Jack Warren

@hellojackwarren.bsky.social

47 Followers 58 Following

filmmaker ⚔️ writer ⚔️ actor ⚔️ programmer ⚔️ loving fool and faerie friend they/them/any/all

Hell yeah. Dr. Strangelove is a fucking crazy movie. That was probably the first Stanley Kubrick movie I ever saw. And now when I watch it as an adult, it’s such a deeply horny movie. It’s crazy how horny that movie is! Especially for something made in the ‘60s. It’s just about sex. It’s barely about politics. It’s about men and their boners! God. Good on ya, Stanley.
I definitely see myself in my contemporaries, like Alice Maio Mackay and Louise Weard. I relate to the stuff they’re talking about. I was really into queer film before making The People’s Joker, especially John Waters and Bruce LaBruce, but I also hadn’t seen a lot of stuff, especially in porn. I’m really getting into porn lately, as a genre. I’ve really fallen in love with Jean Rollin. He’s got this whole series of vampire movies; I don’t know if I see myself in them, but I really relate to him as a smut peddler. Because I think he makes art that is so beautiful. He made this movie called Requiem for a Vampire that has no dialogue for the first 40 minutes. It’s just these lesbian clowns getting away from a heist, and they somehow end up in a vampire castle. And then in the middle of the movie there’s a 15-minute S&M sequence. It’s crazy! I feel so lucky that there’s so much art I get to discover. Especially queer art. I should also give a shoutout to Liz Purchell’s movie, Ask Any Buddy, which is a remix of gay porn. I remember going to see it, which was my first experience watching porn in a theater. I can’t remember if there’s any explicit trans characters in it, but it feels like a trans movie to me. It’s this beautiful bridge that a lot of us trans women and trans femmes cross where we first come out. Everyone’s thinks you’re a gay man. And then you start living in that world and then you’re like: “Oh no, I’m something else entirely.” Everyone should check out Ask Any Buddy, if they get the chance. It’s one of my favorite queer movies ever made.
As far as it relates to The People’s Joker… I wanted to talk about the trans experience as an inter-dimensional experience; It’s not just about matching your soul to your body, it’s about transcending those things completely. The entire third act of The People’s Joker is my character transcending time and space and going through this gender-hell-stargate and that was trying to circle a similar thing. Making The People’s Joker, it broke down that barrier of reality, where things I was writing for the movie would then show up in my life. The entire third act of the movie as it relates to Joker telling her story and facing off against this corporate media landscape is what it felt like releasing the movie and having Warner Brothers come after it. And that was weird because it was like: “What the fuck? I wrote this two years ago and now I’m going through it?” But I think that’s what happens when you write something really personal, and you approach it from this sort of chaos magic angle of making stuff.
As this piece of digital cinema, it broke my brain. It really showed me the ability of art to subvert expectations. And how the whole subversion of expectations is a lie; It’s really just following your intuition as an artist and telling a truthful story. As a spiritual source of inspiration it changed my life. Watching that movie—I think of it as an eighteen-hour movie—I was like: “It is time for me to start transitioning. It is time for me to start making art that only I can make”. It was this wake-up call to stop waiting for the green light from other people, that only I was going to be able to create that for myself. And for every other artist of value that’s the only way you get to the other side. And it completely ruined TV for me. I can’t watch TV anymore. I remember when those last two episodes aired, just sitting there and being like: “I’m different! My brain is different now! He changed my brain with art!”
Just one of the all-time greatest humans that ever lived. I’ve been thinking all week since watching it with how scary things are right now, that line in The Elephant Man where John Merrick’s like: “I’m happy every hour of the day because I know I have love in my life.” That is just profoundly something we all need to hold onto right now. Everybody needs to make that the priority, especially in times like these when everything is so scary.