Jodorowsky, Patti Smith, Mount Analog!

A synchronistic guide to saving white whales with instant cinema

Cinema Verses shares the creative process (with a case study: my improvised musical film Brother Verses Brother, with EP Francis Ford Coppola). Today I’m talking about the parallels with my next film, “Helicopter,” featuring Alejandro Jodorowsky, which re-emerged on this journey, via Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and René Daumal. Maybe you need psychomagic in your life..

Holy Mountains, White Whales

Every creator eventually encounters a “White Whale”—the project that stops being a task and starts being a metaphysical weight. For me, that weight is a feature film called Helicopter.

It is a narrative-experimental hybrid—a ten-year excavation of my mother’s death in the helicopter crash that killed rock music promoter Bill Graham. Years ago, the legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky gave me a “psychomagic” assignment to heal from that trauma: put on my mother’s clothing, fly a helicopter through the towers she hit, bike up a 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, alchemizing childhood trauma into a ritual that might either heal an audience or break the filmmaker.

When you are drowning in a “Cathedral” project of this scale, you need a survival strategy.

1. The “Escape Hatch” Principle

I’ve learned that to finish a marathon, you occasionally have to sprint in the opposite direction. I call this the “Escape Hatch” - for me, a self-imposed “one-shot” project that provides the possibility of completion when the main project feels infinite.

• The Short Film Era: While stuck in a year-long edit for the original Helicopter short, I made a film called Culture in a single day—a one-minute performance with ten strict rules. It won the Grand Prize at SXSW and gave me the self-confidence to finish the short.

• The Feature Film Era: Years later, paralyzed by the complexity of the Helicopter Jodorowsky feature version (currently in post-production), I reached for the same solution. Brother Verses Brother—a loose, one-shot improvisational piece with my 99-year-old father—became the oxygen that kept the feature film’s fire alive.

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

2. Synchronicities Are Just Data

When you are deep in the “edit-mountain,” the universe starts sending signals. While cutting a nightmare sequence for Helicopter, I became obsessed with an obscure Italian track, “Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo.” That led me to René Daumal’s book Mount Analogue, which I discovered was the same book that inspired Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain.

The “magic” deepened when I found myself editing bike footage to Patti Smith’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Changing of the Guard,” which we’d played at my mom’s funeral. Months later, in a Paris exhibit, I found Patti had placed Daumal’s Mount Analogue quotations onto her own mountain landscapes.

These aren’t just coincidences; they are confirmation that the mountain you are climbing is a “metaphysical peak.” As Daumal wrote: The summit is inaccessible, but its base is always visible to those who know how to diligently seek it.

The Lesson: Stop looking for the peak (the finished project). Focus on the entryway. The mountain’s “way in” can only be seen by those who know how to look, when the sun hits your boat just right.

3. The Power of the Unfinished Sentence

René Daumal died mid-sentence while writing Mount Analogue. The book ends without even a period.

When I read that abrupt termination, 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 mostly just a series of mid-sentence breaks.

• My father’s performance in Brother is a finished sentence, though he isn’t here to see it.

• Helicopter is finally nearing its summit, but the mountain itself is never fully ascended.

Stop waiting for a “perfect” mood to finish your work. The universe only cares that you started the sentence. Even if you get up from the desk before the period, the act of seeking the base is where the transformation happens.

As my siblings and I prepared to return to Mt. Tam for Brother's California premiere, we knew our dad wouldn’t be there to see his own performance. He never did. But his dust is on the mountain, as predicted in his poems. One sentence is finished.

As René Daumal’s wife Véra 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.

Trees as helicopters