Exclusive Unabridged Interview with Jeff Feuerzeig

Don Goede
Jeff Feuerzeig

DG: Do you remember where you were when you heard your first Daniel Johnston song?

JF: Good question.

DG: Do you remember the exact day, and the time, and the place … is your memory that detailed?

JF: Sort of. I remember I was either in Hoboken or Trenton, NJ. I’m pretty sure it was Hi, How Are You? It had to be around 1985. I just remember listening to it from beginning to end and just being so taken, and I don’t have it on me, so don’t make me look stupid, Don, but doesn’t that have him singing over other records, like Desperate Man Blues?

DG: I believe so, yes.

JF: I remember being so blown away when he was singing over a jazz record. I found out later, through researching the movie, that it was England’s ambassador of jazz, Johnny Dankworth and his orchestra. Of course, nobody knows it at the time, because Daniel doesn’t reveal it. “Keep Punching Joe” is on that record too, right?

DG: Absolutely.

JF: Yeah, “Keep Punching Joe” blew my mind. That just really spoke to me. Are “Hey Joe” and “Keep Punching Joe” both on the same record?

DG: They are, absolutely.

JF: Yeah, “Hey Joe” is still one of my favorite songs both melodically and lyrically, and then he reprises the Joe theme in “Keep Punching Joe,” and there’s the drawing on the back of the boxer. It came together for me sort of instantly.

DG: Right, [it came together] for me too. That album also has “Running Water.”

JF: Yeah, “Running Water” blew my mind with the water running from the faucet. I could tell you about every nuance of that record if I had it in front of me. Read the titles off for me real quick.

DG: Well, it starts with “Poor You”.

JF: Oh, “Poor You” is great. It’s probably the most pitiful song, but he’s doing that comedic voice! I was like, aw, this is great! Tragedy! What’s next?

DG: “Big Business Monkey.”

JF: “Big Business Monkey” is interesting… like, yeah, somebody is trying to exploit him.

DG: There’re lots of rumors of whom that’s about.

JF: Yeah, those rumors are cracked in the movie. Daniel tells that story openly, so it’s no secret. The song’s about Dick, his brother. When [Dick] was young he did not understand his brother and did not encourage him. He tried to help [Daniel] that summer and give him a job in Texas, but then Dick evicted him! So, there you go! Dick also says it in interviews in his own words.

DG: And then of course we go into “Walking the Cow”.

JF: “Walking the Cow” is great. We of course learn many years later that it’s based on the cow from the Blue Bell ice cream wrapper in Virginia.

DG: Which I think the Johnstons still eat.

JF: The best part of my first trip down there was when Dick was driving us around Chester, and I saw what probably was one of those water silo things. I don’t know what you call the big water towers in the air. I think I saw a water tower with a Blue Bell cow, or I saw a barn with a Blue Bell. It was almost like a billboard, but somebody painted it. I saw that cow, and I just thought that it was like the Holy Grail. Of course, later, I got that ice cream wrapper, and we actually scanned it, and did a little animation where the ice cream wrapper starts animating to the song “Walking the Cow,” but that didn’t make the final cut [of the documentary]. That album is rich, isn’t it?

DG: Well, you bring up a really interesting point, because, fortunately, my first Daniel Johnston album was Yip Jump.

JF: Which is also a masterpiece. It’s a chord organ masterpiece.

DG: Apparently you know the album very well, so we don’t have to go through all the songs. I think you probably suffer from the same thing that I do. By that I mean that Daniel has so much music, and has such a catalogue, that you don’t necessarily think of Daniel as just one of his albums, or at least I don’t. I just think of it as an experience. What I was going to get at was what would have happened, do you think, if your first [Daniel] album had been maybe something not as strong? Because, Yip Jump and Hi, How Are You? are two very powerful albums.

JF: Oh my God, it doesn’t get better than those two.

DG: In the film you don’t really go too much into how people really take Daniel. Over the years I’ve been watching people listen to his music for the first time, and can be very controversial as far as all the lo-fi goes. After being on the road with him for years, I realized you have to be in a certain state of mind, and I’ve always wondered what happens if you don’t hear certain songs of Daniel’s first. The fact that Hi, How Are You? was one of the first [Daniel Johnston] albums you listened to might have really opened up a giant can of worms. Do you think that if you had listened to something else first that you might have been turned off by the whole [Daniel Johnston] thing, or have you always been drawn to that particular type of music?

JF: Well, as you know, I’m a huge music fan, of all styles and genres. I literally heard Yip Jump and Hi How Are You? on the same day. I bought all the cassettes the same day. Basically, almost all the cassettes, and I do mean almost all the cassettes, were already recorded before [Daniel] ever got to Austin. He recorded this monstrous body of work when he was basically graduating high school and going into college. So, to me, it’s all one time period.

DG: It sounds like you were bit by the same bug that bit a lot of us… that you wanted to get as much of it as you could.

JF: Well, it touched me on a molecular level. Even now just talking about those particular songs again gave me a chill… that’s how much I love that music.

DG: So, to change gears a little bit and talk about his art. At what point did you figure out that Daniel was also an artist? Obviously the cassettes had his artwork on them, but how much longer after that did you figure out that he drew and he painted, and what made you decide to attack that side of things?

JF: The drawings on the cassettes were my only knowledge of his art, and I loved those drawings, but I wasn’t as hip to art back then. My knowledge of art was very, very limited. Over the years, I’ve really come to understand much more about art, but initially, hearing the song “Keep Punching Joe” and seeing that drawing of the boxer on Hi, How Are You? really tied things together for me conceptually. I started linking all of those images to the music and what he was writing about. I realized how he was self-documenting his life, like with the mom yelling, and I instantly took it as performance art. I didn’t just – I certainly did not think of him as just a singer/songwriter at that moment. I loved the music, but it really was a performance art piece to me, it was like this triple threat.

DG: Did you research Daniel during that time, try to find about more about him as a person?

JF: There wasn’t much to hear about him, honestly, there were a couple articles about him, and I saved everything, so I guess the answer’s yes. But the best thing that came out at the time was the Chemical Imbalance magazine with Daniel on the cover and this huge article on him by Mike McGonical, which I saved to this day. That had the most information you could have about the guy. Of course, the Spin magazine article by Louis Black was also astounding.

DG: And this is all early ‘90s?

JF: No, this is late ‘80s. You know, I’m collecting this stuff, ’85, ’86.

DG: Now, are you making any films at that time? Are you experimenting with media?

JF: Yes, absolutely, I made my first music documentary about a gentleman named Ben Vaughn, and the Ben Vaughn combo. He went on to produce Ween, Charlie Feathers, and Arthur Alexander, and had a big solo career his whole life.

DG: So would it be safe to say that at that point that maybe even possibly, subconsciously, you might have been thinking about doing something about Daniel?

JF: Consciously. I have all those postcards saved, and I got the idea to make a movie about Daniel the day of the WFMU radio broadcast, when he was promoting the album 1990. That’s when the whole idea for this movie came together. I decided I was going to make a movie called Yip Jump Movie, in 1990.

DG: Now, did you see Daniel live first, or did you see footage of Daniel first?

JF: I never saw Daniel live until the year 2000. He never toured… he only played in Austin. So, if you were a New Yorker, or a Hoboken WFMU person (a huge contingent of Daniel fans), he was just an enigma.

DG: Right.

JF: So, there is no Daniel Johnston to us except the voice on those tapes.

DG: Which probably added to some of the mystique.

JF: Oh, totally, and that’s why the film came out the way it came out. I wanted to keep Daniel … Daniel Johnston is best appreciated as an enigma.

DG: Oh yeah.

JF: I can quote from that show. When that broadcast went down, I taped it live on the air, and everything I’d been thinking about Daniel was there on this one tape. On that broadcast, he’s interviewing himself, playing all the parts, including the female parts. His obsession with fame happens on that tape. It was funny.

DG: Well, Daniel is a funny guy.

JF: That’s what I was getting at here. The humor of Daniel. I think that some of his songs are incredibly humorous. It’s like John Lennon. The Beatles had great senses of humor, and I love humor. Daniel’s humor really, really touched me. I think Daniel’s hilarious. He likes to be funny, and he was funny on the radio. In fact, he was brilliantly comedic on the radio, and he was also doing this incredible Woody Allen jump cut editing in his sound on the radio show that is very evocative of one of my favorite movies, Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run. Later on, in his notebooks, I saw he had cut out pictures and made collages of Woody Allen, and I saw him draw Woody Allen. Daniel was conscious of a lot of things, because he was a pop culture machine. I responded just as much to his sense of humor as I did to the love story of Laurie and his unrequited love, to the documentation of his family, and to the self-documentation of his mental illness. They all went together into this incredible cocktail, and I was like, wow, this guy is a force, you know?

DG: Well, I totally agree, and one thing I did notice about Daniel as I’ve been studying him over the years, is that at one point, I felt like he was on his way to becoming quite an intellectual. I didn’t realize how much he had studied even when he was in high school and college.

JF: That’s true. That’s all because of Dave Thornberry. Him and Dave, were discussing Kurt Vonnegut, and he was very conscious of Andy Warhol, who grew up right up the river from Daniel. An Andy Warhol soup can was an early piece of art of Daniel’s art except he did like Cowhol … Andy Cowhol or something.

DG: Not long after that, “Dead Dog’s Eyeball” came about.

JF: Exactly. So all that came out of there, but he’s conscious of Warhol… I have tapes of him, and a lot of drawings of him in high school where he’s drawing the story of Vincent van Gogh and talking about cutting off his own ear. He wanted to be an artist, and he knew about Picasso, and he knew about all these great artists. Jonathan Richman was into the same great artists.

DG: It’s pretty safe to say he studied quite a bit, I think before, well, I don’t know exactly when that stopped, but I would say that probably a lot of that did with after the breakdown.

JF: Yeah, no question, he studied hard, and he pursued it, and I think after the breakdown, the way my assessment is, and you’ve spent time with him too, it’s just this incredible case of arrested development where intellectually it’s all in there, but the arrested development is interesting because it’s like Groundhog Day: he wakes up every morning, and it’s like you weren’t even there the day before, and he’ll say, “Hey, let’s go for a Slushee,” or, “Hey, let’s go get some stickers at the five-and-dime store. Let’s go get some Beatles bootlegs.” He’s like stuck in…

DG: Well, one thing I realized about Daniel is that he buys the same records over and over.

JF: Yes, he does. He buys the same comic books. It’s like he’s stuck in an endless loop, like he’s like Bill Murray in Harold Ramis’ movie Groundhog Day. I find it fascinating, but the truth is, what I learned, and this is one of the greatest nights of my entire life, I have to tell you, is Daniel dancing in that garage, at the end of the movie, which is like his interpretive dance of his life. Being in that garage at three in the morning with him, I realized, like, oh my God. He’s having a party in his head all the time at night, alone in this garage. He’s the happiest guy in the world in there, and he’s laughing, he’s playing these bootlegs that never sounded better to me than they did in Daniel’s garage. All of the sudden, I was back in high school, like, oh my God, remember the years when you could just hang out and just listen to records all night long with friends till three in the morning, and I was like oh my God, his studio, his garage is the greatest place on Earth. I was so happy. I felt like I realized what I’d have without the responsibilities of my life. We all take on work, and family, because we’re not all stuck in arrested development, and we all moved on in our lives. Daniel didn’t. He’s stuck in a beautiful place even though he is, you know, God’s lonely man.

DG: I experienced a lot with him on the road. There were lots of times when we were listening to music, or eating pizza, or drinking coke, or what-have-you, but there were also times that I saw his frustration.

JF: Oh, no doubt, he’s incredibly frustrated.

DG: And I think you did a wonderful job capturing that in the film, by the way, and doing it in a way that’s very respectful.

JF: Well, respectful is number one in my film.

DG: I know.

JF: Why did I make this movie? It’s very simple: it’s a love letter. Not only to Daniel Johnston, but it’s a love letter to art, period. That’s all it is. Daniel Johnston, in this film, starts off his opening line, “I am the ghost of Daniel Johnston.” And it ends with Daniel Johnston dressed up as Casper flying through the air. In my mind, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a portrait of a living ghost. That’s why he’s an enigma, and that’s why he isn’t interviewed in his own film. Instead, I’ve woven all his cassettes into a monologue which I think is much more powerful.

DG: I agree.

JF: We haven’t seen a film like that before. We’ve seen older artists being interviewed and telling the worst stories of their life, but Daniel wasn’t really able to do that in a way that was satisfying to a film, because he was medicated. He explains what it’s like when his manic depression hits and he gets the tingles in his fingers, but he’s telling that to his cassette tape as it happens. When he’s diagnosing himself out of the DSM-4 psychology manual, that’s actually happening. Audio is much more powerful than picture to me, and that’s why the film is powerful, because Daniel self-documented and recorded himself.

DG: Did you feel a connection with Daniel when you found out he was a filmmaker? Did you realize, hey, here’s a fellow filmmaker who was doing stuff so early on?

JF: Well, when he showed me those films for the first time, nobody knew that Daniel Johnston made films. It was not in any of the research anybody could know. You didn’t know; I didn’t know; nobody knew, OK? And when he showed me those films, they blew my mind. I think “It Must Be Monday” is one of the greatest home … I don’t want to call it a “home movie,” because it’s a movie. It’s a Super 8mm film made by a 13-year-old boy, directing himself, playing multiple roles like Peter Sellers, playing his mom in drag. The scenes are brilliant. The acting is brilliant. It’s like Buster Keaton, Woody Allen, and Charlie Chaplin all in one. Daniel pulled it off, and it blew my mind. The editing is great. The eye lines, screen direction, the colors, the wardrobe, the props! I mean, the guy did it all, and he’s 13! I’ve seen a lot of student films in my life from students who are a lot older, and they don’t hold a candle to Daniel Johnston’s “It Must Be Monday.” Including my own student films, for that matter.

JF: Yes.

DG: And I do agree to a certain point. I do often think about his brilliance and what certain things that happened to him along the way… it seems like Daniel, whenever anything really big happens for him, it almost kind of collapses upon itself, like a star or something. And you touch on this in the film a little bit, but now you’re part of that, because your film has not been released yet officially; it won’t be out until late March. And I’m just wondering how you feel about Daniel’s career and why it has to happen that way: is it just something that after so many failures, eventually Daniel will be above ground, and everybody will have heard of him and his music? Or do you think he’ll just … I mean, what are your thoughts about Daniel’s relationship to the world?

JF: This is how I see it, OK? I don’t look at Daniel’s career as a series of failures; I look at it as a series of successes. I truly, truly do, because I see each and every one of those creations as a success. Because I believe the moment of creation is when the artist is speaking, or writing, or drawing, or whatever it is…

DG: Maybe I mean more commercially. I don’t mean Daniel’s work itself, I’m talking more about, just as one example of many, Atlantic records putting out Fun and not knowing how to market it, and it ending up in the children’s section in record stores.

JF: I’m going to make a comment on that, listen, I’ve said it openly 1000 times: I’m an early Daniel Johnston fan, once again, from ’85-’86. He records his gospel album with Kramer, who’s a great producer, and doesn’t overproduce the record, and it’s a masterpiece, I think 1990 is a masterpiece. It’s just as good as the early tapes, except it’s not lo-fi, and it’s thematically about his battle with the devil, essentially. And Daniel went to New York, according to the tapes I have, and set out to make a gospel album. And that’s why you have the song “Careless Soul” on it, which was written by somebody actually from Chester, West Virginia. Or East Liverpool, excuse me. I think Kramer did a masterful job; that was the apex, after all those years of cassettes. And then Artistic Vice was recorded with his friends from church and there’s a couple good songs on there, you know, “Laurie”, and, uh…

DG: “Fate Will Get Done” (laughing)!

JF: And “Honey, I Sure Miss You”. But you know, it’s a shamble band, and it’s kind of entertaining and fun to listen to, but you know, it’s not 1990 and it’s not the cassettes. So it’s sort of the downfall, you know, Daniel’s music is sort of going down the gutter. Then he has a slurry of new great songs, and he records them live at SXSW, and we have all these songs on cassette, I think it’s called Frankenstein Love or something, and we get all these songs, including the WFMU broadcast songs, like “Spinning Globe”, and “(SOMETHING ABOUT BLOWING UP THE WORLD; UNABLE TO CONFIRM TITLE)”, and um, a lonely song, which he does a lot of stuff like that, a lot of lonely songs. We get all these great songs, like “Silly Love”, and we get all these wonderful songs, and we fall in love with these songs from the SXSW cassette, OK, you with me?

DG: Yes.

JF: And then what happens is Daniel’s not well. It’s not his fault. But he gets this record deal because an outside influence, Kurt Cobain, wears his tee shirt. And Atlantic Records comes in, and Daniel is not well, records, to me, not a great record – Fun – with Paul Leary in the garage. I’m not trying to say they weren’t trying to make a great record, but he wasn’t well. Daniel doesn’t even play on the record. Daniel sings on the record, and Paul Leary plays almost all the guitar parts and things like that, OK? Everybody knows that. Anyway, I didn’t like that record when it came out. Because it’s not a great record. Period! End of story! I mean, there’s a couple good songs on there, but there are better versions of those same songs on SXSW. I fell in love with those songs, and I hear the tapes that Paul Leary chose or got out of Daniel, who wasn’t well, and it wasn’t the best. I mean, “Silly Love” is great, why isn’t it great on this record? You know what I’m saying?

DG: Well, they’re very slick.

JF: They’re not a commercial failure, and I was laughing the whole way; they were never going to sell Daniel Johnston to the world. It was like trying to put Buddy Holly with strings back then. It was misguided. So I don’t see it as a failure, I see it as … Fulton’s folly.

DG: I’m sorry, what do you call it?

JF: Fulton’s folly.

DG: Right.

JF: When… the the the… the steamboat.

DG: But, isn’t it safe to say that Daniel, it’s almost like he’s afraid of succeeding, because it seems like a lot of times when he gets opportunities, that can be…

JF: Why is that his fault? He’s mentally ill, and he’s not able to record a good album that year, but they release it anyway. Why is that – that’s not his fault.

DG: No, no, I don’t mean that, necessarily, but like, wasn’t it not long after that that Daniel started pulling stuff on stage, and that’s when Atlantic decided to let him go? I mean, I’ve talked to Daniel at great length about that, and there’s really no rhyme or reason why he did that. He told me it was a joke.

JF: But hold on, listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about, all right? He only played three shows to promote the Fun album: one was in Dallas, on was in Houston, and one was in Austin, cause I have all three video tapes. And those are incredible shows. It’s the only time he ever played Fender rhodes. And I have Fender Rhodes versions of all the songs, like “Hey Joe”. And me being an incredible fan of Yip Jump Music and the chord organ, all of the sudden when he played those songs on a Fender Rhodes, they were even more beautiful. So anyway, he was amazing at those three shows, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, so what happened?

DG: Well, he told me that he screamed out into the audience that everybody was going to Hell. And then he ran off the stage. And then it was – I could be wrong on this – it was a week later that Atlantic dropped him.

JF: Well, I can’t speak for you, cause I wasn’t there, but big deal if he does it; he still does it on his more recent tours, we’ve all heard that. I’m not sure that really happened. It’s not on the three video tapes I have of the three shows he played on that tour.

DG: Well, we might have to cut this out of the interview but what I was trying to get at, and I can’t seem to get the answer that I’m looking for, or what I wanted you to talk about, was that there is sort of a… every time Daniel is on the verge of some sort of success, it seems like it almost collapses upon itself.

JF: (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) in the film.

DG: Right, right, and that’s maybe what I’m getting at too, and you know, the film’s a little fuzzy because I’ve only seen it once, and do you agree with that? And if you do, what is the film going to do for Daniel after it’s released in late March? What are your predictions?

JF: I don’t even know if I agree with that. I just think things happen in the guy’s life ‘cause he’s not well. And he fluctuates, and he went manic and he hurt people, and hurt himself and his dad and other people, and that happened, and maybe that’s just the timing of the ups and downs of manic depression. Can I say one thing I think the film will do?

DG: Yes. Please.

JF: All right, it’s very simple: the film is a love letter to this man and his art and his music, and I believe that his art is his second act in life. Music was his first act, and he will continue to make music, but he’s not gonna have musical impact. I think that his old recordings are his great body of work and I think that everybody should hear them. But his art will be his second act, you know, with the Whitney Biennial. It’s gonna be like Crumb! You know, Crumb being collected all over the world, after the movie Crumb came out, and I think that’s so beautiful. And based on his health and his age, that’s a great thing to happen to an artist.

DG: Right, he is very young…

JF: Nobody expects a 45 or 46-year-old Daniel Johnston to go out there and rock the world, and no one expects Brian Wilson to do it now, either. People will that upon Brian and they put him out there and they try. But it’s not like Brian’s new album is gonna be Smile or Pet Sounds again; it’s not gonna happen. And it won’t happen for Daniel either. But his art will continue, because God, I mean, how many does he draw a day?

DG: Depends on how much money he wants (laughing).

JF: You know what I’m saying. He’s still cranking, and he’s still … even recently he surprised me. I saw a show in LA a few months ago, Ron English was there, and Daniel did some larger paintings that were all blue. They were watercolor. He was over at Bergamot Station. I (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) Daniel’s art fanatically, but in recent years, his lines … he doesn’t have the control of his early years. So all of a sudden, he really surprised me. Some of the line power came back, and the themes and the colors, he really took me. I was like, wow, Daniel really knocked it out of the park with some of this new art. So anyway, the film is not a music documentary; it’s a portrait of an artist. And music is art, but it’s his art that’s going to end up outliving all of us.

DG: So you think, more than the music …?

JF: No, the old music of course will outlive us all, but what I’m trying to say is he can continue making art, and that’s amazing, and make a good living out of it. The film has already raised the value of his art from like $135 a drawing to a couple thousand.

DG: Well, in some ways. They’re still going for $30 on eBay.

JF: Right now, as you know, the Clementine Gallery in New York has raised the art to two or three thousand for this big show, and when the film comes out, it’s going to go up, and I’m not saying there won’t be some cheaper stuff available, my point is that we never would have seen that price without the film happening, and I’m so happy to have done that for him. I think that number is going to quadruple. Who knows how high it will go? And let’s face it, the masterpiece, the oil with the Hulk painting? Who knows what that will go for one day. So I think that’s wonderful.

TAPE ENDS, SOME LOST

DG: …Dick Johnston, to get his stuff in, and Jordy Trachtenberg, I’m doing an interview with him. I want to talk a little bit about what happened to Gammon Records. I guess I’ve pretty much covered everything that I wanted to talk about. The only thing that we didn’t talk about that I’m still very curious about, and part of this has to do with the fact I worked with you over the last few years, and I got to experience you as a director, and I helped kind of get Daniel to certain places, cause while you were filming, Daniel and I were sort of doing our touring, I want to know if you, how many times … obviously, working with Daniel is very frustrating. Because he definitely is kind of all over the place when it comes to how he decides to communicate with people, and you can’t really ever figure out any specific patterns, you know, good days, bad days, what have you. Were there ever times that you were so frustrated working with him or his family or whatever that you just didn’t think that you could finish it? I mean, what did you do to keep going through the rougher times of making this film?

JF: Well, specifically, you and I know the low point of the movie, which is not in the movie. And you can talk about it if you choose to, but I’d rather not, because I moved on from that, I felt like he did the same thing he did to everybody else in his life who ever tried to help him. His dad has my favorite line, when he says, “We’re all just pawns in the theater of Daniel’s mind.” Dave Thornberry told me that was part of his art. Part of his art was to… to quote Dave Thornberry, it’s to fuck with people.

DG: It’s true, it’s very true.

JF: And it’s part of his art, that’s what he does, and there’s a diabolical, dark side of his art, but Dave Thornberry had fun with it, and enjoyed it, and loved it. You were interviewed about it, and you had your assessment or rationalization about what he was doing, and what you said is valid, but the truth is, bad behavior’s not excusable for anybody.

DG: Even if you’re mentally ill?

JF: Right, even if you’re mentally ill. Because we know how smart he is, and how intellectual he is, and we know on some level he knows exactly what he’s doing.

DG: So maybe that’s what I was trying to say earlier, is that it seems like maybe it’s Daniel himself, that whenever he gets close to success, in some form of the other side, not his creating part, but the part where the people … someone’s either exploiting it, or celebrating it, or trying to get it out to more people … you’ve said that many times in this interview that you think that everybody should listen to the tapes, and I feel the same way. When you get that excited about something, your natural reaction is to share it. And maybe the same way he helped foil the Elektra record deal, maybe he tried to do that with you and the film, and you got through it. There’s a lot of people who have started movies about Daniel, I mean, more than I can count. And you’re the only one who was able to follow through and get it done. This movie was almost nominated for an Academy Award, I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that. And I just wonder what kind of a person gets through all those… it’s been a rollercoaster. Fair?

JF: Yeah, it was tough, it was like five years of my life. I was determined to make this movie, and I’m a guy that just finishes things. And I was going to make the movie I wanted to make, and say what I wanted to say about this person. And a movie is an hour and a half, two hours long, and you can’t do everything. And I wanted to make the portrait of a living ghost, an enigma, and keep him that way. And someone else can make a movie and follow him around and have him yell (INCOMPREHENSIBLE). I don’t make movies like that. (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) How was that?

DG: That’s fine, that’s good. What do we have to look forward to in extra footage in the DVD?

JF: You know, I don’t even know. Deleted scenes, commentary… A lot of fun deleted scenes that are really, you know, very interesting. There’s a great scene that links Daniel’s manic depression illness to his grandma Boyles, where we see a photograph of Grandma Boyles, who looks like Daniel in every physical attribute: her weight, the size of her hands, the way she curls her hands, at a piano, and on her piano are all these pictures of her family, and it’s like Daniel has Grandma Boyles’ DNA in him. And then Grandma Boyles, there’s a newspaper article, and she developed her own system of music on a piano. She transposed sharps to flats, and that was brilliant; I was like, huh, that was interesting.

DG: Consciously or subconsciously?

JF: Consciously. Well, who knows? She did it, OK? (laughs) And she also, when she was sad, i.e. depressed, she would retreat to her piano. And I did a wonderful scene about that, which didn’t make it into the movie, and there’s a lot of other scenes.

DG: I feel pretty good about that, how about you? Anything else you want to add?

JF: Well, I feel great about the film, and I feel very satisfied about how it turned out, and I hope the world can experience Daniel Johnston now and get touched and share what you and I have shared through this great work, and when they pop in that song and hear “Keep Punching Joe”, they’ll want to keep punching Joe, they’ll want to keep moving on with their lives, no matter what obstacles are in their way. And that’s the answer. How did I keep going? I had to keep punching Joe.