EH: And then you and Leacock distributed Godard’s La Chinoise. Was that how you became associated with him?
D.A. P: I’d met him before that but didn’t know him very well at all. He was just somebody I met at the Cinematheque. For [1 P.M.] he had gotten some arrangement with a thing called PBL, which was kind of the beginnings of PBS. He had the idea that the rev- olutionary activities that were starting to take place in Europe were going to happen here, too, and he was going to film this. 1 A.M. is what the film was called. Ricky and I were going to be the filmers, and he was the director.
EH: Did you also think the revolution was going to con- tinue in America?
D.A. P: Well, he kept saying we’ve got to hurry. It was because there had been several outbreaks, I think at UCLA or Stanford, which were basically anti-Vietnam. He wanted to get to California—that was his aim. In fact we had arranged something with [Eldridge Cleaver], so that was hanging over us, and he kept saying, everyday, we’ve got to hurry out there. He expected to see what you saw in Paris, where the stu- dents gathered in the streets. I knew there was some anti-Vietnam feeling out there, but I’d never seen any- thing like what he was talking about. So I didn’t really take it seriously.
EH: You definitely get a sense of different personalities and different points of view marshaled into the film all at once. When he’s talking to Eldridge Cleaver, he’s clearly
trying to convince Cleaver that they’re on the same level, yet Cleaver’s not really buying it. And from where you were standing with the camera, you sense a skepticism about the whole thing.
D.A. P: Well, it was true. With the money we gave to Cleaver, he went to Mexico. That’s how he got out of the States. Actually, he ended up in North Africa. And years later, not too many years later, I went down with somebody from the Cinematheque who was going down to a screening in North Africa. And I met Cleaver down there. He was designing clothes.
EH: He was designing clothes?
D.A. P: And very happy. He kind of liked North Africa. But when I first heard him talking about Mao Tse- tung, I didn’t know who Mao Tse-tung was. So the whole thing politically was kind of interesting for me. I thought there was much more here going on than I have any idea about, and if I’m making a film about it, I better find out. So I was finding out as I cut, reading and becoming aware of the political tracts being writ- ten. And I could see that they were quite real, that the whole black community perceived itself as a colonial entity, and until that got fixed, they weren’t going to be able to survive individually. I was intrigued by how to put what I was learning into a film that didn’t really have anything to do with that. So my mind muddles had an effect on that film.
EH: Looking back, that’s the most accurate way of approaching it all, it would seem. There wasn’t a clear sense of how to proceed.
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