Rie Rasmussen’s HUMAN ZOO is a wild, bloody, frequently exhilarating debut film. It’s the story of Adria (Rasmussen), a Serbian-Albanian woman who survives and ultimately escapes Kosovo thanks to the tough-love charity of an army deserter/gangster named Srdjan (Nikola Djuricko). After opening with a brutally violent scene in a blood-spattered hotel room (where it appears Adria is about to be stabbed to death), the film shifts back and forth in time between Adria’s growing involvement in Srdjan’s illicit activities and her present-day romance with an American expat (Nick Corey) in Marseille – all the while leaving us to wonder when we’ll double back to that hellish first sequence. It’s strong stuff, but Rasmussen’s penchant for complicated long takes and extreme emotional intimacy (including two very real sex scenes) keeps the viewer from recoiling.
This is raw, personal filmmaking, but it’s not the hyper-naturalistic, rub-your-nose-in-human-cruelty experience you might expect. Rasmussen’s got a playfully macabre streak that recalls Brian De Palma – which makes sense since her modeling career took off after her slinky, gold-plated participation in the bravura opening sequence of the master’s FEMME FATALE. She also shot HUMAN ZOO with FEMME FATALE’S brilliant cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, who subsequently lensed the lovely Rasmussen in Luc Besson’s ANGEL-A. There’s a clear comfort level here, which is crucial given the film’s harrowing content and formal audacity.
HUMAN ZOO is a divisive movie, but it’s received strong support from Eli Roth, Elvis Mitchell, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, who’s seen fit to give the film a week-long run (11/11 – 11/17, paired with ANGEL-A) at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Rasmussen will be participating in Q&As following every screening, which is reason enough to check the film out at some point over the next seven days. Rasmussen is smart, candid and very fucking funny. When I interviewed her earlier this week, I quickly learned that there’s nothing out of bounds for her. I dig her bluntness, I share her influences, and I believe she’s got the potential to be a major filmmaker.
Here’s my mostly unedited conversation with Ms. Rasmussen. It’s a wild one.
Rie Rasmussen: Hello.
Beaks: Hello Rie.
Rasmussen: Hello. How are you, mister?
Beaks: I’m fine. How are you doing?
Rasmussen: I am doing pretty well today, I can tell you that.
Beaks: Terrific.
Rasmussen: I’m very happy about all of this stuff.
Beaks: I can imagine.
Rasmussen: There’s been the Berlin Film Festival, and then the Cannes Film Festival, and then there have been reviews from Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Eli Roth, and Elvis Mitchell. I can’t tell you what makes me more happy.
Beaks: And now a run at The New Beverly.
Rasmussen: And a fucking run at The New Beverly. Hell, yeah! (Laughs) Oh by the way, I read that you saw FEMME FATALE at The New Beverly?
Beaks: Oh yeah?
: Yeah. Right on. So you’ve seen my tits twice.
Beaks: I have. Yeah, I’ve seen your tits twice. Boy, have I seen your tits twice.
Rasmussen: And a little bit more than that, but twice at least. (Laughs)
Beaks: Indeed. But FEMME FATALE is a favorite of mine.
Rasmussen: That’s awesome. It was one hell of a cool time for me in 2000 to film that thing with Brian De Palma, I can tell you that. I was the geekiest motherfucking fan. It was awesome. It was also my first one with Thierry Arbogast. And then I made ANGEL-A and… HUMAN ZOO with Thierry Arbogast.
Beaks: You’ve got a great relationship with that guy.
Rasmussen: Yeah. I’m as loyal as I can be. I love that guy.
Beaks: That’s great. So within the first ten minutes of watching HUMAN ZOO, I realized “Okay, here’s someone who is totally in love with cinema” - which is not a guarantee when I’m watching movies nowadays. When did the cinema bug bite you?
Rie Rasmussen: To start out with it, your quote is corroborated. Luc Besson would always introduce me when we did press junkets around the world for ANGEL-A, he’d be like “She’s from the Quentin Tarantino Cinema School of Filmmaking.” So, yeah, this is exactly where I’m coming from. I learned my craft from watching movies, and that is because I grew up in bumfuck-nowhere Denmark, more north than Hamlet’s castle where it’s dark and grey and fucking cold. So if you want your kids to be great filmmakers, raise them in a rainy hellhole and they might do something good. (Laughs) I mean there was nothing else to do, man! You had to escape and that was the way. If you had any level of imagination, you were just like “Oh my god, give me anything!”
Beaks: So you’re watching movies your whole life, and then at some point –
Rasmussen: Not all my life. My dad watched Sergio Leone, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, and was definitely a Clint Eastwood fan before he was solidified as a director. I lived with my father’s first wife, their children, and my father’s second wife - who was my mother. All of the wives and the kids lived together, and my dad obviously wasn’t there. He was a handsome devil. (Laughs) So I lived in this little hut-like hippie commune. But my father’s first wife liked anything that was Spielberg and Tom Cruise, and my mother was [into] Monty Python and Martin Scorsese, and my sister was into POLTERGEIST and anything scary, and DIE HARD and LETHAL WEAPON. So I really had this kind of like eclectic group of people to watch movies with. The only way I knew my father my entire life was, on every second weekend, I would go with him, and we would get five VHS tapes, as much candy as I could carry, and we would just only have burgers and bloody meat all weekend. That’s daddy’s girl. It’s couches pushed together, VHS tapes from Blockbuster, and. you know candy and bloody meet.
Beaks: Dear god, I wish I could have had your childhood.
Rasmussen: (Laughs) It was awesome.
Beaks: So at what point did you decide you want to make movies?
Rasmussen: I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but I do graphic illustrations. I do oil paintings. I’ve always been a drawer. When I was young, I wanted to work for Walt Disney. There was nothing I wanted to do more than to work for Walt Disney, because I would do cartoons and everything. My dad had a massive amount of graphic novels, but more like the general one like ASTERIX and TINTIN - and some MILO MANARA, by the way. But I was a drawer, so I had already a gazillion stories since very young told on paper. I would draw the storyboards, and then my sister would do one. I would draw all of the characters out, and I would draw the storyboards scene-by-scene, and then my sister would put a cassette tape in. We were like six or seven years old. She would push record, and I would talk for three hours, like long, meandering, horribly dramatic movies. But these were me and my sister’s first movies.
And then I came to New York at fifteen. From New York I followed a surfer boy to Huntington Beach, California, got stuck making, like, Hi8 movies down there with skateboarders, and then I went at eighteen to the Hollywood Film Institute. Then I went to Paris. By the way, when I went to HFI, we were living in my friend’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s house, who was Owen Wilson, who was living with Wes Anderson and Luke Wilson because they just made a little movie called BOTTLE ROCKET. So that was really cool. We were all living in a house together. I was living in the basement.
Beaks: You definitely had a foundation in classical storytelling, but it sounds like there might have been an experimental bent to your early work.
Rasmussen: The [classical foundation] came, I would say, around my early twenties. I really started like branching out into the classics, which were Billy Wilder and William Wyler and Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. I really started getting my roots there. At the same time, as I was coming of age, Brian De Palma was my fucking hero. There was just nothing better. Then Quentin Tarantino came in, and MAN BITES DOG and John Dahl. John Dahl was on a fucking roll back then; he was the fucking man. There were all of these different impressions that really made it so multi-layered, and then – from twenty-three to twenty-seven - I wouldn’t watch [any films] older than 1949. I just didn’t care. Then I went back into the 70s again. But we all had these periods. For a while, I was like, “Nothing is well-crafted if it’s after 1949!”
[Both Laugh]
Beaks: There’s certainly a falloff in terms of dialogue at a certain point.
Rasmussen: Yeah, female dialogue since the 50s… forget it. I won’t fucking watch a movie from the 50s. It’s a waste of time. But the 40s dialog for women… come on! THE BIG SLEEP and THE MALTESE FALCON! I mean, these girls are sassy. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI… it’s fantastic, I love it. These women get to do shit. They are real characters.
Beaks: Like Bacall in TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT.
Rasmussen: Yeah! Bacall in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT is just fantastic. Right on! And she’s gorgeous at the same time. And then Howard Hawks… he was cool like that. He was into the beautiful girls with some meat on their bones to chew at when they were working, you know?
Beaks: So you’ve got all of these disparate influences, and then you begin writing screenplays. I read that you were writing a noir screenplay before you launched into HUMAN ZOO.
Rasmussen: In 2001, I was in Cannes with FEMME FATALE. Tom Ford, who is also a director and an avid film lover, put me, because of our film connection, as the single face of Gucci - which was both a doom and fantastic at the same time. So that kind of spurred me into that side of the art for a while. I was very much there, and very much the muse of that whole thing. But then by 2004, I found my way back. I mean Richard Avedon had died, and I was like “What’s the point?” So in 2004, I’m back in Cannes, I’m nominated for Palme d’Or with “Thinning the Herd”, and Quentin Tarantino is head of ceremonies of Cannes. He’s running the shit. And then I was going to do ROMANCE IN THE DARK, which was basically ROMANCING THE STONE. It’s me wanting to do… a film noir thriller/heist/badass girl action film. That’s basically my vision for it, if you can put all of those things together. As filmmakers we have a fault that we want to push everything into one. But then Luc Besson shanghaied me for ANGEL-A - which was awesome, but then I had to learn French, so it really sidetracked me for a second. I had to open the movie worldwide for like a year and a half, and since I was then doing my next feature film with that company, I was very loyally opening this movie.
But then this personal story of HUMAN ZOO came around, which is [inspired by] my adoptive sister now in Denmark. She came out of Vietnam. Her mother was stolen and sold into slavery to Moscow. She was enslaved and, you know, what that entails. And with her little daughter… she got her daughter out at fifteen. The daughter escaped, the mother didn’t. She arrived in Denmark, and my family was trying to adopt her for like six years. It was a huge process, and my reaction to it was “What is this fucking human zoo we are in? With these people behind cages, behind these imaginary lines made with blood around all of these countries, where if you were in one country you fucking won the ovarian lottery?” America, Denmark, Switzerland… you’re all right! Sweden? Great, fantastic! But if you’re born in Vietnam and your mother is sold into prostitution in Moscow, you’re not that good. Why is this different? These are imaginary lines that men made with blood, killing each other, you know? And there is no better place than ex-Yugoslavia to show it. Ex-Yugoslavia, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro… they have been killing each other for the last 2,500 years over differences, and they are obviously brothers and sisters if you get down to it. It’s such a tiny region, and it’s like “This is the fucking place to tell that story. What is wrong with us? We are all the same. What are these fucking borders?”
Beaks: And you wrote this fairly quickly, I mean did it all come spilling out in this non-linear—
Rasmussen: It came spilling out. Having a deadline with ROMANCE IN THE DARK, I had like a 400-page script because I really wanted it to be two movies. But I was really irritated by something, and [HUMAN ZOO] is what came out in almost like a vomit.
Beaks: And in a non-linear fashion?
Rasmussen: The thing is, it’s one story. It’s one girl’s story. It’s her being raised in this. “What happens if a war criminal raises a young girl?” It’s her story. And then we just take the past and the present, and then we mix the past and the present up. But we don’t just shovel it around. We go, “Okay, I’m going to give everybody the answers first. These are the answers.” And then you’re going to sit there the whole fucking time going, ‘Yeah, but why?” So finally you come to the end, and you get the question. I like that. First you learn all of these things, and, in the end, you get the question, “Well, why does that happen?”
Beaks: It’s amazing to have such creative freedom to be able to tell a story in that fashion. You try that in America, and it’s just not going to happen.
Rasmussen: The script was, to say the least, alternative. I wanted it in Serbia. I wanted Serbian actors. I was just right on for Nikola Djuricko, who is one of the best actors in the entire world. The guy is just incredible; a force of life, that man, and an incredibly gifted actor. It’s too bad that he’s over there, though I do believe that Angelina Jolie put him in her new Bosnian movie, which I’m very happy about. But this is what I wanted: it’s in Serbian and it’s a crazy story.
But I had been working with this… production company [Europa] for many years now. My first thing was almost getting a nomination in Cannes [for “Thinning the Herd” in 2004], so by now we were all trusting each other and working together, and therefore I could force through a script like this. As production moved along, there was also [ARTHUR AND THE REVENGE OF MALTAZARD] and TRANSPORTER 3; there were all of these [Europa-produced] movies shooting at the same time as me. That did make things a little bit more complicated than I had imagined, because what would have been greater for the company would have been an action flick, a balls-to-the-wall, female-estrogen-kicking-ass type of film. That would have been a better suit for the company I was with, because then I think Luc Besson would have been there to produce it. That’s the one thing I would change on the next film: I want a great producer. I can write it, I can direct it, I can act in it… anything. I just want somebody who has my back.
Beaks: I think you did fine here. For a first-time filmmaker, you pull off some really audacious and elegant shots. Without giving too much away, that overheard shot near the end… your De Palma influences are definitely showing there.
Rasmussen: De Palma and Scorsese from TAXI DRIVER, definitely.
Beaks: How long did it take to choreograph and stage that scene?
Rasmussen: That was a bitch. The set was awesome. We had as the set designer one of Luc’s guys, Hugues Tissandier. He’s a great set designer, but he didn’t have much time on our film because we were a small budget and everything. But this set was immensely important to me, and we built it in Serbia actually. The craftsmen in Serbia… worked sixteen-hour days. If you wanted something in rock, they gave it to you in rock. If you wanted something in heavy wood, they gave it to you in heavy wood, not papier-mâché bullshit. No fucking around. Serbia picked up the production quality on this movie. They made it look ten times more expensive than it was, and we couldn’t have done that in any other country.
Beaks: It does look big.
Rasmussen: Exactly. I remember somebody in VARIETY or something was like “They spent all of this money on this movie. It’s so much money for a first time director.” Bitch, you don’t know the fucking budget! This was fucking nothing, man, do you understand that? When you shoot in France, you have French working laws, French union laws, French salaries, French per diem, French lunches, wine at the lunches… I mean, you can’t even imagine what you spend your entire budget on. And I’m a socialist with socialist policies, but it’s fucking annoying!
Beaks: Your also have the most remarkably authentic depiction of oral sex I think I’ve seen in a film.
Rasmussen: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s what it was about. You can’t do a sex scene and “Oh, you cut to the lips, and you cut to a drop of sweat, and you cut into the eye and fluttering of the hair.” Fuck that shit! This is not TOP GUN! I loved it, but that’s not what it is. This is for real. I wanted to see it for real, and I wanted it to be from a female’s point of view. Yeah, he is going down on her. It’s in one take. There’s no fucking cutting in and out and making it all romantic and rosey and shit. This is one take, and that’s how it is. It’s clumsy, it’s sexy, it’s hardcore, and he is going down on her.
Beaks: A great sex scene is kind of a lost art nowadays.
Rasmussen: Well, some people really fucking pull it off, but that was a thing in the 70s – which is where I got the second sex scene in the movie. It’s from COMING HOME with Jane Fonda. You know the scene on Adria’s face she bends over into frame?
Beaks: Yeah.
Rasmussen: That’s from COMING HOME. I remember seeing that and going like, “What the fuck? This is awesome!” You see the back of the guy, and he’s fucking her, and it’s just all about her pleasure in that scene. So I made it not so much like… missionary and boring with him on top of her. There’s some other shit going on.
Beaks: So is filmmaking your primary calling now?
: It has been my primary calling since 2004. Also, I think acting is filmmaking as well. It’s a part of this entire wonderful story. So it has been my calling since 2004. And painting. I do all of my own storyboards. I get to do all of my artistic expression on the side. I get to paint anything that I feel illustrates or inspires the film, too. I photograph all locations, I photograph my camera angles, I photograph my scenes… so it’s like a photographic storyboard. I really use any art form all of the time on a movie. So, yeah, for the next fifteen years movies are going to be primary. And then I can always paint when I get old. I mean, shit, I can sit on the terrace.
Rie Rasmussen's HUMAN ZOO begins its week-long run at The New Beverly this evening, November 11th. Admission is $8, and you'll certainly want to stick around for Luc Besson's ANGEL-A.
Faithfully submitted,
