Artist turned filmmaker Laurie Anderson talks to our very own Jason Wood about her latest project, Heart of a Dog…
Jason Wood: Can we talk about the genesis of Heart of a Dog – Did it begin as a film project or start from another place?
Laurie Anderson: Well I was asked by RT TV, the French/German channel, to make a film about why I make art and I thought, ‘Why do I make art?’ So I thought well mostly what I do, whether it ends up as a song or a film or a painting, I do with a story. So I thought I’ll make a film about stories and not just the stories themselves but what happens when you forget them, what happens when you repeat them and why we use them. So it was a collection of stories but also stories about stories.
JW: As someone who works in so many different mediums, how were you able to pull all of those disciplines together to tell the story that you tell in Heart of a Dog?
LA: Well I’m what’s called a multimedia artist which I’m afraid is kind of meaningless because everyone’s a multimedia artist but in performances I often use images and almost always music and stories. Of course this isn’t a filmed performance but it’s more like a radio play. The images are only about half the time relating to what you’re hearing about, otherwise you’re using your imagination to fill in the blanks. So it’s a film that’s really like an essay rather than a story. It jumps around between topics and then tries to pull them together.
JW: Did you allow yourself to be influenced by any particular filmmakers? Chris Marker is somebody who’s work I’ve heard mentioned in passing.
LA: Absolutely. I love his films. La Jetee is such a masterpiece. It’s a film made of stills and a voiceover – it’s like a slideshow – but it was just a wonderful, really evocative film and you didn’t feel like anything was missing because the images weren’t moving because your mind was moving. So my film is made up of almost all questions. There are so many questions – it begins with them, it ends with them and they’re threaded through the whole thing. It’s meant to be almost a conversation. It leaves a lot of room for someone to come into it.
JW: I wanted to ask about the use of the 8mm footage from your childhood – Why did you decide to incorporate that?
LA: I wasn’t going to use it. That wasn’t my intention at all. One of my brothers said ‘I have all these cartons of films from our childhood, would you mind transferring them?’ I was kind of busy but I said okay and when they came back there was this whole lost frozen world of my childhood. People skating on the ice, I’m skating, my mother’s skating, we’re pushing my little brothers in their stroller – I called my brothers and said ‘Guys, do you remember that day I almost drowned you?’ and they said ‘Yes we do…’ and they said ‘You’re not going to use that in your movie are you?’ and I said ‘Well, would you mind?’ So I did.
JW: Was returning to the period in your life when you broke your back difficult or cathartic?
LA: Everyone has a go-to story when somebody asks ‘What kind of kid were you?’. You have a short story that represents your childhood – I was a shy kid or I was a punk or whatever – and you use those to represent yourself but they’re not really that accurate and often they’re remembered from the point of view of a child. I realised that I always remembered breaking my back and being in the hospital as the 13-year-old that I was. I remember the doctors being idiots and saying that I wouldn’t walk and thinking they’re such idiots and actually adults are idiots because they put all these kids together in the same ward and every night I listened to children screaming and watched them die. So you tell the story that you can tell and for me, as a 13-year-old, I was able to tell that story. I could only tell a story that was me as a hero and a survivor and I couldn’t tell the story of what it was like to watch children die. When I was an adult, I realised that I should tell the story of the child telling the story because you have to think – how are you seeing your life? Are you seeing your life as a romantic comedy? A tragedy? A soap opera? A blog? How do you describe yourself and how does that affect who you are?
JW: The film also talks about the cloud and the idea of where all this information is stored. It’s a gently political film – I wondered if you could talk more about that aspect?
LA: Well it’s also about not only the stories that we tell about ourselves but the stories that get pushed on us. We’re always being described and categorized and put into boxes. You’re put in a box generally for economic reasons. What are you going to buy? What are you going to be interested in? Here’s an example – say you buy a book on Amazon and then you get a notice that says ‘Hello, you just chose that book, here’s another one you’ll like’ – a lot of times I’m thinking ‘Wait a second, I bought that book as a gift. Don’t think you know me because of what I just bought’. So we’re always pushing ourselves into ‘Well, here’s my Facebook personality’ or ‘Here’s my Wikipedia self’ or ‘Here’s my commercial economic profile as done by my bank’. You’re being defined that way all the time so it’s those stories that I was looking at, how they get stored and of course how odd they are, those presentations of you.
JW: The thing that really blew me away was the spiritual aspect of the film. There’s something about watching this film that really makes you step back and look at the pace we live life. Was this intentional?
LA: Yeah, most of my work is about slowing things down. To me, being a buddhist is exactly the same as being an artist because it’s not like there are any rules. There’s nothing you have to believe and no one’s in charge. I also love that that no one’s telling you what to do or making pronouncements about what’s true or not true, you have to decide all of it and I find that exhilarating. I just want to be free. I just want to be able to make up my own mind and I hate it when people tell me what to do and that’s what I do as an artist too. So this is a way to just pose a lot of questions and leave a lot of room for people to step in and go ‘What do I think?’
JW: The score you’ve composed for Heart of a Dog is incredible because it works very well as a stand alone piece but also as a compliment to the film. Could you talk about scoring the film and whether you wanted there to be this clear synergy?
LA: When I finished the film there was no music and I screened it for some people and they said ‘Do us a favor – don’t put music in this film, it’s so hardcore’ and the Producer Dan said ‘You know… You are a musician, why don’t you just try it?’ and so I just did it in like four days, all of that stuff. I played the violin through it a few times and I added some other things and I just thought ‘Okay, I like it’. It was done very intuitively and very fast.
JW: Has this experience given you an appetite to work more in the film medium?
LA: It was great fun to do and one of the reasons it was fun was because there was no pressure. It was done as an art film with almost no budget and I loved working like that so I would have to put myself in a situation that was similar, I think, to have as much fun. But I had a lot of fun doing this. The next projects I have taken on are all about writing but as soon as I get back to having some time I’ll definitely do another one.
Heart of a Dog screens here at HOME from Fri 20 May. Book tickets, watch the trailer and find out more here.
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