An Interview with Kenneth Anger
by Carl Russo
The story of Kenneth Anger’s life sounds much like the celebrity dish he published in his bestselling book Hollywood Babylon (1975), and is just as difficult to swallow whole. From his scandalous experimental movies of the 1940s-80s, to his associations with the satanic underground, the septuagenarian seems to invite speculation.
His notorious reputation was punched up by journalist Bill Landis’ Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (1995). The book explodes with tales of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, magick and murder, and much is written about Anger’s purported vindictiveness.
Anger denounced the book as a pack of lies and put a curse on Landis’ ass.
In November of 2000, Anger returned to his old haunt, San Francisco, to receive a tribute and cash award at the Art Institute’s Cinematheque--presented by the Film Arts Foundation. I met with him when others wouldn’t. A reporter from a local gay newspaper was too intimidated to cover the story, and a staffer from the San Francisco Chronicle "forgot" to get back to the publicist.
We chatted in the lobby of the Cartwright Hotel near Union Square. Anger was gracious and in good spirits. He apologized for being late and, at the hour’s end, ran back up to his room to fetch three videotapes as a parting gift: a copy of his Scorpio Rising (1963) and two other films he distributes through his web site.
The following is a complete transcript of the interview. I’ve annotated for clarity and reference, but have not attempted to verify the events that Anger related. That would be virtually impossible and would spoil the fun. And a curse I don’t need right now.
_______________________________________
CARL RUSSO: There’s a whole new generation of young filmmakers who have been influenced by influences of you. I’m talking about movies, commercials, and music videos that have taken a lot of your aesthetic, a lot of your style. These kids have seen them before they’ve been introduced to your actual work. Does that make you crazy? Does that make you proud?
KENNETH ANGER: It doesn’t make me either. I have a kind of cynical attitude towards it. Once I was offered by what I call the "MTV people" to do a music video on a young group.
CR: Do you recall the band?
KA: Combustible Edison. And they sent me a demo tape or something called "Bluebeard." They asked me if they could commission me doing a music video to fit it. And I’ve never done that because I’ve always selected the music. I’ve used pop music even before the movies people have seen. I was using the Mills Brothers in Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941). That came out in World War II, sort of predicting the uneasy mood of war breaking out. That was when I was a teenager, before Fireworks (1947). And paying rights--I don’t steal it--all my life in various forms. But I choose the music I like. I’ve never had someone send me a piece of music and say, "Would you like to make a picture to fit it?" It’s the opposite.
CR: The music supports your film. You’re not scoring to it.
KA: And often I use it in ironic ways. I was the first one to use "Blue Velvet" before Mr. [David] Lynch picked it up from me [for Blue Velvet (1986)]. Well, he must’ve.
CR: No question.
KA: I’ve never met him. But I use it in an ironic way, because I have a tough motorcycle guy [in Scorpio Rising (1963)] dressing in blue jeans and leather with blue lights on the leather while the tune says, "She wore blue velvet." So there’s an ironic twist to the whole thing. That’s the only kind of thing that interests me.
Anyway, Combustible Edison sent me this tape called "Bluebeard" and I listened to it. It didn’t turn me on. And I had to frankly tell them, "I’m sorry, but I don’t know why you call it ‘Bluebeard’ because--" It’s something about a secret behind a door and all that. Nobody in America, in the modern generation, have read their mythology or legends or whatever, and even know who Bluebeard was: that he killed twelve wives and their bodies stuck away in a secret room. That’s what the story is. Probably you didn’t know that.
CR: I didn’t know that.
KA: Well nobody does. I mean, I knew it because I studied fairy tales and things. There was an actual character named Bluebeard, a serial murderer back in the Middle Ages. [Laughs.] But I had to tell them, "Sorry, music doesn’t do it for me. And I think it’s pretentious of you to think that you can tell the story of Bluebeard to people that know nothing about it by just mentioning there’s a secret behind the door."
So I passed on it. Apparently they passed on it too because they never issued it as a CD or anything. It just disappeared. [Combustible Edison’s "Bluebeard" was released on their album Schizophonic.] But basically that was the only offer I ever had. I kind of reject the whole notion. It’s a selling tool--that’s all it is--of making these visuals to go with the music. I think most of them are totally forgettable. A good piece of music doesn’t need it. Like take Dylan’s "Like a Rolling Stone." Are you gonna see him rolling a stone down a hill or something?
[Laughter.]
CR: It’s pointless.
KA: Yeah, totally pointless. If it’s a good piece of music, you don’t need it. And I myself, I’ve used music. I mean, I shouldn’t be talking that way. But I approach it from the opposite standpoint. I will take a piece of music that I feel supports my visuals. Usually with an intent that is not in the original music. Most of the pieces of music in Scorpio Rising have an edge against what the music originally intended. One of the pieces from the sixties that I picked up is totally forgotten--except that I secured the rights to it-- is [Kris Jenkin’s] "Torture," which is about a torturous love affair. [Laughs.] If it wasn’t for my using that piece in my film, it would be totally forgotten. It was a good song, but my use of it was ironic, not--
CR: Promotional.
KA: Yeah, or whatever.
CR: Now the two films that you’re screening tomorrow night [at the San Francisco Cinematheque], Lucifer Rising (1970-80) and Eaux d’Artifice (1953). Did you choose those two?
KA: Yes I did. The reason I chose Eaux d’Artifice is that I wanted the audience to see it because it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. It’s the only one of my films that was. And I don’t know what actually they’ve done to--they bought a copy, but I don’t know whether that means they put the copy in the freezer or what. [Laughs.] They have kind of an honor list that they’ve been doing for about the last ten years, and mine was the only, like, short 16mm of the year that I was selected. The other ones are things like The Godfather (1972) and things like that--you know, big expensive features on 35mm. So in that way it was an honor that this 16mm short film was selected.
CR: Last night I rented this. [Reaching into my backpack, I pull out a videocassette box of Lucifer Rising and show it to Anger.]
KA: Uh-huh. [He points to the face on the cover photo.] This is my friend, Donald Cammell. Committed suicide. He directed Performance (1970). And the reason I chose him to play Osiris, the God of Death, was because he was always threatening suicide. And finally he did it. He blew his head off. Have you seen the film Performance?
CR: Yes.
KA: Well, you remember at the end Turner shoots himself in the head. And so finally Donald did it. And Donald wrote the script, and co-directed it with his photographer [Nicholas Roeg].
CR: You’re quoted here on the back. It says, "A film about the Love Generation."
KA: Where is that quote?
CR: See right here? Is that you? [I hand him the box.]
KA: Well, see, it started in the sixties in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, actually. And it was called, briefly, the "Love Generation" at that time. So that’s why that is there.
CR: So the ritual that’s in the film wasn’t necessarily a comment on the sixties per se.
KA: No, it was just that, if you remember, it was sort of that brief period of what I call a false dawn of optimism. Like the Age of Aquarius and Hair (1968) and all that. Like something new was happening. Then it fell apart. It didn’t work out at all. It became poisoned by the Manson killings, by heroin in the Haight-Ashbury and a whole bunch of bad things. And the fact that these so-called hippies were--
The sad thing that I saw happening when I left town and went back to Europe--because I was here during that period--was that they were stealing from each other. And they called it "ripping off" or something. They evaded morality. Like someone would be asleep with their sleeping bag and another--they were all from middle-class homes, it wasn’t like they were homeless, poor kids--and so another kid would be sleeping there zonked out, maybe stoned, and they’d go in and steal his dope or whatever and think this was okay. It was wrong, anyway. [Laughs.] There wasn’t anyone there to say it was wrong for you to do that. They’d steal guitars from each other, I mean, it was nasty. So I said, "Fuck them. I wanna get outta here." Not that they were all like that, but there was a tendency of their morality to just crumble. And they were smoking a lot of dope, too.
CR: And were you?
KA: No. Very little.
CR: Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) was actually shot here in San Francisco.
[Anger reaches for a jade elephant figurine sitting on the coffee table.]
KA: This is bolted down so people won’t steal it.
[Laughter.]
KA: I’d be tempted to steal it! It’s jade, but it’s definitely bolted down. Yes?
CR: Oh. Invocation of My Demon Brother was shot here when you were living in the old mansion?
KA: It was called the Russian Embassy. It’s on Fulton Street. It’s still there: 1198 Fulton Street. It’s now listed, like a--
CR: Historical landmark.
KA: Historical building, yeah. They call it the Russian Embassy, but it was actually the Russian Consulate, in the 19th century, when the main connection with Russia was sending the beaver skins--furs of various kinds, because they use a lot of furs there, it’s so cold. Seal--all these animals that shouldn’t be killed. We realize it now, but back then it was just a trade. Leather, animal fur, seal skin, beavers and all that. So that was a big thriving trade going on between California and Imperial Russia, not Soviet Russia, because it was years before that. So it was an interesting place to live. I leased it for a few years, and I got it quite cheaply because it was in a horrible state, leaky roof--
CR: I also brought a picture of that from the cover of this book.
[ I pull out the dust jacket from The Great Houses of San Francisco (Bruce & Aidala, 1976) featuring a photo of the Russian Embassy in a decrepit state. Anger inspects it.]
KA: I wrote on the door here--I don’t think it’s there--"Do what thou wilt," the [Aleister] Crowley motto. There is another photo of me and Bobby Beausoleil standing on these steps with writing on the door. I need a magnifying glass--I can’t tell. The interesting thing is, when I moved into it, I went up to this room, which is--this is a conical roof under the tower. There’s this room in here, which is like a square room, and it had on the floor painted a magickal circle.
CR: Before you moved in?
KA: Yeah. By somebody else. And it was a genuine one. I checked it up in a book, and it was like the Seal of Solomon or something. I mean it wasn’t just some hippie scribbling. Somebody else had done some magickal things in the house, but I never knew who or tried to find out. People couldn’t tell me who lived there before and might’ve done it.
But I had some interesting experiences here, including a couple of very good flying saucer sightings, because there’s a park [Alamo Square] across the street. [Points to the mansion’s tower in the photo.] From this room in the windows, Bobby and I used to watch for flying saucers.
CR: Uh-huh. Well, speaking of the hippies and Bobby Beasoleil: the film itself, Demon Brother, is filled with what looks a lot like tripping hippies taking part in the rites. Things really looked out-of-control and crazy.
KA: Well that’s what it was supposed to be. You see, I began filming in 1967 the first version of Lucifer Rising with Bobby Beausoleil, and he’d been a musician in a band called Love, which was sort of acid rock. He was a guitarist in it. And that’s where I first saw him, at some kind of dance or something at the Glide Memorial Church. And I talked to him--he was about 18 years old--and I asked him if he’d like to be in the movie. He had shoulder-length hair and great big blue eyes, and he said "Yes." Then he told me he was a Scorpio and all that.
He had a lot of girlfriends. He used to go around in an old World War I, long, leather aviator’s coat that was like a creaking antique, but he looked good in it. And a top hat. And his nickname was either Top Hat or Cupid. He was what you call a, um-- It’s a psychological condition that is not exactly an illness but it’s definitely a special condition. It’s called a Don Juan. His interested in women was to the extent that he would seduce them, sleep with them, and then say "Bye."
He’d never have a relationship with any one woman. And they would want to, and he wouldn’t want to. He wouldn’t want to get nailed down. He was young and all that, and I can understand that, but he knew he could have whoever he wanted as far as women are concerned. I was amused by this, because he would have such a-- They’d come in and out, you see, and then they’d knock on the door and he’d say, "No, I don’t want to see that one again." [Laughs.] So I had to be like his buffer, like, "No, you’ve had your Bobby, now go away."
CR: And he lived with you.
KA: He lived with me. We shared a room, the front room. [He points to the first-floor windows in the photo.] This was his room here, the three beautiful, tall windows. And mine was on the same floor, but in back, with three windows like this on the back side, facing north. [Points.] This is facing south. I heard a house close to it burned down. This was threatened by the fire, but it didn’t catch. But I think it’s all been restored now, and it looks quite nice, repainted. ‘Cuz the roof was leaking when we were there. We had to put out buckets to catch the water.
CR: It’s funny, because these days the guides tell the tourists that Manson lived there, which I think is bullshit, right?
KA: Absolutely no. Kenneth Anger lived there. In the sixties. But never Manson. Manson was waiting for Bobby down in southern California after we broke up and I kicked him out of there. Because he had the nerve to-- I gave him about 500 dollars which he said he needed to take my van, drive down to southern California to buy some electrical equipment for his band, which was called The Magic Powerhouse [of Oz]. I suspected that it was, like, stolen-- Those big speakers, like you use-- ‘Cuz when he said he could get these things at a bargain down there, that sounded suspicious. Anyway, he said he needed 500, he said he could get something worth 2,000 dollars for 500 or something. So I reluctantly gave it to him, and he took my van down to southern California to pick them up. That’s what I assumed.
But he was lying to me, the whole thing was a hoax. He drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and loaded up my van with a key--as big as that table--of solid, compressed marijuana, and drove it back in my van wrapped in tight, black plastic. Now in those days, like 1967, they obviously weren’t checking the borders too carefully with guard dogs--sniffer dogs--and inspections and everything. ‘Cuz apparently he just drove down and drove back and they never bothered him. They sort of waved him in then out of the country.
He was taking a big risk. They could have easily caught him if they wanted to, because it wasn’t like hidden in the floor of the vehicle or something. It was just sitting in the back there with other junk. He brought it back and put it in my studio and didn’t tell me about it and then went off to see one of his girlfriends. And when he was gone, his dog, which I’d been looking after--he didn’t take his dog with him when he went on the trip--began sniffing at the package like he was a sniffer dog. Sort of pawing at it and sniffing, ‘cuz dogs are attracted to the smell of marijuana. I knew something was fishy, so I took a razor blade and cut one corner and, sure enough, it was solid marijuana, worth a lot of money. Well, he paid like maybe four or five hundred dollars for it of my money.
That was the cause of our breakup. Because he lied to me. He was also placing me in jeopardy storing it in my place. Because he was a minor and, if there had been a bust, as an adult, and the fact that it was in my place, I automatically would’ve been busted. And I thought it was such a lack of consideration that I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I hate people that lie to me anyway, and it was just-- I just wanted him out of there so I threw him out.
He managed to steal my van, then he drove it to southern California where I put a curse of the frog on him, which is where you trap a frog in a well. And the van broke down in front of the Spahn Ranch where the Manson family was staying. And then the Manson girls asked him to move in with them. So that’s how he got mixed up with them, which I certainly didn’t intend. But it was just bad karma coming out of his own actions being a 19-year-old Scorpio smart aleck.
CR: And yet he ended up scoring Lucifer Rising.
KA: Oh, but that was years later. After he was in prison--he’d been sentenced to death--he was reprieved because temporarily the death sentence was lifted in California and then it was put back. So he was, like, on death row and then taken off death row. Apparently there’s something like double jeopardy: once you’re on death row you can’t be put back on it again. I don’t know, the laws are in such a fuzzy mess, anyway. When I knew that he was finally in prison I--
One way or the other we began exchanging letters and so forth. And finally I went to visit him in prison [Tracy State Prison, California], and then I met the psychologist of the prison, who was a woman named Dr. Minerva Bertholf. She was a wonderful woman. And she said, "Well, Bobby has all this talent, and he has time on his hands." She was being ironic to say the least. "And he’d like to record the music for your movie now that’s he’s here." So she arranged for it to be possible a few days a week for the various musicians in prison to get together with Bobby and record the music. And that’s how it happened. It’s the only time it’s ever been done, and I never could have done it without the help of the head psychiatrist of the prison system. And she said it’s better that they’re recording music than rioting or whatever.
CR: Are you still in contact with him?
KA: No, because he’s married, he has several kids now. I can’t keep track of how many kids. He’s married a couple of times to prison groupies. They’re older women--well, not so old, but I mean they’re women who’ve probably been married once before, and that turned out to be the case. They probably have children by a former marriage. And there’s a certain type of woman who becomes--for psychological reasons that are probably suspect--they become enamored of killers in prison. Or notorious people in prison, in other words.
CR: Why do you think that is?
KA: Well, this is only one woman in a million. I mean, you certainly don’t have a whole line of women lining up. But the phenomenon of prison groupies is a fairly common, well-known phenomenon. No matter who-- Because, like for instance, when Truman Capote went around interviewing murderers, um, the pair of killers--
CR: For In Cold Blood (1965).
KA: Yeah. Well, those killers that had slaughtered a whole family and everything, they get proposals of marriage, you know, and then women would want to come and visit them, send them cookies, things like this. It happens all the time. Or send them their underwear or things like that. It’s strange. Even someone like that serial killer in Chicago, the one that dressed up like a clown, John Wayne Gacy. Well, he was gay, and he was still getting proposals of marriage because some women are attracted to killers. Maybe a killer that’s in prison, they think that they can reform him, or who knows what? It’s the mere fact that they’re famous or infamous.
CR: I guess there is a kind of a fascination. I’ve always been fascinated with the stories in Hollywood Babylon (1975), and I’ve gone to L.A. and taken my death trip tour.
KA: I mean, there’s still girls that are interested in Charles Manson, even though he’s a toothless crone now.
[Laughter.]
KA: He’s lost all his teeth in prison and he looks pretty silly. I’ve always found him horribly repellent. There’s people interested in him as a kind of cult thing, and other ones. But Bobby was a genuine person who made a serious mistake when he was quite young [the 1969 murder of music teacher Gary Hinman], and, unfortunately, he’ll be paying for it for the rest of his life. Largely because of his association with Manson, even though some of the girls have been let out. Most of the men that were in the group are still behind bars. And they probably will remain so because, well, Bobby made a foolish mistake when he was inside. ‘Cuz he gets called up for parole hearings every eight years.
But he said, "You just wait till I get out. I’ll get even."
Now you shouldn’t say things like that if you wanna get out. [Laughs.] And so every time they review his--and he’d curse them--and then, "Oh, I’m like a pussycat. No, I won’t hurt anybody. All I wanna do is draw pictures." He does erotic drawings, which they tried stopping him-- They did stop him. They took away his pencils. He was doing little girls. Very young little girls, naked. From his imagination, naturally. We decided they were pornographic or something. I think he’s drawing again, but I think he’s turned them into angels or something. So they’re a little bit more unreal, not like Lolita types.
CR: Well we can bring things up to date just a little bit.
KA: Okay.
CR: You have a project possibly in the works, Gnostic Mass?
KA: Yeah. Like this award I’m getting up here will allow me to make it. But then, of course, I’ll be broke again. I can make it for about the 7,000 dollars that I’ll be getting.
CR: Shooting in what gauge?
KA: 8mm, filming in Austin, Texas, where there’s a temple lodge of the Scarlet Woman of the OTO, the Ordo Templi Orientis, which is Crowley’s organization. I’ve been there to watch the mass. They perform and they’ve got robes, they have an altar, they have the room space. They done everything right. And they do it about once every Sunday, which it should be done, but there’s not that many groups that do it, or that have the space to do it. ‘Cuz you have to have--a room like this [the hotel lobby] would be big enough. I mean, you need a fairly large space. You can’t do it in a little cramped room. You have to have room to walk around, and you have to have an altar on this side. Another symbolic tomb on this side. It’s sort of a Masonic setup.
But that’s going to be a fairly straight recording of something that takes forty minutes, with dialogue, speech. And so it’ll be a test of my ability to work with sound. For the first time, really.
CR: You’ve not made anything with sync sound?
KA: No. I’ve done tests, ‘cuz people have loaned me the Nagra tape recorder where there’s a way to sync it up with the camera. And nothing I did to this date wanted to win me over to this, to dialogue or sound. ‘Cuz it seemed to kind of weigh down the material rather than liberate it. Like, make it too specific, like in time and place. But I have other plans using speech. I’ve finally entered the talkie era. [Laughs.] At least in my plans. I think I can handle it all right.
CR: I’m sure you get asked a lot, but what about a full-length feature?
KA: Well, I have been asked. You’ve heard of a film called Natural Born Killers (1994)?
CR: Of course.
KA: Well, the two producers are Don Murphy and Susan [Montford], a woman and a man. And they’ve done other movies beside Natural Born Killers. They approached me to direct a film on the life of Jack Parsons, who was the husband that was killed in an explosion of a woman [Marjorie Cameron] that I lived with for a couple of years, so I know his story very well from his wife’s viewpoint. He was killed in the fifties. He founded Jet Propulsion Lab, and he invented rocket fuel, so he’s a wonderful subject. And he was also very interested in Aleister Crowley. I hope it’ll happen. If it does--
And this Murphy has a kind of private joke with me: his offices are in Sony studios which used to be MGM in Culver City. It’s just a lot where a lot of the different producers have their setups now. And the sound stages are there and everything. But he named his production--to try to lure me into all this--Angry Films.
But he’s pursuing me, I’m not pursuing him. I’ve never knocked on a Hollywood door in my life. I have never gone and said, "Look, I have a script. Can I--?" I’ve never hustled in that way, because as a kid--well, a young man--I could’ve gone to work when I graduated from Beverly Hills High School. And I was auditing classes at University of Southern California in the cinema department. I could’ve moved from that into some kind of job in one of the studios ‘cuz I knew people through my family and everything.
Like the classical way to start is-- Even some very famous directors have started in the mail room, which is just getting inside the studio, getting to know people, getting to know the routine. I certainly could have got that kind of job, or maybe a little better. But at the time when I logically would’ve gone into begin work that way, Hollywood was going through the convulsion known as the Blacklist. And I found it so obnoxious, even though my political inclinations weren’t as leftist that they would’ve got me in trouble personally. And I was too young to belong to any of the kind of organizations that made people suspect.
But I knew people that couldn’t work, like the dancers in the Rita Hayworth musicals at Columbia Pictures called the Jack Cole Dancers. Many of them were from New York, and in New York during the Depression before the war, they belonged to labor organizations, or something like that, which were just trying to find people work and look after the interests of workers. They weren’t communist. But the [Senator Joseph] McCarthy people and the House Committee [on Un-American Activities] later called them commies. I mean, they’re what you can call left-wing because they were trying to help the workers work! [Laughs.] In fact, after the war, for the political advantage of the evil politicians, anyone who had any show of interest in labor or unions became like an enemy of America.
It was so laughable in retrospect. But I decided I didn’t want anything to do with Hollywood, because friends of mine like [actress] Gale Sondergaard the Spider Woman was blacklisted. She couldn’t work anymore. The dancers at Columbia Pictures--that danced in a dozen of them, that would dance in all the Rita Hayworth musicals like Down to Earth (1947) or Cover Girl (1944) or all those wonderful Technicolor pictures--were being subpoenaed to testify about their sympathies. And they said, "Fuck them! The hell with them! We don’t have to put up with this!" They got an offer from the Lido nightclub in Paris, which is the most prestigious nightclub in Paris, to do their choreography and their principal dance numbers--the equivalent of getting a big position for a big club in Las Vegas. So they just took off, and they said, "Ken, come stay with us." ‘Cuz I just graduated from high school. And they said, "Well, you can sleep with us." So I went over with them.
I wouldn’t have gone off if they hadn’t had a thing set up ahead of time. My family was dead set against it. In other words, I went. But I didn’t have-- Like arriving in France with no money? Not exactly cool. But it all worked out very well. I arrived there in 1950, and the Cinémathèque Française offered me a job immediately as the assistant to the director, which made a lot of French people jealous. [Laughs.] Because they couldn’t understand how Henri Langlois--
CR: You were assistant to Langlois?
KA: Yeah, for twelve years. We liked each other very much. He admired my early film work like Fireworks and so forth. And I said, "I’d like to live here and work," and I knew a lot about American film history. He said, "Oh you can help me. I’ve got all these American films that only have French titles. We have to find out the original American titles" and all that. So I helped him in that way. And we did several exhibits together, like "75 Years of Cinema"--that kind of thing. I like working on exhibits. So-- [Pause.]
Okay, is there anything else you’d like to cover?
CR: Yeah, I’d just like to get your reactions of the so-called "Digital Revolution:" DV cameras that are making it so easy for anybody to start shooting, getting their films out.
KA: I’m still working on 16mm, and it’s becoming harder and harder for me to get my films developed, because one by one the labs are closing down and disappearing. I’ve been to Rochester to the Eastman headquarters and I know people at the Museum of Photography [the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film] there and know people that work there. And I asked them, "What is happening to things like 16mm? Why are they doing this and what’s their agenda?" And they said, "Well, it’s gonna become like a fossil, extinct in another ten years, and then everyone will have to work on digital or they won’t work."
In other words, they--the big corporations--are removing a whole area of artistic expression because it suits them to move everything into digital. And so celluloid emulsions will be history maybe by 2050 or something. I mean, I suppose there still will be some European or other sources, but it’ll become harder and harder. And particularly like 8mm has been discontinued, Super-8 is on the way out, and then 16mm. And so either you work on tape with digital or something or you won’t be working as an independent. I’ve seen digital--in fact, I’ve made some tests on it.
CR: So you have shot some video.
KA: Yeah, tests. I worked with a camerman named Gary Graver who was Orson Welles last cameraman [for TV’s "The Orson Welles Show" (1979)]. And he shot a documentary for me that I haven’t released yet. It’s on, well, they call him "Mr. Science Fiction," Forry [Forrest J.] Ackerman. And he’s an old friend of mine. We shot it in his house. It’s okay but I don’t love it. In other words, I don’t think it’s as beautiful as film.
It’s convenient. I mean, it’s nice to be able to immediately run it back and see whether you’ve got a good shot or not. Because with film you have to send it out and wait for the development while you’re on tenterhooks to see whether you’ve actually got an image or not. Sometimes something’ll go wrong in the camera, or it can be scratched and ruined, and you’ll never know till it’s developed and it’s back. But with digital you can just immediately see it. And so that’s an advantage
But I’ve seen a film like Chuck and Buck (2000) which was filmed on digital and then transferred to 35mm to release, and it looks really course. But it’s still acceptable on the kind of film it was. I think it was probably a good decision to have made it on that particular project.
CR: In many cases it might not get made otherwise, just because of the cost.
KA: The cost is so different, yeah. Well, I may make the Gnostic Mass on digital, I don’t know, because I have the choice. The trouble is, I have an offer from a cameraman in Austin who does commercial work, and he likes my work. He has a 35mm camera like an Arriflex. And he said, "You can buy these odd ends of 35mm film left over, you know, maybe a few minutes--"
CR: Short ends.
KA: Short ends, not odd ends. And he said that we can put together enough 35mm to shoot rather inexpensively. I’d rather make it on 35 because he has the camera and everything. I don’t like to cut 16mm, it’s always a strain to have to work on. I’d much rather work on 35. I made Rabbit’s Moon (1950-1970) on 35 in France. [Digital] is around, I mean you gotta accept it. It’s certainly okay for a lot of different types of things. There are other types of things where it certainly would look better if you have the option of film. If I had my options I’d like to work on 70mm, because I like a lot of detail. And I can think of interesting ways to use a huge screen like IMAX that they have never thought of.
CR: That would be incredible. Kenneth Anger on IMAX!
KA: Well, why not? I mean, the Rolling Stones made a concert film on IMAX [At the Max (1991)] a few years back, remember? And Julien Temple [co-] directed it. And he is an ex-MTV fella. He made a few music videos. I never thought much of his talent. He approached me about my book Hollywood Babylon and he said he wanted to make a musical based on it. And I said, "Well I don’t want you to make a musical based on it, because you don’t know anything about Hollywood." He’s British. "And you’re just too goddamn superficial." He said, "Thanks veddy much."
[Laughter.]
© 2000 A Rat's Ass Production. All rats reserved.