AVC: Do you think that serious approach sometimes gets lost under all that explosive diarrhea?
LK: Our fans are pretty intelligent. The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in. The Cinémathèque Française, The British Film Institute, the AFI at the Kennedy Center have all had Troma retrospectives. Vincent Canby—one of the all-time great New York Times critics—he chose to review Toxic Avenger when it came out instead of the big Hollywood movies that came out that day, because he loved Squeeze Play! and Waitress!, those raunchy early comedies we made. When we went to his memorial service, Janet Maslin told me that he always talked about Troma and how we were underappreciated.
AVC: Speaking of your early days, you started out working with Oliver Stone, yet when he recently spoke at the Austin Film Festival, he basically denied those early films, as though they were beneath him.
LK: Oliver Stone would not be making movies if I didn't make movies. My roommate and I at Yale made two feature-length movies with a Bolex—which is a wind-up camera, not a social disease—while Oliver would hang out. He was writing this horrible, crappy novel—he was trying to be James Joyce or something, but it was awful—but as a result of hanging around us, he went to film school. I've known Oliver forever. We grew up together, from second grade on. We lived a couple of blocks away from each other in New York. In fact, we used to have sleepovers as kids, and he used to beat the shit out of me. He was a bully! [Laughs.] He's better now. He's still a psycho, but much nicer. But at Yale, he would hang out while I was making movies. He's in my first color movie, The Battle Of Love's Return. And with Sugar Cookies, he was associate producer. Oliver had very good instincts on that movie. There were scenes I'd written that the director wanted cut, with a big fat kid—my first big fat kid!—dressed in a woman's nightgown and lipstick, running into the street. Oliver said, "No way," and we kept it in and it became the conversation piece for the movie. He also saw the need to try to have some kind of name actor in the movie, so he got us Monique van Vooren. I had been hanging out with the Warhol gang, so I got some of the Warhol people.
AVC: Were you part of the Factory scene?
LK: I hung around the fringes of that Factory crowd, just observing. I'd see Warhol at Max's a lot. I think he knew my face, but I don't believe he ever saw any of our movies. He's a big influence on my work, no question about it. Anyway, Oliver's early films… Seizure is a very interesting film. The Hand with Michael Caine is great. He shouldn't be ashamed.
AVC: He basically just said that he doesn't appreciate horror, like that's just not his type of film. Is there any cinema you'd consider unworthy?
LK: I would only make a movie that I believe in. If I didn't believe in it, it would be unworthy. Squeeze Play! is very entertaining, but it's also about the women's liberation movement. Stuck On You! is about palimony. Toxic Avenger is about the environment. You know, I don't think I would make a biopic comparing Hillary Clinton to Abraham Lincoln, even though she might have a thicker beard. That kind of stuff would be beneath me. But luckily, I've never been offered a directing job that was lucrative, so I've never had to make that decision. I've never heard, "Here's $800,000 to remake Sisters." [Laughs.]
AVC: Your distaste for the Clintons and Gore—that wouldn't have anything to do with being classmates with George W. Bush at Yale, would it?
LK: Well, Bush was a classmate in '68, and I distinctly remember in freshman year, he was running around campus looking for weapons of mass destruction. We couldn't figure out what that was all about, but now we know.
AVC: You weren't in Skull And Bones, were you?
LK: I was invited! But I didn't know that there was money involved. I didn't know you get taken care of for life, and whatever career you choose, you get. I just saw these jerks. I wish I had joined Skull And Bones. I probably would have had six Oscars by now. Maybe it would be me in the White House. Maybe Bush would have been directing Poultrygeist. [Laughs.] But I was kind of an oddity at Yale.
AVC: How so?
LK: I was making feature-length movies. In the '60s, everybody was doing short, psychedelic stuff, but I was interested in the long form. I showed my movie, The Girl Who Returned, at the Yale Film Society, where I learned two very valuable lessons. One was that once people have paid, no matter how bad the movie is, they don't ask for their money back. And there were two movies shown that night. One was Moonrise by [Frank] Borzage—which is a masterpiece—and the poster on campus just had the title on it. Not a lot of people there. But The Girl Who Returned had a photograph of a gal lying on her back, with her love pillows stretching her T-shirt. We had about 350 people show up. So I learned a little about marketing. The movie wasn't erotic, per se, but I was heavy into Warhol, so the film had these long periods of this girl with nice jugs jogging around.
AVC: You didn't go to Yale for film.
LK: No, I majored in Chinese Studies. I'm probably the only director of chicken Indian zombie movies who can speak pretty good Mandarin. But if I hadn't gone there, I would not have made movies. It was the '60s, and I was going to be a teacher and improve the world. Teach people with hooks for hands to fingerpaint, and teach bums to draw happy faces on beads. But through fate, I got put in a tiny bedroom with a movie nut who ran the Yale Film Society. Our beds were head-to-toe, and at night, I would inhale his Godard-stinkin' feet, and the "aroma de Troma" was born. I didn't even know what a film director was. To me, Charlie Chaplin was a goofy clown, and John Ford—what? Never heard of him. Howard Hawks, Stan Brakhage. Warhol, I'd seen his soup cans. Anyway, I started going to the Society screenings. One night, I saw Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, and I remember being so knocked out by that film. I decided right then and there that I would make movies. It was as easy as getting up out of the La-Z-Boy and opening up a fresh vial of crystal meth.
AVC: How did you start looking for film work?
LK: The first time I took acid, I made the decision that I would stay in New York and find an independent film company to get a job with. I had two possibilities: To work on The Owl And The Pussycat—with the whiniest actress in history, Barbra Streisand—or I could work with Cannon in New York. On acid, it came to me that I would stay and work for the tiny company. I got lucky there, because John G. Avildsen—who went on to do Rocky—was about to do Joe with Peter Boyle. It was his and Susan Sarandon's first movie. I got on it and learned a lot from him. Originally, Lawrence Tierney was cast in the part of Joe, and he had a bit of a drinking problem. I was assigned to take him to get some costumes in a department store, and we were going up the escalator, and the guy started taking a piss. [Laughs.] It was my first job, and here's Lawrence Tierney taking a piss on my leg. This was my film school.
AVC: You actually teach a Master Class at various film schools now. What's the first thing that you tell your students?
LK: The first decision is, "Do I want the big mansion in Hollywood? Do I want the hookers? Do I want to be on the cover of People stepping out of a limousine with no underwear?" If that's what I want, then I gotta go out to Hollywood and fight my way up the food chain. But if that's not necessary, then no need. One can stay in New York or Chicago or Memphis or wherever and make your own damn movie the Troma way. The other very important thing is, "To thine own self be true"—which is a phrase coined by William Shakespeare, who wrote the bestselling book 101 Moneymaking Screenplay Ideas, otherwise known as Hamlet.
AVC: Do you think most of your students want to create films or just "make it"?
LK: I think the people that show up for my classes are already predisposed to be independent. I think they come as much to be inspired, to hear that it is indeed possible to work outside the system and survive. Even though there is economic blacklisting—even though whenever I, Lloyd, have penetrated the hymen of the mainstream, I've been the one to get fucked—they can see that one can have a satisfying creative existence without selling out. I think they want confirmation of that. It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies—if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke—if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.
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