Interview: Bret Roberts (Appetites)

Bret Roberts is the definition of multi-talented. Roberts is an actor (“Night Stalker,” “May,”), musician and a painter. He is on Instagram under bretroberts_paint_music He stars alongside the equally talented Lauren Parkinson in the new film “Appetites” available on DVD, August 4^th. Roberts spoke to me for a Horrornews.net exclusive.

How did you prepare to play John Doe in “Appetites?”

I basically looked at that character and I said wow this guys like the most despicable, terrible person that could ever walk the face of the earth. This ego maniac who thinks he’s so cool and he kills people and thinks he’s cool for doing that and I was like he is the worst person ever. But then you know he sort of meets his match in this movie and I kind of figured it out that this movie is really about love. It is about when you are a little bit different and you meet someone who’s a little bit different too and you kind of can’t help but fall in love.

I just fell in love in real life a couple years ago and I had a real hands on experience with meeting my match. My girlfriend doesn’t eat people but she is definitely real interesting and really funny and amazing and all the things that I try to be. She’s a great dancer, anything I do. I speak a couple languages and she speaks five languages. So it was kind of like okay this guy kills people but the girl she eats people. The other thing is that she really doesn’t fall for his one-liners. She’s just like get outta my face. How does anybody really catch each other’s eyes these day? So I had to make a guy who thinks he’s so cool fall flat on his face and then can’t help but feel something for the first time and I felt like if I could make him feel something then maybe if someone watched it they might feel something too.

What was it like working with Cameron Casey and Lauren Parkinson?

Cameron Casey is really fun to work with. He is a pro on set and he’s done a lot of work in Hollywood. All kinds of work and some of the biggest music videos you’ve ever seen have been directed by him so he really knows his way around set. I just recorded a bunch of songs over in Paris and it sort of made sense that Cameron wanted to put my songs in the movie. Cameron was great. I loved working with Cameron to point of where I was approached for another movie called “The Face of Jace” to play the lead role and I asked Cameron to come and direct the film which is a comedy that we are hopefully going to make this summer. To speak about Lauren, Lauren is a very interesting person. Her story is pretty wild about how she came to L.A. and became an actor and all that stuff. I’ll let her tell it to you but she’s got a great story and she has this laugh, it basically turns heads all the time. You have this beautiful girl with this crazy laugh. She is really funny, she is almost like a Jim Carrey type. She is like Jim Carrey stuck into this super babe. She is very different and she does a lot of theatre. She is very capable and it was fun to work with her, trying to pump up the chemistry and trying to sell that love story.

What about your music and what are you working on next?

The idea was to put this movie out and then release the soundtrack. We are hoping to release these songs as the “Appetites” soundtrack and then if that doesn’t happen those songs will be re-recorded and put onto my first solo album that I have been writing the last three years. So musically I have written thirsty songs in the last three years and I am sort of trying to figure out with some intelligent minds on how to put those out. I produced a movie last year called “The Alcoholist,” it’s an Italian script, an Italian filmmaker who I found working in Italy and he hired me for his first film “The Perfect Husband” a few years ago which was a really great film starring Gabriella Wright and myself. Then basically we had such a good time he told me about his film “The Alcoholist,” so I helped him translate it from Italian to English and then we brought the budget, him, the cinematographer and seven other great Italian crew bought them over to America, hired a bunch of American crew too and shot it in Buffalo, NY at Niagara Falls. “The Alcoholist” is another super indie but I think it’s a pretty powerful drama but it also has some fun to it. It really kind of gets into the mind of a really rough alcoholic that I play. He gets mixed up with Gabrielle Wright’s character who is a Alcoholics anonyms type of volunteer who is sort of in it for all the wrong reasons.

The reasons she is helping is that she has her own issues with alcoholism. It sort of shows the human error in the therapy for alcoholism. I think this movie has a chance to help some people and so that’s why I made it. It also has a very strong statement about violence and I think violence is the number one problem, war in this world and violence that’s happening weekly in America. It is something they really need to stop. If we need to stop movies from being violent and video games, we should do it. Whatever we can do. “The Alcoholist” I think it will touch some people so I hope you all get to see it.

Bret will be posting his paintings, some news about music when it is coming out and when I am playing live shows around the Country. And James Jewell he is from Reading, Pa and he recorded the songs for Bret and he played some of the instruments.

BRET ROBERTS IMDB http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0730888/