Oops!

It looks like you don't have flash player 6 installed. Click here to go to Macromedia download page.

An Interview with Terrance Zdunich of Repo! The Genetic Opera
Posted: Sunday, November 02, 2008
By: Charity VanDeberg
Concert Editor

When the 10-minute opera "The Necromerchant's Debt" debuted nearly a decade ago, Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith never expected to see their creations living and breathing on the big screen. They could not imagine sitting in a room jamming with Ogre, Sarah Brightman, Melora Creager, Poe, David J, Paul Sorvino, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paris Hilton. How could they have known that one of their little musical skits would take on a life of its own and mutate into the successful stage show that would ultimately be Repo! The Genetic Opera? As the date of the limited release grows nearer, Zdunich, who does triple duty as co-writer, actor (as GraveRobber) and makeshift publicity manager, takes time out of his heavy promotion schedule to discuss the progression of birthing a cult classic.

You're in Toronto right now. What are you doing there?

Zdunich: Repo! is playing in Toronto's After Dark Film Festival tomorrow night, so I'm here representing the movie, and the good news is that we're sold out, so I think it's going to be a good crowd, and hopefully a crowd that will get what we're doing.

You're going to end up with people in costumes. They're going to be singing along.

Zdunich: I hope so. So are you, in general, a big rock opera geek like I am?

Actually, yeah. I grew up watching Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and all of those really cool musicals. I actually went to see Moulin Rouge twice, and it was so close to being good; it was good, but it didn't have that edge that it could have had.

Zdunich: I agree. I've seen Moulin Rouge a few times, and it took me a couple of watchings to really get into it, which I like about art, when it's not so obvious. What I really respected and appreciated about it the first time I saw it was it was its own thing, and it was so its own thing that it told you you're either with us and you're going to enjoy this and welcome to our world, or you're not going to like it and wasn't for you anyway, so get out.

Moulin Rouge was the first movie I had gone to where half the audience walked out.

Zdunich: Imagine how we feel! We have blood and guts, but we don't have Nicole Kidman or a big marketing campaign.

You have Paris Hilton.

Zdunich: That's true, but Paris Hilton is kind of despised by the people that would even, maybe, at face value, like what we're doing. But I think after they see the film, I don't know if they'll like her, but she won't stand out in the film. I don't think anyone will walk away and say, 'Wow, Paris really drew attention to herself.' I think in a world like Repo!, where it's so stylized, I think the world is the star of the movie more than any particular performer. It's such a stylized thing that almost everyone is unrecognizable in it. Certainly me. I play GraveRobber in it, and I'm in the audience sometimes watching it with people who don't know that I'm Terrance, I'm GraveRobber, and I might talk to them right afterward even, and I'll be like, 'Hey, what'd you think of the film?' 'Oh, it was really cool.' Then they might be talking, and then along the way they might say, 'I liked that GraveRobber character,' and I'm like, 'Oh, thank you.' They'll get this blank look on their face, and then they're like, 'Wait a minute...' because everyone's so made up, which is cool, I think. I actually got to meet someone dressed as GraveRobber in Austin. It was a heavier version of me. It was a couple. It was GraveRobber and Amber Sweet, and they came dressed together, and I took pictures with them and it was really really cool. I was just like, 'Holy shit! I've made it, I guess.'

According to IMDB, you are a storyboard artist.

Zdunich: That was my main job prior to Repo!. Repo! has been a main part of my life, my main artistic endeavor, for about eight years, but during that time, we played as a stage play in New York and in LA, and all along the way I was not only the writer and one of the actors, but I was in charge of booking the shows and getting the audiences and dealing with a lot of things, so I've been sort of acting as a closet producer over the years, but I didn't make money off it. The money I made during that time was from drawing, and it was hit and miss. I'd get a big gig, and then I'd not have a gig, and then I'd have a big gig, because I was always freelance. The most sizeable thing I've done as a storyboard artist that people would know would be Into the Wild. I storyboarded that movie. I went to school for drawing and illustration, so it's always been one of my first loves as an artist. I think, ultimately, storytelling is my favorite aspect of all the disciplines, so whether it's performing or songwriting or drawing, I always like sort of telling a story.

That leads to the question: have you considered turning this into a graphic novel?

Zdunich: You know? Yes! And funny enough, a lot of people have asked me that just because of the amount of artwork I've created for Repo!, whether for the film itself or, over the years, all the various sketches or promotional materials. There's probably enough material on hand right now, presently, in a file in my house that you could literally release an 'Art of Repo!' book and it would be dense. But in terms of generating an absolutely new Repo!-themed comic, I'd be absolutely up to it. In fact, something I'm working on right now is a graphic novel. It's not Repo!-based, but it's for the graphic novel medium. I'm just trying to find a publisher or somebody to help finance it. But, yeah, I love drawing and I love the medium, and I think the Repo! world is dense enough that it could be any number of forms, and I think comics could be a great way.

It is obviously a fully formed story. Just seeing clips from when it was the 10-minute operas, you can see that this world existed before you tapped into it, like Cool World.

Zdunich: It's funny you should mention Cool World, because I'm trying to think of the production designer on that film. His name was Barry something, I'm drawing a blank, but he was one of my teachers at Otis. Really cool artist, a total hippie, and we referenced Cool World a lot when we were doing some of the early preproduction meetings for Repo! the movie, because we were dealing with this fact that we had this futuristic world with all these big concepts and we had a very little budget. How do we try to make that work? Cool World came up a lot because of the sort of flatness of the backgrounds, obviously not specifically, that style wouldn't work for Repo!, but kind of as a motif to kind of intentionally go two-dimensional instead of going 3D but then kind of failing because we don't have the budget.

You can't build an entire city.

Zdunich: We kind of did, though, which is crazy. Everything in Repo! was filmed on location in a sound stage. Everything was filmed in the same place, and we might have the graveyard and then part of the family house existing at one time, and then we'd redress the same area; the family house might become GeneCo's office just by moving around some furniture. So we made a lot out of a little, and when you watch the film, I don't think anyone will go, 'Wow, they didn't have any money.' I think people will assume we do, because it looks so cool. That, in many ways, may work against us, because we are a struggling independent film that, right now, only has eight theaters. Yet, when I talk to people about it, they're like, 'Oh, that's a big budget movie. That's a huge thing.' Actually no, it's a horror rock opera with no A-list stars and no distribution. So it's kind of a double edged sword.

How did you manage to get the cast? Was there a casting call? Did you have people in mind, or did people just hear that this was available, and they had seen the show and really wanted to be a part of it?

Zdunich: No, we definitely sought people out. That includes the casting of the actors and the players on the soundtrack. When we got the green light and we knew that Repo! was going to be made, we were immediately aware that just reading the script was a hard thing for people to really get the full scope of what we were trying to do; one, because if you can't hear the music, you're already missing so much, and two, it's such a visual world that we realized that the names that the producers were throwing at us of potential actors just seemed way off the mark. Like, they didn't quite get the concept, and they hadn't seen the play, so it didn't make sense. So, the two Darrens and myself started putting together our sort of dream cast list and our dream musician list, and people that we thought would really encapsulate the roles, whether it was a singer or an actor. And I'm happy to say that of the eight principle roles in the movie, six of those cast were in the top five we had put on our list, so we actually managed to nail the people we were going after. Ogre, however, wasn't on that list. And the only reason he wasn't on that list is because we were thinking myopically. We weren't really thinking about rock singers, necessarily. We were looking at actors and theater people. And then someone mentioned Ogre, or mentioned Skinny Puppy, I should say, to perform music for the soundtrack, not to be an actor in it. And when they said that, when they went, 'What about Skinny Puppy? You know, do some programming or something,' it just clicked in my head, and I said, 'Oh, fuck! Ogre could be Pavi!' and you just got this look in the room from the people who knew who Skinny Puppy was. They were all like, 'Oh my god, that is perfect!' and all the producers got the look of 'Skinny who?' So we had to go and convince them. Even though to its fans it's like the goth Elvis, to the mainstream, and certainly to a mainstream Hollywood producer, they've never heard of Skinny Puppy. So it was a bit of a sell, but, that said, we won, we got him, and he's great in it.

The first reaction for a lot of people, when seeing the first trailer, is that they were excited but hesitant, because there is a fear that, although it would appear to appeal to a more gothic or industrial crowd, there is a chance that it could have almost seemed like a cliché, or that it was making fun of it. There was a risk that it wasn't going to be sincere. Too often you have movies that are meant to be gothic but they are just over the top 1985 gothic. But the more we've seen, the more sincere it's been. The fact that it's not all this obscure cast – you have Paul Sorvino and Anthony Head – the fact that these people are involved, and not in a sarcastic way, made it seem more appealing. It's probably because this is what you love, too?

Zdunich: It most definitely is. It's funny, you set out to – at least I think if you're good, and I hope we have achieved that status – you set out to do something that you would like to see, and when you're writing, you don't necessarily go, 'OK, I'm writing for this market or this demographic.' I just sort of said 'What would I like to see?' and was always very brutal with myself about it. You can get so caught up in the minutia of a thing that you forget why you're doing something, and you're so focused on the details as opposed to the big picture. But then when I pull back the lens and really think about it, what my influences were, even what the origins of Repo! were before it was as big as it is now, it was just two people. I mean, for Christ's sake, it's centered around a grave robber in a post-apocalyptic future, so it automatically has that cyberpunk feel. Not to mention that if you look at the players in the soundtrack, you get a sense of my CD collection at home. But I think what is specifically great about it is, yeah we're getting a lot of accolades from the goth and industrial community and that's really cool, because I think that's my people and they're a loyal audience and a smarter audience than I think a lot of people give credit for. I think that what's great is oftentimes you see goth, or what's labeled as goth by the mainstream, and you see the movies and it's always someone mopey, disenfranchised, never very bright. And the best you get is like a Tim Burton situation, which I like, but it's very slick and it always feels like Hollywood's version of that aesthetic. But I think Repo!, just because it took so long to make, and just because of the people that are involved, really is goth, and it really is intelligent. It never treats the audience like they are a bunch of mopey losers who can't fit in anywhere. I think we just treat it like this is the world we like and, as such, the response has been very positive from that community.

Has the music changed since working on the film? Have you written new songs that may be added to the stage show?

Zdunich: The answer is yes. If Repo! is a success, even a sleeper type of success, I think it's a very natural thing to go back to the stage where it started. In fact, it might be an even easier call than the whole film process. It makes everything so much more difficult and so much more expensive and, in many ways, it requires that it be more pop. But in terms of how it changed and how it grew, it's been growing since day one, but definitely when we got the phone call that it was really going to become a movie, we clearly had to adapt the script. We basically had to adapt a libretto into a screenplay. Darren Smith, the co-writer, and I were very committed to not just making this a film version of the stage play. So often with musicals or operas that become movies, they already are so popular, like Chicago, for example, was such a big hit already as a stage play that by the time it became a movie, there are only so many creative choices you can make. People love the music already, so they don't like to change it too much. Repo!, because it never really achieved a mainstream audience, it never really got a big Broadway run, it was unknown to most people. So we didn't have that pressure that we couldn't change it too much. Moreover, because ours is a futuristic story, we felt like it really needed to be visual, and to me one of the main differences between film and theater is in theater you tell everything, whereas in film you show everything. So a lot of the stuff on stage that may have been the biggest hits, the biggest songs, the ones that always got an applause, they were literally a show-stopper, meaning you literally stop the show to applaud, that doesn't work in movies. You can try to manufacture it. You see it sometimes in musical movies, where there's a big number and then there's a pause, as though that's where you applaud, but it always sort of stops the show, and I think in movies you expect things to always be moving forward. So the adaptation was pretty intense. I would say we changed definitely over 50 percent. That's not to say that we completely rewrote 50 percent of the things, it just meant we adapted things. A lot of the songs might have got truncated so they didn't feel as show-stopper-y, but rather just forward the action, but we also wrote entirely new things and then we also deleted entire things from the libretto going into the screenplay. Once you start involving outside musicians and outside actors, everybody has their contribution. That said, everyone who was on board knew what they were getting into. They knew they were making an opera; it wasn't an MTV mash-up. To put it in perspective, when we first knew we were doing this, the producers started giving us names of actresses who they thought could play Shilo, the heroine in our play. Very naturally, they started bringing up people like Avril Lavigne, which to me felt wrong, but OK, if you're going more mainstream, maybe she could do it. But what her people said was, 'Sure, she's potentially interested, but she'd want to write her own songs.' Now, to us that's horrible, because this is not an MTV mash-up where everyone just comes in and you throw it all together and you have a big collage of a music video. We were actually committed to making a 21st century opera, and if it was up to the producers they would have said, 'Yeah, sure, you can write your own music. What do we care? We're just making a movie.' But thankfully Bousman, the director, and us of course, we were like, 'No, no, no. You guys don't understand we're actually making an opera, and it's not a free for all.' Once it becomes a free-for-all, I think it's actually going to lose its integrity.

That said, you want to get people involved who are playing on it who are already naturally in tune with what you're doing, so they're not looking necessarily to go, 'Well, it's an industrial song, I get it, but you know what? I'm better at writing folk, so can I make it folk?' It wasn't that; it was rather they were adding to the best ability what they could contribute but while always being reverent to the material. So I think ultimately what you get is the best of everything. You have a solid through-line that doesn't feel like it's been bastardized by 20 disparate voices. We thankfully got some of the best within the genre to add their little nuances.

And you have Melora Creager. She seems to have been made for this sort of work.

Zdunich: By the way, that was my biggest geek. That's when I geeked out the most. I love all the acts on it, but to me, of the musicians at least, she is Rasputina, and I have all Rasputina's albums, and I'm a big fan. As much as I love say, Jane's Addiction, Stephen Perkins is a part of Jane's Addiction and a big part, but it wasn't like I felt like I was sitting in the room with Jane's Addiction, whereas I felt like I was sitting in the room with Rasputina, and she was playing music that I wrote. So I was definitely geeking out and trying to remain professional, of course, but I was always frustrated because there were all these tasks I had to do, just because of our crazy schedule that I couldn't just sit there, even though I wanted to many days, and just listen to them play. Just listen. You know, just sit in a room and just drink a beer and go, 'Holy fuck! Melora Creager is rocking out to Repo! songs.'

How much control did you keep over this whole process?

Zdunich: We had a lot. Probably a lot more than most writers ever get in Hollywood, certainly more than any first-time writers ever get. I think the reason for that is that the project is so unique that there isn't really an expert in the field. I mean, you could have maybe said, 'OK, we're doing a goth rock opera. Let's hire the people who did Dreamgirls.' How horrible would that have been? But we didn't have that. We're dealing with Twisted Pictures, who did the Saw films. They're still an independent-type facility. They certainly never made a musical, let alone an opera where there is no spoken dialog. Thankfully, they said, 'You guys know this best, so you tell us. If we send someone to you that we want to cast, we're asking for your opinion as to whether or not they can cut it to sing the role. We all know they can act.' We've all seen Paul Sorvino act, but did we all know he could sing as that character and carry it for 90 minutes for the filming because, unlike something like Chicago where you still have people talking and they just break into occasional song, for the most part, it's their talking and acting that are carrying the character, with musical spices. Repo! is all singing the whole way through, so there is no reprieve from it. You either could sing as the character and carry it, or you couldn't, and we certainly had people come in that it was very obvious, very apparent immediately, that they wouldn't be able to do it, and then others where you're like, 'Stop drilling, we struck oil.' It's been awesome.

You know, the sad thing is that I realized that even if Repo!'s a big success and suddenly this time next year someone's saying, 'Hey write the next thing and we'll pay you a bunch of money,' I doubt we'll ever experience the level of creative control that we've had with Repo!.

If given the opportunity, would you rather turn down an uninspired project or work on something just for the money?

Zdunich: Obviously, I only want to do things that I think are meaningful to me, especially if you're going to devote the amount of energy and time into something. Like Repo!, even though it's been done for a year now, filming and editing and such, I still do 14 hours a day on the project, and it's mostly not fun stuff. It's trying to get us into festivals, it's personally going to Hot Topic and pitching them ideas for clothing lines. Part of that is just that we don't have the support from the studio. They look at Repo! more as an obligation than an opportunity. I'm hoping that we can prove them wrong and change their opinion on that.

But, that said, I've actually been thinking about that question quite a bit. What do I ultimately want to do? Do I want to be a manager, which is kind of what I've become almost this last year on Repo!, or do I want to be an artist? Do I feel like I have stories that are things that I want to tell and stories that people would want to hear, would want to listen to, want to watch, want to read? I've been working on that graphic novel that I told you about and just trying to make it happen now, while I'm sort of living on borrowed time from Repo! and while I don't have another project lined up where money's influencing what I'm doing. I also haven't run out of money yet, so I'm not in a position where I'm like, 'OK, I've got to make money!' So I wanted to create something that is a work of art, that is inspired just by the art and not by some necessity, not by some outside force saying, 'Well, we'd like you to do this.' I hope I can do both. I hope I can do inspired work that also pays my bills, but honestly, inspired work will always come first. You always hope that whatever is real to you is that will be real to a lot of people, but it's not always the case, obviously. If you're asking if I've been close to cutting off an ear before, the answer is yes.

The final question is a really important one. When did you realize you were only attracted to dead girls?

Zdunich: Because 'I can't get it up if the girl's still breathing,' right. In fact, there was a line in the stage play that unfortunately was lost in the many adaptations, but it was a scene between Shilo and GraveRobber, and in this version of the stage play, Shilo has a locket that was her dead mother's, and her father gave it to Shilo, and Shilo wears it around. GraveRobber is doing what he does, and he's out there with Shilo and sees the locket, sees the picture of the dead mom on it, and he goes, 'Hey, kid, your mom is hot,' and she goes, 'She's dead,' and he goes, 'Well, that's even better!'

You know what we're up against right now, with the movie. We're in the position where I think we have something really cool here, and I think something that will appeal to a lot more people than it's being given credit for right now. I actually think the goth audience is a bigger audience than people are imagining, and a much more loyal audience. And unfortunately right now, our weirdness and our coolness is creating a very difficult concoction for us in the mainstream studio world, where we are having eight theaters, and that was only after a bunch of kicking and screaming. Lionsgate wasn't even going to release the soundtrack, to put it in perspective, until a couple of months ago, and that was from us kicking and screaming. So my pitch to you is, if you like the movie, just talk about it. A lot of people don't even know we exist. November 7 is soon, and I'd hate to be in a situation with all these people going, 'I missed it? I didn't even know it was out.' So, we need all the help we can get.

Repo! The Genetic Opera will be opening in these select theaters Friday, November 7:

Los Angeles, CA
Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90046
323-848-3500

Pasadena, CA
Playhouse 7
673 East Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91101
626-844-6500

San Francisco, CA
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California St. at Polk
San Francisco, CA 94109
415-267-4893

Berkeley, CA
Elmwood Theatre
2966 College Ave. at Ashby
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-433-9730

Las Vegas, NV
The Palms Casino
4321 W. Flamingo Rd.
Las Vegas, NV 89103
702-507-1525

Austin, TX
The Alamo Drafthouse
1120 S. Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX 78704
512-707-8262

New York, NY
The Angelika
18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St.
New York, NY 10012
212-995-2000

Minneapolis, MN
Landmark Lagoon Cinema
1320 Lagoon Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55408
612-825-6006