We talk with Q. Allan Brocka about the banned video cover of EATING OUT (now on DVD), his upcoming opus, BOY CULTURE, and CAMP MICHAEL JACKSON.
After playing email tag for several weeks, I got Mr. Brocka on the phone when he had a little time to kill, since he was locked out of his apartment. But that's another story.

New Queer Cinema: Tell us a little bit about your background .. You were born in Guam.

Q. Allan Brocka: I was born in Guam and I moved back and forth, but it was mostly Guam. Between Tacoma, Washington and Guam. I left home at 15 and I went to Seattle and lived there till I was 26. We moved around a lot and I just wanted to stay in one place and finish high school. My mom moved to Germany.

NQC: Was she in the military?

QAB: No, but she married in the military. We were like gypsies.

NQC: How did you get interested in film?

QAB: I don’t know. It just felt right.

NQC: Did it have anything to do with your uncle? [Lino Brocka, Macho Dancer]

QAB: No, I didn’t even know he was a filmmaker until after I started making films myself. When I first figured out what a director was, was on a PBS special about Steven Spielberg. I was about 9 at the time and it clicked and that’s what I wanted to do. So I started making films.

NQC: At age 9?

QAB: Yes. I started making video and animated film strips - Super 8 films. Most of them involved my sister and my neighbors. I made a bunch of Lego movies as well.

NQC: The Rick & Steve films?

QAB: No, they were mostly dinosaurs and stuff. I was nine. I didn’t know I was gay yet. But when I went to film school I was in a similar situation where I had to make films but I didn’t know anyone; I didn’t have any friends. So for my first school project I went back to the Lego I used as a kid. The first was Rick & Steve and that started a career for me.

NQC: Did you have any trouble with the Lego company?

QAB: Yeah, I’m constantly having trouble with the Lego company. So it no longer exists in Lego but the idea still exists and we’re in development with Logo right now, the gay network that just launched.

NQC: You’ve worked with both film and video, what do you prefer to work with?

QAB: There really isn’t much of a difference for me in the medium. The difference for me is documentary vs. narrative or television vs. feature film formats. I've only shot one thing on actual film, outside of Super 8 -- everything else has been video or high def. On the set there's not a whole lot of difference because people treat the [HD] camera just as professionally now as they do a film camera. Before, there was this whole intimacy with a video camera, but it's lightened up a bit and people have seen what can come from video. It's kind of a double-edged sword. It's harder to get people loosened up sometimes.

NQC: How did you happen to get chosen for Gay Hollywood?

QAB: Gay Hollywood came about from a long relationship I have with a company named World of Wonder. We've worked together on a number of projects. They asked me if I wanted to be on Gay Hollywood, which they were producing and I said OK.

NQC: Do you think gay people hold gay films to a higher standard than they do Hollywood movies?

QAB: They do. I know I do, and most of the people I know do. There's a personal stake going in to see a gay movie because you expect to see yourself reflected in a way you don't expect in a Hollywood movie. When a straight person goes to see War of the Worlds, they expect to see themselves on screen - they expect to see a crazy alien adventure movie -- the same thing we expect. Now if it were a gay War of the Worlds, we would expect to see something that wasn't in the non-gay world. And that's pretty natural because images and stories in general of gays are still very few and far between compared to the amount of media out there. Yeah, we have Will & Grace, we have Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and those are really all wonderful advancements, but still not integrated. There's so much more now than there was ten years ago. It's weird if The Real World doesn't have a gay cast member; the last one had two. It's weird when there is a Survivor without someone queer on it. So we're heading in that direction but we're not there yet. So on our way there, we really analyze the images we see of ourselves and the stories and we compare them to what we know, which our own personal life and experiences. We bring all of our baggage, and being gay can have a lot of baggage depending on what you had to go through to get to where you are. Some people were thrown out of their houses, other people had all of their friends die of AIDS, other people had no problems at all. So it comes with all kinds of baggage that people bring with them when they go to see a story. And I don't think anything is wrong with that.

NQC: So what about the film Trick, which only exists to be a feel-good movie? It gets criticized for being a shallow comedy.

QAB: There are two things going on. People weren't used to seeing gay genre films and it's just starting to happen now, which is a nice thing which means a certain level of acceptance. The whole thing with genre movies is that you either like them or you hate them. If you hate a genre, you're going to hate all films of that genre. Maybe there'll be a breakthrough gay western. If you hate romantic comedies and find them shallow, then you're just not going to like them. Gay genre films are more honest to the genre than to being gay. Genre films are more honest to the genre than they are to real life. The other thing is independent vs. Hollywood. People wonder what the point is of making a genre film if you are making an independent film. The whole point of making an independent film is to have a fresh new voice and be completely independent of the studio system. The Hollywood fluff that everyone wants to see like War of the Worlds or whatever the latest romantic comedy is. Everyone doesn't want to see a gay genre film. So we're in this conundrum of wanting to make a feel-good happy Hollywood type film, but we want to see ourselves in it. In order to do that we've got to make this thing that purports to be mainstream on a completely indie budget. And it's not necessarily indie voiced other than it's a familiar story with gay characters in it. So you open yourself up to a lot of criticism from all corners of the universe, from picky gay people that we are trying to entertain, who we are just trying to represent, and you've got the independent community who feels like you're selling short the independent community and going Hollywood. Then you've got Hollywood who knows that you're nothing at the box office. There's a lot of criticism to be taken for doing that. I respect that, and I see the point of all that criticism and I don't think it's all completely invalid.

NQC: What does one do about that? Nothing?

QAB: No, you keep making it. I think Trick was fantastic and I think it subverted the genre pretty well because it was about two people trying to fuck and how that turned into love. I've never seen that before, not even in a straight film. Yeah, it felt like a romantic comedy, but I felt it really subverted it. They were looking for a place to fuck and on top of being gay, that is a really subversive kind of comedy. I thought it was brilliant. I really enjoyed that about it. It was done so well that people think it's a fluffy romantic comedy but it was really a lot darker than that. It's kind of a love/hate statement about the huge issue in the gay community about when a trick becomes a romance and where we draw the line, and how we all do that. I thought that was great. I don't even pretend to do anything like that. Eating Out is a sex comedy, and I really like sex comedies, with a bit of John Hughes in it, and I guess there's some John Waters too. I just want to appeal to the same sensibility that Porky's appeals to in a straight guy. Or American Pie. I really like those movies. They aren't particularly lauded, but they're movies I watched a lot growing up. They formed an impression of an adolescence I didn't have. Partly because I was completely closeted and was unable to interact with other people during the beginning of my sexual awareness. It was always cool to see other people going through these experiences that part of me was going through in a different way but I was never able to express because I couldn't be gay. So doing a gay one was really exciting for me.

NQC: Eating Out had a ten day shooting schedule. How is that possible?

QAB: Because there's a seventeen minute phone call in the middle of it. Because that a big chunk of the film is taken up with a phone call and there's very little coverage. One scene is all just one shot. It's one continuous dolly into her, then we pull back a little at the end. It's a seventeen minute take. So we knocked out a huge portion of the film in just one and a half days. There were also very few locations. We didn't have the luxury to go outside. There are very few characters and lots and lots of talking. That's how we get away with doing it in ten days. The actual shooting of a take is one of the shorter parts of running a set. The long things are the setups. The more shots you have, the more time it takes. A seventeen minute take may take three hours of lighting to set up, but a two minute take would take the same three hours.

NQC: So the producer needed it done in ten days and you agreed.

QAB: I've always been of the school of thought of taking whatever opportunity you have and making art out of that rather than waiting around for everything to be perfect to express myself because I'd still be waiting. Some people are good at getting stuff to be perfect and I'm not. I'm a terrible producer so I look around at what I have access to and what I have to work with and use that to make films the best I can make, which is how the Lego thing came about. It took me to Sundance and all around the world.

NQC: Did you try to cast gay actors?

QAB: Yes, I really tried to cast gay actors. I'm not comfortable asking an actor when they come in if they are gay or not. I don't know if I'm allowed to, legally through SAG. I ask my questions that lead to that. I try to get a feel if they are or just talk to them like I would talk to someone who was gay, especially if the character is gay. You can usually tell if it's a straight guy in there. For me it's easier if the person is gay so I can talk to them in a different language that they will get. If there's a reaction that you have to have when the character walks into a bathhouse they'll get it without me having to explain it to someone who has no concept of what that is. But it's hard, it's really difficult. A lot of gay actors are only comfortable playing very flamboyant characters and not all my characters are that. The gay actors who can play non-flamboyant characters well are homophobic -- I don't know that they are homophobic, they don't want to play gay. They don't want to be outed, they don't want to be caught, they don't want to be stuck playing gay. I have no problem with a flamboyancy in a character. I like guys who are comfortable enough to flame out a little bit, but that aren't always on. I'm like that, and I like characters like that who can be very girly when they need to be. Those are the hardest ones to cast. Straight guys don't really know where to go with that in general, and gay guys who can do that well, don't want to play gay. That was mostly my experience in casting these past two films.

NQC: Tell me about the two different DVD covers for Eating Out.

QAB: In order to get into big chains we had to have a less sexual cover. So rather than changing the whole cover, my distributor allowed me to keep that and added an extra cover that could get us into other stores. He's a big queer activist and wants to reach every single person he possibly can and have it available in places in suburbs and the red states - every possible corner of the universe where you can get a gay title on the shelf. That's his motivation in this and I think it's great. I'd rather force the big stores to [go with the original cover], but they just won't do it. I'm glad that it will be getting to places that it might otherwise not be getting to.

NQC: Is Eating Out rated?

QAB: No. The reason we haven't had it rated is because it's expensive to do that. Most movies are unrated for that reason. The very least rating we could get would be an R, and that doesn't open up the market much more than not being rated at all. For a movie that cost under $50,000 to make, that's a huge cost for us.

NQC: Tell me about Boy Culture.

QAB: Boy Culture is a new film that will be rated and will have to have an R rating. It's a much bigger budget. It's based on the book of the same name and it's a dark romantic comedy. It's a bit in the vein of Trainspotting with not so many drugs but a lot of hustling. We're going to hit the film festival circuit with it the beginning of next year.

NQC: What did you learn from shooting Camp Michael Jackson?

QAB: I learned that Michael Jackson is innocent. I didn't know that before I started shooting it.

NQC: How did you come to that conclusion?

QAB: I came to that conclusion through evidence and lack of evidence. I questioned why I came to the opposite conclusion before shooting the film. Before shooting I thought he was probably guilty. I had no reasons really, I felt, My God, here's this guy who's said he's slept in a bed with a boy. Of course he would probably jack him off. I began to question why I had made that leap and what the implications of doing that were and how harmful that was in the greater scheme of things.

NQC: Do you plan on making more gay interest films, or is the genre not so important?

QAB: I plan on having gay characters in my films as often as I can. I don't have any scripts right now that don't have gay characters. I have some where they are not the lead but they weigh heavily in the film and can't be written out. I can see some of them may not be considered gay films, however. It's not something I plan on leaving, if that's what you mean.

NQC: If Disney offered you Herbie Rides Again 2, would you do it?

QAB: You mean like Angela Robinson? It would be really hard to turn down a $60 million movie. A lot of gay directors have gone on the make teen movies. It just seems like fun. The offer hasn't come in, but it's something I would seriously entertain. If I can bring a queer sensibility to it, even better. As long as it isn't homophobic or racist, I wouldn't turn down a big budget genre film.

Eating out was released to home video July 26th 2005.