One of the questions people ask me all the time, and I think it is an important one is,
what advice would you give. And when I look at what we’ve done, the only thing I can
say to them, well I can say two things to them; one is, don’t wait and the second
is, there are no mistakes. I always wanted to make films. I didn’t always want to be
a film maker, that’s a slightly different thing but I always did want to make films
and I always did, to be honest. Right, so this is where I work, this is my...this is
pretty much where I am most of the time and the desk has just the usual, sort of, mess
that it would have when I’m working, so there’s books, CDs, some [Maria Callas 01:01]
to some old biddy I’ve never heard of. This is my library of archives. Essentially, it
is a collection of images going back a century. The figure that really caught my attention
was Russian, a guy called Andrei Tarkovsky and the film that really did it for me was
Mirror. [Female voice speaking a foreign language 01:36]. It’s the one that feels like the
border of cinema, like, when you start off you’re trying to understand what the limits
of something are, and when I saw Tarkovsky, I thought, this is it, this is the Mexico,
I’ve found it, you know what I mean. Like, if you could go this far, you’ll still be
okay and it still functions a little bit like that for me. It’s, kind of, the limit of
cinema. I do installations most of the time in the gallery world, feature length films
in the cinema world and documentaries in TV. The ideal way of working, for me, if you want
to occupy these multiple zones is to be aware that each of the zones has its own demands,
ethical, political, cultural, [aesthetic 02:47] blah, blah. So at the inception of an idea
or a way of doing something, what matters is to be clear about the pathway. It’s learning
to really listen to yourself, think aloud and then having the, not so much the experience,
just the courage to name what those germinations are. Here’s the philosophy which is really
what it is, a montage. The commitment to bricolage, the commitment to having discreet elements,
fragments come together. Is that something that you want to apply to this and generally
I say, yes. Everyone who helped popularise their philosophy or montage was interested
in one thing, deferred meaning. That somehow when things collide, two opposites collide
in this dialectical way, some sort of synthesis is engineered or brought about and in that,
a new form, a new meaning or a new way emerges which you can chase, add infinitum. And that’s
the philosophy, it’s a dialectical philosophy and I’m absolutely committed to that. The
thing that, in a way I’ve spoken a lot about, is how much the archive is, sort of, memory
bank which connects it to questions of mortality. Usually, most [outcome 04:48] you can’t
watch stuff without realising that it’s also watching people who’ve gone. That recognition
is, on its own, not very much unless it’s married with a second recognition which is,
that the image is one of the ways in which immortality is enshrined in our psyche and
in our lives. And documentaries do that, you make a documentary because you want to both
capture something that’s going to die unless it’s captured but you’re also trying to
capture something because you want it to live. The
question of why history matters is connected to why the non-fictive or non-fictions matter
because you could tell, and I’m using the two phrases here in metaphoric terms, you
could tell when the surplus of fiction has got into the mix. You know, so one of the
reasons why I was compelled, in a way, to make Vertigo Sea is because you’re sitting
there listening to someone referring to ‘migrants’ as ‘cockroaches’ and you think, okay what’s
going on here. How do people migrate from being human beings to cockroaches. What do
you have to forget, what’s the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting
that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings. So those things,
the aversion to fiction is what keeps me interested in the non-fictive. It’s what keeps me interested
in questions of the historical because they act as a, kind of, powerful counter-ballast,
it means a, sort of, turbulence of amnesia and amnesia is a constant sea. We swim in
it all the time. So one does need the ballast of memory and historical just to counter balance.