As we progress with the production of CHURCH OF THE EYES we have ran into several snags along the way. The biggest one is the misinterpretation of the script by people who we have either asked to help out, or have asked to be part of the production that are not our normal "troupe". I am not usually in the habit of explaining my art or myself, but as this production still needs a few key personal to make it blossom I think I should say a few things for clarification...
CHURCH OF THE EYES started life as a collaboration between myself and musician Kevin Jones as an experimental/art/video piece. In the beginning it was never really meant to even have a story, just images set to his music. These images were based on dreams, pieces of abandoned projects, and a lot of artwork I have done over the years.
As we had further meetings on this the whole thing began to gel into a loose narrative, and things in my personal life had been turning sour for a lot of people I loved around me. America's political situation was looming in a bad place at this point (mid 2007). I had longed considered myself to be hovering somewhere between atheist and agnostic but was seeing large portions of the country and the world at large using religion as a tool to manipulate and tear each other apart. There was (and still is) a real "chaos ascending" vibe going in the world at large. And it hit me, what if the main character's journey in the movie was that he was going to find and kill God? The movie was already about this man reveling in his grief about the loss of his girlfriend and the demons he was battling from that. So what if that spurred him on a Journey to find God and actually make him feel the pain the world feels?
Now of course it is a surreal, nonsensical, internal journey, because at the core we are all trying to kill our own Gods, and once we do that we attain some sort of inner peace. The movie is really about battling our own madness and suffering in the face of the same things in the world at large. Kill our own inner Gods, our own inner demons to see if we can find some sort of transcendence...
It's heady shit I know...
The movie is also about love and the great loss of it. How losing of love makes you feel like you are living with a phantom limb, or a lobotomized brain. It is this great and huge loss that puts the train in motion in the movie.
So why is all of this so important to talk about when the movie isn't even completely shot yet you ask? Because as we get collaborators we continue to run into the same problem with new people who are unfamiliar with my past work, or writing. The themes of religion and sexuality are freaking people out.
The script has almost no dialogue and is driven by imagery almost exclusively. It is this strong imagery that drives the narrative and has to tell the audience exactly what is meant. So for example for the audience to understand in one or two scenes that the two main characters are passionately and exquisitely in love, I can either show them running over the hillside holding hands, or show them passionately making love like two people who never want to be apart. I went for the latter, in what is admittedly a fairly graphic, though not distasteful sex scene. The scene ends with some Catholic communion imagery worked in.
Later there is another sex scene between the two characters that is more intense and nightmarish that involves more love making, but with blood pouring from the ceiling onto them, engulfing them. Once again representation of her death and his inability to let go of her. The scene is written in a pretty intense manner that pops off the page.
These two scenes have caused problems from the get go as people read the script and misinterpret our intentions. It has been called blasphemous, it has been called pornography. Neither of which is the intention.
We are very serious about the movie we are making here. We are dealing with extreme, and haunting themes, many of which are adult in nature and not the kind of thing people are comfortable exploring. We understand that. CHURCH OF THE EYES is not going to be a movie for everyone, and was never intended to be. But hopefully by the time it is finished some demons will be exorcised, a journey taken, and people out there will see the finished film and get some further understanding that we are making a dark piece of art.
If we were setting out to make a blasphemous piece of pornography, we could have made something MUCH easier to make, and MUCH more vile and contemptuous than this! We have other goals in mind here.
