NEWSLETTER

JACK BOND

INTERVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
PHOTO BY BEN RAYNER



Jack Bond was a headmaster when he was 21. Sometime after that he lost a full-grown bear and nearly 50 mental patients in the woods in Wales. He also rolled with Warhol and Magritte in New York and drove Salvador Dali into a rage. These days, he’s making a film that the French intelligence services have warned him may cost him his life. His life is as unusual as his directorial career.

British directors traditionally leave the art to the French while they dig under the kitchen sinks of Britain’s crumbling societies, but director Jack Bond, together with writer and actor Jane Arden, created a canon of avant-garde, paranoid films which, while celebrated in America, have been largely lost from British cinematic history.

In 1965, Bond, then 28, and Arden spent two weeks with Salvador Dali filming the dramatic documentary Dali in New York. Until Arden killed herself in 1982, the pair worked together on a series of dense, obscure, psychedelic films: Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), Vibration (1975), and Anti-Clock (1979). After being unseen for over 20 years, the BFI are re-releasing them this year on DVD.

Anti-Clock is their greatest achievement. It’s a surreal Oedipal thriller set both in a hotel full of CCTV and mad therapists, and inside the abused mind of volatile murderer they are studying. It’s close in premise to A Clockwork Orange, but far more intense, bizarre, and devastating. It’s weird, then, that Jack’s about the coolest, most convivial 71-year-old living in Bloomsbury today.

Vice: Why have the films you made with Jane Arden remained hidden for so long?
Jack Bond: When Jane Arden committed suicide, it had such a violent effect on me that I put them away. I stored them away in a laboratory in the national film archive with orders on them that they weren’t to be shown again or ever released. Strange reaction, isn’t it? I find it hard to work out why I did that.

So you hadn’t seen them since 1982?
No. After a memorial screening for Jane Arden at the National Film Centre that year, they were never seen. When I finally rang up the archive they said, “No, no, no, no. That stuff’s not to leave here, every can’s got a label on it: ‘Never to be released again by order of Jack Bond’.” I said, “Wait a minute, I am Jack Bond!” So I had to go down with my passport and driver’s licence.

Anti-Clock was actually never released in the UK at all. Why was that?
Well, in America the support we had was incredible, it won a Golden Globe, and it ran well in decent cinemas. Then I came back to England, showed it to a few distributors and got incredibly negative feedback. At that point I said to Jane, “Fuck England, I’m not going to show it here.” And she said, “Fine, let’s do that.” So we didn’t show it here. A couple of years later they’re ringing me up and asking for it, but we said no. That was the beauty of Jane, she was completely supportive of my rather uncommercial attitude. And we had other interests in life. I had a bloody great yacht, and I set off on it for three years.

Separation was banned from the Cork Film Festival, Anti-Clock was rejected over here—did you feel like you were making controversial art-house films?
The truth is I was a foolish optimist. I couldn’t, in my mind, separate mainstream from more off-beat stuff, and when I was making all these films I couldn’t see any other way of doing them. And it didn’t seem in the least bit odd to me really. [French director] Louis Malle once pointed it out to me: “Quite simply, Jack, you were born in the wrong country. I don’t know who you are, but you don’t seem very English to me. I can’t see you surviving in England. If your work was French, nobody would think anything about it, but you’ve got nobody to play with there.”

Somewhere in Anti-Clock’s unsettling mix of the past, madness, premonition, demon psychology and occult philosophy, you managed to make a film which predicted the visual language of surveillance society. Did you see that coming?
I went to Sony and explained that what I was doing was establishing CCTV. It’s a film about a man with a very self-destructive nature, who is either going to kill someone or kill himself, who goes to a hotel for a weekend enlightenment course. I wanted the guy to be observed on CCTV so he couldn’t walk up a staircase or go in a room without being followed by cameras. Sony loved this idea, maybe they saw the future, but I don’t think I was seeing it in those terms, I had no idea it’d be like this now. Sony took my idea very seriously. They festooned the roof of the hotel with cameras so the streets were surveyed, as well as the interior of the hotel.

Warhol was a big fan. Did you know him?
Yes, for years. Dali introduced us when we were making Dali in New York. He took me and Warhol to the opening night of René Magritte’s retrospective.

That’s a big line-up.
Yeah. We got in a cab and Dali said to me, “I rang René Magritte this afternoon and I told him we were coming and I asked him if we could arrive with pineapples on our heads”. Apparently Magritte said to him, “If you choose to come here looking ridiculous, you will not be allowed in!” How amazing, one surrealist telling another not to look ridiculous! When we got there, there was René Magritte in a three-piece pinstripe suit with a watch chain. He looked for all the world like a bank manager.

In Dali in New York, Dali seems pretty intense.
Oh God, yes. I saw him not that long ago in New York and I asked him at what point in his life did he realise who he was? He told me it happened when he was 12. He was out for a walk with a particularly beautiful, glamorous auntie, who suddenly wanted to piss. She stood up, pulled her skirt up and pissed with the force of a carthorse. He said the amber liquid struck the ground with such violence that it exploded into a million tiny droplets backlit by the sun, and all these droplets were suffused with divine knowledge. And that’s the moment he realised. Isn’t that fantastic?

During the filming of Dali in New York, he famously stormed off set when Jane Arber stood up to him.
He did! He was sitting on the side of the street and he holds out his wrist and says, “And now you will do up my cufflinks, please.” So Jane does one cufflink and and he says, “Now you are my slave.” She said, “Oh no, no, no. I’m perfectly happy to do up your cufflinks my darling, but in no way am I your slave or anyone else’s.” “You are my slave,” he says and he stands up and shouts, “Everybody is my slave!” And he goes off down with his flunky getting bits of dust off his coat, shouting, “Everybody is my slave!” We thought that was it for the film. I mean, he fucked off completely. And I thought, oh bloody hell, we’re only two days in and he’s gone, he’s not coming back. So I rang Andy [Warhol] and I said “He’s buggered off!” and he suggested we made a film together. I had this wonderful crew, so I said, “Well, have you got any ideas, because I haven’t.” He wanted to make a film in a sweet factory in Brooklyn, and he wanted it to run for 36 hours. That night Dali’s manager rang me up and said Dali in New York was on again.

So you never got to make the Warhol movie?
No!

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Comments

Anonymous, on Sep 24, 2009 wrote: @ hi fructose - actually kubrick withheld Clockwork Orange himself after he heard about some ’copcat’ crimes. it couldn’t be released until he died. basically he was really paranoid. buuuut, there is a school of though that says that he always resented that movie - he wanted to make his napoleon flick instead. interesting aside, in the stage version of clockwork orange by anthony b, the stage directions include a bit where ’a look a like of stanley kubrick walks onstage playing ’Singing in the Rain’ on the trumpet and the cast beat him up’
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: I find it odd that a filmmaker cannot decipher the difference in perception of arthouse and mainstream. Shouldn’t the person making the film have a better idea of this than anyone else?
	hi fructose, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: unless i’m wrong (which is entirely possible) a lot of english directors have had difficulty with uk censors. i know kubrick couldn’t screen ’clockwork’ in england for decades. it’s weird to think that so much more is shown on television there but they take offense with violence in their films.
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: oh man. can you imagine how good it would have been if he and andy warhol actually did make the film! amazing.
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: haha, I love how he denied Anti-Clock to the UK. if they didnt immediately appreciate it then they dont deserve it
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: it is definitely strange that he hid those films for so long. Im glad he finally let them out though