the film, but I like the sound that's derived from the random positioning and certain juxtapositions.
A specific question about the long continuous shot of the sign on top of the building that reviews some of the history of pi. Halfway through, a guy comes out and almost gets hit by a car.
He's carrying a pieanother stupid pun.
It was too obvious for me! But once you start reading that sign, it's hard to look at anything else.
That was the idea behind putting the one little narrative element down below. I wanted you to wonder whether something happened earlier that you missed while reading. There's competition: should you read or should you watch the image?
Can you say a bit more about the film you're working on now?
I've written a script [the working title was 'New York, 1980'; it became
(1982)]. It has dialogue, and I'm going to try to use actors. I'm not sure how it's going to be stylistically, probably something like
but with a stronger narrative.
Are you going to continue to work in 16mm?
Yes, but my fear is that this could be my last film. Film's getting so expensive that we're going to have to raise rental prices. The people who rent our films now are so marginal that any increase could put them out of business. There has to be a larger market. Maybe I'm ready to stop making films. I don't know. I've been doing installations. They're more fun, they're quicker, and you get to use tools and build stuff.
I still like the films I made in the past, but I'm past all those issues, and I'm starting to react against a lot of avant-garde film. One thing that's affected me a lot is the films of Vivienne Dick and a few other Super-8 filmmakers. The whole mentality of making the film, finding your own showcase, renting a storefront if you have to, is very exciting. It's like the early Warhol factory. I'm thinking about making films that are much more accessible.
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Part 2
This may be a strange question, but it seems an obvious one. In the films you've made since you woke up in bed with a friend of yours who had diedI'm not sure exactly when that was . . .
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It's easy to remember because it's the day the hostages were taken in Iran: November 4, 1979.
Since then, all your films
have dealt with crime or death. I assume that incident was pivotal for you. Did anyone question your innocence?
Only the police department when they talked to me in the morning. I'm not worried about anybody's suspicions about me. For a while I did have a huge amount of guilt: if I had awakened at the right moment, I could have saved her. It's interesting that you ask that though, because I've been talking about that incident with a woman in prison [Lawrencia Bembenek, subject of
] who says she's innocent of the murder she's serving time for. She told me, 'All it would have taken to convict you would have been a jealous boyfriend who said, 'Yeah, they were having a big fight before it happened.' ' I could have ended up in prison like she did. I'd never thought of that.
The making of those films, starting with
was a way of dealing with how I felt about discovering death so close to me. It certainly changed my life. As you say, all my films since have dealt with some kind of deatheven
[1985], and I didn't write that script [Bert Barr did].
When I've shown
and
I've found them accessible even to people not acquainted with unusual forms of films. My audiences have a harder time with
and your other early work. Were you trying to be more accessible?
Not at all. I would love to be more accessible just because I would like to make enough money with my films to support myself. But it isn't really a concern. The change you mention is just a by-product of adding more narrative information. Probably parts of the films still aren't accessible. In fact, I worry that people aren't seeing those parts of the films. At least in the older works the audiences were confronted directly with the major formal issues. In these new films they might miss half of what's going on, but maybe I'm not giving the audience enough credit.
