Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
I've already expressed my great love and affecting for THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, the tender-hearted tale of the love that can be shared between a doctor and his patients…whom he connects ass-to-mouth in the hopes of constructing a new lifeform with a single digestive system. Having watched horror films for as long as I can remember, I know how to spot when a director is filming something that represents his own personal fears and phobias. And it seemed clear to me that writer-director Tom Six hates doctors, insects, and the very idea of bodily trauma caused by surgery. Welcome to the club, Tom.
Born in The Netherlands, Six has managed to construct one of the most sickeningly enjoyable mad scientist films since Stuart Gordon's THE RE-ANIMATOR. THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (subtitled FIRST SEQUENCE) is not his first film, but what he'd done prior to it has no bearing on the work he's doing today, and will continue to do with the sequel (FULL SEQUENCE), set to begin shooting in June (now there's a set visit I'd like to make). When I first saw THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE at Fantastic Fest last September, I was struck by how strangely normal, even giddy, Six was as a person talking about the atrocities he films. He has a very analytical approach to his work, and what's he's done goes beyond exploitation. He's actually taken the time to think and deconstruct the thoughts in his head that led to this movie. I think that will show in our talk.
Soon, I'll post an interview with one of the actors in THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, the German superstar Dieter Laser, who plays one of modern horror's greatest villains, Dr. Heiter. But for now, please enjoy Tom Six…
Tom Six: Hello.
Capone: Hello, Tom. How are you?
TS: Fine, thanks.
C: What is your take on mad scientist movies in general, ranging anywhere from METROPOLIS to FRANKENSTEIN to RE-ANIMATOR? What were some of the films in that genre that you were most inspired by, and, beyond those, what inspired you to write this film.
TS: Yeah, sure. The films that most inspired me are the films of David Cronenberg, especially his early work, like RABID and SHIVERS. His films are really an influence. I love Japanese horror films, especially from Takashi Miike like AUDITION and VISITOR Q. He made some really strange stuff.
C: Oh yeah. I’m a huge fan of those movies too.
TS: Yeah, they are incredible. I think these two, in the cinema, these two are the most influential for me.
C: Okay. Cronenberg certainly had a few twisted scientists in his films as well.
TS: Yes.
C: And lots of emphasis on manipulating and defacing the flesh.
TS: I love it.
[Both Laugh]
C: What was the process of finding Dieter [Laser]. Had you written that character to be German, or was he just the best actor that you found for that part?
TS: Oh no, when I was younger and in school in Holland, you learned a lot about the second World War and Germans, and so I read a lot about it and the notorious Nazi doctors from the era. When I was writing the script and I had a surgeon in there, for me, it had to be a German, Nazi-like doctor. I can’t imagine any surgeon scarier than a Nazi.
C: You used to see those things as a kid?
TS: Oh yeah, you learn at school a lot of World War II, because Germany of course invaded Holland as one of the first countries. A lot of people talk about it, older people and everybody is still really upset by it, especially older people. So you hear so many things about the war, and it’s kind of fascinating. Of course, it’s not my generation, but it’s fascinating somehow, and you read a lot about it and yeah. I don’t like medical things, so my absolute nightmare would be being operated on by Nazi doctors or something.
C: That is a common fear, like people have nightmares about surgery being forced upon them. That’s a very common phobia, I think.
TS: Oh yeah, with people putting a knife in you and stuff. That’s also why I came up with the idea of the surgeon explaining the operation by breaking it down for them, because all surgeons do that to patients. Before they go into the operation, they usually draw a little thing of what’s about to happen, but that’s so incredibly frightening.
C: It’s just so funny, because you are absolutely right. He’s still a surgeon; he’s still going to explain the surgery before he butchers these people.
[Both Laugh]
TS: I like that aspect a lot.
C: Let’s go back to Dieter for a second; tell me how you found him. You said he’s actually a pretty major actor in Germany, right?
TS: Yeah yeah. I always call him an “acting dinosaur,” because he’s done almost like 40 films and he does a lot of heavy plays in Berlin in the big theaters as well on stage, and I saw a couple of DVDs of him, and I always thought when I was writing the script “This guy has to play Dr. Heiter,” and I had no other people in mind. So yeah we contacted him and we flew to Berlin, and I explained to him in very much detail the entire script and he absolutely adored it. He loved it. He’s just as crazy as I am, so we made a great duo, and the deal was done in like an hour or something.
C: Did you explain the film to him, or did he read the script?
TS: What I did, first I explained the film by talking through the whole script, and then of course we gave him the script so he could read it at home, but I wanted to tell him, because I wanted to see what his reaction would be when I told him all of this crazy stuff. If he would have said right away, “Oh this is terrible. There’s nothing for me,” then it was useless, but he was listening and enjoying every minute of it.
C: Wow. It looks like he is. Did you also have a fascination, beyond the surgery, with just anatomy and insects in particular?
TS: For me myself, I hate insects, but that also makes them fascinating of course. There’s nothing more fun than going to a zoo and see all of those nasty little spiders and centipedes and it’s the most fascinating thing, I think, but I hate it as well. The human body I think of a little bit like David Cronenberg, human beings have only a body, and you have no idea what’s going on inside and it’s pounding and it’s flowing and everything is going on in there. It’s a scary idea, I think.
C: So you've made a movie about a few of the things that you fear the most.
TS: Yes.
C: So we are watching your therapy sessions basically on the screen, is that it?
TS: [laughs] I think these elements are very scary, but I think they scare lots and lots of people. It’s almost it’s own genre in the horror world I think with operations and stuff. To make it like, of course, you have the maniacs running around with an axe or something, but that’s not really my thing. I think when there’s intelligence involved with doctors, for example, it’s much more frightening for me.
C: Speaking of which, both the poster and the trailer for the film have the tagline “100 percent medically accurate.” How do you know that’s true?
TS: I made the human centipede drawings, and then I really wanted… The surgeon had to do the operation right. I really wanted a real operation, so I went to a real surgeon in Holland and at first he said “Oh no, I don’t want to do this. It’s against my medical oath,” but he loves movies, so after a while I tried to convince him, of course, he said “Well okay, I'll help you. Film is art,” and then he made this very detailed operation for me with every step, so every drawing you see in the film is actually a medical drawing.
He said “If I would do this operation, I would do it like this,” because if you just attach a mouth to an anus, you could rip it off. But he said “If you make these incisions in the buttocks and make those incisions in the [facial] cheeks and you combine that, it will be very firm. All of these are his ideas, so it’s very crazy. He said “I could perform this operation in a real hospital, so I could make a human centipede.”
C: So the extra skin on the sides of the face, that’s for fortifying the connection then.
TS: Definitely, they are little flaps that are coming out of the buttocks, yes.
C: I remember seeing this film at Fantastic Fest, a guy sitting near me walked out near the end and I thought “Well, he didn’t like it” and then I saw him outside, and he said it’s one of his favorite films of that festival, but he just couldn’t handle it. What have been some of your favorite fan reactions?
TS: The most crazy one was when we were doing this test viewing when we were editing the film in Holland, and we invited all kinds of people, horror lovers, but also people who like romantic comedies, just to see the impact, because nobody knew about the film then yet and nobody knew what they were about to see. There were a few women that left the audience and left the theater crying. I walked behind them to see what was going on, they were so afraid of me, even to look at me. It was so incredibly strange, because the film of course is nothing real, so it’s really strange. In Spain for example, there was a guy that from the beginning to the end he was only laughing, laughing laughing, crying of laughter, so that’s an incredibly different reaction.
C: Where was that first test screening?
TS: In Holland.
C: Okay. I’m also curious in terms of the doctor, let’s talk about him again, did you ever really think much about his motivations or goals.? Is he building up to something with these experiments or was it a… It didn’t seem like it was a sexual thing for him, it was strictly about the art of the surgery. Is he building to something like in his head, or does that not even matter?
TS: For me, the most evil things are if they are purely out of selfishness and there’s no motivation at all, like a miserable childhood or something. This guy just used to separate Siamese twins and now he wants to create something when he is retired and he just wants to see, because he hates human beings, if he can make something out of it and do this operation and use this centipede construction as some kind of dog companion almost. He’s like a god he thinks.
C: I was going to say he is creating a new form of life in a way, so I did think that he had this real serious God complex.
TS: Yeah he is, definitely. You’ve also got to talk to Dieter?
C: Yes.
TS: He can tell you all about it. He loves it.
C: The two actresses that you hired, you really seem to put them through hell in this film. How did you find them? It seems like there might have been a lot of people who thought they wanted to be in it and then found out what it was about and ran screaming.
TS: [laughs] Yeah, that was the hardest thing, to get beautiful young actresses that were very good actors, and we did the casting in New York and I showed the drawings I made of the Human Centipede, and so many actresses walked out, because they thought I was mad and didn’t want anything to do with me, so that was pretty hard, but the smart ones stayed and luckily very good ones as well.
C: They were good, yes.
TS: So I explained the story, just as I did with Dieter in very much detail, and then of course we had to put them on their hands and knees and be very close to an ass in front of them. Not every actress could do that. They couldn’t do it. They thought they could, but… We ended up with the great Ashlynn [Yennie] and Ashley [C. Williams], and what’s great about it is that a lot of young actresses only want to be pretty in movies. I asked them to be attached to an ass and be very ugly. I am very happy I’ve got these great girls, yeah.
C: You had made other films in Holland, but that this was going to be the breakthrough film and that’s why you made it in English. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Why did you think this was going to be the film, because this is your first horror film correct?
TS: Yeah. It’s my favorite genre, because you can really cross a lot of boundaries and you can really explore those territories, and in Holland I made two black comedies and a children’s film, because in Holland the market for horror films is not there. It’s a very, very small film market there and films in the Dutch language hardly every go out of the Netherlands. I always knew my first international film has to be a horror film, because internationally horror is very much appreciated everywhere and very popular also. I could then finally do the things I really would like to do.
C: It’s not a secret that you are about to embark on a sequel. I know you can’t say much about it, but what can you tell me about when you start shooting and if you can tell me anything about what the story will involve.
TS: Yeah sure. When I made the first one, I had so many more ideas I wanted to put in the story, but that wouldn’t have been good, because I first wanted the audience to get used to this basic sick idea and now in the second part, I can use all of my creative ideas and put them in the second one. I always envisioned a much larger human centipede, and so it’s going to be a centipede of 12 people, and we are going to shoot it in June in London, and we hope to have it finished and hope to show it to audiences at the end of this year with festivals. I don’t know yet, but that’s our goal.
C: Right. I don’t want to ruin anything, but is there a chance that Dieter could be in that film or do we not knoe yet
TS: Yeah, I can’t say that yet, because the big secret of course is if Dieter’s going to come back and in what form.
C: Okay. Where do you go from there? Are you liking the horror arena and the way the fans have sort of taken to this film, or are you going to try different things?
TS: No, no I also wrote a third script I want to shoot in 2011. I would like to shoot a film in LA with an all-American cast and it has nothing to do with centipedes, but again horror/drama film--like I think HUMAN CENTIPEDE is also has a lot of drama in there--and it’s going to be something really disturbing, and it’s still pretty original, so yeah I definitely want to explore this genre more, because I think I’ve got some hopefully great ideas in my head that I want to execute.
C: What was your reaction when you heard that IFC was picking up the film and giving it a fairly healthy release? It opens this weekend here in Chicago, and I know it opened in New York last week, right?
TS: Right. What happened is when we went to Fantastic Fest, that was the first time it was shown and it got such incredible buzz. American distributors got very curious about what the film was about, because so many people were talking about it, so we were approached by different distributors. We had a good feeling with IFC, because they really loved the film and really understood the concept, and they thought, “We can really make something out of this.” That belief was so cool for us that we said, “Well, let’s work together” and that they wanted to put it in theaters and give it a lot of promotion and stuff. If you have the wrong distributor, they just put it on a DVD and they don’t do any marketing or whatever, and it’s just gone if you don’t watch out properly.
C: I was convinced when I saw it at Fantastic Fest that that would be the only time I would see it in the states until it came out on DVD, so I was really happy to hear that IFC picked it up.
TS: Us as well.
C: I’ve seen you in front of an audience and I’ve seen some other festival video of your actors and they all seem like very nice normal people. Everyone seems very happy with the suceess.
TS: Yeah, yeah. I’m now in New York, and we had like a preview screening, and it totally sold out. I was doing the intro with all of the actors. Dieter was there, the two girls, and everybody had so much fun, because everybody, strangely enough, is very friendly and not arrogant or something. That’s very cool.
C: Yeah, it is. Well Tom thanks for talking with me about this, and good luck.
TS: Thank you for the interview, I appreciate it. And good luck with Dieter!
C: All right, thanks.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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