particularly impressed with because of its lack of logic. This is the direction in which 1 was pushing my film. In DEAD OF NIGHT, everything is mo­ tivated down to the last detail and in SEIZURE, I leave some things unexplained. I think my failure as the film’s director was not taking this [idea] far enough. I would’ve loved to make use of B&W sequences, silent footage, strange things happening, shadows that one finds hard to un­ derstand. If I was to do the film over now, I would cut down the presence of the three creatures. After they come into the movie, at the 45m mark, I think a lot of tension goes out of the film. It would have been more effective, as is often the case with fear, if we didn’t quite know what we were up against. 1 wish I had gone more the way of VAMPYR than concern myself with the logic of DEAD OF NIGHT.
L e t ' s backtrack for a moment. Tell me something about your background, how you became a film director. I went to Yale University, dropped out in my
sophomore year. 1 wrote a book, which was re­ jected by the publisher I’d chosen. Depressed, I joined the Army, went into the Infantry and served in Viet Nam as a draftee. Upon my release, I eventually ended up back in New York University film school, where I studied with Marty Scorcese. At NYU, I made three short films. They were not so short; they were really sort of a training ground for feature films. The other guys and girls in the class were making films of five-minutes-or-less, while my first film clocked in at ten minutes, then I did another one at twenty minutes, and a third one at thirty minutes. None of those films worked; they were all sort of aborted features. They should’ve been longer, but there wasn’t enough time or finance. I simply hadn’t the resources to make them longer, so they were highly illogical, unstruc­ tured films. However, they were a means for me to learn, which was my major concern. All three films were marked by attention to
other film directors. My first one was called LAST YEAR IN VIETNAM and was a highly impressionistic film about my returning from the war and I used a French soundtrack based on Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT and, at the same time, used Russian music. It was sort of an original film, but in the second one, THE MADMAN OF MARTINIQUE, I was very impressed by Claude Chabrol and tried to mix him with Jean- Luc Godard. Godard was the biggest influence in my life at that point, because I am half-French and always had a love for French cinema. I was knocked
out by his sense of pace, his different way of doing things. His editing techniques are being incorpo­ rated, very slowly, into the American mainstream. People like Jerry Greenberg, who cutTHE FRENCH CONNECTION, are, I think, very influenced by Godard’s cutting methods, particularly inBREATH- LESS and in PIERROT LE FOU. I love Godard’s zaniness, his willingness to try anything. People can talk all they want about their first filmic expe­ riences with Orson Welles and John Ford. Nobody had ever made a film like Godard! Nobody! And I don’t think anyone has, since then. Another guy who I find very exciting to watch is
Billy Friedkin, because he too is possessed with that drive and intensity that marks the best work of Godard. Friedkin calls himself “commercial” cin­ ema, but so was Godard until he began to get over- political, redundant, and boring to most people. But he was interesting and a true revolutionary. I saw BREATHLESS eight times, I saw PIERROT LE FOU eleven times, I sawCONTEMPT seven times— that’s what fucked me up with these shorts. I was so impressed by Godard that I kept trying to bring his influence into my films, which is to say, cross­ over work, voice-overs, illogical statements, deal­ ing with madness and obsession.
The same ingredients you now wish you had incorporated into SEIZURE! You can say that SEIZURE deals with Godard’s
common ingredient of obsession—the obsession of an individual named Edmund Blackstone—but I made the film, roughly, two years after leaving film school. I had had the experience of failure with the short films. They were never shown anywhere. I mean, they were shown at some festivals; they did win a couple of prizes, and I was named Best Director at NYU in 1971, when I graduated at the age of 23. However, my early films were not communicating; they were not coming across. They were blurred. Finally, I convinced myself to go ahead and do something original. When I made SEIZURE, a film about a writer’s
obsession, I did not readily connect this with the themes of Godard because it was based on my own nightmare to begin with. In the period before I shot the film, I remember deliberately setting up shots in my mind so that I would have a rigorously self- dictated sense of composition. If something were to creep into my mind and, by chance, I could place it within the context of a Godard or Chabrol film, I would go deliberately in the opposite direc­ tion. In the end, due to shooting conditions, I was only able to get about 50% of what I really wanted pictorially.
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