“In two years, I will be 90 years old,” laughs Alejandro Jodorowsky, the now silver-haired godfather of midnight movies. “You are speaking with a very old person. But I do not believe it. I have no age. I am neither a man nor a woman. These things are too limiting.”
Geographically speaking, Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is certainly hard to locate on a map. His personal and insanely multicultural history ensured that he has, in the past, represented all nations to all men: “In Bolivia I was a Russian. In Chile I was a Jew. In Paris I was a Chilean. In Mexico I was French. And, in America, I am a Mexican.”
These are but superficial details, he insists: “The ego is a formality to me because I don’t have nationality”.
Jodorowsky was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Tocopilla, Chile. Growing up, his abusive, Stalinist father ran a shop while his eccentric mother forced her son to wear his hair long in memory of her own dead father. Alejandro was conceived when his father, suspecting his wife was flirting with a customer, beat and raped her.
“They were immigrants, so they work like spiders for more than 10 hours a day,” recalls Jodorowsky. “They were not happy, because there was no love, only work. They suffered with me, because they wanted me to be a doctor to do something real. But I was born this way, born an artist. All the experiences they gave to me make me happy now, because they are used for my art.”
Jodorowsky sought escape in reading from an early age, then theatre. By his early 20s, he was leading a 30-person avant-garde performance troupe. At 23, he had relocated to Paris to train with the mime Marcel Marceau.
“When I came first, I think I came to be superior to him,” says Jodorowsky. “But I realised it’s not possible. Because he was a genius. So then I wanted to work with him. I wrote pantomime for him. And then I was happy. I created my own work. Everything I wanted to do I did.”
Buddhist phase
Having cofounded the Panic Movement and directed Maurice Chevalier's music hall comeback in Paris, Jodorowsky crossed back over the Atlantic to Mexico, where he would train with a Buddhist monk, begin developing a trippy psychoanalytic-guru method known as Psychomagic, and make his first feature film, Fando and Lis (1968). The paraplegic, post-apocalyptic adventure was promptly banned.
“At that time everybody believed that movies were the big art, highest art,” he says. “They didn’t realise movies were just there to make money. That is why a genius like Buster Keaton was destroyed by Hollywood. But I believe and still I believe that movies are the biggest art of all, because movies have everything.”
In the early 1970s, his psychedelic western El Topo made him a counter-cultural superstar and won admiration and friendship from John Lennon and George Harrison. Lennon and Yoko Ono were instrumental in financing Jodorowsky's next surrealist masterpiece, Holy Mountain (1973), the only film to date to stage the conquest of Mexico using a cast of chameleons and toads. A dispute between the director and the late Beatles manager Allan Klein meant that El Topo and Holy Mountain were out of circulation, and presumed lost, for 30 years.
Their creator is not bitter: "This person is dead. Myself, I am alive," he shrugs. "So I won that battle. And he didn't kill my pictures. Avatar makes hundreds of millions of dollars and after three months no one can remember it. People can remember things from my pictures 40 years after they've seen them."
The idiosyncratic film-maker would get burned, yet again, on an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. As chronicled in Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, the auteur spent more than two years on the storyboards and assembling such personnel as David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, prog-rockers Magma, and Salvador Dalí (who demanded $100,000 for every minute of screen time).
"But if I had made Dune, I would have been trapped in big movies," he says, now. "Instead, I get to make comic books, I am very happy about what I did."
Jodorowsky, who began creating comic books in 1966, has presided over dozens of the most highly rated graphic novels, including The Incal, a cornerstone publication for what would become the Jodoverse. He continued to create elsewhere, though not so prolifically. After 1990's The Rainbow Thief (his only British production and an onscreen reunion for Lawrence of Arabia costars Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif), Jodorowsky did not get behind a camera for 24 years.
His newest film, Endless Poetry, an excavation of his teenage and early adult years, picks up where his 2013 psycho-memoir (The Dance of Reality) left off, with an army of grotesques and dwarves, strained familial relations, and a riot of symbolism.
Our intimate truth
“I am a confection of a human being,” he says. “We have an ego made by the family by the society, but we all have a deeper part. Our intimate truth. In the interior, we don’t have a name or an age. It’s always the same: we are not yet old or young. That is the part I make biopic of.”
With a neat Oedipal twist, the younger version of Alejandro is played by his grandson, Adan Jodorowsky, while his Stalinesque father is played by his son, Brontis Jodorowsky.
“My son is an artist,” he says. “The son of my son is an artist. The daughter of my son is an artist. I don’t have to work with the star system, where there are big egos. We are like a theatrical troupe. I gave to myself the sense of family that my father didn’t give to me. And I give that to him in the film.”
Endless Poetry is the second instalment in a proposed trilogy: "Normally I don't get past the first part," laughs its creator. "But I will see what I can do. I make another kind of picture. I am making art, not business. Movies are an industry, you know. They want Superman all the time. Something like that. I just want to have my work and the pleasure of realising my art.
“I love what I do. I never seek money. I make films to lose money. So I will always be happy.”
Endless Poetry opens on January 6th.
THREE FROM THE JODOVERSE
El Topo (1970) Blood, guts, dead donkeys, dead bunnies, dwarves and mutants define the desert landscape, where an avenging gunslinger (played by Jodorowsky) seeks out four gun-masters so that he might achieve nirvana.
Holy Mountain (1973) Mad adaptation of Ascent of Mount Carmel by St John of the Cross, in which human versions of various planets and Tarot cards are transformed.
Santa Sangre (1989) Several limbs are lopped off and an elephant gets a funeral in this indelible circus horror.
