The legendary cult director's films El Topo and The Holy Mountain are about to be re-released after a 30-year feud with ex-Beatles manager Alan Klein, who held the films. Alejandro Jodorowsky spoke with the Guardian.
I meet Jodorowsky at his Paris apartment, in a book-lined room patrolled by cats. "Are you afraid of cats?" he asks. "Some people are." He explains that he lives alone but has a woman - a new woman - moving in with him soon and that he is having the place repainted in readiness. "Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life." His grin exposes a spectacular set of teeth. They can't be real, but maybe they are. With Jodorowsky it's sometimes hard to separate the fact from the fiction.
Jodorowsky's life reads like the plot of a magic-realist novel. He was born in Chile, of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, but abandoned his family "because my father was a monster, and my mother was as well". Alighting in Paris in the 1950s, he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and directed Maurice Chevalier in music hall. Relocating to Mexico, he founded an avant-garde theatre group and scandalised the Catholic priests, who believed he was holding black mass orgies in the cathedral. "In Mexico they want to kill me!" he exclaims. "A soldier held a gun to my chest!"
In 1970, he directed El Topo, a deranged peyote western that some have interpreted as a metaphor for the Old and New Testaments. It starred himself as a cold-blooded gunslinger in rabbinical black, and his son, Brontis, buck-naked apart from a Stetson. El Topo came to the attention of John Lennon who hailed it as a counter-culture masterpiece. Lennon introduced the film in New York, where it later played in special midnight screenings for almost a year. He also convinced Klein to stump up $1m for Jodorowsky's next production. And that's where the trouble began.
I watch El Topo and it stands up pretty well; a shotgun wedding of Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini: primal and pretentious in about equal measure. Then I watch The Holy Mountain and it's as though the world has gone widescreen. It's astonishing, outlandish; unlike anything made before or since. The plot concerns a thief who meets an alchemist (Jodorowsky again) and embarks on a quest for immortality. Yet the movie comes riddled with extraordinary setpieces. The most notable of these depicts the conquest of Mexico, re-enacted with chameleons dressed up as Aztecs and toads playing the Conquistadors. "Klein hated The Holy Mountain," says Jodorowsky ruefully. "He think I am crazy."
Here's a related 2005 post: TIFF - Cult movie experiences in theatres: Time to let go?