Interviews
[Fantasia ’15 Interview] Gabriel Carrer: Director of ‘The Demolisher’
One of my favorite films coming out of the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival was Gabriel Carrer’s surreal vigilante study The Demolisher (our review and behind the scenes look). As a big fan of vigilante cinema, I’m always itching for a new take on what is typically a formulaic genre. The Demolisher is that fresh palette cleanser. Carrer, whose previous film In the House of Flies is also worth checking out, takes a fascinating approach to the vigilante film and after speaking with him it’s clear why: he’s a filmmaker interested in bringing something new to the screen. His efforts paid off too – The Demolisher won the Silver Award for Best Canadian Feature at Fantasia.
Carrer took a break from Fantasia to talk to me about his influences, his directing approach, how much of a pain in the ass acquiring riot gear is, and more. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for The Demolisher when its released by Raven Banner Entertainment.
The origins for the film started out simple enough. “I wanted to create a stalker film. But that had been done so many times before. So I took a step back and just looked at my previous films. I realized I should do something that’s an exercise and work really closely with the actors. That was the major influence: taking what I did with In the House of Flies and bringing it to The Demolisher. I wanted the actors to take control, basically. Instead of blocking the film, the actors told us essentially where to go. We’d set up the frame, but then we’d watch what the actors did and adapt. There’s so many vigilante films out there that get right to the chase, so to speak, and I always wondered, “What’s their home life like?” I think about all these other things that could be going on in vigilante films, you know?”
This flexibility to allow the actors to feel out the scenes themselves was an important aspect of the film. For his approach in directing lead actor Ryan Barrett, Carrer told him, “To breathe and not to blink. I told Ryan, the movie’s a dream. Even in the dream, there is a dream. That’s what a wanted this movie to be: one massive surreal dream. And when we dream, we don’t really talk. You can’t read. And there’s no real time. You see a lot of visuals and you’re only observing. That was a major point in directing, letting him be in that dream. He absorbed everything around him and focused on very precise things.”
This isn’t the first time Carrer has collaborated with Ryan and it certainly won’t be the last. “Every time I make a movie I want him in it. I know a lot of actors say this, but Ryan really gets into the character mentally. He goes down some dark paths. There’s a lot of moments in this film where it was all Ryan. That was really important for the character of Bruce.” Ryan was also able to tap into what made the film personal for Carrer. “The Demolisher is a very personal film for me too. And Ryan knows me very well. We’ve been friends since age 12. There’s a lot of hidden things in the film that are about the film industry itself. Characters and even objects in the film can be paralleled to my experience in the film industry in real life. And Ryan knows that and how to play that.”
What helped Ryan really get into character even further was the riot gear. Watching a lone man walk down vacant streets at night decked out in full riot gear is trippy and scary as hell, but getting their hands on the costume wasn’t so easy. “There’s a crazy story there. I had a riot gear suit on order for 10 months from the States. It was high end. I had to go through a security firm and my whole team had to go through background checks. It was nuts. Showing our passports, everything. Who knows, they probably even checked our mutual friends. So we finally got approved and we just waited. Finally the helmet came in. Then the security firm said, “Bad news, we can’t get the suit.” I said, “Why? I can pay cash.” He said it’s not that. The suit is from the U.S. and they have 10,000 on backorder. I didn’t ask any questions about that.”
This difficulty turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “But then the security firm suggested we look into motocross gear. Me and Ryan took some road trips looking at motocross gear and it was very much the same as riot gear. We decided to change his character’s backstory so he was an ex motocross rider. So in a way, the security firm contributed Bruce’s story.”
As cool as bruce looks stalking the streets in riot gear, by the film’s halfway point, it becomes tough to root for the guy. This toying with the audience’s moral compass was a challenge for Carrer. “It was tough. I still wanted people to root for Bruce, but I can see why they didn’t. Even though he’s releasing his anger on somebody that’s totally innocent, I still wanted people to sympathize for him because of what he’s gone through. It goes back to every one of us as human beings. Under pressure, we snap on people who don’t deserve it. Parents do it to their children even, you know? This is like that but a thousand fold. With Marie, we wanted to make her strong and make her a previous survivor. We wanted to make sure she just wasn’t some screaming girl. That was important for us, to show those moments with Marie at the beginning of the film so that Bruce isn’t chasing anyone he can lash out on. We wanted to make some kind of connection between them. In the end I hope people think Bruce has some redeeming qualities, when he goes through that trial to his redemption in a way. He’s still a fucking nut job, but he has a little redeeming qualities.”
This climactic chase scene between Bruce and Marie is an impressive cat and mouse game. Even more impressive, it was accomplished with permits. “We shot so much. Jessica Vano has military background, that’s one of the reasons we cast her. We told her she would have to be running for hours. And she was down. In the beginning I wanted the chase scene to be a lot longer. So we shot so much gorgeous footage. But we just had to cut it down. We had no permits, but we lucked out with the time of the year. It was spring and we had an early thaw. We would just go into the streets and just started filming, pulling all-nighters. At some points, since we didn’t have permits, we still needed lights outside. So we would pay businesses that were still open, like a pita shop. We would ask them if we could plug into their power and in exchange we’d order 50 pitas for everyone. They were down with that.”
As a fellow lover of vigilante films, I couldn’t let Carrer go without asking him about his favorites. “Obviously Death Wish. I also really love Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon. I feel like that film should’ve really gotten more attention. It really hit home. Badlands with Martin Sheen could even be considered a vigilante film. That would be one of my favorites. I also love the original Punisher with Dolph Lundgren. I think that’s the best Punisher film to date.”
The Demolisher had its world premiere at the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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