Hi8 Humiliation: An Interview with Louise Weard
by Ryan Akler-Bishop
from Issue 2
Louise Weard: renaissance woman of the gutter. I first encountered her work as a ninth-grader in 2014. Louise was promoting her film Computer Hearts—a microbudget body horror melding flesh and hardware—across the waters of early-Letterboxd. In the decade since Computer Hearts’ release, she’s blossomed as both a scholar of castration images and a genre filmmaker. Her latest work, Castration Movie, sheds her horror background for a tender and vulgar Hi8 drama about several young West Coast trans women, their heartbreaks, and their squabbles (think: Vancouver Personal Problems). It’s estimated to clock-out with an eighteen-hour runtime (Part I, its first installment, is currently available). Starring Louise as its crass protagonist, the movie’s full of unsimulated intimacies including real sex, self-harm, drug use, etc. Castration Movie is a revelation, but so is its production and exhibition: a truly handmade, contemporary approach to the creation and dispersal of moving images. Louise and I chatted about her cinephilic upbringing, distributing movies on Letterboxd and 4chan, the DCR-TRV330 Sony Handicam, her gung ho, who’s who ensemble, and trans assimilationist cinema.
RAB: I know you grew up in Saskatoon. How would you describe your childhood household?
LW: We were in Saskatoon for six years, then we moved to Calgary: both cities around rural environments. Western Canada has an odd mix of ideologies, on the one hand, it’s all cowboys, conservative politics, the oil industry, and redneck bigotry... But there’s also the reaction to that, like the punk scene. Growing up was a constant push-and-pull between these different ideological backgrounds. Since my dad was a lawyer, there were lots of heavy conversations about politics (which were more like debates), and there was always a degree to which I had to justify my behaviour to my highly educated parents. I had to mount a defense of everything.
My parents got divorced when I started high school. I became hyper-aware of gender dynamics watching my parents’ marriage dissolve and, at the same time, dealing with first queer feelings in high school. This has been such a heady, psychological answer. [Laughs.] To summarize, my childhood prepared me perfectly to make movies that were hyper-critical of social structures.
RAB: Where along the way did you find yourself hatching an interest in film and specifically transgressive art?
LW: Since my parents were more academic-minded there was little limitation on what I could watch. My dad, God bless him, was a big movie guy. When I was two years old he was restoring a cabin in Saskatchewan, near Turtleford. This was ’95 or ’96, before internet and DVDs. He wanted a little buddy to come up with him on the weekends. Since there’s no cable in the middle of nowhere, he’d buy used VHS tapes for entertainment. Early in the day my dad would throw on animated kid’s movies he’d purchase from the bargain bins. When he got tired of hearing the soundtrack to a kid’s movie, he’d put on Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, or Shawshank Redemption: quintessential 90s dadcore movies. I was two and watching Scorsese or Tarantino movies because my dad didn’t care.
Early on I absorbed some degree of cinematic language. When I was ten I asked my dad, “What’s the scariest movie you’ve seen?” and he said The Shining, which is the funniest answer for a dad to say. He said I couldn’t watch it but, in fifth grade, we made a deal: if I read the book first, I could watch the movie. Since it’s a huge book, he didn’t expect I’d finish it. Well, I read The Shining, and my dad had to let me watch it. We went to HMV, and I somehow talked him into buying me a full Stanley Kubrick boxset. I was ten years old then; my dad didn’t give a shit, it was awesome.
In A Clockwork Orange, there’s a scene where Alex breaks into a woman’s house and beats her with a phallus statue. When he slams the statue on her head, instead of showing the impact of the violence, it cuts to a crash-zoom of a screaming woman’s painting. The editing is what tells you the violence happened. That blew my ten-year-old mind. I thought, “Movies are the most incredible artform in the entire world!” All you need is an edit, and now I’m feeling the impact of this violence without actually seeing it. I said, “Fuck books. I’m going to do this instead.”
As a really little kid I would pick up the camera and record family weddings or whatever… But it was only after Clockwork Orange when I truly devoted myself to making short films with my parents’ home video camera—which I’d later use to shoot Castration Movie. I distributed my little projects on early YouTube. At some point my younger brother and I were charting as the top fifty YouTube creators in Canada, just because we made so much content.
RAB: Are your videos still online?
LW: No. [Laughs.] Well, they’re all hidden. My middle school found out [my brother and I] were posting videos with swearing online. They got upset and made me delete my original YouTube channel. Most of that content was saved on a hard drive, so if anyone wants to see an hour-long video of me playing every character in the first Twilight film as a parody, that’s a video that exists somewhere!
RAB: Was that one of your big hits on YouTube?
LW: Nothing was a “big hit,” but in terms of stuff that feels like a slap in the face: yes. [Laughs.] Sometimes I think about how, at that young age, I was going through the cycle of writing, shooting, editing, and posting a little comedy short to distribute it. Even as a fourteen-year-old, I realized I could do the whole process myself.
RAB: Going back to the home-video camera you resurrected for Castration Movie… it’s the TRV330, right?
LW: It is! The DCR-TRV330 Sony Handicam.
RAB: So there’s no interchangeable lenses, but there’s manual focus?
LW: It’s a basic camera: point, shoot, zoom. It has manual focus, but I never use it, hence why so much of the film is out of focus. I found a wide-angle adapter lens for it. It’s a fun lens because you get a very wide view. But, for some reason, you end up with a bit of masking in the corner; you can see the lens, it’s so wide. Because of how I’ve made the movie, I let that stay in the edit. I don’t crop it. In Part II, there’s a lot more shots where you can tell we’re on the wide-angle lens.
RAB: How’s shooting on such a barebone device changed your approach to directing?
LW: When I was first thinking of [Castration Movie], I wanted to make it the simplest process possible. I was living out of my car and couch-surfing then, so I didn’t have a computer handy when I went around shooting. It felt good to shoot on tapes, collect them, and figure out what to do with them later. I had access to that technology because my mom gave me a camera and all these old home videotapes to digitize.
Afterwards, I was sitting with a box of childhood videotapes that I could safely record over and a working home video camera. The second we started shooting, I could feel myself finding this spiritual connection to me at age six, holding the same camera. As a filmmaker you get bogged down with the artifice, chasing a certain aesthetic quality. Especially as an indie filmmaker, you’re always trying to fill this gap between what your work looks like and what a more professional production can pull off. For me, this gap puts the fun back in shooting. I wasn’t worried about cinematic form, I was just a kid shooting a family reunion. I walked into every scene just shooting, playing with the zoom, toggling on the nightvision. I could do anything that would be a faux pas in respectable cinema. It was freedom to me.
RAB: Is there a caveat to that freedom? Do you ever wish you had more control over the image?
LW: A lot of the time I’ll shoot something, and there’s a voice in my head that says, “Oh my God, that looks like shit. That’s screwed up. You missed this part. You didn’t get that on camera. There’s your shadow.” When I sit on it for a while, I get beyond that voice, and a clarity comes in. There might be a moment where whoever’s holding the camera gets distracted and looks at a wall outside. Or maybe they walk across the set and have the camera pointed in the direction they’re walking instead of the scene. I realize there’s such a magic in that lack of intentionality. The camera operator had intentions in that moment, and they were totally separate from the film being made. It creates a degree of conflict that lets the voyeuristic viewpoint of the camera feel like its own character, it pulls the camera into a world that’s real.
I needed [the film] to look as shitty and busted as possible. The choppy frame rate is so brutal, I didn’t even use the DV output on the camera. I’m using the RCA output into a Costco capture card that’s 240p. I had good capture cards, I could’ve done a direct signal and made it work, but I made the conscious choice to use the most consumer technology on all levels.
RAB: There’s something uncanny about Castration Movie’s images. On one hand, the camera’s look is steeped in late-90s home video associations. But at the same time, the story is very contemporary and hardly nostalgic.
LW: [When I was] digitizing my mom’s tapes, I realized I had all this period footage of me as a little kid. There’s an almost documentarian impulse to get into the past, to get self-reflexive with this back catalogue. I think of my childhood through the veneer of that home video look. Shooting a modern world with that aesthetic makes it seem more “real.” It’s almost like nostalgia makes us associate the [Hi8] look with real life. That said, I don’t see it as nostalgic so much as “real.” Nostalgia creates the feeling of authenticity.
RAB: Cycling back to your family: you mentioned before I was recording that your brother’s visiting you, and you’re going to show him the nine hours of Castration Movie you’ve shot so far. You mentioned you’ve avoided sharing your movies with your family…
LW: Yes, because my family has the highest expectations for me, it’s nothing to do with the content. I just don’t want them to watch it and criticize my art. [Laughs.] My family members have always been my toughest critics, but my younger brothers have also been confidants to get notes from. Showing my brother will be fun. I have been naked in every movie I’ve ever made, and some of my family saw a lot of those earlier shorts.
When I made SIDS, I showed it in a theatre with every fellow classmates’ family present, and I got through that fine. With Castration Movie, it’s different. It’s not because of the content, but because it’s so long. We went to a screening in Seattle the other day. I showed up to do the Q&A, and my younger brother was with me. I said, “Hey, do you want to go in and watch the last half-hour?” And just through the theatre’s wall, you could hear me saying, “I like it! I fucking like it!” while I’m being fucked during the ending. My brother just looked at me and said, “I think I’ll wait to see the whole thing.” [Laughs.]
RAB: I first encountered your work with Computer Hearts in 2014. You were one of the first filmmakers sharing their work on Letterboxd in its very early days. (The other being James Healey, who went on to be one of the worst filmmakers I’ve encountered and, now, a right-wing grifter.)
LW: Even before Letterboxd, I started on 4chan! When Letterboxd entered Beta we started sharing the invite codes. Those [4chan] threads moved to Letterboxd; it was our version of Rate Your Music. Mr. Healey and I [laughs] started by shilling our work on 4chan. I’d post a music video I did, he’d post his film Mindless which became a huge gag. We’d all go on Letterboxd and tear his movie to shreds.
Since we were both on Letterboxd and 4chan, we started a little frenemy rivalry. He was working on his film Worth It, and I was working on Computer Hearts. If you go back to the 2014 reviews, you can see that rivalry. The most hurtful reviews I got were like, “Well, at least James Healey’s movie was shorter.”
But it was interesting to build community on Letterboxd initially, especially because it was a bunch of people who were shitty edgelords. All the 4chan thread people wanted to be a power user on the site. We were all trying to pump out reviews. There were points where me and Healey were in the top users. We wanted to create a scene, to be at the forefront of whatever Letterboxd was going to be. It wasn’t positive all the time, there’s definitely some fun comments if you go back; everything’s archived. But it’s such an important part of my development as a filmmaker and an important part of my building of an online persona.
RAB: Were 4chan and Letterboxd the main avenues of distribution for Computer Hearts?
LW: At first, definitely—that’s what made it a cult film! A lot of people don’t realize that, when it first came out, Computer Hearts was a punchline to a joke that had been set up for two years. I’d been paying to put banner ads for the movie on 4chan and was shilling it on Letterboxd. When it came out, it had some defenders, but most saw it as a middling student film: too long, but with some cool effects. However, since it was on Letterboxd, people would add it to lists of “psychotronic movies” or “crazy internet movies” or “Letterboxd-core.” I also made the effort to upload it to all the big torrent sites so anyone could find it easily. That kept [Computer Hearts] alive for years. I pat myself on the back for knowing how the internet worked to find a cult following.
RAB: How much of Castration Movie’s exhibition has come about through similar internet communities?
LW: I would say 100% initially, but now I have distributors handling it. Last year in June, I said: “It’s been one year since I did the Kickstarter for Part I. I want to show I have something to deliver.” So I posted the first part even though I never anticipated releasing them as separate sections. Since I had so much done, I figured I could get a vibe-check on how people feel about the movie, change course certain ways, or just say, “That’s the film,” if it wasn’t working.
It started slow. In the first month, maybe 10-20 people watched it, but then all those people told another person to watch it. By December, it was in major Hollywood trade magazines, praising it as one of the movies of the year. It all happened through word of mouth online: people doing watch parties on Discord servers, tweeting about it, or posting it on Bluesky. It’s really fun to see people bringing their online friends and real-life friends out to these screenings. So many people coming to in-person screenings have already seen the movie; they just want to go out and laugh along with their friends in-person.
RAB: Computer Hearts is full of prosthetics and artifice. Castration Movie’s acts of extremity are not simulated. There’s actual surgery, actual self-harm, lots of actual sex. When did you start to embrace the unsimulated?
LW: The whole idea of being a transgressive artist is to forward political or social ideas. The transgression is to make people think, since you can’t be a passive viewer, since you’re having a physical response. I was struggling with how to be transgressive in the modern era. When I made Computer Hearts, I thought stabbing and tonguing a computer with a giant pussy was a subversive image. Almost ten years since Computer Hears started filming, I began wondering: “How can I stay relevant?”
I watched this controversial movie called Actors by Betsy Brown. The movie showed me the new way to be transgressive was to mix the online with the real, to confuse the boundaries between who you are and who you perform as. At that point, I started writing a series of articles where I’d play a character, as Louise Weard, at my most shameless and self-loathing, willing to say anything. I ran that series of articles which were, on the surface, detailed film criticism but with a more shocking, self-disparaging tone. To me, the transgression was in the danger of my real views being associated with the views of a character they don’t know I’m playing.
For Castration Movie, I moved that approach beyond the theoretical space into the cinematic space. I figured I’d make a character that presents myself as a nightmare-ish person, then apply that sentiment to every character in the movie. I was grabbing friends and saying, “Let’s up this quality, let’s be shameless. Play heavy into your narcissism.” It’s a way to make yourself look bad and have fun doing it. A lot of people watch this movie and assume I’m like Michaela and feel intimidated by me. That I can speak so brazen and shockingly as Michaela, and have that associated with my real views, is transgressive to me.
[Castration Movie’s protagonist] Michaela stemmed from a tweet I saw that said, “We need to hold accountable trans women who had a Nazi phase before they transitioned.” I thought that was such a funny concept; you’re a Nazi and then suddenly you change it out for being a trans woman? But then I thought back about being on 4chan and remembered some of the first trans women I saw online were traps in SS uniforms. I have both disgust and fascination for these fascist portrayals of trans women, and so I figured I’d write a trans woman protagonist who had a stereotypical 4chan Nazi phase and see if audiences could find a vein of empathy for her. After that, I figured we could have an incel and then, in Part II, we add TERFs, detransitioners, people from extreme kink communities. I wanted to frame anyone at the margins who you’d initially judge with, “Fuck that person,” but once you spent time with them, you’d figure out what makes them tick and maybe have empathy. While there’s definitely subversive content, I don’t consider [Castration Movie] an edgelord movie. The first point of the movie is to fill it with love, especially for people you may not want to see yourself adjacent to.
RAB: Can I name a collaborator and you say how that collaboration came about?
LW: For sure!
RAB: John Paizs.
LW: He made my favourite film of all time: Crime Wave. There’s nothing better than Crime Wave. We were following each other on Instagram, and I DM’d him saying, “Will you be in my movie?” He said, “Yah, I’d love to. You coming to Winnipeg?” I told him I wanted a voice cameo. He was like, “You never hear my voice in any of my movies. No one will know it’s me.” But that’s why it’s a funny cameo, since it’s not his beautiful face! I really hope I can pull things together to have him in real life, but I’m always fighting against the budget. I’m constantly looking at really cool casting and ideas, but also the dwindling money. Every time you fly or fly someone out, a percentage of the budget goes away.
I ended up recording John’s voiceover in my car. I was at a point where it felt like the movie was never getting done. I said to him, “I just hit two years of working on this film. It feels like there’s no end in sight.” And he said, “No, you’re doing great. Crime Wave was the same way.” That comparison gave me some confidence. [Laughs.]
RAB: Vera Drew.
LW: Vera and I became friends through the film festival circuit. I was doing screeners for SXSW and Fantastic Fest, which is how I became one of the first people to see Vera’s People’s Joker in the festival world. Now, she’s like my best friend. Her whole sequence [in Castration Movie] was perfect timing. Outfest was on, so I knew Alice [Maio Mackay] would also be in Los Angeles. We shot that scene in L.A., and it was one of my favourite days of shooting.
RAB: Ada Rook.
LW: In the early days of Castration Movie, on Trans Day of Visibility, I posted “I’m broke, someone should buy me a pizza.” The musician Lauren Bousfield, a long-time mutual, messaged me, “I’ll buy you a pizza, Louise.” I told her I was joking, but that started a conversation about collaboration. Her and Ada Rook had finished a song for Lauren’s new album, and we ended up filming a music video between all of us.
When Rook was in Vancouver last summer, she needed someone to shoot another music video for her song “cortisol[_inside cortisol_explosion excessive_cortisol cortisol_]everywhere.” She wanted someone to beat her up until she pissed herself. For some reason, she was having trouble finding someone. [Laughs.] I told her immediately I was down. We shot that video over six nights, I just beat her up again and again. While we were discussing doing that video, we found her the perfect role in Castration Movie. Since I’d been beating her up, we had to come up with reasons why she was covered in bruises. Rook’s a fantastic person to work with, she’s so clever and has such good comedic timing.
RAB: TIFF programmer Peter Kuplowsky.
LW: Peter and I go back a little bit through the festival circuit. I was at Fantasia, and we were doing what we typically do at the end of the night: having a beer. I said to the whole table of film industry guys: “Hey, while I’m here I wanna shoot this scene for Castration Movie where I’m sucking a john’s dick in a hotel room. Who’s down?” Everyone, of course, said, [drunk, enthusiastic voice] “Yahhhhhh, I wanna do it!” Then, in the sober light of day, people were more hesitant. I asked Peter if he was still interested, with no pressure, and he responded, “I said I’d do it last night, of course I’ll do it!” So, we went up to his hotel and shot the scene. I’m super grateful. Peter’s one of the most generous guys in the entire film industry. Not only will he pretend to have his dick sucked for my movie, but he’ll answer any questions I have or give me notes on a rough cut.
RAB: More broadly, how have you gone about finding collaborators who are open to performing intimate and transgressive acts on-camera?
LW: Everyone just trusts me! Everyone feels safe being shameless around me since I’m already burning myself with cigarettes and getting pissed on. Movies are playing pretend, which grants people a safe outlet to do fucked-up, crazy, and gross things. When you pitch people on crazy shit, they’re usually excited to be part of it.
RAB: I know the movie’s funded for $25K from the BC Arts Council. When you’re applying for grants, do you find yourself sanistizing the project to get government funding or are you totally forthright?
LW: It’s important that the BC Arts Council gave us that support, and I’m very grateful for it. When I applied for funding, I didn’t write, “Here’s this hyper-transgressive work that’s full of sex and violence!” That wasn’t what the project was to me. I didn’t want to come in with any degree of edgelord-y-ness. That’s not who I am; I’m a fairly academic artist. That said, when it was approved, I was with some friends, and I read them the full grant application because I felt self-conscious that I’d sanitized the project too much! When we read through it all, we decided it was accurate, just not edgy in any way. To me, this is a very sincere project about representing a pocket of community and marginalized people here in Vancouver.
RAB: In one of your Substack articles, you talk about being conscious of assimilationist tendencies in trans cinema. How would you define these assimilationist tendencies?
LW: I’m responding to this idea of a touristic gaze. A lot of trans cinema does one of two things: leering at the trans body as a site of sexual fascination for its difference, or it’s a more grotesque, pitiable, freakshow environment. Assimilation might mean a trans story that walks a fine line between those modes; but by doing so, it shaves off a lot of what trans experience is.
This happens a lot more in TV. I don’t ever want to criticize the trans people who work in those fields, as I think it’s necessary for them to make those choices to air stuff. But by having no real industry funding, I keep [Castration Movie] tied to myself; I control the copyright, I get to present trans people however I feel like—including characters who are at times hard to sit in a room with. There’s no sanding-off. With an assimilationist trans story, the transness ends with coming out or wanting access to surgery. I’m trying to form a new language to film a trans body and watch trans people exist.
RAB: Are there points where you notice an idea you have brushes up against assimilationist tendencies?
LW: What I worry most about with this movie is the addition of different viewpoints. When there’s a discussion of trans people in a mainstream setting, people want balance, they want to have a pro-trans person and an anti-trans person. That’s a very cis viewpoint: to see transness like it’s a debate. It causes a lot of assimilationist people to try and prove they’re one of the good ones; “Oh, I just wanted to fit into society, shave off my edges, and try to be as not trans as possible.” In my movie, I do the dialectic of having anti-trans characters in the second half, but I don’t think there’s any degree where it shaves off the transness of the story. A lot of Part II has Michaela struggling with ideas of assimilation. She talks a lot about how passing is important. The movie itself is critical of these ideas, which helps me stay focused on doing my own thing.
RAB: How does shooting Vancouver and using its real-life locations inform your process?
LW: I just wanted to shoot where I live. Vancouver never gets to play itself. I never see the parts of the city I exist in on film, even though so much shoots here. Vancouver is a nightmarish city. It’s interesting how parts of the movie are now a historical document since Vancouver has so much turnover; many businesses, music venues, or DIY spaces we shot in aren’t there anymore.
One of my favourite moments in the movie is when Brooklyn and Turner have their breakup in front of the lighting store. I remember moving out here in 2012, and the closest IKEA to my university was across from that lighting store. I remember seeing the store and thinking, “Oh my God, I want to film here.” Eleven years later, I’m writing that breakup scene, and I knew it would be set there.
RAB: I read your thesis Castrationsploitation!. How consciously are you situating Castration Movie in the history of on-screen castrations?
LW: It’s going to be the turning point of how all castration cinema follows! I’m building on the images and different modes of castration cinema I discuss in Castrationsploitation, whether it’s the sick film or exploitation paracinema. I’m in dialogue with how the trans film image has been linked to castration in movies like John Dexter’s I Want What I Want, I’m trying to reference Ryan Nicholson’s Gutterballs. I wanted to make the ultimate castration film. I guess that’s why it’s called Castration Movie; it's the castration movie.
RAB: When you talk about I Want What I Want [in your thesis], you describe a symbolic healing that comes from the act of castration for the trans viewer. Is that same symbolic healing something Castration Movie aspires to? Or is it more complex than healing?
LW: It’s more complex than just healing. In I Want What I Want, the healing’s of an exterior social wound. Exploring characters at the margins and using the DIY metaphor of self-surgery is about having to look inward at disreputable, degenerate, socially transgressive, or unwell parts of ourselves and try to focus in and heal. The lesson of the movie is a degree of self-actualization and self-love. I hope the viewer takes that with them and understands that the basis of all problems is a failure to love yourself.
[This interview’s been edited for length and clarity.]