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Coming from a generation that watched a lot of television
and sort of grew up with rock and roll,
I seized on three things--
the text, the screen, and action.
So when I started making films, I really integrated the screen
into the film, which then became the front plate
and the back plate.
Meaning that I could put text on the screen,
and it would influence what you saw behind it.
When I decided that I was going to make film,
I knew that it had to be as much a sound piece
as it was a visual piece.
Most people in my generation at that particular time
were directed towards video photography,
but I wanted to work with film.
Film cameras and large performance projection
and the kinetic element was extremely important to allow
that kind of participation.
I wanted the audience to feel with the film.
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Cinderella was a very intense production.
It involved using a studio for probably six months
to both build and shoot in and animate in
and do everything in.
It was a very intense black box experience that I wanted simply
to get out of the black box.
I seized on Cinderella when I found
the book that had something like 800 variants,
from 1600s to the late 19th century.
And within this, I found motifs that are still with us
today in the story that we know-- the shoe et cetera.
But most of the stories had nothing
to do with the Cinderella that Disney has left us
with and ordained us with.
Cinderella the film was an interactive narrative.
You The Bettor started off years before Cinderella
to be an interactive gambling game.
Which was something I observed.
I did a lot of research, looking, going around
to casinos.
I observed behaviors and I observed
the sort of phenomena that happens
in a casino where the player is betting against chance.
Using something like belief, will, strategy
to predict the probability and also to hopefully succeed
in the game of chance.
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Someone sought me out, an instructor
at a film school in Budapest that
was the director of the Bela Balasz
Studio, archive of avant garde, experimental,
and documentary work.
And he saw a picture of You The Bettor and said,
I want you to come and do something.
And we'll give you a crew.
And if you come to Budapest, we will make a film for you.
I was very interested with the Soviet idea
of the factory, which included public and worker housing.
So there was a community that supported
the manufacturing of a product, and it was
a self-sustaining community.
So I asked it to see these places, these factories that I
had seen.
Gas factory, pig factory, all these places
that were so utopian to me were on their way out.
And we were struggling to find places where I could shoot.
And so I quickly had to abandon the fairy tale
and just work with a sort of skeletal idea of a woman who
is engaged in the process of manufacturing
and wants to escape it.
Tension Building was first an experiment.
Strictly an experiment to see how
having come from making Switch Center where I animated
architecture, I wanted to see if I got involved in really
analyzing how an architectural space is designed,
and integrate that design of the space
with my camera movement, what would happen?
And began to think about how stadium architecture is
created in order to provide certain spectacle
points of view.
I wanted to work with this idea that you create
a world that people understand through modification,
through alteration, transformation.
And that it's all, not just abstract visuals,
but it's also performance engaged
with these abstract images.
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