Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan skipped class and slipped his way into John Lennon's hotel room. With a reel-to-reel recorder at hand, the bold but somewhat bewildered Levitan sat down with the pop icon to converse about politics and music. More than three decades later, the recordings landed in the hands of Josh Raskin who'd cut the piece into the brilliant and loopy animated snapshot I Met the Walrus, recently announced, to the filmmaker's great surprise, as an Academy award nominee.

Following here is a conversation wherein Raskin speaks about peace, originality in art, handmade style animation and editing John Lennon.

SM: You'll have to walk me a bit through your background if you don't mind. How did you get into doing film? Why did you know that was something you wanted to do?

JR: I've been interested in film from as far back as I can remember. I did my first animated short when I was nine-years-old. It was called The Mouth, and I drew every picture by hand for a few weeks. It was just about a mouth that opens and closes a few times and then grows fangs, a fly flies in and a tongue shoots out, eats the fly and then it burps...So really early on I was fascinated and interested in film, but it wasn't until high school when I got my first Super-8 film camera that I started making films of my own that I'd consider showing anybody else.

Then I applied to film school, actually, to go to university, and I was going to go through the whole audition process and interview process to get into the school, Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. But, they wouldn't look at any of my films as part of that process, and so that tipped me off that working in the film industry might not be really what I was after. It seems to be a little more traditional, close-minded and streamed toward specific career paths.

I discovered a program called New Media at the same school, at Ryerson, which is a lot more open to creating your own projects and involving any media you were interested in working with. I was interested in film, but I was just as into making music, just as into learning about animation. It allowed me to work on all the different things I was into without being too (bolted down) into one medium.

Jerry Levitan, the kid who interviewed John Lennon in 1969, grew up to be a lovely man who lives and works in Toronto, the same city that I'm from, and he'd seen some of my university film work. I guess for some reason he didn't think it was horrible, and he gave me a call and asked if I'd be interested in doing something on his story. He told me the story, and I thought, "This is an amazing story." I've been a massive fan of John Lennon and the Beatles since I was born. I was force-fed that since the moment I popped out of the womb.

What I was really interested in though was the recording itself, was this document that Jerry had been keeping locked away in a dark dungeon, hiding in his house for 38-some years. So I wrestled that out of his hands, listened to it a bunch of times and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, which was to cut it down to about five minutes, a manageable length, and animate directly to it, which is the disaster that ultimately got us here.

SM: Now the original recording was [26 minutes long], so how did you go about listening to it and then paring it down?

JR: That was easily the most difficult part of the filmmaking process for me...It's John Lennon, and so every single thing he said was endlessly poetic, endlessly profound and absolute genius. So the hardest bit was deciding what not to include as opposed to what to include.

What I tried to do was to make it a back-and-forth narrative interview. So there's the question and the answer, the question and the answer, where the actual full version is a little more meandering and ramblely. We definitely had to lose some bits that were absolutely brilliant and hilarious. Sometimes you have to shoot your babies when you're editing I think, but we're pretty happy with the bits that are left over.

SM: (The short) is a great cross section of three main topics. That first idea, that big idea that's animated so beautifully is that idea of peace, that the individual has to rally the law in order to attain peace. Talking about that topic, when you first heard that question and answer, what were your thoughts, and do you agree with the concepts Lennon was speaking about...?

JR: Absolutely, yeah. On top of being a massive Lennon fan, I thought the most important reason to make this film at this time was because of how relevant his words were today and a lot more relevant probably than when they were spoken in '69 even. It just goes to show how little we've learned since then. We find ourselves in a very similar, more insidious, terrifying situation than that war. What John's talking about as prophetic and profound as it might sound is really simple I think. He's basically saying, "If we stop being jerks to each other, we'll be alright." Of course he goes into detail about, "It's up to all of us," and it's not like you need to lie in front of a tank necessarily, but just make sure that everything you do, the way you live your life, the way you are with your friends, the way you are, more importantly, with your enemies, every action that you carry out is to adhere to that hope where you're just doing your best not to screw people over. Do things peacefully be it, in his words, "piss for peace or smile for peace or go to school for peace or don't go to school for peace, whatever it is, just do it for peace." I don't think that that means you need to be thinking about peace constantly while you're doing it, but the minute your actions hurt people, you're probably doing something wrong.

SM: One of the other interesting things that he mentions that makes it hard to gear your life in a way that, even if you're not consciously thinking about peace, you're living that way is this idea he speaks of about man being simultaneously Christ-like and Hitler-like, that we have those two sides equally...As an ideological extrapolation, do you think it's true that we have that duality?

JR: Absolutely, it's an essential paradox. You can't have good without evil. I don't really believe personally in black and whites like that, where it's good and evil, but you can't have hot without cold; you can't have one thing without the other. As soon as the opposite disappears, the other is the only option, and so there wouldn't even be a word for it. It wouldn't even be a thing that existed. I fully believe that.

Any great thinker in recorded history has talked about similar things. There's the Freudian idea that the death wish is as powerful as the life force. You want to kill other people, or you want to kill yourself as badly as you want to reproduce, love other people and keep yourself alive. That's an easy explanation anyway for why there's as much pornography as there is, bombing of other countries, but I don't think that that excuses violent behavior. I don't think that excuses the lack of peace. I don't think that means that war is an inevitable way for people to carry out their lives.

What I think he's saying is that this struggle is within everyone, and it's everyone's responsibility to focus on the constructive things, the useful things that don't mess each other up.

SM: In terms of the technical side of what you did, I know you lead animated, but you were working with (visual artist James Braithwaite and computer illustrator Alex Kurina.) I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how that process went.

JR: The first step was locking myself in a room and cutting down the audio, resulting in that five minute chunk, and then spending a few months writing a very meticulous script that outlined in terrifying detail everything that would happen on screen from the tiniest ink blog to the most obscene phallic sword bending...Then I went through the script and decided what elements should be hand-drawn and what elements should be digitally created.

James did all the hand-drawn illustration, which was literally black pen on white paper, printer paper, and he drew thousands upon thousands of frames of this animation. All of that was scanned on a home scanner and brought into the computer, and then Alex created all of the digitally constructed pieces. So, he used Photoshop and Illustrator and made these strange photo vector collages, these strange machines based on designs we'd worked out. All of those elements were then brought into a program called After Effects, where I wiggled them around a lot and made a horrible mess of things for five minutes.

It wasn't difficult for us to figure out how to work in that way because there was no other option really...I'd worked with Alex a lot in the past, and James and I had been best friends since high school. I've been a huge fan of his illustrations. He's my favorite artist in the world, and in addition to that, his drawings had always reminded me of John's drawings. Part of the idea of the film was, "What would John's drawings look like if they came to life and moved around and did obscene things?"

In addition to those two styles of elements, we did a lot of stop motion photography. James painted over some globes, and we shot them turning one frame at a time...We shot video of ink clouds in water and ink splats on paper, and so nothing we did was all that high tec. We were just making everything up as we went, with combs, desk lamps, green bristol board backgrounds for green screen. Every part of the process was as handmade as the film ultimately looks.

SM: I don't think it had that handmade aesthetic for me.

JR: Oh, really? Maybe we got a bit too slick with it in the end.

SM: No! I think it's great.

JR: But, things like leaving the frame numbers bubbling in the corners above the characters as they move--we didn't want to clean it up too much. It's maybe even a bit tidier than we'd originally envisioned, mostly because it gets so blown out when it's projected on a screen that you lose all the stains and things that are actually in the background...It's basically made by people who have no idea what they're doing.

The driving force behind doing it as an animation in the first place and the way it was animated, the idea was, I wanted it to feel like you were inside the head of a 14-year-old kid who was overwhelmed, naive, entirely star-struck and unprepared interviewing this larger-than-life god to him, John Lennon. So, the words transform and mutate in this stream of consciousness, this free associative way from one thing to the next in a very almost literal fleeting, momentary way that doesn't try to interpret the meaning of what he's saying. It literally visualizes the words. In doing that, I wanted the people watching to interpret his words. To me, they're simple enough and the message is clear enough, but it didn't feel like it was our responsibility to tell people what he was talking about. It's pretty clear listening to the full interview anyway, and I hope it comes across in the bits we used in the film, that Jerry is barely listening to the answers. He's just so overwhelmed with this situation that he's just sort of scrambling to try to figure out what he should be asking next in front of this super hero.

SM: Jerry's pretty ballsy, actually. Some of the questions he asks, especially for a star-struck 14-year-old, he really challenges [Lennon] with things that I assume professional journalists wouldn't even ask...Part of my question is, how did you react when you first heard that? I wish I could be that ballsy.

JR: A lot of people, including myself, wish that we could be that ballsy. That was to me, aside from the message being so profound and I thought timely, that was the reason it was such an amazing recording, such an amazing piece of history. It is just this naive, obsessive fan who found himself in his incredible situation on account of his remarkable balls, and he's just completely honest. He's talking about how he's not all that keen on George and how his friends like the Bee Gees... He interrupts John, he barely listens to the answers. Yet, John treats him with as much if not more respect than he would a CNN reporter. To John, that's a way more viable, useful and real interview probably than talking to a major network. He probably just got a kick out of the whole thing, but as a historical document, it's just a testament to John's genius as well as his lack of super hero persona. He was just a guy, and he makes a point of repeating that. He's just one of four duds who happened to fall into this thing, and Jerry was just this one younger dud who happened to fall into this other thing. Their lives intertwined, and this event happened, but there's certainly no pretense whatsoever in the way that he deals with this kid or his naivete. That was a very attractive part of the recording for me personally.

SM: Talking about the stream of consciousness, the transitions are done so beautifully. We see the still frame of Jerry with--was that live action, the movement of the reel-to-reel recorder?

JR:...The reel-to-reel player was stop motion. We photographed the reels turning one frame at a time and then looped in shoddy and imperfect way so that they jump, which we like. Some things we just wanted to look extra crappy and feel really handmade, a little bit off and imperfect to match the whole feeling of the film.

There's a microphone that comes off the reel-to-reel player that was designed by Alex, and the concept of that was, "Well, Jerry's interviewing, and it's just a very straight up, unmoving shot of the kid as he's composed and running the show." Then as soon as John starts to speak, and the kid loses his train of thought and gets swept away in this world of free associative answer, the animation follows suit.

SM: You do sort of lose your center. You have a definitive center with Jerry, but then you're completely swept away by the answers, especially considering the issues (Lennon's) talking about...I'm also always interested in the way filmmakers work with rhythm because there's a certain musicality especially in the editing. With this short, you were dealing with (rhythm) in the early scripting stages.

You talked earlier about the influence of music in your own work. How do you see that music affects your filmmaking now, if it still does at all?

JR: It does completely. In fact, the other half of my life is that I make music, and the way I approach filmmaking and music making is exactly the same. I don't really draw differences between different types of media in that way at all. Same goes for animation versus live action. If there's an idea that needs to be communicated, I'll use whatever media would best communicate that idea.

So, in terms of rhythm and pacing, I knew for this film that it wouldn't work if it was just all that free associative, stream of consciousness barrage of imagery. It would be exhausting, mentally exhausting, and you needed this anchor to keep falling back on, as Jerry probably did in the interview. John's talking; Jerry's heart's probably jumping out of his throat, nervous out of his mind, and he needed to keep re-rooting himself in the reality of the moment, the fact that he was actually there, even by hearing his own voice. So, we wanted to do that visually in the film too.

But, music has been a massive, massive part of my life, almost more so than film. I've been playing different instruments since I was 6-years-old, and I started making my own music in high school and continue to do so now. Actually, I'm currently trying to finish up a record that I'm doing. Basically, what I do is I steal music from all the kinds I listen to--from the Beatles, to Radiohead, to Biggie Smalls, to Beethoven to Johnny Cash--and, I chop it up into tiny bits and piece it back together in terrifying new ways and make new songs out of them. So, my approach to filmmaking is really quite similar in a way in terms of re-appropriating found, existing things and creating something new out of them...Really, I think it's a more honest approach to doing what every artist has done throughout history. You could ask any musician about how they wrote a song, and they'll rattle off the fifteen bands, artists, notes or melodies that influence their writing. What this is doing is just very directly referencing that by using the source recording as the material--instead of just liking this little tune and that little drum beat and this lyric. It's nothing new. It's just more honestly referencing where the ideas came from to begin with.

SM: The idea of originality, at least for me, especially being American, this idea of rugged individuality--and, you're Canadian, so there might be a difference of opinion--

JR (laughing): Let's find out.

SM: Americans are grown up with this idea of manifest destiny, this rugged individualism so to speak, so we put a lot of emphasis on being original. But, the reality is, if you're really thinking about art, there's no original idea so much as an original evolution of an idea, an original interpretation.

JR: ...And it extends well beyond art. Any original idea, whether its Steve Jobs coming out with a new product, Alexander Graham Bell or Picasso, any original idea that has come to fruition throughout history has probably been taking two or more existing ideas and just combining them for the first time. And so, nothing comes from nothing. Because of the pace at which work is getting made and ideas are being mass produced in this day and age, these things happen a lot quicker and often combine more disparate things at the same time to seem more original maybe--or less original depending on what it is. I'm a firm believer in the absence of the immaculately conceived concept or artwork.

SM: At six years old you started making music and nine years old you did your animation, and so early on you had that artsy gene. The big question then is: What does it mean to be an artist to you? Just in general, why do people make art?

JR: To me it was never a question personally. That was the venue for me to express the things that I wanted to express and explore the things I wanted to explore that made me feel a certain way or think a certain way or got a certain reaction from other people. It was just a way for me to express myself and my ideas that was culturally deemed somehow useful or unique.

I think the role of the artist is not really all that different from the role of the toilet cleaner. It's not something that necessarily has to happen, but it makes life a lot more enjoyable. So, having a messy toilet and having a crappy film are not so far apart.

SM (laughing): I like that. I'll work with that.

For more information on the filmmaker and his work, visit www.imetthewalrus.com.

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