My phone call wakes Voss the next morning, so he calls me back after taking
twenty minutes to pull his brain together. We kick around the names of a few
establishments and meet an hour later. In person, the forty-year-old Voss looks
like he could be a character from one of his films, with a large tattoo on one
arm and black-and-white clothes that might be described as "rock-and-roll casual,"
except that "rock-and-roll" doesn't quite fit with a Starbucks in Brentwood.
Voss's flexibility in meeting me is not surprising. He embodies the independent
spirit and do-it-yourself filmmaking ethic. In 1987, after graduating from UCLA
film school, Voss co-wrote and co-directed Border Radio with frequent
collaborator and former classmate Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida
Loca). The shoestring-budget movie about three desperate L.A. punk musicians
who steal money and flee to Mexico didn't make an impact, and the next few years
found Voss dabbling in both directing and screenwriting. Bills have to be paid,
however, so in the '90s, Voss directed a string of straight-to-video genre pictures
such as Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, Below Utopia (later renamed Body
Count), and The Heist. Yet Kurt often found ways to work with musicians
in them, such as Ice-T, John Doe of X, and Michael Des Barres of Power Station.
In 1998, as the straight-to-video/cable market for action movies began sputtering,
Voss reconnected with Anders, both of them resolved to rediscover their filmmaking
roots. They conceived a film about aging rock-and-rollers that unfolds along
multiple storylines. Determined to shoot right away, they wrote the script in
just a couple weeks and recruited a cast whose real lives paralleled those of
their characters. They included Rosanna Arquette, Ally Sheedy, Beverly D'Angelo,
and many actual musicians such as John Taylor (Duran Duran, Power Station),
John Doe, Michael Des Barres, and Martin Kemp (Spandau Ballet).
As with many of Kurt's films, the cast is populated with real-life rockers--the
four leads are all musicians and Poledouris, daughter of renowned film composer
Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian,
The Hunt for Red October), wrote the film's music, having already worked
on a score for John Waters (Cecil B. Demented). Other musicians include
Coyote Shivers as the object of two of the Dolls' desire, and Janis Tanaka of
L7, Inger Lorre of the Nymphs, and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead among the Paper
Dolls' hangers-on. With the same do-it-yourself aesthetic and real-world absurdities
that characterized Sugar Town, Dolls is everything that most bigger-budget
rock-and-roll movies aren't--both authentic and amusing.
AboutFilm: Obviously you have a film background; you went UCLA film
school. What's the music connection? How do you know all these musicians;
how is it that you're interested in musical themes?
Voss: I don't know, just a rock fan from adolescence really. It's
almost like a religion--a secular one, of course. John, Paul, George, and
Ringo were the gods on my wall when I was a little kid. I just always loved
pop music, and then English punk. 'Around '78 or '79 I got really into that,
at the end of the Pistols. At the same the LA punk scene started to happen,
and that's what Border Radio grew out of. I guess it was about '81
when I met Allison. We were both going to Valley College. Allison had just
come back to the Valley after having lived there several years earlier. I
was a high school dropout, and her second daughter was just old enough to
go back to day care. She was big into punk rock, the LA punk scene, so she
introduced me to some of those bands--I was following the English stuff. Out
of our interest in LA punk came Border Radio, later, when we eventually
got into UCLA and decided to make a feature.
AF: I'd like to backtrack over your career, but let's start with your
current movie, Down and Out with the Dolls. How did you meet the four
leads and the other musicians involved in this movie?
Voss: It was just a very diligent casting process that led us eventually
to the players. We did a lot of open casting, in the Pacific Northwest primarily.
AF: So you always knew that you wanted to make it up in Portland?
Voss: Always had that in mind. Ideally I wanted to use all local players,
or at least people exclusively from there and Seattle, but we ended up bringing
in a couple of people. Kinnie Starr came in from Canada, and Zoë Poledouris
came in from LA.
AF: And Coyote Shivers, also.
Voss: Coyote also came in from LA, that's right. You would think with
all the musicians in Portland we would have had it absolutely surrounded,
but it didn't work out totally that way. So they were all fresh faces, not
just to me. Most of them hadn't acted at all. Nicole Barrett, who plays Kali,
and Melody Moore who plays Lavender, were both 19 or so when we filmed. They
had done a little high school theater or something, maybe.
AF: When did you film, exactly?
Voss: End of 2000.
AF: Did you put this together as quickly as you did Sugar Town?
I understand that movie was six months from conception to finish.
Voss: Yeah, about that fast, although getting it to the marketplace
turned out to be a longer haul, a bigger proposition, for a number of reasons.
Number one, no cast--no names to speak of--always poses a greater challenge.
And, of course, the industry is just in total, utter turmoil. I don't know
where it's going to land, what's going to happen to the independent thing.
I don't know who's going to even afford to make little movies as an ongoing
proposition.
AF: Were you trying to get a studio or distributor attached beforehand,
or did you want to finish the product first?
Voss: Yeah, the idea was to finish the product first, as was the case
with Sugar Town, to strike fast. In that case we sold the film to Film
Four, and they paid for the whole thing. But we still retained the U.S. rights,
which turned out to be financially quite a good deal for us, for a change.
But, similarly, in that case, we didn't know where we were going to land with
it.
AF: What was your budget for Dolls and for Sugar Town?
Voss: Sugar Town was under four hundred thousand dollars, and
Dolls was not terribly far off.
AF: How did you fund it?
Voss: Dolls was financed by an Australian company called White
House. I actually got to know the heads of the company on a previous straight-to-video
title I did called The Heist, which was a shoot-'em-up thing with Ice-T
and Luke Perry. They were investors on that film, and we became friendly and
decided to work on something a little more quirky.
AF: Did you originate the concept for Dolls completely on your
own or did you collaborate?
Voss: No, I collaborated with [co-writer and production designer]
Nalini Cheriel, who had performed in several bands up in that part of the
world in the '90s. It was really out of her anecdotal stories, just funny
shit she told me about the indignities of life on the road, and cohabitation
with other musicians and related stuff that suggested the movie.
AF: With real musicians and real experiences influencing the film,
it had a very natural feel, I thought. That's obviously something you were
conscious of as you worked on it?
Voss: Right, we were quite intent on that, and similarly, to make
the girls not only plausible players, but to make sure they didn't look like
a Coyote Ugly-type rock band. They seem like real girls from that part
of the world.
AF: In Dolls, Fauna [played by Zoë Poledouris] seems to be
cut from the same cloth as some of the characters in Sugar Town. Ambition,
desperation, and desire for fame all wrapped into the same person. Is that
a character you find particularly interesting?
Voss: Well, in the case of Dolls, it's de rigeur to
have the bitch-on-wheels singer, and obviously it's a cliché because it's
such a pervasive truth. In Sugar Town, the character of Gwen [played
by Jade Gordon]--I don't know, we were thinking of almost a Courtney Love
type of person, as our inspiration--someone who is totally dedicated to the
idea of success at any and all costs.
AF: Well, Gwen's a sociopath; I wouldn't call Fauna a sociopath.
Voss: Absolutely. If Fauna were as purely calculating as Gwen, then
the band wouldn't implode. So yeah, I agree, she's not quite as much a sociopath.
AF: You chose Melody's character, Lavender, as sort of the point-of-view
of the film. Is that because she was caught in the middle and had less of
her own drama?
Voss: Yeah, it's a little bit of that. She's supposed to be the straighter
one, if you will. A certain segment of the audience will relate to her a little
more easily.
AF: In Sugar Town, you worked with veteran musicians, whereas
in Dolls, though have some supporting players who are veterans, you're
primarily working with people who are fairly new on the scene. What was the
difference in working with them?
Voss: Well, one big difference was that they didn't have the relationship
with the camera that someone like John Taylor has, who was in Duran Duran
and photographed probably a million times. Someone like that knows instinctively
where the lens is. Ice-T is another guy who comes to mind who has done so
many movies that you say, "Hey, Ice, walk backwards across the camera track,
pivot, find your light, and shoot the gun," and he'll do it in the first take.
It was difficult sometimes for these people to walk and act at the same time.
Having been in front of the camera just a couple of times, I'm empathetic,
because it's very disconcerting. Someone shuffles you off to the trailer;
you sit there for eleven hours wondering what the hell's going on. Then someone
comes and drags you in front of the camera, and they're already saying, "Okay,
we got it. Moving on." You get one or two takes. So it's a tough job.
And it was good in a way, it forced me to reconsider some of my tricks, my
ways of covering action. I'm used to doing a lot of dolly tracks. We were
using a dolly track, for instance; you turn around with the same track and
film the other side of the room, and a lot of those tricks didn't work in
this case. I had to be a little more seat-of-the-pants to accommodate the
players.
AF: I guess when you film one side of the room and then the other,
you have to make sure people hit the exact same marks, otherwise it doesn't
look right.
Voss: Right. Just the math of it, the geometry of it all was really
wigging some of them out when we started filming. I remember Kinnie Starr,
the drummer, saying as actors do, "My character would walk over here and then
go stand over here," not realizing this choice she made at 8:30 in rehearsal
that morning [would mean that at] 3:30, we'd go, "Okay, now we [need] the
little piece of film where she crossed to here and back again." Suddenly you've
broken the whole thing into thirty shots, and they're ready to cry. So, yeah,
I started trying to get people a big wide frame to wander around in, that
kind of stuff.
AF: You shot in digital video. Was that helpful with that kind of
thing, in addition to being cheaper?
Voss: Yeah, it's helpful in terms of being able to do more with choice.
That's the main benefit. The downside was that, having never worked with it
before, I was dubious that it would ever look like a movie. You have to use
a lot of light and achieve a lot of contrast for the transfer. When you're
shooting interiors with white walls and a lot of light, it looks like a sitcom
on video. It looked like we were doing Who's the Boss?. You look at
the dailies and go, "whoa."
AF: I've seen digital video movies that are of wildly different visual
quality. Sometimes they look very pristine and other times they look very
muddy. It has to do with the lighting?
Voss: Yeah, I think that's largely it.
AF: So these were small-budget films. What's the biggest budget you've
ever had to work with?
Voss: Two million dollars, maybe. Baja was around two million
dollars. Yeah, we're really small fish, especially nowadays. I really don't
know where the independent fits in anymore when twenty-five million dollar
movies are considered straight-to-video fare. We're like penny postage stamps.
AF: Have you ever been offered a major studio film? Would you do one?
Voss: Sure, why not? I'd direct a James Bond movie or something. It
hasn't been the case of preserving my integrity. I've just never had the opportunity.
I wouldn't want to put myself up for something that I didn't think I could
do a good job on. I wouldn't to direct material I didn't feel I could serve,
but I don't have anything against doing bigger pictures.
AF: Of course, the more money and the bigger the picture, the less
freedom you probably have.
Voss: That's the trade-off, I suppose. But the other way around is
you can have a lot of control and an infinitesimal audience, or no audience
at all.
AF: How widely is Dolls going to be released initially?
Voss: I think twelve cities the opening weekend, and the rollout from
there will probably depend on who comes out to see it. The film succeeding
depends to a certain degree on people going to see it for the more universal
aspects, which I think are there. Women in their fifties at European film
festivals have come up to me and said, "You know, it reminds me of when of
lived in a squat." Hopefully we can reach some non-rock fans.
AF: I'd like to talk a little bit about the music of the movie. Zoë
was the primary composer. The only composer?
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The Fighting
Dolls
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Voss: She was. She wrote the underscore and she wrote all of the Paper
Dolls songs.
AF: Did she write Kinnie's lyrics? Or did you?
Voss: The corny ones? I didn't write those. You know who wrote those?
Jeff McDonald from Redd Kross. In Sugar Town he plays the junkie who
Gwen leaves to die. He's a very good pop writer, very funny. All we gave him
was the set-up, and he wrote her lyrics based on that. But Kinnie writes her
own very earnest little folk songs, so she could have written her own version.
AF: So how did the music come together? How was it developed?
Voss: We had a music supervisor named Howard Paar. I hadn't worked
with Howard before--I've worked with him subsequently--and Howard knew of
Zoë. She had done a John Waters movie [Cecil B. Demented]. Originally
we were just talking to her about the score, but then we screen tested her
as well. We liked her very much. She really understood the world. She had
been with a girl rock band, though she hadn't lived with one. She's more of
a Hollywood kid, in fact. And then, in terms of the texture of the band's
music and stuff, Zoë knew we wanted it to sound plausible that a twenty-year-old
four-piece band would play this stuff. They, in fact, can play all that stuff
together.
AF: So they all played their own instruments in the film.
Voss: Yeah, well, they're playing the playback. The music isn't live.
But they recorded the basic tracks. They recorded those in Zoë's hotel room
while we were doing the film. I'm very happy with the music, and I'd love
to work with Zoë again.
AF: What kind of challenges did you run into when you began shooting?
Did anything go unexpectedly wrong?
Voss: Not beyond the usual. We were shooting in Portland, so it rained
all the time. That posed the usual continuity headaches, especially in the
beginning when they're having a barbecue and running around and so forth,
trying to figure out how you're going to deal with the wet sidewalk in one
shot. It's amazing that Citizen Kane type movies get made. How do they
get it so right? But no, no huge production tales. Though Lemmy [bassist and
singer for Motörhead, former roadie for Jimi Hendrix] was quite an adventure.
Lemmy Kilmister, he's such a beast.
AF: I assume he's slightly more coherent in real life than he sounds
in the film.
Voss: Mm, no, not terribly so. Actually he's quite bright, but he's
surreal.
AF: So was he being himself? The personas in Sugar Town seemed
to be very close to the musicians themselves. Was that also the case in Dolls?
Voss: In the case of Sugar Town, we actually cast before we
wrote the script, so we were quite consciously playing with the actors' personas.
In this case it was just a matter of casting close to the bone, you know,
including casting Lemmy as a speed freak.
He was actually based on a guy I knew as an adolescent. He was renting a
walk-in closet. He was a guy in his twenties. Me and the other little suburban
mallrats I ran with idealized this guy. We all thought he was really interesting
because he lived in closets. But again, that's the sort of thing you would
find in Portland. A lot of people live with no apparent means of support.
I kind of envy the musicians up there. You're down here, busting your ass
in Hollywood, and it's like Lily Tomlin's joke about the rat race--all you
prove in the end is that you're a rat. These kids, even people in their thirties,
they live out there for ten thousand dollars a year or something. They've
got a band; they've got a girlfriend; they've got a two-hundred-dollar car.
Their friends are all waiters; they all eat for free. They got it wired.
AF: What are some of your favorite rock-and-roll movies by other people?
Voss: Oh god, my favorite rock and roll movies? I haven't seen it
in years--I liked Phantom of the Paradise a whole lot; it's real corny.
It's a Brian de Palma movie. Its pedigree is a little dubious--it's got a
rock score by Paul Williams--but it's very pop; it's good in that respect.
I don't know, I think Abel Ferrara's stuff actually qualifies as rock and
roll. It's got an anarchic spirit even when it's not dealing with it in terms
of the subject matter. I wish I had Allison here to jog my memory. She's teaching
a class in rock films at UCSB. We just showed Dolls up there about
a week ago. She had Michael Apted there Friday to show Stardust, I
think, from the '70s.
AF: I'd like to go over your filmography now. Could you tell me a
little something about each film--maybe something that sticks out or how you
remember the film in your head? Let's start with your first movie with Allison
and your first movie overall, Border Radio.
Voss: I saw it again recently because I transferred it--made a new
digital master.
AF: Is it coming to DVD?
Voss: It was supposed to come out with Sugar Town. I worked
on this project for about eight months for no pay, including getting all the
releases from Sugar Town performers. To put restored or omitted scenes
on the disk, you gotta get a new release. There's no one at these companies
who does this; they kick it back to the producers. So anyway, I spent a long
time on this. The whole thing was ready to go, and then USA Entertainment
got bought by Universal, who promptly shelved the project. Universal wouldn't
even call me back about it. It's indefinitely in limbo.
AF: I'm sorry to hear that. Was it released on video at all?
Voss: It was, it was released at Blockbuster, as a 'Premiere.' We
heard subsequently from Universal--their official explanation was that films
released in that manner don't do so well in sell-through. Whether that means
anything or not, I don't know. In any case, having seen Border Radio
recently, it's a total shaggy-dog story. Barely coherent plot, but very nice
to look at. It's shot in glimmering black and white by Dean Lent, who subsequently
shot Gas Food Lodging for Allison and Genuine Risk for me.
AF: And you worked with John Doe.
Voss: Yeah, it featured John and The Blasters, so it had people from
the punk bands. And Allison and I think that, though we've obviously learned
our trade since making it, we've also lost something, maybe. There's some
really beautiful shots in it. We'd spend half a day waiting for the sun. David
Lean, you know. Stuff that you can't do when you have a six-page schedule
on the day, which is what moviemaking ultimately became for us… I don't know,
it's an interesting little curio, and it definitely captures the L.A. punk
scene in the '80s.
AF: Next was Genuine Risk [1990].
Voss: Genuine Risk was a movie with Peter Berg and Terence
Stamp that was done as part of the noir wave of the time. Actually
a better example of the genre was Delusion [1991], which I was a writer
on. But Genuine Risk had some good stuff in it, too. I really liked
working with Terence Stamp, because he's so economical an actor.
AF: Horseplayer [1991] with Brad Dourif.
Voss: Horseplayer was made very inexpensively around the same
time and ended up at Sundance. I ended up marrying Sammi Davis [Hope and
Glory], who acted in it. We were married for a few years. I've just seen
her again this past year. She moved to the Midlands and has left the business
pretty much. But I went up there to talk about doing a new film together.
I think we're going to work with the writer David Birke, who co-wrote Horseplayer,
and re-activate that whole team. I'm developing a script for her that's based
on a short I wrote that I was going to do last year with Katrin Cartlidge
before she died. She was in Naked, the Mike Leigh movie. I think From
Hell was her final movie. A brilliant, strange, gawky woman. I was really
looking forward to working with her. She was going to play an artist based
on Tracey Emin, a contemporary conceptual artist in London. Anyway, Katrin
got ill and died this past fall--41 years old. It was quite shocking. So anyway,
I'm taking the character out of that short to develop a feature.
AF: Is that what's next for you?
Voss: Maybe. There's four or five things juggling. There's something
to be said for just sticking to one project and being very kamikaze, but in
this climate you've gotta have a couple of things going because everything
is so apt to crash and burn. Ideally, that would be next.
AF: Okay, Baha in 1995.
Voss: Yeah, Baha was several years later. I had a couple of
lean years in between. Where the Day Takes You came out in '92, which
I wrote, and Dangerous Touch in '94, which I also wrote, a straight-to-video
thing. I think Allison and I were selling stuff in the recycler in '93. Baha
was a movie I did with Molly Ringwald, Lance Henriksen, and Donal Logue. It
was a lot of fun to make. We shot out on the Salton Sea, south of Palm Springs.
On a budget it was a challenge to re-create Mexico. For example, there's a
hotel opposite a strip mall, but I wanted to make it appear that it was next
to a body of water, so I shot all the reverses at the Salton Sea two weeks
later, that kind of thing. I like that part of filmmaking, all the jigsaw
puzzle stuff. I don't know, it's got some virtues. I think Lance Henriksen
gives a very good performance.
AF: One of the Poison Ivy movies was next [Poison Ivy: The
New Seduction (1997)].
Voss: I don't know. I needed a paycheck, and I knew it would recoup
its costs. I liked all those kids very much. It's nice working with really
young kids because they don't know--I just told them to stand there and do
what they're told, and they did it. That movie was made for well under a million
dollars. I should sue New Line because it's a perennial seller, and they've
never paid me a nickel in royalties. For how little money we made it for,
I thought it was a pretty slick-looking product, which came down to that photographer,
a lot of it--a very good DP [Feliks Parnell], who I'd like to work with again.
AF: The interesting thing about these straight-to-video movies is
that they do make a profit. They have a certain budget, five hundred thousand
to a million dollars, and they're expected to recoup. They tend to do well
in international sales, like on cable in Asia.
Voss: Well, they always have, and that's the problem. It's not happening
now. Roundabout '97, the Asian market collapsed for action movies. And now
I think part of the problem is all the DV films. There's more movies now than
ever, and competition for the entertainment dollar. These movies aren't recouping
the way they used to. These little producers used to make something for a
million, and get on a roll. One would finance the next. They crap out eventually,
but then they go start a new company. But these guys just aren't getting to
first base.
The buyer for USA Home Entertainment before they were bought by Universal
was bragging to me--it was like a big fish bragging about eating little fish
before he himself was swallowed--he was saying he was getting all these straight-to-video
films for no advance at all to the producers, just part of the profit. Two,
three million dollar movies that would have two or three solid names for the
video box. There's no cash flow in that, if the producer has to wait not only
two years after the movie is finished, but another six months for the video
to ship. And it's always been the sort of business where you're betting dollars
to make nickels. Slim profit margins. Sex Lies and Videotape once every
hundred times at bat. On average it's a grind-it-out proposition. And now
I think these poor guys are really hurting.
AF: Amnesia [1997]?
Voss: Amnesia… who was in that? A bunch of nutters. [laughs]
Sally Kirkland, John Savage… Ally Sheedy and Nicholas Walker both ended up
appearing in Sugar Town. This was a quirky little movie. It was a TV
premiere on Showtime. It got some good notices. They called it housebroken
David Lynch. It was a noir thing, but it got progressively stranger.
It was a tongue-in-cheek little movie. I liked that one.
AF: Below Utopia, renamed Body Count [1997], with Ice-T,
Alyssa Milano, and Justin Theroux.
Voss: That was the first of the two times I worked with Ice-T. All
good people, quite an enjoyable shoot. It deals with a home invasion, and
so you spend a lot of time with the protagonists hiding in the unlit basement
waiting for the other shoe to drop, so it had kind of radio-play elements
to it. Pretty solid little thriller. I think it was a budget of about a million
dollars.
AF: Okay, The Pass, aka Highway Hitcher [1998], with
William Forsythe, Elizabeth Peña, and James LeGros.
Voss: Not a movie I have really any fondness for. William Forsythe
plays a guy who has a midlife crisis and he's reinvigorated by an incident
he has while he's on the road to Reno. I don't know, it was a little too schematic.
A bit of a misfire. And I loathe William Forsythe. He's a total fucking
prick. And that you can print. There's something with actors in their 40s,
I don't know--there's this tendency with these guys, either they're not where
they wanted to be, or--I mean, this guy was making good money and working
a lot. It's almost like they have a bad conscience about the job, like it's
unmanly or something, so they try to compensate by busting the director's
balls 24/7.
I had heard terrible things about this guy taking over people's shows, essentially.
Alex Rockwell did a movie with him [Sons]. Apparently he just hijacked
the movie. It's just unpleasant to deal with a guy like that. Really contentious
and petulant. … James LeGros is a lovely guy, but by his own admission he
was miscast, because he's supposed to be quite scary, and he told me afterwards,
"Ah, it never works." I kind of had a sinking feeling even during the table
readings that there was something not quite right. But again, I had no money,
I was down to my last five hundred bucks. That was the cast that worked for
the producers, so you had to hold your nose and proceed.
AF: Which brings us up to Sugar Town. It sounds like after
some paycheck movies that Sugar Town really was a reconnection with
some of the things you were passionate about.
Voss: It was. For Allison, too, it was a necessary return to that
stuff. Stuff she was developing with the studios just wasn't advancing. We
made Sugar Town to combine our strengths and our resources at that
point. I should say, too, going back to what I said earlier, the Asian action
market had fallen apart at that point. Sugar Town's distribution ultimately
got screwed up, because it was bought up by October, who were then bought
by USA immediately. Then when it came time for USA to release the DVD, the
home entertainment side wanted to rectify the poor treatment on the theatrical
front, but they were bought by Universal and are now Focus. But financially,
it improbably turned out to be quite a payday for us.
AF: One of our writers reviewed Sugar
Town quite positively, but her one complaint of it was that she didn't
get to spend enough time with the characters. It was only ninety minutes.
She wanted to get to know them even more. What do you think hearing that?
Could there have been more movie?
Voss: We only had 18 days to shoot the thing. We just didn't have
the resources to make the story any longer. I don't really take that as a
criticism, in fact, it's a compliment. It's nice that she felt that way. But
I think there was just enough of the movie. We had a two-hour cut at one point.
There was a little bit more time spent at John Doe's house, a couple more
scenes with the wife, but nothing that really advanced the plot. We had to
pace it out to make sure the first act break occurred where it did. It needed
to have that to keep rolling. So no, there wasn't really too much more movie.
A couple of funny outtakes though. There was a funny bit with Michael Des
Barres screwing Beverly D'Angelo--
AF: Yeah, we didn't see the actual sex scene.
Voss: Right. And she's telling him that he should ditch the band,
and I think she's promising she's got a contact to get him a solo recording
contract. This is the thing that gets him off ultimately. It was a funny little
bit, but it was too off-the-wall for the movie. The other scene is very gentle.
It just proved redundant and breaks the tone.
AF: Then after that you did The Heist [1999], which was another
action movie.
Voss: Yeah, that was something I'd committed to before Sugar Town.
It just took awhile for the money to come together. That was a crazy movie.
I had a producer on it who was trying to get around paying certain deposits
to SAG. SAG came and shut us down, and took all my actors away. I was shooting
close-ups with the script girl's hands for inserts, anything to make it work.
It's an armored-car heist movie. An armored car gets jacked. So then we sent
the armored car out to do some running shots, second-unit-type shots. We had
one of the guys from the camera crew, a black guy who was dressed to double
as Ice-T. He had a bandana on, and some stage blood to match an earlier scene.
There was also stage blood on the window of this armored car, and when they
stop to refuel it, some good Samaritan puts two and two together. Next thing
we know SWAT was mobilized. SWAT actually surrounded these guys on the 6th
Street bridge. Helicopters, police cars, the whole thing. The guys are lucky
they weren't shot, because apparently they came out brandishing their walkie-talkies
to prove they were a movie crew. That whole movie was like that. De'aundre
Bonds was in that, playing the third member of Ice-T's crew. I just got a
call from Patrick Goldstein from the L.A. Times who wanted a quote
because De'aundre is in prison for twelve years for murder. He stabbed his
aunt's boyfriend to death. He wasn't violent when we shot, but he was a pretty
live wire. I don't know, that whole shoot was just nutty. But it's a pretty
solid little genre movie. Probably of all those I'm proudest of it, because
it was so hard to make, and it holds together pretty well. I like Richmond
Arquette a lot; I've worked with him a lot and would like to do so again.
AF: Then you co-wrote Things Behind the Sun [2001], again with
Allison.
Voss: Right. Actually the script for that went back to '96, I think.
I was spending a lot of time in Mexico City. Allison and I met in El Paso,
and laid out the story, which is pretty much based on her own rape as a teenager.
So, quite autobiographical. In fact, she went back and filmed the rape at
the very house she had been raped at thirty years earlier. I went down to
Mexico City with the outline and wrote the script in a hotel room down there
over the course of a couple of months. It was kind of like almost like channeling
Allison a little bit. It was a moving experience, actually, to write.
AF: I would imagine it was good to collaborate, if it was really personal
for her. I imagine there were times she needed a more objective, detached
person.
Voss: Yeah, absolutely. I think specifically what I was most able
to provide was--the movie treats the guys, even the rapists, with a certain
amount of empathy and tries to understand them. I think, by her own admission,
that she couldn't have made that leap without someone to mediate to a certain
extent. But yeah, that's a good film. It took ages to get made. Winona Ryder
was supposed to star for awhile, then Heather Graham was supposed to star.
They had these names attached, and they would sit around at studio level awaiting
development. I kept telling these guys, you have to come back to this. I thought
it was going to win some sort of award., I just had a feeling. It did, in
fact, win a Peabody ultimately, which was a trip.
AF: And now, Down and Out with the Dolls. You didn't work with
Allison on this film. What kind of working relationship do you have? You seem
to go away from it and come back to it every once in awhile, and have maintained
that for a long time.
Voss: Yeah, in addition to the stuff we've had produced, we wrote
a spec script on Darby Crash of the LA punk band The Germs. It was about '91
that we did that. It's still kicking around; I think HBO or Showtime are looking
at it at the moment. Madonna was actually going to make, or announced it for
Maverick at one point, though it was probably just for the sake of that day's
publicity. River Phoenix was interested in starring in it at one point. That
isn't going to happen either. We're talking about trying doing something else.
We wanted to perhaps develop a TV show for Don Cheadle, who was so good in
Things Behind the Sun. We have an idea for that. We'll probably take
that out with us this pitch season, which is coming upon us.
And that was it. I couldn't think of anything else to ask and didn't have a
big tie-everything-up-with-a-bow type question prepared. So I asked Voss if
there was anything he wished I had asked him that I hadn't. There wasn't. He
asked me if I had any leading questions I might want to ask. I didn't. So he
inquired about the history of AboutFilm and revealed that he had once written
for Film Threat. After that we went our separate ways. I left making
a mental note to find a copy of Things Behind the Sun and hoping to see
more from Voss in the future--perhaps even interview him again, though next
time in a more contextually appropriate location than a corporate latte outlet
in O.J.'s old neighborhood.
urt
Voss and I have been playing phone tag for a couple weeks now. The fault is
mine. I have been juggling a dozen different obligations, but Kurt has been
most accommodating, even going so far as overnighting me a copy of one of his
earlier movies, Sugar Town, so I can watch it before the interview. Kurt
may not be Mr. Big Famous Film Director, but it's not supposed to be this way.
The interviewer should not make things difficult for the interviewee. We agree
to talk in the morning and identify a mutually convenient location to have a
coffee and a talk. 
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