Yeah, so, zombie strippers!

Yeah!

So, you based it off the play, "Rhinoceros?" Did you see the zombie connection beforehand?

Actually, no. What originally happened was we were making a very low-budget, actually non-budget horror movie that was shamelessly marketable just based to break into one of the film markets. While we were making this one film, we were consoling ourselves by saying, "At least we're not making something as bad as 'Zombie Strippers'." That was the joke. And then every time I said that, it got a laugh. So it got me thinking, well, hey, if just that joke can get a laugh so many times, why don't I actually use that for another shamelessly marketable film, yet something that we're obviously mocking ourselves with.

Then, if you start that low in the gutter, you have a place to pile stuff up underneath it to bring it up a little bit, to put content to it. So you can disguise, or not so much disguise, the kind of content that we wanted to put in the film and yet make it shamelessly marketable. And so, Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" is the perfect play to use to parody because zombie stippers is so absurd, "Rhinoceros" is so absurd, and then zombie strippers is so much more marketable, we can just meld the two. And hopefully get the notice of someone like Jenna and Robert, people like that, to help bump us up a level. And along came Sony, which surprised us.

But then, in the play, people turn into rhinoceroses. So is that like people turning into zombies?

Yeah, yeah. The play was a warning of the rise of fascism in Europe, and how this absurdist brutality is just rising and rising and we're just kind of ignoring it, and sort of saying it's okay. Whereas our film wants to say hey, here's the rise of, again, a brutality that's rampant in our country, yet we take it -- kind of in an American way -- and tie it to pop culture, and say, be careful of what somebody labels something, it's not necessarily beautiful just because somebody says it to people. Because there are so many things being thrown around now just in the name of, say, democracy ... it's such a beautiful word and yet people are using it for such horrible, horrible meanings.

Do you view this as a form of activism, in a way?

Passive activism, maybe. It's a capitalist activism, maybe. ... We wanted to make a movie -- we're filmmakers, first and foremost, but then again we wanted to have a message. So the film is supposed to entertain, and make money. It's the two things. It really needs to be for us to keep going, and make more films, and get more messages out there. But at the same time, we just slipped that message in there, so we can not necessarily preach, or hit the head with the message or lecture to them, but say hey, here's what we think, ha-ha-ha, here's some more good makeup effects, and another stripper, and oh, here's more of what we mean. ... It might be that subconsciously it may make a little more impact, or you might be able to send a message by more freshly entertaining people with the message.

And what about your previous films?

Well, the film before that was a film called "Noon Blue Apples," which was actually premiered at Sundance Film Festival. And it was a dark, psychological thriller that dealt with a woman who got involved with a conspiracy theory. There was a lot of anti-government stuff too. Whether it's real or not, what the paranoid character goes through, it exposes a lot of the conspiracy theories -- revolving around the government, around academia, against religions, stuff like that. This was right after 9/11 too, so not a lot of people received it very well. It got some critical acclaim, but nobody really wanted to put any money into it to try to sell it.

So for a few years, my sister Angela and I, ... we tried to come up with something else to do that we can get our production company off the ground and up and running. And horror was the perfect genre for that because so much was happening selling-wise. So many of these low-budget to no-budget horror films were selling, and making it to Blockbuster. These people who made these horrible, horrible movies were getting multi-picture deals and distributors, so that's why we tapped into horror genre.

And you've also done documentaries?

Yeah. I did a documentary about Jamaica with a friend of mine. We've done a few short films; usually they have some sort of scandalous or blasphemous or shocking content to them. Bruce Fletcher, who's the head of Dead Channels, he's the one who I talked to about coming up here -- he's shown three of our films? Actually this will be the fourth film of ours that he's shown up here in San Francisco. He says he likes our films a lot because they get both great reviews and horrible reviews.

How do you feel about that?

Actually, if the people who I'm targeting to insult or offend, if they're really hating the movie, I actually think I'm doing something right. So I'm fine with getting some horrible reviews, so I know people are talking about it at least, and its affecting them in one way or another. I'd hate to get just OK reviews across the board. It's really nice when you hear someone raving, like the San Francisco Weekly saying it's the best movie of the year, really, but then one of the Republican newspapers in Nevada saying it's absolutely by far one of the worst movie ever made. So I think that says something.

In the play, there's a part where they're talking about the rhinoceros, the African versus the Asiatic rhinoceros. And you're half-Asian, right?

Right.

So then, this whole Asiatic versus African rhinoceros conversation goes into this discussion about race, and how "my best friends are Asians," and stuff like that. And then I was looking at the YouTube videos that were out there and interviews of the actors, and the one who plays Kwan -- Jessica Custodio, she says, "I play the token Asian." So how does this idea of race work -- does race work into your film at all?

It does, but specifically to the Latin American race, to Mexican Americans. At the time, politically, that is the most obvious, I think, conflict -- when it comes to the Mexican border. And so there's Paco, the janitor, and Joey Medina who plays the character, he was on board 100 percent to make the racism between Ian, the main character, and Paco as absurd as possible. We wanted to make the racism over the top. And make Ian not only a racist, but ignorant and a hypocrite. Unfortunately, a lot of that really kind of politically incorrect humor was cut out by the studio. So there's still humor there, but the whole hypocrisy of the whole thing seems to not be there anymore, where Ian just completely ignorant when it comes to his knowledge of other races and cultures. He's supposed to represent middle white America. ... So we're trying to be as absurd, as ridiculous, as comedic as possible, but then again give them some meat. Give them the real people, the characters.

What are you trying to accomplish politically? You say you're "trying to make a difference," I read somewhere. What is this difference that you're trying to make?

Just like, I think, any artist who's doing something not just for the sheer, filthy lucre of it, if they have a voice or a vision, they would like to make some sort of difference. If it's something like just making the world a more entertaining place, or, as we would like to say, we don't know if our message is right, just in our own minds we know we're right about everything, so that's where we would like to make a difference when it comes to what we feel is a more just society, a more just world.

I guess the most obvious thing would be if you see this film and it makes you cringe when you hear that this is George Bush's fourth term, maybe it would give pause before this election year, and think, "Well, who am I going to vote for?" Just to think a little bit, just for people to think a little bit more for themselves, as opposed to just blindly accepting what people are telling you. That's basically what this film is about -- conformity, about believing what people are saying, and not thinking for themselves. To become, in metaphor and allegory, "the walking dead." And just having no view for themselves, no thinking and personality. It would be nice to kind of break that from to so many people, who just wander around the country, not knowing what they're doing but just doing it because they're told to do it.

Do you identify [with any of the characters]? Are you in there?

Actually, I'm not sure. Basing the script on another medium, even as loosely as we did "Rhinoceros," sometimes you're parodying certain characters and certain aspects of our culture, that sometimes you don't fit in there. I guess I'm probably in there, I'm just in denial about it. I'm not sure which one. But I'd like to think I'm the coolest one.

Whatever that means.

Yeah!

Did you go to film school?

I tried to go to the [University of Southern California] film school -- I'm from Los Angeles -- I tried to get in, and I went there for one semester but just couldn't afford it. I tried to raise money to go back to school, I just started working in the industry, and worked in almost every aspect of the industry, from production assistance to location managing, to camera, to learn just about everything I could before going back to school. After so many years it didn't make sense to go back to school for this, for filmmaking, and just started do them myself.

So do you have a background in the humanities? Were you a philosophy major?

No, actually, I just had the one semester at a university. And basically I just try to educate myself. Actually it's a great education when you have an idea -- like I had read "Rhinoceros" on a whim years ago, because I had a friend who wanted to produce the play, and I thought maybe I'd help. And now years later, I thought I wanted to parody existentialism, let me do more research on it. So I did a lot of reading, and researched the hell out of it, really, and that's my education -- researching my own work as I'm going into it.

Where do you want to go? What are your dream projects?

Well I have a bunch. Of course the idea was that you're trying to plug your own ideas for years and only being able to make a handful. I keep writing and writing and writing. So I have everything from more horror films to films that are based on "Rashomon" that tackle Christianity, and stuff like that. I just have a whole slew of things that I want to say. Hopefully I'll say them in the film medium, since that's what I love doing. I would love to be known as somebody who can make the worst horror movie that is for some reason enjoyable, and something that is so inaccessible that people have no idea what I'm trying to say. And a few in between, but I like pushing the edges. I like being extreme.

Certainly "Zombie Strippers" is.

Yeah, hopefully! Hopefully.

In your casting, you went to the top -- of horror, and to the top of... nudity. How was it deciding to pick up the phone and say, yeah, we want Jenna Jameson, or yeah, we want Robert Englund.

With our other little horror film, we're using MySpace a lot to market it. And we were getting people -- I'm sure it wasn't actually them, but it was their fan pages -- we were getting some interesting people who were becoming our friends on this little page. So we decided, hey, let's go ahead and try talk to these people. And Jenna was one of them. She's a huge horror fan.

So Jenna was on MySpace, and you contacted her through MySpace?

It wasn't through MySpace, but it was took getting Jenna Jameson wanting to be our friend on MySpace, going, well hey, wait a minute, here's an idea -- these are the people who are into the horror world. We sent the script to her, tried to get hooked up through her manager at the time, and it was really tough, but she read the script and just based on the script agreed to do it. But it was seeing that she was on the cover of a horror film, and the DVD was in Blockbuster -- and she was only in the film for five minutes. So knowing her politics, knowing that probably politically she would want to make a statement along with us, and knowing that she could market a film even though she was only in it for five minutes, well, this was the perfect opportunity. Or the perfect person to go to with a film like this. And when I met the Sony exec for the first time, the first thing he said to me was, "Jenna Jameson, zombie strippers, this film for us is a no-brainer!" And I said, OK, well apparently that was the right decision to make, because at first we were warned to not use Jenna Jameson in the film because no one would want to touch the film, but Sony couldn't wait to get ahold of it.