LD: I don’t know where it will lead me. I’m just telling stories anyways, so if somebody discovers my work, then it’s just about that. I think more of my audiences [as part of the practice]: the issue of engagement, the issue of discourse, but I don’t think of them in the sense that I want to do this for them, to please them, to make more money. ... It’s so nasty and dirty to think of cinema as just a product. I want it to be like what we’re doing now. You are here because of my cinema, so we’re talking about it. And we’re not just talking about cinema now. We’re talking about life, trying to question everything. That dynamic, I want to have that with my audience. Just a simple discourse with my audience—or with my grandson, maybe, someday.

THC: I have to ask about the current political situation, both here and in the Philippines.

LD: Everything is fucked up. It’s an abyss opened up, a slide towards barbarism every day.

THC: Before it happened, could you see it coming?

LD: Of course, if you see that there’s this huge wall of ignorance. Making cinema allows me to go to the countryside, to the islands. The biggest issue I can see is ignorance, this huge wall of ignorance, and it creates all these massive things. I’m always afraid that things are going to happen, and it’s happening. It’s our failure, it’s our debacle. I haven’t done anything yet [to confront it]. You see what’s happening all over the world, and you’re just this very, very tiny thing, the filmmaker or the poet or the writer or anybody. We have to confront life more. The biggest issue is that we have to destroy the wall of ignorance. ... Just yesterday alone, come on, just read the news. In Egypt, two bombings. In Sweden the other day, the truck. The bombing in Syria. It’s actually just going down. It’s an abyss of barbarism, and you wonder, it’s already the 21st century! You look at Harvard, where everything is moving forward intellectually, but then the world is moving away, sliding back to the age of darkness.

THC: But maybe art, or engagement, can hold it together?

LD: If you’re a songwriter, keep writing great songs. If you’re a writer, keep writing something that matters, that matters to you. If you’re a dancer, your physicality. This is the way.

THC: I have some questions that are more specific. I’m not going to bring up duration, because…

LD: It’s been done!

THC: …it’s been done…

LD: Ad infinitum.

THC: One of the reasons I asked about audience is because I find there’s something in your films that’s retaliating against the current trend in attention span. The other day I was on the bus, and there was a girl in front of me on her phone. She would refresh the screen, see all of her Snapchats, and just thumb quickly through them. I couldn’t process it because the images were moving so quickly. And then the weirdest part was that later she was watching a YouTube video, GoPro footage of people on vacation. I could see the rhythm of the cutting. And it was the same rhythm that she had been flipping through the images on Snapchat! So as I’m trying to think about your films, I think that although you say you want this engagement from your audience, your films seem like a retaliation, a reaction against that frenzied relationship with time. Do you imagine people watching your movies on a phone, or on a laptop? Is that something that you do, or do you only watch films in the theatre?

LD: I also watch DVDs, because I attend a lot of festivals where I’m part of the jury, and I want to be fair with the filmmaker, so I watch the films twice, in full, sometimes three times. You have to see it in full, to experience it. But what you described is part of the new culture. Everything is on fast-forward. Everybody is being selective now. And it reflects on life. They’re selective with truth, selective with facts, selective with events, so everything is just compartmentalized. That’s life now. Everything is breaking down because of that. You cannot unify time and space.

THC: But that’s exactly what the long takes in your films are doing. It feels like resistance.

LD: My kind of cinema is about “being there.” It’s very different from being subordinated to the action of Tom Cruise in a film. You’re not being there. You’re just following the movement of this actor. With my cinema, you’re being there. You’re part of it. You’re sucked into this universe, so you engage with the whole thing. You can see even the movement of the leaves, the movement of the ants, and it’s so different from being subordinated to the action of the main character. That’s what the girl was doing: trying to find the action.