JODOROWSKY
OK, shall we continue?
When El Topo kills the
Fourth Master, he has the Fourth Master
within him, right?
And then I explained how the eight-sided tower
opens up, etcetera, etcetera.
He finds his way: he is killed by the woman,
etcetera, etcetera.
And then see the person in the cave. His hair is dyed and
he's been painted like
a statue of a saint. But, beginning with this sequence,
he will reach the moment
when he'll lose his personal problems and will
acquire social problems.
When you struggle internally in life, and you
triumph and are freed
of your problems, you become faced with
a greater problem:
the problem of the entire universe. Right?
In other words, you are
never liberated from the weight. You increase it.
When a mystic reaches
a god, he realizes that there is a greater god.
And he hs to work
and work. It's endless. El Topo is endless.
It
never ends.
One day we'll all film
a movie that will last a hundred years. I feel it.
There will only be time
out to eat, to shit, to make love, and to work.
FIRESTONE
That's the film we're
in.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I know.
COHEN
It'd be hard to watch
that movie, in one lifetime.
But it wouldn't be hard
to make it.
JODOROWSKY
It wouldn't be hard.
I think we could make a fundamental change
in film. Those who want
to make art try to put everything into the
picture, nothing escapes
and everything is done for the picture.
And they feel that the
camera is the umbilical cord to the heart
of the world. Yes.
I feel that the heart of the world is the heart
of the world. And
that the camera is an insect which consumes
only a part of the world.
I never hope to include everything
in one frame. I
saw a photograph of a medium. A thread of
some white substance streams
down from his mouth and
falls to the ground.
And on the ground a foot begins to form ...
it's forming a body.
If I photograph the foot, I have the body.
The same as when a policeman
takes the imprint of a shoe,
he has the thief.
I believe that each image of the film is an
imprint. I can't
give the entire body. You have to form it.
Each film must be a sample
of the entire universe,
as each grain of sand
is a sample of the entire beach.
Rene Guenon says, "Man
is a symbol just as a word is a
symbol." Every word
and every symbol carry man along.
Man is the symbol of the
nonmanifested, and you have to live
your life like a symbol.
Because if you don't want to live your life
like a symbol, but as
what you think is a real body, you're not living.
The other day I was with
Valerie and suddenly I said to her,
"You are the left hand
and I am the right hand of a prayer."
Right? Etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera. What do you want to know.
Etcetera. I always
say etcetera, etcetera, etcetera because
there is always an etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera ...
FIRESTONE
There's always more to
say.
JODOROWSKY
In mathematics I studied
Group Theory.
This theory says that
there are many kinds of infinites.
Within one infinity, there
can be many infinites.
That's why I say etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera.
We can never finish a
theme. Right?
Because within each theme
there is a universe that
cannot be exhausted.
That's why one should never
write theories with the
intentions of including everything.
No book can encompass
the entire universe. The Africans say,
"Truth does not exist
in a single head." But I say, there are many
Truths, there is a Truth
in each head. So we must look for groups
of Truths. One problem
has infinite solutions. Marcel Duchamp
said that there are no
solutions because there are no problems.
Right? Beautiful. But
if there is a problem, there are infinite solutions;
and you must choose the
solutions you like. Right? Not the solution.
But I like all solutions.
I use all solutions at the same time.
And there is no contradiction
in that.
In this world, the concept
of contradiction doesn't exist.
The concept of contradiction
exists if you walk down a street:
you only see the present.
But if you travel by plane,
there are no contradictions
because you see many presents
and many pasts and many
futures at the same time.
I swear that I'll direct
my next film from an airplane ...
ten thousand meters away
from the actors.
All the actors will wear
earphones.
COHEN
I want to ask you how
you were changed
by the experience of the
movie. I mean,
like all those things
with the sacrifices, the rabbits ...
JODOROWSKY
I was born. A new
life. Really, a new life.
I think my brain opened
up. When I started this interview,
I spoke about my skull
dividing into eight pieces, and the
butterfly that came ...
Maybe the butterfly was the movie.
Maybe when you do something,
you are changed.
When I shaved my head,
and when I found the landscapes,
for example, those were
very strong experiences -- Jungian
experiences. I took
an old woman -- she was a hundred years
old -- from the town,
and I kissed her when we ate the beetles.
The beetle is a sacred
symbol of Egypt. We entered into Time,
and she gave birth to
me. You'll notice she has the Tree of Life
embroidered on her vestment.
I had it embroidered for her.
COHEN
Who was she?
JODOROWSKY
An old woman of the town.
It was a small town.
She was a very old Mexican
woman. I had asked for
a woman who was a hundred
years old. They didn't want
her to do the film because
she was so old. But she liked it.
And I think I was
reborn, like a hero who must die and be reborn.
I think my whole
life was changed. Fox example, when I returned
home after filming the
movie, I couldn't stand having anything on
the walls.
And I took everything down from the walls,
And now I live in a white
house with no pictures on the walls ...
nothing. And
I put a box in the middle of the room, took all
the books that no longer
said anything to me, and put them in
the box. And I let
my friends take them away. I threw away
all my clothes because
I couldn't wear them anymore.
I kept a few pairs of
pants and some shirts, that's all.
I had the honor of not
being admitted into many New York
restaurants. Incredible,
isn't it? Even the restaurant
on the first floor of
this building turned me away.
That's why now I'm in
the heights of the building.
When I finished the film,
I felt I had nothing left inside ... empty.
And then Joanne Pottlitzer
called me to invite me to lecture
at universities in the
United States. And I said, "Yes."
But I never thought it
would happen. I don't think she was
serious. But later
she called me and said, "Now you must come."
I said, "I won't go."
And I went to Guadalajara. But Pottlitzer
is a typical North American
woman, and she found me by
telephoning Guadalajara.
She found me. And she made me come.
For one of the lectures,
we traveled two hours from New York
to go to Philadelphia.
To Temple University. And I said, "I am empty."
But I went.
Two hours by train to say what? I had nothing to say.
"Why did I come?"
And we traveled at night. I saw the emptiness of
the towns, the emptiness.
And a Nazi came to meet us at the station.
A Nazi who hated
negroes. He said to me, "We live in another area of
town. And we've
left the downtown section of the city for the Negroes."
And he took me to the
lecture hall. And I walked and walked,
trying to make conversation.
I felt each step like a gunshot.
And at that moment, I
realized that I was a dog. I said,
"I'm a mysterious dog."
Like those dogs I used to see in
restaurants when I would
eat with the workers in Chile. Right?
In those restaurants,
you'd sit down to eat beets and a dog
would come up to beg for
some meat. And you'd give him half
of your portion and he'd
wag his tail. That mysterious dog was
merely giving you the
great gift of being able to give.
He was giving you the
possibility of giving. At the University,
I was standing before
the group of students like a dog ...
begging for the joy of
giving. I was prepared to wag my tail,
to wag my sex, my hair,
my hemmorhoids, anything.
To express my happiness.
Right? To give. Everything.
When Jewish families sit
down to eat, they always set an extra
place in case someone
else arrives ... a beggar. This unknown
person who might come
is always a divine messenger, a seventy-
kilo dove. The Annunciation.
If you're an unknown person,
you may just as well be
a seventy-kilo dove or a seventy-kilo dog
who comes to a university
to bring the Annunciation. And the moment
in which the Annunciation
is conveyed is a moment of infinite joy.
COHEN
That was Philadelphia.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. Philadelphia.
And the Head of the Department invited me to
eat in the Faculty Dining
room. And he told me to put on a coat
and tie; he
said he would lend me one. I answered him, "Go fuck
your mother!" And
I drank a cup of coffee in the Student Dining
Room. I couldn't
eat anything. This is a story about dogs. Right?
FIRESTONE
I want to ask you about
the Bandits in the movie.
JODOROWSKY
How I got the costumes
for the Bandits? I went to a costume-rental place.
And I had each of the
Bandits stand in front of me, nude. And I started
dressing them from the
undershorts and socks on out, like someone
who constructs a sculpture.
I put women's panties on some of them.
That's how I started with
the ugly one ... the one who kisses Mara ...
the old man. I put
the panties on him and he laughed. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
And then I put a
tuxedo on him, and finally the holsters, which made
him feel very manly.
But underneath he was wearing the panties.
I contructed everyone.
I spent days constructing like that.
Because I said, "I don't
create like Fellini, in Satyricon, for example."
I don't make a sketch
of the costume first. We must find the costume
in reality and construct
it like a sculpture. Right? With musketeer
costumes, old Mexican
costumes, modern things ... everything's in
the movie. Some
of the Bandits wear priests' vestments.
FIRESTONE
The first three Bandits,
the ones with the shoes and the beans.
In the original screenplay,
there's none of that detail.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. But don't
think you should put details in a screenplay.
You cannot give details.
I wrote the script as a practical thing.
But I think the script
is a crutch; I won't use a crutch. We can't
use a script. It's
impossible. A monstrous thing ... a Hollywood
thing. We can't
do this. We write a script for the producer and
then we change it. We
must change it. Right? We must change
the script. There
are many things in the film that I didn't write
into the script.
And I asked myself, "Why did I write the script?
Why should I write it
if I can do it?" Right? I can do it. I can
do it. I don't need
a script because the unity of a picture is not
the director, but the
producer, nothing. I think it's the feeling
of a poet. If you
feel something, you are the unity. Really. OK.
COHEN
What about the scene with
the dwarf ...
in the basement of the
bar?
JODOROWSKY
Yes. What
a scene!
COHEN
Yeah. It was very
beautiful.
I mean, when you went
down into the
cabaret, all the whores
were there ...
JODOROWSKY
Yes. I wanted to
show her nude ... to show that
she was a woman, right?
Because when you see
a dwarf, you don't
think of her as a woman.
COHEN
But you didn't really
make love to her in that scene.
JODOROWSKY
No, no. Because
I didn't feel sexually attracted
to her. And she signed
the contract stating that
she wouldn't make love
with the director.
COHEN
What about the other women?
They also signed the contract.
JODOROWSKY
Right. But when
you need to do something for the movie ...
in the sand, for example:
it's terrible to make love in the sand.
It's very beautiful, but
your sex is full of pebbles. It's not so pleasant.
I think that a dwarf
is a woman, not a dwarf. And I used the little
woman in the film because
I think it's beautiful to use a woman like her.
Maybe in my next
film I'll use a woman who weighs two-hundred kilos.
Really. I've always
thought that if I ever direct Hamlet, Ophelia will be
a giant. Not a two-hundred
kilo giant, but a five-hundred kilo giant.
And I'll make an
artificial river that runs through Manhattan, and the
giant Ophelia will swim
down to the river destroying all the skyscrapers.
Really, I want to use
a woman who is bigger than her man. Why not?
Beauty is never,
never, never used by the movie industry. Like Hollywood
in the 40's, right?
Hollywood never knew the beauty of a woman.
You feel
beauty. There's beauty in a woman or there isn't.
You feel a woman, you
like a woman, she is very attractive to you.
Maybe you think she is
a man. But she's a woman. She's like a man,
but she's a very wonderful
woman. Like a man. Once I was very attracted
to a very fat woman, but
big ... huge, who was knitting a very thing little
woolen stocking.
Red. Little. I thought she was a poet. I thought she
was knitting a stocking
for her navel. We have a navel in each stocking.
We do. We
have a navel in our hand. It's a symbol of a large blossom.
And these wounds are "giving"
wounds and they can heal.
And the wounds in our
feet are "receiving" wounds and they heal you.
That's why it's imperative
for you to be able to put your foot
anywhere on your body
so you can kick yourself.
Yes. So you can
kick yourself. OK?
COHEN
Fantastic. What
else can you tell us?
JODOROWSKY
The town.
I needed a town, a cowboy town. And when I was
looking for locations,
it was as if I were dreaming. And then I
saw a beautiful town in
the desert, and I said, "It's impossible.
A cowboy town in
the middle of the desert. How can it be?"
And we went toward
it. It was a cowboy town in the desert
because an American movie
with Glenn Ford had built sets in the
desert. They paid
for the job, built it, shot the picture, and left ...
abandoned it. It
was an abandoned town ... a ghost town.
And the producer
said, "We must fix it up, paint it." I said, "No, we'll
use it just as it is.
We'll us it like this. An old town.As is. A set.
If I'm going to use a
set, you must see it as a set from an
old cowboy movie."
I think it was The Law of Tombstone.
Yes, I think it was a
Glenn Ford picture. I used it.
COHEN
So you're the true sleepwalker
...
JODOROWSKY
Yes.
COHEN
... of film.
JODOROWSKY
Do you want to ask some
other questions, Ira?
COHEN
< barks a cough >
JODOROWSKY
You're the mysterious
dog. One time I was in Santiago de Chile.
This is very sad, because
in those days we used to go to parties
and they never really
got off the ground. And once at four or five
in the morning, a dog
wandered up with a white stone in it's mouth.
And he laid it at
my feet. I didn't know what to do. And suddenly I
understood. The
dog wanted me to pick up the stone and throw it.
I did. The dog ran
off to fetch it and brought it back to my feet.
And so we started to play:
a great communication. I reconstructed
my life there. And
when I got on the bus to go home, the dog started
to run after the bus till
it fell down and pawed at the street.
I left. And all
my life I've thought that perhaps I should have
stayed there forever and
played with the dog ... that perhaps
I'd ruined my life.
Right? Don't you think? Yes, yes.
Every experience gives
you a different kind of loneliness.
Loneliness in Greek civilization
is different from loneliness in
Egyptian civilization.
(I say civilization because people may
misunderstand; they may
think I'm referring to today's Greece.
For example, a young boy
once came to my house and asked me
to teach him about illumination.
And I was very happy and started
to show him piles and
piles of books and talking to him. He didn't
say anything. When I finished
he told me that what he wanted
to learn was how to light
a show. He hadn't understood a thing.
But I learned something:
before you learn scenic illumination,
you have to learn self-illumination.)
Loneliness in Roman times was
different from loneliness
of today. And loneliness in New York is
very different from loneliness
in Los Angeles. Very, very different.
We can have something
and, at the same time, know the loneliness
of what we have.
So that when we love someone, we love that person's
presence and his absence
at the same time. Because in everything we have,
there is an infinity that
we can't have. And that's what I'm searching for.
Loneliness is what
I have. Right?
For example, when I see
an image in a film, I'm struck with a feeling of
dreadful loneliness ...
about everything that was outside the camera's range.
Because the other
day I saw a little tree in front of my house.
And I said, "This tree
isn't growing in my garden; it's growing on the planet."
And I filmed my picture
on the planet. I would have liked for the planet
to be in the picture.
But I could only have landscapes.
Civilizations don't die.
That's not true. They continue.
Everything is continual.
Films don't begin or end. They're
a continuation.
OK? Another question? Fantastic, fantastic.
COHEN
What do you think of New
York now?
JODOROWSKY
Fantastic. If you
ask me, "Can we eat New York?" I'll answer,
"Yes, we can eat New York
because we don't have a mouth."
When you don't have a
mouth, you can eat anything you want.
Right? When you
are blind, you can see anything you want.
FIRESTONE
How about the symbol in
the town of the pyramid with the eye?
JODOROWSKY
I'll tell you a little
secret, but don't tell anybody.
It's on the dollar bill.
I think it's a perversion of knowledge.
Because if you take a
sacred symbol of Atlantis, or whatever,
and put it on the dollar,
this symbol becomes a very terrible symbol:
an economic symbol.
But in old traditions, all gods, after a certain
period of time, become
devils. I can say that in five hundred years
Jesus Christ will become
a white devil who rides a burro ... a red burro.
Very red. Because
the burro that Christ rides -- like the one El Topo
rides -- is the dominated
phallus. Yes. It's the union of spirit and sex.
The little girl -- the
dwarf -- blows a horn in the film. I used this
horn because it's a Jewish
shofar. In five hundred years, maybe
Jesus Christ will be a
white demon with a burro ... an infinite burro.
Right? But
the burro will be mounted on Christ. And your children
will scream in the night.
If you mention Jesus Christ, the children will
scream, "AYYYYYY ... !"
Terror. The symbol of the pyramid, for example,
used to be a very, very
beautiful symbol. Now it's on the dollar bill.
FIRESTONE
Isn't it a Masonic symbol?
JODOROWSKY
I don't know ... It's
a pyramid. But if you look at the dollar bill, you'll see
something very incredible.
I'll explain what it is. The pyramid has been
cut in two. Once
I was in Guadalajara and a Mexican asked me,
"What is the symbol of
the pyramid?" I said, "The top of a pyramid
is always cut off.
I don't know why. I think it's like a statue.
The pyramid is the
pedestal and the top ... the statue ... is you.
The pyramid is a compound
of eternal minerals; but the top of it ...
the point ... is you.
And what are you? You're the frog."
There's always a frog
at the top of the pyramid.
Why does the princess
kiss the frog?
Why does the frog become
a prince?
Because the frog is Buddha.
One day I saw Zen painting
of a frog that was meditating
like a monk. A frog is a monk.
A monk is Buddha.
I'm a frog sitting on top of a pyramid waiting for
a princess, a beautiful
five-hundred kilo princess to come and kiss me.
Right? It's the
union of spirit and soul.
If you look at the symbol
on the dollar bill and you're slightly mad,
you can see the pyramid
becomes weightless. And the top part
of it is a flying saucer.
The pyramid. A Masonic symbol, right?
The top of the pyramid
is you. This is a symbol.
But I used it in the film
as a symbol of guilt: the eye says,
"You are guilty, you are
guilty." Yes. A guilty society.
In the film. It
was a very nice symbol.
COHEN
Who played your grown
son? Your substitute?
JODOROWSKY
He is a Canadian:
Robert John. He's a Canadian
painter ... a striking
resemblance to me, physically.
COHEN
Somewhat.
JODOROWSKY
Somewhat. In reality,
though, he looks very much like me.
Not in the picture, but
in reality he does.
COHEN
That part is all based
on Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I took a little story
from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,
but I changed it completely.
It's completely different
in the film. The
only thing from it that remains is:
"I can't kill my Master."
And then the Master kills himself.
COHEN
Always.
JODOROWSKY
Like in the first part,
when El Topo can't bring himself to kill
the Fourth Master, the
Master kills himself. Because the
Master has to die.
If he didn't, there'd be no new Masters.
That's why universities
are so bad ... so sick. Because
the Masters don't want
to die. On the other hand, the
students don't always
want to be Masters. McLuhan says
that means of communication
have increased. They have.
But those who communicate
have diminished, because the
communications media are
for people who are sitting down. Do
you understand? That is
what I say. Maybe the communications
media will become extensions
of the senses of one man:
the President. He'll
be like a gigantic octopus who'll put
televisionglasses on your
eyes. Yes, and sound in your ears and
a communicative skin over
your skin. Right? The new media. OK.
FIRESTONE
How did you do the scene
with the people in the cave?
JODOROWSKY
It was very difficult
to get these people.
I'd always imagined that
scene with eight or ten thousand people
pouring out of the cave.
I used a hundred because I had little money.
I went to the little town,
to the streets, to find a hundred people:
monsters, beggars, etcetera.
But the mayor got very angry. He said,
"You'll give a horrible
impression of Mexico." And he wouldn't
let me use the beggars.
I had to get beggars from another town.
He was trying to
say: "We don't have people like that. There's no
one like that here."
And when I finally got the madmen and
the beggars, I told them,
"You're going to make a movie."
And they did. They
worked very hard because they felt
useful ... they were actively
doing something.
They were very happy.
FIRESTONE
They changed also.
JODOROWSKY
I think they changed because
they did something.
And I'd say to the monsters
... the deformed ones,
"Show your legs.
They're beautiful. Fantastic."
And they showed their
legs, like a ballerina ... like Pavlova.
COHEN
What did the President
of Mexico think about your film?
JODOROWSKY
I don't think he's seen
it. I don't know.
But they cut half an hour
for Mexico.
FIRESTONE
What did they feel about
the priest in the second part of the film?
JODOROWSKY
They cut that out.
His part was cut out entirely. But it was very, very
strange because a modern
priest came to see the picture and said,
"This is a sacred picture."
And a little woman who was there at the
time said, "It's horrible!
The way you use the triangle with the eye.
That's a symbol on the
Host!" And the priest said, "I'm talking about
mysticism, not about cooking."
You see, there are little nuns in
Mexico who make beautiful
designs on the Hosts. But that doesn't
mean they're sacred symbols.
These days priests give out Communion
with pieces of bread.
When I show this picture to people who are truly
religious, they like it.
But when I show it to limited people
who don't really have
a mystical outlook, they say it's a sacrilege.
FIRESTONE
Sure. Did you shoot
the first part of the film first
and then go right on to
the second part, just continuous?
Or was it done at another
time?
JODOROWSKY
It was continuous.
In the first part my hair was long and I had
a beard; in the second
part my hair and beard were dyed;
and then my head was shaved.
FIRESTONE
Yes, but I mean the two
parts of the film are so different,
two such different trips.
Did you just continue shooting
when you finished the
first part? Was there one creative
process that continued
throughout the whole picture.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. I filmed it
like The Odyssey, like the conquest of
Alexander the Great.
I started out and kept going.
I can't shoot a sequence
out of order. I don't feel it.
I can't do it. That's
good for Hollywood movies.
We must do it as a continuum
because the actor
is changed by the movie,
right? I am changed.
It's a continual thing.
It's a growing process.
You must grow with the
picture.
FIRESTONE
When the people finished
their parts in the first part,
did they go home?
Did they leave the set, or did they stay there?
JODOROWSKY
No, they left. They
left because we didn't have the money
for them to stay.
They didn't continue on the film, but they
continued in life. i told
you that the little dwarf became pregnant
and now she has a beautiful
girl. Right? She continued.
COHEN
What's her name?
JODOROWSKY
Jacqueline. Now
she's added her husband's name.
His name is Luis.
She changed her name. Now she's
Jacqueline Luis.
And she's very happy, a very happy woman.
She continued after the
picture. And I continued after the picture.
Everyone who participated
continued after the picture. Except the
professional actors.
Because actors are the worst actors of all.
They never get involved
in a scene. I don't love actors.
They love themselves so
much they don't need my love.
FIRESTONE
Was the Colonel an actor?
JODOROWSKY
The Colonel was an actor.
He was like Errol Flynn
in his day.
He was a very, very nice
man ... a beautiful man,
a very successful man.
He was a leading man in films.
And then he lost his hair,
he got fat, and quit making films.
And I asked him to be
in my film.
COHEN
That moment when he's
walking away is fantastic.
JODOROWSKY
He was a very, very nice
man.
He used to be a boxer,
and very good too.
COHEN
You said that whole scene
was an old abandoned liquor factory, right?
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes, a mescal factory.
I found it. It was a mescal factory.
Abandoned.
Because the owners died. I found it eight-hundred
kilometers from Mexico
City. I found it. I saw a road sign that said,
"Trinity-1".
I said, "Trinity and One. I must go there."
It was one kilometer to
Trinity. Trinity was what I needed.
And there it was.
Fantastic. For twenty years the people
who lived there at nothing
but pork, and they didn't work.
Men and women. "I
want to film the picture here," I said. So
I went back to Mexico
to ask permission. My representative
called the daughter of
the deed owner and said, "Never!"
And then the man
said to me, "She'll never permit it."
And I said, "Give her
my name." And he gve her my name, and
the woman called me and
said, "I'm Pedro Coronel's wife."
She was the ex-wife of
Pedro Coronel, a painter.
"We are friends.
Do whatever you want. Use whatever
you want. It's my
house." A miracle ... really a miracle.
Yesterday I performed another
miracle. We went to dinner
at the Gerard's.
He was with Universal Pictures. And their little
daughter told me her psychiatrist
saw the picture at Columbia University
and said that I was sick.
And at that moment I put my brain to work
like a computer and I
saw everyone in the auditorium at Columbia, like
a photograph. I found
the man and said, "Ah! That man!" And I
described him to her,
his skin, his laugh, the way he used his voice ...
"And he is a Freudian,"
I said. And he really was a Freudian psychiatrist.
Really. Then
I said, "He thinks I'm mad because he thinks in Freudian terms.
Maybe if he followed
the Jungian way, he wouldn't think I'm so mad."
FIRESTONE
What other filmmakers
make a film an act of poetry?
JODOROWSKY
Erich Von Stroheim.
Buster Keaton.
I think Buster Keaton's
films don't have very good techniques.
But he's so beautiful,
so strong, he doesn't need to use great techniques.
You don't need to do anything.
You only need to use Buster Keaton.
When I made El Topo,
I said, "I want to use episodes like Buster Keaton ...
very, very beautiful episodes.
And I'll forget about technique."
In El Topo, there
are no techniques ... no dissolves, no effects, nothing.
I filmed things as they
were. And always with strong light.
Arthur Cravan is a poet
who says, "Mystery in broad daylight."
Andre Breton wrote about
him in his book on Black Humor.
He also said, "Spitting:
is it an insult or a caress?"
Right? I feel those
two concepts are very good.
TOPP
Do you do the editing
yourself?
JODOROWSKY
I edited the film with
a man who's worked for twenty years
in Mexican film, and he
was very ill. His name is Landeros ...
Federico Landeros.
When he saw the rushes of this picture,
he was working on something
else. But he wanted to edit it
so much. He said,
"I won't look at anything without you."
And we worked together.
We edited it together. Together,
together. Yes.
I think it's terrile if you don't edit your own film.
IT's like having a baby
and not educating him. It's very important.
And I tried not to have
close-ups in the film.
I learned that from Faces.
When I saw Faces, I said,
"Never in my life will
I use a close-up of a face."
Because I think it's very
easy to convey something with a face.
Right? And with
hands. Faces and hands are what are shown in
close-ups. If there
were a hungry lion in this room, the first thing
he would try to eat would
be our faces and hands, right?
I want to make pictures
with the torso ...
with the body. I
feel that close-ups are easy.
COHEN
In the Fiji Islands that's
the part they love to eat most:
the palms of the hands
... and the cheeks.
JODOROWSKY
They're the most edible.
I don't want to work with
human flesh like food.
I want to work with the important
parts of the human body,
not the edible parts.
TOPP
Alexandro, you once said
that you don't put anything
between the actor and
his camera.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. No aesthetic
effects. When I took Corkidi
on as photographer, I
told him, "No more aesthetics.
Think of yourself
as a newsreel photographer.
You must shoot a scene
directly: between the
object and the camera,
a straight line. And the camera
shouldn't judge.
No opinions. Objective, clinical."
The photographer was very
jealous about his art,
about his camera.
And he didn't want me to touch the camera.
So I finally had to take
the photographer and move him around
to get what I wanted.
And one day I picked him up and said,
"You are my woman, you
are my woman. I'll fuck you.
You are my woman."
He laughed.
FIRESTONE
In the first part of the
film when El Topo was on the bridge,
and in the second part
when he's running toward the
town as the crippled people
are being slaughtered ...
did you do those scenes
with a telephoto lens?
Because it looks like
the space is all flattened out.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I used it because
the telephoto lens reduces space to two
dimensions. Distance
doesn't exist. And for that very reason
Time is changed.
It loses its velocity. Everything happens
without transpiring.
I ran for two kilometers before doing
that scene. I was
very, very tired. You can tell, right?
In my first picture, Fando
and Lis, I said, "We must not pretend.
We must do things
realistically." All the blood in that film
is real blood. There's
a man who drinks blood.
He draws blood from Lis'
arm and really drinks it.
When people are hit in
the first picture, it's real.
In El Topo, I tried
as best I could to have the actors do things realistically.
That's why the falls aren't
spectacular. Because the actors themselves
do them, not doubles,
not those acrobats. And so I was faced with a
problem. When a
man is hit by a bullet in a normal Western, the bullet
throws him down.
Maybe that's how it really happens. But I did away
with that idea and had
the people receive the bullets standing up.
I only show the
pain, not the physical reaction. I can say that
my bullets in the picture
don't make people fall to the ground.
That reminds me of something
a lady said when she interviewed
me for a magazine. It
was a very malicious interview.
She asked some questions
which I found very funny
and I answered them.
But when she published my answers,
they were incomplete and
she didn't publish her questions.
For example, she asked
me, "Why do you say that moles are blind?
Or that they're blind
when they see the sun? That's not scientifically
true." And I answered,
"If yuou take all the moles of the world
and put them in the state
of New York and have them all look at
the sun, then you will
be able to tell me if moles are blinded or not.
Because if I find just
one mole that is blinded when he sees the sun,
my theory is scientific."
And in the last analysis, moles are blinded
because I say they're
blinded in the film. It's my principle ... like the
Non-Euclidean mathematicians.
Euclid says, "Only one parallel can pass
through a point distant
from a straight line." Lobatchevski says,
"Infinite parallels can
pass through such a point." And Riemann says,
"No parallel can pass
through it." Right? I create my own reality.
I create my own logic.
Right? If I say the mole is blinded, the mole is blinded.
FIRESTONE
I shouldn't think that
would be a problem.
JODOROWSKY
In a few years, I should
make a new film ... Son of El Topo
or The Return of El
Topo. Yes. About what happens to his son
and the little dwarf and
the baby. We can do it.
The second installment
... on television.
With the ghost of Cecil
B. DeMille playing the role.
One day I wrote music
for a play by Leonora Carrington.
[Leonora Carringon is a
surrealist painter and writer
who has resided in Mexico
for twenty-five years.
She was married to Max
Ernst.]
And at one point in the
score, I said I would use
the voice of Oscar Wilde's
ghost. And a critic created
a big scandal out
of it. "How dare he disturb ghosts!" OK.
RODAY
You said that the film
is like a library, like a library of influences,
like a library of books.
Do you feel that there is no single
or unified influence from
any one author in your film?
JODOROWSKY
No, I think there are
multiple influences in the film -- I have them all:
the influence of all the
books I've read and all the films I've seen,
of all the winds that
have blown against my skin, of all the stars
that have exploded during
my lifetime, of each manifestation
of the non-manifested,
of each flea that's shit on me.
Especially a flea I met
in 1945. It shit on me in such an incredible
way that it changed my
life. I'm sure that flea's in my film.
FIRESTONE
Bravo!
JODOROWSKY
There are moments in the
picture when I pay small homages.
Homages. For example,
when the bandit sucks on the shoe, that's
homage to Bunuel.
When Mara circles El Topo in the desert saying,
"Nothing, nothing, nothing
...": to Godard, especially to a part
of his film Pierre
Le Fou. The duel scene between El Topo and
the Colonel in the circular
space: Leone. When the camera is
stationary and the action
takes place in a single frame, I pay
homage to Buster Keaton.
Etcetera. The shot that frames one
of the bandits with the
legs of the Colonel is one of the most
common used in film.
So I decided to use it to amuse myself.
Another common take is
showing someone approaching
the camera. I only did
that once. The influence of bad movies.
RODAY
I have three small questions
about the audience. Do you
ever think of an ideal
audience for any one of your works,
or are they all different?
There's an audience for
your cartoons, your plays,
your films ...
JODOROWSKY
Yes, different audiences.
When I draw the cartoons,
I think of children.
Really, really. I think of children.
They're very ... naive.
But the content isn't naive.
The comic strip is also
like a library.
RODAY
It's been my contention
for a long time that in novelists like
Dostoevski, the individual
characters are really extrapolated
from different personality
traits in the author himself,
and merely heightened
and intensified, so that if he has
an insane man, it's part
of Dostoevski's own psyche.
JODOROWSKY
This is one of Otto Weininger's
theories. Weininger is a philosopher
who wrote Sex and Character.
He says that a genius is identified
as one who lives all lives,
one who has many people within him.
A genius can be many people
and they live within him.
So, the less genius the
person has, the fewer people
he can be. It's
a study of the characteristics of genius.
There are many such studies.
This is Otto Weininger's.
An artists cannot express
what he doesn't live. Right?
And the greater his state
of sainthood, the greater and more
horrible is the devil
who appears to him. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche says, "Don't
be afraid. Don't be ashamed of what you feel."
Because the taller the
tree grows, the deeper grows its roots in the ground.
RODAY
Got that. While
we're on Nietzsche, and
since you mentioned the
bridge a moment ago ...
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. The bridge.
I took it from Nietsche's bridge.
I'm very familiar with
Nietzsche because I've just directed
a play called Zarathustra
which is adapted from his work.
And the symbolism of the
bridge is the symbolism of the
passage between man and
that beyond him. And that's
precisely why I wanted
to do that scene on the bridge.
It's the moment when El
Topo passes from one state to another.
And I think that's where
he reaches his first state of enlightenment:
when he crosses the bridge.
Good question, I'd forgotten about
that, but now that you
reminded me, I remember.
FIRESTONE
El Topo opens in Mexico
in May.
JODOROWSKY
May, yes. In a theatre
where a Fellini film is running now.
FIRESTONE
Is this the first Mexican
film to be shown in that theatre?
JODOROWSKY
Yes, the first, the first,
because they only show foreign art films
there: Kurosawa,
Fellini ... I like Kurosawa very, very much.
I also did some Kurosawa-like
scenes in the film.
Not an imitation.
I told you I talk about books,
about ideas in the picture.
I also talk about filmmakers.
RODAY
Yes. It sounds like
a reference. You're making a reference.
JODOROWSKY
Yes.
FIRESTONE
So you absorb ...
JODOROWSKY
I absorb it, I use it
as I use a book.
I use Nietzsche.
I think about Nietzsche ...
and I think about Kurosawa.
There's a Spanish proverb
I like very much, "In
art, he who is no one's child is a son of
a bitch." And I
say that I'm everyone's and everything's child.
There are films people
have hated which I like very much. Like
Freaks by
Tod Browning and Mondo Cane. I liked Mondo Cane
very much. I think
it has some very good things in it.
And for a while I liked
James Bond. Dr. No. I like
Flash Gordon's first picture.
Very much. Etcetera, etcetera.
RODAY
Is there anybody in the
world you'd like to collaborate with?
JODOROWSKY
Yes. Many.
For example, if Robert Crumb would illustrate
this book -- the part
about the hippopotomus and the balls
of shit -- I'd be the
happiest man in the world.
And if I could make a
pirate movie with Frank Zappa.
I'd like that too.
Right? I like Frank Zappa.
When I heard his first
record, I thought he was a genius.
I think he'd make a wonderful
pirate.
FIRESTONE
His mustachioes.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. Wonderful
to collaborate with him.
Let me think of people
I'd like to collaborate with.
This is good for me.
The man who wrote Operating Manual
for Spaceship
Earth -- Buckminster Fuller. I like him.
I'd want to collaborate
with him if I could. I'd like to
work with the author of
Psychedelic
Experience -- Houston.
And I want to do a pirate
picture with the author of Do It --
Jerry Rubin. A wonderful
pirate. If it's possible, we'll do it.
It would be ideal to collaborate
with Rubin on that.
RODAY
If anybody in history
could be brought back --
any writer, any artist
--
who would you like to
collaborate with.
JODOROWSKY
With the Spanish Jew who
translated the Zohar.
I want to collaborate
with him.
RODAY
And with Alexander the
Great?
JODOROWSKY
Yes, Alexander the Great.
But more than with him,
I'd like to collaborate
with his horse.
RODAY
Bucephalus.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. Bucephalus
is a big phallus.
I don't think Alexander
the Great conquered
anything. The ambitious
one was his horse.
So Alexander surrendered
himself to his horse
and did what the horse
wanted to do.
The mythology of the dominant
horse
can be found in a story
by Poe.
RODAY
The Rider of the White
Horse.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. Poe.
I think Poe knew that Alexander the
Great was the horse ...
I'd like to work with St. Exupery.
And I'd like to film a
comedy with Gurdjieff. Right? A comedy.
RODAY
Fantastic.
JODOROWSKY
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And I'd really like to know
Rosencruntz' horse.
Rosencruntz -- the mysterious figure
who created the Rosicrucians.
I'd do a musical comedy
with Rosencruntz, one
better than Hair. I'd like to
collaborate with the Conte
de Saint-Germaine. He believed
he was immortal.
And if I could find him, I'd like to talk to
Fulcanelli, who wrote
about the secret societies of cathedrals.
RODAY
Do monastic orders appeal
to you?
JODOROWSKY
I'd like to read Liza
Minnelli's clitoris ...
Yes, monastic orders interest
me, but only those with women.
Men and women monks who
don't give up the sexual act.
Like in Rabelais.
RODAY
In El Topo, you've
accomplished something with cinematic time
and space so that one
feels in many scenes as though
he were living a late
medieval experience.
JODOROWSKY
I feel the Middle Ages
... especially Huizinga's Middle Ages.
The one he describes in
The
Waning of the Middle Ages.
I like the Middle Ages
because there are so many of them.
But I like Huizinga's.
I also like his Homo Ludens.
I think it was something
very important.
Time doesn't matter to
me. I'm not into normal time.
In the film there is no
normal time sequence. There can
be a thousand years between
one sequence and another.
The film can start with
pre-historic time and end with the
atomic bomb. When
I burn the village at the end of the film,
I use the sound of the
explosion of an atomic bomb.
FIRESTONE
Fantastic.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. That's in the
picture. I found a recording of an
atomic bomb explosion
and used it ... with horses.
The atomic bomb and horses.
RODAY
Since we've mentioned
authors and conquerors and conqueror's
horses, I was wondering
if perhaps you also pay homage
to artists, to painters.
Are there Daliesque scenes?
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. The tower.
Paolo Uccello. Because Paolo Uccello was
a geometric artist, a
very good one. And in the sequence of the
Second Master, with the
lion ... the burning lion can be found in
Magritte. The burning
lion. The owl, too. The owl character is used in
surrealist painting ...
that's the Second Master, right? And the deformed
people: Breughel
... and Goya, right? Etcetera. But when I made the film,
the imagery came from
within me ... because I've seen so many paintings.
But I tried not
to make paintings, not to think about painting, not to think
about photographs when
I made the film. I tried not to make beautiful
photographs. But
I'm sure that the photographer was masturbating
while he was filming.
I'm sure of it. But I didn't concern myself
with that. Eisenstein's
done enough of that already.
FIRESTONE
The music in the film
... you composed it yourself.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I composed the music
... the musical themes. All of them.
And I used Tibetan music
and music of Zen Buddhist temples.
Japanese and Tibetan music.
Mixed together.
RODAY
Dance. Everything.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. Together.
Japanese and Tibetan music
with music I composed.
I didn't do the arrangements ...
the orchestrations.
I don't know how to do that.
RODAY
You weren't trying to
do photographic studies,
but it seems that you
were portraying the things which people try to paint.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. But I
took a position on color.
Everything I looked for
-- al the costumes, all the
locations -- I looked
for lack of color: black, brown, beige.
And the only strong colors
you see are the blue of the sky,
different greens of the
plants, and the red of the blood.
Sometimes I use color
in the costumes of the townspeople --
the extras -- but that's
all.
RODAY
They're living
images, they're not still images, they're not frozen.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. Of course
they're living! Because I told
the photographer that
we would put our lives into
each take, and each time
he would begin to film a
scene, I told him that
our entire lives would be at stake
and that he should never
forget that. In other words,
there isn't a single take
that doesn't involve our lives.
RODAY
And is that what you meant
earlier when you said there
was no alienation, that
everybody was involved in the picture,
was involved just the
way when you were screaming ...
JODOROWSKY
Yes, everybody was involved,
all the workers too. I worked
with technicians who were
used to making shitty movies.
But they're very young
people and they love movies ...
and they believe in film.
So they were very happy
to be doing something
different. They knew they were doing
something different.
I worked with a new workers' union,
and they worked very hard.
They work all week and take
Saturdays off with the
whores. And sometimes they land
in jail. So when
we started to film on Mondays, some
of the workers would be
missing. But I wouldn't
say anything. We'd
just go get them out of jail.
My technicians are different
from the older ones.
The older technical crews
get drunk on beer; mine smoke.
That's the difference
... the essential difference.
RODAY
Were you stoned at all
while you were acting?
JODOROWSKY
No, no, no, no.
I wasn't. No one was.
On Saturdays and Sundays
they're free ...
RODAY
But not when you're working.
Would you like to think
your audiences would be
stoned when they're watching
this picture?
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I'd demand them to be.
To arrive stoned and to
get high on the movie. Both.
RODAY
It happened to me both
ways.
JODOROWSKY
I think it's better that
way. Both ways. Together.
And I had that kind of
audience in mind.
Good. I'd always
like to direct my work to that audience.
FIRESTONE
Let me ask you some biographical
questions:
How old are you?
JODOROWSKY
I wish I were 38.
[He's 41.]
FIRESTONE
Where were you born?
JODOROWSKY
It's embarrassing for
me to answer realistic
questions. That's
why I close my eyes.
I was born in Iquique,
in the north of Chile, where I lived until I
was eight. Then
I went to Santiago to study. I went to college.
I studied psychology
and philosophy for two years. Then I left
the university to work
with marionettes and theatre and everything
else. My father
was born in Russia and my mother in Argentina.
Her parents were
Russian. That's the story of my life.
I directed many plays in
the university theatre and did
a lot of work in mime.
By the time I was twenty-three
I had a company of fifty
people. Then I went to Paris where I
studied with Etienne Decroux.
He was Marceau's and Barrault's
teacher. I worked
with Marceau for six years; I wrote two mimes
for him, The
Mask Maker and The Cage; and I made a world tour
with him as his partner.
There were only three of us in the company.
I also directed Maurice
Chevalier when he resumed his career
at the L'Alhambra Theatre.
The show was so successful
that the theatre was renamed
after Chevalier.
I was also the first to
direct Michel Legrand and
I introduced him at the
L'Alhambra Theatre.
For a year I directed the
Trois Baudets Theatre with Canetti,
the impresario.
Raymond Devos and Guy Behart got their start
at the theatre.
OK. There are so many things. Then I went
to Mexico where
I've directed more than a hundred plays. I did
Ionesco's The
Chairs, Victims of Duty, and Exit the King. I
did
Exit the King with
the best actor in Mexico, Lopez Tarso, in an
eight-hundred-seat theatre.
We had full houses every night.
I did Samuel Beckett's
Endgame,
Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, and
an adaption of his Dream
Play. That play has anout fifty characters.
I reduced them to
two, a man and a woman, and I rewrote half of the play.
That's the adaptation
I used. I also did surrealistic plays ...
I wrote one with Leonora
Carrington. Then I returned to Paris and
founded a Panic Theatre
group with Arrabal, Topor, and Sternberg.
We staged a happening
in Paris that lasted for four hours.
Arrabal mentions this
happening often in his autobiography.
I directed it. Ferlinghetti
saw it and published it in his City Lights Journal.
Arrabal has asked me to
write about my theories on theatre for his
theatre magazine.
An entire issue. But I couldn't do it because my
theories on theatre changed
every three hours. What else do you want
to know? I've done
so much, so much.
I have a comic strip, etcetera,
etcetera ... I have a weekly comic strip
in a right-wing newspaper
in Mexico. The Herald . But when they
realized what I was saying,
it was too late to do anything about it
because a million people
were reading it every week. It's more successful
that
Mandrake the Magician.
I've been doing this strip for almost two-hundred
weeks. It's called
Panic
Fables. I didn't know how to draw when I started it,
but I'm learning, right?
FIRESTONE
They're fantastic.
Beautiful.
JODOROWSKY
Yes. I've done much.
Let me see. I've worked with marionettes.
I've worked with the circus.
I've danced. I was a painter --
a flat brush painter,
like Hitler. I painted houses. I have an anecdote
about that experience
that I like very much. I arrived on the job the first
day expecting to find
a crude laborer. And instead I found a Master.
The head painter
turned out to be a disciple of Gurdjieff. And the
man who painted with me
was an Arab who celebrated the Ramadan.
He was very religious.
So we would paint to the music of Bach.
One day when we were painting
a castle, the head painter
told me to plaster a crack
in the wall and gave me the plaster.
Then he hit me over the
head with a stick that had an inscription on it:
"In springtime, the flowers
bloom." (Like the Zen Masters who would hit
their disciples over the
head. Actually, the Masters hit them on the shoulders.
So I've had my share of
blows from the Zen Masters.)
Then he picked up a piece
of iron pipe, broke the plaster, and made the
crack larger. And
then he plastered it over again. And he told me that
as long as I pitied the
crack, I could never plaster it well.
To cure a wound, you must
first open it.
You must not simply leave
it the way you found it.
You must respect it.
That's why I don't pity myself.
If I have to cut a section
from the film, I cut it.
And if I fail, I accept
that too. That's why I saw that I have
triumphed in life ...
because I've learned how to fail.
OK. This is
my biography.
FIRESTONE
Fando and Lis ...
JODOROWSKY
Ah! Yes. I also
filmed Fando and Lis . I've really made three films
in my life. The first
picture I made was in Paris, with a girl,
Ruth Michelly, and an
American. His name was Saul Gilbert.
But this picture was a
fable done in time. And it has
an introduction by Jean
Cocteau. Cocteau liked it very much
and wrote the introduction.
Saul Gilbert died of cancer.
Before he died he had
a beautiful yellowish color,
like old ivory.
His wife went to live in Germany.
Ruth Michelly. I
mention her name because if this interview
is published she might
read it and tell me where the film is.
That film was lost; she
took it with her.
It was based on The
Severed Heads by Thomas Mann.
I think it was good because
Cocteau liked it so much.
But I had no idea of what
I was doing when
I made the film.
It was my first.
The second was Fando
and Lis . It was based on Arrabal's play.
I had directed that play
and worked with it so much that I knew
it by heart. It
has two characters, a boy and a girl, who encounter
three other characters
during the play. For me those three
characters represent the
world, society.So I told Arrabal
that I would use the two
main characters and eliminate
the other three, replacing
them with whatever or whomever
I wanted. In other
words, that i would do a film with the
young boy and girl.
And I filmed it without a script because
I knew the play so well
... and I started playing with it.
I filmed it on weekends,
Saturdays and Sundays.
And I never thought that
it would be shown.
But it was shown at the
International Film Festival in
Acapulco ... and they
wanted to lynch me. The concept
of Mexican film was changed.
It was quite a scandal.
Now there's a clothing
store in Mexico called Fando and Lis.
FIRESTONE
It was made in Mexico.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I filmed it in Mexico.
It was my feature film.
RODAY
Did it have scenes with
eggs?
JODOROWSKY
Eggs. Yes.
Why do you ask that?
RODAY
A Mexican I met yesterday
told me. He said they are the
most remarkable images
he's ever seen. The eggs.
JODOROWSKY
In Fando and Lis .
The film was sold to Cannon Productions here in New York.
But I think they behaved
rather stupidly because they cut all the strong scenes.
They wanted to directed
themselves to the readers of the New York Times .
They edited the film with
the taste of the New York Times critic in mind,
and they killed it.
Of course I don't recognize the version that's here
in the United States.
But I have a copy of the complete version in Mexico.
There are many things in
Fando
and Lis that resemble Fellini's Satyricon ,
but my film was made three
years before Satyricon .
There are so many similarities
that you might think I copied Fellini's film.
RODAY
That's what this man said
yesterday. Not that you copied it.
He said, "Three years
ago I saw
Satyricon , with the eggs and the ..."
JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes. That's
right. But in black and white. That was Fando and Lis.
However, I prefer
El
Topo because it was my first professional feature film.
And I think that
the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions,
by doing it ... not by
learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts
to change. I can
feel a change in myself, for example. I know that
my vision will be more
... more general when I make my next film.
And that I'll be
able to express myself with greater freedom because
I have experience.
Without experience, you cannot make films.
Right? It's
like Karate. You can't learn it from a book. You have to attend
a school and be around
other people. Yes. Then you begin to feel it in
your bones and not in
your mind. Yes. That's what I feel ... that is doing.
I also think that films
should be a form of life. For example, there should be no
alienation between the
creator, the actor, and the film itself. And certain
experiences in the film
should be real. Like the first scene of El Topo,
for example. The
bear and the photograph that the child buries.
It is really his first
toy and the photo is really a picture of his mother.
And it should produce
a change in him.
FIRESTONE
How long did it take to
make El Topo ?
JODOROWSKY
Nine months. From
the moment I conceived the idea until it was
completed.
I wrote it, prepared it, Viskin raised the money,
I filmed and edited it.
Viskin and I got together on a Monday.
I had nothing thought
out and Viskin didn't have a penny.
And we said, "Let's make
a film." Then I found the idea
and Viskin found the money.
Nine months. There were
moments during the filming
period when the technicians
would queue up to receive
their money. And Viskin would
race up in his car to
pay them. He had just managed to
borrow the money.
Borrow or steal ... I don't know.
Really, really.
I think of Viskin as a very magical person for me.
Because I am ... well,
I don't know if I'm an artist, but I live
like an artist.
Viskin lives like a normal person, but he is
as crazy as I am.
In this world. We know that you can't make
films without money, and
to put a crazy person up against the
money world is crazy ...
I needed someone who was realistically
crazy. I never had
to ask Viskin's permission to do anything.
I always did whatever
I wanted to. And sometimes Viskin
didn't even know what
I was doing. But he had confidence in
what I was doing.
At times I would tell Viskin that I needed him
to go to Torreon, the
red-light district, and bring me twenty prostitutes.
He would go without asking
questions. Or I would ask him to buy
me two hundred rubbers,
prophylactics. And with great dignity, Viskin
would go to the pharmacy
to buy them. I used them for the blood effects.
Etcetera, etcetera.
Nine months. Nine months.
Editing, costumes, everything.
RODAY
How did you describe the
picture to Viskin when you first started?
At the first meeting,
what did you tell him? That you wanted to make a picture.
JODOROWSKY
No. I began working
with Viskin when I made Fando and Lis. So he knew me
and how I worked.
We said, "Fando and Lis was banned here, but we sold
it to Cannon in the United
States." When I made Fando and Lis the film industry
in Mexico was closed to
me. But the scandal it created opened the doors for me.
So when we were accepted
into the industry, we decided to make a film which
would be even stronger
than Fando and Lis. Right. So we made a film.
And it
wasn't banned. They cut
a half hour from it before we could show it in Mexico.
That's the whole story.
RODAY
You've written books too.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, I've written books:
Panic
Stories, Panic Games, Panic Theatre ...
Panic philosophy.
They're out of print in Mexico. Now I've written a novel.
I want to finish it this
year. I've been writing it for five years.
Five years ago it was
seven hundred pages long.
Now it's a hundred!
RODAY
Which do you prefer, film
or novel?
JODOROWSKY
I make movies, but I think
I can express myself
better in a novel.
You have all the possibilities. Right?
RODAY
Except the ones that only
belong to film.
JODOROWSKY
I prefer film, but I think
I work better in novels.
At least one, right?
I don't know ... I don't know.
RODAY
Is it a structural question?
Is it a question of the
narrative in the
novel being easier, more
accessible.
JODOROWSKY
No. I read the Surrealist
Manifesto and Andre Breton spoke about this ...
about the novel ... about
postcards. He took a passage from a Dostoevski
book, the description
of a room, the walls, the flowers, the light ...
and Breton said, "All
these descriptions, all these words ...
they're postcards."
And another surrealist, Raymond Rousell says,
"I try to say as much
as possible with as few words as possible."
Strong, right? I
said that the novel has all possibilities,
but I was speaking of
the novel as I understand the novel.
Anais Nin spoke about
the novel. She wrote one novel all her life ...
daily: a diary.
She was constantly writing it. Like Milareppa,
the Tibetan saint who
spoke in poetry all his life. He wrote a
hundred thousand poems
because his whole life was a poem.
For a novelist, his whole
life is a novel. That's why it's such a
pleasure to do this interview.
Because it's part of my novel.
RODAY
But don't you feel the
same way about the film?
JODOROWSKY
I think my films are also
part of my novel.
RODAY
But writing the novel
isn't part of your film.
JODOROWSKY
I'll answer the way I
feel. The dove is the Annunciation for Mary,
and Mary is the Annunciation
for the dove. So both the dove
and Mary became pregnant.
And at the end of nine months,
Mary laid a huge egg.
And the dove gave birth to a human foetus.
Right? And the person
born of the dove was Judas. Etcetera.
This is a way of saying
that everything in the picture is part of the novel,
and the novel is part
of the picture. But all these things are fragments:
part of you, or part of
me, or part of life. We cannot separate politics
from religion from art.
Reality is one. And the person who says,
"I am a politician." isn't
accurate. He has to say, "I feel politics."
We must get to the
politics we feel. Right? It's merely a means
of expressing yourself.
Politics is the means of expression for
politicians. But
everything is contained in politics, just as
everything is contained
in art. Like the philosopher
Nicholas DeCusa says,
"Everything is in everything."
RODAY
The different structures
are so intrinsic to each of the forms,
each of the media.
When you say they're both the same,
that you're writing your
novel as part of the film and that your
film is part of your novel,
we wonder about the product.
Will your novel be filled
with pictures?
Will your films be filled
with narratives?
Will everything you do
be parabolic, the way you do it now?
I mean parables about
the dove, parables about the Four Masters ...
JODOROWSKY
Yes. I think in
symbols.
RODAY
You see, I think you could
write a novel with one word.
JODOROWSKY
Yes, and I will.
But it won't be with one word, it will be with one dot.
It's the story of the
Koran, as we said before: the whole Koran
is contained in the first
sentence, the first sentence in the first word,
the first word in the
first letter, and the first letter in the first dot.
But since the dot is nothing,
I can make a novel with nothing.
I know a Japanese painter
who swam his painting.
This is what I mean:
if you're an apple tree, you bear apples.
That's all you can do.
Because you're an apple tree.
That's it. We can't
separate one thing from another.
That's what I mean when
I talk about communications media.
Nothing is nothing.
Right? Everything is everything.
Because politics has become
theatre; theatre is film; film is song.
Right? It's art.
CONVERSATIONS WITH JODOROWSKY - 3