2001 Sept. 11th, Cheap Thrills, Chronos

MH: The church ecstatics propel you out into the desert, where the film slows down to look, with very languorous camera holds and tilts. Did you have a particular style of camera stylo in mind? We slow down to look, really look, at the snakes and rocks and petroglyphs, and my favourite moment where you stop on the road and watch the rain on the windshield. These shots convey an equivalence of energy, perception and movement.

PM: Each place determined my aesthetic or camera response, I realized that only afterwards. Trying to respond not impose, environments dictated visual interpretations, still strained through my experience. In an ecstatic environment the camera moves a lot. When I was in the desert alone there is a much quieter meditative look into emptiness. If you're moving a camera around frenetically in the desert you won't see much, it's about fine details, you need slowness to be appreciated. The desert attracted me because what the past might have been, the future may be. The walls show thousands of years of sedimentary deposit and erosion, and fossils and native American traces are still there. I was in deserts in Utah and Nevada, and ventured to a site once used for nuclear testing, filled with radioactive warnings but wondered if I was risking my health to get an image of empty ground.

Las Vegas was interesting because it was constructed in the middle of the desert, a virtual city which refabricates marketable world sites (Venice, Egypt) as a backdrop to gambling, another way of finding your escape, meaning, epiphany, risking winning and losing. I shot a lot of gambling footage, and one person in particular who was paying his way through college by card counting poker. He always played with headphones running Nine Inch Nails so he wouldn't get distracted. The truest version of Gambling G-ds is eight hours long and would include these scenes, but because of agreements and money that allowed the film to be made, I had to leave out scenes that I love, but didn't fit into the three hour composition. I didn't want to shorten everything down to get it all in because I thought things were already too short. There's still a question of whether I should make an eight hour movie which would include more scenes and be more reflective of the actual journey.

MH: There's a quietly funny scene in Vegas where a red leather woman is strapped into an orgasmatron and you ask her about her favourite recipes.

PM: That scene was delicate to edit, because Dante is fairly outrageous and the situation quite sexist. Dante rang up a woman to model the sex chair and I wanted to disarm the situation by drawing out her humanity. Her favourite thing is talking to her parents and cooking lasagna, she's not just a sexual object and the disarming works to let viewers look deeper into the people of the situation.

Part of the journey of Gambling G-ds was reacting to things that came up, recording like a diary, the earlier research a subconscious tuning. The research gave me antennae, but it was never plotted, if encounters naturally came up in the process of exploration and it felt intuitively correct, I would go down that road. When I went to Las Vegas I knew the sociologist Kate Hausbeek, whose main study was the sex trade, and she led me to new people, like Dante, the man who makes the sexual chair. Ideas grew in assocations, the dust in the desert looks to the dynamiting of the Las Vegas hotel and the remains of a loved one. All narrate the idea of impermanence. We believe in the illusions of our construction but they become dust eventually.

For instance I was interested in the wife of Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist who bought land for water export which she opposed, wanting to set up a spiritual retreat instead. She said I should stay with a filmmaker who had worked a lot in Tibet, and he took me to a poker game where I met Jose, and that's who I eventually filmed. I had no idea he was keeping the bones of his wife in a scarf. He brought it to the table as I let him direct the scene, it unfolded the way he wanted. I can't put a schematic on it (first thought, best thought or pre-scripted), it's informed observation, not forced exposition. Its logic is mysterious, but the journey had an inner/outer logic I was sure would hold its own truth.

MH: The Switzerland section has an establishing shot sequence which contrasts the clean and the unclean. You say in voice-over that you are going back to the perfect world of your parents. What do you mean by that?

PM: Switzerland achieves a utopia of urban planning, fine education, beautiful landscapes and integral transportation systems, but at the same there is an underside which can't abide these rules, the heroin culture for instance. The opening sequence points towards the fact of decay, death and *beep* natural cycles that are pervasive no matter what the system.

Christof is a genetic scientist who discovers that we all share the same bacteria on a horizontal level, it's not inherited but shared at the same time, which suggests to him that we're all part of the same thing. His science mind is beginning to look at things in ways similar to Roger, their conclusions and aims are similar, but their experiences are very different.

I had always been interested in the heroin scene in Switzerland and met Roger Greminger and Christine while editing. When I was seventeen I went to school in Switzerland for a year and was compelled to stick my thumb out on the road and see where I wound up. Someone took me to an old monastery which had become a rehab centre for heroin addicts. I connected with the priest who ran it, took a lot of photographs, then went back to Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto to learn filmmaking. I attended two years, then decided to take a year off and try to create a project where they would invent and make a film, which didn't work out because they weren't very motivated and there wasn't money. But there was a lot of other fruit, like the film Scissere, which refers to Bruno Scissere who lived there. I'd been interested in what draws people to heroin, what kind of people they are. Heroin is the darkest, most taboo drug, people consider heroin users *beep* criminals, but my experience was that they were some of the most sensitive and compassionate people I'd encountered. What desire is heroin fulfilling? In Switzerland it's easy to get on the streets, and for a time Yugoslavia sold drugs to buy arms for the war, and these arms (in part), were made by Swiss companies down the road from needle park. This seemed to fit the web I was following for Gambling G-ds. When I met Roger and Christine, I was struck by their love for each other, and by their compassion and warmth despite the fact they were deep into this addiction and Roger was on his last legs in a wheelchair with a spinal infection and she was taking care of him. There was a beautiful love despite the fact that they were really bad for each other.

We had a sit down conversation with the camera rolling, which I'd done with a number of people, it was talk and information oriented, and then I asked Roger if there was something he'd like to show me about his life, about Zurich, and he took me to a clothing depot where he used to sleep. There was no great strategy behind that. In all the interviews I had a core of ideas, but what tended to happen was a process of discovery led us towards the places where they found meaning. Often I would spend a day or two with these people talking until it went into a realm more pertinent to the film. I had to say a lot about myself, they wanted to know who I was and feel a level of trust before they would talk about what was personal and important to them. I would often pause for a long time. When you ask a number of questions the interview form feels familiar, then it would arrive at a point where I would pause for an uncomfortably long time, and that's usually where it got interesting. They would start to talk, and the real preoccupations of the person would come out in a voluntary way. There were a set of questions I asked at the end of each interview, a simple list of questions you could answer yes or no or elaborate. They became a mantra throughout the process, though few ended up in the film. One of the installation works I did included a collection of these questions, but I didn't work to that schematic in editing.

The film's three hours may seem a long time, but many-layered conversations are shrunk to a few essential matters, people are left only a few minutes to talk. In almost every case, the person interviewed had far more to say in the assembly stage of the film. With Roger and Christine, the edit focussed on why they were attracted to heroin. Roger said he might have meditated for many years and arrived at the same place. They were quitting at that point, talking about addiction as if it was the past, but it was a very recent past. As it turned out, they both managed to quit, Roger's had a couple of lapses but it's essentially gone. For Roger it had been an experience of peace that was very comforting and he'd been doing it for twenty years. I asked Christine if it was an answer for something she were searching for. She said no, it stopped the need to search. They both insisted heroin was a temporary fix which pulls you into a way of life making you dependent. You need money and then the fix is only taking your peace away. Every day is captured by getting this drug inside you, it's a horror. But at the same time she saw aspects of herself before addiction she didn't like and didn't want to return to. Going through this extreme experience taught her a lot about herself, and she was fortunate enough to pull out of it and use what she learned to continue. I was concerned that they were comfortable in their presentation so I showed them different stages of the editing for their feedback, secretly hoping that having announced their quitting in public would provide an incentive. I don't know how much the film influenced them in the end, but I think it may have helped.

It's always difficult to watch yourself on film, knowing a few sentences represent your entire experience, you understand the innuendo of every muscle twitch and eye flutter. It's like listening to your voice on tape, it's unbearable at first, there's always a process of becoming familiar with looking at yourself. My task was to put this drug story into the context of their personalities, so it was no longer “drug addicts talk about heroin” but this is Roger and Christine, and they took heroin. I tried to do that with everyone.

MH: Christine says: "Well it's so..." and then later, “Somehow it's so...” and those are her last words, she never manages to finish the sentence. In a normal documentary these unfinished thoughts and long pauses would never be shown. Why did you leave them in?

PM: For me, that's one of the most beautiful moments in the film, it points to dimensions of mystery we can't find the words for. After Christine you hear the rain and see something very banal, a circling pan out of a window again and again, and that's something I found more and more beautiful during the film's making, looking at everyday things that had no obvious sensation or meaning yet feeling the profundity of being there.

MH: Can you tell me about the title?

PM: I'd been researching different kinds of peak experiences, addictions and escapes, and drew a large page of identifiers. I put words together and came up with gambling, G-ds and LSD. The title stuck until it was finished, though I tried to abandon it, but its essence was always present. The film has an LSD logic in terms of time and observation.

MH: It's called a trip.

PM: Albert Hoffman invented LSD in Switzerland, but in the film he ended up talking about childhood. His discovery remained a suggestion as opposed to an explored subject. The sense of wonder he describes in childhood is revived by the drug which he feels is an important tool for the expansion of consciousness. He felt Leary was overly flamboyant and overly simplified, and the resultant publicity made further medical research impossible. Before he found LSD he researched the colour of flowers and their function. He approached chemistry in a wondrous and artistic way, wanting to understanded how nature works, he's made a couple of books which don't seem to come from a scientist but a mystic. I finally met him at the premiere screening in Nyon. Sitting beside him was very interesting because he emoted a lot, he moaned when he enjoyed passages. He thought of LSD as a reminder or triggering or revisit of childhood states, there is something familiar about it, but it's an unconscious visit by something forgotten.

MH: Why is it forgotten?

PM: We use our brains to structure events, to analyze and define, in other words, to cut. We're forever processing thoughts, preoccupied with getting things done and taking little time to appreciate the way clouds are floating overhead or listen to a piece of music profoundly. We forget we can do that. Different belief structures and systems can engage people in similar processes of focussing.

MH: How is stillness the same as being at the all night raves you show in the film?

PM: The ecstatic qualities are high adrenaline, exalted epiphanies, whereas meditative, inward peace involves slowing things down, taking distractions away, yet they bring you into a state and focus that is also epiphanic. One is active and requires taking something, drugs, dancing or worship, it's going to blow me out the top of a volcano. It adheres to triggers. Religion is similar to drugs, a belief structure can be a substance as well, similar to sports or dancing which provide structures that take you into an altered state socially. The other way requires putting it all away and finding clarity within. Silence

MH: The Swiss scientist speaks about death on a molecular level, as an exchange of energy. But he also says that he will live on in his children. Is your filmmaking a way of cheating death, of holding onto a present that is always slipping away? For someone so concerned about the present, you spend a lot of time condemned to pictures made some time ago, it's been seven years between films and a lot of that time was in the edit room.

PM: Film is a paradox, using a medium to see into the present which immediately becomes a recording of the past for future viewers. I want to create a cinema experience which includes a self-reflection in the audience which isn't about holding onto my journey, but brings you into the present. That presentness is a state that you can carry with you when you leave the theatre.

It's a challenge to keep that improvisational energy while editing, when it's natural for your mind to create compositional structures. How do you clear the mind and play your instrument? Editing often induces trance, you go further in, then step out and ask what does this mean? This was different than The Top of His Head or Picture of Light which had more thematic unfoldings. Gambling G-ds works much more by association, that's why I can still watch it, it doesn't add up neatly.

There was a lot of material and we didn't know how long the film was allowed to be. Reviewing, logging and assembling the material took a year. We tried not to editorialize, and kept chronologies intact. The logistics of editing in Switzerland took a lot of time, and we didn't have enough money to finish an hour and a half film, though we had an assembly of fifty five hours. Then we worked on a five hour cut to show the television people and distributors to allow us to get enough money to finish the film. That was the second year. Then we began to cut towards a three hour cinema film.

It begins with proposal writing. With Gambling G-ds I was very honest about describing the film as an exploratory process, and while I didn't know what would be in the finished film, I knew the themes, and provided possible scenarios. People trusted me based on my previous work, especially Picture of Light which had a similar approach but a much narrower subject. The managing and producing side was so overwhelming that I don't know if I would ever do it again. Essentially you're setting up a platform to work intuitively, but building the platform takes up ninety percent of your energy and requires at every turn an explanation of why you're doing it and what would it be in the end. It's exhausting not falling into the trap of giving a false proposition. The five hour demo required them to drive a long way to our edit room in the countryside and they were riveted. They said OK on the spot and I'd never had that happen before. Luckily it won prizes, ARTE was the main TV participant, and that is one of their rewards. If the film gets notoriety, that encourages them to work that way again.

One of my interests is to bring artistic processes and thematics, more often found in experimental film to a wider audience, and you need industrial structures to get your film shown. I'm still not sure it's the right way. In the end you lose power over the work and it becomes part of the machine, but we're opening in many theatres and there's a DVD that's widely available, and that wouldn't have happened any other way.

MH: How did you know the film was over?

PM: We had edited for so long, knowing there were a number of configurations which would work. I went out for a walk on September 10, reviewing the whole experience, flashing through the years and components, and remembering John Paul Young at the bridge at the beginning of the film. What you don't see in the film was his challenge that I ask G-d to make an appearance. When I told him I couldn't think in those terms, he said you have to pray. This kind of filmmaking is my prayer, but how do I know it's finished? I felt I needed a sign, and the next day was the infamous September 11. I was scanning through the film on the Avid, getting an overview, looking for spots I might want to change or react to, and stopped on a rooftop scene in Bombay. A Muslim man prays and then the camera tilts up to the sky where an airplane flies into the distance. That's the last shot I touched. Then I put all the different timelines together on the Avid, and the moment I was finished the phone rang and a friend of mine said, "You won't believe what just happened in New York City." We began sticking wires into the TV to get a signal and finally saw a jet going into the World Trade Centre. I watched the film later that night through the filter of that news, seeing traces and codes and anticipations of that event. Belief systems and the conflicts they provoke, prevalent images of airplane travel and imploding buildings, civilization at a boiling point where something has to break. That was a sign. The timing was uncanny.