Interviews by Staci Layne Wilson

Check out our interview with the masterminds behind Repo! The Genetic Opera. This is part one of our uncut, in-depth interview with Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, conducted by Staci Layne Wilson before she saw the film in its entirety. Please read her review of the film here.

Staci Layne Wilson: On the record: How do you officially sum Repo! The Genetic Opera up?

Darren Smith: It has some of the cool, timeless elements of sci-fi, like what Philip K. Dick did, where you take what's happening in the present with trends, and say, 'What would be happening in 50 or 100 years?' but never, ever lose sight of some sort of emotional connection. I think that's the best kind of sci-fi.

Terrance Zdunich: Yeah, and it's funny. On par with this, I've been working on some graphics and such for the film. There's an animated prologue that I've done to set up the movie, and it explores the question, “What does it look like when people start to change themselves in the future? What's the next step beyond plastic surgery?” Some of the imagery is pretty extreme like runway models standing in front of x-ray machines, and they have enlarged hearts or bigger kidneys sticking out. And that's vogue. That's chic. It's sick, but it's not just sick for sick's sake. It's based in reality. You can say, “Yeah, I can see organ repossessions becoming legal somewhere down the road.”  Certainly, it is not too far off in China right now.

Smith:  Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that is the thing, too. We're not on any soap box, but the truth of the matter is that these things are happening now. These things, forced repossession in China and the following Gong sect, which is being persecuted is horrible. It's a horrific. And you look at it, that in our future we made it legal to let people of America vote to make it legal to vote against their own self interest, to want to make this legal because they think that being able to finance organs is going to benefit them somehow, that’s the thing with the sci-fi stuff. I think we have a sick sense, a sardonic sense of humor. Plus, I think we are pretty cynical in some ways of culture, but that is what this whole thing is about. It's like what makes our society now. What makes somebody feel superior to somebody else because they've got a cell phone?  You know, to most people, you couldn't tell the difference between that cell phone and the other, and they've got this car versus the other. What we are doing is just saying, “Well, you know, I think you and I both took a lot of trends and say this is just completely absurd. So why not be able to judge other people because of their kidney size or the color of their eyes, because they've got these bizarre organs.”  Right?

Zdunich:   Yeah, and we've been doing research. We've read about things that are extreme like there's a survey called the g-shot, which is essentially injecting silicone or something into a woman's g-spot so that it is enlarged and irritated and they call it the g-shot. I used to teach art classes in Calabasas, and it was kind of in a strip mall. This was a year or maybe two years ago. There was what I thought was a spa at the end of the shopping center, you know, walking distance from where I was teaching kids, and it was a spa, but for the most part it was kind of in and out plastic surgery for these wealthy house moms that would essentially drop the kids off at the nannies or with me and then go next door. And I walked by once, and they had balloons up, and candies, and I was like, "Oh what is going on?”  And they were like, "Oh, it's a Botox party" with a straight face.

Wilson: Or a slack face.

Zdunich:  Yeah, exactly. And it's not that I guess on some level I almost respect it because it was like we are admitting exactly what we are doing. To me, I would think, “Like oh my god you're injecting fat in your lips or cutting yourself.”  And I would think that would be something on some level you would want to keep on the down-low. But they are like "oh, let's hang some balloons."  So anyway, I think Repo is kind of informed by all those. We enjoy the sickness of it, but we also enjoy, hopefully, that it makes you kind of think a little bit.

Wilson: Do you guys even remember how you first came up with the idea?  How did you first start talking about it?  Was it meant to be a play? Was it going to be an album, or what?

Smith:  Well, as part of our 10 minute opera, we started out playing rock clubs, doing these basically rock operas, just the two of us, and telling stories. They were different stories. One would take place in 18th century Vienna. You know, classical stuff. I think he had a powdered wig back then. But we have all sorts of different stories. We talked about doing a story about somebody who is in a graveyard who sees different things happening. The underbelly of society. The kind of things that people don't necessarily see.

Zdunich:   It's not just kind of…I don't know, the crypt keeper people doing the gardening or whatever, but royalty and paupers are kind of all going in and out sometimes to visit a loved one, sometimes to be something a little bit more salacious. We created this character that would kind of sit there and kind of comment on what he was seeing, and in doing so, kind of doing an overall social commentary. One of the things that he saw in this graveyard was an organ repo man, which at the time was just one of the many cool things that we had created that you had seen, but that particular idea seemed to resonate with the various audiences that we played it to. They were like, “Repo Man. That is a great idea. Maybe we will steal that idea and make a movie.”  It started off as just kind of a wacky concept, but I think as we started to have it grow, I think it really got bigger than what we could ever really do it on stage. And as such, I think we wanted it to be a more visual medium. The film, I think, adds horror, but I think we talked about that it could be a graphic novel. Something more than just here's a live show that you put on, something that has a bigger visual element. We wanted it bigger than it could ever really be as a play.

Smith:  Yeah, we saw somebody be able to put on their own play with relatively reasonable inexpensive things, so it kind of made us think that maybe we could do this ourselves. And when we basically decided to do that, we had a 10 minute story, and we expanded it, and we went through many gallons of coffee. There were a few things we were really resolute about. One of them was, we really wanted this to be an opera, as opposed to a musical where people sing from beginning to end. Once you get over the artifice of somebody opening their mouth only to sing, hopefully you forget about it. They're singing, but they are telling a story. Two, we wanted science in our science fiction. We studied opera, and we also studied the scientific aspects of being able to implant organs into people. We talked to surgeons. We read copious amounts of Philip K. Dick. It's an over-the-top, fun, somewhat absurd story, but we wanted it to have elements of truth and of a real heart for people to grasp onto. And we needed the facts to ground it, and make it so.

Wilson: What would you say would be one of the more outrageous scenes in the movie that people may be talking about after they see the film?

Zdunich:  You saw The Thankless Job scene, right?

Smith: I showed her Thankless Job.

Zdunich:   That is one of my favorite scenes, but I think it may be one of the more interesting scenes, although it happens pretty early on in the movie. So, hopefully, it gets better and better as it goes along, and by the end we will say that everything culminates on an upper house stage that essentially is dripped blood. The spilling of blood, and it's almost all over pretty much every character on solo. The last 10 minutes of the opera is pretty extreme in that way. Also heartfelt, even though there is blood pouring everywhere. But Thankless Job, I think, is a great scene because just for me it's musically fun. It's well acted. It's a scene between the Repo Man and one of his victims, who he essentially repossesses all the guy’s organs and sticks his hand up inside the guy’s gutted torso and uses him as a puppet which is visually stunning.

Wilson: That was well done. Gruesome fun.

Zdunich:   Thank you. Yeah, you can't see that on tape, but...

Smith:  His hand is going in a diagonal way 6 inches. And the other thing is that Amber Sweet, who is played by Paris Hilton, is what we call a scalpel slut. She goes under the knife because in the future, you can change anything about yourself, your race and what-not. In every scene she looks different, and because of these repeated surgeries, something really horrible happens to her face onstage which you will have to see the film to find out.

Zdunich:   The last 20 minutes of the movie takes place in this opera house. The main villain of the stories has orchestrated so that all of these characters live, and conflicts sort of collide at the opera, onstage before a televised audience. So, you have a little bit of almost like a Roman gladiator type of show within a show with an almost like feed-the-Christians-to-the-lions type of thing. So, you have a blood-thirsty crowd kind of cheering on the death and dismemberment of various people. I think you'll walk away hopefully even feeling disgusted by it or just enjoying the gore, but then also walking away really caring for the main character, who climbs out of blood. Or will she?

Smith:  The main character is played by Alexa Vega. She is a teenage daughter who…do we reveal any of this, about the father?

Zdunich:   Yeah, I think everyone knows about it.

Smith:  She thinks her father is a surgeon at night. He works the late shift, but in reality he is the dreaded organ Repo Man who works for GeneCo., this nefarious multi-billion-dollar corporation which is owned by Rotti Largo, a character played by Paul Sorvino.

Wilson: So, did Darren Bousman find this and champion it?  How did it happen to become a movie because this is really a departure from what people expect for him to direct?

Zdunich:   Well, we actually found him. That is one way of putting it. When we decided to make Repo a stage production, and like Darren said, take it upon ourselves to find the money and find a venue and just put it on and see what happens with that, at that time, we kind of opened up our pool of who we were working with which prior to then was just about anybody. And we said okay when we go to audition actors, we will get a cast, we will get a costumer, and we will get a director. So, we saw and basically interviewed a lot of directors for the role and we ended up choosing Darren Bousman which obviously worked out for us in the long run, but not just because he went on to make Saw.

Wilson: This was pre-Saw?

Zdunich:   This was pre-Saw.

Wilson: What was it about him that intrigued you?

Zdunich:   Well, it was funny because we saw a lot of people and some which probably had more experience at least directing stage plays than he did at the time. And, as such, they would've come in and they would've had a very, I think, more traditional way of looking at the project. I have this choreographer that I work with, and I have this light person that I work with, and he just kind of came in and, in many ways, he reminded us of us. It was more that he loved music. He actually loved the rock operas of the seventies as well. And he loves horror, and I think his approach is that not only was he really passionate, which ultimately is what swayed us, but his basic approach was one that I don't think anybody would walk away going, “Yeah, that's musical theater, and that's how you do musical theater.” So, he came at it with a kind of edge and the passion that none of the other candidates really had. It really worked out well, and it was a great show, and obviously it has worked out in the long run. From that day at the moment we worked together, he kind of fell in love with the project and the music of the project much to the chagrin of his girlfriend. He's been singing for almost 5 years. Even though he has changed over the years, he's been involved, and he came and saw it, and he went on to other theatrical productions. After the one that he directed with different directors and different cast, he came and kind of supported each progression of it and all along he said, “I would love to make this into a movie. If I ever get the chance I will make this into a movie.”  So the chance came five years later.

Smith:  Here we are. I was really impressed because initially when he read the script that was five years ago, and he was just out of film school, I think. He was like, “I was made to direct this film, this stage show,” and I think we have heard that before, and we have heard people be all excited when they want to get a gig, but we sat there and talked with him. And initially, right off the bat, he's got all these ideas like we’ll have somebody come in pretending to be a patron and have a cell phone and talk on the cell phone and annoy everybody, and then we will have a Repo man come and repossess this person right out of the audience. Or, people will have these genetic barcodes, and we will have some problem with the Jesus freak who thinks it’s out of the Book of Revelation and that people should never have any kind of bar code on them. So, he had this idea of like staging outside all these right-wing Bible belt people with songs boycotting us. It was just like these totally bottom of the box ideas.

Zdunich:   Bottom of the box ideas that really worked. It was still stage show, but there was some stuff that was pretty extreme. During the stage show, we had decorated the lobby with tanks and organs and IVs and glowing fluids. Online we actually found all these animal body parts plastic sealed, and they put them in jars, but they were real guts kind of surrounding the stage and blood spill on the stage. This particular venue was pretty extreme. I'm glad that we moved beyond that in some ways. It was essentially a warehouse that we rented. I think some plays and stuff probably had gone on there, but certainly nothing as ambitious as what we were trying.

Wilson: It's an underground theater?

Zdunich:   Way below code, and nothing really worked. The guy that ran it was really weird.

Smith:  The bathroom was behind us.

Zdunich:  The bathroom was behind the stage and the only way that she could get into the bathroom was to actually go over the stage. And then we were serving liquor and stuff without a liquor license. It was really a quality kind of underground experience. And one of the things was that we were drinking and people gotta pee. We're pumping drinks into them, and they've gotta pee. So at the intermission, you would have a line going across the stage, and the intermission was like 45 minutes long, so we kind of worked that into the show, too, where the Repo Man would kind of clear the stage. And that is why we chose Darren. That same sort of spirit I think has translated to the film in a great way.

Wilson: So how does the movie open? What will hook everyone from the first couple minutes?

Smith:  It opens with a comic book prologue, which I hope will captivate everybody. Terrance has done a really great job. He is an artist.

Zdunich:   My background is actually in animation and storyboards, and in one of the stage shows, we actually had multimedia in it, and we incorporated some of these elements. It's almost like it was a backdrop, and so we have kind of continued with that a bit here. We have a prologue and a couple of transitions in the movie which are animated, and they actually set the condition and move you through the story. That is the first two minutes of the movie. It’s animation in a great way in that it creates a sort of mythic comic book graphic novel type expectation for the character, and I think it also allows you the freedom to be as wacky as we are, which is you can sing. You can puppet someone's insides to death while you are singing. But it sets up, basically the condition and the characters and so you have an animated prologue and then you jump into the real world.

Smith:  The real world shows a violent repossession of a heart. You'll immediately see blood, guts, and plastic surgery.

Zdunich:   Sex, drugs and opera.

Wilson: Now, which role do you play in the film?

Zdunich:   I play a grave robber which is ironically the role that kind of started this whole thing. At the time, he was supposed to be the narrator, who is sitting in the graveyard. Smugly commenting on…

Wilson: Kind of like the Greek chorus?

Zdunich:   Kind of like the Greek chorus, yet it definitely had a narrator type thing. When it became a bigger play, [he] was really just a side character, and that's how he is in the film. But, he is a grave robber, and his basic role in the story, which was inspired by some of the research that Darren was talking about, is that he is a drug dealer, and he gets [this particular drug which is] the chemical that we hypothesize is produced in the brain at the time of death which creates those kind of euphoric white light kind of experiences. And Gene-Co. found this out and marketed it as a mainstream pharmaceutical that goes hand and toe with their surgeries. It helps to relieve the pain of the recovery. So, like while you are changing your heart or changing your face every week, you don't really feel the pain of it because you are constantly doped up, and they continue to make money at it. But, there is a lower grade version of the drug on the street that doesn't go through the proper process. If you're a character like a grave robber with flexible morals and a willingness to exhume bodies and cut out the middleman… He extracts this drug, and he sells it on the street and does some narration.

Wilson: Yeah, we saw a trailer. Do you have a scene with Paris Hilton and it?

Zdunich:   I do, and she is addicted. The Amber Sweet character that Paris plays is not only addicted to surgery and changing her face, which she does throughout the movie, but she is also addicted to this drug. I am kind of like her dealer and erstwhile lover.

Wilson: What's it called, the drug?

Zdunich:  Zydrate.

Wilson: Okay. And is it injected?

Zdunich:   Our thing is that it is administered by way of electrical surge. You have a gun, we call it Z-gun, and basically you get a jump. You kind of drift off into euphoria and then the doctors can cut you up and do whatever you need.

Smith:  As he said, it is extracted right at the moment of death. Right through somebody's nasal cavity with a syringe. They’re very graphic and violent images.

Wilson: Huh. And you guys use like some kind of a green liquid for that, or was it blue?  I can't remember now…

Zdunich:   It's blue in the film. It has changed colors over the year based on what we could afford onstage, but essentially it is the cheap effect. It’s kind of drained glow sticks, although in the movie when it is all done through post it'll be more of a magnificent glow than just what we can do. But it isn't a little vial. You stick it in this gun, and it sparks, and you give someone a surge.

Smith:  Do you want some?

Zdunich:   Yeah, your first time is free.

Wilson: Hit me up after the interview. Off the record.  I'd like to know more about the casting, I guess, because the casting is so unusual and disparate. I mean, we have got everyone from Paul Sorvino to Ogre from Skinny Puppy. How do you get all these people together, and who was sort of in charge of casting, and how much input did you guys have?

Smith:  I think we had input from everything. We met with everybody who was involved and went through the whole audition process.

Zdunich:   We were really worried, actually, when this started. I don't want to say worried, but I think we were just sort of expecting that the project is going to be made, and now we are going to have very little say in it, but it hasn't been that way. I think one of the reasons that it hasn't been that way, is, of course, that Darren Bousman is the one that is directing it, and he definitely trusts our input, and he actually needs it because none of these people have created a musical before. I would probably argue that no one has really created a musical quite like this, but they certainly haven't. So there were all these factors that they had no idea how to really contend with like what it would really take to sing the parts or to learn the parts or to record the parts.

Wilson: Yeah, it's a lot of work.

Zdunich:   It's a lot of work, and so we have been involved from beginning to end and part of it was with the auditioning process. A list of possible actors would be presented and even if someone was like, “Yeah, yeah, they would be great at this part,” they would essentially send them to us and see if they could actually sing it, and how they were singing, and how quickly they learned and because there is no speaking, these characters had to essentially sing their part. They needed to sing at the character and several people that came in. Not only could they not do that, but they kind of choked at the prospect of it.

Wilson: It's almost unfathomable just to even think like that!

Zdunich:   It is, and you don't hear it. You can kind of say, “Oh, I have seen that person act. I know what they sound like,” and in many musicals like in Hairspray or something, you could still kind of go well they’re speaking and they’re singing and as long as we can make them sound like they’re singing, you have the speaking to fall back on, but we didn't have that. So, we were very involved with that and everyone that was up for the role we heard saying, either in a formal audition process, or like in the case of Paul, we went to his studio where he had been working on Goal, which is kind of one of his big soliloquies in the movie.

Smith:  And he studied opera for 17 years and sang at The Met, Paul Sorvino did. So the guy really knows his stuff and to amplify what he is saying, we didn't want musical theater. We wanted to marry the two interests of ours which was opera and rock and not necessarily rock opera either. I am classically trained, and I have a degree in music composition and all of that, but we both really love rock music. We wanted to be able to do that, but what we didn't want is something that sounded very Broadway. And so that eliminated a lot of people right then and there because of the quality of their voice that we thought didn't have the edginess that we wanted. I think we are really blessed with everybody who came through.

Zdunich:   We are. And I think all of the cast that kind of ultimately we chose, they chose us. I guess kind of the weeding down process was a certain person like Paul which was kind of an unlikely candidate. You might suspect he was basically saying, “I have to do this movie.” He saw it as kind of the Opera of the macabre thing, but he says that he has always wanted to be an opera singer, and he doesn't like musicals and that’s probably why he doesn't like musicals is because they don't really show the operatic singing. He took this as a very serious project and said, essentially in his own words, “It would be a sin for me not to take this part.”  And the same thing was true with a lot of our other cast. Sarah Brightman, you know, came and heard it and said, “I'm in! I'm in!” and so that was pretty much across the board with the cast that we were interested in. They were just as interested in us. We had people that would come in, and it would be like they just don't get it. We had everyone, I think, that was very into it. [They] loved the idea of it, and loved the weirdness of it, and took it, and worked well beyond what they normally would, I mean, Paul was working on this for months and months and months on the music. And we didn't have the budget really to retain someone for months and months and months, but they were doing it because they actually believed in the project and wanted it to be great.

Wilson: Bill Moseley, if you don't mind if I interject for just a second because he is an icon, of course, in the horror world — I have some of his Cornbugs CDs, and he doesn't really sing on those, but from what I have seen on the clips here, he really is singing, and he is really good. He had quite a lot of projection. Can you talk a little bit about working with him?

Zdunich:   Working with Bill?

Wilson: Yeah.

Zdunich:   Yeah well, the character of Luigi, I mean, it's a character piece. Pavi and Luigi are kind of like Abbott and Costello in this, the dark version of Abbott and Costello. A murderer and a rapist are our comic relief.

Smith:  As long as it's not the Three Stooges.

Zdunich:  Yeah, and they’re our murderer and rapist.

Wilson: Hey, I'm tickled!

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