Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a French and Chilean film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, comics writer and spiritual guru. Best known for his avant-garde films, he has been "venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts" for his work which "is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation"...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth17 February 1929
CityTocopilla, Chile
CountryChile
I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.
When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.
I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.
Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.
Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'
My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.
Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.