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Wordy girl

For Cecil Castellucci, it’s the message, not the medium

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“The tool that you use to express narrative stuff is not important to me,” says former Montrealer Cecil Castellucci (perhaps remembered better as Cecil Seaskull), now an L.A.-based filmmaker and novelist. “If it’s a book, a play, a song, a film, whatever—doesn’t matter. It’s all about telling a story.”

Born a New Yorker, Castelluci’s story in our fair town starts in 1990, where time served working at Café Phoenix and hanging at Biftek led to frontperson position in the band Bite, at the time Montreal’s only all-girl indie band. That would be followed by her Nerdy Girl music project, then her splitting for L.A., where the Mirror reached her for a game of catch-up.

Mirror: What do you remember about the Bite days?

Cecil Castellucci: I didn’t even really want to be in a band! Everyone was just afraid to sing, and I was like, “I’ve got a big mouth, I’ll sing!” So it was sort of an accident, but it was totally fun and exciting—there was all this exciting stuff going on in indie rock music. It just wasn’t Montreal’s time, but groundwork was being laid for what was to come.

M: Which leads us to the first year of the MIMIs, the local indie music awards for which you and Corpusse were on the Mirror cover in 1995.

CC: I was only there for one year of the MIMIs. I was nominated for Best Hair—fulfilling a lifelong ambition of mine, to be fashionable. Although I did not win—I was very sad about that. What I remember is, I’d gotten into a big fight with Bite, because I’d been kicked out of the band. Denice [Maupin] and Julie [McGovern] had come back and were there, and I remember being completely traumatized. I wasn’t talking to them or Nancy [Ross, current Greenland “enforcer”], and then I didn’t win Best Hair, and I’m a sensitive girl—I was totally traumatized.

M: What’s this about you doing a feature film?

CC: I decided that between novels I should do a feature film, because, um, that’s what a lady should do sometimes. I’d actually tried to make a feature film while I was in Montreal, and I never finished it because it was complicated—editing, 16mm, all that. But in L.A., I’d co-founded an alternative, experimental filmmaking club called Alpha 60. One of my co-founders, this guy Neil, had made a feature. I thought, because I’d been practicing making all these short films, “Fuck it, I’m gonna make a feature too.” So I got somebody to invest a few thousand dollars, and I begged, borrowed and stole everything. Because I’m interested in experiments in storytelling, I e-mailed all these actors with two questions, I wrote the script based on their answers and then workshopped it. I just had my premiere at the American Cinematheque here in L.A. The film is called Happy Is Not Hard to Be. It doesn’t suck—it’s like a La Ronde movie, a big ensemble piece.

Lit parader

M: And what about your novels?

CC: I have one book out, it’s called Boy Proof. They’re for young adults. My next book, called The Queen of Cool, comes out in the spring of 2006. I also have a third young-adult novel called Beige, coming out in 2007, and actually it’s about a girl who comes from Montreal and has to live in L.A. with her famous punk-rock drummer dad—and she hates music. They’re published by Candlewick Press—I refer to them as the equivalent of [the record label] Matador in its heyday. They’re a major publishing company, but they’re independent, employee-owned, not part of any big thing. They really fit in with my whole frame of mind about stuff—they’re really hands-on, really indie, and at the same time they do amazingly excellent work.

M: There was all this talk about you camping out for tickets for Star Wars Episode 1. What was that like?

CC: It was, um, interesting. You can’t live on the sidewalk of Hollywood Blvd. for six weeks and not be affected by it. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but at the same time, it was Star Wars, and Star Wars was the reason that I even thought you could become a person who told stories when you grew up.

M: What did you think of the film?

CC: Well, errr, um, you know—I didn’t think it was very good. I think that Natalie Portman’s outfits were really beautiful. Other than that—I wanted to be a quivering heap of flesh and melted bones. I kinda wasn’t. I was cringing a lot.