From Canada, a filmmaker in his 20s trailblazed the scene with his short films grasping topics of homosexuality and the American society as the centrifugal driving force. Using archival footage, inspired by Vaporwave and unorthodox narrative methods, Kalil Haddad was a breath of fresh air in queer cinema. His films such as the He Never Dies series to My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting, which made him banned on Vimeo, have sparked interesting visuals to create further progress within the community. With accolades of having his films screened in Melbourne’s Brunswick Underground Film Festival to NYC’s Film Diary, we had the honor to talk with Kalil Haddad for the next 90 minutes through Discord discussing his films, internet music, hentai, to piracy and many more.
I want to ask, first of all, uh, Kalil, how are you doing today right now in Canada?
I’m doing good, I’m doing good. The weather’s turned around, it’s starting to feel a bit more summery. It’s nice. I just went for a big walk, good stuff.
Yeah, did you have any dope breakfast for today, man?
Um, I just had a ham and egg sandwich. It was pretty sick. It was pretty sick.
I actually have something to tell you about how it was to experience screening one of your movies. When I screened Victim of Circumstances, it’s one of the most polarizing films I screened, because I literally saw from the projector room that some people walked out from the movies. Has that ever happened to your movies?
Have people ever walked out? I don’t, well, the thing is I’m not able to go to all of my screenings. So I’m sure some people at some point have when I’ve been touring recently with the films as part of the He Never Dies cycle. I think people, most people know what they’re getting into, so I think a lot of people like to stick it out. I found some of the reactions to be predominantly positive, but I have seen some polarized reactions to what I would say is people misreading the text of the film and misreading its messaging, I suppose. So I’ve seen polarized reactions in that regard.
But it’s funny, I was also at an experimental film screening recently and there was, for the very final film they played there, it was a film that just strobed the entire time for 12 minutes. It was really intense. I mean, I fuck with it. Like I love those kinds of movies and the intensity of that. But I mean, I saw— that was a film that I really saw a lot of people walk out on just because of the form itself and how intense that was. So even beyond any politics, I suppose, I could also see the kind of formal attributes, especially Victim of Circumstance, that has like a 5-minute-long strobe scene as well, people kind of walking out from that. I actually had a screening one time where they dimmed the projector because the strobe was so intense, they actually dimmed it down so it’d be softer. Um, and I’ll never screen there again.
The first question I would love to ask is from our friend who is actually in work right now, and his name is Grieff. He can’t speak on the mic as of right now, so I will be the one who will ask his question, but he will be asking about your movie Paul and Eileen. He said this: I really found Paul and Eileen very interesting in the use of archival media through multiple generations. When going through archival media, do you look for any specific stories that follow similar themes to what you display, or really just whatever speaks to you.
I find that, like, going through archival material can open up so many different pathways. And, as a filmmaker, it’s about narrowing those and really finding the ones that I think have the potential for the most kind of power in their story as well.
With Paul and Eileen specifically, those are all family photographs from my mom’s side of the family. A few years ago, she had given me this old suitcase that was full of family photographs. I started going through them just out of curiosity to see what was in there.That inspired the creation of the film rather than me wanting to rather than having this idea for the film and then trying to find the material. It was the material that specifically inspired the creation of the film. In exploring these photos, it just brought to light all of these stories that my mom lived through, her generation lived through, that I’ve heard about, but I, of course, didn’t experience firsthand, and how these photos illuminated that history and presented them in such a tangible way and so for me, it was this process of wanting to, in a sense, reconstruct those histories I had always been aware of, but in a concrete kind of form. Yeah.
Have you found any archive stories that you probably want to take for your future films?
Definitely. I mean, I can speak to this more broadly. I guess these are more broadly, but when I was making Victim of Circumstance, like that film kind of developed over the course of two years. It really started off with me finding this one specific magazine, this issue of Jock from July 1985, this porn magazine. In exploring this issue, I realized that this was the entire gay world kind of synthesized into a singular package. That’s really what inspired the creation of this film. At first, it was this idea of like, how can we bring this magazine to life? And then what are the kind of secret histories hidden in the pages? What are the implications of even things like the advertisements, like ads for poppers or for specific albums, like a Donna Summer album? And how is this specifically kind of created in the image of the gay world? And then also, how does it itself reinforce that? And I guess it’s like a chicken or the egg kind of situation where it’s like, does this influence culture or is the culture influencing how this magazine operates.
Sergio: So I wanted to ask a question. It’s more so not directed towards one film in general, just your whole work. But I wanted to ask how would you respond to the critique that your work’s use of queer aesthetics from pornography as a form of horror, would you. How would you respond to the claim that this actually enforces exploitation more so than it actually critiques this exploitation and how it is interrogating the queer community’s historical struggle and trauma.
From my perspective, I think that, like I said about this magazine and Victim of Circumstance being really based around this magazine as like an object. I think what I’m doing is representing history. Of course there are so many positive aspects of queer activism and the queer struggle and the history that is built upon, but I think it’s also important, especially now when I think queerness has become so much more mainstream, to kind of look back on where it was before and the kind of generations that were built upon. It’s really easy now to see the queer struggle as a queer struggle of the past and what I hope to do with these films is to highlight the struggle that was there, the oppression, the exploitation. And I think this is a misreading of the film from certain circles because the film is strictly about those subjects, it somehow negates any of the positive aspects of queer activism and the queer struggle and the history that that is built upon. But I think it’s also important, especially now when I think queerness has become so much more mainstream to kind of look back on where it was before and the kind of generations that were built upon. I think it’s really easy now to see the queer struggle as a queer struggle of the past. And what I hope to do with these films, is to highlight the struggle that was there in the oppression, the exploitation, and that is what I would say would be a misreading of the film from certain circles. Because the film is strictly about those subjects it somehow negates any of the positive aspects and i think that we have so many positive queer representations now I don’t think it’s um I don’t think it’s wrong.
I think it actually behooves us to look at the way, to look at some of the more negative aspects and not negative because they’re gay, but negative because of how queer people were just treated and the world in which they kind of lived in and that oppression. It’s really easy to kind of forget where we’ve come from in that regard. And for me, like I think a criticism I see is that people for some reason interpret that the use of pornography in and of itself is supposed to be scary. And I don’t think that’s the case whatsoever. For me, these films aren’t scary because they show gay sex. They’re scary because of the world in which that’s taking place and the other kind of dynamics at play and the world that hates you for being yourself, for who you love and how you kind of internalize and embody that and how you might wish to be something other than that. Yeah, like when the whole world feels like they’re against you or is oppressing you, how would you psychologically kind of feel being in that position? And I think that’s what I try and do with these films is create a more kind of expressionist perspective.
What would it feel like to be in this environment, to have the weight of the world crushing you for who you are? So yeah, for me, it’s not about gay sex equals scary or anything like that. I think, in fact, I think the strobe sequence in Victim of Circumstance is really beautiful. Like that scene makes me cry when I watch it, even though I’ve seen it a million times because I can feel, for me, I can feel the passion and I can feel the pain in that. And especially in that film too, this idea of, especially that time too, you see the personal ads as well in that film and like the struggle to kind of connect with someone. And I think especially when you look at queer life outside of a metropolitan hub, in that time as well, what would it be like to live in a kind of a rural area and maybe you’re only, you don’t know other queer people, your only outlet is writing into this magazine or anonymous kind of hookups and not because gay people are dirty, but because that’s what’s available to them in their time and place.
What specifically drew you to engaging with queer subjects, may I ask?
Well, I’m gay, so I just find it fascinating to look at queer history. I think it’s funny because I think we, in a more contemporary world we live in, it’s easy to kind of even forget that 10-20 years ago, things weren’t the way they were so even when I was growing up in high school, I didn’t know any other gay people and so I think that even though I didn’t live in this time in the 80s when these He Never Dies films are set, I think I can still in my own way empathize with these kind of dynamics as well. These dynamics of loneliness or feeling misunderstood or feeling like yeah there’s no other outlets and of course even growing up in like the early 2010s as a teenager which is very different from the 80s and the 90s. But I think that’s the thing about queer history, it’s just continues to evolve and I don’t think we need to be locked into one specific form of queer representation, which is counterintuitive, because I think there’s so many different voices, so many different queer experiences, and stories that have taken place, real histories.
That’s why I kind of push back on this when people kind of critique Victim Of Circumstance for these things. I think is every gay story in 2026 supposed to be Heated Rivalry and just be like these tender queer narratives? Because for the majority of queer history, that has not been the experience. And I think even as a teenager, I was really inspired by these stories of struggle and these stories of like outsiders. like The Boys in the Band or like Midnight Cowboy even, or some of the old Paul Morrissey films like Flesh and Trash. And so that’s always, and so when I was growing up, like those were the kind of queer narratives that I consumed. And I think that like, I think any great drama, any great drama has conflict in it. And I don’t see much conflict in a story that is just a palatable story for a kind of mainstream audience that just kind of waves its hand at some of these, at some of these like real struggles. It’s something that’s only like only within youth is only like a coming out story or there’s so many different types of narratives. And I think for queer people and their stories to be genuinely acknowledged and respected for what they are, I think we have to put that out there, whether it’s unflattering or not. This is someone’s story and they still deserve to be told. And a lot of these porn stars that I feature in this film did have these very tragic experiences and troubled kind of upbringings and backstories and that’s what led them into this. So that’s also not a critique of like all porn is evil or anything like that, I don’t think that’s the case whatsoever, but I do think that, especially at that time, not to make any blanket kind of sweeping generalizations, but I think it did attract a certain type of person who was a bit more hard on their luck and kind of needed to do what they needed to do to survive. To compare porn then versus porn now, as some people have with this film, is also counterintuitive because I think we see adult sex workers, adult film stars, I think have much more power with OnlyFans and they have a way of like controlling it themselves.
Retaining that power where in a lot of these scenes at this time, it’s like, I mean, in The Taking of Jordan, he’s offered $200 for the scene and that’s just it. He sold his rights away for that scene for 200 bucks. Now it’s just out there. He doesn’t continue to make anything off that, doesn’t benefit him anymore to continue to have that shown or to be pirated on, on XHamster or whatever. So it’s about like the autonomy we have now, as sex workers, as queer people, is very different than what it was then. I think these comparisons between the 80s and now are kind of black and white in a lot of ways. And I also think the male experience as a sex worker is also very different from the female one, because I’ve also heard that kind of critique. I was at a screening in Chicago where a film critic who also was a sex worker told me that she had an issue with these depictions and I think the queer element and the period element adds two completely different layers that separate it from that sort of, from the same kind of context itself. Again, I think it’s about really looking at the nuance of these situations and of the people involved. For me, it always comes down to empathy for the characters and really wanting to understand their experiences and what they’ve been through, because again, for me, I feel like these are the people that the queer community is built upon.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your films kind of remind me of Kenneth Angers and how he uses queerness and also montage in his film. Could you tell me, what are some other queer films that have moved you personally? Or let’s say influenced you in the process of this filmmaking thing?
I feel like I have a lot of early influences like Kenneth Anger or Fassbinder. Todd Verow’s film Bottom, I love that movie which is this documentary about this man in New York who’s trying to, in his words, take as many loads in a day as possible and we just kind of follow him and it’s this very raw film, where we follow him having sex and we see how he ignores the idea of love and begins to see himself as just a body, as just someone who exists for other people’s pleasure. And it’s a really harrowing film in general.When I was making these films, I didn’t necessarily have any direct influences.
I think these films are really... inspired by like pornography itself and the way that those films kind of function as a form of documentary even when constructed, it’s like you are still seeing these two actors, these two people having sex on camera, and I always find it interesting. Especially amateur stuff as well and it’s like you can hear them talking and it’s like okay well what is the relationship between these two people? Who am I seeing having sex? Where is this taking place? And I find it interesting looking at the context clues of the space. Like there’s a white brick wall. Okay, maybe this is in a dorm room, it’s always interesting to me. I would say the unintentional documentary nature of porn is the biggest influence on these films. And I’d say as well, like I think a lot of my influences aren’t necessarily like other queer people filmmakers, per se.
There’s a lot of queer films I love. I mean, Mysterious Skin was a huge formative film. Bad Education by Almodóvar. Like I said, Querelle. A lot of these classic queer features, The Boys in the Band. But for me, a lot of the inspiration came from when... It’s funny actually, this was like a few years ago when Letterboxd started allowing adult films on their platform. I began looking through some of these lists and it was really for me, the biggest inspiration is like the discovery that there was an entire genre of queer film in the 80s that’s just been kind of lost to time. And the actors who were in these films were like queer stars in their own right that would appear on the covers of magazines. They were like film stars and they were famous in the queer community. They’re actors and they have iconic films that people don’t talk about. Like if you talk to someone who knows about vintage porn, like a lot of the films sampled in this are pretty like iconic movies, but they’re films that nobody’s like really aware of now.
And so for me, it was like unearthing this lost history, this lost genre really, and seeing that at a time in the 80s when, queer people weren’t being depicted on screen in any kind of traditional or mainstream drama to any kind of large degree. There was this entire subset of queer film for queer people and beyond just like the sex on screen. It’s like a lot of these films have their own narratives and you can see their own stories and you can really see how cultural dynamics of the period play out and, and learn about the gay community and its kinks at that time. In certain setups like in Victim of Circumstance, you see the glory hole scene at the gay club. These were, at the time, the types of scenarios in these films were common queer hookup scenarios.
In terms of looking back at this kind of lost history, I think that a lot of these spaces that we see exist in these old films don’t really exist to the same degree now. I think the queer community has become and in some ways, I guess for the better, because it means that we become more mainstream, we become more normal within society, but we’ve lost some of those spaces. And I think those are really important too. And again, better or worse, like the idea of, although commonplace in their time, the idea of some of these scenarios looking back are not the most ideal for forming any kind of connection. I think that’s why people, especially at the time, saw queerness as transient because it was kind of forced to be in a way that it’s not now. So I think that we are in a much better place, but I think in being in a better place, we’ve also lost a bit of not only our edge, but these kinds of environments that kind of gave queerness in the 80s and 70s its own identity.
It’s very great that you mentioned Araki because my friend has a question that mentions Araki in it. In the text, he said in here, what can you say about something about the new era of queer filmmaking, with you and also, I’m sure you’ve seen the castration film. Have you seen the castration trilogy so far, right?
Yeah
Schoenbrun to Araki, where do you think queer filmmaking is in this present time? Do you think it will focus more... experimental sides? What do you see right now in this hemisphere?
I think we’re existing at a really interesting time because I do think that, and I mean, with this tour that I’ve been on with my films as well, I think that I found that there really is an audience for queer kind of transgressive work.
and an audience that’s not only interested, but hungry for it, with the Castration movies as well, which I think is incredible. I think that the mainstream side of film and the kind of outsider or experimental will always be kind of divided in a sense. I mean, there’s films like Gregg Araki that were able to, or even like Fassbender to a lesser extent, I suppose with Querelle, but that were able to, kind of bridge some of those modes.
But I do think in terms of mainstream stuff nowadays, I think that as queerness has become more mainstream, I think there is a sense that it needs to be, it always needs to be palatable in some way. I do think that Heated Rivalry is like a fantasy. And if for nothing else that I don’t like, I don’t believe like two DL guys are going to be that emotionally open with one another. It’s a fantasy. And so, and I think we’re always going to have these kinds of mainstream queer stories. I mean, even when we look back to the nineties with like Philadelphia, that’s very much a straight version of a queer story versus like, you look at a film like Longtime Companion made a few years prior also about, I think that was like the first feature film about aids, and it was a gay story for gay people. It’s so funny cause I have an old VHS of it and it’s like an MGM release and at the top, they used to put the genre and at the very top it says avant-garde. There’s nothing avant-garde about the film, it’s just a queer story, but I guess I still have it somewhere. Even that I find really condescending because there’s nothing avant-garde about it. It’s only avant-garde because it’s not fitting into kind of a mainstream accessible kind of narrative or kind of for a straight audience, I should say. With Philadelphia, I do think there will always be these like queer stories for straight people like Heated Rivalry now, but I think Castration Movie and I think my films are queer films for queer people. I think queer people can understand on a different level. I think that maybe some straight people might see some of the elements in Victim of Circumstance and think that they’re for shock value, which I would disagree with because I think that they all serve to kind of make an emotional and a historically accurate statement. kind of point but I think that queer people who have seen the film, I’ve seen reviews that people talk about like I said about the strobe sequence in that film, where I’ve seen queer people talk about how they’ve cried during that sequence. There’s one review on Letterboxd that talks about how as someone who grew up living on the streets, they were having an out-of-body experience to this scene and I think that emotionally queer people can feel these films and they can resonate with them in a much different way. It’s for any kind of audience that’s open to these kinds of stories open to experimental work but maybe having some of those lived experiences just allows it to hit differently and hits on a deeper level. Even though I didn’t live through these personally, I have my own experiences as a queer person as an outsider that allows these topics to resonate with me in a way that that I’ve wanted, that’s made me want to explore them on a deeper level.
I do find that the idea of queerness can be very superficial now. Queerness now comes down to like Stan culture and which I think again, has its place. Gays have always loved their divas, but to boil it down just to kind of that experience, does a disservice. It misrepresents us as something, less than the sum of our parts.
On Harry’s question, there are some malaise in your work to other underground filmmakers such as Fred Halsted in his presentation of sexuality and the relationship to violence right. I remember you have this film that made you banned in Vimeo, which I really love by the way and he said in this question, do you find that these themes of violence and darkness particularly significant when it comes to portraying homosexuality with respects to a historical context within the United States, to the point that they surface naturally in exploring these themes?
Yeah, I think they do. I think it does like, I don’t think that any of the violence in these films is being imposed upon the subjects.
The subjects themselves have been victims of violence. And so, looking at their experience, the violence is a natural extension of that lived experience. And again, this is not all, these films are not about the entire gay community. They’re about looking at this kind of, this specific aspect of the gay community and the gay experience as it were. And like I said, a lot of these porn stars that I looked into that are featured in these films, some of them did die very horrible, violent deaths. Some of them died due to AIDS. And I think that’s its own form of a hate crime, the way that AIDS was handled in the 80s, because it allowed all of these gay men to die because they were looked at as nothing, like trash. That’s how society saw them and society turned a blind eye to them. And so I think that whether it’s a hate crime or HIV, it’s all the kind of, it boils down to the same mainstream indifference to the experiences of gay people and the lack of empathy on the part of society for people who didn’t fit the mainstream, were outsiders, were different.
These films are providing an outlet to those voices, some of those voices who aren’t here to speak to those experiences. It’s funny, I feel like when I’ve spoken to older queer men specifically about these films, they really resonate and really understand the experiences and the times that I’m speaking to. And I think, and on the other end, I think there’s some older gay men. It’s never older gay women. It’s always older gay men who are saying this to me. There’s some older gay men who I think want to look at the past with rose-colored glasses and go, oh, well, it wasn’t all bad. Meanwhile, the gay man saying this to me lost the majority of his friends to AIDS as a 25-year-old. And I couldn’t imagine, I can only imagine how soul crushing, how harrowing that experience would be. Like, if all of my friends right now started just dropping like flies, where would that leave me psychologically? How would I look at my own worth in terms of how society views me? And I think that’s really what I’m speaking to here.
It comes down to a person’s politics, because some people like the kind of raw nature, what I would see as the honest nature of these films. Other people think that, oh, well, we shouldn’t put these representations out there, especially to straight people, to mainstream people. And I just don’t buy that argument, because... this is our history. It would be like a black person wanting to ignore the civil rights struggle, and the civil rights struggle did have a lot of violence. What was done was disgusting towards black people, towards minority people, and so to act like oh like one day everything was just good out of nowhere it’s like even into the 90s there was still not significant infrastructure. 10 years after the start of AIDS, there was still not significant infrastructure to be helping queer people in any kind of meaningful way. And that’s the world in which these films exist. These porn films also in their own way exist as fantasy. They’re being made at a time when AIDS is prevalent, but in these films, sex is always safe. Sex is always available. And in that sense, I think these are very joyous films. And what I’m doing with them is these experiences, these times in which these films are set are being depicted as joyous. I’m glad they are in those films but the idea of recontextualizing this is what would these films actually feel like if they encompass the real feeling, quote unquote, the real feeling of the moment and the fear of going home with someone, the fear of unprotected sex. Outside of the fantasy trappings of porn.
I want to focus on your acting. So I remember I messaged you last time about Gangsterism, right? And somehow, I haven’t seen it, but I’m actually quite curious since you’re usually known as a filmmaker, but in gangsterism, you play as an actor. Could you tell me what is the process, your outlet of working has become as an actor differentiating from you being a director? What was the experience like?
Gangsterism was a lot of fun to make. I used to do some acting in high school, like a while ago now. I used to direct plays in high school as well. I guess, I should say another influence on me was like Tennessee Williams. I directed the Tennessee Williams play back in high school as well. It was his only ever explicitly like gay play that I directed. It’s a short play. But yeah, so acting and theater, like I’ve always been interested in. It just kind of came about organically, I’ve always really admired Isiah Medina’s films. I’ve always really appreciated them. He’s one of the boldest voices we have contemporary voices we have in Canada and so we became friends and just got talking and I joined on the film and it was a lot of fun to exercise that muscle again after working with found footage. I spend especially with these last few films working exclusively with found footage. I’ve just spent so much time just in front of my computer, so it was really fun to get back on set to work with other actors and to kind of have a different experience where, I think I learned a lot, as well from Isiah being able to function as an actor and to watch him as a director and to see how he kind of operate as well.
It was a very intimate production. Isiah and his partner, Kelly Dong, were the only crew members really for the majority of the shoot. Isiah would be directing, he’d be a cinematographer and framing the shot and Kelly was producing and she would organize us and was also like a boom operator, so it was a very kind of intimate production. And I think, again, especially as an independent filmmaker, it was really inspiring to see how much they were able to do with their budget and how they were able to work with that and this large collection of actors and locations and how they were able to make a feature film at such an accessible kind of cost. A lot of people think that making a feature is so far removed from their means or what they can do, so I found it very inspiring to see their workflow and to kind of work with them as an actor.
Also in Canada, we had this other film recently called Permanent Tourist that just came out. This film by Alex Lowe, and it was all shot on an iPhone for like a thousand dollars. It’s a feature film. I just find that so inspiring the way that people find to tell their stories. Even with Victim of Circumstance, it was always intended as a found footage film, but that’s the kind of film that I would love to be able to make as a narrative feature and then I think about how much that would cost to do it as a period piece. At this level, that might be inaccessible but I think as a found footage film there’s methods you can use to tell any story within your means. It’s just about how you kind of approach it. If I had approached it as a fully fiction film with actors, it would be completely removed from my availability, but by working with found footage, it opens up so many other doors. That’s what I found with found footage is the kinds of stories, the scope of stories that you’re able to tell by working with archival material and recontextualizing it into something new. I would also say in terms of that, like another inspiration for me is like Luther Price and the way that he uses queer experimental filmmaker, how he uses sound footage as well to tell these ambient, almost, I would almost call them like drone films, like the music genre, like drone films and how they use sound footage, but they almost like loop, but not literally. They stay in a mode. It’s like he puts you in an emotional perspective and he somehow is able to kind of drag that out over the course of a 30-minute short. It never feels boring for a second. It feels hypnotic and haunting. But, yeah, I suppose I’ll go back to Gangsterism, though. Yeah, I thought it was just a very... It was a really fun experience. And... yeah I think that directors should try their hands at acting because I think it does highlight a lot of different working methods and gives you empathy for the actors. It’s like one thing to tell an actor what you want them to do, but it’s another to kind of understand what and how they have to embody that, and what the emotional experience of performance is. When a director can understand that and really have that empathy for their performers, it forms a much deeper bond and forms a much more honest kind of trusting relationship which is what I found I had working with Isiah.
Sergio: Idris wanted to ask, what do you plan for the trajectory as a filmmaker? Are you still going to continue making these sort of queer horror-centered films, or do you think you’re going to tackle different types of form in order to tackle the dynamics of the contemporary situation with the queer community rather than how it was in the 80s or such like that?
I mean, I feel like every director that I love is always evolving. and is always trying out new things.I don’t ever want to kind of cement myself into one kind of thing. I see it as an evolution. I feel like those prior films were films I needed to make to get to kind of where I am now. And I think that now that I’m here, there’s other things I wanna do. I’ve been thinking about it like, He Never Dies is a project that I wanna continue working on because I have so many more story ideas. At the same time, I’m also kind of torn right now. It’s like, I want to tell those stories, but I also feel like I want to do probably some new things too. You know what I mean? And continue kind of expanding what I’m doing.The themes I’m interested in, are always going to be themes that are near and dear to me but I think that I always want to keep progressing them, pushing them forward and doing something new with them.
In terms of feasibility, I’m really interested in like these period pieces, but that’s the kind of stuff that I can make as an archival kind of found footage movie. It’s a lot trickier to kind of make a period piece as a narrative drama, especially in a way that can really sell itself. I find that a lot of contemporary period pieces, I don’t buy as being period because of that look, because people in that time just have a certain look to them. The cameras have a certain look. It creates this whole other kind of thing, this other kind of wall. That’s not one that could be broken down and done with, but that’s the kind of thing to create a realistic period piece that requires a certain amount of budget, which as an independent filmmaker, I’m not working with right now. So there is a kind of practical answer to that, but at the same time, thematically, I think I’ve spoken to those issues now, and I’d like to speak to something, to your point, more contemporary.
Even if I had the money for a period piece, I would like to be able to focus on something more contemporary and tell a new kind of story. I find that we’re living in such a fucked up time right now that the next film I want to make, I want it to, and not necessarily in some overtly didactic political way, but I want these next films that I make to really be able to say something about the here and now and the world that we’re living in. These He Never Dies films do in a sense by reflecting on the past to the present and making that comparison, but I think that, yeah, these next few projects, I really want them to be films that really address the kind of the world we’re living in. and our current times because I think a lot of filmmakers right now. the big filmmakers like Scorsese, PTA, Tarantino, whatever it’s like, all these like big mainstream filmmakers, yeah whatever. So many of them now are focused on reflecting on the past and making period pieces and I find it really rare for a contemporary director to make a film about the here and now and I for whatever other controversy it had, I really loved Eddington because I thought that it was really speaking to our kind of current moment.
I found that really inspiring as well, that even though it’s a period piece, it’s supposed to be set in 2020, it is still about the world we are living in right now. I find it so brave and raw for a filmmaker to just kind of go balls to the wall and just kind of tackle that subject matter. Because I think a lot of filmmakers are so afraid to talk about the present and it’s much safer to talk about the past and I find that boring in some ways. Show me and I want to move beyond just the form of a film. I want to see and feel a film I have never seen before and I think that film is such an old medium, but it’s such a new medium too. As filmmakers, we’re obligated to continue progressing the form and to progress narratives forward and not stay stuck in a certain mode. I mean, if you look at all the eras of visual arts and how they might last for a hundred years, and then they’ll move on to a new era, from Romantic to Renaissance, and they continue to evolve and styles change.
It’s never locked in one form. Right now, because film is such an expensive medium to produce, a lot of people want to play things safe. That’s why I love that a film like Castration Movie can exist and can have an audience. It’s a film that’s DIY and shot on DV cams and there’s an audience for that. It’s not a film that’s afraid of, like, Oh, I need to shoot this in 4K. For people to want to watch it, for it to be distributed. It’s like, no, they made the film they wanted to make and they made the film as it needed to be made, what that film specifically needed and I think that’s powerful. That’s what a great artist should do is I think you say like, fuck any of these industry kind of concerns. Great art is what sticks out in the end even beyond anything queer. People just want to see something new now. I think people are so bored with where mainstream, especially film, is at the moment. It’s just the same recycled tropes and bullshit. I think that we’re obligated to say and do something new.
I really think that, you know, we deserve better cinema for it to progress. Because like music, if music never progressed, we would be stuck with the same regurgitated bullshit as like it was in the 60s, right? But what really changes, you know, not only that... It’s like how you said earlier, you know, how porn changed back then and now porn is different and how the industry changes. I actually am quite curious about this. With how the internet has gone, there is this whole schematics of how pornography has gone towards the mainstream idea. How now porn has become a meme. For example, in Indonesia, gay black men have become pornographic memes here with phrases like “ambatukam”, all those phrases or recently on Twitter, there’s a video of a guy jacking off in front of the camera while showing us identifications like, “Ooh, expose me, expose me” and all that. There is also this one angle of porn. I don’t think you’ve ever tackled it so far from your filmography, from what I’ve seen. But I think that hentai, doujinshi, and Japanese cartoon pornography is such a very interesting angle of pornography, which I haven’t really seen that’s been dealt with Western pornography because it’s animated. It’s very hypersexual. Especially with yaoi porn that I’ve seen. I remember seeing one hentai where the guy turns into a girl and his friends fuck him as a girl and also as a guy, so it’s like something that is out of the ordinary tradition of what porn is, but have you ever seen these other formulated forms of pornography?
Yeah, I have seen those and I always think back to there’s this one Beefcake Hunter video that I always see goes viral. It’s a straight dude getting a blowjob and I saw this meme where I feel like everyone knows this screenshot of this specific video as like a meme. Cause people, I always see this guy’s face posted around and I’ve seen videos too, where it’s like, he’s taking off his pants and then it cuts to something before you see anything sexual. Then I saw one where it cuts to a K-pop song, but that’s what I find is interesting though about these things where this is a very vulnerable moment we’re seeing captured on screen and it’s being commodified into a joke or cause a lot of these people who are in these videos, even with the Taking of Jordan, a lot of these people don’t think that these videos are going to leave whatever bubble they created in and then you see them spread all over the internet. I think about that too. Like when this guy makes this video, when anybody makes these videos and they become memes, it’s like, the idea of that kind of unintended exposure and what that means, even though they’re in the video, they’re facing the video. If it leaves the bubble, they thought it was originally intended for like, what does that do as well? And then yeah, I mean the hentai element as well. It’s like I’ve seen a lot of crazy videos like that. I don’t know in regards to my work something like that I do find interesting in terms of the extreme nature of it but I guess what attracts me to the content that I’ve worked with is, like I said, it’s like this kind of pseudo documentary nature of it. And also in that sense, like utilizing it as like found footage.
It just feels like something that was real, it existed. Something private was on earth and that’s what kind of intrigues me about that. In terms of addressing more extreme sides of sexuality, I guess it’s something that I’m open to. A lot of these films are about deconstructing fantasy. He Never Dies ones are about deconstructing fantasy, something like hentai where it’s like the ultimate fantasy, it’s animated, because it’s something that we couldn’t even physically do or like bore kind of stuff as well, where it’s like you can’t actually do that i guess you could maybe you could, but you can’t actually really do that. You can’t be completely consumed. I’m just like attracted to these films even in the fantasy construct of these vintage films, the still inherent reality of the time that they possess.
Have you ever seen like, you know, do you have any fond memories of you watching your first experience of like hentai with very weird fetishes?
Um, no, I guess not really. I’m not much of an anime person I suppose, so I haven’t seen some hentai here and there, but it’s not something that I personally watch, but I have seen those specific videos, but what I always find interesting about the existence of hentai is like the almost like, how do I want to say this? The pedophilic nature, I suppose, of some of them as well. Even if, like I’ve seen somewhere, it’s like, oh, like the old, like the busty older teacher and her young male students, like that kind of shit. I find that interesting too, because it’s like, yeah, this is illegal. You can’t depict this with actors, but for some reason, it being animated there’s some sort of leeway for it to exist, which I find interesting too, because thenI guess it just opens up a whole can of worms. Like okay, obviously child sex abuse material does exist but it’s like what kind of material would exist in a mainstream way if it wasn’t illegal. I just find that sociologically like an interesting kind of thought experiment. Like, what are the limits of people’s sexuality when unencumbered by kind of societal approval, I guess?
But yeah, that actually just made me think there actually is this one film, I thought was insane, like really well done, like a batshit movie called Legend of the Overfiend. It’s an anime feature. I was just shocked and I guessed it was the first real tentacle porn film and it was crazy. I was reading about it, and this film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival back in the 80s as mainstream, just like an anime release, like Akira. It was really insane, but this movie was really... I’m trying to remember it now. I saw it a few years ago, but it was probably the most batshit animated film I have ever seen in my life. But I thought it was beautifully stunning with the animation. I thought it was really like, I’m not a tentacle porn guy or anything, but it was just an insanely good movie. I love that.
Especially with these types of genres you’re talking about too. I love the blending of genres itself. I love that that film is an erotic film, but it is also kind of like a horror movie. It is a sci-fi movie. And because these forms of sexuality are so extreme and so imaginative, they take on all of these other kinds of genre modes as well within themselves. And I find that, yeah, I find that really fascinating. I would even say with some of these like vintage porn films that I’ve seen, like the way that some of them, like there’s this one called Born to Raise Hell. That’s also kind of like a horror film, like a slasher movie and it is a fisting film. It’s really insane. So it’s like, you have the more romantic vintage stuff, like the twinks and surfer boys and all that kind of stuff, like California sunlit kind of movies and you have these darker films, like you mentioned like Fred Halstead. His work on how intense and shocking all of that stuff is as well. I think he’s kind of a debauched person, but I think in terms of his filmmaking, I do also find like the extremes of like Lucifer Valentine’s films really interesting, like his Slaughtered Vomit Dolls movies, which I think are like very like repugnant, but I also find it fascinating because they are, I don’t know to who, but they are erotic films in a sense, but then they’re also these very bleak experimental horror movies as well. And I think the second film in that trilogy, I think it’s called Regurgitated Sacrifice. It’s like, it like mixes in like stuff about like JonBenet Ramsey and like about Kurt Cobain’s suicide and at the end, it’s real, but then the majority of the film, since he’s Canadian, so it seems like they’re just real Vancouver prostitutes starring in these movies so it also has this kind of like documentary kind of nature as well that I find very fast. I think of him as a human being, he’s gross but I find his work and that’s the thing too. A lot of people too are a general kind of thing. It’s possible. I think an artist can be like a repugnant person and a person that I might not want to know personally, but to write off someone’s art because of, like, yeah, I guess the question of separating the art from the artist, I suppose. Because even with my own feelings about him as a person, I do think his art is very inspiring for how bleak and for how raw it feels. You can say that rawness is a product of maybe the exploitation of its creation, which again, I think is wrong.
At the end of the day, the work now exists and the work is there as an object. And I think as an object, what can we get from that? Same with in the way that obviously like, I mean, he’s come around recently, but Kanye West views are horrible, but like personally as an artist though, I do find him very inspiring. A great artist should always be progressing. And I love artists like that. I think about Prince or David Bowie, who like every album, they were trying to do something new and try and play around with new sounds. I also would say generally too it’s like I do feel like I’m much more inspired by musicians a lot of the time than like filmmakers and that music, unlike film, is such a more emotionally visceral art form. It’s so just emotionally direct. And I think that, yeah, there’s a lot that can be gained from viewing art even by people that we don’t necessarily agree with.
Since you were raised in those eras, the Tumblr days. Then you have taken a very huge inspiration from vaporwave, DJ Screw, all this remix stuff. Could you tell me what your relationship with music is? And do you have any early memories of music that you are really fond of? Like, where do you find your first love with music?
My first musical love was Kanye. I got Graduation when it was a brand-new album. I loved that album. I listened to it constantly. I remember being so shocked when 808s and Heartbreak came out, and it was such a different sound, but I loved it all the same and I felt like I felt that album so viscerally when it came out. The cold-like synth heavy album and it was so especially at that time so unlike anything I had heard from like a rap album too, I feel again I found that really inspiring like how an artist can kind of continue to evolve and change their sound and a great artist expresses what they feel and what they want to. The hope is that an audience follows you along that path. I even speak in my own stuff. I think that my films have evolved over time. The films I’m making now are not the films I was making even like a few years ago with the Glue trilogy. It really inspired me to continue evolving. So I think that probably like if we’re talking about first musical loves and I would probably say him.
Growing up, when I got really into Vaporwave, I feel like Vaporwave also gave me that sense of nostalgia for the past, but not like a roasted nostalgia, but in a way that you kind of feel in an emotional way. And then from there going into Chopped and Screwed stuff and like a lot of 90s, Memphis rap. I also found that I was there at ground zero when SOPHIE started dropping music. I found her stuff just so forward thinking, so different than anything I’d ever heard as well. I feel like she was a big inspiration. One of the films I shared was my film Farm Boy. And in Farm Boy, you can hear basically like a cover version of Ponyboy in the movie at this one scene where they’re at the club together. I’m really inspired by outsider music as well. And, like, outsider art, I think, generally. Donnie and Joe Emerson, who were, like, this brother duo in the 70s who lived in rural Washington and cut a 70s Rock album and they just made a bunch of pressings. It never went anywhere because they didn’t have any kind of industry connection. It was just a homemade kind of product and then somebody in 2011 or something found it in a record store and it became revitalized, and so I also do find it interesting too. I’m so inspired by things that are maybe less overt. I find it so beautiful the idea that anyone can make art and because they’re not trained, it allows them to see what they’re doing in a much more experimental kind of forward thinking way. They’re not encumbered by traditional kinds of structures of art. And I feel like that’s been a big influence on me as well in terms of not feeling like I need the kind of position in my movies or in any kind of particular way in terms of how a movie is supposed to look or feel.
When I was a kid, when I first started making movies, music was always where it started. I would be listening to a song and visuals would come to me and I would start thinking about those visuals more and how they link to maybe a greater story or a greater scene. So it’s like when I write, I always listen to music and I think the music helps inform the tone and the effect of what I want to be doing. That’s why I say, I don’t watch a film thinking, oh, I really want to recreate what he’s doing, what Scorsese is doing. I think a lot of people are so inspired by these overt examples and it’s much more interesting to me that a lot of the things I’m influenced by are things that maybe people would consider bad art. Because they kind of exist in that form to people, it’s like they actually hold all of these really forward thinking attributes because they’re not bad, because they’re poorly made. They’re bad because they don’t fit into maybe our preconceived notions of what they’re supposed to be. And I would even say, obviously people caught on with SOPHIE, but I think that like when she first started dropping music. It was so different. It was so abrasive. It wasn’t even like other hyper pop that was coming out at that time, like any of the A.G. Cook or like Hannah Diamond stuff. Music has always been my biggest influence above film. That’s where I find my emotional voice, I suppose. A lot of my movies are so music heavy in a sense and sample heavy because for me, it’s about music being the most viscerally potent art form. I find that my films I like, trying to construct in a kind of musical way to visually represent the feeling of listening to music. It always starts with the music and the feeling that that gives me and then trying to kind of allow that feeling, that effect of the music to kind of inform the way the film is being constructed. In His Smell, there’s a lot of SoundCloud rap beats and for me, that film is an embodiment of what those songs emotionally feel like for me to listen to and then kind of transcribing that into a narrative, taking those feelings and narrativizing them.
Do you see your work as a way of deactivating the original economy of these images, especially their function as objects of consumption? And if so, what do they become instead? Are they still images of desire or something closer to traces or even wounds? I’m asking this question because it reminded me of that one masturbation scene from Farm Boy on the abandoned house. I wonder why you shoot it from the back. Was it as a way to conclude the sexual tension from the beginning by making the two men? Because I did not understand very well why the first man left. In the final scene, the one guy who left first the room was transparent. So I wonder if it was a way to destroy its original object, masturbation, by becoming transparent. It might be related to that wound or that desire was left out.
So I guess to the first point, I suppose in recontextualizing these vintage images, I’m not necessarily trying to offset the economy of those original images as much as I am trying to deconstruct what their meaning is outside of the scene. Outside of just what we’re strictly seeing. So yeah, it’s not about like, oh, because I’ve repurposed them, it no longer serves the same function. I think it still can.
I think that these scenes are like, and again, back to this, maybe the critique that I’ve heard about these films in terms of how it represents porn is like, I still think a lot of these images are very erotic. And I think that’s part of what the conflicted nature of these films themselves is like, we can still experience sexuality or eroticism from them, but, I’m trying to look at them on a deeper level too. When we take in this new level, what meaning are we kind of left with when we see the whole picture? Porn as a fantasy is showing us just one level of it, but there’s multiple levels of play here between the actual scene with the characters, the actors, and there’s the actors’ backstories, there’s why they’re on the set, why they’re involved in shooting this movie. There’s layers to it, too, but I think it can still serve like an erotic function. I can still serve an erotic function but by looking at it on a deeper level, we’re just getting more of the bigger picture in a way and on the other question about Farm Boy, so that shot, I’m trying to think back right now…that shot for me shooting it in that way is and I feel like multiple scenes in Farm Boy do this so it’s not just it’s not just about this one scene but it’s about like a lot of scenes in that movie are shot really wide from a distance almost like voyeuristically like these images of the past that we are returning to and we see at the end of the film when we see the farm boy is now grown up and he’s in the club and he’s talking to this trans woman about how he would have loved me.
It contextualizes for us that these are images of the past so it’s almost like giving them this dreamy kind of nature in terms of memories that we’re returning from a distance, in a literal sense. In terms of the guy walking away, It’s like the conflicted nature of queer youth where it’s, these two boys have some sort of connection. They probably are attracted to each other, but one of them is more comfortable with that connection than the other and that connection scares him and so even though they’re in this erotic encounter, where he touches the other guy at the same time, it scares him away, and and I think at the very end, when we see him talking about he would have loved me, it’s like it’s looking back on what would my life have been if this guy who also liked me wasn’t afraid to like me and that’s something that still happens now. It’s like, I don’t think that what I was talking about before is like queer youth and coming out stories but I do think these are things that still very much happen and we still do live in a world that prioritizes heteronormativity. I personally think that a lot more guys would probably be bi if it was socially acceptable or would be gay and I think there’s societal expectations around that, of course, still, and in the Western world, but even more so I think elsewhere as well, where being gay is less accepted. So that whole scene in and of itself is just this construction of like looking back on this memory and this idea of what could have been and the kind of regret inherent in that and how, Sometimes when we regret and we look back on things, we can only really see them from a distance or we only see them from our point of view and maybe that point of view is cold. Maybe it’s lonely. Maybe it’s empty. And so that’s what kind of cinematography they are doing.
I’m sure you see that if you use social media and Twitter, a lot of people do this thing with piracy, right? What are your stances on, let’s say piracy on films?
There’s two levels to this, I suppose. In general, I think piracy can be important because I’ve seen so many obscure kinds of underground films that I wouldn’t ever get to see because they were pirated. Some of these Luther Price shorts that I’ve seen, or some of the newer quote unquote, like Kenneth Anger movies from the nineties, like that never screen anywhere. I’ve seen them because they were pirated on Kara Garga or whatever. I think in that sense, film piracy can be a set. It can be a version of a film preservation, which I think is really important. But like, I think if someone leaked Castration Movie right now, I think that would be fucked up because it’s an independent film and it’s still actively making the rounds so I’d feel differently about that. At the same time, if somebody likes the films enough to pirate them, you know what I mean? Then I feel like, in some way, I feel like it’s a little flattering, maybe, but I think it all depends, like, what it is. Like, it’s actually funny. I was over at a friend’s place recently and they have a Plex and they had some people’s libraries on Plex. We’re looking at one person’s library and they literally had my movies on their Plex that aren’t available anywhere, but I wasn’t even offended. Like I wasn’t even bothered by it. It was like, I thought it was funny. Like, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting. Like for me, it’s like, especially making underground films. I wouldn’t want my brand new work to just be out there like on YouTube or something, but I think if films are being shared discreetly, you know what I mean? In like film circles, whatever, it’s like, these aren’t films that are like easily accessible so it’s kind of cool. It’s kind of cool if people want to see the films and they’re sharing them around like that. That doesn’t necessarily bother me or anything, it’s just it would only bother me if they were leaked in a public way that was preventing me from showing them publicly, because I am still touring around with the films. So if somebody just posted them on Vimeo, that would piss me off, but I think being on plex or something…I don’t know. I think if people are engaging with the films, that’s what matters to me at the end of the day as an underground filmmaker. I just want people to be able to see and engage with the films and maybe they’re like uh SupremeLemon or whatever and like don’t fuck with the films and maybe they see them and they do you know what I mean… To me at the end of the day, like the people’s individual receptions to the movies, it is neither here nor there for me really. What matters to me is just like, I’m an artist and I want to be able to share my art with people. So if people care enough to share the links amongst themselves and kind of them, then I think, yeah, then I’m all for that.
Since you love music, you are raised behind MTV, so I want to ask you whether you have any favorite music videos that you probably love, because they combine visuals and music together
Oh that’s such a good question. I’m trying to think off the top of my head. I feel like once we get off this call I’m gonna think of so many videos I would wish I said. One that’s coming to mind right now that I watch a lot actually is this Kylie Minogue video called Come Into My World where it’s literally her walking around one set, and every time she loops around the set, more of her get added. It’s a Michael Gondry video. And I also love Chris Cunningham. I love the Window Licker Apex twin video where the first six minutes of the video is a parody of a hood film. I also really love the simplicity of the elegance of Sky Ferreira’s Everything Is Embarrassing video. Just shot in black and white. I think it’s really beautiful. This is such a vaporwave kind of thing, but I love the Ginseng Strip 2002 Young Lean video and like all the kinds of vaporwave-like effects in that video. There’s this Dan Mason video. I think it’s called Make Me Love You. And it’s like archival footage of a Budweiser ad or something and bikini girls like on the beach, roller skating and I really like that video a lot.
I also study from music videos when it comes to making movies too. Music videos were the first kind of stuff that I did a bit more professionally, actually. I don’t really do music videos anymore. Now, I kind of just incorporate music into my films themselves, but yeah, I used to direct a bunch of music videos.
To those who are reading this right now or probably those who are watching this interview right now, what will be your final message to the world, to them?
Believe in yourself, believe in your art, and I think take that as far as you can. And I think don’t let anyone, don’t let anyone try and tell you what you can and can’t do with it. Great art has been made on the back of adversity and has been, and trailblazing art has been made from artists who thought differently. Any kind of artists that are canonized now. Like I was mentioning SOPHIE earlier. SOPHIE’s pretty canonized now in Pop music. When she first started, she wasn’t and all of her stuff was so avant-garde and forward-thinking. As artists, we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to an audience to really kind of speak from ourselves, speak honestly, and put ourselves out there in all our rawness, in all our blemishes. Like I said about outsider art earlier as well, I think that so much great cutting edge stuff has come from people who weren’t following the rules, whether intentionally or not. That’s what great art should do, it should look forward and it should challenge the status quo and it should look towards new futures. Always follow your vision.
Kalil Haddad’s Favourite Music Video:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9hPoU95vY0wCdRjlja6jg2I-zLlFHVxw&si=pKlNHhGp7BDidh5V