The Toxic Avenger Director Macon Blair Explains How You Pull Guts Out Of A Butthole [Exclusive Interview]
Macon Blair is one of the great "those guys" of modern cinema, with a presence so memorable that you can't help but sit up in your seat when he pops up in a film. Seasoned movie buffs may point to his work in films like "Murder Party," "Green Room," "Logan Lucky," and "The Florida Project." A billion dollars' worth of people saw him this summer in a key supporting role in "Oppenheimer." Offscreen, he won a fair amount of acclaim for his directorial debut, the Netflix release "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore." But the Macon Blair who made that offbeat dramedy is also the same maniac who made "The Toxic Avenger," the surprisingly lavish remake of the infamous z-grade B-movie from 1984, which put Troma Entertainment, with its now-legendary history of disgusting schlock-by-design, on the map.
The new film stars Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, a well-meaning, terminally ill janitor who is thrown in a vat of industrial waste and emerges as a hideous superhero with the power to tear his enemies limb from limb. It's filthy, nasty, gory, and packed with enough gags to make "Airplane!" blush. It's going to make some folks recoil. It's going to make a lot of other folks, especially the Sickos out there, very, very happy.
I sat down with Blair at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, where "The Toxic Avenger" served as the opening night film to the 2023 edition of the annual genre film festival. Like so many people responsible for the most vile and grotesque movies ever made, he's a perfect gentleman. A perfect gentleman who was more than willing to talk about the mechanics of making a movie scene where a mutated Peter Dinklage yanks a man's intestines out of his anus.
Can you believe this movie doesn't have distribution yet? I can't. Here's our conversation.
'Cartoonish, juvenile, silly, ridiculous, all those things which sound pejorative, but I mean very affectionately'
We met at Fantastic Fest a long time ago. I had just seen you in "Blue Ruin."
It was here?
It was at the Lakeline Alamo Drafthouse location.
It was. Exactly.
A mutual friend introduced us after the screening. But it was about 10 years ago.
Yeah. Oh my God, it was. Somebody told me, the editor, Julia [Bloch] had an event lately and she was like, "This was from 10 years ago." I was like, "No, no, no. It wasn't 10 years ago." And then I did the math and I was like, "Oh, f***. It was like a decade ago." It was wild.
I loved "The Toxic Avenger." I wasn't sure at first, but then there came a point where I realized, "Oh, s***, I love this."
Oh, good.
You made this movie to make yourself laugh and hope other people laugh too, right?
That is exactly the way to say it. Exactly, yes. I was like, "Look, I can't..." Knowing that it's a beloved cult hit, and Troma fans are very passionate and devoted, I wanted to make sure that they felt served, but I also knew that there's sort of a larger movie-going audience that maybe doesn't know it, or at least is not as steeped in it as the original fans are, and they needed to be served as well. But you can get in a loop with that in your own head trying to second-guess choices. So you're exactly right. At the end of the day, the best I can do is make myself laugh and hope that there is enough overlap with enough ticket buyers that it'll work. So yeah, that's right.
I don't want to spoil the gag, but I was describing a joke to my wife and I couldn't stop laughing while describing it. It's the [describes very funny joke in detail]. It's such a "Simpsons" joke.
I guess it is. Yeah, I think so.
There's a cartoon elasticity to this world.
Well, "cartoonish" was a word that we used a lot in the development and shooting, and throughout the whole thing, and not in a talking down kind of way. Cartoonish in a celebratory like, "Yeah, cartoonish!" So it's fun and lively and bright and weird. But yeah, cartoonish, juvenile, silly, ridiculous, all those things which sound pejorative, but I mean very affectionately.
It sometimes feels like a pre-Code Max Fleischer cartoon. Every single element of this world bends, and it always bends toward hostility.
Absolutely.
There was never a point in those cartoons where the characters were not in danger, where the world wasn't out to get them. And the world of "Toxic Avenger" feels like this is a world where everything in existence is out to hurt everybody on that screen.
Absolutely. And yet it's not, or I hope it's not — its intention is not to be mean-spirited or cruel. It's always like, yes, people are in jeopardy from the bad guys. They're in jeopardy from the way that society is crumbling in the little universe that we were making, all these things. It is fraught and dangerous, but it's the kind of place that hopefully you would want to hang out and revisit. My fondest hope for the movie was really that it would be one of those ... I don't know how people are going to be watching movies in the future, but like a DVD that you have on your shelf and once a year, at 1:00 in the morning, you throw it on because you know it's just going to be fun. It'll be a comfort food type movie. That was the sort of vibe I was going for.
'He's going to rip his guts out of his butt?'
The last film I watched before Fantastic Fest got started was "The Equalizer 3." Every villain in that movie is such bad guy, so despicable, that when Denzel's chopping off their heads in the finale, you're like rooting him on, no matter how violent it gets. Here, one of the movie's henchman is literally a breakdancer dressed like Zodiac killer.
Yes. Zodiac 3000. Yeah.
Can you talk about making sure the villains are hateful enough that, when you're destroying them, it's okay to laugh?
I mean, the Zodiac 3000 is just, it's funny to me. We got one of the best break-dancers in Bulgaria to play that part because the guy with the target suit on is just sort of like, it's so dumb that it makes me laugh. I wasn't interested in the type of deaths where they're strapped to a chair and they're getting their fingernails pulled out. I dig those movies, that's fine. But for this one, it was important that no, the way he dies is he falls off the stage and explodes into a big pile of blood. How could — his body blew up? Yeah, don't worry about it. And then sprinkling moments like that throughout the movie where it's just like, it's best to not think about it too much because we're already onto another gag as quickly as possible.
There's a very peculiar moment in the closing credits, I'm hoping I got this right ... "Butt Guts Unit"?
Yes.
Can you talk about having a Butt Guts Unit and what that means?
Yes. I would. So you go to make the movie and there is the finite budget, and so there's the scene and you have to operate within those bounds. And so we shot a scene where Toxie, he's fighting the bad guys in the restaurant. And it was actually done entirely from — as soon as the fight starts, once the first guy gets chopped in the face, you don't really see what's happening. You see, from the outside perspective, blood splashing on the window and that sort of thing. But then as we got into post-production, I think because Legendary was pleased with what they were seeing or they were excited about it or whatever, they came back and they said, "Would you want to add some additional shots? Not like a whole new sequence or not a whole new character, but just literally one day's worth of shooting just for some fun stuff. We can sort of adjust the budget to do that."
And so some of those shots that we did were just some little digital effects that Phil Tippet studio did. But one of them was what became known as the Butt Guts Unit, which came about like this. And I'm so glad you started the interview with, "Did it make you laugh and was that the justification for it?" Never a better example than the Butt Guts, which I was like, "Yeah, dude, we could just get these little out-of-context flashes of what Toxie is doing in that restaurant." We were sound mixing the movie at night because I was actually working on another movie during the day, so everybody was kind of tired and punchy. And I was like, "I think what we should do is Toxie will take his mop and he's going to rip this guy's pants down." And one of the assistant editors on the movie, named Delaney, she just goes like, "He's going to rip his guts out of his butt?" And I was like, "Nope ... yes."
And then it became writing the executive of Legendary, these very responsible, powerful people, "He's going to put his fist in his butt and pull his guts out of his butt." Send! And then I woke up the next morning and was like, "Oh, I should have kind of added some context or explained myself a little bit better." For some reason, he wrote back, he was like, "Yeah, dude, we can do that." And so then we ended up in Los Angeles, we had one day of shooting in a special effects shop where they created a fake butt that had a cavity in the middle that you could pull intestines out. And so we had a dedicated unit whose sole purpose was to shoot that. It was just two shots in the movie, but it was one of those ones where it was like, "Yes, that makes me laugh. And hopefully enough people will have a similar reaction to that."
'Untalented sons need love and support just as much as the other ones do'
I love the whiplash. You have butt guts, but you also have actors who treat this seriously. Kevin Bacon is clearly hamming it up, but Elijah Wood and Peter Dinklage are taking this very seriously.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Can you talk about that decision? "Okay, we've got to make sure you guys play this seriously because it provides such a fun contrast"?
I agree, and I think part of it was sort of thinking about the subliminal baggage ... "baggage" is a bad word, but whatever, the history the audience has with a given actor and what do they expect from them and what have they seen before and not seen? So there was something fun about Kevin Bacon, who is a very funny guy in person, but he's not traditionally known as a comedy guy. He's six degrees of Kevin Bacon, he's an iconic American movie star, but you don't think of him in the same way that you think of Will Ferrell, for example. So for him it was like, "If you've wanted to go nuts and not have somebody telling you to tone it down, you'll want to do this. I will not tell you to tone it down." And so it was appealing to him for that reason.
On the other hand, with Peter, it was like, "Your circumstances in this movie are going to be so ridiculous, and you're falling into chemicals and that's getting you muscles and your Excalibur weapon is a mop. It's really absurd. So if you start going way over the top the way Kevin is, I worry that it would feel unbalanced." And there's a line in "Spinal Tap" where they're like, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid," or something like that, where it's just kind of like it can go right up to the edge, but not too far.
So for him, I really did want him to play it straight and have it be emotional so that — because we lose him after 20 minutes. And so he kind of needs to give you that heartfelt real performance in that first 20 minutes so that you can still feel connected to him once he mutates. And then it becomes, your experience is more about the suit and the muscles and everything like that. So it was sort of like picking and choosing which people I wanted to send off in the more antic cartoonish zone or the more heartfelt exposed sort of zone.
Winston loves his deeply untalented son [a teenage dance enthusiast played by Jacob Tremblay] so much.
Yes, he does, because untalented sons need love and support just as much as the other ones do. And by the way, I'm so glad, you're very astute with this stuff because it is that his dance routine is not good. That's the whole thing, that he only wins the crowd over ... I mean, we worked with a choreographer, and Jacob does a great job, but my point is, it's meant to have that sort of traditional ending where like, "Yay, he wins over the crowd," but he doesn't win over the crowd with his dance routine. He wins it over because he's doing a Gallagher show. He's smashing lowest common denominator, professional wrestling style. And that's when the crowd is like, "Yeah, okay, we like this kid after all." But he is unremarkable. And that was another one of those things where I kind of wanted the kid to kind of try his best, have it not be great, but still have his dad be up in the balcony cheering him on. The important thing was his dad being there like, "Good job, son." Not that the dance is good, you know what I mean?
"The Toxic Avenger" doesn't have a release date yet because no distributor has had the nerve to pick it up. Cowards.