From Star Wars to Alfred Hitchock to the Alien franchise, Alexandre O. Philippe has been dissecting American pop culture for years. It’s a boyhood passion he has turned into a career, as he explains in the quote that describes him on the streaming service MUBI: “I’ve always been fascinated by pop culture, I’ve always been a huge film geek anyway, ever since I was a kid, and so, to me, this idea that I’m essentially deconstructing moments in cinema that have become cultural moments, is something that in a way I was already doing as a kid, and was passionate about, so it makes complete sense that I would be doing this now as an adult.”
Although he lives and works in the United States, the Geneva-born Philippe remains proudly Swiss. “I still have my Swiss passport, and I feel as connected to Switzerland as I do to the States”, he tells The Film Verdict in between trips around the world. Now he returns to Karlovy Vary with his new film You Can Call Me Bill, a portrait of Star Trek icon William Shatner, a year after visiting the Czech festival with Lynch/Oz, in which six interviewees – one critic and five filmmakers, including John Waters and the directing duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead – discuss the links between David Lynch’s filmography and the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz.
How did Philippe construct that film’s different voiceovers, a necessary substitute for on-camera interviews in pandemic times? “I spent a few hours talking to each person on the phone, and I recorded the conversations. From that low-quality recording I produced a script for each segment, and once they had approved it and done any necessary revisions, I got them to re-record their contributions in higher quality.”
What sets Philippe apart from most documentarians making films about cinema is that each time, he chooses a different angle for his projects: 78/52 deals with Psycho by analyzing only one sequence, the shower murder (the title refers to the sequence having 78 cuts and lasting 52 seconds); Memory: The Origins of Alien explores the mythologies that influenced the creation of the xenomorph; and Leap of Faith is a single conversation with William Friedkin about his horror masterpiece The Exorcist, with typically candid insights about what he perceives as the movie’s flaws (by his own admission, he’s still on the fence about the ending, which was a source of contention with screenwriter William Peter Blatty).
And in the case of Lynch, what better way to try and get inside his famously elusive head than by examining his lifelong passion for someone else’s work? As for Shatner, the chosen method is to just let him talk about himself, straight to camera, a stream of consciousness as opposed to a one-on-one chat. One might compare this versatile approach to that of Mark Cousins, a comparison Philippe is aware of. “It’s been mentioned before. The funny thing is, even though we’re both regulars on the festival circuit, we’ve never met.”
The common thread that unites these different films is the subjects’ standing within American culture, which Philippe explores in fresh new ways. Does his Swiss background help, in that he comes at it from a different point of view, having grown up in Europe? “Yes, definitely. My relationship with these elements is not the same as if I’d been born and raised in the States, and while I am passionate about these topics, there is a certain distance.” Does the European notion of cinephilia also come into play? “Not really. I don’t want my films to be university lectures; my aim is to be informative but also to make sure you have a good time in the theater for two hours.”
The diverse nature of the films certainly helps, with no two documentaries being alike. Even when the approach was meant to be similar, the final result was not: Memory was initially conceived as the Alien version of 78/52, covering the importance of the iconic chestburster scene, before turning into a very different beast.
On that note, the conversation inevitably turns to another Star franchise and the 2009 film The People Vs. George Lucas, which deals with the somewhat hostile reaction fans of a certain galaxy far far away had to the second trilogy of films, released between 1999 and 2005 (as a famous Internet saying goes, no one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans). As the documentary’s title indicates, George Lucas himself was the target of most of the vitriol, which led to his decision to retire from filmmaking and sell his company in 2012.
Ironically, a lot of the same people who accused Lucas of ruining their childhoods are now clamoring for his return, with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy being the new object of their ire. Could this turn of events justify a follow-up documentary on the topic? “I have thought about it”, Philippe concedes. “The idea is, once the rights revert to me, I might reissue the film with an epilogue summing up subsequent events. But a proper sequel? I don’t think so. The main reason for that is, I don’t really care for the recent Star Wars stuff. It’s quite boring, always dealing with the same situations and characters. I’ll check back in once they start moving away from all that.” In the meantime, he’s keeping busy, with another Hitchcock project in the pipeline while You Can Call Me Bill uses Karlovy Vary as the European springboard after first premiering at South by Southwest in March.
