Alexandre O. Philippe has made films about Lynch, Hitchcock or William Friedkin. But there’s one that got away. At least for now.
“Nicolas Roeg. He holds more mysteries to me than any other director,” he says. Roeg, who passed away in 2018, is best known for “Don’t Look Now” and “Walkabout.”
“I feel like I haven’t spent the time with his films that I need to spend, and I keep wanting to go back and understand how he worked. There’s one film in particular that dabbles in a really strange kind of cinematic magic and that’s ‘Eureka’ with Gene Hackman.”
Set to receive the Indie Star Award at Tauron American Film Festival, Philippe has become known for analyzing cinema history in his detailed docs. Recently, he’s been also delivering intimate portraits of William Shatner or Kim Novak in “Kim Novak’s Vertigo,” the latter of which premiered in Venice.
“There’s definitely been a shift towards the personal. I’m very interested in craft, but the emotion of cinema is really what I’m most passionate about,” he agrees.
“For me, it really started with William Friedkin, just having that personal connection with him and spending so much time together. We were able to dig deep.” Philippe talked about the late director in “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist.”
His secret to getting close?
“The best way to answer this is that I’m not looking for gossip,” he says.
“I don’t have an agenda other than making sure I give them the time and the space to show themselves as they are. They all have a reputation for being extremely guarded. Everyone was terrified of Friedkin. And Shatner? [Songwriter] Ben Folds said he eats directors for breakfast. Kim Novak is a complete recluse.”
And yet he was allowed to “go up into her attic, pick up boxes and spend the night going through them.”
“It’s crazy that we had that level of comfort. We still do.”
He adds: “With Kim, for example, I wasn’t interested in her relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. – Colman Domingo is already making a film about that with Sydney Sweeney. I’m more interested in what makes them tick. What gets under their skin? In ‘You Can Call Me Bill’ there’s a whole chapter dedicated to loneliness, which is Shatner’s deepest fear. You’ve never seen him like that.”
Philippe is slowly preparing to make his own fiction films, too.
“It’ll either be a western or a horror, but it’s hard to make a unique horror with something to say. I’m a big fan of ‘Weapons’ and was super impressed by ‘Longlegs.’ I’d love to make a horror film that gets under the audience’s skin in an unexpected way,” he admits.
In the meantime, he’ll continue proving to people “there’s no one right way to look at a film.”
“When I was touring with ‘78/52,’ I said I could make nothing but movies about that [‘Psycho’] shower scene for the rest of my life, and I would still have a full and fascinating life as a filmmaker,” he laughs. Initially, “Memory: The Origins of Alien” was supposed to be about the infamous chestburster scene.
“I thought: ‘Why don’t I apply the same model I applied to ‘78/52’ and talk about that instead of the shower scene? They’re both completely shocking and changed the course of cinema. But it just didn’t work.”
Philippe recalls: “They operate in very, very different ways. The shower scene was the scene people wanted to see back then. It said: ‘The1950s are over. Welcome to the 1960s.’ The chestburster scene was not the scene people wanted to see. They wanted friendly aliens and E.T. It was 40 years ahead of its time.”
He started reading about Ridley Scott showing H.R. Giger Francis Bacon’s triptychs. “You realize these three figures in his triptychs are the Furies of Greek mythology. I started geeking out, thinking about the mythological roots of the Xenomorph.”
A film about distant future turned into a film about distant past, he says. “The lesson I learned from that was that, well, you should never be lazy. My job as a filmmaker is to pay attention to what the film actually wants to be.”
Although he delves deeply into the movies he loves, he never intends to reveal all their secrets.
“It’s not about: ‘Let me explain what David Lynch or Kim Novak are all about.’ With Kim, the feedback I’ve been getting is that she seems even more mysterious now. That’s the best compliment I could ever get.”
He adds: “People have always asked me if David Lynch watched ‘Lynch/Oz.’ He certainly never told me that. Back in March we had a screening in the wake of his death and, of course, someone asked about it again. A week later, I got a message from critic Matt Fagerholm. He said: ‘An old dear friend of David’s asked me to tell you he watched it and loved it’.”
“It moved me tremendously. He understood my intent was not to ‘solve’ David Lynch – that would be preposterous – but to deepen the mystery.”
