Nik Fackler’s new film Sick Birds Die Easy comes to Minneapolis next week as part of Sound Unseen, an ongoing film festival dedicated to the role of film and music as a conduit of powerful ideas and diverse viewpoints. Sick Birds will play at the Trylon Microcinema with the director and two stars in attendance. Unlike most of the works in that series, Sick Birds isn’t about music…well not exactly. The film follows a ragtag band of ne’er-do-wells: Fackler himself as the director, a drug-addicted comedian-turned-organic farmer, a self-involved musician and his francophone fiancée (who handles all of their translation), and a midwestern camera crew as they travel to Gabon to seek ritual healing through a sacred hallucinogenic drug called iboga. From the coastal town of Ebando, where a French expatriate spiritualist named TataYo performs traditional Bwiti rites for foreigners, our crew plunges into the deep jungle in search of a pygmy village. The deeper they go, the stickier and more surreal the film becomes, bending the traditional distinctions between documentary and fictional filmmaking. Music is not absent either, through the presence of Sam Martin, the musician in their crew, whose punk-rock mandolin ditties accompany the film on its journey into madness and redemption.
Sick Birds is a hybrid film, fusing its documentary elements with Blair Witch-inspired suspense. The interactions feel genuine, though some events in the film are scripted, adding uncertainty to the experience and bringing up doubts about everything shown onscreen. Even Fackler’s pontificating voiceovers play with expectations of authenticity and truth, putting forward theories from alien involvement in major religions to the idea that they have wandered into Eden and that iboga, the drug that they seek, is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What’s more, making this film more than just an ethnographic exercise, they interrogate their own presence in this place, and the privileges that allow this crew of white people to go on a spiritual journey into someone else’s culture.
The film is a hard one to categorize and definitely unique. Graciously, Nik Fackler agreed to sit down and talk to us about his vision, his motivations, and what really happened when they wandered through the jungle.
The film is a hard one to categorize and definitely unique. Graciously, Nik Fackler agreed to sit down and talk to us about his vision, his motivations, and what really happened when they wandered through the jungle.
Nik Fackler: I'm sorry I don't talk like my voiceover from the movie.
Jeremy Meckler: Well it's not exactly the same scenario. You don't have a script printed out in front of you.
What's cool is I actually wrote all that stuff while I was editing. I'd be editing and think "well I should put some voiceover here," and I would just write a stream of consciousness, read it and record it. So a lot of what's in the film is like first takes. I would just record it real fast in one take, and then put it in. And for a lot of that stuff I'm really drunk and stoned.
Well that seems kind of fitting for the subject matter.
Exactly. That's what I was hoping for.
So, I really enjoyed the film and I think it's a really fascinating experiment with documentary form, in the vein of F for Fake or Sans Soleil, all these documentaries that play with authenticity. Can you talk a little bit about how that was important to you or how the authentic is important to you?
Yeah, yeah. Maybe it would be best to answer one of your questions from your email first and tell you how this all came about.
Yeah sure.
It will kind of answer that question too. My first film was a narrative feature called Lovely, Still.
I've read about it but I haven't seen it.
Well it was kind of a traditional Hollywood-style movie. I was toying with the concepts of old Hollywood or the classic Christmas movie, but with a new twist. Well, right after Lovely, Still, it didn't find the kind of success I was hoping it would. I think as a filmmaker you make a film and you hope that it's successful and that it is a launch pad for the rest of your career. That didn't happen for me. It came out and it got great critical praise but then it just disappeared and I was back to the drawing board.
I feel like that probably happens to more people than it doesn't.
Oh yeah, totally. You have to do something and really knock it out of the park. I was also 22 when I made Lovely, Still and I think my age was going against me. The scripts that I did get offered after I made Lovely, Still were these older love stories. I didn't want to get pigeonholed into making the same film over and over again. But I got a call one day from this dude who is named Stephen Hays, and he was in the film too, but he said, "Hey, I've got $100,000 and I want to shoot a film in Africa. What do you think?" I was like "Whoa, really?" and he said, "We want to do a scary Blair Witch kind of movie and have it take place in Africa."
So I told him that's nothing I'd ever want to do, ever. I'm not interested in that kind of movie, and I told him no. But then I took the weekend, and I kind of thought about it. I'd been studying iboga and I was kind of on a…journey, I guess you'd call it. You go through life and you go on a little spiritual journey. I was on one and I was really obsessed with psychedelics and indigenous cultures and Native Americans. I was reading all these different books and I thought, well this could be a great excuse for me to go to Africa and do iboga and learn about that. So I called him back and wrote up a one page idea that said, I'm going to take drug addicts and take them to Africa and try to cure them, and it's all going to go horribly wrong, and that's the movie. And he told me it sounded great. So that was the start of it.
I had never really wanted to make this kind of a movie before—I didn't really want to be a documentarian. But I had faith in myself that I could do it. As an artist it's always good to challenge yourself. I kind of imagined that when it was over I'd be a documentary filmmaker. So the whole creation of this film, I knew it was going to be fake. I knew it was going to be part real and part fake. I just tried to think, as an artist and a filmmaker, how can I do this in a new an interesting way so it's not like anything anyone's seen before?
Jeremy Meckler: Well it's not exactly the same scenario. You don't have a script printed out in front of you.
What's cool is I actually wrote all that stuff while I was editing. I'd be editing and think "well I should put some voiceover here," and I would just write a stream of consciousness, read it and record it. So a lot of what's in the film is like first takes. I would just record it real fast in one take, and then put it in. And for a lot of that stuff I'm really drunk and stoned.
Well that seems kind of fitting for the subject matter.
Exactly. That's what I was hoping for.
So, I really enjoyed the film and I think it's a really fascinating experiment with documentary form, in the vein of F for Fake or Sans Soleil, all these documentaries that play with authenticity. Can you talk a little bit about how that was important to you or how the authentic is important to you?
Yeah, yeah. Maybe it would be best to answer one of your questions from your email first and tell you how this all came about.
Yeah sure.
It will kind of answer that question too. My first film was a narrative feature called Lovely, Still.
I've read about it but I haven't seen it.
Well it was kind of a traditional Hollywood-style movie. I was toying with the concepts of old Hollywood or the classic Christmas movie, but with a new twist. Well, right after Lovely, Still, it didn't find the kind of success I was hoping it would. I think as a filmmaker you make a film and you hope that it's successful and that it is a launch pad for the rest of your career. That didn't happen for me. It came out and it got great critical praise but then it just disappeared and I was back to the drawing board.
I feel like that probably happens to more people than it doesn't.
Oh yeah, totally. You have to do something and really knock it out of the park. I was also 22 when I made Lovely, Still and I think my age was going against me. The scripts that I did get offered after I made Lovely, Still were these older love stories. I didn't want to get pigeonholed into making the same film over and over again. But I got a call one day from this dude who is named Stephen Hays, and he was in the film too, but he said, "Hey, I've got $100,000 and I want to shoot a film in Africa. What do you think?" I was like "Whoa, really?" and he said, "We want to do a scary Blair Witch kind of movie and have it take place in Africa."
So I told him that's nothing I'd ever want to do, ever. I'm not interested in that kind of movie, and I told him no. But then I took the weekend, and I kind of thought about it. I'd been studying iboga and I was kind of on a…journey, I guess you'd call it. You go through life and you go on a little spiritual journey. I was on one and I was really obsessed with psychedelics and indigenous cultures and Native Americans. I was reading all these different books and I thought, well this could be a great excuse for me to go to Africa and do iboga and learn about that. So I called him back and wrote up a one page idea that said, I'm going to take drug addicts and take them to Africa and try to cure them, and it's all going to go horribly wrong, and that's the movie. And he told me it sounded great. So that was the start of it.
I had never really wanted to make this kind of a movie before—I didn't really want to be a documentarian. But I had faith in myself that I could do it. As an artist it's always good to challenge yourself. I kind of imagined that when it was over I'd be a documentary filmmaker. So the whole creation of this film, I knew it was going to be fake. I knew it was going to be part real and part fake. I just tried to think, as an artist and a filmmaker, how can I do this in a new an interesting way so it's not like anything anyone's seen before?
I don't think that I've seen anything that is quite the same blend—you know it has the Blair Witch feel to some degree with the shaky handheld cameras.
So that was sort of to please this investor who was with me the whole time telling me to make it this way or that way. I wanted to make my own film but I think—well we shot a lot of stuff that didn't get put in this film…just to please the people putting up the money for it. Once we were in the editing room it was clear that it didn't work. My plan was, I wanted to get a really unique, interesting group of people together so I would have a really good group of characters. So I got Sam and Emily, because I knew Sam, who is an amazing musician. The whole score of the film—almost every piece of music you hear in the film Sam wrote. He's one of my best friends so it was great to work with him. But also he was engaged to Emily, and they were constantly fighting and breaking up, so I thought that's great, bring them.
A real reality-show mentality there.
We were sort of playing with that too because I wanted this film to be about western culture going and trying to save itself. It's like we reached the point of no return in western culture where everyone is addicted to something and we're all in this downward spiral together. Where do we go from here? What if there are ancient lessons to be learned that we've forgotten about because we have this huge ego? I thought playing around with reality TV would be a good way to represent Western culture, because that's kind of the current pop entertainment.
Sure, and you have Ross—I don't know how much is scripted or non-scripted—but you have him consciously critiquing it while it's happening too.
Yeah, yeah. And none of that stuff is scripted—I mean there was a script but we didn't really follow it. We went there knowing the things that would happen. But we got there, and none of us had been to Africa before, none of us had stayed where we were going to stay. I really wanted to play around with intuitive filmmaking, like Herzog or Francis Ford Coppola doing Apocalypse Now. Things change in production so much and a good filmmaker is going to be able to ride those changes and follow them, ride with the flow of intuition. I really wanted to challenge myself and improve that part of my ability as a filmmaker. I tried to design it in a way that would help with that.
Everyone is really just playing themselves. Ross is really like that, he's really a conspiracy theorist. He really lives on a farm. Sam and Emily are engaged and Sam is very egotistical and kind of an asshole. And Dave is my best friend. They're all real. All that stuff is real. The way it's kind of scripted, the way we'd approach a scene was like, okay here's the scene. This is a scene that's set-up but no one should act like a character. Act the way you would act. If we come across the situation where one of our guides leaves us, everyone just say what you would actually say naturally and we're going to film that and do it a couple times.
And the fact that everyone had a different camera—we had a main camera and a mini-DV camera, a Hi-8 camera and a little flip camera—and everyone had different shots so we could edit. So we could shoot the guy quitting three different times, and shoot the scene three times with everyone having a different camera, and then in the editing room we could edit all those three things together using the different camera angles, and make it look really believable and real at the same time.
It's a really hard film for me to talk about because there were just thousands of layers of different ideas that were happening at the same time when we were making it. It became really overwhelming and it all came together in the editing room
So, you don't have to answer these questions, but what parts of it were surprising, real things that happened to you and what parts were scripted?
I'm completely open to talking about what's real and what's fake. I think that's part of the fun of it. So, the guy dying is set up. One of the guides quitting is set up. And us getting chased out of the pygmy village is set up. The film is real up until we go into the jungle. Then it becomes slightly fake and surreal. My idea was that it starts sober and then as we go into the jungle it becomes very trippy and fucked up and you don't know what's real and what's not real. And then at the end you get to the ceremony and the ceremony is real, and everything after the ceremony is real. So it kind of goes from reality into fantasy, and then once the trip is over back to reality again. From documentary into mythology back into documentary.
So that was sort of to please this investor who was with me the whole time telling me to make it this way or that way. I wanted to make my own film but I think—well we shot a lot of stuff that didn't get put in this film…just to please the people putting up the money for it. Once we were in the editing room it was clear that it didn't work. My plan was, I wanted to get a really unique, interesting group of people together so I would have a really good group of characters. So I got Sam and Emily, because I knew Sam, who is an amazing musician. The whole score of the film—almost every piece of music you hear in the film Sam wrote. He's one of my best friends so it was great to work with him. But also he was engaged to Emily, and they were constantly fighting and breaking up, so I thought that's great, bring them.
A real reality-show mentality there.
We were sort of playing with that too because I wanted this film to be about western culture going and trying to save itself. It's like we reached the point of no return in western culture where everyone is addicted to something and we're all in this downward spiral together. Where do we go from here? What if there are ancient lessons to be learned that we've forgotten about because we have this huge ego? I thought playing around with reality TV would be a good way to represent Western culture, because that's kind of the current pop entertainment.
Sure, and you have Ross—I don't know how much is scripted or non-scripted—but you have him consciously critiquing it while it's happening too.
Yeah, yeah. And none of that stuff is scripted—I mean there was a script but we didn't really follow it. We went there knowing the things that would happen. But we got there, and none of us had been to Africa before, none of us had stayed where we were going to stay. I really wanted to play around with intuitive filmmaking, like Herzog or Francis Ford Coppola doing Apocalypse Now. Things change in production so much and a good filmmaker is going to be able to ride those changes and follow them, ride with the flow of intuition. I really wanted to challenge myself and improve that part of my ability as a filmmaker. I tried to design it in a way that would help with that.
Everyone is really just playing themselves. Ross is really like that, he's really a conspiracy theorist. He really lives on a farm. Sam and Emily are engaged and Sam is very egotistical and kind of an asshole. And Dave is my best friend. They're all real. All that stuff is real. The way it's kind of scripted, the way we'd approach a scene was like, okay here's the scene. This is a scene that's set-up but no one should act like a character. Act the way you would act. If we come across the situation where one of our guides leaves us, everyone just say what you would actually say naturally and we're going to film that and do it a couple times.
And the fact that everyone had a different camera—we had a main camera and a mini-DV camera, a Hi-8 camera and a little flip camera—and everyone had different shots so we could edit. So we could shoot the guy quitting three different times, and shoot the scene three times with everyone having a different camera, and then in the editing room we could edit all those three things together using the different camera angles, and make it look really believable and real at the same time.
It's a really hard film for me to talk about because there were just thousands of layers of different ideas that were happening at the same time when we were making it. It became really overwhelming and it all came together in the editing room
So, you don't have to answer these questions, but what parts of it were surprising, real things that happened to you and what parts were scripted?
I'm completely open to talking about what's real and what's fake. I think that's part of the fun of it. So, the guy dying is set up. One of the guides quitting is set up. And us getting chased out of the pygmy village is set up. The film is real up until we go into the jungle. Then it becomes slightly fake and surreal. My idea was that it starts sober and then as we go into the jungle it becomes very trippy and fucked up and you don't know what's real and what's not real. And then at the end you get to the ceremony and the ceremony is real, and everything after the ceremony is real. So it kind of goes from reality into fantasy, and then once the trip is over back to reality again. From documentary into mythology back into documentary.
But hopefully a changed documentary too, right? That seems like what you're going for in general, with the real life of a drug addict to taking this hallucinogen and entering into another fantastic paradise temporarily, and then coming back into a different, changed reality.
Exactly. It's the transformation. It's the shamanic journey.
Or catharsis or transference or whatever.
Right, or the hero's journey. It's what we all strive to do as humans. The film was a way for me to talk about all those things we were exploring. I was exploring mythology and how important myth is to cultures and how our Western culture's current mythology is like reality television—something that we all know is fake but we still choose to believe. That's what makes us feel our real emotions and that's what changes us. So I wasn't afraid to make a documentary that had false things in it because, for one, I felt it makes a statement about documentary and about reality television in our modern culture. I feel like that is something that people should be talking about. But also that's a myth.
I've always felt that myths are very important. Myths are a story that's told to you as if it’s real but it's not real. But the importance of the feelings and the point that it's getting across are very real. It's like telling a story to teach sacred knowledge. The human mind just eats up stories, it loves stories. The way that the brain learns is stories and it’s been like that for thousands and thousands of years. I'm continuing that tradition.
That's a good way to think about it, I think. So it sounds like the genesis of this project is you had this strange opportunity sort of come and drop into your lap and you totally transformed it.
Yeah exactly. And it made a lot of people mad at me. Everyone was mad. People quitting in the film, like Ross quitting, that's all real. Everyone just quit, and they stopped letting me film them. And in post-production everyone got mad. Like, why is he taking so long? He should have had this figured out months ago.
Were you guys really lost in the woods there where everyone was quitting?
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard man—the jungle. This is the hardest project that I’ve ever been a part of. It was impossibly hard from the very first moment to the end. When I got back from Africa I had 500 hours of footage from 5 different cameras, everyone was mad at me, and Ross went through the initiation and nothing happened, so everyone hated him. We were all fighting with each other and then I got back. Also we were going to have this crazy ending. We were going to have this ending where we were going to hook the camera up to a helium balloon and float the camera into space. That was going to be the end of the film and we didn’t even get that shot. It was going to end right when you are really questioning the movie’s realism the camera was going to float up into space and that was going to reveal that we have been in Nebraska the whole time or something like that—something ridiculous.
But we didn’t get that and really the last three days that we were in Africa, everyone just quit, so I just started shooting interviews with TataYo because I just thought he was so interesting. I was just doing interviews with people thinking the way I could salvage it was to turn it into a film about TataYo and Ebando. So when I finally sat down in front of the computer I had this weird documentary, I had this reality TV show, I had this Blair Witch Project knockoff, and I had all of these ideas in my head that I’ve been trying to explore and find out myself.
Like I was obsessed with the bible and obsessed with where we came from, and obsessed with this shamanic journey and psychedelic worlds. If you’ve ever done anything like DMT or Iboga or Ayahuaska, when you come back from those places…like, I really did see the angel. I was just trying to figure all that stuff out in my own mind. I had all of those elements and it was just me, by myself, in front of a computer day and night for like two years. I had all of Sam’s music with me on a hard drive, and I was just trying things out. I basically formed the story of the film from all those different elements and just put them together as a collage.
Exactly. It's the transformation. It's the shamanic journey.
Or catharsis or transference or whatever.
Right, or the hero's journey. It's what we all strive to do as humans. The film was a way for me to talk about all those things we were exploring. I was exploring mythology and how important myth is to cultures and how our Western culture's current mythology is like reality television—something that we all know is fake but we still choose to believe. That's what makes us feel our real emotions and that's what changes us. So I wasn't afraid to make a documentary that had false things in it because, for one, I felt it makes a statement about documentary and about reality television in our modern culture. I feel like that is something that people should be talking about. But also that's a myth.
I've always felt that myths are very important. Myths are a story that's told to you as if it’s real but it's not real. But the importance of the feelings and the point that it's getting across are very real. It's like telling a story to teach sacred knowledge. The human mind just eats up stories, it loves stories. The way that the brain learns is stories and it’s been like that for thousands and thousands of years. I'm continuing that tradition.
That's a good way to think about it, I think. So it sounds like the genesis of this project is you had this strange opportunity sort of come and drop into your lap and you totally transformed it.
Yeah exactly. And it made a lot of people mad at me. Everyone was mad. People quitting in the film, like Ross quitting, that's all real. Everyone just quit, and they stopped letting me film them. And in post-production everyone got mad. Like, why is he taking so long? He should have had this figured out months ago.
Were you guys really lost in the woods there where everyone was quitting?
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard man—the jungle. This is the hardest project that I’ve ever been a part of. It was impossibly hard from the very first moment to the end. When I got back from Africa I had 500 hours of footage from 5 different cameras, everyone was mad at me, and Ross went through the initiation and nothing happened, so everyone hated him. We were all fighting with each other and then I got back. Also we were going to have this crazy ending. We were going to have this ending where we were going to hook the camera up to a helium balloon and float the camera into space. That was going to be the end of the film and we didn’t even get that shot. It was going to end right when you are really questioning the movie’s realism the camera was going to float up into space and that was going to reveal that we have been in Nebraska the whole time or something like that—something ridiculous.
But we didn’t get that and really the last three days that we were in Africa, everyone just quit, so I just started shooting interviews with TataYo because I just thought he was so interesting. I was just doing interviews with people thinking the way I could salvage it was to turn it into a film about TataYo and Ebando. So when I finally sat down in front of the computer I had this weird documentary, I had this reality TV show, I had this Blair Witch Project knockoff, and I had all of these ideas in my head that I’ve been trying to explore and find out myself.
Like I was obsessed with the bible and obsessed with where we came from, and obsessed with this shamanic journey and psychedelic worlds. If you’ve ever done anything like DMT or Iboga or Ayahuaska, when you come back from those places…like, I really did see the angel. I was just trying to figure all that stuff out in my own mind. I had all of those elements and it was just me, by myself, in front of a computer day and night for like two years. I had all of Sam’s music with me on a hard drive, and I was just trying things out. I basically formed the story of the film from all those different elements and just put them together as a collage.
It sounds like the process itself was kind of harrowing, but it did turn out great. I think all of the things you just talked about are definitely implicit in the film.
Yeah, I guess I found a way to kind of make them all work together. And that was part of the intuitive filmmaking experience for me. Not just intuitive filmmaking in the field, but intuitive editing too. I had all this footage, but what am I supposed to do with it? Watch all 500 hours and then decide what to do? I just decided no, I’m not going to do that. So I just sat down from frame one, recorded the opening voiceover, “There are other uses for this world…” Recorded it, built the scene, and then just made the entire film from the beginning. I didn’t jump around because I didn’t know where it was going to go. So the first cut of the film, when I finally got it done, was six hours long, but it was done. And then I just started whittling it down until it was 87 minutes.
So are you able to make a living as a filmmaker too?
Umm, yeah? For the most part.
So you weren’t talking about 500 hours snuck in between the full time job and the family life, or whatever.
No, I don’t have a family. I am in many bands though. While I was editing the film I was on tour a lot. So I’d go on tour with Icky Blossoms or Tilly and the Wall—I play instruments in both bands—so I’d be editing editing editing, leave for a month to go on tour, come back and edit again, leave for a month to go on tour, come back. I make a living as an artist, but I’m basically living in poverty.
That does seem like the way to do it these days, just live somewhere cheap so you can survive. But you’re not living the highlife by any means.
No no, I’m living in a cheap house in Omaha, NE, and drinking Canadian Springs every night. (laughs) But I’m doing what I love. I was born to be a storyteller and a creator. Like if I were to have been an archetype, that’s what I would be. I’m the storyteller of the village. It’s in me, and I don’t know why it’s in me, but it is and I have to do it. If I were not to do it, I wouldn’t be living my life’s purpose, you know? So it doesn’t matter how much money I make in the end, I have to do it.
So hypothetically imagine that this film hits it really big and you are able to do a vanity project as your next thing. You have nearly unlimited funding for it. What do you do?
Sci-Fi. Big time. I think sci-fi is one of the most important genres because it really, to me, follows the same path that I’m on when it comes to mythology and ancient cultures. If I was living 5,000 years ago in a pygmy village, all the stories and myths that are being told about these heroes and gods—things that people look up to and strive to be and do—would have been science fiction. I think the reason that we have electricity and can make fire and everything else is because hundreds of thousands of years ago people were telling stories about people who could make fire and electricity. Now we’ve created those technologies to bring our myths alive. You know? In a way we’re living in a very magical world, but we’re scientifically doing it.
Sure, the border between what is science and what is magic is pretty flimsy.
I think science is what we’ve used to create magic. That’s why if I could make anything I wanted I would go straight to science fiction, because that is to me the continuation of this tradition where we can show people in the audience scientific advances that haven’t happened yet. But it puts the idea in people’s minds. And then the geniuses that watch the film and the people that have the drive can go and invent those things. I mean, the reason we have iPhones and stuff isn’t because some guy just thought of it some day. We’ve been thinking about how to get this idea to work for the last hundred years.
Yeah, I guess I found a way to kind of make them all work together. And that was part of the intuitive filmmaking experience for me. Not just intuitive filmmaking in the field, but intuitive editing too. I had all this footage, but what am I supposed to do with it? Watch all 500 hours and then decide what to do? I just decided no, I’m not going to do that. So I just sat down from frame one, recorded the opening voiceover, “There are other uses for this world…” Recorded it, built the scene, and then just made the entire film from the beginning. I didn’t jump around because I didn’t know where it was going to go. So the first cut of the film, when I finally got it done, was six hours long, but it was done. And then I just started whittling it down until it was 87 minutes.
So are you able to make a living as a filmmaker too?
Umm, yeah? For the most part.
So you weren’t talking about 500 hours snuck in between the full time job and the family life, or whatever.
No, I don’t have a family. I am in many bands though. While I was editing the film I was on tour a lot. So I’d go on tour with Icky Blossoms or Tilly and the Wall—I play instruments in both bands—so I’d be editing editing editing, leave for a month to go on tour, come back and edit again, leave for a month to go on tour, come back. I make a living as an artist, but I’m basically living in poverty.
That does seem like the way to do it these days, just live somewhere cheap so you can survive. But you’re not living the highlife by any means.
No no, I’m living in a cheap house in Omaha, NE, and drinking Canadian Springs every night. (laughs) But I’m doing what I love. I was born to be a storyteller and a creator. Like if I were to have been an archetype, that’s what I would be. I’m the storyteller of the village. It’s in me, and I don’t know why it’s in me, but it is and I have to do it. If I were not to do it, I wouldn’t be living my life’s purpose, you know? So it doesn’t matter how much money I make in the end, I have to do it.
So hypothetically imagine that this film hits it really big and you are able to do a vanity project as your next thing. You have nearly unlimited funding for it. What do you do?
Sci-Fi. Big time. I think sci-fi is one of the most important genres because it really, to me, follows the same path that I’m on when it comes to mythology and ancient cultures. If I was living 5,000 years ago in a pygmy village, all the stories and myths that are being told about these heroes and gods—things that people look up to and strive to be and do—would have been science fiction. I think the reason that we have electricity and can make fire and everything else is because hundreds of thousands of years ago people were telling stories about people who could make fire and electricity. Now we’ve created those technologies to bring our myths alive. You know? In a way we’re living in a very magical world, but we’re scientifically doing it.
Sure, the border between what is science and what is magic is pretty flimsy.
I think science is what we’ve used to create magic. That’s why if I could make anything I wanted I would go straight to science fiction, because that is to me the continuation of this tradition where we can show people in the audience scientific advances that haven’t happened yet. But it puts the idea in people’s minds. And then the geniuses that watch the film and the people that have the drive can go and invent those things. I mean, the reason we have iPhones and stuff isn’t because some guy just thought of it some day. We’ve been thinking about how to get this idea to work for the last hundred years.
Yeah, you can even see those high-tech cellphones in The Matrix as a proto smartphone.
Totally. The Matrix is such a great example. And if you go to these trippy worlds, like if you go to the iboga realm or if you go to the DMT realm you’ll see how accurate, in a weird way, The Matrix is. We really are living in an interesting hologram. I wouldn’t be surprised if the end goal for humanity is to make our own universe and to be our own gods over our own universe that we control.
So it feels like your main query is the question you ask everyone in the beginning of the film: what is reality?
Yeah.
Were you disappointed by their answers?
In the movie? No, no.
It felt they were sort of avoiding the question, particularly Ross.
Oh sure. I realized quickly that the people that I brought…I purposely brought assholes and people that would challenge me. That comes from loving Herzog and reading all the stories about him.
Sure, you found your Kinski, I think.
Exactly. I just wanted to go to this hell. Like everyone loves reading stories of filmmakers that went through hell to make their art, and I kind of wanted to give myself that. So I just chose a bunch of people that I knew would give me hell. So when I asked them that question, literally everyone just said, “this is the stupidest thing that I’ve ever been asked.” But I feel like that was great too. I think they provided great balance for me as a character and as a person. My voiceovers are all very philosophical and questioning the world, and that is me, but it’s also a very specific part of me. I’m really also a weird stoner dude, but I sort of had to shave off the useful part of me to look mature. It was great to have that element balanced with all these people that think I’m a joke and they’re just laughing at me the whole time. Just the idea that nothing is serious. And I think that’s where the most sacred knowledge lies. I don’t think the universe is a serious thing. I don’t think the universe really cares about seriousness, it just exists. If anything the universe is just having a good time. And I think what I learned in Gabon is the Bwiti culture they call a clown culture. A lot of Native American cultures are this way too.
Yeah I think they call it “trickster hermeneutics.”
Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of the holy men—like we went to different tribes and villages—but the holy man was usually this goofball freak. There was something that rang true to me in that. God is walking around all serious, and the trickster is there to trip him up, just so you know that it all isn’t that serious. If you take it super seriously, you’ll get stuck on your own ego. And I wanted the film to prevent that too. I wanted the film to be funny. Maybe that’s what separates my take from Herzog’s. As much as I love Herzog, his films are very serious and kind of melodramatic. I wanted to do the opposite and do something kind of goofball, completely ridiculous and not serious. But within that realm, I think there’s a lot of serious stuff. You shouldn’t have to take it so seriously to get there. There’s this dude Daniel Pinchbeck, have you ever heard of him?
No.
He was one of the top figures in the new age revival neo-shamanism movement that’s happening. And he saw the film and he hated it. He actually told me that he thinks I am going to slow down the evolution of humanity by releasing this film. He thinks it’s bad because it’s not taking sacredness seriously, or something like that. But that’s not what I believe. I was taking this film seriously, and to me this film is sacred, and to me the most sacred thing in the world is laughter. You’re releasing yourself from the bonds of reverence. You need to inject a little bit of punk, otherwise you just get stuck in this dogmatic idea of the world.
Totally. The Matrix is such a great example. And if you go to these trippy worlds, like if you go to the iboga realm or if you go to the DMT realm you’ll see how accurate, in a weird way, The Matrix is. We really are living in an interesting hologram. I wouldn’t be surprised if the end goal for humanity is to make our own universe and to be our own gods over our own universe that we control.
So it feels like your main query is the question you ask everyone in the beginning of the film: what is reality?
Yeah.
Were you disappointed by their answers?
In the movie? No, no.
It felt they were sort of avoiding the question, particularly Ross.
Oh sure. I realized quickly that the people that I brought…I purposely brought assholes and people that would challenge me. That comes from loving Herzog and reading all the stories about him.
Sure, you found your Kinski, I think.
Exactly. I just wanted to go to this hell. Like everyone loves reading stories of filmmakers that went through hell to make their art, and I kind of wanted to give myself that. So I just chose a bunch of people that I knew would give me hell. So when I asked them that question, literally everyone just said, “this is the stupidest thing that I’ve ever been asked.” But I feel like that was great too. I think they provided great balance for me as a character and as a person. My voiceovers are all very philosophical and questioning the world, and that is me, but it’s also a very specific part of me. I’m really also a weird stoner dude, but I sort of had to shave off the useful part of me to look mature. It was great to have that element balanced with all these people that think I’m a joke and they’re just laughing at me the whole time. Just the idea that nothing is serious. And I think that’s where the most sacred knowledge lies. I don’t think the universe is a serious thing. I don’t think the universe really cares about seriousness, it just exists. If anything the universe is just having a good time. And I think what I learned in Gabon is the Bwiti culture they call a clown culture. A lot of Native American cultures are this way too.
Yeah I think they call it “trickster hermeneutics.”
Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of the holy men—like we went to different tribes and villages—but the holy man was usually this goofball freak. There was something that rang true to me in that. God is walking around all serious, and the trickster is there to trip him up, just so you know that it all isn’t that serious. If you take it super seriously, you’ll get stuck on your own ego. And I wanted the film to prevent that too. I wanted the film to be funny. Maybe that’s what separates my take from Herzog’s. As much as I love Herzog, his films are very serious and kind of melodramatic. I wanted to do the opposite and do something kind of goofball, completely ridiculous and not serious. But within that realm, I think there’s a lot of serious stuff. You shouldn’t have to take it so seriously to get there. There’s this dude Daniel Pinchbeck, have you ever heard of him?
No.
He was one of the top figures in the new age revival neo-shamanism movement that’s happening. And he saw the film and he hated it. He actually told me that he thinks I am going to slow down the evolution of humanity by releasing this film. He thinks it’s bad because it’s not taking sacredness seriously, or something like that. But that’s not what I believe. I was taking this film seriously, and to me this film is sacred, and to me the most sacred thing in the world is laughter. You’re releasing yourself from the bonds of reverence. You need to inject a little bit of punk, otherwise you just get stuck in this dogmatic idea of the world.
Right, I think it’s a power relation structure that way, with you being reverent and bowing down to whatever is sacred.
Yeah and I just think, fuuuuck that, we’re all in this together. There shouldn’t be one person more powerful than someone else. We’re all in this together. I just really think that to get the ideas I wanted to get across in this film, it had to be kind of a comedy and be kind of goofy.
It definitely works for me, as someone not involved in the neo-shamanism movement.
Exactly. People in the shamanism movement, a majority of them, get really annoyed with my film because I’m kind of teasing and making fun of it a little bit, but I’m also teasing and making fun of major religions. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned because really, it’s all ridiculous. If anyone takes any of these things too seriously and thinks one is better than the other, then you’re stuck and you’re the problem.
I feel like you’re also teasing conspiracy theories in general too.
Yeah, I’m teasing everything. I’m trying to bring the ridiculousness out of everything and anti-semitism and stuff comes out too. That was something I wasn’t planning on dealing with at all.
Yeah, that was a surprise to me too. I was sort of riding along with Ross thinking these theories sound fun, or I partially agree with a lot of them, but all of a sudden he reveals a lot of anti-semitism too.
I think you find that a lot in conspiracy theorists. But I didn’t want to hide that either. I wanted to bring everything out and then make everything look ridiculous. I think that’s how you get people to start talking about it. I don’t want everything to be so serious that people will be afraid to talk about it because they don’t want to offend somebody, because then you won’t make any progress.
You kind of set the tone when you start the film by talking about how all major religions have some representation of supernatural alien involvement.
Right, it’s funny, but they do too. I’ve done a lot of shamanic exploring, and the DMT—I’m not sure if you’ve heard of DMT or Ayhuasca—but that shit is the most alien stuff I’ve ever experienced. I can imagine if I was a Mayan or something thousands and thousands of years ago that it would just look like God.
I think that is something I haven’t seen realized well before your film, this idea of the psychedelic as the serene. Maybe a Jodorowsky movie or something?
Oh I’m a big fan of his too. You asked in your email about my influences. For this film it was Jodorowsky—all those psychedelic filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Jodorowsky, Werner Herzog, Apocalypse Now. There are references to Badlands, like the dancing scene in Badlands. I was trying to make film references in this film, and that sitting around the campfire scene felt very Easy Rider to me. Sitting around a campfire talking about our generation. And of course, while I’m trying to do this scene, Ross is just sitting there saying, “nobody wants to watch a bunch of hippies around a campfire.” So I thought that was perfect too, an homage to one of my favorite scenes that also kind of made fun of it.
David Lynch too?
Not a big David Lynch fan. I guess it’s not that I’m not a fan, but I just haven’t had my moment yet. It’s like I never watched a Herzog film until after I made Lovely, Still. For that film I was really influenced by old Hollywood, like John Ford, but also Tim Burton and Paul Thomas Anderson, who were sort of my teenage idols. After that I got into all the weird shit. I still haven’t gone through a French New Wave phase yet or a David Lynch phase. So maybe that will be next. Music is the same way too. You know, when I was 14 I listened to a certain kind of music, and then in my 20s I listened to something else. It’s the same thing for me, music and film.
Yeah and I just think, fuuuuck that, we’re all in this together. There shouldn’t be one person more powerful than someone else. We’re all in this together. I just really think that to get the ideas I wanted to get across in this film, it had to be kind of a comedy and be kind of goofy.
It definitely works for me, as someone not involved in the neo-shamanism movement.
Exactly. People in the shamanism movement, a majority of them, get really annoyed with my film because I’m kind of teasing and making fun of it a little bit, but I’m also teasing and making fun of major religions. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned because really, it’s all ridiculous. If anyone takes any of these things too seriously and thinks one is better than the other, then you’re stuck and you’re the problem.
I feel like you’re also teasing conspiracy theories in general too.
Yeah, I’m teasing everything. I’m trying to bring the ridiculousness out of everything and anti-semitism and stuff comes out too. That was something I wasn’t planning on dealing with at all.
Yeah, that was a surprise to me too. I was sort of riding along with Ross thinking these theories sound fun, or I partially agree with a lot of them, but all of a sudden he reveals a lot of anti-semitism too.
I think you find that a lot in conspiracy theorists. But I didn’t want to hide that either. I wanted to bring everything out and then make everything look ridiculous. I think that’s how you get people to start talking about it. I don’t want everything to be so serious that people will be afraid to talk about it because they don’t want to offend somebody, because then you won’t make any progress.
You kind of set the tone when you start the film by talking about how all major religions have some representation of supernatural alien involvement.
Right, it’s funny, but they do too. I’ve done a lot of shamanic exploring, and the DMT—I’m not sure if you’ve heard of DMT or Ayhuasca—but that shit is the most alien stuff I’ve ever experienced. I can imagine if I was a Mayan or something thousands and thousands of years ago that it would just look like God.
I think that is something I haven’t seen realized well before your film, this idea of the psychedelic as the serene. Maybe a Jodorowsky movie or something?
Oh I’m a big fan of his too. You asked in your email about my influences. For this film it was Jodorowsky—all those psychedelic filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Jodorowsky, Werner Herzog, Apocalypse Now. There are references to Badlands, like the dancing scene in Badlands. I was trying to make film references in this film, and that sitting around the campfire scene felt very Easy Rider to me. Sitting around a campfire talking about our generation. And of course, while I’m trying to do this scene, Ross is just sitting there saying, “nobody wants to watch a bunch of hippies around a campfire.” So I thought that was perfect too, an homage to one of my favorite scenes that also kind of made fun of it.
David Lynch too?
Not a big David Lynch fan. I guess it’s not that I’m not a fan, but I just haven’t had my moment yet. It’s like I never watched a Herzog film until after I made Lovely, Still. For that film I was really influenced by old Hollywood, like John Ford, but also Tim Burton and Paul Thomas Anderson, who were sort of my teenage idols. After that I got into all the weird shit. I still haven’t gone through a French New Wave phase yet or a David Lynch phase. So maybe that will be next. Music is the same way too. You know, when I was 14 I listened to a certain kind of music, and then in my 20s I listened to something else. It’s the same thing for me, music and film.
So how do you feel the two influence each other in terms of your art practice? Do you edit musically?
Oh absolutely. I wouldn’t be able to edit my own stuff if I didn’t know how to keep a rhythm. Montage is rhythmic and I edit to music. I started off doing music videos. That’s my background, I started making films when I was 15, started directing Saddle Creek Records music videos when I was 17, and then made my first feature when I was 22.
Did you go to film school?
I just jumped into it. I guess I’m kind of anti-college, for me at least. It really stifled me. But yeah, musically coming from a music video background, I had to stop working with editors because they would not hit the one [the downbeat in 4/4 time]. They never hit these beats when they’re editing to a song. I think humans are rhythmic and our minds are rhythmic, storytelling is rhythmic and comedy is rhythmic. Everything is based around a rhythm. So to me, filmmaking and editing especially is a very rhythmic art form. So it is good for me that I study music and have been playing music. I like strange rhythms and things—polyrhythms and complicated stuff. It’s not all just 4/4. You have a lot of room, and I always edit for rhythm.
With Sick Birds I had this hard drive full of Sam Martin’s music. He is a prolific musician and he gave me a hard drive that had like 60 songs on it. Every scene I would try out a few songs and I worked like that the whole way through. Everything you hear is Sam except for the opening track, which is Rachmaninoff because I wanted something epic and choral. Everything after has a garagey punk rock, Velvet Underground, druggie feel. So every scene I’d pick a song. In the big first cut I had there was music going the entire time. Once I had put it together, the next step was removing music from scenes that could stand up without it.
So do you feel like your filmmaking life informs or influences your musician life as well?
I don’t know. I think it kind of has to. I can’t give any specific reasons or examples, but I think it must. They’re so closely tied together, like I’m leaving tomorrow to go record for three days somewhere and I just got done editing something. A lot of people say the music I write is very cinematic. My films are very music based and rhythm based, and my music is very visual. I wanted Sick Birds to be a music film. I actually wanted more songs than we got, I wanted Sam to play like five little songs for this film in these breaks where his song would keep the story going. But that was in the six-hour cut. I really love Sam’s music. I think he’s amazing. I hope this film is a good launch pad for him and his music career.
I think the one scene where you have him playing music onscreen is really powerful.
Yeah, and that song he’s playing in front of the burning field—he wrote that song like 20 minutes before we shot it. That was close to the very end of filming, and it was like, “Okay we found a burning field, let’s go there.” He wrote the song in about 5 minutes, and played it. And it was perfect. I couldn’t be happier.
There was no part of this film that was fun. For every project I’ve ever done, the thing I set out to make is a combination of all these different crazy things. And then I make it and it feels like it all falls apart, but when I have a finished product, it’s actually all there where it was supposed to be. I feel good about it, about the experimentation with intuitive filmmaking. Searching for intuition and inspiration is like exploring the spirit world and asking the energy of the universe to guide you. I can look back on all of this and say I definitely think it did. I hope it did, and I hope it hasn’t hurt anybody in the process.
Oh absolutely. I wouldn’t be able to edit my own stuff if I didn’t know how to keep a rhythm. Montage is rhythmic and I edit to music. I started off doing music videos. That’s my background, I started making films when I was 15, started directing Saddle Creek Records music videos when I was 17, and then made my first feature when I was 22.
Did you go to film school?
I just jumped into it. I guess I’m kind of anti-college, for me at least. It really stifled me. But yeah, musically coming from a music video background, I had to stop working with editors because they would not hit the one [the downbeat in 4/4 time]. They never hit these beats when they’re editing to a song. I think humans are rhythmic and our minds are rhythmic, storytelling is rhythmic and comedy is rhythmic. Everything is based around a rhythm. So to me, filmmaking and editing especially is a very rhythmic art form. So it is good for me that I study music and have been playing music. I like strange rhythms and things—polyrhythms and complicated stuff. It’s not all just 4/4. You have a lot of room, and I always edit for rhythm.
With Sick Birds I had this hard drive full of Sam Martin’s music. He is a prolific musician and he gave me a hard drive that had like 60 songs on it. Every scene I would try out a few songs and I worked like that the whole way through. Everything you hear is Sam except for the opening track, which is Rachmaninoff because I wanted something epic and choral. Everything after has a garagey punk rock, Velvet Underground, druggie feel. So every scene I’d pick a song. In the big first cut I had there was music going the entire time. Once I had put it together, the next step was removing music from scenes that could stand up without it.
So do you feel like your filmmaking life informs or influences your musician life as well?
I don’t know. I think it kind of has to. I can’t give any specific reasons or examples, but I think it must. They’re so closely tied together, like I’m leaving tomorrow to go record for three days somewhere and I just got done editing something. A lot of people say the music I write is very cinematic. My films are very music based and rhythm based, and my music is very visual. I wanted Sick Birds to be a music film. I actually wanted more songs than we got, I wanted Sam to play like five little songs for this film in these breaks where his song would keep the story going. But that was in the six-hour cut. I really love Sam’s music. I think he’s amazing. I hope this film is a good launch pad for him and his music career.
I think the one scene where you have him playing music onscreen is really powerful.
Yeah, and that song he’s playing in front of the burning field—he wrote that song like 20 minutes before we shot it. That was close to the very end of filming, and it was like, “Okay we found a burning field, let’s go there.” He wrote the song in about 5 minutes, and played it. And it was perfect. I couldn’t be happier.
There was no part of this film that was fun. For every project I’ve ever done, the thing I set out to make is a combination of all these different crazy things. And then I make it and it feels like it all falls apart, but when I have a finished product, it’s actually all there where it was supposed to be. I feel good about it, about the experimentation with intuitive filmmaking. Searching for intuition and inspiration is like exploring the spirit world and asking the energy of the universe to guide you. I can look back on all of this and say I definitely think it did. I hope it did, and I hope it hasn’t hurt anybody in the process.
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