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boards.] There's a "seed" for
Koyaanisqatsi
in this image. Here's this incredible landscape and in the middle, a horrifying image that undercuts the landscape's beauty.
Reggio:
Definitely. That campaign was extraordinarily successful. We hadn't predicted what the outcome would be; we wanted to see what simultaneity could do. But the result was the elimination of Ritalin as a behavior-modifying drug in many school districts in the state. Knowing that politicians often do the right things for the wrong reasonsthey live by pollswe coordinated the campaign to happen when the state's Democratic and Republican conventions were held. While I don't believe in polls as a way to exercise democracy, I knew that politicians did, so
we
had a poll done by the University of New Mexico. The issue we were focusing on went from a fourteen percent recognition rate up to a sixty-seven percent. Politicians adopted almost all of the issues that were built into the campaign, and two of our congressional delegates in Washington cosponsored bills that eventually led to the elimination of psychosurgery in all federal institutions in the country.
Next, I tried to use what we had developed in this campaign as a prototype and take the issues into a national forum. A conference was being developed at the University of Chicago for principal lawmakers around the country. Senator Sam Irvin was going to keynote it. We had worked with Lawrence Baskir, who was the chief consul and researcher for the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. We had given them a lot of material and felt we were in a position to launch a national campaign. We wanted to show that this was a pattern
endemic
to the information society, that in fact
everybody
had extensive files on them, and that police and planning bureaucracies were using computers, aggregate statistics, to do all of their prognosis and policy development, that drugs were being used, from Ritalin in schools to Prolixin [a strong tranquilizer] in the prisons.
That campaign didn't work out, but I wanted to continue to explore media and I felt that film might give me more access to the public. Of course, having never made a film, having no credibility, I found it agonizing to get support. Basically, I found "angel support," people who were not interested in the return on their investment, but loved our project.
Koyaanisqatsi
took seven years.
MacDonald:
Let's do a timetable. When did you form this collective?
Reggio:
In the early seventies.
MacDonald:
This local campaign that was so successful was in . . .
Reggio:
1974. We worked on
Koyaanisqatsi
from 1975 to 1982.
MacDonald:
When you look at the film now, can you see its history? Were certain kinds of things shot at certain times?
Reggio:
Well, we started to shoot the film in 16mm because at first