NOTE – Israel Luna is the director of the recently released indie film, Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives. The film opened in New York last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival and has attracted its fair share of controversy by transgender groups as well as GLAAD.

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For the transcript, Continue Reading.

I’m Israel Luna and I’m from Dallas, Texas.

I think because of my exposure early on to the overly sexual and the fact that that’s okay, that’s come out in my films now because I’ve had a filmed called Five Guys and a Sex Party, I’ve had on the other side of it, the extremeness of the violence of horror movies and it’s just not an issue. They’re movies. And I think it has, because of my exposures, made it easier for me to just have any type of subject matter in any of my films and not have to worry about, “Oh, what is my family going to think?” They’re just like, “Oh, that’s Israel.” And I have no one else to think but my family for being that open and not giving me any limitations when I’m trying to be creative.

I saw The Exorcist at 5 years old and that’s what originally got me interested in being a filmmaker because I was watching–I was supposed to be watching Superman at a Drive-In, but my eyes were over here watching The Exorcist. So having that early exposure to those genres I think has greatly influenced me as a filmmaker with making the types of films that I do now.

I remember being about 12 years old and my aunt and uncle lived right down the street, two houses down. And when my aunt would go out of town, my uncle would call me. So I would go over there and what I would do is, he couldn’t read and write, so he would take me to the video store and I would help him choose porn films. And it was exciting to me, of course, because 12 years old, hormones are raging. So I would go and read the backs of the, back in the day, VHS, so I would read them and of course I’m secretly looking at the cute boys although I’m reading the synopsis, but who watches porn movies for the stories?

So I’m watching one and I remember one of them being Lady Chatterley something or other, and she’s filthy rich and she has all these people working for her and there’s this one limo driver that I remember thinking, “Oooh, I want to see him naked.” So I would read the backs and say, “Oh, this one looks pretty good.” We’d go back home and my reward for helping him would be, that he would let me watch one. So, at 12 years old, oh my god. So I would watch about 10 minutes of it, of course concentrating on the boys, and about 10 minutes after I’d say, okay, I’m done with this, I’m gonna go outside and play.