When me and fellow movie-addict Vuk Radic met Lloyd Kaufman at the Tromathon, the retrospective Eye organized at Amsterdam’s Filmmuseum last March, to begin with he interviewed us. He grabs that mini-DV cam he carries all over the world – when he was in Syria a sand grain got stuck in the lens and now it doesn’t work that good anymore – and points it to your face. Then he asks you questions, such as: Why are you in Amsterdam? And of course you have to answer you came for the Tromathon.

As you can guess by its title, the retrospective was about Troma, the cult production company which Kaufman and his partner in crime Michael Hertz founded more than 3 decades ago. I say partner in crime because the duo is mostly famous for (very) low-budget horror-splatter comedies, many of which have now become classics – most of all the Toxic Avenger, which you might also known by its nickname “Toxie”, Troma’s mascotte.

Despite being an over 60-year-old with a wife and grown up daughters, Lloyd is still touring the world to sell DVDs, spread some DIY wisdom in his workshops, and carry on his institutional struggle against media moguls. Even with such a tight schedule, he also manages to find the time to whip out his Toxie mask and pose for embarassing pictures with his more or less shaved interviewers (which you can appreciate in this page).

Me and Vuk, whose Twitter skills and Troma savviness got us the interview in the first place, had come up with a lot of questions, but Lloyd answered them all in his own straight-forward way, mixing cultural references to musical and movie classics with harsh remarks about the star system that excludes him. To somebody who has done sort of everything (adult movie director under pseudonym, location manager for Saturday Night Fever, even guide for the Peace Corps in Ciad) you could ask anything, but in our long talk we discussed piracy, South Park, John Waters, Rupert Murdoch, Uwe Boll, the Oscars, and musicals, with a few unexpected interruptions from the animal world.

Vuk Radic: You know, VHS and DVD piracy have made your films huge all over the world. You weren’t making any money, but your films were being seen… What do you think about piracy with your films in mind? You know, spreading the word versus making the money, recuperating the costs…

Lloyd Kaufman: Well, me and I think my partner Michael Hertz maybe want to make money, and we’ve made some money in the past. Now we’re totally economically black-listed, because the industry is controlled by a small number of giant conglomerates and they eat everybody’s lunch, so the piracy actually helps us. In Russia we became famous through piracy, then when the country became more capitalistic and inserted the copyright laws now we’re making a small, small amount of money, very little. But we’re making some money there. And it’s thanks to piracy that Troma became kind of a brand in Russia. I think that piracy opens the door, it educates people anout new art. Because you won’t learn it from Rupert Murdoch, he’s not going to tell about the young art of the future. Troma gives you movies of the future, and big companies don’t want you to learn about it, so a little bit of piracy is not so bad. And the young people are pretty fair, you know… If they just can’t buy the DVD, it’s better that they go on Pirate Bay than not seeing my movies.

VR: You’re big on Twitter, you’re using internet… Are you embracing digital technology? I know you said you shot Poultrygeist on film because you wanted to show it in the theaters. Are you looking into digital technologies, distributing online, maybe an online payment system?

LK: We are experimenting. We are streaming some movies on troma.com, if you go to the website I think they have a small number of movies you can pay a small amount of money to stream. We have movies on Hulu – you know, that it’s free – XBox, iTunes, we’re experimenting… And then of course we are relasing some blue ray movies, but we call it “brown ray” of course, like explosive diarrea. The blue ray of Poultrygeist is quite successful, Tromeo and Juliet is coming, Class of Nuke ‘em High, Mother’s Day… Of course nobody has blue ray machines, but other than that it’s very successful.

Nicola Bozzi: How much do you think the city of New York, as an environment, has helped making Troma what it is? There is any other place, for example in Europe (maybe Amsterdam, with its kind of squat mentality…) where you would imagine another Troma could be born?

LK: Very good question. Really in New York there is no appreciation for Troma – other than my wife, who is in New York’s State Film Commission. So she appreciates Troma, and the governor of New York, ten years ago, when we had our 25th anniversary, made a proclamation, you know, a certificate about Troma, but that’s it, that’s all… New York is more interested in the big movies… The mayor has a big party every year for the movie industry, you know, maybe there are a thousand people, and I’m never invited, even though most of those people don’t make movies, they are bureaucrats, they are shop girls, whatever… you know.

VR: Does you wife get invited?

LK: Yeah, she is invited. She takes me even though i’m insulted, so i don’t want to go, but to support her I would go. My wife is invited to many of the opening studios. She gets invited to the New York premiere of The Bounty Hunter, so I have to go with her to that, even though I know it will be a piece of shit, and then it is a big piece of shit. Not all of the mainstream is a big piece of shit, most of it is shit… District 9 was very good, and Whip It is very good, the movie by Drew Barrymore about the girl on rollerskates. Very good, like Frank Capra. But you see, Troma is more appreciated in Europe I think… La Cinémathèque Française has Troma events, like this place here (Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, NdT). The New York Film Society never has Troma events. Maybe the universities, but not the film museum in New York… But in Amsterdam, in Tokyo, in Paris, people look at Troma as an art form, but they don’t really appreciate us in New York.

NB: In terms of art forms i wanted to ask you something. John Waters wrote that exploitation films are the only ones that get close to the dreaded word “art”. Do you agree? What do you think?

LK: I don’t like the term “exploitation movie”, because Avatar is an exploitation movie. It exploits the Smurfs and the Indians, right? I mean, the movie with Johnny Depp, Alice in Worderland, that’s exploitation… It’s exploiting Johnny Depp… So, the word exploitation was invented by Rupert Murdoch and the elite to insult the independent artists. Van Gogh would have been called exploitation artist back in his days because he was doing kind of wild paintings. During the ten years that he painted, during the very torturous, sad years that he painted, I’m sure he was referred to as exploitation artist. So it’s a bad word really. And John Waters, of course, he has kind of become the mainstream…

VR: Has he sold out?

LK: No, he hasn’t sold out, no, but he has this more middle class… he’s never really been subversive. His movies are very bourgeois, you know. They’re funny, but they’re not saying “workers unite” and “get rid of Rupert Murdoch”, they don’t have that message. They’re saying: “Let’s grow within the system, let’s be a nice little pussycat. We’ll have some outrageous scenes, but we’not going to fuck with McDonald’s, we’re not going to fuck with the status quo.” And I like Fidel Castro, so… I don’t like him so much now, but I liked him in the 1960s.

NB: That’s something else I wanted to ask you about: the importance of social satire – over shock value, for example. Because I noticed, in American comedy and American movies in general, like porn and horror – they’re very American kind of genres in a way – everything is about the explicit. So how important to you is the explicit, in Troma movies? Do you think it’s a part of American culture?

LK: It’s not a part of American culture, which is very conservative, very religious… We still haven’t figured whether or not a woman has the right to her own body. So I think Troma opened the doors to South Park, you know… Those guys began with us, and they’re very much influenced by Troma. Troma has been an influence on Peter Jackson – he used to come to see Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke’em High – and of course for me the grand guignol really was influnced by the original French theater of grand guignol, and of course Buñuel’s Chien Andalou gave me ideas… But we just did it, I think, more because it’s funny, it’s cartoon, it’s the Looney Tunes… The first Toxic Avenger and Mother’s Day, my brother’s movie, are more influenced by cartoons really. Personally my films are all social satire, I think it’s the best way to bring some kind of movies that can change the world. The best way to bring that to the public is with humour, and in my country social satire was pretty dead. And Troma opened the door a little bit, but now South Park has exploded, and almost every movie, the Hollywood movies, the big 80-million dollar horror films, are trying to be funny at the same time. But they’re not puttin in the social satire, that’s the mistake, they’re just being stupid.

NB: Going back to South Park, what do you think about it being mainstream? There is this rumor – I don’t know if it’s true – about the Trapped in the Closet episode on Tom Cruise. Apparently the second airing of the episode was blocked because the actor kind of told Viacom that he would not promote Mission:Impossible 3 if they didn’t. Basically Mission:Impossible, Tom Cruise and South Park are under the same Viacom banner. So what do you think about satire like South Park, which I think is very good, how do you think it comes out in such a big media structure?

LK: Those guys are geniuses. They’ve taken Troma humor and they’ve made it mainstream. But they’re very subversive, and it’s wonderful their ideas are on mainstream television and the movies, because they have good messages, a good message to the american public. And Tom Cruise is full of shit, he really is full of shit. Unfortunately it got a little bit censored, but still thanks to the internet that segment is everywhere. If you’re interested, I gave an interview with Trey Parker on the Cannibal! The musical double-disc DVD. I ask him those questions, and he said that in the case of the Muhammad episode (Cartoon Wars, NdT) he didn’t get upset when it was censored, because he didn’t want people to be killed. He was concerned that, maybe not him, but somebody at his company might get a bomb put in their editing room. So he said it’s not worth dangerous situations.

VR: But they still did it, it was later on censored… Do you think that they have a self-censorship, since they’re working for a big company?

LK: I think they do what the believe in.

VR: Do they stop at some point?

LK: I know what I’d do. I’d stop where I don’t believe, and I think they’re the same way. I think that they’re brilliant. They’ve been able to get what they want within the system and that’s wonderful. There are other people like that… I’ve had total freedom for forty years, but my wager – you know, like Pascal – is that I have to make a small budget, I have to make compromises…

VR: So your only compromises are budget limitations? Is there anything… let’s call it “sacred”, to you?

LK: If I don’t believe in it then I don’t do it. I’m not gonna make a movie that glamourizes Paris Hilton. I dont like her, so I’m not gonna make something that says she’s good. You know, that kind of thing… And I think Trey and Matt are the same way, I think they’re totally decent, they say what they believe. Because they’re so talented, because they really are brilliant, they are geniuses. I don’t think i’m a genius, those guys are geniuses. And there are others… You know, Oliver Stone started with Troma. He gets what he wants, he had total freedom for 30 or 40 years. He may be a psycho, but he has the total freedom to do what he wants and he has integrity. So there are a small number of us who have total freedom and some of them have total freedom on a big level. You know, maybe they have to self-censor themselves a little bit because if they have a big star they have to have some kind of an audience. You know, with me I don’t care because I have no audience…

VR: Do you prefer it that way?

LK: No, I don’t prefer it that way, because I have to sleep on a park bench. At the age of sixty-four I’m bringing DVDs here like Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. I could be his grand father. He should do that, but I’m too old, and look how pathetic! (points at his suitcases) I bring those from across the ocean, I carry ‘em by hand because Troma is too poor to ship them, right? So I take them in my suitcase. I have no underwear because I can’t afford to have overweight baggage, so I’m wearing the same underwear now for… Don’t come to close! There’s no room in my suitcase for underwear, only DVDs… So the point i’m making is you know i have a bit to sacrifice. My life has been… small, you know, I never had a big house… Well, I have a decent, a fairly big house, but i’ve never had… You know, I don’t have drugs or… I’ve had the same wife… Well, I have drugs of course, but people give them to me, they’re from my fans, I can’t afford them… but you know what I’m saying? I’ve never had a big time advertising or cars, never had a big fee, never was hired to make a movie…

VR: That is true, but I can’t think of a director that would have such a huge following, such a loyal fan base… You know, people that are really – it sounds very weird but I say it – obsessed with you…

LK: It’s the only reason Troma is still here. Because we have really really loyal fans. You know, I hate McDonald’s like José Bové in France, and if i went on my MySpace or Twitter or Facebook and said “All of you, if you’re really a Troma fan go in your town and take a brick and throw it to the window at McDonald’s!”, I think a lot of McDonald’s would have broken windows…

VR: Probably because it’s the kind of people that would do it…

LK: I think they would… I’m not so sure that Sandra Bullock fans would do that. You know they are fans, and she’s talented, but I don’t think they would do it to that extent. You know the word fan is not about air conditioning, the word fan is from the word “fanatic”. So that’s the only reason I’m still permitted to make movies, because there are enough fans who will, you know, find our DVDs and make the extra effort to buy them. Because they’re impossible to find, you have to buy them on our site or Amazon or here in the Dutch museum… That’s it, we’ve been lucky.

(Go read the second part!)