Santa Claus isn’t the only one coming to town this
month. You’d better watch out for a very
large, very hungry, very scary Dust Bunny!
Out TV series creator/writer/showrunner Bryan Fuller is
making his feature film debut on December 12th with the nationwide
release of Dust Bunny. Set in a decaying apartment complex on the
edge of New York City’s Chinatown, it is a dark, surreal, yet fun fable told
through the eyes of 10-year-old Aurora.
She is convinced there’s a monster living under her bed, one that devoured her
foster parents in the middle of the night.
Isolated and frightened, Aurora becomes fixated on her reclusive neighbor, a wounded
hitman she secretly follows through the city.
After witnessing him kill a dragon-like creature on a rooftop, she
decides he might be the only one capable of saving her. As the two form an
unlikely bond, her neighbor–who is himself being hunted by professional killers
tied to his past—uncovers a chilling pattern: Aurora’s previous foster
families have all mysteriously vanished. But when one of the neighbor’s wannabe
assassins is swallowed whole by something beneath Aurora’s bed, he realizes her
fears may be grounded in something very real…and very dangerous.
Dust Bunny
boasts a fantastic cast led by Mads Mikkelsen as “The Intriguing Neighbor” and
amazing newcomer Sophie Sloan as Aurora, with Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian
and Rebecca Henderson in wild supporting roles.
Bryan Fuller,
the film’s writer-director, got his start in the entertainment industry as a
writer on TV’s legendary Star Trek series Voyager and Deep
Space Nine. He next created or co-created such memorably offbeat shows as Dead
Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies (which won multiple Emmy Awards),
Hannibal (which also starred Mikkelsen) and American Gods. Fuller is
openly gay and most of his work features a notably queer sensibility.
In the movie’s
press notes, Fuller shares the very personal motivation behind Dust Bunny:
“Our heroine,
Aurora, wished for the monster under her bed to eat her parents. ‘They weren’t
very nice to me’ is all the explanation we get as to why Aurora wished her
wish. A little background: I grew up with an abusive father, and I would have
been content to have him eaten by a monster. There are all sorts of reasons
your average child might, in a blaze of anger (or less), wish their parents
dead. From no cha-cha heels at Christmas to curfews to things less common and
cruel. I want the viewer to have their own take on why Aurora did it. Or more
specifically, why they would do it. I know I had my reasons.”
Reverend recently spoke with the very thoughtful, very funny Fuller via Zoom. Note: Some
questions and responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Bryan, I’m truly
honored to have this opportunity to speak with the creator of what I feel are
several of the best, if sadly short-lived, TV series of the 21st
century so far.
Oh, thank you!
Absolutely. Can
you tell me a little bit about what’s your method or your sensibility when it
comes to choosing or developing projects?
I love storytelling and I love characters and I love
thematics. There’s something about if a story or a narrative has the opportunity
for me to break off a bit of my soul, and put a horcrux into it, to give me a
barometer of what an audience would want from that story. I definitely have to
be the first person in the audience that wants to see this story, so I can’t
imagine working on something that I wouldn’t watch. There’s plenty of movies
where I’m like “I don’t know if I’m the audience for this; I may enjoy the
experience but I also don’t necessarily know how to steer something like that.”
I’m primarily a genre storyteller because I like those
extra colors in my Crayola crayon box to color with. I think that there’s
something about horror, science fiction, fantasy that gives you an opportunity
for an analysis of certain thematics that do feel distinctively queer. The
things that I’m attracted to have a queer sensibility to them. How I like to
tell stories and the aesthetics and the way that I enjoy telling a story feel
very queer to me. For things like Dust
Bunny or Pushing Daisies that may
not have queer narratives, they are certainly queer in design and
characterizations that feel like that part of my psyche is being serviced in a
way.
I would say the easiest answer (to your question),
particularly for this publication, is “What is the inherent queerness of this
story and what is my relationship to the perception of that queerness?” Sometimes
that queerness is asexual and sometimes it is sexual. There’s something about
the asexual romance of Pushing Daisies,
or the blossoming of an asexuality into a sexual romance of Hannibal, or the explicit sexuality of
something like American Gods, where I
got to do barebacking, flaming ejaculation kind of sex scenes–that you’d be
hard pressed to find anywhere else—but in a fantasy story of sorts. I do think
my guiding principle for a lot of my taste is rooted in my queerness.
Thank you, that’s
an excellent response and helpful. It’s funny, just thinking about and
reflecting on Dust Bunny I wrote
“fairy tale meets anime meets horror movie meets survivor story, with a musical
number thrown in”! I loved the dancing nuns.
(Laughs) Do you remember that song from the 70’s? I know
you grew up Catholic. I was raised very Catholic so I’ve been fantasizing about
robbing a church (which Aurora does in the film) for most of my life.
Of course! (laugh)
Congratulations on Dust Bunny. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it visually
stunning, as well as so compelling and interesting. I’m so happy that it is an
original story of yours that you got to direct, because I had read that you
were working on adapting a novel or doing a remake or something. I’m so glad
that this is the film for your first feature on the big screen. How does that
strike you or how does that feel?
Thank you, thank you. You know, we were developing this
story for (the TV series) Amazing Stories
and we were having trouble pushing it through the process. It had so many of
the things that I loved growing up and watching the (Steven Spielberg) Amblin’
brand in the 80’s, whether it was Poltergeist
or Gremlins or The Goonies or E.T. All of them had a sense of someone who didn’t
feel like they belonged in the world in which they were living, and a guest
from another world coming into theirs and showing them how they belonged. Not
necessarily in the world that they’re struggling to belong in but what other
worlds and relationships they can belong in. That also feels distinctively
queer.
I also loved fairy tales growing up. I love the Disney
extrapolations of the fairy tales. I loved Ichabod Crane and the Legend of
Sleepy Hollow, and that there were these gateway horror stories being sold to
children that were scary and thrilling. Now we are so sensitive to traumatizing
children but I do think there’s a lot of fun in scaring kids. I did it a lot
when I was a kid. We would always ambush people in cemeteries in cloaks. The
kids I was babysitting when I was like 12 years old, we would design haunted
houses for their friends that would come in. I would leap through a window and
grab the kid and pull them out screaming into the yard. (laugh) I love that
kind of fun of telling a spooky story, and it is fun first for me. Even when Hannibal got very dark, I saw it as a
black comedy and there was something about those storylines and the extremities
that I just innately found a sense of humor in. Also, I think cannibalism is
hilarious. As a pescatarian, people being served up in a way that they would
serve others up, I find delightful. (Both of us laugh)
The idea of this being my first movie and also something
that feels like the movies that I enjoyed as a kid, and wanting to share that
experience with both younger audiences and the adults who are taking those kids
to those movies, was really exciting. I think that was kind of the impetus for
me, to bring the joy of the audience experience that I remember to modern
audiences who may not have been around in the 1980’s to see all these fantastic
films in the theater.
Talk to me about
working with Mads Mikkelsen, who you’ve worked with a few times now on
different projects. What’s your working relationship or your friendship like?
Is he kind of your muse?
Mads is so cool. When I met him, I was like “Oh, I get
it; he’s a movie star.” He’s like Danish George Clooney and he’s got the rizz,
as they say, for days. But so many of his characters that we see him play in
American movies are villains, whether it’s a James Bond villain (Casino Royale) or an Indiana Jones
villain (Indiana Jones and the Dial of
Destiny) or a Marvel villain (Doctor
Strange). In Star Wars: Rogue One,
you assume he’s a villain but he ends up being the greatest hero of the
rebellion. So, there is a contained quality to a lot of his American
performances that are directly in contrast to some of his Danish roles, where
he plays more of a fool or is a very stoic hero.
I wanted the (Dust
Bunny) audience to see just a little bit more of my friend, who has a
charismatic personality, is a family man, who doesn’t have all the gravitas of
all these weighty, villainous roles that populist audiences associate him with.
I wanted everybody to see more of the guy I know as my friend but also just
realizing, with his professionalism and his dedication and how good he is at
his job, that it was undeniable that he was the guy. I pitched him the story at
the premiere of Rogue One (in 2016)
and he was like “Great, I’m in.” And then the movie lived and died at various
studios who wanted various kinds of actors in the role. We finally found a
studio (Lionsgate) that would make the movie with Mads.
About Mads’
character, Resident 5B or “The Intriguing Neighbor,” what can gay viewers
deduce or conclude about his character? Is he gay? Is he queer? Is he open to
interpretation?
What I love about queer analysis of movies is that if you
give us an inch, we’ll take a mile. And if there are no indicators of sexual
desire or opposite sex attraction, we plant a flag and claim that character as
our own. You certainly can–because
there is no real romance in (Dust Bunny)–project
that onto Mads’ character.
This is not necessarily a queer narrative, although it
did recently screen at Outfest. I would say if politics are proceeding along
the line that some would hope that they would proceed and it becomes illegal to
be gay again, the smoking guns of my homosexuality will be Dust Bunny and Pushing
Daisies. Despite not having actively queer characters in them, they are
distinctively queer worlds from a queer person. That’s the immersive experience
or the aesthetic that also invites the audience to project themselves onto the
characters. If you want to project a queerness onto Mads, it’s there. If you
want to project a queerness or outsider-ness to little Aurora, for all of us
queer kids who grew up in tricky households, you can. I say if you see
queerness it’s there, it’s yours. Claim it!
The Most Reverend Chris Carpenter is editor of Movie Dearest and chief contributor. He has been reviewing movies and theatre since 1996 and also contributes to Rage Monthly magazine (ragemonthly.com). He is a founding member and former Vice President of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Critics (galeca.com) and currently serves as a nominating/voting member of its New York-based Theatre Wing. Reverend Carpenter has been an ordained minister since 1995.
