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street and all the deathevery night there'd be something or somebody killed, lying in the street in the morning. I had met up with this (archetypal) young girl, riding her pony. And I was afraid to meet her father. I'd sent word out trying to see her, and
he
sent word back to come meet him, and I thought, "Oh, God!" But he turned out to be a very nice fellow: Manuel Sasa Zamora, of Jalisco. They were very poor and lived behind a big gate and had a horse and a dog named Penquina. That horse didn't like me and would not let me film. I had to give it up for a while. Later, I named my horse after the filmValentina.
MacDonald:
When I was looking through your films, the biggest discovery for me was
Quick Billy
. It's a pretty amazing film, and certainly begs for questions because it's so diverse. Reel one is very much about morning and creation.
Baillie:
I think that beginning section is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in the movies. I had to get out of bed to make every one of those takes. I was really sick, with hepatitis. Tulley would come over, and I would tell him what part of the house I had to go to, and he would help me up. I'd tie a knot in a big beach towel and pull in my liver with it. He'd walk me over to, say, the fish tank, and set the tripod up and load the camera. Then I'd do the take and go back to bed.
MacDonald:
The opening shot of Part One is very mysterious. The spectator never actually sees anything, just a shade of pink that gets a little more dense, then less, over a period of about two and a half minutes. And I'm not sure what I'm hearing: sometimes it sounds like traffic, sometimes like the ocean.
Baillie:
It's the ocean. Later, there are the sounds of passing timber trucks.
That opening is supposed to be the highest moment of illumination in the whole work. I was following the Tibetan description of the time between life and death, and that's either the illumined memory of perfection or the illumined moment of discovery. It can go either way. I never played the film backward, but it was designed so it could run backward or forward.
MacDonald:
You mean the whole film, all four parts?
Baillie:
Let's see, the last reel was in narrative form so that would always run forward. Then would come the end of Part Three, from the end to the beginning; then the end of Part Two would come, then the end of Part One. The end of the whole film would be the beginning shot with that pure light.
MacDonald:
So that version would move from the mundanery of conventional narrative toward this moment of supreme illumination, like a journey up the chakras?
Baillie:
I don't remember the whole story. I was describing my own