Director Louise Weard Discusses Her Cinematic Epic, Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps
Ahead of the Calgary premiere of Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps with A League of Their Own, REVERIE chatted with director Louise Weard about the project. Read her full interview with writer Flora Bews below, and check out the screening at Globe Cinema.
Flora Bews: I came out 2 years ago, and I’m honestly loving finding theres been a little renaissance of trans femme cinema happening.
Louise Weard: Yeah, I assume your talking about The People’s Joker, I Saw the TV Glow, those movies.
FB: Exactly.
LW: I do feel like all really reflect— they’re all so specific to the filmmakers making them that it’s impossible for them not to reflect some universal truths when taken as a whole.
FB: You’ve worked with Vera [Drew, director of The People’s Joker] and Jane [Schoenbrun, director of I Saw the TV Glow]. I’m wondering if there’s any conversations where you’re feeding off the same pool of creativity and such?
LW: No, we’re actually all so different. We’ve definitely shared advice and talked about stuff on the industry level, in terms of how to navigate our careers: how do you deal with so and so. That’s the really important sharing knowledge sort of thing. Most trans people have seen at least one of our movies. Our work has gotten out there. If you’re someone who likes movies, you’ve probably seen those films, especially if you’re someone trans or genderqueer in some way. I don't think that’s reflected as much to us talking about our processes.
Like I’ve seen Vera direct. I’ve seen Jane direct on set, and they’ve obviously seen me direct because they’ve acted in my stuff. It’s like, I can guess what all their influences are, based on what’s in their movies. But it’s not like we’re all sitting around being like ‘okay, here’s what trans cinema is going to be.’
FB: The cabal of transsexuals, making movies with the same agenda.
LW: If we’re all sitting out on my porch with a ginger beer, or whatever, the conversation is not gonna be deep in the weeds of ‘okay what does trans cinema look like?’ I think all of us find it kind of funny to even try to think about putting all of our work into the same box. All of us joked with each other: ‘God, it’s so weird that they would compare your movie and my movie.’ We’re both trans, but we don’t exactly see the similarities. If you were to watch Castration Movie, The People’s Joker, and I Saw the TV Glow, you definitely see the overlaps, maybe in the trans stuff. but the way we relate to it, the way we present it is all so varied and so different that it’d be really hard. I’d love to see someone make a case for how these movies are related, if there’s something below just the transness of them.
FB: TV Glow is the one I encountered first, and that’s because of distribution I’d say. I’m interested in the different approaches to distribution you’ve all had. You’re on Gumroad and select theaters. The People’s Joker has had a very rocky distribution life due to copyright stuff. TV Glow has A24 behind it, so it’s the most institutional if we had to say that. I’m stoked to get to see Castration Movie in the cinema. But at the same time, this needs to be watched on some dinky computer in my basement.
LW: It should be on your iPod video, that’s the version I imagine in my head. That’s how I engaged with fucked up weird art movies when i was younger. I grew up in Calgary. So, unless something was going on at the time, it’d be at the Plaza would sometimes show a cool movie. If it wasn’t for that, I was limited to see anything that looked or sounded or felt like Castration Movie. I had to torrent it online and watch it covertly on my ipod video where no one could see the weird sex stuff and queer elements.
So, to me, my association with what Castration movie is, as a cinematic object, is something you click a download link on the internet, you wait X number of hours for it to download, and then you can watch it secretly in your house. I was the type of person who would find some fucked up movies, and I’d invite some friends over and we’d watch them downstairs at my mom’s house. To me it was trying to match that experience. You can never dictate how your movie is gonna be watched by people. You never know how the audience is gonna come to it. With me having that side of things where i was pulling from in terms of the tone, the feel, what i felt this movie represented, and trying to match that in distribution, it did have the result that the way the movie mainly blew up was people watching it together on discord. People who had seen it would be like ‘oh my god, we’ve all gotta get together and watch this.’ and then they would watch it on a discord server together. And that started to branch out where people would invite their friends over, and that’s how it got this wildfire word-of-mouth. If you’re 10 people in a discord server, all of them might be in a different city. They’re pulled together by some niche topic, and then someone’s like ‘for our movie night this week, lets watch this.’ So now you’ve got this very international friend group who now have an awareness of the movie. and they each take it to their own spaces.
I think the way, especially queer people is we take up a lot of different niches in our lives, where we have the things we like, and a lot of people I know will be in multiple discord servers each based on one niche they have. So if someone watches the movie and thinks its super cool, they might bring it up in three or four of those servers where it makes sense. Now a bunch of people are hearing about it. That’s how i saw it all happening. I also then ended up with really great supporters to distribute an independent film because i wanted to keep it as accessible a project as possible.
I wanted to keep the Gumroad up and pay what you want. Basically the minimum threshold I charge on there is just so I don’t lose money for someone to download the movie, because Gumroad has to take a cut. So that’s like $4 Canadian or something right now, and that’s the bare minimum. So people can download the movie and watch it. Then I have distributors in Europe, Matchbox Cine, who are the fist people to screen the movie theatrically. and then Muscle Distribution in the US and Canada who have said ‘hey, if you all wanna see this movie, lets get it out into theaters.’ so it started from that word-of-mouth of people who watched online, and people were starting to say i would love to come see this.
One of the first super DIY screenings we in North America was this guy, Hal, reached out to me. HE was like ‘hey, I haven’t seen your movie yet, but I have access to a space in Seattle. Can I screen it” I was like ‘yeah, I’ll come down, we’re all in Vancouver. It’s so quick.’ He had never done a film screening before. He’s never hosted anything. The venue was an anarchist art gallery space. So it was literally just an old projector facing a white wall with laptop speakers. Actually, it was better than laptop speakers. But it was very minimum presentation. But the second we did that screening, I knew that was gonna be the life of the film. There was someone who had driven from Oakland, to Seattle to attend the screening of the movie. Me and the cast, Eva Clements and Marissa Wright and Penny Andrew’s, Dakota Blaze, they were all with me. They were kinda looking at each other like, ‘Oh my God, this movies gonna be a big deal, isn’t it?’ That was in October 2024. We were all thinking ‘this is gonna get a lot bigger than we anticipated.’
From there everyone started screening it. I’m flying in two hours to go to L.A. and screen both movies.
FB: That’s nuts, because people struggle to get any kind of eyes on their projects. I honestly think it’s because you’re mimicking a lot of the media you’re commenting on. People had already been sending each other weird .mp4s at each other to freak each other out. now we have this slow cinema, mumblecore trans story about the most pathetic people. I’m really curious about the method you used to shoot this. The dinky camera is amazing and has such a texture.
LW: It’s so funny because its literally my parents old home video camera from, like, 2000. I remembered shooting stuff on it as a kid, and I had been in the process of digitizing all these old tapes i had. And i was couch surfing with friends at the time and it was easy to just throw it in a backpack and have it with me. the first footage we shot for the movie was my friends Aoife and Magda, they had their band, and that’s the band in the movie. Thy were playing in the space that opens the chapter i star in (chapter ii.). They were off to perform in this very historic Vancouver venue called Smiling Buddhas, which has been around forever. At the time that we shot it was this grungy DIY falling apart space. It’s burned down since then so it’s not been accessible for a while. I was like ‘oh my god, if i’m gonna go shoot you guys playing in here on this Hi-8 camcorder, the footage is gonna look crazy. It’ll look so timeless. We’re gonna go in, all gonna be wearing our winter jackets in this cold warehouse type space, we’re gonna perform, and if I shoot it on this camera its gonna add a joie de vivre or something to it. It’s gonna feel beautiful and timeless and special, and we’ll have that footage forever.’
The second I put that camera up and started filming them play, I knew castration movie was gonna be this. That was when CASTRATION MOVIE started to fully form as a stylistic and ‘Oh, I can just sort of do this’ sort of thing. And then the story, it had been a bunch of pieces that came about over the months preceding and culminated in, well, it would have been the same week that i filmed that show in December 2022. I was talking with Noah Baker who plays the incel superman in chapter one. We were driving to Magda and Aoile’s house. And Noah, he does a lot of theatre, asked ‘if you were to write a play what would it be?’ I had this idea a long time that I’ve been percolating of a trans woman doing a DIY orchiectomy, and we have multiple characters intersecting. and the basic structure was built out of that conversation. It was really funny because I had thought of it as a theatre piece, on stage. The grand beauty of it was that the second we started filming it with that home video camera, it was like no this will create real life in the way that a play would, you know, the immediacy, the home video effect. And then I knew I could merge these two things, where the story, I wanted, to have this very personal [closeness]. Like, with a play you are writing this thing where you want the audience to be in the room with these people, and you want it to feel real and feel close. That’s what I realized with the home video camera was I can zoom this right into the pores on someone’s face. I can get close and make this be so intimate in the way theater would feel.
FB: It completely works. Its the immediacy and, also the familiarity. Digital video has really entered our brains, wormed its way in. Even then way its titled, its like one of those files you would find in a ZIP file full of awful footage, like “castrationmovie.mp4” beside that eel movie from Japan.
LW: Well, with castration movie it was kind of a joke to be like, well its what it says on the tin. There’s this humour of it because we thought we’d release the movie as one piece. So, I thought we’d have this really long drama and that would culminate in my character performing a DIY orchiectomy. And the thing with that is, the movie got away from me. It became a long sprawling epic in a way that i just didn’t know what happened. I just like the movie. I just kept filming. and then one of my friends was like, just allow yourself to let it be long. I was like okay im not gonna try to put this in the box of what a movie needs to be.
So what ended up with the title, it was a joke of saying, I’m saying ‘there’s going to be a castration at some point.’ So people who wanna see it for horror, in a fucked up movie way, I’m getting them in on that, and the other level, theres a meta humour to it, as a trans woman making movies it’s a way of reclaiming the worst impression of what your movie could be. I get that with underground trans women artists, theres always this sort of appear towards addressing themes around dysphoria with some degree of bodily harm. There’s definitely been a lot of remarkable art that does that. So theres also this way of joking, ‘this is what you expect of us, so I’m just gonna give it to you.’
Because a lot of films made by cis filmmakers turn that on its head, and they have these big scenes where a trans woman will be like, oh im so dysphoric, and they castrate themselves, thats how the ending of the movie has to be. and its just so so goofy when its something so beautiful. There’s a great film by this filmmaker named Carta Monir called “Side Shave.”She’s a trans woman and she expresses this anxiety she has over a childhood fear of getting her hair cut, that’s a lasting trauma. Then the bodily harm we see is this act of having her hair cut on screen. It’s this beautiful performance art. There’s such a way of elevating that, but the way that Hollywood treats it in movies is as almost a joke, a punch line, like of course the tranny is gonna castrate herself. So, to reclaim it in a way and say ‘no, this isn't like that.’ That’s what you think coming in as, maybe, a cis person, like ‘I’m gonna watch the trans castration movie,’ it sounds like a punchline. ‘The four and half hour trans castration movie’ sounds like a joke. Then you watch it and its this very sensitive depiction of characters that are very real and not particularly shocking. Like I think theres shocking elements to it, but we never set out to make something shocking. It was always just driven by what we felt was real and authentic. So to me, theres nothing specifically meant to be a big shock image in the movie or something, in the way that a lot of people might expect reading the title.”
FB: That’s perfect because the expectation, its part of the narrative structure. When you brought up theatre I was thinking of Oedipus Rex, like people going to that play are aware of this guy and are like ‘oh no, i know what’s gonna happen, oh no.’ they’re just waiting for him to realize.
LW: And that’s the same thing we’re setting up with this movie. That’s the fun of it. and now the third part is coming out in a couple months. In each part, I think the audience is waiting for it. They’re like ‘is this where it finally becomes the castration movie?’
FB: I was thinking about Twin Peaks: The Return a lot, because its an eighteen hour movie essentially. it just takes its time, and gives you these vignettes. You get attached to it thinking you’re gonna be watching season 3 of Twin Peaks, and obviously it is, but its just not giving you that willingly. Lynch is like, no we’re gonna sit for a while, and we’re gonna have a think. And Lynch is so influential. He had his finger on queer cinema somehow.
LW: I will say that’s actually probably one of the biggest unifying factors with like, me, Vera and Jane. This is still something I wanna formulate a full opinion on, but its like we all have such high reverence for David Lynch. Like that’s all over our work, but whats so fascinating about it is all of us pulled different things from Lynch. which I think is really interesting.
FB: That rules. It’s so metal, and I do think it comes through. Well, I’m out of time, but I wanna know if you have any Calgary shout outs.
LW: I mean, the thing is the Calgary I know and love is left back in 2012, because I haven’t lived there in 14 years now. I will say keen viewer will potentially notice a few Alberta locations in the movie. There’s the sequence where the brother’s wedding is shot at a rather notable little camp that is just South West of Calgary. It’s funny, the movie Camp directed by Avalon Fast, which was an Alberta production, was shot at the same camp like a year later. Its a fascinating little Alberta film connection for anyone watching it. it’s definitely got some Alberta in it. I am planning to have an entire chapter of this project take place in Alberta. So, we will have to get back to Alberta eventually.
FB: Right on. To the chagrin of Danielle Smith.
LW: Well, maybe I might try to get Danielle Smith to cameo in the movie.
Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps plays at Globe Cinema on Wednesday, January 14.