A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I should also mention that without the tremendous organizational ca-

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pacity of Mel Lawrence, who was one of the directors of Woodstock, I couldn't have got

Powaqqatsi

done. Mel and I had gone around the world once before, looking for locations, while we showed

Koyaanisqatsi,

and used that as a way to find people we could work with as production crews in each of the countries where we were planning to film. We went to thirteen countries with virtually no screw-ups. We lost one piece of equipment between Peru and Brazil and that was it, and we had two and a half tons of equipment going around the world! Without his ability to organize local crews, locations, permissions, getting stock in and out of the countries for processing, dealing with customs, the film would never have happened. The other producer was Lawrence Taub; without his ability to maintain the budget and the schedule, we'd have had all kinds of problems. So I feel really well served by the producers I worked with.

MacDonald:

May I go back to a comment you made a while ago about mistakes you felt you made in the first two films? What mistakes are you referring to?

Reggio:

In the case of

Koyaanisqatsi,

I feel that the experience was perhaps too intense. At one point in the film, we were dealing with eleven polyrhythmic musical structures colliding all at once, for twenty-one minutes! That was a bit much, I can remember, having attended many public screenings of

Koyaanisqatsi,

that at the end of that sequence, you would hear an enormous sigh from the audience. Now on the one hand, that motivated me to say, 'Well, we probably did the right thing,' but on the other, I feel I may have battered the audience a bit too much. I also feel I could have placed more focus, albeit in a mass form, on human beings caught inside this vast machine we call modernity. The film could have had a more human focus.

In the case of

Powaqqatsi,

I tried to be very conservative, especially in terms of the possibilities of juxtaposing images. What I learned from

Koyaanisqatsi

is that you can't just do a hundred-minute montage: it won't work; you can't sustain interest. The montage form is good for a half hour to forty minutes

max

if there's a master working on it. Looking at

Powaqqatsi

now, I feel that if I could have made it a little shorter, it would be stronger. And I would like to have intercut some things to suggest other dimensions of the issues raised.

MacDonald:

Do you mean more mini-montages, like the one about religious observances?

Reggio:

That's correct. On the new film,

Naqoyqatsi,

I feel I can be more adventurous. We can diversify ourselves a bit. I don't want to repeat

Powaqqatsi

or

Koyaanisqatsi

. I want to hold to the metaphysical point of view, but I want to develop it in a different form.

MacDonald:

Did you assume from the beginning that you were going to do a trilogy?

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Reggio:

No. It was only during the editing of

Koyaanisqatsi,

when Philip and I became so excited about the language we felt we had struck upon, that we decided we wanted to flesh out our point of view.

MacDonald:

How did you originally connect up with Glass?

Reggio:

Through two friends, one known in the film world actuallyRudy Wurlitzer, a screenwriterand Jeffrey Lew, a Buddhist friend of Philip, who set him up with his first recording studio at 112 Green Street. I had done a study with a woman in Santa Fe who is a composer and pianistMarcia Mikulak. But after listening to various music, I felt Philip's music was what I wanted. It had a trance element built into the rhythm structures that would fuse with the image. Getting to Philip was difficult. After my first inquiry through Rudy, Philip said, 'I don't like movies, I don't see movies. I have no real interest. I'm not putting down your effort; it's just not what I do.' Then I said to Rudy, 'Let's try this: I'm going to put some images to some music Philip has donespecifically,

North Star

and I'll have a little screening for him at Anthology Film Archives,' which was on Wooster Street at that point. Philip was kind enough to come to the screening, as a favor to Rudy, I think. He told me afterward that he had intended to duck out, but he became very entranced by the relationship of my images to his music, and from that moment on, we've had a very productive and convivial relationship. We're able to be very critical with each other and yet maintain a mutual respect.

Within the production group here, the choice of Philip Glass was the single most controversial thing I did. People here

hated

his music. They said, 'If you wanted to choose the

worst

composer in the world, you'd get this person who has broken-needle syndrome.' Of course, I disagreed and