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I was born in 1958 at the Toronto General
Hospital and I have been going back and forth between Canada and
Switzerland my whole life. I did one year of school in Switzerland
and later I lived there for a year. I have now done two films
in co-production with Switzerland, so I’m kind of culturally
schizophrenic. My parents sent me to Upper Canada College, in
Toronto, where I was expelled, but conveniently there was a school
in Switzerland that ran under the Canadian system. My parents
sent me there instead.
Why were you expelled
from Upper Canada College?
A friend of mine was committed to a mental hospital, and the school
blamed me for giving him LSD. It was actually one of the high
points in my life because I got a chance to stand up to the school
and say what I believed in. I felt very strongly that I hadn’t
done anything wrong, and my friend hadn’t done anything
wrong. It was a classic confrontation about the way of seeing
things. It gave me a lot of fuel. UCC let me finish grade twelve,
then I left after that.
Your first student film was Reverie,
made in 1976, is that correct?
It was made the same year I was expelled. So all these things
were tied together. It was very adolescent, about drugs and consciousness,
and so on. It was shot in Super 8 mm, and the irony was that the
principal who kicked me out at the end of the year had to give
me an award for the film.
What was the film about?
It’s about a guy who buys a dream on Yonge Street from a
gypsy, and the dream is the dream of death. The gypsy shouldn’t
have been selling the dream and she gets into trouble, but he
gets to keep his dream. You see the dream play out as a film within
the film.
Why were you drawn to film, as
opposed to any other medium of expression?
It’s a very personalized medium that deals with how we see,
feel, and hear. I knew nothing about theory or the history of
cinema at that point. I had the option of joining a film club,
which I did, and instantly felt comfortable with the medium. It
seemed suited to what I wanted to do. I was just a kid, but as
soon as I discovered the camera I knew where I was going. I knew
it would allow me to experience a lot of different things in life
and could act as a medium of discovery.
When you were expelled from UCC
and sent abroad, where did you go to school in Switzerland?
The school was located on the outskirts of Lausanne. My short
career in film had come to a complete halt. I took up photography
instead and wrote plays. I turned the school washroom into a dark
room and worked on the yearbook. I made my application to college
from Switzerland and I was accepted. So I returned to Canada to
study film at Ryerson in Toronto.
What did your parents think of
all this?
My parents weren’t wealthy. They had come to Canada from
Switzerland with nothing, and all their savings were put into
sending me to UCC, which, to them, meant a career as a doctor
or a lawyer. Film was very foreign to them and meant risk and
instability, chaos and weird people. The whole idea of me going
to film school was disappointing, but the principal of the Swiss
school was very nice. He talked to them and told them how he thought
it was a good idea. He saw what I was trying to do and encouraged
it. So reluctantly they went along, but they also suggested I
go to business school. That never happened.
Did you have any teachers at
Ryerson who had an impact on your future films?
Lots of people, but I would say Bruce Elder was probably the most
significant. Jim Kelly was also really great with his hands-on
instruction. Those two figures were the most important to me.
You made a number of 16 mm shorts
there – Poison Ivy, Gregory, and Lancalot Freely.
Everything up until and including Scissere, except Reverie, was
made at Ryerson. I was making films all the time, even in the
first year when we were not supposed to be making films. As soon
as I got there, I just wanted to make films. I didn’t want
to do boring exercises, which was a big no-no at Ryerson. I was
very impatient and tried to combine the exercises with the making
of some kind of film. Eventually most of them worked out. Poison
Ivy was a kind of collage, made essentially from my gut feelings,
while Gregory was a more dramatic assignment. Scissere was also
very much made by gut feelings, assimilating all the knowledge
that I had learned at that point. Bruce Elder’s influence
– portraying states of consciousness, not telling stories
– was always something that interested me.
Elder must have introduced you
to film theory and history as well as some production ideas.
He was excellent at provoking new ideas but he was a terrible
teacher. Showing him things was always an event. You never knew
if you were going to come out battered or what. I was yelled at
by him a number of times. He introduced his class at the beginning
of the year by saying, ‘I’m here because I want to
make films. It’s my job, so let’s be easy on one another.
I’ll just lecture and show you films, and you leave me alone.’
Which was fine by me. What he taught me was really valuable, and
on the production side of things, Jim Kelly was good to talk to
about the process of filmmaking. I remember showing Lancalot Freely
to Elder, and he yelled at me. He asked me why I was making a
film about such an insignificant drug-addict-type person. He thought
it was pointless.
Who or what was Lancalot Freely?
It’s a film about a reunion I had with my best friend from
grade school. He was this punk character who had a quite brilliant
mind, but he was constantly in and out of prison, living on the
streets in a drugged haze. His motto was sex, drugs, and rock
‘n’ roll, and the film was a portrait of him. It was
made as a documentary exercise.
Given the realist tradition of
documentary in Canada, why did you choose this more impressionistic
approach?
I just did what moved me. I had ideas and visions and I wanted
to make them into films. School, for me, was very sheltered. It
didn’t have much to do with the history of cinema or any
context for Canadian film. In those days it was blissful and I
didn’t have to worry about history or context.
I understand that Bruce McDonald
was at Ryerson at the same time as you. Were there others that
you remember?
After two years at Ryerson, I took one year off to work at a heroin
rehabilitation clinic in Switzerland, then I came back and did
another two years. So I went from one group of people to a second
group. Jeremy Podeswa and Bruce McDonald were in the second group.
Henry Jesionka was in the first group and he came to Switzerland
with me. He was pretty experimental in his orientation.
What lead you to work in the
heroin clinic?
Hitchhiking. This is going back to when I was in grade thirteen.
It was a strange day. I thought I would go out on the road and
stick my thumb out, and see where I was taken. Two rides ended
up taking me to this twelfth-century monastery hidden away in
a forest. There were these freaks roaming around, but no one would
tell me what the place was or what it was being used for. I hung
around for awhile and talked to some of the people. Eventually,
I realized it was a home for the care of people with drug problems.
I stayed for the weekend, took a lot of pictures, and went back
to school on Monday. But I went back a number of times. I liked
the place and what it was trying to do with these people –
a kind of questioning and opening up to that society. Then I went
to film school for two years, but somewhere in that experience
was the germ of an idea for a project for my final student film.
Scissere came out of that experience, but at first I didn’t
know it was going to end up looking like it does now. I had other
ideas. At first Henry and I thought we could work with the addicts
and get them to make a film about their situation, and we would
serve as their tools. But, of course, it’s not that easy
to motivate a bunch of heroin addicts. So we ended up doing a
year of research instead. We met Bruno Scissere, who was less
from the drug side and more from the psychopathic side. He had
been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. Eventually,
the film became built around a character that is, in fact, an
homage to him.
When you got back to Ryerson
for the second time, did anyone give you permission to make a
feature film based on your experiences at the heroin clinic?
I never called it a feature. I was just making this film, but
it was written out precisely, something I subsequently don’t
do. All the movements, which feel like they are improvised, were
scripted but not the dialogue or action. I showed it to Elder,
and he said you’ve been reading too much R D Lang. I showed
a rough cut to Kay Armatage, who was a programmer at the Toronto
Festival of Festivals, and she liked it and agreed to program
it. It was the first student film to be accepted at the festival.
Even though the school year was over, I went back to Ryerson,
and my teachers let me use the editing equipment to finish the
film.
The opening fifteen minutes of
the film appear to be influenced by Elder. It’s very abstract
and beautiful to watch. It’s a very impressive piece of
filmmaking.
For sure, it was Elder’s influence – in terms of techniques
and knowing how to do superimpositions and working with travelling
mattes. You definitely see it in that film. For me, that sequence
was the depiction of the birth of Scissere, and slowly it takes
you through his progression until he appears in the psychiatric
clinic. It was the source of the character since birth but also
the source of the character in terms of representation. These
are the elements that make up film celluloid – that make
up the grain of celluloid, which comes through nature –
chemistry slowly forming into patterns, ideas, and representations,
introducing the character of Scissere. Sometimes I think that
the opening sequence in Scissere is really the key scene in all
my work and all my other films relate back to it. The film is
not only about heroin addiction, that’s only part of it.
It deals with a schizophrenic’s life, and I was trying to
represent that on the film, which is pretty ambitious for a student
film.
Bruce McDonald was involved in
the making of Scissere, wasn’t he?
Bruce was involved in the editing. In school, everybody helped
everybody else out. Bruce came in several nights to help edit
and sometimes he would hold the boom. Collaborative Effort was
the producing faction, and that was Ron Repke and Al Magee. They
had already formed the company while they were at Ryerson, so
Ron became the producer of Scissere. We were starting to play
the filmmaking game a little bit.
Scissere was accepted at the
Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1982. What was that like and
what was the reaction to the film?
I was a thrilled. Going directly from film school to being at
a film festival – a festival that I had been a driver for
for a couple of years – and to have a real audience, it
was great. The reaction was across the board and every extreme.
Everybody liked the beginning and they all hung in there for the
first twenty minutes or so, but not everybody could get to the
end. I was amazed by what kind of people would get into it. Since
then I’ve discovered it’s very hard to tell what the
audience is for that film. I remember at the time being unhappy
with parts of it – its structure and things that weren’t
shot properly – but I had no way of redoing it. I, personally,
really like it because, as I said before, I was in a privileged
position when I made it, a naive position, and I was allowed to
go to extreme places where normally a filmmaker is not allowed
to go. I value that a lot in Scissere, even though I don’t
think of it as a perfect film.
You seemed to excel in cinematography.
Did that come naturally out of your interest in photography?
I never wanted to be the cinematographer. When I started to make
films, people asked me to shoot their films, and I did it because
I love the process. After Ryerson, I just kept shooting other
people’s films but I wasn’t pursuing a career in cinematography.
It was just feeding into what I wanted to do, which was to make
my own films.
When you came out of film school
in 1982, there must have been excitement in the air. Your film
had been accepted by the festival and Bruce was starting out his
career. What was it like back then?
I guess we were all full of ourselves, certainly enough to think
we could do what we wanted to do. We were very determined. The
nice thing about Ryerson at that time was its twenty-four-hour
access. You could do your courses during the day and stay all
night. You could sleep in your edit room and no one would bother
you. You could use animation cameras and the mixing theatre. It
was great. I think Bruce and I were there most nights. I have
a picture at my parent’s house, the time they brought us
chicken for dinner one night. I think we had been there for weeks
on end, and my parents showed up with food. There’s a picture
in their house of Bruce and I eating chicken in the editing room
at Ryerson.
The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers
of Toronto (LIFT) started up around the same time you graduated
from Ryerson. Were you involved with that?
That was one of the things that came out of the group at Ryerson.
Janice Lundman wanted to start a co-op. Alan Zweig and Mark Achbar
were involved. Bruce and I also thought it would be good to have
some sort of co-op. Then suddenly LIFT sprang up, but it wasn’t
the kind of thing that Bruce and I had envisioned. It was a place
where people could get equipment when they left school, like a
transition. I was thinking of a movement, something like Dada
or Dogme 95, where there would be a manifesto behind the whole
thing, not just a place to rent equipment. So I got out of it
quite quickly, but Bruce hung in there and made it work.
Toronto has a history of competing factions and not a great deal
of cooperation among the filmmakers. The Toronto Filmmakers Co-op,
which predated LIFT, disintegrated because everyone was just trying
to grab whatever cash or equipment that was available. It seems
that what you were doing in the early to mid-1980s was something
quite different.
I was aware of the problems with the first Co-op, and that people
were just using it to lever cash for their projects. I really
never had anything to do with it, but I was aware of its history.
We were just working with what was available to us and helping
each other. We would borrow equipment and go to places like PS
Production Services, which invested in the films with its equipment.
At this stage did you feel that
you were part of a community in Toronto? You were working with
Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, and Ron Mann.
We never looked at it as a community, or anything that concrete,
but it was a group of friends who could relate to each other and
work with each other. We came from astonishingly different points
of view. What Ron did, what Bruce did, what Atom did, and what
I did were very different takes and formal approaches to things.
It was amazing that we could talk to each other and genuinely
appreciate what each other was doing. My experience with other
groups is that people tend to close the door on each other and
there’s a kind of snobbery if you’re not doing the
same kind of thing, or moving in the same kind of direction. So
it was marvelous that everybody could talk to each other and work
with each other. This was especially true between Atom, Bruce
and I. We were genuinely collaborationing and not just working
for each other. We still remain close friends.
Do you remember how you met Atom?
He was studying at the University of Toronto when you and Bruce
were at Ryerson.
He was at the U of T making films and looking for a collaborator
on Open House. He had seen Scissere at a screening at Ryerson,
and we became friends. He was studying politics at university
while I was at film school. Film was a passion for him, but it
went along with all the other things he was doing; for me, film
was a full-time thing. He had made a couple of short films, at
that point, that were very theatrical. With Open House, he had
an idea and a good story and he asked me if I would shoot it.
I said, ‘Okay, how do you want me to shoot it?‘ He
said, ‘What do you mean?’ What I had been doing instinctively
– interpreting reality in a cinematic language – was
something that he hadn’t done yet. He was still working
on the idea level, something that I was inclined not to do. However,
we met at a middle point, which was good for both of us. At the
first stage of our working process I went home to work out how
the film could be shot. I presented it to him, and it was a revelation.
It was the first time anyone had talked to him about film like
that.
Do you mean you storyboarded
the film for him?
Storyboarding, turning his ideas into cinema. He likes jokes,
and sometimes his films are one long, winding, complex joke with
a punchline. His films have become more sophisticated and formalistic,
but ultimately you can always go back to the original joke. Actually,
I love collaborating with people, whether it’s Atom, Bruce,
or Jeremy [Podeswa]. It’s much more fun than making your
own film because you don’t have to wait, raise the money,
sweat it out, and all the other things that go into getting a
film off the ground. The pleasure of shooting a film is fantastic,
but that pleasure isn’t enough for me. I guess somewhere
in my deepest soul it is not where I want to be, just shooting
a film, being a medium for someone else. For me, the issues are
issues to do with personal vision and engagement with the world.
If you are a medium for another person, you can only go so far.
But it’s also great to be a servant, helping other people,
and in a way you are liberated by doing that. Sometimes I think
I would like to go back to doing that.
The next film you shot for Atom
was Next of Kin. How did you come to work on that film?
By now we were friends, so we just did it as a natural thing to
do. We talked about the design of the film, the idea that the
camera would be a character, the way people would be seen, and
how their point of view would be different. That sort of thing
was going on in Scissere, where the camera became the point of
view of the main character. In Next of Kin we worked it out in
a more formal sense.
During this time you also shot
Passion: A Letter in 16 mm for Patricia Rozema. How did that one
come about?
I was getting a lot of phone calls from different people, people
wanting me to shoot their films. That’s how it happened
with Patricia. We met, hit it off, and I shot that film. Linda
Griffiths was also a big part of Passion, which was interesting
as well. She came from the theatre scene that was happening in
Toronto, which none of us had been connected to, except for perhaps
Atom. Patricia was similar to Atom in the sense that she had ideas
and stories she wanted to tell, but not much in the way of a background
in the language of cinema. We had a similar working relationship,
but Patricia and Atom came from different backgrounds and had
different issues. The subtitle of the film was A Letter in 16
mm, so it was already in that area of how to use cinema to tell
a story while being aware of the medium at the same time. Things
like Passion just kept coming up, quite rapid-fire. There was
always something going on. If anything, I had the problem that
I was doing so much camera work for other people, I wasn’t
getting my own films made.
One of these other films was
Knock! Knock! for Bruce, and it does feel like a collaboration.
Actually, there is a part in the film that is really yours. Did
he ask you to take over part way through the shoot?
It was actually quite a complex film for Bruce, and he disappeared
half way through the shoot. He had started the film a couple of
years earlier in Ryerson for his documentary project. It was an
exploration of people’s bedrooms. It started as a black-and-white
documentary, then later he tried to develop a story to go with
it and it became very complicated. We were shooting in his apartment,
and the landlady was giving us shit, so we had to stop shooting.
The script was not making sense, and Bruce needed a break, so
he just disappeared in the middle of the shoot. Christie MacFadyen,
who was acting in the film, Daniel Brooks, and myself had to come
to terms with what to do. Because I felt quite close to Bruce,
and knew him well, I knew what the film was about and where he
was trying to go with it. I proposed we keep going. Daniel was
definitely against it, but Christie said yes, and the rest of
the crew was impartial. So we shot for a few more days and incorporated
the idea that we were looking for the director. Finally, Bruce
showed up again.
It’s a funny scene when
he does.
It’s real. When Bruce walked into the room he knew he would
be walking in on camera rolling. We did some more rewriting and
shot more footage to accommodate the fact that he had left. The
end of the film could have been edited a thousand different ways.
It is what it is now, but it has all the ingredients for various
different endings. I really think it is a flawed but remarkable
film. It’s not often you get that kind of chemistry going.
Can we now move on to your next
film, which is the short, Eastern Avenue?
I don’t really consider it to be a film. It’s more
like notes for a film. Eastern Avenue was an intuitive response
to the places I had been in Europe in previous years, especially
the heroin clinic. The film was shot chronologically, with an
almost one-to-one shooting ratio, much like a diary film. I was
using it as a development tool for The Top of His Head, although
The Top of His Head works, formalistically, very different from
Eastern Avenue. You really wouldn’t know the two were related
if you looked at them now.
The sound you use in Eastern
Avenue is much more developed than in Scissere. It really stands
out as an integral part of the film, which, as you say, is a travelogue
shot in Berlin, Switzerland, and Portugal.
Eastern Avenue uses cinema in an impressionistic, almost musical
language, which, for me, was an experiment. I’m very interested
in the musicality of cinema. To me the camera, music, and sound
are all one. They are the language of observation and emotion.
I studied piano when I was younger and for me cinema is an extension
of music, much more so than storytelling. Eastern Avenue was about
improvisation. The violin and cello you hear are two people playing
improvised playback to the picture. They did two or three passes,
and then I cut different parts of these passes and recomposed
them to go with the film. So, in a way, I used a spontaneous,
improvised reaction to the film and then composed it. A lot of
the sound in the film was done in a similar fashion. One sound
is a long passage riding on the back of a rickshaw in India that
goes on for fifteen minutes. It’s a sound story. If you
listen closely, you can hear the driver talking. It’s superimposed
over Berlin and it’s equally important as a narrative. To
me, working on the film was like playing a piano. I had these
sound tracks and these images and I could fade the sound like
a note on the piano, up and down. I was composing the film. That’s
one of the things I love about filmmaking. It’s one of the
high points. It’s where all the elements come together.
To me the sound of a film is just as important as the image.
Atom also has a musical background,
and I guess you two could relate on that level.
It’s funny, we always say we should jam together, but we
never have. I had a rather boring piano teacher who made me practice
classic scales. I didn’t enjoy it but I was forced to do
it. Finally, after seven years, I told my parents I didn’t
want to do it any more, and literally the day after I quit I started
to enjoy the piano and to improvise, just wander around and do
different stuff. That became very important to me. Music helps
me discover ideas.
Before you made your feature,
The Top of His Head, you shot one more film for Atom, Family Viewing.
I stopped shooting for other people after that film. When The
Top of His Head started rolling, I just never had time anymore
to leave my own films for a month or two to work with someone
else. In terms of standard of production, Family Viewing was my
most real film up until that point. It was designed, organized,
scripted, and had this play between video, film, and observation.
It was really an exciting film to make, and I think it was the
same for Atom. He thought it was risky, a dangerous film because
he thought nobody would get it. It was quite exciting to have
the tools to make a film like that.
Was it interesting for you to
be shooting in two different formats, video and film? Atom, John
Greyson, Steven Soderbergh, and others were starting to blend
the formats at about the same time.
It was the first time that we had combined the two mediums. It’s
interesting to see how Atom’s work – and everyone’s
work – has developed. The schism between film and video
has gone. That’s where it surfaced, in Atom’s films.
You didn’t really see it before then, but it was an obvious
tool to use. A lot of people back then were merging disciplines
to create a new language. It just seemedappropriate to use a different
technology as a tool of expression, to make you see something
in a different way. People were interested in breaking down the
old system a little bit, showing a different way of working and
creating reality.
Something that you were also
doing at that time was breaking down the barriers between documentary,
fiction, and experimental filmmaking. Did you see those barriers
as a limitation to what you wanted to do?
The barriers are there, definitely, but only on the outside. You
have the narrative ideology, you’ve got the experimental
community, and you’ve got the documentary faction. And within
those groups and factions you have people saying you have to do
things like this or that. What I have always found a challenge
is that I don’t fit into any of those categories, yet I
fit all of them. There is the outer world of how things appear,
then there is an inner world of what I want to do. The inner world
is quite easy if you don’t have to deal with the outer world.
You just find the voice and a way of doing things. There’s
a whole combination of things that influence your language, but
when you get into a position where you have to defend yourself
to get the film made – such as with the Canada Council,
which won’t give you the money because the film is too big
or too dependent on narrative; or Telefilm Canada, which won’t
give you the money because the film is too experimental; or television
documentary shows, which won’t show your films because they
don’t fit the form of documentaries – you have to
convince these people using their own language. The same thing
that happens when the film finally does get made. People approach
it from their own frame of reference.
Which brings me to The Top of
His Head, which seems to combine all those elements of narrative
structure, experimental form, and documentary style. How did you
convince the producers, in this case Rhombus Media, to back the
film?
I was looking around to make my next film and I thought I would
like to try classical narrative cinema, but, at the same time,
subvert it. It was a formula that meant I could work in the commercial
realm while at the same time commenting on it. The early drafts
– which were the best drafts – talked about what the
film was doing, the process. I was trying to combine storytelling,
music, intuition, intellect, male and female sensibilities, and
was explaining why it was working, what the intention was. The
initial feedback to those early drafts was to take all that stuff
out. So I did, and the script was reduced, but those are the terms
of getting a script through the system. It was clear to Niv Fichman
at Rhombus what I was trying to do. He had seen Scissere and saw
something in it that worked for him. His background is in music
as well and he thought the film was do-able. Making The Top of
His Head was a huge learning experience for me. Coming from film
school and Scissere and Eastern Avenue, then suddenly having all
this money might make you think you can do what you want, but,
in fact, it was the complete opposite. I felt totally restricted.
Suddenly I had a crew to administer and I had lost scenes in the
script that were integral to the film because I couldn’t
reshoot them. I couldn’t go over budget. On Scissere, if
something didn’t work, I could redo it .
Which scenes did you lose?
During the set up there was a wedding scene and certain elements
that fit the puzzle and moved you to where Gus is launched on
his voyage. For me, the film is pretty accurate to the script
from that point on to the end. But the whole set-up is problematic
because there are scenes we eliminated, and we tried to tie things
up differently during the editing.
The film contains some scenes
which could be taken from performance art, especially the one
in the warehouse at the end. Where did the idea for that come
from?
For me, the design of the film was the merging of polarities –
masculine and feminine, intellect and intuition, and so on. The
piece at the end was symbolic. There are two people swinging lights
attached to ropes and there are two polarities, east and west.
There is a riddle in the film that has to do with the meeting
of east and west and solving just where that point is. That scene
visually depicts the narrative line. Gus walks into the middle
of the swinging lights and that’s where he comes to his
revelation. The film has all sorts of layers you can expand on,
if you want to look at it that way. For me, it’s too narratively
based at the beginning, so you are hooked into a narrative way
of thinking and then the narrative becomes undone and the audience
hasn’t been properly set-up to read the film in this way.
Some people got it, and a lot of people didn’t but enjoyed
it anyway, and then some people were frustrated by it. What frustrated
me most was it didn’t get a chance to be seen – it
didn’t get proper distribution – and it had taken
a lot of work to get the film made. It took a lot of risks and
it wasn’t a simple project. However, what I have found when
it’s shown in a retrospective context is that people understand
it much better now. The language of cinema in general has gone
through a number of changes since it was made and it’s easier
to read. The segues are easier to understand.
Back to that warehouse scene
for a moment. Technically it seemed like a difficult shot but
it was brilliantly worked out.
It was done with dolly shots, in 35 mm, well-lit, and choreographed,
as opposed to Eastern Avenue, which was old footage, short ends,
and a hand-held camera. But to me they are both equal, just different
levels of the language. In my current film, Gambling, Gods and
LSD, I am using a lot of crude imagery with a television camera,
which also developed from the techniques I used on Eastern Avenue.
But on the other hand, I am using Super 16 mm blow-up and smoother,
fluid shots. I see these as filmmaking tools, forms of the cinematic
language, not that one method of filming is any better than the
other. With The Top of His Head I had all this fancy equipment,
high-quality stock, and assistants. That particular shot in the
warehouse was crazy. We had the camera dollying in with these
heavy lights swinging around. One of the gaffers wanted to stop
the shoot because he felt it was too dangerous. But it was okay
and under control. Everyone had hard hats on.
The Top of His Head is the first
film where you direct actors. You had done many films, but never
with professional actors. Was the experience of being on set behind
the camera helpful to you when you filmed The Top of His Head?
In film school, I acted in a film by Maury Pomerantz. Christine
MacFayden and I had the lead roles. I went to a drama class at
Ryerson to get a feeling of what it is like to be an actor, but
I didn’t have any aspirations to be one. On the other films
I worked on, such as Atom’s, I would watch what was going
on with the actors. I always felt that the relationship of the
actor to the camera was equally as important to whatever the director
did to motivate an actor to get the right performance. It’s
not theatre. The actors are playing to a camera, which can change
the nature of the performance. I feel there should be a clear
dialogue between the camera and the actors. I was being told by
everybody that I couldn’t be behind a camera and direct
at the same time. I asked, ‘but why?’ because it seems
to me the best place to be. When I was shooting other people’s
films the actors were really playing to me, and the director was
struggling to see what the performance was like. There are several
reasons why you can’t direct and shoot at the same time,
but there are reasons why it works for me.
What are those reasons?
It’s difficult because if you’re operating a complex
shot, you’re definitely preoccupied with where the camera
should be and with the framing. You’re seeing the actors
through the lens or you don’t hear them properly because
they are too far away. You might get a good image, but you can’t
evaluate the performance. But on the other hand, when you’re
intimate with an actor you get the performance better than anyone
else. You also know the movement of the camera is happening in
coordination with the emotion you are feeling from the actor.
In a way, you are directing actors simultaneously with the camera.
Fred Frith is one of the great
composers of our time and he ended up composing the music for
The Top of His Head. How did that come about and what was that
like working with him?
Back when I started out, I didn’t really have any strong
father figures or mentors in cinema, but two people who really
impressed me were Fred Frith and Pina Bauch. They come from two
completely different disciplines, but their work related directly
to what I was interested in. I discovered Fred just by chance.
I found one of his albums, Speechless, in a record store in New
York. It had the same kind of credit notes as Eastern Avenue,
something about a tin can being kicked in a parade in New York
City. He was acknowledging a sound as you would acknowledge a
saxophonist and, to him, random sounds were just as important.
I bought the album and discovered it could be used for the soundtrack
of The Top of His Head. It was the merging of narrative, classical
musical structure, with an undercurrent of improvisation and random
play. It was a melding of what I was interested in, so I tried
to find Fred. It turned out, by coincidence, he had done a concert
at the heroin clinic I had worked at in Switzerland. The head
of the clinic gave me a number to call, and that was how I found
him in New York. He’s British, but he records all over the
world. I just asked him point blank if he would work with me on
the film, and remarkably he said ‘okay.’ He eventually
came up to the National Film Board in Toronto and worked for four
weeks on the soundtrack.
Sometime around this point you
also must have met Robert Lepage.
We were editing The Top of His Head in Montreal, and Tectonic
Plates had just started touring. That was the first time we met.
About a year later, Debra Hauer in England, and Niv Fichman agreed
to make a film around Tectonic Plates and Niv proposed me as the
director.
Did you travel with the production?
I spent about a year with it before I started shooting. I saw
it in Quebec City in one incarnation and then went to Scotland
for a month or two where it was playing in Edinburgh. Robert and
the actors were trying to work out the piece much like I would
work out a film on an editing table, accept that with theatre
you can change every nuance and with film you are stuck with the
shot. I would watch the play throughout rehearsals and performances,
and then they went back to Ottawa. In a small way I was adding
to the process, giving Robert some feed back that actually affected
the shape of the piece, but mostly I was making notes about what
I saw and trying to write an adaptation that would work for television.
Of all the many Lepage stage
plays, why this particular production to shoot?
I just think it was the one going at the time. I liked it, and
it’s one of the best of his stage shows that I know about.
It involves a process that is really fascinating. The metaphor
itself, the Continental Drift – the tectonic plates –
are fantastic things that can apply to many different themes and
characters. It’s a really great metaphor and became a metaphor
for the medium, for cinema, and theatre. The paradox of turning
the piece into film is that Robert uses quotations from film all
the time. He uses devices, transitional devices, on stage that
are quite spectacular because they are borrowed from cinema. When
you take that and translate it into cinema, it’s really
quite ordinary, like a dissolve. We couldn’t shoot it as
a full-fledged film, because we didn’t have the budget,
so the task became how to preserve the theatricality of the piece
with its special characteristics and film it while still preserving
what made it so remarkable.
You do get a sense of the water,
and the play remains as powerful as it was on stage. You manage
to make it cinematic while still maintaining the essence of the
performance. Obviously your process here was how you adapted the
piece and still maintained its magical quality. How did you do
that?
By injecting more cinematic moments into the stage play, like
the rearscreen that allows the actors to ‘walk into’
Venice. That wasn’t in the original production. We would
segue from a real location back into a theatrical space, or go
under water and emerge in Venice. What was remarkable about the
process was that you had thirteen people working around a metaphor,
developing characters, developing scenes. Robert was developing
the staging, and I was developing the film. The play I saw in
Quebec, at the beginning, was very different from what the film
is now. It was a living being, full of influences and currents.
That is why it was so fascinating to do and why it was appropriate.
I could relate to it with my own themes and motives. In a way,
it was a let down when we finished the film. You’re seeing
a process that was frozen in time, but in fact, for two years,
it was this jigsaw puzzle, which is another metaphor used in the
film.
Did Lepage approve of the final
film?
He liked it, and it was a good experience for everyone. Robert
was very gracious about the whole thing, but that’s how
he works. When he works with a group of people, they are allowed
to construct, to be part of something, and he is just one of the
elements. When it came to the film, it was absolutely understood
that I should do what I saw fit. We discussed everything in great
detail with the entire group. The directorship was handed over
to me with no qualms, and it was clear that the vision of the
film was my responsibility. Of all my films, it was the most fun
to make because I had this great set, some great people to work
with, and enough time and money to make it happen properly. However,
in the end I was disappointed because it didn’t play in
the cinema, only at festivals, and was limited to television.
But it had been shot for the small screen.
What came next for you?
Balifilm in Indonesia. Niv had made a film called World Drums,
and one of the groups in that film was a Balinese orchestra. I
loved the way they played. They seemed such supercharged, happy
people that I wanted to go there. Niv had been to Bali and told
me about it. So I went and again, as with Eastern Avenue, I had
short ends, a little camera, and I just had lots of good luck
and ended up in good places. I went back two years later and shot
more material, and like Eastern Avenue was to The Top of His Head,
Balifilm was notes for Gambling, Gods and LSD, the film I am working
on now. Then Thom Sokoloski came to me and asked if I had any
material he could use in a live performance piece he was about
to direct. I said I had the material I shot in Bali, so I started
cutting the film to existing compositions he had already worked
out. When the piece was performed live, I made a recording of
that performance on film.
What was shooting in Bali like
for you?
I was in paradise. Especially after The Top of His Head, which
was exhausting. It’s a place where the culture and creative
impulses just oozed wherever I went. The people have a great relationship
to nature. Certainly they have their own problems, but I was experiencing
the island on another level. I recorded some great dance troupes.
The man with the long hair in the film is a Dalang, of which there
are only two on the island. They are basically the cultural gods,
if you will, the people who possess the most knowledge about their
culture and pass it on to other generations. He is also the shadow-puppet
master who tells the whole nine-hour Ramayana saga. He does all
the voices and puppets at the same time, while tapping his foot
on a drum.
So Balifilm was shot between
The Top of His Head and Tectonic Plates and put together much
later, is that right?
There is a lot of footage that I sit on like that, diary-type
footage that just hasn’t manifested itself yet.
And after Tectonic Plates you met Andreas Züst in Switzerland,
who would come to produce your next film, Picture of Light.
I was in Switzerland showing Tectonic Plates and I was staying
at a friend’s house. Züst was invited over for dinner.
He’s an obsessed meteorologist and his whole life he has
wanted to record the Northern Lights on film. We had hit if off
rather well and during that evening he proposed we make a film
together. I said, ‘Yeah, great idea but I don’t want
to produce it. I don’t want to spend three years finding
the money to make it. If you can find the money to make it, I’ll
gladly do it.’ He said, ‘Okay, Peter.’ Then
a couple of months later, he came back to me and said, ‘Okay,
I’ve got enough money to go.’ He had raised the money
from a wealthy Swiss artist who was now living in Germany. Actually,
it all happened quite quickly, and suddenly we had to get ready
to go to Churchill, Manitoba.
Essentially, it was an improvisational film, although there were
some guidelines, number one being to get the Northern Lights on
film. The other was to explore the context of the place. We had
to do all sorts of weird technical things in order for the lights
to be filmed. The camera had to be slowed down and it had to be
heated. There was no way of knowing what exposures we had to use
in advance. We had to do exposure tests when we were there. We
ended up going to Churchill twice because there was a major technical
problem with the set-up and equipment the first time. But in retrospect
– because our insurance covered the costs of these problems
– it allowed us to go back a second time and it turned out
to be a creative blessing. It meant that we could process the
footage, roughly edit it, and see what was working and what needed
to be followed-up on. So we went back a second time, reshot what
we needed, then went to Switzerland to do the editing and post.
Picture of Light is very experimental in style and beautiful to
watch.
I think The Top of His Head wears its complications – in
terms of content and style – on its sleeve, while in Picture
of Light they’re much more hidden and focused around something
very simple, a straight-forward trajectory to get the Northern
Lights on film. Ultimately you can always fall back on the spectacular
nature of the lights.
It has a documentary structure to it, but there is a lot of voice-over
and a lot of talk about poetry.
I’m always trying to merge forms, to get the viewer to look
at something on a different level, to bring an experience forth,
whether you call this poetic, or musical, or emotional. The choices
I make are made to achieve that effect. It’s my natural
instinct to work that way. I try to find the form to take the
audience to the place I am interested in. If I had continued to
work in the form of Eastern Avenue, then I would get the size
of audience I got for Eastern Avenue. Few people have actually
seen that film. I try to tread that delicate line with my films,
so I can bring them into the mainstream dialogue.
Of all your films, Picture of
Light has had the widest theatrical release. That must have been
satisfying to you. Do you see it as your most accomplished film
to date, or do you look at your films that way?
I regard them as a whole, but I can understand why that film got
a lot of attention. Partly it is because of the simplicity of
it. The Northern Lights are an awesome phenomenon. It’s
a good hook.
You mentioned the essayistic
style you use in your films. Was the French director Chris Marker’s
films an influence on your work?
Most definitely.
And Jean Roch?
Less so. I met Jean Roch in Paris. I was there because of Gambling,
Gods and LSD. Roch is more of an archivist. Marker is more of
an essayist. There is also a lot of mystery in Marker, which is
closer to my style.
What is your new film about?
It’s called Gambling, Gods and LSD and takes place over
four regions of the world – the airport region in Toronto;
Las Vegas and the desert around it; Zurich and the mountains surrounding
it; and southern India. It was completely improvised and mostly
I travelled alone. Some research was done, but a lot of it was
just encountering what came along my way. It’s about how
people create meaning for themselves. I have taken very different
characters, their experiences within their own culture, and created
a tableaux of associations around the notion of God and His meaning.
It was designed as a regular-length film, but when it was assembled
it was fifty-five hours long, containing about one hundred scenes.
It’s a mixture of digital video and film. At the outset
I didn’t think so much material would be usable. But there
is a lot of diversity in the material. I think the truest experience
of showing the material would be to see it as a series or an installation.
To see every scene, and then make your own experience out of it,
which, of course, a feature film doesn’t allow you to do
because feature filmmaking requires storytelling, structure, and
transitions.
The film begins at home, where I grew up, which is very close
to the airport. There is a scene set in the Constellation Hotel
on the airport strip. When I was a kid I used to look up to the
thirteenth floor with all its flashing lights. Now it’s
an abandoned place. It had a bar there called the Magic Carpet
Room. It’s beautiful, with all these magnificent views of
the airport. It’s kind of a transcendental space. One of
the major scenes at the start of the film is a church situated
near the airport where some people say God visited some years
ago. People come there from all over the world. They laugh hysterically
and speak in tongues. One of the objectives of the film is to
really try to undertake a process where the film could make itself.
I wasn’t prestructuring or predetermining. It was really
a matter of trying to be free enough to go out into the world,
respond and build something from those responses that could show
me something that I, myself, don’t understand. In a way,
it deals with the mystery of life, the mystery of how life works.
I really wanted to work by those rules of so-called chance, of
course filtered through my own knowledge and my own experience,
my own desires, etc. You can’t get away from that, but,
as much as possible, I wanted to let the film make itself. It’s
a journey back to wonder how we perceive the world, how we formulate
meaning out of the world.
Did you shoot it all by yourself
and how long did it take to accumulate the footage?
It took about two years, and for the most part I shot it myself,
except for a few shots. Sometimes I travelled completely alone.
Sometimes I worked with a camera assistant and a soundman. Sometimes
I did my own sound. It was really a mixed bag. Sometimes I used
a digital-video camera, sometimes I used a full camera set-up.
I would pick up help along the way. I would have someone record
sound who had never recorded sound before. The advantage was that
it was a very fluid journey in terms of experience and things
were allowed to happen that might not have happened with a crew.
So you sacrifice a certain degree of quality, but you gain a certain
depth of experience by working alone.
I shot about 100 hours of material. The first thing I did was
create an assembly of all usable material. There was very little
material that was shot twice. Most of it was done in one take.
That added up to a fifty-five-hour assembly of very different
scenes. In a way, that was the work, that was the experience.
From 100 hours to the three hours, it becomes much more conceptual,
much more sculpted, and of course most of it is left out, obviously.
One of the big challenges was to concentrate the experience into
three hours without being overwhelmingly dense. I think I have
been successful. I feel that from the people who have seen the
three-hour version and have also seen a longer version. The essence
they felt in the longer version is still there, but it was quite
a job to get it to three hours.
Is there an actual storyline or is it all impressionistic?
There is a storyline, which is me as a young boy who ran away
from home, progressing through the world, looking at how different
people find meaning, find their way, creating importance in their
life, which gives them reason to go on. That’s reflected
in what I am doing with the camera. As the film develops, it becomes
much more about how we look at things and how we see things.
Why Gambling, Gods and LSD? Is
this going back to your school days at Upper Canada College and
your experimentation with LSD?
I had to tip my hat to LSD, and thank it for a few things. I think
it was significant for tuning me in to a certain kind of vision.
For me, it was a turning point, turning the invisible visible.
Drugs are addressed in the film, but never LSD directly. It’s
more about the sensibility of the drug. There is a scene with
Albert Hoffman, the man who invented LSD. He’s ninety-four
and still living in Switzerland. Hoffman is neutral about the
effects of the drug he invented. He discovered this psycho-chemical
thing from nature and released this whole new consciousness on
the world, but he is not at all sure what it all means.
I understand you now live in
an artistic co-operative in Switzerland, which is where you edited
the film.
Basically, where I was editing Gambling, Gods and LSD in Switzerland
was an hour outside of Zurich, in a rural area. There was an abandoned
hotel that I always had my eye on, but there was one person living
there. It was shabbily made, like an old lodge you might find
in northern Ontario. It was huge and had lots of rooms. When the
last person left, and the place became available, I managed to
find four other people to form a collective. We approached the
owner and rented the place for two years as a kind of trial. We
left space open for other people to come and work, whether it
be to write or rehearse a theatre piece. There are three floors
and lots of small rooms to hide away in, but at the same time
live in a community. The main floor is a big open room, so you
can project film or videos. You can have a poetry reading or a
performance. Everybody does something different in the group.
It’s not like we’re all filmmakers.
You have talked a lot about the
space between things. Would you please explain more what you mean
about this rather abstract notion.
Formally, there is always a collision of things that creates something
else that is indefinable. If you look at a techno rave in the
streets of Zurich, then you look at this church in Toronto, which
is also a group of people in a trance, then you look at a guru
in India who spends twenty-two hours in a day hugging one individual
at a time while thousands wait. That’s a juxtaposition of
three things. When you see that it adds up to something that is
in between, that you can’t exactly describe. You can intellectualize
about it or impose an idea upon it, but there is a feeling you
get when you see the juxtapositions that are in this in-between
place. It’s very hard to talk about in the sense of what
it means, what is it. It’s alchemy, putting this and that
together without knowing the outcome, but it gives a certain kind
of tension. There is a tension between the polarities of all the
things. I talked about this earlier – intellect vs intuition;
male vs female; narrative vs musical – these are tensions
in the culture. Out of this collision, things open up and give
you perspective, insight.
And you think cinema is the proper
form to do this?
Yes. The thing about cinema is that you can do anything with it,
but it is so pushed into the corner of what is considered marketable
that very little is allowed to be done with it. It’s remarkable
that we have a medium that is so vast that it can almost incorporate
anything, yet we’re stuck in these formulas. We’re
told to work in these formulas, which is fine, but they are certainly
not the only thing you can do with cinema. There is so much more.
Such as using multi-images to
tell a story?
I did an experiment in Switzerland with an open house. We set
up several monitors in different rooms showing scenes from Gambling,
Gods and LSD randomly. I was curious as to what people would perceive
out of this situation; what was the whole that they took away
with them. But I’m also a fan of staying in linear film
time and have the mind work associatively. I give you a line of
images, sound, stories, etc., but you should feel free to interpret
them in the way that you want. To reflect back on what you saw
and even anticipate what might be coming. The risk I find in multi-image
installations is that they are just like life. Every day we are
completely inundated with 10,000 random images, so I’m not
convinced that putting this in the context of an art gallery is
taking us anywhere. In a way, my reaction today is opposite to
how I felt when I made Scissere. My reaction now is to reduce,
to simplify, and let the mind and spirit breathe while they are
watching something. Find yourself in it, instead of being bombarded
by information.
What sort of reaction did you
get when you set up the monitors in your hotel?
I was surprised that people would actually sit for an hour in
front of one monitor, then go to the next and sit there for an
hour and not have a storyline guiding them. They were just watching
experiences and seeing things. In every conversation I had, they
would be talking about themselves, not about my film. They would
be talking about what it meant for them, what they saw in it,
what it reminded them of and what they felt. I liked that, because
the experience felt very alive.
What is next for Peter Mettler?
Part of the way I work is that I am always collecting things,
Gambling, Gods and LSD being the most profound example of having
a lot of material that can be used somewhere else in the future.
But to be honest, work has been so intense on this film that I
haven’t made a lot of plans of what I am going to do next.
I do have a lot of ideas of how I would like to use the other
material. But I haven’t come to any conclusions yet. I just
want to finish this and breathe some air. Closure is always a
problem for me because you are being shown a number of things
simultaneously and dealing with it in an in-between kind of state.
I can’t really wrap it up because it’s always ongoing.
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