[SOUNDS OF BIRDS CHIRPING]
Where are we? We're in Campbell Hall, New York.
[Laleh Khorramian, Artist]
It's about an hour and a half northwest of New York City.
[After 11 years living and working in New York City]
[Laleh's spent the last 9 months upstate.]
On a typical day, I get up at 7
and just work and make things and cook things
and be on the phone and do computer work
just like everyone else.
[New York Close Up]
[Music begins playing]
["Laleh Khorramian's Epic Animations"]
[Music continues]
[Private studio -- Not an exit or entrance]
Always quite a bit of organizing...
This is only like a fraction of the scraps of paper
that I have and have worked with for years.
Look at this gem.
It's almost a joke with some friends who pick up scraps from the floor
and they're like, "You sure you don't need this?"
"You might need that."
When I was a teenager, I really wanted to learn how to paint.
Since I didn't really have any teachers at the time,
I just read about artists and how they did it,
and I would say ,"Well, I'll just do it how they did it."
You know, and that to just do a lot of drawings and repeat yourself.
So monotype was one way to do that: to just practice.
You basically paint on a surface
and you lay something else on top of that
and peel the paper away.
You just never knew what exactly you were going to get,
which is the aspect of it I really enjoyed.
To make a film,
I would always just have an idea of what the story vaguely would be.
I would scan the monotypes at a very high resolution--
searching these things for these crazy images that I would find
on a very micro level.
They were telling me the story.
The imagery that you find is so dramatic
["Chopperlady" -- 2005]
and so fantastical.
It think it evokes a place that people want to be.
So, I'm interested in creating
["Sophie and Goya" -- 2004]
my own stories in those settings.
I was born in Tehran, in Iran.
We emigrated to the United States when I was 2 years old.
Now, that's where I grew up--is Orlando, Florida.
I mean, I went 22 times as a kid to Disney.
If we had company come from out of town,
they wanted to go to Disney.
And then they would come and take me out of school,
which was a child's absolute dream.
Disney had a remarkable influence on my imagination.
And then I had an experience going when I was, I think, 19,
which everything changed,
and I just saw it as a whole, like, "cardboard" setup.
That had a remarkable effect on how I would look at everything else.
["I Without End" -- 2008]
I don't have an instinct for directing.
That was one aspect of filmmaking that I just didn't work well with, was people.
And I always thought, "I would always love one day
to make a film with couples."
But it wasn't until many years later that I actually went,
"A ha, I know how I'm going to do it."
It's ridiculous using an orange peel to make an erotic film,
but somehow there is a resemblance.
I made it in my bedroom,
and I had three or four cameras sometimes.
I just set them on timers to shoot every 30 seconds.
I would go to sleep and I could hear the clicking.
I would wake up...you know, you're thinking about your children, you know,
and you hear them breathing, and I would just hear like,
"Click. Click. Click."
"Okay! Alright, everything is fine! Go back to sleep." [LAUGHS]
When I think about where the work comes from, I actually think of very dark things.
I'm definitely informed by destructive things around me,
["Water Panics in the Sea" -- 2011]
or even in my own head.
But even Disney movies had dark sources, you know.
It didn't necessarily come across that way, but they did.
I like epic stories.
And, I think there's the epic in just about everything.
There's an epic story somewhere in everyone's realities,
even when we think nothing interesting is happening.
["Liuto Golis" -- 2010]
When the works sort of get sometimes classified as 'fantasy'
I mean, I really don't see them as fantasy.
I guess I'm thinking about creating a certain atmosphere,
a certain place.
It's just proposing a different reality.
It's a world happening at the same time as this one.
We're just kind of peering in.