Please tell us a little more on the background of Myth Labs. How did it start ? Was it based on a original idea by yourself ?
- Why was it important for you to make this film ? I went home for Christmas and saw Meth addicts at the train station- in the smallest Pennsylvania town, my best friend from childhood made it through a Meth addiction and I met her 17 year old Meth-effected son; a new found friend is going to the Florida swamps to find her High school friend who's on Meth, another friend is complaining about her furniture-moving Meth-addicted upstairs neighbor and so forth. All of this came after making the film.
It struck me that it was a rural affliction and having come from a very rural area I could understand the lure of the drug. That said, I have never done Meth. I found interviews with lumber jacks, farmers, the Amish, truckdrivers, ministers and mountain people who were on Meth and I recognized something of myself, because these people are ‘the cloth I am cut-of’. So, as much as the film comments on politics, religion and drug abuse in a sometimes slap stick fashion, it was also an emotional piece for me.
The puritans were sure of man’s innate depravity. The Puritans accounts of the wilderness transforming from a place of hope to a place of horror began my journey into this subject. In search of ‘the depths of the mind’( into which every sinner is to go to before they can be crucified and so ‘saved’) they ran into the woods and screamed and yelled. In the film, the fall-out of the founding of our country in a state religious fanaticism has left a socially depleted landscape; a vacuum in the soul of the people, and they fall under the wheels of Meth…and the religious are not immune; the rich are not immune; housewives are not immune. The Christian and American myth are built on paradoxes of pitting old against new and the individual against the community, so I sought to make a film that reflected this also, that we should look to the past.
- Is the way you worked on this film similar to Secrets of
Mexuality or Cosmetic Emergency?
Myth Labs is exclusively animation...or stop- motion filmmaking using a hand-made three layer glass animation stand. Cosmetic Emergency and Secrets of Mexuality were a number of techniques, in separate kind of sections. Myth Labs is a seamless narrative..in a way. The landscape is continuous and we travel in and out of fractured lives of the people in habiting it, whereas the earlier films were more visual , than narrative.
Cosmetic Emergency, 2005
- Can you tell us if you get inspiration in your work also by watching work by other filmmakers ? Who are they ? In what way do they inspire you ?
At the moment a film is a song, a fairytale, a poem, a document, propaganda, a mural, etc... I'm as much into reading and looking at art as watching films. For Myth Labs, I read personal accounts of Americas first settlers and drug addicts, re-habilitation philosophy, scientific studies, poetry by recovering addicts, the Bible, Kafka, books of prophecies, and looked at painting of the middle ages, Bruegel, the photos of Boris Mikhailov, the Music of Moondog, the art of Egypt and the New Objectivity art movement and on and on… for movies... I watched amongst other things....Fleisher cartoons, Kubrick, 1970's horror films, educational videos about religion in painting and Flemish painting masters, F.F. Coppola films, every poor quality re-make of the witch trials and re-creations of early American life, Sister Wendy Beckett art videos, break-dancing videos, Bukowski videos and so forth...all from my favorite place; the public library. When I first became interested, it was there that I watched Surrealist, Dada, Avant Garde and underground films and animated films.
- Can you say something about the techniques you used. The choice
between film and video. The relation between the image and the sound.
Film is cool. It is me, the lens, the negative and the memory of what
I have filmed. I like a situation where it feels more like a painter and a canvas (only much more wild) in the way that the camera is in the room with me, its not a computer, which will fall asleep or a camera that will shut itself off. It’s a battery-operated device, that once turned on, is a call to action. Film is demanding and quite unforgiving of mistakes. The music in my films is by friends. Some playing their pieces composed-improvised to the films, sometimes group improvisations, to composed and pre-recorded music. I basically bring people together. Myth Labs was a very complicated film in a way, and I searched-out musicians. I met drummer Ryan Sawyer through my recording studio friend Matt Marinelli (who ended up playing electric guitar and Moog organ solos to an Over-dose and a breakdancing scene), Mike Evans creates homemade sound effects/foley and through Ryan I met Laura Owens who plays musical saw and violin. By the time the musicians
could play on this film, I was so concentrated on it, that it was as if the musicians played exactly what I had thought of. Only better. So I work a year, or three on a film, then the musicians can often only spare me one hour…so I have to relinquish control at this point and have faith or focus. It’s exciting to hand my film over like that; to watch the interpretation into sound and understand that any shortcomings of myself or the music or anything, is in sync with the heart of the film.
Myth Labs, 2009
- Is it important for you that you film will be screened in a
competition program?
Basically I don't expect of my films to be a 'prize-pony'. I like that they have screenings or art shows. If at all avoidable, I keep competition away from my films, unless it’s for money to make more films, because I don’t want to equate others opinions with the value of the film, but if their approval means better times, and hope for making a next film, that’s alright.
- What was the audience you had in mind when you made Myth Labs ?
I think about surprising the audience sometimes. The film has shown in a few small towns and art events, and people say that they recognized so many things. That they see their 'Meth friends and relatives' doing (like compulsively cleaning for instance) or in some cases people come running over to say "I used to do that" " God that was great!" "It's the greatest thing ever" "I look this way because I did Meth"… I wasn’t expecting this response, it always surprises me. Mainly I focus on how to ‘materialize’ my ideas and in the process, how to expand on them, and then I can think of an audience. I watch a lot of live music performances while I make my films. I think because I like to see people who open-up in front of an audience and their reaction, it’s all very emotional and physical. It’s so far from my room and the ‘paper people’. I guess I expect the same sense of high drama and excitement I feel when watching a powerful performance, from my own work.
- Could you please tell us something about the next project you will be
working on?
Triumph of the Wild is my new film, and it hasn’t really shown much,
mostly because it is not finished filming. The film covers time
roughly, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan/Iraq Wars. This
film is about the triumph of ‘The Wild’ in people. The animals in the
film are not ‘The Wild’. Animals can’t ‘win’ because they can’t
coordinate their ‘wills’ to do such a thing, if they have ‘wills’, in
other words, animals cannot ‘Triumph’. For the film, I was thinking
about how synonymous with our history is the history of nature,
America’s nostalgic idea of history and nature, and the impulse of
‘the hunt’, the resiliency of life, in the face of crisis. So I try to
make a story which falls apart on a kind of molecular level, where,
within the pictorially harmonious universe, wars are acted out and
violence abounds, but with nostalgic imagery. In the film I am using
puzzles I have collected for a year or so, and they are used to convey
my ideas and my interpretation of aspects of what it must be like to
have PTSD. I read somewhere that Roman soldiers would paint
silhouette figures on their shields and would spin them and crowds
would gather to watch the ‘impression’ of motion of the little
figures. I like to think of this image; the entertainer and the warrior.