Confession time - Director's Commentary

I’m a poser. Yeah, people know me as the horror guy, but the truth is… I came to Los Angeles to make musicals.

Who does that? Apparently, I did.

Let’s rewind.

I grew up in a tiny town in Kansas. I was terrible at sports, even worse at school. The only place I ever felt like I belonged was the theater. My defining educational moment wasn’t winning a championship or getting straight A’s—it was being cast in Jesus Christ Superstar. At the time, I had no idea that the film version of that musical would become one of the biggest creative influences on my life, or that it would quietly shape the path my career would eventually take.

Fast forward to film school.

Every class got to make one project on 35mm film, and one student was chosen to direct it. Somehow, that student was me.

Most people would’ve used that opportunity to make a crime film, an action movie, or some gritty character drama.

I convinced my entire class to make a musical.

I still remember the eye rolls from both the faculty and my classmates when I pitched it. Honestly… I can still feel them.

Then I moved to Los Angeles.

Like every optimistic filmmaker, I arrived with delusions of grandeur. I thought Hollywood would throw open its doors and let me spend my career making weird, theatrical, over-the-top musicals.

Then reality hit.

Hard.

I drove down Sunset Boulevard for the first time and realized the odds of anyone handing a first-time director the keys to a rock opera were somewhere between impossible and nonexistent.

Well…

Maybe not nonexistent.

Because I met Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith… two wonderfully unhinged artists who shared the exact same obsession with storytelling through music.

In the early 2000s, I was hired to direct the stage production of Repo! The Genetic Opera, which premiered in a tiny black box theater on Hollywood Boulevard. That production changed my life.

I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Saw II, III, and IV opened doors I never imagined possible, thanks to Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures. Those films gave me a career.

But even at the height of that success, nothing compared to what I felt making Repo!. This was a movie with almost everything working against it.

We didn’t have enough money. Almost nobody understood what we were trying to make. And the cast? On paper, it made absolutely no sense.

“Wait… Paris Hilton and Sarah Brightman are in the same movie?”

Exactly.

That’s why it worked.

It wasn’t built by committee. It wasn’t chasing trends. It wasn’t trying to fit into a box.

It was strange. It was loud. It was theatrical. It was unapologetically itself.

When the film was released, it failed commercially. And I’ll be honest… I  thought my career might be over. I had gone from being the kid who made Saw II to directing one of the strangest studio films anyone had seen in years.

But none of that stopped us.

We believed in the movie.

So we toured with it. We screened it. We introduced it. We celebrated it. We kept showing up because we knew there was something special buried inside it, even if the world hadn’t found it yet.

Eventually… The audience did.

What started as a commercial disappointment slowly transformed into something far more meaningful: a genuine cult film. Fans didn’t just watch Repo!… they adopted it. They sang along. They dressed up. They quoted it. They kept it alive long after its theatrical run had ended.

That’s something no opening weekend can measure.

Repo! The Genetic Opera became everything I had hoped to make when I first packed up my life in Kansas and drove west.

It was weird. It was undefinable. It was messy. It was ambitious. It was theatrical. It was completely, unapologetically me.

If it took nearly two decades to find its audience, so be it.

They’re here now. They’re loud. They’re proud.

And they’ve been keeping this movie alive in theaters around the world ever since.

Looking back now, I don’t just remember the blood, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, or impossible production schedule. I remember the privilege of creating something with an extraordinary group of artists, musicians, designers, actors, and friends who believed in something that probably shouldn’t have worked… but somehow did.

I made Repo! in my twenties.

Now I’m in my forties.

And after every project I’ve directed since, I’ve found myself comparing it to one simple feeling: The feeling I had walking off the set of Repo! The Genetic Opera for the very last time.