Jodorowsky, Patti Smith & Mount Analog

A guide to building cathedrals

[Cinema Verses shares the creative process. Case study: my improvised musical Brother Verses Brother, EP’ed by Francis Ford Coppola. Today I’ll share the parallels with my next movie, “Helicopter,” and how René Daumal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan merged in psychomagic.]

Holy Mountains, Unfinished Cathedrals

Every creator eventually encounters a project that becomes an unfinished cathedral. For me, that was a feature film called Helicopter. But just as cathedrals need grace to take their final form, so do movies.

Helicopter is a re-imagining of my mother’s death in the crash that killed rock music promoter Bill Graham. Filmmaker-shaman Alejandro Jodorowsky gave me the following “psychomagic” assignment to heal: put on my mom’s clothing, fly in a helicopter through the towers she hit, bike up a (holy) mountain, and re-invent her death - on film - to free her spirit. A trailer, if you’re curious:

What followed was a decade-long edit-hell spanning five countries, as I worked to alchemize childhood trauma into a movie that could heal an audience. Or maybe just break me. I learned that when you’re lost in the middle of building a Gothic-Cathedral-level piece of architecture, you need to try a different construction technique.

The Elf House Principle

To finish a cathedral, I sometimes build an elf-house in the forest. For me, twice, the elf house has been an improvised single-shot movie. This provides the practice of fast completion, when another project gets stuck on the gargoyles.

• My elf-house Short Film: While lost in a year-long edit for the original Helicopter short, I made an instant film called Culture - a one-minute performance, filmed once. It won the Grand Prize at SXSW and gave me the self-confidence to finish the first Helicopter.

• My elf-house Feature Film: Years later, paralyzed again by the complexity of the Jodorowsky feature-length version of Helicopter, I commenced Brother Verses Brother, a one-shot improvised musical starring my family. This also became the oxygen that brought Helicopter back to life.

The Lesson: If your main project is a cathedral, go build an elf house this weekend. You need to remember what it feels like to write “The End.”

Synchronicity For Beginners

When you have the courage to sleep in your unfinished cathedral towers, even during a hurricane, God sometimes sends you messages to keep going.

While cutting a nightmare sequence for Helicopter, I became obsessed with an obscure Italian electronic-music piece from the mid-seventies, called “Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo.” The title of the track led me to René Daumal’s book Mount Analogue, which I then realized was the same book that inspired Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain.

Mount Analogue is the story of a quest to climb a mountain that can only been seen by those who know how to look for it. René Daumal died mid-sentence while writing the book - it ends without even a period. When my eyes passed over that abrupt termination, I began to weep.

But it wasn’t a tragedy, it was somehow profound and correct. We are often paralyzed by the “Assessor” in our heads who demands a perfect conclusion. But life, death, and art are really a series of mid-sentence breaks.

And yet here I was, being accidentally tortured for years by Jodorowsky, who’d been inspired by Daumal. Was I also creating a journey up a mountain I’d never fully ascend? I went to Paris to try to meet with Jodo, and ask for clues about his insane artistic-ritual instructions, but his kind wife told me they were too busy to meet. I left a drawing for them in their mailbox.

And then the magic deepened. In my Paris Airbnb, laptop on my knees, I began editing the scene where I slept on the last spot my mom touched the earth.

I decided to try editing to Bob Dylan’s “Changing of the Guard,” the song we’d played at my mom’s funeral, but it didn’t feel right until I switched to Patti Smith’s soulful, powerfully feminine version of the same song.

In the afternoon, I stretched my back from my edit-slouch and wandered to the Pompidou museum, where Patti Smith herself had put together an exhibit of some sort. Climbing to the top floor, I was mesmerized by a snowy installation that felt like a mountaineering adventure. And then, I discovered that Patti had placed Daumal’s Mount Analogue quotations onto the walls of the exhibit.

“Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo” had come full circle. Sometimes in life, things aren’t just coincidences, they are confirmation that the mountain you are climbing is the right one.

The Lesson: Stop looking for the peak (the finished project). Focus on the entryway and the mountain will appear. As Daumal wrote: The summit is inaccessible, but its base is always visible to those who know how to diligently seek it.

The Power of the Unfinished Sentence

My father’s performance in Brother Verses Brother is an unfinished sentence. He isn’t here to see it. And though I am finally polishing the towers of the Helicopter cathedral, I have made elf-houses all the way up to inspire myself (and the gargoyles). But here’s the thing: Helicopter may look okay in an unfinished-gothic state anyway.

The Lesson: Stop looking for perfection to finish your work. God only cares that you started to carve with an intention to reach the spires, and the sculptures will appear. Yes, I realize I’m mixing metaphors: mountains and cathedrals! But they’re the same thing, no?

Even if you die at your the desk before your pen writes the period, the act of climbing and carving is where the transformation happens. As I prepare to bring my new films into the world, my parents - who are the real stars of the film - won’t be here to see my renditions of them. But their dust is on the mountain, in the elf houses, and on the spires.

As Daumal’s wife Véra Daumal wrote:

I am dead because I have no desire
I have no desire because I think I possess,
I think I possess because I do not try to give;
Trying to give, we see that we have nothing,
Seeing that we have nothing, we try to give ourselves,
Trying to give ourselves, we see that we are nothing,
Seeing that we are nothing, we desire to become,
Desiring to become, we live.

Elf trees as spires