MARTIN SPEAKS!
Laurence R. Harvey discusses Human Centipede 2 and film censorship
interviewed by David Flint

Love or hate The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), there’s no denying that it has one of the most memorably twisted villains in recent cinema history. Car park attendant and Human Centipede fan Martin seeks to emulate his fictional hero Dr Heiter by creating his own human centipede, with results shocking enough to send the British film censors crying for mummy.

The man behind this warped, silent character is Laurence R. Harvey – in real lie a charming, thoughtful actor and cult film fan. As the film comes to UK DVD, your editor spoke to him about the movie and the censorship furore.


How did you first get involved in HC2?

Basically, my agent called me and said ‘I’ve got some people who want you to be the lead in their new film’. As a character actor I thought ‘really?’. And then my agent said ‘I think it’s porn, I think you should turn it down’. He’d been to the Six’s website, which says ‘Six Entertainment – adult entertainment, Amsterdam’ (laughs). I think ‘adult entertainment’ might mean something different in Holland than it does here! So I asked what the title was and he said ‘Human Centipede 2’. I’d heard of the first Human Centipede through it being on at FrightFest – I hadn’t seen it at this point, it was still doing the festival circuit. So I said I’d be interested in going to the casting, and on the day of the casting, they did a screening for cast and crew they were casting that week, and so I saw it and an hour and a half later, I was doing the casting.

What did you think when you saw the first film?

(laughs) Well, Dieter (Laser) is so brilliant, I thought ‘well, that’s pretty big shoes to fill, and I’m sure I won’t get it, I won’t get this role at all’. I thought surely they won’t cast me. But I would really love to be involved in the film in some way, so I was going to ask if, even if they didn’t take me for the part they were auditioning me for, I just wanted to be like a neighbour that popped round for a cup of tea. Once you see what happens to the neighbour, (laughs), I’m glad I did get the main part!

Dr Heiter is obviously quite an iconic character, but Martin is very, very different...

Yeah, in the casting, Tom was very clear than in many ways, the film’s a kind of opposite of the first one, so he wanted somebody that’s physically the opposite of Dieter. Dieter’s tall and thin, and plays quite a powerful figure... so I’m short and fat and play somebody that doesn’t have any power, that’s kind of abused by everyone around him rather than being an abuser himself. For me, when Tom was explaining this, it reminded me - he took me through the plot scene by scene – it reminded me, there’s a sub-genre of horror in Japanese cinema where somebody that’s picked upon snaps and takes their revenge – the ‘lone dove syndrome’ films. For me, it seems very Japanese in what it was trying to do, but then there’s the whole satirical element as well, with him taking that Daily Mail figure of somebody who sees a film and is influenced by it so much that they just act it out without thinking... and how Tom wants to take that idea and run with it and push it to the extreme. So yeah, it’s interesting from that point of view. I saw the way that Tom wanted this powerless figure to be a kind of problem solver – in the first film, Dieter’s carrying people over his shoulder with a fireman’s lift, people unconscious... I just wouldn’t be able to do that, as Martin I just drag people very slowly. It’s things like that that are interesting, in Tom’s approach to the character.

Martin definitely seems to be as much a victim as anyone else in the film. He’s a product of the way society treats people who don’t fit it.

Yes, yes. A lot of mainstream commentators have seen Martin as someone with mental disabilities, but because I come from a disabilities point of view, I’m very much against that. When we were talking through with Tom, it’s more that he’s become socially retarded because of the abuse around him, and how that might affect him as he goes through school and employment as he’s growing up. So I don’t think Martin’s the brightest – he’s not educationally advanced, or socially or emotionally capable, but there is an intelligence there, which is why ... the humour comes out when he thinks of a way to get around a problem. He obviously hasn’t got surgeon’s skills when he’s attaching people’s mouths to the backside of the person in front – he just has a staple gun and stuff like that. It’s those kind of thought processes that I found interesting about Martin.

What I loved about the character are those little moments of joy when he had a success and his despair when things went wrong... you actually feel quite sorry for him.

Martin’s emotional reactions are kind of inspired by... whilst we were filming I stayed for a weekend with a friend of mine who’s got two one year old twins, and looking at the way in which they interacted – what would happen is, if one twin had something go wrong, the reaction would be huge and instant, so there was this disproportionate level to things, and I tried to keep that with Martin, so instead of being slightly disappointed that something had gone wrong, he’d start crying. But I think there’s a disconnection between his responses and his actual emotions, both in the proportional way and also how he doesn’t react genuinely. A lot of the emotional things stop and start abruptly. When I was watching these two one year old twins, one would start crying and the other one would be looking at him and see that he’s getting all this attention, so he’d immediately start crying as well, even though there was no emotion behind it – just joining in. And then the first one would stop abruptly, as if that emotion was fake all along. So there’s a level of fakery as well as the disproportionateness of their emotional reactions, which I tried to use for Martin, because there is this thing where emotionally and socially, he is still a child, and that’s very much about him living at home with his mother - because (laughs) I live at home with my parents at the moment because a housing situation in London fell through. And when you’re back at your parents, you’re treated like a teenager again, or in Martin’s case even younger . So it’s that kind of regression I wanted to capture.

It would be so easy just to treat him as a monster, so it’s impressive that you’ve avoided that. And he’s very multi-faceted and sympathetic, without any dialogue.

When we did the cast and crew screenings, a friend of mine came along and said you want to step in and just give Martin a hug and tell him not to do the bad things. So there should be that element of sympathy. I think you should want to have sympathy for Martin, but reject the choices that he makes.

He’s from a pretty bad family background.

Yeah, and of course, the absent father who you hear in voice over briefly.

Exactly. One thing that struck me watching the film – the ending arguably suggests that this could have all been a fantasy in Martin’s head.

Yeah, that’s valid, but I think it’s open to interpretation, because there’s the child crying. It’s whether you’re going back in time to the beginning, or to the point where the family is coming into the car park, or whether the crying is actually Martin’s psyche. I think the exact shot is picking up again is where he’s watching the businessman rail against the ticket machine over the CCTV – this is the guy that dies when Martin cuts too deeply into his buttocks. So it depends where you think its gone back to in time. When I first saw it, I thought ‘Martin has got away with it’, but the child was still in the car, so everything was going to come undone because there’s a secondary victim, as it were, still in the car park. Or you can then extrapolate and say that Martin now has his family, by raising the child – you can look for a happy ending...

It’s good that it’s open to interpretation.

I think that’s one of the strengths of it as well. I love the film as a whole but it does have an ambiguous ending.

The film was shot in colour. At what point did you know it would eventually be in black and white?

LH: At the casting initially, Tom was talking about it having a kind of washed out colour – he was talking about the whole film being a mix between a gore film and Kes (laughs). He wanted a washed out, 16mm look to some of the colour, particularly because British realist films have that silvery blue light. He was always going to treat the colour in some way. I think whilst he was going through the palate in terms of treating the image afterwards, he just tried it in black and white and it seemed to have something. And I think it really works. I think what it does is help you concentrate on Martin and his actions, rather than being distracted by the reds and browns of the events at the end.

It takes it out of reality a little bit too.

Yeah, it makes it dream-like and I think also the soundscape makes it seem like it’s in Martin’s head, whether it’s a fantasy, or whether you’re just viewing things from his point of view. So yeah, I think it’s quite ingenious the way that it’s turned out.

I’m sure that while making the film, given the original movie and the stuff you were shooting, you knew this would be fairly controversial. But I guess you didn’t realise just HOW controversial!

Yeah... I thought the reaction in reviews & blogs and so on would be OTT. To be honest, when the film was finished, I thought that the sandpaper and barbed wire scenes would be cut, or at least trimmed down to a brief glimpse, just because of the BBFC and the sexualised violence that Martin directed at himself. We weren’t expecting the BBFC to reject it outright and release this long, highly opinionated statement...

That was totally misrepresentative...

Totally misrepresentative and way beyond their remit as well. It seems a very foolish thing for the BBFC to have done. The rejection would be fine, if that press release hadn’t come out, because at least with a rejection, you could open up a debate with the BBFC and discuss what’s needed to be cut. But that press release, saying it was uncuttable, it was all sexual violence, the whole thing – which is patently untrue. It was a ridiculous thing to do, and I think a reason they did that was to put off mainstream cinemas putting it on. It was more about the BBFC trying to flex its muscles to show that it’s doing something than judging the film on its own. It was personally insulting Tom and his abilities as a filmmaker, it’s questioning whether the first film was any good or not... they’re not there to review films, they’re there to assess films and classify films, not to say whether it’s of worth or not.

And of course they dug themselves into a hole with that statement, having now passed the film, because it makes them look like idiots, no matter what side of the censorship debate you are on. If you’re anti-censorship, you’ll be appalled by the cuts, and pro-censorship people will see the BBFC as caving in to pressure...

I know, it’s stupid. And also, what was a kind of niche film that people who are into gory horror would’ve seen, or enjoyed the first film would’ve gone to see, with the BBFC rejecting it, it’s created a kind of hype around the film. There’s a good side and a bad side to that. It’s frustrating that cinema exhibitors are shying away from taking it on.

It’s weird that people would be put off from showing it because of the controversy. That’s the sort of thing that used to put bums on seats!

I think also what it is, is because the BBFC have delayed finally accepting it for so long, the turnaround had to be pretty quick before it was out on DVD and Blu-ray. That becomes a commercial consideration for cinemas. And also a lot of the smaller chains and independent cinemas book three months in advance.

It has been forced into quite a rushed release I guess...

LH: yeah, partly because back in June when the film was submitted to the BBFC, Eureka had done a deal with HMV to do an exclusive release on Halloween. So with it taking so long to get through the BBFC’s appeals process, in order to get it into the cinemas around Halloween and hopefully before the HMV edition came out, it’s been a complete rush. I’m really glad that Eureka and Bounty have at least tried their darndest to get it out there.

It does feel like we’re entering a new period of censorialness...

Yeah, it’s interesting at the Abertoir Film Festival there was a censorship panel debate and Martin Barker was saying whenever there’s some sort of political crisis that the BBFC start paying attention to what the Daily Mail and papers of that ilk say.

Given that they’ve also just banned The Bunny Game, maybe the answer is not to shoot extreme cinema in black and white...

(laughs) The Bunny Game comes from a kind of performance art background in a sense as well. I think if it’d been a documentary, not geared towards the cinema, it might’ve been able to come out exempt from classification, through arts distributors...

The BBFC have always had a problem with BDSM, even when it’s consensual...

Yeah, which is why you can’t get any of the Japanese BDSM films.

Unfortunately not. So how have people reacted to you since the film came out? Given that you’re laying such an intense role and are in the movie throughout, have you found people reacting to the character when they meet you?

I get called Martin a lot (laughs).

That must be fun for you!

People keep forgetting that I’m called Laurence. But apart from that, it’s been fine. In Austin there was one girl that didn’t want to come up to me or say anything to me because she was scared of how I was in the film (laughs), and another guy who came up to me the day after the film and said ‘I wanted to come up and shake your hand after the film but I thought you would be like Martin, but I’ve been watching you and you seem like a nice man’ (laughs). So I think some people are wary but most people take it as an acting job, especially if I’ve done a Q&A or an introduction. They know I’m not Martin!

As long as you don’t walk around with a staple gun in your hand, you’ll be okay.

Well, you know, staple guns are pretty useful (laughs).

What did you make of the London Tombs show, by the way? I saw you down there on launch night.

It’s good. The first time I went round I was at the back, and then I went when Dieter was in town and I went to the front, which is even better, even scarier. I liked how the guys at London Tombs are all fans of horror films and of the first Human Centipede. I’ve got my Number One Fan in the UK - one of the girls in the Human Centipede at London Tombs (laughs) – she’s my official Number One Fan!

Read our review of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)