o’clock in the afternoon. And I had a painting going, which was of a garden at night. It had a lot of black, with green plants emerging out of the darkness. All of a sudden, these plants started to move, and I heard a wind. I wasn’t taking drugs! I thought, Oh, how fantastic this is! And I began to wonder if film could be a way to make paintings move.

At the end of each year, there was an experimental painting and sculpture contest. The year before, I had built something for the contest, and this time I thought: I’m going to do a moving painting. I built a sculptured screen—six feet by eight feet—and projected a pretty crudely animated stop-motion film on it. It was called Six Men Getting Sick. I thought that was going to be the extent of my film career, because this thing actually cost a fortune to make—two hundred dollars. I simply can’t afford to go down this road, I thought. But an older student saw the project and commissioned me to build one for his home. And that was what started the ball rolling. After that, I just kept getting green lights.Then little by little—or rather leap by leap—I fell in love with this medium.

CURTAINS UP

Know that all of Nature is but a magic theater, that the great Mother is the master magician, and that this whole world is peopled by her many parts.

UPANISHADS

It’s so magical—I don’t know why—to go into a theater and have the lights go down. It’s very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they’re red. And you go into a world.

It’s beautiful when it’s a shared experience. It’s still beautiful when you’re at home and your theater is in front of you, though it’s not quite as good. It’s best on a big screen. That’s the way to go into a world.

CINEMA

Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it.

I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium.

For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It’s not just words or music—it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film.

When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.

INTERPRETATION

A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words.The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience.

You don’t need anything outside of the work.There have been a lot of great books written, and the authors are long since dead, and you can’t dig them up. But you’ve got that book, and a book can make you dream and make you think about things.

People sometimes say they have trouble understanding a film, but I think they understand much more than they realize. Because we’re all blessed with intuition—we really have the gift of intuiting things.

Someone might say, I don’t understand music; but most people experience music emotionally and would agree that music is an abstraction. You don’t need to put music into words right away—you just listen.

Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words. And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating.