JT Leroy talks with Bruce LaBruce about his latest film provocation, The Raspberry Reich.

A scene from The Raspberry Reich. Photos: Jörn Hartmann/Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion

“They kidnapped business leaders, gunned down police officers and hijacked an airliner. But even after Sept. 11, the failed German revolutionaries who spread fear in the 1970s and ’80s have acquired a certain chic.”

Thus began a recent article, [“Terror Films, Fashion Stirs Germany”] by Associated Press writer Stephen Graham, reporting on the resurgence of interest in the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof Gang) among young German filmmakers and designers.

In addition to a half-dozen German films “that attempt to give the RAF a more human face” — such as Baader, Black Box Germany, The State I Am In, and What To Do In Case of a Fire — writes Graham, “RAF symbols, such as its trademark machine gun and red star have been recycled … Stores have marketed underwear bearing the slogan ‘PRADA-MEINHOF’, and a Berlin boutique offers T-shirts for infants with the word ‘Terrorist’ in bright colors across the chest.”

Not surpringingly, this pop culture mythologizing of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, “rankles older Germans,” says Graham.

When the Associated Press article appeared, Canadian director Bruce LaBruce — who keeps his finger on the pop culture zeitgeist — was on his way to Berlin to begin shooting his latest film, The Raspberry Reich. (The Raspberry Reich, also known as “Schili” – a cross between “chic” (schick) and “left” (linke) — were the affluent German leftists who supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang during their time on the run, providing them with shelter and money.)

La Bruce — a self-described sexual revolutionary who launched the homocore movement in Toronto in the late ‘80s in response to the homophobia of the punk rock scene — decribes The Raspberry Reich as “a critique of terrorist chic.” He plans to create a hardcore porn version as well as an R-rated, film-fest-friendly version of the film.

Novelist JT Leroy spoke with LaBruce earlier this fall just prior to his departure for Berlin to begin work on The Raspberry Reich.

A scene from The Raspberry Reich.

JT Leroy: I’m really excited to talk to you. I know so many people who also know you.

Bruce LaBruce: Yeah, everyone from Bruce Benderson to Asia Argento and Gus Van Sant, and people like that — I’ve been wondering when we were going to actually cross paths.

Leroy: It feels almost like you are an old friend, which is a trip. [laughs] I hear you’re about to make another film.

LaBruce: I’m going to Berlin on Sunday.

Leroy: Who is financing it?

LaBruce: Well, it’s the same guy who finances most of my movies, Jurgen Bruning. He’s done all of my features since No Skin Off My Ass in 1991.

Leroy: What does he do?

LaBruce: He makes films as well. And his career and mine kind of intertwine in a bizarre, interesting way. My character’s name in Hustler White is Jurgen Anger, which was half based on Jurgen Bruning and half based on Kenneth Anger. A couple of years after that film, Jurgen and a partner started a porn production company in Berlin called Cazzo Films, and Jurgen directed films for that company under the name Jurgen Anger. So it’s weird, because that character then took on a life outside of Hustler White.

Leroy: How did you guys hook up?

LaBruce: Jurgen happened to be at Hallwalls art gallery in Buffalo as a guest curator for film [in the late ‘80s]. He came to Toronto, which is close to Buffalo, looking for work to show at Hallwalls. So I showed films there.

Leroy: It’s kind of like a film director’s dream to have somebody give them money to make a film, and the sex isn’t an issue.

LaBruce: Yeah, definitely. He is one of those rare producers who really is very hands-off and lets me do what I want to do. But, on the other hand, we’re dealing with really low-budget films.

Leroy: What’s your average budget?

LaBruce: Preposterously low. People don’t believe that Hustler White, [released in 1996], was made for about $50,000. You know, we got a lot of favors and people to do stuff for free. Tony Ward did it for free, and blah, blah, blah. We got a free $10,000 sound mix. Just favors, favors. So the actual real costs would have been probably 2 or 3 times that, but that’s how much we spent. The earlier ones were even less. I think I made my first film, No Skin Off My Ass, for $14,000, something like that.

Leroy: Where does he get his money from?

LaBruce: Well, Jurgen accesses various sources. For some of my films he’s gotten money from the Berlin Film Fund. But mostly after No Skin Off My Ass, I had all these small international distributors who picked the films up in different regions, like Great Britain or Japan or America or whatever, and we got recoupable advances from them, so that’s how we’ve been getting a lot of the financing.

Leroy: Have your films been making money?

LaBruce: I’m not making tons of money off of them, but I still do make some income off of them.

Leroy: It’s kind of ideal in a way. You double dip. It’s like what someone once said about Dorothy Allison’s books: she straddles both gay/lesbian fiction and regular, straight fiction. And you kind of do that too.

LaBruce: Definitely. It depends on the region. In Japan it’s not particularly gay audiences, a lot of it is straight teenage girls.

Leroy: Isn’t that weird about Japan? All those teenage girls …

LaBruce: Yeah, they fetishize gay male sex in a really interesting way. I think they just see it as another genre; I don’t think they really see it as a political thing or anything like that.

Leroy: I think they relate to the outcast or the Other, and in a way I think it’s easier for them to relate to gay male oppression [than to the oppression of women] — and being sexual at the same time.

LaBruce: I think they like the potentially egalitarian relationship between gay men in a relationship. So they sort of project themselves into that scenario. But even though my films are very explicitly gay, Jurgen and I have definitely never ghettoized them and we show them as much as we can in non-gay contexts, like international film festivals and what-not. And I much prefer it that way, even if I’m making a gay porno, I don’t like to think that I’m making it for a gay audience necessarily.

Leroy: Do you see yourself ever wanting to turn down the sex to go in a direction like Larry Clark?

A scene from The Raspberry Reich.

LaBruce: Actually, I just saw his latest movie, Ken Park, at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s totally sexually explicit. I mean, he has sort of gone back —

Leroy: I heard. I heard from people who saw it in Sweden and stuff and couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.

LaBruce: So I don’t know if he’s the best example, but then again, I think he sort of got to this point of credibility within Hollywood where he could sort of double back and make something like that.

Leroy: The people I know who have kind of straddled that outside world and then became acceptable or even mainstream … Like Gus was always threatening to make, or toying with the idea of making a porno film. I was going to go to the GayVN awards with him this year, but I guess he decided not to do that, or we both decided not to do that. [laughs]

LaBruce: I could see him doing that. I went to Kentucky when he was shooting Easter, that short film he made based on Harmony Korine’s script about an albino couple living in an all-black southern town. It wasn’t sexually explicit, it wasn’t porno, but the albinos were watching black porno on the TV, so it’s pretty out there. So yeah, he kind of has the luxury where he can do that.

You know, people have been pushing me for years to go in a more mainstream direction. I definitely don’t have a desire to go and make Hollywood films in the current climate. I just think it’s ridiculous. Maybe 30 years ago, but not today. And so far, I don’t really like working with real actors that much. I find real actors can be so actor-ly and have all this baggage with them.

I like bad acting styles. I just saw Swept Away with Madonna — and I kind of like her acting style. She’s so stilted and artificial. You can see her trying but it’s not working. [laughs] I kind of like that. It reminds me of my acting style. [laughs]

But I do have this script that definitely has a lot of interest right now in Canada. I collaborated on it with a Canadian novelist named Michael Turner, who wrote a novel called Hardcore Logo that was made into a movie. And he wrote another called The Pornographer’s Poem. We collaborated on this script called Untitled von Gloeden Project. It’s about the famous photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, and it’s not a biopic or anything, it’s just sort of riffing on him and his identity. And it’s definitely meant to be a larger-budgeted film with actors and stuff like that. I really would love to have Asia Argento in it, because there’s a role that was sort of written with her in mind.

Leroy: How did you hook up with her?

LaBruce: Asia? Actually, I just heard tell that she liked my movies …

Leroy: “Just heard tell?” Where are you from? Who have you been hanging out with? That’s like West Virginia talking — “I’ve heard tell!” I don’t hear that out of mouths from people from Canadia (sic).

LaBruce: Well, I don’t know, I came from a farm. My dad kind of talks like that. He has a real farmer accent.

Leroy: Where’s he from?

LaBruce: Well, it’s just 150 miles northwest of Toronto, but he has this real twang. But it’s kind of hard to describe. He calls my mother, his wife, “Mother.” “Hello, Mother.” And instead of “calm” or “palm”, he says “cam” and “pam,” like, “The water’s real cam today, Mother.” [laughs] I do have farmer blood in me.

But anyway, I heard tell that Asia was at the Toronto Film Festival with Scarlet Diva, and somebody asked her who her favorite filmmakers of the moment were, and she said Guy Madden and Bruce LaBruce. So I was like, wow, because I saw Trauma when it came out, her father’s film with her when she was like 16, and then of course I was a huge fan of Stendhal Syndrome. And so I proposed to index magazine that they should fly me to Milan to photograph her and interview her, which they did.

Leroy: So those photos were done in Milan?

LaBruce: Yeah. She was staying in this really fancy hotel at the time, and we took them in the bathroom of the hotel.

Leroy: I lived for a little bit with her and her baby.

LaBruce: Yeah, I saw the baby. I mean, I was with her just before the baby came out. And you were with her after.

Leroy: She’s really amazing. She’s very much an old soul. Wasn’t there that uproar about her smoking in those pictures? It’s almost like she was shooting heroin or something.

LaBruce: I know. Well, actually, there was a little mention of that on “Page Six” just after they came out. But they also came out just after September 11, so the climate was really not right for that kind of decadent behavior. I think if it hadn’t been for that timing, they wouldn’t have been seen as quite so decadent or naughty or whatever. But c’mon, she’s Italian. The first thing I did when I met her, she was with Dziga, her Chihuahua, in the lobby of Milan’s most expensive hotel, and she was 8-1/2 months pregnant, with her dog on a 15-foot leash, and the first thing she said was, “Let’s have a drink.” [laughs] We went and had lunch, and had a bottle of wine and we were smoking cigarettes, and the next day we had a little hash together and hung out in a cemetery. For Italians, when you’re pregnant you just slow down a little, you don’t change your whole regimen.

Leroy: It’s this kind of Madonna thing here when you’re pregnant. The thing I love about her, she doesn’t play by anybody else’s rules.

LaBruce: She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about her, that’s for sure. Did you see XXX?

Leroy: No. I saw her dubbing it. I want to go see it.

LaBruce: She’s the best thing in the movie, but even doing that, obviously she doesn’t care if people think that she’s making a bad Hollywood movie or whatever. She has her own agenda — and fuck everyone else. And then also, I told her she was like a hard fucking man in reverse in a way, because of the way she deals with men. Which is what the world needs. We need a return to that kind of … I think it’s a kind of feminism actually.

Leroy: She’s completely like that. You know, she’s going to make a film out of my book, The Heart is Deceitful … She’s optioned it and she’s writing.

LaBruce: I thought it was just one short story in it, or is it the whole book?

Leroy: The whole book.

LaBruce: Cool. That’s amazing.

Leroy: Yeah, of all the pictures I’ve seen of her, you really captured it, and I think it’s because you can go to that place of the outsider, and capture the eroticism of it. I guess that a lot of your movies straddle that world of the political, the sexual. They tie it all in. It’s kind of some daring worlds you explore there.

A scene from The Raspberry Reich.

How did you decide that you were going to [make the kind of films you do], instead of making films like Scorsese or something like that? Was it a political decision?

LaBruce: It kind of was political in a way to begin with, because I was in the punk scene, and I thought that I was making punk-rock movies, basically. I was openly gay in this very macho mosh-pit-type world, and my friends and I expected punk to be this revolutionary movement, and we expected it to be sexually revolutionary. But it actually wasn’t. At that time, in the late ‘80s, it was homophobic. I used to get beaten up for making overtly homosexual movies. So that was part of the motivation, to push it in their faces, and to say, “Well, if you think you’re so revolutionary, then watch this guy sucking this cock!” [laughs] But it was also just a function of my background, my socioeconomic background and class and all that kind of stuff. I came from a very working-class background, and I was struggling to put myself through university, and working, and I didn’t have any money to make big productions, so I was just making these very simple Super-8 films. It wasn’t, “Oh, I’m going to use Super-8 as an aesthetic choice.” That was the only choice I had.

Leroy: I have people tell me, “Oh, if you can write a more mainstream novel, blah, blah, blah, you’ll reach more people and you’ll be able to get your message out.” And I don’t necessarily feel I have a message. It’s kind of like I do what I do and then if there is a message in there, well, what a surprise, you know?

LaBruce: I kind of got to that point, too. I felt like I was starting to get too ideological, and I was trying to make very specific ideological points about sexual representation and the objectification of women, and I realized, as a filmmaker and as an artist — because I had a background as a critic, from film theory — I had to just drop all of that theory and just go more by instinct and not try to figure out where these images or the impetus of my work was coming from, and to just let it come out without thinking about it so much.

Leroy: Do you get turned on when you’re filming?

LaBruce: You know, I used to, but then my last movie, Skin Flick [aka Skin Gang (1999)], which is a hardcore porno movie, was totally an asexual experience.

Leroy: That’s kind of ironic.

LaBruce: Exactly. But the porno industry proper — it’s such a conventional medium. It’s highly constructed. Everything is contrived to present the illusion of sex spontaneously unfolding before your eyes, but it’s actually extremely calculated. It’s an industry, so you are pushing out this product, and it wasn’t a sexual kind of vibe at all.

Leroy: What is the response to the films in Germany?

LaBruce: In general, I have a pretty strong following in Germany. I don’t know why that is. I do have German blood in me from my mother’s side of the family. So maybe there’s something genetic there, I don’t know. And also, it’s amazing how Europeans still — despite the fact that America is all about mainstreaming pornographic images of Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera being a “dirty” slut — despite all that stuff, everyone is still incredibly uptight about sex, you know?

Leroy: Yeah. I mean, people seem ready to accuse you of making sex films and just tacking on, “Oh, it’s political” in there.

LaBruce: Well, what do they want me to do? Pretend that I have no education and that I’m just like every other idiot that does bad porn in Hollywood?

Leroy: You’re making porn that makes you think.

LaBruce: And that’s exactly what people don’t want, because they like their porno pure, and they like it —

Leroy: You are doing a grand Fuck-You-Reese’s-Peanut-Butter-Cup.

LaBruce: Yup.

Leroy: You’ve got your porn in my politics!

LaBruce: That’s what some people said about my first two feature films. They were surprised that they could actually get turned on by something that wasn’t just raunchy, typical porn for gay guys who were so conditioned to hate women because first sight of a woman, they get a limp dick. And people were also surprised that a film that isn’t coded as a straightforward porn film could give them a hard-on.

When I was making Skin Flick, I really wanted to have Cameltoe, the lead character, have real unsimulated sex in the movie. And the producers were all like, “Oh no, we can’t do that because it’ll scare away the gay men.” Fuck you! If you can’t get a hard-on when you see a pussy then you’re an idiot. Or if that makes you lose your erection, then that’s sad. I mean, I’m not even bisexual, but I can watch straight porn and get a hard-on.

Leroy: Porn doesn’t do it for me, but if there’s a relationship — like if they are showing emotions … like there’s a story — that’s what’s hot.

LaBruce: I think that’s what people really respond to in my films. They’re very heavy on narrative, and a relationship develops.

Leroy: I think there’s an awful lot of ‘em who just want to pound their meat and not have to think about anything else, not have to question any political thoughts — “What’s going on here?” — even unconsciously.

LaBruce: Yeah.

Leroy: But it also kind of shows people what is possible, because so much of porn is just straight-out hardcore stuff, and people think that that’s all that [consumers] want, and so that’s all they make. People don’t get to find out that maybe they would be into something else unless they get offered something else.

Scenes from The Raspberry Reich.

LaBruce: Exactly. It’s like a hermetically sealed world.

Leroy: But it’s the same thing for the straight audience too, [who fear] gay sex unless it’s Robin Williams and what’s-his-name fooling around in that film…

LaBruce: The Birdcage.

Leroy: …like it’s cute.

LaBruce: Exactly.

Leroy: What is your shooting schedule for your new film?

LaBruce: We’re doing it really on the cheap. We’ll shoot it in probably like 8-10 days. And talk about political, it’s called The Raspberry Reich, and it’s about this group of young people who emulate the Baader-Meinhoff, the Red Army Faction, these ultra left-wing terrorists. But it’s more along the lines of Godard’s La Chinois or Fassbinder’s The Third Generation. It’s sort of about the phenomenon of ultra-left wing terrorist chic, or people who emulate these terrorists without necessarily understanding the moral implications of what terrorism actually means. My movie is more of a critique of terrorist chic. But it’s kind of bizarre, because it’s an extremely agitprop script with lots of quasi-Marxist monologues and stuff, but it’s using an all-porno cast. [laughs]

Leroy: How do you find your cast? Are they from the porn industry?

LaBruce: Yeah, the guys are all pretty much German. It’s an all-male cast except again, like in Skin Flick, there is one main female character, Gudrun, who in this instance is sort of the leader of these would-be terrorists. And she is being played by an actress. But all of the rest pretty much have done porno before. As with Skin Flick, we are making a hardcore version and a softcore version — and if you want to make a real porno that looks like a real porno, you have to use real porn actors. You can’t be expecting people with no porn experience to pull it off. But it’s going to be very tricky, and it’s one of those experiments that can go terribly awry.

Leroy: In what way?

LaBruce: The dialogue and the ideas and everything, even for an actor would be difficult to pull off, but expecting these porno guys who are essentially non-actors to pull off this kind of dialogue is going to be interesting.

Leroy: There’s room for humor.

LaBruce: Yeah, that’s the thing. I mean, some people who don’t understand my films, they’ll go, “Well the acting was really bad.” Well, who cares? I don’t care if the acting was bad. That’s not the point — or that was the point! They are non-actors. My idea of good acting and other people’s idea of good acting — my idea of bad acting is like Leonardo DiCaprio. [laughs]

Leroy: He used to be really great.

LaBruce: He did. But I just think when people take on so much baggage that when you look at them, you can’t think about the movie because it’s all about something else, it’s all about their extra-curricular stuff.

Leroy: How is anybody ever going to be able to watch Winona Ryder again without thinking, you know, shoplifter.

LaBruce: Exactly. In fact, some of the guys in my movie are wearing “Free Winona” T-shirts. [laughs] For me, that’s part of the fun. Because I’m very process-oriented.

Leroy: That’s like a John Waters — the glee and sort of like the out-takes kind of a thing.

LaBruce: Sure, I like that kind of stuff. Like I said, I’m very process oriented, so for me, working with porn actors and trying to get them involved in something that’s very political and making a political statement is part of the whole production of meaning. And because everyone is German and it’s about a German phenomenon, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, they all sort of relate to it in a very specific way.

Leroy: It’s like Gus right now, he’s making a film, and he’s using these non-actors, these kids.

LaBruce: Right, the high school thing.

Leroy: Yeah, I originally wrote the script for it. He brought me into it to write the script, but he decided to work on it improv, and he’s using some of what I wrote. But we were talking about it today, and he was saying, “God, it’s so nice dealing with people where they’re not like ‘My character wouldn’t do that’ or ‘Explain my character’s motivation,’” that bullshit.

LaBruce: Right. I’m not that kind of director. That’s another reason I’m not really eager to break into mainstream filmmaking. I don’t want to deal with stars and their egos and their entourages and all that shit. It’s just all distraction and it’s all about their egos. If you’re directing a movie it’s about your ego [laughs] not their ego!

Leroy: Some directors, the ones who are kind of known for being assholes, in a way I think they probably have the least stressful job. If you are kind of concerned about not being an asshole … Like Gus is one of the nicest, non-offensive kind of a people, and it’s probably just —

LaBruce: I don’t know how he does it, he has a certain legerdemain on set that is unbelievable. Because I’ve been on three or four of his sets. And that’s what people always comment on: he has a kind of almost invisible presence. But also, because people respect him, because he is nice and he is not a maniac, they kind of submit their egos to him.

Leroy: But he’s had to deal with buttheads, and had to have somebody else deal with them. [laughs]

LaBruce: Maybe he just knows how to delegate. I have noticed that his first a.d.s are always extremely iron-fisted, no-nonsense types.

Leroy: He’s very good at that. It’s like the doctor who has the nurse give the shots.