What is a French Western? One Part Reality To Two Parts Fiction

Marie Losier is a filmmaker whose films operate in a space between fantasy, camp, absurdity, identity swapping, and her embrace of community. Born in 1972 in Boulogne, France, she now lives in New York City. She has been working on a series of film portraits of directors, beginning with Mike and George Kuchar in 2003. Losier is presently working on three documentary portraits, with musician Genesis P-Orridge, filmmaker Albert Maysles, and filmmaker/musician Tony Conrad. In addition to the portraits, she has created fictional short films that develop from her actors' idiosyncrasies and are shot in campy, homemade theatrical sets. Losier's deep love of the silent film era reveals itself as an underlying structure for her works. Her films have been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Seoul Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her film The Ontological Cowboy, a portrait of Richard Foreman, was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This interview was taped in Losier's loft in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in June 2006.

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Your film The Ontological Cowboy opens with Richard Foreman's statement "The theatre is about sex . . . there's always a huge erotic charge in the theatre." Does desire play a role in your films?

Yeah, always.

How so?

Well, first of all my desire to always be in the film in some way or another, and also because a lot of the work and the people I work with are very attached to the emotions of life. Their work is very theatrical in a way that plays with emotions. It's all about feelings and death and masquerade and humor. I think that relates right away to desire.

How did you begin working with Richard Foreman on The Ontological Cowboy?

That film took a long time for me to make, but I always wanted to make a film portrait about Richard Foreman since I worked with him eight years ago on the play called Paradise Hotel or Hotel Fuck. I made all the props. That was one experience that completely changed my life because of his aesthetic. Staying with the play every single day for eight months totally changed my aesthetic and it freed me from what I thought I should be doing. I met these actors who weren't actors; they came from different backgrounds and they were doing many other things at the same time.

How did Foreman influence your aesthetic?

Through the gesture, the theatricality and also the cheapness of how he makes props. He would use really cheap toys and tapes and painting and he didn't mind if it was crooked or slick, which totally goes with my aesthetic.

Richard frightened me to death because he is so shy and intense that I never dared to ask him to make a film. Years later I finally came up to him after making more film portraits and being more confident and I asked him if he would do it. He was very reticent in the beginning but then he said yes. So I started going to his house. I thought I would do an interview with him first so I could get an idea of the direction I wanted the film to go. The first interview I did I was so nervous that I put the microphone on the tape recorder and I only recorded the sound of the tape recorder. So in the middle of the night I realized that I didn't have the interview and I had to e-mail him, which was dreadfully painful. He accepted to do it again. It was intense. The interview lasted two hours. He answered all of my questions and I got what I wanted from him, which propelled the whole visual part of the film.

When we do see Richard Foreman in the film, is he in his library?

He's in his house. His house is just books.

Who made that decision? Did he elect to film it that way or did you?

I wanted to film him in a performance like in my...