Fuck director Steve Anderson

I wrote a dramatic feature called Vlad the Impaler and it is a comic horror film in the American Werewolf in London or Shaun of the Dead vein. The first film I did was called The Big Empty starring Jon Favreau. That was also in the dark comic vein. There seems to be some interest in the script and now we need the money which is always one of the more difficult parts.

When I first thought of it, it came out of my mouth as a joke. I can’t remember who I was talking to but I said, “Hey we should do a documentary about the word fuck.” I thought I was being funny but the second I said it, I realized that it could really be a really cool idea. It’s a naughty word that we’re all taught not to use as kids. But it’s a word that almost everybody uses and certainly a word that everyone has heard before. I also consider this the word right in the middle of this constant debate on free speech. There are words that are worse than fuck but fuck really seems to be that tipping point where people have opinions on either side. I wanted to make a movie that is really entertaining and funny but also use it to talk about more important subjects like free speech and censorship.

It’s funny you say that. We make a joke about it in our film but the BBC had just announced that they’re making a cunt documentary.

Exactly, over here it’s pretty difficult to be funny with cunt. I’m sure some people could do it so I’ll leave it to them.

I drew up a broad outline and I hoped to make a film that would take a populist look at the word. I knew I didn’t want it to get too scholarly. I kept saying that if I made a boring film about the word fuck then I probably shouldn’t make movies. The word really has an impact on almost every part of popular culture. It’s in music, in films, television and even politics and religion. So I broke it down into categories and then started to research some of the famous fuck quotes in TV and movies. Then I worked my way backwards to who we might interview. I wanted to have interesting people that we hadn’t seen in a hundred documentaries. I don’t think there is any other film that has both Ron Jeremy and Miss Manners.

We also had both liberal and conservative points of view because if no one thinks fuck is a dirty word it ceases to be interesting. The film certainly tilts liberal as I do, although I am probably a little bit more conservative than most people would believe.

Yeah, I was a cameraman for 15 years and I worked for PBS in Rochester, New York. There I shot documentaries, including one that won a Peabody Award, so I have a pretty strong background in documentary filmmaking. Though when I moved to Los Angeles I started to concentrate on writing. I think people make the mistake of thinking that a documentary is going to be easier because you don’t have to worry about scripts or actors. I thought we might be able to get it done in six or nine months but it took about two years. But I hope to bounce back and forth. I love documentaries. Filmmakers I admire like Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese seem to bounce back and forth in between the two and I hope to do that.

For a long time documentaries were relegated to PBS or a Walter Cronkite Presents type thing and they took on serious subjects and serious points of view which they still do. But in the last five or ten years they’ve really shown that it can be a populist art form and that people can have fun with them. What I really hoped for with Fuck was we could have both.

Fuck was really high concept to use Hollywood terms. I didn’t have to explain it to people very much. I just said, “Hey we’re doing a documentary on the word fuck.” People got it right away. We interviewed 35 people in the film and we have great animation by Bill Plympton and we had clips to keep the film moving. Hopefully we don’t go too deep but once it’s over people usually tend to realize, “Wow this movie really does have an effect on all these different parts of popular culture.” Then you can reflect on it’s deeper meaning.

When we were coming up with ideas I sat down with a couple of producers and we were throwing ideas around and one of the executive producers, Gregg Daniel, said “What about Bill Plympton?” I said, “That’s great. His work would completely compliment this.” So I just sent him an email through his website. He got back to me very quickly and expressed interest. He’s obviously a great talent, so I was really pleased to be able work with him.

Yeah, for example in the Amazing Word Man sequence we had we had to get a lot of information across there. So I wrote that sequence but then Bill ran with that.

Yeah, it was a challenge especially because we decided to call it Fuck. Since I was the director and producer on it I had to pay attention to the marketing aspects. But at the end of the day I just decided it was the honest thing to do. It is what the film is about and in an odd way our film has had a parallel journey to the word because you can’t put it on marquees and you can’t put it in major newspapers. I think we did the right thing but it’s been tough to get the word out. What I found a lot of times is that people didn’t have anything bad to say about it but they can conveniently ignore it and not print anything or just print a little blurb rather than a feature article.

No, when we were making the film we didn’t know what we were going to call it. I thought it would be neat to call it Fuck but we simply called it the Untitled F-word project. But we didn’t pull any punches on anybody. When I talked to Pat Boon about doing the interview, I said “Pat, we are going to be doing a documentary that’s centered on the F-word. We’re going to talk about its history but we’re also going to use it to talk about censorship and broadcast decency.” Neither he or any of the other conservatives we asked blinked about it.

I think I was really pleased that they were so open and willing to talk about it. Now mind you, I haven’t heard from any of them since the film came out. I don’t particularly agree with most of the things that some of the conservatives said like Dennis Prager.

That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t agree with that but I will respect his opinion. That’s one of the big differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals are much more open to hearing other opinions. They may not agree with them. But conservatives find a point of view and stick with it and that’s all they want to hear.

I don’t really have anything at this moment to talk about. There are a couple things but it is really difficult to follow up Fuck. I think there’s a documentary in internet porn and how the internet has changed the porn business.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck