THC: You have to give up control in order to engage.

LD: That’s true.

THC: In terms of the long take, it’s not always clear for the audience what to think about. In a more mainstream film, you can see what you’re being told to think. But with the long take there’s so much screen time in which there’s no obvious directive.

LD: You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like life.

THC: Sometimes there’s an initial reaction of “nothing is happening,” and then 30 seconds later you have to think about something else. Because you can’t only think “nothing is happening.” It’s almost like a meditation, a meditative space where the audience is projecting something onto the screen, their action, their story.

LD: It’s giving you that space also.

THC: Do you meditate?

LD: For me, doing cinema is a form of meditation. Doing art is a very spiritual thing. That’s what I want to give to my audience, to actually see. That’s cinema: your own life. It’s like you said. You wonder during this very long scene. After a while, you’re thinking of something else before you go back to the film. So you’re being there, in life. ... If you’re thinking differently than just following the movement because of these fast cuts, if you negate that, then you’ll think more, you’ll be reflective, so it’s really very meditative, actually. All of this is very physical. ... I’m trying to tell you, “Hey, hey, reflect on life. You’re not just in the movies. You’re in this very real place.”

THC: It sounds so obvious when you say it, but I feel like it’s really easy to miss the point.

LD: Of course! The very first thing that you do [when watching my movies] is that you’ll be very resentful of the form. “Come on, man, it’s so boring! Nine hours of cinema? Eight hours? Four hours? Why not cut it into an hour and a half?” It happened with the new film, when they showed it at the film archive here. One of the fellows really liked the film, but at the same time he told me he could cut the film into two hours. I said, “Really? I can give you the footage. We’ll see.” I actually told him that. He’s a really intelligent guy. I like him a lot. But when he told me that, I was shocked. … I’m waiting for him to send me his cut. It’s really another thing when someone says, “I like your film, but I want to cut it to a more manageable length.” What is a manageable length? It’s another form of questioning existence. Are you really sure with your life? No! There’s no certainty. You have to open it. Certainty is death. It’s f**king death. Certainty is fascism. It’s fundamentalism, extremism. You’re very certain with the length? It’s very feudal. It’s Hollywood. They imposed that, you know.

THC: Yeah, sorry, I said I wasn’t going to bring up duration. Do you think you’ll ever return to shooting on film? Do you think it’s historical now? Do you think it’s a luxury?

LD: I love celluloid, but I’ve come to terms with it now. I’ve grappled already with the issue of being pure with cinema, of “Oh, I don’t want to do digital.” Again, I have to embrace life. The medium is evolving so fast. There’s a new thing every three months. Technology gives you that, and you have to embrace it. Otherwise you’re not part of the evolution of the medium. But it’s also economics. If I have money, I want to make cinema with 16mm film again, or even with super 8. I want to see those images again. I want to see the real grain, the jerks, all these things, even the noise of the camera. It gives me the feeling of being reborn. I want to go back to that, being tactile with this iron, this very heavy thing, because those are the first things that I used. The Arri 2c, I want to go back to those guys. So it’s basic economics. Celluloid is beautiful for me, but you also need money and time.

THC: For me it has something to do with the experience of time. There’s something about the photograph that expresses the past in a way, but the digital image is more about the present, more of a currency. You can manipulate it, you can dispose of it, you can revive it. It’s an image created more for sharing than for recording.

LD: It all depends on the individual perspective now. How do you deal with it? is this thing going to last? For me, I want to leave something that’s … I don’t want to use the word “timeless,” but I want people to be able to go back to it. I still want to read the poems of Rilke, Whitman. I want to go back to those things. If you look at the technology now, there’s the danger [of losing old works]. It’s changing every three months, so how do you keep it? So you see the importance of archiving, of the museums. I went to London just a few weeks ago, where they showed the print of my old film “Batang West Side” on 35mm, and then they showed the new one, “The Woman Who Left,” and there’s a huge difference.

THC: Then again, while digital is not as good for archiving, it allows the agility to be able to just go out and shoot, and that’s political.