In an exclusive conversation for The Queer Review, prolific New Queer Cinema provocateur Todd Verow and veteran actor Guillermo Díaz discuss their collaboration on the atmospheric and captivating indie horror thriller You Can’t Stay Here, which opens in New York at the IFC Center on Friday, January 5th, followed by its New Orleans release at the Zeitgeist Theatre on January 23rd, and Los Angeles at Laemmle Glendale on Thursday, February 8th. Loosely inspired by real events in 1990s New York City, You Can’t Stay Here follows an aspiring art photographer, Rick (Díaz), as he spends his days and nights cruising in Central Park. After he witnesses the murder of a gay man, he’s drawn into a dangerous and sexy game of cat and mouse with the magnetic killer that leads him to question his own sanity. The cast features Justin Ivan Brown, Karina Arroyave, Vanessa Aspillaga, Becca Blackwell, Marlene Forte, J.J. Bozeman, Boy Radio, Jack Waters, Sophia Lamar, James Kleinmann, and Michael Vaccaro.
After working as a cinematographer on Jon Moritsugu’s early 90s features Terminal USA and Mod Fuck Explosion as well as Gregg Araki’s Totally Fucked Up, Verow made his controversial feature directorial debut with Frisk. The film world premiered as the closing night of the 19th San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (now Frameline) at the iconic Castro Theatre, before going on to screen at Sundance, Berlin and Toronto. Adapted from Dennis Cooper’s infamous gay serial killer novel, the film’s outstanding indie cast featured Craig Chester, Parker Posey, Alexis Arquette, and actor-turned-editor James Lyons, with a score by British experimental band Coil.
Named one of the first Digital Directors To Watch by Variety in 2000, Verow’s vow to make ten digital features in four years headlined the cover of Time magazine. He has continued to make an eclectic array of unapologetic ultra lowbudget films at a rapid pace ever since, with notable features including Little Shots of Happiness, Shucking the Curve, The Trouble with Perpetual Déjà-vu, A Sudden Loss of Gravity, Once and Future Queen, Take Away, Anonymous, Vacationland, The Final Girl, Between Something & Nothing, The Boy with the Sun in His Eyes, Bad Boy Street, This Side of Heaven, Squirrels, the documentary Age of Consent (co-directed with Charles Lum), Goodbye Seventies, and F**ked In The Head.
Díaz’s screen career spans more than thirty years, including portraying fan favourite Huck, a former black ops agent for a top secret sub-division of the CIA, in 124 episodes across all seven seasons of the hit ABC series Scandal opposite Kerry Washington. His work on Scandal saw Díaz receive three back-to-back nominations as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series from NAACP’s Image Awards. He’s currently revisiting the series as co-host of the rewatch podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox. In 2009, Díaz received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination as part of the ensemble cast of the popular Showtime comedy Weeds. He has also had guest star spots on Comedy Central’s Broad City and HBO’s High Maintenance, and more recently, a recurring role on NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime.
Among a plethora of memorable movie roles, Díaz’s big screen credits include Half Baked, Party Girl, Stonewall, Nowhere, 200 Cigarettes, High School High, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, and Cop Out opposite Bruce Willis. In 2022, he was part of the historic all-LGBTQ+ cast of Bros as the tush-shaking brother-in-law of Billy Eichner’s character. He made an inedible impression as the leather-clad driver pouring milk over himself in the Britney Spears video for her single I Wanna Go and appeared in Beyoncé and Jay Z’s video Run alongside Sean Penn and Jake Gyllenhaal. Making his directorial debut with the documentary short Valley Of The Undocumented, produced by Russell Simmons and Mark Zuckerberg for Immigrant Heritage Month, Díaz has just completed his narrative feature directorial debut Dear Luke, Love Me.
Following a festival run that took in Mexico City, Oslo, Chicago, Berlin, and Austin, You Can’t Stay Here will make its New York debut on Friday, January 5th. Ahead the theatrical release, Verow and Díaz reconnected over zoom to reflect on their collaboration, why they wanted to make a film centred around cruising, their favourite aspect of filmmaking process, and the dynamic between a director and their cinematographer. Verow also shares which A-list actors he’d like to work with, while Díaz talks about the directors on his wishlist, and the pair also discuss their shared love for Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic Showgirls, which Díaz had an early audition for.
Todd Verow: “Okay, how shall we get started…? Guillermo, how did you first get involved with this project?!”
Guillermo Díaz: “Well, listen, Todd… I’ve already told you this quite a few times, but the the main reason why I did this movie is because I wanted to work with you. I was working on a TV show in New York City at the time and the money was good, but they weren’t giving me much to do. Artistically, I felt like, ‘Oh, God, what am I doing?!’ I knew that I needed to express myself in a different way and work with somebody whose work I love and I thought of you. So I sought you out and told you that I was a huge fan and that I’ve always wanted to work with you. Luckily for me, you were a fan of mine too and agreed to meet up. The first time we met, we went to a little café in the East Village, right?
TV: “Yeah, it was Mud on 9th Street.”
GD: “I remember being nervous because I’d never met you before, but we got along really well and we were both in the same headspace about wanting to do something in the thriller/horror realm. You had some ideas and it all worked out.”
TV: “Yeah, it was a really nice conversation. Do you remember that it was in the middle of a hurricane? I was like, ‘Are we going to get blown away?! Should we postpone this meeting?’ Then I was like, ‘No, this is a sign that we need to get together and talk about this!'”
GD: “That’s so funny because right now here in LA there’s a storm. It’s pouring rain. That’s a regular day in New York City, but here it’s so out of the norm. Everybody’s like, ‘What’s going on?!’ Todd, I wrote down a few questions for you. Let me see…where I should start? Okay, my first question is what were you like as a kid and as a teenager?”
TV: “I was incredibly shy when I was younger. Whenever a teacher would call on me in class I would turn beet red. Actually, whenever anyone would talk to me, I turned beet red and would break out in a rash. It was really bad. But then when I was in middle school I discovered acting and that was a huge relief for me because I could play a character and not be myself and that cured my shyness. In high school, I was a jock and a theatre geek.”
GD: “You were a jock? No way. So you were you into sports?”
TV: “Yeah, I was a competitive swimmer and I did football for one season, but then I was like, ‘I could get really hurt during this. This is crazy, forget this!’ So then I did track, cross-country and basketball.”
GD: “Wow. Do you remember when you first picked up a camera and thought, ‘This is my thing’?”
TV: “When I was in high school there was a group of us who acted together. Stephanie Niznik was one of my really good friends. Later she was on the show Everwood. We did community theatre together and I was really into that. We would also direct each other in little things and that’s when I discovered that I liked being behind the scenes more than being out front. It wasn’t until I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, that I really got into making films and video.”
GD: “What I love about your work is that you don’t get caught up in the whole Hollywood machine, having all these people’s opinions about the work and how you should do it. Was there a time when you were like, ‘Okay, fuck that, I can’t do this Hollywood thing. I’m going to do things on my own terms’?
TV: “When I first started making video art and films and doing performance art at RISD it was all very much do-it-yourself and do it by yourself. So I really got into that and I really liked the idea of filming something myself because I was involved in the action. I can’t imagine directing something where you’re sitting at a video monitor away from everyone. To me, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I need to be connected with the actors and with the scene and what’s happening.”
“When Frisk came out it was such a huge controversy and all of us that made the film were like, ‘Huh? What happened? Why is everyone freaking out about this?!’ Because we had such a blast making it and we didn’t think it was controversial at all. So after that, I was like, ‘Well, if I’m going to get this big a response for a movie then I want it to be something that means something personal to me, rather than being based on someone else’s work’. So that’s when I started making Little Shots of Happiness, which I filmed on a little video camera with a bunch of actors that I knew, and that just became my way of working.”
GD: “Did you shoot Frisk yourself or did you have a DP on that?”
TV: “I didn’t want a huge crew, but I did have a DP on Frisk, Greg Watkins. I didn’t have a monitor though, and I was next to him the whole time and we were working together. I’ve worked as a DP on other movies and I really like doing it as long as I’m working with a director who knows what they want and can communicate with me. I like it when it’s a collaboration, rather than just being ordered around by someone who doesn’t know what they want.”
GD: “I just directed my first indie feature and I feel like that was one of the most challenging things. I had a really lovely DP and she was really good. We’d go over a shot list beforehand, but then when we’d get to set I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, the vibe is different. Now I’m feeling this instead of what we wrote down over zoom when we were going over the script’. I feel like a lot of it is instinctual. I remember you being on set and being like, ‘Okay, let’s do this now’, because you were feeling what was happening in the moment and anticipating moments. So it’s really nice to be able to do that holding the camera yourself and creating that.”
TV: “I’ll be a DP for you on the next film you direct.”
GD: “Yeah, that’d be great. I feel like you and I would really vibe together.”
TV: “Yeah, that would be fun. It’s a really interesting relationship between a director and a DP. It can be very volatile, but it can also be really amazing when it works. When the two click it’s an amazing collaboration. I think that’s true with actors too. When I work with an actor like you, who is really prepared and has a lot of ideas and who is willing to do anything really, you develop a relationship that’s almost like a psychic connection. I’ll be thinking, ‘You should do this now’ and then you do it without me even saying it out loud.”
GD: “Yeah, totally. So I have another question for you. If you were given the opportunity to work with one A-list movie star—who would be willing to do whatever you wanted in one of your movies without compromising your artistic integrity and agree to work in your guerrilla style—who would your dream person be?”
TV: “Oh my God, that’s a really good question. Well, I worked with Patricia Arquette on a student film when I was at the American Film Institute, AFI, and she was amazing. I would love to do something with her now. That would be fun.”
GD: “You worked with her sister Alexis Arquette on Frisk right?”
TV: “Yeah, I met Alexis when I worked with Patricia and she suggested that we have Alexis be in that film as well. So that’s how I met her. That was actually the only film that Patricia and Alexis were in together. I thought Alexis would be great for Frisk and I worked with her again years later when she did a voiceover for a short film I made called Fire Island 79. We were also talking about doing another project. I wanted her to have a part in a movie that I haven’t made yet, but unfortunately that never happened because sadly she passed away. I loved her and I loved working with her.”
GD: “I did too. We did a movie together called I Think I Do that Brian Sloan wrote and directed and Strand Releasing, who did Frisk, distributed. I’d never met anybody like Alexis before. She was quite a character on set and everybody loved her. I remember one time Alexis was shooting a scene and she grabbed the other actor and pulled him away from the camera because she didn’t like the way the scene was going. Brian was like, ‘You can’t do that!’ But that was so Alexis. She was so great and artistic and unique.”
TV: “I really like working with actors who challenge me, who have opinions. That’s always fun. Another actor I’d really like to work with is Jennifer Jason Leigh. I met her when I was going to AFI because she acted in a short film that I worked on. I think she’s so brilliant.”
GD: “Me too. I love her in so many things, but I’m obsessed with Fast Times at Ridgemont High and also Dolores Claiborne based on the book by Stephen King, your old neighbor in Maine. I love that movie. She’s so great at playing that tragic, my life is a mess, sort of fucked up, super unhappy kind of character. She’s so raw. She’s so good.”
TV: Well, how about you, who would you like to work with?
GD: “I have directors who I’d really love to work with. You of course. I want to do more stuff with you. And John Cameron Mitchell I’d love to work with and Pedro Almodóvar. I love all of his movies so much, but recently I rewatched Bad Education with Gael García Bernal and it’s so great.”
TV: “Law of Desire is my favourite, but I need to watch Bad Education again because I’ve only seen that once.”
GD: “It’s so good. It’s so provocative too. He really pushes things without it being too much. It’s a great movie. I always wanted to work with Wes Craven too, but unfortunately he’s passed away. So we’re both huge fans of Showgirls. Do you remember where you first saw it?”
TV: “Absolutely, it was at the Alhambra Theatre in San Francisco on opening night. It was sold out. I went with my friend Laurel who directed the student movie with Patricia at AFI, and we both just sat there on the edge of our seats, like, ‘Oh my God, this movie is so amazing!’ Meanwhile, everyone around us was like, ‘What is going on?!’ We didn’t watch it again right afterwards but we did think about doing that.”
GD: Remember, back in the day, when you were able to just stay in the theatre and do that? When I was a teenager we’d just go back in and watch a movie again or go into another movie.”
TV: “Yeah, you’d go and hide in the bathroom until everyone had left and then you’d go back into the same movie like you’d just got there.”
GD: “So you liked Showgirls the first time you saw it?”
TV: “I loved it! It’s so bright and so colourful and so nasty. It perfectly encapsulates what Las Vegas is because I think Las Vegas is incredibly scary.”
GD: “Oh, yeah. It’s sketchy and gross and shiny and sexy. All of those things at the same time. I had the opposite reaction when I first saw Showgirls. I actually auditioned for the role of James, her friend who’s the dancer. Glenn Plummer played him and he’s so great in the film, but I auditioned for it really early on when they were still developing that character. I never had to dance, I don’t think the dancing was a big part of that character yet. Even though I would have busted a move if they had wanted me to! I never heard anything after I auditioned, but then I started hearing rumours that Madonna was attached to the movie, or that she was interested in being in it. In the New York Post there were photos of her at a strip club and I actually saved the clipping. The article said that she was researching for an upcoming move called Showgirls.”
“Anyway, so auditioning was my first introduction to the movie and that started my excitement about it. Then I ended up seeing it on opening night in Las Vegas. I went to the theatre with a couple of friends to see it and I remember being so mad and so pissed off because it was so bad. I just hated it. So I had the complete opposite reaction to you initially, but then I saw it again and again and it grew on me. Now it’s one of my favourite movies ever. So we had the opposite reaction to it to start with, but in the end we both came to love it.”
“I have a Showgirls poster in my bathroom. It’s Cristal Connors as Goddess which was used in the film. I have a friend who worked on the movie as an assistant to the set designer or the set decorator, and he was like, ‘Do you want this poster?’ And I was like, ‘Hell, yeah!'”
TV: “I’m so jealous. I want that poster!”
GD: “What about another actor who you’d want to work with, maybe it’s somebody from Showgirls?”
TV: “Gina Gershon. I think she’s fantastic in everything she does. I’ve met her a couple of times and I’m always so awkward. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I love you’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah, okay’.”
GD: “We also met together at the Party Girl rerelease afterparty in New York last year didn’t we? The restoration of Party Girl played at the IFC Center and that party was the first time I met her. It was because your husband James introduced her to me. James actually said to her, ‘Guillermo’s got a poster of you in his bathroom from Showgirls‘. I’m the same way though, I just turn into a bumbling idiot when it’s somebody like that who I love and admire and who is one of my favourite movies and I don’t know what to say.”
TV: “In Showgirls she’s playing on a different level to everybody else. Her character, and her as an actress, are sort of in on what’s happening whereas everyone else is playing it straight. So it’s a really interesting dynamic.”
GD: “Her performance is so nuanced, right? I hear exactly what you’re saying. It’s like she’s on a whole other plane than everybody else and Elizabeth Berkley is reacting and in the moment, whereas Cristal is on this heavenly, otherworldly level.”
TV: “I’m still not convinced that Paul Verhoeven was really aware of exactly what the movie was. But that’s okay because it is what it is and it doesn’t matter if he intended it to be that way or not, that’s the way it is and it’s perfect. All the elements work together to make this bizzare, perfect movie.”
GD: “I wonder what his feeling about it was when it became a cult classic. I wonder if he’s angry about it or if he’s flattered by it. It’s brilliant, but I think you’re right, I don’t think he had any idea what it would become. No one ever really knows what something is going to become, but I think he really wanted it to be a serious, Basic Instinct type film about a girl trying to make it as a dancer who pushes this other dancer down the stairs. I think he thought it was going to be a drama, but then everything goes off the rails, which is what’s so great about it.”
“Todd, one of the things I remember about shooting You Can’t Stay Here is all of the delicious vegetarian meals that we had together. I’ll eat meat or fish once in a while, but I am mostly vegetarian. I love to eat, so of course I’m bringing it back to food! Now you’re a vegan, but how long were you a vegetarian before you became vegan?”
TV: “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 16 years old, so 40 years now. My mom told me that when I was very young, she took me to a slaughterhouse. I don’t know why she took me to a slaughterhouse, but she did, and I saw animals being killed. I have no memory of that whatsoever, but she said after that trip I didn’t want to eat meat anymore. I still did for a while though.”
GD: “That sounds like the perfect beginning of a movie for you, this mother who takes her child to a slaughterhouse and then everything evolves from there. I did a movie in 2005 called Shooting Vegetarians and I played the lead vegetarian punk rocker who starts killing people like butchers and chopping them up and putting them through the meat grinder. It was the craziest film. At one point, this chicken appears to me and tells me to kill these people! The chicken is played by Brooke Smith, who was the girl in the pit in The Silence of the Lambs.”
TV: “Oh my God, really?”
GD: “Yeah, the prosthetics on this chicken woman were amazing! Didi Conn who plays Frenchie in Grease was in it too. I think you can find the movie out there somewhere!”
TV: “Oh my God, I’ll have to check it out. So what was your favourite thing about shooting You Can’t Stay Here?
GD: “There were so many, but one of them was that we got to shoot in Central Park. That was the best. That I got to wake up every morning and go to Central Park to shoot a movie with you was such a thrill. I loved that shooting in the park was really easy and everybody there was really nice. It’s such a landmark and I’m a New Yorker—I live in LA now, but I was born and raised in New York City—so getting to shoot there was incredible. I love that you’ve turned the park into another character in the film. You really feel the vibe and the essence of Central Park in the 90s in our movie. I love that so much.”
TV: “I loved filming there too and we really lucked out with the weather because we were supposed to start shooting a month before and then we had to reschedule. The month when we were originally meant to shoot it rained every single day, so I’m really glad that we ended up shooting it in June 2022. The weather was perfect every single day. It wasn’t too hot, but it was nice and sunny. It was really fun. It was almost like going to camp in a way. We’d go to the park and we’d have our picnic basket with us and we’d film, then we’d have our lunch, and then we’d film some more until it got dark and then we’d pack up and head out.”
GD: “I love that you shoot very quickly. You don’t do a lot of takes which I admire and because I’ve been on many sets where directors do more than the necessary amount of takes and it gets ridiculous. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. You’ll do one take, maybe two for safety, but then you move on very quickly from scene to scene. There was one day that it rained, but imagine if it was like that for the whole shoot? That would have been really difficult.”
“The other actors that you got for the movie are so great and they fell right in with you and with your style of working. They were all so willing to play with you and do this Todd Verow movie. I feel so lucky that we got those actors to be in the film.”
TV: “Yeah, me too. They were all so great to work with. When you and I first got together and started talking about making a movie, I thought about making something about cruising. I had recently gone to the Ramble in Central Park because I’d heard that during COVID it was busy again. I went there and saw that it was. It made me think about cruising a lot and I wanted to make a movie about it. So that’s how that came about. What are your thoughts about cruising?”
GD: “I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so cruising was a big part of my existence as a gay man in the closet as a teenager and in my 20s. Back in the day, we didn’t have iPhones. Now everyone’s on an app and that’s how they cruise, virtually. But we did it in person. So it felt very familiar. It felt very naughty, like cruising always does for me. It felt exhilarating and scary.”
“I was super into the idea that you wanted to centre this film around cruising. I was really excited about it. I remember us having a lot of discussions about it and telling each other stories about things that would happen when we’d be in those situations and you used a lot of that stuff in the movie. There have been other movies about cruising, like the the William Friedkin film Cruising with Al Pacino, but I don’t think there were a lot of gay people involved who could be like, ‘It wouldn’t happen like that.’ So I love that you were familiar with it and we both knew the things that rang true and felt real and what wouldn’t work.”
TV: “Well, Guillermo, it was so great to reconnect and I’m so excited that the movie is opening at the IFC Center on January 5th and that you’re going to be there with me to do some Q&As.”
GD: “Same, Todd. We’ve been in a few festivals, but this is our premiere in New York City where we shot the movie so I’m super excited to see the film with a New York audience.”
You Can’t Stay Here, written and directed by Todd Verow, produced by and starring Guillermo Díaz, opens at New York’s IFC Center on Friday, January 5th, 2024 with Q&As at select showtimes and will open in New Orleans at the Zeitgeist Theatre on January 23rd, followed by Los Angeles at Laemmle Glendale on Thursday, February 8th, 2024 with Q&As at select showtimes.
