Film Culture (Spring 1964)

INTERVIEW WITH GREGORY MARKOPOULOS Robert Brown RB: I take it that your family migrated from Greece; your mother and father or your grandparents? GM: My mother and father; they’re both from the Peloponnesus. As a matter of fact, when I was shooting Serenity, I visited — I had visited my mother’s town which is Tripolis in the central part of the Peloponnesus — but I did visit my father’s village, and I mean exactly that; it was way up in the mountains and we took a very torturous route in an old bus of 1929 and I got very panicky. At this point I was with a cousin and we walked around the side of the mountain and arrived at the village and it was really fantastic. It’s one of the most idyllic and romantic places that I’ve ever seen. You can see Olympia from the top of this village. RB: It seems that the majority of your films have dealt with Greece and Greek myths. How was the Greek culture instilled in you, especially during your formative years? GM: Well, it was very simple. I didn’t speak English until I went to Kindergarten. The first language that I learned was Greek. As a matter of fact I was going to Greek school classes before I was going to English school classes and that’s one reason for my obvious great interest in Greek mythology, although at this same time I can say that it may seem now that I’m dealing with Greek mythology, but perhaps twenty years from now they won’t refer to it as Greek mythology, but rather as my American mythology. RB: You just visited Greece once, during the filming of Serenity? GM: My old friend Curtis Harrington, with whom I went to school, used to chide me; he used to say, “Gregory, your big opportunity to direct a film in Greece.” This was about 10-15 years ago. Then in 1954 during the Christmas holidays I decided to make my first trip to Greece, and I went there. I went to Greece again in 1956 and I kept going back and forth until 1958 during the time I was working primarily on the film Serenity. RB: If I remember correctly, you did your first shooting when you were 18. Is that correct? GM: Well, I made my so-called first experimental film when I was 18, but I have in my 6 FILM CULTURE possession a film which I made when I was 12 years old based on “Scrooge” which we showed as a kind of joke one evening at the Gramercy Arts Theatre along with some of my other films, and people were so charmed with it that we showed it over and over again. It lasts about 3 minutes and tells the whole Christmas Carol in 3 minutes. And I, of course, play Scrooge myself. RB: How did you get interested in films so young? GM: Well, I believe — I believe it was the fault of my uncle. When I was about 7 years old, he took me to see my first motion picture. I remember distinctly that one of the films, the first image that I can recall on the screen was of this huge chimpanzee and this figure. If I’m not far wrong, it was a Tarzan film and the film that followed it was something about submarines and I got very very upset and was taken out of the theatre. From that point on, like any other person, I was taken to the movies quite often, mostly by my Godmother and my Father. I remember the first Chaplin film I ever saw. My father took me to see it one afternoon. It was Modern Times. I even remember the name of the theatre in Toledo — The Loew’s Valentine. I remember saying to my father, “Why doesn’t it have sound,” which is sort of amusing in a way. My first color film that I ever saw, with which I was greatly impressed, was A Star is Born. It was a Janet Gaynor film. RB: When did you first use your single-frame technique? GM: I would say that the first time that I used it was in the film Psyche. Amos Vogel, over the Christmas holidays of 1963, sent me a present which I will never forget. He returned to me all of the rights of my negatives — complete ownership of Psyche which I had sold to him at one time and it was a very generous thing for him to do. But in Psyche there is a sequence in the “Ecstasy” episode between Psyche and her lover. There are some very short cuts of clouds. I would say that that was the first time I used the short motion picture film fragments, and at the end of the film I have what I’ve always referred to as a recapitulation of everything that has happened in the film. At the end of Psyche,