EH: One thing that interests me about the time period, which your film really captures, is this sense of almost limitless possibility in terms of both film and personal lives—drug and sexual experimentation—but also a sense of impending doom. The Newark riots, Vietnam, society falling apart. Did it feel like dystopia and utopia were going on at the same time?
JM: I’d never heard it explained that way, but it’s not a bad way of looking at it. It was all kind of boiling under the surface. There were all these awful things happening in the world—as there are now, as there always are, I guess. It all eventually sort of exploded into the youth moment, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. It did feel like there was some- thing happening, and I was in the mix of it.
EH: Your film was also basically predictive of where our society was going in terms of people making spectacles of themselves. You look at the Internet, YouTube, even way before that with videocam culture in the ’70s and ’80s. Are you surprised at all by how prescient you were?
JM: Well, I don’t really know about it really. I lived through that experience, I made that movie, then made another couple of movies that turned the cam- era back on myself. Then I lost interest in it. All that stuff [that you’re talking about] happened later on. I didn’t follow it very much. I mean, it’s a legitimate enterprise to explore your own reality. Certainly in terms of the diary, the journal. And there’s been a long tradition of self-portraiture in painting. But it was never really possible in movies because everything
was so expensive. So as things got cheaper and easier to use, it just seemed inevitable that that would be a result of it.
EH: I love the speech that David’s friend Pepe gives, say- ing: “Go write a script. Make a good movie. Your own life is a bad movie.” I don’t mean to relate this to you directly, but I was wondering if that was at all a projection of things you were trying to work through yourself. Because soon thereafter you made a first-person documentary— a really lovely one—called My Girlfriend’s Wedding.
JM: It was kind of stupid, wasn’t it, not to have learned a lesson. [Laughs] I look at those films now and I cringe with embarrassment. But there was some- thing in the air about…You set aside the issue of reality and truth, and there’s another word, which is honesty. One of the things that motivated a lot of the cultural revolution going on in those days was this feeling that what came from the establishment, what came from television, was a manufactured idea, was bourgeois middle class values or something like that. There was something to trying to find a different way of approaching one’s life. Finding a personal sense of honesty and truth was a goal. That’s probably what motivated me.
EH: The notion of honesty is almost a separate conver- sation to truth. Because you can be honest while mak- ing a fiction, and you can be dishonest while working in non-fiction.
JM: That’s very true. 31
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