Interview

Alejandro Jodorowsky: 'I am not mad. I am trying to

heal my soul'
By Xan Brooks
Th 84-year-old director rolled into Cannes this week to discuss his latest film La Danza de la
Realidad, a magic-realist memoir of his youth. He talks about his troubled childhood, his
passion for psychomagic – and why ageing doesn't trouble him
Thu 23 May 2013 16.47 BST

M
issing, believed lost, Alejandro Jodorowsky rolls into Cannes like a conquering
hero. He has a room at the Croisette and a film in the directors' fortnight – a
rambunctious sidebar away from the Palais. "I am like the rain, I go where I'm
needed," the director explains. "If I were in the big house, with the red carpet and
photographers and all the fancy women, I would be ashamed." He has always
been happier way out on the fringes.

Jodorowsky turned 84 last birthday. He has white hair, bright eyes and a crocodile smile. It is
now more than four decades since he thrilled the faithful as El Topo, a mysterious gunslinger in
rabbinical black, and 23 years since he last sat behind a movie camera. We thought he was a
goner, that it was all over bar the obit. Instead, it transpires, the man is barely getting started.
"Look at this, I show you something," he says, leafing through the pages of the magazine at his
elbow. His tour leads us through a world of glossy advertisements. "Beautiful woman – selling
things. Beautiful woman – selling things. The Great Gatsby – selling watches." It is the picture of
Leonardo DiCaprio that really gets his goat. "Prostitution!" he roars. "He should be ashamed."

Alejandro Jodorowsky stars in his 1970 film El Topo. Photograph:

Alamy

Jodorowsky's latest film, La Danza de la Realidad, also feels like the first in that it unfolds as an
exuberant magic-realist memoir of the director's own childhood, replete with iguanas, circus
clowns and amputees. He shot most of the action in his hometown of Tocopilla, a dirt-poor
Chilean village that he found had barely changed in the intervening decades. In a neat
generational twist, the director's eldest son, Brontis, plays Jodorowsky's brutish Stalinist dad.

The whole thing was undertaken in a spirit of healing. "My father was a monster," he recalls. "A
monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again. Oh yes, it was a
terrible thing that I did. But what I am doing here is recovering them and giving them what
they never had. My father had no humanity. So here, look, I am making him human."

As a boy, Jodorowsky was bullied for being Jewish and bullied for being bookish. Flight, he
decided, was his only option. In Paris, he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and directed
Maurice Chevalier in music-hall. In Mexico he outraged the authorities with an avant-garde
theatre group. "In Mexico they want to kill me!" he marvels. "A soldier held a gun to my chest."

Jodorowsky's magic-realist memoir of his own childhood, La Danza

De La Realidad.

By the early 70s he was a star of American counter-culture. El Topo, a demented peyote
western, won an ardent fan in John Lennon and it was Lennon who helped secure the funds for
1973's The Holy Mountain, in which the conquest of Mexico is re-enacted with chameleons
dressed as Aztecs and toads playing conquistadors. And yet The Holy Mountain would prove
too rich and wild a brew and, since then, Jodorowsky's career has been an infuriatingly stop-
start affair. Here at Cannes, another festival picture (Jodorowsky's Dune) charts his endless,
agonised attempts to spin a film out of the Frank Herbert fantasy tome. The film was
eventually directed by David Lynch, while many of its visual ideas filtered through to Ridley
Scott's Alien. Jodorowsky, for his part, was left out in the cold.

Such indignities might have undone a lesser man. Yet Jodorowsky claims to be altogether
untroubled. The ticking clock means nothing to him. "Anyone who thinks they will get older
and die has a big problem," he says. "Tarantino says that he will stop when he gets old because
the pictures are for young people, I don't believe it. I am going to live 120 years."

Besides, he says, he has always been able to keep himself busy. At home in Paris he writes
comic-books, reads the tarot and gives free lectures on his theory of "psychomagic", which
strikes me as a peculiarly Jodorowskyan blend of psychotherapy and shamanistic mumbo-
jumbo. "Lots of psychomagic in this film! My son playing my father. Psychomagic! The boy in
the film is afraid of the night, just as I am. So he paints himself black. Psychomagic! Not afraid
of the dark any more." He laughs. "People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my
soul."

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From time to time, Jodorowsky even pops up in La Danza de la Realidad himself. He plays a
kind of wise, white-bearded angel, grinning his crocodile grin and cradling the child in his
arms. If he could really go back, what would he say to his bullied younger self?

"But this is what I did in the film," he says, as though I missed some crucial point; as if there is
no distinction between his film and his life. "I say: 'Listen, don't suffer, I am here. You are not
alone because you are with me.' I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends
with me. But I say: 'I am with you and just listen what you will do. You will be an artist, you will
travel. You will be happy.'" Jodorowsky, it turns out, was who Jodorowsky was waiting for all
along.

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