Sundance's blog

Tom DiCillo, director of the hilarious, almost-too-true 1995 film Living in Oblivion, represents both a generation and an era of narrative filmmakers who helped redefine American independent film. DiCillo’s other features, made over the last 15 years or so, include Johnny Suede, Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde, Double Whammy, and Delirious, each of which tells a slightly strange, often humorous story with idiosyncratic characters. This year, however, DiCillo returns to the Festival with his first feature-length documentary. When You’re Strange uses a vast archive of footage shot between 1966 and 1971 to weave together a riveting portrait of The Doors, focusing on the rise and fall of the band’s mythical lead singer, Jim Morrison.

While the film may seem to represent a radical shift in DiCillo’s career, it actually continues his main objective as a filmmaker, which he describes as uncovering seminal truths. “As an independent filmmaker, I’m still operating from this naïve point of view that people will be interested in what I say in its most unadulterated and original form,” he says. “The most important thing that I need to do in either narrative or documentary is tell the truth rather than try to create something for a mass market.”

DiCillo says that one of his goals with his new film was to clarify the notion that Morrison was the creative center of The Doors when all of the band members were major contributors. “I think every one of the band members has a hugely different perspective on the band,” DiCillo says. “I wanted to make my own observation, and this was hugely daunting because so much has been written and said about The Doors already. However, I think I humanized the band in some ways.”

The film’s largely chronological structure is built from the archive of footage supplied by Wolf Films and Peter Jankowski, the film’s producer. This material is intercut with outtakes from a 50-minute film from 1969 made by Morrison’s friend Paul Ferrara titled HWY: American Pastoral, featuring Morrison as a drifter in the desert.

“Basically, I received all of this material in random order, and none of it had sound,” DiCillo says. “Interspersed with it were all these outtakes from HWY. I didn’t want to use anything directly from the film, but it struck me that the outtakes would offer an interesting way to create a structure. And I think for viewers, the discovery of this footage as somehow different from the rest of the material is one of the nice moments in the film.”

Asked about references from the world of documentary that inspired his own foray, DiCillo points to one. “Errol Morris is always able to imbue his films with this mythical, slightly surreal quality and that comes from finding a strange, human truth in all of his films,” he says, as if he were describing his own body of work.

Post new comment

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

• Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
• Allowed HTML tags: <p><b> <br> <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <div> <span> <embed> <param> <object> <script><i><b><u>
• Insert Google Map macro.
• Images can be added to this post.
• Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image?: *

Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.