A Man Marked for Death: Julien Temple Talks 𝘉𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘵 25 Years Later

Real mobsters. Real heroin. Real creative differences.

Bullet (1996) is insane. Imagine a gangster picture at the crossroads of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, Abraham Polonsky’s Body and Soul and Fassbinder’s Querelle - only with the JMZ subway line as backdrop instead of the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine a vehicle for Mickey Rourke - after achieving the pinnacle of movie stardom, snorting it all up his nose and getting himself battered beyond recognition in an ill-advised boxing career - opting to relive those traumas on the silver screen. Imagine Tupac in an extended cameo as a one-eyed drug lord with a heart of gold named “Tank”. Imagine Adrien Brody (post-Angels in the Outfield, pre-The Pianist) as a beret-clad wannabe Salvador Dali, painting massive murals on the sides of abandoned brick factory buildings. Imagine early cameos from Michael Kenneth Williams, Donnie Wahlberg and Peter Dinklage. You don’t have to imagine any of these things, because they already existed 25 years ago in Bullet - which, as it happens, you’re welcome to watch right here if you’ve got the stomach for it. It’s not perfect and it’s also impossible to forget: mean, scabrous, repugnant and violent, with moments of sublime widescreen beauty along the way.

This movie has no cult, had no subcultural predestination. Bullet came and went anonymously in 1996 with a dubious afterlife via video-on-demand. What happened? How is this macabre, queer-curious ugly duckling credited to British filmmaker Julien Temple, the de facto sixth Sex Pistol, who made his name directing day-glo music videos for Sade, Culture Club, David Bowie and countless others? Temple’s prior features, the British coming-of-age musical Absolute Beginners and the American sci-fi romp Earth Girls Are Easy, both had a mischievous, sparkling pop sensibility. How did Julien find himself chasing rats and making Mickey Rourke look even more like a walking skeleton than thought possible, all on grit-sooted location in Giuliani’s Brooklyn? I had to find out. Sly and hilarious, Julien was generous enough to heed the call (with the caveat that he barely remembers making Bullet) and indulged me for an hour-plus “pisser” of an interview, hopefully the first shot in a bigger resuscitation for this misunderstood, grand guginol anti-classic.

“Cheers” for doing this, Julian. Where are you right now?

I’m in Somerset, the west of England.

Is that where you were at the beginning of all this madness?

Well, I was in Turin on the weekend when they realized they had gotten it, I guess on the 23rd of February, last year… And it was the carnival, you know. It was bizarre because everyone was dressed up as Joaquin Phoenix in Joker, the streets were taken over by thousands of Jokers, twenty thousand Jokers. And the police were there, telling the Jokers to go home: killer virus on the loose! And that was the first I’d heard of it, actually - I was in the middle of that. And I work in London, but I haven’t been there very much since the beginning.

Joker… Did you see it?

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been putting it off. Maybe I’m afraid. I really like the Jack Nicholson version…

Gotta check it out. A lot of people hate it but I love it.

Okay, so. I’m trying to come at this from the perspective of a film programmer. Specifically I’m trying to focus on films that have - for any reason or number of reasons - slipped through the cracks. Usually the reason is telltale. Films that aren’t as renown as they should be - 

Ah, I see. All of my movies! 

But among your movies, this is the one which truly nobody is talking about. Please correct me if that’s wrong. It’s not a slag… I would rather interview you like this than drum up a painful spin for some editor at some clickbait publication, on why Bullet deserves to be reconsidered, “now more than ever” yadda yadda…

Sounds good. My only problem will be, I haven’t thought about this film for a long time - so it may be floating around in my consciousness…

Let’s make that the first question. Why haven’t you thought about Bullet? This is a safe space.

I’ve got other things to think about. Keep going forward, mate! Moving on up! No, I don’t know - I haven’t seen anyone who was in it recently. I think about it when I see Mickey Rourke, which is very rare these days. Our paths don’t cross. But, it’s nice to hear about it - it was a painful experience - that’s why I’ve kind of blotted it out. But I wouldn’t mind watching it again; you’ve tripped my interest. (pause) Is it available?

The movie is in fact very hard to pin down - VHS, some ancient DVDs, certainly not streaming. I had to go to a website where people trade extremely rare films and they didn’t have it. And I feel like other New Line Cinema titles from the same era were given more considered home video releases…

It’s kind of weird, isn’t it, because Tupac is such an icon for the ages. Mickey Rourke is Mickey Rourke. Adrien Brody, a big star in his own right. You’d think there would be some interest in it. Ted Levine, such a great actor. Uh… Don’t know. If I start thinking about it, maybe something will happen. I have a version with the music that I wanted, but of course they took it all off, forced me to use tracks they could afford, I guess. You know the Miles Davis album “Jack Johnson”?

One of my favorites of his.

That’s what I had edited it to. It was a great backdrop, a great soundtrack. That was the score for my version of the movie - a lot of it, maybe all of it. “Right Off” - that was our main kind of theme. I’ll try and dig that out, it’s kinda fun. And a much better soundtrack. It wasn’t just Miles Davis. But that was the vibe.

Who is “they”? New Line? 

Well. “They” is a good question. It was a very, very strange movie - I was always asking who “they” were, actually. Who were the producers? It’s a movie that Mickey Rourke did - not necessarily because he wanted to do it. Because he owed a favor to a certain bigshot mafiosi in New York City. He… paid him off, with this movie. I had no idea, any of this, really, when I got involved. Some weird lawyer in L.A. was strangely fronting it as a “producer”… I went out to Miami to meet Mickey, who was so out of shape - really sagging all over. Living as though he was a Cuban, speaking in a thick Cuban accent. I was like, “Mickey… How can you be in shape to play this fit boxer in six weeks’ time?” I’m thinking, this is a joke. This whole thing is a joke. Mickey says, “I’ll be there. I’ll be fit. You’ll see me, man.” And the miracle of steroids... It happened!

He’s also credited as cowriter on the film. How much of the mafioso stuff was deliberately put into the movie? On the one hand, the film is stylized to hell; on the other, the scenes in these homes and businesses feel somewhat authentic.

Well, we were going for, you know, poetic realism, as usual. If you can get both it’s a good thing. It was based on real characters, real places, real life experiences - the cowriter was Bruce Rubinstein, and it’s the story of his brother. He and Mickey had met in jail when he was part of a gang in Long Island and Mickey was in this Miami gang; he’d come up north and they would both rob a fur warehouse in Queens. This is before Mickey was a movie star. They got busted and thrown in the same jail cell. Bruce became Mickey’s assistant after he became a star. And they always talked about this story: Bullet, he was called. A Jewish street gangster, a drug dealer. They wrote the script over a period of time together, and it definitely had an authenticity to it. We had real problems all over New York, doing it - the story of a Jewish gangster. We’re asking Jewish permission to shoot and they’re refusing us, saying, there’s no such thing as a Jewish gangster. Every Jewish boy is a doctor or a lawyer. There’s no Jewish mob. (laughing)

And there are very few films about modern Jewish gangsters. It’s always Meyer Lansky or Bugsy Siegel. I remember shooting in Williamsburg, where the Hasidic community is - during a religious holiday, a big celebration, a bunch of people heard we were shooting nearby and they wanted to stop the shoot. So they just lined the roads wherever we shot - like 5,000 guys in fur hats lining up outside the production, across the street. A lot of fur in this story. Meanwhile, Mickey and his guys are trying to drive into the shot, with this Barry White playing - did Barry White make the movie?

Yes - they leave the prison up north, drive down to the city, and start cooking and shooting up heroin with “Never Never Gonna Give You Up” playing.

One of the few tracks we could afford. 

Your choice - not the production’s.

That was about the only one that survived, I think. Because they were singing it. So it was even harder to replace. They were all smacked out for real, as well. They’d all shot up for that scene, a number of scenes. They were high on real heroin, giving it another layer. In fact, Mickey insisted that I film an 8-minute take of him shooting up heroin, listening to “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. And you see the real effect of the heroin on him. I think they made us cut it out. I’d have to look at it. He wanted it that way. 

It was very difficult working with Mickey, because every night when we would wrap, he had to go eat dinner with the mafia guys. He couldn’t do what the rest of the crew did - you know, go out, get into New York City, go out with models or whatever he’d normally do. He couldn’t be Mickey Rourke because he was paying his dues in South Brooklyn. And he got more and more depressed because they wouldn’t let him do anything else, really. He was staying at the Plaza when it was still a hotel, he’d come back wanting to kill himself. He’d lie in the road on 5th Avenue trying to get run over by cabs. We had to pull him off the road: “Mickey, it’s not as bad as all that, man - it’s only another five weeks!” A lot of the time he wouldn’t turn up until four in the afternoon. Very, very pressurized. Tupac was the one who kept him behaving, vaguely. And Tupac’s reputation at the time was such that Mickey was no longer the “baddest” guy on the set.

Even if it was greenlit to pay off Mickey’s debts, Bullet has the look and feel of a movie that was supposed to be big.

It wasn’t a big studio picture, it was low budget - Village Roadshow, the Australian company, they were small at that point. Was Mickey the draw in 1996? Not really. Our coup was Tupac. He was something else at that point.

My initial obsession with this movie starts with the use of locations. Most of Bullet takes place under the JMZ subway line, in south Williamsburg - maybe near the Lorimer stop? I think I recognized a police station, a florist… There’s also a funeral scene at Calvary Cemetary, adjoining Long Island City and Maspeth.

I was taken around by the location guys - all around Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, all over the place - Coney Island. I’d be saying, “Wow! Stop! That restaurant looks great! Let’s shoot there!” Like, an old Fifties type mafia restaurant. “Nah, man - you can’t shoot there. You gotta shoot here. Vinny’s place.” I’m like - what? You’re the location guy but I’m the fucking director. No. You shoot where we say you shoot. I’m like, whoa, this is getting stranger and stranger. And as we drove around I was shooting all these locations with a little old video camera, you know. The more we got used to each other, the more they would open up. They start telling crazy stories of, you know, Sopranos-like acts all around Brooklyn, things that happened in this or that building. They went to 7-Eleven in Coney Island, it was the end of the day, sun was just coming in through the wind screen, and I turned down the visor and it had, attached to the back of it, all these pictures of John Gotti Jr. Suddenly it all clicked. “Who are the caterers?” We’re the fucking caterers. Doing everything. You’re going into Bed-Stuy? That’s the jungle, man. You need us. You need security. That sort of thing. They lived in these suburban houses with all these add-ons, several little houses knocked together, motorbikes everywhere, big-screen TVs, every luxury you could imagine.

One of the first scenes we shot with Tupac was a drug deal, in a Black housing project. We were setting up and the mercs, the mafia guys, were helping set up all the lights. Just getting dark, you know, twilight. Suddenly this gunfire rings out. Shooting the lights out from the roof of the project. “Get the fuck out!” All this stuff. These kids on the roof were objecting to us taking over their space. Well, the next thing I hear is the screeching of tires - the mafia guys were the first out of there. The security was bollocks, mate. So I’m banging on Tupac’s trailer, “Come on out, man, it’s getting a bit weird out here.” “I’m not ready yet, man! You hear that gunshot? You’re joking!” Finally, he comes out: “Look, it’s me - Tupac!” They’re like, fuck off! More gunshots. Fuck off, “Tupac”! They didn’t believe it was him. Tupac’s kinda rapping to prove it’s him. In the end they realized he was the real deal, and they came downstairs. So it was that kind of shoot.

Tupac was probably the most famous person on the planet in 1996.

He was both famous and infamous, on a huge scale. We were looking for a guy and some casting agent suggested him. I don’t know quite how it happened but he agreed to meet me and I met him downtown, at some big restaurant in the afternoon, it was really empty. He was very keen. He auditioned by doing Shakespeare to me. I’m like: This guy is amazing! And he was a wonderful guy. 

My background is white, Christian, suburban - it occurs to me that white people always cited Tupac’s affinity for Shakespeare. He did theater as a teenager, he knew Shakespeare - I have a notion that this was used to somehow de-scandalize Tupac, to make him more palatable. Or for whites to rationalize their love for his music, I guess. The guy contained multitudes and I wish he had been able to act in more movies. Tell me what Tupac brought to Bullet?

Well, he brought himself. Which was what we needed really. He was a subtle actor, interested in the art of acting, definitely. Very good to work with! We improvised a few times and I always dug what he came up with - “You know, you smell like wet dog”, that kind of thing. We got on really well. I visited him the first time he was in jail, actually. He inhabited the role - he knew what he was playing and he made intelligent choices about it. A sharp guy, a brilliant mind - as was Mickey, but he was in more of a crisis at that moment. Tupac was able to ride out the storm surrounding him - then again, he didn’t get out of it alive. But at the time he seemed invincible. 

But it was kind of overwhelming, his aura at that moment - whether he had shot those cops in Atlanta, whether he had raped this girl, y’know. He didn’t rape the girl, he didn’t shoot the cops, but he did bring that mad danger with him. He had that rep, that rap. He was so famous that wherever we went, the NYPD fucked with us. They did not want Tupac on the streets of New York City. They were abusive to him. You had to have cops on the film, obviously - but these were not happy film cops. Whenever he was around, it was a definite bad vibe. They did little things you couldn’t call them out on: letting trucks go through when you’re shooting, you know what I mean? A lot of shots were ruined, sound-wise, mainly, because the cops let them be ruined. A lot of takes, the NYPD would let trucks through when we needed sound running. What you pay the film cops to do, after all, is to stop traffic. They were manipulating traffic so it was more difficult to shoot the scene. It felt like some of the cops wanted to kill Tupac if they had the chance. So they were making it really really hard for us to shoot outdoor sequences. But also, he was mobbed by fans wherever we went - so we couldn’t start shooting until that had gone down, then another half-hour after waiting eight hours for Mickey… (laughing) 

Interesting, interesting. I shared a trailer with Tupac. Again, these are mafia guys, trying to save money I guess. It was a big Winnebago but they give me a little spot at the end, just partitioned it out. And you know - it’s lunchtime, I’m trying to crash out, just to get some rest or whatever, and obviously Tupac and his crew are in there blasting music and dancing. The biggest guy was his bodyguard. So the whole trailer would be rocking while this guy was dancing - like, 250 pounds of muscle. And they’re spliffing away, so I’d come out after the lunch break, high - breathing all this weed through the cracks in the partition. That bodyguard was the one who would set Tupac up, the first time he was shot, in New York City - he was recording some songs for the Bullet soundtrack, at the end of production.

Filmmaking after smoking weed… I’ve done it on the sets of student films and it was always a mistake. I can’t imagine what it’s like on a big production with A-list stars.

Well, you have to get a grip on yourself. But you know - they were on heroin. Not Tupac, obviously. But Mickey, John Enos III - they were on smack. I’d rather I had not inhaled while working with a film crew. After hours, fine, but not while working. 

How did you, Julien Temple, end up directing this movie? At first glance there’s no music connection, you had no prior visible interest in crime films… 

I knew Mickey a little bit - he dug the Pistols so he knew Steve Jones, a guy in LA, we’d bump into each other. He was friends with Johnny Depp, he’d seen and dug my work. I had a friend named Gerry Harrington who’d sort of managed people. He turned me onto the project when the script was flying around. 

Where was your career in 1995?

In the doldrums, man! (Chuckling) You know - I had done Earth Girls Are Easy, which had gotten a fucked up release, I’d done a lot of music videos. 

Absolute Beginners got a fucked up release here in the States as well - or did it even get one?

Yeah. I had to leave England because I couldn’t get any work after Absolute Beginners. I went to America where they offered me Earth Girls Are Easy. I was trying to do loads of movies that never happened - my big thing was trying to do a Weegee movie, which is why I kind of knew a bit about New York. I had researched that quite heavily. A different era but a similar milieu. We even had Joe Pesci - suddenly he’s doing a different Weegee movie, The Public Eye with Howard Franklin. Odd movie. I was learning I wasn’t really suited to being in Hollywood. I’m used to doing what I want to do, not what I’m told - a difficult career choice but worth making.

You worked with incredibly famous artists and directed incredibly famous music videos. That didn’t buy you any autonomy?

Projects that didn’t have massive commercial promise, they didn’t like. That’s who I am: I live and die by that, so it’s fine.

The movie is such a smashed mosaic: it’s about race, sexuality, class, religion, family, drug addiction, the body. It takes a much more confrontational view of people’s identities than a typical American or Hollywood film. Is that your outsider perspective? 

Certainly I wanted to bring a punk attitude to it. Filmmaking is a social activity, it’s about the society you live in. Earth Girls is about the San Fernando Valley. This is a film about those parts of New York, built into its fabric. Maybe I didn’t have the hangups an American director would have - I clearly saw those things and I went for them.

Mickey’s character is Jewish. Pac’s character is Black. Donnie Wahlberg plays another hoodlum who’s Irish - and there’s a thread where the trio were childhood best friends, and now each represents a different faction in this blossoming gang war. It’s almost like a backlot Warner Brothers film, a Cagney film...

The script was definitely rooted in the gangster tradition of the Thirties. I loved film noir as a genre, of course - I wanted to bring a noirish look to this even though it was a color film. I was fucking with genre, really. 

The movie has an insane visual panache. Now, film critics are very lazy people - but this time the cliche was true. It made sense, to me, that a music video director would turn in something so kind of baroque and colorful, but also very grimy, very violent… So tell me a bit more about what you referred to earlier as “poetic realism”. Some scenes look like Minelli, but it’s guys shooting up heroin or stabbing each other or whatever. And this is a literal theme, too, with Adrien Brody’s character, hoping to escape hood life and become a fine artist.

I was a big expert on Minnelli musicals, actually - Absolute Beginners was inspired by Minnelli. And also, I grew up studying fine art, the history of painting, I never saw movies as a kid - we didn’t have a TV in my house. So I was very aware of visual composition, always. My films are very much about that, or they used to be. I like banging it all together. I used to insist on cranes and things like that. The visuals of a film are very important to me, it’s why I make ‘em really. I see them as moving paintings. 

I’m very fond of the sequence where they go to buy drugs in that bombed-out warehouse overlooking the East River from the Williamsburg side. On the one hand it’s the supposed “real” New York of the 1990s, but on the other it has a kind of lofty, widescreen, theatrical, Brechtian kind of a look…

Probably. Yeah. New York City is a beautiful thing to photograph, a brilliant thing to put a camera on - whatever, wherever the decay is. I’d like to do more of it.

The financiers didn’t see it as a work of art. For them it was supposed to be something that came off a conveyor belt. Mickey had to do it - he didn’t have enough respect, from my point of view, for the process of making the film as good as it could be. I don’t fully blame him for that. He was in a bad place. I understood a lot more about him, his childhood, how difficult his early life was - he’s a very complex guy. It was wonderful working with him in a lot of ways, but he was difficult. The fact they just wanted to keep to the schedule and get the movie done - they didn’t see the movie as anything other than a way to make (or lose) money.

Watching with a friend, his first question was… Was Mickey Rourke trying to come out of the closet with Bullet?  

You know, I was always puzzled by that. When I met him in Miami he had these little chihuahua dogs with bows on them - he was playing this effeminiate street gangster guy. 

Lester, the character played by John Enos III - he’s somebody who flaunts his voracious sex life, all the women he’s banging, and obviously spends a ton of time and money on his appearance. Bullet tells him: “Deep down inside, you fuckin’ hate women. This shit’s real deep, it goes all the way back to your childhood. You don’t even know it’s going on… Deep down inside, I think you’re a latent homosexual.” It’s not subtext - it’s supertext!

It’s also the context of jail - being in jail, what goes on in jails. That’s an element in the mix. Was Mickey playing with it? Was it real? You know, I’ve worked with fascinating characters who played with gender fluidity, the Davies brothers, the Kinks - they were proffering an answer to the machismo of the Rolling Stones. Those mad heterosexual gyrations of Mick Jagger. Ray Davies became a big part of Warhol’s scene with Candy Darling, all those guys in the early Seventies. Bowie was the biggest thing in front of the early Kinks gigs, you know, they were bending genders - it’s what Bowie initially became famous for. But Bowie was not really gay, the Davies brothers weren’t really gay, but there was a fascination with playing at that. Even the Stones, Jagger, you know - it’s an interesting area, non-gay guys getting a kick out of pretending in some way to be gay. I think that was part of the subject matter in Bullet, for sure.

There’s an extraordinary sequence where Bullet, just released from prison, picks up this woman - I’m not sure if she’s a sex worker or just “keen” - they go to a motel and he can’t get it up. Later, he’s alone, shooting up heroin, and the image is dissolving: he’s having flashbacks. We see images of these guys from back in prison. Again, I’m like… New Line Cinema released this movie?! I don’t think an American filmmaker would include something like that - or would get away with including something like that.

I was keen to be real, as much as I could. No one was stopping me from doing that. And Mickey was into it. It was a chance to be free - although Mickey was forced to do the movie, the fact is these were not normal studio executives running the show, blanding it all out wherever they could - that makes it what it is, I guess. 

I’m hearing the film was supposed to come off a conveyor belt, but also that the film was free, in some other way, to be weird and wild. How much of the finished product is you?

As I said it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen the film, I’m not in a position to own this or disown that - it is what it is, it’s what happened. I’m kind of always accepting that a film is what emerges from what you went through. And you can’t really rue the mistakes you made or get too excited about what you did right - it’s just what you manage to produce. Bullet had a lot of great factors, people in the cast, the cameraman Crescenzo Notarile was great, it was just very difficult because of the elements and time and pressure involved with working with Mickey at that time in his life. You were scheduled to get a day’s work and you didn’t get it - and that was building up and building up and that was bad vibes. It’s difficult to deal with: you haven’t gotten this, you haven’t gotten that. It gets you at the end. (Especially when you’re high on weed.) And I was the only English guy on the crew so I did feel a long way from home at times, on the streets of Bed-Stuy, Two weeks behind schedule, three weeks in: how did I get here?

I don’t mean to keep putting the film in the same frame. But let’s take inventory of the factors influencing your creative choices. Mickey is one, the financiers are another. Tell me, from memory, what you can about the version of Bullet that was taken away from you.

The weirdest thing was… I was in London, working on the film with my editor. And I found out they were editing their own version in L.A., without telling me. So I guess I’m lucky that they used my edit, even without the Miles tracks, rather than some other version. But the postproduction was dodgy, like the production.

You know, I had been run out of England for going over budget on Absolute Beginners. English film production was at a real low ebb in the mid-1980s. A company called Goldcrest had three relatively big British films in an effort to kickstart the industry. Revolution, with Al Pacino - 20 million quid. The Mission, with De Niro - 15 million. And then Absolute Beginners, at 9 million. Those two went £15 and £10 million over, respectively. We went £1 million over, an overspend on the huge London sets that we had built. And that was an up-front expenditure. So as the young kids on the block, we got the spanking when Goldcrest went bankrupt - threatening to bring the entire industry down with them. They told me I destroyed film in Britain. Which I would have been proud of doing, but I didn’t! And so I was warned by various grandees in the film game I would never work here again, but I was offered Earth Girls are Easy - and Absolute Beginners had been better received in the States. So I left Thatcher’s Britain behind for Ronald Reagan’s America.

Needless to say I was desperate to prove that I wouldn’t finish over budget or behind schedule this time. We came in a million dollars under budget. There was one shot with Jim Carrey’s tongue - I wanted to do a proper special effects shot with this huge, long tongue. Proper. They said, “We’re not gonna spend money on that!” Just a few months ago, a crew mate from Earth Girls told me: at that time, the line producer was working for a percentage of whatever we didn’t spend. I had not realized this in 1985. So, if we came in under a million, she would get $250,000. Under the table. This kind of thing… you see it a lot. Not just on movies like Bullet.

I once heard this about Larry Cohen - half the film’s budget is the director’s salary, the rest gets divied up on the actual production. The caveat being, if you write yourself that salary, you absolutely must grind the film out before the deadline. 

We were in that territory with Bullet, definitely - which makes it harder to make a film in a calm and reflective way. It was a challenge. I’m sure the movie has moments that work and moments where it doesn’t. I’ll watch it again. Let me reiterate: the version you have, those are my edits. It’s just a different soundtrack. 

The movie ends with Jay Z - the “In My Lifetime” remix. (“What’s the mea-ning / What’s the mea-ning of life?”) There’s poetry in that - a quarter century later, he’s one of the biggest rappers of all time, proudly hailing from the area where you shot Bullet, and the movie is all but unknown. Was that song your choice?

Like I said - they gave me a bunch of options and that was a track that I dug. And he wasn’t big at that time, was he? Some of the music they let us use, it wasn’t all bad - there was a lot of shit they gave us, but there was still some you could work with. 

Would you describe the process of making Bullet as traumatic? Traumatizing?

(long pause) Yeah. I would. Yeah. But, you know - I’m glad I went through it. I think most films are traumatizing. If they’re not, you’re not diving in deep enough, I think. This was particularly traumatizing - Absolute Beginners was too. 

I remember... well, I probably shouldn’t talk about that. I won’t talk about that. But I remember getting off the plane in Heathrow and feeling I had just survived something quite extreme (chuckling). Which is a good feeling. I just did a film with Shane McGowan which wasn’t the easiest, but it’s probably a better film because of the madness.

The release/completion of Bullet - how did it land in the culture? Did it?

It didn’t, I don’t think. They found it too real and too extreme in some ways. I was happily editing away here, as I said, when I realized they were cutting a tamer version in Los Angeles - I somehow managed to win that battle. I’m not sure how it happened. But they did take all the music off it, which made it a different film to me. I did manage to work with tracks they said they could afford, they gave me a list of things, they must have had some deal with whomever was involved. I can’t remember. Trying to make it work with what they had. They were very dismissive of the process of getting the movie out there - it was aborted at birth, essentially. Now I’m sounding a bit bitter. I don’t mean to be. I’m not sure how happy I would be with a mega-success, truthfully, so it doesn’t really bother me - it’s important to me that the film is out there but it’s not important that the weekend opening didn’t go through the roof. I think that affects you badly, as a filmmaker. If I had had a huge success with Earth Girls, I’m sure I’d be found upside down in some jacuzzi in the Hollywood Hills a long time ago. 

Special thanks to Dan Sullivan, Mike Hayes and Vivien Goldman.

uP nExT . . . . . .

Sandwiched between St. Patrick’s Day and Good Friday, I’m serving a long-simmered essay combining personal and political reflections on Martin Scorsese’s little-seen 2016 vanity project Silence - starring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as Portuguese Jesuits doing underground conversions in 17th century Japan - alongside his infinitely more successful (and equally Catholic-guilty) followup The Irishman, filmed in New York’s hottest new neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens.

Current Mood: pensive… 🤔
Current Music: David Bowie (feat. Mickey Rourke) - Shining Star