Your new movie Dis -
in a few words what is it about, and what can you tell us about your
character in it?
Thank
you for asking, Mike. I can't improve upon the official synopsis of this
very strange little film:
"An
ex-soldier with a criminal past takes refuge in the woods. A demonic
figure seeks the seed of killers and the blood of the damned to feed his
mandrake garden. DIS is an infernal descent into the root of the mandrake
legend and a man who wanders too close to that legend and the unnamable
terror behind it. What you sow you will reap...."
I
play the ex-soldier, Ariel. Dis is arthouse horror.
There's a teaser at https://vimeo.com/231304899
(like the film, it is for mature audiences only).
How much of Bill Oberst jr can we find in Ariel? There
is much of real-life me in this character: Ariel is quiet, he is haunted
and has seen too much of darkness to imagine that it does not exist.
How
did you get involved with the project in the first place? The
film's writer and director, Adrian Corona, wrote to me and we met for
coffee near my place in H'wood when he came to town (Adrian
splits his time between Mexico and the States). He said he wanted to do an
artistic horror film with literary references and a strong Latina cultural
component. I was very into it from that description alone. Dis
isn't exactly the most usual film - so quite honestly, when you first read
the script, what went through your head? I thought:
"Wow. This is allegory. This is metaphor. This is madness. I want
in." What can you
tell us about Dis's
director Adrian Corona, and what was your collaboration like? Adrian
is an intense personality, a deep thinker and a compassionate man. I
trusted him implicitly. And, with a script like this one, which I only
imagined that I understood, that kind of actor/director trust was
essential. I surrendered, which is always the best way to get to the
truth. Dis
is mostly an outdoors-movie - so how did that aspect of the movie agree
with you, are you at all an outdoors guy? I
am an outdoors guy - when I was a kid my great solace was walks deep into
the woods. I still feel more comfortable outdoors than in. Still, Dis
was a rough shoot. To get the lush forest shots we walked many miles up an
isolated mountainside with the camera gear on burros. We slept in a
freezing, wet cabin. We shot on a freezing, wet set. No complaints; the
shoot's hardship added to the realism. For this film, the extreme was
appropriate.
as Hans Kammler |
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What can you
tell us about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere? Everyone
in cast and crew had to do things that were physically strenuous, and
everyone gave Adrian their all. That's why I'm glad to see the movie
winning awards in its first festival runs - the effort was worth it. When
the film becomes available to the public, your readers will see Ariel
strapped to a medieval torture wheel. It might interest them to know that
the film's art director built that wheel using her own body to measure the
circumference, but she's way taller than me, so the torture was real. Any
future projects you'd like to share? I
played Hitler's chief of secret weapons, SS General Hans Kammler, in two
ZDF-TV projects: Die
Suche Nach Hitler's Atombombe and
its sequel, Geheimste
Unterwelten der SS - Hans Kammlers Schattenreich, both by Austrian
writer/director Andreas Sulzer. Now Andreas is developing an idea for a
feature dealing with Kammler and his role in hiding Nazi secret weaponry
in the closing days of WWII. If it happens, and if he asks me to play
Kammler again, I'm there. It is a challenge to bring something new to the
stereotype of the cinematic Nazi, but no man is so unlike any other man
that he cannot find the same potentialities within.
I relish such challenges.
Your/your movie's
website, Facebook, whatever else?
Dis
is on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/Disthemovie.
If your viewers would "like" that page it would
help us tremendously.
My IMDb is
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2454994/
and my site is
http://www.billoberst.com/.
Anything else you're
dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask? Only
to thank YOU for what you do, Mike. You give exposure to movies and
movie-makers who often labor in darkness. It is very, very appreciated. Thanks
for the interview!
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