 So, hopefully, we'll have other opportunities to see your film. Uh... I think this is the second time it's been shown in public. It's hard to get films like this shown anymore. I remember back in the 1980s and 90s, John Joe's films used to play fairly regularly in San Francisco, the Arn Institute, the Roxy Theater, and that was always the high point of the month when my friends and I saw that on the schedule. I remember about 30 years seeing your plane talking common sense, I think, and I asked you why at the end of that movie it's a black-and-white final sequence. There was a red line on the side of the frame, and you said it's to keep it interesting for you, to hold your attention. And I was struck that every single frame of his films, and this is not the only film that this is the case, is quite beautiful, fascinating in its own right, you know, painterly. You have a real visual flair and an interesting, I think, relationship with landscapes. How did you decide on this film and this particular place? Well, I knew the area because I lived there for a while in Port Hadlock, otherwise known as Port, locally known as Port Hardlock, because the kind of people who lived there like me. And Steve lived there, and I visited Steve quite often and stayed in his house a number of times. And way in the back of it was a distributor named Marcus Who who originally came from San Francisco, I believe, had a thing called Strand Releasing, which is essentially mostly gay films, and not just, but mostly gay films or unmarketable Euro art films. And he was always pressing me to make a gay film, and so I thought, well, okay, we'll make a gay film. I didn't make it for him, but it was sort of okay, we'll make a gay film. And somehow in the back of my head, I didn't have a story, I just had, okay, a gay couple breaking up, that's all I had going for it. Everything they said was improvised, essentially around... There was a back story because John Manow used to be the director of the community theater in Port Angeles, and he had done a casting call, and Steve had gone to the casting call for some play he wanted to be on. Steve also was director for this thing, and apparently typical theater stuff. They did a casting call, but the guy already knew who he wanted, and it wasn't Steve, so then Steve got pissed off. And I think that tension, there was clearly between them, there was clearly a tension, so it played good for a bickering bitchy gay couple. And basically Steve inverted the roles of his own partner, right? He played his partner in what the kinds of things they brought up and talked about was all straight out of his life, except being on the other side of the fence. I don't know what makes me do films. It certainly isn't to make any money, and certainly with films like this, it's because I don't know what else. I'm finally learning what else to do, maybe nothing. I'm about ready to say. There's certainly not the first of your films that deals with relationships or tensions in relationships. I think there's quite a few films like that. Yeah, I would say very many of them deal with tensions in couples or tensions in, you know, whatever. One of my earlier third films was a third feature film, even mine I did make shorts for ten years before I made any features. Last Chance for a Slow Dance, which is one of the ones that's better known. I do make a little money off of it because it was published in a book called, referenced in a book called A Thousand and One Films You Must See Before You Die. And so, you know, two or three times, three times a month, sometimes once a month I'll get this. You're the last one. I finally found you. I want a copy. And so I said, okay, now you can die. But that was about, you know, it wasn't so much about a couple. It was just about an asshole guy, you know, which there's plenty in the world. And the title of that film, Last Chance, is C-H-A-N-T-S. It's sort of a pun, I suppose. Well, it was named that because it had like six or seven of my songs in it. And the songs were an integral part of the narrative. So it was, you know, it's a nice rhyme. Last Chance for a Slow Dance has double meanings, seemingly orally anyway. And it was the last songs for a Slow Dance. One of the remarkable things that you've just witnessed is the role of music in John Joe's films. The film I saw just before this, they had a coming. I believe you're singing in that also. Which is quite, it was quite moving in the film. And then when the credits came up, I thought, oh, that's amazing. That's the director himself singing. I was like, who is that singer? Just the whole oral dimension of the film is also very, I was quite struck in this film for weeks after seeing it. I heard the WC playing in my head. And likewise, you know, it's interesting. That was all just happenstance. It happened John played harp and I'm not going to let that go. It happened that Steve flew an airplane and I'm not going to let that go. So it's just sort of, you know, I had no story when it began. I was like, oh, you play harp? Well, let's see if we can weave that in. I have a filmmaker friend, Mark Rappaport, who loved coming to terms, the film, two films before this one. And then I sent him this one, Mark is gay. And he said he absolutely loathed to this film. This film. Because he said, who would want to spend two months or two minutes around these bitty guys? Which I concur, yeah, this is true. And then he told me, and I hate harp music. And I hate wind chimes. I said, well, I guess I get the trifecta. I actually love the wind chimes because it is to me it kind of transitioned from the sounds and the sites of water, you know, the sounds of nature. And then the wind chimes are sort of, if you might say, are played by nature because it's the one that's playing it. And then you go to the harp and there seems this whole tension between how we are living our lives against a backdrop of nature and nature is doing some of it. We're pushed and pulled by these forces and then we ourselves are, you know, creating this fragile existence there. I thought you had the different images that you had really nicely summarized that. And, you know. So we have some questions? Yes, questions from the audience. Here's the mic. Hi. Sure, the first film I saw by you was Rembrandt Laughing. Could you say a little bit about what that film meant to you or the experience of making the film? Anything at all about it? I love that film. Well, it was made, like most of my films, with my friends. In this case, it was, normally I make films in two or three weeks. In Rembrandt Laughing, I wanted to take a long time and I told everybody who was involved. Most of them were friends of mine. A few of them were friends of the friends of mine who got brought into the film. And I just told them, well, I want to do, take our time. And, you know, when you have an afternoon and you can give me an afternoon, then we'll shoot. And so that film, I don't really remember how long it took, maybe six months. I don't really remember. But it was very casually done. I think it was done in order. And there was no script. I had a central idea for it, which was I wanted to tell a story by leaving out, by leaving gaps in it. So the film starts on a Sunday morning. It goes to the next Monday, Monday later in the morning. And it's going through characters as it's doing this. And basically you're going, each scene is a progression in time through a day until, I think, you get to Thursday. And then it jumps a week. So we don't know what happened in that week, in between week. And then it jumps a month. We don't know what happened in that. And then it jumps a year. And one of our lead characters has died and things like that. And in fact, the person who's dead, I just spent the afternoon with him looking at his gorgeous films in the family of Dorsky. So it was a concept about using time as a structure. But the story was just improvised and made up along the way with things that were shot in... Where are you, Barbara? There's Barbara. It was shot in Barbara's apartment. And it was shot in places just my friend's places or where they worked and just put together like that. I don't... The way I imagine myself making films usually is that I'm going along the street and I have a vague idea and I find a piece here and it's like a jigsaw puzzle. And I say, until I get enough piece and say, okay, now let's put the jigsaw puzzle together and see what comes out of it. And so the... Usually I don't know what the end of the film is going to be until we get to shooting the end. And then I'll go, oh, I guess that's... And so it's I guess a very different approach than most filmmaking is. And Rembrandt laughing is one of my personal favorites. It's also one of the most painful for me to watch because John English who played the lead guy is dead. Roger Ruffin is dead. There's just, you know, I go over the three or four people in the film are dead. So that's a little... And John not only played the lead role but he did music for five of my films. And so it's a little hard to look at. But I like the film. It's one of my few warm films, right? The central tone of it is quite warm and nice about nice people. Not that long. I mean, I'm never based in anywhere very long. I think that was 89. I've been in and out of San Francisco, I think, since 85, maybe, 86, something like that. But, you know, a period and then gone away for a year and then whatever. So I've been familiar with San Francisco since 68 when I moved from the Midwest to the West Coast. Any other questions? I've got one there. This is the first film of yours that I've seen and they are simply gorgeous. Had you intended from the beginning that the end be as violent? No. I didn't really know what the end would be until we were a fair bit of the way through shooting and then I thought, oh, you fly an airplane, you're depressed, so maybe crash your airplane. Kind of a trivial ending in my this film. I like it as an experiment to see how diffuse I could make a narrative and other things but I don't really it doesn't quite work for me. But I think I don't think it's bad. There's something about it that I just you know and I don't and I haven't been able to figure out what it is. I don't really understand what it is that I find a little problematic but I I like so much of it. I like the setting and ambient in which the story becomes not secondary but even lower than that on the totem pole of import and just sort of feel this stuff and maybe that's maybe that's my problem is because the story with the guys is such a clash with the rest of the movie. I mean the rest of it is beautiful but that sort of makes it more interesting to have the friction between here you are in this beautiful place and everything is so wonderful. You guys are acting like cats and dogs and maybe I don't think when I make movies I don't have ideas and think about them and say well I'm trying to express this I just get together enough pieces to make a movie and make a movie and find out whatever that was in it and that's I guess what I found out in this one. John, I think if you'd cut from the guy annually flying his plane to the phone call and left out the discovery of the body Allah, Rembrandt laughing it would have fixed it up that's just my advice I'm sure you thought of it I sort of agree that the body on the beach should go but I'm not interested in going back to it. Questions? I don't know much about you John I just want to tell you that I really enjoyed the movie kind of like an experience I haven't seen movies like this so much and it was exquisite as far as I'm concerned probably I would agree that I would have been perfectly happy without the ending that part of it I just love the gaps the stillness within somehow everything worked the nature and these two human beings somehow merged I was reminded of kind of a holographic image that each part of it represents the whole it was like every five minutes of it could have been satisfying in and of itself and then the whole thing put together was it was just lovely thank you I think you're an amazing man you're in a minority you don't care thank you sir yeah I'm trying to think about how to ask this question it has to do with what you I would like to hear you think about what you brought to this in terms of having it be a relationship between two men instead of heterosexual relationship because I think about in many of your films and I think about Surefire and I think of Bed You Sleep and I think of coming to terms and I think of other films that are about males and male heads of households and patriarchs and failed patriarchs there seems to be something that you say in those films that has to do with patriarchal family structures and capitalism and American ideology that you whine very you do very you implicate the landscape and the atmosphere in those films and I saw you doing that with the landscape and I felt it in the depressed environs of the place you were at and I don't have any problems with seeing male-male relationship fall apart or anything but it definitely stood out as a sort of a change of tone and I'm wondering what you think about that and I don't know if I have a clear question. Well the thing is the things you say about the other films but once again I don't think about these things I don't think I'm going to make a film about an asshole male patriarch in Utah. I don't think that. I just go to the place soak up the vibes whatever is necessary to do it and then it happens. There wasn't a script for Sure-Fire. I didn't know the Sure-Fire would end the way it ended until we got to the end and I was like oh this is the right ending for it and did all the rest of the films but it is you know I am kind of it's true that I'm very consistent and usually at the end of my films some characters are dead but that's that long ago I intellectualized that for myself I said you can't tell stories about life if you don't have death in it because implicit in any deep sense of life it comes to an end people die often not nice ways but and so long ago intellectually I thought probably now I just feel that I just feel well it isn't really full if you do a film about human beings it's got to be death has to be snucking it somewhere whether it's benign like in Rembrandt laughing somebody dies but it's so discreet some people don't even know somebody died when they look at Rembrandt laughing you know because it's done so delicately that you you know some people don't know that's as ashes in a jar at the end but it's just for ages it's just like to me making I play stupid country western I write my stupid country western songs I play them and get much better than I used to be I practiced a year in Ragusa Italy with my new electric guitar and the thing is if I'm playing music and I'm certain it's true for any musician if you think you fuck up and long ago I I began to address okay I'm making a film and to me it's like I'm playing music and so I think basically the point where I felt that I knew my instruments well enough I knew a camera I knew editing I knew sound I knew all that well enough to say that now I can just play right I don't need it I don't need a crutch of a script I don't need a storyboard I can just walk in the room and I'm so cinematic I go most of you know like probably most people saw say all the Vermeers is the one maybe most people here might have seen you know like there are scenes in there that are 15 minutes of screen time that were shot in an afternoon because I can go in a room and go this night you know and just patch it together cinematically just very quickly and so when I'm making a movie it's just I'm just you know I picked up my horn and I'm playing and if I start thinking about what I'm playing then I start having problems and so at least that for me that's the approach I take so you know I did not write what those guys said so I had no and I didn't tell them that's what I wanted to say I said okay you're a couple splitting up right and Steve's grabbed out his life and John grabbed out of his and then they just basically squabbled about things that were very real to them and I had no say about you know I want you to say this to reflect something no I just want them to do it do whatever they did so I didn't think about you know but I didn't on the other ones either I didn't do it on the bed you sleep and I didn't think oh I'm doing this thing about it just happened because that's how I see the world right or how I see America and it's not intellectualized it's well you're saying though that it just comes out it just comes out again and again because that's the that's the song that you have in you well that's that's how I see the world I mean in general yeah in general males left to their own devices there are pretty much assholes what can we know about it and other films that have been really must have been like what's the is plain talk is that there's a documentary about four corners in this and and this one is much more scripted than these these four you know plain talk was scripted after the fact I mean I shot and then I wrote what I felt would you know articulate something but it wasn't scripted before it was you know it was scripted as I edited until I got to say something here no question yes in light of that comment you're shorted with Mitch Hampton takes on a whole new meaning for me you're a short film with Mitch Hampton playing the piano takes on a whole new meaning for me which improvises that whole thing I know right but this actually blue straight kind of reminded me of slow moves in a way without without as much of the humor perhaps but I was wondering kind of a more utilitarian question how did you arrive at the title of the film well it's shot on the straight of San Juan de Fuca you're talking about this film so it was shot in Port Angeles which is on the straight of San Juan de Fuca which separates Canada from the U.S. so it was a straight and then because of general tonality was kind of down blue sad what do we call it so I had played around with it I had other things but they all had blue in it plus ages ago like 40 years ago I wanted to make a film on the southern California coast Del Mar that one was going to be and I never got around to making it and I wanted to call it coastal blues so I sort of resurrected part of my title I did not I don't think I consciously meant that the straight part of this would have other connotations it would be spelled differently anyway so any other questions there you go do you ever watch mainline movies and what do you look for if you do basically no I do not I do workshops and have taught at the university for four years in Korea and I basically tell my students I'll say well did you see this and they say I have a film on my shoulder back and forth to people talking if it has that I'll just leave which means I leave 99% of films because that's how most films are grammatically structured and it's not just that it's other things that irritate me basically I'm not really interested in films that are just about people if there isn't something visually going on that I have never seen before like this afternoon I spent two hours with Nathaniel Dorsky looking at his films in his basement his newer films and I kept seeing things I've never seen before but I know he can do that so I have no problem sitting down to watch Nathaniel's films and I just I don't want to see an ordinary film I don't want to see a narrative film that's more or less conventionally and at this point I don't have that much time yet to live and I certainly want to live in a different way than looking at boring movies that I already saw 3,000 times in form and content they're all more or less the same once in a while you get a kick in the butt and you'll see something where they actually did something what, three or four years ago there was an Oscar winner the first time I ever liked an Oscar winner and it was Birdman because I saw something I'd never seen before because I saw a well-executed single-take movie visually it was a single continuous take without a cut a cut in it and it was excellently, the story I didn't care about it, I didn't give a fuck about some guy like that but the execution of making this seamless continuous thing that put you over time space, everything did it so well and as a person who makes films I know how difficult it is to have all that technical apparatus and in that case particularly all the actors were trapped in a highly technical box and they had to look like as natural as could be and they did it you didn't see any actors waiting for the camera to come to them when the camera came life was going on and I thought he executed that fantastically even if I didn't give a shit about the story and I I did think he should have ended it at a different place, it should have ended when he shoots himself on the stage the hospital and all that was silly stupid anyway that's so once in a while I'll go the only reason I I just said that the reason I went to see that film which normally I would not have gone to see that film was I was Lincoln, Nebraska, a guy who runs this cinema had been sitting in the thing with me giving a workshop to some students where I had said if there's an over the shoulder shot I leave and he came up to me and said John you might want to see the movie going on on the other side because there isn't any over the shoulder shot so I said okay I'll give it a try and I really liked it other film I saw recently for three years ago I liked Leo Krax's Holy Motors I thought that was a wonderful movie which I think where you know it played in big cities for a week and was gone you know I was in Portland when I saw it and it was there for one week and when I went there was like three people in the audience because it was you know a very well produced, wonderfully acted experimental movie basically that's one way to look at it questions? yeah yeah lots of time don't worry about it one of the last interviews I read in the popular press or weekly press that published at the time it's already been a few years now but I remember you mentioning that you had to leave the country very necessary to your filmmaking because of the environment here I wonder if you'd care to say anything about how that has developed for you over the years and if everywhere else is catching up to us or if it's still I suspect this must have been at least 20 years ago it could have been about 15 at least okay well I did go to Europe for a state in Europe with never coming back to states for 10 years mostly in Portugal and Italy and when I went yes it was true that the probability of being able to make movies on the scale of Oliver Mears or films like that was much better prospects over there but more or less around the same time just a little bit afterwards the first digital video came along and basically relieved one of the having to deal with money people and thinking about money whatsoever not even you don't have to think of a story that will recoup a little money because in digital you know this film cost me $200 if it cost that it probably didn't cost that plus Steve's an excellent cook and I was taking his house so I got fed he's really an excellent cook so every time you sit down for a meal with him you might as well be in a five star restaurant so you know I was eating $200 meals every night while I was there and so I guess I didn't spend $200 I received $2,000 for food so yes I went over there but then digital video came along quickly I did make a film over there in Italy I had another that I was going to make in Austria and was dealing with two asshole crooks and I left after it had begun because they just were just jerks and then I decided I don't want nothing to do with this anymore and I've had enough of this kind of bad experience with people who's interested in money or the glamour of films or whatever it is and digital came along and that's very interesting I jumped into digital well before I got into it in 1996 and when critics would write the gritty they said it looked ugly old digital video can look quite extraordinarily beautiful I know I have friends who late in Pierce makes extravagantly beautiful films in digital video and if you try to make it look like 35 then you're a stupid asshole although when it came out people were desperately trying how do we make it because the film looks like a 35mm movie when it's instead this beautiful medium they can look like nothing like a movie can look quite beautiful in a different way so I started making digital films for example I had an argument with the Berlin Festival where I used to be a regular and then I started working in digital I said well yeah we'll take your film we'll put it in video sidebar and I said I don't want to go in a video sidebar just because it's made on video doesn't mean it's somehow not as good as film people are friends of mine the Greggers and actually I just had a lunch with them last year and they said well John you were right because I had a real running with them because for four years I wouldn't accept my stuff because I said if you can show it you show it just like it's a film and they didn't do it and then over dinner he said well John you were right the digital was the thing and this is weird because of the festival that sort of specialized avant-garde and blah blah blah but we have to stay with celluloid no matter what along comes another medium that allows you to do other things and we can't experiment and play with that so when I switched to to DV basically since then basically festivals don't want to show my work by and large I have like four or five long films that have never been showed publicly because nobody wants to show the kind of films I'm doing because festivals along with most other venues for filmmaking have all whether they're conscious of it or not become highly commercialized and they're concerned about getting butts in seats and certain kinds of films are not going to get butts in seats that's simple so I went to Europe to whatever take my chances and then I decided to totally pull out of the film business as a business and what I make I make for myself and I have a cluster of actor friends who are happy to fly across the country and work for me for free I give them a place to stay and that's about all I can do for them and I cook and I feed them and but I have a cluster of people who are making a film John please make another film at this point I think I'm more or less ready to stop I have three long films none with actors that I should I feel obliged to finish and after that I'm sort of it's just not doesn't make any sense anymore I'm hoping that doesn't happen but what are the hopes of regardless of that getting some sort of retrospective locally, PFA something these people all know me I you know I don't think it will happen also doing a real retrospective of me now would be a major league job for any archive because I have 40 long films and three more are waiting in the wings and that's a large bit of shit to do plus I have you know six programs of short films at least right so so I don't actually I have thought over the last year that I sort of to try to write a polite letter as people think I I have a reputation of not being polite but that's stupid people where these all this shit comes from once you're into public people say what they want but I've been thinking that I should write all the archives of the world and say you know one of you should maybe do this you know it's like I think my work is pretty good and a lot of other people do but then I look at my career and I say here I am 74 years old I've made 40 films I was at one point modestly well known so it's not like I'm hiding under a rock and there's never been one book written about my films not even been a long maxi article and I wonder what is it about my work that doesn't attract the kind of people who there's a guy in London who's wrote some stuff maybe he'll end up doing a book but it's clear that whatever I'm doing academics are not attracted to this even though I would look at it and say oh it seems like such a juicy me to analyze and go blah blah blah blah but it doesn't happen so well I think that's part of it is that you know I don't make the same film again again like James Benning is a good friend of mine and he's been very successful right now in the art world and installations and all that and he would be a case in point of you know in the modern arts if you make the same thing again and again and again then you will get rewarded because people in a way know what they're going to expect and they get it and I really like James and I like a lot of his films and some of his films I find not interesting at all I don't want to watch 21 people smoke cigarette for example he makes some really wonderful films and he makes some that I just feel like he's cataloging yeah okay so number of things just came up there one thing is you've been threatening for a number of years like you're done that's the end of it all you know George Lucas threatens he's going to make an experimental movie so one question would be if you're done then what are you going to do instead and then also do you really think that and you're done because why you've run out of ideas okay so those are that's one set of questions and the other one is is I was thinking about who's going to archive this stuff so yeah I think you should at least try to get send out your polite letter well all my stuff is stored at the Netherlands Film Archive you know so I can be assured that it's all going to be underwater in 50 years that's a really good about so okay so that that's all varied styles see I would disagree I think that there's a number of themes someone I don't know that I would read a book about a film films but there are a number of themes throughout your movies your films that are similar and they aren't all in the same film and they're not there's there's a lot of similar stuff there if someone really wanted to sit down and write a book about it yeah well I agree my view is I make films that are very varied but if you look at them they all look like one of my films even though they might be completely different from each other but you underneath it is my eye and my maybe my sense of time and what I'm told is my bad capacity for telling stories you know that I don't know how to tell stories and I say I can tell I know a lot of my films will leave people in tears well somehow something's working even if it isn't told the same old way right anyway that was something what will I do well I have no idea when I'm going to keel over and die it could be tomorrow or it could be 10 years from now or it could be 20 years from now I like to paint I write a lot if I put I've had people tell me I should organize some of my blogs as books because because and I look I've looked at them and I agree that with some editing I certainly have a few books that have already been printed on the net in the form of blogs and and and if I could I'd like to learn how to do nothing but so far I failed in that endeavor because my brain just is like maybe not thinking but something else I have a hyper active over active thing and I can't sit tight for 10 minutes and not do anything so so but there are other things to do aside from making films or videos although I do have a backlog I have in some hard discs I have at least 50 hours of highly experimental looking stuff which if I took my father I could organize and say here's this experimental film and here's that one and here's this and it's all very beautiful stuff but nobody's ever seen it not because I didn't try to show it but because you know I'm I'm pretty much in film people's minds I'm billed as some kind of new narrative fiction new narrative filmmaker and if I make something that's completely abstract or like I have extremely beautiful film which called Bowman Lake where I went to Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park and I sat there all day long from sunrise to sunset and shot shots and it's like a two hour and 20 minute long film where you see a single shot of Bowman Lake but it's not pixelated I hate pixelating that way and it just looks like real natural time except the light comes and goes and there's a little wind on the lake and so it's choppy and then it's classy and then the light does this and the light does that but all very slowly because there's like two minute there's shots of five minutes and there's a one and a half minute dissolve getting from one shot there so you don't see a dissolve you just see the a slight compression of a whole day in a way that you would never sit there and look at a lake that way in reality you'd be too distracted by other things but in a scene amount for two hours you just look at this stunning gorgeous play of light and water and the mountains and everything nobody's drawn it I what can I do you know it's way too late in the game for me to go groveling right it's like okay I think I can speak for the rest of the staff here we would love to have you back and Joe so some more of your films