After the announcement that we wrapped principal photography on The Arcadian went out the production company started forwarding me emails asking what I mean by the line:

“Brian Thompson stars as Agmundr, an artist who works in the medium of human flesh.”

I can’t really explain it in direct context of the film without spoiling some things, but I can talk about my motivations when I was writing the part. Maybe that can help to make it clearer.

A few years back, right after New Year’s, I was crashing at an apartment with a bunch of friends. I didn’t live there. That year they had a little trouble paying their rent and I chipped in for them. I knew that they couldn’t pay me back so I decided I’d sleep there most of the month to make it equitable. It didn’t seem unreasonable since I’d been partying with them almost every night anyway. Well, I woke up around 6pm when one of the guys got home. I real fun friend who loved life, and I’m sad to say recently passed away in a very tragic incident involving some bad pills and maybe a stripper (he deserved better). Anyway, he got home and asked if I wanted to go in on some coke with him. I’ll readily admit I’ve been a recreational user of cocaine on occasions few and far between. We drove down that long, dark, palm-tree lined road that hugged the Atlantic Florida coast until we parked in one of the many brown-shingled two level apartment complexes.

The smell of weed and stale dishwater punched through the walls and out into the parking lot. Inside they had blacklights and rasta posters hanging next to some fake potted plants. There were two men in the living room. One of them was in a wheelchair, a little wiry white guy with a half-grown goatee. The second guy was a taller South-American with silver rings on his fingers. They both were wearing stained white undershirts. While my friend talked to the wheelchair-bound guy about his love life and his brother’s band, I was forced into a conversation with the other one. When my friend finally broke off normal chit-chat and started the deal-making process his friend turned sharply to me and asked, “Do you like art?”

The next thing I know I’m in his bedroom. It’s all candle-lit. Not tea candles, or romantic candles… this guy had those big dripping unscented colored candles all over his bedroom. The place was caked in wax like something from a Christopher Lee movie. He started showing me his sculptures. They were fantasy animals made by combining the skeletons of his old pets. He showed me the bleached skull of a monkey affixed to the winged spine of a snake. He pointed to a cat with tiny deer horns. One after another in this menagerie of the beasts from his imagination he’d tell me about how he collected and cleaned the bones. After he took a few hits from his bright red bong he began to feel me out a little. He asked what I thought of them. Honestly, I was a little creeped out, but I told him they were really unique. He got bolder and started telling me he had plans to get a friend of his from a local funeral home to get him some human bones, even a skull. He wanted to make a series of angels and demons using human parts.

Soon after that my friend burst in the room with a full baggy and an ear to ear grin. I basically told the guy “good luck with that” and took off.

That night stuck with me and it formed the basis of the character Agmundr. Now you know.