The following interview originally appeared in CHAOTIC ORDER #14

       

DIVIDED INTO CRUELTY: An Interview With Mitch Davis

By Bob Smith
 

Infliction Films was started back in 1994 by you, but what led to its formation?

Well, 1993-1994 was a very strange period for a lot of us. There was a lot of crazy stuff happening in most of our lives and when it came time to focus on finally making a full-length feature together, it was only natural for me, as producer, to launch a production company as an official banner under which could all work. This way, we’d get officially recognized as a filmmaking entity and just as important when you’re working with practically no money, you get tax breaks. It’s important to underline the fact that we shot Subconscious with privately raised money – not a cent of government coin, not even in Post – which is very unusual in the realm of Canadian film, and it’s also why it took us six fucking years to finish the thing! The government didn’t exactly want to see knife blowjobs and infanticide out there representing “the Canadian consciousness” so we were on our own from the start, which we expected, and that was fine for a film that was so low budget. Anyway, my point with all this is to say that virtually everyone we made Subconscious with was a filmmaker in their own right, and I felt that, given our relatively morbid collective interests, it was always going to be an uphill battle for any of us to raise money for our projects, doubly so when you consider how young most of us still were. So the idea was that any one of us could make their films under the Infliction banner and this way, even if it was to be the work of a first-time director, the company itself would have a history which could hopefully translate to a perceived track record in the eyes of ever-nervous potential investors. Of course now, eight years later, we know that it just doesn’t work that way anymore, and most of the principle Infliction people have started their own individual companies – Julien Fonfrede and Karim Hussain have Screen Machine, Patrick Tremblay has Sombreself, Philippe Spurrell has Circus Maximus etc. We’re still there for each other’s projects, but we might as well each have companies that we can call our own.

I was interested in the collective mentality of Infliction Films, it seems to be similar to that of the mid-80's Cinema of Transgression (Subconcious Cruelty also echos Richard Kern's Submit to Me films in some of its' sylistic content). Was this a movement you were aware of?

Sure, but I wouldn’t say that the New York scene was that much of an influence on us, though we definitely appreciated the soul of it. If anything, it was more Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell, Donald Cammell, Shinya Tsukamoto, Bava, Lynch, Argento, definitely Dusan Makavajev for Karim.  We were very excited by the films that constantly obliterated any demands an audience could make on them. Films that kind of hurt people but forced them to FEEL, because the moviegoing act had become more and more passive and audiences were rarely engaged by anything anymore, let alone challenged or provoked. When we began making Subconscious, the idea was to make something that would almost be like a terrorist act on film, drenched in color, poetry, atrocity and negative emotion. We wanted it to have a very real sense of danger. The film was a very intimate collaborative thing for all of us, but it’s very much Karim’s baby. He wrote the bulk of it when he was 19 and in the end he shot it, directed it and edited picture and sound. It’s very pure in that sense.

Divided Into Zero was very much your own baby though?

Yes, absolutely. It’s a strange story. I started making the film at the tail-end of a very destructive wave of depression that had been going on for years on end. You know, the kind where it seems as if everything from before is gone and this is it now, for good. I was finally coming back to my senses, pulling out of a pretty severe dope habit and forcing my lifestyle to become somewhat human again. Certain personality types made me so uncomfortable that I did my best to avoid being around people, outside of a very small, trusted circle of friends. So Zero came out of all that. It was such a painful film to make, fittingly I guess. I wanted to make a junkie film without dope, to fuse the cycles of addiction with patterns of abuse.  The idea of this man literally dying in his past, growing old at such a young age and then spending the rest of his life just standing still, evaporating in the same mental place, no matter where he is in life – that was all I was able to feel for as a writer. Anything else felt dishonest. Zero’s all about guilt, loss and that horrible sense of predestined damnation that most addicts convince themselves of. I’ve always found that the best writing I’ve done was when I started with something horribly personal and then built and built on it until I could barely recognize myself in there anymore. No matter where I would take things, the core would always be truthful, you know? Of course, I could be totally delusional here and maybe I’ve actually written garbage when I worked that way, but it always felt like the right way to do things. In the end, I wrote it, shot it, produced it, directed it and spent forever cutting it, so yeah, it’s definitely my therapeutic little baby. Karim’s lighting, David Kristian’s sound design and Suzuki’s music are a huge part of it too, so as personal and hands-on as it was, like any film, it wasn’t made by one person sweating in the center of an empty room. The one true hell of filmmaking, especially if you’re shooting on nothing, in little bursts that are weeks or months apart, is that when you write something personal, chances are that you’ll outgrow a lot of the material before the film is finally out there. I can barely relate to Zero anymore. When people see the film – if it doesn’t bore them to hell and they make it all the way through -  I get these heavy reactions like how could you make THIS? Well, fuck. That was how I felt, and I’m really glad that I was able to make the film when I did. It’s such a time capsule for me. A very negative one, but so what?  These days I’m a bit embarrassed by some of the louder moments near the beginning, but other than that, I’m still proud of it.

In regard to the New York scene what I was meaning, rather than influence per-se, was that there is very much of a group of like-minded individuals collating their talents into a focused and unified direction.....

Oh sure, that applies then.

You mention the knife blowjobs / infanticide, and I read that Karim was stopped at customs bringing a copy of SC BACK into Canada, how much, if at all, did the idea of transgressing 'boundaries' appeal to you, of being consciously opposed to a rigid idea of taste?

Well it was definitely something we wanted to work towards – the confrontational aspect, not necessarily going against the norm for the sheer sake of having something to go against, but using people’s expectations against them, hurting them with that they think they want, forcing people to feel more than they bargained for. We were young and angry and dying to engage. Karim’s idea was start the film at an extreme that few films ever reached, and then take everything FURTHER. The collective pranksters in all of us couldn’t wait to see faces turn white, but at the same time, there was a great deal of politics and personal philosophy or poetry in every frame that Karim shot. The film is more or less a roadmap across his psyche as it stood when he was 19 and in that sense it’s very pure. Also, as film obssessives, we were all very intent on playing with film language, exploring new means of visual storytelling and all of that. That whole customs incident was hilarious. Imagine Karim getting busted for “importing obscene goods into Canada” when the film’s ORIGINAL NEGATIVE was both shot and archived in Quebec! That’s government for you…

As you mention both films were very much a reflection of their creators. Was it an over-riding factor to make the films as personal statements as much as filmic statements?

In a very big way, yes. I’ve always felt that the best films out there are the ones that literally bled out from their creators you know, where it feels as if the person who made the film all but died in the process of doing it, because the emotional heat was so close it almost scalded their faces off. Films like Martin, The Reflecting Skin, Minus Man, Santa Sangre, The Devils. If a film, or for that matter any creative work, is intensely personal, then by proxy it will also be – have to be - entirely unique. To me, the worst thing a film can be is generic. I go fucking crazy when I see these 100 million dollar studio films that don’t try to do anything new or different.  Every one of us who was there at the beginning of Infliction wanted to make films that would be as individualistic as DNA.

I read recently that you supplied the transfer print for the DVD version of Last House on Dead End Street, how did this come about?

Man that story’s gotten around! I’m a real fetishist for film element. When I was a kid, I had a super 8 projector with these tiny 8 minute horror film condensations, and I loved just holding the frames out in front of me and breathing in the smell of lab residue. Anyway, over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of collecting old 35mm prints. There’s something so beautiful about actually handling and projecting an original release print of say, Peeping Tom. Of course, you can’t show these things publicly and charge admission, but I can always have private screenings at the cinema I program for. I also bought a portable 35mm projector for my apartment and I have screening parties there every now and then. What you need to know is that most distributors destroy their batch of release prints once their film is done with its theatrical run. They simply can’t afford the costs of archiving all of these reels, so they archive one, sometimes two prints, and have the rest bandsawed – literally fucking sawed to pieces! Over time, those prints in storage just seem to disappear because there’s a sickening number of titles, and I mean major studio titles, where you’ll find that there are no longer any prints available for booking. Programming a repertory, that’s the first thing you discover.  Anyway, most collectors are open to lending their prints to cinematheques or festivals provided that the rights are cleared, so whenever a filmmaker or company is looking for a rare element, they often go through the collectors circles to see if anyone might be holding something they can use. Fortunately, (LHODES director) Roger Watkins and I have several mutual friends, and one of them – Anthony Timpson, who does the Incredibly Strange Film Festival in New Zealand – told him that I had a print in my collection. He called me up and made me an offer but I gave him full access to the print for free – I mean, the original distributor completely ripped him off and to this day, he hasn’t seen a cent for his work, there was no way that I could take money from him!  The exceptional thing in this case is that virtually every original lab element from Dead End Street has been lost. If someone wanted to strike a new print of the film, there is no real way to, short of making a neg from the old print, which would include every splice and scratch. Roger and the guys from Barrel spent a small fortune digitally correcting their video transfer of my beaten-up print and their disc master looks incredible, definitely as good as that film’s ever going to look

So did you contribute anything else on the disc, or was it just the print?

Just the print.

Interesting that you programme a rep. theatre, over here in the UK (and from what I've seen and heard in the US)  they seem very much a dead / dying form, taken over by big business and home viewing.....

It’s true, and it’s so depressing. We still get crowds – enough to keep the cinema above water – but it’s nothing like the heyday of the late 70’s and 80’s that I grew up knowing. I was a kid during what I guess was rep’s golden years, and there was one cinema in particular – Cinema V – that I practically lived at. There was such a huge scene around that place and everyone was so charged about seeing something special – not just seeing it, but experiencing it as a group. Going there to see stuff like Don't Look Now or Repo Man, it was fucking religious, man, and it affected so many of us. So now it’s crowds of 50-150 instead of 400. It’s still a beautiful thing, but I guess a lot of the magic is muffled. I don’t knock video because really, none of us would have been able to see half the films that changed our lives if we were only able to watch what made it to our local cinemas – I mean, how many masterpieces have never gotten proper distribution, you know?  I’ve always seen video as something fantastic that compliments the movie-going experience, not acts as some down-sized photocopied replacement, but clearly not everyone agrees. It really is a shame because a huge cultural tradition is on the verge of being lost, and it’s probably one of the only ones worth preserving! Still, it’s incredible to watch a modern audience respond to Singapore Sling or Lickerish Quartet. We play a lot of First Run indie and art house stuff at the Parc too, so we get a good mix of audiences, between contemporary and retro. And you know, the more or less larger audience that comes to see Y Tu Mama Tambien  gets trailers for Shogun Assassin and La Bete before their film!  What really drives me nuts is knowing that half the films that tank in rep would get a thousand people if I played them at FanTasia. It makes no sense to me when I see 40 people show up for Montreal’s first-ever screening of Last House On Dead End Street. That’s unreal. I kind of wonder about the UK rep situation though. I mean, if the Scala hadn’t been shut down in that ludicrous Clockwork Orange bust, would that audience have disappeared? I’m not so sure. The thing is, there’s no other cinema that’s doing that kind of programming  - although the NFT seems to come close sometimes.

How do you now see the advent of Digital media affecting low-budget filmmaking?  

I think we’re in for a lot of treats, because rules are being re-written on a daily basis now. Of course, video at its current tech is no substitute for film. I can’t live without film grain. Grain is pure alchemy for me and for that reason I would rather shoot on expired super 8 emulsions than industry-standard Betacam or DV formats, but things are changing fast. Panasonic’s getting ready to launch a prosumer DV camera that shoots at 24 FPS, which will finally give everyone the option of shooting with the same dreamy slur that you get with film. I still don’t like the way colors saturate on video, but again, it’s improving by the hour. The real breakthrough has to do with industry acceptance. DV is seen with a credibility that Hi8 and even Betacam never had. Sundance will show DV productions in competition, certain  A-list directors shoot DV with relatively affordable (Under 5 grand) prosumer gear. What this means is that feature filmmaking no longer needs to have an entry-level cost of100 grand. You can go out and shoot DV with a few thousand dollars – or even a few hundred if you go the route of shooting a couple days, raising more cash, shooting a few more days etc until its done – and make something that has a shot of getting out there and being taken very seriously. Dv is also giving us some incredible documentaries from total newcomers that could never have been made on film because the filmmakers themselves often weren’t sure they had something worthwhile until two years later when they started assembling their footage. Stuff like How’s Your News, Gods Of Times Square, Daddy Of Rock And Roll... Some of these guys would never have started if their only option was to spend a fortune shooting on film.  Of course, the downside is that everyone seems to be shooting DV films and when every second of footage isn’t costing them their first born, some just do whatever, aren’t remotely serious about the process and then call themselves filmmakers. You end up with a lot of flat, unambitious productions that run like, two and half hours and don’t even TRY to be something, you know? But that doesn’t matter. What counts is that people who have real ideas are finally getting chances to express them without having to sell their organs!

An obvious last question, but what's next for Infliction and for yourself?

I’m finally finishing up a new short film. It’s called God’s Little Girl and it’s kind of a strange comedy, I guess, about an intensely religious woman trying to understand why her baby daughter died in a disgustingly-preventable accident. You know, this completely ridiculous, needless type of death that happens just like that. She convinces herself that there is such a lack of genuinely good souls in heaven that God lost patience when faced with the absolute pure goodness of her daughter and took her to heaven right away. Of course then, the woman begins to wonder whether her own utterly "good" moral codes might be setting the stage for her own premature death, and she decides to take action to undo some of the potentially reckless good of her past, because no matter her convictions, she doesn’t want to die young! The film’s been cut for months and I just finished the sound design with David Kristian so now all that’s left is cutting the neg and blowing it up (from 16mm) to 35mm for festivals. I’m still raising money for the blow-up, so there’s a bit of time left to go. Should be ready by the end of the year or the dawn of the next. I’m also working on a pretty unusual feature-length script, but I’ll probably do one more short first. Actually, there’s a certain documentary that I’m very tempted to do as well and yeah, I’d shoot DV if I did it. I also want to get back into still photography a bit. In a weird way, I’m not in that big a hurry to commit to making a full-length feature right now. Whatever happens, Priority One is to make sure that my lifestyle allows me to continue with FanTasia and Cinema Du Parc. It’s kind of geeky, but that kind of film exhibition gives me more joy than anything on earth. If I had an agent, I’d probably get dropped for saying this, but I don’t put a higher importance on my personal film work than I do on other people’s films that I admire and want to help get seen by new audiences. I honestly feel much better about life when I’m doing the latter. If that means I’ll only make a handful of films during my career, so be it.