Can you talk about some of your inspiration in making Repo!?

Bousman:  Yeah, I just wanted to do something different than the Saw films.  I wanted to make something that couldn’t be called Saw: The Musical.  Because it’s easy to see the parallels – there’s organ repossession, people getting killed – and we wanted to make something completely separate from that.  Some of my favorite filmmakers, David Lynch or Terry Gilliam – you look at something like Brazil, that’s something that really influenced me a lot and something I found that I kept drawing from.  Also a film starring Paul Sorvino, Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty’s film – it was a very comic-booky movie and one thing we wanted to do with this was make it almost like a comic book.  We wanted everything to be bigger than life and very colorful.  So we really approached this as such and tried to give it that bigger-than-life comic-book movie feel.  And with Terrance’s expertise and drawing up a lot of the concept art.  Also a big inspiration in that way was propaganda – like Russian propaganda art.  That’s how we promoted the movie was through propaganda art, and that’s something I think really fit this film.

What influenced your choice to shoot on video as opposed to film?

Bousman:  Again I wanted to distance myself from Saw a little bit – Saw was shot on 35.  But there’s two main reasons:  there’s the separation from that Saw world and then on top of that, this is a futuristic opera.  It’s fantasy, it’s sci-fi.  I wanted to have a more crystal-clear look, when you’re doing something like Saw you want it to be down and dirty – grainy almost.  With this I didn’t want grain, I wanted it to look futuristic.  So what is the future?  Digital’s the future.  So that was my main intention, to shoot this in HD rather than film.  You spend a little more money shooting in HD, but in my mind it looked so much better.  Terrance and I actually just saw the movie projected digitally and it looks like a whole different movie.  You see this thing projected digitally because that’s how we shot it, and it’s amazing.  It really is a whole different experience.  For those who have a Blu-ray player, wait ‘til you see this thing on Blu-ray.  Try if you can to watch the film like that.  It’s just… I don’t know how else to say it.  It’s fuckin’ bad ass.

Paul, how much say did have in creating your character in this film?

Sorvino:  I pretty much designed my outfit.  I felt that Rotti ought to have a ponytail.  He ought to have a big wig and at one point you see him take it off.  We knew that the way Rotti dressed had to have a Victorian design, so when they came to me I talked with the costume designers and we kind of collaborated from that end.  But the costume designers were great.  Primarily things that were central to the costuming were the hair and the boots – which I didn’t come up with, once again that was the genius of the costume designers.  Where I really think I should answer that question though, is that we had to do the recording before we actually shot anything.  Because with a musical you’re lip synching to the pre-recorded audio track.  So I think where the real creativity came in and where the real personal stamp came in was because it was written without knowing who was gonna sing it – I mean this not a typical Puccini opera or Verdi opera where it’s centered on baritones and basses and such, that all goes away.  So when we were dealing with the script – or the music, which in this case kind of is the script – it was very rough.  The music was all there but the arrangements for the singing were all based on the performances.  They didn’t know how I sang, whether I was a baritone or a soprano or what have you – so there was a lot of give-and-go in that respect because while we were recording I could turn to Terrance and say, “I think there should be a B-flat here,” and so I kind of got to decide how to arrange my vocals while I was recording them.  That’s something you’d never get to do in any other kind of opera.  It was a great thing to do because it was a way to something very new.  And because I worked such a great director, I didn’t feel like an actor or a singer – I felt like a collaborator.  And that’s thanks to Darren and Terrance.

Zdunich:  As we were doing it, the recording process was – like Paul said – done before the actual filming of the movie.  So we were up against ridiculous deadlines, and it seemed impossible to get ahead.  At the same time, you want to have flexibility for your performers but in order to make things flexible you need time.  We didn’t have time and we didn’t have money.  So when I first met Paul, it was one these moments where you’re like “Jesus Christ, I’m in Paul Sorvino’s studio and he’s singing ‘Gold’ and he’s just – knocking it out of the park.”  But Paul had the idea for the bridge of “Gold”, because the tempo of the whole thing was kind of the same throughout.  We were recording that day and he said, “It’s too slow.”  So there was kind of a back and forth of “There’s nothing I can do.”  “But, it’s too slow…”  “There’s nothing I can do, deal with it!  Deal with it!”  [Laughs.]  And at the time it was just like “Fucking Paul…”  So I told him we’d figure it out and he went to go get a coffee or something.  I go back to work and it’s like “What can we do?  Well we can speed it up, but it’ll just sound like chipmunks.”  So we decided to go ahead anyways and speed it up – and it was almost double-time when Paul sang it.  I just thought to myself “Goddammit, he was right…” [Laughs.]

What kinds of things could you not do on stage with Repo! that you were really satisfied with in transferring to film?

Bousman:  Everything.  We did the stage show – and it was the first thing I ever directed.  Before the Saw films, before any music videos I’ve ever done, I did this play.  And I was so excited because this was my first big directing gig, and Terrance goes “By the way, we have fourteen dollars.  That’s all the money you have to make this play.”  We were in a black box theater.  The costumes were made from the actors in the play’s clothes.  We had very few sets.  So getting the chance to do the movie, the freedom it opens up is incredible.  This was a really low budget movie, and Saw II, III, and IV were all really low-budget movies – [but] this cost less than Saw III and IV.  We shot it in thirty days, and what that means is that we were shooting two, three songs a day.  For example, “Gold” – we shot that in two hours, Paul had one take, it was just like “Got it?  Move on.  Got it?  Move on.”  The scene where Sarah Brightman’s eyes are projecting Marni – we shot that in three hours… it was, like, one day, and we were like “Move on, move on, move on…”  And the set caught fire – we didn’t even stop it!  We were like “Uh-oh, fire.  Sarah, don’t you fucking stop singing!” [Laughs.]  When you look at something like Moulin Rouge or Dreamgirls – they have a week and a half to shoot their big numbers, we had like four hours for ours.  So it was crazy.  We had a lot more resources than the play, but this was still very much a guerilla shoot.

Zdunich:  The scene that currently opens the film, where I come out and sing, “Out from the night in the mist…” – that was written in the script to be in titles.  Then we decided that we were gonna shoot it.  And it was a day we were breaking for lunch…

Bousman:  And the set’s being torn down by the way.

Zdunich:  Yeah, the set’s being torn down.  So Darren gets me and the DP together and says, “Hey, we’re gonna shoot ‘Repo Man’ tonight.”  The DP was like, “But there’s no lighting.”  Darren’s going, “Oh, it’s fine – just light that trashcan on fire.  We’ll make it happen.  Just get up there and do it.”  It ended up being the beginning of the movie.  It was just absolutely crazy.

Sorvino:  That I think is the mark of a great filmmaker though.  You look at guys like John Cassavettes – he used to do stuff like that all the time.  And Cassavettes is one of the great independent filmmakers of all time.  I just did a film with Benny Gazzara, and he used to work with Cassavettes and he was telling me all these stories where Cassavettes would just think of something and say, “Alright let’s just shoot it.”  Sure enough he’d put it together and get it on film.

Bousman:  Yeah, this film was straight independent.  Y’know, I’ve been going through my career thinking “Okay, the next one I’ll have more time, more money, more resources,” and it’s just been kinda the opposite. [Laughs.]