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Ottawa's king of B-movies director Lee Demarbre never expected to make a feature action drama, nor a documentary film, about one of his fascinating stars.
Certainly not yet, nor at the same time.
"I make Jesus Christ Vampire Killer," says Demarbre. "Very campy, fun little movies."
Demarbre first gained recognition back in 1998 with the faux movie trailer, Harry Knuckles, and has gone on to make several features in a similar style. Speaking from home, where he was cutting the final scene on The Dead Sleep Easy, the unexpected action drama shot on location this winter in Guadalajara, Mexico, Demarbre said he wasn't ready to venture outside B-movies.
"I figured that would come later," he said, "with growth and experience."
Then a project presented itself that forced him to grow. Demarbre was in Los Angeles piecing together financing for a feature he still wants to shoot in Jamaica when he noticed wrestler Vampiro was fighting in Anaheim, Calif. The Thunder Bay native, whose real name is Ian Hodgkinson, overcame a life of homelessness and drug addiction to become a wrestling superstar in Mexico. Demarbre ended up meeting with Vampiro/Hodgkinson and became captivated with wanting to tell his story.
"It really made me think, 'Hey, this could be a movie, this could be Goodfellas,' but with wrestling," he said. "But it seemed like a pipe dream ....he's been approached many, many times by people wanting to tell his life story on film or in a book. He always said no."
Hodgkinson thought no one could ever get his story right but that's before he gelled with Demarbre. The wrestler dismissed the idea of a narrative film outright as "too unbelievable," suggesting it would be impossible to get someone to realistically play him. So they decided on a documentary. It was while Demarbre and crew were following Hodgkinson around Europe and Mexico shooting that they hatched a plan for The Dead Sleep Easy, a fictional tale about a mob-connected gringo who makes it big in the world of Lucha Libre -- Mexican wrestling -- incorporating some of Hodgkinson's more surreal life experiences. The final piece came when the wrestler called Demarbre to relate an anecdote about his love life.
"He told me how he was seeing this girl in Mexico, she'd been in one other relationship with this guy who was in the mob, who was killed in his car in a drive-by shooting," Demarbre recalls. "All of a sudden this guy showed up. He had faked his own death because of the mob. He had to break up with her because her dead boyfriend came back."
Demarbre hopes to release The Dead Sleep Easy and his Vampiro documentary together this fall.