Page 119
reminded me of that film. You said that if your parents hadn't left this house to you, you'd probably be on Skid Row.
Baillie:
Like the guy in
On Sundays,
yes. I met him living in an abandoned car under the Bay Bridge.
MacDonald:
It struck me that there was an interesting prescience in that film: there's this Skid Row guy chasing this young Asian woman . . .
Baillie:
Oh yeah! Just like me and Lorie. [laughter]
MacDonald:
Obviously, you're not homeless, but the thought of that seems to have been in your head a long time.
Baillie:
Well, it hasn't, actually, at least not that I'm aware of. Only in recent years when I came to realize what the result of not following the "American Plan" can be and usually is: you have nothing when you get older, after you've used your energy. All the systems are designed, more and more, to take care of
employees
. I've only been an employee occasionally to earn a little more to go on being an unemployed artist. In the American value scheme, people who are not employed are not holding up their end.
But whatever someone else might see in
On Sundays
must be there for the seeing.
MacDonald:
While not a conventional narrative, it has a lot of conventional narrative elements, and it's interesting that the next two
The Gymnasts
[1961] and
Have You Thought of Talking to the Director?
[1962]are a little different: they're both narratives, but the story seems only a pretext for a trip into a mental state. There's a development from learning how to tell a story to learning how to externalize what you're thinking or feeling. Could you talk about those early developments?
Baillie:
Hard to recall. Generally, each film showed me what
it
wanted, as the Eskimo carvers say. I was slowly coming to understand more about my medium. I do recall deciding to proceed slowly with this huge task and to proceed in a conventional way, meanwhile looking around and seeing others going off into modern art and expressing themselves in their own unique ways. I simply couldn't at first.
I was just pushing on to uncover hidden ground. Looking back on that time, I think of a Japanese garden with all the neatly laid stones you walk along that emulate the randomness of nature and yet have the exactness of the Zen Buddhist's mind. I look back and see that each step, each stone, was something I laid of necessity, my own necessity, the necessity to know myself. I would make each film as it came along, I'd smell in the air when the time had come again.
I remember more clearly what started me to work on the later films. In
Castro Street
it was the color quality of the Standard Oil tanks in Richmond, California, on a particular rainy day. For
All My Life,
it was the quality of the light for three summer days in Casper, California, up the