The First Cut

In Excision, the polite façade of American suburbia is, as ever, a happy face hiding the darkness underneath and, here, an oddball adolescent grows increasingly obsessed with surgery and the human body while enacting a plan to lose her virginity. With icons of transgressive and trashy cinema amongst the cast – Malcolm McDowell, Ray Wise, John Waters, Traci Lords – filmmaker Richard Bates Jr shows where his black-comic sensibilities lie. But the chief piece of casting is its most surprising, this creepy, sociopathic teenager brought to life by AnnaLynne McCord, the 25-year-old starlet best known for playing bitch/vixen roles in Nip/Tuck and the 90210 reboot.

“I said to my agents: 'Get me this film! I have to do this movie!' and I was met with a little resistance. And by a little I mean a lot,” McCord deadpans, in recalling her reaction to receiving Bates' script. “Ricky had no desire to even meet me, let alone hire me for his film. Based on my previous work, I was pretty much the complete opposite of his ideal candidate for the role; which is, of course, the exact reason why I wanted to do it, to break out of the stereotype I've been put in.”

Feeling immediately “protective” of the role, McCord convinced the director of her worth “with some 'interesting' tactics” at their meeting, inspired by having been met with “a lot of closed doors” in previous attempts to land roles that defied her soap-operatic typecast. She came prepared with photos of her own spotty youth (“I was the strange kid who didn't care to play with other children”), but “really swayed” the director when he mocked her for never going through with a promise to shave her head for the role. “He was pissing me off, so I took my steak knife off the lunch table, and proceeded to start sawing my hair off in the restaurant. He just said to me 'you're crazy', and begged me to stop. So, somewhere between crazy little kid pictures, and cutting my hair off with a steak knife, I was able to convince him that I was actually right for this role.”

Seeing similarity to herself in the main role – “take away the homicidal, sociopathic tendencies, I was a lot like Pauline” – felt exposing to the actress. McCord believes you can divide thespians into two basic types, “the actors who can only ever play themselves, and the actors who don't ever want to play themselves,” and as determinedly the latter she was “scared shitless” about the role. “I said before that I was protective over her,” she clarifies, “but that's not it: I'm protective over me.”

The film mocks religious hypocrisy, suburban conditioning and glib moralising, touching further nerves for someone who felt “victimised by religious oppression” growing up in the red state South (“I know it caused me a lot of damage: that's why I'm an actress,” McCord laughs, grimly). “I want this film to genuinely provoke people. Walmart won't sell my film, so I know it's touching a nerve somewhere, and I like that. Whether the reactions are positive or negative, I'm fine either way. When you have that kind of reaction, those two extremes are great. Because the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. So if you hate this film, maybe deep down you really love it, too.”

WHAT: Excision

WHEN & WHERE: Friday 9 November, Monster Fest, Cinema Nova