Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with another AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. I had a chance to talk extensively with Darren Lynn Bousman, director of such terrifying treats as some of the SAW sequels, REPO THE GENETIC OPERA, and MOTHER’S DAY. Bousman’s new film is called 11-11-11 and it opens tomorrow in select theaters. The below lucky cities will be able to see 11-11-11 at midnight tonight;New York: AMC Empire 25 – Midnight
AMC Jersey Gardens
Los Angeles: Universal City Walk - 11:11 PM
AMC Block 30 – Midnight
AMC Ontario Mills – Midnight
Seattle: AMC Southcenter – Midnight
San Diego: AMC Mission Valley – Midnight
Houston: AMC Gulf Pointe – Midnight
Virginia Beach: AMC Lynnhaven – Midnight
Columbus: AMC Easton Town – Midnight
AMC Lennox Town – Midnight
Indianapolis: AMC Indianapolis 17 – Midnight
Omaha: AMC Oakview – midnight
Oklahoma City: AMC Quall Springs – Midnight
Pittsburgh: AMC Waterfront 22 – Midnight
Philadelphia: AMC Cherry Hill – Midnight
Detroit: AMC Star Fairlane – Midnight
I’m hoping to see it in Chicago, though it doesn’t seem like it made the midnight screening list. Nevertheless, I had a chance to talk with Mr. Bousman a few days ago. Here’s what he had to say about trends in horror, the troubles distributing MOTHER’S DAY, and superstitions and lore involving the ominous numbering of 11-11-11…
AMBUSH BUG: How are you doing today?
DARREN LYNN BOUSMAN (DLB): I’m doing well man. I’m doing well. How are you?
BUG: I’m good. I think the last time I saw you was the MOTHER’S DAY premiere here in Chicago. DLB: I’m pretty sure that was it.
BUG: I have to tell you that was an awesome film. I loved it.
DLB: Well thank you man, it’s a shame it’s not been released yet and I pray every single day that that will change, but you know I’m shocked.
BUG: Yeah, so is that frustrating?
DLB: Yeah, we can talk about it. I think people should here it. Beign a director, a lot of people hound on you and harp on you about things such as the trailer of a movie or the release date. “Why is your movie not released?” Those are things that as a director you can’t control. In this case with MOTHER’S DAY I finished my edit. I turned my director’s cut in. the director’s cut was approved. We sold the movie and that was it. That was my involvement in everything and I’m kind of at the mercy of… That’s what I have to go on and I sit there and believe this is going to happen and then as we get closer and closer to time, I don’t see trailers out there. I’m like you, I get online. I look on Ain’t It Cool News or Bloody Disgusting or Shock and I’m waiting for trailers that never show up and it’s a frustrating process, because you want to control things. You want to control this and you just can’t and in the case of MOTHER’S DAY it had something to do with a lawsuit with the person who actually bought the movie and it was something that had nothing to do with the actual movie itself. Long story short, when you go after a company or a company is in a legal state, all of their movies are held, thus being the case with MOTHER’S DAY. But then when we received the movie back, we lost that date and so the question is “What do we do now?” Well it takes time. It takes time to figure out “Okay, we have to resell the movie. We have to rebuild a campaign. We have to start at scratch with a new buyer.” So it’s a frustrating process, but again the only thing I can do is stand by the movie and I’m very, very proud of MOTHER’S DAY. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done and I’m eager for people to see it however they see it, be it on DVD or Blu Ray or hopefully at some point theatrically if it comes out here in the United States.
BUG: Yeah, I think it definitely was… I think it was your best film as well and it seems like everybody behind it was giving a hundred and ten percent as far as the movie is concerned. Is it going to be coming out in any…?DLB: Here’s the deal, it will be seen 100%. It cost too much money for it not to come out. The movie, I think in my opinion, there are so many great performances for it not to be seen. I mean Rebecca De Mornay is fantastic in this movie and I was humbled and honored to work with her, so I still fight on it every single day. Every week I send 15 emails to everyone involved asking “Where the hell” the movie is and why it’s not out, so again we are hoping at some point everyone will get sick and tired of my emails and something will actually happen, but it’s with the movie gods now. We’ve done everything that we can do, it’s not up to us anymore.
BUG: Well best of luck with it. I think it is really a great movie and I can’t wait for people to see it, but let’s talk about 11-11-11. So I haven’t seen the film, so maybe we can start out just by having you give a brief description of what it’s all about.
DLB: Well you know what’s funny, very few people have seen the film. We just finished. I just, just sent in for a final mix yesterday and so it was a movie that we were rushing to make a date, to try and make the… It was really kind of serendipitous that everything came together and how this whole thing worked out. Basically I took a general meeting with a producer friend of mine. He said, “We have nothing really for you now, but if something comes up we will make sure to give you a call,” which is how most meetings end. What’s interesting is 24 hours later I did get a phone call from the producer and he’s like “Another other producer friend of mine has an idea for a movie and would like to meet with you.” So I went and met with this producer, Wayne Rice, and he pitched me this idea of a 11:11 and the ironic thing is he had no story behind it, he just had a number and said “I want to make a movie about this” and I said, “Well what is this?” and he showed me the number and I didn’t really understand numerology, so I was like… He said “I still want you to think about it. Don’t say no, yet. Just give it a little bit. Just think about the number and think about how the number 11 is important in your life”.
I went home and I googled 11:11 which he asked me to do and I was kind of amazed, because there were hundreds of thousands of websites devoted to this phenomenon called “The 11:11 phenomenon” and basically the phenomenon states that there are celestial beings that exist just out of our range of vision that have been sent here to basically guide humanity to a higher understanding and awakening. It’s kind of this religious stuff and still at that point it was not enough for me to become enticed by the movie. Then almost overnight I did start seeing the number 11 everywhere and again that could have been my subconscious just saying “You’ve just seen the number 11” or “You are up for this movie,” but it became more than that. My birthday is January 11th, 1979, so went you write my birthday out it’s 01/11/1979… I started seeing it everywhere and I met with him again and he goes “Okay, I just want to pitch you one thing. Let me tell you how the movie ends” and he pitched me the end of the movie and I was blown away. At that point I was like “That’s cool” and I really really did see it and so about three and a half weeks later I went off and wrote the script and turned it in and after that I was on a plane to Barcelona shooting it. BUG: Awesome. So this is kind of a departure for you. You’ve usually done some pretty reality based films although REPO is kind of set in a fantasy world, but still it’s the real world, there are no supernatural stuff going on. What was that like for you? Was that something that you were always going towards?
DLB: You know, it was… Yes and no. Listen, I love all aspects of the genre and I think that every movie that I do I want it to be a little bit different. Example, THE BARRENS is completely different than 11/11 which is completely different from REPO and on 11/11 it was a chance for me to do something that I’ve always been a fan of and that’s like quasi-religious supernatural horror, which I love. Growing up as a kid, THE OMEN and THE EXORCIST, ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE TENANT… These are movies that I grew up on, so it was a chance for me to do something like that, a kind of religious demonic thing. I’m a huge fan of reading about demonic things and Satanism. It just interests me so much, so get the chance to play around with that was the first kind of checkmark in 11/11’s corner, but yeah it definitely does take a supernatural twist that I’ve never done before, but I’ve tried to. Here’s the thing, this movie is not NUMER 23. It’s not… It’s kind of hard to compare it to anything. I tried to make it believable and make it in a world that could really happen if these things could really happen, meaning while there are demonic entities… I tried to set the world up in a way that you don’t have the audience immediately turn away from the movie and maybe that was too much painstakingly researching things and cult activity and things, but it’s just the way that I work. I want to set it… When you watch ROSEMARY’S BABY or you watch a Roman Polanski film, you buy into it. You just buy into it, because it’s so subtle the way he unveils everything and that was really important for me. When I’m doing a film it’s trying to tap the sort of idea of that.
BUG: Yeah, how tough is it to do a film that’s set on a specific date and that usually around that date in theaters there are cartoons and holiday movies coming out and everything. Is that scary for you? Is that a good thing that it’s after Halloween and past all of that competition? DLB: I don’t think there ever is a right time to release a movie. You can always point at a reason why not to unveil on a specific date and I think that… Here’s the thing which is funny about 11/11 and part of it has to do with the MOTHER’S DAY campaign. The marketing and everything with 11/11/11 “The end is now.” Well I hope I’m not spoiling everything for everybody, but it’s not really about the end, it’s about the beginning of what is about to happen, so a lot of people have been asking “Why aren’t you releasing on 11/11/11? Doesn’t that kind of invalidate that day? If we wake up that day and the world ends, what’s the point of seeing a movie about 11/11/11?” That’s not what this is about. Again, the event which we are talking about happening on 11/11/11, but it’s not the end of the world, it’s the day it begins on 11/11/11. Regarding releasing the movie on that specific date, I mean listen there’s IMMORTALS opening up, there’s that Adam Sandler movie… There’s other huge big budget massive movies that are going to be on 4,000 screens and you can’t really compete with that. I shudder to even think what it is, you’ve just got to hope that people find the movie and that the people who find the movie respond to it.
BUG: I look forward to films like this, because it’s not that I’m not going to go see IMMORTALS, but what I will probably do is go see your film and then sneak into THE IMMORTALS after.
[Both Laugh]
DLB: Here’s the thing and this is what sucks about… I don’t know what the budget of THE IMMORTALS was. I must say about the director, I thought THE CELL was awesome, but you look at a movie like that and you’ve got to think “50, 60, 70, 80 million or maybe more” Maybe I’m really underestimating how much the movie cost. Maybe it was a lot more than that and they have all of these toys. They have all of these amazing visual effects and big actors with big explosions and guys in tights jumping… We had probably a fraction of their scenery, but for one afternoon. In fact, their snack tray they bought for their first day would probably equal our entire budget. If the audience knew that when you watched the movie, you wouldn’t know that. You walk in and say, “Does this movie entertain me?” You don’t judge it as “Hey, look what 11/11/11 did for one one hundreth of the budget THE IMMORTALS did.” That’s kind of cool about it as well, because you know when people go see your movie they are seeing it with movies like THE IMMORTALS and that Adam Sandler movie and whatever else is out there, which is kind of cool.
BUG: Yeah definitely. Well it’s funny, because we’ve been talking about it for a while, but I still am not sure what the film is about. Is it going to start with 11/11/11? Or is it going to end that way? Is that giving away too much? DLB: The movie is about an event that is going to happen on this specific date that’s been prophesized for hundreds and hundreds of years about what actually is to occur on this day. Now what will occur on this day I can’t tell you, what I can say is if you google “11/11/11” or the 11/11 phenomenon. There are legions of people that believe in this and I’ll give you what the belief is and I’m going to do a terrible job explaining it quickly, but it’s an interesting idea. There is a book that was written in the 50’s called THE URANTIA YEARBOOK. The book has no reported authors to it and it kind of just appeared out of nowhere. The book reports itself as being written by celestial beings, beings from another world that these beings are here to basically fill the gap in religion and bridge the gap between science and god. This book basically challenges every belief you have on religion. When it first came out it was labeled for heresy. People thought it was blasphemous. Now in the last 50 years it’s actually been adopted by a lot of churches. In this book it talks about 1,111 beings who will come to earth at a specific time to basically bring us to the next level of understanding, the next level of evolution. A lot of these people talk about these beings being demonic as what they really are and this book is so important to so many people and I actually… The book is very, very hard to read. It’s hundreds and hundreds of pages, but it deals with a lot of really kind of intense religious topics and they still to this day can’t find out who wrote the book as there are again no known authors on it. So this story is about an atheist. 11/11 is a story about an atheist who is a writer in New York who is forced to go back to Barcelona where his family lives to basically see his father off as his father is dying. When he arrives there he is faced to basically go back to his religious household who he absolutely turned his back on. Weird and crazy things start to happen to him almost the moment after arriving there all around the number 11. The son was killed at 11:11, so it’s a number that continually haunts him, but he now starts finding this number everywhere in Barcelona and surrounding his family. He uncovers this idea of what the number actually means and he starts to uncover things about religion itself and what his family actually has to do with everything. So it’s very much, I think if you are going to compare it to a movie, and I hate comparing any movie to any movie, but it’s much more along the lines of THE 9th GATE and it’s a kind of satanic undertone to it, but it’s about when an atheist is given proof about religion and has to determine if he chooses to believe in this or if he’s going to just write it all off and it’s one character’s story about the three days leading up to 11/11/11 and how he plays with the fact that it might be real and if it is real is he willing to believe what the book says is going to happen is really going to happen?
BUG: So having made this film I know you said that being convinced into it you started seeing all of these numbers all around you and everything. Has that changed you in anyway with your belief in this thing? DLB: Yeah, you know what’s crazy is my beliefs really have changed after making this movie. My beliefs have changed considerably actually and not in the fact of I’ve become more religious or less religious or anything like that, but something a little… When you have… I’m always on the Talkbacks and read everything that anyone writes about any movie, including my own and it’s funny, because when people when the first trailer hit, people started talking about plot holes and things. My thing about religion is this, there are those that believe in religion and a great percentage of the population do believe in religion… Most people believe in something. If you’re an atheist, that’s your belief. You’re belief is you believe in nothing, but that’s as important as your beliefs if you were someone who believes in Christianity. Those that believe in Christianity believe in the Bible and if you believe in the Bible you believe that a man walked on water…
[Darren’s other line begins ringing and he has to get off of the phone for a moment.]
BUG: Alright, so we were talking about your own belief in all of this.
DLB: Oh yeah, so basically what I was saying is that you look at what people believe in and you look at if you are religious you believe a man walked on water or you believe a snake talked or a guy could cure lepers or someone can part the see, yet you find it hard to believe in something such as this about demons rising from the earth, demonic entities, all of these, but what’s ironic to me and I think what I have come to realize is that if you believe in one verse of the Bible, you have to believe in the verse right after it, but if you are willing to believe in the fact that a man rose from the dead, you have to believe there are demons our there. If you believe that there is a god, you have to believe that there is a devil and so in some respects this movie isn’t that far fetched in how the whole kind of premises around it isn’t that crazy, but again it’s hard for people to accept something they refuse to believe in or it’s hard for them to understand, ie this whole idea of Satanism and Lucifer and demonic entities, that’s hard for them to understand, but it’s comforts them to think there’s a god and that God can cure your pain and if you pray to him, he will make things better for you. So I think I saw a lot more while making this film in the way of people’s belief systems and “How is this any crazier to believe than what we believe on a day to day basis?”
BUG: Okay. Who is in this film? DLB: Well with this we made a conscious effort to go… I didn’t want anyone to have baggage in this movie, because you are asking someone to believe… Again when you’re doing something like REPO you immediately suspend disbelief because you are going into a movie that is about organ repossession. This movie is something that again I wanted people to… It was important to have great actors who didn’t have a ton of baggage behind them. We went with a guy named Timothy Gibbs who is an amazing, amazing actor. He actually lives in Barcelona. He’s an American actor. They actually based the game… I’m sure you’ve heard of Max Payne. He is what they based Max Payne off of. He was the guy who came in and they put the shit on and did all of his movements. He is that character, which is just kind of hilarious. Wendy Glenn from YOU’RE NEXT. A guy, Michael Landes, who’s in FINAL DESTINTAION I believe 2, but maybe it was 3. It’s a very, very small cast with only like four people and then a lot of Spanish actors. This movie takes place in Barcelona and I wanted to use Barcelona talent, so we have some really great Spanish actors in this film as well.
BUG: What was it like filming in Barcelona? Was that a challenge for you?
DLB: Yeah, it was insane. First off, I love Spain. I love Barcelona. I’ve been there numerous times for my movies, so the ability to have the chance to go there to film something was awesome. You can’t create what Spain has to offer here in the states. There you have buildings that are hundreds and hundreds of years old. You have gothic quarters. You have huge cathedrals. I think that it fit perfectly in the movie that I was trying to make and trying to tell. That part was awesome. What wasn’t so awesome was it was a complete challenge to… First off I don’t speak the language, so you have an American over there who is trying to communicate with a basically Spanish crew. They did speak English to some extent, but I didn’t speak Spanish and so it was always a thing where we had to… It would take a lot longer, where in America I would say “I want X, Y, and Z” and five minutes later you would have X, Y, and Z. In this, you say “I want X, Y, and Z” and you would go through the entire alphabet to get there, because they… So that was the first challenge. The second challenge was we made this movie in such a short amount of time, there was no time for mistakes. There was no time for errors and I don’t know if you’ve seen some if the blogs that I wrote or some of the behind the scenes of what occurred when we were there. Have you seen any of that stuff yet?
BUG: I don’t know if I have yet, but I will definitely take a look at it before this posts (and you can too by checking here!).DLB: You should definitely take a look at it and here’s the thing. I was writing a blog series when I was out there about 11:11 and I eventually stopped writing it, because I saw myself sounding crazy and I saw that people didn’t believe it was real, so I was going to stop writing about this, because no one believed it anyways. Everything you read in my blog is 100% accurate and it’s what actually happened to us and basically long story short is there are certain places that just have a negative energy that they give off with a negative feeling and when we shot this movie, the house was absolutely one of those places to the point that the first time I walked in there I immediately wanted to leave. The only way to describe it is it had this energy that made you feel wrong for being there. That’s what my belief system was before. I think what I believe in is bad energy. (Laughs) I’ve never in my entire life felt anything like it. It was a house that was used for a cult, so basically this cult took this house over and then did parties there a la EYES WIDE SHUT, but when we walked in there were diagrams all over the ceiling and floor and it was a weird candelabra thing with wax drippings on the wall. But more importantly there were weird holes in the wall that if you would go inside the holes you would find coagulated blood.
BUG: Oh wow.
DLB: We pulled the history of the house and the history of the house reported that two people were killed there, one of them in the 1900’s, the daughter of a Marquee which was a very big thing and then another person recently that died to an unexplained death in the house. Well the story of the girl who was killed there was that her father had her killed in a sacrificial way and buried in the wall. Well we found where she was buried and you can see the footage of it. The problem was as I started talking about this everyone thought it was just hype for the movie, which I guess you’re making a horror movie in Barcelona and here I am talking about finding bodies in walls and it seems fake, but it was absolutely not fake and some of the experiences that happened while in Barcelona where pretty horrific. We had crew members quit after feeling bad presences. We had a producer quit after seeing something on a wall. We had seven different people quit after getting a mysterious illness after walking downstairs. It was all kinds of insanity, but no one ever saw a ghost, but we saw a lot of fucked up things in that house, things that I find a hard time talking about right now, because it just sounds ridiculous when I hear my self talking about the shit that was going on in that house.
BUG: It sounds like a movie in itself you know? DLB: And that’s the problem and why I kind of backed off talking about it, because it does sound like a movie in itself and it sounds like it’s what this movie is about and it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but we found… I told you we found this hole in the wall with all of this coagulated blood and we also found an altar that had weird diagrams on it which appeared to be dried blood on it. We had audio recordings like when we were doing takes you would have a character talking and then you would listen back to the audio and there was a voice that was screaming behind him that was not there when we filmed it. One of the craziest things which I look back at how fucking ridiculous we all are, the production designer had to repaint a lot of the house. As he was repainting the house he would find little holes in the wall and eventually after finding like the tenth or eleventh little hole he reached into the hole and grabbed out what was in it. What was in it was a piece of parchment paper and the parchment paper was rolled up. Well that parchment paper had a bunch of weird insane writings, so he went through all of the house, pulled out all of these pieces of paper and each one had these weird writings on it. Well when we finished filming we thought of what the paper was and the paper was a Sumerian enchant that whoever lived in the house put there and it basically protected the room against demonic spirits and evil. So here we are removing all of these things in the house without knowing what they are and we leave the shoot and find out what it actually was. The house was pretty crazy that we filmed in. It was a beautiful house on the Mediterranean Sea, but it had quite a history behind it.
BUG: Yeah, well it seems like everyone talks about themes in horror and what’s hot now and everything…you have always seemed to be one of the filmmakers who have been on the cusp of that with the SAW films during the rise in those types of torture type films and then MOTHER’S DAY was kind of a home invasion kind of film and now we’ve seen a lot of those out. Do you think that with things like this religious trend and these coincidences and things like that, do you think that that is the start of a new trend here? Or a resurgence of this theme which was once pretty big?
DLB: Here’s the thing. I think horror has a way of cycling and when I was lucky enough to be part of the SAW franchise we didn’t recreate the torture porn thing or anything like that. All we did was kind of recycle what was around in the 70’s. You look at the video nasties from like the 70’s and you had THE HILS HAVE EYES or MANIAC… You had those types of films that were extremely popular and then it kind of died off and found it’s way to the slashers in the 80’s and then the POLTERGIEST things and all of these films, but they never left, they just cycled into something else. The religious type of film has always been there before starting back with EXORCIST or ROSEMARY’S BABY or THE OMEN or any of these other films. They were always there, then they kind of cycled out, so I think what you are seeing is like a circle. These movies have circled back around and I find them fascinating and I think why is you have an immediate connection with them because I don’t care who you are, you were brought up with a belief system. You were brought up to believe something, so movies that challenge your belief system and say “If you believe in this, well I have a story for you.” You have a fundamental place to start. You can start with another scene that you can’t start with when you are watching a movie about a serial killer. Unless you are attacked by a serial killer or had a family attacked by a serial killer, you have no frame of reference to start your journey in this movie. With movies like THE OMEN or THE EXCORCIST or any of those things, you have a place to start. You understand the idea of God. You understand you have a Devil. You would understand going to church. So I think that yeah, within the last couple of years you have THE RITE open at number one, you had THE LAST EXORCIST open at one. You have this movie that’s just now coming out now, THE DEVIL INSIDE ME, so I think it’s a genre that is one of my favorites in the water. BUG: Yeah, me too. Well I don’t want to take up too much of your time, because I know you’ve got other stuff going on, but as far as this movie coming out and everything, what’s next for you? What’s coming up after that?
DLB: Well I just finished a movie called THE BARRENS starring Stephen Moyer. It’s Stephen Moyer, Mia Kirshner, it’s a movie that takes place in the woods with a family that’s lost in the woods that thinks they are being chased by the Jersey Devil, which is a mythological cryptozoology creature. I’m so excited by that movie. The cast brought their A game. We shot it. We just wrapped last week or a week and a half ago. The cast brought their A game and it looks fantastic. It’s a unique and different looking film. We shot this thing in summer 16mm which gave the film such an amazing badass look. Again it’s harking back to my favorite era of these types of movies of the 70’s, but I’m really excited about it. I’ve never done a movie like THE BARRENS before, which is a monster movie.
BUG: Have you seen the film THE LAST BROADCAST? DLB: I absolutely have and that was where my fascination with the Jersey Devil started on THE LAST BROADCAST.
BUG: I love the whole mythology around that and I didn’t realize that that was you that was making that film. I had read about that film being made and I can’t wait to see that one.
DLB: Yeah, that one was really exciting. So I’ve got that coming out and it will come out sometime in the middle of next year and then I’m doing a kind of passion project. Sometimes you’ve got to step away and just do something for you and luckily for me most of the movies I have done have just been for me. I’ve been lucky enough that all of the movies that I’ve had a chance to direct or work on have been movies that as a fan of horror I want to see, but this thing that I’m doing right now is something that’s very much in that REPO world, which I think as a filmmaker is the most liberated I’ve felt making a movie.
BUG: Cool, well I met Terrence last summer at San Diego. He was on my panel for comic book horror for his comic book, THE MOLTING, and I loved that book. It’s such a great book. Have you read that?
DLB: I have. Terrence is a really talented guy, a talented artist, actor, writer, and so again I love… What I have learned as a director is there are a million more people more talented than I am that aren’t working and in fact in one block there’s probably 55 better directors than I am, the reality is though you are only as good as who you stand next to and the people you surround yourself with and I have been lucky that I have found a great group of people that have elevated myself, that have helped me elevate myself from the DP that I work with to Terrence… REPO was an amazing experience, but again all I care about doing is working with people that I like and working with people that again I like to be around, because you are only as good as those people. I think that I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great creative people and Terrence is one of them.
BUG: Very cool. Well one last question. Has there been anyone contacting you of these 11-11-11 believers? Have they contacted you since they found out you were making a movie about this? DLB: Yeah. It’s funny, I did three SAW movies where I massacred people, pulled people apart, and I didn’t get an email about what I was doing. The minute I signed on to do a movie about 11-11-11 people came out of the woodworked and addressed me and said I’m going to hell and damned me and cursed my kids and it was crazy. Not only have I gotten facebook messages, I’ve gotten actual letters in the mail about this thing asking me to stop, telling me if I realize what I’m doing… Again, any time you challenge someone’s belief system… There’s two things you never talk about with someone, you don’t talk about politics and you don’t talk about religion, because you’re never going to win and it’s kind of the same thing with these eleveners are people that believe in the 11:11 phenomenon are very adamant about their belief systems. They hear the guy from the SAW films that cut a guy’s head open and made someone else cut their eye and all of this shit is making a movie on their phenomenon… they were pretty pissed off. (Laughs) So I urge them to see the movie before they come after me with threats, but yeah I actually had quite a few threats after I made the movie and it was funny, because again I’ve made some pretty brutal films and outside of maybe getting a negative comment in a New York magazine about the violence, I’ve been getting nothing. I do this movie and people come out of the woodwork and that’s kind of crazy.
BUG: Okay, well I know that the film’s going to be opening next week. Is that going to be opening wide?
DLB: No, it’s a limited release. It’s through AMC Independent and the idea is to roll it out further and further. I think it will go on to other cities and then we will go out from there.
BUG: Well I can’t wait to see it. I think it’s coming to Chicago and I can’t wait to check it out. DLB: It is. It will be in Chicago.
BUG: I’m definitely going to see it on 11-11-11, just because I love doing stuff like that. (Laughs)
DLB: Well fantastic man. I hope you enjoy the film and I appreciate the chance to talk about it with you.
BUG: Thanks a lot. Great talking to you.
DLB: Good talking to you man, I appreciate it.
BUG: 11-11-11 will be in select theaters starting tomorrow. Find out more about the film here and on Facebook here! Get out and celebrate the beginning of the end of everything and support an indie film worth getting behind!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole / wordslinger / reviewer / co-editor of AICN Comics for over nine years. Mark is also a regular writer for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and will be releasing FAMOUS MONSTERS first ever comic book miniseries LUNA in October (co-written by Martin Fisher with art by Tim Rees) You can pre-order it here! Support a Bug by checking out his comics (click on the covers to purchase)!
THE DEATHSPORT GAMES’ Facebook Page
FAMOUS MONSTERS PRESENTS LUNA: ORDER OF THE WEREWOLF’s Facebook Page
Check out AH Digital: the source for international cinema!
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