer I’ve come up with so far is I just work with people who are exceptionally talented and they’re doing all the work and I just kind of hit play on the camera.
AF: That’s being a good director.
I would love to hear a bit more about the script. I can’t imagine this is the type of film where every line was written out on paper.
AF: Yeah, I’ve never ever seen a script for this film.
LW: There is the idea of a script.
AF: Oh, good. Yeah, I’ve never seen it.
LW: I always say that what we do on “Castration Movie” is collaborative writing, right? The process is I come in with the idea for the scene. I know what we need to do to get from point A to B to C. And then we sit down, we have a conversation about it, and we block it out. We really talk as a group about how to do it. What’s great about that process is, for example, in this film, Avalon and Henri are so deep in these characters and thinking about these characters that, you know, if I say, “Oh, and then we’ll get to this line,” and then Avalon or Henri’s like, “Oh wait, wouldn’t it be like better if I said this?” We’re not like glued to this script we’re trying to study. We can all have a conversation about how to get to the purest version of the scene.
So through that process, we end up with the most perfect iteration of how to get through a sequence. I would say it’s a very collaboratively written process. Then we just say, “Okay, time to shoot,” and we do one take. The freedom is there for the cast to take it in a different direction if they’re feeling it in the moment. I see this all as so collaborative. The process for these movies really wouldn’t work if we weren’t aiming to make sure that everyone feels like there’s something very authentic about what they’re doing in the moment.
The film also tackles the concept of autonomy and choice, from both sides of the situation. What did you do to navigate that conversation in the film?
LW: I actually don’t think choice is the main thing. I would say that with all of “Castration Movie,” I think that one of the biggest questions that we keep coming back to is this idea of empathy.
It’s these scenes of people in rooms who are talking past each other because they just have this inability to understand or feel for each other. That causes things to just get progressively worse, which is how I kind of feel it’s like to be in the modern world. That’s my sort of diagnosis for everything wrong. I wanted to make a horror movie of language that’s just having to watch a bunch of people who just can never understand the other person. I guess that there’s an element to that that we could choose to listen, for sure. I think that would be like really nice. I think for me, like understanding and empathy would be the main theme you could take out of this movie especially. You’re just hoping the whole time that these two characters can sit down and have a mature adult conversation about their needs and their feelings. But, they’re talking past each other the whole time.
AF: Like Louise was saying, I obviously like drew from a lot of parts of myself for this role, and then for one part of it specifically, like nothing at all. There’s like one very significant part of this that’s completely made up. I think any time I’ve performed in somebody’s film, I’m trying to pull from real places. I think it was interesting when you’re talking about choice. I kind of had this thought that I don’t think that Izzy ever looked at the situation like there was a choice to be made. She leads entirely with her first instinct, which is fear. When you’re scared, everything else kind of goes out the window. I think it’s when you’re in a state of survival and high fear, your ability to empathize with other people’s feelings is completely gone. I think that that’s true for myself. There just was no conversation. From the moment I got scared, there was no coming back from that place. I continued to get more and more scared because things were continuing to go in a direction that I couldn’t understand.
LW: Most of this was shot in order, with only a few exceptions, over a handful of days so we could really stay in that emotional ride as a group. I think that for that character, what was so important was I wasn’t telling Avalon to go research TERF ideology or anything. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want that at all. If there was anything that we had to hit on that was a specific TERF cultural thing, I would just feed Avalon those lines before the scene or those things I wanted Avalon to hit so that you didn’t have to go do any Googling. I didn’t want you doing research for this role in that way.
But I think what that caused was it meant that that journey had to be something that was like so much more subtle and human and right here, right now within Izzy’s life. The way that she attaches all of this fear of change onto Tiffany for the transness. If instead the partner had cheated on Izzy or something, we could have seen a completely different way that this played out, you know? It’s a very human thing to find that you need to get out of a relationship that’s not working. But then introducing this complication of anti-trans ideology and the way that these wires get crossed becomes kind of the crux of why we’re telling this specific story instead of something else. I think that that’s what makes it so exciting to work with the whole team on a project like this is like, because of that added level to the story we’re telling. It’s very dark, but it’s saying something that I think all of us could relate to as a human thing of knowing what it’s like to go through a bad breakup, you know? And that’s where you start with the story. And then we add all this other stuff that makes it a lot more thematically complicated.
It seems that you’ve really found the right audience for these films, and they’ve become kind of a cult classic. What has has the journey been like finding the audience for these films and receiving positive feedback? And, what does it mean to you to have your film play at CIFF?
LW: You know, we got lucky. We made “Castration Movie” and somehow got it finished thanks to the work of all my amazing friends. We basically were like, “Well, I don’t think we’re gonna get the whole like 30 hours done right now, but let’s put the first little bit out and see what people think.” So we got that finished, put it online, and it was thanks to a collection of people who had been following my work for a long time on Letterboxd, some of my really good film critic friends who took a chance to watch it. All of those people started saying, “Hey, this is really cool. Someone else should watch this thing.” It kind of became that exponential audience growth from there, where now, only 2 years later, it’s one of the most popular micro-budget indie films of all time. I think we’ve somehow cracked the code on just getting a bunch of cool people together who are extremely talented and working on art that we love. And thankfully, the audience came to find that.
Chicago is where it all started. Just to drive home the Chicago connection, it was thanks to showing the last film I had directed at the Music Box, which is a thing I made back in 2013 and 2014, and it never came out. We ended up showing it as part of Music Box of Horrors, through a very crazy story, and it came together. It was while showing that film there that I realized I had to make another movie and started to work on this like a month later. So the Chicago connection has always been very strong for this work.
AF: I was busy working on somebody else’s movie, so I actually didn’t get to attend either of these screenings, which is very sad for me. But I’ll be back at the Music Box for the newest chapter. So that’ll be cool.
LW: That’s the great thing is because of how close the connection is to Chicago, especially with this project, we are going to be world premiering the next chapter at the Music Box on December 2nd.
For more information about “Castration Movie 3/5 Year of the Hyaena”, visit http://www.musicboxtheatre.com
This film was screened as a part of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival
