By Anita Malhotra
Director Lee Demarbre’s films are infused with a passion for B movie genres: Hong Kong action flicks, horror movies, musicals, Blaxpoitation films and Mexican wrestling films, to name a few. A 16mm short – Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy – launched his career in 1999, garnering a Slamdance film festival award. Demarbre followed up with a string of genre-bending films, from the low-budget 16mm cult film Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001) to the big-budget horror film Smash Cut (2009).
Anita Malhotra spoke with Demarbre on April 19, 2011 at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre, where he is co-owner and programmer.
Lee Demarbre in his office at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre after his Artsmania interview
AM: When did you start making films?
LD: When I was very young, when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, that was the first film that made me think, “This is something maybe I can do when I grow up.” It wasn’t the movie itself, it was the poster, because the poster said, “From the makers of Jaws and Star Wars.” The poster made me think, “Oh, that’s a profession. The guy who made Star Wars and the guy who made Jaws are teaming up to make Raiders. That’s gonna be a good movie.” And I learned about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and starting buying books and reading them at a very young age.
AM: How old were you when Raiders came out?
Demarbre speaking at the 10th anniversary screening of “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” on March 25, 2011 at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre
LD: Eight.
AM: When did you actually start shooting films?
LD: Spielberg’s story of how he got into filmmaking as a young boy is inspiring. He borrowed his Dad’s camera. He just started shooting stuff in 8mm. And I said, “Dad, do you have a camera I can use? And he’s like, “No.” My Dad was a military guy.
I started playing on tape recorders. I’d record movies off the TV, or plays, and I’d edit them. I would take Monty Python albums and I would choose one of the characters I wanted to be and remove all that dialogue and then record my own dialogue. In a way I was constructing a narrative, you know, without visuals.
When I moved to Ottawa I wanted to afford a video camera, so I started working at this Chinese restaurant in town that was controlled by the Italian mob. I was washing dishes and they were running prostitutes out of the kitchen. It was kind of scary. These cooks got into a fight one day and one of the cooks cut off the fingers of the other cook, and I was asked to replace the guy with the missing fingers. It was really frightening. I was young, too. I was working with pimps and gangsters. But as soon as I afforded my camera, I quit.
So now I had a camera. I could use my VCR as a playback machine and I could edit on my camera. One of the first things I did was take movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and cut my own trailers, having fun like that.
Poster for Demarbre’s film “Smash Cut” (2009), featuring fomer adult film actress Sasha Grey, who later appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” and the TV show “Entourage”
AM: What were your earliest movies like?
LD: I met a friend in high school who shared the same passion, so we started what we called “Basement Wardrobe.” Basement Wardrobe was either my basement or his basement and we would raid our parent’s wardrobes, and based on what we found in the closet, we would create these little skits. Just a few years ago I digitized a lot of them to DVD – 88 short films that I made before I finished high school. Just before I graduated, we made a short feature film called The Hacker on VHS. We both worked at a video store, and I had friends who worked at other video stores, and we were able to release this movie independently in video stores.
Continue reading →
ARTSMANIA 