Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio "Goyo" Crdenas Hernndez, has been praised as "a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions," and derided as "a massive clearance sale of leftover psychedelia." It's story and imagery has been dismissed as "a series of banal Freudianisms involving a circus family" and celebrated as "a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini." But love it or hate it, you'll never forget it, since with Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky firmly straddles the line where madness becomes genius.
Conceived and directed by Jodorowsky, who wrote the screenplay with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni, Santa Sangre tells the story of a young magician named Fenix, the son of two circus performers, who witnesses the death of his overprotective mother, Concha, at the hands of his knife throwing, hypnotist father. Concha, who in the big top is suspended from great heights by her hair, also happens to be the leader of a religious cult, which worships a girl whose arms were cut off during a violent rape. The sect's temple of worship, which houses a pool of holy blood (hence the film's name), gets bulldozed in the opening sequences. After his mother's murder, Fenix's arms are possessed by Concha - whose own arms were severed in the fatal attack by her husband - and a killing spree ensues.
Santa Sangre was released in 1989, over a decade and a half after Jodorowsky's defining films, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The low budget horror movie-cum-art house masterpiece has since gained bona fide cult status, resulting in its first official US DVD release via Severin Films in January of this year.
The multi talented Jodorowsky (who, aside from filmmaking, has also mastered comic book writing and the tarot), had previously scored his own films, but with Santa Sangre he handed the musical reigns over to English musician and composer Simon Boswell. An integral part of the post-punk power pop band Advertising, after the outfit's demise, Boswell went on to score over ninety films including Phenomena (Dario Argento), Dust Devil (Richard Stanley), Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle), Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker), and Hackers (Iain Softley).
Ironically for a composer whose rsum has a distinctly devilish slant (his latest credit is the Richard Driscoll film Back2Hell), Boswell in recent years has been collaborating with the Vatican, producing music featuring the voice of not one, but two popes. He provided the score for Santo Subito, a DVD released in 2007, which commemorated the life and death of Pope John Paul II. That was followed up with contributions to Alma Mater, an album released in 2009, which featured the voice of Pope Benedict XVI. Boswell's next papal project is an album celebrating the fast-tracked deification of Pope John Paul II, which is set for release this spring.
Given that we are a counter-culture community, when we called Boswell up, our initial focus was on the colorful orgy of sin that is Santa Sangre. But since you can't have saints without sinners, our conversation also explored more outwardly virtuous topics, and how often the best art is a seemingly contradictory balance of heavenly and hellish elements.
NP: I understand you were in LA recently. What was that trip about?
SB: That trip was about the Santa Sangre screening at the American Cinematheque. I gave a little talk beforehand and then did a Q&A at the end.
NP: When you first got involved in the project, you probably didn't think you'd be flying halfway around the world to talk about it over twenty years on.
SB: No. Well, that's true, one wouldn't. But I've been asked so many times in my career, "What's the best film that you've done?" And I have to say, when I think about it, it was very apparent even at the time that Santa Sangre was just quite a unique piece of art really.
NP: How did you get involved? Were you aware of Jodorowsky before you got the call to do the job?
SB: The whole connection to the Jodorowsky film came about through Dario Argento, the Italian director. That was the first movie I ever did. It was called Phenomena, or Creepers as it's called in the States. His assistant A. D., Michele Soavi, directed the second film I did, and the first film was produced by Dario's brother, Claudio Argento. He asked me to do Santa Sangre, so there's sort of a creative connection going through there. But I had seen El Topo when I was a student at the cinema, and it had never left me. At the time I'd never seen anything like this either, so I was aware of Jodorowsky going way back actually.
NP: The Santa Sangre project was very much an unknown quantity, at the time because, discounting Jodorowsky's kids fable Tusk (1980), there had been a huge gap between El Topo (1973), The Holly Mountain (1973), and this one.
SB: Yes, it was an awful long time. Obviously, there's great difficulty in raising money for films like that, which are supreme examples of art house cinema and probably don't make any money. There was a lot of difficulty with him raising money, but when I asked Alejandro about it, he said, "Well I don't consider myself a filmmaker." He said, "When I make a film I'm a filmmaker, but otherwise, I have plenty of other things to do." It's interesting. It's not like he felt he had a career as a filmmaker. So that was his take on that.
NP: When did you first come face to face with Jodorowsky?
SB: I flew to Rome and met him there whilst he was editing Santa Sangre, and watched the film with him. We talked through a few ideas, but he mainly sort of sent me away saying, "Just do what you want to do."
NP: So there was no grand brief?
SB: No, no, not in the slightest. It's funny I discovered subsequently - I didn't really know this [at the time] - but he was keen on me doing the music. I mean he's a musician himself.
NP: Right. This was the first film on which he'd actually handed over the reins for the music to someone else.
SB: Yes...Dario and Claudio were pushing me because I was doing a lot of electronic music which, at the time, seemed quite fresh and quite different. It was sort of somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield. I think Tubular Bells is probably an influence on loads of film composers.
But it was the idea I think of doing what was kind of fake orchestral music, but with synthetic sounds, with synths and samples. It was a little bit like the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. It clearly must have sounded nothing like that, but Jodorowsky - I mean he's a true artist in the sense that he's very happy to allow the creativity of other people to come to the fore - so I think it intrigued him, the idea that on this very organic film set in Mexico there would be an electronic score.
NP: Did he involve himself at all in the music for Santa Sangre?
SB: No, no, not at all. There was only one scene [in the film where he gave me specific input]. On the first day that I met him we were watching it through, and there's a scene where the knife thrower's wife, Concha, gets her arms cut off. It's pretty grizzly, and I said to him, "Do you want me to write something horrible for this? Something really unpleasant?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." He said, "This is like a moment of religious ecstasy for her. It must be wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. She's going to heaven." It was a very early lesson for me in smart movie making if you like, which is to...
NP: To not do the obvious?
SB: Well I get really irritated with most film music these days, and most movies. Because film music it seems to me tells you the same information you already know.
NP: Right. And I don't always want to be told in a heavy handed way what I should be feeling. It's good to work it out for yourself.
SB: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of paranoia in the film business about "let's make sure everyone understands the scene." Just kind of treating the audience like morons really. Clearly that is the case. When there's a car chase they have really car chasey music, and if there's a love scene they have some soupy love theme. And it's very interesting, Jodorowsky was the first one, but Dario also pointed this out to me. He said to me, "You know you can write beautiful music for something horrific." That makes the audience actually question what it is they're watching, and makes them more engaged in a film than less engaged. You tell people the same information twice, it's just like having too much of something really, and it usually turns me off the movie.
NP: When you saw the bare bones of Santa Sangre coming together in the editing room, what was your first impression?
SB: Well my first impression, having seen El Topo previously, was that it's been made more like a work of art than it has a movie. It has this strange atmosphere - not of bad acting - but a kind of very mannered, slightly awkward acting. They made it in English with a lot of very heavy Mexican accents. And I was just aware that the look of it was just incredibly beautifully crafted. The color palettes and the way the subject matter has something of surreal art about it.
It is quite a surreal movie. All that stuff with the elephant, when the elephant dies...it's like a Magritte or Dali feeling picture in the sense that it's just a bit bizarre. And what it makes it even more bizarre is it's not explained at all. It's not necessarily a part of the plot. It's just there because it's wonderful and crazy really. So I just knew it was a very special film. I took it in my stride because at this point I wasn't thinking I was going to be a film composer. I didn't set out to be one, so I just kind of reacted honestly to the images. And because the images are so inspiring, I think I wrote some good music for it, but I also wrote some stuff I cringe at now, because I was very nave.
NP: Well when synthesizers first came out there was the novelty element. It's only with the passage of time that we can look back and see what kinds of synthesized sounds have dated and what haven't. You don't have that issue with a violin for example, because the violin's been around for hundreds of years.
SB: Yes. I think that's very well put actually. It is interesting, you can tell which movies date and which don't, and in the same way, you're right, there's certain bits of music... But it wasn't like it was all synthesizers. There was a guitar scene in there which I wrote and played myself, which I think really expresses the soul of the young boy in it. It's very simple and full of yearning and lost innocence as well.
NP: Have you kept in touch with Jodorowsky over the years?
SB: I have actually. I don't see him that often, but I made an album over a period of 13 years actually, which I was sort of finishing about 5 years ago. I cut a lot of my film scores up into bits and then reassembled those bits as if they were samples other people had made, but it was all my own samples as it were, and created new pieces. I wanted to involve some of the filmmakers that I was particularly proud of having worked with to [do] spoken word stuff on the album. At the same time I also filmed them doing it. So I rang up Dario, and I went to Rome and filmed him saying his lines that I had written for him, and I did the same with Jodorowsky in Paris.
NP: And the "Close Your Eyes" music video was borne out of that project (see below).
SB: Yes. I had already filmed Jodorowsky five years ago doing his bits, that's on the CD, on the album. But I just thought, why not make a kind of pop promo. When they said to me I could use any clips from Santa Sangre I thought, okay, I have to do this.
NP: I know that Jodorowsky's working on a sequel to El Topo - is that something you're going to be working on?
SB: I'd love to say yes, and the only reason I'm saying I'm not sure is because he's been trying to make that for about 10 or 15 years, and I think it's by no means certain that he'll make it. I'd like to think he'd ask me but, as it's sort of the son of El Topo, and he did music for El Topo, he might want to do it himself. So I wouldn't feel at all bad about whatever decision he made on that really. I'd love to work with him, but I think he takes each kind of film on its own merits really.
NP: Has he spoken with you about the project in general?
SB: No, not really. Have you got the Santa Sangre DVD?
NP: Yes.
SB: I interviewed him. This is about the same time that I went to Paris to film him...El Topo 2 didn't come up, but I asked him about Holy Mountain and the Beatles and John Lennon. Because he was sort of taken up by John Lennon after El Topo came out as some sort of genius guru, and there was talk of him directing a Beatles film if you can imagine, which would have been amazing. And in that interview, he does talk about George Harrison. Harrison was going to be - I forget which - the thief I think was the character in Holy Mountain that he wanted to be. But Jodorowsky said, "Well there's a scene where the thief has to strip naked and have his anus washed."
NP: And Harrison wasn't up for that?
SB: So Jodorowsky said, "You don't have your ass washed, you don't do my movie."
NP: Harrison quite literally wouldn't put his ass on the line.
SB: There you go.
NP: Given the subject matter of Jodorowsky's films, particularly with regards to religion - I understand, though spiritual, he's very disapproving of organized religion because of the destruction it brings - your career has taken a different and unexpected turn because you're now working with the Pope.
SB: [laughs] Yes it has...I mean there are things that I'm deeply uncomfortable with about the Catholic Church. I'm not Catholic, I'm not religious at all. So I'm struggling with why I was asked to work with them, but they seem to quite like me. In fact the best explanation I had for it is that - there was a documentary being made about of the making of this thing, and the director of the documentary asked the priest who is creatively in charge of the project, "Why Simon Boswell? Why have you picked him?" And he kind of fell about laughing, and he said, "Jesus loves the sinner."
NP: [laughs]
SB: [laughs] So, knowing my dysfunctional lifestyle, I'm happy to have that on my gravestone really.
NP: Has that priest to watched Santa Sangre?
SB: Probably not. They're actually rather sweet. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's very difficult and wrong with the Catholic Church obviously - that's had a lot of publicity recently - but they're very kind of sweet and nave a lot of the priests that I've met.
I first got involved when they asked me to write some music for a DVD which had the funeral of John Paul II on it, and there's two stories I can tell you actually. I was on holiday near Rome because I knew this project was coming up, and I went into a meeting in the Vatican and I had my laptop bag with me. They were trying to show me this footage on the DVD. All these priests couldn't make the technology work, so I said, look, I've got my laptop, we'll watch it on here. I took it out and then saw my battery was flat, so I rummaged around in the bag and pulled all this stuff out, and onto the floor fell a copy of The Da Vinci Code.
I put my foot on that as they sat behind the desk, so I had to sit for an hour in the Vatican feeling this book burning a hole through my shoe. But at the end - this is sort of going back to their naivet - Don Giulio, who's the priest who christened me a sinner, he said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to have a song on the end of the DVD?" I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe." And he said, "Simon, you've worked with Elton John - why don't you ask Elton?" I looked at him and I had to say, "He's homosexual." He went [Simon puts on a very shocked Italian accent], "No, no."
NP: [laughs]
SB: [laughs] I thought that was quite sweet really, the idea the priest is completely unaware that Elton John is gay.
NP: Do you have any more Vatican projects in the pipeline?
SB: Yes, we do actually, funny enough. I find it so strange answering these questions as if I've become some sort of weird Vatican...
NP: Well you are the go-to guy for Vatican music.
SB: Yeah. I have to console myself actually with the fact that Michelangelo probably was too [for art] - and we don't know what he was thinking. I mean when he was doing the Sistine Chapel, he could have got there in the morning and said, "I'm not working for those bastards today." I mean, who knows what he thought.
We're doing a new album which is going to be a tribute album to John Paul II who is being made a saint at the beginning of May. We've composed some new tracks using Gregorian music, and this time asked some people to perform them. We have Andrea Bocelli, we have Placido Domingo, and we have various other world stars who are going to perform on the album. And we're trying to get a big concert together in Krakow where John Paul was born to commemorate his death. So that's the next project for the Vatican.
NP: You realize you're setting a whole new precedent for the deification process. Now no pope can be deified without a soundtrack album and at least a couple of world famous opera singers singing on it.
SB: I know. It's hideous. I'm sorry. I apologize now. But I don't think it's as bad as X Factor.
NP: Nowadays art is judged in terms of sales, and with these papal releases, the legacy of popes will be judged by how many records they sell when they die and are deified.
SB: What's interesting is of course that's how all the world thinks, but the Vatican really don't consider themselves to be a commercial entity. I mean there was a lot of difficulty in getting this album released, and they didn't want to be paid for it either. There's some payment you make to license the Pope's voice, but they really discourage people thinking of them as a business. But obviously the rest of the world thinks that way, so there's going to be some sort of comparison between things.
The last one didn't sell anywhere near what we thought it would. But I think that's because they didn't try and sell it to Catholics. They sold it to the rest of the world as a sort of classical crossover album.
NP: You don't think it's because the Catholics are more adept at downloading?
SB: [laughs]. That's a sin. Don't you know that? No, it was kind of wrongly marketed. I was only one of three composers on the album. I probably did about half of it. It was really nice music, and I think the record company got carried away with the fact that it was this classical crossover music, rather than just for Catholics. And clearly that was a mistake in terms of sales. Because if only five percent of Catholics had bought it would have sold more than Thriller, and I'd be speaking to you from a much bigger house.
NP: It is interesting the relationship between the Catholic Church and commerce. I remember going to the Vatican and on the roof there's a hut with nuns selling plastic rosary beads. I was like, haven't they read their own Bible? I mean even I know that Jesus disapproved of that kind of thing.
SB: Yeah, well I think there's a great gulf between the things one knows about Jesus and his preachings and his sayings - a huge gulf between that and organized religion in general, whether it's Catholic or Church of England or whatever. I think they've lost the basic principles of all of that stuff to be honest with you. But you know, I have to say, it's been a learning curve for me doing it because I was quite moved by being in [the Vatican]. I mean there's a lot of fantastic art that's been made in the name of religion. The Catholic Church, and churches in general, have been incredible patrons of wonderful art.
NP: Incredible patrons of the art, but then also, particularly with music, they've had a very uncomfortable relationship with artists. For example, if you make music you can shake your hips to it's considered akin to devil worship by some.
SB: You mean like Elvis wiggling his hips, that sort of temptation.
NP: When you're doing the music for the Vatican projects, have they ever come back to you to complain that anything's to jolly and therefore inappropriate?
SB: I didn't feel that sort of pressure from the Vatican. I think they're quite keen on uplifting music actually. In fact there's one track which we didn't use in the end...There's a whole branch of music which is called marian music, which is written to the memory of the Virgin Mary, particularly in Italy. It sounds like Neapolitan music, like Volare or some sort of thing Dean Martin might have sung. It's wonderful actually because there's all kind of oom-pah stuff. It sounds very jolly and very Italian. So I don't feel there's any problem with that. There's a huge debate though about the happy clappy stuff that came in the '60s, when you couldn't go into a church without some god-awful guitarist singing some new hymn he'd written. I think the current Pope is very disapproving of that, and my god, I agree with him.
NP: So he's not a happy, clappy Pope?
SB: He's not a happy, clappy Pope. No, he's not. Basically he likes Mozart and music like that. That's pretty uplifting stuff.
NP: It's interesting when you talk about the marian genre of music because that seems to be reminiscent of the Santa Sangre music in the scenes where Concha is fighting to preserve her temple.
SB: Yes. Yeah, well that's interesting...In fact, I saw that scene just recently, where they're confronting the people who want to knock their church down. They sing this song called "Fin Del Mundo," which is a Mexican song about the end of the world. One of the jobs I had to do quite a lot of in Santa Sangre was to fix or add to things which they'd literally recorded live on the set. When I got that clip there was just people singing. You could hear like one guitar way off in the distance. I had to stick a load of guitars and things on it and make it into something that sounded like it was a bit more peppy really, give it a bit of zap.
NP: In the DVD extras Jodorowsky talks about that scene. How he was searching for authentic music, and how he was randomly tapped on the foot by a beggar in the street. He saw it as a sign, and asked the guy where he could find some music. And the guy, as it turned out, was in a blind choir, which Jodorowsky then used for that scene.
SB: Exactly. It's funny, that's very particular of Jodorowsky. He finds meaning in wherever life takes him. I really admire him for that. You were talking earlier about his interest in spiritual things rather than organized religion. You know he is very knowledgeable about the tarot and he gives tarot card readings every Wednesday in a caf just on the corner of the block where he lives in Paris. Loads of people come from all around the world every week to have their tarot read by him.
NP: Have you had your tarot read by him?
SB: No, I haven't. I was a little bit scared really.
NP: Well of course the Catholic Church would say tarot was akin to devil worship.
SB: Oh my god, of course they would. They would indeed. But you know, it's funny, people talk about the Catholic Church like it's all of a like mind - and it's not. What I discovered was that it's full of people who don't agree on all kinds of things. It's not like they're all unified in this particular way of looking at the world. Being a Catholic means lots of different things to different people.
NP: Even within the church - or maybe especially within the church.
SB: Yeah, even within the Vatican City. I mean there are different orders of priests. You have Paulines and Jesuits, and they really have a different world view actually. The Paulines, for example, run the whole media wing of the Vatican, and they're more relaxed. They wear jeans and are much more into film and music. They run all the Catholic bookshops all around the world, and are involved in the media, the newspapers and TV stations that the Vatican own. And I'm sure they're at complete loggerheads with the Jesuits who are part of that rather austere group who want everyone to be a bit miserable.
NP: On the DVD you talk about how Jodorowsky had this fatalistic approach to the music; He'd hired you, and therefore the music he got was the music he got because it was in your hands.
SB: Yeah.
NP: Ironically that seems to be a similar approach to what you experienced with the Catholic Church.
SB: Doesn't it, yeah. That's interesting. Yes. I guess so. It is a sort of fatalistic approach. I have to say I've really taken that lesson through into my life...and also coincidences that you come across in your life. I'm more of a believer in Jung than anything religious, and Jung says that what we see as being coincidences is really our unconscious making things happen for us. It's not that there's a level of awareness, but our unconscious drives our life in certain directions that we're not aware of, which is why things happen that you think, my god, that's such a coincidence.
NP: So there's a connection in the work process, because you're attracted to situations where you're not being micromanaged. You want to work with people who will trust your choices - even if it might not be their choices - because, at the end of the day, that's why they hired you. That's the whole point with art. You're not buying a commodity, you're buying someone's creativity and taste.
SB: That vision. That's true. Absolutely, and you know, this couldn't be more relevant I suppose. I find that the best directors one works with are directors who are generous enough and secure in their own selves enough to hand something over to someone. And that the worst directors just try and control everything, being sort of Nazi directors that are very unwilling to let people do their thing. And it's really, I think, a function of being a secure person or insecure person.
NP: So beyond Jodorowsky and the Catholic Church, who are the directors you've had good experiences with?
SB: Richard Stanley, for example, do you know his work? I did work on most of the stuff that he's made. There's a movie called Hardware and a movie called Dust Devil, and I think some of my best music has been for him and Jodorowsky and people who just let me do my own thing, you know, let me have an interpretation of my own on the film. Clive Barker also was like that. He's very trusting. It's very difficult I think for directors to hand over their baby essentially to someone doing music. Because music is the one thing you can't really describe in words, and it has a huge influence on the outcome of a film, so it's a great act of trust for a director to hire a composer. I'm always very aware of that.
NP: What's next for you?
SB: I'm working on a film with Richard Stanley, which is a film with different segments by different directors. And I've just been to Sundance, and there's a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun. It's a Rutger Hauer film, and it pushes the level of bad taste to a new high or low, whichever you want to describe it. It's a completely over the top movie, and I think it's going to be a crossover hit. I didn't score it. I was contacted about them licensing a song that I'd written for the first movie I ever did with Dario Argento for this really cool sequence. I'm very pleased about that. That's coming out, and I think will take the world by storm.
NP: I'm glad. I think Rutger Hauer is really underrated.
SB: Yes, I think so too.
NP: He's a very intriguing presence on the screen.
SB: Yes. Particularly in this film, let me tell you. It's very funny, but completely over the top.
NP: There is that fine line between bad taste and genius. That's always something that Jodorowsky's straddled isn't it? People love him or hate him, or say his work's tasteless or high art.
SB: Yes, that's true. That is true. Even in Santa Sangre, the elephant sequence, that scene's gratuitous but in a rather wonderful way. It doesn't tell you anything extra about the film's story. It's just a wonderful, weird thing. I think it's very difficult to ride that line, and let me tell you, Hobo with a Shotgun has some scenes which you will not believe....
What's this website you've got? What is that?
NP: Suicide Girls? It's a counter culture website. It's named after a term Chuck Palahniuk coined. He was talking about how those with tattoos and piercings are essentially choosing to commit social suicide by permanently marking their body, which ultimately means that there are certain sections of society that they're permanently barred from entering or getting approval from.
And of course there's a big rite of passage tattoo scene in Santa Sangre between Fenix and his father, so it's an iconic film within our community. Also SuicideGirls is about redefining beauty, and Santa Sangre is a very beautiful movie, but it could also be perceived as being ugly by some. There's beauty in the ugliness and in the horror.
SB: Yes, exactly. No, it's true. That's very interesting. It's a very interesting observation. And it's very true. Yeah, of course, tattooing is a big statement, isn't it really?
NP: And the choice that Jodorowsky made that you were talking about earlier with the music in the scene where Concha's arms are sliced off, he was inclined to see that as a moment of transcendence, but someone else might only have envisioned it as a horrific and ugly scene. He chose to see the beauty in it.
SB: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that's what great artists do to be honest. They create a resonance within things, between what you see and what you feel. The contradiction is everything - it's how life really is.
So when I look at my life, and how I work on horror movies and with the Pope, I remember one thing. As a teenager the writer who influenced me the most was William Blake, and in particular a work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even when he wrote it, which was the late 18th century, he was making a statement against the church basically, but saying that true creativity has to have both energy, which he sees as hell, and form, which he sees is like heaven or the restrictive aspects of the Church like the Ten Commandments.
His famous poem, "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright," is about the idea of taking this pure energy and putting it into words, into the restrictive form of poetry, where this contradiction allows the finished poem to throb and burst as the fire within tries to bend the bars of it's prison. For me, this is a sensible way to see the creative process, which is to put something that contains chaos, or comes from chaos into something that has form, like a film, just as Jodorowsky did. But not a film where the violence of that scene with Concha is just violence. It must contain an element that challenges, that pushes, that provokes and even insults.
That's what the best art is, for me. It's stuff which is inexplicably contradictory. And when I was sitting at night, pretty much alone in St. Peter's - because we recorded in there at night with a Gregorian choir - I remember not only being very moved by it being a very spiritual experience, being in that huge space, surrounded by Michelangelo's art instead of by a zillion Japanese tourists, but that it was also that I couldn't be a better living embodiment of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In my life, as well as my art. Horror may be beautiful. And beauty may contain true horror.
The first official US DVD and BluRay release of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre is available now. The 2-disc set features a new high definition transfer of the original film plus over five hours of additional content, including an interview with Jodorowsky conducted by Simon Boswell.
Close Your Eyes, an album of music drawn from over 50 of Simon Boswell's original film scores which features the voices of numerous singers, actors and directors (including Jodorowsky), is available via iTunes and at SimonBoswell.com/.
Sources for quotes: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (positive) and Hal Hinson, Washington Post (negative).
Conceived and directed by Jodorowsky, who wrote the screenplay with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni, Santa Sangre tells the story of a young magician named Fenix, the son of two circus performers, who witnesses the death of his overprotective mother, Concha, at the hands of his knife throwing, hypnotist father. Concha, who in the big top is suspended from great heights by her hair, also happens to be the leader of a religious cult, which worships a girl whose arms were cut off during a violent rape. The sect's temple of worship, which houses a pool of holy blood (hence the film's name), gets bulldozed in the opening sequences. After his mother's murder, Fenix's arms are possessed by Concha - whose own arms were severed in the fatal attack by her husband - and a killing spree ensues.
Santa Sangre was released in 1989, over a decade and a half after Jodorowsky's defining films, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The low budget horror movie-cum-art house masterpiece has since gained bona fide cult status, resulting in its first official US DVD release via Severin Films in January of this year.
The multi talented Jodorowsky (who, aside from filmmaking, has also mastered comic book writing and the tarot), had previously scored his own films, but with Santa Sangre he handed the musical reigns over to English musician and composer Simon Boswell. An integral part of the post-punk power pop band Advertising, after the outfit's demise, Boswell went on to score over ninety films including Phenomena (Dario Argento), Dust Devil (Richard Stanley), Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle), Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker), and Hackers (Iain Softley).
Ironically for a composer whose rsum has a distinctly devilish slant (his latest credit is the Richard Driscoll film Back2Hell), Boswell in recent years has been collaborating with the Vatican, producing music featuring the voice of not one, but two popes. He provided the score for Santo Subito, a DVD released in 2007, which commemorated the life and death of Pope John Paul II. That was followed up with contributions to Alma Mater, an album released in 2009, which featured the voice of Pope Benedict XVI. Boswell's next papal project is an album celebrating the fast-tracked deification of Pope John Paul II, which is set for release this spring.
Given that we are a counter-culture community, when we called Boswell up, our initial focus was on the colorful orgy of sin that is Santa Sangre. But since you can't have saints without sinners, our conversation also explored more outwardly virtuous topics, and how often the best art is a seemingly contradictory balance of heavenly and hellish elements.
NP: I understand you were in LA recently. What was that trip about?
SB: That trip was about the Santa Sangre screening at the American Cinematheque. I gave a little talk beforehand and then did a Q&A at the end.
NP: When you first got involved in the project, you probably didn't think you'd be flying halfway around the world to talk about it over twenty years on.
SB: No. Well, that's true, one wouldn't. But I've been asked so many times in my career, "What's the best film that you've done?" And I have to say, when I think about it, it was very apparent even at the time that Santa Sangre was just quite a unique piece of art really.
NP: How did you get involved? Were you aware of Jodorowsky before you got the call to do the job?
SB: The whole connection to the Jodorowsky film came about through Dario Argento, the Italian director. That was the first movie I ever did. It was called Phenomena, or Creepers as it's called in the States. His assistant A. D., Michele Soavi, directed the second film I did, and the first film was produced by Dario's brother, Claudio Argento. He asked me to do Santa Sangre, so there's sort of a creative connection going through there. But I had seen El Topo when I was a student at the cinema, and it had never left me. At the time I'd never seen anything like this either, so I was aware of Jodorowsky going way back actually.
NP: The Santa Sangre project was very much an unknown quantity, at the time because, discounting Jodorowsky's kids fable Tusk (1980), there had been a huge gap between El Topo (1973), The Holly Mountain (1973), and this one.
SB: Yes, it was an awful long time. Obviously, there's great difficulty in raising money for films like that, which are supreme examples of art house cinema and probably don't make any money. There was a lot of difficulty with him raising money, but when I asked Alejandro about it, he said, "Well I don't consider myself a filmmaker." He said, "When I make a film I'm a filmmaker, but otherwise, I have plenty of other things to do." It's interesting. It's not like he felt he had a career as a filmmaker. So that was his take on that.
NP: When did you first come face to face with Jodorowsky?
SB: I flew to Rome and met him there whilst he was editing Santa Sangre, and watched the film with him. We talked through a few ideas, but he mainly sort of sent me away saying, "Just do what you want to do."
NP: So there was no grand brief?
SB: No, no, not in the slightest. It's funny I discovered subsequently - I didn't really know this [at the time] - but he was keen on me doing the music. I mean he's a musician himself.
NP: Right. This was the first film on which he'd actually handed over the reins for the music to someone else.
SB: Yes...Dario and Claudio were pushing me because I was doing a lot of electronic music which, at the time, seemed quite fresh and quite different. It was sort of somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield. I think Tubular Bells is probably an influence on loads of film composers.
But it was the idea I think of doing what was kind of fake orchestral music, but with synthetic sounds, with synths and samples. It was a little bit like the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. It clearly must have sounded nothing like that, but Jodorowsky - I mean he's a true artist in the sense that he's very happy to allow the creativity of other people to come to the fore - so I think it intrigued him, the idea that on this very organic film set in Mexico there would be an electronic score.
NP: Did he involve himself at all in the music for Santa Sangre?
SB: No, no, not at all. There was only one scene [in the film where he gave me specific input]. On the first day that I met him we were watching it through, and there's a scene where the knife thrower's wife, Concha, gets her arms cut off. It's pretty grizzly, and I said to him, "Do you want me to write something horrible for this? Something really unpleasant?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." He said, "This is like a moment of religious ecstasy for her. It must be wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. She's going to heaven." It was a very early lesson for me in smart movie making if you like, which is to...
NP: To not do the obvious?
SB: Well I get really irritated with most film music these days, and most movies. Because film music it seems to me tells you the same information you already know.
NP: Right. And I don't always want to be told in a heavy handed way what I should be feeling. It's good to work it out for yourself.
SB: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of paranoia in the film business about "let's make sure everyone understands the scene." Just kind of treating the audience like morons really. Clearly that is the case. When there's a car chase they have really car chasey music, and if there's a love scene they have some soupy love theme. And it's very interesting, Jodorowsky was the first one, but Dario also pointed this out to me. He said to me, "You know you can write beautiful music for something horrific." That makes the audience actually question what it is they're watching, and makes them more engaged in a film than less engaged. You tell people the same information twice, it's just like having too much of something really, and it usually turns me off the movie.
NP: When you saw the bare bones of Santa Sangre coming together in the editing room, what was your first impression?
SB: Well my first impression, having seen El Topo previously, was that it's been made more like a work of art than it has a movie. It has this strange atmosphere - not of bad acting - but a kind of very mannered, slightly awkward acting. They made it in English with a lot of very heavy Mexican accents. And I was just aware that the look of it was just incredibly beautifully crafted. The color palettes and the way the subject matter has something of surreal art about it.
It is quite a surreal movie. All that stuff with the elephant, when the elephant dies...it's like a Magritte or Dali feeling picture in the sense that it's just a bit bizarre. And what it makes it even more bizarre is it's not explained at all. It's not necessarily a part of the plot. It's just there because it's wonderful and crazy really. So I just knew it was a very special film. I took it in my stride because at this point I wasn't thinking I was going to be a film composer. I didn't set out to be one, so I just kind of reacted honestly to the images. And because the images are so inspiring, I think I wrote some good music for it, but I also wrote some stuff I cringe at now, because I was very nave.
NP: Well when synthesizers first came out there was the novelty element. It's only with the passage of time that we can look back and see what kinds of synthesized sounds have dated and what haven't. You don't have that issue with a violin for example, because the violin's been around for hundreds of years.
SB: Yes. I think that's very well put actually. It is interesting, you can tell which movies date and which don't, and in the same way, you're right, there's certain bits of music... But it wasn't like it was all synthesizers. There was a guitar scene in there which I wrote and played myself, which I think really expresses the soul of the young boy in it. It's very simple and full of yearning and lost innocence as well.
NP: Have you kept in touch with Jodorowsky over the years?
SB: I have actually. I don't see him that often, but I made an album over a period of 13 years actually, which I was sort of finishing about 5 years ago. I cut a lot of my film scores up into bits and then reassembled those bits as if they were samples other people had made, but it was all my own samples as it were, and created new pieces. I wanted to involve some of the filmmakers that I was particularly proud of having worked with to [do] spoken word stuff on the album. At the same time I also filmed them doing it. So I rang up Dario, and I went to Rome and filmed him saying his lines that I had written for him, and I did the same with Jodorowsky in Paris.
NP: And the "Close Your Eyes" music video was borne out of that project (see below).
SB: Yes. I had already filmed Jodorowsky five years ago doing his bits, that's on the CD, on the album. But I just thought, why not make a kind of pop promo. When they said to me I could use any clips from Santa Sangre I thought, okay, I have to do this.
NP: I know that Jodorowsky's working on a sequel to El Topo - is that something you're going to be working on?
SB: I'd love to say yes, and the only reason I'm saying I'm not sure is because he's been trying to make that for about 10 or 15 years, and I think it's by no means certain that he'll make it. I'd like to think he'd ask me but, as it's sort of the son of El Topo, and he did music for El Topo, he might want to do it himself. So I wouldn't feel at all bad about whatever decision he made on that really. I'd love to work with him, but I think he takes each kind of film on its own merits really.
NP: Has he spoken with you about the project in general?
SB: No, not really. Have you got the Santa Sangre DVD?
NP: Yes.
SB: I interviewed him. This is about the same time that I went to Paris to film him...El Topo 2 didn't come up, but I asked him about Holy Mountain and the Beatles and John Lennon. Because he was sort of taken up by John Lennon after El Topo came out as some sort of genius guru, and there was talk of him directing a Beatles film if you can imagine, which would have been amazing. And in that interview, he does talk about George Harrison. Harrison was going to be - I forget which - the thief I think was the character in Holy Mountain that he wanted to be. But Jodorowsky said, "Well there's a scene where the thief has to strip naked and have his anus washed."
NP: And Harrison wasn't up for that?
SB: So Jodorowsky said, "You don't have your ass washed, you don't do my movie."
NP: Harrison quite literally wouldn't put his ass on the line.
SB: There you go.
NP: Given the subject matter of Jodorowsky's films, particularly with regards to religion - I understand, though spiritual, he's very disapproving of organized religion because of the destruction it brings - your career has taken a different and unexpected turn because you're now working with the Pope.
SB: [laughs] Yes it has...I mean there are things that I'm deeply uncomfortable with about the Catholic Church. I'm not Catholic, I'm not religious at all. So I'm struggling with why I was asked to work with them, but they seem to quite like me. In fact the best explanation I had for it is that - there was a documentary being made about of the making of this thing, and the director of the documentary asked the priest who is creatively in charge of the project, "Why Simon Boswell? Why have you picked him?" And he kind of fell about laughing, and he said, "Jesus loves the sinner."
NP: [laughs]
SB: [laughs] So, knowing my dysfunctional lifestyle, I'm happy to have that on my gravestone really.
NP: Has that priest to watched Santa Sangre?
SB: Probably not. They're actually rather sweet. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's very difficult and wrong with the Catholic Church obviously - that's had a lot of publicity recently - but they're very kind of sweet and nave a lot of the priests that I've met.
I first got involved when they asked me to write some music for a DVD which had the funeral of John Paul II on it, and there's two stories I can tell you actually. I was on holiday near Rome because I knew this project was coming up, and I went into a meeting in the Vatican and I had my laptop bag with me. They were trying to show me this footage on the DVD. All these priests couldn't make the technology work, so I said, look, I've got my laptop, we'll watch it on here. I took it out and then saw my battery was flat, so I rummaged around in the bag and pulled all this stuff out, and onto the floor fell a copy of The Da Vinci Code.
I put my foot on that as they sat behind the desk, so I had to sit for an hour in the Vatican feeling this book burning a hole through my shoe. But at the end - this is sort of going back to their naivet - Don Giulio, who's the priest who christened me a sinner, he said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to have a song on the end of the DVD?" I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe." And he said, "Simon, you've worked with Elton John - why don't you ask Elton?" I looked at him and I had to say, "He's homosexual." He went [Simon puts on a very shocked Italian accent], "No, no."
NP: [laughs]
SB: [laughs] I thought that was quite sweet really, the idea the priest is completely unaware that Elton John is gay.
NP: Do you have any more Vatican projects in the pipeline?
SB: Yes, we do actually, funny enough. I find it so strange answering these questions as if I've become some sort of weird Vatican...
NP: Well you are the go-to guy for Vatican music.
SB: Yeah. I have to console myself actually with the fact that Michelangelo probably was too [for art] - and we don't know what he was thinking. I mean when he was doing the Sistine Chapel, he could have got there in the morning and said, "I'm not working for those bastards today." I mean, who knows what he thought.
We're doing a new album which is going to be a tribute album to John Paul II who is being made a saint at the beginning of May. We've composed some new tracks using Gregorian music, and this time asked some people to perform them. We have Andrea Bocelli, we have Placido Domingo, and we have various other world stars who are going to perform on the album. And we're trying to get a big concert together in Krakow where John Paul was born to commemorate his death. So that's the next project for the Vatican.
NP: You realize you're setting a whole new precedent for the deification process. Now no pope can be deified without a soundtrack album and at least a couple of world famous opera singers singing on it.
SB: I know. It's hideous. I'm sorry. I apologize now. But I don't think it's as bad as X Factor.
NP: Nowadays art is judged in terms of sales, and with these papal releases, the legacy of popes will be judged by how many records they sell when they die and are deified.
SB: What's interesting is of course that's how all the world thinks, but the Vatican really don't consider themselves to be a commercial entity. I mean there was a lot of difficulty in getting this album released, and they didn't want to be paid for it either. There's some payment you make to license the Pope's voice, but they really discourage people thinking of them as a business. But obviously the rest of the world thinks that way, so there's going to be some sort of comparison between things.
The last one didn't sell anywhere near what we thought it would. But I think that's because they didn't try and sell it to Catholics. They sold it to the rest of the world as a sort of classical crossover album.
NP: You don't think it's because the Catholics are more adept at downloading?
SB: [laughs]. That's a sin. Don't you know that? No, it was kind of wrongly marketed. I was only one of three composers on the album. I probably did about half of it. It was really nice music, and I think the record company got carried away with the fact that it was this classical crossover music, rather than just for Catholics. And clearly that was a mistake in terms of sales. Because if only five percent of Catholics had bought it would have sold more than Thriller, and I'd be speaking to you from a much bigger house.
NP: It is interesting the relationship between the Catholic Church and commerce. I remember going to the Vatican and on the roof there's a hut with nuns selling plastic rosary beads. I was like, haven't they read their own Bible? I mean even I know that Jesus disapproved of that kind of thing.
SB: Yeah, well I think there's a great gulf between the things one knows about Jesus and his preachings and his sayings - a huge gulf between that and organized religion in general, whether it's Catholic or Church of England or whatever. I think they've lost the basic principles of all of that stuff to be honest with you. But you know, I have to say, it's been a learning curve for me doing it because I was quite moved by being in [the Vatican]. I mean there's a lot of fantastic art that's been made in the name of religion. The Catholic Church, and churches in general, have been incredible patrons of wonderful art.
NP: Incredible patrons of the art, but then also, particularly with music, they've had a very uncomfortable relationship with artists. For example, if you make music you can shake your hips to it's considered akin to devil worship by some.
SB: You mean like Elvis wiggling his hips, that sort of temptation.
NP: When you're doing the music for the Vatican projects, have they ever come back to you to complain that anything's to jolly and therefore inappropriate?
SB: I didn't feel that sort of pressure from the Vatican. I think they're quite keen on uplifting music actually. In fact there's one track which we didn't use in the end...There's a whole branch of music which is called marian music, which is written to the memory of the Virgin Mary, particularly in Italy. It sounds like Neapolitan music, like Volare or some sort of thing Dean Martin might have sung. It's wonderful actually because there's all kind of oom-pah stuff. It sounds very jolly and very Italian. So I don't feel there's any problem with that. There's a huge debate though about the happy clappy stuff that came in the '60s, when you couldn't go into a church without some god-awful guitarist singing some new hymn he'd written. I think the current Pope is very disapproving of that, and my god, I agree with him.
NP: So he's not a happy, clappy Pope?
SB: He's not a happy, clappy Pope. No, he's not. Basically he likes Mozart and music like that. That's pretty uplifting stuff.
NP: It's interesting when you talk about the marian genre of music because that seems to be reminiscent of the Santa Sangre music in the scenes where Concha is fighting to preserve her temple.
SB: Yes. Yeah, well that's interesting...In fact, I saw that scene just recently, where they're confronting the people who want to knock their church down. They sing this song called "Fin Del Mundo," which is a Mexican song about the end of the world. One of the jobs I had to do quite a lot of in Santa Sangre was to fix or add to things which they'd literally recorded live on the set. When I got that clip there was just people singing. You could hear like one guitar way off in the distance. I had to stick a load of guitars and things on it and make it into something that sounded like it was a bit more peppy really, give it a bit of zap.
NP: In the DVD extras Jodorowsky talks about that scene. How he was searching for authentic music, and how he was randomly tapped on the foot by a beggar in the street. He saw it as a sign, and asked the guy where he could find some music. And the guy, as it turned out, was in a blind choir, which Jodorowsky then used for that scene.
SB: Exactly. It's funny, that's very particular of Jodorowsky. He finds meaning in wherever life takes him. I really admire him for that. You were talking earlier about his interest in spiritual things rather than organized religion. You know he is very knowledgeable about the tarot and he gives tarot card readings every Wednesday in a caf just on the corner of the block where he lives in Paris. Loads of people come from all around the world every week to have their tarot read by him.
NP: Have you had your tarot read by him?
SB: No, I haven't. I was a little bit scared really.
NP: Well of course the Catholic Church would say tarot was akin to devil worship.
SB: Oh my god, of course they would. They would indeed. But you know, it's funny, people talk about the Catholic Church like it's all of a like mind - and it's not. What I discovered was that it's full of people who don't agree on all kinds of things. It's not like they're all unified in this particular way of looking at the world. Being a Catholic means lots of different things to different people.
NP: Even within the church - or maybe especially within the church.
SB: Yeah, even within the Vatican City. I mean there are different orders of priests. You have Paulines and Jesuits, and they really have a different world view actually. The Paulines, for example, run the whole media wing of the Vatican, and they're more relaxed. They wear jeans and are much more into film and music. They run all the Catholic bookshops all around the world, and are involved in the media, the newspapers and TV stations that the Vatican own. And I'm sure they're at complete loggerheads with the Jesuits who are part of that rather austere group who want everyone to be a bit miserable.
NP: On the DVD you talk about how Jodorowsky had this fatalistic approach to the music; He'd hired you, and therefore the music he got was the music he got because it was in your hands.
SB: Yeah.
NP: Ironically that seems to be a similar approach to what you experienced with the Catholic Church.
SB: Doesn't it, yeah. That's interesting. Yes. I guess so. It is a sort of fatalistic approach. I have to say I've really taken that lesson through into my life...and also coincidences that you come across in your life. I'm more of a believer in Jung than anything religious, and Jung says that what we see as being coincidences is really our unconscious making things happen for us. It's not that there's a level of awareness, but our unconscious drives our life in certain directions that we're not aware of, which is why things happen that you think, my god, that's such a coincidence.
NP: So there's a connection in the work process, because you're attracted to situations where you're not being micromanaged. You want to work with people who will trust your choices - even if it might not be their choices - because, at the end of the day, that's why they hired you. That's the whole point with art. You're not buying a commodity, you're buying someone's creativity and taste.
SB: That vision. That's true. Absolutely, and you know, this couldn't be more relevant I suppose. I find that the best directors one works with are directors who are generous enough and secure in their own selves enough to hand something over to someone. And that the worst directors just try and control everything, being sort of Nazi directors that are very unwilling to let people do their thing. And it's really, I think, a function of being a secure person or insecure person.
NP: So beyond Jodorowsky and the Catholic Church, who are the directors you've had good experiences with?
SB: Richard Stanley, for example, do you know his work? I did work on most of the stuff that he's made. There's a movie called Hardware and a movie called Dust Devil, and I think some of my best music has been for him and Jodorowsky and people who just let me do my own thing, you know, let me have an interpretation of my own on the film. Clive Barker also was like that. He's very trusting. It's very difficult I think for directors to hand over their baby essentially to someone doing music. Because music is the one thing you can't really describe in words, and it has a huge influence on the outcome of a film, so it's a great act of trust for a director to hire a composer. I'm always very aware of that.
NP: What's next for you?
SB: I'm working on a film with Richard Stanley, which is a film with different segments by different directors. And I've just been to Sundance, and there's a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun. It's a Rutger Hauer film, and it pushes the level of bad taste to a new high or low, whichever you want to describe it. It's a completely over the top movie, and I think it's going to be a crossover hit. I didn't score it. I was contacted about them licensing a song that I'd written for the first movie I ever did with Dario Argento for this really cool sequence. I'm very pleased about that. That's coming out, and I think will take the world by storm.
NP: I'm glad. I think Rutger Hauer is really underrated.
SB: Yes, I think so too.
NP: He's a very intriguing presence on the screen.
SB: Yes. Particularly in this film, let me tell you. It's very funny, but completely over the top.
NP: There is that fine line between bad taste and genius. That's always something that Jodorowsky's straddled isn't it? People love him or hate him, or say his work's tasteless or high art.
SB: Yes, that's true. That is true. Even in Santa Sangre, the elephant sequence, that scene's gratuitous but in a rather wonderful way. It doesn't tell you anything extra about the film's story. It's just a wonderful, weird thing. I think it's very difficult to ride that line, and let me tell you, Hobo with a Shotgun has some scenes which you will not believe....
What's this website you've got? What is that?
NP: Suicide Girls? It's a counter culture website. It's named after a term Chuck Palahniuk coined. He was talking about how those with tattoos and piercings are essentially choosing to commit social suicide by permanently marking their body, which ultimately means that there are certain sections of society that they're permanently barred from entering or getting approval from.
And of course there's a big rite of passage tattoo scene in Santa Sangre between Fenix and his father, so it's an iconic film within our community. Also SuicideGirls is about redefining beauty, and Santa Sangre is a very beautiful movie, but it could also be perceived as being ugly by some. There's beauty in the ugliness and in the horror.
SB: Yes, exactly. No, it's true. That's very interesting. It's a very interesting observation. And it's very true. Yeah, of course, tattooing is a big statement, isn't it really?
NP: And the choice that Jodorowsky made that you were talking about earlier with the music in the scene where Concha's arms are sliced off, he was inclined to see that as a moment of transcendence, but someone else might only have envisioned it as a horrific and ugly scene. He chose to see the beauty in it.
SB: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that's what great artists do to be honest. They create a resonance within things, between what you see and what you feel. The contradiction is everything - it's how life really is.
So when I look at my life, and how I work on horror movies and with the Pope, I remember one thing. As a teenager the writer who influenced me the most was William Blake, and in particular a work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even when he wrote it, which was the late 18th century, he was making a statement against the church basically, but saying that true creativity has to have both energy, which he sees as hell, and form, which he sees is like heaven or the restrictive aspects of the Church like the Ten Commandments.
His famous poem, "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright," is about the idea of taking this pure energy and putting it into words, into the restrictive form of poetry, where this contradiction allows the finished poem to throb and burst as the fire within tries to bend the bars of it's prison. For me, this is a sensible way to see the creative process, which is to put something that contains chaos, or comes from chaos into something that has form, like a film, just as Jodorowsky did. But not a film where the violence of that scene with Concha is just violence. It must contain an element that challenges, that pushes, that provokes and even insults.
That's what the best art is, for me. It's stuff which is inexplicably contradictory. And when I was sitting at night, pretty much alone in St. Peter's - because we recorded in there at night with a Gregorian choir - I remember not only being very moved by it being a very spiritual experience, being in that huge space, surrounded by Michelangelo's art instead of by a zillion Japanese tourists, but that it was also that I couldn't be a better living embodiment of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In my life, as well as my art. Horror may be beautiful. And beauty may contain true horror.
The first official US DVD and BluRay release of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre is available now. The 2-disc set features a new high definition transfer of the original film plus over five hours of additional content, including an interview with Jodorowsky conducted by Simon Boswell.
Close Your Eyes, an album of music drawn from over 50 of Simon Boswell's original film scores which features the voices of numerous singers, actors and directors (including Jodorowsky), is available via iTunes and at SimonBoswell.com/.
Sources for quotes: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (positive) and Hal Hinson, Washington Post (negative).