Stuck on Stu

Stuart Gordon likes to make his audience squirm.

A dark comedy inspired by an actual case of a woman who hit a homeless man with her car—then left him in her windshield to die—Stuart Gordon’s Stuck is a genial affront to fine taste. “Greetings, lovers of culture,” the director joked when he was introduced at Toronto’s midnight screening of the film in September. Amazingly awake the next morning, the Chicago-born, theater-trained horror-movie icon (Re-Animator) sat down to have breakfast with us. Stuck opens in Chicago this week.

How did Chicago influence your career? You were one of the founders of the Organic Theater Company.
Yeah, I was the artistic director of the Organic Theater Company for 15 years in Chicago, and we did original plays, including the first production of David Mamet’s work professionally. We had an ensemble company of people like Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz, and they were constantly getting cast in movies, every time a film would come to town. It occurred to me that maybe we should do a movie together—develop a project that we could do in the summer or something. I read that Bergman use to do that with his theater company, and [we] developed the project Re-Animator to be done by the theater. The board got wind of it and were horrified for all the wrong reasons. They thought we should be doing an art film, and at that point I had raised the financing and really wanted to make it. I said, all right, I’ll take a leave of absence, and that’s how I really got started making movies.

You came full circle a few years ago when you directed the film version of David Mamet's Edmond (2005).
Yeah. I had seen Edmond in Chicago in—I think it was 1982, and was sort of knocked out by it. I had been talking to David about [doing] it as a movie for years. It’s a very cinematic play. Unlike anything else he’s ever written really. But it was a great time to be in Chicago. John Malkovich and Gary Sinise at Steppenwolf and, you know, William Petersen at the Remains Theatre, and you had Bill Murray and John Belushi at Second City. It was a phenomenal time. And, you know, playwrights like David Mamet just getting started.

Do you feel ambivalent about moving to L.A.?
Yeah, I miss Chicago, I just was back there in May [2007], and it just looks so beautiful. I saw the new Millennium Park and the Bean, and it’s an amazing city. L.A. doesn’t really feel like a city. It’s very spread out, feels like a big suburb. I miss Chicago.

What do you think current trends in horror film? There’s been a lot of talk lately about “torture porn.”
Yeah, I hate that label, because I think that people are always trying to ghettoize horror. There are always people who think that horror movies are just kind of one half-step away from porno to begin with. And you know, torture is one of the staples of horror movies, really. It’s been there since horror movies began. Hunchback of Notre Dame—we see him being whipped. The Black Cat—Bela Lugosi is skinned alive. So it’s nothing new. I think that every generation redefines horror for itself, so it’s interesting for me that there was a renaissance of horror right after 9/11, and that it’s all I think inspired by our fears of terrorism, bioterrorism. There’s all these what I call “plague movies” that are being done now. 28 Days Later would be a good example. But even this new version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers [The Invasion]—instead of it being pods, it was some sort of a virus…torture [is] in the news every day, so the horror movies are really just reflecting the fears of our society. You’re always trying to find new ways to scare people.

And with Stuck—had you ever done something that was true to life?
A true story? No. But the last three movies that I’ve done have been sort of set in the real world, the here and now, starting with a film called King of the Ants [2003], which was about a young man who gets hired to be a hit man. And it was a horrific movie, but not really what I would call a horror movie—more of a crime thriller. And then Edmond, which—even though someone did say they thought it was my best horror film—it takes place in our world, the real world.

So you don’t see your films as a reaction specifically to 9/11.
My films are going in some slightly different direction. I think what I’m realizing is that the things that people really do to each other are much more disturbing than something that you can dream up.

There’s an Internet Movie Database listing for a Re-Animator sequel, House of Re-Animator.
Yeah. I’m hoping to get that made. It’s a sequel that’s set in the White House, and it’s about Herbert West being called in to reanimate Dick Cheney after he’s had a massive heart attack, so I’d better make it soon.

Is there any hope that it’ll get off the ground?
I don’t know. I think there’s hope. The thing with movies is that it always takes forever to get your financing. You know there’s interest, but the subject matter—I think the political implications of it scare a lot of people. Even though I’ve got William H. Macy, who wants to play the president and my old friend George Wendt [as] the vice president. And of course Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott.

Have you seen Joe Dante’s Homecoming [2005, about zombie Iraq soldiers who return home to vote Bush out of office]?
Yeah, I did. I thought it was great. It kind of bugged me that he sort of beat me to the punch with the idea—with a political horror movie like that. I also think though that it’s interesting that one of the only antiwar movies that’s been made was a horror film. I think that’s one of the things about horror movies that I like. They can really deal with subjects that people are afraid to talk about.

Last night it was said that at the Organic Theater, you were guaranteed a naked woman on stage before the curtain came down.
Well, not always. The nudity was part of it. I think the approach I took with it was that…anything is possible on stage, and that theater shouldn’t be just like these kitchen-sink dramas. I always tried to kind of shock and wake up the audience and get under their skin. So there was a lot of violence in our shows, there was a lot of blood. A lot of the techniques that I use in my movies I was using on stage live, which is even more upsetting when you see it.

In 1968 you were arrested for obscenity.
Again it was an attempt to make a political statement. ’68 was the year of the Chicago Democratic convention, and my wife and I—at this point we were not married yet—but we went to Chicago that summer and ended up getting tear-gassed by the Chicago police department, and that experience kind of radicalized us, it politicized us. And I had a professor who [had] posed this sort of challenge to me. He said, “Do you think it would be possible to do Peter Pan without flying harnesses?” That was kind of going around in the back of my head, and I suddenly realized you could make Peter Pan into a political allegory. That Peter Pan and the lost boys were yippies and hippies—Abbie Hoffman and the gang—and that Wendy and her brothers are kind of like these straight suburban kids who get pulled into this whole thing, and Captain Hook and the pirates became Mayor Daley—the original Mayor Daley—and the Chicago Police Department. The sequence that got me into trouble was—we didn’t change any of Barrie’s dialogue—but when he says, you know, just to take some fairy dust and think lovely thoughts and up you go, it became an acid trip. In order to portray that I had a psychedelic light show that was projected on the bodies of seven naked women, who were dancers. That got me arrested—and also, my wife Carolyn—for obscenity. It was a felony offense, and we could have gone to prison for ten years.

Regarding Stuck—as you said last night, everyone somehow heard this story a couple of years ago.
Yeah, it’s one of those things that when you mention it to people, they go, “Oh yeah.” … I’m really pleased with the idea. I think it’s a very participatory film, because the audience gets very involved, and their sympathy is shifting back and forth. I love the fact that every screening I’ve had there’s a lot of noises being made by the audience. You don’t quietly watch this movie.

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