Thank you for accepting the interview! Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers?
I am Robert Rowland and I am the Producer and one of the writers for Girls Guns and Blood. I have made indie movies for 15 years on and off and this was the movie I always wanted to make.
When, and how, is born the idea for Girls, Guns and Blood?
GGB came to be because I have always wanted to make a B movie. I had many different ideas in mind when this one came about. It really came all together when I had Christine come to Houston to do a trailer for a horror movie we plan on doing in the future called Brackish Waters. That is a legit film and you can see the trailer on our Youtube Channel. Had known Christine for about 8 years and promised I would use her someday and in 2017 that day came. She came in and we got lucky and got a hold of some local stunt guys that came out for us also. It just dawned on me to use the stunt guys and Christine and other really attractive women and make a action comedy. I got a hold of Jeff that I have been trying to work with for about 12 years and finally we got to put this together. He wrote the concept of the brothel and the phones as trackers. I looked at it and went this is really good, but I wanted to put my touch on it. My touch on it was to make it as bad as humanly possibly. I mean I rewrote it to make it the most ridiculous, offensive thing I could think of. It flowed pretty freely and then I sent it back to Jeff. We did some small adjustments. I got the director Thegin and he wrote some of the funniest lines in the movie and we were off and running. I had the money. It was not a whole lot and we worked every deal we could to make it happen. In 6 months we were filming, but the movie was written to be done quickly so we knocked out principle in 5 and a half days and one pick up day for the Cherie Deville scene. There are defiantly flaws in the final product, but we had to shoot a scene every 15 minutes and with the fight scenes we had to make it work. We did and again it was written to be able to have mistakes. This is not Shakespeare.
I have hundreds of stories on this shoot and most of them are funny, but I could not be more happy with the final product. I get it. This movie is not for most people and it was not meant to be. I am a firm believer that if you dont do something rememberable in a movie then you have just wasted your time. The golden waterboard and the tree scene to me are both so offensive that I think everyone will tell a friend about those scenes and if you tell a friend about a scene in a movie, either good or bad, then the filmmaker has done their job. If you can get a reaction from people then that is why I think you make movies. The worst thing you can do is ask a person about a movie and they go it was ok and not be able to tell you one particular thing about it. I worked at a movie theater chain and I have seen many of those movies. So again love or hate this movie you will remember it. It makes me laugh every time just because it is so wrong and that is what makes it so right.
The movie’s cast sees a large presence of actresses from the hardcore industry, or from the softcore genre, such as Christine Nguyen. Why this choice?
Casting on this was difficult. Christine was a ton of help on this. I had her and she got Karlie Montana to play a role. We were going to shoot in December in Texas and in late October we were still looking. We settled on a few unknown actresses, not from porn or softcore, that were willing to do sexy scenes, not necessarily nudity that came on board. Then in late October Karlie (more power to. her) decided to get out of the acting business and backed out so at this point we had all brunettes cast. Against advice given to me, I wanted to get adult actress to replace her and play another small role we had. I personally think adult actresses are a untapped commodity in acting in mainstream films. They can act. Not all of them, but if you can find them. I dont think so much it is they can’t act, I just think the scripts and the acting they are told to do is bad. Trust me we even asked them to do some bad acting in this movie just for comedy sake, but they kicked ass.
So I started looking and was not responded to by a few managers and actresses. I dont blame then as I know I probably came off as a stalker. I came across Britney Amber from a Showtime late night movie she was in. It was one of those hard core movies that they turn into soft core for Showtime. She showed some acting chops and of course would get naked. I emailed her manager. Of course he replied that she was not interested. I emailed him back to give me a second chance as of course I know he thought I was just some creep. I sent him the script, told him what it paid and she agreed to come read for the role. So I was fine with one adult star and I had my blonde. Turns out Britney shoots a bow in competitions and her character Trix also shoots a bow. She was on board after she did a great read.
We were three weeks away from shooting when Britney came on board and the manager offered Kleio for the small role and I jumped at it. Two of the actresses that are still trying to be actresses backed out for a couple of reasons including that their managers now would not let them work with adult actresses even though we already had them when they signed on. I took it as a blessing, so Kleio sent me a tape to take over the bigger role of Berretta and she could not have been better. She is so great in the movie and so happy we moved her to that.
Cody came in for a read. She applied with over a 150 others, but I had a feeling on her and I told Christine that if she shows to the read then she will get the role. She showed up on her Harley and did good on the first read. She posted something on facebook saying she could do better and I followed up with her to do it again. She did, even though I was still going to give it to her, and that showed me I could rely on her and hired her in a heart beat. You can now see Cody in the El Camino: Breaking Bad Movie. She is going places and deserves every role she gets. I think she is also in the Weedies that comes out on Full Moon Streaming Channel soon.
Rebecca was not part of the original cast. In fact she was not part of the cast when we started shooting. We had Stormy Daniels to play the role of Monique. We were so excited and pleased to have Stormy. This was before the Trump stuff by about a month, but the director and I knew Stormy was big time and we felt so lucky to have her. Stormy was supposed to start filming on day 4 and the next three days were mostly her. Well after we did 14 hours on day 3 we all went to a bar. I.leaned over to the director and told him the only that can fuck us now if Stormy not showing. So 5 minutes went by and Stormy texted she could not make it for some reason. I didn’t respond or freak out. I told everybody at the table and after about 1 minute of silence everybody started throwing out ideas and Christine got on the phone. Rebeccas was one of her first calls and the first one to respond. We had Rebecca on a flight the next morning. We sent to set the next morning not knowing what we were doing. We rewrote some shit and started filming. Rebecca got there at 4 pm. She had never punched anyone before so our stunt guys worked with her asap and we were filming her punching and throwing dudes around and we kept going. We got lucky to get her and even more lucky that she was perfect for the role and did great. Plus she could not be a better person.
What can I say about Christine? She made this movie happen. She was my rock. She helped through the whole process. I was always confident having her as she has a ton of talent. She really has no limits on the types of roles she can get. She was part of this from the get go and look forward to working with her again. I would say more, but again she is not just a actress to me, she is my friend. Well they are all of my friends and I would do anything for any of them, but Christine and I have gone through the ringer together and she is cool in my books.
Can you tell us some nice anecdotes about the making of the movie?
There are a lot of great stories while filming this and the whole cast a crew laughed the whole time as lets face it there are a lot of things in this movie that are just funny and not PC. Here are a couple.
Britney actually thought she was going to pee on the guy herself in the golden waterboard scene. We told her we had green tea for that and she did not have to drink a bunch of water before the scene. It was 50 degrees for most of the shoot, so the ladies were always cold, but they did not show it.
Klieo actually connected on the punch to the guy before they water did the waterboard part. She almost broke his nose. He shook it off and we continued shooting after a couple of minutes. We used that take in the movie.
Rebecca was surprised we never showed her tits in the movie. Britney actually shot the arrow into the tree for the first chase scene of the bad guys. That is all I can think of for now, but there are tons.
What are the main contaminations of this film? What inspired you?
Not sure what you mean by contaminations, but I can say there are to many continuity mistakes in this movie. I could make a drinking game of it and everyone would get wasted. My inspiration is just I like to make movies. I do what entertains me and if others like it then great. There are going to be many people that hate this movie, but I like it and that is good enough for me. Other than that I wanted to make a really good, bad movie and I am proud of this one.
What challenges did you have to overcome while working on this movie?
Money is always first, but this one was pretty easy since I put up a lot of it. Time constraint. We had 6 days to pull it off and we did. Casting of course was the most stressful, but could not be happier or more proud of the cast top to bottom. The thing is that I have a great team I work with and try to work with them every time and if you surround yourself with great people you trust then you cannot fail. It is a team effort and everyone pulled their weight. As a producer my proudest moment was on day 4 when the AD told me to go away and they had this thing under control. It was bittersweet to here that, but boy I was proud of them.
One of the writers, Jeff O’Brien, has previously worked on the softcore genre with Bikini Girls form Lost Planet and Ghost in a Teeny Bikini, two classics with Christine Nguyen and Rebecca Love, two actresses in this film. Looking at the experience with Girls, Guns and Blood, would it be possible to revive the softcore genre by drawing on what you did? Currently, the softcore genre is practically dead. What do you think about it?
Jeff is great and we will write again in the future. I dont think soft core will ever die, but yes it is becoming more irrelevant. I dont want to make soft core. I’m not into making 10 minute sex scenes and do 3 minutes of story every 15 minutes. That is just me. It is not to say I did not watch a lot of growing up, and it served a purpose. It still does a little. I will make more sexy movies with nudity, but it just has to have more than simulated sex as the draw. I think it would be good if someone came up with a streaming channel that just got the rights to all of those types of movies and made it available like a Netflix where you pay a monthly fee. I think that could work and if it gets enough subscribers then you could do original content, but until someone does that then I dont see a big future for it. If I had the money to start that channel I would do it.
The ending of Girls, Guns and Blood leaves a small door open for a possible sequel. Is it something possible?
Yes in the credits we set up for a sequel. I already have a couple of ideas for it, but it has to financially viable and right now it is not. Hopefully enough people will buy or rent or even watch GGB on Amazon Prime Video to make that happen. It is free for Prime subscribers, but it would take a lot of people to make that happen. Again the script is pretty much written.
Future projects?
I am working on a few projects right now. They are nothing like GGB. They are not B movies. One is the Cottages that is a web series that we will put up on Amazon soon enough. We are in middle of filming a horror movie that has done great in script competitions. It is really good, but it has zero nudity. It is truly mainstream.
Thanks for having me. Hopefully there are not to many typos and hopefully not to long. I appreciate all of your support since we started this in 2017. I will keep informed with anything else we do and again thank you.