Bobcat Goldthwait, director of the film Sleeping Dogs Lie. (Steve Carty/CBC)
This article ran during the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.
Remember the voice? The constipated, manic, perpetual-pubescent, meltdown-approaching voice? Anyone who survived the 1980s has filed the grating voice of comedian Bobcat Goldthwait next to the song Karma Chameleon in the mental folder of Things I’d Like to Forget. Alas, the voice is no more. Gone, too, are Goldthwait’s crazy man-child antics, which culminated in a 1994 appearance on The Tonight Show where he lit a couch on fire. Today, the comedian — slim, gracious and shyly smiling — has reinvented himself as a writer-director of independent films. He is at the Toronto International Film Festival to push Sleeping Dogs Lie, an oddly sweet film about the downside of both bestiality and honesty. In a voice distinguished only by a touch of post-interview gruffness, Goldthwait talked to CBC Arts Online about making movies via Craigslist, Kurt Cobain and why he doesn’t care about your special relationship with your goat.
Q: Sleeping Dogs Lie opens with a carefully shot scene in which the main character gives her dog a spontaneous blowjob. Years later, in the interest of full disclosure, this nice, relatively straight woman tells her fiancé about it, throwing their lives into a tailspin. But the weird part is that in the end, the film is really a tender romantic comedy. How conscious were you of not going for prurience, for shock?
A: There is nothing sexual in the movie; it’s all in your brain. I just think it would have clouded the movie if I actually delivered bestiality in it. This sounds so stupid, but it’s true: it’s not about bestiality, but there is bestiality in it.
Q: So what is it about?
A: Well, I’ll tell you what I wasn’t trying to do. I wasn’t trying to make a window for people to come up and tell me their creepy stories, and that’s what’s happened. I just want to put that out there. I don’t want to hear about how soft or rough a goat’s mouth is, and a dear friend told me, ‘I [masturbated] a horse once. I can tell you about this, right?’ Well, no, you can’t.
A: It’s kind of funny; it really was hard to find something that people couldn’t get past. Like, what is taboo now? But I don’t know if I was saying anything about shifting morality. I guess I wanted to write about the idea of people doing a lot of damage under the guise of being honest. People use honesty as a weapon, almost. I give you some terrible fact about me and now you’re burdened with it, you’re creeped out. Really, I guess it’s a movie about kindness.
Q: It has some intense, semi-shocking moments, but the tone is very gentle.Bryce Johnson and Melinda Paige Hamilton and star in Bobcat Goldthwait's Sleeping Dogs Lie. (Odeon Films)
A: It’s probably the sweetest dog-blowjob [film] ever made. Although we haven’t seen the new Lassie. I think they really spice it up.
Q: Comedians generally overdose, self-destruct or vanish. Did you have to overcome any excesses to make it to the point where you’re promoting films at festivals like Sundance and Toronto?
A: I’m not supposed to be alive, right? Now if I die, it would be, ‘Oh, that makes sense, how old was that guy?’ I’m past my untimely death. Now I’m into timely death.
I’m happiest directing, not performing. I used to direct Jimmy Kimmel Live, and I directed Dave Chappelle on Chappelle’s Show. I left that, and I hope I can continue making movies. I really like being behind the camera and working for other people as long as they’re comedians, and as long as I feel like I’m helping create an environment where they can be funny. For so much of my career, I was dealing with people who don’t understand comics. It’s not like we’re monkeys; we have some okay ideas and people shouldn’t be so threatened by us.
A: Everyone is afraid of them. They represent anarchy.
A: I was on the road doing stand-up in Ann Arbor [Michigan] and someone said, ‘There’s this guy in a band and he wants to interview you.’ So I went on this college radio station and Kurt had a bunch of questions written on a paper bag, and he interviewed me. He gave me a copy of [Nirvana’s] Bleach and my friend Tony and I were driving and I was listening to it and I was like, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll sucks, because these guys are really good and you’ll never hear from them.’ [Laughs] About a year and a half later, I was opening for [Nirvana].
He was very sweet. I opened for him in 14 cities, and we did spend some nights just hanging out. He was really, really sweet. I liked him a lot.
A: He’s good. He’s good. [Laughing]
What happened was, in an article in a magazine [about archiving film], the interviewer asked him, ‘Are we really supposed to save every movie? Would you save Shakes the Clown?’ And he goes, ‘I love Shakes the Clown,’ and he said all these nice things about it. My daughter was watching me reading it, and she was like, ‘Why do you keep reading that over and over?’ I told her, ‘I’m never going to get an award. This is your dad’s only award.’ And I even kept trying to smudge it with my finger to make sure my friends weren’t putting me on, like maybe they went to Kinko’s and made a fake thing.
A: Yeah, we shot it in two weeks, and a lot of the crew was from Craigslist. We had no money. We were filming in the producer’s home, but we couldn’t film in his garage and his neighbour had a house for sale. We said, ‘What’s going on over there? Did anyone move in yet?’ Now, I’m not admitting anything, but let’s just say the garage lock fell off somehow, so we rolled the car in and ran power cables from across the street. The crew [were] these kids from Craigslist and we were telling them, ‘We have to be very quiet tonight because it’s a really heavy scene, it’s the crux of the movie.’ And they were like, ‘You don’t have permits again, do you?’ And I said, ‘Dudes, I don’t even know whose house this is.’
Sleeping Dogs Lie opens Nov. 3 in Toronto and Nov. 24 in Ottawa.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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