Queer View: There are films which are serious on the surface, but when you examine them more closely, you realize how empty and conventional they are. With Hustler White, it is the other way round. This film at first looks like funny trash, a joke, good unclean fun and a pretext to present horny guys, but on closer examination an underlying seriousness becomes apparant. I think in particular of the depiction of the amputated man which ist not sensationalistic, but which looks very natural. It was amazing. I never had seen a leg-fuck before, I didn't know it exists, and it looked so normal on screen. Was this intentionally your message?
Bruce LaBruce: Yes, I think, my thoughts in general [are] about normalizing extreme things, normalizing gay sex, making it just seem like real people you run into and know everyday. Which is really much like real life. I mean, everyone has things that they do in private that are very extreme. A lot of people, very normal people, have very extreme sexual fantasies. And as far as the seriousness goes, I think you're right, a lot of people commented to me about this sort of tragic thing. And I think homosexuality is tragic really in general. I mean just the position they put in the world, you know, in sort of being a very small minority which is largely loathed by the larger part of the population. Homosexuals are very bitter and angry, and some of them get over it. This explains the sort of tragic and serious underline of my film.
Queer
View: But straight men often envy gay men for their promiscuity.
Gays have much more opportunities for sex.
Bruce LaBruce: If you take advantage of your difference, then you have a lot of opportunities that other people don't have.
Queer View: Among gays there is more solidarity, and they have an identity.
Bruce LaBruce: Well, I have never really thought that. I think a lot of homosexuals gain their solidarity by conforming to the gay community which sometimes isn't that exciting and interesting.
Queer View: But the more problems you have, the more you grow with them.
Bruce LaBruce: Yes, absolutely. But I still think there is a line of tragedy that runs through a lot of gay people's lives.
Queer View: That sounds very much like self-stylization.
Bruce LaBruce: Well, I don't know about that. I think the way of disapproval of culture in general has an unconscious effect when you grow up, and there is legitimate anger in most homosexuals. I'm not saying that that should rule your life, that it should overtake your life. You can take advantage of it. But it's still there. And I think that's why homosexuals are really into things like movies, great tragic movies like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life and Fassbinder, because they like to celebrate the tragedy of their lives.
Queer View: The film was directed by both of you. Who did what in your film? I can imagine that Bruce contributed the bitchiness and Rick the humanity.
Rick Castro: Before we talk about that, first a comment to your first question. I think that Bruce and I were in complete agreement when we presented the sexual situations that we were to make it very as a matter of fact. That was the definite intention. It's not an issue, we're not exploiting it. These people are pursuing their fantasies. So, I'm glad that you comment about that. And about the amputee, I had a lot of people come to me directly and say how ugly it was. I said, but he had a beautiful body, and they said they don't want to see that. That was an important thing for us to do to show types of sexuality that weren't just obvious penetration and make people see that there are different versions of sexuality that might be homosexual or not homosexual. And then about the part about homosexuals being tragic: I totally disagree with that. I'm a bit naive and romantic about it. I think homosexuals tend to romanticise situations and have an unrequited longing.
Queer View: As a middle European, you are not as easily confronted with aggressive homophobia as you are in the United States. There are not so many hate crimes here.
Bruce LaBruce: I think homophobia is perfectly understandable and natural. It's subtle, it's everywhere
Rick Castro: I would say that maybe Bruce is just more personally attracted to tragedy as probably I am as well but I don't think it has to do with homosexuality. I think it has more to do with drinking.
Bruce LaBruce: No, it's heroin now (laughs). Also, the actor who played the amputee was very concerned that we treat his character like him, based on his story, so that he's a real person. And not like some freak or something.
Queer View: Do you know Tennessee Williams' story One Arm? He has written that short story about a handsome, muscular guy who loses an arm and is compared to a broken statue.
Bruce LaBruce: Yes, actually Gus Van Sant is supposed
to make a film from that story.
Rick Castro: Coming back to the question who did what
in this particular project: I am a photographer and I documented the hustler,
who were my models whom I used for the past five or six years, and I had
a lot of videos of the hustlers that I showed to Bruce, and Bruce suggested
we make it into a feature, so that's how the collaboration for the project
started. We wrote the script together in four days in Palm Springs. Then
we shot the movie in ten days, and I brought in the models that I used
in my pictures for the casting. I liked that when I helped him direct his
part when he was acting.
Bruce LaBruce: The way that we solved the problem of actually shooting was that we worked out with the director of photography so we didn't have to argue during the shooting.
Rick Castro: We are different people in temperament, but we share similar aesthetics in this particular project.
Queer View: The whole film was shot in daylight. Was this for budget reasons or did you want to get a more optimistic note?
Rick Castro: No,we did it because of the fact that the hustlers do more business in the daytime. In the evening on Santa Monica Boulevard, all the drag queens take over. We also wanted to take the obvious idea away that hustlers work at night, hidden. Or are very young. A lot of the actors are over thirty, in their thirties. And the customers aren't all old and ugly. The actors in the movie are hustlers, and they told us their stories.
Bruce LaBruce: As for the daylight, we wanted to suggest that, even if the action takes place over an indetermined period of time like several months, we wanted to give the impression that it was one long day.
Queer View: Wasn't it difficult to get Tony Ward? I can imagine he is very expensive because of his appearance in such videos as Justify My Love.
Bruce LaBruce: He was a former model of Rick's, Rick has known him since the 1980s, and he did it for very little.
Rick Castro: Originally we had cast a hustler in the lead, his name was Monty, that's where we got his name, and – shall I tell him this?
Bruce LaBruce: Yes...
Rick Castro: Within a week before the production he had got one girl pregnant, he married another girl, and he stole another actor friend of ours a guitar and John Wayne Gacy paintings. So Bruce and I decided he wouldn't be very reliable for the shooting. And Tony would have been my first choice. I thought he would be afraid to do this so I didn't approach him immediately. But after the first actor fell out, I called him and said, you know, let me know what you think about this script. And he called back immediately and told us he definitely wanted to do it. So that was great.
Queer View: I was surprised because in his videos he looks so wooden and so cold, and in Hustler White he is quite animated and funny.
Rick Castro: I think so, too and I think it's because he really understood the script. He's known me for years, so he was comfortable and he trusted me. And he had a good rapport with Bruce as well. He had no fears that we would do anything that he doesn't want.
Bruce LaBruce: I think that's exactly why he did it. He has done so much modeling and had always been stoic, now he felt intuitively that here he could do something else. He tried to take over direction sometimes.
Queer View: There was one reference to Andy Warhol's Flesh, when Tony is playing with the small child. Was it his?
Rick Castro: It was the child of his girlfriend's at the time. He said he doesn't know wether it is his. It doesn't really look like him up he thinks it is. As for Tony, I think this project is really more him than his modeling carer. His modeling career, he thinks it is bullshit. He does it for the money. With us, he was really generous with his time.
Bruce LaBruce: He didn't only show up when he was in a scene, he also showed up to watch the shooting.
Queer View: Your film is neither family entertainment nor hardcore. The sex scenes are half-hard. Was this because the performers got no erections, or was that an artistic decision?
Rick Castro: A lot of our models were too nervous and couldn't have done it. We didn't push it, we just said it's fine. We used rubbers, by the way.
Bruce LaBruce: I consciously wanted to get away from explicit sex. Because I think slowly I want to get away from that. Actually some people were disappointed, asking: "Why aren't you doing sex anymore?"
Rick Castro: In Sundance we lost more people with the
kissing scene than we did in the stumping scene. They weren't used to see
Bruce that way.