It’s been five years since David Lynch released his last film, Inland Empire, and since then, the 65-year-old auteur—who directed cult classics like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive—has done pretty much everything but direct another movie. These days, when he’s not giving weather reports, bemoaning the debt crisis, or creating installations at Duran Duran concerts, he’s making music. On November 8th, Lynch will make his debut as a solo recording artist with Crazy Clown Time, featuring 14 original tracks written, performed and produced by Lynch, a self-taught “non-musician.” Last night, we sat in massive red velvet armchairs at the Soho House in West Hollywood with about thirty other people to preview the new album at Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time listening party, where girls in mermaid-sequin dresses and feather boas took us through Crazy Clown Time track by track. Read on for an exclusive look at Lynch’s musical debut.

“I’ve always been interested in sound,” Lynch told Rolling Stone. “Sound is so beautiful …. I’m not really a guitar player. But it kind of thrilled my soul to be making something that sounded like music. I just got deeper and deeper into it.”

He’s been involved in music projects for years, working with composers Angelo Badalamenti and Marek Zebrowski on his soundtracks, collaborating with Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse on their Dark Night of the Soul project, and signing Ariana Delawari—remember her eerily prescient horoscopes from L.A. RECORD 100?—to his own label and directing a promo video for her album Lion of Panjshir. But Crazy Clown Time is his first foray into the spotlight as a solo musician, a culmination of decades of sound experimentation.

In a lot of ways, the new tracks are exactly what you’d think Lynch’s music would sound like: odd, disorienting, and more than a little creepy. But there’s a pretty wide range of sounds here, from Eraserhead industrial drone to infectious dance beats to ramblings on the state of human existence.

Opening track “Pinky’s Dream” features unsettling, ghostly vocals from Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs backed by pulsating beats and was played so loudly in the Soho screening room that the clanging chandeliers on the walls provided additional creepy tones. “Good Day Today”—released as a single last November—follows, with Lynch’s heavily processed vocals up against a bouncy pop beat. If Captain Beefheart had stuck around long enough to make bluesy electronic pop with Tom Waits, you’d have “I Know,” Crazy Clown Time’s second single. Wonderfully titled tune “Strange and Unproductive Thinking” is probably the most interesting track here, the most Lynchian Lynch song on the record. High pitched, twisted voices speak of “cosmic awareness” and “the higher self” and “dark and evil forces.” A vision of human existence spewed over a steady beat, it’s manic and meticulous and, at some points, a bit terrifying. Title track “Crazy Clown Time” hits a few songs later, a lyrically simple—but delicately constructed—composition about the world as he sees it these days. (“Sally ripped off her shirt completely”/”Danny poured beer over Sally”.) “Speed Roadster”—which appeared in 2008’s Jennifer Chambers Lynch-directed Surveillance—is weird and creepy and perfectly suited his daughter’s violent thriller. Crazy Clown Time closes with more synths and distortion in “She Rise Up,” with the whole album clocking in a bit over an hour long.

Crazy Clown Time—as a collection of diverse tracks—is unsurprisingly strange and completely fascinating. It’s an unexpectedly strong musical debut for a director known for bringing some of your darkest thoughts and his own sickening nightmares to the silver screen. Crazy Clown Time releases on Nov. 8 on Sunday Best/PIAS America. Full track list follows.

Track List:

01) Pinky’s Dream (feat. Karen O)
02) Good Day Today
03) So Glad
04) Noah’s Ark
05) Football Game
06) I Know
07) Strange and Unproductive Thinking
08) The Night Bell With Lightning
09) Stone’s Gone Up
10) Crazy Clown Time
11) These Are My Friends
12) Speed Roadster
13) Movin’ On
14) She Rise Up

—Lainna Fader

Director Sion Sono started out as a poet and staged guerrilla experimental poetry street performances with his Tokyo GAGAGA collective before making films about brutal murders, twisted families, and demonic hair. His latest film Cold Fish, a twisted tale about a struggling fish store owner who falls into the dark orbit of a rich, charismatic—and murderous—owner of a successful high-end fish shop, screens at Cinefamily this weekend. He’s also in production on his first English-language film, Lords of Chaos, which follows the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s—a scene which spawned a wave of murders and church burnings across the country. He speaks here about crime and creativity, pervert power, and his own cult experiences. This interview by Lainna Fader.

The serial murders that drive the plot of Cold Fish were over dogs in real life, but in Cold Fish, your characters are murdering over tropical fish—why did you change dogs to fish for the film?
I thought fish would be visually beautiful, and I kind of liked the fact that those tropical fish can be surprisingly dangerous in spite of their visual beauty. I thought it could be a good theme for the movie. A realistic movie like Cold Fish has to be depicted beautifully. If it’s a fantasy, I pay a lot of attention to colors—how to use colors beautifully.
You’ve said you’ve always loved films but felt you were too shy and withdrawn to actually make movies. How did you overcome that?
I started out as a poet, writing poems, but then I stopped doing it. It was boring to write on a piece of paper, so I wrote my poems on different surfaces—on the street walls, lavatory walls, and such—and shoot them with an 8mm camera. And soon I turned the camera on me, shooting myself reading poems as well. So I started making films without even knowing I did at all.
After working in film for a couple decades, do you think you’re better suited to being a filmmaker rather than just a writer?
Next year, I will start over as a poet, once again. I’d like to shoot a film and write poems. I want to do all kinds of things.
You said that with Love Exposure—a four-hour epic about love, lust, religion, cults, guilt, and revenge—your ‘shell exploded’ and now you have no more love nor hope nor god, and all you have is sadness, despair, and darkness. Did working on Cold Fish cheer you up?
Depending on the situation I am in at any given time of my life, my movies become completely different. When I made Love Exposure, I was very much in love. And I filmed Cold Fish when life felt extremely disappointing for me. So, you see, it all depends on the circumstances. And I am happy now.
Are you more attracted to the brutality of the murders in your films, or the artfulness of the murders? What’s the overlap between crime and creativity?
I’ll give you a hint. If I see blood—real blood—I would be shocked and disgusted, but I love blood if I see it in the movies. The crimes committed in the movies are such creative trickery that I enjoy them very much. I would hate the crime in reality, but I love to commit—create—crimes if it’s in the movie world.
How much of Love Exposure comes from your own experiences?
The film is based mainly on a true story, an experience of a friend of mine. He is a real pervert, you see. He loves sneaking shots inside skirts. And it is a fact that his sister actually joined a cult and he did take her back with his own hands, with his pervert power.
How can you use pervert power to rescue someone from a cult?
The funny part of it is that my friend persuaded his sister saying, ‘Come back to my world’—meaning ‘get out of the cult back into the “normal” world—but I know him well enough to know that ‘my world’ in his case is the world of perverts! The cult may be weird, but he is just as weird. That’s the funny part of it all.
The Zero church in the film is a highly structured corporate-like cult—why would someone want to join a cult like that? What are they looking for?
They all say they are in search of God, but I think they are actually looking for something else—happiness, or a ‘connection,’ so to speak. In Japan, all kinds of connections and relationships are falling apart, including family ties. You can’t trust your own father. Nor your mother. Who can you trust, then? You need something or someone else. That’s where a cult comes in, as a link or circle that one can belong to—as a kind of replacement for family.
Why are family relations in Japan so weak these days?
Well, how are they in America?
I wouldn’t say they’re breaking down necessarily—there’s a wide variety. The extremes balance each other out.
In a way, Japan is more or less the same, I think. I hope I am not creating bad impressions of Japanese people by saying these things about them. I am not saying that Japan has lost it all, obviously—what I mean is that the loss of connections—family ties and human relationships can clearly be perceived as a phenomenon—not that Japanese people are all fallen apart in a mess.
You’ve said you’re in the Jesus Christ fan club—but not a fan of Jesus Christ. Why?
I find Jesus Christ very interesting purely as a person, just like I find John Lennon very interesting. I may not join Beatles Fan Club, but that does not mean that I am not a Beatles fan. It’s not like one has to be a member of Beatles Fan Club to be a Beatles fan. Same thing should apply to Jesus Christ.
Your first English-language film is Lords of Chaos, which follows the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s, a scene which spawned a wave of murders and church burnings across the country. Why did you want to make a film about that story?
I thought that it was an event that truly represented all the themes I had worked on in the past. It’s about the boys who burned down the church to the ground. The irony I find very interesting in it is that they actually believed so much in God that they had to do that. They hated God so much that they burned down the church, but the flip side of the coin is that they would not have done it unless they believed in God so much. You can’t hate a God you don’t believe in, and I don’t think there are many people who believe in God as much as they did, to be able to hate God so much. One does NOT resort to such drastic measure of action for something one doesn’t believe in.
Varg Vikernes—who was convicted of the stabbing of metal band Mayhem’s guitarist Euronymous—has been opposed to the book and now to your movie, even threatening to kill you. How do you cope with such threats and do such events impact the filmmaking process?
I’m not worried. The film isn’t just about him—his opinion doesn’t matter to me.
You’ve called Ozu—one of the most revered directors in Japanese cinema history—the anti-Christ, the anti-God—why? How does Ozu’s legacy in Japan impact how you make films?
He is too much of a ‘god’ in Japanese movie history, and the history can not be refreshed unless we become anti-Ozu. I have nothing personal against him, but I have to declare I am anti-Ozu in order to move forward.
How’d you feel when people started drawing comparisons between his work and yours with family drama Be Sure To Share? What were the reactions like in Japan?
People told me that I grew up unexpectedly. I felt like making a ‘normal’ movie for a change, so I made one using standard, typical techniques, so to speak. It’s like a punk band covering a Frank Sinatra tune for a change.
I read about how when you ran away to Tokyo to 17, you met a woman in a park who wanted you to go with her to a hotel so she wouldn’t have to die alone. What did you think when she said those words to you?
I was afraid. For several years, I suffered from the trauma—kind of scared of women and all.
Did you think the woman was really going to kill you?
Yes. She had these gigantic scissors—shears. I really believed it.
And she agreed not to kill you if you pretended to be her husband?
Yes, that’s what happened. I went with her to see her family. I was so patient that I got awarded, as a gift, with some money to go back to Tokyo.
You said at the time you were lonely and wondering whether you were a criminal—what did you decide? And what did you mean when you said you’re ‘prepared’ to be a criminal? Do you think most people who commit crimes go into them feeling prepared to be criminals?
At that time when I was making Cold Fish, there was a possibility that things would get criminal right away, but now, after having made films such as Guilty of Romance and Mole, my heart is a little more peaceful now and I don’t feel that way at all. There are strange cases in this world. I did research when I made a movie called Suicide Club. People who commit suicides are not really prepared—they themselves don’t even know they are doing it until it happens. For instance, someone goes to a supermarket and buys something. While carrying it in a bag, this person suddenly feels like dying. Or someone is having a business meeting. In a corporate building. He walks out onto the veranda during the break. Then, huh? ‘Where is he?’ people ask. He is already gone. Some strange suicide cases happen like that, totally unprepared—totally without warning. Likewise, there must be criminals who commit crimes totally prepared.
When you came back to Tokyo, you’ve said you joined a cult so you could eat. Why did they still let you in when you said, ‘If I believe in your God will I stop being hungry’? Was it not important to them that you shared their beliefs?
It was when I had no money and I was hungry. At the station, if you told them you believed in God, you could get some food. It wasn’t so dangerous. Since that’s not something I could possibly believe in, I didn’t feel that I might be brainwashed so much anyway, regardless of the length of time I stayed there.
Why—and how—did you leave?
It was—well, kind of boring. So it wasn’t easy to stay there in that sense. And in order to get out of the place, I had to go to another powerful place—another cult.
That cult let you off the hook because you said you were joining an even bigger cult? How does that work?
I can’t really explain it without getting into a big trouble.
When you went to Berkeley, why did you only study B cinema?
Until then, I was a typical film student, so to speak, studying classics like Truffaut, Godard, Nouvelle Vague, American historical movies and such, but as I got to see tons of those vulgar, nasty movies in Berkeley, I realized that this was the kind of movie I had better be studying now. I got a chance to absorb and study the kind of movie I used to hate because of the nastiness of it.
You said Suicide Club is your B movie, and that the Japanese public should hate it—why did you hope the Japanese would hate it? Do you want to be hated?
My original intention was to make a movie to be detested. I always intended my first entertainment movie to be detested by people rather than entertaining people. ‘Amanojaku’ in Japanese is exactly what I am … How shall I put it in English? I can think of it only in Japanese. If, if, if the content of Suicide Club was something people would like—if everyone else was making movies similar to Suicide Club, I would have been making love romance movies. I just like to do things contrary to others.

SION SONO’S COLD FISH SCREENS AT CINEFAMILY ON SAT., AUG. 6 AT 10PM AND SUN., AUG 7 AT 6:30PM AND 9:50PM. $10 / FREE FOR MEMBERS / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG.

Brainfeeder audio-visual artist Strangeloop’s latest Fields is a beautiful and mesmerizing experiment in sound and image. Deeply moving ambient soundscapes build and fold over the course of three acts—the first a movement symbolizing birth and constellation, the second death and dissolution, and the third a transcendental union of both. He celebrates its release with a gallery exhibit of his art at Gus Harper Studios this Saturday, and speaks here about being in a metal band, what the real apocalypse looks like, and the DMT trip that showed him his rhythm. This interview by Lainna Fader.

How did you help your high school found its electronic music department?
When I started going to Malibu High School, there was a big influx of money from some of the rich people—you know, a lot of kids of rich people end up there—and it all went to founding a new electronic music department and a new video editing department. And I helped set up both of them and was interested in both simultaneously. Even though Malibu High is a whatever school, it was a really good time for me to be there cuz they had ProTools and Logic and all that. And I was in there every day after school just experimenting with music and video and stuff for four years. It was amazing! We had great pre-amps, guitars, and synthesizers. It was a dream—it was synchronistic. I was there just at the right time. I’m not even sure if they have that department anymore—it was called Music Exploration. And I was producing other people’s tracks then, too. It was a good collaborative environment because there were a lot of musicians and I was in a metal band—
You were in a metal band?
Yeah, I used to play guitar in a metal band. That was actually my steez before any of this stuff. So we’d record our band in the music room at school—actually, before that we’d take a bunch of drugs and just mess with all these instruments and it was really good.
How did you go from metal to electronic music?
I was kind of making both in tandem, but at a certain point—actually, at the time, I was really into the heaviest possible music and once I just got to Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity, I would listen to it over and over again and was thinking, ‘There’s nothing heavier you can make than this with real instruments. You’d have to like break apart the audio.’ So I got into Venetian Snares and Amon Tobin—some experimental drum & bass-y stuff—and after a while, metal sort of lost its appeal to me. There’s a few bands that I’m still obsessed with—Lightning Bolt, Hella—but more straight death metal stuff wasn’t doing it for me.
How does taking 8 years of classical piano influence the work you make now?
It’s the basis for a lot of things I do. I still play piano every day. I was into classical music, but there was this kind of falling out with my piano teacher. I was playing Mozart—I was rehearsing it for a recital and I was maybe 13, 14 or something—and I liked to play the classical pieces but I’d like to speed them up progressively and play them faster and faster and faster until I find that point where I’d go, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhh!’ And my piano teacher hated that! But it was what I loved to do so I kept doing it, and at a certain point—he was a very straight-laced guy, always wore a tie, traditional piano teacher—and eventually he just stopped me and yelled at me, ‘DON’T FUCK WITH MOZART!’ He freaked out. So I stopped playing piano for a little bit and sort of abandoned classical musical entirely.
Sounds like a fairly traumatic experience.
Right? Now it’s whatever but as a thirteen-year-old I was kinda freaked out and it put me in a rebellious mindset. ‘Fuck all these traditions—I’m gonna make metal music, jungle, and weird psychotic stuff.’ So in a way it was a really good thing, but it was kind of funny.
Who convinced you to start playing again?
I would dabble in it over the years, but meeting Austin Peralta got me into playing piano more. I saw what he was doing with the instrument and it was inspiring—it made me realize that whatever I was doing on the piano, I was just fucking around. I’m never gonna be on Peralta’s level. It’s just a fun instrument—you can design an entire piece from the piano, it’s just a great compositional tool.
Austin Peralta said he knew you were a like-minded dude when you showed up at the same coffee shop and started ranting about the apocalypse.
I’m on apocalyptic rants a lot of the time. I’m just interested in the downfall of our Western civilization, our global civilization—which I think is happening right now on a certain level, a paradoxical awareness that can occur within this whole collapse. We’re in a really fantastic time and a really terrible time and it’s all happening simultaneously. The etymology of the word ‘apocalypse’ interestingly enough means the ‘unveiling,’ not ‘the end of the world.’ It’s actually a golden age on certain levels. I like Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse—that’s what I feel. It’s a golden age and a dissolution of all these things that we thought were relevant and important. Like capitalism—that huge, global beast—the substructure of that thing is not really working for everybody and if we keep on this path—hyper-consumer, society-spectacle trip—then I think we’re basically done as a species. And there isn’t actually that much to refute that at this point. Most great scientific minds of our time say that—basically—that we’re a train going off the tracks.
How much time do you think we have left?
I don’t know, but I think maybe the apocalypse is already happening. It’s a cultural apocalypse. If you go to any spot in America and find a strip mall with Carl’s Jr.—that’s the cultural apocalypse. That’s the homogenization of culture. It’s horrific. I think maybe we’re in some sort of transition. For instance, in the 22nd century, we won’t be human as we’ve known ourselves to be for thousands of years. If we do survive, we’ll be something totally different.
Is that an idea that’s exciting or scary to you?
It’s both. It’s exciting and scary and overwhelming and inspiring. I’m a big student of Terrence McKenna, Kurzweil, and all the Futurist philosophers. And I like discussing these things because I think awareness is important—I think it gives us more say in where we’re going. Otherwise we’re passive recipients of all these future catastrophes that are coming down the pipeline. But on another level, there’s nothing we can do about it. And when Austin and I met, I was ranting about the apocalypse and I guess he could relate.
Where does Fields come from?
I made it when I went up to Portland. I was relaxing up there, taking psychedelics, trying to reconnect with some deeper sense that I felt I had lost after being in the hurricane of all these beats and dubstep works. I actually heard the Fields composition in my head—I smoked some DMT and I had this bizarre experience where I heard this music emanating out of space and I saw it too. I could see the music. And I was gone for twenty minutes, just dissolved into this composition, and I came back and I thought my friend John was playing the music in the room because it was really loud. It was loud but it was also a minimal, textural composition. He wasn’t playing anything. I felt like I downloaded it—I had it in my head. I knew the time signatures, I knew that it’d be in movements—three movements—and we had a studio in the house, so I went to the studio right after and just started trying to make the composition on a couple synthesizers and just start tracking it. It was an unusual process because it doesn’t usually work like that for me. I literally heard the composition before I made it.
You’ve said you ‘wanted to get the kind of vulnerable heart of a lot of what you’ve been trying to do with your life.’ How did you accomplish that with Fields?
It’s more subliminal than many things I’ve done in recent years. It was very personal—and not necessary as derived from what’s around me culturally. That’s all in me, but I wanted to find something deeper. I think for its time and place, it’s exactly how it needed to be. I could’ve gone back and done more mixing and refining but I just said no. It’s fine how it is—it’s raw and it’s fine, whatever it is. It’s exactly how it was when I wrote it and I wrote it in two, three days. When you go from my other stuff, like 2010, this fucked up dystopian piece of madness, you can see a pretty stark contrast with Fields. I did want to make a journey from all this dystopian stuff I’ve been doing the last couple years and explore something utopian. They both coexist, and I wanted to have something that was very positive and uplifting.
Fields is endlessly folding and looping into itself—do you think anything ever has a true end?
That’s how I feel about reality. That’s where I got the name Strangeloop—it’s a technical term for a tangled hierarchy. You can travel from one point to another in a hierarchy and you get back to where you started. Especially from my psychedelic experiences, I wanted a work that felt like it was a full dimension that you could fall into and it would never end. It’s like a fractal, it would always change and have self-similar aspects. There’s a whole mythos in my mind around it, based on this form, this neurological web that I call Nawgu—the Nawgu deity, the God of Psychedelic Media. So I was exploring this god, this thing. And when I started studying my world more and more, that’s all I see. Especially when I take psychedelics, they’re just blooming everywhere, these dendritic, synaptic things. All the imagery that we get from science—the whole universe really looks like that, all these synapse structures and I see it everywhere. If I worship anything, it’s that. And it’s not specific—it’s a pattern that I love, and I give it this deity status even though I’m not religious by any measure. Hopefully with Fields, you go into it, and you feel like that space will always be there, and you can always go back to it if you want to.
Godfrey Reggio said, ‘All of us are refugees driven from our human state.’ How do you bring yourself back to your human state?
I actually was able to meet him and hang out with him for a bit and I got to ask him all these big philosophical questions. A lot of the things he told me—I’m still trying to wrap my head around them. The whole idea of that quote relates to his idea about us being astronauts. We’re literally off the planet on some level. When you think about it, it’s kind of true. We’re not on the planet—we created all these infrastructures that have lifted us a little off the planet. We’ve been driven from our natural state—our feet are not on the ground anymore. But of course, that idea resonates on a whole bunch of levels. I’m not sure that our job is to return to some prior state that we had though. This is a very common idea now—we have to rebalance ourselves with nature and whatnot—and sometimes I’m totally on that boat, but nature really is not balanced in the way that we think it is. It has some fractal order in it but it’s not this stasis we can return to. Massive, crazy, catastrophic events happen out of nowhere—and I think we’re in one of those now—but it’s an evolutionary event. I don’t think the answer is, ‘Let’s try to go back to a tribal society.’ We have to figure out—not even figure out, but let go of this process. I feel that Reggio and his idea that we’re all astronauts is kind of like what Terence McKenna said about cities and modern civilization, that we’re in a sort of transitional phase because we’re trying to become a species that’s intergalactic, as crazy as that sounds. We’re reaching for that and to do that, we’re kind of like a child rebelling against its mother, against the earth, and trying to become independent and self-sufficient. And that’s what a city is, as messy as it is a lot of the time. We’re trying to create a bubble for ourselves, a technological chrysalis that we can develop in and it’s probably part of the natural process. I’m not sure what I’m in the camp that believes that it’s all a mistake. Nature is infinitely intelligent and there’s probably an infinitely intelligent reason for why all these things are unfolding in this certain way. I think that quote from Reggio—and it’s like a page long thing—is one of the most incredible quotes of all time.
Terence McKenna said, “We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, and don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.” How do you—and Brainfeeder—create your own culture? How do you reclaim your mind?
That’s the plan, right? I used to think that I had to rebel against all the things I found troubling in the world. I come from a very political family and that was the modus operandi—rebel against the system. Though I preserve an element of that, you give power to the things you fight against. It’s like in a Go game—if you’re in trouble somewhere, and start reacting against the trouble and try to make your way out, you actually give your opponent more pieces. I play Go with Alfred [Daedelus] and I always do that and I gotta stop! We have to create our own culture. We have to create what we want to see and experience. I think it’s great that there are all these creative communities that have sprung up locally—Brainfeeder, Alpha Pup, dublab—all these communities make life really exciting right now. Whereas if I just watched the news instead and just tripping out on the state of the world—which I do, sometimes—life would kinda suck. There’s these parallel histories right now—the histories of human follies unfolding on epic proportions that we couldn’t even dream of. The most absurd news—you couldn’t have people write that stuff, it’s so ridiculous. And there’s also a totally epic creative renaissance right now. As much as I do in my life, I’m some very tiny little cell—and that’s great! Being part of something that fuels you and inspires you and is much bigger than you, moving all the time regardless if you’re sitting in your house playing video games, you’re always moving forward.
In an interview I read with Philip K. Dick he talks about experiences he had where supernatural beings went into his mind and took hold and explained all of life’s mysteries that had been troubling him for a very long time. Have you had experiences like that?
For whatever reason, in my life there is a plethora of those sort of bizarre experiences. Not always a ‘full secrets of the cosmos’ kind of thing. Maybe not even with drugs—just lucid dreams, or some bizarre experience in daily life. It’s not always epiphanal but it’s always weird. ‘Why is my mind doing this?’ I have a predisposition for these altered states. I don’t think I’m crazy—but I could be! Or I’m sometimes on that borderline. Some of my experiences on psychedelics have been totally traumatizing. This one time I hit my head on psychedelics and I left this world entirely for a very long time. Blacked out. I was basically living with this beautiful woman in the woods for a long time—it felt like an eternity. I came back to this world in a very traumatic way: I was being dragged into this dorm room and didn’t know where I was, thought I had gone kinda crazy, and I had all these geometries flooding out of this gash on my head. Very perturbing experience but when I came back I was obsessively drawing these patterns. I was so traumatized by the experience that I felt like I had to return to it to understand it so a few months later I took psychedelics again and delved deep into it. I came into contact with this alternate version of myself. The archetypal me. This is getting pretty heavy! Basically, in a way—and not just in an intellectual way—it told me what I’m supposed to be doing on this planet. Whether I should believe it or not is almost irrelevant to me. More than anything, it showed me my rhythm, which maybe I had forgotten, being all wrapped up in college at the time. That’s where I can return to all the time, whether I’m doing musical stuff or visual stuff or just living—that was the important thing that experience gave me.
Surprised you found that so traumatic—going off into the woods with a beautiful woman for eternity sounds like a really pleasant experience.
Well, that part was okay. That was fine. It was the exit from this realm into that realm and the return where I thought I had gone mad that was awful. The fear that you’ve gone mad forever—and anyone who’s into psychedelics knows this—is a really deep one. It shook my core pretty intensely. But at the same time, like with all traumatic things in my life, they end up being very defining things that I hold really dear to me. It might be fucked up in the short term, but it always ends up being quintessially important in the long run.

STRANGELOOP’S FIELDS ART SHOW WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES BY TEEBS, AUSTIN PERALTA, AND SPECIAL GUESTS ON JULY 23RD AT GUS HARPER STUDIOS, 11306 VENICE BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 8 PM / ALL AGES / FREE. FIELDS RELEASES JULY 26TH ON BRAINFEEDER. STRANGELOOPTV.COM.

When Genesis first met Lady Jaye, Genesis had just spent the night sleeping in a friend’s S&M dungeon. S/he woke up to see a beautiful young woman wearing an exquisitely-coordinated 1960s Mod outfit walk into the dungeon, and then take off her clothes and change into an equally remarkable set of fetish gear. This episode would foreshadow the rest of their story, where love at first sight, romance, and nostalgia would blossom simultaneously with explorations into radical sexuality, gender nonconformity, and transhumanism.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a new documentary that tells of the love affair between Genesis P-Orridge, prankster, artist and pioneering experimental musician, and Lady Jaye Breyer, performance artist, cabaret performer, and professional dominatrix. Several years into their marriage they mutually decide to undergo a series of operations in order to look like one another. They get surgeries to alter their noses and chins. Genesis gets breast implants, which s/he happily shows off to the camera. The motivation is partially a testament to their love, partially an exploration of self, and partially an art project. The pair desire to create a third entity between themselves, the Pandrogyne, that would live separately as a combination of the two of them.

Lady Jaye died suddenly in 2007, leaving Genesis behind to carry on their projects and to tell their story. Genesis narrates the documentary, leaving Lady Jaye a distant, enigmatic, but ever-present figure. We see the couple spend an afternoon in Central Park, rehearse with their band, look through their wedding photos (they both wore drag). In a willful anachronism, the film is shot almost entirely in 16mm, rendering Genesis and Lady Jaye’s world in the valentine hues and velveteen textures of celluloid film grain, complimenting the intimate, home video nature of the footage.

While this story would lend itself nicely to an anthropological, sociological, or political film, director Marie Losier mostly lays these issues aside and focuses exclusively on the romance. This approach leaves a few gaps by the end of the film’s brisk 72 minutes: we don’t see much of Genesis’s relationship with their grown children, nor do we get more than a glimpse at Genesis and Lady Jaye’s other art projects or even their flaws or personal struggles. It’s a lovely story starring complex characters, but one told without much conflict.

In the end, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is an idealized portrait of a loving marriage, one as loving as the ideal of any “normal” relationship, albeit one between extraordinary people. It poignantly captures two lovers united in the contradiction of their love affair: they express their radical individuality with the ultimate consummation of sameness. They find a love familiar in its shape but dissident in its architecture. Their love questions its gender and shouts its own name.

—Charles Mallison

Dimitri Simakis, a.k.a. “Ghoul School” is an excavator of lost and terrible VHS gold and co-founder of Everything is Terrible!, the blog that edits down video for found footage freaks worldwide. With a monstrous library of clips of awful movies, unintentionally hilarious infomercials and bizarre instructional tapes, EIT! trolls all—sometimes in person in cloaks or monster suits. Here are some of his best VHS finds. Curated by Lainna Fader.

DEADLY PREY (DAVID A. PRIOR, 1987)

“A delicious Rambo sundae with The Most Dangerous Game sprinkles, Battle Royale fudge and a homo-erotic cherry on top. Every line … Every goofy face … You have no idea what’s going to happen next, and it constantly reminds you of the fact that this movie is completely genuine. We did a screening of it at Cinefamily, and I can honestly say it was one of the greatest nights of my life. We were so lucky to have had the film’s star—and director’s brother—Ted Prior do a Q&A and he could not have been a nicer dude. Watching him cry with laughter as he sat by his eight-year-old son turned it into a religious experience. Watch this movie and tell me you wish Ted Prior wasn’t your dad.”

TODD WEEKS’ Enjoying Karate Volumes 1-5 (VARIOUS WORKS)

“The great Pinky of TV Carnage fame first hipped me to this dude. All we knew was that Todd Weeks is a forty-something, balding man who jumps around in his basement while questionably-aged girls hit him with foam tubes for hours on end. One day I get a call from my buddy Scott saying his grandmother’s plumber makes these ‘weird martial arts tapes.’ I knew right then it was fate and Mr. Weeks and I became the best of pals. And by that I mean we talked on the phone once. He even scores every tape by putting himself in the bottom of the screen, violently hitting bongo drums and guitar stings. ‘Hypnotic’ is a good way to describe it and you cannot deny the originality.”

15 MINUTE IT (MATT CARTER, 1999)

“Not a week goes by that I don’t think about the one that got away. Her name was 15 Minute IT, and I may never see her beautiful face again. Before You could Tube, we were handed a tape from a friend of a friend who made a remix of Stephen King’s ‘IT’ focusing primarily on the 50s greaser/bully/best character ever, Henry Bower. The editor’s name is Matt Carter, and I owe this guy a fancy night on the town for opening my brain. As odd as it sounds to me now, back in 2000 the idea of someone taking a silly movie and remixing all its most awkward moments was unheard of. For reasons unknown, god mysteriously took the only working copy—that we’re aware of!—away from us years ago, and trying to recreate it all based on memory in Final Cut lacked soul. All the fancy computers in the world can’t beat the magical timing of someone editing VCR to VCR.”

MARK & SHERRY’S WEDDING VIDEO (MARK & SHERRY?, 1991)

“If every DJ or film dweeb has their one and true Holy Grail, then this is my Holy Grail’s Ark Of The Covenant’s Crystal Skull. The day was July 28th, 1991, and it was the happiest day of Sherry’s life. Mark on the other hand, appears to have either he has a rock in his shoe or a switchblade in his mullet. Hey-oh! Nonetheless, Mark wants to go on a murder spree and could not be more uncomfortable. It gets way too real during the reception’s climax as Sherry performs quite the bridal striptease in front of a bunch of children and elderly. Mark is a rock through all of it and I admire him for not giving a fuck. I was so moved that I turned it into a spec video for TV On The Radio, hoping that any day Dave Sitek would be begging to shoot some hoops. Instead we got a cease-and-desist from the groom himself and YouTube pulled it, the cowards. I just hope Mark and Sherry are happy, wherever they are.”

SOMEWHERE IN TIME (JEANNOT SZWARC, 1980)

“This very well might be the single greatest thing in the world, and it’s still such a mystery as to how or why it exists. From what we can piece together, it’s a short film played at a wedding reception for a young LARP couple, and it tells a tale as old as time: heroine can’t stop looking at a painting of a nerd in an African art gallery, nerd pulls heroine into painting, heroine and nerd look at each other and smile a lot. Enter evil gay painter who tries to paint—paint-rape?—heroine to death. Nerd saves the day by killing gay evil painter, and then nerd and heroine live happily ever after. As insane as it is, they say in under 15 minutes what most people what most couples can’t express in a lifetime.”

THE PELICAN BRIEF PROJECT (Ted Dorsey, Andy Featherston, and John Elliott, unknown)

“All my life, I thought I was real funny whenever I would drop a good joke by referencing 1993’s The Pelican Brief. That is until I found out that an amazing semi-obscure L.A.-based band known as Candybox Violence took it to the millionth step and re-scored the entire thing, turning it into an artistic masterpiece. We live in a world where a group of guys who actually spent a lot of their time to score scenes of Julia Roberts looking at a computer monitor in a library. How wonderful is that? This is one of those rare instances where the execution surpasses the concept, and turns complete shit into shinola. Be prepared for a live scoring at Cinefamily with Candybox Violence in person! If that doesn’t wet your wiener, then I don’t know what will.”

SHOOTING STAR (1992)

“For years my friend used to say she was once an extra in a movie, and I suppose she was right. Shooting Star is certainly is a movie in the sense that it has transitions, edits, lighting, and people acting in front of a camera when someone pushed the record button. On any other level however, it most certainly is not. It was made by a D.A.R.E. officer from Mentor, Ohio, to warn kids about the dangers of booze and drugs, but by the end of it you can’t wait to score some toot. It’s basically an after-school-special rock opera, where every line of dialogue is sung through the tunes that defined rock ‘n’ roll. What makes this one truly mind-melting is the fact that this tape literally slows down the conception of time. Just don’t watch it alone or you might wake up after it ends to find yourself dead.”

SHERLOCK: UNDERCOVER DOG (RICHARD HARDING GARDNER, 1994)

“This one puts a delightful spin on the—let’s face it—bore-a-thon that is Sherlock Holmes by replacing the lead role with Sherlock … wait for it… ‘Bones!’ He’s a foul-mouthed one-eyed Scottish mutt who appears to have a severe drinking problem! This is the kind of movie you sit around watching with your best buds, wondering if you’ve ever been this high. And then you remember you have a drug test coming up and haven’t smoked in weeks. This film played a big role for our next big project which I am happy to announce for the first time in public: ‘Everything Is Terrible! Presents: Doggie Woggiez Poochie Woochies!’ Commodore Gilgamesh and I are getting in the shit with it all right now, and we plan on having a rough—RUFF!—cut by the summer to show all you puppies, if we don’t die in a sea of poochies first. It’s going to be redogulous. Woof.”

DINOSAUR ISLAND (FRED OLEN RAY, JIM WYNORSKI, 1994)

“A classic in the ‘Hootiere Cinema’ (or ‘Hooter Cinema’ for the classless) genre of the early ‘90s. Not really sure why they made so many movies where breasts played such an important role during this period of time. Think about it for a second—there’s actual sex, then hardcore porn, then Spice Channel porn, then softcore porn, then cable TV edits of softcore porn. That’s weird and gross, right? Anyway, a group of Army fuck-ups crash-land on an island filled with ancient horny stripper bimbos who’ve never seen a man before, and there is a disturbing amount dick and boob puns. I was pretty obsessed with this movie as a pre-teen, and you might even say this was the movie that made me a man.”

HOLLYWOOD COP (AMIR SHERVAN, 1987)

“I think of this as an experimental film more than a movie. Thanks to a closing video store in Athens, Ohio—pretty much everything we got that day turned out to be a classic, and it was the first time my friends and I all said to each other, ‘Dudes, let’s spend the next decade of our lives alone in our rooms watching insane shit like this while missing out on sunlight, human interaction, and fun.’ Now here I am: an adult who sometimes posts for a blog, and who occasionally tours the country with his friends dressing up like some merry band of pranksters who try and blow people’s minds with our ‘culture jam.’ Wait—we were talking about a movie? Oh yeah—it’s about a cop from Hollywood and a bunch of crazy stuff ensues. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some crying to do.”

The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is a work of genius, a fantastic performance piece only the Mael brothers could dream up. Last Saturday night, the Los Angeles Film Festival presented the world premiere of Sparks’ musical at the Ford Amphitheatre, with a humorous introduction by Michael Silverblatt—the man responsible for bringing Sparks and director Guy Maddin together—of celebrated KCRW program Bookworm. Originally crafted for radio, this is the first time the piece has ever been performed by actors in front of a live audience.

The sold out show featured an ensemble of 14 actors, with the Maels themselves acting in supporting roles—Ron as affable Bergman’s chauffeur, and Russell as a charmingly pushy studio executive. As Russell sang, Ron played the keyboards, and the pair were backed by guitarist Jim Wilson and bassist Marcus Blake. Peter Franzen—one of the most respected Finnish actors of the last couple decades—starred as Ingmar Bergman, portraying his angst and confusion expertly.  Ann Magnusen played an absolutely stunning Greta Garbo, who appears towards the end of the musical as Bergman’s savior. Guy Maddin provided stage direction, and also moved about the stage capturing the performance on a flip cam.

Partial cast photo by Lainna Fader

Sparks treated the packed house with a peak into what they imagined would’ve happened if the famed director left his native Sweden for Hollywood. Like all of Sparks’ work, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is witty and wild and whole lot of fun. They recognized Bergman’s lesser-known lighter side—yes, not all his films are as serious as The Seventh Seal—which many forget existed. Thus, they chose to start the performance with Bergman winning the unlikely prize of ‘Best Poetic Humor’ at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival for Smiles on a Summer Night. Bergman decides to go for a walk, and all of a sudden feels compelled to enter a movie theater to see “escapist art of the worst sort: a typical American action film.” There, he’s whisked away from his homeland and dumped on the streets of Hollywood, where the drama all begins. He’s pushed and pulled by studio execs and fans to make a Hollywood film—literally, in one scene, where a mob stretches his arms several feet beyond their natural length—and chased by police through the streets of Hollywood. In the end, he’s rescued by a lovely woman revealed to be Greta Garbo, who takes him back into a movie theater and sends him home.

Bergman and Garbo photo by Lainna Fader

The performance was simple but effective. The Maels made the wise decision to not delve deep into the minutiae of Bergman’s career. All the audience needed to know about the Swedish director was revealed in the first ten minutes of the show; any more details would’ve interrupted the tale, which was easy to follow and flowed naturally. Very few props were used; just an old mid century modern couch, a bed standing upright in the corner, a couple folding chairs and a megaphone. Images of the real Bergman and Garbo were intercut with images of Beverly Hills and Hollywood locales, and close-ups of pages of the script itself were projected onto the massive blow-up screen.

The chase, photo by Lainna Fader

Sparks fans will, of course, love every second of The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, but those less familiar—or at least less obsessed—will still find much to enjoy here. The Maels have given Maddin much to play with for a film version; if he can manage to recreate some semblance of the magic at the Ford, it’ll be a massive success. The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman was by far the most exciting program at L.A. Film Fest this year.

All photos by Lainna Fader:

[View with PicLens]

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Long-running pop duo Sparks are now 22 albums deep and their latest, a musical commissioned by Swedish National Radio called The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, will be performed live at the Los Angeles Film Festival, with stage direction from Winnipeg wunderkind Guy Maddin, who hopes to direct a feature film adaptation. This interview by Lainna Fader.

Why did Swedish National Radio commission Sparks to write a musical?
Ron Mael (keyboards): We played in Stockholm a few times. For some reason there’s a following for us there and this woman who was the main person at the Swedish National Radio commission had come backstage at one of the shows. There’s kind of a system in Sweden where they really support live radio drama. It’s kind of considered something cool—it’s not something intellectual. So she contacted us in 2009. Most of the artists that have done work for Swedish National Radio are Swedish artists but she really liked what we were doing and she wanted to know if we’d do a radio musical. We were a little hesitant because we’re kind of visually oriented but we decided to go ahead with it. The only stipulation they put on it is that it had to have something to do with Sweden in some way. We were familiar with Ingmar Bergman and we love that sort of cinema so we decided to write something for them. They had the premiere of the radio musical and they have kind of a ritual there where everybody goes into basically a small opera theater but there’s nothing happening on stage. You just sit there and listen to it.
So they were staring at a blank screen?
Ron: Well, there was a picture of Bergman on the screen and a couple of exit signs but other than that it was kind of nothing. We were sitting in the audience and usually when you’re performing you kind of think that you’re pulling some strings sometimes but with this there was nothing, But the reaction was really good. So in any case we’ve always wanted to do a movie musical. We’re big fans of Guy Maddin and our mutual friend Michael Silverblatt introduced us. For about a year and a half we were telephoning and emailing and he really thought this was a great piece and wanted to direct it. Our manager sent the piece to the L.A. Film Festival and they really thought it was special—plus they really love the work of Guy Maddin so the combination of the two was something they were really interested in. They originally just wanted a table reading where everybody just sits there and sings or reads the thing and Guy Maddin was just going to do stage directions in between pieces but we thought that it’s not so exciting for an audience to watch people sitting there reading. We had total confidence that the music would work on a purely aural level, but once you added the visual element of people reading it seemed like it would be more boring. So one thing led to another and now we’re doing it on a pretty grandiose scale. We want to keep it from being a completely successful theatrical event, because our aim for doing this—to be crass about it—is to get somebody to finance the film version. And if they saw it as being finished theatrically then what’s the point?
What is it about Maddin’s work that you are attracted to?
Russell Mael (vocals): We feel a kinship with Guy in a certain way. He’s got a self-contained world and all of his films fit into that world. And it doesn’t necessarily relate to anything that’s not in that world or going on in film. Sparks has created kind of its own universe musically. It doesn’t really matter what anybody else is doing on the periphery. We think Guy has that same sort of vision with his films. He’s just in his own little world and we really like that world a lot. He doesn’t operate within the same parameters that are used in Hollywood. Having said all of that, we feel that the combination of what Guy does with this project is not so left field that it couldn’t have a bigger audience.
Bergman’s films are deeply impacted by his experience of growing up religious, losing his faith and then struggling with that loss for the rest of his life. How do you relate to Bergman in terms of faith?
Ron: We kind of understood him through his films, really. Our upbringing wasn’t as traditionally religious as his was. But there is a moment in this piece where he’s asking for God’s help in much the same way someone in one of his film’s would, and we wanted that to be sincere and not a joke. It’s the one moment in the piece where the Bergman character actually sings and that seemed like the way to make it seem really important for Bergman. Peter Franzen, the actor who’s doing that song, is able to perform it so it’s really touching, whatever your feelings are about religion.
Why is Greta Garbo Bergman’s savior?
Ron: Even though the starting point of the piece is the ’56 Cannes Film Festival, we wanted the time references to be all over the place so it wasn’t just a story about the past. So at the time that a savior is needed for him, to have Greta Garbo—another iconic Swedish figure—walking on the beach in Santa Monica and spiritually and physically saving Bergman seemed like the right thing to do from our perspective. She seems so iconic and out of place but we like things that are out of place. All these things are done with some absurdity but we never wanted it to be campy or just funny. We wanted it to be emotionally touching and we think we pulled it off as far as the writing went, but the people actually performing are taking it to another level. The combination of Peter as Bergman and Ann Magnuson really raised the level of the piece.
Russell: She is also kind of the bookend device to how he got himself in trouble by adventuring in to see this Hollywood movie. A Swedish device ends up showing him the way back to where he really should be—and that he made the right decision to clear out of Hollywood.
You guys did an interview in the 70s in which you said you liked doing music and liked acting, but you didn’t like combining the two in the same project. What changed?
Russell: Ego trip! I can’t even remember in what context that was said but I honestly don’t know. I think it’s more about combining the things on our own terms. It just depends what the project is. Our strength is doing our very specific vision and it’s the same with Guy. You take the person out of their world and you dilute their strengths.
Ron: Also—in the 70s, we were working within the song format. Even though they weren’t traditional songs sometimes, they were still albums of ten or twelve songs. By taking part of something that’s more theatrical and not as restricted, maybe our objections dampen because we’re trying to find a way to burst out of what we feel is such a limited view of what pop music is today. In some ways, what we always do is a reaction to what other people are doing. The more conservative other things seem to us, the more adventuresome we want to be.
You’ve said that you fight hard to not sound like a band who’ve put out 21 albums—how do you do that, and why?
Russell: I don’t think there are any other bands that would do the kind of project that The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is. With 21 Nights, we were really convinced that no other band would ever do 21 albums in 21 nights. There aren’t that many bands that have 21 albums and the ones that do are groups with a more established, comfortable situation that wouldn’t want to go through what we did, rehearsing for four months for this. We know the Rolling Stones will not do 21 of their albums, even though they have more than 21. They will never do it—I promise you that! Having that kind of spirit of wanting to do things that other bands wouldn’t want to or couldn’t do keeps you fresh, as does wanting to do challenging stuff that gets people as excited as we were when we heard things on the radio that inspired us. Roxy Music was releasing albums when we were living in England in the 70s, and it was unspoken but we wanted to be able to compete. There was a competition when our stuff would come out while we were there and we’d go, ‘Oooh, what’s Brian doing now?’ You always heard about the Beatles and the Beach Boys working off each other, seeing who can outdo the other—just having that kind of provocative spirit. When you do something that makes you a little uncomfortable, those are the things that end up having the best possibility of sounding really fresh.

THE SEDUCTION OF INGMAR BERGMAN ON SAT, JUNE 25, AT THE FORD AMPITHEATRE, 2580 CAHUENGA BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8:30 PM / $18 / ALL AGES. ALLSPARKS.COM OR LAFILMFEST.COM.

Director Guy Maddin’s latest project is a “film-to-be” adaptation of a musical originally written for Swedish National Radio by brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, in which a live cast—including Maddin and the Maels, appearing in supporting roles—will perform on stage the story of Ingmar Bergman, who is mysteriously transported from his native Sweden to Hollywood during the height of the studio system in the 1950s. Maddin will direct the on-stage world premiere of The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman at this year’s L.A. Film Festival and hopes to make the story into a film in the future. He speaks now from his home in Winnipeg.

Why are you working with Sparks on a musical about Ingmar Bergman?
I’m a longtime fan of the boys—the Maels. It never occurred to me that I’d ever do anything like this. I’d been researching them as film forces for a lost film project that I’m in the middle of right now—lost, aborted and unrealized films, I should say. I know at one point they were slated to make a picture with Jacques Tati back in the 70s and I was really intrigued by that. I think I discovered them in 1974 when they were just a few albums old. I’d kept in touch with them because I liked the fact that they’re really hard-working and kept evolving but still kept what I’d loved about them in the first place. I’d heard from a mutual friend—Michael Silverblatt, the guy that runs KCRW’s Bookworm—that they were aware of my movies and liked them OK or whatever so he arranged for some kind of introduction so that we could just kind of sheepishly glance at each other through splayed fingers and blushes, things like that. I find that they and I have very similar temperaments and as I got to know them a little bit more I learned to love these guys. When they asked me if I’d be interested in working on this I just said, ‘Absolutely. Sounds like fun.’ I’ve always been interested in the occult way in which music and image work together. No one can ever figure it out, I don’t think. There’s no formula. It’s not quantifiable. There’s no function that can be written down. It’s just very mysterious and so I thought, ‘Well, why not try to make it happen with this project?’ Which was already pretty cinematic. After all, it had its premiere in a theater with a blank screen and so people were listening to The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman and sitting in their seats looking at blankness—so they were obviously seeing things through the music.
How does the Maels’ relationship with Tati feed into their characterization of Bergman?
I don’t know. I’d kill to get my hands on the original Tati script for Confusion—the film they were going to do. I know Bergman is endlessly complicated and the more you watch him, the deeper he gets. What’s strange about the Maels’ music is that it seems remarkably simple—at times even as simple as a kind of a Dr. Seuss-y kind of a bounce—but the more you listen to that, the more you appreciate what’s going on in it. It rewards constant re-listening. I think maybe at first glance the opera—or whatever this is—is so simple. Bergman goes into a Swedish theater showing an American film and ends up literally in Hollywood—not just imaginatively—and has himself a little panic attack, which ends by the Santa Monica pier. And he runs out of North America to flee from Hollywood and then just his sort of fevered brow … You know, us Scandinavians—I’m Icelandic—us Scandinavians aren’t used to having brows with temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so when his brow is soothed by Greta Garbo, a successful Swedish émigré to Hollywood, he feels he can safely return to the dour, cold breast of Stockholm. I just liked the simplicity of it. And yet Bergman himself brings so much complication. It’s almost like you’re just getting a character transplant. A lot can be done in a short amount of time with the movie.
How exactly will Greta Garbo rescue Ingmar Bergman in the film?
I don’t know. I had my own encounter with Greta Garbo once—slightly more mystical than Bergman’s. In 1992 I went to Stockholm and saw the dress she wore in her first film, Gösta Berlings Saga. It was locked in a glass case at the Stockholm Cinematheque and I asked the curator there if he could please, please, please unlock it just so I could climb inside the glass chamber just so I could be inside the same space as the dress and he actually did so. I couldn’t believe it. I had to flirt with him a lot to get him to do it. He even locked the door so it was locked in there with me and once the door closed I was surrounded on all four sides by clear glass, like a perfectly transparent phone booth with the Gösta Berling dress—which I was very familiar with, I’d watched it over and over again—just on some kind of body mannequin. My head started to swim and I couldn’t help it. I licked it. I licked it right on the breast and with my big soggy tongue, dug into the fabric, which was 72 years old or something. I don’t remember exactly, but it was old and I tore a hole in it. I tore a hole about the size of a quarter in it and whatever formaldehyde spritzes were being used to preserve the fabric scorched all the taste buds off my tongue and I couldn’t taste anything for a year after that but I was so proud that I didn’t care. I couldn’t taste food. It was a tasteless act, I suppose, on some sacred object but I felt like it was mine. It was mine to do with what I wanted and it was a bit of a gesture of mad love. I know I do have a cold temperament like so many other Scandinavians but … I don’t know, I was just overcome by madness. I’ve just always felt a lot closer to Greta since then. So when I encountered this episode that they’d written in, I just thought it was another great intersection between Sparks and me. That they would choose someone as all-powerful as Greta Garbo—because that was the face of a century, after all—to loom out of the sky, to loom out of the luminosity and just restore things to a monochromatic cool and everything would be fine …
Why do you think Russell is suited to play a studio executive and a police officer and Ron is suited to playing a limo driver and a Hollywood tour guide?
They only have so many singing parts and things in the movie, and I guess maybe Ron just didn’t want to play Ingmar Bergman. I guess he just doesn’t look enough like him. It’s a big fever dream so it makes sense that the creators of the opera themselves actually serve as sort of footmen—that they’re at every level of the hierarchy of this thing. They’re chauffeurs and executives and composers and performers as well. I like the fact that they’re interlarded with the project from top to bottom. They’re kind of smaller parts, but they’re very lovely and they just keep reminding everybody that even though there are other performers and bigger parts—Bergman, Garbo—the Maels are involved top to bottom. It’s a nice way of knitting the composers right into the performance by actors and singers. I think I’d really love that to happen in the movie as well, if it ever gets made.
The Maels have said that they aren’t interested in revealing their own personalities in their music. How do you relate to them?
I think it’s another place where we agree or where we have similar approaches. A lot of people think my movies are really strange or bizarre or something but I’ve always been a folklorist—a fairytale buff. The Maels and I are always entering the world of music and literature and film through the fairy tale door, finding ourselves in there somewhere and then trying to figure out ways of representing ourselves in those terms—in heightened terms, in uninhibited terms, exaggerated terms if you have to. I like the idea of calling it ‘uninhibited’ terms because when you’re uninhibited, you’re telling the truth and the truth that’s on your mind is free to be blurted out. It might seem exaggerated or too loud or inappropriate or bizarre but it’s still true. When you’re exaggerating what’s on your mind, you tend to distort things. I think what they do is they take the truth and figure out a really stylish or boppy or fun way of uninhibiting it and revealing it to people in disguised forms—forms that are more fun or melancholy even, or boppy or catchy, whatever atmospheres or flavors they’ve chosen for songs.
What fairy tale meant a lot to you as a kid?
I really liked Journey to the Center of the Earth which was more of a movie I remember seeing when I was very young, maybe 3. Maybe just ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ which I never took to heart. I’m still building things out of straw. I became a housepainter and instead of replacing rotten boards, I’d just put three coats of paint on top of them. I kind of make films that way too. Their surfaces are always moldering and flaking off and things like that but I do try to have at least a strong framework underneath—but I’ve still got lots of rotten straw around there. Maybe somebody should have explained the fairy tale to me.
Memories from growing up are obviously a big part of your films—do you think memories enhance or impede our ability to enjoy the present?
Our memories are the present, you know? I can only paraphrase something Faulkner wrote. I think that we all live in the past and the present simultaneously. When you think of it in the most simplistic terms … you see a glowing red-hot stove element and you go to put your hand on it because it’s attractive but then you remember. There’s a very complicated matrix of memories that inform every moment and whenever we smell something, it subconsciously or even consciously reminds us of something. We’re just constantly wading through a sensory world of memory that’s being stirred up constantly by the present.
What do you think the difference is between nostalgia, melancholy and grief?
It’s tempting to be glib and say they’re all the same thing. They’re all sort of component parts of … yeah, I don’t know. Luckily I don’t feel grief very often. Nostalgia and melancholy are often overlapping—like carpet and underlay, you know? They’re hard to distinguish and sometimes they do feel synonymous. I like the feelings. I like a melancholic stroll. For some reason, walking is just a thousand times better for producing memories and creative solutions to problems than, say, driving or jogging or bike riding or laying on the couch or even just writing and trying to solve things. For some reason, just going on a stroll and thinking … it’s like everything settles in while your most recent meal is settling in. All the years that you’ve lived before start settling in, kind of like collating pages and shuffling them and squaring them until they’re in a nice, neat stack and things start to make sense. You start to remember how far back some things are and place them and they make some sort of emotional sense—how emotionally far back some things are and literally how chronologically far back some things are. For some reason I like those feelings. I guess I’ll just refuse to answer your question. I won’t distinguish between those two things. I like them both. It’s kind of like whether to get a chocolate shake or a chocolate malted. They’re both exquisitely melancholy.
In your published journals, you describe sex and amnesia as two different anesthetics for the pain of loss. What kind of loss is best treated with sex? What kind of loss is best treated with amnesia?
Amnesia is a far better anesthetic than sex, I’d imagine. We all need forgetfulness just to get through the day. There is a Borges story, ‘Funes, the Memorious,’ about a guy who remembers everything so well that he’s basically paralyzed. You’re remembering everything and ultimately nothing. Starting there, you need some amnesia just to create some continuity in your life. Then, you need to be able to move on and forgive yourself so you need to forget some of your most heinous acts of thoughtlessness or cruelty. You also need to forget those that have been committed against you. You need to forget some of your fears. Sometimes it’s helpful to forget your responsibilities and duties. You need to forget that it hurts to fall off a bicycle or a horse or you wouldn’t ride a horse or a bicycle. You know, those sorts of things. Some people forget their marriage vows and things like that and that’s a good thing for them. All that stuff makes the world go ’round but it’s obviously not good for everybody to do that—or to forget their parents. But I think sometimes it’s great to forget grief. To forget a big injury is part of the healing process so if someone you really love terribly has left you, it’s best to be allowed to forget that now and then. So forgetting sounds like a negative thing when you first think of it, but it’s very liberating. Sex? Oh geez, I don’t know what that anesthetizes. That’s more like scratching an itch—sometimes an itch big enough to literally revolve the moon around the Earth and the Earth around the sun but sometimes it’s just whatever. I don’t know what I was thinking of with sex as an anesthetic. I might have been thinking about how my genitals had no feeling in them anymore.
You’ve said most filmmakers don’t have the nerve to be really cruel to their characters, to give them what they deserve and what the audience secretly wants, even if they don’t know it. What are they afraid of?
I must have said that a few years ago. I was probably just bullshitting. No, I think I was probably complaining that a lot of directors are afraid of melodrama and that in melodrama, just like in the Old Testament, people get what they deserve—in melodramatic terms anyway. I’m not calling for a crackdown on crime or anything like that. I actually believe in rehabilitation instead of punishment. I’m one of those people. However, once I’m holding a camera or watching a story, I think we all become punishers—or people trying to understand the world—but you can’t help but give yourself over emotionally rather than just rationally, or judicially or fairly. Who needs to be fair when they’re watching a movie? So I think a lot of movies wimp out. They’re afraid and they get bogus in the third act and give people the ending they feel they should rather than give people the ending that seems psychologically right.
Do you think people—either consciously or subconsciously—tend to enjoy seeing other people suffer?
Absolutely. Not always. Sometimes witnessing such things creates permanent trauma. It’s almost as horrifying as the other’s suffering. But let’s face it—that term schadenfreude exists for a reason. Almost everybody has it at one time or another for sure. I’m not so cynical as to think that it’s all the time. I’ve actually worked hard at trying to be more empathetic. I think I was a sociopath when I was a teenager and a young man. I recognized that at least. I think I read a definition of a sociopath and secretly gasped and realized I was one. I’ve been working a lot harder on being less of a sociopath and I think you can actually make some progress that way.
How do you do that? How do you work to be less sociopathic?
How did I do it? I think it was just an exercise of trying to constantly put myself in other people’s shoes and maybe I just accumulated enough years on the planet and actually experienced some miserable things and realized how little the old me would have cared about how the new me would have felt and I was kind of appalled and felt lonely. I’d also had some huge regrets about how I hadn’t sent off some elderly relatives very well and I really don’t want to make that mistake now that some more elderly relatives are ready to go. They’re on the launch pad. Some of it’s selfish. I want to be more empathetic so I’m less haunted by the send-offs. I’m not sure that’s complete empathy, but if all I can get is a facsimile of empathy, I’ll settle for it.

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