by Joseph McCabe

Director Darren Lynn Bousman?s upcoming adaptation of the horror musical stage play Repo! The Genetic Opera is a sight to behold. Savage, bold and beautiful, it tells the musical tale of a futuristic society, in which organ loans are common, and bloody organ repossessions commonly terrifying! But among its cast of familiar faces (including Paris Hilton and genre faves Bill Mosely and Anthony Head), is one face audiences may not find familiar?that of Terrance Zdunich, who co-wrote the off-Broadway play on which Repo! is based. Zdunich plays Grave Robber, a shady nightstalker who steals a fluid called Zytrate from dead bodies, and sells it on the black market as a painkiller to those addicted to surgery. We recently spoke with Zdunich in Toronto, where he was supervising the final sound mix for Repo!. And he gave some insight into the film?s past, present and chilling future?

Repo! begins with a great deal of exposition told through comic-book panels. How did the exposition work in the stage play?

One of the things that benefit a stage play is...most operas actually give out the entire synopsis of the story in the program, or it is actually on the screen as you?re watching it. When you think of opera--and I?m not a huge fan, I do like the idea of this tragic world where everyone sings and is bigger than life?for the most part, operas weren?t even written in the language of the audience. They [the operas] would be in Italian and it might be written for a German audience. They basically dealt with stories. You already knew the characters, you already knew the myths, you knew exactly what was going to happen so you weren?t going to the opera saying ?I wonder what?s going to happen next?? You were going to be a part of the kind of grandeur.

On the set we would have programs. Some had the comic book artwork but most had a synopsis because we didn?t have very elaborate sets. We?d list a song, where it was taking place and then a brief summary of the set. Then you were free to enjoy the music, the wackiness and the bigness and not saying, ?What was that lyric?? or being there when the producers come in and want to play it safe. Safe, and I?m going, ?we don?t need to play it safe.? They wanted to lower the music so that all the vocals were totally intelligible and that makes sense, but when you do it too much, it?s no longer music. It?s no longer rock music, that?s for sure, when you pull back the drums and the guitars so you can understand every syllable, it becomes musical theater. I?d rather say, ?Screw that. Pump the guitars and drums up so it feels like you?re watching a rock goth opera.? Then, give people a program so now they feel like they?re going to a movie theater but yet it feels like some live event. I would be more in favor of that then like dumbing it down.

Are there thoughts of handing out a comic-book style program either at screenings or the San Diego Comic-Con?

I think we?re going to be, I?m kept out of the loop on a lot of that stuff in terms of what the grand marketing idea is. I know Lionsgate and they go to Comic-Con every year for Saw. I think it would make sense that Repo! was there as well. There?s no shortage of artwork that has been made for the film. About twice as much artwork has been produced and ended up on the floor. All it would cost would be printing costs; and I really hope they do that.

You were co-writer of both lyrics and music?

Yes, Darren Smith, the other co-writer, and I have been writing together for 12 or 11 years. Not on Repo!, but on other things. They have always been music based and then got more and more theatrical as things went along. We co-write everything. The revision process and trying to make all the songs and lyrics conform to a narrative structure, which has changed over the years. It ends up being silly to really break it down but it has been a real challenge because with the movie you write a track, you record a track with the actors, you edit their performance, then they match their performance on the day of shooting like they?re lip-synching their own singing and then you shoot all the scenes and you put the film together and you?re like, ?okay well this is working or that isn?t or we just need to cut out ten minutes because the movie?s too long.? It?s more difficult when everything is in song because in a normal scene you could just cut two lines out of the middle of that monologue but you can?t do that with this because suddenly all the music is thrown off. It has been a huge task and scoring is also a huge task. When you have a movie that?s 75% sung song, you can?t just throw a score over top of that.

Repo! the film has 57 songs in it. How many were in the stage play?

I don?t know. We?ve decided on many songs that we?ve written for stage plays that we may have even recorded, that don?t exist in Repo! the movie. Maybe if we did Repo! 2 we could come back and do them but I don?t know; I?m not sure. The answer is, it varied. You know, it started out very long, as most things. When you first start painting, the signature takes up half the painting but as you get more and more mature as an artist by the end you hardly even notice the signature on the painting. With us, in the beginning it probably started as a three and a half hour opera and it got whittled down to 90 minutes, with an intermission in the stage play.

One of the most interesting things we?ve discovered with film, because it?s so much different from sitting in the audience of a live stage show, is that songs that were kind of show pieces in the stage show, songs that got the biggest applause, those types of things work the least successfully in the movie. When you?re watching a movie it?s all about forwarding the movie and forwarding the action. When you go to see a live show, you almost want curtain calls and almost want to have all the action stop you can hear someone belt out a number, then everyone would applaud, and then you go back to the action. In movies, it?s not very forgiving, so it has been very interesting. Hopefully some of the cast will forgive us, but some of the bigger stand alone numbers, which sound great by themselves and work great in a live show capacity, are not very successful in the film. You can?t stop the action to have a three minute soliloquy. It?s been hard because--and Darren Bousman really loves the music?there has been moments where we?re hearing from everyone and it?s like ?we love the track but it?s just not working in the movie.? It could be one of our favorite songs but if it?s not working in the movie so we?ve got to cut it or cut it down.

Could you talk a little about your character?

It?s a narrator and that?s a very interesting story, to me, because of how this has come about. The role of Grave Robber, is really what sparked the world of Repo!. Darren Smith and I were performing as a duo. It was more performance art than musical theater or even rock, and we would do these little ten minute narratives and they would have music and theatrics but it was kind of experimental. I would sing and act out these stories and Darren would be a one man band. One of the things I was trying to capture revolved around a futuristic grave robber, who while he was robbing graves, would catch people doing bad things in the middle of the night and would comment on them. One of the things he saw in the middle of the night was this idea we had for this organ repo man. It was a disenfranchised, cynical narrator. He would rob graves but he would also comment on society where he was at the bottom. He?d comment on this high society and say, ?Well I have this dirt on you so you?re no different from me.?

Again one of the characters he saw in this little short story was the organ repo man, and I liked this one a lot; I liked the macabre ones. We would talk to the people and they would really like the repo one. It was called the Necromerchant?s Debt. Of course as it developed it became this father-daughter relationship, and though the grave robber stayed in the tale, it started out as this kind of detached narrator and as it developed he became an attached narrator, attached to this world. For lack of a better comparison, he was like the scarecrow to Dorothy, except this was the grave robber to Shiloh, who didn?t have her best interest in mind but was kind of guiding her through the world. Through the editing process, and even now, it went back to a sort of detached narrator where he?s singing to the camera. Some of that was re-shot because originally people sort of responded to that and liked a commentator to the world.

And he goes beyond robbing graves?

Yeah, he?s a grave robber and while I?m sure this character would steal--he?d take the fillings out of your teeth and take the rings off your dead mother?s fingers--but for the most part he?s a drug dealer in this movie. There?s a futuristic drug in this future of ours that essentially is used as a pain killer and it has become marketed alongside this whole surgery marketplace. Everyone is addicted to surgery and with that, comes a great deal of pain. There?s this drug, that you can go under the knife as often as you want and you?re so doped up you can?t even feel it. You can be Michael Jackson in the future where you can continually change your face and cut yourself up and kind of have a pain free experience. But it?s an addictive drug and even though it is mass marketed, there is a street version of it that can be extracted from dead bodies. So, people like the grave robber with questionable morals, will cut out the main commercial supply and go directly to the source to unearth these bodies and sell it to the black market. He?s a bit of a rock-star in that sense, by providing the drug, but he?s willing to kind of do and go anywhere. At least in this story, he?s not partaking, he?s enabling, but he feels like ?this is the world, you make your own choices, but I?ll sell you this to help with your pain?.

Can you comment on how the gore in the film version compares with that of the stage version?

Well obviously we had limitations [with the theater version], but Darren and I always envisioned it grander, and always envisioned it as a movie. I say that mainly because we wrote something that?s almost impossible to put on a stage. Without a budget, it?s futuristic. It?s operatic. The music is really something you couldn?t play live, because it incorporates sort of these industrial style elements, but we did have some gore.

The play always opened up with a heart repossession, so initially we had a musical overture, and it was a vignette almost of a group of junkies standing around, working their corner. All except one would all leave and it would always be a girl, of course, working the old horror tradition. She?d be standing there and you?d start to hear the repo man ballad, the chorus, and then she?d get pushed to the ground--we didn?t have a splatter zone but we did have blood flying which was an issue when we?re doing the rock clubs because we weren?t running the thing and someone would have to come on after us. So some sappy folk guitarist or something would have to go on after an organ repossession and there?s a puddle of blood on the stage.--you saw the scene where they?re inventorying the organs and saying ?Mark it up, mark it up.? We had organ carts. They were gross. We actually had pig guts in these canisters and they?d be glowing. In New York we even passed out fake sticky gooey organs that we?d pass through the audience so everyone had to touch them and be a part of the action.

What was the most difficult part of adapting this to film?

I don?t know if there was one difficult element. I think the biggest element was, successful films show and don?t tell but I think that successful operas tell and don?t show. Through the editing process people had confusion with the story. While at one point it?s a simple story, there are a lot of complicated turns to it, but all the info is in the lyrics. And because it?s sung, it?s a lot to take in. You have the music, the visuals, and the stylistic choices in the singing. This isn?t Broadway. One of the differences between Broadway and rock is that on Broadway they really care about everything being perfectly annunciated and silly held out notes. It?s all show and there are these perfect ?T?s? at the end of notes. We wanted to make it rock. Half the time, you?re there to rock so you may pick up a certain lyric but you don?t necessarily know every single lyric the first time around so through doing it, it made perfect sense to us. People who were familiar with the music knew exactly what was going on, but we found that because it is still stagey and we?re doing more telling than showing, people were not familiar with the music. We struggled with the storylines and adding ADR and making it more simple, and the comic book worked to help bring that together. To me it seems pretty redundant, but I have to put myself in the shoes of someone who has never seen a Goth horror Opera. It?s a story they?re not familiar with, it?s not some Greek god tale or Jesus, it?s not like everyone knows that he?s gonna? die in the end. It?s like, ?I don?t know who the Repo man is I don?t know who Shiloh is, what is this drug?? There are utterly new elements as well as it being from the future and a new type of music so I think if I were to do it again, I think we would have spent more time writing music that showed more than told, and while I think we got there, that was the most difficult part of the adaptation.

How much thought went into the amount of gore?

It?s been a debate, you know? It was brought up by the production companies that maybe this should be a PG-13 movie, and you could make an argument for that and the reason for that is, well it?s a musical and musicals are generally, something you could take your family to it. When you add to that equation that it?s very fairy tale-esque, and you add that the lead is a 17 year old girl, then you add Paris Hilton, and Anthony [Head] from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, those are all possibly PG-13 demographics. Then couple that with a guy who rips out body parts and that the music is edgier and more sophisticated than, say a High School Musical type.

Darren Lynn Bousman wanted to make it far more violent, and I think we kind of did too. The script was more violent than we ended up shooting but I think ultimately what prevailed was the music. We could have filmed a more violence but music set the tone for the picture and it needed to. Everything is music in this and so how do you make the music more violent when you?re singing, where it doesn?t feel just tacked on? I think we?ve done it in a couple places, but it?s been more tongue in cheek. I don?t know if you can create real horror with a musical, because you?re watching an event, but it?s not really true suspense, where in a horror movie, the suspense is ?don?t open that door? but if you sing ?don?t open that door,? it?s no longer suspenseful. The amount of violence in the movie was dictated by the tone of the movie and when I look at it from those terms and stand back, I think it?s just right amount of violence.

It?s almost like true terror is always silent. It?s more jarring. I don?t know if our music is commercial, but I think it is catchy. If we did something that was discordant from start to finish it would be a very unpleasant musical experience. You might achieve musical horror but I don?t think you?d want that for ninety minutes. I think it would just make for an unpleasant art project.

How did the project get started?

In 2006 Darren Lynn Bousman collaborated with us to shoot the short film version of Repo! and it was basically two songs from the stage play that we took out of context to try to tell a mini story. Darren tried to pitch Repo to his contacts in Hollywood and everyone was just like ?I don?t get it, it sounds weird on paper.? So he?s like we?ve got to film it and let people see it. That was the first time I ever acted on film.

What?s your greatest fear?

That?s a hard question. Recently I had a funeral for a friend of mine from college, and it wasn?t a close friend but I?d see him once or twice a year, and he was murdered. I remember when I heard about this, my initial thought was I hope before he went down he turned around and fought. The reason I tell that story is I have this overwhelming notion of ?anyone can get hit over the back of the head and be done.? I guess for me even if there was extreme pain involved, I hope I have a chance to fight death.