The sto­ry of Kuso, by Fly­ing Lotus

Whether Steven Elli­son – bet­ter known as musi­cian Fly­ing Lotus – realis­es it or not, his career has been coloured by cin­e­ma from the start. Even his big break in the music indus­try was serendip­i­tous in that movie-esque, verg­ing on sac­cha­rine, too-good-to-be-true fashion.

In 2006, Elli­son spot­ted a tele­vi­sion ad call­ing for song sub­mis­sions dur­ing Adult Swim, the late night pro­gram­ming block of Car­toon Net­work. Rather than crack­ing open a frosty Bud Lite and suck­ing up the lat­est episode of Robot Chick­en, he decid­ed to send some tracks to the net­work. The sub­mis­sions were select­ed, Elli­son adopt­ed the moniker Fly­ing Lotus, and the rest, as they say in the movies, is history.

Okay, not exact­ly. But it is a cru­cial back­sto­ry when it comes to under­stand­ing how and why he made a film so polar­is­ing that a hand­ful of crit­ics have brand­ed it ​‘the gross­est film ever made’. (Spoil­er alert: it’s not.) Kuso is a port­man­teau fea­ture depict­ing base human desires, filthy sex and enough bod­i­ly flu­ids to fill a reser­voir. It even stars P‑Funk all star George Clin­ton as a back street sur­geon with a very spe­cial (and revolt­ing) heal­ing tech­nique. For a musi­cian who, seem­ing­ly, gives zero fucks about what peo­ple think, why both­er with all this to begin with? Who cares about the crit­ics, or any­one for that mat­ter, when you’re ​‘Fly­ing Lotus’?

Here, Elli­son takes up the sto­ry, dis­cussing the shock reac­tion to the film at Sun­dance, about run­ning through lines with the great George Clin­ton, and how Twit­ter is killing real emotions…

Fly­ing Lotus: ​“I’ve nev­er real­ly liked mak­ing music videos. The way my brain works, I like nar­ra­tive. I like dia­logue. Music videos don’t real­ly offer that. They’re also meant for a real­ly short atten­tion span. I grew up with films. I watched a lot of movies. I appre­ci­ate the time and say­ing it’s not a fuck­ing inter­net thing. It’s a movie that you have to actu­al­ly give an hour and a half to. It’s not a two-minute clip where you’re already itch­ing to click some­thing else. But that’s just how my brain works.

“I had expe­ri­ence in work­ing on dif­fer­ent stuff, but I didn’t know I was going to have to do sound design for the movie, pro­duce it, fund it, pup­peteer it, edit it, score it, all that shit. And do visu­al effects, and visu­al effects ani­ma­tion. I didn’t think I had to do all of that. I know I was going to have to do some of it. You know, I don’t rec­om­mend any­one ever do that, but I felt like I had to chal­lenge myself. I had got­ten to a point with music where I felt I real­ly had to step out­side of that and chal­lenge myself. But it hap­pened, some­how. A movie miracle.

“Brain­feed­er films is my com­pa­ny. We had to make a film com­pa­ny so I could get insur­ance and stuff and so I had com­plete cre­ative con­trol. I made the movie I want­ed to make 100 per cent and, you know, Shud­der, our dis­trib­u­tor, they also allowed for me to do what­ev­er I want­ed and it was real­ly sweet. There are still some things I will do in the director’s cut phys­i­cal copy, or what­ev­er, but this is real­ly fuck­ing close to what I orig­i­nal­ly set out to do.

“The thing about the Sun­dance shit was that the film was sen­sa­tion­alised. The actu­al screen­ings of the film with a reg­u­lar audi­ence – peo­ple were laugh­ing and hav­ing a great time. When I did a press screen­ing for stuffy jour­nal­ists, of course, it’s not for them. A lot of them walked out, but with reg­u­lar screen­ings it was fine. The sto­ries that went around were like, ​‘Oh peo­ple walked out’. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, shit like that will shape the nar­ra­tive of your film before it even has legs. But that’s also what got a lot of people’s ears poked up. Like, ​‘Oh, what is this?’. It’s frus­trat­ing to have your whole nar­ra­tive shaped off of one fes­ti­val, but at the same time, I didn’t hear about too many movies at Sun­dance. They talked about Kuso a lot.

“I approached Craig Robin­son to play the doc­tor at first, which could’ve been awe­some. But hav­ing George Clin­ton as that char­ac­ter was so cool. The best part of it was that he shows up on set, day one, and he looks at me and he’s like, ​‘Hey man, you know I’ve nev­er act­ed before right?’ And I’m like, ​‘Err, don’t ter­ri­fy me George’, and then I’m like ​‘It’s okay man, I just want you to be you, and I know as long as you do you you’ll be fine’. He’s like, ​‘Okay, that’s great. Sec­ond thing, I don’t know any of the lines yet’. I was like, ​‘Alright, okay, it’s cool, we’ll fig­ure it out…’

“A lot of that stuff he had to do we’d do it in lit­tle pieces at a time. Because he didn’t know the lines and, you know, every­one was try­ing to fig­ure out what the fuck to do. And I’d nev­er direct­ed a movie before. We’re all work­ing togeth­er to make it hap­pen. It flowed mag­i­cal­ly, man, it felt real­ly cool. By the end I couldn’t believe that we actu­al­ly got the scene and the pup­pet and all the stuff actu­al­ly worked.

“The world is real sen­si­tive right now, and it’s some­thing to be mind­ful of whether you push those lines or not. Every­one is racial­ly sen­si­tive and sex­u­al­ly sen­si­tive and gen­der sen­si­tive, so you’ve got­ta know when to push the but­tons and when to just let some­body else say that thing. I think that peo­ple need to see cer­tain things and things need to be expressed or these things might man­i­fest them­selves in dif­fer­ent ways. I think art has always been a great release for social frus­tra­tions. I think we have to be mind­ful of what we put into the world because of what peo­ple perceive.

“The truth is, every­one online is itch­ing to be offend­ed. Twit­ter is bull­shit. Peo­ple just wake up and look at Twit­ter and they want to be offend­ed by some­thing, they want to react to some­thing and stand on their lit­tle soap­box and talk shit and have some­thing to con­tribute. But you know what? In real­i­ty, the sad part is, peo­ple won’t say shit in the real world. Peo­ple don’t say a god­damn thing. It’s like peo­ple don’t even emote in real life any­more – they have to use emo­jis. I feel so sad that, in real life, peo­ple don’t smile and peo­ple don’t laugh. They just ​‘haha’ and ​‘LOL’. That’s not laughter.

“If I was mak­ing art films I would def­i­nite­ly con­sid­er muse­ums as venues, but I’m try­ing to make come­dies so it’s a dif­fer­ent – we’re dif­fer­ent. We have dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ries. Kuso is not a muse­um film, but if I did make a project like that then sure, that would be awe­some. I have ideas for instal­la­tions too, but it’s not some­thing that I want to pur­sue at the moment. But I’m help­ing (film­mak­er and col­lab­o­ra­tor) Kahlil Joseph with his next project too, so I’ll be in the muse­ums some­how. I’ve start­ed devel­op­ing a cou­ple projects as a fol­low-up to Kuso. There’s actu­al­ly a TV thing in devel­op­ment, too, but we’ll see what hap­pens. Just tak­ing it easy, fin­ish­ing projects, slow­ly chip­ping away at things.”

Kuso is released exclu­sive­ly on Shud­der 21 July.