No other film director has been the victim of so much vituperation as Albert Pyun. Frequently compared with Edward D. Wood Jr., they both share a fascination with the bizarre. Pyun has a feel for the stylistic and hypnotic, changing the conventions of fiction, and making each of his movies an extreme experience.
Unintentionally born in San Diego, he was later brought up in Hawaii. There, his childhood was illuminated by an unending consumption of movies - awful horror and tacky action films in the cinemas regularly used by the marines from the Kaneohe military base.
And at the age of nine, Pyun started shooting short films with an 8mm camera borrowed from his parents. At sixteen he embarked with his mates on gangster movies that he later revealed underground, while working at night as an editor, sound technician or electrician for local laboratories.
Following his graduation, at eighteen he traveled to Japan. Once there, supported by Toshirô Mifune, he succeeded in getting hired as a trainee of the great Akira Kurosawa.
Back in the United States, he shot over three hundred adverts. Taking advantage of the revival of the sword & sandal genre prompted by John Milius' Conan le barbare (1982), he obtained funding for L'épée sauvage (1982).
Probably one of his less loathed films, it was a visual feast - extremely pulpy, although with a touch of gore not suitable for all. Its unexpected success would raise the interest of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the owners of Cannon Films, a flashy production company.
Under the Cannon seal, Pyum would complete some of his most well known films such as Cyborg (1989). A vehicle for the up-and-coming martial arts actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, it was initially conceived as a heavy opera without dialogue to be shot in granulated black and white. But the proposal was refused by producers, opposed to this kind of avant-garde treatment.
In 1993, Pyun made another movie on cyborgs, Nemesis (1992), where gunfights prevail over martial arts in comparison to his previous movies. It has a great cast of brute actors (and actresses), and pre-empts the cyberpunk aesthetics of later movies. Its success would pave the way for three sequels.
Pyun usually has to overcome budget shortages, re-editing, and the other kind of damage caused by producers and distributors intending to bury his authorship. His swift shooting style allows for avant-garde exploration within his films, and Albert Pyun belongs to that lineage of film makers yet to receive the appreciation they should. To define Pyun, we could call him a sort of Jean-Luc Godard of the B (or possibly Z) movie. Albert Pyun has completed more than forty films overcoming the worst circumstances.
Pyun's creative restraints have frequently pushed him to shoot two films at once. While completing a project with a more or less assured budget (never generous though), he takes advantage of locations and technical teams to shoot undercover an "author's fancy", sometimes in just two or three days.
Pyun has hardly ever controlled the final editing of his films, but he always shoots in scope format, with anamorphic and wide-angle lenses, in an attempt to emulate the shot compositions and usage of framing of his master, Sergio Leone. Re-edited by producers and re-framed to satisfy the television and video market, a large part of Pyun films' magic has gone missing. Eager to preserve the originality of his work, Pyun created the production company Filmwerks in 1994, through which he will finance a handful of titles representing an illustrative summary of his unique and captivating art.
Despite some reverses and bashes, Pyun has managed to complete Infection (2005), a film where he finally has been able to exert full control, and recovers his avant-garde impulse along with his hectic creativity. Once more, Pyun leaves the spectator in a shock following a display of his technical skill: this time, the focus is on the shooting of a definitively psychotronic plot in real time and in one continuous sequence.
Albert Pyun is already working on new projects that he describes with his characteristic enthusiasm: "Cool Air", an adaptation of Lovecraft in an editing stage; a remake of Mean Guns on a Faustian tone; he is even considering the making of a surrealistic western, "Left for Dead", that he is to shoot simultaneously with "War Zone", a bellicose nightmare.
