"более чужой,чем чужак" Ф.Кафка
Опять для тех,кто хорошо читает по-английски.
Интервью журналу Rolling Stone, Ноябрь 13, 1980
Visionary from FringelandVisionary from Fringeland
By Henry Bromell
David Lynch, best known until recently for his midnight movie 'Eraserhead,' agreed to meet me at the Studio Grill in Hollywood, across the street from the old Goldwyn studios, and talk about his first full-budget ($ 5 million) film, 'The Elephant Man.' The Studio Grill is an impressive re-creation of a New re-creation of a European restaurant: modern prints on the walls, flowers, white tablecloths, classical-guitar music babbling discreetly from invisible speakers. Well-groomed young studio executives had already gathered for wine and demure shop talk. It was the kind of place that made me feel like I was slouching and looking sullen. I wasn´t exactly comfortable. Nor, as it turned out, was Lynch. He would have preferred to eat at Bob´s Big Boy, his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. He has a thing about the milkshakes there. Yet he was as ready to deal with the Studio Grill as he had been to make the transition from his home movie, 'Eraserhead,' to 'The Elephant Man.'
Produced by Jonathan Sanger and Mel Brooks, 'The Elephant Man' stars Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Sir John Gielgud and Anne Bancroft. Based on the same source material as the successful Broadway play, but in no way connected with the play itself, 'The Elephant Man' is the story of John Merrick, a Victorian Englishman (John Hurt) so disfigured by multiple neurofibromatosis at birth that he can survive only as a freak in a carnival. He is discovered there by Dr Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), a young surgeon at London Hospital who becomes obsessed with helping this so-called Elephant Man lead a normal life. Written by Lynch, Christopher DeVore and Eric Bergren, 'The Elephant Man' is the touching tale, a true one, of a romantic young man trapped inside the body of a monster, and how he brings out both the best and the worst in the people around him. It is also a portrait of London during the Industrial Age, a uniquely cinematic movie filmed in vivid black and white and filled with startling images and sounds as well as extraordinary performances. It should establish Lynch in the forefront of American directors.
Born January 20th, 1946, Lynch grew up in such places as Missoula, Montana; Sand Point, Idaho; Spokane, Washington; and Alexandria, Virginia; his father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. Wanting to be a painter, Lynch attended art school in Boston and Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia in 1966, for 200, that he made his first film, a 16-mm, one-minute continuous reel projected onto a two-dimensional screen. Then he made a four-minute film - a mixture of live action and animation - called 'The Alphabet,' which won him a grant from the American Film Institute. With those funds, he made 'The Grandmother,' a thirty-four-minute, 16-mm color film that earned him a place at the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills. He moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and has remained there ever since.
'Eraserhead,' funded in part by the American Film Institute and in part by privately raised money, was released in 1977. If there´s a New Wave movie, 'Eraserhead' is it. Henry, its hero, is a blank-faced fool wandering through a black-and-white landscape on the edge of a nameless city. The film is a nightmare about city life and the family in which the wife is a stranger and the baby a mutant - a bleating, wailing beast that Henry eventually kills, more out of curiosity than malice. At once gruesome and beautiful, 'Eraserhead' is edited in a slow, jagged rhythm that´s awkward, even spastic, like Henry himself. The sounds, mostly industrial noise, never cease; infact, they increase when he is alone, the city filling his head, literally, and turning him into a kind of mechanical zombie. Like Beckett´s Malone, he drifts confusedly from event to event, the perfect living, breathing robot, all consciousness.
A film oddity, 'Eraserhead' met with little enthusiasm until distributor Ben Barenholtz, who more or less invented the idea of midnight movies with 'El Topo' back in 1969, put 'Eraserhead' on his midnight-movie circuit, where for the past few years it has been gathering a strong and growing following.
David Lynch looks like he ought to be teaching English at a New England prep school, which is to say he looks like one of the Talking Heads. Certainly there´s something comical, even ironic, about playing it straight in the Eighties. Khakis, tie-up shoes, plain blue shirt, near hair no longer than Paul McCartney´s in 1965, scholarly glasses and pale, quizzical eyes. His voice and bearing, earnestly anarchic, suggest the same deadpan humor. He seems straight - until he starts talking. Then it quickly becomes apparent that he has a quirky, perverse mind, hardly fitting the myth of the Hollywood director. Absorbed in what he´s doing, you can almost see him looking up and squinting around every once in a while, chuckling, then dipping back down to work. He is friendly, straightforward and somewhat shy.
Is Eraserhead a freak?
Henry´s a strange-looking guy, sure... But there´re people living in those fringelands,and they´re the people I really love. Henry´s definitely one of those people. They kind of get lost in time. They´re either working in a factory or fiddling with something or other. It´s a world that´s neither here nor there. But Henry´s not a monster. He dresses up, he keeps himself tidy, and he´s got his girl. He´s really confused, you see. He thinks a lot, and he´s got plenty of time to think things out, but it doesn´t all add up. A lot of things puzzle him. He doesn´t quite have a bead on things.
Do you feel that way yourself?
Sure.
What was the main influence on 'Eraserhead'?
Philadelphia. I was married, and we had a child. Not having any money and needing lots of space, I was forced to live in a very poor area. We bought a house for $3500; it had twelve rooms. I tell people that all that protected us from the outside were the bricks. But the bricks might as well have been paper. The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. A kid was shot and killed half a block away. Our house was broken into three times. There was violence and hate and filth. A little girl pleading with her father to come home, and he´s sitting on the curb. Guys ripping another guy out of a car while it´s moving. All kinds of scenes. It wasn´t those things that did it, though. It was what they did when they sank inside of me. Eraserhead came out of that.
What did you do between 'Eraserhead' and 'The Elephant Man'?
I built sheds. I like to build things, and I like to collect things. When you collect things, you need a place to put them. So I built a stucco garage, then a little shed onto the house for equipment and then a storage shed. Then I built a very elaborate little studio shed out of found wood. I was also doing a lot of painting and drawing. I wrote a screenplay called Ronnie Rocket. It wasn´t a boring time, but it wasn´t anything that would set the world on fire. I really wanted to make films, so it was frustrating in that way. Nobody wanted to make Ronnie Rocket. The studios weren´t interested.
How did you come to direct 'The Elephant Man'?
Stuart Cornfeld, who worked for Mel Brooks, called me because he liked Eraserhead. We got to know one another. Then one day I decided I had to see what was out there and work on somebody else´s project. I asked Cornfeld what was available, and he told me about The Elephant Man. I said, "That´s it." So he introduced me to the writers and to Jonathan Sanger, who wanted to produce the film. We got together at Bob´s Big Boy.
Bob´s Big Boy?
Yeah. That´s one of my favorite places. The chocolate shakes at Bob´s are fantastic. They have these machines, I think they´re called Taylors, that make this soft ice cream. You can´t use a straw in it. But she shakes vary. Sometimes they can be granular and too soft. The best is when they´re the consistency of hard butter. They have a lot of chocolate in them. I think what happens is, the shakes come in cartons, and a lot of the chocolate settles to the bottom, and when they pour it into the machine, they don´t stir it up, so sometimes the chocolate looks pale brown instead of a nice, rich chocolate. Two-thirty is Bob´s time.
Every day?
Oh, yeah. I can think there and draw on the napkins and have my shake. Sometimes I have a cup of coffee, and sometimes I have a small Coke. They both go great with shakes.
And that´s where you decided to do 'The Elephant Man'?
Yes.
Then what happened?
We took it to the studios. They weren´t interested. Then somehow Mel Brooks read the sсript and wanted to get involved. That was magic time.
What drew you to the story?
I don´t really know. I think it seemed the perfect thing for me to do to follow Eraserhead and get me into the mainstream, and at the same time not compromise. I was worried about that. I want to make art popular. I want to make good films that I can really get into and love doing, and yet that people will like. I just worry if that is possible.
How did you get such great actors?
Once somebody as strong as Mel Brooks gets behind something, things start happening. Also, people were drawn to the project just because of the story. They loved the project.
Was it intimidating working with people like Gielgud?
Yeah. You wake up in the morning, and you say to yourself, "Well, today´s the day I´m going to direct Sir John Gielgud." Your brains are scrambled. You´re trying to get it together and get your pants on. It´s mind-boggling. But at the same time, these guys are just regular human beings, like the Elephant Man. And I didn´t have a lot of directing to do. Somebody like Sir John will give you what you want. All you have to do is ask. They´re all so good that you´re nit-picking when you say things. After we were finished, Sir John wrote me a letter. He said, "You never really told me how I did." That´s so touching. Here he is, one of the world´s all-time greats, and he wants to know how he did.
Why did you decide to film 'The Elephant Man' in black and white?
I always thought of it as a black-and-white film. Black and white immediately takes you out of the real world. To go back in time and have this mood of the Industrial Revolution - the places, the stark feeling - black and white is perfect. Most of my favorite films are black and white.
The details in 'The Elephant Man' are wonderful. How did you know so much about the nineteenth century?
I didn´t know anything about the Victorian era before I started, and I really worried about that. I mean, here I was, from Montana, doing this Victorian drama. But I believe you can tune into a feeling for a time and place. We did a lot of research.
Like 'Eraserhead', the movie is filled with industrial images and noises - factories, smoke, clanking machines.
Well, I´m flipped out over industry and factories - sounds as well as images. I worked with Alan Splet, who also did the sound on Eraserhead and has since won an Academy Award for his sound work on The Black Stallion - Alan and I met in Philadelphia. And as for the images, The Elephant Man takes place when industrialization was still starting. It was the beginning of Eraserhead times, I was hoping that the Victorians would have had more machinery around. There wasn´t a lot, but what they did have made a lot of noise and a lot of smoke.
Most of the people who torment the Elephant Man are poor. Any thoughts on that?
There are poor people who exploit people, and there are rich people who exploit people. That´s what Dr. Treves worries about. I do believe that humans are on a ladder, that everyone finds himself on a different rung, and that we´re working our way up the ladder. It doesn´t have anything to do with money. It has to do with consciousness. There are different problems to solve on every rung of the ladder. It just so happens that poor people exploited the Elephant Man. He was available to them, and he brought them what they needed, so they ran with it.
I got the sense that there just wasn´t enough room for them to be more generous, that they were too maimed by industrial poverty, the ugliness of their own lives...
At the London Hospital, where the Elephant Man really did live, there´s a medical museum. A guy named Mr. Nunn helps run the place, and he became a good friend of mine while I was filming over there. They´ve got specimens from the nineteenth century. He was telling me that there were people walking around with gigantic holes in their bodies and these terrible sores. You saw much more horror on the streets then.
It seems to me that the Elephant Man gave people a chance to be good, or he gave them the desire to be good ....
Yes. The character of John Merrick is innocence and wonder. He´s been kept for so long from all these wondrous things. He´s heard about them but never seen them. It just blows your mind to see the sadness of his being kept from them, and then the joy of watching him experience them.
Do you feel there´s something saintly about him?
I like to think that way. He´s a person who teaches people lessons. He teaches people to be human, and yet he´s a monster. Who´s to say what it was really like in his time, or what he himself was really like? But what he´s become, through Dr. Treves´ stories and everybody´s imagination, is a beautiful symbol, the perfect thing to bring out the good in people. Somebody I know saw the film and said it was a spiritual experience, that afterward he didn´t want to talk about anything or see anybody, that he just wanted to be alone and ride the feeling. That´s something. It´s a real honor to be involved with a film like that. And I don´t think they come along very often.
Why are you drawn to freaks, outsiders, fringe people or whatever?
I don´t know. I guess everyone feels like an outsider. That could be at the base of it, that I identify with those people.
And what about your obsession with industrial wastelands?
Well... if you said to me, "Okay, we´re either going down to Disneyland or we´re going to see this abandoned factory," there would be no choice. I´d be down there at the factory. I don´t really know why. It just seems like such a great place to set a story. It´s the textures and the look that drive me nuts.
Textures?
Yeah, I´m real interested in textures... For instance, I once had this dead cat. A vet gave it to me. I took it home. It was a real experience. I got all set up for it in the basement. And I dissected it. I put it in a bottle, but the bottle had a real small hole in it. The cat went in like a Slinky, but it got rigor mortis in there. I´m not kidding you, it ...
Why would you dissect a cat?
To study the textures. This was for Eraserhead. It´s like... it´s like a duck. I love the idea of a duck. Because there´s the bill, there´s the head and neck, there´s the body and feet, and then there´s that eye. That eye is real little, but it´s gleaming like a jewel. So, it can be little and still command as much attention as the big body. If the body were the eye, and the eye were the body, it wouldn´t work. Those kinds of things just drive me nuts. I think that those proportions in nature, in a duck, mean something. The proportion of the eye to the body, and the material, and the amount of "busyness" in it. I think that painting subconsciously obeys these rules. And all these things are there when you´re dissecting something. The textures and shapes are unbelievable. That´s why I dissected the cat.
Are you completely dispassionate when you go down to your basement and dissect a cat?
Yeah, I am. I can slip into the freak-out area, but I stay out of that and go into the dispassionate area of textures. There´s something in nature, especially when nature starts decomposing, that brings out these textures. For a long time I loved looking at that. I wasn´t into negative thinking or loving death or anything like that, but people would put me there. Industrial textures and things that nature has overlaid on top of something are real exciting to me. Other things are too, though.
Like what?
I´m real keen on the Midwest, downtown L.A., Egyptian hieroglyphics, black-and-white German expressionism and art deco. I think a bunch of people once live on the planet who knew what was going on in terms of design. That gets back to the duck - the different proportions. Those people got it from insects and Egypt and Aztecs and flowers and industrial materials.
How do you imagine your future as a director?
I think it´s possible to do something that people want to see and not compromise what you want to do. That means a lot of ideas that you get are going to have to wait or fall away. A lot of the scripts that people give you are going to have to be turned down because people don´t want to see that anymore; it´s a formula and they´ve seen it before.
Then you think there´s a place for you in Hollywood?
I sure hope so. I could make my films in16 mm in my garage, but I love a big screen and good sound, and for that you need money and equipment.
What do you think movies should do?
I want to make movies that you can´t go to in a car or plane or a boat. You´ve got to buy a theater ticket to go into that world, to have that experience. I would like to think you could be taken into a space that is film-space, even if it´s only for a moment within the film and it needs all the rest of the film to make it happen. In this sound-and-picture space, you should know something, or have a feeling that you couldn´t have unless there was cinema. I know there has to be a story. I´m interested in that. But I like the idea that film can be really film as well as do the other things.
I know that films are going to keep getting better and better. It´s exciting. One image coming up to another image, and then a third image with this sound... It doesn´t matter whether it´s film or video. It´s a character and a setting. It´s a mood. I just love mood. Underneath the surface of things - somewhere in there, it´s happening. Most films are on the surface. Most films are one-line jokes. When you walk out of the theater, it´s like you´ve been eating cotton candy. I think people really want to be able to make good films, and we´ve got to be able to get the chance.
Интервью журналу Rolling Stone, Ноябрь 13, 1980
Visionary from FringelandVisionary from Fringeland
By Henry Bromell
David Lynch, best known until recently for his midnight movie 'Eraserhead,' agreed to meet me at the Studio Grill in Hollywood, across the street from the old Goldwyn studios, and talk about his first full-budget ($ 5 million) film, 'The Elephant Man.' The Studio Grill is an impressive re-creation of a New re-creation of a European restaurant: modern prints on the walls, flowers, white tablecloths, classical-guitar music babbling discreetly from invisible speakers. Well-groomed young studio executives had already gathered for wine and demure shop talk. It was the kind of place that made me feel like I was slouching and looking sullen. I wasn´t exactly comfortable. Nor, as it turned out, was Lynch. He would have preferred to eat at Bob´s Big Boy, his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. He has a thing about the milkshakes there. Yet he was as ready to deal with the Studio Grill as he had been to make the transition from his home movie, 'Eraserhead,' to 'The Elephant Man.'
Produced by Jonathan Sanger and Mel Brooks, 'The Elephant Man' stars Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Sir John Gielgud and Anne Bancroft. Based on the same source material as the successful Broadway play, but in no way connected with the play itself, 'The Elephant Man' is the story of John Merrick, a Victorian Englishman (John Hurt) so disfigured by multiple neurofibromatosis at birth that he can survive only as a freak in a carnival. He is discovered there by Dr Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), a young surgeon at London Hospital who becomes obsessed with helping this so-called Elephant Man lead a normal life. Written by Lynch, Christopher DeVore and Eric Bergren, 'The Elephant Man' is the touching tale, a true one, of a romantic young man trapped inside the body of a monster, and how he brings out both the best and the worst in the people around him. It is also a portrait of London during the Industrial Age, a uniquely cinematic movie filmed in vivid black and white and filled with startling images and sounds as well as extraordinary performances. It should establish Lynch in the forefront of American directors.
Born January 20th, 1946, Lynch grew up in such places as Missoula, Montana; Sand Point, Idaho; Spokane, Washington; and Alexandria, Virginia; his father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. Wanting to be a painter, Lynch attended art school in Boston and Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia in 1966, for 200, that he made his first film, a 16-mm, one-minute continuous reel projected onto a two-dimensional screen. Then he made a four-minute film - a mixture of live action and animation - called 'The Alphabet,' which won him a grant from the American Film Institute. With those funds, he made 'The Grandmother,' a thirty-four-minute, 16-mm color film that earned him a place at the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills. He moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and has remained there ever since.
'Eraserhead,' funded in part by the American Film Institute and in part by privately raised money, was released in 1977. If there´s a New Wave movie, 'Eraserhead' is it. Henry, its hero, is a blank-faced fool wandering through a black-and-white landscape on the edge of a nameless city. The film is a nightmare about city life and the family in which the wife is a stranger and the baby a mutant - a bleating, wailing beast that Henry eventually kills, more out of curiosity than malice. At once gruesome and beautiful, 'Eraserhead' is edited in a slow, jagged rhythm that´s awkward, even spastic, like Henry himself. The sounds, mostly industrial noise, never cease; infact, they increase when he is alone, the city filling his head, literally, and turning him into a kind of mechanical zombie. Like Beckett´s Malone, he drifts confusedly from event to event, the perfect living, breathing robot, all consciousness.
A film oddity, 'Eraserhead' met with little enthusiasm until distributor Ben Barenholtz, who more or less invented the idea of midnight movies with 'El Topo' back in 1969, put 'Eraserhead' on his midnight-movie circuit, where for the past few years it has been gathering a strong and growing following.
David Lynch looks like he ought to be teaching English at a New England prep school, which is to say he looks like one of the Talking Heads. Certainly there´s something comical, even ironic, about playing it straight in the Eighties. Khakis, tie-up shoes, plain blue shirt, near hair no longer than Paul McCartney´s in 1965, scholarly glasses and pale, quizzical eyes. His voice and bearing, earnestly anarchic, suggest the same deadpan humor. He seems straight - until he starts talking. Then it quickly becomes apparent that he has a quirky, perverse mind, hardly fitting the myth of the Hollywood director. Absorbed in what he´s doing, you can almost see him looking up and squinting around every once in a while, chuckling, then dipping back down to work. He is friendly, straightforward and somewhat shy.
Is Eraserhead a freak?
Henry´s a strange-looking guy, sure... But there´re people living in those fringelands,and they´re the people I really love. Henry´s definitely one of those people. They kind of get lost in time. They´re either working in a factory or fiddling with something or other. It´s a world that´s neither here nor there. But Henry´s not a monster. He dresses up, he keeps himself tidy, and he´s got his girl. He´s really confused, you see. He thinks a lot, and he´s got plenty of time to think things out, but it doesn´t all add up. A lot of things puzzle him. He doesn´t quite have a bead on things.
Do you feel that way yourself?
Sure.
What was the main influence on 'Eraserhead'?
Philadelphia. I was married, and we had a child. Not having any money and needing lots of space, I was forced to live in a very poor area. We bought a house for $3500; it had twelve rooms. I tell people that all that protected us from the outside were the bricks. But the bricks might as well have been paper. The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. A kid was shot and killed half a block away. Our house was broken into three times. There was violence and hate and filth. A little girl pleading with her father to come home, and he´s sitting on the curb. Guys ripping another guy out of a car while it´s moving. All kinds of scenes. It wasn´t those things that did it, though. It was what they did when they sank inside of me. Eraserhead came out of that.
What did you do between 'Eraserhead' and 'The Elephant Man'?
I built sheds. I like to build things, and I like to collect things. When you collect things, you need a place to put them. So I built a stucco garage, then a little shed onto the house for equipment and then a storage shed. Then I built a very elaborate little studio shed out of found wood. I was also doing a lot of painting and drawing. I wrote a screenplay called Ronnie Rocket. It wasn´t a boring time, but it wasn´t anything that would set the world on fire. I really wanted to make films, so it was frustrating in that way. Nobody wanted to make Ronnie Rocket. The studios weren´t interested.
How did you come to direct 'The Elephant Man'?
Stuart Cornfeld, who worked for Mel Brooks, called me because he liked Eraserhead. We got to know one another. Then one day I decided I had to see what was out there and work on somebody else´s project. I asked Cornfeld what was available, and he told me about The Elephant Man. I said, "That´s it." So he introduced me to the writers and to Jonathan Sanger, who wanted to produce the film. We got together at Bob´s Big Boy.
Bob´s Big Boy?
Yeah. That´s one of my favorite places. The chocolate shakes at Bob´s are fantastic. They have these machines, I think they´re called Taylors, that make this soft ice cream. You can´t use a straw in it. But she shakes vary. Sometimes they can be granular and too soft. The best is when they´re the consistency of hard butter. They have a lot of chocolate in them. I think what happens is, the shakes come in cartons, and a lot of the chocolate settles to the bottom, and when they pour it into the machine, they don´t stir it up, so sometimes the chocolate looks pale brown instead of a nice, rich chocolate. Two-thirty is Bob´s time.
Every day?
Oh, yeah. I can think there and draw on the napkins and have my shake. Sometimes I have a cup of coffee, and sometimes I have a small Coke. They both go great with shakes.
And that´s where you decided to do 'The Elephant Man'?
Yes.
Then what happened?
We took it to the studios. They weren´t interested. Then somehow Mel Brooks read the sсript and wanted to get involved. That was magic time.
What drew you to the story?
I don´t really know. I think it seemed the perfect thing for me to do to follow Eraserhead and get me into the mainstream, and at the same time not compromise. I was worried about that. I want to make art popular. I want to make good films that I can really get into and love doing, and yet that people will like. I just worry if that is possible.
How did you get such great actors?
Once somebody as strong as Mel Brooks gets behind something, things start happening. Also, people were drawn to the project just because of the story. They loved the project.
Was it intimidating working with people like Gielgud?
Yeah. You wake up in the morning, and you say to yourself, "Well, today´s the day I´m going to direct Sir John Gielgud." Your brains are scrambled. You´re trying to get it together and get your pants on. It´s mind-boggling. But at the same time, these guys are just regular human beings, like the Elephant Man. And I didn´t have a lot of directing to do. Somebody like Sir John will give you what you want. All you have to do is ask. They´re all so good that you´re nit-picking when you say things. After we were finished, Sir John wrote me a letter. He said, "You never really told me how I did." That´s so touching. Here he is, one of the world´s all-time greats, and he wants to know how he did.
Why did you decide to film 'The Elephant Man' in black and white?
I always thought of it as a black-and-white film. Black and white immediately takes you out of the real world. To go back in time and have this mood of the Industrial Revolution - the places, the stark feeling - black and white is perfect. Most of my favorite films are black and white.
The details in 'The Elephant Man' are wonderful. How did you know so much about the nineteenth century?
I didn´t know anything about the Victorian era before I started, and I really worried about that. I mean, here I was, from Montana, doing this Victorian drama. But I believe you can tune into a feeling for a time and place. We did a lot of research.
Like 'Eraserhead', the movie is filled with industrial images and noises - factories, smoke, clanking machines.
Well, I´m flipped out over industry and factories - sounds as well as images. I worked with Alan Splet, who also did the sound on Eraserhead and has since won an Academy Award for his sound work on The Black Stallion - Alan and I met in Philadelphia. And as for the images, The Elephant Man takes place when industrialization was still starting. It was the beginning of Eraserhead times, I was hoping that the Victorians would have had more machinery around. There wasn´t a lot, but what they did have made a lot of noise and a lot of smoke.
Most of the people who torment the Elephant Man are poor. Any thoughts on that?
There are poor people who exploit people, and there are rich people who exploit people. That´s what Dr. Treves worries about. I do believe that humans are on a ladder, that everyone finds himself on a different rung, and that we´re working our way up the ladder. It doesn´t have anything to do with money. It has to do with consciousness. There are different problems to solve on every rung of the ladder. It just so happens that poor people exploited the Elephant Man. He was available to them, and he brought them what they needed, so they ran with it.
I got the sense that there just wasn´t enough room for them to be more generous, that they were too maimed by industrial poverty, the ugliness of their own lives...
At the London Hospital, where the Elephant Man really did live, there´s a medical museum. A guy named Mr. Nunn helps run the place, and he became a good friend of mine while I was filming over there. They´ve got specimens from the nineteenth century. He was telling me that there were people walking around with gigantic holes in their bodies and these terrible sores. You saw much more horror on the streets then.
It seems to me that the Elephant Man gave people a chance to be good, or he gave them the desire to be good ....
Yes. The character of John Merrick is innocence and wonder. He´s been kept for so long from all these wondrous things. He´s heard about them but never seen them. It just blows your mind to see the sadness of his being kept from them, and then the joy of watching him experience them.
Do you feel there´s something saintly about him?
I like to think that way. He´s a person who teaches people lessons. He teaches people to be human, and yet he´s a monster. Who´s to say what it was really like in his time, or what he himself was really like? But what he´s become, through Dr. Treves´ stories and everybody´s imagination, is a beautiful symbol, the perfect thing to bring out the good in people. Somebody I know saw the film and said it was a spiritual experience, that afterward he didn´t want to talk about anything or see anybody, that he just wanted to be alone and ride the feeling. That´s something. It´s a real honor to be involved with a film like that. And I don´t think they come along very often.
Why are you drawn to freaks, outsiders, fringe people or whatever?
I don´t know. I guess everyone feels like an outsider. That could be at the base of it, that I identify with those people.
And what about your obsession with industrial wastelands?
Well... if you said to me, "Okay, we´re either going down to Disneyland or we´re going to see this abandoned factory," there would be no choice. I´d be down there at the factory. I don´t really know why. It just seems like such a great place to set a story. It´s the textures and the look that drive me nuts.
Textures?
Yeah, I´m real interested in textures... For instance, I once had this dead cat. A vet gave it to me. I took it home. It was a real experience. I got all set up for it in the basement. And I dissected it. I put it in a bottle, but the bottle had a real small hole in it. The cat went in like a Slinky, but it got rigor mortis in there. I´m not kidding you, it ...
Why would you dissect a cat?
To study the textures. This was for Eraserhead. It´s like... it´s like a duck. I love the idea of a duck. Because there´s the bill, there´s the head and neck, there´s the body and feet, and then there´s that eye. That eye is real little, but it´s gleaming like a jewel. So, it can be little and still command as much attention as the big body. If the body were the eye, and the eye were the body, it wouldn´t work. Those kinds of things just drive me nuts. I think that those proportions in nature, in a duck, mean something. The proportion of the eye to the body, and the material, and the amount of "busyness" in it. I think that painting subconsciously obeys these rules. And all these things are there when you´re dissecting something. The textures and shapes are unbelievable. That´s why I dissected the cat.
Are you completely dispassionate when you go down to your basement and dissect a cat?
Yeah, I am. I can slip into the freak-out area, but I stay out of that and go into the dispassionate area of textures. There´s something in nature, especially when nature starts decomposing, that brings out these textures. For a long time I loved looking at that. I wasn´t into negative thinking or loving death or anything like that, but people would put me there. Industrial textures and things that nature has overlaid on top of something are real exciting to me. Other things are too, though.
Like what?
I´m real keen on the Midwest, downtown L.A., Egyptian hieroglyphics, black-and-white German expressionism and art deco. I think a bunch of people once live on the planet who knew what was going on in terms of design. That gets back to the duck - the different proportions. Those people got it from insects and Egypt and Aztecs and flowers and industrial materials.
How do you imagine your future as a director?
I think it´s possible to do something that people want to see and not compromise what you want to do. That means a lot of ideas that you get are going to have to wait or fall away. A lot of the scripts that people give you are going to have to be turned down because people don´t want to see that anymore; it´s a formula and they´ve seen it before.
Then you think there´s a place for you in Hollywood?
I sure hope so. I could make my films in16 mm in my garage, but I love a big screen and good sound, and for that you need money and equipment.
What do you think movies should do?
I want to make movies that you can´t go to in a car or plane or a boat. You´ve got to buy a theater ticket to go into that world, to have that experience. I would like to think you could be taken into a space that is film-space, even if it´s only for a moment within the film and it needs all the rest of the film to make it happen. In this sound-and-picture space, you should know something, or have a feeling that you couldn´t have unless there was cinema. I know there has to be a story. I´m interested in that. But I like the idea that film can be really film as well as do the other things.
I know that films are going to keep getting better and better. It´s exciting. One image coming up to another image, and then a third image with this sound... It doesn´t matter whether it´s film or video. It´s a character and a setting. It´s a mood. I just love mood. Underneath the surface of things - somewhere in there, it´s happening. Most films are on the surface. Most films are one-line jokes. When you walk out of the theater, it´s like you´ve been eating cotton candy. I think people really want to be able to make good films, and we´ve got to be able to get the chance.
@темы: разное