Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Creator of El Topo

In the year 2000, the Chilean film and TV actor Bastian Bodenholfer was appointed as cultural attaché at the Chilean embassy in Paris. Full of enthusiasm, he was determined to teach the French about the culture of his own country, but he ran up against the barrier of insufficient funding. He was being asked to engage in many activities without spending a penny. He had heard about my Cabaret Mystique, conferences that I held every Wednesday in a very uncomfortable karate dojo with a large audience that had no problem with sitting on a hard wooden floor. He offered me instead a comfortable room at the Chilean embassy.

Wanting to collaborate with my amiable compatriot, I accepted his suggestion that I give a free conference there every two weeks. We set up a meeting to have a look at the auditorium. It was very comfortable and could hold at least five hundred people, the usual size of my audience. Then he told me, with an embarrassed look, that the wife of the ambassador wanted to meet me right away, and he asked if I would mind.

“Of course not, Bastian, let’s go.”

He led me into a smaller reception room. Now I understood his look of embarrassment. With foreboding and resignation I submitted to a tedious process of being interrogated by this woman who saw herself as a representative of Chilean “aristocracy.” She treated me as though I were some indigent asking for a favor rather than offering one. Summoning all my patience, I recited a curriculum vitae, but this did not stop her from wanting to know full details about the content of my conferences and warning me: “As you know, this embassy cannot allow people to take whatever liberties they please.” My attaché friend was red with shame and anger. I took a deep breath. Then Bastian arose and, inventing a pretext that we were late for an important meeting, took leave of her, thus extracting me from her claws.

As we walked toward a nearby café, he apologized profusely for her behavior. “That woman is always meddling in things that are none of her business. She is not the cultural attaché—I am! I never thought it would be like this. I can well understand if you’re having second thoughts about running your conferences here. .”

“You’re right, Bastian. With that woman on my back, it would be impossible.”

My friend was now so angry that his hands were shaking as he drank his coffee. “How can I hope to get any decent work done in such conditions?”

He was so distressed that I offered to give him a tarot reading. He accepted gladly, but as I shuffled the cards, taking my time, I had the intuition that I should take advantage of his distracted state of mind and try to speak directly to his unconscious. Still shuffling the cards, I asked, in a very soft, calm, casual voice: “When a turtle is swimming deep under the sea and needs to breathe, what does it do?”

Still distracted, he answered without thinking: “I don’t know — what does it do?”

In the same soft tone of voice, but speaking very slowly, I told him: “It returns to land.”

He forgot this hypnotic conversation immediately. I gave him a tarot reading, but it was only superficial. I felt the real work had already been done, and we said good-bye.

A week later, he resigned his post and returned to Chile to resume what he should never have interrupted: his real career as an artist. The turtle had resolved the koan.

For obscure reasons, the graphic novel editor of Casterman Publications got into a quarrel with my friend, the artist François Boucq. We were working on a series called Face de lune , and it was suspended because of the quarrel. François could not forgive the editor for having made a public threat: “I’ll have Boucq’s skin!” Now a lawsuit was being threatened in return.

I took it as a koan, and went to see this director. I brought him a tanned goatskin. *35When he received me, I spread out the skin on his desk and said: “You wanted the skin of a goat? Here it is!”

He burst out laughing. I suggested he send a bottle of champagne to my friend, which he did. The koan was resolved, and we completed the series.

In 1997, I had just had my sixty-seventh birthday. Divorced for the past fifteen years, I lived in a large apartment with my son Adan. I had mistresses stay there with me from time to time, but never for more than a week. Most of the time, the atmosphere was one of emotional peace and solitude. I was giving a tarot course to twenty students in the library when Marianne Costa arrived, slightly late.

Absorbed in my explanations, I didn’t even look at her. On the other hand, my large, reddish cat Moiche was so fascinated by her that for the entire hour and a half that the lesson lasted, he pawed unceasingly inside her purse. Perhaps my unconscious was influenced by the sensuality of this feline assault. At the end of the lesson, as was my custom, I embraced my students good-bye, French style. When Marianne’s turn came, I somehow placed my hand on her waist, something I would never permit myself to do normally. An electric shock coursed through my entire body, from head to foot. Suddenly, I felt the beauty of her nudity and the intensity of her soul. She murmured: “It must be wonderful to be a cat in your house.”

Giving her a kiss on the cheek and heedless of the risk involved (with a thirty-seven year age difference between us), I replied: “Then I adopt you!”

Thus began a strange, marvelous, and difficult couple relationship. If I had followed my reason instead of my intuition, I never would have dared to take such a step and would have missed the most beautiful experience of my life.

“Between doing and not doing, always choose doing.”

The monstrous egotism of movie stars is disgusting to me — but unfortunately, if you want a producer to invest the millions that are necessary to realize a work in this industrial art, you have to present a cast with at least two or three stars. Because of this disgust, for years I lost all desire to turn my stories into films. One evening, tired of reading too much, I turned on the TV and zapped rapidly through the channels, protecting my soul from many of them instinctively, not unlike the way I avoid instinctively all dog excrement on the sidewalks of Paris.

Suddenly, in the midst of this stinking wasteland, a perfumed ego manifested itself. I had stumbled on an interview with the rock star Marilyn Manson. His whitened face, reddened lips, Goth style, and sincere statements followed no script or rules, and I found myself fascinated by him. I sensed genius and exclaimed to myself: “With actors like him, I’d find stories to film again!” I made inquiries in the music and film worlds as to how to get in touch with him. I was told it was impossible. He received tons of fan mail and thousands of pleas for professional meetings, but he never answered any. I gave up.

Two weeks later, I was awakened at three in the morning by a phone call.

“Mr. Jodorowsky? I’m Marilyn Manson.”

I could not believe my ears. At first I thought someone was playing a bad joke on me, but it was really him — I did not have to go the mountain; it had come to me! He had called to tell me that my films, especially The Holy Mountain , had inspired him so much that he had made a clip in which he paid homage to it by imitating the scene in which the thief wakes up amid cardboard Christs modeled in his image. He had even been inspired by the title to write a script for a film called Holy Wood , and he wanted me to direct him in it. I told him to send me the script by express mail. Two days later, I read it — a monumental, scathing attack on Hollywood. I calculated that he would need about twenty-five million dollars to realize it. It was clear to me that he had no hope of getting this money from Hollywood producers, because they would never accept the ferocity of such criticism of their world. When I told Manson this, he understood. Instead, he offered to work on one of my projects. He had heard that I wanted to make The Children of El Topo . I told him that it would be an honor and a joy to direct him in the lead role — but a legal obstacle prevented me from doing this film.