“Time is something people made up,” Mary Heilmann says towards the end of “Waves, Roads and Hallucinations,” a biography that true to the artist doesn’t adhere to any strict chronology. The daughter of a civil engineer who helped build up the freeways in California, Heilmann inevitably became fascinated with movement in spite of gravitating towards portraiture, creating paintings of the open road and accompanying landscapes that could fully absorb the viewer and lose all sense of time. Now in her eighties when director Matt Creed finds her, you’d think she’d be a little more concerned with it, yet she isn’t one to be tamed by age and despite the circuitous path her career took, the film suggests she’s known where she’s been heading all along.
There is a dollar figure placed on this certitude at the start of “Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads and Hallucinations” when a single painting can now fetch upwards of $750,000 at auction, but her resolve may be even more valuable to other artists who can barely fathom how they’ll pay this month’s rent as Creed observes Heilmann’s abiding belief in following her own muse wherever it may lead. An iconoclast from the time she was a sculptor who caught the attention of more famous instructors at Berkeley by placing her work closer and closer to their office door over time, she is revealed time and again to stand out amongst her peers, beckoned by splashy magazine profiles of artists to move to the east coast in the late 1960s where she promptly turned to painting to irritate the sculptors she came up with and more controversially, resisted being seen as part of the women’s liberation movement when she saw the value of being a big fish in a smaller pond.
Ironically, some of her most famed work now is predicated around sitting down when she was responsible for the candy colored chairs that have become quite popular since helping to reopen the Whitney Museum in 2015, prominently located on the ledge overlooking the city, and a product of her wanting audiences to feel more comfortable at her exhibits, but the film, where this journey to stillness takes so many ebbs and flows, shows a creative restlessness that has been a constant inspiration to Heilmann rather than an impediment with memories resurfacing and processed with perspective over the years. It provides something to hold onto for audiences as well when there may be nothing more tangible about success in a field rooted so much in imagination and the film offers experience rather than achievements as markers of how far Heilmann has come, bathing audiences in scenes of places of great meaning to her.
Yet as much as it reflects Heilmann, “Waves, Roads and Hallucinations” also shows the verve that made its director Creed someone to keep an eye on following his 2013 narrative debut “Lily,” a delicate drama about a young woman’s bout with cancer, and while Heilmann kept him too busy over the better part of the decade that followed to pursue much else, his latest fulfills the promise he showed when it takes a unique approach towards encapsulating someone’s life. After the film premiered at last year’s Hamptons Film Festival, it is now being made available to stream on VOD and the director spoke about how an introduction after one of Hellmann’s gallery shows in New York led to a collaboration, adjusting his skills as a filmmaker to a nonfiction production and how he could impart some of his own principles as an artist in telling the story of another he looks up to so much.
How does this all takes shape for you?
Mary had approached me about doing something together, and she had this book that she made in the late ’90s called “The All-Night Movie,” which was put out by her gallery Hauser & Wirth – it went out of print, but then it was reissued very recently. It’s a kind of autobiography about her life up to this point [around] 1999, and in this book, there’s a really long text piece that she wrote about her life. I had known about this book and it was very important to me, so when she brought up that idea, I was very excited by it, but we didn’t know how to do it. We settled on trying to adapt it into a kind of moving image documentary form and it just grew from there.
It connected to your previous feature in my mind, even though that was a narrative when I know how that was an equal partnership between yourself and your lead actress and co-writer Amy Grantham, who was dramatizing her own experience to some extent. Is that a way of working that you find especially rewarding?
Yeah, I do. Making films to me is a very collaborative form. You need the help of a lot of people and I really try very hard to throw my ego out the door. And when you’re making a documentary — and I made a short about a friend [before] — but especially on an artist, it’s a highly intimate and invasive process, so you have to trust one another. Mary really trusted me and trusted in giving up something that she has been in control of her entire life because it’s always just her. So I enjoy the process of working with someone and playing off of them and figuring out what, how far things can go, what are the parameters of you can do. This is obviously different [than “Lily”] because when you’re making a narrative, you have a script, everything’s there and you know what you’re doing that day. You’re shooting it. You’re done. [With] documentary, you’re you’re just hanging out with someone and you collect footage or recordings and then years later, you’re like, “What do I have?” Then you sit down and you work backwards, which was the first for me.
And Mary was very happy with how I approached it and how it turned out. She set parameters very early, which [involved] no talking heads and [she said] “I don’t want you to interview a bunch of people. I don’t want it to be like a traditional documentary. I want music…” and all this [other] stuff, which I was like, “I’m on board,” so I approached it a bit as trying to make a very long music video and using archival footage, found footage, and new footage that I had shot and then you learn pretty quick without interviewing people [beyond the subject[ that you have a lot more air to fill and time because you don’t have these people to put on screen telling stories, so it was just Mary.
Was it difficult to find a structure for this? She talks about not having much regard for thinking about time in a linear way, which this seems to honor.
That was another thing where she was like, “Yeah, let’s not make it linear,” and I was up for that challenge. I used the installing and opening of the museum exhibition [in Germany] as an anchor, and I [thought] “Okay, if that can be like a fake throughline, then the rest can be pretty abstract and tonal and atmospheric and very Mary.” You’re sitting there with her, just hearing her tell stories and you have some images to go with it. It’s meant to be very easy to digest and engaging and intimate and at most, there were three of us on set and most of the time it was just two of us. Sometimes it was just me doing sound and filming.
And [since] I never made a doc, this idea of working backwards and not having any money became really daunting, so [I thought], how can I do this in a way where I can stay true to Mary and what she wants and also make something that’s engaging and not too experimental, so it was a combination of like few films that I had been inspired by around the time I started shooting — “Dream of Light” by Victor Erice, after he made “Spirit of the Beehive,” this documentary [where] everything staged with this painter Antonio Lopez and it’s just him painting a quince tree in his backyard and he has like friends come over. I was really into the intimacy of that and this Agnes Martin documentary “With My Back to the World.” Those were the two biggest inspirations of how I could structure a movie and approach it in a very intimate way. And I’m fully riffing off of Adam Curtis [as well with the idea of] collaging and when I discovered him, I was like, “You don’t need to interview a bunch of people. You can listen to someone’s voice and put really great images to it and that’s all you need,” so I ran with that.
The interstitial scenes of landscapes become really important in terms of creating the mood. How did those come into the mix?
When I look at an ocean or at a sunset, I just think of Mary Heilmann. and I wanted to kind of illustrate that as best as I could for other people, so inspirations for her artwork, like sunsets and the color of the sand and the water when the sun hits it and waves and and roads, I so wanted to bring that to life in a way that made people understand that about her work. And I think Mary is an incredibly smart and intelligent person and is an intellectual, but when it comes to her art, she speaks about it in very non-academic terms and it’s very personal storytelling [which I think] most people can relate to. You don’t have to be an artist to understand what she’s talking about.
Was there anything you wanted to express about your own pursuit as an artist through her?
Yeah, Mary as an artist is like kind the blueprint for me. She was a punk and very stubborn about what she was doing and she stayed her course. Andas a creative person, she talks about this longevity. When she talks about being famous, it’s not in a materialistic way. She’s talking about the work. She [says] that’s what’s important and when you’re gone, you’re not actually gone. You’ve left this body of work in the world. I think that is very important for artists to know — it’s not about the immediate gratification or success. It’s about the long-term and even when you’re not even here anymore. That’s inspiring to me and I’m really happy to make something [where] knowing that it can exist in the world is enough. And I like to discover things — I love discovering an album or a film or an artist that has been around since the ‘60s and I’m just discovering it now. I think that’s amazing, so Mary and this film, I hope, can illustrate that.
“Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads & Hallucinations” will be available on July 20th to stream on all major streaming platforms, including AppleTV and Amazon via Tribeca Films. It will screen theatrically in New York at the Roxy Cinema on August 18th at 3 pm.