A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

lar, and hairy. I was born to be an artist, and I had an artistic way of seeing. I looked at every basketball game as a great symphony: the changes of movement, the rhythms, the nice coordination and musculature young athletes have. That finally came out in reel three in that moment of the Bardo, No Man's Land. I was studying it all and putting it down as I saw it. The sun went down in the ocean at the end of reel three. And then reel four was entirely separate and different, but it continued the same themes. Paul, Charlotte, and I scripted this little story and filmed it as we went along. The film ended with the phrase "Ever Westward, Eternal Rider," a kind of Celtic farewell, which I have written into my willa tribute to myself, to life! One must do these things for oneself, I think, given the monumental indifference of the modern mind.

MacDonald:

The beginning of reel three, the scene where you and the woman make love, is very sexy.

Baillie:

Oh, yeah.

MacDonald:

I wondered if you were thinking of three and four as a pair because the personalized, direct experience of life at the beginning of reel three is the opposite of the Hollywood-ized Western in reel four, which certainly isn't very romanticcertainly not for the woman. Reel three puts reel four into a funny perspective.

Baillie:

A lot of people just

couldn't

see that reel four belonged to the film at all.

It was nice to work that hard in those years, to have the blessing from the gods to allow me to manage it. That film just seemed to go on endlessly, like a pregnancy, and then the baby bursts out with such pain! Whew! It was so taxing, so that now, twenty-five years later, I'm living a half life.

I have to rest a lot just to get up and talk to people now. Many people just don't understand these things

at all,

haven't the

slightest

idea, with the longest unendurable explanation, what I'm saying: "Oh, you mean you're retired!?" It's so far from the simple fact that you've used yourself so ruthlessly in order to be a channel for something beautiful. But it is wonderful that such a limited fragile creature as a person, a human being,

can make

a beautiful thing!

MacDonald:

I'm puzzled about the numbering of the short, "extra" reels of

Quick Billy

. There are numbers fourteen, forty-one, forty-three, forty-six, forty-seven, and fifty-two. Is there a system?

Baillie:

I always just number the reels from one on. I shot

Quick Billy

on ASA 25 outdoor Kodachrome, I believe. I think it was about the last they had. And I numbered the rolls from one on, just to keep track of them when they went to the lab. That sunlight image that opens Part One was the first roll I shot. I didn't use number fourteen in the film.

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Then I used all the rolls from fourteen up to forty-one. And so on. And I shot after I knew I was done making the main body of the film. I had to let it keep going since there was so much vitality in what I was shooting. Finally, it got to be like the Greek Golden Age passing when everything got too elaborate and touched up and didn't have the newness of the earlier stuff. So I stopped. Later, I selected the best "rolls" and released them as such. I consider them as artifacts, essentially, as in an archeological dig.

MacDonald: Roslyn Romance

is also made up of a lot of little rolls.

Baillie:

Yes. They're not all small, but generally they have the roll concept, or they're like "postcards," as the intro explains. They're all separate but have the basic connection of belonging to the Romance. I use "romance" in the French sense, of story, and also in the sense that the human and mind seems to prefer inventing, rather than accepting, from moment to moment, the

what is

of life/reality.

Roslyn, Washington, was one of the few remaining examples in North America of the kind of Old Europe village life that ended at the beginning of the twentieth century and was to a degree transported over here. I found myself in that town, with people from the "Old World." For them, reality was, "Well, I'm here in this house and I have a job and I'm respectable and I feed my children and love and protect them; I built this house to defend myself, my family. and this town from others and from the wilderness around us." That was the life I recorded in infinite detail in

Roslyn,

and a major theme of

Quixote

which preceded it.

I wanted to know, like Stendhal,

is that all there is?