What happened to you? You were gone from the film world for
so long.
Around the time of my last movie, I was having trouble relating to
things. In some ways, I just started to feel like it would be best for
me to turn my back on film, on movie making, or just to walk away and
do something else. I couldn’t really connect to anything and I wasn’t
so happy where I was in life. So I spent the last 10 years –
eight years, however many years – doing odd jobs: mowing yards, I
worked as a lifeguard, I interned with a cobbler, and then I spent six
months in Peru with a group of fisherman looking for a special kind of
fish. Then that was it. After a certain amount of time had passed and
years clicked away, I felt ready again. I started to think in images
again and started to feel like I could make movies again.
What is the source of Mister
Lonely?
Early on I had started thinking of this idea of nuns jumping out of
airplanes, nuns riding bicycles in the clouds and doing tricks in the
sky. But that was pretty much it; that was the extent of it. I didn’t
have a story or any kind of narrative. And I was working on a script
before then, right before my houses burned down. It was a script about
a pig named Trotsky and this kid who invented a special kind of
adhesive that he would put on to ride outside of these walls. He would
ride around and walk through the swampland in Florida and firebomb
houses. A lot of that script burned down with my house.
Your house burned down?
I had two houses that burned down. It was within a six-month
period.
The second one I kind of know about but the first one, I don’t
really know how it happened. It’s still a mystery. There were a lot of
strange forces at work during that period.
Werner Herzog is in Mister
Lonely.
I called him and asked him if wanted to be part of the movie and he
said he was very excited to play an alcoholic jungle priest.
Samantha Morton is in Mister Lonely.
She was an old friend of mine. I’ve known her pretty much since she
started acting. I always thought she was one of the best actresses and
someone whose career I followed. I was always impressed by her so I
asked her to do the film and it was very good.
In Mister Lonely, what connects the
celebrity impersonator story to the one about the flying
nuns?
They were both about obsessive dreamers creating their own society
– people who wanted to transcend the limits of who they really
are. It’s almost like they wanted to create a world that was like the
real world but slightly tweaked, slightly altered, like a subtle
science fiction. That was both of them.
I heard you had a film idea about you picking up fights with
random people?
That was actually something I did, it’s just never been released. It
was a film called Fight Harm. It was shot around 1998 or 1999
and it just consisted of me getting beaten up by every single
demographic. For instance, I would go to Harlem and fight a lesbian and
the next day I would get my head smashed in by an Arab guy with a
mandolin. It was supposed to be a feature film that just consisted
entirely of fights. That was pretty much it. After that I just didn’t
do anything.
