James Hawley is the writer/director/scorer/special effects guru on the indie horror film Sewer Chewer, and the upcoming Jesus of Neubla. James currently resides in Oklahoma City with his wife and son. In his spare time he records for multiple dance music labels, travels as a celebrated DJ at various parties and festivals around the globe (Jack Acid, 69 d.b., Pirate Audio, and part of Spiral Tribe), and is currently in works on a a collaboration collection of short films based around urban legends tentatively titled Tales from the Tomb.
For more info on James check out these links!
The official SEWER CHEWER website:
James' IMDB page
Small list of 12" and cd releases
Article on the music genre he is associated with helping create
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_teknoThe group he is mostly associated with in the music industry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Tribe
1. If you could choose three films that you would say have inspired your own film making what would they be?
This is hard because I wanted to be a filmmaker at such an early age.
1.1 Jason and the Argonauts and other Ray Harryhausen films. When I saw his monsters moving about it lit a fire under my ass. When my mom explained stop motion to me, I immediately wanted to start doing my own, which led to my grandparents giving me their old super 8 camera. From there I would go to the library and bookstore and find everything I could on film making. This was the 4th grade. Then I saw the making of Star Wars and knew this was going to be my life someday.
1.2. The original Evil Dead -When I saw this I realised that horror could be done with no money and still be shocking. The fx just blew my mind , everything from latex to stop motion - Junior High
1.3. Early skateboard videos like Future Primitive/ Search for Animal Chin/ Curb Dogs etc by Powel Peralta and Dave Vanderspeck along with other weird art films like Richard Kern and Kenneth Anger - the whole punk video/film thing in the 80's really kicked me into overdrive and inspired my first real film project, a renegade street skating documentary which resulted in my first arrest - high school.
2. For many who do not know, you create your own props and effects. Is this something you started doing prior to doing film work, or just out of necessity?
I grew up very poor and with a vivid over active imagination so I would build my own toys from recycled junk, it began with my interest in giant manga robots, making them from tin cans and cardboard and just continued, eventually the neighborhood kids started asking me to make stuff for them.Halloween was always a diy effort as well and in 3rd grade my mom bought me Dick Smiths Monster Makeup book.By junior high I had become indoctrinated into the cult of Famous Monsters/Fangoria/Star Log and all the other fan/movie mags so I moved into trying to make more intricate props beyond Halloween stuff and in the 9th I got to spend a summer with the fx team of Brewer and Powell who ran the fx dept for VCI films. They did Blood Cult and the Ripper and other video nastys. After my arrest in high school (taking a video camera into a bank and trying to film a skateboarding scene) I cooled it on film and moved into club/music industry and there I applied my prop skills to club installments. When we started doing renegade rave/warehouse events we would theme them and I would make full scale props for the events. By then I realized I could be filming this stuff and making my own movie/videos which is what brought me back full circle to the film/video medium again.
3. Your film Sewer Chewer's score is almost a character in itself, was that something that was planned? Or that developed as editing went along?
Being a major fan of Argento/Fulci and Carpenter, I was drawn by the heavy synth scores in those films. They stand out more so than most scores and run heavily through the movies. Plus I think Heavy Metal, the Wall, Tommy, and other rock operas had influence. I also wanted to do something a step further, and try to appeal to my existing fan base from my music career , I figured they would be the first people to accept Sewer Chewer...that's also why there are a lot of references to Network 23 (that is the name of one of the labels I recorded for).
Plus I think 20 years of performing in front of 10-20,000 watt speaker systems made me a bit deaf.
4. Besides being a film maker you are quite well known in the underground for your music, have you ever been approached or thought of directing music videos?
I have a documentary that will be released next year on the local skate scene and a specific area we all skated back in the 80's, a psychotic concrete ditch under a highway overpass. The editing is very music video like with lots of music from Captain Eyeball. I enjoy working with them a lot and we have done one music video and have discussed doing more. I shot a live video for a documentary in 1991 of Flipper and Gwar performing at a impromptu house party that some kids parents had left town and he contacted the band when they were in town, they came and destroyed the house, several hundred hardcore punks crammed int his small house with 2 of the rudest bands ever. Was a wonderful moment to capture and led to a nasty legal situation between me and Geffen Records,(though the bands gave consent, Geffen owned Flippers name and likeness) resulted in Flipper being escorted off my property by the police a year later and the footage disappearing for over a decade. It just recently appeared on youtube actually. Some friends found a vhs dub of it and uploaded it. A lot of the early skate videos I tried to do in high school were all music related, so music video is something I am drawn to, but have yet to really go that direction. The market locally is already saturated with guys with better studios and gear for that. If I do anything soon it will be with bands I am friends with and can be creative with. Hoping a Rat Fink inspired video with Captain Eyeball soon.
5. Lastly, if you could choose one person dead or alive and do a biographical film on them, who would it be and why?
Actually, it would be a small group of people, not one. It would be my family and its been in the planning stages for awhile.The Woodrings and Hawleys have been a staple in the local/regional dirt track stock car/outlaws and off road buggy racing for several generations, going back to my great uncles and great grandfather. My grandmother had 5 brothers, all of them, my grandfather, all their kids, and all their kid's kids have been involved in one way or another. I grew up surrounded in this culture, the men all huddled in the garages at different ones houses every weekend (always switched houses because the wives would grow tired of the grease mess and beer can mountains) rebuilding cars, every few years a different one would become the new driver, the cousins doing off road buggy racing, all kinds of motor madness. I have been wanting to document it from the beginning first car that great grandpa sponsored to the demolishing of the local track/stadium last year, which ended it. There's lots of old 8mm black and white footage of the uncles racing at the high school stadium back in the day (they would let stock cars race on the track on the weekends) to vhs footage at the fairgrounds and tons of pics. This is story I am proud of and need to show to the world. My family did it from the ground up, on their own, no help from sponsors other than my great grandpa donating parts and frames from junk cars in his salvage yard, and they built a racing legacy.
Many thanks to James for being a part of The Mini-View!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Tribe
1. If you could choose three films that you would say have inspired your own film making what would they be?
This is hard because I wanted to be a filmmaker at such an early age.
1.1 Jason and the Argonauts and other Ray Harryhausen films. When I saw his monsters moving about it lit a fire under my ass. When my mom explained stop motion to me, I immediately wanted to start doing my own, which led to my grandparents giving me their old super 8 camera. From there I would go to the library and bookstore and find everything I could on film making. This was the 4th grade. Then I saw the making of Star Wars and knew this was going to be my life someday.
1.2. The original Evil Dead -When I saw this I realised that horror could be done with no money and still be shocking. The fx just blew my mind , everything from latex to stop motion - Junior High
1.3. Early skateboard videos like Future Primitive/ Search for Animal Chin/ Curb Dogs etc by Powel Peralta and Dave Vanderspeck along with other weird art films like Richard Kern and Kenneth Anger - the whole punk video/film thing in the 80's really kicked me into overdrive and inspired my first real film project, a renegade street skating documentary which resulted in my first arrest - high school.
2. For many who do not know, you create your own props and effects. Is this something you started doing prior to doing film work, or just out of necessity?
I grew up very poor and with a vivid over active imagination so I would build my own toys from recycled junk, it began with my interest in giant manga robots, making them from tin cans and cardboard and just continued, eventually the neighborhood kids started asking me to make stuff for them.Halloween was always a diy effort as well and in 3rd grade my mom bought me Dick Smiths Monster Makeup book.By junior high I had become indoctrinated into the cult of Famous Monsters/Fangoria/Star Log and all the other fan/movie mags so I moved into trying to make more intricate props beyond Halloween stuff and in the 9th I got to spend a summer with the fx team of Brewer and Powell who ran the fx dept for VCI films. They did Blood Cult and the Ripper and other video nastys. After my arrest in high school (taking a video camera into a bank and trying to film a skateboarding scene) I cooled it on film and moved into club/music industry and there I applied my prop skills to club installments. When we started doing renegade rave/warehouse events we would theme them and I would make full scale props for the events. By then I realized I could be filming this stuff and making my own movie/videos which is what brought me back full circle to the film/video medium again.
3. Your film Sewer Chewer's score is almost a character in itself, was that something that was planned? Or that developed as editing went along?
Being a major fan of Argento/Fulci and Carpenter, I was drawn by the heavy synth scores in those films. They stand out more so than most scores and run heavily through the movies. Plus I think Heavy Metal, the Wall, Tommy, and other rock operas had influence. I also wanted to do something a step further, and try to appeal to my existing fan base from my music career , I figured they would be the first people to accept Sewer Chewer...that's also why there are a lot of references to Network 23 (that is the name of one of the labels I recorded for).
Plus I think 20 years of performing in front of 10-20,000 watt speaker systems made me a bit deaf.
4. Besides being a film maker you are quite well known in the underground for your music, have you ever been approached or thought of directing music videos?
I have a documentary that will be released next year on the local skate scene and a specific area we all skated back in the 80's, a psychotic concrete ditch under a highway overpass. The editing is very music video like with lots of music from Captain Eyeball. I enjoy working with them a lot and we have done one music video and have discussed doing more. I shot a live video for a documentary in 1991 of Flipper and Gwar performing at a impromptu house party that some kids parents had left town and he contacted the band when they were in town, they came and destroyed the house, several hundred hardcore punks crammed int his small house with 2 of the rudest bands ever. Was a wonderful moment to capture and led to a nasty legal situation between me and Geffen Records,(though the bands gave consent, Geffen owned Flippers name and likeness) resulted in Flipper being escorted off my property by the police a year later and the footage disappearing for over a decade. It just recently appeared on youtube actually. Some friends found a vhs dub of it and uploaded it. A lot of the early skate videos I tried to do in high school were all music related, so music video is something I am drawn to, but have yet to really go that direction. The market locally is already saturated with guys with better studios and gear for that. If I do anything soon it will be with bands I am friends with and can be creative with. Hoping a Rat Fink inspired video with Captain Eyeball soon.
5. Lastly, if you could choose one person dead or alive and do a biographical film on them, who would it be and why?
Actually, it would be a small group of people, not one. It would be my family and its been in the planning stages for awhile.The Woodrings and Hawleys have been a staple in the local/regional dirt track stock car/outlaws and off road buggy racing for several generations, going back to my great uncles and great grandfather. My grandmother had 5 brothers, all of them, my grandfather, all their kids, and all their kid's kids have been involved in one way or another. I grew up surrounded in this culture, the men all huddled in the garages at different ones houses every weekend (always switched houses because the wives would grow tired of the grease mess and beer can mountains) rebuilding cars, every few years a different one would become the new driver, the cousins doing off road buggy racing, all kinds of motor madness. I have been wanting to document it from the beginning first car that great grandpa sponsored to the demolishing of the local track/stadium last year, which ended it. There's lots of old 8mm black and white footage of the uncles racing at the high school stadium back in the day (they would let stock cars race on the track on the weekends) to vhs footage at the fairgrounds and tons of pics. This is story I am proud of and need to show to the world. My family did it from the ground up, on their own, no help from sponsors other than my great grandpa donating parts and frames from junk cars in his salvage yard, and they built a racing legacy.
Many thanks to James for being a part of The Mini-View!
Great questions and awesome answers!
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