This is easily one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever done in my pseudo radio career. Back in 2010, director James Nguyen came to Toronto for the Canadian premiere of his couch-change funded disasterpiece, Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Sometime after the Q&A, after the drinks and before he left for the airport at 6 a.m., I cornered him for this one hour interrogation.

I went through a whole range of thoughts and feelings during both the interview and the editing process, and again when I revisited the piece to remaster and remix for this incarnation of Cinephobia Radio.

James is a nice chap and a pleasure to hang out with, but he was absolutely convinced that audiences were gobbling up his movie because, despite the budgetary shortcomings and technical imperfections, ultimately they were connecting to the world of the film itself, to the characters, the love story, the Hitchcockian plot and the overpowering environmental themes.

Being the card-carrying cynic that I am (for some perspective, my best friend is a homicidal computer), I didn’t have the heart to tell him that most of the so-called “cinephiles” out there are little more than emotionally suspended infants who love nothing more than to congregate in public settings to mock and jeer films regardless of genre, intent or how inherently ridiculous a particular work may or may not be. These are invariably the same Trembling Gibbles who openly tweet about how terrified they are to get on public transit because of passengers not wearing evidence-free medical-looking masks, funky, multi-coloured bandanas wrapped around their faces or flimsy pieces of cloth with cute pictures of cartoon characters on them hanging from their ears. One can only assume they feel compelled to belittle works of cinema in order to feel superior to whatever is being unspooled in front of their eyes, possibly as a means of compensating for their paralyzing feelings of inadequacy and/or chronic, free-floating anxiety.

The culturally paralyzed, self-conscious metropolis of Toronto is a particularly extreme cesspool of this disposition although I’m hearing from all corners of North America that the affliction is spreading throughout the continent like gangrene. For instance, a friend of mine just went to viddy a 35mm screening of To Live and Die in L.A. as part of a William Friedkin tribute and apparently, the chuckleheads were out in droves, boisterously guffawing their way through what is arguably one of the greatest crime films of the 1980’s. If the Friedkin classic isn’t immune to the snorting, snickering and chortling, I think it’s safe to assume that the species has now amused itself to death.

Usually when I’m editing an interview, I will often remove pauses and hesitations from the finished audio in order to make the conversation flow more smoothly. But in this instance, I left them all in, because it’s in the pregnant pauses where this interview is most compelling. In response to some of my more direct lines of inquiry, you can almost hear the cogs and wheels of Nguyen’s mental machinations working desperately to reconcile the inherent cognitive dissonance embedded within his eventual responses.

But there’s another perversely celebratory, possible perspective on the whole thing. Nguyen is genuinely enthusiastic about and passionate about being a filmmaker. Those qualities radiate clearly throughout the interview, so regardless of any of Birdemic’s virtues or cinematic sins, and despite what audiences may or may not be legitimately resonating with, Nguyen, by way of a happy accident, has found himself in a position to continue practising the thing he loves most. Filmmaking is a cruel mistress and a slimy business but Nguyen, in a bizarre way, has weirdly triumphed. He’s taken advantage of a declining culture to carve out a strange niche for himself and if you ever meet the bloke, and see how innocent, enthusiastic and sweet he actually is, you wouldn’t begrudge him for any of it.

Incredibly, he’s since made two sequels to the movie and Severin Films have compiled a Blu-ray boxset cleverly titled Wings of Disaster: The Birdemic Trilogy. It features a jaw-dropping 13 hours of bonus features, you know, just in case you’re recovering from a lobotomy and are in desperate need of something to viddy.

So until next time, slooshy well my little droogies,

Slooshy Well.

— Stuart F. Andrews

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