Philippe Mora - artist, film maker and Australian expat
The following are archived transcripts of some published interviews with, and articles by, Australian-born and United States resident Philippe Mora. Refer to the associated links to the complete, illustrated articles and to the reference section for additional material.
- Philippe Mora, Culture Shock: Australians in London in the sixties, 2003. [Article]
- Marc Mohan, Inside the "Mind of Mora": Director Philippe Mora visits Portland for his first-ever American retrospective, October 2023. [Interview]
- Chris Donner, This bizarrely captivating 35-year-old sci-fi film is based on an unbelievably true story, November 2024. [Article]
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Articles
* Philippe Mora, Culture Shock: Australians in London in the sixties, Art Monthly Australia, 156, December 2002 - February 2003, 2003.
It’s an old canard that if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there. I do remember. My sixties, as for many others, drifted into the early seventies. Some cultural commentators write that the sixties began with the assassination of JFK and end with the shocking Manson murders. I think the cultural spirit of the sixties really died when John Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980, a tragic event that also heralded the beginning of the Reagan years. [1] My role in all of this as a young artist was not particularly important, but I was a witness and participant, and I had a productive time. I arrived in London in late 1967, aged seventeen. Shortly after, Harold Holt, the then Australian Prime Minister, disappeared when he went for a swim at Portsea, Victoria. This was at a time when conspiracy theories abounded, multiplied and fornicated with each other. Obviously, a Chinese submarine had kidnapped him and he was being brainwashed in Shanghai. According to Occam’s Razor he drowned and/or was taken by a shark. But it was hard explaining to new friends in London how a Prime Minister could go for a swim and never come back. Similarly a lot of people in the sixties never came back (or forward). London was twisting like a freak show contortionist, culturally and politically. Vietnam, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Francis Bacon. Twiggy, drugs, psychedelia, acid politics, sexual ‘liberation,’ women’s ‘liberation’, men’s ‘liberation’ – general ‘liberation’. One almost wanted to be liberated from being liberated. Young men looked like young girls for no apparent reason. Androgyny was fashionable. We studied Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings – especially the erotic ones. This sexual freedom came with crabs, gonorrhoea, bad trips, suicides, dirty clothes, cheap musk, patchouli oil, screaming, pissing in the street and Cannabis Tincture available for free as a cough syrup on the National Health system. This resulted in thousands of young people getting bad coughs. The effect of drugs on culture and history is a synergy that has only just begun to be seriously studied. For example, only recently did Dr Fritz Redlich find a correlation between Hitler’s massive drug taking during the war and his effective battle strategies. When he was ‘sober’ he started winning. [2]
LSD was developed during the Second World War and there is strong evidence that it was introduced into mass culture by the CIA to destroy the anti-Vietnam War movement. [3] Collaterally, would Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and then Cubism have existed without absinthe? In those days a trip to London was de rigueur for any young Australian with or without ambition. It was the big British Empire metaphorical tit that we had to have a suck on. Mother country, mother culture, etc. Metaphors aside, London really was a nurturing city for creative spirits. So we all went – or at least those whose families could afford it. That was thousands of kids. Older Australians had to get to London to ‘make it’ in the international scene. [4] Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley were already there. Charles Blackman and Barry Humphries were having their own Barry Mackenzie adventures in ‘swinging London’. [5]
Australians were now welcomed in London. We were a novelty, probably riding on the coat-tails of the breaking down of some class barriers in England that came along with The Beatles and their ‘funny’ working class accents. The great black and white films of Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Richard Lester helped collapse these barriers as well. [6] Nevertheless, culturally it was odd being called ‘Guv’ by cab drivers and others as if one was in a scene from My Fair Lady. Arriving, it was a pleasant shock to read magazines where the date on the magazine was the date you bought the magazine. It was a shock to read in newspapers that there were some adults, reasonable people, who had reasonable objections to the war in Vietnam. Back home, the reason for the war was never adequately explained except for a vague racist notion of the Yellow Peril. In school we had been taught that if Vietnam fell, according to the Domino Theory, that we (Australians) were next. ‘Next’ was some unexplained horrifying combination of Communism and the fact that we’d all be eating with chopsticks.
Back to London. Soon I ended up living with Martin Sharp and Eric Clapton in the Pheasantry on Kings Road, Chelsea, a grand old building with a bohemian and artistic history. I had met Martin in Australia and he invited me to live there, knowing I was a ‘creative’ type. Across the street, we often congregated in the local café called Picasso’s. Eric was then part of Cream, the band with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Martin was doing the psychedelic artwork for the Cream album covers. He drew, painted and designed posters for a company called Big O. The posters were a success, particularly one of Bob Dylan called Mr. Urine Man. Bob Seideman, a photographer from San Francisco, ended up staying with us for a while too. He had made some great (now classic) images of Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and other ‘hard core’ artists from San Francisco. Our Pheasantry scene was a kind of cultural catalyst and melting pot. R.D Laing would drop by and say we were normal and everybody else was crazy. That was heartening. Bob Whitaker, another talented photographer, lived around the corner – he had met Brian Epstein in Melbourne and had become one of the official Beatles photographers. He befriended Salvador Dali and took some classic shots of the surrealist master. Germaine Greer lived downstairs, working on a book. The (American) Living Theater troupe would drop by (not all at once), and one couldn’t tell whether people were acting or just expressing themselves. At one of their performances at the London Roundhouse that I attended, the large company took their clothes off and asked the audience to do the same. Some people did, I didn’t. George Harrison would drop by the Pheasantry to see Eric, and twenty years later in Los Angeles he reminded me in precise detail of the psychedelic front door Martin had painted. At the time we thought we were neither hippies, psychedelic or otherwise: we were artists for better or for worse. Martin’s style of imagery, along with that of some practitioners in San Francisco, started permeating the world’s consciousness in posters and record covers. When we got hold of Robert Crumb’s first issue of Zap Comix we felt there were some kindred spirits in the New World. In London, Oz magazine, fronted and edited by Richard Neville, was the best underground or counter-cultural magazine. [7] Martin designed some great issues and did some wonderful cartoons for it. Sometimes I helped and published some cartoons in there as well. Specifically, I assisted him on an all-collage issue called The Magic Theatre, now a time capsule minestrone of sixties images and iconography.
I started painting almost immediately I arrived in London, having exhibited at the Argus Gallery in Melbourne earlier that year. Clytie Jessop, Hermia Boyd’s sister, invited me to exhibit at her gallery in Kings Road, Chelsea. [8] The show was a success, with great reviews and paintings sold. It was hard to believe. I was so poor that I had to use insect killing house paint for the pictures. But I turned that into an advantage by declaring that the paintings were ‘not only art but they also kill flies’. I liked anti-art, Dada and that mode of thought. ‘Fine art’ really seemed to have come to the end of the road. After all, Picasso’s protest masterpiece, Guernica, hadn’t stopped more violence. With the world seemingly falling apart – Vietnam, paradigm changing political assassinations, and social chaos – art seemed, for many, basically elitist and thus useless. Art was dead, so we had to do something different. So we made more art! I had several exhibitions at Clytie’s gallery with titles such as Anti-Social Realism and Vomart. [9]
Eric bought a painting of a shot-putter about to throw and simultaneously throwing up. Paintings did not have to be ‘nice’ to sell. I took to heart Picasso's statement that if something was in good taste, then it was not art. Michelangelo Antonioni’s then girlfriend Clare Peploe bought a pastiche of Degas’ absinthe drinker called Forgery of Degas’ Cannabi. Buyers were trendy and it was genuine fun. I had put a painting based on a Dürer portrait of an old, fat, naked lady in the front window for one show. One day as I approached the Gallery I saw Francis Bacon looking at the painting transfixed. Since, for my money, Bacon was basically God at the time (along with Stanley Kubrick), I fled down the Kings Road in terror. Eduardo Paolozzi was not so scary, and was very supportive of my work, and I was not so shy. [10]
The critic R. C Kennedy championed me in Art International, and included me in a show entitled Narrative Painting in Britain in the Twentieth Century at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970. Alan Aldridge invited me to do some work for The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, and I illustrated I Am The Walrus and Good Morning. I organised a wild ‘happening’ with my friend Angus Forbes from Melbourne at his successful photography studio in Covent Garden. (Angus made a small fortune from taking luscious close-up photos of, for example, baked beans, for billboards.) Guests had to crawl through tunnels, watch an artist, Stuart Brisley, bathe in mud, see weird films, and watch female strippers and a male muscleman. (The muscleman, David Prowse, later played Darth Vader in Star Wars.) Meanwhile another Australian friend, Jim Sharman, was putting on stage shows that would climax with his production of The Rocky Horror Show at the Sloane Square theatre. When he got the original tape of all the songs performed by Richard O’Brien he called me over to listen to it. I was unenthusiastic and thought it was corny – ‘Frankenfurter!’ – but Jim insisted he could make it all work (and then we went on to discuss, as I recall, whether it’s best to shave with a razor or an electric shaver). Tired of seeing paintings including my own reproduced in black and white, I decided to paint a show of pictures in black and white, the idea that when they were reproduced the images would be accurate ‘colour’ reproductions. The idea worked, and the show was held at the Sigi Kraus Gallery, and Guy Brett gave me a great review in The London Times. [11]
The same show featured a grey male rat I bought from Harrod’s. When the male rat turned out to be female, giving birth to baby rats, I attempted to sell the babies as ‘multiples’ in an edition of eight. They didn’t sell. But the rat show attracted the German avant-garde. Artist Klaus Staeck commissioned me to do an edition of one hundred screen-prints of the mother rat for the German market. Then Joseph Beuys, Erwin Heerich and Staeck asked me to sign ‘A Call to Action’ manifesto to free the German art market in February 1971. The drift of it was, that even under capitalism, the monopolistic practices in the art market had an odd look and would lead to ‘revolting senility’. Along with Carl Andre, Arakawa, Heinrich Boll, Mario Merz and 187 European art cognoscenti, I signed it.
With the fall of Western civilisation, the Chicago Seven trial, Vietnam and everything else ringing in my ears, I decided to organise a Crucifixion Exhibition at the Sigi Kraus Gallery. [12] This Easter show featured a life-size sculpture of a sitting man, constructed by me, and made of meat and offal. The idea was for it to decay over the course of the show, and disgust and horrify everybody, providing a metaphor for the rotting corpses in Vietnam, and symbolising man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child. This caused a stir. A brick was thrown in protest through the gallery window, and the sculpture ended up on the cover of Time Out, London’s weekly guide to what’s on. [13] Even the pungent Airwick room deodoriser could not disguise the stench. It got complicated when Princess Margaret, visiting one of her regular restaurants across the street from the gallery, [14] complained about the foul odor in the street. Shortly thereafter, Scotland Yard detectives arrived at the gallery and demanded that the meat sculpture be removed and destroyed. Sigi, in heroic mode, said he could not do that because it was a work of art. A detective replied by saying he did not care what it was, it was a health hazard. The sculpture was removed to Sigi’s front yard where it finally putrefied after some time, turning into slime and disappearing into the earth. The same show featured an 8 mm ‘film painting’, Passion Play, with Michael Ramsden as Christ, Jenny Kee as Mary myself as the Devil. This was projected behind a screen framed in leaf gold. [15] Soon after, the art director for A Clockwork Orange purchased a number of works of art for the movie from Sigi Kraus (none of mine unfortunately), including the giant penis sculpture utilised in the film by Malcolm McDowell and the chorus line of dancing Jesus sculptures.
Inspired by the Marx Brothers, Hollywood musicals and Bertolt Brecht, I decided to make a 35 mm musical film. Written by myself and Peter Smalley, it was called Trouble in Molopolis. 16 The financiers of this film were the unlikely combination of Arthur Boyd and Eric Clapton. Arthur loved movies and encouraged me, and Eric was a Kurosawa fan and a film buff. When Robert Stigwood [17], Eric’s then manager, handed over a cheque for Eric, he asked: ‘What’s the deal?’ This confused me and Eric, who replied: ‘There is no deal.’ Those were the days. Sandy Lieberson, the producer of Performance, gave me the 35 mm short ends of that movie to use. Such was the zeitgeist that I deliberately cast a real lunatic as the crazy mayor. Germaine Greer was cast as a cabaret singer, Martin Sharp as a mime, Richard Neville as a PR man, Jenny Kee as Shanghai Lil and Tony Cahill from the Easybeats did the music with Jamie Boyd. Every Australian I knew in London was pulled in to the picture. Robert Hughes lent his apartment as a location, and we also shot in the Pheasantry and in the appropriately called World’s End part of London. The film premiered at the Paris Pullman, Chelsea (11 pm of course), in aid of an OZ magazine legal fund to fight obscenity charges, and was introduced by George Melly. [18] The festivities were only slightly delayed when the loony star defecated in the front row and then passed out in an alcoholic coma. [19]
Meanwhile I had become friendly with Sandy Lieberson and he introduced me to Peter Sellers, after I had given Sandy a script called The Phantom Versus The Fourth Reich. Sellers loved the idea of playing Heinrich, Hitler’s son by Eva Braun, Hitler himself, and the Phantom. This was my first professional job in the movies. Consequently, when Sellers opened the door of his home in fashionable Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, dressed as Hitler, I didn’t blink. I assumed this was how actors worked out their roles in these script meetings. He also had a parrot in his lobby that screeched profound obscenities when I said ‘Hello, Cockie’. Only some time later, when the producer looked surprised when I told him about Sellers’ führer outfit, did I realize his enthusiastic costume procedure was unusual. With Sellers dressed as Hitler, sometimes standing on his head in a yoga position and copying my accent, he and I had some productive meetings. Unfortunately, the film never got made because Sellers wanted to play the Phantom, and the copyright owners were loath to risk the ‘serious’ nature of their hero and possibly damage their franchise. However, my interest in the subject led soon after to meeting Albert Speer in his Heidelberg home – but that’s another story (except to say that he sounded uncannily like Peter Sellers doing Hitler and Dr Strangelove).
Despite the fact that we were very young and having too much fun, the sixties in London had an undercurrent of real physical and political danger. The Vietnam War was splitting America apart and the repercussions were felt in a variety of lateral ways. Incredibly, if a young man just had long hair he could be persecuted. Police were, absurdly, arresting and harassing pop stars (Mick Jagger) and artists (Francis Bacon) for alleged hash smoking. There was an air of irrational persecution of the bohemian, the young and the youth culture. Strikingly, pop stars and artists were political and cultural catalysts – and police targets. Reacting, I did a painting of Dick Tracy breaking down the door of Van Gogh’s bedroom, which was reproduced in Art and Artists accompanying an article called ‘Anti-Social Realism and the Other Culture’. Australians seemed to be everywhere – moving and shaking in fine arts, music, theatre, in conventional, avant-garde and counter culture. I am not sure that such a combined outburst of Australian creativity hitting foreign shores has occurred since. Certainly, it has not been properly documented anywhere. Outsiders in London and expatriates from Australia, this intrepid group, as a group phenomenon, has fallen between the cracks for historians of culture. It certainly proved that the sixties generation of creative Australians did not suffer the dreaded cultural cringe. Some of the work they produced remains iconic and helped change world culture forever in a progressive direction. As the sixties morphed into the late seventies, the Australians went into a kind of Diaspora, some returning home, some staying, and the rest spreading around the world. But it had been, to quote that sixties song, 'One brief shining moment.... [20]
Notes
1) Viewed through political prisms, what the sixties represents as an historical era is controversial. In 1978 it was still a raw nerve: I started to make a documentary on the period, The Times They Are A-Changin’ for Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles. When the studio screened the rough cut, which included various home movie angles on the JFK assassination, scenes of student protests, civil rights riots, Vietnam scenes and so on, the studio closed the film down, putting security guards outside the cutting room. One executive said they had expected That’s Entertainment.
2) Fritz Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, Oxford University Press, 1999. Between 1936 and 1945, Hitler’s doctor, Dr Morell, prescribed fifty-six ‘significant medications’, including amphetamine, cocaine and opiates.
3) John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979.
4 )This tradition was grandiosely pioneered by Robert Menzies in 1941 when he conspired, in a quixotic display of Aussie machismo, to ‘make it’ by ousting Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. See David Day, Menzies and Churchill at War, Angus & Robertson, 1986.
5) For a good account of this refer to Barbara Blackman’s great memoir, Glass After Glass, Penguin, 1997.
6) For example, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Billy Liar, Darling, This Sporting Life, A Hard Day’s Night etc.
7) Richard Neville famously ended up on trial at the Old Bailey on obscenity charges. This is well documented in many places, including his memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake, Bloomsbury, 1995.
8) Clytie was an important social catalyst and focal point for many Australians in London. She was generous and socially adept and her gallery became a kind of salon. She married writer Peter Smalley and later became a film director.
9) ‘Vomart he [Mora] calls it, but though indeed they often look sick there is a pleasantness, and even a comic irony in these emulsion paintings. They also prove to be popular.’ Art Review, 1 February 1969. ‘Shorn of his affectations (first Anti-Social Realism, and now Vomart) he [Mora] stands out as a modern art phenomenon in a decade during which it has not been difficult to light upon pseudo-shocks.’ Art & Antiques Weekly, 1 February, 1969.
10) ‘Eduardo Paolozzi described it as the best exhibition he had seen for ten years’, ‘Art From The Outback’, Nova magazine, January 1969.
11) Brett wrote: ‘The paintings of the young Australian artist Philippe Mora … create the opposite atmosphere to Hockney’s. They suggest networks of fear, threat and violence. Yet it is not impossible to compare them, because Mora uses an apparently dry and cool, economical graphic style, rather than the florid expressionism one might expect.’ The Times, 10 November, 1970.
12) Sigi Kraus was a framer for the fancy Marlborough Gallery, and decided to open his own gallery above his frame shop. It became quite a radical gallery, exhibiting artists such as myself and Stuart Brisley. Perhaps influenced by my paintings of people vomiting, Stuart did a performance work where he vomited spaghetti at the opening as his ‘piece’. I was one of the few people who showed up. Avant-garde artist personalities such as Joseph Beuys visited the Gallery.
13) The sculpture was called Pork Chop Ballad. Time Out wrote, ‘It’s going fast’. Time Out, 16-30 May, 1970.
14) The Neal Street Restaurant, Covent Garden.
15) This harmless film caused me trouble in Los Angeles in 2001 (!), when a film laboratory refused to transfer it to video because its religious owners thought the film was blasphemous. ScreenSound Australian has a copy.
16) Peter Smalley wrote an account of the making of the film in Lumiere magazine, October 1970.
17) Robert Stigwood, an Australian manager and entrepeneur, handled Cream and less musically radical groups like the Bee Gees.
18) The press was okay. Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 14 May 1970: ‘The film is rough and at times amateurish, but it is distinctly original without being pretentious. Gentleman’s Quarterly, March, 1970: ‘Remember a movie called Chappaqua? The one you didn’t exactly have to see, but if you couldn’t talk about it-clunk? A concoction called Trouble in Molopolis is having the same effect on Londoners, and when it comes here (New York) – as it certainly will – you better know a few things about it’.
19) Anthony Slide in The International Film Guide (1971) wrote: ‘John Ivor Golding is quite brilliant as Mayor Hump’. This fellow got a great review then retired back into a mental asylum.
20) Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Camelot, 1968.
Philippe Mora is a film-maker, writer and painter and has worked in Australia, Europe and the United States. He was the founding editor of Cinema Papers in 1976, and his films include Mad Dog Morgan (1975), and Communion (1989). His work will be included in Larrikins in London at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, COFA, Sydney in 2003, and the Royal College of Art Galleries, London in 2004.
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* Marc Mohan, Inside the "Mind of Mora": Director Philippe Mora visits Portland for his first-ever American retrospective, Oregon Artswatch - Arts & Culture News, October 2023.
So what happened? Well, Cinemagic holds VHS Night every Friday, screening cultish films from the 1980s in the format in which they were meant to be seen. One of VHS Night’s biggest hits was Mora’s 1987 sequel The Howling III. (He also directed its predecessor, the brilliantly titled The Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf.). One of Cinemagic’s owners, Ryan Frakes, reached out to Mora in Los Angeles and proposed the idea of what’s being billed as “The Mind of Mora.” The director will attend each of the week’s screenings and participate in Q&A sessions, while hopefully also having time to explore the Rose City in autumn.
From L.A., Mora took the time to talk with Oregon ArtsWatch by phone. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Oregon ArtsWatch: You have amassed an extensive filmography over a nearly 60-year career. Was it a challenge to narrow it down to seven films, one each night? What was that process like?
Philippe: It was easy for me because I left it to Ryan. I thought it’d be better just to let him curate it and I think he’s done a good job. I’ve done 40 movies, so I think he’s picked some highlights for sure.
OAW: I remember watching [the 1982 horror flick] The Beast Within when it was on HBO and I was way too young for that movie. It should be interesting to revisit.
Philippe: Good, I’m glad. That’s when you should see movies—when you’re too young for them. My wife says, only half-jokingly, “Philippe, I think you marked a generation.”
OAW: [laughs] I guess I’m part of that generation, so thank you and I accept your apology. Other films 2023 audiences may remember are Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper, and Communion with Christopher Walken, and of course The Howling movies. But I’m really interested in some of your documentaries, especially Swastika, which was a relatively early project for you and something that contrasts with a lot of the rest of your filmography. Can you speak about how that came about and what the idea was about?
Philippe: Sure. My parents were Holocaust survivors and they never wanted to talk about it. Of course, what your parents don’t talk about, you really want to know. As a kid, I got more and more interested in why were we in Australia and why did my parents have funny accents? [Mora moved with his parents from France to Australia at the age of two in 1951.] Then I had the extraordinary piece of luck to come across Eva Braun’s home movies. I saw a photo of Eva Braun in a book with a camera filming Hitler. As a budding filmmaker I thought, “I wonder where that film is?” I rang up the Pentagon and said, “I’m from Australia. I’m making a film about Hitler. Did you capture any film in Hitler’s house?” (This is the short version.) The colonel who I spoke to was very friendly said, “I don’t know, we’ll get back to you.” It was the PR department of the Pentagon. He called me back three months later and said, “Look, we captured 16 cans of 16-millimeter film in Eva Braun’s bedroom and her private garden. Is that what you’re looking for?”
OAW: Oh, my goodness. You must have been like, “Yes, that’ll do.”
Philippe: That’ll do, yes. Look, it was a sensation. The film was shown in Cannes in ’73 and literally was a sensation. No one had ever seen Hitler in color close-up like that, let alone filmed by his mistress. It was controversial because of the shock of seeing him like this, playing with kids and so forth. Now of course it’s in every single documentary you ever see about Hitler, endlessly.
OAW: The controversy was that some people felt that it humanized him in a way that was inappropriate.
Philippe: Yes. Of course, I thought it was not just appropriate, but essential! If you don’t understand that he was just another guy, albeit an extraordinarily evil one, you won’t see the next Hitler coming.
OAW: After that film and another assemblage-type documentary called Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, about the Great Depression, your next project was Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper at his most Dennis Hopperiest. How challenging was it to work with him at that stage in his life and career?
Philippe: Firstly, that was the first Australian film to get a release in the U.S., any wide release. It broke the ice for Aussie movies. I’m proud of that aspect.
OAW: Absolutely.
Philippe: As far as Dennis goes, I didn’t know that he had been blacklisted. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know much about Hollywood except from reading books. I didn’t know that Lew Wasserman said he wouldn’t distribute The Last Movie. Dennis told him to go and have sex with himself. Of course, that was forbidden and unheard of in Hollywood. He was basically exiled.
Anyway, I ring up his agent from Melbourne, Australia, and say, “Is Dennis Hopper available?’ His agent, Robert Raison, almost came through the telephone like in a Tim Burton movie. “He’s available! He’s available!” I flew to Taos, New Mexico and met Dennis. I climbed out of a single-engine plane and there at the end of the runway was Dennis holding a rifle looking just like Mad Dog Morgan. Then I looked at all the bullet holes in his truck. I said, “What’s with all the bullet holes?” He said, “Oh, the Indians have been shooting at me. That reminds me, get into your hotel by midnight because the shooting starts at midnight.” I thought, “God, Jesus Christ. This is Mad Dog.”
OAW: Well, it really sounds like something of a tale from the Outback too.
Philippe: There’s a lot of stories about Dennis, but he was incredibly professional. We filmed no matter in what condition he was in. We finished on schedule and that, in a way, resurrected his career because Dennis went straight from my movie to Apocalypse Now.
OAW: I want to move on and talk a little bit about Communion, which also had some controversy attached to it relating to whether Whitley Striber’s book describing his alien abduction, and the film it’s based on, should be taken as fiction or non-fiction. Where did you stand on that, and how did you approach that in the making of the film?
Philippe: Let me come at this another way. After the film came out, I went to see Whitley in San Antonio for some reason. On the flight back from San Antonio to L.A., a guy who looked like Robert Redford in a CIA movie sat down next to me as the plane was taking off. He introduced himself and then showed his jacket. He said, “Hello, I’m such and such from the Defense Intelligence Agency.” He showed me this huge badge, defense intelligence. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but it’s the Pentagon’s, CIA. He said, “Oh, Communion, that’s the best film ever made about alien abduction. Have you met Whitley Strieber many times?” Then he said, “Have you met any aliens?” I said, “No, sir.” But I started thinking, “Jesus Christ, maybe there’s something to this…” I believed Whitley believed it. I had no personal knowledge of whether he’d been abducted by aliens or not, but he certainly was sincere with me.
OAW: The most recent film that’s being shown during this week is from 1996, but a quick glimpse at IMDb shows that you’ve continued to be quite busy. It doesn’t look like a lot of these films have had wide American distribution, but what topics and what styles have you been exploring in these last couple decades?
Philippe: They’ve been very low budget, even no-budget films because the subjects that I’m interested in are not big, overtly commercial subjects. It’s very hard to raise money in Hollywood for any really serious subject. I retreated in a sense from corporate Hollywood, Marvel comics, et cetera. Don’t get me wrong, I love comics, but how many men in tights movies can you deal with?
To answer your question more directly, I’m working on a history of art. You can imagine pitching that to a Hollywood studio. I’m really enjoying it. I’ve nearly completed the shooting on a film called The Man Who Thought He Was Salvador Dalí. I love the Dalí stories and I’m very interested in surrealism.
OAW: I notice also that, just judging from the titles, there seems to be a thread of continuing to explore the Nazi era. There’s a movie called Three Days in Auschwitz, there’s Custer at Nuremberg, there’s Dracula: Nazi Hunter. Is that something that you’re consciously also continuing to be interested in?
Philippe: Yes. Look, that’s a good observation. I’m glad you mentioned it. My continuing interest in Hitler and the Nazis and fascism, sadly has become very relevant worldwide. It hasn’t gone away. The rise of fascism is something that I think is terrifying if you’ve studied history.
OAW: Yes, or if you just read the newspaper.
Philippe: Yes. If you just read the paper, exactly. The thing is, it’s an enduring historical mystery as to how that came about, how Hitler came about. There’s more books written on this than most subjects, but there’s still no answer. It really is incredible and I keep finding out more and more about it.
The Nazis did an incredibly good job of covering their tracks. They were very aware, when they were killing mainly the Jews in this deliberate industrial killing method, that it was a really, really bad thing to do. Why do I say that? Because they made every effort to cover it up and it was a state secret. It makes it worse that they knew what they were doing and they knew they had to cover it up. You can’t cover up killing 6 million people. It doesn’t work.
OAW: Not for long.
Philippe: I also have an enduring interest in this because it’s still a mystery to me personally. I had a lot of family that died in the Holocaust. My father was involved in smuggling kids out of occupied Nazi France to the U.S., by the way. I met a distinguished psychiatrist, Henri Parens in Philadelphia, who was one of the kids my dad smuggled out. That was very moving.
OAW: Yes. I can imagine.
Philippe: I guess I’m just keen on the subject because there’s so many unanswered questions.
OAW: Yes. The reason I ask is because I have a similar fascination. I’ve got a World War II section on my bookshelves and when people come over sometimes they’ll see all these swastikas on the spines of books on the bookshelf and I have to explain that. Philippe: As my kids say, “Dad, not another Nazi book.”
OAW: [laughs] Yes, right.
Philippe: Someone who had an equal interest in this as you and I obviously do is Christopher Lee. He worked for British intelligence and he was involved in tracking down Nazis at the end of the war. The one extraordinary part of that story is that he was very close friends with the official Nuremberg hangman, Albert Pierrepoint.
OAW: Oh, my goodness.
Philippe: They would have afternoon tea together. Christopher told me how he actually assisted Pierrepoint in the hanging of Ernst Kaltenbrunner. I thought he may be exaggerating until I went to his apartment in London. He had a room full of memorabilia from the Nazis he’d been involved in arresting. When they arrest them, they rip off their insignia and Christopher collected those. He was an amazing guy. [NOTE: numerous sources indicate that it was in fact a U.S. serviceman named John C. Woods who won the job of Nuremberg hangman rather than the more experienced Brit Pierrepoint. War stories and all that…]
OAW: It’s surprising there hasn’t been a film made about his extraordinary life.
Philippe: Well, his cousin had been Ian Fleming, who was on record as saying that Christopher Lee was one of his inspirations for James Bond. It just sounds so incredible you don’t believe it. I believe, just as an observation as a director, that his life experience and being involved with all this murder and mayhem did give a gravitas to his Dracula portrayals that you couldn’t really fake.
OAW: That’s a fascinating point. This has been a bit of a tangent, but any tangent involving Christopher Lee is always worthwhile. I hope you enjoy your visit to Portland and look forward to the opportunity to further explore The Mind of Mora.
Philippe: Thanks very much. I enjoyed talking with you.
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* Chris Donner, This bizarrely captivating 35-year-old sci-fi film is based on an unbelievably true story, CBR, 21 October 2024.
Extraterrestrials and UFOs are increasingly hot topics these days, appearing in the movies as well as headlines, leading more people to wonder if they might be real after all - but this debate has been raging for a long time. Whitley Strieber's mind-blowing 1987 memoir Communion popularized the now-familiar alien tropes of big-headed, bug-eyed aliens, medical probes, and mysterious implants. The book remains a classic, but sci-fi fans may have forgotten its incomparably bizarre adaptation starring Christopher Walken.
Communion recently appeared in the frame story of V/H/S Beyond, which features author Mitch Horowitz in a fictional version of his Discovery docuseries Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction. Further conflating fact with fiction, Horowitz describes the cultural impact of Strieber's writing, which is as utterly weird as it is eerily convincing. Its even weirder screen adaptation is unlikely to win over the skeptics, but for fans of truly far-out films, it is an absolute must.
No mere movie could capture the strangeness of a real alien abduction, but Philippe Mora made up for this by filming one of the world's strangest movies. The wonderfully eccentric Christopher Walken plays Whitley Strieber: devoted family man, confirmed Catholic, and reluctant abductee. When he seeks treatment for severe post-traumatic stress symptoms that arrive out of nowhere, he accesses suppressed memories of violation at the hands of unearthly creatures. To keep his family together and maintain his sanity, he must learn the truth about what is happening to him.
In Communion, a traditional big-headed, large-eyed alien reveals that it is actually a more frightening creature wearing a mask. This concept is also seen in Fire In the Sky, the film adaptation of alien abductee Travis Walton's memoir The Walton Experience.
Whitley slowly recalls abduction scenarios that range from the expected - intrusive examinations by slender beings with large black eyes - to the unthinkable. In this fabulous FX extravaganza, massive praying mantises and stout blue monstrosities mingle in increasingly freaky scenarios culminating in a startling musical number tailor-made to show off some of Christopher Walken's famous footwork. Love it or hate it, Communion is nothing if not surprising, right down to the wailing, near-constant Eric Clapton guitar.
Though the paranormal part of the film is quite extreme, it is paired with warm, organic performances by Walken, Lindsay Krouse as his conflicted wife, and Joel Carlson as their young son. Walken improvised much of his material, and his co-stars feed his lively energy right back to him, creating an ensemble who truly seem to enjoy each other. This grounded family unit creates a strong counterpoint to the frightening absurdity of Whitley's plight.
When grappling with the cosmic chaos of Communion, it helps to know that it was directed by subversive artist Philippe Mora, who caused a stir in London in the '70s. One exhibit included a rat that Mora believed to be male, but when it unexpectedly gave birth, he attempted to sell the babies as if they were limited-edition prints of the original. His anti-war statement "Pork Chop Ballad," a human figure made out of meat, is a more famous work that caused a scandal described on the England & Co. Gallery website.
The police were called when Princess Margaret complained about the stench when dining at the restaurant across the street, and (gallerist Sigi) Krauss was forced to move it to the back garden where the neighbors, thinking the artwork was a murder victim, called in Scotland Yard again.
Mora is not solely responsible for Communion's shocking qualities, however. The script belongs to Whitley Strieber, who worked closely on the film. The strangest screen scenes - the intergalactic dance number, and Walken's dual role as a devious doppelgänger dressed as a magician - are not in the book, but they help underline the essentially incomprehensible nature of the abduction experience. The harder Whitley tries to gain control of the situation, the more surreal the alien manifestations become. The message is clear: Earthly wisdom is no use against extraterrestrial intelligence.
The classic alien portrait that graces the cover of the book Communion was created by Ted Seth Jacobs, based on descriptions given by Whitley Strieber. It is lovingly parodied in the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space ."
In his book, Whitley Strieber does not commit to any one interpretation of the true nature of alien encounters. UFOs may be ships driven by organisms somewhat like ourselves, but Strieber finds other possible explanations in ancient folklore, religious visions, and even in anomalous brain activity. Mora's wildly unpredictable movie helps underline the point that if humanity ever learns what is really behind alien abductions, it may be much stranger than little green men.
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References
Dan Morgan, Wikipedia, accessed 22 October 2024.
Donner, Chris, This bizarrely captivating 35-year-old sci-fi film is based on an unbelievably true story, CBR, 21 October 2024.
Haanan, Roel, A weirdness you couldn't fake [Interview with Philippe Mora, August 2024], The Flashback Files / Cinema Without Borders CWB, 27 September 2024.
Mohan, Marc, Inside the "Mind of Mora": Director Philippe Mora visits Portland for his first-ever American retrospective , Oregon Artswatch - Arts & Culture News, October 2023.
Mora, Philippe, Monsieur Mayonnaise: A true story. A graphic novel on escaping and fighting with Nazis, 2017, 50p.
-----, Einstein versus Hitler: Portraits of Good and Evil, 2018, 85p.
Philippe Mora [biography], England & Co. Gallery, n.d.
Philippe Mora, IMDB [website], accessed 24 October 2024.
Philippe Mora, Letterboxed [website], accessed 24 October 2024.
Philippe Mora, Rotten Tomatoes [website], accessed 22 October 2024.
Philippe Mora, The Movie Database [website], accessed 24 October 2024.
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Last updated: 27 October 2024
Michael Organ, Australia
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