Lars von Trier’s latest film Antichrist has already generated a vast amount of controversy, and it is so bewildering on so many levels that two of our writers had to take on the task of reviewing it. Virginie Sélavy interviewed the director over the phone and was impressed by his openness, his good-natured efforts to give thoughtful answers to her questions, and yes, his sense of humour.

Virginie Sélavy:You’ve described Antichrist as ‘the most important film of your entire career’. Why is that?

Lars von Trier: There are several reasons. First it was a tool to get out of the depression that I had while I was writing it, so it was a kind of life saver in that sense. Then it links back to some of the themes and images from when I first started making films.

VS: You have said before that the film is based on material from your youth, why did you decide to go back to your past?

LVT: It’s unanswerable. I can’t tell you why I choose stuff, it’s really something I don’t analyse. The only thing I can say is that a film has to demand to be made, I don’t have a plan of what films I’m going to make. The only thing that I know now is that I’m not too crazy about doing things again that I’ve been into before.

VS: What sort of material from your youth did you use for the film? Was it specific ideas or images?

LVT: Yes, you could say that. But also it was this kind of immature Strindbergian idea about women coming out of the Earth to consume you. I have this very perverted relationship to Strindberg. I love him very much, but maybe that’s because I also had a lot of problems with women (laughs), and I thought that Strindberg was also actually a very funny man. So maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’m even more immature now than I was… I just felt like looking back at some of the stuff. My answers are not so good, I’m sorry. I’m trying!

VS: Do you feel there is a sense of humour in Antichrist?

LVT: Well, I know that there is a sense of humour, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can see this film as humoristic. I would say that the way I work is based on humour, because my life is full of humour, but sometimes it comes out as very melodramatic, very serious, but I think the source for the whole thing is the same.

VS: Antichist starts as a film that is ostensibly about grief, but in fact it turns out to be more about fear, and confronting your fears, is that fair to say?

LVT: That’s fair to say, yes.

VS: Was it about you confronting your own fears too?

LVT: Yes. The cognitive therapy that takes place in the film is a form of therapy that I have used for some time, and it has to do with confronting your fears. I would say that especially the part of the film that has to do with therapy is humoristic because people who know about this form of therapy would know that he (Willem Dafoe’s character) is more than a fool.

VS: Why is that?

LVT: He’s doing all the wrong things.

VS: Because he’s too controlling?

LVT: Because he’s just not a very good therapist.

VS: Do you feel he brings about his wife’s violent reaction? Is he partly responsible for what happens at the end?

LVT: Oh yes. One of the things that got me thinking during therapy is that they say that fear is only thoughts, and nothing will happen because thoughts will never be real. And my thesis, or joke, in this film, is that they really do become real.

VS: You said in a previous interview that ‘female sexuality is frightening’. Is that the kind of fear that you personally confronted through the film?

LVT:Yeah, but if it was only that, I think I could cope (laughs). I think it’s more complicated. Basically you’re afraid of chaos, and lack of control and death, that’s the basis of everything.

VS: So why did you say that?

LVT: I think female sexuality is frightening even to the female.

VS: (pause)

LVT: (laughs) I’m not talking about you!

VS: Mmmh, yes, I don’t think I’m frightened! (laughs)

LVT: But as a little boy, when you find out that your penis can become erect, that’s extremely frightening. I’m sure there must be some parallel thing for girls. I’m talking about a female sexuality that doesn’t come out in sexuality itself but comes out in a lot of other forms. But yeah, maybe I’m wrong… I’m frightened of almost everything in life, so…

VS: There seems to be the idea in the film that evil comes from women’s sexuality…

LVT: I think that’s a little excessive… No, I don’t think so. I think that sexuality is the part of human beings that is closest to nature. And nature is dangerous somehow, yes, if you put nature against civilisation, nature is definitely a threat.

VS: And you feel that women are closer to nature than men?

LVT: (laughs) You know, the reason I make films is so that I don’t have to answer questions like that! Yes, maybe somehow I feel that, but not in a negative way.

VS: The vision of nature in the film is very dark, it’s full of death. Is that how you feel about nature, that nature is chaos and death?

LVT: No, the whole thing came from an experiment that was done a long time ago. People were asked to pick their favourite spot in the whole world, where they would not be afraid at all, and the response was a lake in the forest, with deer and all that – I’m sure you have the same kind of romantic picture in England – and that was the place where everybody would like to go and relax. And then I saw a film about the original forest of Europe, and what is characteristic about this very romantic forest, is that it’s where the maximum of pain and suffering and struggle occurs, because a lot of species want to live in this place and they all fight and die all the time. So I just found it very interesting that the place that we would all find to be extremely calming is actually the place where there’s the most struggle and pain going on.

VS: In the film, the characters talk about nature as ‘Satan’s Church’.

LVT: Yes, at a certain point, the characters start talking without my interference.

VS: You mean that wasn’t in the script, it was improvised?

LVT: No, it was in the script, but when you write a script, suddenly things like that come out, and you keep them there. But it’s also connected to the idea that if a god had planned to create a place like this where everyone is longing for life and 99% of everything is dying, then it couldn’t be a god. I thought it was such a satanic idea, the whole nature thing. And also that it’s a god that invents human beings and then tells them that they’re going to die, it’s not a very nice god.

VS: Is that where the title comes from?

LVT: Yes.

VS: You link this idea of this satanic nature to witches and witch-hunts. How do you see the connection? Why did you put the witches at the centre of the film?

LVT: The whole film also has to do with the sexes. And again, to call on Strindberg, there is this eternal fight between the sexes and I thought it was interesting that it has to do with sexuality. I know it’s not a very modern idea but it always fascinated me when I was younger. I don’t believe in witches. I think that’s quite important to say. And I don’t believe that women are more evil than men or anything like that (laughs). But I think that the concepts are interesting. And somehow it’s not politically correct but I think that it’s interesting now and then not to be. The film had to make a turn that went from nature, as in out in the woods, to the nature of men, and we had to turn to some mythology about the evil of women, and we found it in the traditional, primitive view of witches.

VS: There are elements in the film that seem to come from horror. Do you see Antichrist as a horror film?

LVT: No, I would say that I made a film called Dancer in the Dark, and that was maybe not a musical, and it’s the same thing here. I aim for a genre but I will never hit it spot on. It’s on purpose because I try to make this film mine in a way that will make it not a genre film.

VS: Is that your attitude to genre in general?

LVT: I’m really fascinated by it and the good thing about horror films is that they actually allow you to use a lot of strange images that a more naturalistic film wouldn’t allow.

VS: How do you feel about the reactions that the film got in Cannes?

LVT: I only heard about them. If you asked me how a film should be received, I would definitely love that there should be some booing and some applause.

VS: Have you read some of the criticism directed at you?

LVT: It was quite interesting that there was some criticism directed at me because at Cannes, which is a film festival, there should be criticism of the film, but towards me, I think it’s a little bit too much.

VS: Do you feel the criticism got a bit too personal?

LVT: Oh yes, very, from some journalists I got things like ‘justify yourself’, stuff like that. I react against that, of course. I don’t need to justify myself, I just show you a film, and if you don’t like it, it’s fine.

VS: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe give fantastic performances. How did it go with them?

LVT: It went extremely well. They were so nice, and so dedicated to the film. I was in a very poor mental state and I had to have all the collaboration that I could get, and I really got it. There was a lot of technical stuff that I couldn’t really take care of very well because of this depression, but the actors really helped me. And it’s very important for me to have actors who will help and not fight me, because then I can’t really work.

VS: They seemed to understand what you were trying to do with the film.

LVT: Yes, and I’m very happy about the prize that Charlotte got, she really deserves it. And I don’t know if they understood it more than I did (laughs).

VS: It must have been a very difficult role for her because she exposes herself so much, and I don’t mean just physically.

LVT: I agree. But I didn’t experience any problems whatsoever, on the contrary. For example we were talking about the speed of the masturbation in the scene in the forest and I said, ‘much faster’, just being stupid. And she did, and afterwards she said, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it faster because physically it was not possible’ (laughs). I thought that was very good. That’s the kind of actor you want!

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Read our double review of Antichrist here.

After her challenging, mysterious last feature The Intruder (2004) and a short foray into documentary with Vers Mathilde (2005), Claire Denis returns with a softly stirring tale of family ties that has its origins in her own childhood memories. 35 Shots of Rum explores the shifting relationship between Lionel (Denis regular Alex Descas), a Parisian train conductor, and his adoring daughter Joséphine (Mari Diop), who he has been raising alone. Although Joséphine is already a student and old enough to leave home, they still live together in a grey, suburban apartment building, next to two neighbours who have become friends (and silent admirers) over the years. Noticeably linear in its narrative, delicate and graceful, 35 Shots of Rum may seem at odds with Denis’s bolder, edgier previous works such as Beau Travail (1999) and Trouble Every Day (2002). Yet, the tone may be milder, but it is sharply observed, beautifully constructed and eccentric enough to avoid sentimentality. Sophie Moran talked to the director on the occasion of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where 35 Shots of Rum had its UK premiere.

Sophie Moran: Your new film feels much quieter and seems to be your most personal work so far…

Claire Denis: Yes, maybe. Actually, it is inspired by the story of my mother and my grandfather. He came to France from Brazil, and he got married to a French nurse. But she died when my mother was still a baby, so my grandfather raised her on his own. It’s a story I knew and kept thinking about since I was a kid. But in a way, it’s a story belonging to my mother that she never shared with us.

SM: How did you approach these personal memories and develop them into your film?

CD:Once I made the decision to do the film, it was not very difficult, because when we were living in Africa, my mother would receive a letter per day from my grandfather written on this very fine, thin Airmail paper, and she would reply to him every day. This way they shared every detail of life even at this distance, and these letters still exist. But my mother also told us so many stories about her childhood. She felt free not having a mother, and she felt like she was never obliged to do things little girls are obliged to do… and we envied her for this. We thought she had a marvellous life. When my grandfather died, I was only 12 years old myself, but I realised my mother was still his girl, not a little girl, but his girl. She did not belong to my father or to us – she was his. Of course, my grandfather was always very distanced in any sort of physical expression of love, but their relationship was so deep. My mother is 85 years old now and my father is also still alive, but there is always this picture of my grandfather near her table and I know, even if the picture is very small, it is there. In a way, they lived the life of a couple for 20 years.

SM: In your film it seems that there is a certain ambiguity in the relationship between father and daughter as it is so close and intense.

CD: Do you think? Not for me… it’s not an ambiguity. In the beginning for example, I introduce the characters, not telling the audience what their link is, but it’s not ambiguous to me. When I started thinking about this first scene, it was important for me to describe people who have been together for a long time, therefore with a ritual, with habits. And in the end when the script was finished I said to Jean-Pol (Fargeau), my co-writer, knowing that Alex (Descas) was going to be the father, I said ‘it’s strange, but they are really like a couple’, and that’s why at the end of this scene she says, ‘Merci papa’. But it’s normal, I guess… and Alex and Mati have a way to embrace and to touch that is not ambiguous.

SM: The rice cooker Joséphine gets for herself and also from her father that evening seems to have its own very special meaning in this setting?

CD: It is two things, on the one hand it is there to really qualify my homage to Ozu, because he made a film called Late Spring that tells the same story, and it’s a film I like a lot. And on the other hand, in a way it was a sign to say that she’s not ready to go, she still thinks that they can improve the apartment. She doesn’t think it’s time to move.

SM: The scene in the bar, when the four main characters – father, daughter and the two neighbours – are stuck because their car broke down and they all dance together to ‘Nightshift’ by the Commodores, this scene seems to be the emotional heart of the film, but it also signifies a turning point.

CD: Yeah, I mean the father makes that decision, when he is dancing with his daughter. He holds her in his arms like a father, not like a lover, and then when Noé comes in it suddenly changes, things are changing. The father organised it in a way, but he is also suffering at the same time. And when he’s dancing with the woman from the bar, he’s also doing that to remind Gabrielle and his daughter that he’s a man and he has sacrificed a lot of things for her, and he is taking his freedom. He also needs that move.

SM: Do you see this as the central motif in the film, the wish to keep things as they are and the fear that comes with it that things might change too much, too fast?

CD: Definitely, that’s also why I chose the train-driving job, because I thought in a train, time is passing, everything is constantly changing, changing, changing… And I think deeply in myself I feel how much I would like everything to stay still sometimes and not to change.

SM: Trouble Every Day was probably your most extreme film. Did you feel it was a turning point? Did you want to do something very different after that film?

CD: Actually no, I think it was a weird thing that happened. A few years before I made a short film in New York with Vincent Gallo, and James Schamus, the American producer, was there and he asked me, ‘Why don’t you make a gore movie?’, and I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m not able to do that’, but he said ‘You should try’. And it was like that sort of thing that I had in mind all the time and somehow it became Trouble Every Day. Maybe if I’m honest I’m not able to joke about gore, and if I try that it’s going to be really painful. In a way I felt I had to make that film, it was very important for me.

SM: Josephine is studying economics and political science and we once see her in class; there’s also a scene where she gets caught in a student protest because they are about to close the faculty for anthropology at the university where she studies. Both scenes stand out in the otherwise very intimate atmosphere of the film. Why was it so important for you to include these scenes in the film?

CD: I knew it would be a little bit different, but I thought if she is studying in that particular university where they actually really closed anthropology because they thought that for young people from the estates it is better to learn a good job and not to study anthropology, then it matters. It’s superfluous when you’re white and in a good university but in Saint-Denis it’s a question you can raise every day, because it’s true that people are not treated so well there.

SM: Is the ethnicity of the characters important to the film?

CD: I think it was important to see that, to be black in this university doesn’t mean that you’re only there to learn so you get a good job, you also want to understand. So many times I was told ‘Oh, but this is gone, the debt’ and ‘Frantz Fanon is out of fashion’ and so on, and I said, ‘Fine, I don’t care’. For me it was still very important. And at that time nobody knew that Barack Obama was going to be elected and then, last year, when I had finished the film, I was invited to Haward and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] during the election and every student was quoting Frantz Fanon, it was so much fun. When it comes to humiliation, I think we always forget that we – white people – are often still not very serious with these kinds of questions. I kept the speech that Obama gave before the election because he speaks so well about racism and humiliation.

SM: You’re currently about to finish your new film called White Material, starring Isabelle Huppert…

CD: Yes, I hope it’s going to be finished for Toronto. But please don’t make me say something about it. I don’t like to talk about things that are not yet completed… you’ll see.

Interview by Sophie Moran

The BFI have recently released the Magick Lantern Cycle, a collection of 10 short films by the legendary Kenneth Anger. The two-disc box-set includes his explosive debut, the violent gay fantasy Fireworks (1947), the beautiful water dream Eaux d’Artifice (1953), the fetishistic hymn to the American biker Scorpio Rising (1964), the Aleister Crowley-inspired Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and the powerful, still dangerous evocation of counterculture through a Satanic ritual Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969). Kenneth Anger told Electric Sheep, Flux and The Quietus about using a Lutheran Sunday School film in Scorpio Rising, making a film about his neighbour Elliott Smith’s suicide and how the Soviet Union built a 3D screen made up of a million piano wires.

Electric Sheep: Your films seem to have very strong elemental motifs, in particular fire and water, and they seem to define contrasting sides of your work. Fireworks, Scorpio Rising and Lucifer Rising use fire imagery and are full of dark energy while works like Eaux d’Artifice and Rabbit’s Moon are more pensive, fluid poetic works that belong to the watery element. Do you see your work in terms of this opposition?

Kenneth Anger: I’ve got to have contrast, so I don’t think I have two conflicting things in my psyche, it’s just that the subjects I choose have those elements.

ES: Was there anything specific that influenced the making of the fire films or the water films?

KA: Eaux d’Artifice was made in the 50s, and the amazing thing is that I got permission from the Italian Department of Antiquities to film in the Villa d’Este gardens, which is about 30 miles outside of Rome. Of course they said, don’t break any statues or anything (laughs), which we didn’t. But I don’t know if they would grant that today. The Tivoli gardens have always been a tourist destination, and as I was filming I had the right to block off certain parts for half an hour. And usually it worked out fine, but a couple of times the American Express bus would come along and they would say, ‘Let us in, let us in, we’re going to be late to see something else!’ I just ignored them until I got my shot. It’s very tricky filming with the sunlight, and the reason why the Tivoli gardens were so wonderful was that it’s full of big cypress trees, which create wonderful dark shadows, so you have shafts of lights which are almost like theatrical spotlights coming down. I had to plan it all ahead according to the time of day. It’s all day for night, shot with red filters on panchromatic stock. It’s the only film of mine which has been chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation. I don’t know what that means (laughs), they haven’t given me any money to actually do the preservation. They do have a copy of it though.

ES: Is it true that you found the dwarf lady in Eaux d’Artifice through Fellini?

KA: Yes, Fellini suggested her, I’d met him socially in Rome. I wanted to change the perspective, the scale of the film. She was a genuine midget, like a young child, only she wasn’t a child. And she was wonderfully cooperative.

ES: Why did you want that change of scale?

KA: I don’t know if you’re familiar with a famous etcher, an artist named Piranesi who did wonderful etchings of the ruins of Rome and the Tivoli gardens and several other things as they were in the 18th century. But he changed the perspective on everything. For instance, he has a coach and chair and carriages in front of the ruins of the Coliseum, but the horses are the size of dogs, so everything seems much more grand. It’s grand enough as it is, but even more so when you reduce the human scale. He did the same with the Tivoli Gardens, using small figures to expand it in a dream-like way, so I tried to capture that by using as reference a small figure. You can see when she comes down the stairs that her head is actually at the level where an adult hand should be, holding on to the balustrade, so it just changes the scale and it creates a kind of dream-like feeling.

The Quietus: I think you said Fireworks came from a dream. Do you often draw on dreams that you’ve had for your imagery?

KA: I can’t because they’d be too expensive (laughs). Oddly enough, my dreams very, very rarely have any speech, they’re mostly just visuals, so in that way they’re like my films.

ES: Is that why you have no dialogue in your films and you just use music?

KA: It started out of necessity because my early films were made with the family’s home movie camera, which was a wind-up 16mm camera called a CineKodak that held 100 feet, and one shot would last for half a minute if you wanted to push it that far. But most of my shots were shorter than that anyway. So the challenge was to make films with silent images and not use speech. Then I decided I liked it as a technique, so most of my films are that way. I have made a film with the musician Elliott Smith. He was a friend of mine who committed suicide in October 2003 and I was able to film him before that happened, so I put together a little film, a tribute to him called Elliott’s Suicide. That’s one of my recent films.

The Quietus: How did you know him? Did you live next to him?

KA: Yes, we lived in the district of LA called Silverlake and we were neighbours. He used to play in a club, a little neighbourhood thing where there would be about 20 people, just for fun. He had a serious drug problem, then he had a fight with his girlfriend. She locked herself in the bathroom, which is a very bad thing for any girl to do in a quarrel, the symbolism is all wrong (laughs). He went in the kitchen, opened the kitchen drawer, pulled out a steak knife and stabbed himself in the heart, which is really overdoing it. He was only 34, so we will never know what he could have produced, but he wrote some wonderful songs. There’s one particular song that I used full-length in my film called ‘Rose Parade’, which goes ‘follow me down to the Rose Parade’. That’s the famous parade in Pasadena every New Year’s. He was from New York, but when he settled in California he used to go every year to the Rose Parade after being up all night and stoned. And so he would see it through that filter, I believe heroin – I never went with him so I don’t know what he was on. But I understood that he used to enjoy watching it in that state. Anyway, I went back and filmed segments of the actual parade and I included them in the film.

ES: Many of your films have a great soundtrack. How did you choose the music for Scorpio Rising?

KA: They were the pop songs on the radio that year, 63. I knew these bikers, they weren’t like Hell’s Angels or anything like that, but they were a club, mostly Italian Americans living in Brooklyn, and they would have the radio playing as they were working on their cars or motorcycles. So certain songs I decided would make a good comment on the film. I had to clear all the rights. The budget was $8000 for a half-hour film, and clearing the music rights doubled it to $16000. The film was blown up to 35mm and shown all around the country with a couple of other films, so reluctantly I had to pay for the rights to the music even though I happened to think there’s something called fair use for artists; they should be able to occasionally dip into pop music, particularly things that made a fortune in their usual way. I recently used the music of The Police, ‘Every Breath You Take’. I titled my film I’ll Be Watching You, and it’s a tribute to my late friend Michael Powell and his 1960 film Peeping Tom, because it’s also about voyeurism. It’s also about the paranoia of our time, with surveillance cameras everywhere, certainly here in London, and I think most big cities have them now, as if anyone would be anxious to see a couple of sweethearts kissing or something (laughs), but it’s part of the 21st century.

ES: Do you feel your films always reflect the times that you live in? For instance, Scorpio Rising, which you famously described as a ‘death mirror held to American culture’ and Invocation of my Demon Brother, which is very reflective of 1969, the year in which it was made.

KA: I hope so. I’m just part of the zeitgeist and the mood of that time. It’s something I accept. I deliberately insert things that are reflective, like personalities – Marianne Faithfull, or a flash of Mick Jagger, when he held the tribute for Brian Jones (in Hyde Park in 1969). I attended that.

Flux: Did you feel you were being particularly brave at the time when you included homoerotic content in films like Scorpio Rising or Fireworks, or did you think that it was just something necessary?

KA: I just made the films the way I thought they had to be. There are some flashes of sensitive material in Scorpio Rising, but they’re so brief that you blink and you miss them, they’re three frames long. They’re not subliminal because subliminal means something you absolutely can’t see. The shortest thing you can do in a film is one frame, which is 1/24th of a second, which is actually quite slow and you can identify what it is.

ES: What was the reaction at the time to the homosexual imagery in these films?

KA: Fireworks was shown in 1947 at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, which is a small, legitimate theatre where Charles Laughton was performing in Brecht’s Galileo at the time. There was a midnight screening after the play and I had a good reaction, no police raid or anything. That’s where I met Dr Kinsey, who was there doing interviews for his sex research volume on the human male. He offered to buy a print, the first print I sold to the Kinsey Institute at Bloomington, Indiana, and they still have it. It’s in good condition, they don’t rent it out that often (laughs). And other people I met at the screening were James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, and Robert Florey, another famous director of interesting horror films, so it was a good experience. And then it was shown in San Francisco at the Museum of Art, without any trouble. It wasn’t until I had an early showing in London that an Indian woman wearing a sari got up and said, ‘that film should be burned’ and stormed out, but that was the only bad screening. Just a ripple effect.

ES: Did you have any problems with the censors in America?

KA: Well, Scorpio Rising was denounced – this is ironic – it was denounced at its first screening. It was running at a movie house for art films called The Cinema for a week, and some members of the Nazi Party came and they thought I was insulting their flag, which is quite true, even though you don’t see much of it. So they phoned up the vice squad in LA anonymously and denounced it as porn or as obscene. The way it was in those days, this is 64, the police had to investigate if they had a complaint. They went there and without even watching the film they just seized it, and the poor manager of the theatre got arrested and had to be bailed out, so it was a bit of a fuss. But then it went to the California Supreme Court and a famous ruling came down about it, which applied to every film. It said, it has ‘redeeming social merits’, so it is acceptable. Of course this label has been used for all kinds of things since.

ES: Did you have any problems with Christians because of the parallels you establish between the bikers and Jesus?

KA: I used clips from a Lutheran Sunday School film called The Last Journey to Jerusalem, which was delivered to me by mistake and left on my doorstep when I was cutting Scorpio Rising. And I just kept it and then I cut it into my film, because I thought it was serendipity, a gift from the holy powers, whatever you want to call them, not necessarily the gods, but maybe a prankster. I saw the parallels between the leaders and the followers and cut a little bit of it in, and after the film was shown all around the country I got a letter from the Lutherans, saying, are you actually using our Sunday School film, it looks awfully familiar. And I said, yes, but it’s called a fair use, and I said, you should be ashamed showing such clichés to children because to show a simpering Jesus is not really helpful. Christianity has become so sanitised. I discussed this with Martin Scorsese, who did an interesting film, The Last Temptation of Christ. There was a group of nuns in LA, the hip nuns as they were called. They got a copy of Scorpio Rising and they ran it. They said, ‘oh we think it’s very religious’ (laughs). They said thank you, I said, well thank you (laughs).

The Quietus: I’m interested in your view on how society is much more polarised now. You would probably get more criticism now, people seem much quicker to jump onto something and say, this is offensive to me personally.

KA: I’ve never censored any of my own work, it’s all part of a texture. You’ve probably heard of John Waters. He wrote a book called Shock Value. In his early films, like Pink Flamingos, with Divine, he deliberately put in shock. But I’ve never done that. He’s had a rather surprising commercial success, turning his scenarios into musicals (laughs). And his kind of offbeat sense of humour seems to appeal.

Flux: So there’s no plan for Scorpio Rising the musical?

KA: No, although back in the days I got an offer from a small-time producer in Hollywood, because the title became famous and it was written about in Newsweek Magazine and Time Magazine and so forth. So he said, you’ve got a good title, why don’t we remake it in 35mm feature length, only put in a romance, a boy-girl story (laughs). And I said, well that wouldn’t be Scorpio Rising, I’m sorry (laughs). It might have turned out like something like Easy Rider, I don’t know. But at the time I said thanks, but no thanks.

ES: What were your feelings when you saw Easy Rider? Did you feel that they had been influenced by your film?

KA: Well, I know they saw my film, and Dennis Hopper is a friend of mine, I’ve been friends with him and his circle, just casually, for years. The fact that they would pick up on pop songs for the soundtrack, that’s just logical, particularly if you’re a low-budget film, because it’s cheaper to clear the rights.

ES: In a 1951 essay you published in Cahiers du cinéma, which is included in the DVD booklet, you discuss the fact that film is an imperfect medium. Do you feel that digital technology makes it less imperfect?

KA: Oh, the problem is never solved. I’m releasing my films on DVD now, but DVD is not forever and possibly in 20 years they’ll be unplayable. Maybe some new thing will come along, maybe Blu-ray is the answer, I’m not sure whether you’ll have something that is more permanent. But I prefer to think you could sort of rest with the idea of something fairly consistent surviving in a good state. But it is an impermanent medium – if you paint watercolours, you don’t hang them where the sun will reach them and bleach out the colours – it’s the same kind of thing. But I’m still fascinated with moving images and I’m happy that I’ve been able to do as much work as I have. Now I’m working on digital and I like it, it’s simple and I do my coding on final console, which once you’ve mastered it, is easier than doing splices, waiting to dry, even though that has a certain contemplative quality.

Flux: Is there anything that particularly interests you in contemporary cinema?

KA: I like seeing action films that use CGI, just because it’s something that I will never be able to afford, to see what people can do, and I can say, well I can get the same effect doing this and that. But now that they have all these tools everything has become more literal. I’m fascinated by 3D but I doubt I will ever make anything in 3D, because someone would have to loan me a camera and everything. I’m waiting for 3D without glasses. It’s been here already for a short while. The Soviet Union had a 3D screen made up of a million piano wires in the 30s. It was perfect for a totalitarian regime because the only way you saw the illusion was if you sat absolutely rock solid and stared straight ahead. If you moved your head this way or that way the whole thing disintegrated (laughs), which would have been kind of interesting in itself. There were layers and layers of silver piano wires, and the screen weighed 20 tons, so it was built only once. But those damn glasses… there’s something about them that is gimmicky, and you can’t forget about them. And it’s better that the person watching anything, play or film, forget about themselves, physically.