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Friedrich:
I think I did have that plan when I started. I wanted to make something that I (and viewers) would enjoy. But I don't think I set out to contradict any other person's film or any other kind of filmmaking. It's true that when I go to films that are determined
not
to provide traditional pleasure, I end up being really frustrated or bored or angry. My reaction to such films has been building for a long time. Even when I was making
Gently Down the Stream,
I had a combative stance toward antipleasure films, but at that time I wasn't able to do as much as I wanted to do in terms of providing pleasure myself. And certainly there wasn't much place for pleasure in
The Ties That Bind
. It wasn't until I was actually into making
Damned If You Don't
that I realized I could create some of the visual (and aural) pleasures I had wanted to experience in other people's films. Maybe it took me this long to be able to begin to work with pleasurable material because I had my own reservations about it. As much as I was angry about what other people were doing, I knew that I wasn't prepared politically or emotionally to do something different. I had to overcome my own backlog of things I
shouldn't
do.
MacDonald:
The subject of
Damned If You Don't
doesn't seem a very likely place for humor, and I'm sure to some people it isn't at all funny.
Friedrich:
I have a tendency to look at things too seriously. When I made
Damned If You Don't,
I was particularly close to someone who has a really good sense of humor and who definitely pushed me into putting more humor into the film. Also, when I told my brother I was working on the film, he said, "Oh god, why don't you just once make a film about a light subject!" He imagined, rightly, that I was planning another anguished exposition. His saying that really stuck in my mind.
MacDonald:
The woman who delivers the critique of
Black Narcissus,
Martina Siebert, does a terrific job.
Friedrich:
I chose her partly because she's German and has a German accent. Initially I thought of it as a joke on the expert German scientist in fifties documentaries. But her delivery didn't come through that way. Her English is good, but she didn't always understand the cadence I intended, so a lot of times she said things in an odd way I couldn't have anticipatedwhich ended up working out for the best.
MacDonald:
Another section of the film that's pretty funny, and I assume consciously so, is when the text from
Immodest Acts
is juxtaposed with the shots of the nuns walking around. When the reader says, "I saw Christ coming," one nun looks up as though she sees something coming. It's as if the nuns are unwittingly acting out the story. At the end of the film you apologize to those nuns. Was that because you felt you had made jokes at their expense?
Friedrich:
Well, I started the film feeling very angry toward nuns and