“That’s Bordering on the Insane”: Michael M. Bilandic and Abel Ferrara Shoot the Shit

“Everyone in the world is an artist. It’s up to me to pull that out of them.” Have you tried the Jackman Method? In Michael M. Bilandic’s new feature Cabaret Boys, which premiered at the Downtown Festival last week, a therapist of the most eccentric and fruity kind has devised a pretty peculiar philosophy for fixing people. Operating out of his lavish Manhattan home and sporting an endless rotation of batshit outfits, Jackman has made it his life’s work to turn troubled, oddball young men into outsider artists. Things get complicated when a former patient returns and is tapped to headline Jackman’s first-ever cabaret night. Bilandic kept things pretty close to home for this one, filming at some of his favorite NYC haunts, including KGB (where you can catch him nearly any Sunday night), Bacaro, and The Odeon. He also cast a pretty long list of friends and collaborators, all the way from Owen Kline (who collaborated on the story), Talia Ryder, Miles Emanuel, Larry Clark, Dean Kissick, Andrew Norman Wilson, and Adam Friedland, among many, many others. To discuss how he brought Jackman and his whacko world to life, he got on the phone with his longtime friend and collaborator Abel Ferrara, who also co-stars. They also get to talking about billionaires, the size of Chris Penn’s hands, and letting real cops play cops.

WEDNESDAY 3 PM OCTOBER 7, 2026 NEW YORK CITY

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MICHAEL BILANDIC: What’s up?

ABEL FERRARA: I mean, you’re up. What’s happening?

BILANDIC: I just picked up the DCP an hour ago, tested it out and it looks great. I was expecting it to be upside down and black and white so we’d have to do it 10 more times until the screening, but it feels good.

FERRARA: Did Sean [Price Williams] see it?

BILANDIC: He did the color grade for it, but the first time he’ll see it will be at the premiere.

FERRARA: The premieres at the Downtown Festival and The Roxy, right?

BILANDIC: Yeah. It’s exactly a year since we shot the scene with you. I like this idea of filming something at a venue and then they have to play it, like when we did The Projectionist at Cinema Village and then it played at Cinema Village. Joe Delia is going to come down, I’m pretty sure.

FERRARA: Oh, really?

BILANDIC: I’m excited. Last time I saw you, you said you were going to perform with him at a wrestling event?

FERRARA: Oh yeah, right.

BILANDIC: What was that like?

FERRARA: That was crazy. In between these guys wrestling and all this fucking insanity, we performed in the ring. It was good, because then my boy Mike Vinas came down, one of the guys that I first started making films with in the original band.

BILANDIC: You said “Pet Sematary” was a challenging song to perform. Did you guys wind up doing it?

FERRARA: No, I did “Pet Sematary” with an Italian band that wore masks and looked like wrestlers.

BILANDIC: Got it. And that was the gateway to doing more wrestling?

FERRARA: He explained it to me. In other words, “It’d be like a fun house.” You walk into a fucking thing and then chicks or a guy comes running at you with a drill, and then you go into another room, and there’s characters from fucking King of New York.

BILANDIC: This might be the future of exhibition.

FERRARA: I told him, “Yeah, I would do that. If it was about scaring the shit out of people, that would be great.” [Laughs] I said, “But you saw characters out of our films? The audience would start shooting back. We got to make sure the people we attract don’t turn around and kill the fucking actors.”

BILANDIC: Yeah. Working with Joe was really great because we had to shoot this big cabaret scene at the end of the movie, where the protagonist goes to KGB to sing “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”, but we didn’t have a pianist until a day or two before. I called him up and he was like, “Of course I’ll do it. I love improvising along to chaos.” He said The Funeral was one of his favorite things—the Chris Penn song in the bar. What was that like?

FERRARA: It was insane, because we had to write our own song. I had a song but couldn’t get it right. During lunchtime is when inspiration came to me. A little late, but at least it came. So I’m writing it, and Chris Penn—first of all, he’s the size of two people. His hand is the size of two people. His hand comes crashing down on me going, “Don’t you dare change that song.” Then he starts going, “My mother…” Because his mother was a painter, but his mother, I think, ended up in a mental institution. But he’s going, “My mother did this to me. She’d paint the most beautiful paintings and then ruin them and change them. Don’t dare change it. I’ll kill you.”

BILANDIC: Half the fun is discovery.

FERRARA: He liked the song the way it was, and he belted the fucking thing out, and it was great. Then we were in a club in Harlem one of the last days of shooting, and I heard screaming outside. I thought there was a riot, but it was the day OJ got acquitted.

BILANDIC: Whoa.

FERRARA: You can imagine, a white film crew in the middle of this thing. And Penn was one of these guys who would just disappear. People would say, “Don’t leave him for a second,” because he’d just be gone. I had enough of this, because I’d been through hell with this guy. He won the Venice Film Festival for the performance, but it was torture on my side. We had a bar full of people and I’m walking all over screaming at this kid going, “Why’d you let him go? He was right next to me.” And he has some old wino and he’s going, “Hey man, you got to put him in a movie.” I said, “Come on, Chris.”

BILANDIC: Now everyone tracks their friends “Find My Friends.” This is the first time I made a movie where that was a thing.

FERRARA: But they got to allow you to know that, right?

BILANDIC:Of course. Which everyone does now, and I would never do.

FERRARA: So what’s the movie scene? What’s the vibe, man?

BILANDIC: It’s always the same old shit making these things, so much work. It’s super exciting, but I also can’t wait to just go back to writing articles again for a while. That’s mostly what I did between the last one and this one. It scratches a lot of the same itches of finding a character, a story, editing it. You just wrote a book. I’m curious how you feel that process has affected how you want to work now.

FERRARA: I never want to do it again. It’s like Norman Mailer says, “Going back to writing after directing a film is like going back to the farm after you’ve seen Paris.” It’s such a lonely fucking existence. A book, at the end process, becomes totally cinematic. It’s an editing process. And with a film, you’re in the editing room with just the editor going over every beat, every line, the color.

BILANDIC: It’s so unbelievably similar.

FERRARA: Yeah. That’s why I like to keep the movie short, because I think of these guys with their three-hour movies. Every time you check the effects, you gotta go through 15 fucking reels of film. Come on.

BILANDIC: I remember back when I was making Happy Life, I asked you for advice and you said, “You should shoot near your house.” The other advice was, “You should shoot with two cameras.” But I wound up not shooting with two cameras up until this movie. I feel like I’ve been an idiot for the last 15 years. But then I wound up with a three-and-a-half-hour rough cut, which is something that had also never happened before.

FERRARA: How long is the movie?

BILANDIC: It’s 90 minutes now.

FERRARA: That’s cool. There were two cameras in the shoot we had in that bar?

BILANDIC: We had to be a little more low key in that situation, to not accidentally bump into any VIPs. You want to shoot with two cameras all the time?

FERRARA: I would never not shoot with two cameras. First of all, we’re improvising the take, so how are you going to do take two on the other actor? It’s impossible. The argument about the two cameras is you can only light one side. But I think that’s all bullshit.

BILANDIC: When you’re not lighting, it’s not a problem.

FERRARA: Yeah, no, we’re lighting. I mean, he’s lighting. Sean is lighting it, but he’s lighting a room. In other words, we’re finding an environment that works 360. When I think of how we used to do it or how they do it, they go to a location, either black out the windows, change all the lights, move all this shit around. What’s the point of the location?

BILANDIC: And the light is two blocks away.

FERRARA: I mean, I get it. It gives everybody a job. It gives the rental company something to rent. It gives the van rental guys a fucking gig. It allows everybody’s kids to go to school. But the point of picking a location is you like every-fucking-thing about it. I don’t know how we pulled it off, but they let us shoot in a police precinct. This is one of the cops that used to hang out at the bar on Mulberry Street. What’s his name? Marcello’s, right?

BILANDIC: Yeah.

FERRARA: He was an actor and a detective. They let us use the place. All those detective things you shoot are in a studio, right?

BILANDIC: I’ve had to shoot two police precincts, and I shot one of them at the Museum of the Moving Image at the front desk, and the other was at the office of another movie theatre. 

FERRARA: But this place was awesome because the fluorescent lights were so old, funky, and half of them were missing. But before I could remember to tell them not to do it, they got a crew there the day before to take all the fluorescents out and put brand new ones in. And I got there and I’m thinking, “What happened to our fucking gorgeous location, man?”

BILANDIC: What about Welcome to New York? There’s some good prison stuff in there.

FERRARA: Yeah, we went to the prison and we used the guards. I mean, we had actors standing there. Welcome to New York had the same cops that busted [Dominique] Strauss-Khan. They were the same fucking guys. The problem when you use the cops though is they start acting like the TV cops. It’s like The Sopranos, where all of a sudden the real mobsters start acting like the TV guys.

BILANDIC: But in real life that happens too. Everyone’s influenced by culture so much.

FERRARA: Yeah, no kidding. Frank [Vincent] and all those guys would talk about that show as if it was a real family in New Jersey. They’re fucking actors. But anyway, with our cops, I was saying, “Guys, you got to act like cops.”

BILANDIC: It’s so much more efficient. With this movie, we shot in all places that we know look cool, and we shot on all three floors of KGB. We even went to the restaurant with you, the real place. We don’t have the budget to recreate these things, and it looks better anyways.

FERRARA: That’s the point of these movies. I don’t watch my own movies, but when I do, I’m looking at the edges going, “Oh, wow, that building was abandoned,” or, “Wow, look at that car,” or, “Look at those people standing there.” All those movies they’ve made in New York, they are not movies. They’re not New York. They take all the cars out. If you’re in the business, you know this. If you watch 20 different movies made between 1980 and 1990 in New York, all the extras are the same. Butchie The Hat [Frank Aquilino] is in every movie somewhere walking across the street. Everybody’s directed in the background. You see something like Taxi Driver, there are crimes being committed. When he’s got those point of view shots out the car, there’s a guy getting mugged in the dark, way in the back.

BILANDIC: In the last shot of Bad Lieutenant, you have the Trump Casino sign, and he [the lieutenant] gets shot, and those are obviously not paid extras. That is exciting when you see stuff shot like that in the real world.

FERRARA: For sure. But then the cop came and said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t do this, man. You’re going to give somebody a heart attack.”

BILANDIC: On a side note, I just DJed a hotdog eating contest. The kid you acted in the scene with, David [Cardoza], organized it. It was for all the ushers and ticket takers at the repertory theaters in New York.

FERRARA: Were you in a contest?

BILANDIC: I just DJed, and then one person from each theater ate as many hotdogs as they could.

FERRARA: How many hotdogs does it take to win?

BILANDIC: The guy who won was from Spectacle and he ate 10 in 10 minutes, which I think is pretty good. I was thinking about that talent show night we used to do in SoHo.

FERRARA: At Rocco’s, right?

BILANDIC: Yeah. Do you have a bar in Rome? Did I hear that correctly?

FERRARA: Yeah. I got the same setup as Rocco’s, only it’s Chinese people.

BILANDIC: So you do shows and events there?

FERRARA: We play rock and roll, and there’s a band there. I found them because they do homage shows to David Lynch. They do the score outrageous, and then some chick comes out dressed like a Lynch character, and she sings “Blue Velvet.”

BILANDIC: This is the fun house concept.

FERRARA: Almost. So I just came back from Paris. The book came out there.

BILANDIC: Oh, nice. How was that?

FERRARA: You go to Paris and people read, first of all. So a book coming out is a big fucking deal. All they want to show whenever there’s a screening for me is Bad Lieutenant, or King of New York, which now I can’t stand either of those two movies. And they’re having fucking riots there, so I’m asking the cab driver, “What the fuck is going on here, man?” I’m seeing burning shit, kids freaking out. Nobody knew what was happening. And then at night, I went to the Saint Laurent show, which was the opposite of that. These kids are complaining they don’t have money for books. This is like a 25 million dollar—I’m not kidding—budget for 20 minutes of chicks walking. I was sitting next to Francis Coppola, who I kind of know, but I got to talk to him all night. But the biggest stars there were K-pop.

BILANDIC: Yeah.

FERRARA: This phenomenon? Forget it.

BILANDIC: The money that is spent on these shows blows my mind. 

FERRARA: It’s a joke. You can’t believe the place I stayed, how they flew me, how they moved me, how they gave me clothes. They give me everything just to be there. Then I switched to the book deal, and I barely got money for lunch.

BILANDIC: [Laughs] Yeah.

FERRARA: I don’t even know about the clothes. They’re basically selling handbags and shoes, but it’s high end. Enough people with a shitload of money are craving a fucking pocketbook that’s five to 10 times more expensive than anything you could buy. Then they’re burning down the rest of the city because they can’t afford books for the school. But meanwhile, the city let them shut streets off and re-light the Eiffel Tower. 

BILANDIC: Everyone got mad at U2 because they put their album on everyone’s iPhone. They should just put one of our Blu-rays in these bags and find some way to make a distribution model based on the bags.

FERRARA: No kidding. I’m here in Rome. Anne is like 11. My stepdaughter’s four. I’m like, “Who goes to fucking swimming lessons? Who gets to school?” I mean, I’m living a cool life, but in a million years I wouldn’t imagine that at my age I’m going to end up in this fucking—

BILANDIC: I can’t imagine. Everything about getting older blows my mind. I would not have expected anything that’s going on to be our reality.

FERRARA: Right. I was reading about the breaking records on billion-dollar houses because of the new influx of billionaires. It’s capitalism at its white-hot edge. You’re either sleeping in the street or you’re at the—

BILANDIC: That’s New York times infinity. They’re doing profiles in the New York Post on a homeless guy named Tiger who lives outside of Anna Wintour’s house. The homeless people in the neighborhood are like becoming micro celebrities. It’s a weird time.

FERRARA: To say the least. How’s New York going? This is the creative time in New York: October. In Italy, they call October the “Cashmere Month,” because everybody brings out their cashmere. 

BILANDIC: We’re peak cashmere right now.

FERRARA: So your club [KGB] is still happening, right? 

BILANDIC: We’ve been doing the same thing for 15 years. We’re still going there and watching stuff. But now there’s a new group of people that hang out. It’s crazy to still work with all the same people, and it’s really a privilege because it’s so fun to have the people you work with be your closest friends. So yeah, it’s going hard still and hopefully can level up more.

FERRARA: [Laughs] So we can make a living in it.

BILANDIC: It’s a crazy idea, but yeah.

FERRARA: That’s bordering on the insane asking that.

BILANDIC: Well, the last thing I’ll say is these things aren’t… Oh, you’re gone. All right.

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