Jennifer Lynch: 'my new film is not torture porn'

Jennifer Lynch has revealed she did a major rewrite on her new film, 'Chained', to stop it being torture porn. The plot, about a serial killer who kidnaps a young boy and  decides to given him an education in the dark arts of murder: anatomy and psychology, is in some ways based on the traumatic experience of shooting her previous film, 'Hisss'.

She shot the Bollywood-inspired film 'Hisss' in India (2010) with an Indian and American cast, but then lost control. “Don't see 'Hisss'!” she told The Independent newspaper. “It's not my movie. I shot it, but then they took it away, they cut it, edited it, scored it. It's not my movie.”

Lynch revealed the experience sent her into a downward spiral: “I proceeded to go into a deep depression… It was probably the greatest loss I've ever experienced in my life. It felt like I was pregnant for nine months – I was in India for nine months shooting – and the minute it was about to be born, they ripped it from my body and now it's a Kardashian.“

The experience made Lynch extremely wary about shooting 'Chained'. “The script sent to me by producers was more of what I would call torture porn and although the storyline fascinated me I couldn't figure out why they would send me torture porn.”

She says she made the film more about the psychological battle between the man and the boy, removed scenes of breasts being cut off and many of the slow deaths. It became a story concerned with child abuse although at heart it's still a horror movie.

 “I want people to leave the theatre and be more aware of the people around them and be more concerned about their trauma. What's your damage? How do you handle that every day and what is your trauma?"

In the interview she denies her childhood with her father was unorthodox. “I tell you, to me my childhood wasn't weird as it was all I knew. I don't think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood, they might say there weren't a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.”

She recalls her mother's birthday where she and her father covered the entire dining room table with dirt brought in from the yard and piled it about three-and-a-half feet high. "We dug little tunnels and made clay figures sitting at the end of these tunnels. It stayed there for about two years and we loved it, it was all we could afford. We made her an art sculpture and that was what my childhood was like."

She says in her early career producers were expecting her to make films like her father, but now “that thing where they think they are hiring my dad has stopped”.