Matthew Bright: Peculiar passions

Matthew Bright has made a movie about Ted Bundy and says that filming the execution scenes was a joy. He'd also like to talk about the chronic nose-picking. 'Eh?' says Mark Kermode

At some point in my conversation with the cult film-maker Matthew Bright, we arrive at a phrase that seems to define his peculiar world-view, namely: "Democrat-voting, pro-death-penalty, emotionally Republican, anti-censorship Green Fascist." A little unwieldy, perhaps, but then it is a definition that has been reached with reference to the British military historian JFC Fuller ("my political hero – he really shaped me, before he went nuts"), Mao Tse-tung ("he and his wife would have people over for dinner and then shoot artillery at them as they drove home"), Picasso ("never let an artist be in power, 'cos they're going to kill someone, like that other painter – you know, Hitler..."), film censors ("morons and assholes"), the cast of the US comedy show Diff'rent Strokes ("terrible no-talents on the worst TV show ever"), the serial killer Ted Bundy ("an obnoxious wise-ass") and a host of others too numerous to enumerate.

It is the last of these who is the nominal reason for our meeting, since Bright has recently directed the biopic Bundy (Ted Bundy in the States), which he is here to publicise. But keeping Bright on any one subject is a somewhat fraught venture, particularly since he is nursing a hangover caused by an evening out with a Brit-Art "celebrity" whose company he describes as "poisonous", and with whom he is unlikely to be sharing either a tent or a bed at any time in the near future.

So we ramble entertainingly around fragments of his strange career, which has led him from directing the twistedly acclaimed Reese Witherspoon romp Freeway (imagine Little Red Riding Hood with psychos and guns) and its semi-sequel Confessions of a Trickbaby (Hansel and Gretel on acid) to writing the bonkers-sounding TV docu-drama After Diff'rent Strokes: When the Laughter Stopped ("a junkie armed robber, a killer, a guy with a kidney disorder... I haven't even seen it, but I heard it was so sleazy") and, most recently, directing the dwarf love story Tiptoes, which he describes as "a tale of love and lust against the backdrop of the Little People of America Convention". There's clearly a lot going on in Matthew Bright's head – not all of it healthy – but when we do manage to focus on Bundy, one thing becomes clear: the writer/director loathes his subject.

"I wanted to do a horror movie about a historical figure," he begins, reasonably enough, "and Bundy was the template for serial killers at a time when we really didn't know about them. He was very intelligent, outwardly charming, and he educated the FBI about these kinds of people, who were previously thought of as vampires and werewolves. But writing the script made me physically sick, reading about this guy over and over again. I talked to one of his lawyers, who described him as a pure psychopath, capable of doing anything without getting excited. To me, this guy doesn't even have a soul, he's not a human being. He killed all these women, and in his heart he wondered why everyone was mad at him, because to him it was like, 'Well, it's just a girl; there's plenty of girls.' "

Unlike John McNaughton's coldly insightful Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer ("I'm not a fan of that film; I don't like being manipulated"), which indicts the audience for their involved fascination with such appalling crimes, Bright reserves his scorn for Bundy and his alien deeds. "I didn't like most of the books that were written about Bundy," he rasps, "particularly this media creation by third-rate writers which made him look 'normal' – he wasn't normal. He had a misshapen head, he was a chronic nose-picker; he never worked in his life; all his money came from shoplifting, purse-snatching, burglarising houses; he was a chronic peeper, staring in windows and jacking off all night, and he just progressed to walking up to women and hitting them over the head with a stick... sorry, what was the question?"

Nor does Bright have much sympathy with the overtly liberal pleadings of Dead Man Walking, evidencing a guilty delight in the final scenes of Bundy in which Michael Reilly Burke's slimy necrophile has cotton wool shoved up his rectum to prevent him soiling himself as he faces execution.

"We portrayed the solemnity of the execution, but it was also a pleasure," Bright admits, unabashed. "This is a pro-death-penalty movie. I have no love for these people. Sister Helen Prejean, the nun who was trying to get that guy in Dead Man Walking to open up and accept responsibility, said that he died without accepting responsibility; he did a terrible thing, and he died in his sin. As far as Bundy was concerned, he escaped all the time, and nobody's daughter was safe, and I don't accept that just because someone's a human being that their life is somehow sacred if they've done something like that. It's good for the families of the victims to know that society is going to stand up to kill them."

One of the most grimly comic moments in Bright's weirdly alarming film comes when Bundy, at the height of his murderous rage, declares indignantly that he's a Republican, as if that were somehow a badge of innate decency. Mentioning this allows Bright to spiral off into labyrinthine musings on the nature of political allegiance, which he insists is essentially "emotional. Most people don't come to their political beliefs by studying the issues, they get there because of their personality. Democrat, Republican, it's just psychological make-up. JFC Fuller was a 'Green Fascist', and that's what I say I am, sometimes. Emotionally speaking I am a Republican, but I have never voted for them because they're always doing something that makes me think if I vote for them I'll go to hell. Like they're into making gay people second-class citizens, or whipping up support for the 'drug war' so millions of people can go to prison and lose their families for basically trying to treat their own mood disorders. They behave like thugs and I don't want to be associated with that.

"But then again, the Democrats are into a form of equality that means that everybody who rises above their station in life gets pulled down, so that everybody is equal. You can't raise people, but you can pull them down. So you get this faceless, cow-like political correctness... and it's just ugly. In the end I think it's kind of what Nietzsche said: that the only freedoms we have come when these two camps are locked in combat, so they don't notice the rest of us. The Republicans are ideologues, and they're assholes, but they're more my kind of assholes. But I just can't be associated with some of the evil things they do. So I usually vote for a Democrat president – I have to, because of the environment – but everything else about them I just despise."

All of which brings us, naturally, to the Little People of America Convention, the backdrop for Tiptoes, where "Republicans, Democrats, sluts, religious types, all come together because they have this one thing in common." Even by Bright's exotic standards, this latest screen epic (whose top-flight cast includes Gary Oldman, Matthew McConaughey and Patricia Arquette) sounds "unusual", inspired by an interest in dwarfism that dates back to the days when he shared a room with the future Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize ("Boss! Boss! The plane! The plane!") in the early Seventies.

"It starts out like a comedy with a lot of almost burlesque humour, and then it becomes very serious, about having a child with birth defects," explains Bright, before launching into the kind of descriptive pitch that makes you marvel that such a movie could ever get made at all. "Kate Beckinsale gets pregnant by Matthew McConaughey, not knowing that he's got dwarf genes. She tells him that she's pregnant, he flips out, then says, 'OK, I'll try to make it work.' Then the baby's born, it's a dwarf, it's gonna need surgery, and all this other stuff. So they break up.

"And then there's Gary Oldman, who plays McConaughey's dwarf brother, with like a bigger head, hunchback, bigger ass and pushed-in nose, arms tied behind him. And they get together and fall in love and make another one. So it's kind of like Shampoo meets Ordinary People." Quite.

'Bundy' is released 22 November