Lost in Thoughts
An Interview with Peter Mettler
By Ariana Andrei
March 16 2009.
It felt like the first real day of spring, though the equinox was still a week away. Peter’s office was amazingly organized, dense and fertile with walls of books and a rainbow of textures. It was very calm, nothing like the visual chaos I’m accustomed to that perpetually threatens to swallow my own desk. I was clearly about to encounter a mind more civilized than my own.
Peter Mettler
I’ve been writing all morning. Wake up! (snaps) I’m in this reality now.
AA
Are you working on a new script?
PM
I’m doing a film about the Alberta tar sands with Greenpeace, so I’ve been trying to write voice over for that.
AA
Were you making the film for Greenpeace?
PM
It’s sort of a long story. I was researching my own film which involved the tar sands and at the same time they asked me if I knew someone who could shoot for them. [I suggested I could make their film if] I could use the material for my own film. So I ended up going there a couple of times and shooting this amazing aerial photography, cinematography, and we agreed that that’s what we would do. It’s an offshoot from my own research.
AA
Is that how Picture of Light came about?
PM
Well kind of, sort of. There’s a tendency for me to make discoveries along the way. I’m not the kind of filmmaker that plots everything out in script form ahead of time, because I feel the way experience unfolds, and discovering things and making connections along the way, discovering content and building a film out of that. So Picture of Light was the first film where I had the freedom to work like that. In that case I had the kind of support and we just went there knowing we wanted to get the Northern Lights on film, and I had researched a lot, but all of the things in the film unfolded as a result of the process.
AA
One of my favorite parts is when we come upon the man cleaning a rifle and then he shoots a hole in the (motel) wall. How did you convince him to let you do that?
PM
We were in Churchill Manitoba in the dead of winter – the middle of February, and there’s not a lot to do when it’s bad weather inside. So there we were indoors with a small crew at the Churchill hotel motel. They like to drink, it’s one of the big pastimes. So they were drinking and I was trying to figure out how we could take advantage, or get something out of this situation. My friend Andreas had this experience up north where through a tiny hole a whole room would fill with snow. And I thought... oh maybe we could try something like that. At first he (the motel manager) thought I was crazy, but more and more he became the kind of center of it. He wanted to do it and it became his project, which is very funny. And then even at the end he had his own ideas. He said like, why don’t you take 20 tvs outside and film them in the snow... It was one of those things that I didn’t really know if it would make it into the film because it was way out in left field, but experiencing things through imitations – the film being an imitation of the northern lights, or it’s not the northern lights we’re looking at.
AA
The film itself becomes an experience. What is your goal when you go about sculpting all this material that wasn’t organized to begin with?
PM
I think trance is good word. I’m interested in the power of film to take you on a [journey]... Like a drug would take you – it takes you in and you’re experiencing something. But it’s uniquely a film. It’s not a reality, and it’s not dream, but to suggest things to think about. Or to provoke the audience to interpret certain ideas or come to their own conclusions – their own subjective conclusions by the trance that they’re in. So especially Gambling Gods is a film that everybody sees it through their own experience and interprets it differently. I mean I’ve had hundreds of varied reactions on what that film is about.
AA
In Picture of Light you include not only the scientific explanation of the phenomenon, but you also take into consideration more mystical, subjective aspects... The subjective point of view of what you think the subjective experience that the audience could have an important aspect?
PM
I don’t think it’s wrong to say exactly what you think and to take a hard line on things. I think that kind of provocation is necessary sometimes. Relationships of things. Nothing is ever just this. It’s this because of this and everything is affecting everything else... You have to see where you want to get to before you can change. The standard kind of war thing is if you just fight back with the same anger that someone’s being aggressive towards you with it’s probably just going to create more of the same.
AA
How did you start making films?
PM
[I went to a school that was big on athletics and] I just wasn’t really into that, so an other option was to go into the Super8 film club, which I did... But as soon as I tried making a film... it was something I could live through. So already I decided at sixteen that was something I wanted to do because it involved perception and reflecting consciousness, but also it can take any subject and look at it. So it just seemed like a perfect way to live life for a while anyway.
AA
Scissere was more of an experimental work and then you moved on did more fiction style work.
PM
The context of film school was very free. I kind of was just able to do what I wanted. I mean I did have to defend what I was doing, but not in terms of say commercial pressures... and existing forms... The year that I took off between film school, living in a heroin rehabilitation place in Switzerland - the experiences in that year fueled what Scissere was about, and the character Scissere is more like a metaphor but is based on someone I had met in that place... That film was quite successful even though it was pretty weird and I was getting support from the industry side of things right after I came out of school so I was being encouraged to make a feature film. I consciously knew that I was dealing in a realm of commercial film, story telling and wanted to construct something [broader-reaching]... I used basically as a simple model – everything was kind of divided between intuition and intellect. That was kind of what modeled the whole film (The Top of His Head). [The difference between this kind of ] film was that is was very restrictive in terms of the production approach. I had way more money than I’d ever had... It’s a very different kind of artistic process. I enjoyed it but I felt that I wanted to have more flexibility. I wanted to deal with mystery more. I wanted to deal with the unknown more... [documentary] was still a form where you had more room to play. So I think that Picture of Light and Gambling Gods are documentaries, but they’re also not, kind of.
AA
Do you consider yourself an experimental filmmaker?
PM
Yeah. Well, I actually hate the term experimental film because all it’s doing is separating itself from what’s not experimental... [It’s looking for] answers in the nature of things, and you’re dancing with it, going through a creative process that shows itself as you go along, and I guess that’s experimentation. Experimentation I guess means you’re trying things without knowing what the outcome will be... you never know what the outcome is going to be so it’s all an experiment.
AA
In your interview with Mike Hoolboom, you said you did a lot of research before you went out to shoot Gambling Gods and LSD, to prepare your subconscious mind to set the stage. Is this how you went about preparing for Picture of Light?
PM
Well in Picture of Light, I don’t know how much you know about the story, but I met someone in Switzerland, Andreas Zuest, at a dinner and already at the end of the dinner he was quite an eccentric meteorologist, artist. He said we should make a film about the [northern lights.] And I said to him I would do that if he could find the money... Most of the research was about how to do it, because it’s such an extreme climate and it’s not an easy thing to film, obviously, because of the light levels involved and the sensitivity of film stocks. So it was mostly just research on that and all the different takes on the northern lights, and the rest was for us to explore. Whereas Gambling Gods had several themes and it was years before I shot the film, but I was researching. In seeing how things unfolded according to the things that I had, like you say, in my consciousness. So that research actually informed my choices as I was going along. And there was only one or two things [I planned to shoot]. The rest were all through discovery... it’s also a strange way to work.
The film I’m starting on now, which is also a fairly large film, I’m also doing research for. But this time I find myself being more specific in Yes I am going to go to shoot that, as opposed to Yeah I’m going to go to these places, these four cultures and let one thing lead to the next and capture it... Gambling Gods ended up, the first assembly was really long – it was 55 hours long – so it’s a lot of material that you can’t use in your finished film.
AA
Along those lines, how did you know when it was time to stop reading and time to start shooting?
PM
I’m going through that right now. There’s all sorts of levels of feeling prepared... One of those things is getting the money – if you don’t have it, you can’t do it. A lot of that is essential, but also in terms of the research, a lot of it is just feeling tuned. You feel like you know enough about your subject...
AA
How do you keep your mind focused during shooting, and keep yourself from getting distracted?
PM
I like getting distracted. Time is pretty important. To have enough time, because if you follow distractions. I guess an example is Manufactured Landscapes. I was working with Jennifer who had more of an agenda... but I’d go out to have a cigarette and I’d see something, and then it led me somewhere, and then it ended up being something that ended up being in the finished film, just through this process of taking a break, you notice things. But at the same time you have to corral it, and know when to shoot and when not to shoot. You need to give yourself time to relax, to reflect, to realize, Oh that makes sense, I’m going to go back and shoot that.
AA
So now that you’ve shot all this footage that has a similar feel, how do you go about editing it down so that it has some shape or some experiential quality?
PM
Your theme also tells you, in a sense, its form. I believe there’s a form, a unique form, associated with every subject or experience, and part of the editing process, and already the shooting, the wavelength, finding the resonance and the point of view that becomes the film, that’s harmonious with it... The rhythms of a film are all determined by, like, what do you experience in the first five minutes, and where to do you want to go from there. What kind of effect do you want to create from that point? How much do you want to condense information? How much do you want to empty and slow. All those things are like composing [an] intellectual journey that you can only determine through the engagement with the material.
AA
Is music a part of your life? A lot of your films seem to have an inherent musicality.
PM
Music is hugely influential. Formal conservatory-type lessons for 7 years until I was fourteen. I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like the structure... I just enjoyed going to the piano and playing. This is right around the same time, fourteen to sixteen- that the film stuff started. But what was happening when I was improvising on the piano was that I would see stories. There was a dramaturgy to it. It’s sort of a combination of thought and emotion running parallel.
AA
Do you have a daily creative regiment, a way of harvesting ideas and forming them into digestible pieces? Some people have religion, David Lynch has transcendental meditation, is there something you do daily?
PM
I wonder... Daily? Probably not, no. But you do things that you’re not even aware of. But certainly there’s a process to it, in terms of the researching phase. There’s a certain regiment there, and I usually have to retreat and get everything out of sight, out of the way, get away from my friends and delve into this solitary process. Often the writing is good for that. Even if you’re writing in a free associative state, things emerge from things you’re read. Often film is just keeping track of your ideas and keeping track of the information. Whether it’s a visual idea, a formal idea, an editing idea or a vision or philosophical thought. I have walls of post-its, files and files where everything is organized into their different departments. [Often]I think, why am I doing this, this is taking me so long... [but to get into that] intuitive shooting mode, those things have informed what you spontaneously come out with...
I’m a person of two cultures – Canada and Switzerland – so I’m constantly getting my environment shifted. I have a juxtaposition and that juxtaposition often triggers a lot of thoughts. Traveling does that.
AA
How do you find working between two countries?
PM
Well for what I just mentioned it’s really valuable, that giving of perspective. But it’s all heavy as a filmmaker. I have to take everything with me, my equipment, my office, my live performance stuff. Everything travels with me each time. I find that exhausting.
AA
There’s something very natural about people in front of your camera, almost as if there’s no camera between you at all. Is there something in particular you do to achieve this?
PM
I’ve noticed that too. I’m not entirely sure of the factors that help people feel more comfortable. In Gambling Gods, most of the people I met I didn’t know, and they don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. So the first part of our meeting is mostly about me. I tell ask them to talk about how they feel and there’ll be others in the film doing the same thing in their contexts in life. I think it’s important when you’re interviewing that you’re also listening, rather than trying to get people to tell you what you already know or that you think you want, so that it’s more of a conversation. Sometimes it’s a form of confessional. They have the opportunity to speak about that they believe in or feel. They have a platform to speak from all of a sudden, and they’ll talk about things they wouldn’t normally tell their friends.
AA
I was most stunned by the scene in Las Vegas when the poker player has a moment with his late wife’s bones.
PM
That was amazing and I didn’t see that coming. He didn’t talk much, but you could feel he had something to say, there was some connection and interest. I was about to leave that town when I ran into him again, and I told him it had made an impression on me what I had seen the other night, the fact that this group was gathering out of the ritual of playing poker... I went there knowing I wanted to talk about his wife’s death, but that was it. I could see there was a tension in him throughout the evening. He knew the point was going to come where he was going to talk about it, but how was unknown to me.
AA
Is there a common thread to all your films?
PM
Yea. I wouldn’t know what it is right now, though. I think films made in this way, or even more conventional ways - it’s kind of like pieces of experience. And those pieces are just kind of like parentheses on a big flow – like you’re flowing through your life and all these things are happening, and then you manage to pull a construction together that represents a certain moment... You feel that they’re all connected, they’re all a part of one thing. And if you start analyzing them you start to see signatures that are the medium of the filmmaker, and that all bundles them together. But I don’t like analyzing my work.
AA
Do you have a particular agenda to your films, something you’re trying to convey across your films or is it just open?
PM
It’s certainly not just open. It’s certainly about expanding consciousness, understanding our relationship in the world, to the world. Looking for different perspectives, different ways of seeing and understanding... treating things with a sense of equality. Those values I feel have to be in each film even if they’re not addressed as the subject.
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