Drop the name Bruce Campbell to genre fans, and chances are good that their faces will light up as their thoughts drift back to the first time they saw one of the Evil Dead films, or his surprisingly poignant performance in Don Coscarelli’s endearingly bizarre Bubba Ho-Tep back in 2001. For me, it was the thrill of spending the night at a friend’s place back in eighth grade and sneaking into a forbidden midnight viewing of Evil Dead. It was so over the top that we didn’t really even know what to make of it, we only knew that we were completely exhilarated by the time it ended, and we would be burnt toast if we ever accidentally slipped up and mentioned it to our parents. Years later, I showed Evil Dead II to my college girlfriend on our first date — a kind of trial by fire to try and gauge whether she’d be able to tolerate my bizarre taste in movies — and she laughed so hard that I was actually kind of frightened…. What choice did I have but to eventually marry her?

Still, who would have ever suspected that the buffoonish, lantern-jawed demon fighter from Michigan would gain such a sizable cult following in film and television? Perhaps it’s something about his decidedly non-Hollywood roots and playfully sarcastic public persona — he’s never seemed to take himself all too seriously, and always has a zinger for the fans — that makes everyone root for “The Chin” (as he’s affectionately known by his fans) to come out on top in the end. Watching his 2002 documentary Fanalysis or listening to him speak at one of his frequent public appearances, it’s plain to see that Campbell truly values his rabid fan base, even if he’s occasionally frightened by some of the obsessive, detail-oriented individuals within it. His latest film is entitled My Name is Bruce, and stars Campbell as a washed-up B-movie actor recruited to battle Guan-Di, the Chinese God of War, by just such a super fan. It’s a fun and fast-paced tribute to the enthusiastic people who helped to build his career, and recently the outgoing star hit the road on a 20-city tour promoting the film, with question-and-answer sessions following each screening. It’s a pretty unusual move for a director, but it definitely makes a theatrical screening of My Name Is Bruce an “event,” and in a time when most flicks are casually dumped into the multiplexes for a week or two and unceremoniously yanked after they fail to perform as expected, it speaks volumes about his commitment to the fans.

Last week, Bruce was gracious enough to take some time out of his hectic schedule and dial in for a phone interview with us. As the phone began to ring on the other end, I did my best to suppress my inner fanboy and strive for professionalism…

BC: Bruce Campbell here.
Me: Hey, Bruce, how’s the tour going?
BC: It’s going swell. We’re in our sixth or seventh city out of 22.
Me: I’m out in Detroit, we’re looking forward to having you out here next week.
BC: Yeah baby, I’m gone be getting out there real soon.
Me: Between the small-screen success of Burn Notice and the big-screen success of My Name Is Bruce, it sounds like you’re having a pretty good year.
BC: Out of the park, baby! (pauses, laughs) Well with My Name Is Bruce, the jury is still out –I think people are still coming in and deciding if they want to see it or not — but yeah, Burn Notice is a hit.

(Writer’s Note: Bruce is either being modest or he just hasn’t seen the numbers, according to Box Office Mojo My Name Is Bruce was the top indie release on Halloween weekend, beating out Kurt Kuenne’s fantastic Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father and a handful of other indie horrors with an impressive per-screen average of $18,800 — not too shabby!)

Me: Well the fans seem to be responding pretty well to the movie, too.
BC: Fans are, yes. Critics no, fans yes.
Me: It seems like you’ve got a good thing going with Dark Horse.
BC: Dark Horse is great. They’ve got Mike Richardson, who runs the company, and he’s a rational man, he’s a normal guy. He lives in Portland so he doesn’t do any of the Hollywood crap. I live in Oregon too, so we have that in common. Mark Verhiden, who wrote the movie, is from Oregon so we were all sitting around and like, “How can we make a movie in Oregon” and we kinda figured out how to do it. Mike is one of those rare executives who’s not just a guy with an MBA in business administration — he’s a guy who actually likes movies.
Me: Tell us about the Oregon tax break that helped you decide to base the production there. Michigan has something like that, too. How do they compare?
BC: Yeah, Michigan’s is huge! Michigan is like 40 percent, Oregon is probably 10 or 20. Not quite as attractive as good old Michigan.
Me: So does that mean you’ll be heading back to Michigan for your next production?
BC: Well, we’ll see…we’ll see if you have beautiful mountain ranges, and shorelines, and things like that.
Me: Well, we’ve got the shorelines at least.
BC: You’ve got that, but you don’t have an ocean on that shore. Just little teeny Lake Michigan.
Me: (laughs)
BC: I’m kidding, of course; you can’t really beat the Great Lakes.
Me: Between Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way and My Name Is Bruce, it seems like your career is moving into a real meta-type phase.
BC: I’ve heard that thrown around a lot, but I’m still not sure what it means.
Me: Self-referential, satirical. Moving towards surreal.
BC: It’s definitely surreal. For no one more surreal than me! I’m the only one who knows what’s real in the movie and what’s fake.
Me: It’s been a while since Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way and you mentioned last year that you were working on a new book.
BC: I’ve got a rough title: Vagabond: The Gypsy Life of an Actor. It’s about a lot of the things that happen to you just by traveling the world for your job. So it’ll be about what it’s actually like to live in a Bulgarian apartment building for two months with Bulgarians. The crazy things that happen to you that aren’t necessarily on a film set. When you’re writing a “movie book” like my first book, it doesn’t really get into things that happen off-set. So this is more about crazy shit that happened while I wasn’t shooting.
Me: In My Name is Bruce, you take a lot of hits for your previous flicks that your fans were pretty critical of. Is that a fine line to walk between ego and satire?
BC: Absolutely. The movie takes place in a kind of parallel universe, obviously, so I figure if I’m gonna take some cheap shots then they’re gonna get some cheap shots.
Me: You don’t come off as bitter though.
BC: No. Every actor has been in a shitty movie. I could give you Laurence Olivier and name some shitty movies so it’s gonna happen. Over time, you’re gonna make good movies and bad movies. When you make more low-budget movies like I do, yeah, there are gonna be people involved who aren’t as experienced and they don’t have the money to do this and that so some of them will fail just because they don’t have enough money. But I’m still attracted to the independent and genre worlds because I like movies that are genre. I like genre movies. I don’t really have any one particular thing for horror movies or fantasy, si-fi whatever but I like things that are a little offbeat.
Me: Tell us a bit about the musicians you had in the movie. It was a fun way to set the tone.
BC: Yeah, it sort of evolved. Those are two buddies of mine who I met while doing promotions for Evil Dead II back in 1987 in Oklahoma City. The McCain brothers were both on a morning news show for ABC, so Ben, the guy who played the mayor was the anchorman, and Butch, the guy who played the sheriff was the comedy weather man and I knew that they recorded stuff and I thought, “Guys, this might be a ballad for you.” So I had them write a ballad.
Me: So was that part of the plan from the beginning of the production then?
BC: It evolved as we went. We knew we wanted to have a theme song for the end credits but since it related so much to the actual movie, it just kind of evolved into a Greek chorus.
Me: You talked in a recent interview about a return to “regional filmmaking.” I was interested in that concept and if you see a lot of that happening as you travel around on tour.
BC: Well technology is making it easier. Technically you can go to K-Mart, like the Blair Witch people. Shoot the movie on your favorite Handycam, and cut the movie on your home computer, take your favorite DVDs with crystal-clear sound and download sound effects on the Internet. There are a lot of things you can do with software and a crappy computer these days. So I hope it’s going to empower the guy from Butt Crack, Kansas, just to stay there.
ME: Being a no-budget filmmaker from Michigan, I can certainly appreciate that.
BC: Yeah, look…there’s nothing that looks like Detroit or going up north towards the beautiful lakes up there; the shorelines, the great Lakes, you’ve got great urban stuff, there’s good woods up there in Michigan. There’s a lot to explore that just doesn’t look like other places.
Me: You recently stated that you were, “sick of making movies for 17-year-old kids.” Do you see yourself moving towards more serious movies in the future? I noticed that you’re working on a documentary about land stewardship entitled A Community Speaks.
BC: Well that’s just a side project that comes from a personal passion. I don’t want to make movies for 17-year-old kids because I don’t want it to affect what I do. I want to be able to just write something and do it, or shoot it, and not have to worry about who I’m making the movie for. It’s young people who go to the movies now, so they’re making them for young people. That makes perfect sense. Movies 40 years ago used to be watched by either families or adults, so all the actors from years ago were mostly middle-aged people — Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy spent a good deal of their careers as middle-aged men. So it’s just a trend nowadays and I just get tired of it because you sometimes feel pressure to put something in that would entertain a younger person. I’m like, “Hey man, they don’t have to see this movie.” I’m gonna make it for a low enough budget that they don’t have to. Because there’s always this pressure to make it PG-13 instead of R, and for what reason? It’s all bullshit just to get more box office, more people. I want the right people to see my movie — not just people.
Me: Speaking of ratings, I was a little surprised that My Name Is Bruce got slapped with an R. It’s got such a playful tone. Were you shooting with a rating in mind?
BC: No, we just didn’t care about it. We didn’t think about it. I didn’t curb a single word out of my mouth, we didn’t re-edit, we didn’t re-loop, we didn’t shoot versions that didn’t have blood. None of that crap, we just shot the movie because I hate making a movie either for a ratings board or for a certain demographic. I just want to make a movie and then it’ll come out and it’ll come out and wash. If there are F-bombs and chopped off heads then, yeah, you’re going to get an R, but [My Name Is Bruce] is not graphic. It’s more cartoonish than anything — it just hit enough of the criteria to get an “R.”
Me: You’re alternating between film and television a lot lately; what sort of shooting style are you more comfortable with these days, and what kind of approach did you take when shooting My Name Is Bruce?
BC: Well with low-budget movies you can’t take long to shoot them, so you have to be pretty efficient in your approach. I’m thankful to have directed television back in the Hercules and Xena days, so the pace of television doesn’t scare me at all. Moving quickly was fine, and we moved pretty quick.
Me: You shot the whole movie in 23 days.
BC: A whopping 23 days.
Me: I noticed you were attached to star in a Richard Stanley film titled Vacation. It’s been a while since Richard has made a feature film, so that’s pretty exciting. What can you tell us about Vacation?
BC: We couldn’t make the deal so I’m out of that. They may go ahead and make the movie anyway, obviously, but I won’t be involved.
Me. Bummer!
BC; No, it’s ok. It happens every day. Just like the sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, I’m not going to be in that.
Me: I know the fans were certainly bummed to hear that. How about another unrelated project with Don Coscarelli? Any prospects for the future? It felt like you two were on to something good.
BC: Who knows? Don makes a movie every seven years, so he doesn’t exactly crank ’em out. But I’d like to because we remain friends and I wish him well on the sequel.
Me: So where do you see the horror/fantasy genre headed right now?
BC: Well, I think we need some help, because I think right now we’re too stuck on torture porn. That they think that’s scary, you know, putting someone’s head in a vice or taking a half-hour to cut a finger off. To me, that’s a lazy man’s approach. To me, suspense, scares, and psychological aspects are all important and we just have to get back to a more clever approach — just either funnier, more serious, more adult…I don’t know. It’s the whole graphic violence thing; Evil Dead was certainly banned in its day, but we’re nothing compared to the Hostel movies and some of these other modern-day horror movies like Saw.
Me: They definitely take a more visceral approach.
BC: Get someone trapped against their will and torture them for an hour and a half. And then they either get revenge or they don’t.
Me: Well, since we’re almost out of time, here’s the obligatory Evil Dead question: If you had to place a bet on Evil Dead 4 or an Evil Dead remake, where would your money be?
BC: I’m not a betting man, but look, here’s the truth. Those movies may or may not get made. It’s not because we don’t want to or because we feel that there’s something wrong with those movies, but they’re very time-consuming, they’re very physically demanding. I don’t know if you saw Army of Darkness or not (Writer’s note: Too many times to count!), but 120 days of hell, so it’s not like Sam [Raimi (director of the Evil Dead films)] and I look at each other and go, “Oh my God, we’ve got to make another one of those movies right now!”
Me: Could there even be an Evil Dead 4 if a remake hit screens first? Has that ever happened before, a sequel after a remake?
BC: I would not be surprised if neither of them got made. But it’s only because Sam is making another Spider-Man movie, he’s got five kids, I’m under contract with this TV show for five years, so I’m not going anywhere for a while and neither is Sam. So it’s just a reality of life. It’s not any more complicated than that. We’ve just both gotten involved with a bunch of other things, and sometimes it takes away from the old stuff you used to work on.

For more information on My Name is Bruce, just head on over to his personal website @ www.brucecampbell.com.