B-movie icon Bruce Campbell (the Evil Dead movies, Bubba Ho-tep) is not afraid to poke a little fun at himself. He titled his 2001 autobiography If Chins Could Kill and in 2005 wrote a novel called Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, with self-involved B-movie star “Bruce Campbell” as the main character. Now the fictional Campbell is back as the main character in Campbell’s latest effort as a director, My Name is Bruce, a goofy horror-comedy that finds the residents of a small Oregon town kidnapping the actor to help them fight off a demon. A work-in-progress cut of the film, minus the final score and some special effects, plays at CineVegas. We reached Campbell on the Miami set of his new USA TV series, Burn Notice, to talk about what he’s been up to.
Was this always a project that you were going to direct?
[Producer] Mike [Richardson] knows that I wanted to direct a little more, so he made that offer available that I could be in it and direct it. That’s how I get directing gigs now, is I just put myself in it. Because that’s the only thing they really care about—directors are a dime a dozen. That worked out fine. It also was something that I kind of wanted to do. If it’s a story about me—if I’m doing a fictitious version of myself—I want to be in control of it, and I want to add what I wanted to add to it. So I then took Mark [Verheiden]’s script and adapted that toward both my sensibilities and the sensibilities of the production. It’s an inexpensive movie.
Do you enjoy directing yourself, or do you prefer to sit back and just be behind the scenes?
I did just that on Hercules and Xena, where I directed other people, and same with the Pamela Anderson show VIP, so I’m used to directing other idiots as well. Actors don’t intimidate me, because I know all their little problems. It’s the logical extension of just wanting to have more control over the material that I’m in, because as long as I continue to work on B-movies and low-budget movies, chances are that the directors are just going to be first-time idiots. Who needs that? So recently I’ve been sort of developing and kind of doing more of my own stuff, so I can control my own world.
You shot this film in your home town in Oregon. Are you hoping that this will encourage local filmmaking up there?
Absolutely. It’s the first time I’ve slept in my own bed making a movie in probably 10 years. Normally, I was working overseas in crazy places. It was really great to not only support—because you always hear, “Think globally, act locally.” I’m like, “Okay, how can I not make a movie in Bulgaria?” Because that’s the usual M.O. On a low-budget movie, you go to where they pay people dog shit, and you get them to work, even though it’s not necessarily good for the movie. What’s best for the movie? So I went, “This is stupid. I’m not going to be one of these producers who takes the movie and runs out of the country.” I think that’s offensive. It’s only because they’re lazy, and they don’t really want to work hard. To make a movie in America, it is tricky, because Americans like to get paid, they like to have insurance, they like workman’s comp, they like overtime. They like a lot of stuff. And they’re very catered-to workers, regardless of what they want to say. And so you have to make concessions, and they have to make concessions—everyone has to suck it up a little bit in order to pull it off. But I think we did, and the company that financed it is very happy.
Another one of your films, Bubba Ho-tep, was a big hit at CineVegas a few years ago. Any news on the rumored sequel?
I’m actually not involved in the sequel. There is probably going to be a sequel, but not with me. I certainly wish [director] Don Coscarelli the very best. Things like that happen all the time in Hollywood. That one is not really a rumor for me; it’s not really anything.
My Name is Bruce plays June 9 at 11 p.m.