Q&A WITH COURTNEY STEPHENS
Courtney Stephens’ work straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. Her feature films are also often the result of collaboration and involve archival material. Over the course of the last year, Stephens has made two new films. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, co-directed with Michael Almereyda, chronicles the legacy of the eponymous New Age scientist. Invention, co-written with lead star Callie Hernández, explores the relationship between fathers and daughters, as well as faith and healing. The former is set to make its LA premiere at the American Cinematheque’s This Is Not Fiction and the latter will have its NY premiere at New Directors/New Films.
Q. You have two films playing at festivals right now, Invention and your recent documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office. Both involved close collaborators, Callie Hernandez and Michael Almereyda respectively. What draws you to working in a collaborative capacity?
A. Both projects came about out of conversations about ideas, history, life. I guess I tend to enjoy processing things with other people and being in long-running dialogues — both of these films I do think of as continued conversations. Collaborations almost require you to find new shapes and forms; you’re not simply doing your thing over and over.
Q. Like your other films, Invention challenges what is considered fiction versus what is taken as fact. What is your intention behind blurring these lines as a filmmaker?
A. In my opinion the most interesting questions, both in cinema and in life, are found in that friction between fact and fantasy. How real or fictional are the conceptions we have in our minds of even our own parents, the imagined masses we don’t know, the poison nostalgias that drive our politics. Conjecture, falsification, degrees of belief — that’s the soup we live in, especially now.
Q. Your three most recent features all employ extensive use of archival material to different ends, especially the recent John Lilly film. Where did this interest in images and their histories arise from?
A. When I started making short films I worked with found footage mostly out of necessity because I didn’t have money to shoot anything. I think over time I’ve become interested in what Rick Prelinger calls “the pleasure of recognition,” of decoding the hidden prophecies hidden in the remains of the past. The John Lilly archive shows the figure of the dolphin swimming through the collective dream life of the late 20th century, from the initial discovery of their intelligence to their ascendance as spiritual entities in the 1980s.
Q. Invention incorporates elements of the real biographies of yours and Callie Hernández’s late fathers—how did this take shape?
A. Callie and I ran into each other about a year after her dad passed away and started talking about the aftermath of daughters losing dads. We started fusing different elements from their careers and characters into a story that is mostly fiction, but that displacement of the real pain into fiction became a major element in the movie: what we try to salvage and invent in the aftermath of a big loss — or in the deliquescence of a nation.
Q. What’s a project you’d like to make someday, however impossible it might seem now?
A. At the AFI I wrote a kind of Nancy Drew fan fiction script that follows pseudo-Nancy into the world of adult film — a project I don’t see being makeable. Runner up would be an adaptation of Lucretius — probably impossible for different reasons.
Q. If you could organize one retrospective, whose would it be?
A. Maybe Pat O’Neill, who is underseen outside Los Angeles. Or, a series of every adaptation ever made of The Master and Margarita.
Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?
A. Here’s a screenshot from a film about an Indian playing card museum. It’s the picture on my computer desktop.
