I enjoy the editing part of filmmaking most of all; that's where the films really get made.
is often talked about as a parable of the media intruding into your lives, but when I saw it again the other week, it struck me as very similar to pieces in
.
Well, they keep saying that. I'll tell you what happened. By the time that I actually got to make the film, John and I were together, and the reporters were hounding us, but the
concept was something that I thought of before John and I got together.
In
there's 'Back Piece II,' a part of which is 'Walk behind a person for four hours.'
It was that kind of thing, right. But it was also a film script ['Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)'].
How candid is the
footage? It no longer
candid to me.
It was completely candidexcept for the effects we did later in the editing. The girl in the film did not know what was happening. Her sister was in on it, so when she calls her sister on the phone, her sister is just laughing at her and the girl doesn't understand why. Nic Knowland did the actual shooting. I wasn't there. Everything was candid, but I kept pushing him to bring back better material. The type of material he brought back at first was something like he would be standing on the street, and when a group of girls passed by, he would direct the camera to them. The girls would just giggle and run away, and he wouldn't follow. I kept saying he could do better than that, but he actually had a personal problem doing the film because he was a Buddhist and a peacenik: he didn't want to intrude on people's privacy. I remember John saying later that no actress could have given a performance that real.
I've done tons of work, and I don't have time to check it all out, but I wish I could check about this strange thing, which is that a lot of my works have been a projection of my future fate. It frightens me. It simply frightens me. I don't want to see
now. I haven't seen the
film in a long time, but just thinking about the concept of it frightens me because now I'm in that position, the position of the woman in the film.
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Production still from Ono's
(1969). By permission of Ono.
In the video
we see a similar scene, but with you.
I know. And why did I think of
song? After I wrote that song all sorts of trouble started to happen, all of which was somehow related to the song, that feeling of walking on thin ice. Sometimes I intentionally try to write something positive. But in a situation like that, art comes first. I really thought 'Walking on Thin Ice' was a good song when it came to me. I had no qualms about recording it. The artistic desire of expressing something supersedes the worry, I suppose, and you think, ah it's nothing, it's fine, it's just a nice song or something; and then it turns out that it becomes my life and I
want that.
Just recently I was in this film where I performed as a bag lady [
by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, unreleased at time of interview]. I was a bit concerned what it might mean to enact a bag lady, in terms of future projections. But I reasoned that there are actors who die many times in films, but live long lives, so actually enacting death makes their real lives longer. Well, in the first scene it was a beautiful April day, one of those I'm-glad-to-be-in-New-York days, and I'm wearing these rags and I'm pushing an empty baby carriage in this beautiful green environment. And as I was doing it, I remembered the song 'Greenfield Morn-
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ing' and the line, 'I pushed an empty baby carriage all over the city.' That was the first song we recorded for Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, and I think it's in
tooI mean the instruction 'Push an empty baby carriage all over the city' [See 'City Piece: Walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage' (Winter, 1961) near the end of the first section (Music) of
]. So I'm pushing the baby carriage and I'm thinking I don't want to
