What is Black Light about?

Well, it's about 110 pages long. Wakka wakka!

I apologize.

The short version is, Black Light is about Nikki Blue, a dancer at a tiny strip club located on a rural route in western Massachusetts. A few minutes down the road, there's a store that sells fossils, rocks, and dino-related items; the clerk at the store is Alice, a frequently stoned, perpetually nervous young woman with no plans to speak of. Black Light is about what happens when Nikki and Alice meet, and how it changes both of them. It's also about the women Nikki works with, and about being young and in the middle of nowhere.

I'm sure some variation of the above will make good DVD copy. But what's it really about? Well, it depends on who I'm talking to. My stock answer is that it's a romantic comedy, for lack of a better qualifier. Usually that satisfies people, but when the doorman at the Red Herring (the bar next to the cinema I work at) responded to the romantic comedy response with a snore and asked what else it is, I admitted that it might also be called lesbian erotica. "You know," he said, "You should really say that instead." And when I had to pitch the movie to the reasonably concerned-looking Whately board of selectmen so that Jimmy the Greek could get a special entertainment license for the shoot, I went for broke and used two very dirty words - I called it an "art film." It worked, but afterwords I went home and watched a slasher movie to purge the pretension from my system.

Why do I want to make it? I'm working on that. I want it to be sexy but also smart, and hopefully funny and relatable. Beyond that, I'm still figuring it out. David Cronenberg responded to this question by saying that he makes a film to find out why he made it - I like that. Another response from a more qualified source than I: once I got the chance to ask Werner Herzog about the brilliant, insane ending of Stroszek, asking why he lingers on that damn dancing chicken for so long. He said he just holds any shot for as long as he finds its subject interesting. That's maybe the best advice on filmmaking I've ever gotten, and I've tried to follow it since. Right now, what interests me is a dancer and a dinosaur girl. And hopefully in a little while I'll be able to tell you why.