“We make underground films with very little money for the love of the art,” Christopher Bickel, director of the eagerly awaited underground horror movie Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light, said in pre-release materials. “This is literally my backyard we’re shooting in. Everything we do is like The Little Rascals, putting on a show for the neighborhood kids.”
Bickel’s CV includes stints as a columnist for Maximum Rocknroll magazine and Dangerous Minds. He was also singer in the punk bands In/Humanity and Guyana Punch Line, as well as the brains behind prolific avant garde recording project Anakrid. These musical roots continue to inform his cinematic work.
“Everything I know about filmmaking, I learned from punk rock,” he says. “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood focus groups and traditional distribution routes.”
Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light itself is also for those prone to straying off the beaten path, as Bickel notes, “We make movies for people looking for something different. What happens in Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light is beyond belief. It’s not for the squeamish or easily upset.”
In a new interview, Bickel tells Uproxx about the new movie, how it was made on a tight budget, and what makes something punk rock.
This film! I watched it, and it was like a freaking call to action. I started immediately reaching out to everyone I know, telling them that they need to see this. So, for those who don’t know anything about this movie, tell them what it’s about.
It’s about a girl who works in a record store, and she stumbles upon this rare psychedelic record that was produced by this hippie cult in the early ’70s. She kind of falls down the rabbit hole, as collectors often do, and ends up getting an invitation to visit the remnants of the commune, where these hippies existed and still exist, and things go really bad for everybody that goes along with her on the ride. It’s kind of a Grindhouse-type of horror movie. There’s a lot of violence, exaggerated violence. It’s just a lot of fun. We made it on, like, no budget. It was very, very cheap.
When you say no budget, can you tell us what the budget was?
The budget was $21,000 in total, and we raised that through crowdfunding.
This film inspires me the way early hip-hop did, where you had artists with limited resources trying to make the best possible art they could for a fan base that was loyal to them, without caring about the rest of the industry or what other genres were doing. Do you see that connection at all?
Yeah, absolutely. I come out of punk rock. Punk rock and hip-hop have a very similar track in how they started and where they went. For me, it was, when I was younger, playing in bands and putting out fanzines and stuff like that. It was just about trying to make something with no money, to reach as many people as possible. I think with punk rock and hip-hop, there’s this sort of “from the streets,” aggressive spirit about it that’s sort of screaming out into the void. And I think I’ve carried that over into movies where, you know, we’re up against these $50 million, $100 million movies, and the only way we can compete with that is to offer something that’s a little bit different, maybe a little edgier in some ways.
I think there’s a genre where they think the joke is being bad, and it’s an easy way to cop out of having a low budget, and you see that in music as well. I’ve always disliked it in music. What I loved about your movie is I felt like it was trying to be good. For example, the sound mix: it’s amazing. Do you buy into the notion that for something to be punk rock, it’s just three chords? For me, I think there’s a lot of high art in punk and in this type of filmmaking.
Yeah, I’m with you. I’ve never gone in for the movies that are intentionally trying to be a B movie. You know, “We’re going to be a B movie just because of our budget,” right? We want to try to make the best thing that we can, and I think that’s where the authenticity is in this, or for anybody else working at this level. If you’re trying to do your best, people are going to see the heart in it and appreciate it.
You know, we don’t need to try hard to make a bad movie. We want it to escape our budgetary restraints, I guess is what I’m trying to say. The only way you can do that is to try to do the best thing you can.
What makes something punk rock?
Man, how do you answer that? I think it’s a spirit. There’s a rebelliousness to it, an anti-authoritarian streak. This is a crazy time we’re living in right now. There’s a lot of stuff that might happen within the next couple of years that really scares a lot of people. This movie in particular was sort of written against a lot of that. There are themes throughout it about women being forced to carry babies they don’t want to carry. I mean, it’s done in a very Grindhouse kind of way, but it’s a reflection of the time we live in. And to me, that’s punk rock.
Let’s get into some of these film details. It’s clearly a feminist movie. Would you agree?
I think so, yeah. There are things that are happening in our culture right now that I think we have to take women’s side on. So, I try to put that into the movie, maybe in kind of a sneaky way, you know, because I’m still just telling a horror story about this demon and a forced pregnancy with a mutant baby and stuff like that.
The film is a love letter, in some ways, to independent record stores. Where does that come from?
I’ve worked in record stores my entire life. I was in college when I started, and I’ve owned my own shop for a while, and I worked in another shop. So a lot of the dialogue that’s in there… we keep a book behind the counter of dumb sh*t customers say. A lot of the dialogue that’s in the movie is straight out of that book.
That’s amazing. The other musical thing that grabbed me, and you might get a kick out of this, is the movie describes the music of the fictional band as a mix of psych free jazz and early electronics. And I thought to myself, “God, this filmmaker literally reached into my brain and devised the exact album that I would want to go hunt for if I was record collecting.” Where did that come from?
Just stuff that I’m into personally. The idea was that it was a record made in 1972 that would have been slightly ahead of its time in ’72, so the influences they would have had at the time would have been like the Stooges and Black Sabbath. Like rock and free jazz, but maybe just slightly ahead of the curve on that stuff.
We wrote a whole album of the songs for the movie that aren’t even in the movie because we couldn’t shoehorn them in, but we put out an album that just came out with all the music. So all the music is sort of taking that idea that it’s 1972, but really, we’re kind of playing around in, like, 1976.
In the movie, there’s a massive modular synth room. What’s up with the synth room?
It’s just because when you make a low-budget movie, you just have to use stuff that you have access to. I have a friend that has all these analog synths, so I knew that I had to write a scene in a room with a bunch of synths. And I work at a record store, so I knew that there had to be a scene in a record store. The whole movie came about because some friends of mine, they’re gear heads that work on all these old cars and stuff. They got this bus, and they said they wanted to paint it like an old hippie bus, like the Ken Kesey bus from the ’60s. That’s basically why the movie exists, because they said they had this hippie bus, so I wrote a movie around that.
Well, you know what’s funny about the Ken Kesey hippie bus: I kept on thinking about this line in the movie, “F*ck your whole generation.” I was wondering to myself how much of this movie was taking aim towards the hippie generation or the ’60s, or was that just a fun line to have?
It was mostly a fun line to have, but I think that every generation hates the one that came right before. It’s playing around with that a little bit: “You guys thought that you were the coolest people in the world, and you were the cutting edge of everything, and now you’re just the establishment.”
I loved it so much. He could have said anything to them. And it was like, those hippies want to stay young, right? By saying, “F*ck your whole generation,” it was this acknowledgement of, “You’re old and your ideas are bad.”
That was totally the intent. You nailed it.
Your sound mix in this movie is insane. If you told me that the sound mix was from a major-budget movie, I would totally believe you.
I’ve been a musician for a lot longer than I’ve been a filmmaker, and my background, aside from being in punk rock bands, is I do a lot of avant garde music, and I have for decades. So I’m deeply rooted in sort of experimental soundscape-type stuff. So, it was really easy to apply that towards making movies. Getting the mix right is tough. I’m doing everything just on a desktop computer. It’s like a real crappy setup, but, you know, I think it turned out OK.
It’s incredible. So, I want to talk a little bit about your philosophy. I’ve seen you in an interview, and you gave a list of five perfect movies. They were Taxi Driver, Harold And Maude, The Shining, The Exorcist, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Yeah, that’s definitely my list.
Do you have a list of perfect albums or perfect songs, or even perfect musicians that inspire you?
Oh, crap. I wish I had time to think about this. My favorite song of all time is “Surrender” by Cheap Trick. I think that’s the perfect pop song. My favorite album of all time is Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. I just think it’s the greatest punk record ever. I would probably put Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” way up at the top of my list. I think that, when I hear that song, I feel like the heavens open up, and she’s just an angel, and it’s just lifting the listener up into the clouds.
Having worked in record stores for so long, I love pretty much every genre of music. You know, every day I’m in a store where I’m buying and selling records and listening to them all day long. So, you know, there’s just so much great sh*t out there.
Speaking of buying records, your film is a bit of a cautionary tale about record collecting. Were you making fun of the fact that people take it a little too far?
Oh, absolutely. This is me indicting myself. The character Max in the movie, she finds all these rare records, and her roommates are like, “Well, you need money, you have duplicates of these: you should sell them.” And she’s like, “No. I found these in the wild, I rescued these. If I sell this record, it’s just going to go to some rich bougie guy.” There’s this weird sort of fetishizing of things and wanting to hold on to them. And it’s pretty ridiculous, but I’m just as guilty of it.
How can people watch it the movie? I want everyone to go see it.
We’re doing all our own distribution. It’s all DIY. Right now, people can buy the streaming or pre-order the Blu-ray at paternostermovie.com, and that just takes you to our Indiegogo page. We’re sort of using that as a retail outlet now, but for the time being, it’s only on Night Flight. They’ve just been super cool to me, so they didn’t ask for it, but I offered to give them an exclusive for a month on it, just because they’ve been really cool with promoting it, and cool with paying me on time, which is somewhat of a rarity. But, after a month is up, then it’ll probably be on Prime any any of the other big streamers.
So if anyone wants to see it for Halloween: Night Flight, that’s the place.