you know? That period was when we still had a cer- tain kind of curiosity and naïveté about everything. Then everyone got a bit disillusioned, which is per- haps why all the work that came after that particular period wasn’t quite so intense. I hate to say this, but after I made The Fall, I looked away from filmmaking. I walked away and never really took anything seri- ously ever again about watching or making mov- ies until, in fact, a couple of years ago when I made another film called Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2009).
EH: What brought you to New York to make The Fall?
PW: All the films I’d made in England I considered, on reflection, to be about America. I mean, at the time I made Wholly Communion I was working for news as a cameraman, but I was also working secretly for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. I was in fact editing films from North Vietnam. Then, from Wholly Communion, I jumped into Benefit of the Doubt, which is all about Peter Brook’s production of US, the the- ater play. Tonite, Let’s All Make Love in London, which was my spoof film about Swinging London, was really about how we’d been hyped up by America. For me, the ’60s was America—the cultural imperialism of America, which I resented bitterly, and foresaw as being a total disaster for everyone concerned for- ever. And I would still say exactly that. So Benefit of the Doubt and Tonite, Let’s All Make Love in London were invited to the New York Film Festival as a dou- ble bill, called “The London Scene.” It was there that I was approached by two young women, who asked, “Would you like to make a film in New York?” I said
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I’d be very interested. So they said, “Okay, we’ll raise some money.” I wanted to try to expose how I felt that American culture was absolutely saturated with violence in one form or another. So I started doing a lot of filming—documentary, pure documentary—of everything I could scavenge on the streets of America, and following this particular thesis that this zeitgeist of violence, of imperialism, was a violation of the people. Part One was going to be the camera—what I could see outside. Part Two was where it went into the artist, the person who is sensitive to these par- ticular issues and contradictions. And then finally, of course, [the] Columbia [University sit-ins] happened, and I thought to myself, Well, bloody hell. Finally all these young people have suddenly occupied one of these big institutions in New York. But in the mean- time, you see, the whole process had changed. I discovered that I wanted to make it much more of a film about perception and participation and repre- sentation of myself. I wanted to challenge the idea of making objective documentaries, which at that point I decided you could not make. That it was a myth. I felt like I can’t just disappear. This film has got to be about me. And I have the right as an outsider to say here I am, an Englishman experiencing America and American culture in New York.
EH: Then with the Columbia sit-ins, you really became part of it.
PW: In the middle of filming I discovered that Colum- bia had been occupied. So I went with my cam- era and knocked on one of the windows. I said “I’m Peter Whitehead. I’d love to come in and film. How
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