Remember when there was a part 1 and 2 of this interview? Yeah, I didn’t until now. It’s no secret that things have been a little slack lately in the cogs of the JUICEBOXdotcom monstermachine. Somehow in the midst of moving (which reminds me, new mailing address!), a full technological breakdown, and the tribute night (when, ideally, the last part of the interview should have gone up), our humble website kind of fell by the wayside. At a time when we were getting the most hits. Man, are we ever smart business types.

Anyhow, we’re trying to get back on track now. We have a ton of backlogged stuff that we should have posted soon. Also wait with baited breath for a bit of a site re-haul to get rid of the crap we don’t really use (Box-o-vision? More like… I got nothing… but it’s useless). So good tings a-happening soontimes.

But more to the point, we saw Hugh and Bruce again this weekend while covering Fan Expo (they were promoting Durham County and Pontypool, respectively), which was as good a reminder as any that we should put the rest of this stuff up. And stop appearing everywhere they are for at least 1 year’s time.

FYI, Sam interviewed Hugh for Exclaim! post-tribute, so go look at that too. Outside of the posted interview, Hugh had this to say about HCL: “There’s so much fucking bad Canadian fucking bullshit that it’s great to have a few things that stand up year after year and mean something.”

Amen. And thanks to everyone who came out to the tribute. We’ll have a few pics up soon.

It’s been over 10 years since HCL. What is everyone up to now?
Well John Pyper-Ferguson, who plays John Oxenberger, lives in LA, as he has for many years, and he was on some show called Brothers and Sisters, some big American show. He continues to do stuff, writes music, he’s written a script called The Lounge Singer. So he’s pro-actor LA dude.

Bernie Coulson is in Vancouver and I think he’s just had a very successful rehab-turn-my-life-around kind of thing happen so things are looking good in Bernie camp. He was on that show Intelligence, I think. He also makes music and he’s got a heavy metal band that he plays drums for. Basically he’s full of goodness and excitement. He’s one of my favourite actors. He just goes through really intense times, like, “oh fuck, bernie’s gone off, no one knows where he is, he didn’t show up today.” It’s scary, you know, you want everybody to be good. It’s not so much John, but the other three, in a way, have all had their serious battles with addiction. But they’re winning. It’s not an easy thing.

Callum is in the X-Files movie and he’s in this series called Californication with David Duchovny. He plays a music producer in like 10 episodes, so he’s mid-swing in that.

And then our friend Hugh most recently is the hero of a cop sniper series called Flashpoint. It’s so weird seeing his face on fucking buses all the time. He’s another one who’s made an amazing transformation. Things were pretty fucking dodgy there for a time and then something happened and he decided, “Fuck it, I’m gonna totally change everything.” He quit the Headstones, and in a sense it was to save his life. He’s so crazy in that band, getting into all kinds of trouble, that someone or himself had to put the fear of god in him, like, “Next time you go on tour, you’re coming home in a box.” It’s that simple the way he’d been going. He either got scared, or he decided he wanted to live, or whatever. But it’s really impressive to see how he’s completely refocused his energies. He’s been studying acting and doing a lot of great stuff, top of his game right now. His turnaround and total embrace of another lifestyle is so radical and impressive that now Hugh’s like my older brother and I need to get my shit together.

Noel’s been writing a lot of screenplays, he has some big projects in the making and as I’ve come to realize, it can take anywhere from five to ten motherfucking years to land. It’s just unbelievable. So I think Noel’s waiting for the next one to hit, so he’s got a drawer full after that. Just crank ‘em out.

With Julian Richings, who plays Bucky Haight, it’s actually kind of great, we’ve been doing this series of one-hour portraits for the Independent Film Channel. And we’ve done the Cliques, we’ve done Die Mannequin, Brendan Canning from Broken Social Scene, we may do Metric next, and I pitched them that the narrator of the series should be Bucky Haight. So in all these episodes, he’s on camera as the walk-around expert. It was so awesome that one of the station executives thought he was a real guy at first, had no idea that he was this actor, or that he was in this film called Hard Core Logo. I sold the idea and Julian is having a really fun time channeling Bucky. People are like, “Man, I thought that was the guy from Hard Core Logo… I thought that was a made up movie, what’s going on?” And Julian was in Tracey Fragments too. Any chance I get to put these guys in something, I’ll do it. Whether it’s Hugh Dillon as the child-beating dad on Degrassi, we’ll pull them in to get my buddies work. In return, Hugh has invited me to play guitar with him at the Mod Club and CBGBs, and we opened for the Hip, so Hugh gives me my rock ‘n’ roll street cred and I give him paycheques from acting gigs.

Speaking of paycheques, what’s all this about Hard Core Logo 2?
Well, these ideas have been bubbling for four or five years. For Hugh and I, it’s our make-work project. There are a couple of scripts actually. Like David Griffith, who was the story editor on the first movie, has one we call Hard Core Solo. It’s Joe Dick returning from the dead, so to speak, and doing a solo tour of the UK and recording a solo album with Bucky Haight in a Scottish castle. Pretty great. It’s mostly Joe Dick’s story, the filmmaker’s story, so Bruce the filmmaker plays a pretty big part in that. And Bucky. With cameo appearances by Billy Talent and Pipefitter.

There’s another script that’s just first draft and it’s by a fantastic writer Daniel McIver, mostly known as a playwriter and director. I’d sent him My Dinner with Andre and said, “Dude, I love this movie. Do you think you could write My Dinner with Joe and Billy?” So he kind of riffed off that notion and created this Cassavettes two-guys-out-on-the -own kind of thing between Joe and Billy.

And this other guy, Paul Spence, one of the writers on Fubar, has written the treatment about the daughters of the guys, a high school teenage girl rocker movie. We’re thinking fucking Saw grinds them out, why can’t we do that? Become a moneymaking Canadian rock ‘n’ roll franchise. Why the fuck not? Make ‘em for a million bucks or whatever and it’s a way to work with your friends. But we want the scripts and the projects to be great, and we’ve spent a lot of time knocking ideas around. So they won’t be Hard Core Logo, but there may be this little tracer of continuity. Just something to sort of amuse ourselves. And if we can pull it off, we’ll have some fun with it. The one thing about Hugh becoming a bigger and bigger star is that he’ll bring financing to our little franchise, and as long as we can fit it around his busy schedule, we’ll see if we can start getting them together.

Back to this little tribute night, has something like this ever happened before with the film?
Not that I know of. I mean, i know people like to watch the movie and get high, and maybe other bands have covered some of these songs. But this is just a fun idea. It’s entering that realm of Rocky Horror Picture Show or Dark Side of Oz where you have this film/music component that alternates, this alternating current that’s just neat.

Have you ever been to the Revue before?
Oh yeah, I’m a big fan of the Revue, I used to go there fucking all the time. Not lately because we’ve got a movie theatre next door -– The Royal –- we’re doing our work there. But no, I love the Revue. I’ve seen many, many, many movies there. It’s good to see movie theatres becoming more like the good old days, like vaudeville. You have a performance, a movie, some strippers maybe, whatever.

Do you think we should get strippers for the Hard Core Logo night?
I totally think so. I just made a note to self.