Michelle Uckotter on Serial Killers, Control Freaks, and Her New Series of Slasher Paintings

Michelle Uckotter’s directorial debut, Moviestar, convenes an absurd grouping of degenerate hippies and insufferable yuppies for your less-than-typical slasher film. Crawling over each other in a smoke-filled living room while The Carpenters play softly in the background, they end up in a violent and quaalude-induced showdown. The film was inspired by the Manson murders, the kind of sensationalistic killing spree that could “only happen in America,” as the Cincinnati-born artist puts it. Stills from the movie later became the basis of Uckotter’s new series of paintings, which opened last month at L.A. gallery Matthew Brown, who announced her representation last week. When Uckotter got back to New York, she joined the film’s co-writer Riley Mac on a call to talk about assembling a Reagan-era living room set and how a recent breast augmentation compelled her most recent burst of creativity.–EMILY SANDSTROM

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RILEY MAC: Hi, Shelley.

MICHELLE UCKOTTER: Hi, Riley.

MAC: How are you? How was L.A.?

UCKOTTER: L.A. was fun, but I’m so relieved to be back in the city. Living out of a suitcase for two weeks is a lot.

MAC: It must have been very exhausting and a lot of work, schmoozing with people you didn’t really want to talk to.

UCKOTTER: Yeah, that was the bulk of it. A lot of talking and going to dinner.

MAC: At least you didn’t have to pay for the dinner, and that’s the important part. So you have a solo show at Matthew Brown that’s up until March 29th?

UCKOTTER: Yes, and at Marc Selwyn too.

MAC: I’m kicking myself that I didn’t fucking just bite the bullet and come to L.A., because it would’ve been so cool to go to the movie screening that you did at the theater in Chinatown. 

UCKOTTER: Yeah, it was at the theater called Now Instant and they did a really good job.

MAC: Are you doing a screening in New York?

UCKOTTER: I’m going to try and re-screen the movie at a venue in New York, hopefully next month. There’s still a couple of compositions left from the film that I would like to make into paintings, so I need to figure out the right context for that. But I think it would be cool for the show in L.A. to be the main meal, and then the second part when I make these next series of paintings will be like the epilogue, the cherry on top, the dessert of the whole project. But as of right now, I’m leaving my options open.

MAC: Cool. What made you decide to make a movie and take stills to make the paintings?

UCKOTTER: The idea came to me almost a year ago in March, after I had breast augmentation done. I was laid up for two weeks, and I realized that instead of sourcing images from movies and collaging it together, it would be interesting to take ownership of the image and basically make everything in-house, and then be able to cherry-pick scenes and have control over what I wanted to make. I wanted to do something that would allow me to be more sculptural in a way, dealing with actors and sets, and really pushing myself outside of painting.

MAC: And the set was crazy. You made a period piece.

UCKOTTER: Yeah. It’s supposed to be set in early Reagan’s America, in the late 70s, early 80s. I jokingly was thinking of the period pieces when the hippies stopped doing acid and started doing methamphetamines.

MAC: Right. But that was the funny part, we wrote the methamphetamine into the script, and then someone was like, “That’s actually anachronistic.”

UCKOTTER: Yeah, it wasn’t invented yet by the CIA.

MAC: So it was like, “Let’s stay true to this period piece and put more emphasis on the Quaaludes.”

UCKOTTER: Yeah, coke and Quaaludes and alcohol.

MAC: Pretty simple stuff.

UCKOTTER: It was also way more of a straightforward slasher movie when we first started working on it.

MAC: Yeah, and then it got more psychological. I had never worked on a script before, so I was like, “This’ll be really fun.” But then the icing on top of that being a new experience was that you came to me with a very unique prompt. You were like, “Let me describe these images to you that I want to paint, and let’s build a story around these images with this concept.”

UCKOTTER: Yeah. I basically blocked out the whole movie and then brought you on to flesh out dialogue and stuff like that. You published that book of poems that came out around the time I pitched it to you, and the quality of your writing is very matter-of-fact. It’s very pedestrian and it’s kind of casual. And I thought you would be a really natural exposition writer, which you are.

MAC: Thank you, Shelley. I think that it goes without saying that we really enjoyed working together and we were very compatible. It was a very easy, intuitive process.

UCKOTTER: That was one of the fun things about actually working on the film though; we’re collaborating with multiple people and bringing in their expertise and helping shape the whole thing. Painting is like a control freak type of artwork, and to release that control and work with other people was enlightening.

MAC: I think the way that you compose your paintings made you perfect to direct a film because that crazy attention to detail makes such a difference. What was your inspiration for a hippie-slasher film? We have these New York socialites upstate, and it’s a break-in movie with these psycho hippies. There’s obviously a Charles Manson influence, but what else?

UCKOTTER: Well, I read that book, Chaos [Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties] by Tom O’Neill. It’s great, he’s gay too.

MAC: Yeah, he’s a gay guy from Philadelphia.

UCKOTTER: Yeah, that’s basically you.

MAC: [Laughs] I know.

UCKOTTER: I read his book and was fascinated. The Manson murders are one of those things that I feel like can only happen in America, where the reality of a situation surpasses anything that Hollywood could imagine. The murders were so grotesque and freaky that it actually changed horror and culture. It’s much like how 9/11 is better than any Michael Bay movie, and the Manson Murders are kind of like L.A.’s 9/11.

MAC: And the images are crazy too, from the [Sharon] Tate murder with “PIG” and everything.

UCKOTTER: It’s crazy. It’s like Abu Ghraib and those images that came out of the Iraq War. It’s these depictions of reality that are more fantastical than you can even imagine, that’s what attracted me to the idea of the “evil hippie.” Also, I was thinking for the past couple of years about making a series of paintings on hippies breaking and entering. I think the Burner is an interesting character that’s not really explored much as a horror villain. Like, these pseudo-ideals have waned and now they’re just drug addicts. The whole idea of hippies is ridiculous anyway, because they’re all rich. The hippies and the conformists are all from the same class, and the whole thing is stupid and made up.

MAC: Well, hippies are class traitors in a way, but in the corniest way possible.

UCKOTTER: Absolutely. And they all became conformists when they aged.

MAC: Their true colors.

UCKOTTER: I was really inspired by the horror movie I Spit On Your Grave, and a lot of seventies exploitation movies. 

MAC: Obviously you’ve never been tortured by drugged-out hippies, but did you draw from any personal experience? What parts of you are in this movie?

UCKOTTER: Well, I’m trans and my relationship to femininity is not necessarily that I’m an outsider, but when I’m existing in the world, I’m very aware of how people see me and if they’re aware of me being trans. It’s hyper-vigilance, that over-focus on my own gestures in the world—that’s like a non-reality.

MAC: That ties into another question I had. The cast of the movie is mixed. It’s a cisgender and transgender cast, and there’s a mix of both on the evil side and the good side. There is no like, “Trans is good, cis is evil.” How did you decide who to cast and for what role?

UCKOTTER: In the bedroom scene, I asked my friend Georgica to get partially naked, so there was a pretty major responsibility on my end to make sure that the set was working. You were there too, and it was a really cool thing to have the three actors all helping each other out and making sure everyone felt okay, even though they’re doing something that’s very crude and violent. I think it provided an interesting tension and also insight into filmmaking that I didn’t really expect. I like how the last scene we shot, where the hippies enter the basement, it’s like a talkie. It’s like a Charlie Chaplin almost kind of bit where it’s like there’s no talking. It has this silent, pictureesque quality to it. But my favorite scene would probably be the bedroom.

MAC: Yeah, the bedroom’s really cool. And it ended up being so much fun. I loved it because the script ended up changing so much.

UCKOTTER: Well, we had to respond to the limitations we had. It took an hour to break down all the lighting and camera equipment, so we could only shoot so many scenes. We had to rewrite pretty much every single scene and ended up folding one of the male characters into the other one.

MAC: What was the number one thing that you learned about yourself as a filmmaker?

UCKOTTER: I think I have the ability, as a director, to give everyone room to speak and do their thing. I have a lot of patience with people, and I can kindly make people do what I want without being forceful. Delegating is a skillset I’m not familiar with, but I think I’m actually pretty good at it. 

MAC: Yeah. One of my favorite paintings is the bedroom scene. It’s so cool to think about you in L.A. at these fancy artist dinners, and you’re selling these paintings to the art world bourgeois and it’s like a tied-up girl getting passed around by two girls wearing pig noses. Just kidding; they’re not wearing pig noses in the painting. But the pig noses are there in spirit, and it’s cool. It’s like you tricked them.

UCKOTTER: I’m painting degenerates.

MAC: Yeah. It’s like you trick these bougie people into lusting after these paintings. 

UCKOTTER: I think I’m chasing after something that’s shocking in the manner of a Paul McCarthy movie where he cuts his dick off.

MAC: Right. A lot of people like that shit, myself included, and that stuff has been considered low-brow for way too long.

UCKOTTER: Well, I’m a girl from Cincinnati, so I have no culture. I’ll take whatever I can get.

MAC: What do you think it is about extreme subject matter that you’re attracted to?

UCKOTTER: I think it puts the audience on odd footing when they’re looking at something and it implicates them into an act of violence that is uncomfortable. It creates a very unique, powerful experience when you realize you’re actually implicating yourself by visually dissecting something. I think depicting violence is a way to cut through a lot of the annoying and contrived politeness in culture and get to something true. But I’m not a violent person. It’s all fake.

MAC: I don’t think most people that are drawn to extreme content are violent people, because I think that violent people like to deflect. A violent, pedophile director is going to make a movie about how men are so good and noble, instead of the opposite.

UCKOTTER: Like that guy in Long Island who was an architect; he was killing women and dumping their bodies.

MAC: Yeah, I remember him. That was one of the last serial killers in recent history because–

UCKOTTER: Well, there’s that one in Bushwick right now.

MAC: Is he actually a serial killer?

UCKOTTER: They think he is, because these bodies keep getting dumped in the canal by that… what’s that club, Elsewhere? Or is it Nowadays?

MAC: The Knockdown Center?

UCKOTTER: Less school shootings, more serial killers, please. I’m just kidding.

MAC: On that note, Shelley, it has been a blast to break our NDAs and talk about all this shit.

UCKOTTER: Riley, it’s a pleasure, I love you.