Andrew Kötting talks Lek and the Dogs

Addy Fong has a chat with Andrew Kötting, director of ‘Lek and the Dogs’, which plays at Sydney Film Festival this weekend:

I hope I haven’t called at a bad time, I heard it’s late and you’ve just gotten home? It’s early here in Sydney. I hope it’s okay I record?
Yeah I’m home and I’m drawing up a bath. It’s not video is it? I’m not all with it, I mean I’m almost 70 [Andrew’s wife in background: “he’s funny-looking naked!”]. My wife’s here but she always encourages me to slip off at the end of a hard day. It’s the glue that holds our relationship together, Addy!

You’ve gone all quiet now, hello? [laughs] I don’t want to put you off.

Not at all. Just letting you settle into your bath and light your scented candles. Firstly, is there a difference between Ivan and the Dogs and Lek and the Dogs?
There’s very much a difference, Ivan and the Dogs was a radio play, a stage play written by a very good friend of mine called Hattie Naylor. Hattie and I were very keen to work together on a project and this became Ivan and the Dogs but it started happening four or five years ago and by then I’d already started work on the idea of a third part of an earth trilogy. The actor and performance artist I’d worked with on the other two parts called Xavier Tchili played the part of a character called Lek in these other two films I made. The more we started work on the screenplay… the ideas behind the screenplay, the more the project became a very different thing. It started moving further and further away from Ivan and the Dogs so it felt very disingenuous to keep that title and given that the actor was playing the same part of Lek that he played in the other two films, it felt a lot truer and closer to what I was trying to do with the project to call the film Lek and the Dogs. So you’ve kind of got a vestige or a smidgen of the original idea within the title but, if you’ve seen the film up until about 20 mins, it becomes far more a very different beast to the thing that Hattie wrote.

So these three films are connected as a sort of trilogy?
Absolutely, it was a conceptual connection with the other two parts, because the very first film I made was called This Filthy Earth and it was a film that was set on the earth. Then about 8-9 years ago I made another film which was just called Ivul. I shot it in France in french and it was a story set above ground. It’s a story about a young boy that goes and lives in the forest. He makes a vow never to set foot on the earth again and that was inspired by a Calvino story called Baron in the Trees. It felt right given this film, most of the action, if indeed there is any action, takes place underneath the ground. It felt conceptually very connected. We have one story that takes place on the ground, one above the ground, and this underneath the ground.

Lek and the Dogs is such an interesting film, there’s a lot of textures and stuff going on…
Everything’s interesting about it but it’s certainly not your mainstream fodder, that’s for sure. My first ever feature length film was called Gallivant and this is way before things had gone digital when we were working with celluloid and analogue. A piece of work like Lek and the Dogs could exist in a gallery space quite easily if you stumbled across it running on a loop in a gallery, albeit 90 mins is quite a long time. It would feel as if it belongs as much in a gallery as it would a cinema. I still love making that kind of work for cinema because I’m controlling if people enter into that contract… they buy a ticket and they go sit in a black box. The sound design in particular, the music, the journey, the atmosphere you can take your audience on is quite remarkable. Invariably if you were to go to an art gallery and stumble across I guess what you call a white cue, if you’re not engaging with the work within the first 3-4 minutes you walk out and move into another exhibition space.

My work is always navigated through that thin membrane between what might be defined as cinema, experimental cinema, and what might be defined as art, moving image art. I’m happy. You get quite lonely because if you get a mainstream audience coming in they think ‘what the fuck is that all about?’. Then if you get an art-going slightly pompous hoity-toity audience coming in they think it’s almost there’s too much going on. You have to work quite hard and you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from a gallery, because there’s layers, narrative, lots of different textures, archive, home movie footage stuff which is very pristine and in-focus, stuff which isn’t, and then you’re having to process a language which is made up and you’re having to read subtitles, so it’s a bit of a headfuck. Traditionally I don’t belong anywhere but I think the work is in that sense a hybrid. There are people working in a similar way but they tend not to show their work within a cinema context, or they work in a similar way but they won’t share it in a gallery context. This is kind of navigating between the two spaces.

So how do you go about getting your work in cinemas with this divide between the two spaces?
Nowadays it’s very very hard. This kind of work, you would stream it on TV or in your own home. You’d probably stream it through Mubi – they stream that kind of work – but to have the platform of showing this work in a cinema and having distribution outside of the festival circuit is hard.

Lek and the Dogs has played very well in festivals because people that go along to a film festival are hoping to find something a bit more innovative or original. There’s a sympathetic audience, an audience that want this kind of work, but you couldn’t package it and send it around. There are very particular cinemas that show it and they would only really risk showing it for a week. If people don’t come to see it within that week then they pull it very quickly. I’m very lucky that distributors are still willing to give it a go, maybe because I’ve made so much work over the last 25 years. I have a reputation for making fucking difficult work which is occasionally quite accessible.

Can you talk about how experimental cinema has changed throughout your career?
I’m very interested in trying to experiment with the moving image medium. It was hijacked as soon as sound came into moviemaking and say 90 percent of films since the late 20s early 30s tends to be about story, narrative, and actors rushing around doing their thing. Now it’s mainly CGI, blokes shooting and killing each other and there’s this very very small area of interest. I’m lucky, I spend a lot of my life teaching aspiring students to make that kind of work or you go to festivals and it’s reassuring to know that there are people still playing, experimenting, pushing the medium around, both sound and image.

Occasionally films become completely hijacked by just story, there’s a beginning, middle and end, it’s about character and motivations, about the three act structure. I think my work is closer to maybe music, it’s more about atmosphere. I’m trying to construct an atmosphere that has within it something that compels you to keep watching, listening, and reading, and this particular instance with the film you’re having to read subtitles to get some information. Collage is a word I use a lot with the work, whether it be moving image work or performances, installations in galleries, books and music on CD or vinyl, all of that is just an extension of an idea. It seems sometimes quite limiting. You have an idea you invest maybe a year of your life in and it just ends up being a 90 minute film that seems to me very reductive and very limiting. This project belongs to I guess what I call spillage, things that spill out of the idea of the project.

Do you need a lot technical knowledge to make a film like Lek and the Dogs?
If you’re a bit of an idiot like myself, you make sure you collaborate with people that really know what they’re doing. There’s a guy that shot this called Nick Gordon Smith and he dug me out of a very deep hole. Over 30 years ago when I’d been to Madagascar, I’d shot some footage on an old Bolax camera… I was a postgraduate arts student and I had fucked up with the lens and he helped me salvage it. We salvaged the footage and developed a relationship which was very much about hand processing, optical printing, learning the chemistry of celluloid and the chemicals involved to process. The footage pristine and shot in the desert and underground in the shadows is cinematic and brilliant because I collaborated with people like Nick Gordon Smith on it.

Can you comment about the changes from film to digital?
It’s revolutionised it. I’d made three feature films using an iPhone and an app which costs like two dollars and you can make digital footage look as if it’s shot on Super 8, Standard 8 or really grungy. I like the immediacy of being able to do that. I can go back to my studio at the end of a day shooting and start compiling a timeline. You can fly in sound, record sound on the iPhone or bring in some digitally and start working with music. Jem Finer’s a man I’ve collaborated with on lots of my soundtracks. He can email me just ideas. It’s the immediacy, the speed at which you can start experimenting, constructing, playing with the materials. It’s very exciting and that’s the upside. The downside sometimes is the amount of work becomes so ubiquitous. There’s so much stuff out there, it can be difficult to to sit through it all or start trying to engage with. One might describe it as the better or the good stuff as opposed to the bad stuff. It can become sometimes overwhelming the amount of shit you have to wade through.

Too much choice out there…
Yeah, too much choice, too many platforms. There’s something quite arcane and old school about having film festivals like your festival down in Sydney or festivals my work gets shown on in Europe. It’s almost as if they’re our gatekeepers, people that will select and look at the work and they have a kind of overview. It’s really exciting to look at a body of work which has been made. Sometimes you know the makers, sometimes you don’t but that’s when I get very excited. You think life is worth living after all.

I heard you’re doing a masterclass as part of the Sydney Film Festival?
Yeah, I’m doing a masterclass which always sounds a bit pompous. I do quite a few, I arrive and bombard victims with my nonsense. We just talk about my process, try and understand what it is I’m doing and then learn from that, just through the way in which other people articulate something that you’ve not really seen before.

It tends to be quite scattergun, but it’s structured around the notions invariably of atmosphere or, in this particular instance, I’ll be using the three films from the trilogy of what I call the earthworks trilogy to contextualise Lek and the Dogs and the way in which I’ve been making these three particular pieces.

I do them for film students, artists, writers, I don’t discriminate. Sometimes I do it for people that are curious. If you’re into narrative cinema and think, ‘There’s nothing in it for me, mate! The guy can’t even tell a fucking story. I ain’t gonna sit through that shit, no way!’, you might find that they do get something from it or on the other hand you get people coming along wanting something which is connected to fine art practice and the notions of old school performance or installation. There’s something for everybody in it, plus at the end you can gauge with your audience. I think it’s three hours so we’ll have half an hour for break but at the end I’ll do a performance and that tends to wake a lot of people up. I climax, it’s an eight minute performance which involves a bath, candles, lots of nudity and all kinds of stuff.

Like right now, you’re in the bath rehearsing for it?
Yeah like now and all kinds of stuff goes off. Fireworks, fast cars, lots of naked women, CGI effects, trapezes, I hire ponies, it’s a real extravaganza at the end. People have got bored then I wake them up in the last 20 minutes…everything but the kitchen sink is what you can expect.

So what about your background? Are you from film school cause you must be well into your 60s as well.

I show film students how to use film equipment. I’m not 60 but I’m an old soul?
You’re an old soul, right… If your background is more film school, I mentioned earlier on about collaboration, I think one of the things certainly with this film every now and then is the cards, the inter-titles bring in a new point of reference. They’re dealing with the writings of Emil Cioran, who’s a Romanian misrerabilist thinker and Michel de Montaigne who was a 16th Century philosopher and thinker; in many ways he was five hundred years ahead of his time. He was a postmodernist, somebody very interested in everything and in non-structures. He would go out into the world and study the way people might milk cows or use the milk from cows to make different cheeses around France. He was just really curious and he always had a big influence on me when I was a student and even now, still growing up. I think that connects with many of the themes, the metaphysical themes of the film where I’m trying to say more. It’s not just about the story, it’s about the atmosphere, the trajectories that you, the viewer, can go off on when you’re processing what you’re looking at, what you’re hearing and what you’re reading.
The voices of ‘the specialists’ are almost critiquing the film for you. There’s an animal behaviourist, a body psychologist, and a child psychologist talking about the ramifications of living underground being brought up by dogs. There are a lot of things going on within the 90 minutes but I’d like to think that they all belong. They all belong thematically to this idea of a young boy being brought up by a pack of wild dogs on the streets of Moscow and it’s still very faithful to the original.

There’s this strange dialect spoken by Lek underground. Is it his speech played back in reverse or slowed down?
He was speaking a very obscure Eastern European dialect which sounds like the cassette player is running out of batteries and the whole world slowing down. That’s very much his performance, it’s not easy but if ever you get a chance to speed it up you’ll see it’s just profanities it’s loads of ‘fuck! shit! willy willy bollocks!’ that’s all he’s saying so be be careful. You can’t use subtitles like ‘Willy willy’ because you’re going to lose your audience immediately [laughs].

He’s somebody I’ve been working with for a very long time. I’m very happy for the work to be difficult to pigeonhole. It’s hard to pin down and if ever you get a chance to see some of my other work then there are lots of things happening in the work that are familiar and not familiar at the same time. You feel that the story in this particular instance is going to unfold and there will be resolution and motivation, drama and tension but it’s taking place underground, it’s dark, there’s not a lot of car chases. There aren’t very many sex scenes and it can become difficult to watch but people that go with the work are perhaps looking for that, I certainly did when I was a student. I saw a film when I was about 24 called The Colour of Pomegranates by Parajanov. I’d never seen anything like it before, the camera never moves it’s all fixed than there are little tableaus scenes going on within frame. It doesn’t matter that it was poetry from Armenian circa 12th Century, none of that matters you’re just completely seduced, amazed and overwhelmed by the atmosphere, colours and some of the mad things that are happening within the frame. In the same way when I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead for the first time, I was probably about 18 or 17, you don’t imagine that cinema like that can exist. I think that those points of reference are really important to me still today.

There’s a very particular cinema that comes out Australia which travels the world and sometimes you look at it, you applaud it. I’m not anti that kind of cinema, I’m not interested in making it but then when you look at An Angel at My Table or Sweetie, what Jane Campion was doing with even The Piano which is almost at the vanguard of slow cinema, there’s not a lot of action and it’s about atmosphere. When you look at that kind of work coming out of Australia or even New Zealand you realise that there are other ways, it doesn’t have to be Romper Stomper, it doesn’t have to be gritty and macho, there can be a nuance to it, a lyricism to it, there can be something odd. Jane Campion continues to make odd work which maybe belongs to more of the mainstream then the work I’m making, but I still find that exciting. Somebody that’s made that many films is looking towards other ways of telling stories.

How do you go about finding filmmakers to collaborate with?
It tends to be word of mouth from family, one of the last things I’m interested in whether people are proficient at their job within the industry of filmmaking. People that come from the industry and aspire to the industry are people that I have very little interest in. It’s great that the industry exists and the reason there’s a formula around, for instance you have an assistant director, shot lists, continuity… as soon as you’re buying into that way of making films, it’s vital that those jobs are there and that those people are pushing in a similar direction, but sometimes it’s at the expensive of realising that you don’t need to buy into that model. There are other ways of making work that doesn’t need a big crew, script, lights, special effects, or a composer to tell you what to feel. None of that is needed. You can still entertain, you can transport people to places that they haven’t been before without the mechanics of the industry. If you’re got an idea, just go and realise the idea or draw it on a piece of paper.

At the beginning of the film are they puppy foetuses? Is it animation?
That’s all CGI, all computer generated I wouldn’t really want to put a very young animal through that wriggling, that’s all very high end CGI.

It’s not actually, there were two very, very young loire which are like squirrels and they’d probably only been born about a week earlier. They fell out of a nest onto my daughter’s desk where she was drawing in the French Pyrenees. She called me in to look at them to see what they were I thought they were some of her toys or farm animals but they were moving. The nest is about five, ten metres above in an old barn so we had no idea where they’d fallen from but I felt compelled to film them and, within the context of the film, everybody assumes that they’re foetuses of a dog, young puppies. There’s something very shocking yet compelling about these creatures. They’re in that twilight zone, they’re being born, they’ve fallen out. Luckily they lived happily ever after cause the mother did come. She was calling and we managed to find the nest and put them safely back.

They reminded me of that creature from Eraserhead.
Addy, you’re absolutely right! It is Eraserhead and it’s that very strange thing that was in weird kind of bandages. When I saw them I knew I had to film them and this is way before I was gonna to incorporate them into the film. The opening ten minutes is quite shocking when you see them and you’re beginning to engage with this story. I always look at that kind of stuff as the angels of happenstance, bringing manna from heaven to drop onto your lap. You could never write that, because you wouldn’t think about it, but I filmed them and made room for them in the film, in the edit.

There are so many elements. How did you go about scripting it all?
It was very organic. There was a script, we started with Hattie’s 40-minute play and then we started stripping some of that away and then adding stuff to it. Then I would do an assemble and get a rough structure together, and then I went and interviewed the various experts. There were three women that offered their expert advice about the ramifications or implications of the story and then Hattie would come back to my studio where I live and look at a rough cut and then start tweaking, editing and playing around with some of the new ideas. It’s a very organic way of working and because Hattie is such a remarkable, brilliant writer, very well known in the U.K. for taking things like Samuel Pepys’ diary or a large Shakespearean play and managing to reduce it to its bare essentials. She has a very particular way of editing and organising dialogue and atmosphere through the use of her sparse text, so it was a real privilege to work with somebody that was infinitely more together than me.

Lek and the Dogs blurs the line between documentary and fiction. Is it a hybrid of both? Docu-fiction?
It’s a real collage of all that stuff that you just mentioned. For me one of the most exciting things about the European arthouse cinema scene and festivals like CPH docs in Copenhagen… there’s another one in Marseille in France called FID… there was a massive change about 10 years ago where conventional documentary formats were just blown out of the water. This film for instance has been shown at a couple of festivals not as narrative but as documentary. It’s really nice to think that those areas are becoming a lot greyer. It’s quite hard to put your finger nowadays on what is a documentary and what isn’t. There’s a film by Joshua Oppenheimer called The Act of Killing and that’s a stunning piece of work. It’s two hours long and he gets people that had tortured, killed and massacred… the Indonesian population… he gets them to reenact what they actually did for real maybe 25 years ago. It’s one of the most harrowing things you can ever imagine and within that two-hour ‘documentary’ he gets them to reenact it sometimes as a thriller, sometimes as a musical and it’s very disturbing, incredibly hard-hitting but unlike any documentary that I’d ever seen.

There’s a very inspiring film made by a filmmaker called Philip Trevelyan in the 60s. He made a film called The Moon and the Sledgehammer which was a portrait of a family living in the woods and they all fuck around, they just have some fun over a 10-day period and he manages to structure it into a coherent 60 minute documentary, but you’re permanently questioning yourself and the film, what’s real and what isn’t. We’ve gotten very used to that in the last 3-4 years with fake news and CGI. It’s very easy using photoshop and so on and so forth to cheat. Documentary now for me is one of the most exciting formats, because the genre is no longer as stuck as the films that come out of Hollywood, which are boy films that Marvel Comics put onto the big screen with scantly clad women running around and blokes with muscles with big erections. It’s just kind of tedious. You might as well just go buy a comic, read it on the bus. But at 25, I guess you don’t even know what a comic or a bus is do you [laughs]?

I caught the bus today and I guess I’d read e-comics now.
Oh good [laughs]. Have you got hairs on your chin yet?

No but still got hairs on me head!
You’re not that old. My skin’s flaking off, I’m like an old walnut [laughs].

Make sure you introduce yourself when I come down to Sydney. I wanna see you heckling in the front row of my masterclass. I might need an animal wrangler. I don’t know what you’re like with animal wranglers but when I bring in all the whistles and flutes and stuff for the last 20 minute performance, I’m gonna need somebody to hold some of the animals.

Yeah, I’ll bring a leash for the monkeys and ponies.
That’s it, you bring them in, you can fix those for me. And a smoke machine! I want a smoke machine as wel [laughs].

Well Addy, it’s nice to talk to you and plenty of food for thought. Take care!

…

Lek and the Dogs plays at Sydney Film Festival on the 16th and 17th of June. Andrew is also doing a free masterclass at Carriageworks on the 17th. Find out more here: https://www.sff.org.au/program/browse/lek-and-the-dogs

Interview by Addy Fong.