Interview: Larry Gus and Vasilis Katsoupis

Panagiotis Melidis, AKA Larry Gus, is a deeply humorous but often self-deprecating thinker, and a devoted scholar of the arts, sound computing, and stand-up comedy. You will have a hard time finding a person who’s read more Borges, listened to more WTF podcasts, and is willing to defend even Woody Allen’s critically butchered films (yes, even Scoop.)

As a musician, the 2014 RBMA alumnus takes a near-obsessive approach to cutting up samples and unleashes havoc when live on stage. Thus far he has merged his psychedelic pop melodies and dense polyrhythms on two albums, Stitches (released in 2009 on Greek hip hop label Cast-A-Blast) and his DFA debut Years Not Living, a record directly inspired by Georges Perec’s book Life: A User’s Manual and Lucio Battisti’s 1974 album Anima Latina.

Ahead of the release of his third album I Need New Eyes, a feature-length documentary by the name of My Friend Larry Gus has been premiered at the renowned Karlovy Vary Film Festival. For this intimate “non-music documentary about a musician,” director Vasilis Katsoupis followed Larry Gus and his childhood friends from the rural parts of Greece via Milan to New York City. The outcome is an unapologetic, funny and brutally honest portrayal of what it means to be an artist in the middle of various forms of crisis. Julian Brimmers spoke to Larry Gus and Vasilis Katsoupis ahead of the Greek premiere of the film at Athens International Film Festival.

Let’s talk a bit about the narrative structure of the film. Vasilis, were you at least secretly happy when Stones Throw/Now Again’s Egon, who was originally supposed to put it out, didn’t get back to Larry? It seems like the narrative needs this kind of suspense and crisis to develop the way it does…

Vasilis Katsoupis

I need to give special thanks to my editor, Gregory Rentis. We had like 2 terabytes of video files. 45 minutes is 15 gigabytes. You can do the math, you would need two days to watch all the files of the videos. It was a huge amount of material. In the beginning, it was very difficult to find the narrative. We sat down with Gregory and dissected the material, trying to find a three act structure. That was the most difficult and the most crucial thing to do. The truth is that the film is not in chronological order. We wanted to create a narrative, so we took all these moments and sat down and made the script.

The basic three act structure is as follows: in act one, you have the setup. Panagiotis is in Veria, trying to make his album. The second act is the confrontation and the midpoint of the second act is the big cliff, where Egon comes into play. Then you get to the climax, obstacles, disaster, all these things about Stones Throw not wanting to do the album anymore. Then the guys from DFA want his album and he goes to America to sign with them.

The resolution that I would want people to take away from this film is this: Even if he’s now a musician with an international career, he goes back to life as before. That was the intention. There was another cut for which we ended the film with Panagiotis’ marriage with Konstantia. To tell the truth, it was very funny but it didn’t work well as an ending. It wasn’t a movie about his relationship with his girlfriend/wife in the end, it was about himself and his friends. He goes out with his friends, walking around Veria and having the same talks again and again.

How come we barely get to see Larry Gus actually producing music?

Larry Gus

Whenever Vasilis was coming to Veria to film, I was like, “Let’s go for a walk with Stratos,” my friend who’s in the movie all the time, and we just goofed around. And we would talk about our lives, talk about our failures, our life in the fucking countryside of Greece. Vasilis also took some footage of me in my room, but I was never actually working. Vasilis has footage of that, too, but I don’t think we used it. It wouldn’t have made much sense.

Vasilis Katsoupis

I always like to say that this is not a music documentary. I think it’s wrong to classify it as that. It is a character-driven documentary about someone who happens to be a musician. Initially, making this film, we were flirting with the idea of not even including any Larry Gus music at all, but we found that to be a very bold but also very weird decision. We concluded that his music is the basic characteristic of him as a person, so we need to showcase it as well. Even him performing live is very scarce in the film. We wanted to focus on his character, his personality, and the driving forces behind all that makes Larry Gus.

Panagiotis, can you talk a bit about what your life was like when you decided to go back to Veria after your studies? I would assume that was a pretty big step.

Larry Gus

When I was in Barcelona, I was doing this Masters programme in Sound and Music Computing. While I was doing the promo for my first album, which I put out in Greece on a hip hop label, I was sending out emails and one found its way to Egon [of Stones Throw / Now Again]. He replied after an hour and told me, “I like the album, I can send you a hard disc with stuff for you to work on.”

I never understood that. Why did he send you his own sample sources for you to make a record out of it?

Larry Gus

I don’t know. To be honest, in hindsight, it’s the luckiest moment of my life. If this thing wouldn’t have happened, I think I would be doing a PhD in music technology right now, working in Barcelona, or Copenhagen, or in London, or wherever. He replied after 45 minutes. I couldn’t believe it. At this point, the seed was already planted in me that I had to properly work on this stuff because this was my big shot of actually doing something with my music.

I thought, in order to get this album done, all I had to do is quit everything. Just go to a place where I will have no distractions, and that’s my city, my hometown, living with my mother so I wouldn’t have to care about money. I would just live there and eat food and just work on the album. That was the idea. The moment this thought came into my mind, I couldn’t count the minutes to leave Barcelona. I was like 27 and I had to fucking move back with my mother. My mother is a fucking intense person so it was like, “Why the fuck did I do it?” It didn’t make any sense but it was the only option.

Maybe you can briefly talk about that scene on the beach, in which you tell Vasilis that the Stones Throw deal won’t work out eventually. There’s actually quite a bit of time between the email and the beach scene, right?

Larry Gus

I got the rejection email around the 26th of August and we shot this scene like three weeks afterwards. It was still September. I still have the email. You see, me and Vasilis, we are really, really close friends. So, over the phone, he was asking me about what happened with Egon. I was like, “I don’t want to tell you because we have to shoot it.” I had all these news piling up about what happened. So when we met, I was like, “Vasilis, are you ready? Let’s start talking about it.” This is why it might come across as a bit emotional or a little intense because he’s also finding out about it for the first time in that scene.

It’s emotional for both of us, me and Vasilis, because this place, this beach is still really close to Volos where we first met and we have been going there for a swim all summers ever since. It’s a very crucial place for us.

You both already mentioned how important the setting and the people are, much more, maybe, then the music. Can you introduce the roster of characters?

Vasilis Katsoupis

The main character besides Panagiotis is Stratos Tsipourlianos. Stratos is the closest friend of Panagiotis who is still living in Veria. The second character is his brother, Manolis. I knew Stratos before shooting, but Manolis I met for the first time when we started shooting. I didn’t know him well and I didn’t know how all these things would work out because he is in a very vulnerable situation in the film.

Larry Gus

We’re making fun of him in the film but that’s not our actual dynamic. Manolis is a super responsible person. But Stratos, I think, if it wasn’t for him, the movie wouldn’t have been the way it is. He was really relaxed in front of the camera. He has all these crazy stories, he has this amazing character, just like his mother. I think that Stratos and his family give a really good indication of what happened in Greece shortly before the crisis. His father committed suicide because he had financial problems and he actually shot himself with a rifle.

That’s in the movie. He reenacts that scene...

Larry Gus

Yes.

It’s a powerful moment.

Larry Gus

That happened in like 2002, almost 13 years ago. After this, Stratos still remained super optimistic and happy but his brother Manolis, who we are seemingly joking with in the movie – his hair turned white in like a year. He was 23 years old and by the end of the year he was looking like fucking George Clooney. It was crazy. He was so stressed. Their father committed suicide and the next day a lawyer told them, “You owe 400,000 Euros in back loans” and stuff. It was really fucked up. Stratos owns the car in the movie, this crazy truck. He was taking us around all these weird places in my hometown. He was really open about us showing off our dicks and our bodies all the time, so we have the same sense of humor and make fun of the same stuff. It was really perfect. I think that if it was a matter of justice, the movie should have been about Stratos, really.

Vasilis Katsoupis

I think your parents are main characters.

Larry Gus

Yeah, of course. My mother and my father. The thing with my father is really weird because he hasn’t seen the movie yet and we have to talk about it with him, together with Vasilis. We have to make a meeting with him and be like, “Father, this is what happened. This is not exactly how I feel about you right now,” which is stupid because at this point, I have a really, really good relationship with him.

Although you have a reputation as a daring performer, there’s very little footage of you on stage. It’s funny to see Panagiotis bickering and being nervous before the show and then after the show, with ten seconds of him performing in the middle. That nicely captures what it means to be a musician, the anxiety before and the weird relief afterwards, much more than just showing the momentous success of being on stage.

Larry Gus

That was exactly Vasilis’ idea. To be honest, when Vasilis was filming the movie, I was constantly telling him, “The best thing that can happen to you is if no label picks the album.” When I got the rejection from Egon I was like, “This is good for you now. This is the best thing that can happen for you.” I wasn’t expecting DFA to get in the picture, to be honest, back then. I was really heartbroken. When I got the rejection email from Stones Throw, it was right in the middle of the summer and Vasilis wasn’t around. It literally was the worst day of my life. For one night I was like, “This is it. There is nothing more to it.” It would’ve been super, super fun if nothing had happened afterwards. Then Vasilis had a crazy movie about this fake musician trying to do something and he didn’t actually manage to do it.

So, when Vasilis told me, “Let’s shoot something in New York,” I was like, “Oh, no. Isn’t that too obvious?” All this stereotypical “the guy from a small town tries to do something, he fails, and then he gets a little bit better, blah, blah…” But Vasilis was like, “Trust me. We can do it differently. We can try to find a different emotional core in it.” He was right eventually.

You always seem to have some sort of apocalyptic perspective. When you’re in New York, you’re not sitting there like “we made it”, but you get skeptical about the whole situation. All of a sudden, you’re worried about the sample rights…

Larry Gus

Yeah, that was absolutely real. I was crazy about it. It was fucked up. The only thing that I think me and Vasilis both regret is that we don’t have more footage with the DFA guys because we have some material from the party with Jonathan, but we don’t have much more than that.

Vasilis Katsoupis

He didn’t let me shoot. He was very nervous.

Larry Gus

I was super nervous. I still couldn’t believe that a thing like this was happening. I thought, I’m here but it still doesn’t mean that the record will come out. I’m meeting the people from the label and Jonathan and all of them but that doesn’t mean anything if nothing comes out of it. Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it or so, I don’t know. Vasilis still makes fun of me for that. That mistake is definitely on me.

The music in the film: there are some really great moments of juxtapositions with all these old, weird songs that you dug up.

Larry Gus

That was Vasilis’ idea. It’s meant as a vague reference to our shared love for Woody Allen, which was one of the things that brought us together to begin with. Vasilis has taken these really old sounding songs to complement the movie in a weird way – it doesn’t make much sense with regards to the music that I’m making, but it works really nicely. The singer is Cliff Edwards, Ukulele Ike was his stage name. I found his music in the archive and I think it’s so old that, I think, you don’t have any copyrights to consider. Maybe they will sue you, Vasilis, and then the next movie will be me interviewing you about getting sued. He was a megastar in his times, Cliff Edwards. He was the voice of the cricket in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

That guy.

Larry Gus

Yeah. He’s the guy that sings “When you wish upon a star.” You know what will happen, Vasilis, now his name is in the interview, his copyright holders have Google Alerts on his name and you will face a really nice lawsuit in the next month. No, I think the producer of the movie already looked into it, right?

Vasilis Katsoupis

Yeah, I think it’s cleared.

Larry Gus

I think it would be super fun if Vasilis ever did a second movie about me trying to get back to academics again. After realizing that I failed in music and nothing went as I imagined, I will try to go back to university and then I will prepare my PhD, my proposal. Then I will get rejections from different universities. That would be amazing. Back again, living with my mother and my son. My son would be like, “You’re a fucking failure, Dad.” Then my son will form a coalition with my father and they would be against me together. And my son will want to work in a bank. That would be the best. Vasilis would be so happy. Let’s make it happen.

You premiered the film at the renowned Karlovy Vary Festival. Tell me how that turned out.

Larry Gus

That was wild, really wild. It was a weird time in general because the referendum was happening at the same time in Greece. But we were there at Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic. Our producer couldn’t make it due to what was going on in Greece, so it was just me and Vasilis. We were there and it was literally like Borat. We didn’t know anyone, we were just hanging around next to the bar drinking and looking at all the other people. We were not networking at all, or trying to talk about movies and stuff. We were just hanging out because we didn’t know what to do. It was really embarrassing and awkward. It’s crazy how awkward it was. Then I played a show and the show wasn’t promoted by the festival, so I played in front of 15 people.

But the next day with the premiere of the film, we had many people there who eventually stayed also for the Q&A. First of all, me and Vasilis were amazed by the fact that so many people actually laughed at our inside joke. As mentioned earlier, we never thought that somebody would actually get it. But that was just our insecurity. The Q&A went great. There was this documentary director from Prague and she explained to Vasilis the core of the movie – she understood the whole thing perfectly.

At one point, somebody asked me, “Are you sure that you’re not gay because you’re touching the dicks of your friends all the time?” I told him that I watch gay porn like once every week, every two weeks, trying to be sure that I don’t get a hard on. It was like a comedy Q&A in the end. It was really fun, we had a great time. I was looking at Vasilis and I couldn’t believe it, to be honest. I think he also enjoyed it very much, right Vasilis?

Vasilis Katsoupis

Yes. The only thing that I will add is, the translator was in very deep shit because he had to translate all of that.

Larry Gus “I Need New Eyes” is out on DFA on October 2. “My Friend Larry Gus” premieres in Greece at Athens International Film Festival Sep 23 – Oct 4.