The Pervert’s Camera: Louise Weard on Video

29 Aug 2025 - Janie Jaffe

Louise Weard is the director behind 275 minute transsexual video epic Castration Movie Pt. 1. I sat down with her to talk about why the movie looks like that, her digital video inspirations, and the future of her filmmaking style. Castration Movie Pt. 2 premieres September 13th at The Roxy in NYC and on her Gumroad at louiseweard.gumroad.com

Louise: I wish I had sent you Pt.Two ahead of this too, because I’m going to talk about it.

Janie: So it’s all ready. It’s all edited down.

L: I’m a really hard artist to work with, because I get crazy whims and then I do stuff. I think a big part of having the level of control that I do over Castration Movie where I’m mainly self-distributed and the distributors I’m working with are incredibly friendly to any of the whims I have makes it very funny. I’m such a George Lucas type artist, I do love to change things and constantly go back in and tinker. Like, the version of Castration Movie up on the Gumroad and touring theatrically right now is admittedly not the same version that came out in June of last year. But mainly it’s just fixing things that were annoying me. 

J: You’re not changing dialogue and editing in CGI aliens.

L: No, I’m not doing that. I mean, there’s some scenes that I didn’t get the chance to shoot for Part One, because of either having cast drop out or just circumstances not working. So I think that in the long term, Castration Movie Pt. One might get a few minutes longer to accommodate this one sequence I never got the chance to shoot. So, yeah there might be an extended director’s cut. 

J: Isn’t every cut of Castration Movie a director’s cut?

L: All except for one. There is a producer’s cut where Liz Purchell did an edit of Part Two and it made me so viscerally upset that I was like, no one else is ever allowed to touch the footage but me. When we had finished Part Two, we had joked about, oh, could we do a two hour cut of this film? Like the palatable, general release cut. Because my cut of it is five hours, right? So Liz took all the raw footage and cut together a version that her and I started referring to as “the evil psychopath edit”. It changed the politics of the movie to such an extreme degree that if it was ever released I don’t think my reputation would ever recover. The movie is walking such a fine line politically to land the themes it’s trying to get across that just pulling one block out of it causes the whole tower to fall down. It is unbelievable how evil and psychotic it ended up being just removing these scenes. It seems that on the surface, you’d be like, oh, you can get away with losing that. Like, is it adding that much? And then, you watch a cut that isn’t that full five hours and you’re just like, oh my god, this is actually reprehensible. Like this is unbelievable. So yeah, so if anyone ever says to me, with Part Two especially, oh, it didn’t have to be that long, I’m going to go, no, actually, we did try a shorter version of it, and it broke my mind. I couldn’t stand to release it, that’s buried somewhere now. 

J: I’m very excited for Part Two. I wanted to talk to you about it. Why does the movie look like that? I wanted to ask you about your process and how you achieve the digital video look that the movie has.

L: Yeah, so it’s really funny because when I look at the footage of this film, it doesn’t look like anything else, in a way that is so exciting to me as a filmmaker. OK I’m going to walk you through my process because It’s genuinely so goofy. The way I committed to video in the first place is, as a kid I came up at a time when DV filmmaking first became possible. The start of the 2000s was like, oh my God, I can buy a camera, it has an ILink or DV cable that I can plug in and get footage off onto my iMac G3 and now I can edit a movie in iMovie. So there was a process there that I grew up with and fell in love with digital video, DV tape specifically. 

But before then, my family did own a hi8 camcorder. My mom had a bunch of old home movies and said, “Hey, Louise, if I give you these tapes, can you digitize them?” So I took them and the old family camcorder, the Sony TRV 330 that we had, that I bought at Costco or something. And I started playing back all these videos and I fell in love with the way I shot stuff as a kid, or the way that my family members would shoot stuff. There’s some really cute stuff of me in like 2000 shooting a horror movie with my dad, where I’m holding the camera trying to get my dad to act for me. 

There was something that felt very liberating about it, in a way where I was trying to crack what contemporary aesthetic could be as a filmmaker who’s so inspired by the internet and all this sort of stuff. And I was just like, oh, I’m gonna tap into the style stylistically of like a kid holding the camera, also thinking about watching movies I was shooting on hi8 or DV, and putting on YouTube back in, like, 2006. Back like on YouTube, BlipTV, like Google video days, you know. So I wanted to take inspiration from all that stuff. I was really enamored with early internet filmmaking, thinking back to people who were doing comedy sketches and posting them on YouTube, like, the lighting’s bad, and they’re shot on DV or early HDV. Like the Channel Awesome type stuff, like Angry Video Game Nerd, all that kind of shit. 

So I was like, oh, this is all an interesting aesthetic. I’m gonna play with all of this stuff because it feels both contemporary and timeless because it’s modern, but calling back to something that’s just recent enough where it’ll feel like aesthetic choice. Early Mumblecore has that quality, too. I’m not, like, Tao Lin shooting it on my MacBook or whatever, walking around New York, but, there’s degrees to which these styles all intersect with each other in my head. And, yeah, so I picked digital hi8.

Now, the process of getting it onto my computer was initially…I was trying to figure out how to get footage off of a digital8 camera in the year 2025 and, one: I had to pull my 15-year-old laptop out to even get [the camera] communicating in a proper way. I was originally trying just to get a clean DV signal out, just lossless. I think it’s like 18 megabytes per second or something like that, not a lot. Now, the thing I realized with the DV signal is, although it has a higher level of clarity, there wasn’t enough saturation to the image. There was something that was feeling lost with the raw DV signal. And I didn’t want to touch the footage at all in terms of coloring or anything like that. I wanted to stick to a dogma where it’s like, there’s no lighting in this movie. It’s just capturing spaces as they are and going straight off the camera. So I dug into my box of adapters, and I was looking at different capture cards that I could use the RCA signal off. I ended up deciding on the funniest solution, which is, my younger brother had bought a Roxio capture card back in probably 2008 that he would use to plug his Super Nintendo in to record gameplay, right? I’ve got it sitting here. I can give a model number just so we have it… “Roxio Video Capture USB”… That’s all it says. I don’t think you could even find this online anymore. So we just do RCA direct into this little guy. It only works with the Roxio software, which I have on this 15-year-old computer that gets about a, I would say a sub 240p signal. Now, with the digital8, I shoot it in widescreen, which means that the pixels are compressed by 1.27% or whatever, to give it a 16x9. The Roxio capture card cannot interpret that in the way that an Ilink cable could. So what ends up happening is it squishes the footage down into a 4x3 image. So then, after I get the footage off the camera, after I do the RCA process, I take it over to adobe premiere, I change the pixel orientation so that I can stretch it back out to 16x9, then I use a digital mask to put it into cinemascope or 2.3:1 format. And then the last step of this magical process is I use an old app I have on my computer that I’ve used on every film I’ve ever made called FilmConvert, and I add a fine, tasteful amount of digital film grain over the footage. And that’s how Castration Movie looks the way it does.

J: There’s a part of me that wants to say - surely there is a better way. and there definitely are things that you could be doing, but is that part of the point?

L: Okay so technically, the best, cleanest way for me to do this would be to shoot it onto the tape, take the tape, send it to one of my buddies who does tape preservation and they can get a full, clean prores signal off of it. 

J: And maybe the 10-year anniversary edition will do that. But for now… 

L: Well, I can’t do that because I use the same tape for the whole production. I just rewind and record back over it.

J: Awesome. Awesome.

L: Yeah, so, it is gone. It is gone. There’s no masters. This is like the most psychotic thing in the world to do is to shoot a movie like this and have no masters. Like, it’s hilarious. But I’ve always kind of been like that. Like, I had another project that someone was like, oh, hey, do you have the tape master for this? And I was like, no, I taped over them. They’re like, how do we restore your movie then? And I was like, I don’t know, I didn’t think anyone would care enough for me to hold on to my masters. Like, why would I think that this would matter at all? When I made Castration Movie, I was living out of my car shooting this film, thinking that no one would probably ever watch it, but I wanted to do it for myself just to say that I got to make a movie I want to watch. And then the fact that it’s now… 

You know, I never in my life thought it would play theatrically. Like when I did this process, I was like, oh, it looks pretty good on an iPhone. That’s how anyone’s probably going to watch it. So I remember when I sat at the screening in Oakland, I was right in the front row, and the screen was the biggest theater screen we showed it on yet. And there was a part of me that felt like the biggest troll ever. I was like, this should never have been projected. Like you can count the pixels. Like there’s 24 pixels from bottom to top or whatever. It is absurd that this is screening theatrically. Like, it is not meant for that at all.

 But at the same time, you know, I was watching Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots the other day off of an old DVD. and I was like, you know, this looks just as fucking crunchy as Castration Movie does with the old process they had to do for getting that onto a film print. So I’m actually fully okay with how the movie looks. And it’s really funny because I have had other collaborators be like, come on, can we just please send this down to someone - you know, do this properly, get the full uncompressed stream of this video. And I’m just like, no, I like the way it looks. That’s how it’s supposed to look in my head. It’s supposed to be just garbagey. And it is psychotic, I don’t know. I think it adds so much to the movie to have it look the way it does, where you can’t even tell what you’re looking at sometimes

J: Is this something that you’re thinking about as you’ve filmed Part Two? Are there changes that you’ve made knowing that it’s going to be in theaters? 

L: Well, this is the funniest thing, okay? So now as part of my process, I will get footage off as both DV through the ILink, and through the RCA connection. The reason for that being that, to me, recording the DV signal does make sense as an archival sort of thing. Where it’s just like, I might as well have it. It’s not how the movie’s intended to look, but it is worth it to have as like… something to point to. Like, hey, this movie was making intentional choices here, right? But in Part Two, we only use the DV signal, and then in Part Three, it’s a mix of that old RCA process, and then certain key scenes use the raw DV signal. Now, what that causes is you either have footage that is exceptionally grainy, which comes through the DV signal, or you get that very blocky footage that comes through the RCA. So, you know, my degree is in film semiotics, I’m always thinking about the relationship between the apparatus and the viewer. So, in my head, it’s a very intentional distancing factor where when you see a clearer image in this movie, it’s meant to draw you in closer. Whereas whenever Michaela’s on screen, I’m always making choices that are trying to create some degree of humiliation and distance between her and the audience. So, any shot of her is always going to be with that crummy RCA signal, you know? Unless, then if it doesn’t, then you have a reason for why it’s being changed, you know? 

J: That’s fascinating. Was this always your plan? Did you play with any other looks or styles? Did you consider shooting it any other way? Or was this always going to be? 

L: No, we just started on this and this is how it’s been. I mean, there is a mix of footage in Part Four, which we’ve been shooting exceptionally slowly. Part four uses both of those processes with a hi8. We also shot on 16 millimeter film. We also, probably the worst looking footage in the movie is, we used a capture box with a PD-150, and that looks real crazy. And so, at least from my perspective, it works really well to use a great deal of different styles in a movie like this just because I have the freedom to. And I’m always thinking about the way in which the medium is informing the emotional response to the content. So, switching to PD 150 footage or 16mm footage or whatever, has a very strong artistic through line for me. 

J: Can I ask more about your touchstones and inspirations for digital video? Obviously, you talked about home movies, early internet stuff. Do you think about Inland Empire and films like that? 

L: Like less so. Inland Empire, 28 Days Later, these movies that shot on DV in the early 2000s are kind of what told me that I could go pick up a camera. Inland Empire had a huge effect on me as a kid. I mean, actually, if anyone wanted to dig hard enough with my dead name, they’ll find my Inland Empire homage shot on DV tape that I did at like summer camp back in like, 2009 or 2008 or something. 

But I think that for me, in terms of the way that this process is overly complicated and stupid looks towards two things: one of them is Von Trier’s process for Breaking the Waves - he shot that movie on 16mm and then converted it to video and then back to film. And that’s a stupid too-many-steps thing that doesn’t make any sense, but makes the movie look transcendently beautiful in a way that no other movie looks. That’s unbelievable to me. And then, also his mix of different shitty camera formats in Dance from the Dark, where for the musical numbers, to shoot on consumer grade video cameras as opposed to the PD-150 on everything else. I think there’s some genius stuff there. 

And then from there, one of the other early touchstones for me, in terms of stupid processes, is, I remember the first time I ever saw the film Begotten, Elias Merhige’s film. It was on Google Video, because it was a notoriously hard film to track down, so I watched it heavily compressed and fucked up on Google Video, and all the faces and shapes become this beautiful haunting horror imagery. And then, one of my buddies was like, yeah, no, I saw that projected on his film prints and the original version of that movie looks like a Bergman film, but it had gone through so many processes of degradation from the way he originally shot it, so that he rescanned everything, re-photographing all the frames. Then it ends up on VHS, which was the only official release of the movie. Then the VHS ends up on Google Video. There’s a huge string of insane processes that would then end up with the final imagery looking so amazing and beautiful. 

And you know, it’s so funny because one of my friends, the horror novelist named Perry Ruhland and I would talk about this stuff all the time back in the late 2010s, early 2020s when he had made a film called Sungazer, which was a similar process. It was like with Begotten, if you shot it on Super8, then, added a digital grain to it. And I just went through all these processes, just to try to add as much texture to the footage as possible. That was one of the things, when I worked as a director of photography, that he and I would talk about because, for me, it was always about finding ways to increase the texture of digital video. Like, if I was shooting on a Red cinema camera, it’d be like, how do I add texture to this image in a way that adds beauty to it as opposed to takes it away. Because that texture is just so affordant. And I think that adding a bunch of stupid processes can be really cool. 

One of my films that I did with my ex, Dionne Copland was called Haxx Deadroom, and it was this fun, goofy, cyberpunk homage that was supposed to feel like a TV episode from the late 90s of a show like Are You Afraid of the Dark or Goosebumps or whatever. And the film did not work in 4K, like fucking shot on red…but then I converted it to VHS and then ripped it back out, using the same little Roxio converter. And then that version, that’s like a 240p, super crunchy rip, like posted to YouTube…I even recorded the tape over another TV show tape so that it would have the commercial breaks and stuff in it. So it just felt like it was actually recorded off of TV in the early 2000s. And that was suddenly what made that movie work. So I think that it says a lot, just, how the texture of analog video or early digital video can just add so much to a film that might not be working otherwise.

J: How does nostalgia play into that versus just like, how it’s playing sensorially with us? Like, where do you think the trade-off is there? 

L: I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I think nostalgia’s an easy shorthand. But no, I think what it has to do with is the way contemporary video works with the fact that everyone has a cellphone. There’s a hyperreality to the fact that we’re always all being recorded. Real life almost feels reflected in the images on our phones of modern iPhone photography. That’s why a movie like 28 Years Later feels so future-forward to me because by shooting on iPhone, they’re emulating the aesthetic that we’re seeing every day online. A lot of movies that are shot digitally feel very flat. Like I kind of hate the color palettes of, you know, there’s a house A24 style that we see across a lot of the indie film landscape. And there’s a hyper-reality or, maybe not hyper reality, but there’s an aesthetic to it that feels less real because…it doesn’t reflect the iPhone stuff, like you’re recreating with 28 Years Later. It feels like it’s in this third space that feels just disconnected in a way that I think limits your empathy to the images on screen. Because it kind of looks like nothing in a way. Whereas we are trained on the fact that motion picture film is what a movie looks like. 

And then, the thing about digital video is…just because it’s linked to a place in time its less a nostalgia for it and more so, oh, this has a history to it where I can understand it within the context. There’s a connection to it. I mean, specifically, with the hi8 VHS or DV stuff, it’s also home video. And home video is an aesthetic that I think is less linked to nostalgia and more to just that there’s a temporal limitlessness to it that allows it to always exist in the zeitgeist. I can shoot a movie like Castration Movie on home video, and it can be hyper contemporary, it’s set here and now, but it still lends itself the realism that you get out of, you know, Dad’s barbecue 1997. There’s a timeless quality. And I think that that’s the problem with everything that was post the RED cameras and Alexas…there’s a stagnancy in how far they can improve with, oh, now they’re 8K or whatever. It’s like, no, no, no, we’ve totally lost the plot. Like an original RED camera that had its fuck ups and limitations still had texture, still looked real, but, this elimination of grain, this elimination of texture, it’s like movies are looking more and more like AI. Like, they look artificial or something. We’re losing the imperfections that are the driving force of something feeling real and handmade. 

J: Talking about digital video being grounded in a history makes me also think about digital video as being the look of archival footage - a lot of archival film that we see right now is digital video. We’ve had Liz’s EZTV screenings here in New York, which have been really fun. Do you think that that history also plays into why digital video feels the way that it does?

L: Yeah, no, 100%. I mean I think that digital video is the place of, with the ETV stuff, its the place of DIY, right? It was the democratization of the tools to do this stuff. I mean, film was always accessible in some sense. Like, you could go shoot a movie on Super 8, many kids back in the day did so. But why digital video is so liberating is that it decreases the amount of time required to get things right, where you don’t need to really do lighting, you can see the work right through the viewfinder and know what you’re getting. You could shoot it to VHS and take it back to your house and edit it right away. In the same way that Polaroids are the pervert’s photography, digital video is the pervert’s cinematography. You don’t have to worry… you read stories about queer pornos…like, oh, I went and shot all this cool footage. And then someone at the lab trashed it. Like that was my worst fear. I shot this one scene for Castration Movie that’s me taking scissors to my ball sack in close up that we shot on 16mm film. And then I had to package that footage up, send it to a lab, and you know, trust them, that these guys are going to look at that and go like, oh, yeah, I don’t have a moral objection to the existence of this, I’ll send it back. That’s an insane thought. I was thinking about these porno producers in the 70s and how you have to kind of just find the cool lab who’s going to turn an eye to allowing you to do your obscene shit. And digital video, I think, in the same way as Polaroids just have a seedy quality to them, I feel like digital video has that same thing of like, oh yeah, it’s what you shoot sex tapes on. That’s where the driving force behind this is. That’s why I think the EZTV stuff’s so fascinating. There’s something so beautifully sleazy about digital video, when I’m going around with my hi8 camcorder. We were shooting some stuff that’s just outright pornographic for Castration Movie and to me, shooting it with the digital camera just makes it feel so safe and cozy and intimate, in a way that definitely feels like it’s tapping into that history.

J: You were talking about censorship at the film lab, with someone just trashing your footage. But we see that now on the other end in terms of distribution and how you actually get a movie like this out places. What has been your process with that? I mean, obviously you’re independently distributing it, but did you ever think about trying to go somewhere else?

L: Well, that’s the funniest thing, right? So as I said before, I had no clue that anyone would care to watch this movie. So I was like, alright, well, I’m just going to release it direct online. I’m very unpretentious in terms of, I don’t really think that festivals are the be all end all. I always said for years, if you put a good movie out, audiences will find it, and that was definitely the case for Castration Movie where I just dropped it online and then word of mouth spread. Obviously, everyone can’t do that. I already had a little bit of an audience because I’ve been working in film for 15 years. and also had friends who were film critics and were willing to share it and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of factors in place for that. 

But in terms of the question about censorship, it is such a weird, precarious time right now where we just released the trailer for Part Two, and it immediately got struck from YouTube for being too explicit. And we had even censored out the nudity. So I had the video taken down, I had to appeal the decision and say, hey, this is artistic. You shouldn’t take this down, and the trailer got put back up, but the way that an algorithm is striking it immediately is crazy. One of the scariest things that happened was my Gumroad account got locked at one point, because the movies were considered pornography. And I had to write them and say, hey, you can’t take this down, because this is an important film and go fuck yourself. Having grown up on an internet where that was just where you went to see fucked up shitty pornography, it was weird to be like, oh, someone’s gonna take my work down, even when I put it up on a free site or something like that. That’s fucking bizarre. And I don’t know where things are gonna go from here for work like mine. At least my thing’s really small, so it’s flying under the radar of pavement processors and stuff, but is there going to be a point where Stripe is like, oh, sorry, we’re not going to put up with this tranny shit that has un-simulated sex in it? It’s definitely possible.

I mean, the thing is they can’t censor me selling tapes of my movies. I can still mail shit. I mean, the funny thing is, going between countries that’s also a bit of a crapshoot. Like, I remember I ordered a copy of In the Realm of the Senses which was banned in my province in Canada when I was a teenager, and the disc got destroyed. My ex fiance, I remember her working in a video store and this fucking goon from the government in 2019 or whatever, coming in to the video store she worked at and then actually standing there, opening up pornography and destroying the discs in the middle of the store. Because it was not allowed for sale or whatever. This shit is still so prominent. It is absolutely ridiculous. At the very least, I grew up at a time where we could share stuff through torrents, and at the very least, I can throw my shit up on the dark web. I don’t give a fuck. We will keep the work going. The internet will always persist. As a matter of fact, all the censorship might cause everyone to go off of these major sites that have taken over everything and we’ll end up with more underground stuff. My worst fear is just everyone moving over to discord or stuff that’s already owned by major corporations. I was a kid who was on weird web forums and 4chan and something awful and shit. So I prefer one megalomaniac over a weird corporate megalomaniac, you know? But, yeah, I think that we’ll persist in whatever capacity we need to. And if I have to just go and trade tapes at trans meetups, that’s fine too.