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Cinema of the soul
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“Millions of people in the Western world are documenting their lives,” says Pop Levi, musician and co-director/star of You Don’t Gotta Run, a 37-minute film premiering at the 37th annual Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (numerologists take note). “Essentially, this is just what everyone else is doing, but we’re putting it into the world with the word ‘art’ attached.” Shot on cell phones and point-and-shoot digital cameras, You Don’t Gotta Run features the music of Pop Levi—it takes its name from a tune off Never Never Love, his latest robotic glam/psychedelic soul record—and footage from a recent European press junket, shot by bandmate Lucky Beaches. With his cinematic debut, Levi is launching World Empire, a Web-based production company through which all his future work will be released (and licensed elsewhere for manufacturing and distribution). Ahead of this weekend’s screening, live performance and afterparty with his local Ninja Tune associates, the Mirror contacted Levi at his home in L.A. As his living room was recently shot (with guns) by some of his “socially connected” neighbours, Levi was chilling to some Sun Ra in his bedroom, away from the windows. Pop Levi: I’m just so excited ’cause it’s the first film production that I’ve been involved with, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. Mirror: I gather it was a positive experience. PL: What, being a kid? No, that was shit. M: Ha! No, making the film. PL: Yeah, it’s just living life. It’s gotten to the point where almost anything can be filmed and it’s possible to mould the footage into the kind of films I wanna make. I call it soul film. It’s a genre I wanna build, blurring the line between drama and documentary. M: What can we expect from World Empire? PL: Over the next year, there’s me and Lucky Beaches, Auntie Mum and Sanchez, two girls and two boys, we all live together and make music and film together and separately, a kind of ongoing artistic vibe, so I thought it would be really good to develop profiles of these four people. I want to put this into a blog format, just pure artwork—paintings and poetry, transcriptions of conversations, photo sessions or a short film or a feature film, and keep on growing these ideas until it becomes a world empire. I’m also excited by what we can do with the look of a company, you know? You can get into a real psych edge and build a company like you would any work of art. M: What’s the next film? PL: It’s called Bankrupt! M: Is it semi-autobiographical? PL: It’s 100 per cent autobiographical. M: Will you be shooting in Montreal? PL: Yes, we’re shooting the whole of the premiere. I like the idea of being bankrupt while premiering your film. It’s modern irony, isn’t it? But I especially like the way that this film is really embarrassing for me—it’s 37 minutes of torture. I don’t even know if I can sit in the room and watch it. But it’s an interesting experiment. I’m up for the challenge YOU DON’T GOTTA RUN SCREENS AT |
