An Interview with Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America Writer-Director Douglas Buck.

By Jeremiah Kipp

Cutting Moments.

Emerging as a maverick filmmaker along the horror and underground festival circuit, Douglas Buck has gathered together his “suburban holocaust” short films as Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America for an August DVD release.

Cutting Moments.

Cutting Moments is a 27-minute domestic narrative about a troubled family that disturbingly morphs into an exploitation shocker when the wife delves into self-mutilation. Home expands on the breakdown of the middle class, where a husband undergoes a bourgeois meltdown and slaughters his family. The series culminates in Prologue, which departs from the visceral terrors of Buck’s earlier films as a teenage paraplegic returns home one year after being brutally attacked. Wheelchair-bound with metal claws for hands, the ravaged heroine tracks down her assailant, though the outcome of their confrontation ends more in understanding and despair than single-minded revenge. Prologue’s conclusion is as poignant as it is harrowing, where humanity is found only through an admission of suffering.

Buck falls into a gray zone between art and exploitation filmmaker, but his technique has evolved from the shock imagery of Cutting Moments (where the female protagonists slices her own lips off) to the more subdued, Bresson-ian Prologue. “My style as a filmmaker over the trilogy has paralleled my growing process as a film viewer,” Buck points out. As a teenager, he was obsessed with Marvel comics, horror fiction, and slasher films, but moving into adulthood he grew attuned to the existential horrors of Roman Polanski and Ingmar Bergman.

Home.

By the time Buck reached Prologue, he felt that “the act of violence, so prevalent in the previous films, has become more of an ethereal moment of the past, hanging over the environment like a form of existential dread. This doesn’t mean I never intend to wallow in graphic gore again — I do. It’s just the trilogy moved on towards something else. You might say that my early fascination with the physical and death grew into a fascination with life and the spiritual — as well as the fascinating links between them.”

Home.

The attacker in Prologue is a sculptor, and secretly makes explicit artwork of pre-pubescent boys and girls. As to whether Buck considers this monster an artist, it’s a loaded question. “There are many things in Prologue that I feel conflicted about. This character feels guilty, and desperately tries to shed these taboo desires through his artwork. It has the potential for healing, but it also has the potential for conservative dogma: ‘Of course, the artist is the one who creates these sick things.’ Someone could argue that it comments back on me, making a film like Cutting Moments.”

“But I take responsibility for whatever I do,” Buck continues. “If some guy cuts someone’s lips off after seeing Cutting Moments, I will certainly feel uncomfortable. Making horror films may be cathartic for the filmmaker, because they’re the ones saying, ‘Let me express these feelings.’ But as for the audience’s catharsis, I’m not sure. There’s a complex dance being played out, not without its own inherent dangers, but I have to believe that it’s a much healthier society when the imaginary world is allowed to exist.”

Prologue.

Although Buck’s films have aroused a strong response from festivals such as Fantasia Fest in Montreal and the Oldenburg Festival in Germany, he has yet to find the acceptance of prestige festivals like Rotterdam or Sundance. “Cutting Moments and Home were made as acts of desire,” Buck insists, “not out of any concern for the marketplace. But my acceptance in underground festivals in the U.S. and the European genre festivals reveals the disparity in how these films are handled in America versus other parts of the world. There’s a far greater acceptance in Europe for cinema that provokes, angers, or rebels.”

On the set of Home.

However, Buck is quick to point out that he appreciates the American underground scene as well. “Those festivals have been important, particularly with the New York contingent of independent filmmaking. It has enabled me to take meetings with some of the bigger independent companies to discuss script ideas — I’m now in the process of writing the remake of Brian De Palma’s Sisters with Ed Pressman’s company.” Plans are underway to shoot in Montreal this fall, and all seems to be moving forward.

“We’ve already discussed some casting ideas that I’m very excited about,” Buck explains. “Sisters is the ideal project for me right now. Its structure is mainstream, but its themes are dark and perverse. I’m not someone who dismisses the popular marketplace as a complete waste of time. I’d love to carve out a niche like David Cronenberg, balancing more mainstream projects like Sisters with my stranger, more personal independent projects on the side.” “Let me put it this way,” Buck indicates, with a touch of amusement. “Nothing would make me happier than being able to continue to make movies that put me both in the pages of Filmmaker and in the pages of Fangoria.”

Links:
www.glasseyepix.com/html/buckmain.html
www.douglasbuck.net

Jeremiah Kipp is a freelance journalist based in NYC.