SLASH Talks SLASHER FILMS, Future Of VELVET REVOLVER

Rick Florino of ARTISTdirect recently conducted an interview with legendary guitarist Slash (VELVET REVOLVER, GUNS N' ROSES). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ARTISTdirect: What's next with VELVET REVOLVER? Are you still searching for a singer?

Slash: Something like that! We've actually moved leaps and bounds in the last month. We should be making an announcement one way or another next month.

ARTISTdirect: It seems like the VELVET REVOLVER records paved the way to the solo album for you.

Slash: I never stand back and look at it from any real perspective. I make the record in the moment and move on. I don't go back and listen to them very often unless I have to learn a song to perform it on the road. The first album was definitely an interesting experience because we were working with Scott Weiland, who on an artistic level has a very distinct personality. The "Contraband" record was definitely a product of all these different personalities recording a first album. Then the second album, "Libertad", was definitely exploratory musically. We really started to set off a certain sound. It's going to be interesting to do the third record because we're going to have a whole different personality as a vocalist. Chances are, it's going to be a lot heavier than anything VELVET REVOLVER has done so far because the heaviness was the only thing missing for me in the first two records.

ARTISTdirect: What's going on with Slasher Films?

Slash: It's pretty exciting. I did a press release about it, and I haven't been talking about it too much. I'm friends with Rob Eric, one of the guys at Scout Productions — the production company responsible for "Transsiberian", "Session 9", and a bunch of other really cool movies. He and I were sitting around one night talking about horror movies. I'm a huge horror movie fan from way back, especially horror movies from the '30s and the '60s and '70s when I was growing up with movies like "The Exorcist" and "The Omen". We were talking about the quality of movies coming out in the last decade and the downhill slide that's been happening. He called me up the next morning and goes, "We should do something like Slasher Films. You can look at the scripts and produce movies with your own label and we'll fund it." I was like, "Okay! It sounds awesome." [Laughs] He came back to me a year later with a script he wanted me to see. I read it, and it was amazing. I just said, "Let's do this!" So we put out a press release, and all of the studios and production companies started coming to us. It's been a really positive thing so far. We're going to be putting out two, maybe three movies per year. They'll be really high quality, very character-driven, and insanely scary horror movies. They're not going to be scary in the sense that you're waiting for a monster to come out and cut off someone's arm. They're going to be psychologically scary and intense. They'll hearken back to those great movies of the '60s and '70s and even way before that. I think when "A Nightmare on Elm Street" came out was the last stretch of really great horror movies. Then everything sort of went gore.

Read the entire interview from ARTISTdirect.