Alexander O. Philippe has made films about Lynch, Hitchcock, or William Friedkin. But there is someone who escaped. At least for now.
“Nicolas Roeg. For me, he has more mysteries than any other director,” he says. Logue, who passed away in 2018, is best known for “Don’t Look Now” and “Walkabout.”
“I feel like I don’t spend as much time as I should on his movies. I’ve always wanted to go back and understand how he worked. There’s one movie in particular that dabbles in a really weird kind of cinematic magic, and that’s Eureka with Gene Hackman.”
Philippe, who will receive the Indie Star Award at the Tauron American Film Festival, has become known for dissecting film history with detailed documentation. Most recently, he provided intimate portraits of William Shatner and Kim Novak in Kim Novak’s Vertigo, the latter of which premiered in Venice.
“There’s definitely a shift towards the personal. I’m very interested in craft, but the emotion of film is what I’m most passionate about,” he agrees.
“For me, it really started with William Friedkin. Just having a personal connection with him and spending a lot of time together. We were able to dig deep,” Philippe said of the late director in “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist.”
What’s the secret to how he approaches you?
“The best way to answer this is I’m not looking for gossip,” he says.
“I have no purpose other than to make sure they have the time and space to be who they are. They’re all notoriously cautious. Everyone was scared of Friedkin. And what about Shatner?[Songwriter]Ben Folds said he would eat directors for breakfast. Kim Novak is a complete recluse.”
Still, he was allowed to “go up into her attic, pick up the box, and examine it all night.”
“I can’t believe how comfortable it was. I still am.”
“With Kim, for example, I wasn’t interested in her relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. Colman Domingo has already made a movie about his relationship with Sidney Sweeney. I’m more interested in what turns them on. What’s underneath their skin? There’s an entire chapter in You Can Call Me Bill devoted to Shatner’s deepest fear: loneliness. I’ve never seen him like that.”
Philip is also gradually preparing to produce his own fiction film.
“It’s going to be a Western or a horror movie, but it’s hard to make a unique horror movie that has something to say. I’m a big fan of Weapons and I was really impressed with Longlegs.” “I want to make horror films that touch the heart of the audience in unexpected ways,” he admits.
In the meantime, he will continue to prove to people that “there is no one right way to look at movies.”
“When I was touring for ’78/52,’ I said that for the rest of my life I could only make movies about that (Psycho) shower scene, and then I would continue to live a full and fascinating life as a filmmaker,” he laughs. Originally, “Memory: Alien Origins” was supposed to depict the infamous chestburster scene.
“We thought, what if we applied the same model that we applied to ’78/52,’ and instead of doing the shower scene, we talked about that? Both were completely shocking and changed the course of the movie. But it didn’t work.”
Philip said, “They work in very different ways. The shower scene was the scene that people wanted to see at the time. It said, ‘The 1950s are over. Welcome to the 1960s.'” The chestburster scene was not the scene that people wanted to see. They wanted friendly aliens and ETs. It was 40 years ahead of its time. ”
He started reading about Ridley Scott exhibiting the H.R. Giger-Francis-Bacon triptych. “I found out that these three figures in his triptych were the Furies from Greek mythology. I started geeking out thinking about the mythical roots of the Xenomorph.”
A movie about the distant future has become a movie about the distant past, he says. “The lesson I learned from that is to never be lazy. My job as a filmmaker is to pay attention to what the movie actually wants.”
He digs deep into his favorite movies, but he’s never willing to reveal all their secrets.
“It’s not, ‘Let me explain to you what David Lynch or Kim Novak is.’ The feedback I’m getting about Kim is that she seems even more mysterious. That’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten.”
Furthermore, he added: “People always ask me if David Lynch saw Lynch/Oz, and he certainly never told me that. We held a screening in March following his death, and of course someone asked about it again. A week later, I got a message from critic Matt Fagerholm, who said, “A dear old friend of David’s had seen this movie and asked me to tell him that he liked it.”
“That touched me very much. He understood that my intention was not to ‘solve’ David Lynch, which is silly, but to deepen the mystery.”
