Crispin Glover: Thank you for that beautiful review. I loved it. That made me so happy.
Tom DiVenti: Thanks, it was just my personal observations. We share the same kind of frequencies.
CG: Yeah, I remember now. We were talking before the film began. I really appreciate it. That was the first printed review I’ve seen of the film. And to have such a nice understanding review made me feel great.
TD: I felt where you were coming from with the film's messages, not so much subliminal messages, or hidden messages. more so blunt force trauma messages.
CG: That’s interesting. Why do you say blunt force trauma?
TD: Because the whole concept of guns in our culture being such a prominent boogeyman in our society. Everybody has a gun. My grandma's got a shotgun! Little Billy's got a daisy BB rifle and an AR–15.
CG: There are more guns than humans, I believe that’s a true statistic.
TD: Getting back to the premiere night, there was a sound I kept hearing before the slideshow presentation. It was a rumble like thunder. Ominous creepy sounds.
CG: Oh yes, it’s the subway.
TD: Ha! I know that now, but I thought it was part of the show. I thought it was part of the sound effects. That’s so David Lynch.
CG: I was aware of it beforehand, and I’ve seen a lot of things at MoMA. Really, it’s my favorite place. Their film programming is my favorite. I’ve seen many, many films there, and I knew that the subway made noise. And there’s a lot of trains in the movie. I thought, well, this will add another dimensionality.
TD: It really got me because the friends I was with, were like, is that part of the soundtrack or it is like there's rumbling or something?
CG: I thought that could happen. That’s funny.
TD: I enjoyed that premiere, and the slide show too, it was good also to see Joe Coleman and Whitney. They’re also kindred spirits.
CG: Joe Coleman, I’ve known since, I believe, it was before I had the official publication of Rat Catching. I’d done a different publication of something called Lace Galleries in downtown L. A. around 1986. It was a couple of years before I published the hardbound book of Rat Catching. And Joe Coleman wrote to me, and sent me some drawings. Joe was friends with my friend Adam Parfrey. I knew Joe in two diverse ways, and when I was editing What Is It? Joe had seen different versions of it. Joe was extremely supportive of the editing process which I've always appreciated and of course Joe is an excellent painter and I've gone to his shows, and I've gone to the Odditorium and his collections really need to be a true museum at some point.
TD: We tried to do that in Baltimore many years ago. We found an old Victorian funeral parlor in downtown and they still had the drain rooms for the deceased to blood let the corpses and everything like that. It was a great building, but we got outpriced.
CG: It must happen at some point because his collection really is too excellent to not become a genuine museum for the public at some point.
TD: I agree. Some things are, I will not say fated to be, but like the wavelengths/frequencies that we are on seem to intersect through time like your movie.
CG: Joe, when he made a comment during the Q & A, described the film in a way was fascinating to me because it was very accurate, but it was also, not in the way I would have verbally said it. I've seen the film once again since the MoMA premiere because I had, or the premiere at MoMA, I should say, because I had another media screening in Chicago at the Music Box Theater which is also an even bigger screen and a bigger auditorium than at the Museum of Modern Art and there were just a few people media people there for the screening and I was able to look at the film in a way since the experience of having it there and having different comments and including your article which I was really happy to see. I was able to look at the film and appreciate it strangely in a different way because I didn't know what would happen, how much communication would be, what would be fathomable by the audience. I thought this might be very murky and people might not be able to understand. I'd shown it to filmmaker friends in different stages, and they were supportive and seemed to like it; but having that premiere and showing it to the audience, I didn't necessarily think it would be things people would laugh out loud about.
TD: You never know the reactions of others until they react.
CG: Particularly in an audience, because with laughter, if somebody is by themselves, they don’t laugh. That’s a communication between groups of people. And so that was consistent within those parts. It said to me, oh, there's genuine comprehension going on, and then there were the comments. So, I really didn’t know if that would happen.
TD: I'm looking forward to watching it again. Once this tour is over, will it go out into a broader release or wider market, like cable?
CG: The way that I tour with the film is how I intend to release it. And my first two films were like that as well, and I know that I could contact different distributors, and I’d probably be able to get some kind of distribution. But even when I came out with What Is It? in 2005, I was contacted by different small distributors. But I knew I would have more wherewithal myself by touring with the films myself to different cinemas. And that’s what my interest is, is to have it in a cinema, not streaming.
TD: Right. I was just thinking, after all the excitement is over, will it be available somewhere to watch, like on IFC or Criterion?
CG: That’s not the plan. I mean, anything could happen, but I’ve never released my first two films digitally. And I toured with them between 2005 and 2020, and the reason I stopped in 2020 was because of the pandemic. And then I realized, all right, well, this is a natural pause that I must take. And I thought I‘d start touring again when the new film is ready. I didn’t realize I was going to still have five years of postproduction, two of which were just the color correction. Some of it had to do with titling. It was just it took forever. Everything took forever in this movie.
TD: I know that you used the Fuji 35mm. Did you do cut and splice or did you do it digitally?
CG: It was a digital intermediate. We didn’t cut the negative, it was a digital intermediate. On my first two films, I had a digital intermediate from the 16mm negative, and then I glued that up to 35mm prints, and that’s what I toured with. This, I shot on 35mm negative, and what I projected was a DCP (digital cinema package). I’m planning to make a 35mm print at some point. In the different time periods, each was separately color-corrected in a different fashion. The most extreme thing was the 1868 parts, which was only two minutes of the film, but it’s cut back a lot. We reshot that with a hand-cranked camera. That was by Carl Zeman, but we reshot off the monitor of a 2 or 4K monitor, and then that was hand-processed. The negative was hand-processed because that can give anomalies in the image. And then, an animator was hired to use dyes to put two varied colors, mostly a red and a green, that were then hand-painted hand-dyed each frame. We stayed in the film world.
TD: I thought it was refreshing, and especially the scenes where you go from live action to the diorama miniatures. That was seamless. I mean, that was like a dreamy kind of imagery that reminded me of the old school animation.
CG: The guy who did the miniature models, a great guy named Huy Vu, has done a lot of really great miniature work, and he was great to work with.
TD: Did you have any hands-on painting? Or manipulating of the dioramas or did you let him do it all?
CG: He did all of that. The only thing I did any handwork on was a letter that you briefly see. The sets were built by Ukrainian workers in the Czech Republic, and that was two and a half years of work. I directed them what to do. There were other people that stepped in and did certain artwork, but I didn’t do hands-on physical artwork except for that one letter. I was the production designer. I was the art director on the film.
TD: They were my favorite transitional scenes where you broke away from real live action to the dioramas. That was a very sweet effect. I know you said you spent 13 years this time because of the pandemic.
CG: I wish it were just because of the pandemic, but it was a lot of work.
TD: I know you had to do your regular acting duties on top of that, so whatever spare time you had went into the film. Like I said in my review, I want to see the film again. There are so many things going on under the surface, subliminally. If you blink, you’ll miss it. The shots of you firing at the target, the bullseye, reminded me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas firing the gun at the end.
CG: I know exactly what you’re talking about. He wasn’t shooting at a bullseye. The framing is similar.
TD: Pesci he wasn’t shooting at a target, but he had the unflinching eye to the boom of the gunshot. Now, in the slideshow, I know that they were excerpts from three or four different titles.
CG: There were six.
TD: It was like a poetry reading with slides. But I’ve seen some of the collage, what I’d call formalist concrete poetry, where you manipulate the image and the text by drawing on it or writing your own text. Over the original text, it gives an added dimension to the message that you’re trying to convey, or you are just telling two stories at the same time?
CG: I came into making it in my own fashion; I’d seen in an art bookstore at an art gallery that had a small section of handmade artist books. An artist had put his artwork in a book binding from the 1800s, and I was always drawing and writing. I thought that was interesting, and decided I’d put my own artwork in a book binding. But what was different from what I saw was that I started out just putting in India ink things and I’d bought some older books, a pathology book, or an encyclopedia from the 1800s, what have you. And I was finding imagery, but I always liked words in art. I left a few words on one page that were blanked out, mostly by India ink, randomly, just thought some words that looked nice. And then I went back to putting more artwork on another page, and then a few pages later I randomly let a few more words come through. And then, as I was reviewing it, I realized a new story of its own was starting and that I liked that story. I kept going with it, and finished the book. I liked it. I showed it to people, they liked it and I kept making more books. I made about 23 of these books between 1983 and 1992, not initially intended to be this book show slideshow but when I published them it was.
TD: I’m involved with poetry scenes between New York and Baltimore and Philly. How did the poetry scene influence you back in the beginning, like in the 1990s? Like I mentioned, Rattler magazine, that was in the 80s.
CG: I published my first book, Rat Catching, in 1988, and I made most of the books in the early-80s. But I wasn’t really thinking about the poetry at the time. But I did recognize that there were some published authors that were going around and reading from their books and that they were entertaining in that way, so I did see that. And that made me recognize that that was a way to go. I didn’t know that it would become as important in my life as it’s become, but I felt that.
TD: I dig them. I mean, I dug the reading and the visuals too. Are you familiar with Taylor Mead? Did you ever see Mead perform? He was one of the original Warhol crew. He always performed with an AM radio, and he’d play random stations as like a prop background soundtrack to his words as he read, and then he’d change the stations, and things would get like chants, spontaneous collaborations of music playing or DJs talking with Mead’s words up front, so it was very ethereal.
CG: I met and talked to Andy Warhol at Madonna and Sean Penn's wedding. In what year was that? 1985.
TD: Didn't you play Warhol? (Oliver Stone biopic, The Doors.)
CG: Yes. The reason I was the first person to play him, the reason that I did it was because after I went to the wedding with a girl I was seeing at the time, and we were both interested in art, and she was an actress. Warhol was there with an entourage of well-known artists. But the girl went up and talked to him and she came back and said, oh, he likes you, he really wants to meet you. He’d seen me in Back To the Future. Jokes come; he reacted to me like, uh, you know, he was sort of, he was sort of starstruck, right? Which was funny because he just had that quality of always being starstruck.
TD: You had his mannerisms down. The inflection and tone.
CG: After I met him, I stood back and I watched him, and I thought he’d be an interesting character to play at some point. I looked at how he held himself and how he was moving. I was studying him for that purpose. The first thing that came along was the Oliver Stone Doors movie, right? I’d met with Stone. I didn’t read for him; I just had a meeting with him for Platoon. I liked him very much, but it didn’t go beyond that meeting. But then I heard that there was an Andy Warhol role in the script for the new movie, so I got my agents to set up a reading and got the part.
The thing I really liked best about Warhol is the filmmaking. Like Bad or Trash. Those were directed by Paul Morrissey, but Warhol, in '66, '67, he was stuck with something called an Arkham camera, and he did the first version of A Clockwork Orange, and I think it's 1967, but it's called Vinyl, and they're hard to see because there was something that happened legally. I’m not sure what it was, but you have to see them at the museum. I played my films at the Andy Warhol Museum, and I’ve seen some of them, and they’re difficult to find. But he’d use the Arkham; it was a news camera that had a 30-minute load on it. It was for documentary, so it would have sound on it, so you could go to the place that processed the negative, and it would be a print, right? He’d shoot two half-hour reels and put them together, and that would be a movie. Vinyl in particular is a fascinating movie.
TD: In your new film, No! YOU’RE WRONG, the way you jumped timelines from the past to the distant past to the present was an interesting way to go. Because these guys that you were portraying, you and your dad, were like a lineage of lumber people that made all their fortune in lumber, lumber barons, is that correct?
CG: It’s purposefully not overly-defined. He talks about different things; he talks about wood, he talks about trains, he talks about real estate, dams, water. There’re a lot of topics mentioned, and he’s made money.
TD: Right, they were like merchants, a person of means that was making money with several ways had many ways of making money. I really enjoyed the way it switched. I don’t find it confusing. When they do those flashback scene things in movies, I get lost, like are we now in the present, or the past, or the future? It’s spooky action, man. It’s all now.
CG: The comprehension of the things I was thinking about, like I say, I’m pleased they seem to be a certain way, even Spooky Action at a Distance. I’m using it in a poetic fashion, but Spooky Action at a Distance, the physics element, is one of the most bizarre things. It’s more tongue-in-cheek than scientific research. Right? And yet at the same time, Spooky Action at a Distance, I think the best physicists say that no matter how well you understand quantum, you can't understand quantum, which is this incredibly perplexing thing.
TD: As a poet, I’ve wrestled with that all my life. Like, what’s real? Do you get to the bottom of it? And where do I go from here, and what will this lead to, and why am I doing this So many questions. And that’s what I was finding with your film. I don’t go out to the Marvel Universe and hang out; I don’t find their computer graphics that—right? I’m not sure how to do that. And the computer just agreed with me. One question I ask everybody that I interview—John Waters and other artists, musicians, and poets.
CG: John was nice to me when I came and showed the film. I was only in town for a day. Usually, I’m there the day before, but I was there on the day, and he came over and picked me up, and showed me his art collection and his Diane Arbus photographs. He was great.
TD: I’ve loved John since before he was famous because I grew up in Baltimore and hung with him. I had a punk rock band in the 1970s, the Moronics, and we were his favorite band at that time. So that’s how we gravitated, how we became friends and we hung for years until he got famous and had to kind of distance himself. Anyway, your personal take on life, death, heaven, and hell, and is there an afterlife?
CG: My father was raised a Swedish Methodist in the 1930s and 40s. And he believed as a kid that he was going to go to hell because at the time the Swedish Methodists were preaching that if you like going to movies, dancing, flirting with girls, it meant you were going to go to hell. He felt he was going to go to hell as he was growing up, and he didn’t want to raise me that way in any way, shape, or form. My mother was naturally atheistic/agnostic. As I was growing up, I would’ve called myself an atheist. But there is a true mystery. What is consciousness? What happens after one dies? The only people that know what happens are those that pass into that realm of death and stay in that realm of death. We hear people pronounced dead and then they come back and they talk about lights or having some kind of tunnel. It sounds interesting, what they’re talking about. At this point, I’d call myself an agnostic with a tendency towards atheism.