Pioneers of Queer Cinema: The Living End | Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant and cast

uh yeah i've known uh greg since i think uh mid mid 80s sometime when we both um well i remember getting letters from him that were sort of little poems um ripped up and pasted on on the envelope and inside the envelope loose letters and so it was sort of um strange uh letters from him and we so we were in touch a little bit um in the mid-80s just through the mail and a little bit later in 1987 we were both invited to the torino film festival in italy um torino uh gay film festival and um we both had films there early films mine was malinoche and i forgotten forgotten which one he had that year but um we had we were also very new to the um to the festival circuit and i just remember greg sitting um in front of a cup of coffee in a palazzo somewhere wearing a smith's t-shirt smoking dorals and listening to the smiths on a cassette player and not wanting to do anything else he just wanted to listen to the smiths and we would be you know saying uh we're going to go to this really cool church and he'd say i'm just going to stay here and listen to the smiths that was my memory he's changed changed a little bit since then so um let me introduce greg rocky also um yeah we're gonna have uh mike dietry and craig gilmore the stars of living in are here tonight to share the wonderful saga of the making of this movie and um marcus who's also going to join us he was a producer and got yelled at a lot mike and i can sit here and hold hands so welcome guys awesome work this is really awesome well thank you thank you for having us thank special thanks to gus for doing this i mean he's gusman's hand he's a [ __ ] genius and a giant and the fact that he's here [ __ ] kind of amazing it blew me away because we were out there and you introduced me and oh this is gus and i'm like oh nice to meet you guys it's the best and then i didn't when i yeah i walked away and i'm like oh okay that goes fantastic and there's a character we need that character in the living room is named after gus the guy who slams the door on uh luke's face is gus and uh i thought there was a drugstore cowboy homage too in the movie yeah i saw us the guy that was shot yeah the [ __ ] we were talking about that um earlier in it said avenue pictures i didn't see drugstore cowboy oh i think yeah it was in one one of the one of the bashers and it's like the reason that's in the movie is like this movie it's so shocking to me that 30 years later we're still screening this movie and talking about this movie this was literally just i was just this artsy kid who was really in the smiths and um um you know film school i went to ufc film school and um it was just like the weird godard kind of influenced like artsy new wave punk filmmaker and this was just like some little art project that we made you know me and my friends and you know marcus's mom paid for the lab bill and you know and it was and the chop suey yeah no we used to like i said we used to eat like chop suey all the time although i was saying mike used to eat cans of tuna do you remember that like literally he would just eat cans of tuna that's why you look like that but it was just this little like weird project and in those days sundance had not really taken off to the degree that it was and the indie film world was not what it was it was sort of start you know sex live videotape was obviously before this but um it was sort of starting to percolate but there was never that sense of like well the way sundance is now where it's like i'm gonna you know direct black panther like next year so there was never that it was really just this you know we were just these weird artsy people and that's why i think it's so fantastic that gus is doing this because just seeing us and um you know going over these stories again gus and i our origin stories are so intertwined because um i was telling gus earlier he was there like i remember i remember you know we were hanging out when he was making drugstore cowboy and my pr my own private idaho and gus was there you know throughout like almost all my movies i remember um when mysterious game played toronto august was there yeah i mean it's just we've always had this sort of we've always been on this circuit of festivals and sort of you know these kind of screenings and stuff together for 30 years you know so it's it's amazing that you're doing this so thank you so much you're welcome thank you speaking of uh sundance being kind of a lot more low-key that certainly was true from the first time i went to the 20-year screening when they took it into the legacy project with edward ii but uh we had a party if you remember at the condo and then faye dunaway was there brad pitt was there i totally don't remember bloom was there johnny depp was there when a writer was there so it's not like it was this little small podunk experience i totally don't remember like marcus was talking about brad pitt being there and i don't know i don't remember that definitely but yeah when uh when you were writing the script for this um i had a ques we were talking earlier i had a question of like how um you know with the origins of the story and your queerness and your um motivations um and you sort of said something great about independence yeah i mean this was really this is living in is my third film my third feature i did the two films i did two black and white five thousand dollar features that are really they weren't like the one of them played like the new art for like three nights and it was such a like huge thing to me but they played a lot of like mainly film festivals and stuff um my first film uh was rejected by every it was called three bulleted people in the night it's a 16 millimeter black-and-white movie and it's not it's kind of queer in the sense that one of the lead characters is this gay performance artist and darcy marta is the star that she's she plays um she's in this movie as your bestie that and anybody who's seen you know whatever any of my movies or the tv show i created there's always that relationship of like the gay guy and his best girlfriend like because that's been such an important relationship like throughout i've got mine out there but it's funny because three will bewildered people in the night when you had offered me the role and i hadn't seen any your films before and it happened to be on pbs that same day oh really and so i watched it i don't even remember because you can't google things back then i don't even know how i knew it was on but i just sat there like you transfixed for an hour and a half as almost nothing happened yeah that's so funny because i was like yeah it was on pbs at like midnight or like 2 a.m or something and to this day people like videotaped it like people have vhs's of it and stuff but yeah it was like in those days you know we were just these sort of struggling artist people you know and um these all these film festivals and all these screenings and stuff became like really our lifeline and it's where i met gus it's where i met todd haynes rick link letter like christine vashon like all of us were all doing the same thing you know but all isolated you know all like our in our own little box doing working on our little passion projects and that's why these festivals and screenings were like so important to us but i had done these two other movies that had gay characters in them but then but um i taught a class about independent gorilla cinema or whatever and um allison anders actually came and spoke in my class and so and andrew sperling became one of my producers she was one of my students rocco bellick who was in totally [ __ ] up was one of my students um i taught a class and you know my thing you know in those days also as gus has sort of alluded to i was very kind of punk rock very kind of angry and i remember telling you oh you had an asymmetric hairdo yeah i had the haircut that looks like this just like it was like paul weller and like the for people that remember paul well from the style console it was just like this wedge of hair but um i was telling mike to hey i'm getting distracted um so i had this class and i told the kids in class them all you know intimate cinema is this super exciting vital movement and thing and you know if you're going to make an independent film don't make a [ __ ] like julia roberts rom-com with the indie budget like there's no point to it do i mean like you should really take a risk and like tell a story that's like you know whatever off the deep end controversial like different and that you know those words you know me telling the kids that really sort of reinforced um my riding of the living end and living in was very much a response to the aids crisis and you know bush and reagan and it's it's kind of where you know act up and queer nation all that stuff was born at the same time and you know that's why sundance 92 was you know swoon and hours and times and in paris like there was this whole movement of just like people it was in the zeitgeist in such a strong way that anybody who was a young queer artist at that time their work was sort of infused with this kind of passion and anger so that's very much kind of where living in do you remember that panel at uh sundance the the barbed wire kisses yeah the panel the famous amazing yeah we were talking about i was happy to be a fly on the wall that day but we were talking about that it's we should talk about it because it's in public so we won't but i actually wasn't on that panel but yeah i was not part of it you were invited though and you just you just didn't want to come just didn't understand what it was like what queer new wave what's that derek jarman was the um sort of overlord of the yeah yeah derek is a huge huge influence you know and i like really um in terms of because you know liz said we're i was just this already kid and just like so enamored of that that sensibility of just this fearless queerness and you know that um that um was just a big you know important influence yeah for me i think um his last of england yeah i love that movie sort of a breakthrough i mean i think he had done caravaggio but before that but um the last of england was sort of this amazing eight millimeter super eight millimeter why aren't they showing that here maybe it was very inspiring yeah it yeah it's yeah it's amazing it's it's and also like your work very painfully you know i mean like the images are just gorgeous and tilt swinton and everything but yeah also i think um greg is a member of the new queer cinema but also the new stoner cinema and maybe the new psychedelic cinema as well okay i'll take that because i think i mean it's a reoccurring theme in your in your in your later films um stoner behavior i think becomes becomes a fun theme yeah now there's definitely uh yeah definitely that aspect and also another thing that for us it was you know very like i'm super influenced by you know post punk music and punk music and i remember you talking about going to risd with david byrne from the talking heads and you know just like that's where we came from you know this sort of really cool and amazing open time in culture where things were really changing and happening and it was just like this wide you know horizon of just like all these exciting fun things too and we were just that and we were artists but you know film was sort of our chosen thing so marcus um what's up over there marcus wake up um how was how was um producing this this project well i mean like i was explaining for me it was a very different kind of experience as producer i mean greg was teaching me how to produce a movie and i was just more or less his assistant um you know the the best parts were you know mike dietrich happened to be a neighbor right by my house and i go oh my god he's the one um they should be playing it and brought him introduced him to greg and then craig we actually kind of met through um actually we went through a bunch of photos right we did a lot of we had like an audition process i think and you like sent it yeah it was a it was something i learned from usc film like student films just like putting that drama log or whatever and um we had auditions and you know i mean we were so forth again it was just it's amazing to me that we're even here i mean we were so fortunate that you guys you know nobody got paid it's just like there was no it was literally like the fact that you guys showed up every time we were shooting and it was the film was shot over the span of like weeks i think i can't remember how many weeks so i said mike was saying that he hurt his eye or something in the middle of do you remember that i don't remember that no yeah we had to take a couple of months off like a month and a half off oh i do remember that yeah because you heard it right i tripped and ended up smashing above and below my hair to get stitches so it wasn't it was more than a few weeks yeah i had a few months i don't remember any of this but it's all been blocked from my mind but it was really crazy because we would you know this the crew was literally sometimes it was literally just me and marcus and like i remember when we were shooting a lot of the driving at night footage we were we took a road trip to san francisco to shoot like the bridge and all that and we shot sort of along the five and stuff and it was literally just me and marcus and john in the car with the bollocks like filming but don't you also remember we we were so broke that we just ended up sending the film to rick linklater and he actually shot footage for us and sent it back no he said we would have additional link letters shot the texas footage like there's because there's actually so it wouldn't look like they were just driving around los angeles which is what we were doing but there was actually a shot from texas that like rick and i did we sent him the camera i think he just sent it to us no we sent him film and then he sent it back to us and then we had it developed yeah we should he should get he should get second unit credit for that but yeah that's how it was in those days it was just very sort of makeshift and fly by how did it work with the um screenplay was it something that was finished or or something that evolved as you were filming it was very finished it was set yeah yeah everything's like say those words it's kind of an organic feel to it but pretty much all of those words were what came out of his pen it's my films have always been that way in the sense that because they're so low budget and the schedule is so tight there is a little bit of room for a line here there or just improvise this or that but the structure of it is always i work on the script a lot until i feel like it's ready i don't like because i know like the script for private idaho is like 20 pages long or something and it's literally just like a blueprint of like what's to come yeah there's a lot of uh just editions yeah i have like by the way i have a i had that [ __ ] script in my one of my archives it's just like on instagram's old computer anyway and then from here uh from this film what was how did this progress to the next next project um well it was weird the totally [ __ ] up and living hand are very much hand in hand um we shot living end i think we finished it and then i shot totally [ __ ] up and you weren't totally [ __ ] up as well um and then i went back and started editing living end and then finished living in and then you know went on the festival circuit and distributed all that and you know living in was weird it was such a um it was such a small little art project for us and it was distributed around the world i was flown to like you know australia and you know all over to promote it and you know living in is such a funny movie in the sense that it was so i mean i don't know um i think today by today's standards it's i remember when i did the remastering it seemed almost tame to me like it was all like what was the hub about you know but people would get into fist fights over the living end like i've heard several stories about people in bars like like punching each other over the living room and people like either really like the movie or [ __ ] hated it and they wanted to kill me like there's so many and as i was telling um over dinner i was talking about um they were talking about how oh the angry lesbians there were actually lesbians picketing at the caster theater when it played in san francisco because of the negative portrayal of lesbians of the you know serial killer lesbians who who are mary warren off and joanne went who are you know stars on themselves but yeah so the it it was just a super controversial movie and i remember when we were at sundance it was people were just like shocked like the scene in the shower with the when i started to come choke me and by the way craig has the original it's a button that says when i started to come choke me that the that one the producers jim stark um had printed for sundance as a promotional thing and in sundance 92 all these people on main street were wearing this button that said when i started to come choke me like what the [ __ ] is that so it was it was whatever 500 is really well spent by jim stark but um but yeah so it was it was a really shocking and very um well it's hard to imagine now too that when it was released in san francisco it played for i think 10 days of sold out performances 1400 seats showing the angelica in new york had uh lines literally up the block yeah it was crazy my donna came to see it i didn't hear that i heard ed koch came to see it no edcock came to see mr scott came to see it and uh uh for i had a meeting at maverick too i think it wasn't with her though it was like with something with madonna yeah i didn't get to see madonna but for two weeks and this was pretty amazing for two weeks it was the most attended film in america per screen yeah it was a it was crazy to us because again this twenty thousand dollar like little weird art project um it just really took off because it was it it was really the film of its time you know and that's why i'm so glad you know that it exists in the archives and um because it is such a when i went i haven't seen it for a few years but last time i saw it um it's such an artifact for me of ex it puts me exactly in that place of where i was 1990 you know the early 90s and that that feeling of dread and anxiety and just it's called ptsd yeah yeah no because it's hard for the you know current the the new kids to understand what it was like to be 25 30 years old and feel like you're in a [ __ ] war zone and you know people are just dropping dead on the [ __ ] street and it was literally a black cloud that just hung over everybody and it's something you thought about on a daily basis i guess it's sort of akin to like climate change now yeah i mean it's like literally it's something that's just hanging over your [ __ ] head or the pandemic [Music] can we um maybe have some questions from the audience oh is there a microphone coming let's see um question for mike and craig okay well here's a here's the person here oh there's somebody over there sorry can you hear me yeah uh so i was curious about the character well first of all i mean this movie's amazing and i haven't seen it in years and i i'm realizing now i've lived the last five years of my life like partially inspired by it without even like realizing it oh thank you so much uh anyways like um the character of luke um was that inspired by anyone real you knew or was it like a purely erotic fantasy a really bad boyfriend i had like the bad boys in those days no it was um it was you know the film was actually weirdly um very much inspired by howard hawk's film bringing a baby which is that me being a film school nerd um and it's funny because i met robin wood like there was that robin woods the film critic wrote an article called the lure of irresponsibility and that's where the title comes from irresponsible movie and the bring it the the sort of symbolic whatever structure of bringing a baby is like this very uptight kind of orderly character played by carrie grant his world is turned upside down by this sort of free spirited just insane katherine hepburn character and they had this attraction and this you know sort of desire for each other but also he he she ends up kind of destroying him basically and so that that structure was uh very much a part of kind of where um it came from and you know the characters named john and luke like foreigner that i am so but that was part of sort of what the idea of it was i was also curious for um the actor sorry who played luke um i forget sorry your name mike the one and only mike teacher we were just talking we were watching the last scene in the lobby it's like you know we had no budget no crew nothing and i was amazed at that last scene on the beach you guys are doing like the most crazy hair acting i've ever seen your hair is so [ __ ] perfect both of you and i'm all we didn't have a hair we didn't have a hair person we didn't nothing like we didn't have wardrobe nothing like so it's like their hair is so like it's like you just anyway it's been a while since i could do hair acting youtube anyway sorry question for mike the effect of your life what what what the story was like for you it's interesting because i came into this not having really any clue what the [ __ ] was gonna happen in terms of the movie or how i'd be involved and you know kind of how it transpired i mean i was at that time going on auditions you know you know wanting to make something of an acting career and then i'm not sure how marcus connect i'm not really sure if that was correct what you said in terms of oh i saw this i saw mike he's a neighbor i don't know if it was before life is nice or afterlife is nice but the first thing the first thing that i uh remember is okay um i was stoned most of the most [Laughter] um so i'm not sure if that would influence the whole stoner thing you know that came after let's pick that up i i did not sense that but you know i think me personally i looked i when i read the script i was like you know this is acting you know i i mean i don't have to be gay to play a gay character or i don't have to you know this that or the other and i just tried to you know be there and follow direction and add whatever it would you know was that i could add in the moment and um to this day i was i was telling them over dinner a couple weeks ago somebody and i get them you know fairly often but this dm and they they said i just saw this mtv interview with you you know uh the living end and you know it really changed my life and you know it's it's cool um it's yeah this was a time to this is like many many years before brokeback mountain many many years before like gay you know straight actors were playing gay characters but never yeah helen hadn't even come out yeah no no will and grace no alan like literally the only gay things were um like films from europe i remember um almodovar's like law of desire matador were like the thing that i the thing that i got from it though was and even when i met you i was like oh this guy reminds me of bruce lee you know he's really cut and he's really tired he had these arms and i was always a bruce lee fan growing up and he was like kind of my hero and i was like this guy's kind of cool and we had a lot of the same musical uh you know tastes and this whole sort of angle and i was like he doesn't seem like he's gay but then you looked at marcus and like oh he's gay i knew he was gay of course he he maybe made a few passes at me back then i'm not really sure but i didn't really look at the script as uh or the character as it was a gay character or as a gay i was almost just looking at it as you know people and it might be even it might have even been you know naive of me at that time i was a kid yeah you were you were both really young right like like 22. i was 25 when i filmed yeah and uh so i just always looked at it that way i never really considered the character and i think you're almost like the maverick or vanguard of gender fluidity you know in a sense um as we talk about it now so cool another question up there you guys i have another question oh no more questions oh here right here um hi i'm a huge fan of your movies and their soundtracks um they're how i found my love are you talking to gus or me [Laughter] i'm a fan of both it's like i'm a huge fan of your movies and i don't know who that other guy is up there um so i was wondering um what your process is like for curating soundtracks the music you mean yes i mean i music is such a big big part of my life it's more um i don't say it's more important to me than movies but it's right up there i mean i'm so lucky in terms of where when i was born and the timing of my life you know it's like um i was you know early high school high school early college like right when like the punk explosion happened and um new wave music and as i was talking about earlier the whole culture was just kind of on fire a little bit you know it's kind of so into like the talking heads and x and i remember when i was in film school at ufc um we used to uh like see x all the time yeah i mean it was just like and that spirit has been such an important part of my filmmaking process it's very much why um you know i always my idols you know like the cocktail twins or whatever were never like super hugely popular or commercial but they meant so much to me and that's always kind of what i aspired for my movies so when i you know i listen to music literally from the time i wake up to the time i go to bed and it's such a big inspiration to me and um this movie in particular you know there's so much like the living end is actually um the name of a jesus marriage chain song and that is um that part's important like the sort of industrial music and the angriness like the kmf dm and they have that play that song god like that's at the beginning i was just really into all that stuff you know it's like that was my my thing and it was really i think in a way like my tribe very much like indie film and sundance and um you know berlin film vessel and everything and like where i'm like you know when i saw gus it's like you that is where we belonged you know and it was very important part of that hi uh usc film student here who actually got rejected from ucla wait i don't know where this question is coming from it's invisible okay okay okay wait a minute i also got rejected from ucla i got into usc film school and um yeah right ucla is hard to get into i guess well i should right yeah they're really discerning like but i thank god i got into the usc yeah i was okay so that was my first question is you were at usc film school but you had to break into ucla to cut your film yeah i don't it's like it's all i don't know it's not really remember choice it was no it was very much um in those days as i said i because the films were so low budget and i didn't have money for i mean living in is a little bit different because mar as i said marx's mom paid for the chinese food and the lab bills so we were rolling in dough but the first two black and white movies i had no money i was just out of film school and usc you know in those days was expensive even then um the only way i was able to make um those first two movies for five thousand dollars was the lab guy mar el pagno who i noticed i think did the cr the title design for this he was super sweet to me and used to develop my black and white film because they had a film lab there for their student films for costs so it was like five cents a foot or something and that's the only way i could never pla paid like regular film lab prices so that's how i was able to make those movies but but yeah it was the usc the breaking into the editing rooms it was some sort of like i think sound mixing thing like the mag film things or whatever and i think i somebody i knew went here i don't it's very i just remember literally two o'clock in the morning like breaking into these rooms thank you ucla and then a second part of my question um i feel like no one's really been touching i mean something you just touched on was the jesus mary and chain uh like there's obviously jesus and god themes throughout the film um along with the skeletal references and it made me as long as what was the other part uh the skeletons there's skeletons everywhere and it's like god is dead god is gay it's like a lot of i feel like what i was getting from it i've never seen it before and um i don't know if you wanted to touch on that at all anymore because it seemed like a huge theme throughout the film that i you know interesting because i'm not religious i never you know was in any sort of structured religion but one thing about the film that is funny to me watching it today is that you know as i said there was no hair no makeup no wardrobe department which is where those t-shirts and avenue hat came from because andrea was an intern at avenue and stole them you know so we'd have something to wear the the props in the art design the production design most of that was from marcus's house or my house and i was saying that um in one of the shots of craig in his apartment there's a picture of the films of andy warhol a one sheet and that was actually a ucla archive screening that i went to in the 80s and very big influence on the living end like you could really see it in particularly that film blow job the um the short film the world did and i i noticed that my hustler screening which is another movie that was a big influence on me and you can really see it in the framing of this movie it's clearly something that i was very taken with so but what i was saying is like all the a lot of the stuff is just whatever we had to stick in the room and the apartments were literally like andrea's apartment marcus's apartment like the car was the car i was driving at the time there was my clothes those were basically all my own clothes from my yeah you know literally i would go to the actor but mike's saying that he thinks that leather jacket was mine but it's possible i don't know about that but the jesus marry change shirt was definitely mine but um but yeah so it was uh if the god reference might be a little accidental i don't know um two more questions hi uh first off thank you so much for doing this i saw this movie um i think uh two years ago now and it quickly became one of my favorites so thank you so much for coming here and doing this with us well thank you for coming in to light to a live theater absolutely absolutely uh my question is um that moment at the end when he has the gun in his mouth and he pulls the trigger he orgasms and wait i can't hear you what you the moment at the end when luke has the gun in his mouth and he pulls the trigger and he orgasms and there's no bullet in it it was a very i remember it was a very striking moment for me and it was uh something that i had a lot of questions about so i was curious like what the what the thought process was in uh coming to that moment like how did you come upon that moment uh to conclude the film i don't really know i mean when i write my scripts it's very mysterious you know it's just like kind of some of the music the characters really start talking and do things and you're sort of transcribing what they do i don't know if that's what your process is like but um it was just i don't know i just had this thing that he this would be happening and that he would pull the trigger like he's ready to go there you know i mean and that it's like the gun is empty so it's almost like worse than then um it's almost worse than if he killed himself because there's like kind of the now what and you know i don't i don't know if it's if you're as bad as me gus but so many of my movies are based on because i'm a film school brad and i went to film school for so long so many of my movies are based on moments in movies like that end um the end of the movie which is one of my you know my favorite parts of the movie when craig and mike are just sitting on the beach and it's just sort of like this big moment of now [ __ ] what yeah i mean it just sort of sits there it's very much like the graduate you know i mean it was i remember when i was writing it just feeling like that graduate moment of just total uncertainty like what's going to happen now and it's like just no idea if you remember also throughout we really bounced all around the script as we were filming but that scene was always going to be the final scene did we film at the end yeah i just waited for that and the shower scene it was like this everything was kind of headed towards that scene and we were all nervous i think i just we were talking about that scene over dinner and you know we didn't have a permit we were just on this dockwyler beach out and it was like the dirtiest grungiest beach and there were airplanes flying over every [ __ ] five seconds but it was so amazing i mean that to me is still the way it's shot and the way it's composed and it's just like one of my favorite scenes i've ever shot and you know you guys are both so good in it and it was really just like it was like literally i think three people like it was us and maybe you and a sound person i mean he was like nobody and we were just out in the middle of this dirty beach filming this scene and there was nobody around you it's just like nobody stopped us it was crazy we were pretty lucky really because we didn't have any permits anywhere we got kicked out of a couple places but basically guerrilla filmmaking we would arrive we would run through it maybe it's a testament to you guys as actors that you could you know i mean like do it in such literally hostile like circumstances some of it was real and it was cold it was cold too i remember it was like oh my [ __ ] there was a couple one one scene that actually got cut was the scene where we were late laying on this this freeway that was being constructed and i had my shirt off and of course and mike was did mike have his shirt on mike was pouring uh hershey's syrup all over my chest and and it was freezing out and i mean l.a for everything i was literally shivering and that's the feeling where cooper appears oh is that the blind man john cooper from sundance appears as a blind man walking and that was edited out but it was in the sundance cut i think wasn't it yeah greg how much of the film do you say or would you say that you actually were shooting that you shot that i filmed yeah as a cameraman you filmed the whole thing no no i mean that's true i don't know is there a second cameraman that i did i guess rick lewis shot that one shot in texas chris didn't chris munch actually shoot just a couple of the scenes chris i know he did the lighting chris did the lighting but i think i shot everything chris was also i'm not a cinematographer i'm not a technical person so chris was always like really helpful about the foot candles and the distance and the focal distance and the this and that but um but i just operated the whole movie and he was just doing hours and times which was so beautiful yeah at the same time also part of the queer new wave was he on the panel no i thought you were so selective memory okay one more question hi i love your films oh thank you yeah um i was actually just curious i noticed a big difference uh versus like doom generation some of your other more visual films versus this one which is a little more realistic um what are your stylistic differences and why do you pick them for certain films and i'm having a hard time hearing can you ask again um i was asking about your visuals uh your stylization of your films i noticed that there's a big range between like this one and other ones like doom generation and nowhere and i was wondering um what's the major difference between your like i guess realism versus hyper realism yeah um one is doom generation was my very first film that had like a budget it was 35 millimeter and it's the first film i had a cinematographer and a production designer and you know we had a whole real crew and walkie-talkies like gus and i were talking about how it's kind of a big jump because he went from all notes you to drugstore cowboy and all of a sudden you know you're used to kind of three people and doing it all yourself and then you have all these people around and everything takes longer but you know like us gus was talking about how he has a lot of he does like a lot of storyboards you know gus's background is going to risd as a visual artist so and my background's similar in the sense that um i've always been really interested in drawing painting i was really into like i used to draw my own comic books when i was a kid so i always like create these storyboards and i have a visual idea in my head of what the of what the movie looks like so i did find that once i sort of graduated to having a crew it was much i loved being able to create the imagery without having to do the grunt work like trying to figure out what the focal length is and trying to sit the lit you know you literally just sit there at the monitor and go no it needs to be this it needs to be a little bit this you know and it's having that um having that taken away and you don't have to worry about the technical aspect of it i i really appreciate that part all right um thanks everyone for coming thank you everybody thanks gus and thank you the dogs dear guys fancy thanks