Along with the nine World Premieres announced in early May with their First Wave titles, the Fantasia International Film Festival added eight World Premieres with their Second Wave of titles announced in early June. A Third Wave is coming up in early July when Fantasia’s full lineup will be announced. Until then, here are five World Premieres from Fantasia’s Second Wave to whet your appetite.
Los Vampires (2026), United States; Director: Craig Mitchell—In 1930 Hollywood, a Spanish actor (Henry Ian Cusick) is cast in the night shoot of a soon-to-be-legendary vampire film, forced to imitate the English-speaking star (Thomas Kretschmann) who performs the same role by day. The two actors regularly meet at the transitory hours of their shoots, and a rivalry stirs between them. All the while, a string of murders are occurring on and around the soundstage. With names respectfully altered, Craig Mitchell’s Los Vampires (2026) is a fantastical fictionalized account of the making of George Melford’s Spanish Dracula (1931), the arguably superior version of the Universal Horror classic which had been shot overnight on the same sets Tod Browning’s landmark pictured used during the day. Cusick and Kretschmann captivate as uncanny surrogates for Carlos Villarías and Bela Lugosi, while Daniela Couso, Tony-winner Jefferson Mays, Oscar Nuñez, and Jorge Diaz round out an immaculate cast. Los Vampires is a meticulously designed, occult-tinged tribute to the dignity of performance ... and a darkly imaginative, bittersweet love letter to old Hollywood—and the forgotten struggles that made it what it was.
I Love Paris (2026), France / United States; Director: Nicky Murphy—In an altogether different mockumentary vein, I Love Paris is an explosive and vibrant vampire film that’s equal parts funny, dynamic, and haunting. Avoiding the traditional pitfalls of mockumentary filmmaking, I Love Paris feels real but never forgets to keep its audience entertained. The film stars an explosive and hypnotic Aminata Thiboult as Paris, an aspiring musician who gets vampirized mid-shoot, giving all new meaning to the underground nightlife. Not just a vampire movie, this is a music film where the beats actually hit. I Love Paris captures an improvisational style that blends comedy, music, and horror to draw in the audience. With obvious comparisons to What We Do In the Shadows director Nicky Murphy brings in a dash of Tony Scott’s The Hunger—creating a vampire story that’s funny, pulses with youth and ambition, and blends down-under humor with effortless French cool.
I Love Paris is programmed into Fantasia’s dedicated Underground sidebar, which showcases bold, super-independent, outsider, and DIY cinema and features ultra-low-budget and unconventional films made outside the traditional studio system. Fantasia’s Underground sidebar highlights extreme genres, fetishism, transgressive acts, and bizarre artistic expressions from around the world that possess a pure vision and are entirely unafraid to take risks.
God Skin (2026), Thailand; Director: Paween Purijitpanya—Desperate for money, Bangkok delivery boy Marwin discovers a clandestine arena where the wealthy wager on martial-arts matches with a high-tech twist, in the spectacular Thai action-fantasy God Skin. Panna Stunt Team (veterans of the Ong-Bak films) handle the combat choreography, so top-notch action is assured as Marwin faces off against a succession of outrageous rivals. Leading man Sutthirak Subvijitra, of the My Boo and 4 Kings series, proves equally deft at drama, comedy, romance, and high-flying, hard-hitting stunts, but director Paween Purijitpanya takes things further, as this live-action arcade game loaded with rapid-fire laughs and eye-popping visual effects takes a sharp turn into dark, dystopian techno-thriller territory. This is potent proof that Thailand’s action cinema remains among the world’s best, offering ferocious fights and fresh new ideas.
Cherry and Virgin (2026), Japan; Director: Masanao Kawajiri—Ami and Ryo have a lot in common. They’re both around 30 years old, both draw, both prone to brutal self-criticism—and neither has ever had sex. The duo is awkward, uncertain, confused. In their own weird way, the pair have great chemistry ... but will it lead them to the bedroom—and beyond? Following his short animated mockumentary A Japanese Boy Who Draws (Fantasia 2019), Masanao Kawajiri returns with Cherry and Virgin, an understated romantic dramedy that showcases his unique specialty. Kawajiri tells stories about people who draw and presents them as they would draw themselves. The filmmaker’s skill at mimicking a multitude of styles is remarkable, and he puts it to use brilliantly in the service of surprising and insightful studies of ordinary lives. A patient and precise storyteller with a visual language as expressive as his dialogue, Kawajiri’s sardonic wit and harsh candor offset and even elevate the strong sense of compassion that permeates Cherry and Virgin.
Cherry and Virgin’s World Premiere is slotted into Fantasia’s Animation Plus sidebar, which highlights boundary-pushing animated feature films and projects, ranging from anime to experimental works, that may not always receive mainstream distribution. The section showcases international premieres, romance, dark comedy, and fantasy.
Corpus (2026), United States; Director: Corrin Evans—The body becomes a different kind of temple in Corpus; a bold and visceral horror vision, and the transfixing feature debut from filmmaker Corrin Evans, whose work explores death, eroticism, and the supernatural. Co-written and produced by Lily Cowles, who also stars, Corpus is a body horror yearn-and-burn. Erotic and surreal, the film lands brilliantly as a meditation on identity, desire, and the lethal cocktail of longing, vulnerability, and control.
It's the summer of 1998 in New York City; Sayo (Jeff Wahlberg), a soulful nightlife photographer and small-time drug dealer, is invited to a party upstate by his long-time friend and unrequited love, a movie star on the rise: Vince Marlowe (Brodie Townsend). Together with their rowdy friend Ross (Michael Vlamis), they drive to a remote, bucolic manor in hopes of some summer debauchery. But when they arrive, they discover that the promise of a party is actually three mysterious women—Billie (Lily Cowles), Wren (Nuha Jes Izman), and Cata (Ching Valdes-Aran)—whose disturbing agenda draws the boys into a dark web of seduction and terror. Corpus is competing for the Cheval Noir.
“Evil wants out” is the official tagline for Daniel Stamm’s Lockbox (2026), but it could also be “no good deed goes unpunished” which Ellen (Carla Gugino) realizes when she offers to take in her cousin Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci) who has been severely traumatized not only by a tragic childhood but his tour of duty in the Middle East. Trauma permeates Lockbox throughout, revealed as the seedbed for evil.
Inspired by the cult podcast Knifepoint Horror and based on an original story by writer, creator, and narrator Soren Narnia, Lockbox explores the theme of how evil attaches itself and pursues those weakened by trauma so that it can inhabit their body and psyche. Recognizing that this demonic force is pursuing her cousin Winthrop, Ellen applies herself to rescuing him.
Carla Gugino has long been one of my favorite actresses with an impressive resume of appearances in major genre projects. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed her performances in The Friend (2024), the television mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), Midnight Mass (2021), The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and Wayward Pines (2015-2016), among many other credits, ranging back to the late ‘80s. Her characters are often sympathetic caught in extraordinary circumstances and—as is necessary in genre films with preposterous narratives—thoroughly believable, lending credence through the sincerity of her acting. As Ellen, a woman who retreats to a rural town, seeking peace after her mother’s death, Gugino skillfully carries Lockbox as a woman bewildered by the supernatural danger encroaching around her but determined to overcome her own fears to help her threatened cousin.
As familiar as I am with Gugino’s body of work, Lockbox is my belated introduction to Lou Taylor Pucci (who has multiple credits over the past two decades). Pucci delivers a riveting and anguished performance as Winthrop, a man victimized and made vulnerable by childhood abuse and the horrors of war. As demonic forces attempt to overtake him, you join Gugino’s desperation in trying to save him.
Katherine Isabelle, along with Gugino, has been a genre queen for decades, most notably as Ginger in the feminist werewolf tale Ginger Snaps (2000), and most recently in a minor role in the box office hit Backrooms (2026). She inhabits her role as Vahna Minter with dreadlocked and unfiltered ferocity, imposing herself on the quiet domesticity of Ellen and Winthrop as the neighbor who guides evil to their doorstep. She’s the guest they can’t get rid of and in her own idiosyncratic insistence an individualized home invasion.
The concept of the “lockbox” would be a spoiler should I try to describe it and, quite frankly, I would have trouble trying to describe it anyways, so I leave that for the viewer to experience when the film opens later this week. Suffice it to say that it’s the means by which Ellen endeavors to capture the demonic force pursuing and occupying Winthrop. That occupation, incidentally, takes a silly turn towards transvestism, which felt a little bit like being hit over the head, as if the transference of evil from one individual to another could not be understood otherwise. Other than for those perverse fishnet stockings, Lockbox is an engaging thrill and welcome variation on demonic possession.
In this troubled world of political upheaval and environmental decline is there anything as ameliorative as a World Premiere at one of the most exciting and prestigious genre film festivals in the world? The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 30th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 16 through August 2, 2026, returning to the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screenings and events at Montreal’s Cinéma du Musée.
The festival’s full lineup will be announced in early July but in the meantime, here are five World Premieres from Fantasia’s First Wave of announcements to help you forget your troubles, if only for a frightened climate-changed spell.
Hot Spot (2026), Poland; Director: Agnieszka Smoczynska—In a near future society ruled by sentient A.I., a private eye investigates a murder case only to discover a rebel group capable of undermining the digital overlord. As the detective's identity slowly unravels, his world enters a state of hypnotic meltdown. A singular, provocative and aesthetically stunning new work from celebrated Polish visionary Agnieszka Smoczyńska (The Lure, Fantasia 2016), starring Andrzej Konopka, Noomi Rapace, and Reika Kirishima.
A reminder that Smoczyńska’s The Lure is available for streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Hot Spot is participating in the Cheval Noir Competition, Fantasia’s flagship section, which highlights the best feature-length genre films. Winners are awarded with the festival's mascot statuette, a mighty black Pegasus. The winged black horse draws thematic inspiration from the mythological roots of dark fantasy, reflecting Fantasia’s identity as a premier North American destination for niche, indie, and genre cinema. Recent Best Film awards went to Mother of Flies (2025) and The Count of Monte Cristo (2024).
Ancestral Beasts (2026), Canada; Director: Tim Riedel—Red River Métis director Tim Riedel’s Ancestral Beasts first appeared as a proof-of-concept five-minute film at the 2025 Frontieres Platform project at Cannes and is backed by executive producer Edmon Rotea of Skinamarink fame. Riedel’s film casts a demonic lens on intergeneration trauma. Family is complicated, even in the best of times, but when you have skeletons in the closet and grief as an unwanted houseguest, it becomes something that consumes you—and that’s what Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) finds out the hard way. Dealing with her mother’s death, a snarky sister, and a distant aunt, Elyse leaves the city for her aunt’s rural home to work on her mental health. But she’s not alone and will soon find that intergenerational trauma comes in many forms ... and here, it’s demonic. Riedel draws on his talent for storytelling, personal experience, and genre to weave a tale of Indigenous mothers, sisters, and mental suffering. Look out for Canadian legend Gail Maurice as Elyse’s Aunt Adele in this fresh new take on the haunted house film.
Ancestral Beasts is featured in Fantasia’s Septentrion Shadows Section, a dedicated programming strand that showcases cutting-edge, character-driven genre cinema—including horror, sci-fi, and dark fantasy—with a primary focus on Canadian and Northern regional perspectives.
The Last Temptation of Becky (2026), United States; Director: Jenn Wexler—Fantasia’s family of returning filmmakers is large, and proudly includes director/producer powerhouse, Jenn Wexler. Her breakout debut, The Ranger, came to Fantasia in 2018 and was followed by the World Premiere of her supernatural Christmas crime heist, The Sacrifice Game, in 2023. For Fantasia’s 30th anniversary, the fest couldn’t be happier to have her back with the next chapter of the popular BECKY franchise, The Last Temptation of Becky!
Becky Hooper (Lulu Wilson) has annihilated Neo-Nazis and all manner of victimizers, but this time, she’s going straight to the source! Now a CIA agent, managed by genre favorite Kate Siegel, she’s taking down a nefarious modern-day Nazi played with camp brilliance by the one and only Neil Patrick Harris! Wexler shines here, highlighting the underdog heroine and going for broke with tons of gore and crazy kills. Meanwhile, Wilson reprises her beloved character with gusto, unleashing Becky’s signature rage on an army of insane baddies!
No Rest For the Wicked (2026), Denmark; Director: Kasper Kalle—A young fisherman’s first love with a stranded whaler unfolds in secrecy under the pressures of family, faith, and community in this haunting and subversive Queer vampire film with chilling folk horror flavors. Singular in scope and depth, Kasper Kalle’s No Rest For the Wicked is a vivid new landmark in Danish genre cinema that brings imaginatively radical and nightmarish new elements into the vampire lore.
Adapted from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s iconic 1884 novella Manor, the film is set against the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the 19th-century Faroe Islands. Its stark, yet dreamy, uncanny atmosphere recalls the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer or even Robert Eggers, while its full-blooded heart is just as much an ode to the painful longings of Gothic romance as it is to the genre’s cruelties and horrors. Anchored by a remarkable lead performance from screen newcomer Egor Venned, it co-stars Pilou Asbæk alongside strong performances from Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, and Sofia Nolsøe. No Rest For the Wicked is eligible for the Cheval Noir prize.
Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson (2026); Director: Nick Taylor. Known for his intense work ethic, perfectionism, and obsession with breaking new ground, Steve Johnson has created iconic creatures and effects for some of the most beloved genre films in cinema history, working with everyone from John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Sam Raimi to James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and Guillermo del Toro. His drive and ambition also led to heartbreaking acts of self-sabotage, divorce, and a serious drug addiction.
Over seven years in the making and stacked with incredible, never-before-seen archival footage, Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson is a revealing portrait of an immense talent who could also be his own worst enemy. Director Nick Taylor lets the artist—an enormously engaging raconteur—do much of the showing and telling (though the likes of Linnea Quigley, John Landis, Tom Holland, and Oscar-winner Bill Corso also contribute). Rubberhead is at once a captivating reflection on the game-changing practical FX glory days when everything was unexplored ground primed for radical invention and a fascinating, moving story of an FX master whose greatest monster may have been himself.
Rubberhead is slotted into Fantasia’s Documentaries from the Edge section introduced ten years ago to showcase innovative, provocative non-fiction cinema. The sidebar focuses on edge-of-your-seat subjects, genre-adjacent stories, cult retrospectives, and subversive real-world topics.
As a sample of what to expect from Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, here’s a promotional video for the second volume of Johnson’s AM Ink autobiography Rubberhead: Volume Two, notable for glimpses into all of the projects that—as he frames it—“got away.”
No, I had no idea that poet Mary Oliver was a lesbian.
Yet one of the many strong values of Frameline is how over the years it has allowed us to recognize that our sense of feeling alone as LGBTQ+ people is mistaken and that we are company to a lineage of remarkable individuals who have paved the way for our individuation and who continue to shape personal freedom and dignity towards an ever expanding horizon. As Gabrielle Calvocoressi states in the film: “When we talk about queer family, one of the things about family is that you just have someone to emulate.”
Was the fact that Mary Oliver was a lesbian essential to her craft? Was it incidental? Or a combination of both? Sasha Waters’ exquisite documentary Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World (2026) explores the connective tissue between orientation and practice and trains a respectful and emulative eye on one of the most remarkable women of letters in American literature.
With thorough grace, Saved By the Beauty Of the World traces Oliver’s development from her early apprenticeship to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s youngest sister straight out of high school to her astounding popularity in the later years of her life, packing auditoriums, and beloved by audiences throughout the country who recognized in her words the center of their emotional being.
From its earliest scenes where Stephen Colbert is too overwhelmed to read one of her poems, witness after witness account for the tremendous power Oliver’s words have had upon them.
Because poetry resides in the rhythm and sound of words, as much as in the flow of text, Waters solicits readings from Colbert, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Lucy Dacus, Nick Flynn, Donnika Kelly, Jason Reynolds, Jesse Welles and Oprah Winfrey to prove the tenet that sound creates form; poetry shapes emotion. I first heard Oliver given voice by bard Robert Bly many years ago who read Oliver’s “Wild Geese” while strumming his bouzouki. It was a revelatory experience where her words flowed into my body like water into a sponge. And I took her words to heart. I allowed myself to love what was natural for me to love. Was she speaking to a LGBTQ+ experience? Or more broadly to a human experience in which the LGBTQ+ experience could rest and root, find its face, find its shape? “Just to be a poet in America,” Mark Doty muses in the film, “is already queer enough.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Responding to “Wild Geese”, Stephen Colbert explains that the beauty of the world is an accusation that you are denying your own beauty by being good. Perhaps this has been the flame of rebellion that has characterized my own gayness?
Punctuated by resonant interstitials of nature (foxes, roses, coyotes, autumnal landscapes, deer standing stoic in sleet, geese in flight, Monarch butterflies, white owls and black sheep, blooming wood, hawks, blue wisteria, birds feeding their nested young, bees pollinating, seagulls flocking above waves, conifer forests, bubbling brooks, beach grass, snow drifts, black branches limned with white snow, pinecones, clams, tortoises, beavers building dams, bears devouring salmon mid-stream, falling stars streaking across the wheel of constellations, inhabited spiderwebs, kittens tumbling out of a basket, sunrise, moonrise, sunset, a bright full moon scudded with dark clouds, squirrels, long-legged water storks, fish at the surface of ponds, quaking golden aspen, columbines, ripe lemons, beetles, pussywillows, hatchlings, rain, murmurations at dusk, dogs, lilypads: all emphasizing Oliver’s belief that our enjoyment of the world is not only personal but inherently political.
Sasha Waters’ masterful assemblage of stock footage likewise inflects the cultural scenes that influenced Oliver as a young woman and frequently provides levity to offset the depths of Oliver’s poems. I find it an incandescent touch when—during scenes where the death of Oliver’s partner Molly “M” Cook is mentioned—Waters inserts footage in reverse: cars driving backwards, marching bands marching backwards, a woman on a bicycle cycling backwards on a tightwire, as if to insinuate the attempted reclamations of memory.
Oliver’s lifelong commitment to Molly “M” Cook provides the inspirational frame by which Oliver was granted allowance to discover her own voice. Molly taught Oliver that “attention without feeling is only a report” and that, more appropriately, by giving a lot of attention to the world, you learn to love the world. This became the attentive force of Oliver’s nature poetry.
Of the rich ensemble of talking heads providing ballast to the film so that it simply does not drift away into the ether, I was most surprised and bemused by the presence of John Waters who became Oliver’s friend in Provincetown, Massachusetts. With calculated wit and charming irreverence, Waters riddles the portrait of Oliver with saucy observations that serve to humanize the poet and save her from the thin air of the pedestal.
Many have written about the co-mingling of film and poetry, but I honor Sasha Waters’ Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World as one of the most informative and illuminative melding of those two art forms that this reviewer has experienced in some time. Not to be missed if you care anything about the world.
It is a common queer experience to leave home at a young age to lead an authentic life elsewhere, and at some juncture—for one reason or another—return home to face one’s origins. It often feels problematic, ill-fitting, even artificial, to return “home” and Kai Stänicke’s art house parable Trial of Hein (2026) establishes that feeling of artificiality in the film’s opening sequences where—after 14 years away on the mainland—Hein returns home to a fishing village on a godforsaken island in the North Sea. Stänicke envisions that village as a backlot of structural façades and asks his audience to accept this theatrical convention, which is … well … unconventional, but not totally without merit. (I was reminded of a similar convention in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville (2003).) Hein won Seth Turner Best Production Design at the 2026 Neisse Film Festival and the film has likewise earned accolades at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Teddy Jury Award and is—as detailed by Peter Stein—"a near definitive recipient of Frameline’s Out in the Silence Award, which is given to an outstanding film project that highlights brave acts of LGBTQ+ visibility in places where such acts are not common.”
So the question invariably arises: why has Hein (Paul Boche) returned to the island? It’s a question the islanders themselves ask of him, unsure as they are if it is really him at all; they suspect he is an impostor. This necessitates the titular trial wherein Hein has to prove he is who he says he is; but, doing so will reveal not only why he has returned to the island but why he left it in the first place and if—as Thomas Wolfe so famously phrased—you can ever really go home again. Because it seems sure that Hein wishes he could return home. Life on the mainland has been disappointing. People move too fast, talk too much, and aren’t kind to each other. He doesn’t feel that he belongs and, thus, “home” becomes the place where he belongs. Yet, if Wolfe is right and you can never really go home again, does that mean you can never really belong anywhere?
Performances from the ensemble are all sound and grounded in psychological depth, with fully-developed and nuanced characterizations. Florian Mag’s cinematography has Dardennesque flourishes; his camera following intimately behind Hein as he refamiliarizes himself with his past, negotiating memories through half-open doors and curtained windows. Or suspended overhead detached from the elongated shadows of the court proceedings below.
A striking feature of this narrative is how Hein’s memories of his childhood are insular and disconnected from the memories of others in the village, which speaks to how private the experience of a gay child is in a culture where he is never seen nor allowed to voice his being and is instead forced to be someone he’s not, someone that fits in and belongs for fear of being rejected. Later in life that childhood strategy no longer works for an adult and the pretense at belonging is recognized for the artifice it is.
Anthony Hurd’s paintings immediately came to mind while watching Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s compelling documentary Jaripeo (2026), which had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival (in the NEXT competition) and its European premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (where it was nominated for the Teddy Award for Best Documentary). It arrives to Frameline 50 with favorable reviews of its frank and committed exploration of the queer subculture veined into the traditionally machismo traditions of the jaripeo, rendered artfully through lustrously crafted scenarios composed of vérité footage and color-saturated Super 8 film.
A jaripeo is a traditional Mexican rodeo and cultural festival that blends bull riding, equestrian exhibitions, live music, and dancing. Rooted in 16th-century ranching traditions, it is a vibrant, community-centered fiesta popular in central and southern Mexico, as well as in Mexican American communities across the U.S. In Mojica and Zweig’s documentary it is firmly situated in rural Penjamillo de Degollado, Michoacán, western Mexico, where Mojica returns to ruminate on the jaripeos of their youth. In its opening sequence Zweig asks Mojica why they have brought her to a high vantage overlooking Penjamillo and they gesture to the vista’s expanse, which speaks to how an identity is formed from where a person has been raised.
Mojica’s background as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist are on full display in Jaripeo where their non-binary approach offers a unique and privileged perspective on the otherwise traditionally gendered jaripeo where masculinity is an expectation celebrated in performative display. It’s a theme as difficult to saddle as the relaja featured in the film (a relaja is a horse that doesn’t let you ride it easy and resists domination) and yet Mojica and Zweig manage to ride it out as long as they can, which is arguably all one can do when presenting a film that is critiquing but also celebrating the construction of gender, though the film has come under some criticism for not somehow resolving these complicated constructions. I ask: how can it? Or even: why should it?
The “Lavender Scare” that began in the late 1940s and escalated rapidly into the 1950s was a moral panic and mass purge of LGBTQ+ individuals from federal government employment, driven by the belief that queer civil servants were security risks susceptible to communist blackmail but Michael Trask has observed that the true gist of its paranoia was that “the argument that homosexuals were comprehensible due to their obviousness was trumped by the claim that such figures were beyond discovery by virtue of the finesse with which they could act any role.” It was some men’s ability to pass as straight that proved most threatening.
Mojica says as much when they talk about gays being “disguised as cowboys.” The cowboy is an icon of constructed masculinity whose taciturn manner avoids having to talk about masculinity at all and who deftly skirts the potential of being apostrophized. Machismo, you could say, is the easy way out and it’s precisely that ease that makes it so attractive, if not addictive. If you can prove you’re a man, you don’t have to prove anything else, right?
This dialectic is poignantly expressed in a mid-film conversation between Mojica and Noé who—buff and bearded and thoroughly macho—is nonetheless a member of “the guild.” Noé makes it clear that he disfavors “girly” men and will only interact with straight masculine men because they’re the only ones who are really sexy and hot. Mojica argues that there are men who are inbetween girly and macho who are also sexy. “No,” Noé insists, “that’s not true.” This clearly troubles Mojica’s non-binary perspective and eventually they are forced to admit they are no longer in alignment with macho rancheros because it doesn’t feel right to hide one’s nature. But is Noé hiding? Or does he know exactly what he desires, regardless of political correctness and identity politics?
Speaking across the festival to Frameline’s inclusion of Sasha Waters’ Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026), Oliver might as well be describing Noé when she writes in her poem “Wild Geese” (1985):
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Noé has committed himself to what he desires, even if it means playing into a patriarchal system that rewards a posturing machismo. At the same time he is fully compassionate in defusing Mojica’s fear of coming out to family and friends.
Other characters that are part of the jaripeo scene include a rodeo clown who dresses in drag to entertain the crowds, posing no threat for helping jaripeo participants to have a good time. There’s also an effeminate queer who remains a devout Catholic by believing he is made in God’s image. Both are briefly sketched as caricatures to prove a passing point but not given much depth.
What lingers as an indelible image, however, is that chosen for the film’s theatrical poster: a man in a charro suit splashed with vivid pinks and blues (I was reminded of James Bidgood) suddenly enveloped in stars before the camera reveals he’s riding a mechanical bull in a dun-colored desert. Commentary on the construction of the Mexican ranchero has never been so exact and brilliant.
Sometimes in the process of interviewing the directors of a film, they become your friends. Sometimes those newly found friends then go on to make another film so that the next time you interview them it’s less an interview and more a conversation between friends. I’ve been fortunate to converse with Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller on three of their films—The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden (2013); Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2021); and on a recent trip to San Francisco and over lunch at Arlequin, Peter Asher: Everywhere Man (2025).
For over thirty years, Emmy®-award winning directors / producers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have jointly created critically acclaimed, multi-character documentary narratives that advance their characters' individual personal stories into expanded portraits of the human experience. Multiple awards have anointed their documentary features, including Isadora Duncan: Movement From the Soul (1988); Frosh: Nine Months In A Freshman Dorm (1994); Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996), which aired on Cinemax in September 1998 and was the recipient of two national Emmy® Awards; Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors, which premiered theatrically in October 1999 and aired on PBS in October 2000 as the lead program of the Independent Lens series; Ballets Russes (2005), which was recognized as one of the top five documentaries of 2005 by both the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review and appeared on a dozen critical "10 Best Films" lists; Something Ventured (2011), which premiered at SXSW, went on to play at festivals internationally, and was eventually broadcast nationwide on PBS; The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden (2013), which premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, followed by a robust festival run; as with Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2021).
This go-round Goldfine and Geller aim their talents on Peter Asher—childhood actor turned teenage pop star turned music producer (whose credits include kickstarting the careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt). As with their profile on Leonard Cohen, Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller have tapped into the musical memories of my generation with investigative, imaginative and intimate strengths, elevating the documentary format to artful and entertaining storytelling.
Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (2025) premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, then appeared at the Mill Valley Film Festival where my press credentials allowed me to view the documentary remotely; but, I regretted not being able to interview them during their Bay Area promotion. Thus, I was pleased that—while I was recently visiting San Francisco—Everywhere Man was picked up by Greenwich Entertainment for theatrical distribution, which was incentive enough for me to reach out to Dayna and Dan, invite them to lunch, and sit down to talk with them about the film in anticipation of its theatrical release at the Quad Cinema in New York on June 19, 2026, Los Angeles on June 22, and in San Rafael and my hometown Boise on June 26, 2026.
* * *
Michael Guillén: I’d like to start out by mentioning that I watched your brief interview at the Woodstock Film Festival where—along with being quite funny—you made a comparison between Peter Asher’s chaptered life and your own chaptered life as filmmakers. You said that each time you make a film, you try to make something a little different. You try not to repeat yourself. After all, it takes three to five years to make a film and that’s a committed portion of a filmmaker’s life.
I’m sure it’s serendipitous how the two of you decide to make a film.
My understanding is that the inspiration to make this film was largely
due to Linda Ronstadt?
Dayna Goldfine: Yeah, my high school boyfriend—who is still a friend—lives with Linda. When Peter first started doing his one man show, which took a while to evolve into what it is, he was coming to town and I got this random call from my friend the day of saying, “Linda and I have an extra ticket. Do you want to come and see Peter Asher?”
Guillén: This was the Bimbo’s show?
Goldfine: It wasn’t at Bimbo’s then; it was at the Rrazz Room in Hotel Nikko.
Dan Geller: Did he have a backing band at that one?
Goldfine: He did.
Geller: It was more a musical memoir than a one man show.
Goldfine: As I’ve said many times, I went because I wanted to meet Linda Ronstadt. I had no idea who Peter Asher was.
Geller: And her friend only had a plus one.
Goldfine: Yeah, Dan didn’t get to go.
Guillén: Marriage is a negotiation.
Goldfine: Totally! The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Rrazz Room was there were all these famous people that were coming in. I thought, “Who is this guy?” Because Robin Williams came in and Ben Fong-Torres (who’s now in our film) and all the local luminaries like Peter Coyote, so I thought, “Hmmmm. That’s interesting.” And then he started with the show and I was like, “Oh my God!” He was unbelievable.
Guillén: I have a close friend who works for Linda once a week, she comes and cooks for her and I’m sure other things, and she told me a story that disturbed me. One day Linda gave her a whole bunch of photographs and said, “Burn these.” As she was burning them, she noticed that there were photographs of Linda with Mick Jagger, among lots of other people.
Goldfine: Oh my God! Whoa.
Guillén: I said to her, “You didn’t sneak a few into your pockets? That’s what I would have done.” She said, “No. I couldn’t do that. Linda was asking me to burn them, so I burned them.” I mention that because, by contrast, I was struck that in your movie Linda wanted to remember Peter. On one level she’s trying to forget her memories but this was so important for her.
Goldfine: Because it wasn’t about her. It was about Peter. If you look at Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s beautiful documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019), you hear her voice but she doesn’t appear in it.
Guillén: I felt her appearance in your film was brave. Being challenged with Parkinsons, her willing to be interviewed on camera underscored her love for him.
Geller: We offered her to do this audio only if she preferred and she said adamantly, “No.” She wanted to be on camera. I think you hit it on the head, Dayna. She’s not one to talk about herself. She’s highly self-critical but she is loyal and absolutely aware of where intelligence sits with other people. She knows that Peter is brilliant. When Dayna asked her where her career would be without Peter she said—I’m paraphrasing—“It would be in oblivion.”
Guillén: And with commensurate brevity, the clip of her accepting her Grammy in 1977 for “Hasten Down the Wind” says it all, pow, like that. We’re so used to people accepting awards by thanking their mother, their sister, their cousin, their uncle, their nephew, their dog!
Goldfine: And it’s because of that clip that we didn’t put in the comment about the oblivion because it felt redundant. It was in there for a while but she says it all in that clip in a very sweet way.
Guillén: I’m impressed with your editorial finesse….
Geller: Obsession.
Guillén: … and the way you have structured this documentary. Clearly you were using Peter’s musical memoir as a spine. Was it when you saw him perform at the Hotel Nikko that you decided to make this film?
Geller: Dayna came home that night saying that this would be an incredible story to portray in one way or the other but that there was a filmmaker, CC Goldewater, already there filming a little bit.
Goldfine: I noticed another woman with a camera and I went up to her and said, “Are you by chance making a documentary about Peter?” and she said, “I am.” And I said, “Let me tell you something: it’s not competitive at all and it’s the biggest compliment I can give you but I’m very jealous. Go out and make a great one.”
Geller: We were over for lunch at Linda’s house and we asked, “Ever hear anything else about that CC Goldwater project?” I think what happened is she just didn’t pursue it further. So we reached out to CC because we didn’t want to step on her toes obviously. Peter was coming to Bimbos in the Fall of 2019 and Linda arranged for all of us to get together after the show at Bimbo’s. She prepped Peter to understand that there was the likelihood that Dayna and I were going to ask him about using his memory show as a spine but doing a movie about him, particularly about that period of his life. We were well into editing on Hallelujah, our Leonard Cohen movie, which he was aware of. When we asked him, his immediate response was, “But I’m no Leonard Cohen.” I remember saying, “That’s a great answer. Because that’s the whole point. You are you and Leonard’s Leonard. Different movies. Different ideas.”
So from that moment COVID just shut everything down for a couple of years. We had to get vaccinated, continue talks, and then get into gear.
Guillén: Well, it’s true that you make different films each time. Your own chapters are quite distinct. Whereas Hallelujah was about a song and a songwriter….
Goldfine: It was more spiritual.
Guillén: What I got most out of your film on Peter was discovering his unknown role as a music producer, which is often the case. You never know who the producers are most of the time. I used to know a producer down in L.A. who hated people knowing what he did. He was extremely private about it. He’d come to visit me in San Francisco and stay at my place, and he’d often be reading scripts. One morning he said to me, “I’ve just read the most interesting script. It’s about this little kid who sees dead people.”
Goldfine: Oh my God! Wow.
Guillén: How many producers do you have on this film? You have yourselves and your company and you worked with another couple?
Goldfine: We have multiple Executive Producers.
Guillén: So what’s your title?
Geller: We’re Producer Directors. Mike Drews and Robin Sagon and Dayna and I formed a company WWOL Company to make this movie. We’re actually making another movie together. They’re the investor partners but they’re creatively fabulous. I went to college with Mike. We’re simpatico. Mike, Robin, Dayna and I have known each other for many decades.
Guillén: Were Mike and Robin the ones who negotiated the Greenwich distribution deal?
Goldfine: No, we did. Along with working with Submarine.
Guillén: And who are Submarine?
Goldfine: Submarine is one of the two top sales agents who come on board—sometimes when a film is in production or post—but, in our case it was all finished for the most part. They saw the film, knew it was going to Telluride, and got excited about it. They wanted to get on board, shepherd it through, and see if they could find a buyer for it.
Guillén: And they did!
Geller: And they did. So Mike’s a Reproductive Endocrinologist.
Guillén: Okaaaaaay. [Eyes blinking.] I can’t believe he said that! I would have totally butchered pronouncing that. A Re.pro.duct.ive Endo.crin.olo.gist….
Geller: An Infertility Specialist. Robin worked for many years at the CBS radio network as a cultural reporter. She now runs a horse ranch for therapeutic purposes for children and/or adults who are challenged or have been traumatized. They’re not film people by nature but they have become film people. We’ve all come together to work creatively.
Goldfine: They were involved in a smaller way on Hallelujah. They also have EP credits on that one. They had such a good time with that film that they said, “We want to be involved from the beginning on your next one.”
Guillén: What is Greenwich Entertainment’s reputation? Why are they a good fit for this film?
Goldfine: Ed Arentz, who’s one of the two principals, he’s—I don’t think he would care if I said this about him—but, he’s one of the original gangsters of independent film distribution. We first got to know him in the ‘90s because he was running and booking Cinema Village in New York, which was one of the only theaters and he was one of the only bookers who would actually play indie documentaries. He started agreeing to show our little documentaries that we finished in the ‘90s. Then he went on and founded Music Box, which is kind of a precursor to Greenwich. It’s still in existence but he left Music Box to found Greenwich. Since then, he’s distributed two major music documentaries that we love very much—Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice and Echo In the Canyon.
Guillén: So music is a strong suit for him?
Geller: But he’s also distributed a lot of fiction and non-fiction films. His company Greenwich is really effective and very clever about how to work in a changing marketplace and they’re honest.
Guillén: Well, that’s a novelty….
Geller: It is!
Goldfine: They’re very respected. It’s been gratifying … I mean, the announcement’s only been out about a week but I’ve been surprised by how many bookers have reached out already.
Guillén: How would they roll out a film like yours? Do they go by region? Is it national?
Geller: Typically there’s a national rollout that starts simultaneously or is staggered by major markets.
Goldfine: I wouldn’t say national.
Geller: I mean national like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles. Then they would branch out from there.
Guillén: I want to make sure it gets to Boise.
Goldfine: Me too! Hopefully, the deal is that a lot of the smaller towns are waiting to see how it does in New York, San Francisco and L.A. It’s not that they wouldn’t book it at all but the length of their booking and their commitment to the film will depend a lot on whether it does okay in those first three places.
Guillén: Returning to the chapters of Peter’s life, you focused in depth on the earliest most formative chapters of his career when you could feel him morphing, beginning with his being a child actor. I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet, but I have located all except maybe one of them. Outpost in Malaya (1952) is available for rental on Prime. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) television series is on YouTube.
Goldfine: Which one can’t you find? Maybe we can get you a link.
Guillén: I couldn’t find Isn’t Life Wonderful, which isn’t even included in his IMdb credits.
Goldfine: That one is hard to find. I think we somehow had to get a DVD of it. It’s so hard to find that. There’s one that was in the film for a long time but we had to shorten that section up. He performed with Boris Karloff in an episode of the series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1954-56). It’s hilarious. Peter plays this potentially murderous young kid. That makes him the last surviving actor to have ever acted with Boris Karloff.
Guillén: Why doesn’t it surprise me that he starred in a movie with Boris Karloff? He’s Zelig, right?
Goldfine: He’s Zelig!!
Guillén: I’ve seen that repeatedly mentioned in various write-ups. It’s stunning his presence in the careers of so many artists. Myself, as a teenager growing up in (and wanting to escape from) Twin Falls, Idaho, I was deeply influenced by the diaries of Anaïs Nin. She had a line that aligned with my dream of escaping Idaho; she said: “All I want is to be at the cultural hub of things.” That became an inspirational mantra for me: go somewhere where you can meet and befriend other artists.
Peter appeared to have the same mantra. He knew and knows everybody. He is literally, as you describe him, an “everywhere man” and why I was intrigued by—having been so much a part of the lives of so many people—he cloaked himself a bit in the background invisibility of production such that, like yourself, I didn’t really know who Peter Asher was. I mean, I briefly knew him as Peter and Gordon.
Geller: In some ways that was the last time he was thrust into the limelight in that way or even necessarily wanted to be in the limelight quite that way. He also was never a hostile producer, the way that you might think of some producers, particularly Phil Spector; his was a style where there was a strong chance you would know who produced the record. Peter’s production style was always in service to the artist and the work. That’s why he’s a little bit invisible when most people ask who’s the producer.
Guillén: And quite frankly if it’s a choice between Peter Asher and Phil Spector….
Goldfine: I know, right?
Guillén: I recently watched Sadie Frost’s 2024 documentary on Twiggy. She’s a fascinating person and the documentary is a survey of her own chaptered life. There’s an episode where Phil Spector invites her and her husband over. They’re sitting there for an hour and he hasn’t shown up. Her husband says, “This is getting a little creepy. Why don’t we just go?” The moment he says that Phil Spector’s voice comes over an intercom and he says, “I’m not going to call you Twiggy. I’m NOT going to call you Twiggy.” Her husband turns to Twiggy and says, “That’s way too weird. Let’s get out of here.” Just then the doors fling open and there’s Phil Spector, repeating, “I’m not going to call you Twiggy.” And he pulls out a gun. Her husband picks Twiggy up and runs out of the house. A couple of months later he shot Lana Clarkson. In the documentary Twiggy says she was lucky to be alive.
I only relay that because you mentioned Phil Spector and I wanted to ask about Twiggy being in your documentary. What was her connection with Peter?
Geller: They became friends a little later on but Twiggy was at the center of….
Guillén: …of the London Indica scene!! Of course. That makes sense.
Goldfine: Again, there’s more to that story that was in the film but it had to come out because the film couldn’t be longer than two hours.
Guillén: Not if you didn’t want The Hollywood Reporter getting on your case about it!
Goldfine: Just as an aside, when someone says, “Oh, The Hollywood Reporter loved your film or The Hollywood Reporter panned your film”, I feel compelled to say, “No, no, no, Dan Feinberg loved our film or Dan Feinberg panned our film.” Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that one person at a big outlet like The Hollywood Reporter becomes the voice for the whole outlet?
Guillén: I hear what you’re saying. It’s a disproportionate thumb on the scales of how a movie’s received.
Goldfine: But what I was going to say was that when Peter was at Apple Records the second most famous artist for Apple was Mary Hopkins and her song “Those Were the Days”. Twiggy actually discovered Mary Hopkins and brought her to Apple. Peter knew Twiggy from that rock historical moment. Again, that was in the film but way too complicated. So Peter, Twiggy and Paul McCartney drove up to see this girl who had no idea that she was about to become so famous.
Guillén: You admitted a little earlier that one of the motivations that drove you to make this film was because you wanted to meet Linda Ronstadt. Of the many talking heads in your documentary, I would have been delighted to meet James Taylor. And I would have loved to talk to Carole King because she’s a remarkable songwriter and has been for a long time.
Goldfine: And doesn’t do interviews. Her daughter was shocked that she agreed to let us interview her.
Guillén: But of course she did because it was about Peter Asher!
Goldfine: Her daughter said, “I’ll ask her because it’s about Peter but she’s not going to say yes.”
Guillén: I was impressed how you incorporated Paul McCartney into your film because, of course, it was doubtful he would meet you.
Geller: But he thought about it, he really did, but at that moment he was so overwhelmed with all the Beatles things he was doing, and being on tour, and the Wings documentary, that he was at a breaking point. But he really weighed it. It worked out so well when we asked—in lieu of an interview—could we have the audio from Barry Miles’ 1997 interviews with him for the Many Years From Now book and he said, “Sure. Show me what you want.”
Guillén: And that was temporally appropriate.
Geller: It was far more close to when these events happened and felt really intimate in a way that—even when we do a film shoot and keep it intimate—at that point in the ‘90s he had known Miles for decades and so in their sitting there at a table talking there’s a specific intimacy that comes out of that.
Goldfine: As you said, it was temporally appropriate and his memory was a lot clearer.
Guillén: And one of the pop cultural pops that went off in my brain watching your film was not knowing that Paul McCartney had written the early songs for Peter and Gordon.
Goldfine: I know! Isn’t that wild?
Guillén: It is wild, as were all the many connections between he and Peter; Paul’s involvement with Peter’s sister Jane. There’s an intimacy to this film, not only about music history, but also this cultural hub that I find so important, this social fabric that Peter was so much a part of, both warp and weft.
Goldfine: As we mentioned earlier he’s often compared to Zelig and Forrest Gump and what I would say about the Zelig reference is that—yes, Zelig—but way more active in terms of his participation than a Zelig would be. Zelig is the guy who’s standing on the outskirts, always there, always looking in, but Peter was very hands on.
Guillén: Agreed. Peter was more like Dolly Levi. He was arranging all of these relationships that are now considered classic. Breaking up marriages!
Geller: He never has had nor continues to have any kind of master plan. More begins to show up the more you do, right? He never had any grand master plan other than his deep intuition that he always wanted to be a record producer.
Goldfine: I think saying yes, that could be a plan if you answer yes when you’re asked to do something you want to do.
Guillén: I’m reminded of when Dick Cavett interviewed Katherine Hepburn and he asked her how she had gotten into acting and she said, “I was born with energy.” I can see that applying to Peter. I subscribe to an ancient pre-Socratic philosophy regarding the oak and the acorn.
Goldfine: Explain.
Guillén: Well, it’s not popular now because it reeks of predetermination, but the idea is that when you’re in the countryside and you see a beautiful old oak tree with its branches spreading out into the sky, that was already in the acorn. Some people are just meant to be who they are. They’re born with an energy they act upon.
Goldfine: I think you’re right.
Geller: Given the proper nurturance and when they’re born and where they’re born…
Guillén: I think of it more as an allowance. They’re allowed to become themselves. Peter Asher was allowed to become himself because the culture at the time was allowing artists that opportunity.
Geller: Also, his parents allowed it. He said another set of parents might have said, “You will become a physician” or “you will become a barrister” but they gave him room to be who he was.
Guillén: That’s exactly it. That’s what I’m saying. They allowed him to become himself, which is true to the oak and the acorn theory. Trying to become yourself within the confines of what we call civilization is very difficult. First you have parents who—as you were saying—have ideas about who they want you to be—a physician, a barrister. Most parents are not like Peter’s parents. They send you to schools who try to mold you, who teach you to conform, and then next is religion and that shapes you, and then you get married and that has its fair share of compromises and negotiations.
[Dayna and Dan both nod their heads yes at the same time, which makes me burst out laughing.]
I have often said because I truly believe it that most people lead inauthentic lives.
Goldfine: Intentionally though?
Guillén: Well, yes, because they succumb to the pressures of civilization. They tell themselves, “Oh, I better please Dad and do what he says.” Or I better obey my teachers or adhere to my Sunday school lessons. I better do what Dayna tells me to do … or else!! One of the reasons I’m attracted to the idea of a cultural hub is because I’m only attracted to authentic people. Just as your documentaries are always attracted to authentic people. Even if they’re strange. Even if they go off to live by themselves on an island in the Galapagos.
Goldfine: They were authentic. Leonard Cohen is an example to me of someone who—maybe even more so but as much as Peter for sure—came into the world as himself. He was destined to be Leonard Cohen.
Geller: I think about Lucy Gray when at some point we were having a discussion about him and how our films are always different and she said, “You don’t quite get it about your films, do you? All your films are about the process of people becoming their truest self.” And I thought, “She’s kind of right.” All our subjects—Frosh, Isadora—they were people who all were on a quest, a voyage, to discover or become their truest self.
Guillén: That’s the inspiration of your films. Of the three films I’ve had the opportunity to talk to you about, that’s exactly what it is. I don’t know about most people but I think most films are meant to make the spectator passive.
Goldfine: You do?!
Guillén: Yes, I think a lot of films are meant to make you passive. But your films invite the person watching them to want to be like the subject they’re watching.
Goldfine: Thank you.
Guillén: You’ve chosen subjects who are idiosyncratic and successful at that.
Geller: What I love about cinema is that it works primarily first through emotions and next the intellect maybe and instead invites you to be the people on screen and feel the way they might feel or at least project your feeling into them. Really great documentaries do that for me, like Come See Me in the Good Light. You want to be with those people and be like those people.
Guillén: As filmmakers when you decide upon the subject of a film, knowing it will be a chapter of your life, and in a sense you’re becoming yourselves, have you seen an evolution in your personalities as you explore these subject personalities? I mean, surely you wanted to be Leonard Cohen?
Goldfine: I just wanted to be able to sing in tune! I feel I’ve become more philosophical about the process, not that there aren’t still lots and lots of dark nights of soul where I think, “Can we actually make this thing fly?” The first film that made me philosophical about the idea of chapters was when we did Ballets Russes because it’s the first one where I realized, “Oh yeah, we take on these things because there’s something there that’s nudging us” and the actual reason for doing it—at least for me—doesn’t become clear until we’re well into the project. In Ballets Russes we were in the process of filming it and had probably shot a handful of good answers when all of a sudden it occurred to me, “Oh, I just turned 40, I’m thinking about the aging process. Maybe that’s why we’re doing this project.” Here are these people who are octogenarians, and some nonagenarians, and they’re leading these lives—talk about leading true authentic lives!—they all said, “What if we didn’t care about making money and we just wanted to live in the art and live a life of creativity?” That was the first time where I was like, “Okay. I was gravitating towards the project because I was looking for role models in the aging process, but I didn’t know that at the beginning.
Geller: If I’m getting the aspect of your question right—has it changed us?—it’s that acorn issue you bring up. Would I have been this way no matter what? I don’t know; but, what I do see is that—in each chapter that we engage with people or stories or milieus that may be different from each other—there is that commonality of struggling to become your fuller self. That does reinforce this notion that it would be easier to sit back and make the same kind of film over and over again than it is to keep going to something new and try to learn from it and engage with it in a way that is so rewarding and fulfilling in the process of making. In that way, yeah, it does add fuel to the fire to say, “Let’s try something really different. Let’s do something different again.” The next film we’re working on is radically different. I feel in some ways supported by all of the people that we made films about along the way. Keep doing it. Try something different.
Peter’s a perfect example. Why not do a comedy album because Robin Williams is there? Or do a bluegrass album with Sea of Blood?
Guillén: And you can see how Peter is celebrating his own life with the memoir tour.
Goldfine: It’s true and he’s still doing it. He’s on the road every week with that show.
Guillén: It reminds me of the line from Tennyson: “I am a part of all who I have met.”
Geller: There’s a closing line in Ballets Russes by Dame Alicia Markova that she says during our interview that—when she said it—Dayna and I looked at each other and the hair went up on the back of our necks. It was such a gift! At this point people watching the movie have been through the whole Ballets Russes voyage—it’s Balanchine and it’s Stravinsky and it’s Matisse—so when Dame Alicia says, “We never made much money, but when I think about how I worked with this one here and that one there”—and you know who she’s talking about—“think about how rich I am.” That’s a motto for a life. How fantastic is that?
I feel so incredibly privileged to be able to engage with these worlds that making a movie gives me access. I can’t otherwise knock on Peter’s door and say, “You might not know me and there’s nothing I want to do, I just want to hang out with you for a while.”
Guillén: I know I’ve asked you this before, but I remain interested in how the two of you assemble the different segments of your films, and especially this one, where you have so much material, primary interviews, recorded footage, video footage, music rights….
Geller: It’s really important to give credit to Darren Lund who was the prime editor on this project—and Jason Reid for a little while—but Darren especially because he was there all the way through. We had made it clear to Darren and to Jason when we brought them on board that Dayna and I would be editing and we’d all be trading scenes out of point. But Darren took it far down the road before we then began to jump in and edit each other’s scenes and talk about how to restructure, where the problems were, where things were flowing, where we loved things but had to get rid of them anyway, so he deserves an enormous amount of credit.
Goldfine: This film is very episodic, right? When we started we were working with both Darren and Jason who at the time were coming as a duo. We organized the project, almost like chapters, so it was really easy to go, alright, there’s the whole chapter on Apple Records and there’s the whole chapter on the Indica Gallery and Bookshop; but, once we had organized all the footage and archival materials in these pod-like chapters, I remember saying to both Darren and Jason before they started cutting anything, “What chapter would you start with?” and Darren raised his hand and said, “I want to start with Indica.” I was like, “Oh man, you are bold.” Because that was such a complicated thing.
Guillén: Which reminds me of that great serendipitous footage of the tour group in front of the former storefront of Indica.
Geller: That was even more strange than we could put into the film. Their bus had a flat tire. They weren’t going to be in there. They were only going to pass by and look in through the window.
Guillén: And then one of them goes, “Are you Peter Asher?!!”
Goldfine: It was one of those moments if you’re lucky it happens once in every film where you’re like, “I’m meant to be doing this.” That was one of the first scenes that Darren cut and we both thought, “Wow, he’s really good with verité and he caught that intangible surprise and sweetness.
Guillén: And Peter’s generosity. A lot of celebrities might say, “No, I don’t want to take a selfie with you” but he was so open.
Goldfine: No, Peter is so generous.
Geller: And he also has a great sense of humor, which is why he was friends with Robin Williams, Eric Idle, and Steve Martin. He could see the absurdity of the moment as well. As far as the Steve Martin part, which we shot pretty late in the game, that was one where we just had a hunch something might come up out of that. We made it clear from the beginning with Peter—and Steve was totally up for this—that we wanted them together, we didn’t want to do an interview with Steve. We thought that since they were friends something might come out of this. What came out of it was just so wonderful. It opened the film nicely.
Guillén: And their being together bookends the film.
Goldfine: But we didn’t know that when we shot it.
Geller: We do tend to like to work in—it’s not exactly a circularity—but a spiral where you come back around to something to get a sense of closure and completeness that comes from that, which I find emotionally satisfying when I watch a movie.
Goldfine: But we also say to ourselves and editors that we’re starting to work with, “We’re not cutting the beginning and the ending until we have the whole arc of the story.” That beginning was shelved. We didn’t even know what we were going to do with it. We basically started with … well, we didn’t even necessarily start with the beginning of Peter’s show. But Darren said, “I want to see what I can make of Indica.” His first cut was 25 minutes of just that section. And then to be equally ambitious Jason said, “I want to do Apple” and that section was 25 minutes too, and then I said I wanted to something smaller like Peter’s connection with the Everly Brothers.
Guillén: I think I’ve also asked you this before, but I’m interested in what your respective roles are when you’re actually filming? I especially noticed in this film that it’s you, Dayna, who seems to be doing most of the interviewing?
Goldfine: Dan’s shooting and in general I do, I prep all the questions, I show them to Dan and Dan sometimes adds or subtracts or changes. Then I do the primary interview.
Geller: If it feels like there’s something that dawns on me in the course of an answer I’ll say to whoever we’re filming, “Hey, could you follow up on that?” Usually at some point Dayna will say, “Wait, wait, I’m not done asking my question.”
Guillén: Don’t interrupt me!!
Goldfine: Well, I try to keep it as a personal conversation because the best interviews are when they’re conversations, right? In fact, situationally I try to get as close to a knee-to-knee conversation with whoever we’re filming where we’re really making eye contact. And I’ll tell them, “Even if Dan throws in a question, please keep looking at me.”
Guillén: You do have an intimate style that allows people to talk to you, almost to confide in you. You’re equally gracious. Case in point, when you were asking Peter about Betsy….
Goldfine: Oh my God, that was the most painful moment.
Guillén: It is painful and you could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it and he gave you just a little bit but you didn’t push him, which I respected.
Goldfine: I barely could bring myself to ask the question. Dan and I went and interviewed him a number of times at that same location.
Geller: It was a desk in an upstairs bedroom above his office.
Goldfine: We said, “Okay, it’s time for one of the flowered shirt interviews again…”
Guillén: The “flowered shirt” interview…?!
Goldfine: It’s a particular shirt. We said: “Can you just haul that shirt out again so that it looks like we’re interviewing you at the same time?”
Geller: For continuity.
Goldfine: In Ballets Russes we did that a lot with Freddy Franklin. “We need to put you in the green chair again.”
Guillén: Now, see? This is why I love you: you’re exposing what’s behind the curtain.
Geller: Of course! It’s not news or reportage in that sense, it’s hybrid with cinema where there is artifice involved.
Guillén: There has to be.
Goldfine: Also, I think it’s comforting to an audience member when you’re interviewing someone that the clothing doesn’t keep changing so you’re not distracted. In Peter’s case, if he’s either onstage or in his flowered shirt at his desk it’s one less thing you have to think about.
Geller: About pushing him, at that point where we’re asking that specific question we had already filmed several things where we began to ask him about Betsy. We had filmed Eric Idle talking about how Peter suppressed feelings. We had filmed and asked Peter about his father’s suicide. So when Dayna put the question to him about how Betsy’s disintegration affected him, at that point his body language had him looking out the window, getting so uncomfortable, that we didn’t need to push him. By that point we had all these moments that we knew an audience would understand him. They would have gone through these other moments with him to see that this was the peak of his uncomfortable responses to these questions. We didn’t need to ask any more.
Guillén: It totally graphs a cultural intuition because—in full disclosure—I weathered substance abuse issues for many years while I watched many others go. Peter mentioned this in your documentary: why do some people survive and others don’t? Why does drug abuse affect some people in devastating ways and skirt others? I loved Linda’s comment: “It was fun … but it ruined everything.”
Goldfine: People kept saying there had to have been things that happened in Peter’s life that were not all positive. Then we would say, “Yeah, his first wife, it was really a horrible split. She disintegrated.” Then people would say, “You’re not putting that in the film? You have to put those things in the film.”
Guillén: But why?
Goldfine: I think it makes the film stronger. I do. I agreed with them but I was also trying to figure out how to do it because, hey, I don’t like to torture someone and for Peter to talk about those things given his cultural upbringing I knew it was going to be very painful. But we did feel there were emotional holes in the film and that both those two things were formative. When he says, after he twists and writhes in that Betsy moment, “Well, I guess I buried myself in my career” and then the next thing you see that they break up in the same year that he gets on the cover of Rolling Stone because he was clearly producer of the year. It explains why he did that.
Geller: To understand why he is so sensitive to other artists and their expression of themselves in their music and then to bring the best of that onto a recording, you need to understand then what were the sensitivities he had in his life, the pain as well as the joy, because—face it—most songwriters are singing about trauma or pain, or a quest for something. Songs generally aren’t just bright and celebratory.
Guillén: I asked why but I understand the necessity. I’ve commented on this elsewhere but it seems like every bio pic I see or every documentary profiling an artist reveals that creativity isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. It’s almost like being a shaman. Most shamans suffer for their cultures. A lot of artists suffer for their cultures. I was a student of Joseph Campbell’s and I remember him saying to me once, “Artists are the saints of our times” in the sense that saints were often persecuted, or even earned the mantle of sainthood by being persecuted.
Goldfine: I don’t think Peter suffered much. That’s the thing. For the most part he did live an amazingly positive life.
Guillén: He didn’t get in his own way. When I talk about becoming yourself, Peter didn’t get in his own way. He didn’t try to be something he wasn’t. There’s a feeling of ease to what he accomplished and that’s the inspiration he offers: if you can get out of your own way, you can actually help other people be creative, you can be creative. The blazing testament to that is your montage of all the album covers of albums he produced. Oh, my fucking God!! It’s unbelievable! So many of those album covers triggered immediate memories within me. I grew up listening to those albums, loving them. He entered into my life and impacted my life through his productiion of them.
Goldfine: They were all so different.
Guillén: Which again speaks to his invisibility as a producer. Perhaps invisibility is requisite to promoting the visibility of others? I don’t know.
Goldfine: I don’t really care what critics think—we just do our thing—but one of them said that when we showed all those album covers we reduced it to a minute and didn’t follow up by interviewing Diana Ross, etc. But here’s the thing: this film is really an origin story. You know what happens afterwards.
Geller: It’s like those Marvel superhero movies!
Guillén: Exactly. You have to have a good origin story in order to lead into a chaptered life.
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