Who wouldn’t want to see a movie based on the story of our favorite masked metal maniacs, Slipknot? Well, Shawn “Clown” Crahan certainly would – well, as long as it’s not made by a Hollywood studio.
In a new interview with NME, the band’s founding percussionist – who’s directed over a dozen of their music videos and three of their documentaries – unveiled that he’ll be handling some of the band’s future visual projects. When asked about the possibility of doing an official Slipknot biopic, he gave a refreshingly earnest answer: “It wasn’t that long ago that I was very frustrated with this sort of idea, because the business, if you will, was pressuring us for something like that.”
He added that the success of 2015’s Straight Outta Compton (which told the story of influential rap group N.W.A.) “made all the business people think Bohemian Rhapsody was a great idea.” The problem, he noted, was that the 2018 film based on Queen was “strictly [and intentionally] one-sided.”
He continued:
It’s just about the star, you know, it’s Freddie Mercury’s story – but I’m a Brian May fan as well, and I want to know more about him. But you can’t do that in two hours, and the suits in the corporate world, who maintain the [film industry], they don’t want to do more than two hours. That’s too much of a risk for their business, and unfortunately, they control how art is handled and gets to the majority of the human race.
Consequently, Clown declared, Hollywood will not be involved when – not if – the Slipknot movie is made. He explained:
I could never get anybody to create us, so I’m kind of holding that to the film. I’ve had so many ideas brought to me, and there’s so many people who are frustrated with me about it. They’ve actually told me, “Maybe it’d be better if you’re not involved.” And I’m just like, “Yeah, we’ll see how that works for you.” Because if I’m not involved, that means I’m not involved. That means, “Good luck with whatever the fuck you’re trying to do, because I’m not going to approve a word of it.” . . . It’s like, “You never played with us in the band, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! You’re just impressed that some putz director hit a mark in some visual way for theatres to sell popcorn. Get the fuck out of here. This is my life.”
There’s a lot of dudes [in Slipknot] that need to be represented equally – not one is greater than the other, and you can’t explain the band without explaining all of them. And then there’s our first manager [Sophia John], who passed away – that story would have to be in there – and then there’s a motley crew of about a dozen other motherfuckers. . . . It’s insane. So we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna do it our way.
He certainly has a point.
So, what would he do with a Slipknot movie, and with whom would he want to work? For one thing, he’s open to incorporating Web3 (which is connected to the band’s recently revealed Knotverse) because it’s “creating all sorts of situations for kids that should be directing movies, but never would’ve had a chance [in Hollywood] because they don’t have a network or they’re not in the scene.”
Beyond that, Clown admitted to having “some very insane ideas for how to make it work” as long as he’s helped by “some very creative people.”
“I’m not a writer. I can only give you the stories. But if I sat down with some really creative [screenwriters], I would be able to tell them all these ideas and we could come up with something that would make people say, ‘Yes, we’ll give you the money to make that,’” he clarified.
Regarding specific inspirations, he said that it’d be an “eight-to-15” episode miniseries in the vein of HBO shows such as True Detective. “That way,” he described, “you can go in the past and see [the late] Paul Gray playing a right-handed guitar when he’s left-handed.”
He’d also want to “go back to when [he] was a little kid, and tell all the stories about the crazy shit Joey [Jordison] used to do” to “paint all those pictures that would make you go, ‘Oh, that’s why this fucking dude is who he is!'”
How excited would you be about an official Slipknot biopic spearheaded by Clown? Let us know!