By Travis Johnson
There’s a time-honoured way of discovering really transgressive art – somebody close to you hands you a bootleg. So it was when director Jai Love first encountered ’90s extreme metal band, Kettle Cadaver, and their lead singer, Edwin Borsheim.
“I guess always having a fascination with music and stuff led me to be seeking out those kinds of people,” Love recalls. “And one day my friend showed me this DVD which was this VHS compilation of all this really fucked up stuff that this band was doing.”
‘Fucked up’ barely scratches the surface. Borsheim had a penchant for onstage antics raging from self-mutilation to necrophiliac bestiality that puts GG Allin to shame.
As it turned out, that friend hailed from the same town as Borsheim, and Love, 19 at the time and now a 21 year old AFTRS student, began thinking about the notion of a documentary about the rocker, now a recluse living in an isolated compound. The first major hurdle, of course, was convincing Borsheim – or, indeed, finding him.
“Well, it was a bit hard because for about three months we couldn’t find Edwin,” Love explains. “He was just off the grid. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive or where he was or what he was doing. No one had heard from him, and so we had to track him down. Luckily my friend, who actually ended up being one of the producers on the film, Spencer [Heath], he was good friends with his little brother, so his little brother tracked down Edwin and said, ‘Hey, this guy wants to come over from Australia and make a movie about you.’ At first I think Edwin was like, ‘Oh yeah, whatever.’ But then he realised the seriousness of it once we arrived.”
Working with Borsheim proved to be challenging. “At first he was just really… I’d say he was a little bit timid but also intrigued by what we were gonna be doing. I think he would have always wanted this, and I think it was very therapeutic for him and he knew it was gonna be like that, and that’s why he took part in it.
“Edwin is not someone that you can give a lot of direction to,” Love laughs. “So you have to direct him through questions and lead him that way. I remember at one point we tried to give him some direction and he just shut down. It was a pretty awkward situation.”
Still, Love evidently has a great deal of affection for the troubled musician, refusing to judge him for his scandalous, often stomach-churning past. “I became really good friends with him so it’s hard for me to really dissect his personality, because he’s always been a really good guy to me. He’s definitely done some questionable things in his life, but to me he was just a kid and he never really got the chance to grow up. That’s why I think we all got along so well; all the crew was very young and we were all into the same sort of stuff. We all like the same music and the same art, and have very, very similar interests. Edwin saw that, and we instantly sort of became friends. So I think he’s a nice guy, I think he’s a good guy, but I think that question is sort of more for people who he’s done wrong by.”
And while audiences may come for the gore and the grotesquery, he is hopeful that they’ll take away something deeper from his portrait. “To me the film isn’t about the shock at all, it’s just that that stuff is in there because it has to be in there; you can’t have a film where everybody’s talking about all this shocking stuff that this guy used to do and the not show it. It’s gotta be in there, but at the same time it’s a film that’s about a lot more than what he did on stage. It’s about his mental state, it’s about love, it’s about lost love. It’s a psychoanalytical look at someone who is on the downslope of their life and really coming to terms with his accomplishments and the fact that someday he’s gonna die, and dealing with his existence all by himself.”
Slamdance is releasing Dead Hands Dig Deep on iTunes from September 15, 2017.
Read our review here.
