An Interview with Louise Weard by Nona Varjak and Autumn

Castration Movie is an anthology series by director Louise Weard known for its lo-fi production and its depiction of the lives of trans women. Through its often five-plus run times, viewers are emerged in the world of the films' characters, experiencing scenes in real time with minimal cuts or editorial intereference. Earlier this year, Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts-Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage was released as a standalone chapter of the anthology. This interview focusses primarily on this chapter, as well as Weard's filmmaking process, inspirations, and theories on film in general.

N: What's your favorite Marvel movie?

L: Ooh, how are we defining it? Does it have to be like post 2008 Iron Man or like, does it have to be part of the Marvel cinematic universe?

N: I think for the people at home, we're gonna have to go with post 2008 Iron Man and, like, their current canon, right?

L: Okay, but because of Spider-Man No Way Home making all the Spider-Man movies canon, I'm gonna go with the Amazing Spider-Man 2, which is the 2nd Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movie.

A: Garfield? Say More.

L: Yeah, so it's my favorite because it's the only one, only superhero movie that's ever had emotional resonance for me, because his superpowers were not enough. He still loses the girl. She dies at the end. I think it's beautiful. And then he has to still go out and be a superhero, even though he's like a loser. And then, and that's the thing is, I kind of like it because then when we come back with no way home, Andrew Garfield is such a good actor, that he's able to play that whole movie with that sort of guilt and remorse. And it's like, shit, this is like actually really good. So yeah, that's what I'll go with.

N: Yeah. No, I like that. Is there room for Andrew Garfield in the Castration movie anthology?

L: Oh, 100%. I mean, have you ever seen that Animal Collective Music video he's in where he's playing a trans woman?

N: No.

L: Because Andrew Garfield looks fucking beautiful in it. I think I think there's absolutely space for Andrew Garfield to come and do some experimentation.

N: Yeah. I appreciate that, because I feel like a lot of the times it's like, I know people have said, like, oh, I hate when cis people play trans women. But I think it can be done well. I think I personally am a bit of a Danish Girl defender. I know that, that's a bit of a falls into a bit of the touristy gaze, but there's a moment when Eddie Redmayne is like playing with a little dress that I'm like, you faggot. And it kind of did it funny.

L: I think it can work. I mean, one of the ones I always find really interesting is Isabel Sandoval; the great director of Lingua Franca fame; in her first movie, Senorita, she made that film pre-transition, where pre-transition, she was playing the trans woman lead character. And then she found herself, like the character. So I think actually, considering how, you know, all actors are pretty big faggots. I think it would work really well because we might be able to crack eggs through our filmmaking. And then that's how we get universal rights is we get all the famous people to become trans women.

N: Yeah. This is like the... really Jews of Gender-ing it. Well, follow up to that one, do you think that through the process of making art, it helped you to realize your own transness?

L: That's a really good question. The first film I ever made, that I kind of count as my debut short film, was this movie called Computer Hearts, and it was a movie made out of, like, kind of isolation where I was sitting inside thinking about transition a lot. And then I made the movie to cope with making the choice not to transition. So it was like my repressor project in this interesting way. And then I think the inverse was, the script that I was writing that then became Castration Movie back in 2018 and 2019, was about a trans woman named Louise Ward, who was doing some movie shit, and I kind of ended up accidentally, like, you know, kind of stumbling through writing that project and was like, oh, I'm just writing auto fiction. So then I ended up having to kind of deal with that. So yeah, I would say that art has always been important from both repressing and coming outside of it, for my transition.

N: Yeah. I think a lot of directors are just great reppers. Lars Von Trier, one of my favorite repper directors. Are there any directors that you think are reppers?

L: I mean, Von Trier is, like, the number one for me. I always thought it'd be really funny to make a 10 hour video essay that ends with saying that David Lynch was a repper, just because I think that there's like enough fuel there, you could really go for it. I don't think he actually was, but like there's definitely enough you could point to that it would make it really funny. I guess like, Cimino was one of those ones where it was like, I don't think that by the end of Cimino's career that they were repping. I think they were definitely on HRT, but they never publicly came out. So I think that's really funny.

N: I'll try to get more into your movie making and your movies. Something that I was curious about, I saw another interview you did, and you were talking about playing Barbies with actors, and it being a sublimation of something. I think that I got a sense of the film, part three, being a sublimation of the anxieties surrounding early transition, and maybe to, like, rewrite and dictate what that could go like for people?

L: Yeah, I think that all of the start of Castration Movies, the writing process was really me and my trans friends kind of thinking about a situation where if you were to transition and every single thing went wrong and then making a movie out of that. Where it is kind of worst case scenario cinema. And so with the new film, I think that the idea of like, oh, I come out as transgender, my partner becomes radicalized against that, is like the ultimate worst case scenario, but presents something that, I think is still relatable. Having released it, a lot of people have had that worst case scenario. So I think that that was kind of one of the things with the approach was not becoming cartoonish with it in that sense. Like, even though it is this, like, kind of, like, melodramatic, oh God, this is the worst possible way this could go down, I think that it was important to still inject it with enough humanity and believability that you can see where these two characters are coming from and treat it with a sort of maturity that, you know, leaves that opening where I'm not like mocking what could be someone's real experience.

N: Yeah, I definitely, I found myself kind of empathizing with both of them, with both Izzy and Tiffany. Maybe not empathizing with Izzy, but, seeing how my experience coming out as trans and being very, like, this is it, and, like, Tiffany's lack of any sort of temperature check on how her partner's doing through the movie. Being like, yeah, you kind of have to do that. But, it was interesting, because I was being drawn into a portrayal of terfism that was shedding a light on maybe me housing some of that ideology in myself. As someone who's been on HRT for a while and has been, very, like, fuck what the people think, you know? What that an intention of yours?

L: Yeah, no, I mean, I think all of Castration Movie is a holding a mirror up to internalized transphobia and trying to find ways of getting past the words and language that we use within our community to hurt each other. So that's, like, obviously, like a big part of it. With all of the films so far is really showing how that language can be weaponized, especially language that we're appropriating from other places, like the internet. I think that with, like, offering that level of understanding to the TERF character was definitely, you know, I think the reason why that understanding becomes present is because I wanted to find a new way, like, a way untraditional within cinema of depicting coming out and transition, because coming out is often really shown, like, you brought up,, the Danish girl earlier. Like, there's this sort of, like, almost, like, sensual, like, magical sort of quality to it, right? That's like, oh my god, this is such an amazing, enlightening thing. But the funny thing is, is that, those are coming from the perspective of cis people, right? we're making those movies and trying to find a language by which to express it. But me, as, like, a trans person who's, you know, been through that rodeo before, it's like, no, it's kind of cringe and embarrassing and really hard and like, you look back at that time in your life and you're like, oh, fuck, I wish I, you know, I wish I didn't wear that dress so early. I wish I had asked for better help with my makeup. I wish that I hadn't jumped into that so quickly. How embarrassing. and the thing is, I think there's a, within the film, there's a love for that early stage is something that is like a rite of passage. It's saying that's inevitable. and saying its going to happen. We still see Tiffany's story as this heroic, as hard as it is to watch her, she still gets out at the end and commits to herself. She's gonna go transition, right? But taking a movie where I could present that stuff really matter of factly and get even my trans audience to see a little bit of it through the Izzy character of, like, oh, fuck, that girl shouldn't be doing that. is like something that was really compelling to me as a filmmaker, because it's like, can I get the, even for like a split second, can I get my trans audience on the terf side is like a really, good challenge as a filmmaker, right? So I think with these films, there's always that level of like, can I play with the tools of empathy and storytelling that cinema provides in order to get audiences to, cheer on a character that is so far from their own experience. So I would say like, yeah, that was all like super intentional within the heart of what I wanted this movie to be.

N: I know Autumn had questions related to another seminal work of transgender cinema that you wanted to talk about.

A: How has Envy / Desire informed your filmmaking? Because I do, I mean that, both sort of as a joke. Honestly, I do think that the Castration movie part three, there is, like, a little bit of the same, like you're saying, this sort of, oh, she shouldn't be doing this. It's obviously a lot more compassionately portrayed.

L: It's really interesting, because you guys are the third people to bring up this exact line of questioning to me. Actually, I think it was like our 2nd festival screening. I got an audience Q and A question about this. This has been going the whole time, And I want to push back a little slightly because I don't think that this is doing the same thing as Envy / Desire because that is very much so specifically targeting the idea of being in a relationship and discovering the person you're with is a chaser or fetishizing you to some extent and they start maybe confusing their fetish with your lived experience. And I think that the thing that's really interesting about Envy / Desire is that the story on its surface is a really interesting, compelling, trans narrative that I have seen handled with great maturity and grace, and, like, there's a story called Hazel and Christopher by Casey Pletz that's an amazing short story that's like, what if your partner transitions. So this is stuff that is a part of trans art and can be handled very sophisticatedly. and Envy / Desire , is just too stupid and Twitter brained in order to make any interesting themes or, think that, Miss Aimee Armstrong, the director, gets a little too held up in wanting to make jokes about her Twitter opps as opposed to closing the deal on a good story. However, what I will say is, in terms of influence, I wasn't thinking specifically about Envy / Desire in this movie, because of the fact that, I think that to a certain extent, me approaching this as a cis woman with someone transitioning was, a much, to me, just a much different dynamic that I was exploring. I wasn't really thinking of Envy / Desire . I would say that there is a level by which the character I play in Castration Movie is me trying to understand the type of girl who would make Envy / Desire . I think that Michaela, there's shades of me playing the type of girl that's like an Aimee Armstrong or Brianna Wu or these sorts of pick me, dichotomy type trans women. I shouldn't compare Aimee and Briana. That's like a really cruel thing to do, I'll retract that one. But with Envy / Desire , I did write a huge article about it that was kind of during the first release cycle of the first Castration Movie, right before we put that out. I think that that article in which I attempt to use Envy / Desire as a way of discussing how to canonize trans movies and come up with a lot of different ideas of how to make a comparison between, is this a real trans movie or a fake, like a bad trans movie or something like that? I was trying to really understand that because Envy / Desire gets a lot of things right and even more things wrong. I really wanted to interrogate that. So in a way, Envy / Desire made me a better filmmaker when it comes to representing trans bodies and trans stories, because it was a movie that, because it was made by someone within the community, but still had this weird gaze upon it, that I really interrogated, like, okay, why is this movie functioning the way it is and how can I directly address that with the way I'm shooting?

A: Yeah. It does a lot of things, not so great. I think it's also hard to hear at points. Like, I think that, maybe there's technique that could have been improved there, but I do think that it effectively made me very uncomfortable to watch it.

L: Yeah. Well, I mean, like, you know, my movies look and sound like shit too. So, I mean... All right, that's the trans woman's signature style, is movies that look and sound like shit.

N: That is, yeah, that's coming to be. I saw you said that you edit the same day that you shoot a scene, which is fucking taps to me.

L: Sometimes it'll sit on the camera a little while, because I have to get it off the camera, which we tend to rewatch everything as I'm uploading it. These movies are really easy to edit, because I'm editing it while I'm shooting it, basically.

N: Something that I found that, I don't know if the first two parts were as grim, but part three was like a really grim kind of view of at least four people. Your character, Izzy's friend, Izzy, and in some ways, Tiffany. Would you say that you came to this movie with a misanthropic kind of view that you wanted to portray as a cautionary tale?

L: No, I don't think so. I think that there's a lot of love, and a sincere adoration of the characters in Castration Movie. We kind of evoked Lars Von Trier earlier, and I think that I really like the way he kind of discusses like the way he approaches suffering or the darkness in his work, which is like, you know, it's a way of exploring the self, but there's still like a great deal of like affection and love for the characters. These characters could not suffer if the person making these films did not care deeply for them. I think that for me as a filmmaker, I kind of share in that where it's like, with the Castration Movies, these characters suffer immensely and their lives are very difficult and they they have a lot of, you know, there's a lot of melodrama that occurs, but, I love the characters very deeply and I think that on a sincere level, I'm trying to represent something that feels like emotionally authentic or real. So I don't really ever think of it as it's like darkness for darkness' sake or whatever. It's trying to understand something that feels very real within my own heart and soul and trying to use film as a way of interrogating it. Where it's like, you know, I made a joke that with the new, like, with the Castration Movie you guys watched all of the worst things that either my character or Izzy's character say are things that my mother said to me when I started transitioning. And so I was like, oh, well, like that, you know, putting that into characters, the way of, like, trying to, you know, understand, like, why would someone say these hurtful things to me? Why does it actually look like to take some of these comments seriously? Like, my favorite is when my character says go look at advertisements for American Eagle to see what women your age are dressing like. That is verbatim, what my mother said to me. And it bodied me in the moment. It was such a crazy thing for someone to say. But then I went and did it in that scene, and, like, like, the second we called cut, everyone's laughing, and they're like, that's so ridiculous. And there's something very cathartic about, you know, a bunch of your friends. You're making a piece of art with being like, yeah, no, like that is like an insane thing for someone to say. It makes you feel less alone. And I think that that's really the point of these projects is to try to lend out these, like, sort of, bridges between people in a way to depict this behavior and these archetypes and say, you're not alone in this world. We're all in this together.

N: I saw you say there's too much love in it for it's really being an edgelord film, because I was worried, like, is this gonna be an edgelord film? Because I see so many, you said Twitter opps earlier. There's so many Twitter people in the movies. In the second one at least, I heard, and then I was like, oh, is this gonna be like a Twitter movie? How do you feel about deriving community, and then, further deriving coworkers and fellow artists from that space?

L: Yeah, I mean, like, it's interesting because I think that I view the film as a sort of internet art in the sense of, I think that what I'm doing is just the art house equivalent of the Channel Awesome movies. If you ever were familiar with the Nostalgic Critic and stuff like that, back in 2008 through 2010. I don't know how old you guys are. You seem young, so I don't think that...

N: I'm 27.

L: Oh, yeah, you guys are too young for this. But, basically, early internet people making the most cringe and embarrassing stuff online where you're starting off doing it, then you're kind of building a community around it with both the audience and other people creating stuff. So I kind of went into it knowing it's sort of like an embarrassing, cringe endeavor to, you know, work with other artists who you meet on Twitter and whatever. Like, there's something that is inherently very, I don't know, like it does feel there's a stigma around it to a certain extent where, you know, the second movie, there's a scene where I thought it would be really funny for the lead character to get bullied by Chapo Traphouse. And it's one of those things that it works great in the film, but describing it to someone, it's like, that sounds abysmal. I wouldn't want to watch that. And like, I think that for me, it's like all, I'm really tackling the function of the internet in our daily lives and on art, like the way we can create our art right now. I think that there's an intentionality where when I do casting, I'm thinking of what is this person's presence online? How do people engage with them? What do people think about them? Then if I put them in this role, how can I complicate that in a way, right? So I always think that that's all playing l, I don't know, these movies are extremely intricately designed in a way that I really am trying to guide the audience as much as I can through all these different ideas. And I wanted to make things that felt very contemporary. And, you know, it's so funny because, like, looking at your 1st question about what Marvel movies do I like? I think that so much of, um, so much of this entire film is me trying to respond to that maximalist type of filmmaking and trying to say, well, no, there's something else we could be doing that's still engaging with modern conveniences of the internet and like how that affects culture and these ideas of community and fandom and all this sort of stuff, but like tackle it in a way that is, this much more minimalist, formless sort of thing. In terms of all the internet stuff, like, like, for me, it just kind of comes naturally out of the project, like what the movie is, and then also like, I'm a person who has mostly had friendships and relationships online since I was a young person. All of my work has always been, like, you know, engaging to some level with, who are my friends from Tumblr or whatever, and let's get them involved.

N: Yeah. I like this. The Castration cinematic universe also includes the alternate reality versions of people as they exist on twitter.com.

L: One of the jokes that we actually make about it in the second film, Lex Walton plays the lead character, but then she ends up in a character's house who has a big Lex Walton poster up in the bedroom, but we made a poster where it's a different person is Lex Walton. It's not our universe's Lex Walton. I kind of made a joke, this movie is taking place like on Twitter right now in the real world. Just off screen are all of the actual people that are in this movie, you know, this is real. to a certain extent.

N: Maybe this is more of just, a personal kind of anecdote than any sort of question, or interview, but, I went to college for theater performance, wasted a bunch of money that way, and stepped away from it, because I was like, there's just not a place for trans women. I transitioned around college, and I was like, there's no place for me in this larger world of cinema. And it's beautiful to see Castration Movie become this larger phenomenon than just one film and it's inspiring in that way. But it's also a little bit, I don't know if I want to say disheartening, because that's not what it is, but, the chance to be someone else entirely is something that I find captivating about the act of performing, and do you think that, I know there's, I mean, not responsibility, but there's a move towards wanting to tell trans stories.. But is there gonna be space, or do you think that part of your work is ever gonna be wanting to make a movie about a cis person and cast a tranny in the role?

L: That's a really good question. I mean, I don't know if I'm at that point right now to be having those thoughts for the work that I'm writing and directing. There's definitely stuff I've produced where we've put very capable trans actors in roles that the transness never comes up and you could just assume that they're just a cis woman. So, it's not something that I'm ideologically opposed to or not thinking about in the grander place I take up in the industry. It's already happening in other films I'm involved in. But for my own work as a director, at least when it comes to Castration Movie, it's very much so about trans people in a lot of ways. So I think that just letting people be weird trans freaks throughout a lot of that project is a very fun way of doing it because no one's playing themselves in these movies. It's always more of a like, let your hair down, be the craziest person you want to be sort of thing with a lot of these characters. So I think there is still a catharsis in people getting to play a character who's so distant from themselves, right? So, that's still, that play is still very inherent within Castration Movie. I don't act anything like my character in these films. All of the characters in the cult in the second movie are nothing like those characters, everyone is a very different person than what we're seeing on screen. So everyone is having a lot of fun with that performative aspect in these movies. I think that, with Castration Movie having had whatever level of modest success, a movie that is 99% trans cast members can have. I have been thinking about, like, what sort of projects come next, and I do really think that, you know, I'm gonna continue wanting to work with my friends and the people who were such amazing actors throughout these films. And I don't think I'm gonna be specific about having to be a trans person for a trans role or something like that. I think that it's a much looser thing. It's just who's the best person for the role overall.

N: Would you even say if you had any opps that you had in mind when you were writing some of these characters?

L: I don't really think of the world in that way, to be honest. I kind of have a reputation for being relatively nice, I think, within my personal life. I think that myself is a major opp within these movies. I think there's levels of which, like, I'm always trying to interrogate, like, some of my own like, if I'm going through a hard time or something, it's like, oh, I'm going through a breakup. I'm gonna try to make fun of myself. The first chapter of the first movie follows this cis guy character, which I gave my full legal dead name, as the terrible failing boyfriend in this relationship. And I don't think I was ever like to that extent, that bad of a boyfriend, but it was definitely like some degree of catharsis to be like, letting up this energy of some sort of guilt or grief I felt about this relationship that I've been in.

A: Hyperbole around that experience.

L: Yeah, exactly. I think that a lot of this is just, I always say Castration Movie is turning the dialogue to 11 on any situation. It's every single intrusive thought you have, you're going to say in Castration Movie, that's how we make the drama happen.

N: Yeah. It's depicting the absolute extreme of any interaction, any sort of internal perception of oneself, but it's ultimately helping you release some of that burden of shame and guilt.

L: Yeah, I mean, so I don't think there's any opps specifically that I've been like, Oh, I'm gonna write this character to make fun of so and so. Oh, actually, that's not true. There's actually one I can speak to, which is, the silver man fight in the first movie. Which, having not seen it, I won't spoil too much about it, but I did kind of decide that the silver man would lose that fight, because my friend I had reached out to originally play that character didn't want to do it. It's a bit of a long, complicated story, but I was like, yeah, they're going to get their ass kicked.

N: That's more playful.

A: The question I have is, you're talking about kind of, where you want to go with future projects and, I don't want to be presumptuous, but it does seem like with Castration Movie, it lends itself to a lower budget. You're having people that you actually know acting in it, it's shot with one handheld camera for the most part. If you had a larger budget, are there things that you wanted to explore with these three movies that you felt couldn't be captured by the constraints of the stylistic approaches that were taken and the logistics of production, that you are interested in, or you would be interested in exploring with a larger budget in the future?

L: What's really funny about Castration Movie is it's like the first thing I've ever made in my life where everything is basically exactly how it was in my head. It is like a direct translation of what I hoped this project would be. I think the only limitation in terms of like,production value or whatever is, the sound can try to kind of be not as clear sometimes with some of the dialogue and certain sequences. But that's also like part of what makes the movie charming and the process work, we can do it so quickly and do it so DIY. There is, though, I think what is worth saying is Castration Movie’s never really been held back because the movie came out of the idea of how can I make something right now, the people and resources I have? So it's always kind of met whatever resources are available. We've got two more castration movies left, after the next, so we have the fourth movie coming out on December 2nd, and then, the next two are being shot right now. So we've got, you know, quite a few more to go. It never ends. But, with those next ones we've been planning and shooting stuff that at the start of this project, I would have thought we never would have been able to get the resources together to do. But somehow, we keep pulling it out. So, I don't know, it's just, it is a very blessed project. During a Q and A last week, I said that the movie gods have been on my side while making this. I feel like there's nothing in Castration Movie that's ever gonna be held back from the right, the right choice, you know?

N: I would describe the way that you've talked about channeling the divine, straight from this divine source into the film, yourself being a conduit. It's kind of a Quaker-esque approach to directing, of sitting in the room with the camera and your friends, and then having that inspiration strike. Do you try to channel that?

N: Yeah. You're a lot happier than part three made me feel like I thought you would be. This does seem like you have a more, like, oh, I want to make these movies because it makes me happy to make movies with my friends. Like, it's not this edgelord humor.

L: No, it's really funny because I'm such an optimist in my life. I want these to be fun. I want everyone working on them to be having fun. Otherwise, what's the point in doing art with people you care about? And that's not to say we don't get in really dark places when we're making these films in terms of where we have to go with our character work and stuff like that. But, like, you know, when we're done, we should be able to step aside, have a beer and hang out and then watch the footage back and be really impressed with ourselves for doing the crazy thing or whatever. I think that the reason I make art is to feel less alone and Castration Movie somehow got lucky in this one in a million way, where it found an audience and that audience has been really excited for it and it's definitely made it such a joyful project to keep working on. There are days where I'm overwhelmed by the amount left to go to get the story finished. But I think overall, it does bring me a lot of joy to make art and it's also such an amazing community experience touring the films around the world and getting to meet new people. There's such a community resource that builds up around these films where people get together, we can share, you know, we get in a room and it's a bunch of people who are now making friends with people who are local to them. They're sharing resources and advice and all this stuff, it's something that's very practical and tangible, where I can see how the work I'm doing is actually affecting people's lives. So, of course, I'm an optimist. Art can change the world. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing to be a part of and experience.

A: It's kind of intrinsically a community project at this point.

L: Yeah, I think so. I mean it started that way, so it didn't really surprise me that that's where we're seeing it now. It's just like maybe not just the small community that started making this project, you know?

N: Yeah. What are you trying to do to fend off doubt? Have you ever been beset with any doubt that what you're doing is gonna be effective?

A: Bad optics?

L: It’s really funny because when we made the film initially, we were sitting on the first, like, 4.5 hours of it, trying to decide how we were gonna keep filming it because we were running out of money. And settled on: let's release it and see if anyone likes it. There were talks between me and the rest of the team where it was like, this is stupidly long. This is the most inaccessible thing ever made. But fuck, is it good. We would all pat ourselves on the back being like, fuck this really works. I really hope people watch it, you know? We didn't know if it would find the audience. And then, we put it online and one person watched it and they told another person and they told another person. And by the end of the first month, it was like 20 people had watched it. We were like, holy shit, 20 people watched our 4.5 hour movie. And then, you know, give it 4 months and it was like a cultural phenomenon where it was like, even the Hollywood press was being like, oh, yeah, this is one of the best movies of the year or whatever. And it's like, what? How did we get here? The doubt is always there as it is for any artist, but, I think at this point it's more so, it's not a doubt around, will this be good? It's more like, can I keep myself invested? Can I keep myself excited? Can I keep reinventing the project and challenging myself in a way that I still feel engaged on the level of, that I'm doing something artistically exciting. So that's always the thing I'm kind of brushing up against now is, can I come up with some challenges or some homework or whatever that it's like, I'll be impressed if we can pull this off, you know?

N: Did you always think of doing film? Was there a certain film or director that got you like, is what I need to be doing?

L: Yeah, I always tell this story, which is, I kind of wanted to be like a writer. I knew I wanted to do something with horror specifically because I loved horror movies and horror literature as a kid. And then I asked my dad what the scariest movie he'd ever seen was, and he said The Shining. Which, in hindsight, my alcoholic, workaholic dad, saying The Shining was the scariest movie he'd ever seen, was very funny. Which I only really understood later. Somehow, for my birthday that year, I talked my dad into buying me the Stanley Kubrick box set that had just come out, which was like a bunch of DVDs that had all his major movies. I started watching through all of them. I was, like, probably like 11 or 12 years old. And it was during A Clockwork Orange, there's a scene where the lead character, Alex, breaks into a woman's house, and then she catches him, and he beats her to death with his stone phallus. And during the shot that he hits her with it for the first time, rather than show the impact, it cuts to a painting on the wall of a woman screaming, and it was like, the fact that that an edit to something nonviolent felt a million times more violent in my brain than actually showing the violence would be, made me just stop and go, oh, that's what I'm going to devote my life to. Which I think in hindsight, it's really funny that it was like a violent rape scene that made want to go like, oh, that's why I'm going to make movies. But it was the moment where it clicked for me, cinema is like a very powerful tool because I'm so emotionally affected by this horrifying thing.

N: I had a friend recently read a lot of Dworkin and Sontag, and she also got into taking photos, and she kept getting in her own head about, and getting in my head about the cameras as phallus. Do you think of that ever? Is that just my brainworm? Is that just her brain worms?

L: When I was in university, my specialization in film theory was apparatus theory. A lot of which is the idea of applying Freudian analysis onto the actual apparatus of film technique, where it's like, the cinema space is like a womb and the camera is a penis that's piercing or whatever. So that is definitely not just a unique brainworm to you. I'm always thinking of the camera as phallus sort of thing. Which, I guess, a lot of Castration Movie is, a lot of what I was thinking about was interrogating that default cinematic gaze that looks upon the trans body and how we've seen that through the first 100 years of cinema. And is there a way for us to, like, trans the gaze, transform the gaze in some way? So much of Castration Movie is interrogating it, confronting it, trying to understand that relationship between the trans body and this apparatus that is so disconnected from us. Now that we've started talking about the camera as penis, like, can it be a feminine penis? I guess that's what Castration Movie is asking.

N: I was thinking, so the choice to bring the penis into the center of the scene rather than viewing the scene from the external, eliminating that touristy gaze, I don't know anything about filmmaking, but I know a little bit about Freud, and the scene of the analyst's room, you think about when you're, like, running through the actors in this motion?

L: 100%. I mean, and that's what it all is about, right? Because I'm trying to create a scenario that's so real that these people, everyone involved, are applying their own real experiences and real emotions onto this fantasy setting I've created. So there is like a degree by which, like, as a director, you are psychoanalyzing everyone constantly in order to manipulate them into getting what you want. On another level, it's like, you know, the whole idea of even calling it Castration Movie was like coming from this Freudian idea, because of my interest in the sort of theoretical, application of the apparatus as penis, Then the idea of Castration Movie is, we were castrating that phallic gaze or that phallic device that we're meant to hold onto. And we're trying to rebuild it from scratch. That's why Castration Movie also is shot on consumer video and is very actively trying not to look like a normal movie. It's like we're trying to distance ourselves or castrate ourselves from this default gaze of cinema that is represented by this, you know, primal hoard father of cinema or some bullshit. This is a dangerous line of communication because we could get really obnoxious really fast.

N: Yeah, that's why I wanted to start with this. Well, I wanted to talk about, is it a flaccid camera? Is it erect? Is it, you know... Okay. Maybe another time. Yeah, flaccidity is something that I'm often thinking about when it comes to... In general

L: Makes it really hard to keep the camera in focus when it's wobbling around.

N: But is it an object that's meant to penetrate or is it something that I'm meant to appreciate as a part of the scene?

L: Yeah, well, and I think that's the question, right? I think that so much of Castration Movie's success stems from making the audience feel like they're right there in the room as if they are the camera operator. In the second film, for example, we discuss there being ten cult members within this cult. But there's only nine on screen and that's because the camera, like you, as the audience, are the tenth member of the cult. So there is this direct engagement constantly with trying to make the audience aware of the fact that they are present in the scene. But you've been given this privileged position to stand in this couple's room and listen to them fight and have a moment. I don't know if that's a, I don't think that's a flaccid experience. I think it's voyeuristic, right? There's that scope, the urge to look is present. I don't think there's a flaccid cock in the room. I think it is extremely hard, throbbing, while you're navigating those spaces, for sure. Yeah. Because I'll feel a desire to look. We all have a hunger for information. These movies give you all of it, which I think is really fun.

N: What do you think that the desire to look away from the audience is, what do you think? If you were to psychoanalyze your audience.

L: Well, because I don't have a really steady hand, so it's probably making them sick. I don't know the degree to which people look away in these movies. I think it's really confronting. I think that people look away most when it's something that they feel called out. If I've made them gaze in the abyss and it looks back, sort of thing, that's when they get that recoil away from the screen. It's because they've seen something that is too real for them. It's too close.

N: Oh, definitely, when she was picking out her dress, and the girlfriend let her go out in that cheetah print number, I was like, that's how I knew. She was setting her up for failure. She did not love her. Why did she let her go out in that cheetah print number?

L: Yeah, it's also really funny, because if you watch the first movie, after seeing that scene, there's a scene where all of those are the other trans characters' returns from Value Village. They looked at all those same dresses and were like, these are terrible.

N: I don't know if I have any more questions. I think I've shot my load. Oh, do you think there will ever be an AGP, HSTS exploration of friendship?

A: This question comes from a J. Michael Bailey quote, which is, to summarize, HSTS and AGP cannot ever be friends.

L: You know, this is the thing that I feel the first Castration Movie is trying to answer.

A: it's very optimistic.

N: The answer is no.

L: God, that's a good question. I think we might need another 10 hours of movie to interrogate this.

A: How do you think we could foster that in the movies?

L: I honestly, I've been trying to live my life in a way that, to bridge that divide. I don't know if it's possible.

N: Yeah. Might not be. You're gonna have to accept the fact that some of your friends are gonna put on diapers and call each other mommy. And that's okay, Autumn.

A: Yeah, that's fine.

L: You know, that's what the next Castration Movie is all about, actually.

N: Are you serious?

L: Yeah, It's an optics nuclear bomb in a way that I really love.

N: Let's go! Let's go! ABDL Castration Movie, I'm hyped!

L: I. And the thing was, we're opting not to give it a big theatrical release because, it's so crazy for all that stuff, but I was like, I think we have to just drop it right into the- we said, take it right into the world.

N: Yeah. That rocks. I'm hyped for that. Oh, sis, are you a tourist in that community?

L: Anything that's too personal of a question for an interview context... In life, I believe I'm a tourist to all communities. I I've never felt like I truly fit anywhere, but I have been everywhere.