from
EL TOPO - A BOOK OF THE FILM

RODAY
Why do you make art?   Why?

JODOROWSKY
I make art because I'm an apple tree.

RODAY
But you're also a plum tree, an orange tree ...

JODOROWSKY
I express myself.  I don't possess myself.
I express myself.  I can't even say myself.
I clean my plate.  Every day I wake up with a dirty plate.
And I clean it.  And when I've cleaned it well, the plate
trembles ... and produces an apple.  Why do art?  Why do anything?
So many people ask me, "Why do you do such and such?  There are
so many people who are dying, so many who are hungry, so many
who are killed.  Why do you do what you do?" But I'm very old.
 I'm a hundred and fifty years old. And in all those years,
people have and continue to come to me and ask, "Why?
 Why are you doing this? What for?" And in those years,
I've seen the world give birth to Borges, Frank Zappa, Crumb,
Cortazar, DeBono.  These people don't ask why you're doing this
or that:  they do.  But had all these people listened twenty years ago
to people who say, "Why do this? Why do that? So many people are
suffering, so many people are being killed," we'd have nothing today.
 Right?  Nothing. The person who feels the need to do and to give
must do and give.  The person who feels the need to do nothing,
that's all right too.  Good.  For me, non-action is this:
not pushing yourself, but not holding yourself back, either.
That is non-action ... in you, right?  If a song is born in you, sing.
 But don't try to sing when you don't have a voice.
Right?  But we all have voices.

RODAY
Let's sing.

JODOROWSKY
OK.

COHEN
Everything is permitted.

JODOROWSKY
Everything is permitted.  And then we choose ...
I'm very happy talking like this, because when I talk to
Latin American journalists, I have to be very logical.
And really, I'm very happy when I can talk like this
because I can show you how I think, how I feel.
I prefer it this way ... not so serious.
But if you want, I can also speak very logically.

RODAY
I have no more questions.

JODOROWSKY
No more questions?  Because I have something wonderful to say.
Yesterday, for example, I thought about a very wonderful problem:
I started to wonder about the meaning of the mummy.
And a girl told me a very beautiful story which gave me the key.
There's an Arab in the desert, nude, meditating. And Death
comes to take him away. And he says, "Wait, because I don't
have a piece of cloth for you to wrap my body in."
So he goes to the city and can only afford to buy a turban.
So he returns to the desert, nude, with a turban.  And he says to
Death, "Now you can bury me. Undo my turban and wrap me in it."
Yes.  That's why Arabs wear turbans: to have a piece of
cloth they can be wrapped in should they die suddenly.
Even gauze bindings, bandages, are speech symbols for
me.  Speech is like a form with emotional contents.
For me, words are like a nut.  Right? If I break open a word,
I have an emotion.  The mummy is wrapped in its memory
words, in its turban.  The turban is worn on the head, right?
So I take the turban off my head and wrap my body in it.
And I turn my body into a cocoon.  A mummy.
And a large butterfly emerges from the mummy.
A brain is a cocoon wrinkled up inside the nut of the skull.
One day the nut will open and the brain will unfold like a
huge butterfly.  I think this is the symbolism of mummies.
Yes.   Something else?

TOPP
Yes, go on.  Can you tell us more about the movie?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  There are so many things. As I said before,
I leave impressions in the film, like footprints.
When I started it, I began to play with the Bible.
In the beginning, El Topo is Moses. And I perform
the miracles of Moses. The manna doesn't
come from above; I take it from the earth.

    TOPP
The eggs in the sand.

JODOROWSKY
And there's a paragraph in the Bible that became very magical in the film.
Because, as I told you, I found the woman, Mara, by accident in Mexico.
And Mara appears in the Bible.  Not as a person ... it's stagnant water.
So I did that scene with the stagnant water, the bitter water. And in the
Bible, Moses swishes the water with a branch and it becomes sweet.
That's Moses' miracle.  I based the scene on that. I created a
parable with the woman.  She is the bitter water. And El Topo
takes a branch from a tree. The water is stagnant; it doesn't flow.
But you assume that the branch is a living tree. It's also a phallic symbol
So El Topo pust the new life of the branch into the old life of the water
and the water becomes sweet for her.  Right? I think the scene
is about orgasms, too.  Mara had never had an orgasm.  And El Topo
gave her an orgasm instantly.  When we speak of orgasms, we also
speak of Wilhelm Reich.  El Topo is Mara's orgasm, right?

COHEN
And you immediately take the orgasm to water,
on the screen -- right into the water, into the swimming ...

JODOROWSKY
Yes, into the water.  Fantastic.
The orgasm is woman in the sea.

RODAY
Yes, yes.  That's the primal orgasm.

JODOROWSKY
She's in the sea.

RODAY
Yes, yes.   And he mediates it ... he gives it.

JODOROWSKY
He gives it.  And after she has the orgasm, she never
again says, "Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing ..."
 And she finds food in the sand and water in the stones.
 And she goes back to revere the stone, which is like a
phallus ... and also like a mushroom, a stone mushroom.
Right?  I made it obvious:  a phallus and a mushroom.
I made it with stones.  I constructed it.
And the water spurts out like urine.

RODAY
Or like a climax.

JODOROWSKY
Yes, like an ejaculation.  I was thinking about Moses.
Because the desert is a woman. I think Moses is a
phallus, right?   And the desert is a woman ...
the bitter waters of a woman. And in the
Bible, Moses turns the sun into a woman,
the bitter waters of woman become sweet
when he lowers his branch into the water.

RODAY
But who's the second woman?

JODOROWSKY
I can't say anything about the second woman,
the woman in black. You can say what you like.
 If you want, think about Jung ... about light and shadow.

RODAY
Manichean, right?  Black and white.
Is it possible that the woman in black
is the alter-ego of El Topo?

JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes.  Because she is dressed in black like him.
And she wants what El Topo has.

RODAY
Yes.  But take the first woman.  In Jung, both egos
want the woman, one in the heterosexual and the other
in a homosexual way, right? The object of beauty in a
Jungian sense is the same one, from both egos.  Yes?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  Fantastic.  Jung is fantastic. Because it's very difficult to explain.
When someone asks me about the orgasm in the picture, I say, "Reich."
And when someone asks me about this woman, all I say is, "Jung."

RODAY
Jung ... yes.  I also wondered if you're not saying something about
affection for the woman ... the love, the desire, the need for the
black woman ... that every man and every woman have both
heterosexual and homosexual desires for the same object.
And that in this case, one came out and succeeded. You know,
first Moses succeeded, and then the woman succeeded.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  And Moses is liberated from his sexual life.
It's over with.  It's a step toward enlightenment.
There are levels.  At that point in the film, his human
life, his sexual life is over.  Finished.  He's castrated.

RODAY
That's right.

JODOROWSKY
He has no balls, right?

RODAY
But if Western guilt is burdening him as he kills the Masters,
he's getting further and further ... more anxiety ...
but he's killing them one after the other, right?

JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes.

RODAY
But doesn't that castrate him, also?

JODOROWSKY
No, no.  I think of the Masters as symbols: you can't find a
Master, the Master finds you. There's a story by Fariduddin Attar.
 A Sufi is crying.  And someone asks him, "Why are you crying?"
And he says, "Because I need God so much.  But God doesn't need me."
And that's the problem:  many are called, but few are chosen.
So, I can cry out, but fi the Master doesn't choose me, I can't sing.
So the Masters send a light; they look for a disciple.  And they let
themselves be killed. Because the great gift of the Master is to let
himself be killed by his disciple, to let himself be eaten by his disciple.
And that's what Christ does:  he lets his twelve apostles eat him.  And
I saw that they really ate him ... down to the bone. So when El Topo
kills the Masters, he has the Masters within him. But he doesn't
know that.  He doesn't know he's suffering from introjection ...
introjection from the Masters.  And when he realizes it, he becomes
the Four Masters.  Right?  Like Christ is the Four Evangelists.

Eisenstein, in Film Sense , says that the total is more than the sum of
its parts.  So I think that the Zodiac is its twelve signs, but it's something
greater than that.  It makes Christ.  Christ is the Zodiac.  Because if you
take a part from it, that part can live by itself.  But it doesn't make
Christ.  OK?  This is what I think about the Four Masters. If you think
of Four Masters, you can also see the Four Evangelists. Or you can
think of fire, water, earth, and air -- the four elements.   Or the cross.
 Etcetera.  You can think what you like. I think that reality is a huge
plate of food. And depending on the kind of mouth you have, you'll feed
yourself accordingly.  In other words, you give the food its taste. The food
itself has no taste.  If your mouth tastes chicken, reality is a chicken.  Right?

Everything is a symbol.  The Alka Seltzer, for example, packaged in blue
foil wrappers.  It's a square with words printed on it.  Like me.  I'm a square
with things printed on me: my names, whatever I think I am.   But when I open
the wrapper, it's silver foil on the inside:  negative, water, maternal womb.  And
inside is a white circular form which isn't a circle. It's a Host.  But this symbol,
this Alka Seltzer Host doesn't exist yet. Because it's in an evolutionary state
of effervescent power.  In order for the communion of the Alka Seltzer to exist.
I have to put it in a glass of water.  And when it enters the water, the Host
doesn't disappear.  It salts the water.  Everything is a symbol.

I believe so much in Rene Guenon.  Rene Guenon is a very great philosopher.
A metaphysician.  A French philosopher. He's dead now.  I think it's very
important for all of us that he became an Islamic. He was a Christian;
he became an Islamic.  And he married an Egyptian girl and died in Islam.
 Fantastic. He said that everything is a symbol and that man is a symbol of
the non-manifested. So you can live your life thinking of yourself as a symbol.
Not thinking, but being  a symbol.  Every act is a symbol.  When you wear that
yellow shirt, for example, I think of Confucius, who only wore yellows, white
or black.  They weren't diffused colors.  When you wear that flower on your
shirt, you're manifesting your desire to open your solar plexus ... like a
rose of flesh. A rose of flesh is your body wanting to open up.  And what
does it open up to?  To insects?  No.  It opens up to the sun.  Right?

Everything is a symbol.  But symbolic expression has been forgotten ...
forgotten.  Because symbolic language is a metaphysical language.
Rene Guenon said that civilization has given us a way of speaking ...
logically or illogically.  But metaphysical things can only be expressed
through symbols, right?  And the beauty of symbolic language is that
it's a bottle, a receptacle ... much like Superman's cape. As Superman
grows, his cape grows; and as he gets smaller, his cape gets smaller.
 A symbol is Superman's cape. If you're great, the symbol grows;
and if you're small, the symbol shrinks.  This is El Topo , I think.
If you're great, El Topo is a great picture; if you are limited, El Topo
is limited.  I took my children to see it. They liked it -- maybe because
they're my children, maybe not -- but they liked the picture very much.
Because I think they saw it as a fairy-tale ... because they are children.
But people like you, for example, see Jung, you see Reich, you see
Joseph de Voragine, you see cultures. Because you have all this
within ...  and you can put it into the film.  I think this is good.

COHEN
For me the greatest thing about the film is just the pure story level.

RODAY
For me it's the most incredible execution of such a vast ambition.
I've never seen an execution of such a program.  Because the symbols
meant to me very specific things, and now I see that I can't begin
to even hold on to specific references for the picture. The fact
that the symbols are even richer than I supposed is overwhelming.

JODOROWSKY
The Zen say that when you are enlightened, you can burn the Ten
Thousand Books.  The emperor of China who built the Great Wall
was sharply criticized because he burned all the books of the Empire.
And for Occidentals, the idea of burning books is terrible.  But I don't
think it's terrible, it has to do with changing your bones.  And when
I say bones, I mean changing your essence.  If a book can't change
the structure of my bones, it's useless. I have many books in my home,
and sometimes people ask me why I don't burn them. And I tell them
that I was a very solitary child. And that I used to read because I had no
friends.  So I buy books out of a need for affection. Each book is a caress.
When I buy books, I'm buying caresses, not intellectual documents.
Right?  I think poets -- besides writing poetry -- should go to the
streets and embrace people. For example, I see very little of my children.
Then suddenly I'll tell them:  "I'm going to give you a large dosage of hugs
and kisses." And I embrace them and caress them and embrace them
and caress them ...  for an hour ... until they scream.

I use symbols very lovingly.  I discover very beautiful things.
The lance in Rene Guenon, for example. I loved reading about
that:  the lance that wounds Christ. But the symbol became a lance
that weeps tears of blood ... the blood began to pour out of the lance.
 I like that because I like symbols.

RODAY
Yeah, I understand.
But you did it in the film.
When you come into the village, everyone is dead.
And there's a woman impaled on a spear, right?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  Maybe.  This is beautiful.  In my film, this symbol could mean
that the lance created its own victim. Perhaps.  And there's a
pool of blood beside the lance.  It's a lake of blood, not water.
And if you think of the lance as a living lance, then it is nourishing
its roots from the pool, right? It's growing from the blood.
Yes.  I like this symbol. Each new symbol moves me.
And on the lance a rose blooms ... from the blood.
 And then you know that the lance is Christ.
And that the lance has five wounds.
To speak of "five" -- Christ has five wounds, too --
is very significant.  It's the meaning of man.
I think that "five" is the meaning of man.
One, two, three, four, five.  Five.
Five in Masonry, the Pentagon ... man.
Five.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
We must read the Zohar.  The Zohar.

This morning you asked me if the cave in the film was Plato's cave.
I said yes.  I said yes.  And when the old woman offers the beetle
to El Topo, I think it's an alchemist symbol.  Because they are
black beetles -- black like the crow, which is a symbol of decay.
Putrification.  The beetle pushes a ball of excrement ...
and this ball of extrement turns into gold.

COHEN
Yeah, that's what the alchemists were doing.
 

JODOROWSKY
Their mental work.

COHEN
They got a lot of shit in their beards when they were doing that.

JODOROWSKY
And then you eat the beetle, like a drug.
Beetle.  Drug.  Yes, I think so. Because once
I was traveling through the north of Mexico
and two hitchhikers were traveling with me.
Suddenly they made me stop the car.
There was a huge beetle in the road.  Alive.
And the two men started to fight over the beetle
until one of them grabbed it.  He broke it open and
sucked on it.  Then he started to fall into a state
of delirium. I think that in certain parts of Mexico,
people get high on beetles.

COHEN
Do you want to talk about the next movie?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  I think I'll do two movies, a gangster movie and a
pirate movie.  The gangster movie will be a very old one ...
based on St. John of the Cross.  He wrote a book about Mount
Carmel.  Mount Carmel.  And mountain climbing.  The movie will
be about mountain-climbing ... treated like a cabalistic problem.
  Mountain climbing was always a school of spiritual initiation.
But children will think it's just about mountain-climbing.
The other film, the pirate film:  I think that pirates were true
examples of anarchism.  I think Hollywood destroyed the
meaning of piracy.  Pirates were like the young people of today.
The young are today's pirates.  And I want to use only young people
in the film.  I want to film it ... I hope I can ... in the streets of
New York.  And I'll use all of New York like the ocean.  Like the ocean.
And everyone who'll play the pirates ... the battles, etc ... will be
the fish of the ocean.  Right?  We can make wonderful pirate movies.
I think that the pirate society is very profound. And the pirate women
were the first to proclaim women's liberation. I want the heroine
of the film to be a beautiful blonde who weighs two-hundred kilos.

FIRESTONE
Who else do you want to be in the pirate movie?

JODOROWSKY
People I know.   It'll be a Panic picture with all the young
people i know in New York:  Ira, Marty, me, you, etcetera.
But the other film ... I want to do that Mount Carmel film with
Firestone, Douglas, Kleiner and Dennis Hopper ... And myself.
 I'll need ten people ... who can live the experience.
Because I think the actor must be involved in the picture.
He shouldn't be an actor.  I don't like actors. In my
first picture -- Fando and Lis  -- everything was real:
the physical violence, each drop of blood was real.  In this
picture I want to use people who will surrender themselves
to an experience ... myself included.  Contact between Masters
and key activities  to reach a state of enlightenment.  Right?
For example, I want all the actors to go for eight days without sleeping
with a Japanese Zen Master who lives in Mexico. Eight days without sleep.
 I want the actors to have the experience. Actors who will eat mushrooms
on a given day indicated in the script and who will let themselves
be directed so that they'll reach enlightenment as they do in the film.

RODAY
Soma?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  I want to try it ... with all kinds of mushrooms I want to do it.
 I don't think of movies as a game, in the pejorative sense of the word.
It's a remarkable game.  It's a master game.  And we must play a master
game, not a little game.  I think of movies as a way to enlightenment, as
much as anything else.  I must use it.  The first thing a film must change
are the actors who are in it; and then the audiences.  If a young boy
takes acid and experiences a change, the least a film can do is give
him more than acid gives him.  But you mustn't give him the visions that
acid gives him; you must give him the pill. And then let each individual see
his own visions. That's it.  I believe that not only is it necessary to do now,
but that is must be done.  Enough of storytelling and playing little games ...
little acting exercises, little dialogues, little music, little images,
little movie houses.  Films distributed by human excrement. Right?
 All they know how to eat is shit so they want to distribute shit.
Right?  So a real film must create its own distributor.
And we must forget the idea of making it with Broadway
cinemas. In five years, those theatres will be used exclusively
for showing erotic film pamphlets to propagandize war.

RODAY
I'm anxious to see how you will acheieve the epic quality
of El Topo in your two other pictures.

JODOROWSKY
I've never thought of doing an epic picture.  My Master is the
Anabasis of Alexander the Great by Flavio Arriano. What I like
about the book is that as you begin reading it, you think Alexander
the Great is mad because he goes and goes and goes -- traveling
all over the world.  And when he conquers a town, he loses it
because he's off to conquer another. He went from one town to
the next.  But the real conquest of Alexander the Great
was the conquest of himself.  Right?

RODAY
He plays Adam, like in the Bible.  I mean, he names every town.

JODOROWSKY
Yes, yes.  Like Moses. He crosses the desert and makes the desert
live the way Alexander made everything live ... everything.
 And he never sets foot into the promised land because he
doesn't have to.  The promised land was a desert.  What could
be more of a promised land that one where you get water
from stones?  Right?   That's the promised land.  If Moses had
wanted to, he would have hit the ground with his staff and
each grain of sand would have spurted a fine jet of water.  So
that the entire surface of the desert would have been covered
with a water down.  And you could caress it like an animal.

RODAY
It didn't matter that Moses didn't see the promised land.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  He didn't enter it.  He didn't enter it.
He saw it, but didn't enter.  Because he created it.
The Bible, like all metaphysical books, is a book of
anatomy.  They all refer to the human body.
The whole Bible takes place in a human body.
For example, when Moses starts to cross the desert,
he's between his penis and his anus. So he begins
to climb up his spinal cord with all the Jews of his day.
And then a hole opens in his pineal gland and all the
Jewish people turn into an eight-petaled flower.  Right?

SUSAN
Beautiful.

JODOROWSKY
Yes, beautiful. Because now I understand why Moses took off his
sandals when he approached the burning bush.  As I've said,
I think Moses was born with his sandals on.  We have shoes, but
we don't have feet. So our life's task is to create our feet so that
we can take off our shoes ... so that we don't have to walk on our
shoes any more, but on our feet. When Moses had feet, he could
see God.  But when he returned, he had to put on his shoes again
so people would listen to him and understand him. But he couldn't
talk about feet.  He could only talk about full shoes. And the people
started to adore shoes. The golden calf was a huge golden shoe.
Right?  And he killed the people because they started
to adore shoes and not the idea of feet.

JODOROWSKY
The Sufi say, "The only thing you can teach a disciple is how to learn
from himself."  Which is why I believe that universities of the
future shouldn't have professors or lecture halls.  The idea of
"professor" should end. Etcetera.  Good.  Universities should
be peripatetic ... no ... they should be aero-patetic.  Universities
should be airplanes.  A lecture hall should become an airplane.
 I see the university as an enormous hanger, with airplanes.
So the students board the plane instead of going to the lecture hall.
And instead of a professor, there's a pilot.  And he flies to places the
students are studying about.  Right?  The university is an airport.
The university is mobile ... traveling to the place you have to study about.
For example, no one can understand Greek temples if they don't see
them in the context of their landscape.  But one one can understand
a temple anyway because it's of another era. I propose that a
photograph be taken of each one, that they be disassembled,
and that something else be constructed from the pieces.  Right?
 Someone told me, "God needn't be in a temple or in a cathedral."
But it occured to me that God isn't in a cathedral; he's in a
stone of the cathedral. Ezra Pound wrote a poem where someone
signs a stone of the cathedral.  He made the stone say,
"Adam made me." Ezra Pound.  I think he feels the essence
of a cathedral. A cathedral is made of stones chisled with love.
And if the stones are made with love, the cathedral is a
musical instrument.  Right? That you can play if you discover
the exact spot to touch. If you go to Chartres with a little hammer
made from one of your bones (you must sacrifice something) and
with your little bone hammer, you tap the Cathedral of Chartres ... in one
precise spot ... and it will sing like a siren for two or three entire days.

I can continue to talk about symbols if you like ... for five days.
The sword embedded in the stone, for example. It's a beautiful
symbol.  No one can get it out. Then someone comes along and
takes it out with no effort because it was his sword.  You have a
woman who's made of stone. No one can remove his phallus
from her.  You come and remove it with no effort. She's your
woman ... your woman. You can do it because she's your woman.
Because when she had the phallus inside her, it was immobile.
 Because it was yours.  And you went through life castrated.
But when you laid your pelvis against hers, you recovered your
phallus and you were able to enter and withdraw with ease.
And then water came from the stone.  Right? And that water
fell on your testicles, and your testicles bloomed, like flowers.
Yes, I think so.

One day I had a little illumination ... not a great illumination,
but a little one ... about symbols.  Someone asked me, "What is
the meaning of this animal?" And I told him.  And then we found
it in a book, and it really was that symbol.  I'm not playing a game
when I talk about these things.  You can talk in symbolic language.
If you want, ask me something. We can play with symbols ... or not.

SUSAN
Talk about what you said the other day ...
about society being divided ...

JODOROWSKY
Ah!  She asked me, "What's the destiny of society?"
And I told her it would be divided in half: into transparent
men, like luminous spheres, and hippopotamuses ...
But hippopotamuses with no legs, with huge mouths,
with no eyes or ears, and assholes the size of their
mouths with a door that opens and closes.

SUSAN
Like Bosch.

JODOROWSKY
And the asshole opens up like a door to shoot cannonballs
of excrement to kill other hippopotamuses.  Al day long they're
killing each other with their cannonballs of shit.  And instead
of a nose, they have a finger ... the only human thing they have
left ... to push buttons with.  And what they'll like most is for
people to suck the finger. It's the only sensitivity they have left.
This is what society will be ... And one of the hippopotamuses
will surely become President.  And it will be very difficult
for him to make speeches because he'll kill everyone
who interviews him with his cannonballs of shit.  The
hippopotamuses won't be able to control their digestion.
Right?  OK.  This is what I think.

COHEN
We can make a short film, and ...

JODOROWSKY
Of hippopotamuses and angels.

COHEN
Do you want to?

JODOROWSKY
The hippopotamuses ... Ay!  Fantastic!
Look, the hippopotamuses will have only one theoretical,
metaphysical problem:  since everyone else will be luminous
spheres, the hippopotamuses will constantly be asking themselves,
"Who shat these luminous spheres?" And so they'll have a god:
 a transparent hippopotamus who is always shitting angels.  OK.

COHEN
Don't you want to make a movie of that
as much as of anything else?

JODOROWSKY
Yes!  Why not?  I like it.  I invented it just now.
The other day, Ira said to me, "You have so many routines
when you talk." I said, "There are always new things.
 Next time we talk I promise you a complete new show."
But really, when I talk I invent.  I invent. I never think
about it.  And I'm a very good audience. I listen to
Robert here, right? I don't think you have to have
imagination.  But you must have seeds. So, in a
conversation, you plant the seed and let it grow freely.
Right?  Let it grow.  You mustn't hold anything back.

RODAY
I want to ask you about metaphysics.

JODOROWSKY
Metaphysics, yes. You say the word metaphysics, and I think
the most physical thing is metaphysical ... because it's real, right?
Physical.  It's something physical.  But when we talk about
physics, the only body that exists is the non-manifested body.
That's why I understand Ira's photographs so well.  Because
he puts you in a room of distorted mirrors, and he only
photographs the reflection.  You are the reflection. He never
photographs you. In other words, he photographs your
symbol.   But he doesn't direct, create the symbol.  He looks for
it in the mirror. The symbol appears, he doesn't make it.
There's a beautiful sentence that Papus' master said ...
Maitre Philippe.  He said, "Hunting is not permitted, but fishing is."
I think that's the attitude of any creator. He's a fisherman, not a hunter.
Because if you go after a fish, you'll never catch it. Lewis Carroll wrote
a poem called The Hunting of the Snark. It's about an unknown
animal that can never be caught.  Like Melville's Moby Dick.
And the owner of Kafka's castle. They're all hunters.  But Christ was
a fisherman.  He throws out a net and many fishes fall into it ...
little ones and big ones.  And he takes the big ones.
It's the same as a Sufi saying:  "When you know the ocean,
you're no longer interested in the rivers that flow into it."
You throw out the net and you receive. Now, you get big
fishes and little fishes.  There are many people who spend
their lives getting little fishes, never the large ones.
 The fish is so big that you can't see it.
Beautiful.  It's so big you can't see it.

And Anais Nin.  I just read her today.  I went to a bookstore
and saw the book.  I think I felt the book there and took it
off the shelf and held it in my hands.   When I hold a book,
the book is mine.  I don't have to read it.  But I do read it.  Osmosis.
You can know a book by osmosis.  And yesterday, I knew Anais Nin
by osmosis.  And I said to myself, "How beautiful to write a book
throughout your whole lifetime."  Like the disciple of Milareppa ...
the poet I spoke of earlier ... he spoke in poetry all his life ...
all his life he worked on a novel.   Milareppa.  You live your
whole life like a poem, right? Yesterday, for example, at Ira
Cohen's loft, I saw two people rollerskating at four in the morning.
And I thought, "That noise is like the birds' song that announces
the dawn."  I like to go to Acapulco because all the birds gather in
one tree to sing ... at dawn and at dusk.  In the mornings their
song is right, but in the evenings it's a mistake because when
they see the red of the sun, they think it's dawn again.
They are great poets.  I like them.

SUSAN
Talk about bees ...

JODOROWSKY
We've already talked about bees.

COHEN
You know, in Greece they used the bee as a symbol
of the soul.  When someone dies, he flies away as a bee.

JODOROWSKY
Yes, it's your life work. A bee is a worker.  He makes honey.
Gurdjieff says, "You aren't born with a soul; you have to make
one for yourself."  Right?  You live through different periods.
 And with each period you're constructing:  first, the emotions, then
the intellect.  There are mentally retarded people who have never
created their intellects.  There are spiritually retarded people
Who have never created their souls.  Right?  So the bee is the symbol
of the creator of his own soul. They all work, in the sun, but the queen
bee gives birth in darkness.  Which is why we say, "she gives light."
In Spanish, "to give light" means "to give birth."  And all births
take place in darkness.  A Chinese poet said, "You must be like
a caterpillar who makes himself smaller to be able to move forward."
 Right? So you must fall into darkness to be able to move toward the light.
Because th elight you think you live in is darkness. The earth is dark.
 And when the huge angels who fly through the universe approach
the earth, they're blinded by the sun. Because the sun is darkness.
 The sun is black.  And that's why we live in darkness.  That's why the
mole loses its eyes.  And that's why the great samurai in the Chinese
movies we saw in Chinatown are blind.  A woman is always blind.
 And a beggar.  That's what I say.  Poor of spirit, poor in spirit.
As Christ said, right?  Like the Sufi MAsters ... they're all beggars,
who don't confuse being with having.  I like Speedy Gonzales!

And the sword is very important in Chinese films.  I'll explain the
symbolism of the sword.  The Taoists say that sometimes when a
Master dies, his body disappears and only his sword remains
in the casket.  And they say that the sword is the symbol of
his soul which he had created.  There's something fantastic
about weapons!  A weapon never exists without its sheath
or case.   A weapon always has something to protect it.
And for a Japanese sword, or a great Chinese sword, the
sheath is as important as the blade.  A samurai won't let
you hold the blade in your hands because your fingerprints
could keep the sword from coming out of its sheath quickly.
Cowboys too. The cowboy must keep his holster very, very clean.
A weapon is a duality.  Right?  Very interesting.  So are you.
You're a weapon.  You must be able to take your soul
out of your mouth and put it on the table ...
like a medium.  Very quickly.  Right?  OK.

RODAY
Let's go back for a moment ... to the Wall of China.

JODOROWSKY
The Wall of China.  Ah!  When the emperor burned the books,
he taught us a lesson:  live books; don't adore them.  Kill Christ so
you can have Him within you.  Right?  Now, the act of building a wall
can also be one of uniting a people, a society.  Like The Prince of
Machiavelli, who united all of Italy.  Everyone thought it was an evil
book, but it says beautiful things.  It's very positive.  For example, when
archers want their arrows to reach a distant target, they aim for a point
beyond the target, demanding the impossible.  And thus they attain
the possible.  They shoot for the moon.  They never hit it, but they
become the best archers in the world.  It also works in reverse ...
with Machiavelli or the builder of the Wall of China:  they seem to
shoot their arrow a very short distance toward a meaningless target.
 But their arrow travels with such force that it passes
through the bull's eye and reaches the infinite.

COHEN
I wanted to ask you why someone didn't shed real blood in your movie.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  I'll tell you what Godard said when someone asked
him, "Why do you show so much blood in Weekend ?"
And he answered, "I don't use blood; I use the color red.
I like red."  There are so many people who don't like red.
There's a social barrier against red.  If all the violence shown
in movies doesn't show blood, people will accept it.   The first
barrier against red is the red of traffic lights.  Then there's the
Communist terror.  And the menstrual cycles.  And hemorrhoids ...
which eighty percent of the people in the U.S. suffer from ... from bad
eating habits, from eating hamburgers.  To solve this problem, I propose
that the audience see different colors of blood.  Think of green blood,
for example, and you forget that throughout each human being,
throughout mankind, flows a river of blood.  You forget what the
Essenes said in their Gospel of Peace:  the world is created with
the blood of the Universal Mother.  Trees are made of her blood.
In my pirate movie, I won't have those problems: I'm going to put
green blood in the wounds ... blue blood ...  violet blood.
 And the wounds will spill out soap bubbles, red butterflies,
pieces of shiny cloth, crystal balls, cows' tongues ... or
hamburgers.  OK.  Ah!  Such pleasure!  Such pleasure!
What a pleasure it is to sing ... !

TOPP
Have you ever used liquid crystals?

JODOROWSKY
Liquid crystal?

TOPP
It's a medical thing.  You can inject it into a vein
in your hand and it completely colors the hand.
It's used to determine the circulation, and to locate
tumors, which would show up a different color.

JODOROWSKY
Can you see it with the naked eye?

TOPP
You see the whole outline.
Absolutely.  And it's completely harmless.

JODOROWSKY
That reminds me of something.  You inject a color into your testicles,
and in a tenth of a millionth of a second, your whole body turns blue.
Yes.  I think the body is a huge organ that functions as one entity.
It has testicles on the forehead and eyebrows on the pelvis ...
everything everywhere at the same time.  Everything is simultaneous.
 Plants, for example.  When you put a drop of water on one of their roots,
before the processes carry it to the leaf ... much before ... the leaf starts to
react.   If I touch the tip of this little girl's nose, I touch her whole body ...
her clitoris.  Speaking of clitoris, I once knew a fantastic man ... a very
distinguished man ... who would go to women's parties to read their
palms.  Then he would lift up their skirts and say, "Allow me to read
your clitoris."  And he'd start to read the ladies' clitoris. You can read
the clitoris.  You can read the anus. You can read anything you want.
Because every body is a book.  OK?  Another question.

RODAY
Before, you talked about Godard ...
Have you talked about other filmmakers?

JODOROWSKY
I like all films. Because with every film I see, I make my own film.
Right?  I like them all.  I don't look for any one film to like.
All these years, I've been looking for a film not to like.
Maybe I'll make one.  I like Dr. Strange Comics!

If you know the ocean, you don't need the rivers.  Right?
Perhaps you must find the ocean.  Maybe there is a primal book
from which all books come.  So you go from book to book.
They tell of a tree in Tibet ... they write on its leaves.
They talk of a tree that's in your brain, right?  The Tree of Life.
 These are all books. But there's but one book.  I don't know
what it is.  It's the primal scream.  Yes, the primal scream.
And I imagine ... with great pleasure ... all the horrible stirrings
of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the
universe.  Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into
convulsions and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and
the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window
like a river, and it will flood the city.  And then we'll begin to live.

RODAY
What about something on history?
Some people will want to take a picture as an allegory of time.

JODOROWSKY
An allegory of time ...

RODAY
... beginning sometime in the very primitive state
and then you have this evolving straight through to ...

JODOROWSKY
... to civilization.

RODAY
Yeah.

JODOROWSKY
I accept that.  In the primitive beginnings, the hero has personal
problems.  After his first enlightenment, he has social problems.
And when he dies, I think he'll have universal problems.  Right?
Universal problems.  The problems continually become larger and
larger.  When a person wants to find God, he searches for God ...
and he finds God, a little god.  He has a little god and he wants
to touch this god.  Then the god eludes him and grows larger.
2001 says this about space.  I liked it. I think the slabs were
steps ... a staircase.  No one will every be given a complete
staircase.  You can have only one step. And if you take the step, you
create another.  If you don't take the initial step, the staircase ends.
Perhaps Borges' staircases which led to nothing were created by people
who had no faith ... who reached a certain level in time and then
descended the stairs they had climbed.  I know a Zen story about a
disciple who's standing blindfolded at the edge of an abyss.   And the
Master is pushing him into the abyss.  And the moment he jumped,
the abyss was only ten centimenters high.  I know another story by
Farriduddin Attar about a dog who is very thirsty. He wants to drink,
but he can't.  Because below the surface of the water there's another
dog staring at him.  Until he finally jumps into the water.
I could end by saying that he drowns, but he goes on living.
OK?  You can also compare my film to the Bible ...
the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The Old Testament and the Book of Revelations.

RODAY
The Catacombs and the Resurrection.

JODOROWSKY
You can think of it in these terms if you like.  Because there are
always old books and new books. All religions follow this path.
Old books, new books, non-books ... it all ends up with books.
 So the creators kill God and he lives within them. But the dead
God ends up becoming a devil.  I think we're entertaining an era of
killing God.   Right?  We're killing famous men.  Celebrities.  And we're
killing heroes ... so that we can become heroes.  And famous people are
the last of the  remaining elephants.   And we're moving toward a society
devoid of famous men.  No one will know who the President of the Republic is.
He'll be a little old man who works in an office picking his nose ... making little
balls of mucous.  And he'll use his mucous balls to create a Seurat painting ...
a pointillist painting.   That's how I see the President.

RODAY
Do you think there's any one great moment in all the Bibles?
Is this the moment of revelation?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  I think the greatest moment of human life is ... in Faust,
for example, the most beautiful moment is when the cock crows.
The birth of the day.  The most beautiful moment in the life
of a human being is when he starts to scream.  He has a soul
and feels it roar like a clap of thunder.  "In a beautiful blue sky
of midday."  Do you understand?  Enlightenment is internal birth.
I believe that every human being hopes for this.
I don't think he hopes for anything else.
I don't think people are hoping for money.

COHEN
Do you want to loan me fifty dollars?

JODOROWSKY
Of course.

COHEN
Yeah?  No problem.

JODOROWSKY
I'll borrow it from someone else ...
who's borrow it from someone else,
until everone will be lending each other money.

COHEN
I already gave away some of the fifty dollars yesterday,
I'm afraid, but I figured you might be able to speed it up.

JODOROWSKY
But what was the original question?

RODAY
At the moment of illumination in the film,
it's more than an intensely personal
moment ... if you had said that earlier ...
you get killed, you are crucified,
you are wounded five times on the bridge ...

JODOROWSKY
He loses everything.  He loses everything.
He loses his sexual life.  He loses his material
possessions, his revolver.  He loses his personality ...

RODAY
Right.  He lost his vanity.  He lost everything.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  If you read Jung's Metamorphosis of the Soul ,
you'll see his theory about death of a hero and his rebirth.

RODAY
Oh ... right.

JODOROWSKY
Right?  So when the hero dies and is reborn.  But he's like a
newborn child.  That's why they cut his hair. He's like a baby.
 That's why monks shave their heads. They are nothing.   There's
nothing behind them. They tell me that the film is really two films.
And I say it's one.  Perhaps its just that they don't conceive of the idea
that a man's life changes.  They can't conceive of a Gauguin, who changes
his life and becomes someone else at forty.  i think there can be sudden
changes in our lives.  But all art, and all theatre, has accustomed us to
think of ourselves as Hamlet.  You begin as Hamlet and die as Hamlet.
Nothing changes.  So Hamlet is a schmuck.  And whoever thinks like
Hamlet, has to die like Hamlet. He doesn't die to be reborn, right?  Do you
understand? I think that a normal hero must die in his picture and begin
a new life ... as many times as he wants.  A true Master dies each moment
of his life ... and is born each moment.  Why, in a universe which is being
born each moment, which is the same age as I am at this very moment --
because I was just born this very moment -- since it is continually being
created, why, in this universe, should I live a life of being instead of one
in the process of becoming? I want to be continually being born,
like the universe. My thoughts and feelings must be as alive as my
corporal matter.  If my body cells are dying each moment and being
born each moment, why should my thoughts last longer than my body
cells?  That's why my theory on my film when we started this interview
changed half-way through the interview and is changing again now.
I don't have one theory; I have a continual death and rebirth of theories.
Right?   That's what I think.  Lao Tse says, "Be like water that takes
on the shape of the container that holds it."  Water is very adaptable;
it adapts.  We're ninety-eight percent water.  We are water.
 A writer said that a scientist studied water to come to the
conclusion that we are water expressing itself.  Beautiful.
 Do you like it?  Beautiful, isn't it?
So you must adapt yourself to reality, like clouds.

There's a very beautiful book.  A very, very beautiful book by Kubin,
who is a painter as well.  Breton discovered the writer in Kubin and said,
"He's as good as Kafka."  Kubin's book L'Autre Cote was written before
The Castle.   And it's also about someone who's looking for the owner of
the castle.  But in Kubin's book, the man finds the owner of the castle.
And it's marvelous, because the owner is a person who's sitting down
and constantly changing shape.  A person, a cow ... continually changing
shape.  That's the owner of the castle.  I dedicate this story to so many
sad people who've destroyed their lives because they never knew
who the owner of the castle was. And they died without ever having
solved the problem.  Right?  In the eternity of eternity, we'll know what
Kafka was guilty of in The Trial , who killed him.  And the one who
killed him will be judged, and we'll know. All mysteries will be revealed.
 And we'll know them.  One day we'll know the part that's missing ...
we'll know what Rene Daumal never finished in his Mount Analogue ...
what he had intended to write and what he found at the top of Mount
Analogue.  We'll know what Kubla Khan's poem was like ... the complete
poem.  And we'll know who interrupted the poem and who sent him.
Perhaps it was another Coleridge who interrupted Coleridge.
Perhaps.  Perhaps it was the real poet who knocked at the door.
it was an Annunciation.  The Virgin Mary was writing Kubla Khan's
poem, and the seventy-kilo dove descended and took her away from
writing the poem so that he could make love to her.  A beautiful blonde
weighing two hundred kilos knocked at the poet's door, interrupted
his verses, and made love with him. And the poet screamed and
created the castle of Kubla Khan. Fantastic.  Fantastic.  Very good.  OK.

I knew a man in Paris who was in love with a poet ...
a Chilean poet.  The poet died, so the man married his wife.
He was very fat.  And he told me, "There's a difference between
knowing and possessing.  I learned Italian to possess Dante's
Divine Comedy."  He was very big, right?  And he wanted to possess the
Chilean poet.  So he married the poet's wife.  He only possessed the wife.
Once the poet had said to the man, "I will make a rose bloom in my poem."
And the fat man said, "I've read the poem twenty times ... two thousand times.
Where's the rose?"  The poem crumbled and fell from his mouth in petals.
The first time I saw a beetle was when I saw a beautiful dark-skinned woman --
she was very fat, two hundred kilos -- sitting at a table in a cafe.  She said to
me, "Kiss me."  I went over to kiss her and she stuck out her tongue.
And there was a beetle on her tongue.  And she handed me some Japanese
chopsticks to eat rice with.  I didnt understand what she meant because
I used them like crutches.  Speaking of beetles, I want to ask a  question.
A beetle has shards ... hard wing covers ... which are like wings.
Entymologists say that the shards are wings which have hardened
to protect the beetle.  But I ask, "Couldn't the wings be shards
which have become transparent to allow the beetle to fly?"
One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was
half full.  And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?"
So I drank the water.

RODAY
The Gordian water.

JODOROWSKY
Finito.  No more problem.  The most beautiful speeches I know
where  Plotinus' speeches.   (And in parenthesis, I should tell you
about Plotinus' death.  He didn't want people to draw pictures of him.
He never bathed.  Instead he had two slaves rub him and clean him with
oils. When the slaves died, he never bathed again. One day he was so
dirty that while he was taking a walk along the outskirts of the town,
some dogs attacked him and devoured him --  a very choice omelet.)
Anyway, Plotinis' speeches ... The city was under siege and the people
were afraid they were going to run out of food.  So they told Plotinus
that he could lift the people's morale by speaking to them because
he spoke so well. So he went up to the rostrum, took a glass,
poured flour and water into it, stirred it up, and drank it.  And the
people cheered because of a single gesture. Which means ...
as the Chinese say, "If you want to be rich, lower your ambitions."
If you want food to last you a long time, make a sacrifice.  Right?

There's a story about structures ... I don't know if it's Borges ...
a story about map charters, cartographers. They started to
construct a map so big that the map covered everything
and they began to live in the map. It's by Korszybsky,
I like it very much ... the idea that language is a map ...
an old map ... and we live inside language, which is like
living inside an old map.  But this reminds me of something else.
When I was little, people would tell me: "Don't build castles in the
sky because they'll collapse." But I say that you must build castles in
the sky and make yourself lighter than air so you can live in your castle.
I like Yellow Dog!

Speaking of horses, the Messiah will come on a horse.  The horse will
be made of water and the Messiah of sugar. And as he's riding,
he'll start to dissolve into the horse as sugar dissolves in tea.
And when the horse comes to mankind, it will burst and fill all the
cups in the world with presweetened horsetea.  If we put all the teas
of the world together, we'd produce an enormous horse.  And just now
I'm beginning to understand the meaning of the Trojan horse: we live
inside the horse, but we also hold it in our hands.  Right?  OK?
But who holds me in their hands? In The Circular Ruins by Borges,
a character dreams another dream.  And the dream dreams a dream.
And it has no beginning or end. There's always someone dreaming.
 But we could also say that, instead of dreaming, we could create stones
in the air ...  like mediums make manifestations of stone.
I once knew a crazy woman who worked with her hands in her air ...
she made sculptures in the air.  I didn't think she was doing anything.
But, since she was crazy, she used flour for makeup. She was
always making immobile sculptures in the air. But one day
she moved her face and the flour fell from her face like a
cloud covering up something in the air.  And I saw a beautiful
geometrical form.  Then I took a bag of flour, went into her
room and started to throw the flour around in the air.
And beautiful sculptures began to appear.  That's the story.

SUSAN
But your stories are like labyrinths.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  People often talk to me about labyrinths.
Many people think in terms of labyrinths.  But you must also
think in terms of mobile labyrinths with walls that travel at the
speed of light ... which is the speed of turtles.  We usually think
of labyrinths as being immobile, but if we think of a mobile
labyrinth with just one wall, we'll have a great labyrinth.  Fantastic.

RODAY
Why does the labyrinth as an image continually appear?

JODOROWSKY
The first image of the labyrinth are the intestines. When you open
up a dove and read your fortune in its intestines, you're discovering the
labyrinth.   A labyrinth is an image of human intestines. The Orientals always
looked for truth in their bellys.  When you look for the labyrinth, you're looking
for truth in your belly.   It's a descent into your belly to the Hara.
That's the meaning of the labyrinth.

You can ask me about any sumbol you like. I know the meaning of every
symbol there is. So do you, because the meaning off every symbol is recorded
in your brain cells. It's already been written down. Everything can be read.
Everything is a book.  You can read a hat, shoes ... an umbrella.
The other day I gave a sermon at a church here ...  St. Clement's ...
The Episcopal priest asked me what I was going to talk about.
I couldn't think of anything.  So just to say something, I said,
"About my umbrella."    And then I gave the sermon
on my umbrella.  I began to think about the characteristics
of an umbrella ... it comes in a case ... it's a weapon.
And umbrella is a weapon.  Like you. Only this weapon is
encased by a zipper ...  which is our teeth, our clenched teeth.
Sewn with words, with the words of everyday thoughts, with our
intellectual obsessions.  To get down to the umbrella's essence, we have to
open the case and give it a primal scream. But then we have a closed umbrella.
And to open the umbrella, it has to rain. If it doesn't rain, the umbrella
will never open because an umbrella is like a flower. Umbrellas only open
when it rains.  And if you don't believe me, try opening the umbrella when it
isn't raining.  You won't be able to do it.  If you want proof, I'll give it to you.
So you open the umbrella when rain falls.  But umbrellas aren't meant to
protect you from the rain;  they are meant to collect the rain.  So you must
never hold an umbrella as a protective dome;  you must hold it upside down.
And the umbrella should collect water the same as a chalice collects sacred wine ...
the sacred blood.  Because rain is blood.  Dracula is a heavy drinker of rain.
That's all he wants.  And I'm not so mistaken, because just now I see other things
being revealed.  When they wounded Christ in the side, blood poured out.
But so did water.  Blood and rain.  So Christ wasn't stabbed with a spear,
but with an umbrella.  Therefore the umbrella is the symbol of the Holy Grail.
All the knights of King Arthur's Round Table traveled all over the world
looking for an umbrella.  Fantastic!  Fantastic!

RODAY
Do you have a master?

JODOROWSKY
Well ... I've had Masters.  Right now, you are my Master. But ...
I studied Karate for two years. And I knew a Master.  I studied
Gurdjieff's theories. And I knew a Master.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
But I think the Age of Masters is over.   The contact you once needed with a
Master you can now have with anyone.  You can say that anyone is your Master:
 a madman, a taxi driver, a great artist (although I don't recommend it),
a laborer.  You can choose ... and say that that person is your Master.
Because we live in a state of incompleteness. And each person possesses a
part of the universe. Someone else has something you don't have.
Anyone has something you don't have. So you can decide that anyone will
be your Master.  And you give yourself to that person. And the moment
you surrender to him and disappear, you receive him as your Master.
Right?  That's it.  You have nothing to learn and much to lose.
Because you know too much and you have very little.

The other day I saw two people fighting on the street ... very
beautiful people, a man and a woman. I went up to them and said
hello.  I interrupted them and asked:  "Why are you fighting?
You're fighting an obstacle, and you don't know that the more
you hit an obstacle, and you don't know that the more you hit
an obstacle, the more you make it grow.  When you go to visit
someone, be careful not to knock on the door, because it will grow.
You have to open it."   In horse shows, the horse that wins is not
the one that knocks down the obstacles, but the one that jumps over
them.  At the first moment of human vision, there's an obstacle.
 And the obstacle is not oneself. It's the self behind the obstacle.
 And the obstacle is not oneself.  Its the self behind the obstacle.
 So if I knock down the first obstacle, the barrier grows.  I have to
jump  it ... and find the Master it holds inside. A dog can be my Master.

I remember Barcelona ... fifteen years ago. The ship docked for a couple
of hours.  I was on my way to Paris with no money. So I got off in
Barcelona and didn't know what to do. And I said, "What shall I do?"
And suddenly I saw a stray dog, and I said, "I'll follow it ... for three hours ...
wherever it goes."  And the dogs was my Master.  I started to follow it.
It took me through the marketplace, through the red-light district ... until
we came to Gaudi's cathedral. And that's how I knew Gaudi's cathedral.
 An architect dog ...

Something else.  Illumination.  Speaking of following ... I knew an abbot
from a Benedictine monastery. He was a Jew.  I asked him how he converted.
And he said he had started visiting cathedrals in Italy ... and suddenly found
himself going from church to church. It was the architecture.  It was doing
something to him. Finally he came to a church where a Benedictine monk
was waiting for him ... and he converted.

RODAY
Why should anyone go out into the desert ... as you do in the movie.

JODOROWSKY
I think the desert is the most fertile place
on earth.  It's just that the trees have only been seeded.

RODAY
That's not what I'm talking about.
Why should you go out to kill?

JODOROWSKY
I don't go out to kill.  The Masters need to be killed; they asked to be killed.
A true Master always asks for death.  Because if no one kills him, he'd live forever.
And he needs to leave this world.  And for a Master to step down from his place,
he needs someone to push him, so that someone can take his place,
 And that's the symbol of the pyramid:  one climbing up to another.
 Masters can't progress unless they raise someone up to the place
they occupy.  They get there by climbing stairs. That's why I say it's
a pyramid.  A pyramid is a stone supported by many other stones.
We spoke about this before.

I don't understand English very well, but I heard someone say "wash".
It's very beautiful to talk about washing. For example, why are corpses
washed in the Jewish religion?  It's very beautiful to investigate that question.
I've just discovered the answer. Corpses aren't really washed; they're immersed
in water ... like a foetus is born in water.  Which means that death is a birth.  That's it.

SUSAN
Like the mummy.  The binding of the mummy
is the same thing as the water of the Jews.

JODOROWSKY
That's why the bindings resemble the waves of the sea.
One day we'll lay ten thousand mummies on the floor,
and we'll sail over the bindings.  OK.
Now I'm thinking about the film.

RODAY
In the film, your son buries the doll
and picture when he's seven years old.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  Seven.  Branches of a tree.  The Jewish menorah with its
nine branches is a symbol of the different stages of man's life.
 We're born with a little trunk, and then we sprout a branch
which dies after seven years.  Then another one is born. But
society accustoms us to believe taht we must break off the old
branch when the new one is born.   So we keep breaking off
our branches ... we break off childhood and become boys.
We break the branch of youth and become men.  We break the
branch of manhood and become old men.  So the menorah ends
up with one single branch. All the others have been broken.

I think that a real man should never break off his branches.
He should keep them all and be a child, a young boy, a man, an
old man, etc ... all at once.  When he reaches old age, he should
still retain all his other stages.  That's the moment when a man
becomes ageless and can live for a hundred and fifty years.
Bennet once interviewed a Yogi ... I don't remember his name ...
but I saw a photograph of him when he was 129 years old. And he
looked thirty-five.  When I saw the photo, I was deeply moved ...
I cried ... because everything was in the photograph. His body was
a living proof of what he was. But on the other hand,
I've known Masters who look like hippopotamuses.

RODAY
The two women who ride away ...
and they're no longer in the picture.

JODOROWSKY
No.  There's no need for them to be.  I thought in theatrical terms:
 when an actor exits from the stage, he disappears from the
audience's view.  We can have characters in a film who suddenly
disappear.  Like friends in your life.  Right? Who are with you
for a moment and then disappear. And you don't ask yourself anything.
You think they're still alive; you think they still exist, that they're the same.
But they're not the same.  You can't repeat the contact.

In Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales , there's a story that says: when two
people meet, that union creates an angel.  And that angel lasts for a
certain length of time and then it disappears ... I think that everyone,
every meeting produces an angel. This meeting, for example, has produced
an angel. And when someone new comes into this room, the angel will change.
There'll be an uncomfortable moment, then the angel is produced and lies on.

When you've found someone and have had an intense relationship and  when
you leave, the angel you created -- which is the child of your relationship --
dies. And if you see the person again with the hope of finding that angel,
you make a mistake and you kill the relationship. You're looking for the past.
 You have to meet each other like two newborn babes and create a new angel.
 And work just as hard as you did before.
As Heraclitus says,  "you can't bathe twice in the same river."
Your phallus can't enter the same vagina twice.  Right?
In the first place, because your phallus has changed.

RODAY
Fantastic.

JODOROWSKY
But everyone ... almost everyone ... has, at one time or another,
has used a rubber and kept it ... and wanted the ribber to last
a lifetime as if it were the phallus.  If you want your phallus
always to be the same, you must remove the rubber and let your
phallus die so that another one can be born.  Every woman should
have a harem.  And every man should have a harem ... according to
his needs.  Like a famous Italian condotierre who had three testicles
and needed many women.  His soldiers made a mistake by wanting
as many women as their chief.  They only had two testicles.
You must never want to be or have what someone else has.
You must try to have what you can have and what you want.
Right?  If you need one woman, you need one woman.

SUSAN
Hitler had only one testicle.

JODOROWSKY
Ah!  Speaking of Hitler ... and Mussolini. The most beautiful speeches
I know are Mussolini's.  I'm against fascism, but I can recognize beauty.
That doesn't imply that I'm political.  Right? In a corpse you can find a
beautiful color of rot.  So ... all the university students were waiting for
Mussolini to arrive. But Mussolini took a route that led to a boxing ring.
He made the students wait for half an hour.  His car finally arrived at a
hundred and fifty kilometers an hour and came to a sudden halt.  Mussolini
got out of the car with a shotgun in one hand and a book in the other.
He said:  "Fusil e libretto ... fascista perfetto." A gun and a book make
a perfect fascist.  He got back in his car and took off at a hundred and fifty
kilometers an hour.  It's a masterpiece among speeches. And I think
one of Hitler's lines is fantastic.  He says, "I'm at a boxing match.
There's a very strong contender and a very weak one. The strong one hits
the weak one. Now, I'm the weakest boxer there is. When the strong one is
about to hit me, I pull out a gun and kill him. Moral:  Never fight your equal."

RODAY
What do you think about political constitutions?

JODOROWSKY
How can a society in constant motion be ruled by an immobile book?
There should be a group of people who work all year long
writing the new constitution.  So that each year you receive
your telephone directory, you'd get that year's edition
of the constitution as well.  That's what I propose.

RODAY
Do you think we're living in a time when the films
that are made now are dictated by the bourgeois aesthetics.

JODOROWSKY
For the moment, yes.  Because to produce your art, you need a buyer.
Fortunately, the bourgeoisie is dying. The number of young people is
increasing.  So the only way to keep art from being bourgeois is to
make art for the young ... and open a market which will support you
and in which you can survive.  The minimum you can invest in a film is
$300,000, which is very little. I have to find that money somewhere.  Right?
Usually you get it from idiotic distribution companies which practice the politics
of the system.  If you want overnight success, with no risks involved, you end
up playing the political game of the country that's producing your film.
  But you really shouldn't bother yourself with those things; you have to
do what you want to do. And if you have to do it with bourgeois capital,
you should do it with bourgeois capital.  Right?

RODAY
Are there certain subjects that you could deal with which
are exclusive of the taintings of bourgeois aesthetics?
Like historical subjects?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  History, sex, love ... success.
The artist who comes to the city and triumphs.
Triumph, history, sex, love ... crime.

RODAY
Like the pirates.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  I don't really know what a bourgeois society is.
When I made El Topo, I never thought about it.  I realized
how a bourgeois society thinks only when I saw the sections
they cut from El Topo ... the half hour they cut in Mexico.
I started to examine the cuts and then I began to understand
the bourgeois myths.  Right?  The thing that terrorizes
the bourgeoisie is scandal.  Because scandal can be the ruin
of a politician.  And that's al there is to it.  You can make a film
with the strongest anti-bourgeois themes.  But as long as
they don't create a scandal, nothing happens. The bourgeoisie
doesn't say anything. There's no reaction because no one
has been damaged.   This is what I feel.

SUSAN
Like pornography.

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  Pornography is harmless.  Society accepts pornography just as it
will eventually accept crime and vice.  But my search isn't political ...
like Godard's, for example.  I think it's a problem of sensitivity.
 I don't divide the world into problems ... or into bourgeois people and
non-bourgeois people.  I think that the great majority of people are a
formless mass who are not ruled by politics anymore, but by economics.
I no longer see political problems; I see economic problems ... which
produce human problems.  And it's the human problems that interest
me.  Because human problems create personal problems for me.
So I only deal with personal problems. I don't talk about my father
or my mother or my phallus, but about the pain that the problems of
humanity produce in me.  That is my personal problem.  Right?
And that's my position.  I'm not very strong on politics.
But I'd like to read Bakunin.  I like him very much. I like
Kropotkin and Rosa Luxemburg very much.  I like them.
That's my position.  I also like Le Saude de Bonot, the French
anarchists  who used to hold up banks and kill people in cars.
I like them.  I like anarchism in general.  Very much.
I think that anarchism is a mystical movement.

RODAY
Anarchism?

JODOROWSKY
Yes.  It's a mystical movement ... humane mysticism.
They love humanity.  Anarchists love humanity ...
they love the individual.  Anarchism believes in man,
in the individual, and in human love.  I think that the
anarchists' speeches are very much like those of the saints.
 There's not different between a saint and an anarchist. None.
So if you ask me to talk about politics, the only thing I'd be able to
talk about would be the saints of all religions.  If I were a politician,
I'd want to create the concept of a lay saint, a secular saint ...
a saint with no God.  Dostoevs