Danny Peary Talks To… ‘The Misogynists’ Writer-Director Onur Tukel

Playing in Theaters

Danny Peary Talks To… ‘The Misogynists’ Writer-Director Onur Tukel

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(from DansPapers.com 10/5/17)

DYLAN BAKER AND JAMIE BLOCK AS CAMERON AND BAXTER.

OCTOBER 5, 2017 BY DANNY PEARY

It is becoming an increasingly frequent ritual for me to champion one of the independent cinema’s most idiosyncratic, passionate, and hilarious filmmakers, Onur Tukel. Not only has the 45-year-old Turkish American writer, director and sometimes actor been prolific, but he also he has been punctual, churning out difficult films with shocking regularity: the slightly mad and very chatty philosophical comedy/drama Richard’s Wedding in 2012; the gruesome comic vampire film, Summer of Blood in 2014; the delightful black comedy Applesauce in 2016; and the wild and controversial futuristic satire/revenge tale, Catfight, in which Anne Heche and Sandra Oh engage in three knockdown, no-punches-pulled physical encounters, in early 2017. He has other projects ready for release, but the good news is that he was so incensed by Donald Trump’s victory last November that he has squeezed in another film in this calendar year, just in time for the Hamptons International Film Festival. The Misogynists.

This scathing, decadent satire that showcases an array of amusing characters, brilliant and daring performances, and sizzling dialogue may be his best film yet and even corral him a mainstream audience for the first time, despite some XXX-language. The synopsis from the press notes: Cameron (Dylan Baker) is a lonely businessman and Trump supporter who has recently separated from his wife of 35 years. Now living on his own in a hotel room, he celebrates Election Night with his sad-sack protégé Baxter (Jamie Block), who is experiencing marital woes of his own. As the night progresses, the two men find their beliefs, motivations and identities challenged. And since all Tukel’s films are about characters who are experiencing escalated downward spirals, with situations going from bad to abominable, be prepared to fasten your seat belts, as Margo Channing would say, because it’s going to be a bumpy night. Last week I had this conversation with Tukel about his new movie and the political views that inspired it, and as always he wasn’t at a loss for words. I was, as when I last interviewed Tukel, amazed how he can digress from a topic and go off on a seemingly unrelated tangent yet somehow circle back and tie in what he’s been saying to what we were first talking about. You’ll see! Like me, he is excited that The Misogynists has been chosen for this weekend’s film festival, and that he will no longer be a secret.

Onur Tukel. Photo: Danny Peary

Danny Peary: When we talked just prior to the release of Catfight, you told me you were soon going to make this film. Was it already written and ready to shoot?

Onur Tukel: When we talked in March of 2017, I think I was on the fifth or sixth draft of the script. I did nine drafts total.

DP: Did you start writing The Misogynists on election night?

OT: I started writing it the next day. I copyrighted the first draft of the script on November 17th, 2016, less than 10 days after the election, and then I spent seven months rewriting the movie before we shot it this spring.

DP: What was your frame of mind when Trump won? Did you know you’d have to make a movie about it?

OT: Well, I was shocked. And then, you know, I was angry. And I had the same smug reaction as a lot of liberals: “How could these idiots vote for Trump?” But then, my anger turned toward the liberals who didn’t go out and vote for Hillary Clinton. This is what fueled my writing. It became very therapeutic. I also found a defense mechanism to deal with the defeat. I thought back to how I felt when George W. Bush got re-elected in 2004. I was really devastated that night. And I kept thinking about how collectively insane the country was during that time, which I refer to as the “Decade of Defeat” in America. And when Trump won, I told myself, “Things may seem crazy now, but are they as crazy as they were then?”  The answer was “No.” I told myself, “Trump hasn’t started a war. And until he does, I’m going to give him a chance.” But EVERYTHING annoyed me after the election. I remember walking near Columbus Circle a few days later and there was a parade of protestors screeching some vapid platitudes through a megaphone.   It was shrill and annoying. In the wake of a contentious year, during which the election has oozed itself into every pore of the culture, we were right back where we started on November the 9th! For a while in my twenties, I trained to be a boxer. And I remember hitting that fucking punching bag, just unleashing my rage, it felt so good. And man, writing this script kind of felt the same way. I just unleashed my anger onto the page. It’s kept me relatively sane.

DP: From what I understood, the film was going to be about two Trump supporters in a hotel room on election night. But was it ever going to be just two characters?

OT: No, it was always designed with various characters venturing in and out of the room.

DP: Talk about the collection of people who populate your film.

OT: You have Cameron, a middle-aged man with a great salary. He’s been married for over 35 years but has recently separated from his wife. There’s Baxter, his obsequious protégé, who’s keeping him company on election night. Baxter’s wife, Alice, is at home, trying her best not to lose her mind at the thought of Donald Trump being President—she thinks the sky is falling. An ex-colleague at work, Grant, stops by to imbibe with Cameron and Baxter. He and Alice are the liberal voices of the film. There’s Francis and Don, an interracial couple staying in the hotel room next door, annoyed that Cameron is making too much noise for them to sleep. There’s Miguel, the Mexican who delivers room service and is surprisingly indifferent about the election results. And the sex workers, Sasha and Amber, who have their own mini-adventure before meeting Baxter and Cameron, including getting into an existential argument with a Muslim cab driver. The movie is very much about how divisive the year 2016 was. I think that’s one of the reasons election night was so traumatizing for some. It was an exhausting year. Many people were just ready for the vitriol to end. Trump’s election was devastating because he was so contentious. We all just wanted to stop hearing about him. Anti-anxiety medication sales must be through the roof. Luckily for me, writing is therapy. So, I was able to purge a lot of my frustrations through the script. The great thing about a hotel room set is that I got to focus more on philosophy and less on story.

DP: I kind of pictured you making this film with you and someone noone ever heard of as the leads. When did Dylan Baker come into the picture—and though he played a small part in Catfight, were you startled that he would agree to play the lead without your making his character, Cameron, less vulgar?

OT: I had planned on casting an unknown as Cameron but that didn’t work out. He got cold feet and dropped out of the production. So we pushed production back two weeks and I offered Dylan the role, thinking he wouldn’t want to do it. But he read it and embraced every word. He learned all of his lines in about a week. It’s hard to believe. I could tell you that we workshopped the script like a play, then we spent six months in rehearsals and explored and analyzed every syllable. It certainly feels like we spent that kind of time on it but it’s just not the case. The production came together very quickly.   Dylan dived into this character with an energy that was so inspiring. He’s so funny and warm, and his character is so cynical and at times, disgusting; and he also had to sympathize with his character, who is in great pain. But this is what great actors do. They embrace characters that are so different from their personalities. Dylan’s performance is as devastating as it is electrifying and we were all in awe watching him work.

DP: The dialogue is so sharp that I would guess you sat down at the computer and it just poured out of your mind as you typed. Right or wrong?

OT: I’ve always been really self-deprecating. I love myself. I hate myself. One day, I beat myself up for being a talented hack. Another day, I’m bragging to my girlfriend about what a genius I am. Self-importance is really destructive, so it’s nice to have a self-aware, pseudo-irony to the whole thing. Art is important. But anyone can do it. And it’s also fleeting and inconsequential. And if you do it when you’re anxious or angry, like I do, it can be very therapeutic. So, yes, this thing poured out of me very quickly. Most of my first drafts are written quickly but this one came even faster because I wasn’t so focused on story. It was more about a feeling. What was the general mood of the country that night? It was like a bomb going off! People were shocked. People compared it to 9/11.   And culturally the climate hasn’t changed much.   Uncertainty is everywhere. Uneasiness. Anxiety. But, you know, that’s the American way. A culture of capitalism demands an anxious populace, so it can be easily exploited. At least, that’s how I see it. The hospitals want you to think you’re sick. The news channels want you to think everyone’s going to drown in the hurricane. We live in a diseased culture. Binge-watching is the new cure-all for all the dread. We’re living in Brave New World. I’m looking forward to working on the next script. Every day, there’s something new to be angry or anxious about.   It’s a great time to be a filmmaker. There’s so much to say about this overwhelming nothingness. That said, I rewrote the fuck out of the initial script for The Misogynists. As I said, nine drafts in seven months. Again, therapy.

DP: Talk about the title. By calling your film The Misogynists, you are highlighting one aspect of a great many Trump voters, but pushing into the background equally bad ones, some political.

Trump supporters Cameron (Dylan Baker) and Baxter (Jamie Block) celebrate the macho new president.

OT: Well, the title isn’t just reserved for misogynistic Trump voters. It also fits the mother who tells her daughter she can’t be president. It’s also for the sex worker who complains of sexism while selling her body to the highest bidder.   And look, who was more of a misogynist–George W. Bush or Bill Clinton?   Locker room talk works both ways. And I have been part of many conversations between men that are insanely misogynistic. In college, if one of my friends had sex with a woman, I wanted to hear all the details. Is this worse than shooting a porno film? Is it worse than grabbing a woman without her permission? Of course not. It’s a conversation. It’s freedom of speech. There are terrible people who voted for Trump and terrible people who voted for Hillary and terrible people who didn’t vote at all. I don’t think a majority of voters picked Trump because they hated women. They just hated Hillary, and it’s unfortunate because she was clearly more qualified for the job. But I had a feeling Trump was going to win after hearing the final question of the second debate. He sounded like a human being instead of a politician. I think there’s a way to reach Trump if liberals would just show him a little compassion. He’s all alone and he’s terrified. If you coddle his ego, he can be manipulated. If everybody on Twitter just sent him a nice tweet, instead of a hateful one, he would glow. If you launch a nuclear bomb, he’s going to launch one back. Maybe win him over with love. Now, I’m methodically adopting this attitude for a couple of reasons. I have to have compassion for my main character. He’s my creation, I have to stand up for him.   But he’s also incredibly negative and I have to be better than he is. So as I talk about this movie on the festival circuit, I want to shy away from negativity, which means NOT criticizing Trump or his supporters. Look around at what we’ve become. Trump says something hateful and it’s like firing a cannon on a snowy mountaintop. An avalanche of hateful tweets comes from the left. This causes Trump to load another cannonball. Back and forth. Back and forth. I’ve made the decision to empathize with those I disagree with. I want to find some common ground with those I disagree with. It actually takes a lot of bravery to do that.

DP: Obviously, Cameron is a blatant misogynist but—and you just mentioned a few candidates–what other character qualifies so that the word is plural in the title? Baxter is afraid of women but I can’t tell if he despises them.

OT: Again, The Misogynists could be Cameron, Baxter, the sex workers, the mother, even the outspoken liberal who defends Hillary yet voted for Bernie. We’re all misogynists because we participate in a consumer culture that sexualizes and exploits women.   We’re all misogynists because we watch mass media news channels that NEVER feature thoughtful authors like Naomi Klein or Christopher Hedges. The network news stations never encourage reading. NEVER! They never encourage consumers to be independent thinkers. Most everything on television is geared toward making you feel ugly or fat or unworthy or broken. And by the end of this movie, when the language is at its most vulgar, you can argue that our male characters still, AREN’T misogynists. They are merely describing what they’re going to do to the sex workers. How is this misogynistic? If being a sex worker is form of feminism, then being a literal sex object is a feminist act. Language is just another form of sex play. When men talk about “fucking prostitutes,” I would argue that the words can’t be misogynistic. These words have no power. The body as “sex object,” contradicts this notion that misogyny can exist in language. It can’t. Not in the context of the movie. I’m looking forward to the festivals Q&As with this movie. I’m think there are going to be some very interesting discussions.

DP: Cameron says two reasons for Trump’s victory were that people think he will bring stability (in a bad way) to America and that he recognized people are tribal. Almost a year after election night, could you list many more reasons?

OT: I think Donald Trump’s behavior is moving conservatives to the left.   On the other side, I think PC culture and safe spaces are moving liberals to the right. Maybe I’m old, maybe too set in my ways, but harsh language doesn’t offend me. And the idea of forcing people to be “less offensive” is nauseating to me.   I don’t like being told what to say. And having freedom of speech is hands down the greatest right we have as Americans. And this works both ways. If Donald Trump wants to call someone a “son-of-a-bitch,” well, it doesn’t bother me. Is it racist? It could be? Is he racist? Sure, he could be. But you know what? Son-of-a-bitch” ain’t the N-word, no matter how you slice it. You can rationalize anything you want. We live in nation of bullshit and faux outrage. I think about Turkey, where journalists and professors are locked up for criticizing their politicians. Now, they have something to complain about. But they can’t! Lebron James can call Trump a bum in America and that’s a beautiful thing. Trump has every right to fire back. Is it sad? Yes, it is. Donald Trump’s behavior isn’t appropriate for a President. He’s acting like a petulant child. And you know what, so are the masses. We live in a diseased culture.   And the American empire is on its last legs, just as Morris Berman predicted.

DP: At first I assumed Cameron was thrilled with Trump’s victories because of his vicious policies but after he exclaims how he and others are free to not be PC anymore, I started to see a larger reason. Do you think he’s so pleased with the election because he despises people and thinks they are getting the monster they deserve?

OT: It’s all there in his dialogue. Cameron is a believer in Darwinism. That’s why he proudly owns a gun. He doesn’t see the value of compassion in a world of anarchy. He believes there will be chaos in the streets very soon. People will be looting supermarkets. The one with the gun gets the loaf of bread. When he talks briefly about Vietnam, he’s pointing out a bleak time in American history. A Democrat got us into the war. Republicans kept us there. This is the world we live in. When he talks about the American Indian, it’s as if they don’t even exist. They’ve been literally wiped off the map.   He’s a realist. America was built on principles of absolute selfishness. Having a leader like Donald Trump was inevitable, because he is the product of a diseased culture. Every man for himself. Might makes right. It’s the American way. We are not a nation of Christians, despite what people claim. Jesus wouldn’t have wiped out the Indians. Jesus wouldn’t be on twitter saying hurtful things. Jesus would have compassion for Trump. He would match his hate with love.

DP: I was reminded of Platoon, in which Charlie Sheen is pulled in one direction by the moral Willem Dafoe and the other by macho Tom Berenger in a fight for his soul. Here Baxter feels safer with Cameron than at home with his very moral, politically liberal wife, Alice. Is that how you see it?

OT: I like that comparison. I think there’s a nobility to being in the middle, trying to hear out and understand both sides. Obama was like that. Bill Clinton was like that. But there’s a cowardice there, too, because you’re not really taking a stand. You know, Baxter is actually responsible. He has a family, he takes care of them. He wants to do the right thing, to put his family first, but he’s also tempted to be selfish. But there’s the contradiction. Putting your family first IS a form of selfishness. The family becomes an extension of you.

DP: Is it Baxter’s weakness that makes him want to hang out with Cameron?

OT: He hangs out with Cameron for several reasons. He wants to please his boss and he wants to avoid his wife. Hanging out with “the boys” is a beautiful thing. I’m a stubborn, out-spoken, flawed, often out-of-touch and sometimes self-aware human being. I like drinking with men. Locker room talk IS a real thing. And if you have a sense of humor about it, it’s harmless. There’s a childish superiority to it. AS Cameron says, “Women do it, too. They have their book clubs, their “Margarita Wednesdays.” The world is governed by secret meetings and clandestine conversations. Those who speak in secret aren’t evil. It’s the spies who are evil.

DP: And is it Baxter’s weakness that makes Cameron want to hang out with him?

OT: Cameron’s just lonely and afraid. If it’s not Baxter, it’s Grant. If it’s not Grant, it’s Sasha. When Miguel delivers the food, he’s quick to invite him to have a drink, some blow, a slice of pizza. Cameron, in a lot of ways, is a man of the people.

DP: Did you choose the name Baxter for the harmless but ineffectual character because it fits the definition of a Baxter?

OT: Hmmm, you know what? I never thought about that. Didn’t Michael Showalter direct and star in a movie called The Baxter? I don’t even know what that word means. What’s a Baxter? I’ll look it up. I did write the role for the musician Jamie Block, who does a brilliant job in this. And I guess he just looks liked a Baxter to me.

DP: One of Cameron’s verbal targets is Hollywood. I know you hate Hollywood elitism and phoniness so was he speaking words you might say?

OT: Hollywood is NOT a liberal place. It’s conservative. I could launch into a long-winded monologue about how I really feel about the Hollywood one-percenters and celebrities and the creative choices they make, but my publicist would never approve. Still, if I had a chance to direct a bloated, 50-million dollar film, I’d leap at the chance. If I could afford a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, I’d probably buy one. But being ignored, broke, and angry keeps me prolific.

DP: In the great Joseph McCarthy-era western, Johnny Guitar, every character represents something politically. What about in this film? Is Cameron meant to be Trump-like and that hotel room is like the Oval Office, with an array of people coming and going?

OT: It could be. Cameron, like Trump, is very isolated. He wants Trump to build a wall around America. He doesn’t want Syrian refugees in the country. He looks down at the streets from his hotel room and imagines chaos and anarchy. He’s totally paranoid. In a lot of ways, he’s a prisoner. He talks about freedom but he’s not free at all. By the end, you see who he really is. He’s afraid. He’s lonely. He’s a small child. All his bombast was just an act. Outside the hotel room is the rest of America, terrified at what he might do next. I’m over-explaining things, which is supposedly a big no-no for a director. “Never explain.” But that’s also the point of the movie. Who’s to say what you should and shouldn’t do as a director. I can do whatever I want. It’s my movie. And Cameron says something similar early in the film. “I can say what I want, I can do what I want,” as he bounces up and down on the bed like a child. We’ve put a child in the Oval House. But outside of the Oval Office, the behavior is just as obnoxious.

DP: Cameron may be a 100% jerk but I don’t think any of your characters are without flaws, except perhaps the hotel manager who is in just one scene. In my opinion the worst person of all is the cheeriest and perhaps the most likable, the room service worker, Miguel, who brings Cameron and Baxter food and stays to snort lines of cocaine. He is of Mexican heritage and thinks having a female president would be cool but like many students didn’t bother to vote. And he’s on academic scholarship!

OT: One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Miguel, Cameron and Baxter do a shot of tequila. Cameron has just made a speech about white people being superior to blacks, Jews, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs. He goes on to talk about tribalism and the societal acceptance of genocide. My co-editor Martin, who was assembling the footage during the shoot, hadn’t cracked a smile for the first five days of production. When he started synching Miguel’s footage, it was the first time I saw him laugh. He said the subject matter was so insanely dark that he couldn’t help but laugh at it.   When I wrote this, I was really reaching for the darkest shit I could find. It actually reminded me of the paintings I created for a movie called Septien, several years ago. I occasionally act in indie films and I play a disturbed painter in that movie. I really am an artist, and the director, Michael Tully, wanted me to paint the most deranged things I could think of. It was very easy for me, almost cathartic.   And writing for Cameron was cathartic as well. With Miguel, I wanted to resist making him obvious, which would have meant having him be anti-Trump and anti-wall and pro-immigration.   Instead, I just made him aloof, and that seemed to be the right way to go. I think a lot of people have Miguel’s attitude, which is why they didn’t vote.

Sex workers Sasha (Ivana Milecevik) and Amber (Trieste Kelly Dunn) discuss Trump’s victory and going to see Cameron and Baxter

DP: I picture a Netflix series with Sasha and Amber! Great characters, a comedy team. It’s interesting that you introduce them late in the film and then give them so much time, breaking conventions. Did you write their scenes together, before they come to the hotel, as you wrote the script chronologically, or at the end?

OT: I’d love to do a movie with these characters every year. We could see how their opinions change with each year that Trump is in office. Regarding these two sex workers, I was having a lot of trouble with the first three or four drafts of the script. It wasn’t until I decided to give Amber and Sasha their own act outside of the hotel room that everything really clicked for me. In the initial drafts, Sasha and Amber show up at the hotel room and the four characters continue talking politics. We never see Sasha and Amber on their own. We discover that Sasha comes from a rich family in Serbia and hates Bill Clinton and thus, hates Hillary and blah-blah-blah–it was more of the same stuff that we get in the first act. I had a reading with the initial cast and I realized that the third act needed to be less about politics and more about Baxter betraying his wife. By the fifth draft, I found that I had a really interesting structure for the script. Act one is Cameron and Baxter in the hotel room, drinking and talking politics. Act two is Amber and Sasha on their way to the hotel room, talking about sex work and their own role in creating Trump. Act three is broken up into two parts—Cameron, Baxter, Amber, and Sasha partying together; and Cameron all alone, hitting rock bottom. I always wanted the movie to feel bigger than a hotel room with energetic performances and the multiple characters venturing in and out of the room. Zoe White’s cinematography really opens it up.   But this diversion with Sasha and Amber is a bold structural move. It feels innovative. By the end, there are probably ten locations throughout the movie–the hotel room, the hallways, the elevator, the lobby, the bar, the rooftop and the various streets of New York. But when Amber and Sasha enter the picture, I think it’s really going to throw audiences for a loop. Suddenly, the point-of-view changes and it’s like we’re in a completely different movie.

DP: Trieste Kelly Dunn, who is terrific as Amber, has played a lead for you before. Did she have to explain to Ivana Milecevik, who had just a minor, straight part in Catfight, or anyone else about how you work and that a bit of insane humor is to be expected?

OT: I worked with Trieste on Applesauce so we get each other. We’ve both got connections in North Carolina, so our senses of humor are very similar. I met her one day in a Laundromat in Greenpoint and I fell in love with her instantly. She’s one of my favorite people and she might be my favorite actor working today. She’s the perfect mix of sophisticated and goofy. Trieste and Ivana are good friends. They worked on a popular TV show called Banshee for four years or so, so they were excited about reuniting on screen. They have such incredible chemistry in this. Ivana has an incredible sense of humor, too, and they’re really funny without ever winking at the camera.   I hope I get to make many movies with these two. They’re so brilliant.

DP: How much of this film is about hypocrisy?

OT: You could fan out the pages of the script like a deck of cards and say, “Pick a page, any page” and you’d find hypocrisy. Cameron brags about Trump being a truthful President yet admits that he’s lied his ass off.   You’ve got the self-righteous African American who stands up to Cameron but calls him racial epithets behind his back. You’ve got the liberal blowhard who defends Hillary yet voted for Jill Stein. There’s the sex workers who talk about female empowerment as they head to a hotel room to satisfy the libidos of a couple of rich men. A Muslim cab driver tries to lecture Amber and Sasha on how to behave while forcing his wife to cover her head. Baxter talks of being responsible while doing coke with his boss in a hotel room. Then there are the contradictions of language in the movie. We all want to be free. We all celebrate our freedom of speech. But the left tries to police what we can and cannot say.   A lot of Cameron’s vitriol is a reaction to PC culture. That’s one of the reasons he adores Trump. Trump has no problem hurting feelings. He says what he wants.

DP: When we see all the pain Cameron keeps inside because his wife Julia rejected him, do you want us viewers to feel empathy?

OT: When Cameron delivers the monologue about the last time he and his wife made love, it’s supposed to give us a glimpse of his humanity. I don’t think it’s enough to make us feel empathy toward him, but it would be nice if that were the case. No one has a lot of compassion for Trump at the moment and it’s really unfortunate.   I’m trying to open my heart to the guy. He’s a human being and like it or not, he’s our President. And any liberal who claims he’s “Not my president” needs to check themselves. That’s a fucking smug attitude. He most certainly is our President. We own him. And it’s our responsibility to make sure he doesn’t do anything catastrophic. I can tell you this much, barraging him with hateful insults on Twitter isn’t noble or patriotic. It’s the equivalent of bullying an outcast at school. Sooner or later, that outcast is going to get fed up and go on a killing spree.

DP: Where did you get the idea of the TV in the hotel room turning itself on and running backwards?

OT: That wasn’t in the original script but when we found the hotel room and Estee Braverman, the production designer, started transforming the space, I knew that something would have to be playing on the TV. I didn’t want to see this big black rectangle in the middle of our shots. Philosophically, the idea was a no-brainer. I’m sick of screens. They’re everywhere and they’ve taken over our lives. So the idea of a sentient television screen that pops on and off on its own, distracting the characters, mesmerizing the characters, felt like the right thing to do. It’s another example of the diseased culture we live in. Everyone’s complaining about how horrible Trump is. Everyone’s screaming about the environment and human rights. But they’re not so upset that they can’t binge-watch twenty hours of television a week. Most moral outrage is reactionary and insincere.

DP: You tend to get nervous about audience reactions to your films since they tend to go over all kinds of boundaries. Did you feel with this film that everything was falling into place and that the shoot was easier than expected?

OT: The shoot wasn’t easy because we shot at night, from 6pm to 6am. And the budget and schedule were super tight. But everything fell into place because I was surrounded by an amazing cast and crew.   Because the subject matter is so closely connected to what’s happening in the world, it feels strangely ahead-of-its-time. This might be the kind of movie you see made years after Trump leaves office. That’s why I’m excited about getting it out there early.

DP: Talk about working with Dylan Baker, especially your early conversations. Were you thrilled that he was willing to be as brave as you?

OT: Dylan Baker starred in Happiness. If you’ve seen it and his performance, you’ll know that he’s one of the bravest actors working today. But he’s also one of the most underrated. And he owns this movie! He’s on fire from the first frame to the last. He made everyone better. He inspired all of us. His performance has nothing to do with bravery, its artistry. This is the kind of performance you expect from a great actor.

DP: So you got a prestigious Broadway veteran to be in your film. And The Misogynists will be playing at the prestigious Hamptons International Film Festival. As a “madman of the cinema,” are you shocked and delighted that it has come to this?

OT: I’ve been making indie movies for 20 years now. I moved to New York on Halloween in 2010. I never dreamed I’d be making New York films with the elite of New York, yet here I am, seven years later, and this is the best thing I’ve ever made. Delighted? No question. Shocked? No. This is the kind of movie that is supposed to play at great film festivals. It’s brave and beautifully made. And Dylan Baker’s performance is a tour de force. The rest of the cast and crew are artists. I’m really proud of what we’ve made.

Danny Peary has published 25 books on film and sports, including Cult Movies and Jackie Robinson in Quotes.

Onur Tukel Pushes Sandra Oh and Anne Heche into a “Catfight”

Playing in Theaters

Onur Tukel Pushes Sandra Oh and Anne Heche into a “Catfight”

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 3/3/17)

Sandra Oh and Anne Heche filming the first fight, in a stairwell.

By Danny Peary

If you happen to spot a bearded and slightly mad man handing out cards this week near the Cinema Village on 12th Street off University in Manhattan or the Spectacle Theater, at 124 S. 3rd Street in Brooklyn, please don’t cross to the other side of the street but take one and engage in conversation. That imposing yet gentle soul is actually one of New York’s finest independent filmmakers, having written and directed Richard’s Wedding, Summer of Blood, and Applesauce, my choice of best narrative film at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival–all slightly demented and hilariously written and performed low-budget comedies that deal, mostly, with betrayal between friends, grudges, revenge, selfishness, the fickleness of relationships, interchangeable characters, failure, self-hatred, and characters on downward spirals. All were personal films for Onur Tukel, in which he reveals what he thinks are his worst traits. None made money but they deservedly earned Tukel a following, me included. And so now he’s out on the streets, as Spike Lee was for Do the Right Thing, to alert people that his new film, Catfight, will be opening at those two theaters and eight others around the country, and be available on VOD, this Friday, March 3. For the first time, Tukel has lured name actors to star in his film and I can say that the perfectly cast Sandra Oh and Anne Heche give courageous, nothing-held-back performances. In the near future, as a new war rages in the Middle East, Oh plays Veronica Salt, a slightly alcoholic wife (of a war profiteer who has had enough of her) and mother (of a sweet, artistic teenage boy who loves her) and Heche is Ashley, a struggling, self-important artist who is about to have a baby with her lover, Lisa (Alicia Silverstone). The two angry women come across each other at Veronica’s husband’s party, at which Ashley is helping a caterer friend, and they still hold grudges against each other from something that happened years before when they were college friends. And they fight. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know they really go at:

Not once, but three times in the film. The fights are only some of the film highlights—some may say delights—only some of many WTF moments. On Monday I finally got to sit down with the cool, amiable, and charming Onur Tukel. As we munched on Cuban sandwiches at a restaurant on Bowery, we had this freewheeling conversation.

Onur Tukel. Danny Peary photo.

Danny Peary: What’s your background?

Onur Tukel: I was born and raised in a small town in North Carolina called Taylorsville, which is about an hour from Charlotte. Everybody but my immediate family still lives in Turkey. I was born in 1972, and was the youngest of three children, which I think is why I never want to be told what to do. In 1990, I went to UNC, in Chapel Hill, about two and a half hours from Taylorsville. I was a radio-television major. That’s when I discovered Woody Allen, and the low-budget films of Whit Stillman and Richard Linklater. After graduating, I moved to Wilmington and made some independent films. One was so bad that it crippled my confidence and I lost my nerve to make more films for awhile. I moved to Durham and worked in public television for about seven years. I lost my job and moved to Charlotte and was hired as a graphic designer. I could work from home, so I decided, at 38, to move to New York before it was too late. I had visited New York quite a bit and felt connected to it and always wanted to make movies there. I have always loved the magic, energy, chaos, and the structure of the city. And that it’s a melting pot with people from all over the world with different philosophies on everything. I’ve now been here about six and a half years, of which the first four years felt like I was at the university again. In the seven years I wasn’t making films, I was trying to write and illustrate children’s books. I was sending them off to publishers and getting rejected by everyone. Then the week before I moved to New York, a publisher in Terrytown called to let me know they wanted to publish one of my books. So the first couple of years I was here, I worked on a couple of movies and two children’s books. That was cool.

DP: Are you a full-time director now?

OT: No, no. I did graphic design for one company for several years. I’m still doing graphic design and freelance projects when I can. I love graphic design but it would be nice to do full-time film work and that is all I’m doing for the next few months.

Sandra Oh as Veronica.

DP: I’m surprised you’re not in Catfight because you’ve acted for other directors, including Alex Karpovsky in Red Flag, and starred in your own films, Summer of Blood and Applesauce.

OT: When I was making films in North Carolina it was more about aesthetics than acting. I didn’t understand acting. I learned about acting when I was in Red Flag and Richard’s Wedding. I’d watch my performance and the performances of the other actors and see that I was the weak link. It was heartbreaking and embarrassing but it made me understand what good acting is. I learned so much from Alex Karpovsky and I’m decent in Red Flag. And I’m good in Applesauce because I was doing an extension of my own personality.   I’m aware I’m not an actor, I’m a performer of myself.   If you’re not self-conscious in front of a camera, you can give a good performance. I wouldn’t be able to cry because that’s a skill, but anger is easy for me because I have a lot of anger. I just play what’s natural to me.

DP: You mentioned discovering Woody Allen when you were in college. Your movies are nothing like his—though one can draw some comparisons between your comedy of ill manners, Applesauce, and a couple of his films about troubled marriages–yet people still link you to him. Maybe it’s because of your self-deprecating humor and New York sensibility.

OT: We share the same anxieties, too. Woody Allen is my idol. This is a man who has made a dozen brilliant films. My favorite film of his is Deconstructing Harry. There’s this angry, angry side of him in that movie. He used all these vile, disgusting words and I think his anger was directed at Mia Farrow. There’s also that duality that in my films: I love and hate myself equally. People say I need therapy. It’s true but I’m in denial.

DP: You have made comedy horror films so I’m guessing you are a fan of An American Werewolf in London.

OT: Oh, man, that’s a big influence on me. I was watching it in middle school and I could just picture me and my friends walking on the moors in England. Being young, being silly, and then being ripped apart by the wolf. I like mixing genres and in that film the horror and the comedy mix so beautifully. It’s not necessarily the craft behind a movie that I respond to, it’s the heart behind, the energy, the attitude, and I like a little rock ‘n’ roll, a little grittiness, a little imperfection. John Landis also directed National Lampoon’s Animal House, which I also loved. Most of my influences were the horror films and action films I watched in the 1980s starring Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I lived for their films. In terms of tone, which I’ve never been good with, I think of Rocky III, a great film from the eighties that has, like Catfight, three fights and is at times goofy and silly, sweet and endearing, and full of tragedy and despair. It’s a roller coaster ride of emotions. The tone is all over the place, which is why a lot of people don’t like it, but I like the unpredictability that comes with that.

DP: What’s the genesis of Catfight?

OT: Devoe Yates, who is the musical supervisor on Catfight, and I came up with the idea of making a movie with that title. We were talking about a great eighties movie called Three O’Clock High that ends with a showdown between two teenagers. We thought it would be cool if we did that with women. I am really drawn to two distinct, antipodal personalities going at it. It’s one of the things I love the most. In my own personality I have two conflicting sides. I have a generous, giving side and think about other people. Also I have a selfish asshole side and thinks the world is shit and wants it to explode.

Anne Heche and Alicia Silverstone.

DP: But in Catfight, Veronica and Ashley are both selfish assholes.

OT: Yes. I tried not make either of them the hero. But in the original script, the two women were different from the ones Sandra Oh and Anne Heche would play. The two women pitted against each other were in their twenties, worked at an advertising agency, and were sleeping with the same guy. They w3re in a love triangle. I wrote a couple of drafts of the script and gave it to MPI, a really wonderful media group out of Chicago that specializes in genre and action films. MPI had bought Summer of Blood and read my scripts for Applesauce and Catfight and gave me enough money to make both movies. Applesauce didn’t make any money but they liked it and loved my script for Catfight and wanted to make it. I re-read my script that I’d written a year and a half before and didn’t connect with it at all. I didn’t want to make a movie about women in their twenties anymore. MPI was fine about my doing a rewrite, assuming I’d just tweak the script to make it even better. At the time, I never thought I could get name actors because of the low budget. But then I read that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been passed over for the role of a mistress of a man played by an actor in his fifties because she was 38. Who cares what her age is? She’s beautiful. Any guy with a libido would want to have her as mistress. A light went off in my head. It was a shame that women in their late thirties and forties were being passed over for leads in movies but it presented an opportunity for me, a low-budget director who had never worked with a “star” before. My new goal was to write a good script about two women in their forties and try to find two really good name actresses that age who might be willing to do something on a much smaller scale than they were used to because they liked the script and wanted to do good work.

DP: Catfight is just about two women who are pitted against each other, but you made sure to include political content in your script, which is why it can be called a satire.

OT: To me, Catfight represents the anger and bitterness that I still feel from the war in Iraq. The politics crept in because I’d been thinking about it since the war in Iraq. That was the time I was most angry, when I lost friends and argued with family members. I read a wonderful book a few years ago by Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine that talks about disaster capitalism and not trusting capitalism when it’s built around misery. So when I was doing the rewrite I was thinking about disaster capitalism during war. To me, Veronica, the wife of a war profiteer, represents money and consumption and capitalizing on destruction. I’m not anti-capitalism because as a filmmaker I’m trying to make money, but I’m against making money off other people’s misery, like the despicable people who have capitalized off the war in Iraq. There is so much money to be made by the defense industry and huge corporations.

DP: Were you upset specifically about the preemptive strike or the aftermath?

OT: The preemptive strike, the insouciance of the American public, the collective shrug saying “That’s okay.” The “fart machine” in the movie, which appears behind the right-wing television host when he talks about the current war, represents the collective shrug of the masses. I thought people, including smug liberals, were culpable in the acceptance of it all.

DP: Was MPI happy with your new script written for older actresses?

OT: They weren’t happy. For the original script with the young women, they were going to give me way more money than I’d ever had to make a movie.   But this new script was angry, political, and had women in their forties. So they now offered me an insanely low budget. I was so passionate about the script that I said, “That’s great, I’ll take anything.” MPI had treated me well in the past, never interfering with anything I did, so I didn’t look elsewhere. However, my new goal was to get big actors to be in the movie so MPI would give me additional money. MPI gave me a little start-up money and I hired two geniuses, a casting director, Stephanie Holbrook, and a producer, Gigi Graff, and they got the script into the hands of the right agents and just by sheer magic and luck, Sandra Oh and Anne Heche read the script, loved it, and said they wanted to do it.

DP: Did you feel that you had to have two names?

OT: I could have had one. I was lucky to get two. When Anne saw Sandra Oh had already agreed to be in it, she said she was definitely in, too. They both wanted to play Veronica. Sandra got that part because she was cast first. If Anne had agreed to do the movie first, she would have been cast as Veronica and I’m not sure Sandra would have wanted to play Ashley. So it worked out beautifully. Then I met with Alicia Silverstone and of course she wanted to play Veronica, too. But I asked her if she’d play the supporting role of Ashley’s lover, Lisa. She asked me who was playing Ashley. I said Anne Heche and she agreed. But she told me, “It’s a small role and I want more on the page. She’s not there, she’s a flat character.” So I went off to write a stronger part for her. I can’t believe I got these three women.

DP: Did the actresses know you and your films?

OT: No, they never heard of my work. Although they loved the script, they wondered who I was and the tone I wanted Catfight to have. We showed them Applesauce so they could decide if I was a good enough director to work with. My question was, “If the quality of Catfight is the same as Applesauce, are you onboard?” And there was a resounding yes. Fortunately, they loved Applesauce—the energy, the madness, the naturalistic performances. So we were off and running.

DP: You shot your film at a lightening pace, so did you have time to speak to your actresses about their characters?

OT: Sandra and I Skyped when she was in L.A., and we’d go through the script line by line. She was so respectful, treating me as if I were Paul Schrader. If she wanted to change something, I’d say go ahead because even if I didn’t understand what she wanted I trusted that it was important to her. I never have known how to write for women. Sandra and Anne’s styles couldn’t have been more different. Sandra came in with a script where every line had been dissected. Anne is a very instinctual actress so she came in and figured it out.  Anne said that if she and Sandra went on a road trip together, Sandra would have a map with every turn highlighted and Anne would just follow the sun or use a compass—and they’d both reach their destination at the same time. We had no time for rehearsal but we would talk about things if need be. It’s always the case that I want my actors to know their characters better than I do. That is due to both my laziness and that I always want to give my actors freedom to be artists. All I demand from my actors is that when they come to the set they should know their dialogue so we don’t waste any time. It’s very mechanical for me. Both actresses would challenge me. Especially Sandra. She taught me so much as a director. She loved the script, but I don’t know how she saw me as a director. I could sense she was annoyed at times. Sometimes I’d give a direction that wasn’t the best and I could tell they didn’t think it was the best idea. A bad director can get in the way of a good performance. They knew what they were doing. On most scenes we’d do just three or four takes but if the actresses wanted to go again I would. I never said no. I told them that Catfight would depend on the performances, and I was so open the whole time to everything. All my films are collaborative, but this was insanely so. The whole time it was about respecting them. I knew my place. They were excited that I always film with two cameras because it preserves the energy of the actors. When you have one camera and it’s on one of two people in the scene, sometimes only she is giving 100% while the one off camera is waiting for when the camera is on her. Because acting is so draining. I wanted to see them both at the same time, I didn’t want to miss anything Sandra or Anne or Alicia did.

DP: They gave you their A performances.

OT: They pulled the best out of the crew, which was mostly women, and the women in the crew pulled the best out of them. Even though it was a small crew, everybody was so passionate and into it. We wanted to make something really good. A film like this is never made by one person and I’m beholden to how fucking great my crew was.

DP: Some directors keep actors who play antagonists away from each other between takes, but do you care about such things?

OT: Oh, no. Anne and Sandra are social butterflies. They were excited about working with each other and became as thick as thieves. They had such mutual respect, that you can sense as well as see. My sets are very social. I like people to have conversations. If it’s quiet, I can’t focus. I need the chaos. At times my actresses will ask that I tell everyone to be quiet so they can get into their head spaces before shooting. My job as a director is to make my actors as comfortable as possible so they’re not in their heads too much but in the moment. The only time I remember asking for quiet was the scene in the cabin late in the film. That scene is very heavy and we were not social while shooting it. It was very, very quiet and everyone got into a meditative, intense, dramatic mode.

DP: Were both actresses on the set the whole time?

OT: Actually, for just six days, filming three fight scenes and three face-to-face scenes. Anne’s last few days were at this cabin in upstate New York and her last scenes filming were literally the last scenes in the movie. The first scene that Sandra shot is the scene when they meet at the party, when Veronica asks Ashley to serve her a drink and they recognize each other from college. I’d shot all Alicia Silverstone’s scenes first and then we filmed the party scene on the third day. Sandra came in and we shot her close-ups with Anne, six pages of dialogue. No rehearsal, the two actresses had known each other for about fifteen minutes. Pretty intense, right? For that scene I did six takes and took chunks from two or three them.

DP: That’s a pivotal scene in the film because we learn that Veronica and Ashley have been holding a grudge since something happened in college between them. That’s what started their feud.

OT: We talked about the history between Veronica and Ashley, and what the catalyst was that set them off. I felt that I knew what happened but they didn’t want me to tell them and they didn’t want to discuss it. They felt it was better left unknown.

DP: Their response is interesting because I’d have thought they’d ask you if you forgot to include a line in their conversation that explained their split years before. I’m sure it had to do with Ashley being a lesbian and Veronica either pushing her away or making a call that got Ashley into trouble at school

OT: Right. We debated whether to put a line in, but they said no. Even though we don’t know, I think it’s a pretty clear assumption that, as you said, it is tied up to Ashley being a lesbian.

DP: Your movie characters are always stuck in the past.

OT: Interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but if a character is holding a grudge they obviously are diseased by something they can’t get over from the past. Someone hurt her and she’s still lashing out because she can’t heal.

DP: One of your recurring themes, including in Applesauce, is revenge. Your characters never forget about what happened, no matter how many years have gone by.

OT: Revenge is a dirty, horrible thing but I’m a vengeful type of person.   The way I rationalize it in my head is that it’s about delivering justice. I feel that if someone has wronged me they can wrong other people in the same way, so I have to put them in their place. I tell myself it’s not about trying to make myself feel better or make them feel bad, it’s about teaching them a lesson. It’s very satisfying to see people get what they deserve. But it’s just not the way it is in the real world. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld weren’t punished for the Iraq War. Now that Trump is president, it pisses me off that they are being treated like martyrs and heroes and I feel it’s my job to remind everyone what they did and what we went through because of them.

DP: In addition to revenge in Catfight, there is an escalation of the feud and things get worse and worse, just as in your previous films.

OT: Sure. General mayhem. I’m a mischief maker.

DP: Jennifer Prediger, one of your frequent cast members, told me that she hopes to make a film with you like War of the Roses, the prototype film about an escalation of violence between two everyday people who once got along. That’s man vs. woman. And Jennifer thought of that before you made Catfight.

OT: Really? It would be terrific to make a film like that.

DP: At the beginning of Catfight, Ashley, the antiwar artist, seems to be sympathetic. Meanwhile, Veronica is anti-art, advising her son to give up his drawing and conform. That’s the worst thing to say. We don’t realize Ashley’s an awful person until we see her verbally attack her assistant Sally for no good reason. Are we supposed to like one woman over the other?

OT: I think that by the end you definitely like Veronica more. She has learned so much.

DP: But has she learned the key thing—not losing her temper around Ashley?

OT: She lost her son, then she heals because she gets her son back when she finds videos made by him for her on her phone, and then Ashley causes her to lose him again.

DP: Denial is another constant theme in your movies. Your characters complain and always blame others for what’s wrong.

OT: Absolutely. In this movie, the tragic flaw of Veronica and Ashley is that they blame the other one for what’s wrong in their lives. They’re always pointing their fingers and never taking responsibility for their own actions. SPOILER ALERT: Peace is right in front of them at the end. They break bread. And they lose it because they still blame each other and no one is taking their own responsibility. Veronica should have backed up her video file! Ashley should have apologized instead of implying it was Veronica’s fault for not backing up her file. END SPOILER ALERT Do you think the last sequence was set up a little like a western, with Ashley walking down the trail to the country house where Veronica now lives with her aunt?

DP: If you put her on a horse, I’d have seen it.

OT: That was deliberate. My cinematographer, Zoe White, who designed all the shots, and I had time to really think about shot construction. Even the music has some tribal drumbeat. That’s one of my favorite scenes. It’s a showdown between Ashley and Veronica, and all that’s missing are the holsters and on their sides.

DP: As in other films, seemingly different people can be interchangeable. Here Veronica is hospitalized and loses everything while she’s in a two-year coma, then the same thing happens to Ashley—and they both end up with nothing. Another theme of yours is failure.

OT: That’s a huge theme. I don’t ever want that to go away. So many creative seeds come from failure.

DP: All your characters end up worse than when they started, as in your previous films.

OT: Is that true? Well, it’s the story of my life. At the end of the day, no matter how successful we are, we’re all going to lose—we’re all going to die.   So we’re all losers. Comedy is a way for me to avoid thinking about death.

DP: Veronica and Ashley put each other in position to lose everything by beating each other into comas, but they don’t actually cause the other’s losses themselves. Each loses everything while in their respective comas, two years apart, but it’s not the other woman who causes that.

OT: Yes. It’s all very much about denial, thinking you’re being true in a world that’s very fake.   They ruin their own lives, self-sabotage, but keep blaming each other for that. That’s another big thing for me in my personal life. One thing about their three fights is that each time you think they’re over they keep going. It’s like when Bush stood on the aircraft carrier with the giant Mission Accomplished banner behind him and then the war went haywire. In the first fight, Ashley chokes out Veronica and they’re both on the floor in the stairwell and we assume the fight’s over. If Veronica just says, “You win,” that would have been it. But she backhands Ashley and Ashley goes nuts and beats Veronica to a pulp, resulting in her spending the next two years in the hospital in a coma. In the second fight, if Ashley just stays down, Veronica won’t continue to mercilessly beat her to a pulp and put her in coma.

DP: Did the fights turn out as you expected?

OT: Much better. There were a couple of fights that we used for reference, one between Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours and another between Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe in Class. I love a good fist fight. The nobility of the fistfight is romantic to me: two people facing each other without there being collateral damage. I’ve been in a lot of fights. If someone says something that offends me, I can’t keep my mouth shut.  I’m all for words and think we should have the power to express ourselves in any way we want. My mouth has gotten me into so much trouble, and it always has led to someone throwing the first punch at me. I never throw the first punch because that’s wrong and evil and cowardly. But once someone throws the first punch, all rules are off the table. Of course, I don’t want to kill anyone. I wanted Anne and Sandra to fight like men, without the hair pulling and slapping. I wanted long fights and it to be visceral. The impetus for the film was to see two great actresses give an emotional performance and a physical performance. Sandra and Anne delivered. We had two stunt doubles but they did a lot of the fighting themselves. I hoped it would work and it really did. For the final fight outdoors, it was winter but the days were warm, so we lucked out.

DP: I am guessing the stairwell wasn’t in the script, that you were looking for any space you could find for the first fight.

OT: That’s exactly right for all the fights. The first fight is intimate, in a cloistered space. It was supposed to take place in an elevator in a really high building. When Veronica’s husband tells her not to drink at the party, that was supposed to take place in an elevator going up. Then the metaphor was that in the elevator on the way down with Ashley she was going to crash in ways you couldn’t imagine. We just couldn’t find an elevator.

DP: It works in that they are fighting for their lives in the stairwell and behind the door people are partying.

OT: I hadn’t thought of that but it makes sense. The second fight takes place in a tire shop. The hammer and the wrench can represent military weapons, and there is the transportation industry and the oil industry. The third fight in the country represents man vs. nature, earth, birth. The third fight was supposed to be the bloodiest, but I’m glad Sandra and Anne didn’t want to do any more punching, but instead suggested doing heads in the dirt, thrashing around. I said, “Hell, yes!”

SPOILER ALERT:

DP: It was a good idea because we don’t want either character to be killed. They are the only hope for each other. The need each other Ashley isn’t going back to the city.

OT: Then Veronica would take Ashley in, just as Aunt Charlie took in Veronica. They would have to work it out.

DP: Do you think Veronica and Ashley should be good friends?

OT: We shot another ending, in which they might remember they once loved each other. I won’t tell you what it is and I chose not to have it for my ending, but it will included on the DVD.

END SPOILER ALERT

DP: I think viewers will be surprised that the fights are hardcore, without the humor found in say a Jackie Chan movie.

OT: There’s a lot more drama in Catfight than anything I’ve ever done. In reality, I can’t do anything but comedy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and I haven’t experienced enough pain to make something dramatic. I’m a lucky, entitled person. But I was working toward it Catfight. Because it does deal with war and the loss of children.   It needs some drama for the fights to mean something. Veronica and Ashley have to be in some kind of pain. The drama is to make the pain real. If I haven’t lost the audience after the first fight, or the second fight, then I’ve got them.

DP: Are Veronica and Ashley metaphors for nations that will always be in conflict?

OT: I think so. I also think each of the fights is metaphorical to a degree. Sandra has her own ideas about that. I’m not a big fan of style over a primal feeling, and this movie is all about being primal and reaching inside instead of trying to manipulate external forces. It’s a very internal film.

DP: You made Catfight before Donald Trump was elected but if he hadn’t been running for president last year would your film be different? Was he on your mind while making Catfight?

OT: The Iraq War was on my mind the whole time. We shot everything before Trump was elected. The only change we made from the script to the film was adding the scene in which Aunt Charlie says two of her trees are named Hillary and Donald. We had some extra time after filming at the cabin and I wanted to add something with Amy Hill because I like her so much. So I added in that bit of her naming her trees. Catfight is a metaphor for the new war in Iraq. I just didn’t see a woman president as the person who would start a war.

DP: But doesn’t the film disprove that? We always think that if a woman were in office then she’d be sensible and calm and not macho so she wouldn’t go to war with anybody. But you see these two women, Veronica and Ashley, who can’t control their aggressive, violent impulses.

OT: Catfight is about female aggression but through my lens of the standard political foundations of patriarchy. A mellow president and a mellow administration start a war against a small, defenseless country and we never see it. All I was thinking about was America starting a new war and what kind of government had to be in place for that to happen. I thought Hillary would win but didn’t want to have a female president in my film who would start a war. It had to be a Republican male president.   Do I think we’ll have a future war under Trump? Yes.

DP: I watched you online being interviewed with Anne Heche, Sandra Oh, and Alicia Silverstone and I was wondering what you were thinking as they were saying it is a feminist film but couldn’t really articulate why.

OT: I have the same problem explaining it. We’re talking about empathy here, feeling for the other person, and I think women, because they carry a baby for nine months, have a sacred connection to their children. I lost my dad and it was sad, but the thought of losing my mom cripples me. That would change me as a person. Any time I hear about young people dying, I think of the mother. The loss of children is why I thought I should use women, it had to be a profound loss and I can’t think of any loss more profound than a woman losing her child. While in comas, Veronica loses her son in battle, Ashley loses the chance to share a baby with Lisa.

DP: Almost all screen time is given to Sandra or Anne, or both, but you include a baby shower scene with just Alicia and actresses playing her friends. Her Lisa is a bit odd in that scene, complaining about each of the presents being dangerous to the baby.

OT: When Alicia asked me to expand her role, I read a few books on how to be a really responsible mother and I pitched the idea to her of having a self-reflective baby shower where we’d poke fun at Lisa’s helicopter parenting and how protective of a mother she is. And she got it and was excited to do that scene but said, “Onur, I don’t want her to come off as crazy.” But she does anyway. How could she not when she’s being so impossible?

DP: But if you read about her, you see Lisa is not that far from who Alicia Silverstone is.

OT: She is that fanatical about the environment. The truth of it is what makes it really funny. People really respond to it, and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

DP: Do you think Catfight will get you into the mainstream a little more and people in Hollywood will know who you are?

OT: I don’t care about Hollywood. It’s conservative and smug and they don’t give a shit about enlightening the culture. It’s about keeping people dumb and consuming. From the mass media news networks to Hollywood films, it’s about distraction and consumption and mind-numbing nothingness. I despise Hollywood. That’s probably self-sabotage. It would be great if someone came to me and asked me to make a film for $30 million. But that’s not realistic. And I wouldn’t trust anyone who comes to me. There are a lot of festivals that don’t want my films, a lot of people don’t like me. Hollywood doesn’t know anything about me and few managers and agents have come knocking on my door. Once they’ve had a conversation with me, they run the other way. I have always been a provocateur. It’s not that I want the attention, but what’s the point? And since I’m a low-budget filmmaker, the only chance my movies will be seen and have some impact culturally is if I to shake the nest a little bit. So if someone says not to do something, I always want to do it even more.   I’ve always liked the misunderstood villain in movies, I like the bad guys. And I consider myself an outlaw. People say, “You’ll never be successful being that way.” For twenty years I’ve been making films and I’ve never made a dime off anything, but that has never stopped me and I feel lucky that I can make films and I’ll never stop whether I have success or not. However, I’m beginning to value myself as an artist and at least demand that I get paid. I do hope my films make money. I do hope people come out to see Catfight. Hurting investors who trusted me makes me feel bad. I was recently on a podcast and it didn’t go so well, so I hope I didn’t hurt the film, but we’ll see. I’m not good at the press thing because I’m a loose cannon and probably mentally unstable at times. So it makes me feel good that my actresses think enough about the film to be doing press for it.

DP: You’re a prolific writer, so I wonder how many unproduced scripts you have on your shelf. OT: I’ve been writing scripts since I was twenty-four, so I probably have about twenty-five.

I tend to write my first drafts pretty quickly, and I’m very focused for two or three months while I try to get the rewrites going, and then will do them in three or four days. I spend two or three months total time spread out about seven months writing a script. Then I will read it when I have some distance from it and may completely have forgotten I wrote it. In the last few years I’ve written four scripts that I want to make. They have different budgets. There are the $35,000 films, which, if I can never raise another dollar, I can find three or four friends with disposable income to contribute between $5,000 and $10,000. And there are movies that will cost three or four million dollars, my Holy Grail projects that I assume will never get funded. And there are middle projects what will cost $300,000 to $500,000.

DP: Are you already working on anything else?

OT: I’ve done one thing I can’t speak of yet. And in about a month and a half I’m going to do a one-location movie about two Trump supporters in a hotel room on the night of the election. It’s my favorite thing that I’ve ever written. I want to do movies that are completely outside of who I am as an insecure forty-four-year-old artist. The realistic plan will always be to get the best actors to work with. But there are no other plans other than to create new things. The most beautiful thing about humanity is a bunch of people coming together to tell a story. Film as an art form embraces that.

DP: How can people see Catfight?

OT: It will open on March 3 in about ten theaters, including Cinema Village in New York and the Spectacle Theater, a tiny theater at 124 S. 3rd Street in Williamsburg, and on VOD. And people can go to Itsacatfight.com and see the theaters where it will be playing.