One thing I’m constantly trying to relay about next level communication is that it doesn’t happen with words, but rather through means of subjectively projected telepathic metaphor. In the vast majority of UFO contactee reports, one encounters similar stories about blackened psionic eyes that peer directly into the soul. Eyes that can project and receive pure information. Metaphorically of course, I’d argue that we’re unconsciously engaging in this pursuit with our increasingly art-centric lifestyles. Theses days, half of our experiences involve movies, video games, albums, celebrity sex fantasies, and cutesy kitten GIFS. The reason I’m mentioning this, for probably the bajillionth time, has to do with this interview I just did with the visionary music video director Phil Mucci (who’s films other films you can check out here, or read my top 5 list of here). I honestly knew very little about Phil when I stumbled on his work last fall, but through watching his subversive psychedelic shorts, I realized that I knew far more about him than I initially thought. Seriously, you should really read through this whole thing because he brought his A game. Oh, and hey, he just so happened to come out with a new video too, so sit back and enjoy.
Thad: So, give me a little bit of background on yourself and explain how exactly you got into the illustrious world of making trippy ass metal videos?
Phil: Kind of, by accident on purpose. I started out as a music and editorial photographer in NYC with only vague dreams of one day becoming a filmmaker. I gradually moved up to shooting more and more advertising, because that’s where the money was, but it was soul-sucking work that took a lot out of me and my marriage at the time. I finally became so disgusted with what I was doing that I blew all of my money making a couple of short films that got a lot of recognition at film festivals. After landing a decent script, an agent, manager, lawyer – the whole deal – I sold my photo gear and moved out to LA to direct what I thought would be my first indie feature. I spent months developing it with the writers, but in the end I left the project over differences with the producer. I was now in LA with no gig and no money, so my manager at Anonymous Content introduced me to their music video department. I started from scratch writing a ton of treatments for videos I never had a chance of making. The first gig I actually got was for a band I’d shot publicity stills for; we’d gotten along so great they wanted to work together again. That’s really what it came down to in the end — not the 35 treatments I’d written and illustrated that went nowhere, but not being dick, basically.
The early videos were more standard record label fare, as I was “new.” The budgets were higher then, with more hands-on from the suits. But it only took a few videos with Roadrunner Records before Rick Ernst took a chance on me. He basically handed me the Opeth video with more or less total creative freedom. That was the video that changed my entire outlook on what the medium could do, and what it could be for me as a form of expression. I felt like I was making a film, not a music video, and putting some of myself and what I loved into the work.
Thad: From looking at your work, I’d guess you were inspired by ’70s horror flicks and retro psychedelic horror/sci fi sexploitation-esque vibes in general (albeit with an entirely new spin), but I could be totally wrong. If you were to toss up a quick top ten influences list including films and TV shows, how would that break down?
Phil: How right you are, Sir! Okay — this is as of right… NOW! This list would probably be different tomorrow; in no particular order out of respect, you dig?
Vampyros Lesbos / She Killed in Ecstasy / Eugenie De Sade – the holy trinity of my favorite Soledad Miranda films directed by Jess Franco
Suspiria directed by Dario Argento.
Danger: Diabolik directed by Mario Bava
The Trip directed by Roger Corman
Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) directed by Michele Soavi
Evil Dead II directed by Sam Raimi
Wizards / Lord of the Rings / Fire and Ice directed by Ralph Bakshi
Heavy Metal directed by Gerald Potterton
Robocop / Starship Troopers directed by Paul Verhoeven
The Devils directed by Ken Russell
Thad: Your new video deals with a classic sci fi theme regarding the dangers of overly rationalist AI and, well, how it might fail to process the concept of hotties. I’ve always seen the supposed “battle” between the forces of the natural world vs. robotic forms of intelligence as having more to do with the materialist objective/literal manner of viewing the world vs. the more subjective and metaphorical creative language of the spirit. I think we all sort of get the impression the vernacular of the soul has been shut out by the cold, unthinking, and dare I say, daemonic voices of the inhuman profit margin these days. Thoughts? And make them good because we want to jack up the YouTube hits on this fucker.
Phil: That’s a great interpretation, and it’s definitely the subtext of the video. As you’ve pointed out, many of my videos trade in these classic genre tropes, but I see that as a means of abbreviating the storytelling in what is an extremely short-form medium. You should assume everything you just laid out, because I’m kind of counting on that. We meet on common ground so I can lead you the rest of the way to something new. There’s very little time to establish a “world” in short films, so genre shorthand helps a great deal.
While on its surface “Annihilation Affair” is about the cold rationality of AI, it also challenges that assumption. I think it’s also saying that we flawed humans can’t really hope to create some intelligence that won’t be imbued with many of our own shortcomings. A.I. will learn, at first especially, by emulating us. That’s what is implied by the opening shot of the video, where it appears to be a suburban neighborhood, but it’s actually just machines built in the shape of a neighborhood. But the main point of the video (spoiler alert!) is a critique of militant patriarchy and its inherent nihilism. It is a land of one-eyed monsters, the dome headed drones subservient to the TV Masters with their big cock-canons, who subjugate and torture women in their white butcher shops, driven by some remnant human desire that has perverted into psychosis. The lone survivor herself is found preserved, or rather trapped, inside a very phallic cryotube – it even has balls! It’s fun to layer this stuff in there, and it’s a great challenge as a storyteller to come up with an “A” story that’s compelling enough to work on its own, while planting the seeds of “B” and “C” stories that grow and become more apparent after multiple viewings. Even I saw stuff that I wasn’t aware of until I’d finished it and watched it all put together a few times. I love it when that happens!
In regards to the daemonic voices of the inhuman profit margin, I agree whole heartedly, and that was the basis of the “A” story in the video – that greed, and shortsightedness combined with our tendency to settle disputes through violence, was the undoing of “Mankind” – a word chosen particularly for its un-PC nature. It’s the end result of the world we live in now – where the voracious greed of multinational corps is dooming our entire species. What’s lacking is empathy – the realization that we’re all inextricably connected, that we rise or fall together at this point. There was a great quote in Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the US, where he recalls a woman in the early ’70s telling him “we need to feminize the planet,” and I think that’s kind of a good way of putting it. There’s a reason patriarchal societies have worked to repress women for ages – they’re afraid of their power. They trade in fear, not love.
Thad: I gotta ask about psychedelics because it’s pretty much my beat. Are you willing to come out of the closet as a psychedelic enthusiast? A pot head? If so, how have they influenced your work both thematically and stylistically? Any particularly weird instances of note? How about the Occult? Tons of Occult themes pervade your work, does that come from an aesthetic interest stemming from horror movies or something deeper?
Phil: I am well out of the closet on that count, but to answer your questions in order: yes, yes, and in ways it would take far too long to describe in detail. But I think one of the most important acid trips I ever had was an early one. We were sneaking into the drive-in through a cemetery, then down some train tracks, and through the woods — at night. Just the experience of going into that darkness, which on acid means you’re about to see a bunch of shit, was so terrifying and thrilling. Once I was in the woods, the branches of the trees in the moonlight looked like arms reaching out to me, twigs like fingers extending to embrace me. It was creepy but it was real, and in that darkness I felt a connection to the forest that has stuck with me to this day. Later that night I sat on the roof of a car, watching the wind blowing the leaves of two trees standing very close together, faintly lit by the flickering light of the movie screen.
The pattern of the wind on the leaves was the same as fire or smoke to me, and soon it didn’t look like two trees at all, but two green scaled giants holding onto each other in an erotic embrace. That awareness of the flow of energy and familiar interlaced patterns of living things extended beyond that in subsequent trips to the experience of music, and allowed me to literally “see” music in ways I never had before.
As for the occult themes in my work, I’d say it stems from both. First, as a storyteller, I view occult themes as genre, so I use it in the short films to help me establish the world for the audience. Beyond that, it comes with all sorts of great assumptions that say more to me about human beings and their image of themselves than it does about any real forces acting upon humanity from other dimensions. I’m a secular humanist and atheist, by most definitions. But I’m also a great believer that we don’t know shit; we don’t have all the answers, not even close. I’ve always believed in the existence of alternate dimensions, something which modern physicists think is not only likely, but that they very often intersect. What happens at those intersections could probably help explain some phenomena. But I don’t think Ghost Hunters is an example of that!
In terms of the study of the occult, I have done some of that, and would place that with religion and mythology as a means of explaining things we don’t understand, or bolstering and preserving existing doctrines and social strictures. That said, there are aspects of the occult that seek to tap into and harness the power of the human mind, though they may not express it in exactly that way, and I think that’s a valid course of inquiry, regardless of its basis in ritual or mythology.
Thad: The last time I did a higher dose of mushrooms, I did so ritualistically. At some point while listening to an album I made years ago, I had a vision of UFOs cascading down to the earth through kaleidoscopic skies in a precise columnar pattern, just like in some of your videos. It was awesome. Have you read a lot about UFOs and supposed alien contactees like I have? Man is that shit weird.
Phil: Oh man – I’ve gone deep down that rabbit hole. The book that really rekindled my interest was Leslie Keen’s UFOs- Generals, Pilots & Government Officials Go on the Record. It kinda blew me away; some old cases for sure, but she went at it as a real reporter and skeptic and came out advocating for a concerted research effort. The book even got a resounding endorsement from physicist Michio Kaku. One of the most fascinating modern cases to me is the Phoenix Lights, and its resemblance to objects seen years before in Belgium — these massive black triangular shapes, miles wide, moving impossibly slow and silent in the air. So many great theories about what they could be — extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional beings, or maybe it’s just “us” coming back from the future to see the world as it was before the Great Unraveling? The number of sightings at nuclear missile silos also intrigued me. I ended up taking a lot of inspiration from that book for our short film for Monster Magnet’s “The Duke.”
The contactee experiences are truly unnerving; and if weren’t for the serious attention given them by Dr. John Mack from Harvard, it’s tempting to write them off as a socially induced phenomena or paranoid delusion. But what he found was that – whatever they were – the effects of the abductee experience on the human mind were consistent with those who experience significant trauma. Unfortunately, the UFO field has been so successfully vilified, and while not debunked, so totally marginalized, that it’s hard to separate fact from fiction with many cases. But a lot of people, myself included, don’t see that as an accident. One of the things Leslie Keen’s book makes very clear is that the US government knows a lot more about the phenomena than they’re letting on, and has in fact been lobbied by foreign governments to share that information, to no avail.
Thad: Any final thoughts and if you had say a dream band you’d love to work with, who would that be? What’s next for Diabolikfilms?
Phil: Jimi Hendrix, without a doubt. Might be tough now that he’s shed this mortal coil, but don’t count me out just yet! “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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