ys fe , Zs hs (pa Yeh e Mid, ha he bsg, WU OS BOG ABs OMAN AA K, a uy tpg Yk &N 4 EY iy wlth i, iy Z / nee ae Yr S G; ; \ 4 “fn oe B05 yO ) wg, E = oe a ae An Interview With Peter Mettler by Terry Dawes Peter Mettler is a Toronto based film-maker. He is best known for his feature fiction narrative works “The Top of His Head” and “Tectonic Plates.” His new film, “Picture of Light” played at the Vancouver International Film Festival and is his first feature documentary. It’s about Mettler and his crew’s journey to Churchill, Mani- toba which is about the furthest north a person can go before all signs of human civilization disappear. They went there with the specific intent of filming the Northern Lights. -All my films have somehow dealt with levels of documentary. You know, they deal with images from the real world and non- contrived experience or however you want to put that and sometimes they get worked into fiction and sometimes they get worked into a purely visceral kind of expression. But it’s the first film that looks like a documentary. -I often work with parameters of ideas or themes or subjects and: over the course of the shooting of the film, collect material whether it’s sound or film, whether it’s action or just an image, collect those various elements and, not sure whether they’ll figure into the film or how they’ll figure into the film, but then in the editing process they’re there to reference and, you know, you start to derive meaning out of the material you’ve collected. I find that a really fruitful and exciting way to work. -I don’t think that I use images as symbols per se, in the way that, you know, everybody knows that this represents that, but every image is inherently. a symbol of something. That’s a matter of interpretation. But I don’t tend to say this represents this or that represents that. It works more at an emotional and an intuitive response level. My interpretation of meaning to certain images is my own but I don’t expect, in most cases, that the audience is going to have the same interpretation, necessarily. (About the collaboration with Robert Lepage on Tectonic Plates) -The way that I was working in cinema was similar to the way Robert and Theatre Repar was working in theatre so the methods and sensibilities fit together. It was an interesting process because they started with some basic ideas, the biggest one being the idea of tectonic plates, and derived out of that scenes and stories and tangents. And they’d do a lot of research and, you know, let one idea evolve into something new. : -What happened over the course of making the film is this strong awareness of the material we were getting of the Northern Lights was quite incredible cinematically but it was.quite far removed from the actual experience of standing in the open space and seeing them for yourself. We became very aware that we were hunting for wondrous images or sensational images that will give people a thrill and worrying a little bit that this thrill and the thrill of a lot of media is becoming a replacement for the real thrill, the real experience. So the film started to become a discourse around that idea. -I think I’m always falling between those two tensions, of meticulously trying to put something together and of wanting to aban- don that and just improv and see what happens and not care if it comes out right or not. This idea of improvisation and open proc- ess is something I’m really happy about and excited about and it’s something I want to continue with the new film as well. Picture of Light had a nice circumstance in that it wasn’t involved with any corporations or presales or government funding or anything like that so it was really a completely free and open process and I found that refreshing and valuable because you basically are investing your own time and money. You’re not making money obviously, or losing money. But you have this freedom of the creative process to really find its way and first of all, it allows you to respond with the camera and tape recorder in a collecting kind of way and it allows you discover things within it and to sculpt something out of that, which is something you can’t do in a premeditated script. You can write a wonderful script and you can execute it but it’s a different kind of process and I’m really quite excited about working the way we just worked and would hope that people who have money would encourage that (laughter) as opposed to discourage it which tends to be the case. In “Picture of Light”, during the time lapse sequences near the end of the film with the Northern Lights dancing in the sky, Mr. Mettler has left in what would be commonly referred to by film-makers and watchers as mistakes. These include flares at the beginnings and ends of rolls of film, jump cuts, jerky movement during time lapse, etc. I asked him what he appreciates about these things. - -Well, I like it on two levels: I like it aesthetically. I find it pleasing. I also like, in the case of Picture of Light, to draw attention to the fact, especially in the Northern Lights images, that this is raw material. This is the product of pointing a camera with an intervalometer mechanism pointed at the sky and this is what you get. No further process than that. So in a way, this is a true docu- ment. Peter Mettler is a Toronto based film-maker. He is best known for his feature fiction narrative works “The Top of His Head” and “Tectonic Plates.” His new film, “Picture of Light” played at the Vancouver International Film Festival and is his first feature documentary. It’s about Mettler and his crew’s journey to Churchill, Mani- toba which is about the furthest north a person can go before all signs of human civilization disappear. They went there with the specific intent of filming the Northern Lights. -All my films have somehow dealt with levels of documentary. You know, they deal with images from the real world and non- contrived experience or however you want to put that and sometimes they get worked into fiction and sometimes they get worked into a purely visceral kind of expression. But it’s the first film that looks like a documentary. -l often work with parameters of ideas or themes or subjects and over the course of the shooting of the film, collect material whether it’s sound or film, whether it’s action or just an image, collect those various elements and, not sure whether they'll figure into the film or how they'll figure into the film, but then in the editing process they’re there to reference and, you know, you start to derive meaning out of the material you've collected. I find that a really fruitful and exciting way to work. -I don’t think that I use images as symbols per se, in the way that, you know, everybody knows that this represents that, but, every image is inherently.a symbol of something. That's a matter of interpretation. But I don’t tend to say this represents this or that represents that. It works more at an emotional and an intuitive response level. My interpretation of meaning to certain images is my own but I don’t expect, in most cases, that the audience is going to have the same interpretation, necessarily. (About the collaboration with Robert Lepage on Tectonic Plates) -The way that I was working in cinema was similar to the way Robert and Theatre Repar was working in theatre so the methods and sensibilities fit together. It was an interesting process because they started with some basic ideas, the biggest one being the idea of tectonic plates, and derived out of that scenes and stories and tangents. And they'd do a lot of research and, you know, let one idea evolve into something new. -What happened over the course of making the film is this strong awareness of the material we were getting of the Northern Lights was quite incredible cinematically but it was quite far removed from the actual experience of standing in the open space and seeing them for yourself. We became very aware that we were hunting for wondrous images or sensational images that will give people a thrill and worrying a little bit that this thrill and the thrill of a lot of media is becoming a replacement for the real thrill, the real experience. So the film started to become a discourse around that idea. -I think I’m always falling between those two tensions, of meticulously trying to put something together and of wanting to aban- don that and just improv and see what happens and not care if it comes out right or not. This idea of improvisation and open proc- ess is something I’m really happy about and excited about and it’s something I want to continue with the new film as well. Picture of Light had a nice circumstance in that it wasn’t involved with any corporations or presales or government funding or anything like that so it was really a completely free and open process and I found that refreshing and valuable because you basically are investing your own time and money. You're not making money obviously, or losing money. But you have this freedom of the creative process to really find its way and first of all, it allows you to respond with the camera and tape recorder in a collecting kind of way and it allows you discover things within it and to sculpt something out of that, which is something you can’t do in a premeditated script. You can write a wonderful script and you can execute it but it’s a different kind of process and I’m really quite excited about working the way we just worked and would hope that people who have money would encourage that (laughter) as opposed to discourage it which tends to be the case. In “Picture of Light”, during the time lapse sequences near the end of the film with the Northern Lights dancing in the sky, Mr. Mettler has left in what would be commonly referred to by film-makers and watchers as mistakes. These include flares at the beginnings and ends of rolls of film, jump cuts, jerky movement during time lapse, etc. I asked him what he appreciates about these things. -Well, [like it on two levels: I like it aesthetically. I find it pleasing. I also like, in the case of Picture of Light, to draw attention to the fact, especially in the Northern Lights images, that this is raw material. This is the product of pointing a camera with an intervalometer mechanism pointed at the sky and this is what you get. No further process than that. So in a way, this is a true docu- ment.