The BBC has a rather fascinating interview with director Tom Six, ass-to-mouth architect of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), in which he offers many insights into how this year’s most blogged-about horror film came to be and talks some about its upcoming sequel. (It wasn’t subtitled (First Sequence) for nothing.) Here are some of the more salient points in bite-size form, so you can easily digest them and pass them along to your neighbor.
- Six got his start as one of the original directors of the Netherlands’ Big Brother, so he already had experience with shoving strangers together and forcing them to swallow each other’s shit.
- During the audition process in New York—which attracted “a lot of beautiful girls”—Six showed these ingénues a drawing he’d made of the human centipede construction. “So many became very angry with me,” Six says.
- At the American premiere, Six witnessed people vomiting and leaving the theater. Japan, on the other hand, “couldn’t stop laughing.”
- Although it was pretty uncomfortable for the actors having their faces pressed into each other’s assholes, they all got “a massage every day,” which is nice.
- At its core, The Human Centipede is really a film about World War II: “I put in American and Japanese characters so they are all related to the main players of the Second World War.” (If any of you students out there have the stones to write a paper on this, please send us a copy.)
- If that revelation leaves you asking, “Well, what about England?” as anyone with a passing knowledge of history might, Six is way ahead of you: He’s shooting a Human Centipede sequel right now in London with an almost all-British cast in an effort to address that. Also, because he “absolutely loves London”—and what better way to show it?
- Finally, for those who might worry that Human Centipede has already exhausted any lingering shock value from its premise, and that Human Centipede II would only be a flimsy excuse to up the gag factor without adding anything substantially new, consider that the sequel features 12 people linked ass-to-mouth. An ensemble of that size obviously opens the door to all sorts of unpredictable character dynamics—like 12 Angry Men or The Dirty Dozen, only, you know, linked ass-to-mouth. Also, Six was apparently holding back on the first film: “I had so many ideas when I wrote part one but I couldn't put them all in because I wanted the audience to get used to the sick idea. Now I can put all my crazy ideas in part two.” So… Musical sequence?