Periodically, I do an interview and there is just so much material left over that I wish I could have found some way to cram into the article. The Pork Chop 3D piece this morning was one of those.
Eamon Hardiman is a pretty good interview. He’s funny, clear about what he wants to say and doesn’t fall back to some carefully constructed, previously agreed upon bullet points.
One of the things we talked about, but that didn’t make it into print was the Fright Night Film Fest in Kentucky he and Razor Sharp Studios did back in late June/early July.
Hardiman said, “We screened Pork Chop II there and it was awesome, a really big hit for us. We had a whole bunch of people come up to the table [at the convention] to talk and buy DVDs and stuff.”
But it still got a little weird.
“”We had Pork Chop walking around, you know, and the funny thing was there were a lot of families, people with kids and teenagers. I was really surprised at how many of them wanted to pose their kids with Pork Chop.”
Hardiman pointed out that Pork Chop, the pig masked murderer, likes to kill and (possibly) rape teenagers.
“And you want to pose your kids with him?” Hardiman laughed then said, “Well, ok…”
Come to the fair, bring the kids… run away.
The director also talked about having a hard time finding actors, which didn’t make a lot of sense to him (this was part of his feeling that while he was a local filmmaker, he wasn’t really part of the local art scene exactly –not that he didn’t want to be).
“We have casting calls and people don’t show up,” he told me. “There have been times when we’ve waited in a room from nine in the morning to six at night and had eight people show up. We were lucky those eight were pretty good, but I know there are a lot of actors out there. Charleston has a lot of good actors.”
But they don’t seem to cotton to his kind of film making was what he suggested.
Still, he said he was grateful to the people willing to be in his films –particularly (at least in this conversation), WCHS-TV newsman Kennie Bass.
Bring me the head of Kennie Bass!
He said, “Kennie is great and surprisingly a very good actor. I don’t know if it’s the TV news thing or not, but he comes on set and he’s just good –and he let me cut his head off.”
Hardiman added that in his movies, he only kills the people he likes.
Last thing: His Film “Zombie Babies” is available on Netflix. I just couldn’t work that in.