JG: I didn’t read the concept because, as far as I knew, there was no concept. The hard thing to understand about this is that from my point of view—this is the way I thought then and the way I see it now—this was not a game. This was not what you’d call a Paranormal Activity 2. This was not a faux deal. The irritation that I and some of these other people like [Robert] Rosen felt was absolutely genuine. I was a radical person in those days. I was very anti-authority. Even when it came to my friend Bill, I was a very provocative person. Not everybody is that way, and some people would not challenge the authority of a director. Those people claimed, “Well, there’s a concept here, you just didn’t read it.” Well, they’re totally genuine, and so am I. Most of the time you go on a shoot with somebody, you know what they’re doing, and you help them do it. But it’s not like Bill sat everybody down and said, “Look, here is my concept. I’m going to have this sort of fractal or multi-time parallel universe, da da da,” or however he wanted to explain this thing. He did not explain it. The thing just went on and on. And then cut, and then start again. And then the next day we’ve got to be there to do the same bullshit again. Well, it got to the point that you see very clearly in the film where some of us just grabbed a couple of rolls of film and shot [the mutiny]. Bill didn’t know we had done it—the first time he was aware of it was when he found it in the dailies. Now I don’t know if there’s a myth that Bill has created, and I don’t want to get ahead of that or interfere with that—he’s the director, and it’s his baby, and he can build the myth of his creation the way he wants. Let’s just say that when Bill says, “Well, I knew this all along. I was provoking these guys deliberately, and I knew there were these loose cannon types like
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Jonathan. And I just pushed it and pushed it until I knew that these guys were going to do something,” that the whole thing was an artifice that came out of Bill’s amaz- ingly multidimensional mind—well, that isn’t how I saw it. That may in fact be true. Bill might be so ahead of me—I was about 26, Bill was about 36, and he had a lot of authority. He had a tremendous amount of gravi- tas for a young man. Yet he also was playing, or was in fact—again, I don’t know—the bumbling person who didn’t know what he was doing. I respected Bill enormously. He had a very calm disposition. He never got angry or insulting or pulled this diva behavior that some directors would do. It’s a tribute to Bill’s friendli- ness that even though there were sparks and flashes and irritation, the affection for Bill was very great.
EH: In terms of whether or not Bill had invited, if not a mutiny then at least a level of critique and deeper par- ticipation, I wonder if that was fostered by the fact that there was already a “making of” aspect to the film, with two additional cameras shooting what everybody was doing. Did that foster a sense that you were actually a player in this drama, as well as somebody on crew?
JG: At the time—this was 1968—was this an abso- lutely unprecedented, brilliant, you’ve-never-seen- anything-like-this-before? Not really. I mean, these were the times when you would do stuff like that. We were film guys, and there was a spirit of great play. These were the days of the Living Theatre. One wasn’t reluctant in those days.
EH: I’m fascinated by that sense of play. You’re right, it wasn’t like nobody else was doing it—in fact it seems like
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