IAR: With "Sweets" in particular, but for the anthology overall, what were the things that influenced you?

Gregory: Well, for the anthology overall, it was probably a British movie called Dead of Night, which was the key influence, because, first of all, it's terrifying.  It's a black and white movie from 1945, you know, I saw it at a very young age, and also because it was a multi-director anthology and a lot of anthology horror movies aren't multi-director, they just have the one director doing all the stories.  But Dead of Night didn't, Dead of Night had different directors doing all the different stories.  And you could see kind of, these stylistic differences between the films.  I just found that really interesting in Dead of Night, that it gave it kind of like an unnerving disjointedness, that you didn't know what to expect stylistically from one story to the next.  And that gave me the confidence to do this so that it wasn't just a collection of shorts but a cohesive feature, even if it's a cohesive feature that has a wide variety of styles and interests and approaches to the horror genre.  I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I think that actually shows how diverse the horror genre is. 

And also a movie called The Monster Club – it was one of the first movies I ever saw in a movie theater – which is a really cheap movie that got critically panned when it came out.  But what critics don't realize, they often don't, when they're talking about films that are aimed at a younger audience, is that the impression it makes on a youngster is vastly different from what it makes on an adult.  I found it amusing and terrifying and all the different emotions through the movie.  So again, that was something that I think was the idea with this.  With Bizarre, there's lot of different – there is humor, you can be disturbed by it, there's a lot to take in all the parts.  You know what I mean, there's a lot of different emotions you can go through during the course of one movie.

And they do all sort of fit together in an oddly cohesive way by the end.  How much thought and collaboration with all the different directors went into ensuring that each segment would sort of fit together thematically.  Was that a concern?

Gregory: That was just a happy accident, honestly.  Yes, we did confer with each other what our stories were and we all knew kind of the context of the film.  I mean, I told everybody, basically, "It's going to be set in an old Grand Guignol theater and deliver me a movie.  Your movie that would play in the Grand Guignol theater if it was a movie theater as opposed to a theater for plays."  So everybody had that idea in mind when they came up with their stories, but that was it.  There was no other creative restriction whatsoever, people could come back with whatever they wanted.  It could be risky, if you throw a set amount of money at a filmmaker and say, "Do whatever you want," but the fact is, I was very careful in selecting the filmmakers that were going to be a part of this, knowing that they were obviously great artists and had made great films. 

And so it really wasn't a worry, I knew everybody was going to come up with someone cool, particularly if their films were going to play alongside other great filmmakers, filmmakers who they admired.  Great filmmakers, we're not talking about Fellini here, but, you know, other filmmakers that everybody admired, knew that they had integrity, so nobody wanted to be that guy who just sleepwalked through it and just delivered something half-assed.  Everyone just kind of put their heart and soul into it.  But the whole theme of communication within relationships, which I guess is probably the theme that runs through every story, was a complete happy accident.  The fact that you get to see all the colors of relationships in love, loving relationships, is just something that just fortunately came out without any kind of planning too much.

How did you go about actually selecting the directors who were going to contribute?  Were you working from a wishlist or were these all people with whom you had prior relationships?

Gregory: Well, it was a bit of both.  I have to say, I didn't expect that I would get such a high caliber of filmmaker to be a part of this, because it was low-budget.  We had a budget, but it was low budget and I know all the people who've worked on this film worked for much higher budgets than we were working for on this film.  So it's kind of asking people to take a step back in terms of what kind of budget they're working with, but what the happy surprise was is all these people do still have a passion for filmmaking and the idea of just having complete creative control and not being hassled by producers and have to change things and cast certain people and stuff like that, that was attractive to everybody. 

So, more or less everybody I asked on a first go agreed to be part of it.  There were a couple who couldn't because of schedule restrictions, but even those people liked the idea and were just like, "I can't do it because I'm working on a certain movie."  Which is fine.  Karim [Hussain] was the first one that got involved.  I actually floated the idea by him at the Boston Underground Film Festival a couple years ago, and he said, "Sounds like a a great idea.  Keep me posted."  And he suggested Doug [Buck].  With [Richard] Stanley, we'd just done the Hardware Blu-ray through my label, Severin Films, so we were in touch with Richard, but Richard was one of those people I didn't think we'd get because it's been a long time since he's done a narrative movie.  I thought, for some reason, he'd just kind of stepped away from that and moved on to other things, but no, he'd just been, you know, developing projects and stuff like that but hadn't got any off the ground.  Which is another thing about this is the fact that you're essentially doing a small part of a bigger that's definitely going to happen, whereas as independent filmmakers we spend so much time developing and trying to raise money and all that kind of thing for movies that often don't happen.  Sometimes you dedicate months and even years to trying to get certain projects off the ground and they just don't happen, whereas this one was definitely happening.  So it's not going to take three years to do this, it's on and it's actually happening.

Is it true that there was a mandate that every segment have the same budget and the same schedule?

Gregory: Yes, that's correct.  Not necessarily the same schedule, the same delivery date.  We all had the same delivery date.  So they were shooting – none of them were overlapping in shoot times but they were very close to each other because they all had their own crews and producers and things like that.  But yeah, everybody got the same budget, the runtime had to be between ten and twenty minutes, and yeah, that was really about it.  We had, like, the same aspect ratio and frame rate and stuff like that, you know, the technical stuff so that it all kind of matched in the end.  But yeah, it was basically the same thing, which is an idea I took from this arthouse film called Aria, where the producer, Don Boyd, basically gave, – you know, Jean-Luc Godard and Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg and Robert Altman – ten filmmakers the same budget and just told them all to make a film to an aria.  And I thought that was a good idea. I thought that was something that would work really well with horror.  So it's like an experiment because you know that people are going to do something that packs a punch.

Without getting into spoilers or anything, I wanted to talk about "Sweets" specifically.  It's filled with really disgusting eating.  I've never seen any film that's ever done this, where, by the time we get to anything resembling more literal violence, we've already been assaulted by all this strange mastication.  I've never seen something I could describe as sort of "food horror."  What inspired that?

Gregory: [Laughs]  Yes.  I mean there are sort of precedents with disgusting food movies.  But no, it's exactly that.  I basically wanted to do something that was based around addiction, but I didn't want the addiction to be something grim and depressing like drugs or alcohol, something that we all know somebody that's been through and that's a sad world and it's only going to end in tears.  I wanted it to be something that was actually the opposite of that, that was colorful and playful.  And again, I didn't want to base it on actual food disorders.  I actually wanted to base it on something that was more fantastical than that.  So I didn't research eating disorders or feeders or anything like that, I just did it like it was a drug addiction, but with food and candy and stuff like that.  That made it a lot of fun push the ideas of what people would do the more kind of addicted they get.  And I used a lot of – I was inspired, shall we say, by Mondo cane, the documentary by [Gualtiero] Jacopetti and [Franco] Prosperi from the '60s.  It was a shockumentary and they had a lot of images of people eating bugs and how you make foie gras by force feeding geese and stuff like that, so we used that to kind of illustrate what was going on this relationship.

Once it does, erupt in full-blown violence, it's shocking, and I don't know what anybody else's reaction would be, but it goes so big and wild that it's almost giddy.  In constructing a scene with really audacious violence, how conscious are you of what could be too far?

Gregory: In a story like this, there's not a really a too far, because it's such a gluttonous display through the whole thing, but I think if I had taken it into showing protracted long shots of people gnawing at guts and things like that, I don't think it would've been as audacious, because I did want it to seem like a party.  I think the idea of it being a party and people really getting off on it kind of what makes it fun or shocking, depending on your outlook on things like this.  To me, it's fun and it's funny, but I realize the amusing is pretty disgusting so it'll be a bit shocking to other people.  But at the same time, I wanted it also to be beautiful, which is also kind of ridiculous when you think about it because what you're watching is about as far from beauty as you can get.  That's why I wanted everything to be really stylized, including the costumes and the makeup and the hair and all that kind of stuff and the production design.  All that stuff was overly stylized, not really naturalistic, necessarily.  Even the performances aren't particularly naturalistic so it was something that I wanted very much to seem like I was making a conscious effort to make it beautiful even though what you're looking at is really quite gross.  I was trying to basically tread two ends of the taste spectrum at the same time, which is a bit of a strange tightrope to walk.

It's a great sequence, and one that I want to show other people.  I know it's doing midnight screenings and it'll be really cool to see with a midnight audience.  I read that "Vision Stains," particular at festivals, was causing physical reactions amongst audience members, and I read a quotation from you where you pointed out that the people having trouble were all men.  Working in a movie theater before, I've seen that to be true firsthand, and I wondered if you had any theories as to why that's the case?

Gregory: I actually don't know why that's the case, other than the fact that we kind of assume it's a feminine trait not to be able to handle certain images.  It always used to be, at performances of Dracula in the 1930's, it was always the women fainting in the aisles, you know, "Women are the fairer sex, blah, blah, blah,"  but I just don't necessarily think that's true.  I have a problem watching surgery, like real surgery on TV, and most people don't.  And I just don't think it's gender-specific what people find particularly shocking.  Now, a lot of people have a problem with needles and any kind of eyeball trauma, so the fact that you're mixing the two together is just too much for some people and I think it's just as likely to be men, or in this case, from what we've seen, it's actually more likely to be men who are upset by it than women, but I don't know why that is.

I saw as well that you're in preliminary stages putting together a sequel?

Gregory: Yes.  Yeah, I'm basically collecting some ideas from filmmakers.  It'll be the same thing again, same budget.  I don't want it to get bigger than what it is.  I think one of the beauties of this project has been just kind of the purity of what happens...There was nothing to complain about with the low budgets because that's what everybody was getting.  If you're complaining, why couldn't the other guy do it?  It's basically a challenge to the filmmakers to go back to their roots when you really had to use your resources and what you had around you and what you could for nothing or next to nothing in order to get production value out of the budget you have.  As filmmakers, we all start out that way, don't we?  We find out what we can use.  But now, the people actually have experience in filmmaking and filmmaking on bigger budgets and they actually have better resources in this respect because they know how to cut corners in terms of what they need to get on camera.  And that's a beautiful thing, so we're keeping it the same.  We haven't signed anybody yet, but we're very close to signing a handful of people, and it's going to be a good group.

The Theatre Bizarre kicks of midnight screenings in New York, Los Angeles and other select markets on January 27th and January 28th, followed by additional midnight shows on February 3rd and 4th.