This weekend the Music Box Theatre will present two midnight shows of Mod Fuck Explosion (1994), underground writer-director Jon Moritsugu’s breakout film. The movie was made during an exciting time in Moritsugu’s career—he directed two features the previous year, the deadpan provocation Hippy Porn and the PBS-produced family drama Terminal USA; moreover, it comes from an exciting period in American independent film in general, when a new wave of underground filmmakers were first getting mainstream or near-mainstream recognition. In his long review for this week’s issue of the Reader, J.R. Jones describes Mod Fuck Explosion as ahead of its time in its breakdown of Asian-American stereotypes and avant-garde flourishes. When I spoke to Moritsugu the other day, he reflected on the personal and artistic influences behind Mod Fuck Explosion, the film’s international reception, and what he’s learned from four decades of making movies.

I haven’t sat down and watched the entire thing, but I have watched chunks of it. I think it still holds up really well. It doesn’t seem dated in any way, so I still enjoy viewing it.

Did you write Amy’s part specifically for her?

But then it ended up being a movie about students not doing much of anything.

I always wanted to find a really wide audience and not necessarily preach to the converted. Mod Fuck definitely found that wide audience. Everyone to mods to rocker, people in the scene, underground people [watched it], and it sort of crossed over to the really rarified, high-art people. Like, it played at the underground fests, but it also broke out and played some pretty high-end European festivals. It felt like a triumph, especially after Hippy Porn, which was a complete, dismal failure in the United States. It played at pizza parlors and stuff like that here. But it did catch on in Europe and was a weird smash hit in Paris; for a year it played nonstop. It was strange, finding an artsy, weird European audience, but no American audience for the movie. But Mod Fuck turned things around, where there was a European audience as well as an American audience.

I really liked the way it turned out, but it was such a strange experience. It wasn’t until the middle of production when some of the executives finally read the script, and they were trying to stop the production.