Awhile ago now I sat down and watched Subconscious Cruelty, Written and Directed by Karim Hussain. This movie in my opinion was very over the top, very graphic and very strange but all in a good way, obviously :). So I searched Karim up and asked him if it would be possible to do an interview with him, talking about the movie, and he kindly said yes. This was our Interview
Kirsty Nightmare: Can you give us a little background on your growing up and why you chose to go into Directing?
Karim Hussain: I’ve been obsessed with cinema and the horror genre since I was a young child, I started making my first short movies on Super-8 film at 7, so it’s been in my blood for some time. I didn’t choose to go into filmmaking, it was something I always knew I was going to do. Directing was more something I did when I was younger, I am now more a cinematographer and that is plenty fine with me!
Kirsty Nightmare: Who inspires you as a Director and what is your favourite movie?
Karim Hussain: There’s too many to mention in both categories. I’m very much into Euro horror, and art-house horror pictures, radical art movies that mix surrealism with horror, as well as more ultra-realistic cinema. I’d say any movie that tries something original and has a point of view will do.
Kirsty Nightmare: Subconscious Cruelty is very fascinating from the beginning to the very end, it’s made into four parts as we all know but why did you choose to have this movie in four parts and what exactly did each scene mean to you on a personal level and professional level?
Karim Hussain: The anthology format is one that I love, but it was also a practical decision as the movie was shot throughout many years. You wouldn’t need one actor to be there from top till tail, so it was simpler, as we started the picture knowing we didn’t have enough to finish it. I was extremely young when I did that movie, it was more my obsessions as a teenager all mixed with a love of radical art-house cinema and industrial, experimental music that made up the contents of that movie. Today it’s not really where I’m at, though I stand by the movie and its naïve obsessions are good fun for me.
Kirsty Nightmare: What was the story behind each scene and why did you choose those stories?
Karim Hussain: I couldn’t really answer too specifically, as most of it came from dreams, so they were not conscious decisions. I would just sit down and write it, and it would come out that way, without any pre-conceived notions. I consciously didn’t want to do a narrative movie, more an avant-garde kind of picture, which was something that was maybe more acceptable in the early nineties than today.
Kirsty Nightmare: Can you talk a little bit about each scene more in detail for us so we can understand your way of thinking?
Karim Hussain: That would be a bit disappointing, wouldn’t it? The best thing about movies like Subconscious Cruelty is that they don’t give you all the answers, so the movies mean something different to everyone else and they weave their own narratives around the images presented, on a conscious or intuitive level. So to explain things would be too bad. And honestly it was so long ago, I couldn’t really tell you today! Photography on it started 22 years ago, and most of it was written with me being 15 to 19 years old, so it’s all very distant now.
Kirsty Nightmare: What was your thoughts on what the Public would think about this movie?
Karim Hussain: I figured they’d be scandalized, angry, bored, irritated or interested, depending on their tastes, and that ended up being pretty much the case. It definitely upset some people or angered them for whatever reason, and that was kind of the idea. The movie found its audience and definitely has gone further than I would have ever imagined. It’s a very marginal movie, for a very marginal audience, but I’m happy that those that appreciated really do with passion. And it’s something totally understandable if others hate it, that’s an ok reaction for that kind of movie too. It’s an experimental underground extreme horror movie made in the 90’s on 16mm on a micro-budget, so if anyone knows what that means, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
Kirsty Nightmare: You mentioned in a previous interview that woman took to this movie a lot better then men did at the premiers. Why do you think that is?
Karim Hussain: I think women with certain curious tastes got the movie more due to its body horror elements and the fact that I think some women are pretty naturally opened minded and understanding of extremes. I really love women, so I guess, despite the fact that some of the male characters in the movie are insane, fucked up clueless misogynists, I think the women who get the movie understand that it’s a scathing condemnation of that kind of person. The movie’s a sort of naïve condemnation of many things that upset me as a leftie pacifist.
Kirsty Nightmare: The whole movie seemed so artistically done, with each scene having a lot of real looking elements to it. Who did all the Special Effects for the movie?
Karim Hussain: CJ Goldman, an old friend did the majority of the effects. He ended up being one of the top Special Make-Up Effects artists in Canada, an important collaborator on my work. Many of the other people involved in the make-up on that movie ended up being the tops in their field in Canada as well.
Kirsty Nightmare: I read in a previous interview that it only took you as I remember 60 days out of 5 years to Direct. Is this right or can you tell me how long it took to Direct?
Karim Hussain: It was an underground movie where people weren’t working every day and sometimes shoots would just be me with a Bolex 16mm camera running around and getting 2nd unit-type shots with much time in between any work being done. Other moments we had a crew of about 5 or so people on scattered week-end shoots. But the first shooting block was one month, with a larger crew of probably more like 10-20 people, where we worked pretty much every day in a warehouse we rented, and that was non-stop. We were so young and insane we didn’t realize that was abnormal.
Kirsty Nightmare: I think five years to Direct a movie is a very long time, did it go as smoothly as you’re planned or was there a few bumpy moments?
Karim Hussain: It was crazy. We started and stopped when we ran out of money. They negative was held hostage once and we had to pay ransom to free it. I was stopped at the Canadian border and tapes of the workprint were confiscated on the grounds of obscenity. Then we had to get the money to finish it and blow it up to 35mm. With Mitch Davis, my producer, it was quite a journey. It was all done very old school, edited on film, conformed to a negative and optically blown up to 35mm. Stuff that young filmmakers today don’t have to deal with, it’s a million times easier now.
Kirsty Nightmare: Why did you choose the actors you did for this movie? Were they easy to work with or did they struggle? I can imaging what it would have been like for the woman at the start laying naked on the bed.
Karim Hussain: We did open auditions with an ad in the Montreal Mirror, one of Montreal’s old alternative free weeklies, no longer in existence, and people just showed up. The girl at the start was a friend of a friend. She was great, not at all shy, so she handled it perfectly. Funny, the instant people then said they’d be naked and do it, there wasn’t many problems, I can’t believe, knowing how tough it is to do that kind of thing today, that we did it. I think it was just because it was the 90’s and everyone was insane and young. Subversive art was kind of trendy then. Lots of people were on drugs.
Kirsty Nightmare: Is there anything looking back at the movie now, you wished you would of changed?
Karim Hussain: I think trying to change it would be a mistake. It has mountains of flaws, but that’s what makes it what it is. It was re-mastered to HD a few years ago in France, and I supervised the transfer and the sound, and I could have fixed a lot of problems with it, but didn’t, as it was best to stay honest to the sort of analog, underground and imperfect hand-made feel it has.
Kirsty Nightmare: Would you do a follow up on this movie? If yes what would you do differently?
Karim Hussain: I guess out of the movies I’ve directed after that, the closest to Subconscious Cruelty is the Vision Stains episode of The Theatre Bizarre, an anthology movie done in 2011. The last thing I’ve directed, and it might very will be the last thing I direct. At one point there was talk about a sequel with a German company, but the money wasn’t enough to do it right, and I can’t do a movie on that kind of budget again, unfortunately.
Kirsty Nightmare: What other films have you Directed?
Karim Hussain: I directed a very different, difficult movie called Ascension after that, a short that did well called City Without Windows, a Québecois feature called La Belle Bête and that episode of The Theatre Bizarre. It was fun, but cinematography and working with directors I like and are friends are really what I prefer doing. Basically, raising the money and doing the hustle to finance a movie is just too much of a drag. On the kind of budgets that the more unusual movies I used to direct on had, it’s honestly just something I couldn’t do anymore on an economic level. Simple as that. Cinematography is way more fun.
Kirsty Nightmare: Is there anything else you would like to add to this interview?
Karim Hussain: Thanks to all the people who continue to support Subconscious Cruelty, we really appreciate the continued support of my strange youth obsession. There’s a nice French blu-ray of it available to fans, that’s region free and the new HD master you can order from amazon.fr if you want the best looking version on home video.
Kirsty Nightmare: Thank you Karim for doing this interview for me, it was a pleasure talking to you as well. Awsome movie by the way
