In a telephone interview, Lisa Hammer stated:
"Independent film isn't independent anymore. They now have stars and ample funding," says Lisa Hammer, who has two films ("Crawley", "The Dance of Death") at this year's New York Underground Film Festival. "Independent has become an extended arm of Hollywood. Underground film is now where independent film used to be."

Hammer, who has been making underground
films in New York for the past 10 years, finds herself inclined to the off-beat rather than the mainstream. "'Crawley" is supposed to be a comedy, but we can't get out of the "Addams Family" aesthetic. It's in our soul. Even when we try to do normal things, they always end up being creepy," says Hammer, who screened "Empire of Ache," a 9-minute German-Expressionist style film about an institutionalized one-armed girl befriended by strange puppets, a ghost and talking meat, at last year's NYUFF.

Hammer and her collaborators, husband
Eric Hammer and Ben Edlund (creator of the Saturday morning animated hit "The Tick"), are working on a puppet-driven project about Edgar Allen Poe's friendship with Honore de Balzac. Not exactly multiplex fare. But the filmmaker has faith in her ability to make alternative subject matter appealing - and she's willing to be creative about fund raising. To finance her first film, the black and white, trash gore musical, "Pus$bucket", which was shot on super-8 and released on video, Hammer advertised nude photos of herself in a cult film magazine.