I never meant to do something outrageous.
I just wanted to express myself.
I decided to do a western.
I wanted a genre that everybody would appreciate and understand.
And of course I was unable to make a "normal" film.
I tried but I couldn't.
"El Topo" was shown at the Elgin Theatre,
thanks to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
John was showing his short films there.
And Douglas, who was the sales representative of my film, said to him,
"Nobody will see this film unless you introduce it.
"Please show your films and then ask the crowd to stay."
And that's what they did. They asked the audience to stay.
Of course, all of New York's intellectual elite was there to see Lennon's film.
And after that, "El Topo" played for about a year in that theatre.
I went there a few times. There was always a cloud of marihuana smoke.
When I made my way to the stage to introduce the film,
people would put joints in my hands
and I got onstage with a handful of them.
I had suddenly become a mythical character for them!
This movie is semi-autobiographical.
That child is my son and I hadn't seen him for seven years.
His mother got pregnant and moved to Europe.
When Brontis gets off the horse and I say,
"Today you turn seven", it was his actual birthday.
He carries a bear I gave to his mother before she left.
It is the bear of childhood.
That photograph is a picture of his mom.
It was traumatic for him seeing his bear buried.
But I only cared about the film. I didn't care about his feelings.
Years later, I had to correct my mistake by giving him a bear and saying...
Well, I did it in a book. I gave him a bear and apologized.
The title art was done by a great Mexican painter called Vicente Rojo.
Those are my hands.
I paid attention to every detail to make El Topo like a vengeful god.
I was inspired by rabbis, by Zorro, by Elvis Presley.
I watched an Elvis Presley film in France, where nobody liked him.
I saw it in a neighborhood cinema. He was despised there.
I saw him dressed in a black leather suit
that made a great impression on me.
I wanted a black leather suit too!
Here we used a ladder to put this girl on a pole.
There were no special effects.
She was up there for three hours. I almost killed her.
There was no water in that pond and I needed 5,000 liters of fake blood.
It's been said that I was cruel, that I killed animals.
You'll see dead animals.
But I bought those animals at the municipal slaughterhouse
because they were sick and condemned to die.
So no animals were killed.
Those animals were going to be sacrificed and I purchased them.
I said to these women, "Don't move!"
I forgot to tell them the shot was over and they stayed still for 4 hours!
They had to be taken to hospital because they got sunstroke.
They were afraid of me because I was wearing black.
They saw me as a God, as a murderer.
In "El Topo", the sound designer was a very humble man called Gavira.
He was a genius. All the Mexican studios used him.
He had an assistant...
He would use pieces of garbage to create the sounds.
He used coconut shells to create the sound of the galloping horses.
He would create the sound of fire by squeezing cellophane.
It was amazing. He did all these things with a bag full of garbage.
He is teaching his son to be a killer like him.
Rather than a killer, he is an outlaw who brings justice.
With those rings, he's going to attract the bandits.
This scene was inspired by Buñuel,
because Buñuel had a fetish for women's shoes,
so I exaggerated it and I got this bandit to suck a shoe.
He's a fetishist bandit.
He's a Mexican actor that worked on some American films.
His name is Arau. Alfonso Arau.
I mention Alfonso Arau because he directed a film that had some success,
based on a novel by his wife, Laura Esquivel,
called "Like Water for Chocolate". He became famous after that.
First I wrote the script.
Then I scouted the locations, and that changed the script.
Then I cast the film, and that changed the script too.
Initially, I wasn't going to act in the film.
I looked for an actor who would dye his hair,
shave it off, grow a beard... Everything that El Topo does.
But no Mexican actor would do it because they also work on TV.
And since nobody would do it, I ended up playing the lead.
I rented the costumes from the opera.
I did not have the money to design them myself,
so I rented them from a place
that had all sorts of costumes used in the theatre.
The size of the bandits determined which costume they got.
For instance, this man is wearing a lady's cape.
I dressed my cowboys with all sorts of things.
To me the bullets in the head are very comical.
It's like some intellectuals
who have bullets in their heads instead of thoughts.
This is the only zoom in the film. I was very much against zooms.
I was also against close-ups.
There is only one close-up in the movie.
I believed that film should communicate with body movement,
because of my background as a mime.
Bodies, not faces. TV is about faces, cinema is about bodies.
I had a fantastic Director of Photography called Rafael Corkidi
who really wanted to make films.
I directed him by tying myself to him from behind with a belt.
I held his waist and moved him, as if he were a machine.
He would shoot as I moved him.
I made all camera movements in the film by repositioning the DP.
In this shot I did not care if the actors left the frame.
What you see in the shot is not everything.
There is off screen action as well.
The bandits leave the shot and come back.
There is action off screen as well as on screen.
I raised the sound of the goats until it becomes unbearable.
Baa! Baa! It's unbearable.
I enhanced the subliminal sounds and put them in the foreground.
I thought, "Cinema is cinema".
I don't want to make films with location sound.
if we create the sounds afterwards, then they are an artistic manifestation.
I'm not shooting theatre. There's too much theatre in cinema.
Cinema is not theatre. The accidental sounds have a purpose.
I only make the actors talk in my films
when I can't show what I want to show visually.
I don't distinguish between the comic and tragic.
This can be very funny and very tragic at the same time.
I was trying to meld all the genres,
comedy, tragedy, drama... all together.
Since I did not have the means to make the bandits explode,
I made them die slowly.
They are going to die calmly, slowly.
The opposite of the spectacular deaths in most westerns.
Here the character shows his cruel side.
El Topo is cruel. He is relentless.
He feels he is doing justice.
There's no mercy.
All this violence among these poor little animals creates a contrast.
This was forbidden at the time.
To fire a gun at somebody in the same frame.
That's why "El Topo" had difficulties airing on television.
Here he shoots and there's the explosion.
In commercial films you see the firing in one shot,
and the impact in a another one. What I did is forbidden.
I was born in 1 929 in the north of Chile,
in Tocopilla, a small town of 2000 people.
I used to go to the cinema, once a week, until I was 1 0.
In the theaters they had serials.
There was a new episode every Sunday.
There I saw Zorro, Crótalo,
and they had cowboys too.
I didn't know the cowboys were American. I didn't know America.
Tocopilla was all I knew.
They showed all kinds of films...
"Frankenstein", "The War Of The Worlds", westerns...
I thought the cowboys lived in an enchanted country.
They lived in a magical land... A land of fairies.
I find it very poetic that he blows his nose with a page of the Bible,
while respecting it at the same time.
It's respect and disrespect.
I also feature homosexual bandits, which was shocking for the times.
The tough guys are homosexuals It's really weird.
They treat the priests as if they were ladies...
People were not used to seeing
homosexuals portrayed like that in films.
Now in every TV show there is a lesbian,
a homosexual, a transvestite or a transsexual character.
It's mandatory.
So I think we also must feature necrophilia,
bestiality and nice things like that.
I had a friend who was a surrealist,
and every time he attended a family dinner,
he would rape the grilled chicken.
And people would eat the grilled chicken
where he'd previously inserted his penis.
He was into bestiality,
not with a live animal, but with a grilled chicken.
It was very difficult to find blonde boys in Mexico.
Luckily I had an assistant, Pablito, who was the boss of the "gay power"
and I was able to get the most beautiful homosexuals.
After reverence comes brutality. All mixed together.
This woman is not an actress.
I found her in Mexico City's Zona Rosa dressed like that.
She made her own clothes.
She had taken 500 tabs of LSD, and she was out of her mind.
I never knew her name.
She was either English or American. I didn't even know her nationality.
She didn't speak Spanish.
She made the film and then she disappeared.
I dubbed her voice using a 50-year-old woman to make it deeper.
This scene is very important
because we are approaching the god...
The evil character.
This actor, David Silva, had been a leading man.
He had worked in many movies...
...as a handsome young man in the 40s.
But he had got old and nobody called him to act any more.
I thought I would dig him up and after "El Topo" his career took off again.
I have always hated dictators.
And I always thought I had created that character based on Pinochet.
But now I realize that it's impossible, since I shot the movie before the coup.
It was like a premonition.
Pinochet is the most hateful character I can think of. He's dreadful.
More hateful than Hitler, more than Mussolini or Stalin,
because Pinochet is dumb.
He once said, "lf I find a poet in the street, I will punch him in the face."
That's the kind of monster he was.
He was anti-culture. It was shameful.
I was trying to illustrate him taking on power.
He starts as a helpless baby, rolling around in his bed for his mom.
Little by little he becomes dominant.
He adds lifts to his boots, to look taller.
As he puts on the symbols of power, he becomes an almighty god.
The disguise of power. That's what I wanted to represent.
Here comes God, and the pigs come out behind him.
In this shot I wanted to make fun of westerns.
It's always the same.
The shot of the outlaw's legs...
...and between the legs, we see the bandits in the background.
I wanted to do this "classic" shot.
She is the General's sexual slave.
Afterwards she escapes with El Topo.
But she is evil. She pushes El Topo to become powerful like the General.
She is seduced by power.
The film changed my son Brontis's life. I always warned him, "It's just a movie".
Since my sons were born into a family of artists, they are artists.
Brontis chose the most humble form of art, the theatre.
Theatre requires many sacrifices because it's ephemeral.
It is like religion. You do a play, the play is over.
You do another play, that play is over... Nothing remains.
My other son, Axel Cristóbal, chose therapy.
He practices a sacred art that I call psycho-shamanism.
He heals diseases by performing theatre plays -
ceremonies inspired by the Mexican shamans he met,
with me, as a child.
I introduced him to that.
And my son Adam, who is now 25,
plays every instrument.
He also sings and dances. He has his own band.
They all chose a different path from mine.
It is very difficult to have a father like me, a known father.
It's a drama.
They have to castrate me, they have to kill me,
they have to overcome me.
It's difficult. Somebody always says, "Ah, you are that guy's son.
"You are son of the guy who made 'El Topo', blah blah..."
It's hard for them.
So each of them chose a path that has nothing to do with me.
Of course, I was aware of this problem when they were little.
I made a circle in the backyard of our house and we sumo wrestled.
You had to throw your opponent outside the circle.
Many times I would let them win.
I think a father must allow his children to beat him.
This is essential when you're raising children.
You can't always be the father who knows, dominates, and directs it all.
It's a problem, because later in life the child thinks,
"lf I beat my father I kill him."
In my book, "La danza de la realidad",
I say that my father wanted to turn me into a homosexual for two reasons -
one, because he hated his father.
When you hate your father,
you don't want your last name to continue to exist.
So he didn't want me to have children.
Second, his younger brother stole his mom away from him.
His name was Benjamín and he was a homosexual.
Because I was the youngest,
he focused his hatred for his brother on me.
He always called me Benjamín, he never learned my name.
So in order to be accepted by my father
I would have had to become a homosexual and not have any kids.
I rebelled against all that and had five children.
Things didn't go according to plan for him.
El Topo must have issues with his father.
Metaphorically speaking, the General is El Topo's father.
He confronts his father.
El Topo is a father himself. He travels with his son.
And here is this paternal figure that he hates.
The almighty father that he must beat.
Every son has to psychologically kill the powerful father, castrate him.
This is a bit like...
It's like the scenes in... "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
It's an ltalian spaghetti western.
But this is constructed like a ballet, like a dance.
The humiliation begins.
He shoots off the wig, which is quite unusual.
And then with one theatrical stroke he takes all of the clothes off.
Done! He's undressed him totally.
The bandit, the bad guy
becomes a poor victim.
He's now a sad victim. His disguise has been removed, poor man.
"I'm God." The audience laughed a lot when he said that.
There was an Arab poet called Al-Hallaj
who said "I'm God" and he was killed.
He was a Sufi poet.
And when his blood was spilled on the floor, it formed the word God.
When he said "I'm God" he didn't mean he was God,
he meant God spoke through him.
In my film, I eliminated the concept of good and evil.
The bandits redeem themselves, or the good guys become bad.
There is no clear distinction between good and evil.
That is an American sickness.
All the American film books say,
"ln the first 1 0 pages of the script, you must introduce the bad guy."
It's all based on a bad guy.
The "bad guy" is a mere abstraction, nobody is absolutely bad.
And if there is someone absolutely evil, we're all to blame for their existence.
That gunshot was very thought out.
I told them to use cottage cheese, so it would look like a brain exploding.
In that time, things were not so bloody. All the blood and gore came later.
The child is jealous and wants to separate them.
The father must choose.
The child says, "Her or me."
One of the scenes on the horse was wildly imitated.
First we see her behind him, and then she is in front of him.
I saw this love scene on a horse in many films afterwards.
This is the end of another episode.
Now El Topo knows love.
He was the assassin, the outlaw, the killer of the father,
but now he will know love.
Since this woman was so high,
I grounded her through her discovery of nature.
It was a real life experience.
She's not an actress, she is just a person.
I relate him to the biblical character Moses.
He goes to the desert, gets water from the stones.
He turns sour water sweet.
Those are all the miracles performed by Moses.
This is not my voice. For "El Topo" I got an actor to dub me.
I needed a voice that was deeper than mine.
Everyone has been dubbed in this film.
As I've said, she was dubbed by a 50-year-old woman.
The actor who dubbed me had a Mexican accent. That's why I used him.
A woman in black that appears later on was dubbed by a 20-year-old boy.
My premise is that film is not realistic.
Film is a work of art.
If I have the possibility of changing the voices, why not use it?
It's another expressive tool.
So I changed the voices as an artistic technique.
I did it in "Fando y Lis", I did it in "El Topo", in "Holy Mountain".
And I did it in "Santa Sangre" as well.
To me, the voice is another world that is added to the visual world.
It's very important.
She tries to find food, but she can't.
I'm trying to imply that she is frigid. She is a frigid woman.
Around the time of "El Topo" I had discovered Godard.
I really liked his "Pierrot le fou".
I won't say it influenced me, but it had an effect on this scene,
when she says, "Nothing, nothing, nothing".
This scene might make us think about Godard.
But I am nothing like Godard. He is a great intellectual and I'm not.
Godard has one testicle, I have three.
Those three are intellect, emotion, and libido.
He teaches her...
He teaches her how to perform miracles.
She doesn't know how. She thinks the world holds nothing for her.
She is dependent on him. She thinks the world is a void.
El Topo will have to instruct her, but he has to do so with violence,
because she respects power
and enjoys humiliation, just as with the General.
This rape was authentic. I really hit her.
It's all real.
It looks less spectacular than a choreographed one.
I tore those clothes for real and that's why it was harder to do.
That was my time of chauvinism.
Now I've changed. I found a woman who has completely...
...tamed me.
In those days my vision of women was different.
I built the stone like a phallus.
I always said it was a portrait of my sex.
I said, "Short but thick".
20,000 years ago, the female goddess was kicked out of religion
and the hunters introduced the male god.
It's been 5,000 years since the bible has reigned
where the woman is considered a demon,
starting with Eve... and Lilith.
Women have to stop playing
those four parts that they have been given -
whore, mother, saint and dumb.
That was not really a special effect.
I just shot late in the day and used a firecracker.
I copied John Wayne's suit. I thought, "Two cripples make one John Wayne."
All masters represent something. They differ on scale from more to less.
The first master has a tower,
the second master has just a covered cart.
The third master has a small animal corral,
and the last master has only a net for hunting butterflies,
because he has given everything away.
During that time I had a fantasy,
that came from Antonin Artaud and Surrealism.
The fantasy that film was art, the greatest art that could ever exist.
I used to ask "Why is it acceptable in literature
"to have the gospels, the sutra,
"and why can't film be as important as a sutra,
"or a sacred text." Why not?
So I used Christian symbols, Hindu symbols...
I used all kinds of symbols.
Not as openly as in "Holy Mountain", but hidden.
I needed to study to do these kind of films.
I wanted to make sacred cinema,
so I started to study oriental philosophy -
Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan,
Persian, Egyptian, Kabbalah...
Alchemy as well... So many things that I studied and that I'm still studying.
I am still a student.
It took a lot of work for this couple to climb that ladder.
How they hated each other, those two.
The one with no arms used to say to the other "I'm going to kick you",
and the one with no legs said, "I'll punch you."
They fought like that.
But in the movie they were a unit and it was wonderful.
Many people live divided in two.
From the waist up they're one person
and from the waist down they're another.
The blind master is revered in Japan -
for instance Zatoichi, the blind samurai.
It means the inner gaze.
He teaches El Topo to meditate.
As I child I was interested in religion,
because my father was violently atheist.
Whenever anybody gave me medallions with the virgin,
or six point stars,
or an lslamic symbol, he would throw it in the toilet.
He would pull the chain and say, "God doesn't exist, God doesn't exist.
"You die, you rot and it's over."
I was five-years-old. He traumatized me.
So I was desperately looking for a metaphysical aspirin
that would take the anguish of dying away from me.
I tried every method and every religion in my search for solace.
I studied all of them.
A non-actor plays this master.
An actor couldn't have played this part. I needed someone genuine.
So I found the drummer of a Mexican rock band,
who was very beautiful, very clean and spiritual.
This scene addresses the confrontation
between the western barbarism
symbolized by El Topo in his leather suit,
and an almost naked, clean, true man.
We must remember that these masters' weaknesses
are El Topo's virtues.
El Topo is the fifth master but he doesn't know it.
These masters are incomplete.
El Topo will make them complete. Do you understand?
He sets the first master up and the masters falls in the trap.
The master is wonderful, but he is too trusting.
And El Topo is not.
He will absorb the master, but will also absorb his weakness.
Because, deep down, he is the master.
The woman in black is El Topo's alter ego.
His feminine side.
I had studied the psychoanalyst Jung.
He said that every man has an anima, a feminine soul.
I applied this theory here.
The unknown woman a man dreams of is his anima, his hidden feminine side.
The unknown man a woman dreams of is the animus, her masculine side.
I have a different theory.
I believe that each and every one of us has an anima and an animus,
two unknown parts - masculinity and femininity.
I think that in our society we don't know what a man or a woman is.
That's lost, because it's a paternalistic society where only men count.
And if only men count, a man is not a man,
because there are no women in his mind.
But he's not a woman either. He has no anima. Neither animus nor anima.
In order to have an animus and an anima,
we have to develop both our masculine and feminine side.
This would correspond with what in China is called the yin and the yang.
The women are falling in love with each other.
I believed that when a woman fell in love with a man,
she fell in love with the man's feminine side.
That's what I thought then.
She gives her a mirror to make her fall in love with herself.
She exploits her narcissism.
Now she finds herself attractive and recognizes herself as a woman.
We all have narcissism in our core.
When narcissism is very developed,
the person is seduced by being loved.
"Do you love me? Then I love you."
Generally when a man wants to seduce a woman, he tells her,
"You have such lovely eyes, you are so beautiful, I love you so."
So the woman says, "This man loves me, so I love him."
It's the seduction.
Women developed bodily narcissism
because the paternalistic society took her out from the spiritual domain
and placed her in the physical one.
So women developed a physical narcissism.
To have any value she has to show off her breasts, her ass, her hair...
Women massage men's mental narcissism.
"l admire you", she says, "You're brave, smart, and strong."
It's another kind of narcissism.
I deal with all of this in "El Topo".
We see for the first time a maternal character in the film.
El Topo fought the father.
He killed the father.
This is the first maternal character he will meet.
This master is not Hindu, she is a Sufi,
and comes from the school of Gurdjieff.
She is an lslamist, and reads the tarot.
This woman is a bit like the gypsies in central Europe,
Turkey and Persia.
I have him cross a river, a swamp, to access another world.
You always enter another world
by going through a door, by crossing a river.
He is going to enter another dimension.
The second master is the goldsmith...
The Sufis work with their hands.
They fabricate objects, they make shoes.
They work with ordinary life, they are goldsmiths.
This guy was a great theatre director
called Juan José Gurrola.
We were rivals, but became friends because I gave him a part in the film.
I placed him next to the lion, that's a real lion.
In cinema, I cannot create an idea. It has to come to me.
I plant seeds in my unconscious, go to sleep, and then images emerge.
I don't have ideas. I wait for them to appear. It's a different approach.
It's like the thirsty explorer in the desert
imploring the heavens for a little rain.
At night, I plead for my unconscious to work
so I can have the idea that I need the next day. And they come.
What's the difference between what I do
and what commercial artists do?
In order to guarantee their investments, commercial artists look for a market.
"Let's make a film that satisfies the taste
"of this social sector, of this nation.
"Let's give them the product they want, so let's have some sneak previews
"and we'll make changes according to the imbeciles' opinions."
40, 50, 60 imbeciles can change the ending of a movie,
because their vulgar taste must be satisfied.
Commercial artists find an audience that already exists.
There is another attitude, the attitude of a true creator,
who little by little creates his own audience.
Through the years, he imposes his way and creates his audience.
Patience, perseverance, poverty. That's what you need.
Patience, perseverance, poverty, honesty, authenticity.
It's said that in film, opinions are like assholes - everybody has one.
Everybody shits feces and ideas.
You must ignore them.
When you make a film, you don't have to listen to anybody's opinion.
Not even that of the audience.
A filmmaker has to do what he feels, no matter what.
Even if people leave the theater.
Even today there are always three or four people who walk out of my films.
They can't take them.
I don't care, I've done what I wanted to do.
Time will tell if what I did has value or not.
He is very mystical. "l destroy myself to encounter the divine mother."
It's very mystical. Now he understands the love for a mother.
Before this, he had only known the relationship with his father.
He is quoting from the Bible, from Ecclesiastes.
This master is perfect, he has only one weakness -
the love for his mother.
The master gives El Topo a gift that plays a role in saving his life.
Each master gives El Topo a gift that contributes to his success.
Just as an anecdote, I designed that chair there.
You don't get to see it much, but I enjoyed designing it.
It is the T of "Tarot".
I dubbed the mothers voice with a bird's cry.
She screams like a real bird.
El Topo gets rid of his revolver.
He is disgusted with himself for what he has done.
He is evolving.
I had to divide the film into chapters
because they wouldn't let me make feature films in Mexico, only shorts.
I had to divide it into shorts, which belonged to a different category.
That's why there are four title sequences.
I'm going to be vulgar here - I pissed on the unions.
I said "No union is going to forbid an artist to express himself,
"and I'll shoot without permits."
I shot the desert sequences without permits.
I went to the desert with eight crewmembers,
and shot for three or four weeks at an affordable price.
Then the union came and made me hire 1 00 useless workers
that spent the day eating, getting drunk and not doing any work.
In my time there was a union of old directors
that wouldn't give young people the authorization to direct.
They kept us waiting for ever.
After I fought against them and shot my film,
playing the "it's not a feature, it's four shorts" trick,
everybody started to make "four shorts" films.
The young filmmakers got their chance
and the New Mexican Cinema was born.
I was very revolutionary and I faced the country.
Now they love me and thank me.
When the rabbit guides him, it is like Alice in Wonderland.
This is a reminder that we are watching a fairy tale,
not a historic film.
We are in a dream.
Rabbits symbolize reproduction, life.
In this case, they represent simplicity.
The simplicity of life, the Eros.
A simple life that reproduces itself without a problem.
In real life, this master was a Mexican antiques salesman.
He represents the Aztec, the Mayan, the pre-Columbian.
He is very delicate.
Normally, when a Mexican character appears in an American film,
he plays the funny one, the buffoon, the bandit.
I did the opposite here, the Mexican is the wise man.
I was inspired by Confucius.
When Confucius the wise man listened to somebody play music,
he was able to tell everything about that person.
That's why the master and El Topo learn about each other through music.
I invented many different methods
to compose the music for "El Topo".
Sometimes, I would take a Beethoven music sheet and cut it in little pieces.
Then I would randomly assemble them back together,
Another method - I'd give a note to 1 4 friends
who came to see me from different parts of the city.
In the order that they arrived, I would write down the notes.
I would get a musician
to play that melody to me on the flute.
Then I'd say, "Change this and that." I would make changes by ear.
There is something in this scene
that I still regret and it causes me pain.
I killed two birds in front of the camera.
Every time I watch this scene I suffer,
and I realize that I was not
as enlightened as I thought I was.
Poor little birds.
I would never do that again.
But at that time I thought cinema was sacred and required sacrifices.
I thought death had to play a role, like in a sacred sacrifice in a temple.
I sacrificed those animals with religious fervor.
But now when I think about those ancient temples,
about how many animals were sacrificed there... It's terrible.
El Topo aims at the heart, which is the master's weakness.
The master's weakness is his unconditional love for the Universe.
Now El Topo knows guilt.
That's why he suffers after killing him.
He realizes what he's done.
The rabbits started to die, because of the heat.
I could not eat rabbit again in my life after this... I still can't.
It's been 30 years and I haven't touched a dish with rabbit in it.
This scene was cut in England.
They told me that he couldn't wipe his hands on a woman's breast.
I'm fed up with the censorship against the violence in my films.
Everybody sees violence every day in the news on TV.
But when they go to see art, they want everything to be pretty, peaceful.
There is such a thing as a sacred violence.
Or nature's violence -
tsunamis, earthquakes, gales...
Labor is violent - the child is born in the middle of blood.
When I showed blood in "El Topo", I wanted to portray the vital forces.
This woman is not an actress.
I met her on a plane, she was a flight attendant.
I offered her a part in my film. I picked my actors here and there.
I found this one on a plane. She is a Mexican beauty.
This is the Taoist master.
He has no true weapon, only a rusty revolver.
This Mexican man was a great actor, but he was an alcoholic.
In the morning he drank a bottle of tequila. A whole liter for breakfast.
He was very famous, but became an alcoholic.
He died after this film.
I was part of the poetry scene in Chile with the surrealist group.
Just like the tarot has four symbols...
The cups, that represent the emotional life,
the swords, the intellectual life, the wands, the sexual life,
and the pentacles, that represent the material life.
I had four poets as my masters.
The heart, the emotional life, Pablo Neruda.
The Earth and the female, Gabriela Mistral.
The sexual aspect, Pablo de Rokha, a sort of gangster of poetry.
And Vicente Huidobro, pure intelligence.
Those were my four great teachers of poetry.
That's probably why there are four masters in "El Topo".
Later in my life I chose Gurdjieff as a master,
and then a Zen master, a Japanese monk that came to Mexico
and with whom I spent five years. His name was Ejo Takata.
Afterwards I did psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm.
I learned a lot from him. And then I embarked on...
on a profound search that took me to Jung.
I was always on the lookout for male and female masters.
I learned a lot from a surrealist painter called Leonora Carrington.
I got in touch with Leonora
because my master Ejo Takata told me,
"You think that the mind and the heart should be empty, but you are wrong.
"Empty mind, full heart.
"You haven't worked out your problems with the Mother Goddess,
"that's why you should meet Leonora, who is a surrealist master."
So went to see Leonora
and I learnt what pure art was.
She was the first to teach me to read the Tarot.
That construction was made out of toothpicks.
There you can see the son with his mother.
The other master is covered in honey.
The master is covered in real honey.
To me, honey and bees symbolize the divine word.
They're sacred symbols.
El Topo loses his face. He is no longer himself.
He has fallen to the bottom of the abyss...
In this octagon, he is trying to break through his psychological boundaries.
He wants to be free from himself.
He feels like a prisoner of his own mental limits.
How do I get out?
The sacrificed lamb is Christ, a direct link to Christ.
And now it opens. His limitations are gone.
He throws a bird into the air.
The bird is an alchemic symbol. He moves towards spirituality.
He feels compassion for her.
I decided to film on that bridge,
despite the fact that it was barely standing.
It was really dangerous to walk on it.
At any moment the wooden slats could break.
Finding that bridge was a divine gift.
It was part of an abandoned mine, everything was rotten.
Look at how I get on the bridge, over an abyss.
It was like being in a trance.
I usually did one or two takes, hardly ever three.
First of all, we didn't have the time or the money,
and secondly, we all had such intensity, we were all in such a trance,
that we didn't need to shoot more.
Also at the time, you couldn't see the material on a video monitor.
You had to have faith. You would ask the DP, "Was it good or bad",
and the DP would say, "lt was good" or, "l need to do it again".
It was up to him, not me. There was no way to check.
I shot that with a telephoto lens so I could move forward without editing.
I keep walking...but the shot works because of the telephoto.
She will give him the wounds of Christ.
He doesn't fight back.
She will shoot him in both hands, in both feet
and, finally, in his side. The five wounds of Christ.
I eliminated shadows and night from this film.
I wanted the light to come from the characters. I eliminated the colors.
There's just the color of the earth, the color of the sky, some plants,
and all the characters in black, beige, brown,
so the blood would be there at all times.
The only color is blood. That's why I used so much blood.
I must say that this image caused a great stir.
It always got big applause in the theater.
Andy Warhol loved it...
I don't think that cinema is a portrait of reality.
Maybe that's why I like to show everything that is strange,
everything that is bizarre, everything that is monstrous.
Everything that is different.
A dwarf is different, a giant is different,
and a cripple is different.
This fascination with the monstrous, the different, goes back a long way.
It's rooted in the Spanish artistic tradition.
Velazquez, Goya, Picasso,
showed monsters in their paintings.
I am part of that tradition.
He has been asleep for 1 00 years maybe...
He has left his selfish world and now is reborn into the social world.
Others appear, they have deified him.
He has been turned into an icon by the indigents.
He has incorporated the four masters.
Life is continuous evolution, constant mutation.
Art used to bother me because the characters didn't change.
Oedipus had a fixed personality until the end of the play.
The same thing with Hamlet.
It's inconceivable that Hamlet begins the play filled with doubts
and then ends up as an enlightened monk.
There is no character development.
I set out to fix that.
"The characters", I said to myself, "can change, can evolve,
"and they actually should." There must be a spiritual mutation.
In the search for spiritual values,
such as compassion and enlightenment,
those values that El Topo will achieve,
there are three different ways.
One way is by studying, reading, rereading and studying again.
You pray until you find enlightenment.
Another way is by illumination.
By instant illumination.
An explosion occurs inside your mind and you suddenly understand.
And the third way is by receiving guidance from a benevolent person.
Here he learns about poverty and deprivation.
He's sensitive to others.
He's been through his mystical phase and got in touch with his spirit
to get to the social world.
He now thinks, "Nothing for me that is not for others.
"What I give, I give to myself.
"And what I don't give, I take away from myself."
That is his mentality now.
The people in Africa who don't have anything to eat are prisoners.
Poor people are in a prison... An economic prison.
She has a tree of life on her chest.
This is a real shaman that wanted to act.
For money of course. Shamans need money...
But she is a real one.
All we changed was her hair.
That insect tasted horrible.
It smelled awful. It was bitter.
That reaction is for real.
This is a shamanic experience.
Usually, since man is a prisoner of his intellect,
the shaman gives him some psychotropic drug,
Iike peyote, for instance...
When I see the body I had then, so healthy...
The body changes so much. It is like a river, it changes with time.
I have nothing left from that body. Every seven years the cells renewed.
This helped me get over my fetishism.
I was terrified of losing my hair. When she shaved me, I found myself.
It was a sacred ceremony.
While I record this commentary,
I am a 75-year-old gentleman with grey hair.
I see myself on the screen, acting, and it's not me...
But perhaps I was there next to that kid, saying, "You're doing fine, son."
The character on the screen is like my son.
Poor guy, I pity him, trying to find himself.
Here I'm carrying the dwarf.
And earlier the man with no arms carried the man with arms.
That's because I never had any physical contact with my father.
For whatever reason he didn't love me and never touched me.
Once when I was child, we were going to the beach and the bus broke down.
He had to carry me for miles on his back.
I was 5 or 6 years old,
and I traveled for many miles on my father's back.
I never forgot that.
It was the only physical contact I ever had with my father.
I used the symbol of the eye and the triangle
because it's the symbol of God
and it's also on the dollar bill, a Masonic symbol.
It can also represent the state's surveillance...
The husbands are buying a prostitute.
I used a real prostitute from Monterrey.
The women are buying slaves. They are upper class ladies.
Here I address morals and society.
The husbands hide in a whorehouse
in the basement of a café.
It took me hours to film the shot coming up.
This is a very complex shot.
It's a sequence shot.
A circle of horses.
After I made "El Topo",
Leone invited me for dinner several times.
He was curious to know how I'd done things,
what equipment I'd used.
Leone always used sophisticated equipment and spent millions.
I replied, "Just an Arriflex camera."
"But how did you do that crane shot?" "Well, I got on top of some chairs."
El Topo wants to show the dwarf the wonders of the big city,
but the wonders of the big city are a horror.
I myself had the experience of being displaced.
I lived in a small town, Tocopilla, until I was nine-years-old.
I didn't know more than four or five streets.
I lived happily in my own personal paradise.
Until my father said,
"We're going to the capital. Your sister has to study."
I was thrown into a city that smelled like gas,
in a horrible pensión, without friends...
Without a home.
El Topo has become... He is a new person.
He comes to entertain the children. He is some sort of beggar.
We are going to see the underwear I wore throughout the film -
silk underwear.
There it is. He is going to show it.
I was very influenced by Erich von Stroheim,
who was kicked out of Hollywood after spending too much money on a film.
He had created a wonderful army of soldiers.
They were all wearing silk underwear under their clothes.
People asked him why spend so much on something nobody sees.
Stroheim replied, "But they can feel it."
So the first thing I did in "El Topo" was to design the black silk underpants.
I wore them all the time. I was always wearing silk on the inside.
The underpants had a heart on the ass, because El Topo was a bit of a clown.
These women were film extras. They had never had featured roles,
but I gave them little parts in the film.
I hired them and they really enjoyed the experience.
They had never done this before.
They had always been part of the crowd.
It's been so many years since I saw this film.
I'm amazed at how many beautiful old ladies I found.
I wonder where I found them.
I find them very beautiful. I think they're incredible.
Shakespeare said in "Macbeth":
"What is beautiful is ugly, and what is ugly is beautiful."
I had a great time designing their costumes.
This scene is tragic and comical at the same time.
It's terribly grotesque.
The sexual abuse of the slave, it's funny and it's tragic.
I shot "El Topo" with only 400,000 dollars.
It wasn't much, even back then.
What I did was to follow in the tracks of American films being shot in Mexico.
Peckinpah had just shot "The Wild Bunch" and I used his sets.
I used this set that I found in the middle of the desert.
The Americans had shot "The Law West of Tombstone" there.
I had to rush because they were installing the electrical lines
that would go from one city to the next
and our cowboy set was in their way. It was a mess.
We had to bribe the electric company workers
so they would take the day off.
I met that little woman
when she came to see one of my plays.
She was 26 years old and was still a virgin.
I asked her, "Would you like to act in a film?"
She lived with her aunts, she knew how to play the piano,
and was very isolated.
"Of course", she said, and she took this role.
She was very beautiful.
The assistant cameraman fell in love with her.
She experienced her first love.
I had forbidden the use of make-up.
One day, Jacqueline arrived wearing make-up.
I said, "We are shooting. What are you doing wearing make-up?"
I ordered her to wash her face.
Afterwards I realized she wore the make-up
to seduce the assistant cameraman.
He is asking himself, "Does this town deserve to be saved?"
Initially, he wanted to save the town.
But now he just finds horror.
El Topo is hired to clean the jail latrines.
He hits rock bottom here.
But he is humble, he has become a humble being and he accepts his fate.
This is what the Zen monks do in the monastery.
They send the novices to clean the bathrooms.
I was revolutionary.
I played with the macho stereotype of sheriffs
by turning them homosexual.
The guy in green, the sheriff, José Antonio Alcaraz,
was a homosexual musician and a music critic
who came to act in the film with his lover. They acted together.
When I was asked, "Who are you making the movie for?"
I would answer, "I'm making this movie for the world."
They would say, "Nobody has crossed the barrier of the nopal."
The nopal is a type of cactus.
Mexican films never reach overseas. They said I was crazy,
because this film was not going to be understood by the Mexicans
and nobody overseas was going to buy it or watch it.
"Crazy" was the nicest thing they called me.
I didn't receive any money from the government, like other filmmakers.
I didn't have any money myself. It cost 400,000 dollars in checks.
Viskin, the swindler, paid for everything with post-dated checks.
We had nothing.
By the end of the shooting we had a debt of 400,000 dollars.
When we came to America to sell the film, Viskin was fat.
But he started losing one kilo a day.
He ended up skinny because we couldn't sell the film,
and if he returned to Mexico, he would have to go to jail.
Luckily we sold it and the rest is history.
I found this boy in a vegetarian restaurant.
He was a Canadian painter that happened to be in Mexico.
I asked him, "Do you want to act in my film and play the part of my son?"
He said "Yes!", and there he is.
I hired him because he looked like me.
The guy who plays the part of the old priest,
was the director and choreographer of the Blanquita Theatre in Mexico,
where women danced half naked.
I thought he embodied that spirit
and that it would show through when he played the priest.
His name was Julián De Meriche.
They are going to play Russian roulette.
In church.
It's like a game.
The old priest uses dishonesty
and the new priest... uses the truth.
That is why the old priest uses blanks and the young priest uses bullets.
The woman we are about to see was my wife at that time, Valerie.
Sometimes I cast crewmembers as characters in the film.
I worked with members of my family
because I loved them very much and they were a part of my world.
I didn't want to work with known actors,
because when you see a famous actor,
you don't see the character.
You only see the actor. You are at the mercy of the star's ego.
The "star" will be the cinema's demise.
The actors pose a terrible problem.
Because of celebrities, cinema is what it is nowadays.
I'm very happy that movies with unknown actors are coming out now.
The "star" arrives with his ego and demands changes,
certain shots, certain lights, and demands money.
Their demands eat up the budget.
Money should go towards production values, not in the celebrities' pockets.
They transform cinema into simple entertainment.
The director loses his freedom. Celebrities are an illness.
They have turned cinema into a business.
In commercial cinema, that's not a problem. But it is in artistic cinema.
Since I made films outside the industry,
I used people I knew, non-actors, my family,
anyone who would not demand or put restrictions on me.
No way, you can't demand anything from me!
A director must follow his vision, not pay homage to somebody's ego.
Audiences expect an adult to die, never a child.
I challenged those assumptions and conventions by killing the child.
After the child's sacrifice, this hypocritical religion is doomed.
He is searching for authenticity.
He is like his father, like El Topo.
When he takes out this symbol, the true religion appears, the cross.
I used a black and white cross, symbolizing the yin and the yang.
I knew how to do all these steps, but I did them badly
because El Topo is not a dancer.
These are real prostitutes that we brought from the city.
You can see that they are very soft.
For Jacqueline, it was an intense experience to get undressed,
to take off her clothes and reveal her breasts.
It wasn't just about acting.
It was a way for her to learn to accept and love her body.
Like a normal human being.
The character played by the woman I found in the street
was my ideal woman.
She was everything I wanted. I wanted women to be my victims.
I was a bit like the General, like a baby that is waiting for his mother to arrive.
I never really had a mother, a mother who would caress me.
So at first, I am the General, a baby waiting for his mother.
As soon as I get dressed, I take power and humiliate her.
And then I want to show her off so other men will want her and so on.
Later on, I depict her as an ambitious woman,
who forces him to do things he doesn't want to do.
Finally, she is a traitor who abandons him.
It all came from the bitterness I had inside me.
Later, when El Topo is reborn, he meets the perfect woman, a dwarf.
He has a child with her and builds a life with her.
But...why a dwarf?
Couldn't I have found a woman who was not a dwarf?
As I said earlier, I like monsters, people who are different.
But you could state that the solution I came up with is not the perfect one.
Afterward, in "Holy Mountain"
I featured women who acted amongst the heroes.
Everyone was equal.
And in "Santa Sangre", a woman saves the main character.
I made progress with time.
I didn't know I was such a good actor.
I never thought of myself as an actor.
But I was really feeling that.
At any given moment I may be a painter,
at another moment I'm a musician, at another, a filmmaker,
then a poet, then a novelist, etcetera.
But everything comes from a core that I call the essential being.
The consciousness looks for its source, for its origin.
Inside us dwells the source of eternal life,
the life source of the universe.
We call it dark energy, although it's full of light.
But since we don't understand it, we call it dark.
If you open yourself to this energy, it will guide you.
When I shot "El Topo", I was in a state of near holiness.
I wanted to express what I was learning from Zen meditation,
and at the same time, to thrive as an artist.
I had great ambitions.
Later on in my life, I became interested in other pursuits,
and I no longer enjoyed watching the film. I lost interest in it.
I had seen it so many times, that it no longer held any joy for me.
Watching the film, today, after so many years, I'm experiencing great joy.
It's the first time that I like it.
I'm no longer the one who directed it, it no longer upsets me.
It's just a film.
It's ingenious.
I set out to do things that no one had done before.
It's well shot, well acted.
I enjoy watching it. I don't suffer when I see the younger me.
That's what I like the most.
I'm happy to be what I am...
I wouldn't trade myself for that guy.
I went to France because when I saw "Children of Paradise",
they told me that a great mime lived there.
I wanted to compare myself with him.
The first time that I ran into Marceau, we had a heated discussion
about what pantomime should be.
I felt I was much better than him,
but quickly I realized that Marceau was a genius of the pantomime and I wasn't.
Nevertheless, I also realized that I was more intelligent than Marceau.
I believe that good actors are never very intelligent.
They are intuitive, they have other qualities.
I've been reading all my life, since I was five years old,
and back then I was reading the existentialists,
the non-semantic authors, etcetera.
So I decided to help Marceau by putting my intellect
at the service of his genius.
I started to write metaphysical pantomimes for him and he accepted.
First I wrote "The Cage", about a person who is locked
in an endless bunch of crystal cages.
I also wrote "The Mask Maker"
that tells the story of a man who makes a smiling mask
and he can't get rid of it when he is sad.
The mask is stuck to his face.
I also wrote "The Heart Eater",
which was about a man that eats people's hearts
and then becomes the person whose hearts he eats.
This scene is based...
This sequence about the tunnel is based on an old Zen tale
that I discovered in a book by Paul Reps
called "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones".
This is based on a story I found in that book.
In the story, a monk meets a young man
who wants to kill him to avenge his father's death.
The monk had been a killer earlier in his life.
The young man wants to kill him.
The monk says,
"Wait until I'm done with the tunnel
"that will be of a great help for this community."
The young man helps him.
Once they have finished building the tunnel the monk says, "Kill me now."
But the young man replies, "l can't kill my master."
The bandages emphasize the idea that they were monsters.
It's as if the monsters were in a hospital.
There are all sorts of monsters.
I use the bandages to make them look worse.
I sent my assistants to look for monsters
on the outskirts of Monterrey.
Nobody sees them, but they are everywhere.
If you walk around New York, you will to find them there too!
You try not to see them.
They are happy to act. It gives their life meaning.
They are working on a film,
they are making money and they are acting.
It's a great joy for them.
Not one of those cripples was an actor.
I was only able to pay for a few of them.
If I were to make this film now with a bigger budget,
I would hire hundreds of monsters.
I couldn't do the explosions
with special effects and so on.
So we winged it, I threw pieces of watermelon at the bodies.
I used the moment of the shot
when the bits of watermelon hit the bodies,
thus creating the effect of bullets entering a body.
When I put a pillow under Jacqueline's shirt to make her look pregnant,
she started crying. She said, "I'll never be a mother."
But when the film was over, she found a man
and gave birth to a beautiful girl called Lisarín,
who works in cinema and is the same height as her mother.
Later on Jacqueline studied Zen
and became a Zen master.
He comes running, he's afraid of them getting killed.
I ran for a kilometer in that scene.
I used charges of powder inside the suit.
I made them explode one by one.
He overcomes death. The character overcomes death.
It's unreal, a fairytale...
"El Topo" was the first film to be premiered without inviting the critics.
Allen Douglas, the hippie who distributed the film, suggested,
"First let's have an audience watch it before the critics can destroy it."
So we premiered it without inviting a single critic,
and what was called the "Midnight Mass" was formed.
A New York Times critic destroyed "El Topo".
The audience reaction was so strong, they sent so many complaints,
that the newspaper had to publish a full-page positive review.
It was the first time that the newspaper contradicted itself.
My grandfather died from burns caused by an oil lamp.
My mother deified my grandfather.
I thought I didn't care about my mother,
but I gave myself the same death as my grandfather.
Incredible, there I am trying to be the mythic hero
that my mother worshipped her entire life.
Life no longer has any meaning for him.
So it's over.
I got a real skeleton, covered it with steaks and burnt it.
This is a skeleton covered with steaks that I burnt to make it look more real.
They head off into their new life.
The grave is covered by bees.
In other words, since he is now a Holy man,
the bees build their hive on top of his grave.
His efforts were not in vain. He is feeding the world with his corpse.
His life had meant something.
It's a form of immortality.
The great diseases in current cinema are first of all, the actors.
Secondly, the distributors, the theater owners.
These theater owners are idiots
who want all the movies to last an hour and a half,
they want them to be PG.
What I intend to do in my next film, if God grants me a long life,
because I am a little old,
I will make a film that can be projected on the walls of the streets.
I will take film out of the theaters,
because theaters are the great obstacle.
With the new techniques
we'll be able to project on any wall, on any street,
and we will be able to make films that don't necessarily make a profit
but just pay for themselves.
For the last 30 years, I've been giving tarot readings for free.
Likewise, I can make a movie where I won't earn a profit.
I can do that. And I will try to,
because as long as films are shown in theaters,
the empire of the theater owners will prevail.
They will demand this and the other. They want profitability.
Now if you make artistic films, you have to show them in the street,
in museums, in festivals,
at home...
We must liberate cinema, because if we don't,
it will continue to be what it is nowadays - a catastrophe.