'Repo! The Genetic Opera' creator Terrance Zdunich

Imagine a world wherein reconstructive surgery, made prevalent by rampant organ failure, has become a fashion statement affordable for everyone thanks to organ financing. Surgery has become such a massive industry that there is even a massive black market revolving around Zydrate, the painkiller employed for all such surgeries; this black market is populated by surgery addicts (termed "scalpel sluts") who have also long since become addicted to the drug itself. Surgery drives the world; designer organs are available for purchase. The catch? If you miss a single payment on your organs, the company will send out a repo-man... and you can kiss your life goodbye. This is the world of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a delightfully culty musical film that follows the journey of Shilo, a seventeen-year-old who because of her rare blood disease has been kept in her room all her life by her overprotective father—who, unbeknownst to her, is a repo-man. I got to speak with Terrance Zdunich, who not only is co-creator of Repo! but also portrays Graverobber, the quasi-narrator of the piece. Enjoy...

So how are you?
I’m good, I’m good, I’ve been running around quite a bit myself so I’ve had some momentary exhaustion.

I heard that Repo! just got a permanent theater in LA.
Yea well actually we have theaters popping up all over the country. We’re actually playing right now in more theaters than we were when we were released. So it makes Repo! more of a shadow cast and I think LA is one of those cities.

Oh yeah, yeah. I think the closest comparable set up is The Rocky Horror Picture Show—it’s not the same exact thing, but for Repo! people go see it dressed as the characters and they shout out quotes and everything.
Well I think the major comparison is that both movies have a community that surrounds them. And they feel that the movie belongs to them and not the studio or the Hollywood actors or what have you, they actually feel, “Oh, it’s our movie.” And they’re very protective of it and they’re very social about it. To me, as a writer, I don’t think you can get a better reward—I mean, obviously you can make more money, but artistically speaking, the notion that people are literally embracing your artwork so passionately is great for them.

Yeah, and the type of cult—because that’s what it is, there’s a cult following around Repo!, it’s not a mainstream sort of project—it spreads by word of mouth, it’s very much about the community. As you said it’s very much about the community as opposed to about how many people you can get into the seats on opening.
Exactly. Can I ask how you found out about it?

How I found out about it? Well, I didn’t hear about it till after the movie had already been out in New York but had closed, and so I waited patiently for the DVD release.
Well I think the good news is we’re playing in upstate New York. Well, you’re New York-based right?

Yep, Brooklyn, New York.
I believe we’re in talks right now to have a permanent show right there. And if not New York than New Jersey. And I’m pretty sure I have you on my email list but I’ll make sure to keep you informed.

So, speaking of which, I understand that you and Darren Smith came up with the idea when you two were putting together mini operas in cafes and bars.
Yes, we met at an acting class, and we were both the only two musicians in the room, so naturally we had a connection. And we sort of both were talking about how we used to play in bands and do our thing, and we both got really burned out and came up with the idea to lay down three minute songs, and so we both talked about doing something a little bigger, a little more. And as a profession we were both doing operatics and so we started playing and looking at what we called ten minute operas. And they were just little ten minute stories with music and one of those stories basically became Repo!.

And it was called The Necromerchant’s Debt, right?
It was the beginning of Graverobber because “necro” means death.

I identify with the fact that all of this almost came out of an impulse to create your own material, because a lot of the time if you want to be creative it’s so much more helpful to be willing to create your own outlet if you’re an actor or a musician or whatever than to just working within someone else’s work.
Well, yeah. I think one of the things a lot of people are hung up on is that they put a lot of energy into trying to create or do things that they feel it’s the way you have to do it. And when you put a lot of energy into that it’s really a distraction from what you started out to do in the first place. Why you picked up the guitar and wanted to sing or wanted to draw or wanted to write. And I know for me one of the big things is that’s what made Repo! so cool. This wasn’t easy. We were doing something that was sort of unconventional for rock clubs. We were trying to book a room, make demo tapes, and we were ultimately always a little bit disappointed by the fact that we had to fall into someone else’s layout. You had to play right after an audition or you might have to play right before a hip hop artist. Or you might get there and the microphone levels would be all crappy. Lighting isn’t working. Or they bump you. You’re supposed to go on at 9:30 and you don’t go on till midnight. So I think one of the things with Repo! is that as a group we had the ability to make it more of a theatrical production. We actually designed a space and we put it on ourselves and we’d design the lights and we’d be the ones controlling the sound. We’re putting in a lot more responsibility and obviously we had to figure out how we’re going to pay for all that stuff. But I think, because of that, Repo! has always felt like a couple of people with a couple of ideas pushing along with the initial project and even through the filmmaking it’s always been toured more as a concert than a typical movie. That kind of spirit is in this project and I hope that whatever we do in the future can have that same spirit.

Speaking of which, I’d like to also talk about the fact that so many times with stage shows with plays or musicals or operas the objective is always the stage show itself—but with Repo!, you have said yourself that the movie feels like what you’ve been working toward the whole time, which is unusual to hear about something coming from the stage.
Yeah, and I think that’s actually why Repo!’s better than a lot of filmed musicals or operas. With other musicals, what was done onstage is considered the Bible. The movie ultimately is a snapshot of that. It’s a version, in many ways a lesser version than the original. With Repo! a couple of things happened. One, we were writing this in a way that was much bigger than what we could ever pull off on the stage. When you’re a in a black box theater you don’t write a screenplay with people who can shoot projections out of their eyes or people who can change their face from scene to scene, and Repo! is full of that. To actually pull it off onstage would be impossible. Even if you had millions of dollars it probably would be nearly impossible. So I think we always wrote it as though it was a movie, even thought we were doing it as a stage play. I think we were doing that more because it’s what we could afford to do at the time. And the second thing is, I think because Repo! and the stage play never reached the mainstream audience, it always was underground, it always was in tiny black box theaters. So most people’s experiences of Repo! is from the film, not from the stage play. And so I think we made a bit of an impression as a movie as opposed to a movie of an opera.

That definitely comes across. And by the way, I didn’t realize how small your budget was until I watched the DVD movie with the commentary. It’s extremely impressive. As you mentioned, the movie was all incredibly ambitious, and the visuals of the movie were excellent, and I was very impressed to see that your budget was extremely low.
Yeah, by Hollywood standards, our budget was very low—especially when you consider our movie takes place in the future, so you can’t just walk outside and see it. And I’m really proud of it, and everyone that was involved really continued on with the special effects and everyone gave 110% and figured out ways to go the extra mile, as opposed to just “I’m getting a paycheck, I’m going to do my 8 hours, I’m going to clock out when I go home.” With Repo!, I think everyone—the costumers, the choreographers, the effects people—they all felt like it was theirs and they were proud of it so they gave their all. I know our costume designer, for example, she was pretty much going out of stuff that she had at home and calling in favors from friends just to make it work because she was so exited about the project. And I think that kind of love not only shows in the fact that things looked more expensive than they were, but that sort of creates the feeling that it was created out of passion as opposed to out of some Hollywood system that was trying to market research to make money.

Right. For example, you mentioned on the commentary Paris Hilton bringing in a couple of suitcases of her own clothes that could be used as costumes for the movie.
Yeah. Some of the things in the movie are very different from what we did onstage. Some of them are exactly the same. Like Zydrate, for example. It’s nothing more than a vial full of glow-stick juice. That’s exactly what we did onstage, and the reason we did it onstage is it was inexpensive. And it was something that was visually striking in a dark club. You could buy a glow stick for a couple bucks, and you open it and you have magic liquid Zydrate for the night. And a lot of the stuff worked like that. Like even my makeup is very simple. It’s pretty much a white face with a little bit of eyeliner. And that’s what we did onstage. And we contemplated doing something more elaborate for the movie and then ultimately decided, “Well, there’s something to that original look. It’s a little trashy, it’s a little culty… if we tried to make it all slick it would be a mistake.”

Well, now Graverobber’s sort of the iconic character.
You know, I’m sort of happy that happened, obviously, but I had no idea that character was going to be as popular as it is from the movie. I mean, I’ve been doing the role for years. Almost a decade actually. And it didn’t always work live. You go up there, you scream “GRAVES!” or whatever, and sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t. We never felt when we were doing the stage show that I had any sort of the cult reception that happened with the movie. I hope it has something to do with my performance and that I’ll be able to make some other like-minded works in the future, but it’s really flattering to see people embrace the character as much as I have.

Well looking at the fan community, it’s definitely Graverobber. All of the characters are embraced by the fan community, but Graverobber is really the one that has the most devoted fans out of all of them
Well, yes, I think you’re right. Although I think part of it is that Graverobber is fun and you need a character—they’re all kind of wrapped up in human drama, even Shilo, and they’re all kind of like the tragic characters that are flawed, many of whom pay for their mistakes in blood. But Graverobber tends to just be there, look cool, not get wrapped up in the drama, and so I think that’s why in many ways he’s the face of Repo! because so many of the other characters are wrapped in tragedy.

And through the move Graverobber is the storyteller, kind of. He frames the narrative.
Yeah, he’s the court jester in many ways.

And you’ve mentioned also that throughout the development of the show you tried incorporating him in different ways, putting him more of the narrative, taking him further out, and this is kind of what he was in the beginning, and that this is how he has ended up again but this isn’t how it always was.
No, and it’s funny for me to watch the movie or even to watch my scenes because when we started filming the script, and even when we finished filming, Graverobber did have the narratorial persona that the final movie contained and also some of the involvement with the audience, and there was also some involvement with Amber, the character that Paris Hilton plays, and there was some more involvement with him and Shiloh, played by Alexa Vega, but there was the problem of getting the film shorter, which needs to happen. The opera, the stage show was well over two hours long and we thought for the movie we needed to contain it to more of a mainstream format, more to 90 minutes. And so we ended up cutting a few things, and one of the things that was more superfluous that was cut was Graverobber interacting with the main characters, because he wasn’t as wrapped up in the family drama and everything and the tragedy. He was there almost like comic relief in some cases. So when we started cutting away all that stuff, all that remained was Graverobber as a narrator. And so we ended up essentially re-shooting a couple of scenes, or adding a couple of scenes where Graverobber is speaking directly to the camera and acting like a narrator, and I think it works. From an actor standpoint, if I knew it was going to be a narrator from the get-go, I probably would have done some things differently. As a performer these were little things that only I noticed and nobody else would be able to pick up on.

What’s interesting is, from the standpoint of someone who’s just getting into Repo!, I don’t think it could have worked any better than it does now with him as a narrator. But once you become a fan, you kind of wish there was more of the—not that he be part of the drama, but to see more interaction between him and Shiloh and him and Amber. If you’re seeing it all for the first time then it might be too much, but once you’re familiar with it, those are the parts that are really fun.
That’s a good point, and there are a couple of the scenes that were cut that are available. I know they’re on the Blu-Ray and they’re all over YouTube, so some of the earlier stuff is out there.

Well, half the fan fiction involves Graverobber.
[laughs] well you know it’s really an awesome experience to go and sit in the audience all over the country and even in the UK and see people dressing up like the characters and interacting with the movie. And the other great part is I get to meet the fans personally. I meet people who are dressed up like Graverobber. That’s so wild to think that something that I created so many years ago is living in other people. But I get a lot of cool gifts too, from fans, and one of the things people hand me is fan fiction.

People just go up to you and they go, “Here’s the latest copy of my Graverobber-and-Shiloh fanfic; read it”?
Well I think a lot of the people who hand it to me are trying to embarrass the person who’s written it. They might be there and the person that actually wrote it is behind them and they’re like “Here’s a fan fiction that so-and-so wrote,” and I look over and I see the writer turning beet red. But of course it’s awesome and I’ve very flattered by it and I’ve read a lot of them. And some of it is very well written and some of it is just porno. But it’s flattering and exciting. The fact that someone would be motivated enough by my artwork to create their own versions of it, even if it is X-rated.

Well some fan fiction can be really good. There are some really talented people out there who can be writing really good stories with other people’s characters.
Well, what’s especially awesome for me is that fan fiction and the like, and blogging, is not something that was there when I was in school. But for a lot of the audience, which is younger than I am, that’s a huge department of life, and as an older generation the assumption is always that the younger generation is losing touch or that nobody reads anymore. And I’m happy to say that, one, some of the fan fiction I’ve read is really well written, and moreover, I’ll post a blog—for example, I have a website where I embrace that and I’m always posting updates and sharing my travels—and I’ll find that I’ll write something that might be a ten page story and people are actually reading all ten pages. And I know this because they’re picking up on little things and little facts that were in that blog and they’re making fan fiction around that blog. And it’s kind of… wow. It’s kind of scary on one hand but it’s also really flattering because you’re realizing, crap, you have influence. As an artist, I have influence in a form. I can bring a person along and for me that’s completely exciting.

Well, you know, give a member of a fandom some fan fiction and they read for a day, but teach them how to write and, well, there you go.
[laughs] Exactly.

So, about the development of what was originally The Necromerchant’s Debt to what is now Repo!—from my understanding the basic story of The Necromerchant’s Debt is that there is a prototypical graverobber who has a heart that he has bought, and at the end of the story his heart gets repossessed. So how did that grow and how did the story of these other characters come into play?
Basically, Necromerchant was one story of many that Darren and I were performing. It was one of our ten minute operas. And we’d do several ten minute operas in one set, in one performance, and the Necromerchent’s Debt was just one of them. And you’re correct, it was basically about a graverobber, and it did take place in the future the same way Repo! does, and it also talked about the repo-man who comes and kills the graverobber at the end of the story. But out of all the operas we were doing, that was the one that the audience always seemed to talk about. They’d come up to us after the show and say things like, “Wow, that’s a really cool idea,” And they’d ask us questions like “What does the repo-man look like? Where does he live?”, those type of things, and it made us go, “Well, maybe this story is more interesting than the graverobber story.” Because the graverobber was basically just a narrator. So we started exploring that and thinking, “Maybe this repo-man lives a double live. He might have a job in the world and pretends to be a doctor.” And we got him a daughter, and that was the main thing, hiding her. And the story kind of bloomed from that and ultimately it became Shilo’s story, which it needed to be. We had versions of the opera where it was more based around the repo-man, and the thing is when you’re telling a story the main character needs to change, at least in a typical storytelling sense. The main character needs to go on a journey and by the end of that journey have learned something and have changed, hopefully for the better. So we tried doing that with the repo-man character. We tried making it so that it was his story and he was conflicted and he did bad things and by the end he sort of changed his ways and lived happily ever after. And it never worked. It always felt fake. Sort of the reason it didn’t work was that you wanted the repo-man to be bad. So it was only cool when he was sort of evil. So it became more about Shilo because, really, she’s the one who has to go through all the changes. All the characters around her, with the exception of Graverobber, have lived their lives, have made their choices, and most of them have made really bad choices. It’s she who actually has the chance to look around her and explore the bad choices and the good choices and try to make her own life. And so in many ways it became about Shilo and Graverobber was more of a side character and Repo-Man was more of a figure for Shilo as opposed to she for Repo-Man. It’s really more Repo! the Genetic Opera of the Repo Man’s Daughter.

Well, I think the thing about Repo-Man, [whose name is] Nathan, is that’s really the type of character you can only get away with redeeming if he dies in the process. I can easily see how redeeming him without killing him off at the end would feel fake because it’s kind of hard to reconcile in the mind of the viewer.
In the mind of the viewer and I also think in the mind of Shilo. To me one of the main levels of the story is that you aren’t your genetics, you have choices. So I think that how at the end she’s literally left alone, as traumatic as that is, is the best thing for her. And she’s able now to succeed as an individual, as opposed to a dependant.

To go back to fan fiction for a brief moment, I believe there was one circulating in which Graverobber’s mother is Dakota Fanning, and I was wondering if you’d read that one.
[laughs] No, I hadn’t read that one. But I saw that movie she did recently [called Push] where she had greasy punk-rocker multi-colored hair, and I’ve seen that picture next to Graverobber where they both have multi colored hair, and I’ve seen those jokes where they say she’s Graverobber’s daughter, so you know. I didn’t know that it extended into full on fan fiction stories, but it doesn’t surprise me

Well, if you look at the story, at first you’re kind of like “What?” but then you look at the timeline of the story and you go “Oh, wait, that actually does kind of make sense.”
Well, you know, maybe if there’s a sequel of a prequel we’ll have Dakota Fanning as the mother to Graverobber. How freaky would that be?

That would be scary.
Yeah, it would. I like it!

You seem to be drawn toward whatever squicks out potential mainstream viewers the most.
I try, you know. My next project is a graphic novel— it’s written already. But I’m very excited about it and about the particular format of a graphic novel because, well, one, we talked earlier about having creative control and trying to do things that are perhaps not conventional and not having as much outside influence in the process, and I think a graphic novel is a great way to go. You don’t need millions of dollars and thousands of people to create it. It’s something that I can literally create for the most part by myself. I might need a printer. I might need a couple of assistants. But the final thing is we can tell a complete story, an original story, and have cool visuals and cool characters. But the reason I bring it up is it’s not Repo!. It’s not set in the future. It actually deals with the early path, with like caveman. That’s part of the story. There’s a main story that’s happening in the 1990s as well.

Oh. I was going to say, “Maybe they’re like the great great-great-great-great-great—thousands of great—grandparents of the characters of Repo!. Is that what you’re going with, their ancestors or something?
Well, in a sense, they’re the ancestors of everyone.

Well, yes, I’m poking fun.
[laughs] Well, the point is there’s a lot of dark and macabre stuff in this one and also I think people who like Repo! will appreciate this story as well.

I actually so want to ask you about that but I just remembered another thing that I wanted to talk to you about regarding Repo!. What’s really remarkable is the extent to which you have these musical themes, like leitmotifs, that represent each character and their relationships. There’s a post on the fansite that is trying very hard to catalogue all of them and it’s like twenty-five motifs long.
Well, that’s awesome that people are picking up on it. It’s an operatic term, leitmotif, and it basically means that there’s a theme, in this case musical or lyrical, that represents a character, emotion, or connection that re-occurs. And a famous example is Jaws. Every time you hear that theme you think of the shark. So Repo! has a lot of that and some of it’s out there and some of it’s very subtle. For example, a line for Shilo—and that line may appear very subtly, and that might be with some of the instruments repeated. Like with the character played by Paul Sorvino, we had the idea that he was this old Hollywood Italian mob boss and so we’re like “What kind of sounds like old Italy?” and so we came up with this old sound of the accordion. So we have this happening oftentimes when he’s singing or when he appears on screen, so it’s not only that there’s a melody, but sometimes an instrument. And I think that’s what makes Repo! different from most musicals. And hopefully, even if you don’t recognize them at first listen, they move you through the story subconsciously. Doing that sort of stuff is the most fun part for me when composing. It was conceptualizing something larger.

Well, one thing that was particularly striking that blew my mind when I found it was the motif of “I can’t feel nothing at all”, which is repeated at several points throughout he story, mostly by the scalpel sluts. And during the song “We Started This Op’ra Shit” there is one part, I forget where it is, where while the ringleader is talking to the audience you hear this thin female voice say “I can’t feel nothing at all”. But it’s so quiet you might completely miss that unless you were really paying attention.
Can I just say that I love you? [laughs] That’s so awesome that you discovered that, because I know exactly what part you’re talking about, and it’s something that even I forget exists.

Well, now that I know that it’s there, every time I hear that part of the song I hear it without even trying to listen to it just because I know that it’s there. When I found it, I was like “Dude!”
I know what you mean, and it’s kind of cool on a couple of levels, because it’s like a little buried treasure. And, also, the notion that you’re so drugged up and so cut up that you don’t want to feel anything more is a tragic notion. And I think that it works on a psychological level. All your emotions, all this human experience will be numbed. But thank you for noticing! You are a fan, are you not?

Well I think by now you should be able to tell.
Well… yeah.

For more about Repo!, visit the official website. For more about Terrance Zdunich and his other projects, visit his website.