But since that movement is toward oblivion, in my philosophy anyhow, it might as well be backward. It's a delusion to think that you're getting anywhere. Of course, there is an accumulation of experience.
When I finished editing
we opened it at the Charles Theater at midnight, and I took Claes with me. I'd shown
[1962] there at midnight a few months before and got a big ovation for it, partly because it was about the atomic bomb and everybody had atomic bombs on the mind. But for some reason the audience for
was antipathetic. In fact, there was some hissing, which I told Claes was the radiators, but he didn't believe me. Since then, it's slowly gathered a little momentum.
The cool, deadpan, arty mood of the action seems very much of that period. The animations seem less dated.
At the time, there was a sincere feeling that the only valid
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approach to life's absurdities was to have a certain Zen distance on everything, to be above it. To make it obvious that you
above it all, you would set up outrageous situations that you'd go through without batting an eye.
Anyhow, I didn't see much difference between shooting live action and animating, because in both the emphasis was on cutting. For me editing isn't just the perfunctory business of filling out the plan; editing is where I make the crucial decisions that make or break the film. It doesn't matter how good the shooting is if the editing isn't good.
I've always assumed that when you animate, you prepare your cards more or less chronologically and then simply record them.
Hell no! I don't know what I've got until I start cutting. I don't know how things are going to play off each other. When I'm shooting, I can flip a handful of cards and see five seconds of continuity. But until I get it all shot, I don't know how it's going to work. When I was a painter, the process was very different. I used to lie in bed in the morning (which I do still) and daydream, fantasize a creation of some kind. But as soon as I put my foot on the cold floor and took one step toward the easel, that feeling, that image, whatever, would start to evaporate. Every step toward the easel would kill off part of the dream. At the same time, I learned to discipline myself to replace it with equivalents. Every one of those evaporations would be replaced by some more solid idea that would allow me to unscrew the cap of the paint, squeeze it out onto the pallet, put the brush in it, and hit the canvas. It was a matter of using the original inspiration as a motor, but forgetting about the particulars I'd started out with. It's the same thing with filmmaking, but even more so. There are so many mechanical tasks to perform that the concrete replaces the ephemeral. The inspiration gets you moving, but the concrete is what you get at the end. To pretend that I can write down my dream fantasy in words and then transfer it to film later is unrealistic as far as I'm concerned and would be an unfair imposition on the editing process, which really should be as creative as the other stages.
So how do you shoot? Do you get a general idea and explore it for a while, knowing that later onmuch lateryou'll make a film with it?
That's right. Sometimes I've got a strong enough idea to carry me a year. The idea has to be able to accept a lot of definitions, even contradictory definitions, and at the same time survive the attacks I make on it. It might be something as stupid as a particular image or a feeling that the next film will be all crisp and clear. But that's how I work. I'll get a theme for the year and start drawing around it (or I'll start drawing and in the drawing I'll see how I feel that year and what it's going to be like).
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is a tour de force of drawing. It reminds me of Lye's scratched imagery in
[1958] and of the directly scratched jazz passage in the middle of [Norman] McLaren's
[1942].
I was sent a copy of
in 35mm, and I turned it into a mutoscope as a gift to McLaren for this big tribute they had for him in Canada. I cut up his hen so it hipped more than it hopped.
is 35mm. I drew the whole thing, and then shot it in 16mm several times, until I got all of the images lined up in their proper order. I didn't want to waste the 35mm time.
Why did you make this particular film in 35mm?
Because I wanted absolutely the sharpest, best image I could get. I wanted to do
better.
is kind of a throwback in that sense. I wanted to use high contrast film and the sharpest lens possible and the most stable camera. The drawback with my Bolex windup camera is that the shutter exposures are not consistent; there are slight variations, flicker. Shooting in 35mm gives you just that much more resolution. I wanted a super slick film for very simple drawing. I used soundtrack film, which is absolute black or white, and I rented a
