EXCLUSIVE: THE FABRIZIO FEDERICO INTERVIEW

What you are about to read may agitate you. It may disturb you. It may even shock you! At the very least, it will get you to think about cinema in a way you probably haven’t thought of before. For this is the interview with the most notable, under-the-radar, filmmaker of the last decade. Fabrizio Federico.

Causing a stir with his first film in 2011, ‘Black Biscuit’, Fabrizio Federico instantly clinched his place in the underground film scene. Using only the cheapest, crappiest cameras available, he gathered ragtag street people together for an extremely improvised, loosely plotted film that blurs the line between fiction and cinema verité.

He quickly created a set of rules for his new cinema of misrule in the PINK8 manifesto. All of his subsequent films followed the PINK8 convictions to the letter. From his film ‘Pregnant’, a commentary on social media addiction partially shot in Spain, to his more political response to Brexit with 2017’s ‘Loon’, his style of distorted stock sounds overlaying choppy, erratically edited film never wavers.

Experimenting with character performance, Fabrizio Federico created the personas of both Jett Hollywood, whom he credits directing ‘The Evolution of the Earth Angel’ and ‘Anarchy in the U.K.: The New Underground Cinema’, and the camera-headed Blimp Chopsocky. He returned to using his own name for 2017’s ‘Loon’ and 2019’s ‘Teddy Bears Live Forever’.

‘Anarchy in the U.K.: The New Underground Cinema’ is the closest he’s ever gotten to making a conventional film. It is a documentary through the virtue of being an underground, avant-garde film provides an accessible point for mainstream audiences to get a real sense of what the counterculture of cinema truly is. Directed under the guise of Jett Hollywood, the film features interviews with Fabrizio Federico along with the founder of Raindance, Elliot Grove, and filmmaker and chronicler of transgressive cinema, Duncan Reekie. It also mentions briefly the Straight-Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival started by Fabrizio Federico.

Fabrizio Federico’s latest project isn’t a film at all.

It is a book about Jim Morrison, singer and frontman of classic ’60’s rock group The Doors. What sets this new book apart is it focuses not on Jim Morrison as musician, but on Jim Morrison as filmmaker who made experimental films of his own as a student at UCLA.

You can find the book “Jim Morrison: The Genius of An Unsung Filmmaker” through Amazon and learn more about Fabrizio Federico and his films at his website.

Now, on with the interview!

ON GENRE: You just wrote a book about The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison focusing on his filmmaking which he studied at UCLA. What compelled you to write a book focusing on him as a filmmaker instead of his music?

FABRIZIO FEDERICO: I was just a child when I got into The Doors music, my dad introduced me to them because he had “No One Here Gets Out Alive”, then I brought a cheap, crappy Moroccan mix tape from a street vendor, after that all the music on Top 40 radio seemed pale by comparison, it made my bladder splatter. The fact that so many people didn’t know of Morrison’s potential as a filmmaker was heartbreaking because he was a genius, so I wanted to fix that. I’ve been planning this book for a long, long time. Morrison introduced me to the avant-garde, improv, experimentation and as a tribute I wanted the world to learn about his potential.

OG: Did you have access to his movies early on or did it take you a long time to research?

FF: The only one I couldn’t get my hands on was the legendary short film he made as a student at UCLA, it’s gone, vanished forever. Some people think the faculty burnt it or threw it away because it caused such a scandal when he screened it, but it was still so vivid in his classmates’ minds that I was able to reproduce it with words. Thats how good it was. HWY the film he made in 1969 still hasn’t been officially released because of his estate, but its available online as a bootleg. It’s a very strange shamanic film, its deep.

OG: The PINK8 Manifesto, which you created, begins with “Film school is poison.” Did you ever formally study film in college or otherwise pursue a mainstream film career?

FF: That’s the phrase that pays, I was just about to do a college course but then when I spoke to the film lecturers my blood turned to ice. They had zero passion and were very closed minded, so I just learnt from DVD commentaries and watched films like ‘The Brown Bunny’, ‘Tarnation’, ‘Julien Donkey Boy’, ‘The Great Rock & Roll Swindle’ & ‘The Last Movie’ on repeat. I wanted to break all the rules to the point where I didn’t want to know what the rules were. I’m a sample of example.

OG: The PINK8 Manifesto also states, “Your film must be 96.5% improvised.” Do you ever plan out and stage what your performers do on screen for that extra 3.5% or do you always go 100% improvised?

FF: The only thing I plan is my movie’s theme, everything else is raw and real. I want to capture peoples’ demons and souls. I am a total voyeur during filming, there’s no slack in my act. I’m a big fan of the Stanford Prison Experiment, I play games and use psychology because I know all the tricks of the mind: Hypnosis, EST, Scientology, mind control, characterology by Rene Le Senne is fascinating. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I use it all. Psychology is my weapon when I’m filming.

OG: You spent a lot of your childhood growing up in Italy. How did your life there influence your approach to filmmaking? Do you plan on ever filming a movie there someday?

FF: Probably the Italian humour had the biggest impact, it’s so chaotic and in your face, they are hilarious. WOKE culture doesn’t exist in Italy that’s for sure, but they have big hearts, and they are the masters of cinema, Italy helped turn it into an art form. I grew up in Massa near Naples, which was run by the Mafia at the time, but they were great to be around, very straight forward. I might make a movie about a philosophical, cannibal monk lost on a mountain who only reads Nietzsche. They have a lot of mountains in Italy where I grew up, I know them well.

OG: Your early films, ‘Black Biscuit’ and ‘Pregnant’, focus on disparate groups of characters as opposed to your more recent films which focus squarely on central main characters. Is this a conscious effort to infuse something of a traditional narrative structure into your films?

FF: I just wanted to go deeper into the mind of a just a few possessed characters instead of many of them, to focus on the primeval side of their brains. I don’t make films like anybody else so I wouldn’t know where to start. I never use a script, so the film makes itself depending on how I feel each day. I see cinema as an ubiquitous force that surrounds us, it’s become a paradigm for how to live. TV & YouTube are the ones raising our society now, no one knows what is real or fake anymore, reality can’t be trusted.

OG: What inspired you to use stock sounds in your films?

FF: I wanted a subliminal layer to the movies, field recordings, backwards tapes etc.… Humans are prone to many frequencies & feelings, all those unconscious areas of the mind need stimulating. I always loved how The Beatles were able to project the Paul Is Dead message on their records, to the point that it became a reality, there’s so many hidden thoughts in my movies, I play with the viewers shadow of beliefs.

OG: Your film ‘Pregnant’ focuses on society’s addiction to social media. How do you see the continued consumption of social media influencing cinema going forward?

FF: It’s become one and the same, I think the most revolutionary cinema can be found on YouTube & TikTok these days. It shows that we are all filmmakers, we all have something to say, and it’s fast and cheap to do, no wasting millions of dollars on actors & production. That’s what I wanted to prove to those dead-eyed college lecturers that anyone can do this, you don’t have to be a snob to understand cinema, that’s why the Misrule & Punk cinema movements happened, it was a generation gap thanks to all this new easy to use technology, it’s a gift from the Gods to creative people. I have faith in these young rebellious filmmakers.

OG: Do you plan on continuing with the Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival?

FF: No that’s over now. I might start another festival in the future but not right now, been busy with MAO and my other band Paranoid Alice, we play PUNGE ROCK.

OG: What is PUNGE ROCK?

FF: Haha its punk & grunge = PUNGE
The new thing!!

OG: What inspired you to take on the personas of Jett Hollywood and Blimp Chopsocky? Can we expect to see either of them again at some point?

FF: I loved how Bowie created Ziggy Stardust, so Jett was the apex of a superstar alien filmmaker, and Blimp was a recipe of eccentric characters like Frank Sidebottom, George Formby, Charlie Chuck, Edward Barton, Tiny Tim & John Otway. Outsider artists who create their own universe. Jett did a ‘Reggie Perrin’ vanished into thin air (but left a suicide note), and Blimp became a Tai Chi instructor in Vietnam and is broke as a joke.

OG: Your films often contain political statements, from the anarchists in ‘Black Biscuit’ to ‘Loon’ being a response to Brexit. Do you feel all films should be political statements?

FF: Well, I worked in politics with Mitt Romney in America and once you enter that world it opens up your eyes, everything is political, the Wizard of Oz is very real. I also find politics very funny. ‘The New Statesman’ starring Rik Mayall is one of my fav shows. I find politics to be very absurd, but it’s societies backdrop so it’s fun to satire how out of touch politicians are towards the masses needs. I also find propaganda to be an art form, so I like to include that a bit in my films for extra colour.

OG: How long did it take you to get all the interviews for ‘Anarchy in the UK: The New Underground Cinema’?

FF: About a year of me travelling around the country, was very entertaining making that film its full of mavericks fighting the mainstream film industry. The mainstream won by censoring and banning us in the end, but a new generation will be born and hopefully they’ll win.

OG: ‘Teddy Bears Live Forever’ stars Noor Lawson who has some connection to mainstream Hollywood, consistently as an assistant to Bryan Cranston as well as an associate producer on his cable tv show ‘Your Honor’. How did you come about casting Ms. Lawson in your film?

FF: I wanted to try something different. She personifies many things, that film only took a week to make because we shot all day, we met online, and she really understood the story I wanted to tell about a spoiled ‘It Girl’ who after being exposed to a Hollywood cult loses her marbles and degenerates into psychosis. She really delved deep into her multiple personalities and brought them to the surface; she did a great job and was very brave.

OG: You capture a good shot in ‘Teddy Bears Live Forever’ with the star, Noor Lawson, disappearing under the water in a tub leaving her neon blue wig floating. Did you get that in the first take? Do you ever do multiple takes for a scene?

FF: Yes, on the first take it was spontaneous, it’s beautiful but it’s also a very weird scene as she sucks on a Tampax as she washes away her soul. I’ve done thousands of takes sometimes just to push the subjects to a breaking point to get the right facial expression. It’s like primal scream therapy for them. Kubrick did the same. Making a movie is a total mindfuck.

OG: In ‘Teddy Bears Live Forever’ there is a scene with a jazz band in a grocery store. Were they already there or did you have to bring them in? Wasn’t that scene originally in your first film, ‘Black Biscuit’?

FF: Yes, they were playing on a side street, and I convinced them to come into the store and we quickly made the scene guerrilla style in the store before we got kicked out. I never use permits, it’s better to just wing it and see what happens, leave it up to fate. But yes, you have a good eye, that video clip must have ended up in the wrong folder, so I decided to re-use it.

OG: Do you feel avant-garde cinema has a burden of responsibility to endure preventing all movies from becoming big budget commercials masquerading as tentpole movies?

FF: I don’t consider any of the movies that are screening in Odeon, Showcase or Cineworld theatres to be real cinema, it’s all fast food for the masses. Marvel studios should be liquidated, the problem with avant-garde films is that the filmmakers are so shy and quiet. My big mouth has burnt so many bridges because I speak the truth and will tell anyone to fuck-off-and-die if I need to, but I can’t do all the dirty work for them and that’s the problem with the avant-garde it’s not outspoken, hence why they will always be in the shadows. You have to shake the cage, that’s why those riots happened at my screenings, certain people are sick of fast-food culture, but the mainstream doesn’t give a shit if you are holding a flame for real cinema, you have to take what you want in this life. Be provocative to spread your message.

OG: Are you currently working on a new film? When can audiences expect it?

FF: Well, the film ‘The Confessions of Aleister Crowley’ is waiting to be edited, which was shot in Scotland at his haunted house in Loch Ness, but I might never make another film again, just spend the rest of my life as a reclusive living legend. I highly recommend it.