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Stefa Roth and I decided to make this interview with northamerican director Robb Moss after we saw his beautiful film ‘The Same River Twice’ (www.samerivertwice.com ) at the Munich Film Festival in 2003.
He was very kind, cooperative and supportive when we approached him and it turned out to be a very inspiring encounter.
...more info on Robb Moss
SR/LS: Originally, what made you become a rafting guide?
RM: You know, I mean I’ve had the experience on the river, I had dropped out of college for a quarter, I went to visit a woman in Minnesota, it got to be winter, it wasn’t working out so well, so I hitchhiked to Arizona. In Arizona I met a guy, I had no place to stay and he sort of put me up and his family had taken a river trip the previous summer. And I saw these pictures and I went: Wow! And after college...hem... so I started doing river trips at that point and there was a way in which coming out of the sixties... - I went to the University of California Berkley for four years between 1968 and 1972, these were highly political years. My education was mainly a political education more than it was an academic education, it was a bit of both, but mostly political. And how to live your life was one of the main questions.
How could you live your life in some way that was in some way consistent with the values that you believed in, that was a big question. It has turn into a kind of joke, a kind of commodity like it’s turned into a kind of mocking-thing by the political right called political correctness, but -and there is reasons why that’s so. But back than the idea of political correctness was: How do you live your live that’s consistent with your values. This is not a bad thing to think about. But it is complicated; it made it difficult to know what to do after college, even to be a careerist at that time strucked me as not interesting. I didn’t want to live a life to pay for my car-payments and that be the reason why I was doing things. And when this idea of working on rivers came up it seemed to be actually quite consistent with my believes and I think for many of us. There was a way in which... you know, it paid modestly, it was very beautiful, it was very physical, it was something I enjoyed doing every day and when we weren’t working we took our own river trips. And then when I stopped being a river guide I went back to make a film about that experience which was ‘Riverdogs’.
SR/LS: What would you say today, what was it that the rafting gave you?
RM: (long pause)... it was... it was many things. It was the sense of... the river itself, just being outdoors, diminished me, it diminished us and it out us into a much bigger context, a context in which we were quite tiny. And there was something very reassuring about that. It also was a set of skills about how to live outdoors and how to live on very little and being very physical and being very close to nature and all that was an extraordinary pleasure. And then because of that, because of our shared love of rivers, a community grow up in that time that ...hem... was value-driven which was a tremendous, also a kind of a reassurance. It provided a modest living, you got paid for what you did, so it wasn’t just fun, it was also work and it also in some sense taught us about work, work in a certain way. It also put us in touch with many...hem... the people who came on the river trip, so we were meeting a cross-section of Americans and people from all over the world, but mainly Americans, and families which in itself was a kind of education, because you’d spend a day or two or a week or two with this group of people and you had to figure out what they were like and what was important to them, but separate from whatever they had achieved. There is a kind of a free space on the river, its not class-bound, and it’s not bound by status or wealth or accomplishment or really anything except your presence, and there was something very pleasurable about that as well.
SR/LS: How do you integrate the rafting guide you were once into your life now?
RM: With difficulty (laughs). I mean, I mean one thing about the film for me, and it’s not about something I knew precisely before I made the film, but as it turns out it seems to be so, is that I would say everybody in the film and to some extent myself included, although it’s not in the film, subscribe to similar believes as we did than, it’s not a film about having once believed something and now see it as the folly of youth and you know, that was sort of crazy or ‘how could we have done that and we got on with our real lives afterwards’. There is a tremendous continuity between the than and the now at the level of values that hasn’t really changed, it has a different form and my life certainly doesn’t have that kind of freedom and fun - but the freedom came at a cost, the freedom came at a kind of cost, the cost of not having a family, it came at the cost of not having the chosen work, not being able to build off of something.
I showed the film Jim, Jim is the character who has stayed a river guide for the past twenty-five years. And I was saying to him that he is still available to the moment, if the wind comes up in a certain way and he wants to go in that direction, he just can, because he’s not attached to all the things that I’ve become attached to. And I used to live a life like his life and I have given that up, I mean I’m not available to the moment in that same kind of way and he has a kind of, eh... he can make decisions at the ecstatic level every moment, so he can chose, you know, when I saw him we got in his car, we drove twenty miles, we went for a little hike, we set on a rock, and he said: I want to be here at this time of day because the wind comes off the water and the sun’s going down, he knew it... and he moves from moment to moment like that and these moments that he chooses that are ecstatic moments and he is extremely available to the moment and he can move in sort of any direction and there is something tremendously pleasurable about that. Traveling is like that for me, you know, when I wasn’t working on rivers and I was on the road some place, that ability to have any chance and it kind of leads to another chance and leads to another chance, and you’re just moving through life like that and what a pleasure that was. But the ways in which I’m available to the moment now that that precludes and that Jim is precluded from are for example when I’m teaching, if I’m in a class for four hours. In those four hours I’m completely available to the moment, it’s not available to the big moments outside of that, but because I’m not available to that I can put a little boundary around that moment of teaching and be completely there for that amount of time and then go on to the next thing and so it allows me to be available to the moment in a very different kind of way I used to, it’s not in the big way, it’s in the small ways, but they’re deep ways and they’re also pleasurable in their own way. Or the same kind of moment is around family-life, if I’m with my kids or with my wife that by not being available to the big moments I’m now available to those moments and completely available to those moments.
SR/LS: As a rafting guide did you already consider yourself a filmmaker?
RM: Yes, I did. Weirdly (laughs), for no good reason, but you know, in college I fell in love with the movies. And I also had a certain notion that you couldn’t go to school to learn filmmaking and then I didn’t go to school, but I wasn’t making films and at some point I went: what am I doing? And I ended up going to graduate school, but I had resisted going to graduate school, I didn’t want to go. I felt like, you know, going to school becoming a filmmaker was like... I don’t know what, you know... going to school to make love or something. Like: how could you do that. But that was foolish on my part. Yet, I mean, there is no point in making a rule about it.
I did a grand-canon-trip down the same river in 1976, before I became a filmmaker. And there was a moment when I passed this geological formation called Fluted Schist, it’s a granite formation, and it’s this sort of angeliding rocks that are very smooth and very dark and I thought that when I became a filmmaker I would film these rocks and I would film a woman in these rocks. And then that image is in ‘The Same River Twice’. In a way it’s an image that stands outside the film, because it’s a different kind of image than anything else in the rest of the movie which is why I like it, I mean, it goes over the line, which is in a way to show where the line is and it also reminds me that I had this thought before I became a filmmaker.
SR/LS: Nowadays, do you see yourself only as a filmmaker or do you have other ways of creative expression?
RM: I teach. You know, I teach-full time, I teach filmmaking full-time.
SR/LS: So you consider that a creative expression of yourself?
RM: Absolutely. It’s.... it’s something I mean... it’s not the same as making a film, but that highly focus paying attention to something in front of you, seeing as clearly as you can what you are looking at. It happens also that I teach filmmaking, so I’m engaged in the filmmaking process with them. They aren’t my films, they are their films, but I’m still thinking a lot with them. And then having to think along with them... so... it’s doubly creative. I mean, there is filmmaking problems, but there is also teaching problems, pedagogic problems and how to merge those two things is something one has to work at very hard. And you know, one of the central parts of filmmaking for me is getting to understand the material you are working with and it’s not a question of budgeting the material into the shape that you want, it’s a kind of precipice relationship- the materials to yourself. And it’s a way of interacting respecting and moving with. It’s almost like dancing or something like that and all that is not different than working with students. So that relationship, that interactive relationship, that trying to see what the thing is and where it might go I think is very similar one to the other, filmmaking and teaching. I would also say that it’s very similar to being a parent, that when you have kids that they are who they are, but that’s not the end of the story. So knowing who they are and then working with their lives and their ideas as a parent, making certain kind of choices, this is very similar to filmmaking, very similar to teaching. It’s not the same, I don’t mean to say that these are all exactly the same activities, they are not the same activity, but they share certain qualities.
SR/LS: What does make an expression artful to you?
RM:... Tough question. But maybe, I mean maybe it’s something that’s consistent with what I’m saying or maybe it’s just the frame of mind I’m in by your other questions, but when something is what it is, when it’s, when it’s achieved it’s own idea of itself then I think it moves into some other plain that maybe can be called artful. there is no absolute idea of this, of cause, there is not a thing that is art and a thing that isn’t art, it’s again, it’s depended so much on the context and the materials, but maybe, given all of the context and the materials, when it achieves itself, when it becomes itself, when it’s not trying to do, when it is it, then you move into another realm, and that realm maybe is art.
SR/LS: What would you say drives you to do what you do?
RM: In part it’s the (laughs); it’s the pleasure of doing the work. there is this extraordinary pleasure in doing this kind of work, and at the same time (chuckles) it’s the constant failure of achieving it, I mean, you know, you do it, you have a good idea, it fails, you do it, you have a good idea, it fails, so, you’re are both driven by that feeling of pleasure and the absorption and focus and concentration. What I want to say is that it’s the combination of doing the work and the constant failure of achieving it fully that moves you to the next project, to the next idea, so it’s both the pleasure and the failure, I think, at least for me.
SR/LS: So what is it the work gives to you?
RM: It’s something about pleasure of knowing the work and knowing myself, moving through the narrative, there is a narrative to work, a kind of story that accompanies the work, that sort of let’s me know who I am and calms me down, and absorbs my interest.
SR/LS: Is there something which art gives to you that life doesn’t?
RM: Well somebody said, I mean it’s sort of foolish to quote by somebody, but, you know, that the difference between film and life is that film is about something, it’s not clear that life is. So while they seem endless they are not endless like life is, there are not infinite numbers of opportunities, they get kind of prescribed, and there is something while they are challenging and they are complexes, in the end you make something that has a shape.
I mean mostly I don’t think like this, mostly I think much more practically. That the work is... ehm... it’s mostly ordinary, and it’s a kind of rolling up your sleeves and digging the hole, I mean it’s ... and than there is moment in which I have this kind of transcendent moments, but it’s work like other work. But there is something about the complexity and the problem solving that’s very fun. The transcendent questions aren’t what get me up in the morning. There is something I can experience, but they are not the thing that I get up and go: today it’s about transcendence... you know, I get up and just go to work. And then, you know, out of that maybe it produces something else.
SR/LS: Do you have the feeling you live and create in your full potential?
RM: I don’t know... I very much like teaching, and teaching buys me the independence to make the films that I want to make, separate from thinking primarily about commerce. That’s good, but it’s a bit strange to be insulated from commerce as well and it also takes up a lot of time, teaching. So while it gives me the freedom it also takes a lot of my freedom and if for example I could just make films for the next ten years, I don’t know what that would produce, I suspect it would produce more work and I think maybe my potential as a filmmaker would be more realized, but I won’t make a living from that. Or if I did, it would be just by chance that that happened. So I don’t spend that much time thinking about that or worrying about that, but if you ask the question I suspect that I’m not at my potential. But on the other hand, this is what’s complicated, if I had the freedom, the complete freedom, who knows what I would do with it, who knows. And also then I would be since I have a family needing to rely on the marketplace to make that life work and then what would my work look like, I don’t know. So it’s a very tough question to answer. I mean I would say the things I have devoted my life to, my family, my film work and my teaching, I’m completely involved in all those three things and doing as well as I can, given all the kinds of overlapping time-commitments and obligations, and in that sense I feel very spend, very used up and in a good way! Whether it could be more in anyone of these three areas, I think it probably could be more in all three areas, but you know I’m not sure... it’s a bit like what I was saying, it’s like the pleasure and the failure, I mean, I feel both in relation to those elements, my life at the makrolevel as well as the work on the mircolevel.
SR/LS: Do you have a mission?
RM: Oh boy... I think of missions as being so much connected to Christianity, you know, just missions, missionaries and conversion, I know, you don’t mean it like that, but I hear the word and I go “....”- say more...
SR/LS: Do you have something you really want the world to know, something you want to give... which is in everything you do, as a parent, as a teacher, as a filmmaker...
RM: (really long pause)...I don’t know, I mean the thing that strikes me as you ask the question, it’s an impossible question, but ... (long pause) I think the thing that I ask of, I don’t know exactly if this makes any sense... but something about the kind of teaching that I believe in, this relates to something we talked about earlier... what I want... when people watch movies I want them to take the movies very seriously and that means the filmmaking as well as the topic and the event of the thing and the experience of the thing. I want them to regard it in a serious way, whatever it is they make of it. I also think that’s how I teach in the sense that I want them to do that as filmmakers, to see what’s in front of their faces, to know the world by observing it, not by overcoming ... ehm... to see as well as they can and to regard other people and I see it as my job in the same way to know them like I’m asking them to know the world, so that’s our deal, ehm... and maybe as a parent something similar to that as well, that it’s my job to know my children, not so much their job to know me, but their job to know themselves and my job to help them become who they are or might be. And somehow all those things are connected, whether that’s actually a mission or just my personality, I mean, I don’t know.
SR/LS: Do you believe that there is an artist in everybody?
RM: (long pause)... I’m not sure how to answer that. My first thought is: there is not an artist in everybody... but that everybody can become an artist (laughs)... hem... so maybe it’s philosophical, it’s ... I don’t have some Aristotelian believe that people are artist and they’ve just forgotten, but I think if people wish to interact with the world as an artist might which is to say: to be as observant as you can be and then find and medium in which to express that, ehm... that I think anybody can do that, it’s not a particular group that is preordained to be that or anything, it’s completely democratic who could be. But I don’t necessarily believe that everybody is.
SR/LS: What do you think is needed in our time?
RM: (long pause)... well, I mean I could ... speaking as an American I would say that, and maybe this is again the mood you’ve put me in or just the continuity of thinking, but I don’t think America sees itself very well, I think it sees itself very, very poorly, it doesn’t have a very good idea of who it is in the world and what it’s doing or what the world is like that it sits in, maybe even more importantly and I would say at least at the political level that America needs to know the world much better, I mean it’s just blundering around like this sort of rogue elephant, just trampling things in a way that it thinks it doing the right thing- I think it’s not doing the right thing, I think it’s causing tremendous damage. So... (pause) you know in the context of this conversation, it needs to hem... you know, see the world like an artist might see it and then know itself.
SR/LS: What do you consider as essential for your life?
RM: Well, it’s really the three pillars of my life. You know, to have my family, to love my family, to spend time with them…, …continue to do film work that interrogates the world and myself at the same time..., …teaching is maybe the thing I spend the most time doing since it/s my fulltime-job, it’s probably not the thing... eh, it’s the thing I could stop doing, whereas I can’t really stop the other two, but nonetheless it’s very important to me to engage with students, to be thinking about things with them and with my colleges, figure out what the world is like the best that we can and to know its history and its traditions.
SR/LS: Does spirituality mean something to you?
RM: I don’t spend much time thinking spiritual thoughts that I’m aware of. I mean, it all is a kind of spirituality in its own way, but you know, it’s again the mission-thing... as soon as things become codified, and I know that you don’t necessarily even mean that, but..
SR/LS: Yeah, not at all... but you have a sense of that there is more to this world then we see?
RM: I don’t know.
SR/LS: And you don’t ask yourself?
RM: I do. But I have no way of knowing.
SR/LS: But a sensation or a feeling?
RM: I don’t even know that I do... or that I.... I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean people have looked at “the same river twice” and given it a Zen-something. I mean, people have written me and they assume that that’s what I believe and maybe it is what I believe (laughs)... but I... it isn’t what I intended it to be, or what I thought about.
SR/LS: Ok, but this is not what I mean. I mean, you wouldn’t say that you don’t believe at all or would you?
RM: I might.
SR/LS: Yes? So you could say that you live here and after your death there is nothing?
RM: I think that’s most likely.
SR/LS: So you don’t have a spirit or something...
RM: I don’t know. I don’t think the universe thinks about me in that sense, … I do think we’re all part of some... and maybe simply material, I don’t know, you know, at the molecular level or something, you know, we die, we decompose, we go back into the universe.
SR/LS: So you feel you’re a part of something...
RM: Yeah. I think rivers help me think that also, it... it’s short of anything that I can comprehend and ... and then there isn’t any way of thinking I’m attracted to as a description.
SR/LS: What does friendship mean to you and what role does it play in your life?
RM: Oh, it’s very key, I mean, you know, I keep my friends, I care, I don’t loose friends. Like going back over the years I’ve known people... I mean in the film there is friendships in there that I’ve had for more than forty years, everybody in the film I’ve known more than twenty-five years, and those are the newcomers. So I’m quite devoted. I’m a terrible correspondent on the other hand, I’m just like the worst, you know, keeping in touch, sending letters, making phone calls, I’m terrible at it. But, I mean, I’m sort of incapable of the small gesture, but I’m very capable of the big gesture. You know, I go see somebody across the country at a moment that that seems like a good thing, but I won’t phone (laughs) and have regular conversations. And I’m capable of just picking right up, like I still feel connected to people, so when I don’t see them for a long time I don’t loose contact with them at all. I mean, I don’t feel that loss of contact, I’ right there with them when I’m with them. I have this sort of in every way and maybe it’s relative to the spiritual question as well, I have a kind of miners head with a light that illuminates about eight feet in front of me and it’s enough so that I don’t fall down, I mean, I can see where there is boulders and I can sort of find my way and I can see very clearly what’s right there, but I don’s see what’s our there at all. But as time moves me forward or as I walk, you know, the light illuminates different things. So, you know, if the friends are out there, I don’t exactly see them, but when they are there, I’m completely there. So I’m a terrible planer for example, I don’t plan.
SR/LS: If you think of the the little boy you have been, what of him is it that lives in your art or in your life now?
RM: (long pause)... I mean there is so many things one could say to question like that, but I think ... I’m the youngest of two children and I think that often when you are the youngest child you see your family in a way that nobody else sees the family because when you are the littlest all you have is your perception. you know, you are not stronger, you are not smarter, em... all you can do is sort of look and see the constellation of your family as closely you can, because that’s where your life, everything comes from. So I think that that experience of sort of looking at the constellation of my family is exactly the same as making films for me or teaching or something, there is just some way in which I can see that as a thing, as a kind of whole thing rather than being in the midth of it. So it’s a kind of outsiderness also. And then I find, you know, if I think about it it’s like I moved from the west coast to the east coast, I’m the only person from this group to do so, and when I first moved to the east I was clearly a transplanted westerner and now I’m hybrid, I’m not a westerner, but I’m also not an easterner, I’m something of both. And I’m a filmmaker who teaches in the Academy and I’m also neither, but both, a kind of hybrid, and I think that’s where I’m most comfortable is to be, you know, neither and both and in that sense I’m replicating being part of my family and then also being an outsider, observing it. And maybe it all comes from there.
© lars schmidt & stefa roth
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