Exclusive: the grass is Greener

A comedian, director, testicular-cancer survivor, actor and Drew Barrymore's ex-husband, Tom Green is anything but ordinary. Which, you can kind of gather just by looking at him.

He is currently in Australia for the first time doing a bunch of stand-up shows and I caught up with him last week. Despite being as quirky and humorous as I had expected, he was also very anti-establishment…which was, er, intriguing. Here’s what he had to say on:

Australia –

"I’ve never been to Australia. I’m really excited to do sand-up comedy here. I know Australians always seem to be pretty fun and absurd, crazy people like myself so I'm excited to see how the jokes translate. I didn’t know what to expect when we initially booked this tour but after doing all these interviews, everyone seems really excited and the tickets are selling. Which is good, because I always like to have actual people at my shows.

I want to hug a duck-billed Platypus and I’m generally just really curious about everything. I'm looking forward to having some beers with the Freddy Got Fingered fans and generally having a good time. I'm excited to see my first Kangaroo in the wild, have my first beer in Adelaide, then my second, third, fourth, fifth, and watch the toilet flush in the opposite direction."

Freddy Got Fingered –

"Making Freddy Got Fingered was saying `look, we did everything wrong here, we smashed the mould and wanted to show you don’t have to everything by these conventional rules or make a cookie cutter comedy movie.’ I purposefully set out to make a movie that was the craziest, weirdest movie. I don’t know if people would say that about it or not.

Everything has got so mainstream and corporate and over-produced now, there’s not so many surprises in comedy as there used to be. It’s (my stuff) for people looking for something anti-establishment."

Stand-up comedy –

"I have always wanted to this in this in some sort of capacity and do it seriously. I did it for a few years as a teenager but I was too young, I was in high school. All those years in Hollywood, doing shows, I just wanted to go and do stand-up. It's the purest form of comedy, there's no teleprompter, no scripts, no boss coming in and telling you what you can and can't say. I got in to comedy so I didn’t have someone telling me what to do all day and then I have a TV show and people are telling me what to do all day."
Movies –

"It’s funny, I never really set out to do movies, it was never really my goal. I always liked television and was a huge fan on comedy on TV. I started my show in a completely independent way with no rules and on a community access station with no executives telling me what to do. After the show did well and got picked up on MTV I did Road Trip. I did a lot of improvising and tried to always do what would be the most ridiculous thing possible.

It depends what kind of movies you want to make, but I never want to be a serious actor. I wouldn’t have an insight to that. I spend a lot of my time studying great comedians from the 60s and 70s and getting inspiration from that."

Why the heck he has so many cameras with him –

"It’s for my show; you can watch all the shows online. It occurred to me about a year ago what better way to promote the show and build on my audience than with the stand-up comedy. My show is so international, with people calling in on Skype, and I thought it would be neat to get my camera and take it with me. I brought a small camera crew, myself and one other person, so we can document parts of my trip here."

His favourite movies –

"Growing up my favourite film was Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. It didn’t have a solid plot throughout the whole thing, but a combination of the most outrageous skits you could ever see. As a kid growing up in Canada I thought `wow, you can vomit on TV and play with guts and have babies fall out of dresses?’ It was very exciting and inspirational to me. To a hyperactive 14-year-old it seemed like the dream. I also liked unconventional movies full of wacky skits and weird stuff like Aeroplane and Top Secret. They were always my favourites.

Recently…I liked Avatar a lot, I saw that. The Hangover was a hilarious movie, directed by my friend Todd Phillips who did Road Trip. I was just really happy for my friend Todd. He started out in a very independent way making documentaries and that kind of thing and has a very distinct point of view. As someone who writes and directs, I’m excited to see him keep making movies the way he wants to. It’s good to see a free-thinking person come from outside of that Hollywood, pre-packaged model.

I don’t see movies as often as I would like to, but when I do I pick something I think I’m going to like."



You can watch Tom Green's online show and find out all about his tour dates etc HERE.

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Say what? Great quotes from great filmmakers

Filmmakers are such awesome people in general, pretty much anything they have to say is extremely interesting and offers some unique insight. Except for Australian director Ana Kokkinos, I got to sit in on an interview with her last month and boy can that bitch talk; mainly about herself and what a successful, brilliant, visionary filmmaker she is (snort). Anyway, I’ve put together a collection of my favourite quotes from filmmakers, some legendary and others, not so much. There’s many, many, many great quotes from filmmakers out there, but these are the ones that have really inspired me in some way, or made me laugh.

I hope you find them as intriguing as I did.

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world." - John Houston

"Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure." - Federico Fellini (below)

"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick.

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock

“I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not." - Errol Morris

"Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul." - Ingmar Bergman

“Thank God I’m an atheist” - Luis Bunuel

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't." – Jean-Luc Godard (below)

“A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?” – Drew Barrymore

"I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead." – David Lynch

“Every day I’m intrigued and sometimes outraged by things that no one talks about. Current is a chance to be heard, and send think-bombs out into the world.” – Catherine Hardwicke

Basically I marvel at anything Woody Allen has ever said (besides “Mia, I’m leaving you for Soon-Yi”) as the man has such an interesting perspective on, well, everything. I may be a little biased with the following quotes as I got to hear them straight from the man’s mouth during a phone interview, but they really have stuck with me.

“In life, as long as you don’t hurt anybody – life is such a painful experience for most people – whatever works, whatever gives you that little bit of happiness. It doesn’t have to obey conventional rules or please people. It doesn’t have to be what you planned your whole life.”

“I have never tried to pay homage to anybody. I rip off when I want to rip off, but I never pay homage. My feeling is if you’re going to steals, steal from the best.”

“I’m really interested in my appraisal of them (my films) and not the public appraisal, because they don’t know. The public, in general, will say what they’re told to say by people they consider their betters.”

“I’ve never had a muse in my life, there’s never been anybody that has inspired me in any way to make a film. It’s always hard, grinding work; I go in to a room, I sit, I think. No muse ever shows up with any good news for me.”

“Usually if I’m making a film, I have a good idea and I screw it up.”

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I said Whip It! Whip It good!

Ah yes, just reading the above post title should induce a jig of some sort accompanied with air-whip movements as the infectious beat of the Devo song creeps into your brain. And stays there. For the next 48 hours.However, Whip It is not only a kitsch musical classic, it's also the title of Drew Barrymore's directorial debut starring Ellen Page, Juliette Lewis, Eve, Kristen Wiig and Barrymore herself. Based on Shauna Cross's novel Derby Girl, it tells the tale of an indie-rock loving misfit (Page) who finds a way of dealing with her small-town misery after she discovers a roller derby league. The trailer has just been put up on the net and it looks seriously wicked. Seriously.

Watch it here.

Hot damn! Strap on my skates and throw me some knee pads because if the trailer is anything to go by Whip It! looks like an excellent ride. I have a lot of faith in Drew Barrymore and she has proved her competence behind the camera countless times as executiv

e producer on flicks such as Never Been Kissed, Donnie Darko, Charlie's Angles, Duplex and a bunch of others.

In a glance, it looks like it has plenty of that Juno-quirk but presented in a lighter, more accessible package.

Whip It! Has a October 9 release date in the US which will no doubt be waaaay later for us Aussies, if not early 2010.

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