Be sure and read parts One and Two of Horror.com's exclusive Repo! The Genetic Opera interviews.

Staci Layne Wilson: So, Alexa, how would you describe it to people who say, “My gosh, where do I begin with this movie?” How do you sort of sum it up? There are so many things.  Is it an opera? Is it a comedy? Is a horror movie? Grand Guignol?

Alexa Vega: I think that is sort of why it took so long for people to really get this film. It really is everything bottled up in one. I wouldn't say it's a musical because “musical” sounds so cheesy, but it definitely has some awesome music, and so I guess you could call it a rock opera, but it's so much more than that. It's kind of your rock opera fantasy mixed with every emotion possible. You have funny. You have gruesome. You have some really sad and good moments between Shilo and her father. You know, what I really like about this movie is that there is a character in it for everyone. When you watch this film, you will be able to relate to one of the characters. There are so many teenage girls and even some teenage guys that are going to know what Shilo is going through, and they are going to get it. There are going to be so many parents who know what it's like to be Nathan and to have to deal with a teenager or deal with the loss of a loved one. There is going to be someone in it for everyone, and it's such a colorful film that you can be 13 years old or you can be 80 years old. I'm not kidding.  I'm telling you that my grandpa would go in there and he would come out singing A Needle In A Bug. I really think it's colorful and fun, and it's going to bring a lot of diverse people together,which I really like about it. I can see all kind of different people going to see it. That's what I love once a movie comes out. I love sitting in the back and seeing what kind of people walk in the theater to see a movie that we've done…

Terrance Zdunich: …And then walk out.

Darren Smith: Not if they have locked the door. And if you're into sexy bloody bald women, this is for you. We can speak for the world, because everybody's into that.

Wilson: Aren't we all? I guess I'm speaking for myself.

Smith: We can speak for the world.

Wilson: Must be nice to be omnipotent. OK. People do like comparisons. Anyone who's going to see a movie or read a book will think, “Okay, if I liked this, if I liked Sweeney Todd (for example), will I like Repo?” So how do you kind of find common ground for people who look at Repo and say, “What am I getting myself into?”

Zdunich: It's hard to do. If you were to compare it to Sweeney Todd, which I saw and I actually enjoyed, it's like us in the sense that there is music, and there is something Gothic about the overall aesthetic, but I think a major difference between us and Sweeney Todd is that the music is huge. I liked Sweeney Todd, but the music is very musical theater and ours is much more rock.

Smith: Nine Inch Nails.

Zdunich: Nine Inch Nails, some of it, but it's certainly more modern and contemporary than Sweeney Todd is. It's a dark comedy, and I think ours also has those elements.  I guess I can say ours is more fun. I mean, it really is meant to be fun. We had fun making it. There's nothing stuffy about it. It's more colorful, artful, and has a lot of the structures of a fairy tale too. In a way, it certainly is darker.

Vega: It's such a fantasy, though.

Zdunich: It's fantasy, yeah. Fantasy will probably be the best way to put it as a genre.

Smith: Well, we've always had kind of our smug Hollywood techno set-up, which is this techno Wagnerian, a little Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror, but I think it's a little of Nine Inch Nails meets The World According to Garp.

Vega: What!? I don't even know what that is!

Wilson: I am in line already. It sounds great.

Smith: I am being funny, but the only reason I'm saying it is in the book The World According to Garp, I just love the fact that John Irving can create these just bizarre things that just don't happen in real life, and yet there's a real emotional component to it, and it just kind of adds to this Nine Inch Nails industrial music that we have in here.

Zdunich: I guess to me it is probably like a really dark fairytale, but set to really cool music.

Vega: That's such a good way to put it.

Wilson: What else can you add?

Zdunich: What?  You're looking for the gory stuff? You're looking for a little bit more crazy? So did you get enough of it?

Smith: What about backstage, and all the liaisons and stuff?

Vega: Oh, lord. You mean with all the people Darren killed on the set?

Smith: I'm talking about the love affairs.

Vega: Oh, the love affairs between Terrance and I? Only when we are in costume, and sometimes out of costume, but mostly because we can't tell Alisa. Alisa is his beautiful girlfriend that I am having an affair with.

Wilson: One of the hench-girls, right? You like a woman in uniform?

Smith: Go ahead. She doesn't read your interviews.

Zdunich: [not taking the bait] One of my favorite scenes, though, was a fucking grueling long day.

Vega: Wasn't that your first day?

Zdunich: Well, yeah, it was my first day of a long week. Shilo meets the grave robber in the graveyard, and this is her first venture outside, and she’s kind of presented with a dangerous choice. There's really no good outcome:  either be caught by the guards or go with the scary guy who seems to kind of know his way around this world. He was digging up a body. So we basically had to get chased by these guards. She goes with me and we kind of run into a dead end. I use the body that I'm carrying to bash down a brick wall.  It’s such a Looney Tunes type of thing.

Vega: They used the take where you almost hit me. Did you know that?

Zdunich: It was fun, and I certainly think it will read fun on film, but the body was very heavy. We had a stunt similar to this in the short that we shot, and in that we were just using something that weighed about five pounds. So it clearly didn't have any weight, and we didn't try to hide the fact that it had no weight. I mean, this body is flying around, but the producers saw it and said that looks ridiculous. We were like, “Yeah we know,” and he was like, “That looks ridiculous. You have to get a body that actually has weight behind it.” So they bring me this body that essentially weighed 75 pounds, and it wasn’t for me to sling around, but to lift up from inside his casket and run around with it.

Vega: And not like four or five takes, we did like 80 takes that day because we shot it from so many different angles. You were so pissed off!

Zdunich: I was so pissed off, tired and sweaty, and the funny thing was it was towards the end of the day. It was getting towards the actual busting down the wall, and the setup time was so long that they were like, “We want to get this in one take.” And I'm like, “I want to get it in one take.” I'm ready to collapse, and they're like, “Okay, now were going to stiffen the body for the battering ram.” And I said, “What does that mean?” They added a metal bar that added 25 more pounds. And I'm running with the thing and I go to Darren [Bousman], “Can we just start it by the wall?' And he was like, “Oh no, I want you to take the whole thing again.” I mean, it was like running and running till I got to the wall.

Vega: And you saw how big the graveyard is.  So he's pulling it out, and it's so funny because I am like, “Are you okay?” And he's like, “Let's just shoot it.” He was so angry, and it was so funny. So amusing.

Zdunich: This is the best part: so we get to the wall, and there are guys on the other side because basically it was a wall that had a cutaway surface. They had the bricks stuffed in there so there were guys that were American Gladiator style on the other side with a cushion.  I'm like, “Well I'm going to hit on three,” and they're like, “Okay.” I only wanted to do this once, and I hit the third time, and the wall doesn't go down. So they took it as three on the fourth one, and he goes down, and I didn't know this at the time. So I'm just thinking “God, I am so weak from carrying this around all day. I can't knock down a Styrofoam wall!” I pull it back, and I go for the fourth hit, and I think "Alright, I've literally got to hurt this bitch," and I pull back and now they move away, and I don't see the wall. I don't know what's going on, and I ran into it, and the momentum and the weight of this thing goes through like butter. I go all the way through with it. So, I literally fly through the wall. I don't think they used that take because it was so funny. But we used the body, a disgusting, stinky, rotting corpse to knock down the wall. It really did stink.

Vega: I tried to think of what crew members they got tired of and chopped up and put in this thing because they really have this kind of stink when you walked on set. All these bodies were piled up and once you break through the wall, it's just like bodies and bodies and more bodies. You are just kind of like, “What is that smell?” It was either Darren farting on set which happened often, or somebody rotting.

Smith: Darren! Darren Bousman.

Zdunich: I think it was just the paint and the latex.

Wilson: I remember you guys had a lot of smoke machines and stuff going on set too, didn't you? [Read horror.com's set visit reports here]

Zdunich: Yes. And there was fake blood sitting out all day.

Smith: I found that acting shit is for the birds anyway because I played the bandleader. And I only had two days of shooting the scene, and I'm running around, jumping, and somebody said, “Kicking more than necessary.” I was so tired. I was so happy to get back here and sit behind my little producer's desk and do the budget and the music.

Wilson: Did the bandleader sing?

Smith: Yeah, he sings. I rile up a crowd of freaks and stuff for GeneCo.'s Genetic Opera, and so I'm like the ringleader for that.  Alexa, didn't you have a thing where you were saying that you had to drink that potion, and that you are getting sick?

Vega: Oh, my gosh, I swear I was either burping or farting mint for a week because we have this thing where I actually use pills because I supposedly have is rare blood disease. They were really cool, these blue pills, but they were mints. There were five mints that they would pour in my hands and then they put Alka-Seltzer in the water. Darren wanted me to do these takes where I drink these pills and down the whole thing of water, and we must have done it like 10 times.

Zdunich: She was just sitting there putting back pills and drinking water.

Vega: Seriously, think of drinking, like, mint water. I drank a gallon of mint water, and afterwards my belly was huge. I kept burping, and it was mint. It was the worst.  It was disgusting.

Wilson: The Alka-Seltzer just wouldn't cure it?

Vega: No. The Alka-Seltzer just made it worse. But that’s okay.  It was for the love of Repo.

Smith: File a complaint with the union.

Vega: I know. “They made me drink mint Alka-Seltzer water!” I think there are going to be so many awesome memories on set, but I think one of the best ones was when we were about to shoot this scene where I come running down the stairs and dad is fighting with Blind Mag. I get in the middle of it, and it was this really great shot where the camera is panning to each of us and the three of us are in a triangle yelling at each other. Obviously we’re singing, and they have all the smoke machines blowing outside and the wind going.  It is really picking up, and we started getting tense, and we were thinking, “Wow we are really getting into this.” All of a sudden, you smell like this burning, and we are thinking, “Yeah. Man, this is really getting into it,” and all of a sudden, someone started yelling, “Fire! Fire!” and there is a big blaze outside the front door. The set was on fire, and you start to think to yourself, “What do I do? That is our exit.” You kind of go through this panic. You really don't realize that when the set goes ablaze, what do you do? Like a dummy, I'm sitting there, and I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to run up the set stairs that have nowhere to go.” So I sit there, and then I run up the stairs, and I think, “Great. I am trapped.” Meanwhile, everybody is like, “Stay still,” and the smart Anthony and Miss Sarah Brightman run out the fire escape. There is literally this little fire escape on set, and I'm upstairs with my knitting needles.

Zdunich: But that is like where the father and daughter relationship ended. He was like, “You're on your own. Here's a whistle.”

Vega: But actually that was a lot of fun that day. That made it so eventful, the fire on the Repo set. I think there are going to be so many cool little stories behind the scenes.

Smith: One thing is that Blind Mag, who is played by Sarah Brightman.  She's in the opera, and she is supposed to be this huge international diva which she is in real life, but she is blind since birth, and she gets these digital corneas from Gene Co., and these digital corneas can record anything. They can record the scenes of your life. So it's just another little gadget.

Vega: Actually, she looks so cool when she's singing on the stairs, and that's going to be like a projector.

Wilson: How many things like that were invented from the time that you conceived the story, to the shorts and the play, into the movie? What is new to the movie?

Zdunich: Well, certainly, we didn't have eyes that project Obi-Wan Kenobi style.

Wilson: I get that, but was there a reference maybe in the dialogue before [to this technology]?

Smith: Originally, we had more dialogue then we have now. You know, like I said, it's an opera. It's sung from beginning to end. Maybe there are about 10 to 15 lines of short dialogue, but when we originally did it, I would say it was about 75% singing and 25% spoken dialogue.  I think that really slowed the action down.

Zdunich: But with that, Mag had the digital upgrade, but it didn't record. It has to be more than just a cool context. It has to be a visual element almost a cell phone camera recorder, but it's in her eyes in the pupils.

Wilson: How do you project cell phones and the Internet and computers and things like that in the movie? I mean, how do you see that stuff years from now? How do you show that, or do you just kind of ignore it so that people don't see it or think about it?

Smith: It's shown. If I understand the question, it's shown as kind of like a hologram.

Zdunich: But you're asking about technology.

Wilson: Yeah, how do you present that in the film?

Zdunich: The production design really had a mix with old and new which I think translates really well into the whole fantasy. It almost has a Victorian element to a lot of it. It makes it seem a bit more futuristic.

Smith: It's a little like the movie Brazil.

Zdunich: Yeah, but Shilo and Nathan have communicators on their wrists that they use to talk with each other, and it monitors her blood pressure. If her blood pressure drops below a certain point he gets notified. We have elements like that in the movie. But again, it's not a Minority Report. Everyone is in their own dark little worlds, and they're not necessarily sitting there chatting on the computer.

Vega: But that is what I like about it.  You know that it is set in the future, but it's not all about all of our gadgets and all of our things. It's more about the people. It's not focused on this is set in the future. It's focused on the characters which I think a lot of films nowadays have lost track of. They're so focused on all the other stuff that you kind of lose what the movie is really all about.

Wilson: Yeah, and it'll look dated later if you focus too much on the technology. So you kind of tried to avoid that?

Zdunich: We tried to, but we almost made it in some ways intentionally dated like the villain is this kind of God.  He spies on people and so he kind of has this huge surveillance that can zoom in on people's lives including people's bodies and their organs. 

Smith: In the beginning, after the comic book prologue, which, by the way, I think does a good job of setting up what the future looks like and what it is, you are in the future, and as Alexa said, we can focus on the human element. We basically pan through the city where he have different voices, and these commercials which can be in about 12 different languages happening at once, but basically we’re touching on the fact that our nervous systems are almost breaking down by the virtual influx of information.  Our attention is split between 20 different things at any given time. This is what's causing people’s bodies in the future to break down and to have these plagues. People are dying of this overstimulation, this syndrome that they have, and this is what leads Gene Co.  It motivates their rise to power. It's part of the prologue. We are trying to touch upon things again that I have seen or read of science fiction.  Ray Bradbury is a good example, too. It’s just things that are happening right now. We can understand it, we can posit this is what it would be like if things are going the way that they are going now. This is what will be in 50 years. That's the soapbox. Over and out.

Wilson: Nice and sudsy. Okay, I think we're good. And thank you for so much for coming in to chat about this. I appreciate it.

= = =

End part four; and this concludes our exclusive, in-studio interview with Repo creators Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, and star Alexa Vega.

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