D.A. P: It was such a funny crossworld, this world we were inhabiting. We were like refugees from the movie world, from a Hollywood fiction film. There were some filmmakers in New York who practiced filmmaking with the hope of eventually becom- ing part of the fiction film world, but there were a lot of us who didn’t know what we were doing. We had no audience. We couldn’t sell the films to any- one. So we were just doing it to amuse ourselves in a way. We were kind of refugees from what we wanted to escape without being quite sure how to get where we wanted to go. After [Don’t Look Back] and Monterey Pop and a couple of other films, when we came to 1 P.M., I thought this is where we come up against the iron cross as it were. The European films were like legends. I just adored Godard’s films. But they were hardly what we were going for. So it was a very disorganized time.
EH: There’s a quote that I read from Tom Luddy about how frustrated Godard became, not knowing if you were shooting his film or making a film about him shooting his film. Is that your recollection?
D.A. P: We were doing whatever he told us to do. But he kind of lost interest. He could see that we just weren’t politically smart enough to even have discussions with him about it all, and whatever we did was going to come out kind of soft focus. He was, at that point, ready to go out and give cameras to revolutionaries. He wanted to ferment a whole rev- olutionary brigade, making films that would bring down governments. We had no such ideas. But along with Rip Torn and some others, we were seeing what
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would happen if we all shared the same party—if we all hung out together. But I certainly never saw it as being a revolutionary film. Not the way we were filming it, which was ridiculous. Rip with the Indian feathers on his head? These things may have had huge importance for Jean-Luc, but we didn’t have any idea about them. But he represented something that I really liked, and since I didn’t know how to get it into my own films particularly, this was as close as I was ever going to get.
EH: There’s this sense of your work as being something of a brand, having a certain style, but I think 1 P.M. shows how formally adventurous you could be.
D.A. P: Oh, that’s true. I could be because who cares? The only reason I finished the film was because we had a contract with PBL, and they were going to sue us if we didn’t deliver a film. Well, I delivered it. They looked at it and said, “Well, this isn’t quite what we had in mind.” I don’t think it was ever shown on television here. Nobody cared what I did, so I might as well have fun with it. The whole thing with the Jefferson Airplane—they were all pals. And they wanted to go to Moscow and do the same thing, do a big deal in the middle of Red Square. And I said, “You know, they won’t take as nice a view of it as the New York Police do. They’ll send you right out to a place where it’s very cold.” [Laughs] And they said, “We don’t care.” They were ready to go. They had a truck ready in Germany. This is what’s so interesting about that time. We thought that you could do that. We couldn’t make a mistake. But we couldn’t make any money either.
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