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ALSO BY JESSE PEARSON
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LES BLANKINTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON PORTRAITS BY JERRY HSU  The life and career of Les Blank each deserve to have a book or three dedicated to them, not just a puny interview in one issue of one magazine. But that’s all we have to offer right now, and so we humbly present for your perusal this talk with one of the most original documentary filmmakers since filmmakers first started documenting. We chose to focus mostly on three films of Blank’s that are especially compelling to us. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1969) is an up-close portrait of the legendary bluesman, shot at his home in Texas with an intimacy and a looseness that makes you feel like you’re just another one of Lightnin’s cronies. Hot Pepper (1973) brings the same treatment to the Creole musician Clifton Chenier and his circle of friends and family. It can make you long for the bayou even if you’ve never been within 1,000 miles of it. And then there’s Burden of Dreams (1982), which is Les Blank’s legendary on-set documentary of the violent, chaotic, and insanely life-affirming Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo. From angry Indians to deadly river rapids to the tantrums of Klaus Kinski and the diatribes against nature of Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams is one of the greatest testaments that man has produced in praise of the courageous making of art. We also threw into this interview some stuff about Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), which is self-explanatory, the Appalachian mountain musician Tommy Jarrell, getting arrested for marijuana possession in the Deep South in the early 70s, and more. To borrow the title of one of Blank’s movies, he has truly led a well-spent life. Vice: You didn’t set out to be a filmmaker, right? It wasn’t a childhood aspiration for you. Les Blank: I wanted to be a fisherman or a professional football or baseball player. But I developed this keen interest in biology in the ninth grade. Oh, cool. Yeah, I got interested in snakes, critters, and reptiles. I started reading about people like Raymond Ditmars, the curator of the Bronx Zoo. And since I grew up in Tampa, Florida, I became friends with the circus that wintered there. What a dream for a kid. I got to be friends with the people who ran the reptile tent, and they gave me a quarter apiece to trap live rats for them to use as food. How old were you when you were doing that? Thirteen or so. And then my brother had become a heart and lung surgeon, and I was very influenced by him so I thought, “Why not become a brain surgeon?” That was the direction I was heading when I went into college. At Tulane University in Louisiana, correct? Yeah. But then I flunked chemistry. Uh-oh. Yeah. You see, I’d gone to an all-boys boarding school back before co-ed was the way to go, and I was very, uh, pent up by the time I got to New Orleans. And that was a place that was full of temptations, to say the least. Very. In the French Quarter, the bars had no keys to their front doors because they were open 24 hours a day. What year did you arrive in New Orleans? 1954 or so. And you were only 18 or 19 years old, I guess? Probably 18. And they also had rhythm and blues, or black people’s music, that I became very interested in—people like Little Richard and Fats Domino. That sounds great. A lot of those people lived in New Orleans then. I could go down and see them in the bars or they’d come out to the campus, to the fraternity houses, and play their music. So with all the partying, my studies sort of fell by the wayside and I failed chemistry. Without chemistry, you can’t go very far in the sciences. What did you move on to? Ever since I was a kid, I liked reading a lot, people like Joseph Conrad. I started getting interested in becoming a writer, so I wrote stories and poems and tried to get them published in the top places. It didn’t occur to me to go to the local literary magazine, the French Quarter. I went to Harper’s Bazaar, Atlantic Monthly… Right, right. …and I didn’t understand why they would reject me. What sort of writing were you doing? Was Joseph Conrad an inspiration? These were poems that were sort of an imitation of him and Ernest Hemingway. By the time I was a senior with a pile of rejection slips, I thought, “Well, if I can’t make it as a writer, I better learn how to make a living. I’ll go to graduate school and learn how to teach.” A noble enough plan. I got into graduate school in Berkeley, but I felt so hemmed in by the rigors of academia. In one class, we were just studying the rhyme schemes of Milton’s poetry. It was too dry and dull for me. It didn’t touch the part of me that wanted to be touched by the study of literature. So I dropped out after a few months. I was also having some personal problems with a failed marriage and, uh, fatherhood. So it was a tumultuous time. Very. I found myself unable to get a job. The cheapest insult came when I went in to try and be a bill collector. They insisted that I take an intelligence test, and I said, “Well, OK, if you want.” I failed it, and then I got so distraught by having failed this Mickey Mouse test. I thought maybe all the anxiety and depression were affecting my brain cells and that really got me depressed. And then I saw a big billboard that had a picture of a knight in armor on a charging stallion. It was reared up and he had his sword up on high. I think I know what’s coming here. And behind him was a fighter jet flying along and it said, “College graduates, be the gladiators or the crusaders of the future,” or something like that. There you go. “Come and join our naval air program, become an officer, and fly your own jet.” So that, to me, seemed like something curious to do. I went by their office and took their intelligence exam and I passed with flying colors. They asked me to come back and take the physical, which I passed, and then they asked me to come in for the interpersonal interview. I thought, “Well, I have no hope of getting past this.” But they probably liked the fact that I had all this trouble with the police during my New Orleans days. What sort of stuff are we talking about? I would find myself overindulging and doing stupid things like destroying public property and refusing to move on and— Alcohol-fueled things. Yeah. Fighting, too. Anyway, I had a long string of these things, and the military was intrigued. “We like our pilots to be full of piss and vinegar,” they said. I’ve heard that. They look for rebels. Then one of the officers found out that I had played football for Tulane and it was like, “Well, that’s it. You’re in.” They gave me my orders. On the way to flight school in Florida, I passed through New Orleans. I called a friend of mine who was in the theater department at Tulane at the time. We went out and had some beers and he asked me what I was doing. I told him I’d just seen this movie by Ingmar Bergman. It really turned me on, and I would like to do something like that but would have no idea where to begin. Which Bergman film was that? The Seventh Seal. It had just come out and I’d never seen anything quite like that. So I told this professor friend about wanting to get into film and he said, “Well, we have a brand-new program that just happens to be starting next semester that offers an MFA in playwriting.” So I applied to the theater program with an emphasis on playwriting. You could learn to write plays and then maybe you could write screenplays, and then you could work with actors. I thought, “That sounds like fun,” and so I told the navy I wasn’t coming. Simple as that? Yeah, at that point, it was. I had not sworn in. I had only been given orders. I was on the way to follow the orders but I had not sworn in. So I came within a couple of hours of becoming a navy pilot. That could well have saved your life. This was right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, so yeah. Did that playwriting course work out for you? I took to it like a fish to water. I really enjoyed theater and acting. I wrote some one-act plays and a three-act play for my thesis. And then my professor friend wrote me a glowing recommendation to both UCLA and USC for film school. I was accepted by USC with a full-tuition scholarship. Great. I went there for two years and then they wouldn’t renew my scholarship for a third year. My second wife was pregnant and that kept me out of the draft, but it also kept her from working. I had to find some way to bring home the bacon. Right. So I went looking for work using whatever skills I had, and I ended up working for nonfiction industrial-educational filmmakers around the LA area. I learned the rudiments of making nonfiction films under real conditions—how you get your exposures, how you get enough light. With 16-mm film, you have to pump in a lot of light. I was directing and shooting and doing sound recording if necessary. Then I’d edit it all and do the postproduction sound, the sound mixing, and cut the negative. So I got a good feeling for how everything goes together. Wow, you were really soup to nuts on these things. Yeah. See all articles by this contributor
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