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| Nik Sheehan Interview in Support of Flicker |
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| Filmmaker Interviews | |||
| Written by Dixon Christie | |||
 (FLICKER LATEST NEWS - TV broadcast premiere on CTV's BRAVO! on Thurs February 5th, 2009 at 9pm EST)MyDocumentary.ca: We are about to talk to Nik Sheehan, director of Flicker. Hi Nik, how are you? I am good man. How are you? MyDocumentary.ca: I am super good. I am a little envious off this movie, especially in that you got to interview some amazing people in making it. Yeah, it was a pretty cool bunch. It was a very amazing experience, but it was a hard movie to make. It was definitely endlessly interesting and challenging which is what you want when you are in the long haul. MyDocumentary.ca: So before we get into the meat and potatoes of this why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your progress as a film maker? Tell us what lead you up to this movie about moving images, which is the core of what films are about. The visionary potential of light as they say. MyDocumentary.ca: Thomas Edison actually created the first film device and it was basically the same principle. Totally, it is based on that. In fact ,early silent movies, if the projectionist was a little lazy or drunk, you know they had to turn the crank to show the films, and sometimes he would crank it a little too slow and all of a sudden it would go into the flicker frame rate and there were reports of people in cinemas having experiences and weird transcendent visions and this kind of thing. MyDocumentary.ca: So why don’t you tell us about your path? Myself? I am an independent film maker, and heavy on the word independent. I only do stuff that matters and means stuff to me, and hopefully to an audience. I try to avoid commercial stuff as much as I can. My first film was… I guess I was very young when it happened but it became a big international film and it was the first major documentary on AIDS back in 1985. That went all over the world, then I made a film adaptation of the Symposium by Plato based on all these Canadian artists giving interpretations of views of love. Like there are ten different people and ten different ideas of love. Then I made a film called God’s Fool which was the biography of a very eccentric Canadian writer named Scott Simons who exiled himself to Morocco in the 70s, having been disgusted with everything he saw in society, so we went and found him and told his story. That was quite well received, and then I made a film called The Drawing Master which is a character study of an art school teacher named Paul Young at the Ontario College of Art here in Toronto, which explores his last year before he retires and the students absolutely loved him, and at the same time they hated him because he challenges them. So that film came out a couple of years ago and did quite well. All of these have been on TV. I have also worked as a journalist and a literary critic. Flicker came along actually about six or seven years ago as a book and a publisher friend of mine who ran Gutter Press called me up and said, “I have got the perfect film for you.” I sort of vaguely knew a bit about the story of Brion Gysin’s dream machine and I just immediately knew this had to be done. I couldn’t believe nobody had made his film on the subject before because it is one of the great untold stories of 60s counter culture. MyDocumentary.ca: Actually I saw this dream machine on a show called Disinformation. Well one of the people in the film is Richard Metzger from Disinformation, so they were one of the more recent people to be bringing back the story again. MyDocumentary.ca: How did you get in touch with Richard? I know he is also the host of Disinformation. Well anybody with a face like that I got to get on camera. There is a whole network of people who know the story and are part of it. Once we sort of got into that, of course one person leads to the next. In fact, I think Disinformation actually published John Geiger’s book Nothing is True Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, so they were publishing it at the time and actually Metzger is no longer with Disinformation as far as I know. MyDocumentary.ca: So were you a fan of William Boroughs before you started making this movie? Oh God yes, the Beats in general and what the Beats represented; that sense of freedom and creativity and not accepting what the man is telling you and of course just the beautiful ecstatic prose poetry that these guys wrote. The answer is definitely, “Yes, I am a big time fan.” MyDocumentary.ca: So you got a chance to interview and talk to people like Genesis P Orridge, and I saw Marianne Faithful… was she channeling in this scene that I saw her? Yes, that was her in the opening and she is looking into the dream machine. All these people have a contact with Gysin and were either friends with him or knew about him or were students of him. I mean Genesis P Orridge is still carrying all the tradition of all the magic and strangeness. Especially The Cat Inside isn’t as well known as Burroughs. A lot of people have heard of the cut up technique which is widely credited to William S Burroughs which he uses in later books, where you rearrange words and stuff on the page to create this sort of mass collage which was actually invented by Brion Gysin, who was essential his soul mate in the 50s and they became very close and were very each others biggest supporters. Gysin was very into the strange side of things and the magical, occult element, which he got Burroughs into and had an effect on his work. There are those that claim that Gysin was the worst thing to ever happen to Burroughs but I don’t tend to agree with that. MyDocumentary.ca: The worst thing in what way? Is this when Burroughs started to get into the junk speak? No, in fact Gysin was not at all into junk or anything like that. He wasn’t part of that, but I think it was more of from a creative point of view. I mean Burroughs was really respectful of Gysin and they worked on quite a few collaborations together. Perhaps the Dream Machine was the most famous one of all, and Gysin thought it was his total ticket and it was a completely brilliant thing because the darn thing actually works. It will induce alpha wave activity in your brain which can lead to hallucinations and images. So he thought that they were going to market the machine as a replacement for the television and the cinema that you put one in every suburban living room and everyone can make their own inner movies. MyDocumentary.ca: In the 50s this could have almost been possible had it been done by the equivalent of Thomas Edison, however it probably came off sounding quite subversive. Exactly, this is the thing. I mean there was some science involved in the thing and there was even some research, but all that dried up quickly once the Beats got involved. There is something quite subversive about the whole thing in a way because if you are not watching television and the cinema or listening to the radio and reading the newspapers you are doing something on your own and that is dangerous to society in some ways. Even pointing that out to people is dangerous and the subject just appealed to me with that idea, but that the machine actually works… that makes it really interesting. MyDocumentary.ca: Well tell us about your experiences with the machines and qualify that statement of it works. Yes, well, it is interesting because when I set out to do it I didn’t really care if it actually worked or not. It is a beautiful metaphor for a film maker and it is a beautiful image and fascinating stuff, and the story is interesting. We had one made by a prop maker in town. I mean, he killed himself doing it because it is quite complicated to do and he became fascinated with it as is almost anybody who gets involved with it does. I brought it home the first day we had it built and everything, and I set it up and turned it on and I was about six feet away and I just looked at it and then I closed my eyes and boom, I had a full blown hallucination and a flood of angels kind of flew out of the sky through my head and it was the most incredibly detailed hallucination [I’ve ever had]. Actually, I mention that in the film because I want the audience to know that the film maker actually does buy into it. You have to accept people’s word for it when they are discussing it, but they are telling you the truth. MyDocumentary.ca: It wouldn’t have mattered if it worked or not; the idea behind it is enough of a motivation to make a movie like this though. Absolutely, and it is just so fascinating. What I think the film seems to be successful at doing as feedback is that it actually seems to capture the aesthetic of the energy of these artists and their creativity and excitement about finding ways to change the world through art and this kind of thing, and that is very exciting. We have grown very cynical in our modern times, like there is nothing new and fresh and everything is co-opted by corporate interest, where as these guys were really genuinely trying to make people see differently, so that really interested me beyond anything. In the end, people react to it, and I mean we all work in some form for the man for some corporate thing, but I believe that Plato said there is bureaucracy but you can’t forget that they are still made up of people. They can hide behind the corporation, but it is still individual people and everybody has needs, desires, hopes, and aspirations. So there is this idea that you have to reach through to the individual. I think if you are honest and authentic it shows. We are so used to everything being slight of hand and fake, and even now with this so called “movie magic” they devote whole magazines and websites to how they do it… so where is the magic? There is something in this that is still mystifying. Even scientists aren’t exactly sure why it works. There is a neurologist that we interview in the film and he says that the brain is still essentially a black box. MyDocumentary.ca: I have a good friend who started a society for autism where they were doing research with light and sound and they found that they were able to partially cure autism with a combination of light and sound. They made it possible for one to go to school actually. Wow, isn’t that incredibly interesting? I hadn’t heard of that but it does make sense. There is this whole area that really hadn’t been looked into probably, perhaps because it got so wrapped up in the psychedelic culture in the 60s that nobody took it seriously, but there is something there. I am not a scientist so I can’t say much more than that, but that is very cool. MyDocumentary.ca: So tell us about the methodology of assembling this movie for you. I had a book, of course, which is really great in terms of raising money and corporate structure, which is where you have to work if you want to make a film with real money unless you have a very rich uncle, which I don’t. So we start with a book and that allowed us to get some development money in, and then it just becomes that long slow process. I know the really complicated thing about this film is it couldn’t really be written. We can’t write this film, we have to discover it and learn about what is going to happen. The Beats themselves were into this post literate words and playing with words and the cut up technique, and the guys who invented this played with that, so I had to be really careful to artistically justify and to be honest to the subject matter. When you are dealing with such madness it certainly didn’t make it any easier. So the film took quite a while, but it was a solid thing and the beauty was that I had some great supporters like Bravo TV… people came in with a really nice amount, and then the National Film Board came on so I didn’t have to get too many different funders which is always good because you are not dealing with so many different viewpoints. That always makes it hard when you are working with funders. So I was pretty privileged in that way, and they also gave me a lot of trust I guess because I had some success with earlier films, so you have to build up your trust obviously especially when you are doing something kind of out there. You know how hard it is to make a film; you can work incredibly hard and raise your money and make your film but it might not work, you just don’t know. Films are little bits of magic on their own. I just sort of stuck to this idea of “let’s be honest it is an outlandish story but it is a documentary and everything in it is true as crazy as some of the stuff seems.” Of course it all blends art and science and magic, so I had to bring the three of them together and I didn’t want to make a biography of Brion Gysin and I didn’t want to make a story only about the dream machine, so they kind of have to fuse together because Gysin and his machine are kind of one and the same in a way. It is his great legacy, and he is one of these weird artists who even worked on making himself invisible to the world, so a lot of things that happened as influences to his he never got credited for as a result because you don’t get credit when you make yourself invisible. MyDocumentary.ca: It would be interesting to note that when you showcase the movie at Hot Docs you will be bringing the dream machine with you so people can experience it for themselves. Absolutely, it will be at our little party afterwards; it is the first thing everybody wants to see after they see the movie. I have to laugh because the machine we had built, it weighs like 60 pounds and it is this big heavy duty thing, and I had to lug it all over Europe and everything. I remember finishing the film thinking, “At least I don’t have to carry this bloody thing around anymore!” and, of course, I started the press stuff and the first thing that the press asks is, “Please bring the dream machine with you.” MyDocumentary.ca: I was going to ask you to send it to me because I want to experience this for myself. Have you seen our website? Because we have a little flicker demo on that but it is nothing like the effect you get from the machine because it is much more gentle and comforting in a weird way. MyDocumentary.ca: There are a couple things we like to ask and the first is preferred cameras and editing solution? Well we shot this in HD and so every film that I have made has been under a different format. Editing was in Final Cut Pro. It was a long editing session but I edited it out of my place so we didn’t have the time constraints. I have an Apple G5 set up, which for offline is absolutely brilliant, and it was great working with Final Cut as opposed to Avid because you can actually see all of the effects and everything, especially when you are working with effects type material. You can actually see it and get what you want and, of course, the costs are way down as opposed to what you would be dealing with Avid. MyDocumentary.ca: Actually about 90 percent of our directors are editing on Final Cut now. I am just wondering what is happening to everybody’s $20,000 Avid suites. Or $100, 000 Avid suites. The whole system costs less than $15,000 and now you can get these terabyte drives so you can really get all your material on there. Although this is a very complex film with a lot of stock footage, animation, there is new footage and old footage so it was quite a thing, but the machine handled it. It grunted and groaned a few times I can tell you but it did the job and was amazing. MyDocumentary.ca: I have seen videos that have been made for literally nothing and cut together on Windows video thing that comes with Windows and put on YouTube and have seen 1 million to 10 million views. Absolutely, and this is one of the interesting things about modern viewing is that as much as they want to sell you those giant screen plasmas and stuff and you do all the fancy HD, most younger people are platform neutral and they don’t really give a shit how big the picture is. I mean, they are watching downloaded movies three inches by four inches so I really take that seriously in the sense that when you are making a film today it has got to work on an iPod, and it has got to work in a cinema, and I really do think Flicker has that ability. It looks really great on a giant screen with 5.1 surround sound and well; as long as your sound is solid it doesn’t really matter how big the image is so it also works on a small screen. I have seen Manufactured Landscapes and it looks fantastic on the big screen but it doesn’t work at all on TV, so it is one of those things you got to bare in mind these days when you are making a film about how you are going to see it; we all know that 95 percent of the audience are going to watch it on some kind of a screen like a TV. You can’t just go, “I am making a giant epic so you will have to come to the cinema!”, and critics are just going to drop the DVD in while they are drinking their coffee. The best is the big screen and the whole experience, but you have to be realistic with most people. If a movie is good once you get into the narrative structure and you are compelled to watch it. Remember 3D films and all this stuff? They are all like cool for the first three minutes, and if the film is any good you still start watching the film and you kind of forget about the fancy effect or whatever. MyDocumentary.ca: I actually just bought a 3D DVD the other day for one of my kids called Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D and they pack it with two DVDs: one with and one without 3D. The 3D is pretty cool actually. I love it, and when you have characters popping in and out and all that it is going to appeal to kids a lot, but again, though I still say that these are all really cool and we all wanted to get every benefit of the coolest image, in the end what people will remember about the film is what story is told. MyDocumentary.ca: It has got to have a good story. Let’s face it: how many films are made that just rely on the technical and then forget to tell a story? MyDocumentary.ca: I got to split here but I got to say while we are talking about these movies and the format, I was invited to a cell phone movie festival. People are going to watch it on their iPhones and those iPhone screens are pretty damn nice actually. MyDocumentary.ca: Yeah, but how do you blow it up to a theatre? Oh it would be on whatever your original format was shot on, but again you can get away with an awful lot. I actually think the real trick is sound and if you have a good sound almost any image will do. So as long as it fits with the theme and aesthetic you can watch it. MyDocumentary.ca: You are not the first director to say that. So I am going to call you back in a week or two. That sounds exciting and I look forward to talking to you after you have seen the movie. Trackback(0)
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