Editorials
Finding Radical Queer Pride in ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’ (1989)
What if I told you Tetsuo: The Iron Man is one of the most evocative examples of “queer awakening” ever put on screen? Okay, that’s a tad hyperbolic, and such queer assertions about beloved media are often met with resistance, but in the case of Tetsuo, queerness isn’t just a supposition or mere subtext — it’s a hard-earned revelation.
That’s not to say Tetsuo is a coming-out story. At a film festival appearance in 2016, Director Shinya Tsukamoto expressed his motivation for making films around the time of Tetsuo as one of “exploring the link between cities and men and the relationship between society and humanity.” With Tetsuo, he emphasizes the dehumanizing impact of industrialized landscapes through the erotic fusion of metal and flesh. But the intimate scale of his production, limited cast, and use of settings largely in passing reveal a metamorphosis of a more personal sort through the shifting dynamics of its character relationships.
The demolition of the central character’s straight ego sends a salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) on a spiritual pilgrimage through emotions associated with grief (e.g., denial, anger, bargaining) before he embraces his inescapable truth. This arc is one that many closeted or once-closeted folks can relate to and perhaps sympathize with the internalized feelings this journey evokes — not unlike experiencing a death of the Self.
The most important casualty in Tetsuo is the version of himself that was shaped to fit society’s expectations of the norm. Only after letting go of this Self does he arrive at a hilarious yet hopeful conclusion: a steeling of his sensitivity against the pressures of others, and a militant acceptance of a queer mode of being.
Enter the Salaryman
Queering the norm comes easily when you start with the generic baseline of an office worker, as Tsukamoto does. The salaryman as a concept is a bastion of normality — one who is stably (though often nebulously) employed. Someone who slots right into the corporate machine, meets the minimum expectations as a productive member of society, and doesn’t challenge the status quo. But when Tsukamoto introduces his salaryman, the character is already in a state of torment and distress. He writhes and flails in a spotlight, flinging sweat as the movie’s title card scrolls to heavy, industrial beats.
An office worker is a role one might expect to receive some disdain from a filmmaker who was branded a failure and forced out of his family home for dedicating himself to independent art over gainful employment.2 But Tsukamoto doesn’t torture his salaryman without purpose. He aims to help the character transcend his conventional origins, deprogram his insecurities, and become stronger and more self-assured when all is said and done.
Flashback: A Fateful Collision
While we’re never shown the true nature of the salaryman’s profession, we do learn that he begins his journey of self-discovery while he is in an active relationship with a woman (Kei Fujiwara). Through carefully planted flashbacks, we see that the overzealous expression of their sexual love is directly to blame for their unfortunate collision with a pedestrian in crisis: the “metal fetishist” (Tsukamoto) whose hysteria over his body’s rejection of dirty, DIY metal implants sent him barreling into the couple’s path.
The pair awkwardly emerges from their vehicle, adjusting their clothes after their motor-borne tryst to dump the injured man among the trees. They then finish their sexual gratification in voyeuristic view of their unusual yet undead victim. Throughout their exhibition, the salaryman notably keeps his gaze squarely on the body of the unfortunate man — never on his partner — an early sign of a shift in his attention.
The significance of their victim’s metal affinity feels innately queer in comparison to the couple’s organic bond. Tsukamoto emphasized the eroticism of its symbolism in an interview with AsianMoviePulse.com where he stated, “I chose metal as a kind of fetish, because the electric brain and the human body becoming one with the metal is more like the act of making love, it has a strong sexual connotation.”
An Unfamiliar Self
Soon after this harrowing encounter in which a man, rather than a woman, first commandeered the salaryman’s focus, he awakens at home and attempts to proceed with life as usual, beginning his day with a fresh shave. The moment he steps in front of his mirror, he notices something has changed. A metallic “zit” appears on his cheek, which he quickly pops and covers with a bandage. This marks the beginning of his slip into unfamiliarity with the person he once envisioned himself to be.
It would be easy to write off this identity crisis as stemming from guilt over the surmised manslaughter and cover-up of the pancaked pedestrian whose dying vision was the couple in lust, but this simplification fails to capture the full scope of the shift in the salaryman’s relationship dynamics that the movie continues to explore.
Denial: A Creeping Suspicion
After the salaryman begins to question things he once knew about himself, he is thrust into a world where he must confront how he relates to others as well. On the way to his nondescript office job, he sits beside a bookish woman who is suddenly gripped by a metallic parasite that grants her a grotesque, metal claw. She becomes monstrous in the salaryman’s eyes and even chases him when he runs.
The pursuer corners him in an auto mechanic’s workshop, clutches her breast until it bursts, and speaks with the voice of the metal fetishist who should otherwise be rotting in a ditch. The salaryman’s hapless hit-and-run victim lives on, either as an obsessive figment of his guilt or somehow supernaturally revived in his grimy lair from where he remotely controls the parasitic claw’s host. The salaryman snuffs out the possessed woman with a full-body vice grip, then hurries home as his own metallic corruption courses further throughout his body.
The fact that this stranger is a woman is an important detail in this queer reading of the film. It forces our salaryman to confront a shift in his relationship with the opposite sex, lending fuel to the interpretation of a queer awakening. Defeminized through her possession by the fetishist, perhaps it’s not her womanhood that the salaryman wants to escape but rather the growing allure of metallic masculinity.
A Deadly Repression
But what of the salaryman’s attachment to his girlfriend? Their attraction is shown as highly sexual, but Tsukamoto seems to have hinted at cracks in their foundation from the moment their relationship was introduced. In the awkward phone call after the salaryman pops his metal zit, the lovers volley “Hello?” back and forth with little else to add. The salaryman seems far more engrossed in the newspaper than their call. Is he searching defensively for news about their crime, or is he perhaps hoping for a sign that the mangled man was rescued?
After his encounter with the stalker in the train station, the salaryman races home and dreams vividly of his girlfriend sodomizing him with a serpentine strap-on. While their physical relationship has shown significant freedom from prudishness, this is the first time we see a break from gendered norms. One has to question what the fantasy means for the salaryman as he grapples with the persistent allure of the metal fetishist.
Waking in a sweat, the two engage in desperate sex until the spread of his metal-morphosis painfully interrupts their act. As the couple recoups over breakfast, the salaryman is simultaneously aroused and perturbed by the heightened sounds of teeth meeting the metal utensils. He begs his girlfriend to promise not to leave him as he reveals the nature of his recent struggles.
In this moment, what the salaryman appears to fear most is abandonment for revealing his new truth, but one last attempt to mask or repress his physical and sexual condition leads to the impalement and untimely death of the final link between him and his former (i.e., straight) identity.
A Wake-up Call
As the body of his former girlfriend rests in the bathtub, the phone begins to ring. The salaryman — now almost entirely cast in metal — picks up the receiver, and the fetishist on the other end announces that he knows the salaryman’s secret. This prompts our salaryman to recall the collision that started him on his path of self-discovery — this time from his victim’s perspective. Afraid of being outed, the salaryman shoves a knife into an electrical outlet, but the shock only amplifies his metal-morphosis and creates an electromagnetic attraction that draws the metal fetishist to him.
The fetishist co-opts the girlfriend’s body and reconstitutes it as his own, appearing before the salaryman with a bouquet in hand. “Soon even your brain will turn into metal,” he says, crawling on top of the salaryman. “Let me show you something wonderful… a new world!”
In this moment, the salaryman finally recognizes a possible future in metal — one where he is not alone because the fetishist shares his brand of metallic disposition. But admitting as much would rewire all that the salaryman has known, and he flees in a panic one last time.
Tsukamoto addressed his fascination with anti-heroic characters like the metal fetishist (whom he often embodies in his films) in an interview with Variety.com. “In the beginning, the main character struggles and tries to avoid the path he is being sent down,” he said. “But the stalker awakes another side to his personality and pushes him towards being someone else. It’s fascinating to see something that is hidden inside someone.”
Bargaining: The Final Resistance
The salaryman begins to synchronize and sympathize with the fetishist. As he runs, he experiences visions of the car accident and past traumas that influenced the fetishist’s metal affinity, all from the perspective of his pursuer. While the salaryman’s own reformation is shiny, untainted, and new, the fetishist’s metallic nature is rusted and impure, which could perhaps be attributed to the solitary, unsupported nature of the fetishist’s own path to self-discovery.
Their chase ends in a heap of metal. The salaryman’s new reality can no longer be denied. The fetishist decides to end the salaryman’s anguish, but the salaryman has come to terms with his new reality and refuses to enter his “new world” alone. With a deep, pelvic thrust, he assimilates the fetishist into his being — solitary trauma and all.
Radical Acceptance
The salaryman finally accepts his position outside the conditions that society once placed upon him, and now he does not have to live in fear of the future alone. Tsukamoto leaves no ambiguity to the nature of the salaryman and the fetishist’s intimacy with his image of the pair nude and joined at one hand with a metal cuff. Their bond is inseparable. In a flash, the two are transformed into a phallic tank, ready to make their vision of a “New World” a reality through radical, shared pride.
While this analysis examines one particular journey through identity, no journey of self-discovery is identical. For some, growing into a new identity is a slow burn. For others, it may be a sudden upheaval, as with the leap of a frenzied pedestrian into their life’s trajectory. Whether someone is gay, bisexual, or even a budding artist in a family of doctors, there’s something about the salaryman’s journey that can speak to anyone who has contended with the pressure of meeting the expectations of others before their own, and that’s precisely what I love about this gloriously weird movie.
May we all take pride in who we are and wreak our own brand of reconstructive havoc on an unjust world. As the metal fetishist so gleefully declares, “Our love can destroy this whole fucking world!” (Penis panzer optional.)
The Host (2006) may not be director Bong Joon Ho’s most acclaimed film, but it’s certainly the one that I find myself revisiting the most. At the time of its Cannes premiere in 2006, it was lauded for how effortlessly it handled both a mix of genres that make it hard to pin down and for how smoothly it delivered its social commentary. Beyond that, its dynamic directing and instantly iconic monster make a creature feature of a different caliber. 20 years later, it’s hard to say the film is anything but some of his best work, even against the impressive catalogue that Bong Joon Ho built up in the following two decades of cinematic excellence.
Among the likes of Best Picture winner Parasite, jaw-dropping crime thriller Mother, and even its much more popular creature-drama counterpart Okja, The Host stands as an incisive movie in Bong’s filmography that manages to cut right to the heart, even on rewatches. But what is it that makes it so endlessly effective, and so continuously cathartic, on every single watch through?
The Host, Real Life Ecological Horror, and Dirty Secrets
While kaiju films intertwined with ecological horror are nothing new (Godzilla as a franchise has revisited the well many times since vs. Hedorah in ‘71), The Host is one of the only kaiju films to succeed at really unsettling you with its subject matter. It has a verisimilitude that is undeniable, and the reason why is shocking: it’s actually inspired by a real-life story.
Before Shin Godzilla tackled the collapse of faith in civil authority, the dangers of bureaucracy, and the uncertainty of our ecological future, The Host was here to blend all of our contemporary fears into a thick slurry of sickening terror and add a dash of real-life depression to it. The movie is overtly inspired by the real-life McFarland Incident, in which a mortician named Albert McFarland, working at the U.S. Army’s Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, commanded a subordinate to dump 24 gallons of formaldehyde into the Han River rather than dispose of it properly.
The opening scene of the film is a recreation of this incident, overtly labeled the cause for the film’s monster, the Goemul, to mutate into what it does: a gargantuan, deformed, half-blind fish creature. What ensues from its birth is a harrowing few days in Seoul, as father Gang-du and his estranged family race to try and rescue his daughter Hyun-Seo from the creature. As the Park family’s search for its youngest member puts them on the path of opaque health officials and military hiding secrets about the creature, a clash between the public and the government begins to brew and threatens pure chaos.
Taking Large Scale Horror and Making It Personal in The Host
In the following decades since Bong’s heartbreaker kaiju born of pollution was put to the screen, the real life Yongsan Garrison painfully remains a symbol of ecological irresponsibility on the part of the American military. Its groundwater is saturated with insane amounts of carcinogens, nearly 30 times the permissible standard.
In the great knife twist of governments obscuring the truth, the status of forces agreement between the U.S. and South Korea gives them effectively carte blanche to dispose of chemicals without any sort of supervision or oversight, mainly for the sake of “keeping the peace”; it’s a dangerous and all too realistic parallel to the smokescreen the government uses in the film to keep the South Korean public in the dark, supposedly in the interest of public safety but more obviously in defense of optics.
There’s an ever present irony, and a hard to swallow misfortune in this fact, that makes the film’s biting commentary sting just a little worse and for much, much longer. As our delicate ecosystems hang in the balance, we live with a sword dangling above our heads; few still have hope that the powers that be can or even want to keep it from cutting us. That’s the real horror the film draws on, and it’s a soul draining theme that permeates it.
But amidst these large-scale societal fears that the script explores, Bong Joon Ho has added an emulsifier of sorts. One pivotal ingredient that takes the large-scale and makes it personal: a sense of alienation in everything. The way the film is structured, from how its characters are written, to how its narrative is split, to the very flow of hope and fear that it uses to pull at your emotions, relies on evoking a sense of alienation in the viewer.
A Cast of Characters Without a Country
Each of the characters within The Host is a man without a country. Each one alienated from the other, their estrangement is evoked for some very dry humor at times, but it’s a laugh that makes you cry. In what is possibly the film’s most overtly humorous scene, the Park family falling out and crying at the memorial service, Bong uses the physicality of the event and their clinging to one another before being torn back apart to represent the family’s irreparably divided nature. There’s a deep sickness of longing in the family, a sense of complete otherness from parent to child and sibling to sibling that is delved into as the characters progress throughout the film.
Our main character Gang-du, is the clearest example of a person who slipped through the cracks and simply ended up alienated from the entire world; he’s a child of poverty, malnutrition stunting his mental growth. Neglected by his father, he ended up resorting to picking around for scraps through the tradition of seo-ri, a type of subsistence by theft that becomes the film’s shorthand for the solitary nature of its characters.
Alienation and Family Trauma at the Heart of The Host’s Horror
His siblings both share this hunger, particularly Nam-il. Once a gifted student and political activist, it becomes clear later in the film that Nam-il has become alienated from his own political identity and sense of self. Becoming a cold and mean-spirited alcoholic, Nam-il has grown numb to hope for change as he is left behind by friends who have become part of the system he wanted to dismantle. Disillusioned by the state of government, Nam-il is consumed by nihilism and trapped in the very bottle he seeks escape through. Even the most accomplished of the siblings, Olympic archer Nam-joo, whom the family delights in watching, is alienated by virtue of becoming a symbol of her family and country’s success rather than being her own person.
A Camera That Embodies Separation
As the script puts together these characters consumed by alienation, Bong places them in the frame with the intention to make you truly feel their hopelessness and terror as the world falls apart around them. Bong favors wide shots of the cast, who often stand alone, contrasted against an encroaching threat. The close-ups he uses in conjunction with them are often uncomfortably intimate, reflecting the trapped state of the Park family, both emotionally and when physically endangered by the monster.
The Agent Yellow sequence is the film’s starkest example of this; each of the Park family being swallowed up by the rolling chemical cloud, scattered protestors starting to grow violently ill as they’re separated from their people. But if I had to hedge my bets on the most striking, it’s between two interspersed sequences: the scientists going to lobotomize Gang-du, and Hyun-seo’s daring escape attempt, which coincide at the end of the second act. They’re so radically different in just about every aspect, with Gang-du’s medical horror being bright and hauntingly sterile in its invasiveness; Hyun-seo’s prospective climb to freedom, mere feet away from the monster is caked in grime and masked in minimalist lighting.
Bong Joon Ho, The Maestro of Emotional Manipulation
But both of these scenes exemplify how masterful a filmmaker Bong truly is. After building up these tragic characters you feel dangerously close to and then placing them in nightmare scenarios, he’s able to get his hooks into you. The whole movie is filled with moments like this where Bong, through visual language and frame perfect editing, drags you up and down on an emotional rollercoaster.
He fills you with hope for the Park family and then shocks you with reveals that snatch your seat out from under you. By tapping into our own fears of the world and then placing us alongside characters whose fear of isolation compounds onto your own, Bong Joon Ho’s The Host stands as a film of true emotional power.
It’s a testament to just how truly moving and profound a horror film can be in the right hands, and of the way a genre film can be pushed to its absolute limits. Loneliness is a heavy weight to lay on the heart, and there are few films where it feels as heavy as The Host.
In May 2015, my father died. It wasn’t sudden, but it was difficult nonetheless. I had just moved to Rhode Island, no longer able to afford Boston. One evening that August, in the midst of my grief, I met up with a new friend I had made since moving to the Ocean State. We had bonded over our love of horror movies – the thrillers we loved, the new releases we did not, what we thought was missing from the genre. At some point, I thoughtlessly said, we should make our own horror movie.
So one fine Tuesday night, Brandon Perras-Sanchez picked me up to discuss this possibility. He shared an idea for a horror movie with me that he had with his friend, Christopher Dalpe. It started as an absurd riff on hookup apps. “Brandon and I knew we wanted to put a dick through a meat grinder,” says Chris. We picked him up and all drove to Ogie’s Trailer Park, a dive bar in Providence’s West End. As Brandon recalls, “our blood pact was made that night at Ogie’s.” That evening, we began building upon their ideas of what would become our first feature film, Death Drop Gorgeous.
I bring up my father’s passing because I think, in many ways, this project carried me through my grief. If you’ve watched Death Drop Gorgeous, this might be silly to read – that a John Waters meets 80s slasher drag queen exploitation film helped me process the loss of my father, but as Joni Mitchell once wrote, “laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.” I’d find myself in cafes in Providence every weekend, writing pages and pages of what the three of us discussed, following our sticky note outline. Then, every week, we’d meet up and read the pages aloud. Brandon made it gorier. Chris made it wittier. We’d change scenes, switch the order, add more, delete less.
Go In, Completely Blind
In this process, we didn’t consider the road ahead. Prior to that, I had always been a type-A Virgo. I planned, I assessed, and I organized. None of us had shot a short film, never mind a full-length. Brandon had gone to school for some sound design, but he didn’t major in screenwriting or filmmaking. We didn’t bother ourselves with those trivialities. Letting go of that control and not considering what it would take to shoot a feature lent to our momentum. Maybe that naivety is in part the reason we finished it at all.
Building a DIY Horror Filmmaking Collective
At some point in pre-production, Brandon looped in his long-term friend, Wayne Gonsalves, to create a more realized character of Dwayne, and his partner, Ryan Miller, to help with finessing the story. We became a strange quintet, running around town, shooting scenes, figuring it out as we went along. No permit? No problem. (Not a joke, we’ve never got a film permit – not for lack of trying! They just never emailed us back.)
At some point, we realized we had to name ourselves. I think it was Chris who came up with “Monster Makeup”; it referenced our first feature: the drag, the gore, and special effects, but it also represented what we did: we made horror movies, we created monsters.
There were a lot of conventions we ignored. For me, this article is not only about reflecting on our work, but also about sharing our process. Like adulthood, there are milestones in a filmmaking career that you’re, allegedly, supposed to follow. I’m not insinuating they don’t help, but there are other ways to make your filmmaking dreams a reality.
The Coven Becomes a Collective
If you finish this article and remember any piece of advice, I want it to be this: if you’re going to shoot a DIY, shoestring-budget movie, you have to have community, and you must collaborate. No matter how intimate and personal your vision may be, filmmaking is inherently collaborative. As a collective, we had to shed our egos. Of course, over the decade, there have been a handful of disagreements, but we never saw our movies as these precious things that only one of us had the final say on.
Funding a Microbudget Horror Movie Through Local Support
Community is the reason our films exist. Death Drop Gorgeous was mostly set in nightlife, and most of us had been working in the bar scene for years. We knew the queens, the venues, what drew crowds and what didn’t. We called in favors to shoot a fake trailer. In addition to a crowd-sourcing campaign, to raise our budget, we also threw fundraising events from a drag show, to a (human) pup Best in Show, to an interactive murder mystery.
“Our projects would not exist without the immense support we received from our friends, family, and community,” says Chris. “Not just money. The spaces we’ve filmed (gifted and donated), the actors and talent (volunteers, many acting in front of a camera for the first time), costumes, makeup, pizzas for the crew – everything has been a labor of love from this weird village, and I’m eternally grateful.”
“We are forever indebted to our Providence family,” Brandon affirms. These films transformed from pipe dreams to community initiatives. As more folks joined our projects, the more it was helped along by others outside our core five. Our thank you speech could be its own feature-length. Somewhere along the lines, we convinced our city we were filmmakers, and eventually, we started to believe it, too.
Working With Your Community as Creative Inspiration
I emphasize collaboration and community because I think aspiring filmmakers feel limited by what they don’t have and not inspired by what they do have access to. We knew drag queens, we knew nightlife, we knew local music. It’s not just “write what you know,” it’s also “write what you have.” I also think some filmmakers have a sense of ownership of their work that doesn’t come from a place of pride but a place of possession. If you’re going to shoot a microbudget film, you need to learn when to take notes, and let others take the reins.
Trial-and-Error
What we learned in the previous film, we would apply to the subsequent project. Saint Drogo, our second feature, was an intentional shift. We lassoed in local photographer and musician Kevin Bowden (who scored a majority of Death Drop Gorgeous) to ensure a more visual spectacle. The quintet became a sextet. We wrote a leaner script without a B, C, and D plot. We wanted to explore another genre and demonstrate our growth. “Myself, and some of the other crew members, lean more towards dark, bleak, folk and fantasy horror,” says Brandon. “We really wanted to take a shot at it.”
While we didn’t want to limit the story, we did go into writing Drogo with the reminder of having undergone such a long production with Death Drop, which included an ensemble cast and numerous locations; we wanted to make filming more manageable for us. Sometimes, the pressure of limited setting or characters forces you to wrestle with the story, assess your resources, and really consider the necessity of scenes. In turn, producing more effective work.
Queen of the Rats and a Decade of Filmmaking Lessons
Our next feature, Queen of the Rats, feels like the culmination of what we’ve learned over the course of these ten years. It’s a meld of our first feature’s flippancy and chaos and the intentionality, cinematography, and nihilism of our second feature.
“I think you’re going to laugh,” says Chris of Queen of the Rats. “It’s a genuinely funny script with amazing characters. But there’s a lot of heart in it, and you might feel sentimental and nostalgic for a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“It’s even exceeding my own expectations,” notes Brandon. “I know every asshole in the biz will say ‘there’s really nothing like this,’ in regards to their own film, but in all sincerity, there really is nothing like this.”
Defining Success as a DIY Horror Filmmaker
Our method is not ideal for everyone. Sometimes, it’s not even ideal for us. Each project consumes a huge portion of our lives, with productions taking over two years, shot in between our day jobs, and we are still fundraising to make each one happen. But we’ve accomplished a lot and never let what we lack compromise the vision. What I am most proud of is our commitment. It’s also worth considering, however, what you as a filmmaker define as success. Sure, we have bigger dreams, but I still feel a great sense of fulfillment finishing these projects, like I’ve run a marathon.
All our lives have changed in the course of our collaborations. As Chris notes, “We’ve all grown up together. We’re a family, and these guys are my brothers. We’ve all changed jobs, boyfriends have come and gone. We’ve been to weddings and funerals together. We’ve watched the city that inspires our films change and transform…With each creative project we’ve taken on, our community and network has expanded, and it feels like our little creepy family just keeps getting bigger.”
“Being able to navigate through this dystopian pedophile pyramid scheme hellscape with a circle of some of your best friends is a blessing”, says Brandon. “There’s comfort and solace knowing that as our work/life balances wax and wane, our dedication, or addiction, to making horror films and content will always remain a sturdy axis.”
Why Queer Horror Stories Matter More Than Ever
Art carried me through the grief of losing my father. Horror helped me cope. These aren’t new, profound concepts, but something I want to highlight, especially given the current state of, well, everything. We need new voices in filmmaking. We especially need queer stories right now. As humans, we aren’t meant to withstand this much grief constantly. We’re going to need art to carry us through.
Monster Makeup is having a retrospective exhibit in Providence, RI, at AS220’s Aborn Gallery for the entire month of June. Opening reception is June 6th. On June 13th, we will be doing an artist talk at the Aborn Gallery and screening a preview of Queen of the Rats. Both events are free.
Final words of advice from the Monster Makeup crew:
“Make whatever you feel passionately about, no matter how successful it may or may not be. Letting that pass you by will always haunt you.” – Wayne Gonsalves
“Story matters. Whether you’re shooting with Richard Deakins or on an iPhone, if you don’t have a story, you’ve got nothing.” – Kevin Bowden
“Aim high. Make it work. Dedicate weekly time to writing, filming, whatever, and you do not stray from that schedule. Get creative. Do not compare your art to other art in a self-deprecating way. DO NOT GIVE A FUCK WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK.” – Brandon Perras-Sanchez
“Just get started, and you’ll learn by doing. Every mistake you make on set will just make you a better filmmaker. Utilize the resources within your community and its natural enthusiasm for filmmaking. It will only elevate your project many times over.” – Ryan Miller
“Follow people’s advice if you want to do what they’re doing. Follow your gut if you want to do something new. Regardless of which one you choose, do it with friends.” – Chris Dalpe
(Behind the scenes photos of Death Drop Gorgeous were taken by Chris Eastman. Behind-the-scenes photos of Saint Drogo were taken by Maxwell Snyder. All other photos by Kevin Bowden)
