According to Ferrara, The Driller Killer is "a documentary about a dear friend of mine, Douglas Metro (later Douglas Metrov). I played the role of my friend. He was a painter who quit painting just before the great new wave of Schnabel and Basquiat. He went into screenwriting, and sold his first screenplay to Mel Brooks (Solarbabies, directed by Alan Johnson in 1986). And that was the last one he ever sold. He lived in that attic with those two girls, they were his real girlfriends. Those paintings are real, those are his stuff. I played the role because it was shot over a long period of time, and we couldn't interest an actor in staying with a film shot in bits and pieces" (5). Douglas Metrov, who appears in the film as Tony Coca-Cola, recalls that "Abel, Frank Delia, Nicky St. John and myself were living in Frank Delia's studio apartment on East 17th Street in lower Manhattan. The place was dark and sweltering hot in the summer. This was around 1975, I believe, way before Noho became fashionable. We had no money. We ate nothing but pizza from Stromboli's down the street. We had no air conditioning, so in the summer evenings we would hang out the fourth floor windows for those occasional wisps of cool air coming in off the Hudson. Well, there was a liquor store on the street below, and these pathetic winos would buy liquor, drink it on the sidewalk, and get so blind drunk they would end up crawling on their hands and knees up and down 17th Street. Some of them would crawl right into traffic, and taxi cabs, racing 50-60 mph, would have to swerve to avoid running over these poor idiots. We would hang out the windows and marvel that there were actually people in the world in worse condition than we were. Because I have an over-active, sick imagination, I started to make up stories... What if a vigilante came out at night, and put these poor souls out of their misery?; they were so miserable, so terribly, terribly miserable. It made total sense, in a very demented way, that someone should put them out of their useless misery. The original Driller Killer did his work with a hammer and a ten penny nail; later the killing device would evolve into an electric drill. So after a few weeks of listening to these awful stories, Abel started talking about making a movie based on the vigilante idea. He wanted to make a feature but couldn't come up with an idea, so he started talking about The Driller Killer. I could not believe he would actually want to make such a movie. It was a joke, I told him, just a sick joke. I begged him not to make the movie, but the more I begged, the more he became absolutely determined. I was heartbroken. He spent the next four months looking for money, and then he found some. By then (because I had finally sold a painting) I had moved into a new loft on the next street up (East 18th Street). Abel had wanted to move in with me, because Frankie the Wolf's place was unbearable. But I wanted my own space, and I was selfish, and, as much as I loved Abel, I said he could not move in because he was almost as big a slob as Frankie the Wolf, and I am anal-retentive. But I did say he could shoot The Driller Killer there, because by that time he had built such momentum to make the film, I saw it was inevitable. He is the most remarkable man that way... he is unstoppable, the most persistent man on the planet. That is his greatness.

WATCH Abel Ferrara's commentary on DRILLER KILLER

Footnotes

- Smith, ibid, Kim Newman, "Thrilling to Drilling", Shock Xpress 1, July 1985, p. 1 and commentary on The Driller Killer DVD (1999). According to Douglas Metrov "I have never stopped painting, despite what Abel has said" (e-mail to the author, June 7th 2002).


NOTE: This is an excerpt from the book ABEL FERRARA: THE MORAL VISION by Brad Stevens available at FAB Press.