HE IS A VISIONARY, A SAINT, A SINNER, AND A CINEMATIC KAMIKAZE. He was a Christian Brother until he was 28.
He ignored convention from the beginning. (He flunked kindergarten.) His experimental documentaries have changed the grammar of movies – he introduced time lapses, for instance. He is most known for his Qatsi trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi.
But his through line is of another dimension: We are out of balance, we are separate from ourselves, from the world. We are ourselves an out-of-control virus. The way to find hope is to start off being hopeless, to confront generally and precisely what is now.
His governing metaphor is that movies themselves are constructed using negatives, but the final result produces a positive.
Reggie is eloquent. His words and work are so crystalline and pristine, it’s as if he is channeling from another world, and has granted us admission to what he sees. Sometimes, in our conversations – and in his movies – I have no idea what he is talking about.
Ultimately, his overriding vision is painful to take in.
But he can be a joy.
He tells me he’s a great dancer. I believe him.
You describe your latest movie, Once Within a Time, as bardic. What do you mean by that?
The bard is one who cannot help but feel and fear the suffering of others. I make films, not entertainment. That’s why I’m an outsider, or out-saned.
I don’t even know how to categorize the things that my colleagues and I have done. And what I do in all the films, especially Once Within a Time, is try to offer a fantasy of the real, not a fairy-tale. Fairy-tales have laudable moral implications created by adults for children. Big booga-boo, the holy saint, whatever, and then happy endings. This has none of that; it’s a fantasy of the real – that’s what bardic events are. They’re the things that got prophets into trouble. Prophets don’t tell the future, they talk about how the future is in the present.
So this is a bardic tale where the ending is not a happy ending, but a resolute beginning. It leaves you with a question: Which age is this, the sunset or the dawn? It’s a question that only the universe may answer, but being animals, we may answer those questions if we are heroes, if we resist destiny, if we are willing to leap into the vivid unknown. So that’s what bardic is. My films are bardic documentaries, actually.
In your films, the subject is unspeakable. It’s not an event we’re waiting for, it’s a black swan event that’s already happened.
We’re living in the middle of it. We’re on speed in rush hour, outrunning the future, we’re in a state of shock, we’re on the clock, the digital shower we take every day, our fingers touching over 30,000 keys a day. We’re burnt up, we’re hot.
This is a way to quell the heat through humor. Not to resist showing the tragedy, but to quell it through humor. Humor is who we are. Baudelaire says humor is the stigmata of original sin.
You have said that the way to be hopeful is to understand what is hopeless.
Let me explain it in terms of the verb. The verb is children now, not in the future. They become the future, but they are right now, they are embedded in destiny, and they know destiny may not be overcome. So if they are courageous enough to be hopeless about this world, then they’ll have the boldness to be hopeful about creating their own world.
The world we live in is homogenized. So centralized that it’s cracking apart. It’s a square cracking to a numbered code, and we’re all buying it. It’s the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness.
The possible resolution, you say, is living in the now. You say Mike Tyson is an example of someone who lives in the now. Not an obvious choice.
He’s an outlaw like Jesus. Both were crucified. Both went to the hell cell. Both are discredited. People are looking to use his name all over the planet, but he doesn’t get booked because he’s an outlaw. He’s a friend, a dear friend; everyone thought when I wanted to conjure him that I was smoking too much marijuana or getting too drunk.
He invited me to Robert De Niro’s restaurant in lower Manhattan. He faced me and said, Now talk to me, you’re driving me crazy. So I talked for him for a half hour, and he says, You’re talking to my subconscious. Then he says, Let’s have dinner.
You don’t make Marvel movies. Your movies are disturbing by definition.
Once Within a Time is designed from the beginning to disturb you because it is designed to implicate everyone that sees it, from whatever point of view they see it. Anyone who sees them is implicated in it. Everyone feels implicated.
Al Gore loves it. He’s one of my dear buddies, remarkably. And he loves the film.
Here’s the thing: I grew up in a very, very Italian Catholic, Cajun, Spanish, ethnic family from way back. I’m seventh generation; now, there are eleven generations of my family. That’s a whole other story to go down.
My mother earned the money. My father was an alcoholic – he would take me to bars when I was four, and he’d teach me the Can Can or George Lewis’s Burgundy Blues. I could do poetry, and I had little cup to get money so he could drink his drink. I loved it. I had a great time when he parked me in a triple feature at the Joy Strand theater. Gave me a quarter for a hotdog and a bag of popcorn.
I couldn’t crack school. I wasted time. Annoyed others. Mater Dolorosa was my school, Mother of Sorrows. If I forget her, she remembers – she tattooed my heart. I love her. But I flunked kindergarten and was kept in penance hall every day from grades one to six.
When I hit the seventh grade, they brought monks in to teach, not the sisters who were beating me up and making me write the rosary 3,000 times. I wanted to be like the monks, so I left home and followed them. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I went into a 50-acre community in Cajun country, on the bayou with 110 monks, the ancients, the working brothers. We lived our own lives, had everything – young brothers, postulants, novices. And that became my family, which was super militaristic, like the Boy Scouts. I took my vows at 25 years old in Chupadero, New Mexico. There it is, right there.
How did your vows go?
My vows were fine, and I was a lifer. But I went to a big conference in Illinois, where all the brothers met and the assistant superior general brother said to me, It’s time for you to leave, brother.
So, in effect, I was ex-cloistered – thrown out of the cloister. And then I went out, and the first job I got was digging graves at Rosario cemetery. I did it for six weeks, it exhausted me, and I learned how to go to Oklahoma.
Where did I go? I went to Norman, Oklahoma and went to work with the activist Saul Alinsky. We went around to all the demonstrations and picked out radical leaders and assembled them in Chicago. I had a very close relationship with Saul.
Then I got busted in Chicago, during the Daley days, and was facing eight years in prison. Judge made a mistake. I had a good lawyer, he got me out.
And I fled, came back to New Mexico and did a medical clinic, La Clínica de la Gente, on San Francisco Street. There were over 13,000 people without medical care in this community of wealthy people. We got it declared in an indigent state and got money from the government to set up the clinic.
Are your actions still informed by your vows?
Yes.
The brothers didn’t realize that in throwing me out. They sent me out to do the Clarion call, to do the ecclesiastical. To be ecclesiastical is to call. My films are ecclesiastical – you can put your God on it and reshape all of the myths and turn them upside down.
In this film, we look at the Garden of Eden, we look at Adam’s apple. Adam bites the apple, not Eve. Changing the gender changes the whole meaning of the Bible and the earth. We look at the Tower of Babel. We look at the Trojan Horse. We look at the snake – all of it.
What made you comfortable with questioning so much?
My first remembrance in life is being in my mother’s big breast arms. And she would say, Little demon, you little angel, love you, love you.
I was always in trouble. I was called Battling Bones. I was good with the switchblade. Good at jazz. I could dance also, I could really dance. I could dance up a storm.
So, as an apostle, did you find that film was an effective way of communicating?
I did a campaign for the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s online – you can see it. We did radio and drive-time billboards in high density areas, TV at prime time.
Were you surprised that you were good at filmmaking?
I don’t think about those things. I always work with people more talented than me in music, imaging, accounting, everything.
It’s the boogie woogie. I never believe in the best, I only believe that anybody can be the best, that you can walk on water or move mountains if you believe it. I believe.
You can be the best you can be.
You can be the best because there’s no such thing as the best. Records, races, winning – winning requires losers, and we don’t play that game.
Does New Mexico influence your films?
I was sent from a swamp in Louisiana to one of the driest, highest deserts on the planet.
New Orleans is a party town. In Santa Fe, you’re in the state of the mind. Many people can’t handle it. That’s why artists come here to see the sky, wake up in the morning, hear the birds.
To me, Santa Fe is a place of height. It’s a place of contemplation. It’s a place of being open to create. And then you leave to go create somewhere, or you do it here. That’s what you do. For me, I’ve made all my projects start here in this room.
But I’m apostolate. I’m not a megalomaniac. I don’t believe in it. But I do believe in doing megalomaniac acts today because the world we live in has a megalomaniac net that’s catching everybody in it.
There’s a value to being extreme. And if people don’t like it, then I’m just a crazy guy on the plaza, screaming among the other crazy people there. But everybody’s celebrating the moment we’re in. It’s a great transition. We’re going from human to cyborg. And AI will take over. We’re gonna live forever. We have drugs. And it’s so disgusting that I know I am sane and everyone else is mentally ill. [laughter]
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PHOTO SFM
Godfrey recently received the Santa Fe International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. More at imdb.com/name/nm0716585.
