By Pavita Millimuff                October 6, 2090

For a couple weeks now, The Tomorrow Syndicate, the massive comeback attempt of once-great director Nathan Durdiskes, has baffled filmgoers of all types. Some have immediately gone to war for the film (in the metaphorical sense, thankfully) and defended Mr. Durdiskes as a hero bringing about the second coming of real cinema. Many more have immediately dismissed it as a straightforward case of “old man yells at cloud.” A dystopian epic about a criminal organization selling literal shares of the future to the highest bidder, the shrimp-infested rock opera has become a modest box office success that has given signs of life to Earth’s wartime economy. I met remotely this week with Mr. Durdiskes to discuss the film’s release and his many thoughts on it, as well as cinema and the world at large.

Pavita Millimuff: How did you feel about releasing the film at a time like this? Was there any consideration of delaying the film’s release until the war is over, or at least until it settles down more?

Nathan Durdiskes: Pavita, let me first of all address some of the employees at Jorge’s Super Sandwiches in Burbank. Now, I was at your establishment last Tuesday and I ordered the Lupa Deluxe sandwich, the one with all those pickles and the Venusian puffin frog meat, but I specifically ordered it with no mayonnaise. I made this very clear. Yet for some reason you decided to interpret this as meaning that you should just add dark matter mayonnaise to cancel out the mayonnaise. But that is not how that works, you would know that if you had paid attention in your middle school science classes. And then you go and raise a whole fuss online about how Nathan Durdiskes only tips 30% to sandwich shop workers, well let me tell you something. I am usually a very good tipper, but when people get my order wrong and then argue with me about what my order was or was not, I’m not gonna give you a great tip. So I just want to clear that up. Your sandwiches are very good, but you really need to make sure your employees are respectful of their customers, because it turns me off from your business. Also, there’s this guy who used to work there, Ferdinand, like several months ago, before the war. If any of you have his contact info, he still owes me money from our fantasy football league pool four years ago. He’s been ghosting me. Of course, if he’s been drafted into the war, then tell him not to worry about that right now and just pay me back once his tour is up. But do remind him of his debts, please. I’m sorry, Pavita, what was your question?

PM: Was there any consideration of delaying the film’s release because of the war?

ND: Oh, no. Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite. I’m a reckless gay artist with fourteen stab wounds in my lower back that I got trying to recover my Lindsey Buckingham Chia Pet back from Chombos 29. My entire life has been about running towards the fire instead of away from it. We weren’t gonna shy away from putting out this thing that we’d been working on tirelessly for years just because it didn’t feel like the right time. If now isn’t the right time, when is it? Waiting around for the right time to do something is just being in denial about not doing it. When the war broke out, we felt that our film might be able to help in its own way somehow, we felt now it was more critical than ever to get this thing out there. When something like this happens, you can see it either as an excuse not to do the thing or a reason why you have to do it. I always go with the latter.

PM: This is your first film in 27 years. How long have you been working on this one?

ND: Since before I was born. I know that it sounds crazy, but it’s true. Artistic creation is sacred. Art isn’t something that you just drum up, the same way you would make a chair. When you create, you submerge yourself into a vast cosmic energy, the kind of thing that penetrates across all space, time, all the other dimensions too. You’re tapping into something beyond yourself and drawing from it as you draw water from a stream. You ingest that cosmic energy, guzzle it all up, let it bounce around, and then in a beautiful ritual you shit it out onto a page, or a screen, or a canvas, and that’s art. That’s where this film comes from. From that magical metaphysical dance of light and spirit and cockroaches with pink top hats. It’s made of stardust, and I didn’t fashion it myself. I just happened to have the intestines.

PM: A lot has changed in the time between this film and your last one. How is making a movie today different from what it was like earlier in your career?

ND: There’s just a lot more people. So many goddamn people that get their hands on this thing. And granted, this is with much of the film’s financing coming out of my own pocket. Everybody always wants a consultant for this and a coordinator for that. They’re trying to get me to get a permit to film in my own house. Let me tell you something, back in the day we didn’t do any of that permit shit. We would just show up and shoot as much as we could and then run away whenever the police came. I mean, I got arrested a few times for that, and several more times for other reasons, but it was the spirit of the thing. Now everyone thinks that because I’m an old man I have to do everything all straight and narrow, but that’s never been me. That’s never been what art is about. The more people that get their hands on it, the more nothing it becomes. Producers and cinematographers and various people tell me they don’t understand something, and I say good! That means there’s still some life in the thing. Roll the camera before it dies out. So that’s what I’d say is different about it. Oh, and also there’s a hell of a lot more exorcisms that happen on set.

PM: The film is reckoning with a lot of things, and one idea I picked up on was that of older generations not being willing to cede power to the younger ones. This certainly has a clear connection to the point you are at in your career. How did that influence your approach to the film?

ND: I never really think about the movies I work on in that sort of personal sense. They’re not meant to be allegories psychoanalyzed to be reflections on my own life. If you spot connections there, more power to you. But I don’t design the movies that way. They’re not about me. They’re just in large part by me, for me, and in some cases of me. I mean that literally, by the way, there’s a part in The Carnival of Marxist Pantyhose where some flesh out of my left asscheek got pressed onto the film stock. Long story. But yes, you are right that generational strife is a large part of the film. I remember when I was a teenager I used to do magic shows for my little sisters’ birthday parties and my dad would always say something about how my fake mutilations of squirrels was “not the vibe.” I never understood that, the vibe is a descriptive thing, not a prescriptive one, after all. He just never saw me as myself, I guess. I was just there to fulfill the vibe. I think you see the same kind of thing all across the solar system between old and young, they just can’t dance to the same beat. And in The Tomorrow Syndicate, we see people trying to fix that by getting rid of the beat entirely.

PM: I think that among this film’s concerns about the future and how it is being commodified, there’s a concern about the future of cinema, and whether there’s a place for true artistry in it. I wonder if you viewed this film as a sort of call to action to save cinema from the corporate interests that have come to dominate it?

ND: Well, first of all, I would never be so arrogant as to suppose that one movie from an old fart like me could really make a difference against the powers that be in Hollywood. So I wasn’t making a film to save cinema, only a movie that would express a deep truth about art and society and the human experience such that it would resonate deep in the annals of cinematic history and make an everlasting impression. And maybe also save cinema. But the truth is, cinema isn’t something that needs to be saved. You can’t kill art. Not really. Sure, cinema is being throttled and suppressed right now and choked up against the side of a toilet bowl with a dog leash the way I once was one night in Rochester back in 2052, but it’ll survive in some capacity. Like water or investment bankers guilty of massive fraud, it’ll always find a place to go. People will always keep making art, you can’t take that away from them no matter how hard you try. People made art when it was illegal in Hitler’s Germany, and in Björk’s Florida. True cinema will always be there if one looks hard enough for it, but what we want is to make a world where one doesn’t have to look so hard for it, where it can be centered and appreciated for how valuable it is. You can’t do that just by making a single movie yourself, no matter how good it is, which makes my whole project of making myself the savior of the art form sort of stupid.

PM: How do you think the kind of cinema you hope gets celebrated more can help us to work through the crazy times we’re living in?

ND: When you’ve got different planets and moons and asteroids all fighting a war over something I’ve honestly lost track of, you start to feel lost. You start to feel like nothing matters, like there’s no solid ground anymore. And that’s what great art can give you. It can orient you again, keep you tethered to what matters to you, to your own humanity. It can give you a light that you can follow when all the other ones have gone out. And it can be a bright light. So bright that it blinds you, that it burns your eyes and separates the eyeballs from the retinas and burns your face and forces you to go see a doctor who tells you that you’re gonna have to wear patches over both eyes now and that you’re gonna look like the most badass pirate in history, and go by some name like Captain Beefboss, and then you’re gonna build such a reputation as Captain Beefboss that all the thugs and no-good hooligans want to be your lackeys, including that kid Norbert that used to bully you in high school, and then when Norbert tries to work for you and finds out that you’re Captain Beefboss he’s gonna be so freaked out, and then you can get your revenge on him by making him eat and swallow the brown part of a banana, and you can watch the pain on his face as he slowly starts taking a bite of it. Well, you can’t watch because you’ve got eyepatches on both eyes, but you can listen to him squirm while he does it and imagine his face. So yeah, you all want to support great cinema knowing it might one day lead to you with your two eyepatches and hardcore pirate name listening to Norbert licking that banana bruise? Damn right you do.