PunkTV.ca

Thomas Mignone Interview - Filmmaker, Music Video Director and Visionary.

PunkTV.ca: We’re on the line with Thomas Mignone who’s a music video director, a live music director and now a motion picture director. How are you Thomas?

Doing great today. How are you Dixon?

PunkTV.ca: Very good. So can you just as a bit of a background bring us back and tell us how you got started in directing music videos, live concert productions and then evolved into motion pictures?

Sure, I had an opportunity to work, a good buddy of mine Scott Gibbons had given me an early CD of some music and it was a group I hadn’t heard before called Slipknot and I really kind of fell in love with it and ended up doing videos for them that got a lot of attention. They were at the time touring with another band Mudvayne which I then did a video for them right after and that ended up getting a lot of attention and an MTV award which kind of opened up the opportunity to work with a lot of different artists like System of a Down and I’ve done some work with Sepultura and Soul Fly and a lot of rock bands. Each of the video projects that I would do with these artists, my particular style is to try to come up with something of a narrative even though it’s not a linear story line, just something that would conceptually kind of convey the spirit of the song and a lot of the artists really liked that in addition to the performance elements. That wanting to keep writing I guess story lines prompted me to a year or so ago I wrote my very first script and people seem to really like it and I was able to get some support and ended up directing that last year and over the last 12 months directed it and then did all the post on it and now finished the final graphics and sound and it has taken about 12 months from conception to completion and that film is now done as the first feature and we’re just starting to take it to festivals and screening it for folks at the distributor level and plan to have it theatrically released.

PunkTV.ca: We can get to your videos and discussion about the technical and creative aspects of that but first let’s talk about the movie, it’s called “On the Doll”?

Each of the characters in the film has over the course of it has been kind of contemplates and reflects on some of the early issues they have in life which causes them to be the characters and actors that they are in the film and a lot of times they share similar exploitive traumas whether on a psychological, physical or emotional level. The lead character in fact was physically assaulted and the title comes from a term that’s used by child welfare advocates and helpers when they would say to a child show me where on the doll, show me where you were touched, where you were molested. So it has a subtle reference to that.

PunkTV.ca: This is going to get a bit personal but obviously in anything that you write like that there’s got to be, especially in your first movie, some underlying elements that are semi autobiographical?

In this particular case, no. I wanted to write a story that would sort of encompass a lot of themes that people seem to be very much intrigued by and can relate to but I wanted to do it in a very non-exploitive way and from a perspective that is typically not seen from and the lead character, although non of it was auto-biographical, you tend to cross paths with a lot of people that when you go beneath the surface of who they are whether artists or friends you start seeing maybe some reasons why they act a certain way and why they have a certain perspective on the world. I think a lot of people can relate to those themes and many people have been abused or exploited in different forms and it isn’t until later on in life that they can really look back at it and put it in a proper perspective. The film has a lot of fetishistic and dark sexual connotations. There’s no graphic or gratuitous sexual scenes however, it’s all on a very psychological level. So I think it kind of takes a pretty interesting path to tell the story of these characters in a way that’s not typical.

PunkTV.ca: Steven Covey, the self-empowerment speaker, refers to that position as a paradigm of one sense of reality as it affects their ability to qualitatively and quantitatively process external stimuli. I think you’re saying what you’re trying to do is show the similarities between the characters and the ways that they relate to their outside world based on similar shared paradigms based on previous experiences.

Yea, overall there is a paradigm for how all of these characters have been in one form or another been abused or exploited and as adults now when they cross paths unknowingly and unwillingly they end up befriending each other and helping each other out of situations that they each find themselves tumbling into. The lead character Guy works at an adult newspaper and he is constantly crossing paths with an assortment of kind of strange and interesting characters and one day a girl enters his office and seeks his help on running an ad which isn’t really a very savory thing, she’s looking for someone to help her get out of a difficult spot and she wants to run an ad to do so an ultimately the lead Guy helps her by doing the job himself and along the way they kind of get over their heads when they cross paths with some not so nice people and they also meet other characters from different story lines that have shared paths and they end up all helping each other without even realizing it. The way the story is kind of intertwined and culminates together I think people are finding pretty interesting.

PunkTV.ca: So it’s non-linear then?

It’s very non-linear and sort of fractured story telling but with things occurring the background of one scene or story line that are seen else where that correlated and it isn’t until the last third of the film that it really starts to come together and reveal itself.

PunkTV.ca: I can think of a lot of non-linear films that I really like but sometimes they drive me completely bananas I think it’s because I’m compulsive obsessive by nature. So a movie like Memento is beautiful or Run Lola Run or these kinds of movies and even Pulp Fiction which was so wonderful. Why do you think it’s becoming so acceptable to show movies in this fashion? I thought we were getting to the point where people where finding it difficult to keep their attention span on anything for any lengthy period of time and yet more and more movies come out like this one where you’re basically proving the opposite, that people want to see non-linear movie making. What are your thoughts on that?

Well I like the references that you made to some of the films although On The Doll is not similar in structure to films like Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run or even Memento. I understand your point in regards to that but I think maybe more references such as Crash or Magnolia which have current story lines is probably a little bit more in a direction that On the Doll is structurally. I think a lot of people do like that approach in one sense because I think a lot of the way we conduct our lives is very much in that capacity.

PunkTV.ca: You’re checking your Blackberry and you’re doing an interview and you’re turning another phone that comes on off and you got the TV playing in the background, like there’s always 5 or 10 other stimuli that’s going on is what you’re saying.

That and I’ll have multiple You Tube windows open at once and a couple different My Spaces going or it’s not uncommon to have 4 or 5 different IM’s going at the same time. It’s just the way we conduct our lives, it’s very multi-tasked like that and have parallel actions. So I think as a story telling structure it feels, at least for me, natural to try to convey information in that way and I think just as a style element it’s the way I like to try to tell stories. The videos that I did had the similar approach that a lot of the information was happening simultaneously and different pieces of information are given come together towards the latter part of the clip. That’s kind of been my stylistic approach on my writing and directing.

PunkTV.ca: The fact that we are capable of doing so many things at the same time now I believe our brains are almost getting supercharged, we’re getting faster CPUs even though we’re basically making the same amount of money we got to work so much harder for it and we really have to process so much more data don’t we?

It’s really interesting you say that because that is the exact subject of a script I’m writing and how we are so fast approaching almost the saturation point in our physiological ability to deal with the increased streams of information that are sort of bombarding us. I find that very interesting and potentially catastrophic for the frailty of human beings and I think that’s why a lot of people tend to snap under the increased work load or pressure.  I completely agree with what you’re saying.

PunkTV.ca: I want to read that screenplay.

I’m probably about 70 something pages deep on it. If what you said is any interest of you I’m sure you’d find this screen play intriguing.

PunkTV.ca: Do you read DSM manuals and did you spend a lot of time researching aspects of mental disorder and human psyche and varying conditions of despair to write the script you did for On the Doll?

I did a bunch of solid research. One thing I feel I tired to do as accurately as possible is just convey a very strong genuine sense of reality. I think people leave a screening saying wow this is definitely something that could be happening or is happening right in the here and now. I did speak to a lot of people, reached out to a lot of psychologist and psychiatrists and just got a strong sense of not only just persons experience but also interpret that in a way a mass audience could relate to some experiences or similarities of people’s own paths could at least be related to what they see on screen in the behavior of certain characters.

PunkTV.ca: You were trying to create a universalism in understanding…  Painting with broader strokes in order for the message to be profound and poignant yet widely understood and loved and revered.

I think that it’s true and the effort was made to try to convey these nuances and subtleties in people’s personas to a wide audience. I think that people tend to get an initial impression of for instance somebody or some thing, a piece of music or a painting or let’s just say an initial impression of a person they bump into or meet, you may think that person is one way. Maybe you don’t like them, maybe you don’t like they way he looked at you or an action or something but then as soon as you get to start to know somebody a little more you start to think I see why he was that way and he’s not so bad after all and I understand it a little bit more.  A lot of the characters in the films when we first cross paths with them they aren’t very likeable and you wonder why they do what they do and why they just behave the way they do and it isn’t until certain elements, especially some of the lead guys there are a couple of key scenes that I think audiences in some of our screening the feedback was they thought some of these people were initially really horrific and unlikable and then towards the end they start realizing that they really are genuinely likeable people and it’s just their situations kind of dictate why they are they way they are.

PunkTV.ca: (So you are saying) Let’s hope we can celebrate A) the differences in people and B) a little bit of compassion and understanding. Just don’t accept that initial gut reaction that you have about somebody because that’s really what paradigm is all about is trying to understand someone’s paradigm and the sense of perspective that’s created from within that.

I think that’s an idealistically nice approach and thought but I for one I don’t have a whole lot of faith in people’s abilities to do that. I wish and I think we all grow up wishing that people could be that way but it seems to me that it’s an unlikely reality that people would kind of embrace differences or embrace the things that make us diverse or different. I just don’t have a lot of faith in human kind’s ability to do that to be quite honest with you.

PunkTV.ca:  But that’s what separates people that are able to create the kind of creative works that you do and let’s face it perhaps some of the people that are listening to that music, that’s just what separates people is that level of understanding and ability to do that. You’d hope that people would attain to that at least, eh?

I would hope so.

PunkTV.ca: Tell us about the growth and the bridge between the music videos and the motion picture and how that experience has been for you?

Well a lot of the videos that I do I approach very cinematically and I work with artists that appreciate that and are seeking that. Going into it I’m asked to write a treatment and my particular style is to key onto a lyric or a theme and then to develop a very cinematic and somewhat narrative and certainly a non-linear yet narrative story line  that could reflect or depict that them or that lyric line that I find interesting. I think a lot of artists spend a lot of time and though putting their music together and the whole process of creating it and then recording it and I try to compliment that as much as possible by bringing a certain artistic integrity and that to the visual interpretation of that. A lot of the artists I work with really appreciate that because that conveys a though provocative or compelling capability on the sense of the artist. What they’re trying to say is not just superficial and not just eye candy. So that approach to the videos I’ve done is just my own personal style and I’ve just been an avid lover of films and music forever and when I finally decided to put pen to paper and try to write a story that’s been bouncing around in my head for some time it seemed to come out in that same kind of way as an extension of the music video treatments that I typically like. My video treatments sometimes are 20 pages long.

PunkTV.ca: You keep answering questions that I was so interested in asking you. The first was about the treatment writing process and the second was what would typically be in a Thomas Mignone video treatment and how long would it be and would it contain sketches and drawings and text?

The first thing I pretty much do is listen to the song honestly at least a hundred times before I write a single word. I just would listen to it over and over again for 3 or 4 days driving, at home, I just really feel like I need to absorb that music really well in order to comprehend it. A lot of times when we film there are so technical aspects of my film making approach to videos that are just my particular style. I never like doing play back to an artist because I think it’s difficult for an artist to try to keep up to a song that typically when they play it live, they might record the song and now they go out on the road to support that new music with a tour, they’re playing that song live and it’s typically played faster and slightly different than when it was recorded a yea or so ago or a half a year ago in a studio and so the artist is used to that. On a video shoot technically I will have the artist play the song live, I don’t have nay play back, I don’t like to read on any of the performers faces that they are struggling to keep up with something so that’s one approach on a technical level. On a  creative level I need to understand the structure of the song and the notes to the song and the musical flows and the emotional flows of the lyrics so that visually I create something that compliments the song structure and tells a story that the artist might feel profoundly strong about. So I absorb it by just listening to it over and over again then I will most of the times just struck with a very heavy idea for one or 2 lines of the song that will stick out in my mind. It’s usually something that I find very interesting the way they say something, the words that they use or the significance of a particular line will most times just jump out at me and stick in my head and that’s what the concept will imamate from and I’ll write a very lengthy and sometimes way too long concept and a lot of times I’ll write how that concept for that particular video relates to other songs on the album, on the CD, because a lot of artists write more than just one songs so I try to find common threads or elements amongst several songs on a CD that seem to be similar or connected so that the artist feels that this is a true depiction of what they’re trying to say. Some songs are independent on their own but a lot of times songs on an album tend to have the same ideas and trends that are like others. So I try to wrote a treatment that conveys those themes or elements in particular to the one song but how it might even be reflected in other songs. Then I’ll work very carefully with the artist on and I tend to tear out a whole bunch of pictures from magazines of lighting examples, wardrobe styling, the level of color saturation or muted imagery. Whatever the aesthetic is that is in the writing of the treatment I will usually supply a whole bunch of visual references because a lot of times you may say ‘oh it’s a very deep red feeling in the video’ but deep red to one person may be totally different to another so I’ll have examples of what different picture parameters and perspectives could be interpreted by and then we’ll narrow it down. I take that usually right through when we are filming I typically have no story boards per say but I have all of these visual references tacked up on the board and we get an overall atmospheric vibe or sense of what the feeling is of this song in that particular scene. Then I think a lot of artists typically at that point are on the road and by the time the video is shot they are on the road supporting new music so you don’t have the luxury of sitting in an editing room or a color timing room with them. I tend to spend a lot of time, sometimes 3 or 4 days just color timing and I’ll have several different passes for what the color parameters could be and the lighting parameters and we go back and forth a bunch of times with editing and post production decisions. I very much like to keep the artist in the loop on that because it is in fact a visual depiction of what they’re all about and I like to keep honing it down to exactly what they feel is accurate and that process I’m pretty passionate about and I spend a lot of time devoting myself to and I tend to find that artist really appreciate that and they get exactly what they expected and their expectations a lot of times are exceeded and they are quite happy and we end up doing multiple projects with the same artists.

PunkTV.ca: I want to talk just briefly about Fiona Apple and Marc Romanuk and how he portrayed her in a lolita-esque fashion in that debut video of hers and if you’ve ever completely missed. Like Fiona Apple might say that she loves the aesthetic of the video but she feels that Marc missed on that one. I’m just wondering if you’ve ever missed?

Well I really don’t know any of the history behind Fiona’s video and what the treatment may or may not have been and what the intentions may or may not have been. I was very intrigued by that video, I thought that was a very beautiful looking video and I found it very interesting to watch but I don’t know any of the history of that. With regards to my own work I think I’ve been able to put forth what my ideas are and interpretations are and then communicate them over creative dialogue with the artist sufficiently where when we do get on set I normally have a big monitor there and rather than me off to the corner behind some flag or something everybody kind of peeking into the monitor I like to have the monitor in the middle of the floor on a swivel so I can swing it around and show the vocalist ok I’m framing you from right here to right there and I’ll open it up and zoom the camera here and we’re going to see you and the guitarist behind you in this shot or we’re going to move it over here and they have a sense of what the shot actually is and how it’s framing up so that then they know how to properly perform and play to the camera in order to make it feel as natural as possible. I think that’s just an individual film makers approach is how they do it and how they can get it right.

PunkTV.ca: I think that by building that foundation throughout the process and by the time they get to the end they feel more like they’ve been an active part of the process rather than saying, “hey we had nothing to do with that”.

I think especially where a video sits you have the ability to record everything and then now the video resolution is quite high and you can play back to the audience why you think that take wasn’t all that good or that was killer or we could move on because we grabbed this here and it spontaneously came to life here and that’s a killer shot, let’s move on. They can see it and they have a sense of the culmination of it everything kind of coming together and there’s a confidence saying we can wrap out now feeling like we’ve got it at least in the can and as long as we got a tight edit on it then it should come out as expected.

PunkTV.ca:  Back to one of the comments you said earlier when you said you don’t get the band to lip sync to the song for the reasons that you stated, obviously you’re going to stay away from tighter shots of the lead singer singing that part of the chorus at that point because you may have problems syncing it up then?

I don’t know, I don’t agree with that. The technology is there to compress or expand frames to fill a shot and I’ve never come across a situation where I like to hang on to shots for extended periods of times and the Mudvayne video was a great example of that. That’s done live and they played as hard as they wanted to and were unrestricted in the sense of their performance. Once we got into editing there was some number crunching that had to get done to make sure that as we hang on shots of the monitor the frame is filled with tight close ups of their faces and the words are spoken very fast and everything seems to stay in pretty tight sync. At times you have to press upon the artist to at least listen to their CD version of the song because a lot of times they tend to change some lyrics or sing it a little bit differently  6 months later or 2 months later and you just want to remind them that if you want to be at sync in these parts you have to be at least speaking the right lyrics.

PunkTV.ca: For your style tell us about the influences, directors and artists and literary heroes that make it into your work on a regular basis.

That’s a pretty interesting question. I’m a huge fan of several directors, certainly Paul Thomas Anderson or David Sphincter or Michelle Gondry of course. Very sort of stylistic film makers I like them very much and I think they do just tremendous work. I’m a big fan of guys like Ralph Steadman or Charles Bukowski, guys that just had a really interesting slant on some things.

PunkTV.ca: Charles Bukowski is the best. I love his writing. Not some much on the poetry but I really do love his books. I’ve read a whole bunch of the beat stuff and I think him and Kerouac and Ginsberg and Cassidy and Richard Brautigan. There’s really a lot of that missing in today’s literature.

So there are 2 heroes of mine right now who I just think are awesome; one is Phil Hendry.

PunkTV.ca: Who’s that?

He’s a completely brilliant and insane talk show personality. He has a show that’s just unlike any other that I’ve come across. Phil Hendry will have a dialogue with someone that you just completely loathe and for people who don’t know they don’t realize that Phil is doing all the voices of all the characters and he has people, and it’s usually on your drive when you’re stuck in traffic and the day is beating you up and there’s they guy who’s suing Aamco because he’s sitting at the traffic life and he heard the commercial come on the radio and so he thought someone was beeping behind him so he lunges forward into traffic and takes out a school bus of kids. He’s suing now the radio company and the advertisers because they forced him to do that and it’s just the most outrageous, ridiculous scenario and the skit is the folks who are calling in to react, they don’t know that it’s just all an act and the person that’s talking to the host is the host himself kind of just playing one against the other and it’s really the most clever kind of scenarios that this guy comes up with and the way people react to it is what’s really, truly entertaining.

PunkTV.ca: Comic genius and great timing like that new Colbert.

Exactly, that’s another great example. That kind of sort of tongue in cheek humor and slant on the world that we live in I think is really, really engaging to me. Riley Martin is another great example. Just guys that are a little bit off and out there but rooted enough in the reality of what we see and live everyday that it’s just a really odd take on things but you know that there’s a lot of truth to it and that I find really fascinating.

PunkTV.ca: Really brings out the nature good and bad of the human condition.

There’s a really odd quirkiness about people just why they are the way they are and you can watch the National geographic shows and the Discovery Channels and you start realizing that out of all the creatures that are walking around or doing their things humanity is just the one that has the strangest take on things.

PunkTV.ca: It’s little known that you did the 1997 Lit video Bitter that featured Vincent Gallo, speaking of strange and wonderful. I think he’s just about the coolest person and one of the best directors on the planet. How did you meet up with him?

Well Buffalo 66 is one of my favorites. I’ve known Vincent for a while and he’s an audiophile and he’s actually a great musician.

PunkTV.ca: As an aside, he has a website that’s called Big Blue machine or something like that, that lists all of the gear that he’s into and he collects all kind of 50s and 60s equipment and everything. People might not know about him and how you met.

The way I got him to be in the Lit video was like getting him a 19 inch Ampex equipment rack. They’re really hard to come by and I knew someone that had one. I drove over in this old school car and he just loved it and that’s how we kind of connected on that level. And so I had listened to the Lit song Bitter and it just conjured up this character who just struggles and struggles and struggles and just can’t seem to get anything right epitomized by the story line that plays out in that track. I just kept envisioning Vincent as the only guy who could actually portray it with facial expressions and body language to just convey that sense of utter frustration and bitterness. I approached him with the idea and he really dug it and agreed to do it and we’ve remained friends since. Like you, I think he’s a very talented artist.

PunkTV.ca: He’s an enigma. By the way thank you for that story, that was very entertaining and I’m sure quite indicative of the way that he deals with everybody.

Well he is a unique person and when you find that quality in somebody it’s a good thing, it keeps you interested in things. He has a fresh perspective as opposed to anything that gets stale.

PunkTV.ca: What did you think of the Brown Bunny? It got booed and I saw it and I thought it was beautiful.

Ya I have a DVD of it and I’ve watched it several times and it stands on it’s own for what it is. Every film maker does things for a myriad of reasons and what they’re trying to say may not always be what someone else is going to experience it for or wanting to hear so sometimes the match is perfect and other times it’s not but that what makes film making and film going the experience that it is. I would much rather watch something that’s maybe not to my liking or at least controversial so I could have dialogue afterwards about what I just spent 2 hours experiencing and I think any time that you can do that it’s a goof thing. Certainly that’s much more interesting to me than just kind of being lulled into a mediocre sense of complacency.

PunkTV.ca: Yeah, spoon fed pabulum kind of complacency.  Which leads me to this question…  there is that one scene there, obviously it is a beautiful movie and all the movies that he really does he’s kind of Marlon Brando-esque in the sense he has a vision for the movie whether he’s directing it or acting it or behind the camera or whatever and I think that supersedes everything that’s pretty much happening at the film at the time. That’s obviously the Chloe Sevigny scene where he’s really literally and symbolically giving a hundred percent of himself in this scene, the gratuitous sex scene. I’m just wondering at one point did he and did you self censor? Do you find that you’re ever saying to yourself, “ok, this is going to be too gratuitous, I can’t let this go” or sometimes I think it was Romanek again that did the video for Nine Inch Nails and there’s nudity and bondage and so forth, at what point do you say I’m going to self censor that and I’m going to stop and not allow myself to do that.

I think it’s a collaborative choice. Certainly with videos you have an artist that you’re responsible to and certainly on music video projects things are funded by a record company or a management company there’s a certain inherent responsibility to deliver a product that is usable and the definition of the usability is there could be one version that is airing, there is a second version that is available on a DVD etcetera. So I think that’s a collaborative decision that has to be made amongst the artist, the companies involved with the end product and the film makers. On a feature film, I think it’s much more wide open and on something that is more of an indie style approach where let’s say there’s an author director that has written something and self financed it and he just wants to be totally true to what his or her vision is without any limitations. Certainly the artistic landscape and the ability to express it are not limited except if you impose it on you self. If a studio is behind it and a studio’s money is behind it then you have to be responsible to that and if there’s someone on set saying this is not going to fly those are battle between producers and directors and on set representatives. For myself I would say that I typically write just form the heart and I’ve never really been one who’s tried to be blatantly either fallacious or gratuitous. I tend to find sullies and innuendo a lot more interesting than anything that’s blatant and so if you read for instance the script for On the Doll you would see a lot of very overt sexual and promiscuous scenes. However the ways the scenes are filmed and the way the psychological level which those scenes are conveyed in my opinion leaves a lot more to viewers imaginations than anything that I could film and I particularly like that approach. There’s a classic scene in Reservoir Dogs where to me it was very upsetting and disturbing where the police officer was tortured and ultimately killed when I go back and watch that scene I don’t see anything but I just watch the frames that isn’t really that disturbing but when the camera frames away and the sound design moves away creates a very upsetting feeling in me I know that’s because on a psychological level that’s playing a lot more to my imagination than any thing that I could be seeing. I think we’ve seen so many things now whether it’s in films, the technology is so advance that we have the ability, budget permitting, to be as realistic as we need to be. We can re-create things very realistically I we want to and I think we’ve all seen so much whether it’s sexual or violence or just things around us, the stimuli around is in addition to just in film but whether it be turning on the news or online. We are so much more savvy just by the things that we are bombarded with constantly that to try and create something new and different feels like it would be better to try to do so on a psychological or emotional level rather than just trying to recreate a reality.

PunkTV.ca: The Red Ocean / Blue Ocean. One is their management theory and one is to work within an existing infrastructure and to compete within that infrastructure is to think outside the box and that competes with no one and in your when you do go that route and you are gratuitous you’re basically doing what everyone else has done but if you try to find another way to represent that you’re taking the path less traveled and competing with no one.

You just triggered my mind. The climatic scene in Buffalo 66 for example, I thought it was brilliant how this person’s whole entity and being is consumed by his sense of revenge to exact revenge on the person who missed the field goal and ultimately landed him in a jail cell. When that climatic moment occurs, that could have been filmed in a way that could have had prosthetics and effects but with dynamics it could have looked horrifically real and it almost would have been like ok so what? The way it was handled which was not so gratuitous which was a frozen moment in time and then allowing a camera to kind of examine that in a very suspended moment kind of feeling the non-reality and on-gratuitous approach I felt realy made that a significant moment for me.

PunkTV.ca: I was thinking about the torture scene in Pulp Fiction.

Or in Reservoir Dogs where they dragged the police officer out of the car and then Michael ultimately slices off his ear. You never see any of that, you hear it and it’s brilliant sound design and the way they just pan the camera of to the right you are left with this really ugly feeling but you see nothing. If the camera would to stay on that for the sake of gratuity it would have been a lot less dramatic I think because all you have to do is watch the current version of the world’s most extreme medical videos and the next thing you know what could be more real than a guy with a giant steel hook coming out of his head that’s in the operating room, it just doesn’t get any more real than that. So we’ve seen these kinds of things so many times that we tend to become a little bit maybe dulled by the reality therefore gratuity I think kind of just doesn’t stack up so much anymore and to me I find people a lot more sexually appealing, a lot more sensuous when they’re wearing something than when they’re not. I think a lot of that can be applied to the day to day that we live all the time.

PunkTV.ca: What would surprise kids most to learn about director Thomas Mignione?

Probably that I love classical music most and that I wish I could be directing a video for a guy like Chopin but he’s dead so I can’t but I wish I could.

PunkTV.ca: Well you could do Michael Buble or Bochelli.

There you could.

PunkTV.ca: Or Norah Jones.

I’m an avid fan of classical music even though I do a lot of hard rock and heavy stuff, I like classical music a lot.

PunkTV.ca: Which of the following experiences have you had: have you seen the face of God, have you had an alien encounter or have you seen a ghost?

I’ve actually experienced all 3.

PunkTV.ca: Do you care to expand on any one of them?

No, they’re real personal.

PunkTV.ca: You wouldn’t believe the variety of responses I get on that question. I’m going to publish a book along with my photography about it at some point.

It’s a great question and it’s a really, really solid good one.

PunkTV.ca: It’s common and you wouldn’t believe I talk to death metal bands and black metal bands and punk rock band and directors and a whole gamut of people and there’s a commonality in those kinds of experiences. For me, it attempts to try to get together the existential question of belief in things outside of that which we experience internally.