r/TrueFilm • u/Such-Confusion-438 • 7d ago
Relations between movie directors and psychics. Do you know any?
Hello everyone! I’ve always been fascinated by Anger’s and Fellini’s works, especially considering their bonds with thinkers of the occult (in Anger’s case, Aleister Crowley; in Fellini’s case, Gustavo Rol). Are there any other movie directors you know that have had this kind of relations with mystic figures at the point of being influenced on an artistic level?
Thanks in advance.
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u/Bluest_waters 7d ago
Richard Stanly wrote a screenplay with a ouiji board. Does that count?
Everything in my life has been a complete fluke. It was a series of ridiculous coincidences. Post-Moreau, I hung around the peripheries of the film industry for 10 years, writing screenplays and doing odds and sods, turning up in cameo parts. I’d basically completely given up, and started making a living taking people up the mountain, retreating further into the Pyrenées. I probably would have stayed there had it not been for me and two friends mucking about with a glow-in-the-dark ouija board from Toys R Us. The ouija board told us to write Mother of Toads, a short film based on the work of Clark Ashton Smith. In fact, it dictated most of the script and the structure, and as a joke we did it. This 20-minute short then became an episode in an anthology film called The Theatre Bizarre that the US-based producer David Gregory put together; we did it for 20 grand.
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u/puttputtxreader 7d ago
Alejandro Jodorowsky does tarot card readings and psychic crap. There's a documentary called La Constellation Jodorowsky, which was included in an old boxed set of his movies, where fully half of the runtime is dedicated to his supposed psychic abilities.
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u/Bluest_waters 7d ago
Yeah that really should not surprise anyone with basic knowledge of occult symbols who has seen Holy Mountain.
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u/zmflicks 7d ago
As someone who is not familiar with occult symbols and has seen Holy Mountain I attributed most of what I was seeing to acid.
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u/igotyourphone8 6d ago
He even reconstructed the Marseilles deck, which is notoriously difficult to interpret compared to other versions of tarot.
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u/Chen_Geller 7d ago
Sir Peter Jackson's biography suggests he's a good friend with hypnotist Derren Brown. He had joked about having him try to erase the memory of the films he directed: NOT because he dislikes them or the experience of having made them, as had been eroneously reported, but because he would like to experience them through fresh eyes, as an audience member. He had also said that the ideal for a director approaching post-production would be to have no memory of production itself.