Interview: Ruby Larocca

Ruby Larocca has a lot to say, I found this out pretty quickly after meeting her at the most recent Famous Monsters convention in Indianapolis at the beginning of July. She is a woman who has been in the genre for many years from working with Misty Mundae and William Hellfire in the films put out by Factory 2000 to roles in films done by Seduction Cinema.

 She has starred in such films as The Devil’s Bloody Playthings, Flesh for the Beast and Lust for Addiction. Most recently Ruby can be seen on the DVD release of Shock Festival in the mock trailer for They Made Me. The ever busy Ruby Larocca also works with her own production company and is set to be a strong voice in the future of independent genre cinema. Intelligent and smart Ruby is the kind of girl that instantly becomes one of your friends when you speak to her and I was recently able to get to talk with her about some of her current projects and some other topics:

When someone goes onto your IMDB site these days you seem kind of busy, what current projects are you involved in?I love it because I am so busy I guess I should say first and foremost that I do have a production company with three of my friends that we are currently in the middle of shooting our first feature and we are shooting it on 16 mm and its expensive and we are funding it ourselves, it started last November and it should be finished by this November so between working on that there’s also been other shorts and music videos…all kinds of stuff. This summer I was in Zombie Babies which just got shot this last month by director Eamon Hardiman and Razor-sharp studios in West Virginia.

 We were in this small town which was totally creepy, but for me it was creepy in a fun way. There was a tiny little main street and 75 percent of the stores were closed…totally bizarre. We were shooting in this hotel which was built in 1894 which was half under renovations and half of it was being turned into a hostel, but it wasn’t finished yet. The third floor of it was literally falling apart, literally windows were broke and bricks were falling in. On down time I would sneak around taking pictures or go outside to take pictures. I’m actually leaving tonight to go to Baltimore to work on Chris LaMartina’s new movie called Witches Brew. Then next week I have preproduction for the actors then the 22nd I head to the Pittsburgh area for a movie called Cemetery and that’s going to be awesome, there are five main characters and I am one of the five. I don’t wanna give away too much but my role is pretty crazy it’s definitely a stretch for me. It’s going to be awesome because it’s actually outside of Pittsburgh with a lake and we are staying in cabins so it’s like a summer camp but for people who love horror films. I’m real excited about that

I am also going to be in The Sickness which is being directed by Brandon Brooks and his production company. I’m also working on Post Mordem 2012 directed by Cameron Scott and it has Linnea Quigleyin it. In it I get to shoot guns…in my characters description it says favorite weapon…anything that kills…I love that anything that kills even my own bare hands, I’m excited about that one too.
I have too many things going on but in a good way. I have not been home hardly at all this summer; I get home from one movie and go to work on another one. It’s been pretty crazy but I am very fortunate.

So you were involved in the short trailer They Made Me for the DVD release of Shock Festival…is that a possible future project?

I don’t think so because those of us who were involved in the fake trailers were given a copy of the book Shock Festival and in the book there is a chapter that had all of these fake movie posters and there were no descriptions for the films so you had to pick a poster and based on the poster do the trailer…really just do what you want to do. We were the only the only ones who chose to do the girl gang movie. I personally love all of the girl gang movies like Switchblade Sisters…I love that movie. So we did the girl gang trailer but we aren’t going to make it into a feature it was just for the project. It was really fun making it though, not that it was easy it was just a fun shoot. We got to pretend to beat up one of our friends and everything. We do have plans, Victor Bonacore and I have started to write this new revenge type of film, not really a girl gang movie but its called Girl From the Gutter its kind of a homage to those I Spit On Your Grave kind of roles where the victim becomes the heroine. That is a future feature that will be done by Chainsaw Kiss.

Recently Flesh for the Beast has gotten a rerelease I’ve noticed that on the store shelves but they got rid of the cover art and went for a more generic cover image…what’s your thoughts on that?I used to work for Media Blasters and their in house production company so when we did Flesh for the Beast I was not only acting in it I was working in the art department as well. I am also still friends with the owner and I understand why it was rereleased because they were very successful with the film. It got a good following and a good amount of attention and people really like it so I understand after a couple years…you know that happens with books and I read a lot. I have a tattoo of a cover of a book that now isn’t the cover since its been changed. I understand why they do it as a company…what sucks for me when I go to conventions and sell copies of Flesh for the Beast well I have my own stock so I can sell copies of it but I have the old ones now and I feel guilty and I don’t want to sell it to people when there is a newer and better and fancier multiple disk version out there. If I am at a convention where they are at I won’t sell it, I tell people to go over to buy the new version and then come back and I’ll sign it for them. If I am at a con where they aren’t I will put the copies I have out and when people want to buy it I tell them that there is a better version out there full of extras…I understand why they did it as a company, it doesn’t bother me. People are still buying it that’s what makes me happy, it means they are watching it.

Now you mentioned that you have a cover of a book tattooed on you and that is the cover from Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters

Right

There have been a couple film adaptations of Palahniuk’s work if you were to get a role in one of these which would it be?

Oh man I have to say Invisible Monsters…I’ve read every book he’s put out except Pygmy because it’s the kind of book you have to sit down to read. It’s written phonetically with a Chinese accent so its not one of those books you can just pick up and read for ten minutes at a time. Invisible Monsters was the first book I read by him and then later on I read Survivor and Survivor is my second favorite those are my two favorites and I go back and forth between which one is my favorite. If I got to be in a film adaption where I got to play the main girl in Invisible Monsters…that would be insane…I could put that on my wish list of impossible dreams…thank you…I never really thought about that before…that would be amazing.

Now just how many tattoos do you have because they seem to keep growing as I watch you in movies?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell (starts to count) fourteen….quick count. I actually just got a new one last night. It’s from a Dylan Thomas poem…rage against the dying of the light…which is strange because it’s from one of my favorite poems. I was sixteen or seventeen when I read it and even before I had tattoos I knew that I wanted it. I thought it would be the first tattoo I ever got, but it wasn’t. Even though I got all of these other tattoos I always knew I wanted to get that one day and for whatever reason I didn’t. Well my father right now is sick and Dylan Thomas wrote that poem for his father so I went and got it done yesterday for my father. I just think it’s strange the timing because it’s something that I’ve always wanted for so long and just never got it done and now getting it done has more of an impact for me. There is a lot more meaning for me to get it now. It’s just weird that I knew I was going to get it one day and I finally got it last night.

You tend to drive to a lot of shoots or ride with people to them?

Sometimes depends on where it is, I’m driving to Baltimore tonight cause it’s only three hours away. I love driving I like to blast music and singing on the top of my lungs when I drive alone. Last year we were shooting on weekends and I was being flown into West Virginia every weekend and it was just insane. Each time I had to get connecting flights because there were no straight flights into Charleston West Virginia so it was a nightmare. My first flight would get delayed and I would miss my second flight. There was one weekend there was a hurricane and I sat on the runway in a plane for five hours until they were finally like “the flight is going to be delayed another four to five hours if you want to go back into the airport you can”..I ended up getting off of the plane because by the time I would have gotten to West Virginia it wouldn’t have been til the next night and we wouldn’t have had time so this year we took two weeks and just shot everything consecutively.

There’s another actress from New Jersey who is awesome and a really good singer well she was driving and only lives thirty minutes away from me. I was so nervous because I have never met her before and its like I’m gonna be in a car with this person for nine hours I was like please let them be cool what if they don’t like my cursing or listen to Britney Spears. When I got to Desire’s apartment the instant I walked through the door and we met it was like we had been friends for ten years. We had so much fun driving down. 

If it’s close enough and not a hassle because flying can be a pain in the ass so I will drive if I can. I got offered a part in a movie filming next summer filming in Kentucky its Matt Furgenson’s new film. I’m flying to Nashville and then driving to Kentucky and I’m excited because I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville and now I can. I love to travel….even in West Virginia there were locals who sat on the street everyday, not because of a movie being filmed it was just where they hung out. Even the director told us not to go into this one bar because some scary people are in there…they are freaks. I was like I love freaks! Take me there now! 

When I was there I learned all of the locals names and we would wave to each other…I thought it was awesome…They were a little weird, but I like the weirdos they are more interesting.

You mentioned music videos earlier anything new with that?

Chainsaw Kiss and I have done a video for a singer song writer named Johnny Lee Jordan two summers ago then recently he wrote a song for our movie Blood Wing so we shot a video to help with promotion. It was awesome that he wrote a song just for our movie. We taped that and we actually had three different cameras going at once, an HD camera and a 16mm camera. I’ve done camera assist on projects but that camera is really heavy. Victor had an 8 mm camera and we had all three cameras going at once and we shot in a couple spots around our neighborhood that are just strange looking like under a train trestle and its like a woods with a beautiful stream and graffiti and we shot that for that video.

I personally was in two music videos which for me was kind of a goal of mine because when I was a kid MTV was life, you got home from school and watched MTV and I always wanted to be one of the hot girls in a rock video being all sexy. As a kid I thought they looked so cool and I wanted to do that.

I did one music video for a local north Jersey metal band and it’s actually on YouTube. In it I really am the video girl…I’m on the pool table and everything is fast shots and it looks really cool like a shot of sexy look and hair swinging kind of stuff. Really it was exactly what I was thinking of when I was a kid watching MTV.
About a month ago I was in a video for a band called My children my bride who are another metal band. It was myself and my friend who is an actor named Brandon Swavel and we shot it in a cemetery and there wasn’t a story we just made it up when we got there. One of us is dead but you don’t know which one and we are lovers. It was really cool because the cemetery shots are all black and white but the director kept my hair red. It came out really cool and I was excited because I was in a metal video…I mean like METAL. 

What was the first genre film you saw?

I know exactly and I’m going to give away my age but that’s okay. A Nightmare on Elm St. I was six or seven years old and I wasn’t allowed to watch it and my brother had a VHS copy of it so I stole it from him and waited for everyone to go to sleep one night and went downstairs and watched it by myself. I don’t think that I slept for a month. My mom delivered news papers at the time and got up really early in the morning I would stay up all night and wait for my mom to get up then I would get up and pretend that I had woken up and couldn’t go back to sleep can I go to work with you? Instantly once I was in the car with her I would fall asleep…I never told her I watched the movie and that’s the reason I wasn’t sleeping at night. I just had a twin size bed at that time and my dad was in the army so he was away a lot and if I went to sleep in my mom’s bed with her because I was scared and if she left the room for anything while I was in the bed I would move over because I couldn’t lay in the middle of the bed because of the Johnny Depp scene…It affected me for many years.

I saw The Exorcist when I was in fourth grade, it was scary but I watched with friends and once again we weren’t allowed to watch it so we waited until there were no parents. Then we started watching it every other day. Phantasm when I was a kid, from my memory it was before the Exorcist and it was on regular television on a Sunday afternoon and that movie scared me so bad that I was at Chiller one year and Angus Scrimm was there and I didn’t know he was a guest and I was going down the escalator and he was coming inside from the celebrity tent…I saw him and got to the bottom and turned around and went back up the escalator. I had to get away from him just to be like “he’s just an actor everything will be okay”….it scared me to death just seeing him in person…as an adult it scared the sh*t out of me.

Do you have an all time favorite scream queen?

I don’t know if she can be considered a scream queen I love Soledad Miranda she was in Vampiros Lesbos and all of those weird sexploitation types of horror films. As far as more recent Linnea Quigleyand I really love Julie Strain and Brinke Stevens. I think Julie Strain is just incredible looking and she is a very amazing photographer.
I love old movies so Audrey Hepbern….Elizabeth Taylor…I love that old era of cinema because it was amazingly beautiful. Elizabeth Taylor was absolutely breath taking when she was young. I like Greta Garboe the most out of that era though…I just like old Hollywood where everyone was so classy and elegant and everything was shot on film and the sets were just so elaborate and decadent…I like all of that old stuff.

When was the first time that you said “this is what I want to do?”?

I used to be a nanny and one of the kids one day told me “I wanna be an actress when I grow up or a lunch lady”…she was six and I guess she liked her lunch lady a lot….I just remember I always said I wanted to be an actress or a veterinarian. After high school and when I started college I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do. When I was eighteen I started doing movies but I didn’t think it was something I could do forever. There were delusions of grandeur like when I was working with Will Hellfire and Misty Mundae back in the Factory 2000 days I really thought we were going to take over the world. I thought we could change the world through our art and we thought that’s what we were gonna do forever and then that fell apart. Then I worked for Seduction Cinema and they stopped and then it was Media Blasters and they kinda stopped for a while. I never auditioned for anything everything I’ve done was through word of mouth, I would work with one person and they would suggest me to someone else or a director saw a movie I was in and they would call me…I was really lucky that way then there was this point where it was like everything was drying up no one I knew was making movies. Victor and I were friends for a long time, he went to school and majored in film…I was in one of his college films…Linnea Quiqley and Lloyd Kaufman and the three of us are in one of his college movies! It just shows Victor has always been ambitious and we had been friends for a long time and once we decided we were going to start doing this production company together and we started doing things that’s what completely changed my mind and I started believing again that I can do this as a living. 

During the slow times I lost the faith in it that I could do it forever and make a living out of it and not a hobby. Anyone who makes movies even if they have day jobs its more than a hobby it’s a passion, I didn’t think I could make a living out of it. Once I started working with Victor it has completely changed my mind again and now we can make this our lives. Then once I started believing again I started getting busier than I have ever been. With positive thinking and hard work you can do whatever you want in life….I really believe that.

What is your favorite part of the genre scene?

Besides actually acting….obviously that’s my favorite which is funny because I have horrible stage fright but I’m completely comfortable in front of a camera. My second favorite part is the conventions, even if I am not a guest at one I will go and hang out on a Saturday. Being a guest at a con to me is the best thing in the world and I am so grateful anytime I am a guest at a convention. It’s so amazing to meet people who know who you are who you’ve never met before and top of that they know who you are and they are a fan of a movie you are in. It never gets old to me…it’s the most incredible feeling ever that people know who I am and like what I am doing there is nothing in the world that can beat that feeling…everything that you’ve worked hard for and now you are getting recognition that’s the pay off for me. It never gets old to have someone want to take a picture with me or talk about a movie I was in. I go back home to my “regular” life and I cuddle up with my dogs every night but when I go to conventions its just amazing the attention the fans give…I am so grateful anyone knows who I am. I love every minute of it and then you get to party its really awesome when the bigger celebrities who are there come to hang out…like having a beer with Gunnar Hansen.

When I did the Famous Monsters convention that whole weekend was so surreal to me. First of all riding in a car up with William Forsythe next to me I was just “where am I?”….I was trying so hard not to geek out like “can I get a picture with you”. That convention in particular was really awesome for me, it was farther away than the ones I’m used to and I got to meet so many new and cool people and on top of it travelling with who I was travelling with…it was just so surreal.

Did you have any last words for your fans?

Thank you….the fans are what makes it worthwhile at the end of the day. You work very hard but there isn’t a point if no one ever sees it. It’s the most incredible feeling in the world to have to work so hard and have people appreciate what you are doing…I never take that stuff for granted. Most people will never get to have that experience so I feel so lucky to have fans…I don’t even like using that word fans…its like they are people…its weird for me to say that.

I am just forever grateful to anyone who has ever watched one of the films I was in even if they didn’t like it, if they did like it that’s even better. Especially with a small production company like what we have anyone who likes it who is a fan of it….we need that…to keep going it’s really like the fuel to do another project. I don’t know what else to say except thank you and I mean it from the bottom of my cold black heart (starts laughing)