william gazecki: the interview part 2, films of personal
commitment
interview by Jason W.
Ocker January 21,
2002
Continued from Part
1.
TiC:
Central to your film on Waco was the concept of injustice. Similar
veins run in your film on Brandon Hein, Reckless
Indifference, as well as your upcoming The Great Darkness:
The Orphans of Duplessis. What is it about the ideas of justice
and injustice that draws you to them or that you find especially
valid?
WG: Justice is a very
honored and regarded part of our world. It's thought of very highly.
I mean, we're fighting a war right now over issues surrounding
what's just, you know, we're fighting an injustice in our war
against terrorism. So justice is a big part of how we govern
ourselves, how we keep ourselves an organized society. So injustice,
I think, is where we, they are examples of a weakness in our overall
functioning. Injustice is where we have screwed up, basically. And I
also think it's like in our individual lives, we learn from our
mistakes, you know, and injustice is a mistake. It's something where
the justice system, or justice process went awry, something went
wrong. And it's unfortunate that some of our institutions that are
charged with guarding justice, they don't like to talk about their
mistakes. That's not what they're there for, they have other
concerns, other factors that they put above, you know, complete
access to everything that they're about, complete, what do they call
it, disclosure. Institutions don't like to disclose, they're
selective. But I don't think people are as selective as that. And,
again, we get to this sort of collective idea that I think people as
a whole learn from knowing about the errors that have occurred,
either in the past or in the present. There is a value there in
knowing when things have gone wrong. I mean, I know that in my own
life I learn from my mistakes. Sometimes my mistakes hurt, but I
learn from them. That's part of the process of life. I think that on
a larger scale, the same principles still apply.
TiC: Now, besides what
you've already told us about justice and injustice, what is it that
drew you in particular to this case which involved Brandon
Hein?
WG: Well, Brandon is Mr.
Everyman when it comes to teenagers. He was not that unusual of a kid. The film, you know, is actually
about Brandon and a couple other kids. Brandon was the only person
that I could get into the prison to film because of restrictions in
the California prison code. Brandon and those kids are pretty much
Joe Blo Everybody as far as teenagers are concerned. They were not
really, radically dysfunctional young kids. They weren't model
students, but they also weren't, you know, serial killers, either.
Yet, they got life without parole. And I think that the mixing or
the confrontation between what these kids did and the system is
something that deserves, you know, circumspect observation. The
other thing that that story is about is their parents. You know,
their parents were not prepared for what happened to their children.
Their parents went into this thinking, you know, the system is
behind us. You know, we trust our system, we trust our district
attorney, we trust the justice system. You know, we live in America,
we live in an American suburb. We are model citizens in one regard,
we work hard, we pay our rent, we pay our taxes, we believe in, you
know, God and country. And the experience of the parents was
absolutely devastating, let alone for the kids, because at the end
of the day, their kids are in jail for life. And only one of them
really did anything that was criminal, certainly in their
perspective. And since I made that, I've gotten reports, about three
or four that have managed to trickle into my personal life of other
teenagers who are confronted with very similar situations here in
Los Angeles. Kids who have, you know, one friend of mine, his son is
in jail now for, I think he got 11 years, and it was almost for the
exact, it was a very similar story to what happened to those kids in
Reckless Indifference, very similar. So I think, you know, the
thesis that these kids are the teenage examples of Joe Everyman is
valid.
TiC: Now, you have three
projects, if I'm correct, three films that are due out imminently,
Quest of the Croppies, Into the Mystic, and The
Great Darkness: The Orphans of Duplessis. What can you tell us
about those?
WG: Quest of the
Croppies is
about, basically centers around the crop circle phenomenon over,
which is primarily over in southern England. I stumbled onto this a
few years ago, and thought it was quite fascinating. These pictures
appear in the cornfields over there every year during the
summertime. And there's quite a social milieu around this
phenomenon. There's people who have been studying it, writing about
it, photographing it, you know, in general trying to document it.
And it's quite a worthwhile pursuit. What I found interesting was
the degree of knowledge and sophisticated data that has been
collected over the last ten years or so, related to this phenomenon.
And once I investigated it and found out it was a real phenomenon,
it wasn't some sort of man-made trickery or something, you know,
there's a little bit of that, but the actual phenomenon is really
huge. There's like a hundred of these things that appear every year,
every year for ten, twelve, fourteen years now. And the British
press kind of, you know, pooh-poohs it and the American press has
pretty much ignored it, and when I went over there and actually saw
them and sat in them and met people who were associated with
researching them, I was very impressed. I was very impressed by the
level of intelligence and objectivity and scientific acumen that a
lot of these people possess. They're very media-shy, they don't like
the media, they're not really media-hungry. And it's very, really
quite an interesting subject.
TiC: Did you come to any
conclusions about these crop circles, any theories you think are the
most accurate?
WG: That's what's going to make the film fun is
that there is nothing but theories, because nobody really knows
what's going on. Even the people that have been there ten or twelve
years, that was one of the things that I found quite fascinating,
the people that have been there ten or twelve years, their bottom
line is, "We don't know. We have no idea." I think there are a few
little things, they've been doing some scientific, some biological
analysis of the plants, and the plants showed some very specific
biological anomalies that indicate heat, high heat, very short term,
high temperatures, a couple other, you know, sort of unusual
biological specifics that from a scientific standpoint, indicate
something out of the ordinary, something that we can't recreate just
by taking, say, a board out and laying a bunch of crop down and
making a picture out of it, making that formation. So there's
something going on, but beyond a few little scattered pieces of
scientific evidence, the most compelling aspect of this is the
actual design themselves which to a great degree in many instances
incorporate a lot of higher level mathematics. A lot of geometry
involved. And that's what really piques people's curiosity, why they
keep coming back to that there's something going on here that looks
like it could be some sort of communication, some sort of obtuse. .
.people don't know. But there's a lot of very sophisticated
mathematics in these things. You've probably seen pictures of
them.
TiC: Sure. But all I really
know about them is what I've learned in the School of Pop Culture,
you know, aliens and hoaxes.
WG: Right, and both of
those are a waste of time. The alien thing is really more of a, sort
of pop cultural kind of pigeon-hole. We don't know what it is, so it
must have something to do with extraterrestrials. That's the only
pigeon-hole we have to put them in. The people who research and have
been involved in it say they don't have any evidence for that at
all. There's no, there's no evidence for that, you know, it's just
the press heightening stuff. The hoaxing part of it, the fact that
they're hoaxes, there is a small group of guys who take great glee
in professing to make these things. This has been going on for about
ten years, but when you get down to the facts, when you get down to
the fact that there are like, like in southern England last year
there were like 106 formations. Do you know how hard you'd have to
work? Even if you had, you know, ten guys to go out there, they'd
have to make them at night, and nobody's ever been caught making
them. There's never been one found that has a mistake in it, and
nobody's ever been caught. It just doesn't add up. The facts don't
add up that they're man-made, so there's something going on over
there.
TiC: Now, Into the
Mystic deals with psychedelics. I've read that it is "not a
pro-drug opus," but that neither is it a demonstrative condemnation
of those substances.
WG: We have a lot of
confusion in our culture about things that affect the mind. There's
a lot of legislation and control and fear about anything that
affects the mind, any kind of, you know, psychotropic, or what they
call these days, entheogenic, initiated experience, you know, an
experience that you can initiate on your own that will purposely
affect your mind in a very powerful manner. We don't really have the
architecture in our society to really handle that. What I found
interesting is that in indigenous cultures, in native cultures all
around the world, for centuries, the purposeful ingestion of some
sort of plant or herb combined with some sort of ceremony, some sort
of ritual that is very highly regarded in a spiritual sense, is very
commonplace, it's very common. When you talk to an anthropologist
and ask them, you know, where in the world do they eat herbs or bark
or roots or whatever and combine them with some sort of ceremony or
ritual to expand their consciousness or to somehow access some
alternative state of consciousness. And what anthropologists will
tell you is, well, that's very common, it happens all over the
world. It doesn't happen in our current society. So then when I
started researching this issue more and tried to find some
parallels, like, what is it in these indigenous cultures, why do
they do this? Is this just some sort of useless, arcane, ancient
pastime that we don't have any use for anymore? And I did not find
that. What I found was that these experiences in these indigenous
cultures are very important for them to manage themselves. They
basically seek insight into issues that are of concern to them. And
I think there's a need for that here. I think we have a lot of
issues in our contemporary world that could use some insight, that
could use some new thinking, some alternative approaches. And we
already have a lot of ways to sort of, you know, brainstorm outside
of our normal, everyday consensus reality. And then I started
finding out that in some of our more progressive industries, like
computer programming, for example, software design, that the use of
psychedelics, the use of some of these plants and herbs from other
cultures are very common. A lot of computer programmers, a lot of
graphic designers, a lot of people in the arts are experienced in
altering their consciousness for a purpose, for a reason. You know,
it affects what they do in terms of being creative, in terms of
finding alternative methods. When I found out how popular
psychedelics work in the computer programming world, and in the
graphic arts world, and I started finding out the history, for
example, in the late 1950's and the early 1960's, people like Henry
Luce, who was the editor and publisher of Time magazine took
LSD under a psychiatrist's supervision, because in those days things
like that were considered to be experimental and potentially very
valuable. Cary Grant had like a hundred LSD trips, and credited his
experiences with LSD in helping him work out some issues with his
dad. I actually talked to his psychiatrist, who is a wonderful
woman, who is still alive, she's quite elderly now, but I found out
the whole story. And, you know, in that very short period of time,
the late 1950's, early 1960's, there was a tremendous interest in
what I'm talking about here, in the possibility that there may be a
tool available to expand one's consciousness or to, you know, create
an opportunity for insight and insightful examination of oneself. So
the film is really about that, that possibility.
TiC: It's definitely true
that we know very little about the mind, the physical apparatus
certainly, but also most definitely regarding the more intangible
mental workings, but it also seems that there would be at least some
valid reasons to combat that kind of optimism toward these
substances, or I guess potential optimism, about a possible tool
for, say, health reasons or what have you.
WG: Well, what I'll say is
this, it was important to me in working on Into the Mystic,
to be aware of the climate that exists for a subject as this. And I
think that concern over drug abuse is valid. Concern over any kind
of abuse, drug abuse, emotional abuse, you know, anything like that
is a very valid concern. But I think it's unfortunate that the topic
gets blanketed in sort of an overall categorization. That anything,
you know, that is in this area is potentially harmful. There's a lot
of information out there as well, I've talked to pharmacologists,
people who are working in the brain chemistry field, and pretty much
all these things that involve psychoactive properties that are in
the plant and herbal domain are non-toxic. There's no toxicity, you
know, chemically, there's no chemical toxicity. So, there's a lot of
false information out there that I'm interested in straightening
out.
TiC:
Moving on to your third film due out, The
Great Darkness: The Orphans of Duplessis, it seems that
you're moving back into Waco territory as far as tone and
heaviness of subject matter, especially when compared to Quest of
the Croppies and Into the Mystic. What can you tell us
about that?
WG: The Orphans of
Duplessis is another, again, like Isaid before, my hope is that
we learn from our mistakes. What
happened in this story was a monumental set of unfortunate
circumstances and just downright deceptive practices that hurt a lot
of people, and my basic objective in this is to sort of be a part of
the process of rectification, of sort of, you know, setting to
right. Because I met a lot of these adult orphans who are now in
their fifties and sixties. It's, you know, very compelling. Because
these people were children, and they had no idea, they had no
control, they had no power over what happened to them. They had no
choice, they did not choose this, this was imposed upon them as
children. And the real crux of it is the fact that the church, the
Catholic church was involved in this. And the approach that we're
taking is that within the church itself are traditions of
forgiveness and traditions of reconciliation and traditions of
setting to right injustices. And, you know, what happened was in
Quebec during this time, all the orphanages were turned into
psychiatric institutions basically overnight, and all the children,
even normal ones were treating as mentally ill patients and
subjected to all sorts of inhumanity as a result. In fact, my
partner is somewhat involved in this story. She remembers from her
childhood, you know, a time when you think that everybody's nice,
you know, the world that everybody wants to remember, and when she
found out that right in the middle, in fact, I drove up there to
where she grew up, about a quarter of a mile away from her home was
one of these institutions and when she was a little girl she
remembered that it was like, you know, don't go there, don't walk
down there, don't go over there because it's, you know, it's scary
there. Well, it was one of these orphanages. And when she grew up
and read an article on this, she said, we have got to investigate
this and find out what's going on, because I was a part of
this.
TiC: Yeah, that's pretty
amazing to be able to pull that subject matter out personally, out
of one's own personal experiences.
WG: Yeah, she's a part of
the film, too. She's actually going to be in the film. Her name's
Christiane Schull. We got her going around discovering all these
things, you know, talking, discovering what really happened, what
really went on, why it happened, you know, all the things that the
story's about.
TiC: I noticed on
Waco your credits for the film included writer, director,
editor, producer, and probably some others that I missed, and I'm
sure on your other films it's similar, but that seems like a lot of
involvement for a single person on a film.
WG: It's fun because they
become very much a part of your life, and then they're done. And the
funnest part is for me, and one of the things that keeps me engaged
in all this, is I love to see what the impact is. It's like throwing
a pebble into a pond and seeing where the ripples go, and how the
ripples shape themselves. And I really like seeing what it's like to
take, to devote myself to something that I really have a commitment
to, and a connection to, and I do my best, I do what I do, I make my
films, I put it out there and see what happens, see how people, how
it really impacts people's lives for real. And that's one of my
favorite things about it. I'll tell you a little story, when I was
nominated for the Academy Award, one of the special things for the
nominees is this luncheon that they have every year where all the
nominees in every category come together down over in Beverly Hills
and have this lunch. They take a big picture, take like a class
picture that you get a copy of later on and whatnot. You know, other
than the Oscar ceremony itself, it's one of the more special moments
for a nominee. So I went there, and I overheard a conversation. And
somebody said to somebody else, well, what's with the documentary
thing, you know, why do they even do documentaries. They don't make
any money. It's not like they're blockbusters, why do they even do
it. And the response was, listen, these are the last filmmakers
left, these are the only guys that still make films. They shoot
them, they cut them, they have hands-on themselves, they touch them. They make
the movie, like Chaplin used to do. You know, Chaplin was a
consummate filmmaker-type. He shot and edited and, you know, he did
everything. And I thought that was a very, because I was concerned
about what the answer was, too, and I thought that was a great
answer. I really felt honored with that kind of response. Because
that's really where the Academy is coming from, is to honor the
form, the art form. So I think that says a lot about what
documentary filmmaking is about. It's not filmmaking by committee,
it's not selecting projects that have toys that can be marketed with
them, or, you know, ancillary products or, they're not films that
are green-lighted by marketing staffs, you know, they're films of
passion, and they're films of personal commitment.
Learn more about William Gazecki, OpenEdge Media, and
their upcoming projects at OpenEdge Media.org.
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