Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Online
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
WARHOL: Oh, yeah, but when you see
Made in USA
it really is bad. It really is so boring.
CASTLE: Well that could be . . .
Alphaville
I didn’t like at all. . . .
WARHOL: Oh, I didn’t like that either, it was terrible.
CASTLE: Terrible.
WARHOL: But
Masculine-Feminine
I really liked, I didn’t want to like it but I did. I really did. And it was just easy and. . . .
CASTLE: It was going to be so bad and then it really wasn’t.
WARHOL: Yes. Well, this one now, there’re more gun shots. Everybody is shooting, you know I mean it started somewhere where. . . .
CASTLE: He’s always been fascinated with that. . . .
WARHOL:
Masculine-Feminine
had a couple but this one was, he’s always. . . .
CASTLE: Even his old pictures have people pointing a gun at somebody.
WARHOL: Yeah, but they didn’t shoot as many times as they did this time. This time they really shot, you know, they really, they killed everybody.
CASTLE: He’s always been fascinated with the way in American films suddenly you know two people confront each other and one pulls out a gun and that’s that.
WARHOL: But it’s sort of interesting that. . . .
CASTLE: But he doesn’t understand it, actually, you know.
WARHOL: But now it’s even, it’s just so much, it’s fantastic.
CASTLE: Well. . . .
WARHOL: And uh really now it’s so screwed-up.
CASTLE: What’s that? [a brochure]
WARHOL: Oh, uh, oh, why don’t you take it. He drives me insane that guy.
CASTLE: I was just looking at this.
WARHOL: He bugs people’s apartments, you know, he bugs everything.
CASTLE: Oh, this is one of these sex things. . . .
WARHOL: No, this is a guy who bugs things, no, he’s a, he really is scary. He’s a, oh he wanted to be our manager somewhere but uh and then uh he was so sneaky about it like he’s uh you know bug things or something, you know, and it was just so scary.
CASTLE: He’d record stuff?
WARHOL: Yeah, he sells bugging machines and stuff like that and uh he was just scaring me and it was just. . . oh . . . thanks.
CASTLE: Thank you very much.
WARHOL: Oh, come up and see us since we’re back.
CASTLE: Yeah, all right.
WARHOL: We’re going to work hard.
CASTLE: Back to the ordinary schedule?
WARHOL: Oh, oh, yes, yeah. We’re working, working very hard. I hope Ivy isn’t waiting for me.
CASTLE: It’s too early. Good night.
WARHOL: Good night. Oh, thanks.
1
a, a novel
(New York: Grove Press, 1968).
Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis had conducted two short interviews with Andy Warhol before this more in-depth session from 1969. Upon returning to the Union Square West Factory, Gelmis was struck by the elaborate security precautions that were taken following Warhols shooting by Valerie Solanis the year before. “I remembered that there was a fake wall in front of you when you got off the elevator to guide you and a turnstile to slow you down so that without having a guard there, you actually went through a maze-like process to get access to Warhol. The first thing you saw was Cecil B. DeMille’s stuffed harlequin great done standing there. It stopped you dead in your tracks.” When he finally did gain entry, Gelmis found Warhol absorbed in television.”
Gelmis’s newspaper reporter slant was reflected in the nature of his questions to Warhol: “I took the everyman approach with him as opposed to somebody who was asking more elliptical, insider or antagonistic questions. Warhol responded appropriately, giving me disarmingly pragmatic and simple answer.”
This piece was published in a book ofGelmiss interviews with prominent directors of the day, The Film Director as Superstar (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), including Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola. Gelmis recalls how different his experience with Warhol was: “Most directors I interviewed were starved for people to ask them questions about the creative process or what their practice meant. Warhol was interesting for a totally different reason because he hadnt a clue about the filmmaking process. I must have interviewed 5,000 filmmakers in the course of 30 years and he was unique in his non-narrative approach. He was admitting that they were coming out of a non-technical, fdming-what-happens kind of approach, and in doing so, putting on film what nobody else had achieved up to that point.”
In his original introduction to the interview, Gelmis wrote: “He is a listener and observer who absorbs and absorbs and absorbs. Ordinarily, he is like a somnambulist, with very gentle, doe-like eyes, slack, melancholy mouth, straight, platinum-dyed hair, soft, courteous voice. He is a listless conversationalist, totally passive. In the following interview, which was conducted at his ‘factory’ in a Union Square loft, the only time that Warhol became at all animated was when he started to discuss the ‘beavers’ he had seen earlier in the day. In talking to others who came and went during the afternoon, he spoke in the same monotone and drifted around in a kind of vague torpor.”
The interview lasted approximately half an hour and is printed verbatim.
–KG
GELMIS: Why are you making movies? Why did you give up painting?
WARHOL: Because movies are easier to do.
G: Easier than signing Campbell Soup cans?
W: Yeah. Well, because you just turn the camera on. And then, if you go into commercial filming, it’s even easier because people do it all for you. They really do. The camera person is really the person that usually makes the movie.
G: Do you really think that Lester and Penn and Kubrick and Nichols let their cameramen do all the work?
W: Yeah.
G: There’s an element of confession and of autobiography in almost everything you film. The people who act for you seem to be constantly confessing. What’s your fascination with the confessional?
W: They’re just people who talk a lot.
G: Where do you get your actors? Where did Ingrid Superstar and Viva and Ultra Violet and Mario Montez come from?
W: Just around, I guess. They were just the ones who wanted to be in a movie. So that’s how we used them.
G: Have you since gotten many more people interested?
W: No. It’s very hard. Those people just sort of happen. You can’t look for them.
G: How much of your films is fiction and how much of it is real? Is this what they’d be doing whether you had the camera turned on them or not? Would Ondine do what he did and said in
Chelsea Girls?
W: Yes. He does better things now. I wish I were filming it now.
G: How do you see your role in getting him to do what he does?
W: I don’t do anything. That’s what I don’t understand.
G: What’s your role, your function, in directing a Warhol film?
W: I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.
G: It’s been suggested that your stars are all compulsive exhibitionists and that your films are therapy. What do you think?
W: Have you seen any
beavers?
They’re where girls take off their clothes completely. And they’re always alone on a bed. Every girl is always on a bed. And then they sort of fuck the camera.
G: They wriggle around and exhibit themselves?
W: Yeah. You can see them in theaters in New York. The girls are completely nude and you can see everything. They’re really great.
G: If they aren’t prohibited by the state obscenity law, what’s preventing other filmmakers from doing the same thing?
W: Nothing.
G: So why haven’t you done it? Or have you?
W: We’re getting there.
Lonesome Cowboys
has two fucking scenes. There’s hard-ons and the actors go down on each other in
Fuck
1
. That’s a movie we made when I got out of the hospital after I was shot. It’s been shown at the Museum of Modem Art.
G: Have you actually made a beaver yet?
W: Not really. We go in for artier films for popular consumption, but we’re getting there. Like, sometimes people say we’ve influenced so many other filmmakers. But the only people we’ve really influenced is that beaver crowd.
The beavers are so great. They don’t even have to make prints. They have so many girls showing up to act in them. It’s cheaper just to make originals than to have prints made. It’s always on a bed. It’s really terrific.
G: How did you learn to make movies?
W: I bought a 16-mm camera and took a trip to California four or five years ago. We were going to Hollywood, so that’s what made me think of buying a camera.
G: Did you bring along a tape recorder or shoot silent first?
W: Silent. I was just learning how to use a camera. I’m still learning how to use a camera. We haven’t made a
movie
yet.
G: What have you been doing until now?
W: Just photographing what happens.
G: Is it preparation for something you’re planning in the back of your mind?
W: No. Things always happen, so you never know what’s going to happen. You can’t really prepare for anything.
G: When did you make your first movie, or non-movie? How do you refer to them, incidentally, if you don’t call them movies?
W: Depending on the time, we have short ones and long ones.
G: But are they called movies, or what? You say you haven’t made any movies up until now.
W: I think movies are the kind of things Hollywood does. We haven’t been able to do that. Because you need a lot of money to do that. So we’re working it out our way.
G: Why was
Chelsea Girls
half in color and half in black and white?
W: I don’t know. We got a little more money, I guess.
G: Is money still the chief consideration for why things are done the way they are in your movies?
W: Yeah. We have to make our movies look the way they do because if you can make them look better bad, at least they have a
look
to them. But as soon as you try to make a better movie look good without money, you just can’t do it.
G: It looks shoddy?
W: Yeah.
G: When people went to see
Faces
2
many were disappointed because they thought it would be a slick Hollywood movie but it was grainy 16 mm enlarged to 35 mm and it wasn’t carefully lit.
W: It was very slick when I looked at it. I saw it in
Life
magazine and it was cropped. If it were shown in a square it would have been awful. But it was shown in a nice super-oblong.
G: Do you experiment much with various projection shapes yourself?
W: Well, you get used to cutting off things. It makes the movie more mysterious and glamorous.
G: Why did you make a movie like
Sleep
about a guy who sleeps for eight hours?
W: This person I knew slept a lot.
G: During the day?
W: No, at night.
G: Doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?
W: Not when you turn the camera and the lights on and everybody’s making noise.
G: You just set the camera on a tripod and had operators spelling each other behind the camera for eight hours?
W: Yeah. Well, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to because I did it in three-minute things. So now we do it in thirty-five-minute things.
G: Were you using a simpler camera then?
W: Yeah. We use an Arriflex and a Nagra tape thing now.
G: Have you made a 35-mm film yet?
W: No. I guess we’ll do that some day. It’s expensive.
G:
Sleep
was shown silent, wasn’t it?
W: Yeah. The first time we showed it, we had a radio on in the theater. Instead of recording a sound track, we just put a radio next to it and every day put on a new station. And if a person were bored with the movie, he could just listen to the radio. People listen to radios.
G: You’ve said you like television a lot, too. Any special programs?
W: I like it all.
G: Why?
W: There’s just so much to see. You can change all the stations. As soon as it gets a big picture, it’ll be even more exciting. Everybody should have two television sets. So you can watch two at a time. Every time you see the President, he has three.
G: Can you really pay attention to two sets at once? Or is it just images and sensations, anyway?
W: I put two things on the screen in
Chelsea Girls
so you could look at one picture if you were bored with the other.
G: How do you feel about the interruptions of the commercials on television?
W: I like them cutting in every few minutes because it really makes everything more entertaining. I can’t figure out what’s happening in those shows anyway. They’re so abstract. I can’t understand how ordinary people like them. They don’t have many plots. They don’t do anything. It’s just a lot of pictures, cowboys, cops, cigarettes, kids, war, all cutting in and out of each other without stopping. Like the pictures we make.
G: How many pictures have you made so far?
W: I dunno. It depends on how you count. We have small ones and big ones and sometimes we make two from one or one out of two older pictures. We stopped making so many now. We thought we’d wait a while to see what happens.
G: You recently made a one-minute television commercial for Schrafft’s.
W: Yeah, well, that just took a minute to do.
G: But it took more than a minute to put that minute together, didn’t it?
W: No, it just took a minute.
G: What about the use of videotape? You’ve said you’re enthusiastic about using tape. Why?
W: Oh, it’s like instant pictures. You can see it right back. You can combine things together that you can’t do in films. You have to send films out to be processed.
G: Can you imagine yourself making a full script sometime, written out in advance?
W: Yeah, if anybody asked us to do it, we’d do it.
G: You did make a western, or at least you made a movie,
Lonesome Cowboys
, on location in Arizona.
W: Yeah, that was with Viva. We asked them to make up something, but they were still themselves. They were in cowboy hats.
G: You were supposed to go on a tour of colleges last year and you sent someone else in a wig who pretended to be you on the stage introducing the films.
W: We went to about fifty colleges last year.
G: Is it true that you sent a stand-in to the college lectures?
W: I only did it because I thought it was what they wanted. It was more entertaining.
G: You’re really anxious to entertain?
W: Oh, sure. That’s what we’re trying to do now. The cowboy movie is more entertaining than the early ones.
G: Is there a market for your films in colleges?
W: Yeah, that’s where we get most of our films shown. I think movies are becoming novels and it’s terrific that people like Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag are doing movies now too. That’s the new novel. Nobody’s going to read any more. It’s easier to make movies. The kind of movies that we’re doing are like paperbacks. They’re cheaper than big books. The kids at college don’t have to read any more. They can look at movies, or make them.
G: What was the reaction of the college audiences to your films last year?
W: We showed them so much they didn’t know whether they liked them or not.
G: Is that the reaction of most people?
W: When people go to a show today they’re never involved any more. A movie like
Sleep
gets them involved again. They get involved with themselves and they create their own entertainment.