Utter Trash--Robert Banks

From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse

An interview with filmmaker Robert Banks

By Bob Ignizio

Most people in Cleveland know Robert Banks as the city’s award winning experimental filmmaker, even if they’ve never seen any of his work. So it might come as a bit of a shock to some that a large part of what made him want to be a filmmaker was watching horror films and other forms of fantasy entertainment on TV as a kid. Robert says, “It started with watching the Ultra Man series. After that, Giant Robot came on, and Japanese anime shows like Speed Racer, Astro Boy, Prince Planet. Shows like Gumby and Davey and Goliath. Superhost, Universal horror films, Godzilla and Gamera movies, and almost every other stop motion animation movie. All of that got me into movies.”

Robert’s entertainment horizons soon expanded beyond the boob tube when he discovered the joys of drive-in theatres. “I really loved going to the drive-in. I can name you probably the first 6 to 8 films I saw as a kid. I saw ‘Golden Voyage of Sinbad’ and ‘Hammer of God’ at the old Miles Drive-In. I saw ‘Madhouse’ with ‘The Bad People’ at the Drive-In. We saw ‘Cooley High’ at the drive-in. Great, underrated movie. ‘Orgy of the Vampires’ and ‘Dracula’s Great Love’. Those memories are dead on. The fact that you’re sitting in a car, watching these films outside on a big screen, there’s just something about that that’s immeasurable. I think it’s sad that drive-ins are slowly fading away. I tell all these younger kids they don’t know what they’re missing.”

It wasn’t long before Robert’s love of movies extended to a desire to make movies of his own. As a kid, he and his friends would act out their favorite films complete with homemade sets and costumes. Robert says, “I just loved the magic that went into films. The fact that light could travel and give a moving image life, that intrigued me as a kid. I just decided to pursue this, even though I had no idea it was going to be such a competitive process. Not to mention tedious and, I hate to say it, at times scummy and cutthroat.”

By the mid seventies, Robert’s mother told him he should start making movies of his own. Robert says, “She did that to keep me active, instead of just watching films. The problem was, the cameras we had weren’t the ideal cameras to use for doing conventional films. They were good for doing home movies, but not for anything I needed. I didn’t have a tripod. I had to wait for a while before I got a tripod. Eventually I started dabbling in doing all forms of animation, and painting and drawing on film just for the hell of it. Then just taking my friends and doing all sorts of crazy stuff like making them pop in and pop out of films.”

Later, when Robert was in junior high, he met some other kids who had similar interests. Robert says, “We did a couple short, mainly experimental films. That got me more motivated, but the problem was none of the other kids took it seriously. Everything I did from when I was a kid I took very seriously. It wasn’t just a hobby. It wasn’t just me screwing around. I was dedicated to pursuing this. In Cleveland, there’s this attitude that you do your films on the side, you don’t pursue it. When I hear about filmmakers in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Chicago doing stuff, these guys had a city and a community that supported them. Cleveland didn’t have that for some reason. It’s happening now, but it’s ten or fifteen years too late.”

Despite a lack of support at the time, Robert forged ahead with making short films. Robert says, “I realized that if I were to pursue this, I’d have to first develop my skills and try to maintain an identity and test my abilities. So I started dabbling with forms of cinema while, at the same time, doing commentaries about certain issues in media and technology that I feel are ruining society. Not to get up on my soapbox, but I felt if I were going to do something, it couldn’t be just self indulgent abstract stuff.”

Before long, his work was being shown in public. “The first films I had shown were shot on film, edited on video, and shown in clubs,” says Robert. “I soon realized that while club films are cool, they don’t really get you anywhere.” Originally, Robert’s short ‘Froggy Central’ (1990) was going to be shown in a club as well. Instead, it wound up playing at the Cleveland Cinematheque. “After that, I started cranking out other short films,” says Robert. “The first one that really took off was ‘Eyes’ (1992), then after that was ‘X: The Baby Cinema’(1993).”

‘X: The Baby Cinema’ (available on the ‘Best of the New York Underground - Year One’ compilation) became Robert’s “breakthrough” film. It’s a look at the merchandising that surrounded Spike Lee’s film ‘Malcolm X’. “That was the first one that got major international status,” says Robert. “That film was distributed all over the world. It’s still winning awards. Yale University even bought a copy for their archives. That was the first thing I did that got a major mainstream response.”

While Robert has done mostly short films to date, he does have one feature documentary under his belt. ‘Can’t Get Peace of Mind’ (1994) chronicles local Cleveland musician and eccentric Dan “Supie T” Theman. Robert says, “A lot of people don’t know how to take it, because it’s about a Viet Nam vet (Supie T) who thinks he’s a punk rock singer. Some people think the movie is exploitive. They thought it was mean, and bringing this guy down and making him look like a complete freak, and that was not my attitude. I went into that with much dedication and sincerity towards Supie. I loved his music. His music is cool. Supie just wanted people to hear his jams and have fun, and I tried to capture that on film. What made me so angry is that he should have gotten the deal Daniel Johnston or Wesley Willis got. It’s not the greatest film, but for what it is, I’ll stick by it. It was something that I had to experience.” For the film’s upcoming tenth anniversary, Robert has restored some previously unseen footage, and plans are underway for an anniversary screening. Expect a DVD release in the near future, as well.

With the exception of the Supie T documentary, most of Robert’s work to date has been in the realm of “experimental” films. Many of Robert’s films have played at festivals all over the world, including the prestigious Sundance festival where Robert’s short ‘Outlet’ (2000) was screened. Along the way, he’s garnered his fair share of awards and critical praise. It’s a career path that has earned him plenty of respect, if not a great deal of money. What he really wants to do, though, is make a horror movie like the ones he grew up watching as a kid. Robert says, “It’s just something that I can’t deny. I love horror movies, I love monster movies. There’s a part of me that really wants to do commercial films. Not for the sake of making money, but to dabble in certain aspects of the genres that influenced me as a kid. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m pushing back into that. Why try to be something that you’re not?”

Although Robert has no immediate plans for a feature length horror film, two of his most recent shorts, yet to be screened as of this writing, deal with horror and science fiction themes. Robert says, “The people who have seen the rushes from the horror film I’m doing have said they were disturbed by some of the scenes. I want to make this movie as upsetting as possible, because I want to irritate the viewer. That’s what I set out to do and I did it. If I could get the budget to do something full length I would, and I’d be more critical about every element that goes into it. I could do one and have a luxurious shoot for $100,000, but if we had to strip it down to the bare essentials, $30,000. And I’m talking about shooting on film, and finishing on film. It could be done. Would it be strictly a horror film? Maybe not. It would probably be something a little more out there.”

Speaking of “out there”, another recent Banks short shows he hasn’t completely abandoned experimental film. It’s a satire of Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster’ cycle of films, and an unfinished work print recently screened at the Twisted Spine Micro Film Festival where I saw it. Robert says, “I saw Cremaster 2, and I loved it for what it was. It was a good film. I really had fun with it. I thought Cremaster 3 was half of a great movie, the other half was a joke. Matthew Barney, like a lot of other young artists with money, can flaunt stuff around and be as pretentious as they want, and be praised as geniuses. Yet all the other filmmakers that predated them get no respect or recognition. Guys like Jodorowsky, Derek Jarman, Dali, Bunuel, Ken Russell. Those guys have been doing this kind of stuff for 40 or 50 years, and they did it better. When people go out of their way to praise ‘Cremaster’, I just think the man’s not a filmmaker, for one thing, and anybody could have done it, for another. The original title was ‘Banks vs. Barney’. It’s meant to be visually interesting and funny, but I made it more as an exercise than anything.”

So what would Robert do if Hollywood were to come calling? He says, “I really hate the entertainment business with a passion now. Something I grew up with as a kid and wanted to be part of, now I despise it. Everything now is just so generic and formulaic. It’s hard to do anything creative or authentic. If you do something that’s even slightly innovative that’s a hit, people think you’re a genius. There are all these directors who came out with one great, innovative film. Then when they get to Hollywood, all of a sudden they’re has-beens. I know for a fact, when you’ve got all these people yelling at you, how do you direct? When you’re dealing with a big name movie star and their pompous ego, how do you direct this person? I ask myself, could I cross over to that kind of filmmaking?”

Whatever sort of movie Robert makes next, one thing you can be pretty certain of is that it will be a film. Robert says, “I knew when home video equipment came to be, that was the end. There was a JVC commercial where one guy had a super 8 camera and the other guy had a video camera. They were following a parade as it went by, and it kept showing the guy with the super 8 camera fumbling with cartridges. It showed this other guy with a video camera with a deck, and he was saying, ‘You get two hours of tape’. And he was made to look like the smart guy. That commercial made me mad. My mom was saying to me, ‘See Robert? That’s where things are going. You need to wait and get one of those kind of cameras.’ I kept saying, ‘Mom, that’s not what I want to do. That’s video.’ It’s an electronic medium. There was something that I wanted from film that I couldn’t get from video, and nobody ever understood that.”

As for those who think Robert has gone completely insane for wanting to move from more “serious” work into the realm of horror movies, he says, “People think if you do one thing, that’s all you do. Why should I be limited to just doing experimental films, or films about black issues. Ernest Dickerson was inspired by a lot of Italian horror movies. He shot ‘Day of the Dead’ for George Romero. He also directed ‘Demon Knight’ and ‘Bone’, which is a rip-off of ‘J.D.’s Revenge’. Why should it be that, if you’re a black filmmaker, you have to do films about black issues? There’s no reason for that. I don’t care if it’s an all black cast, I don’t care if it’s Asian, whatever it is. My goal is that I want to do horror films. I want to make films that will freak people out. We need more people that respect horror films as good cinema.”