Gathering in Fantasia’s secret basement lair, I had the opportunity to talk with the director, a few writers, and most of the stars of recently premiered crime drama, Lowlife. Because this was such a large group, I indicate the director, Ryan Prows, with an “RP”, and others as “->”. My apologies to the non-Ryans who participated in the interview: your involvement was just as valuable as his.

366: Hello everybody — thank you all for gathering here today! I wasn’t originally slated to come and interview you fine people, but I had a gap in my schedule after I chatted with the director of Kodoku Meatball Machine…

RP: Aw, shit. Was it good?

366: …Well, it certainly does what it does. [Laughter]. Whether it’s good, I suppose that depends what you’re looking for. So if you’re looking for a funny variant of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, then maybe it’s your kind of thing. [Laughter]. So, in the interim I was able to whip these questions together kind of quickly, so hopefully this will work out all right. Now, you mentioned after the screening one of the things that influenced you was Wild at Heart.

RP: Bobby Peru! Actually, we were just talking about it. Teddy’s character is totally, like, his cousin or something.

366: Definitely one of the great scumbags of… uh…

RP: “Scumbag Cinema”?

366: I wanted to ask you—you’re probably asked a lot, “Do you feel you’re like ‘this director’ or ‘that director'”—but what filmmaker would you like to be compared to?

RP: Like I said yesterday, Cassavetes meets Verhoeven. So hopefully there’s some kind of sensitivity with the character work, so people care about the actors, like there’s an actors piece, but there’s also RoboCop shooting between the legs…

366: So there’s a little bit of splatter-gore-sci/fi-hardcore-Western.

RP: There we go. Nailed it!

->With heart.

RP: Now with Verhoeven, it’s like the same thing. He’s so smart and does his thing, perhaps the best satirist in cinema history. Cassavetes, same thing. He made these important movies, but they’re all wild as fuck. He left his own stamp on each thing. So those are the film-makers that excite me, and I think the goal of trying to make this movie was so—I remember talking about this, when we were flying out here—from the beginning of the process to now, it was… absurd. We were sitting here a few minutes ago being interviewed and Mil Mascaras walked in to be interviewed—and we thought, “What world are we fucking living in?” We’re talking about Lowlife and this luchador comes in being interviewed next to us.

366: Yes, it seems you’ve come a nice long way there, and speaking Continue reading KICKING BACK WITH A BUNCH OF LOWLIFES (2017) →