Dolphins and Aliens in John Lilly Film Narrated by Chloë Sevigny: IFFR

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, a film written and directed by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens and narrated by Chloë Sevigny, is looking to make a splash with its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Monday evening.

Indeed, the awkwardness that this writer feels about this soggy pun – about both the dolphins and whales featured in the movie and the fact that it screens in Rotterdam’s Harbour program, “a safe haven to the full range of contemporary cinema” – may pale in comparison with the amazement that viewers may experience, considering that the IFFR promises “adventures in mysticism, fantasy, and showmanship,” including isolation tanks, altered states, talk about drugs and communicating with extraterrestrials, and monkey brains.

Those are just some of the many elements that this essayistic film puts a spotlight on as it explores the life and ideas of utopian neuroscientist John C. Lilly and his unorthodox experiments on human and animal consciousness. Via archival material and interviews with people who knew him, the movie showcases the ambition and the controversy that were Lilly’s trademarks.

His work inspired not only the movies The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Altered States (1980), as well as the video game series Ecco the Dolphin, but the far-reaching concepts he developed continue to have an impact on present times.

Check out the film trailer here.

Stephens and Almereyda have both been grieving the loss of David Lynch. And watching their film, it is not hard to understand why since it is opening a door to what some will experience as weirdness and a recognition that consciousness is not easy to classify.

Before its Rotterdam premiere, the two filmmakers talked to THR‘s Georg Szalai about why they decided to tackle John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, the psychonaut’s lasting influence and controversies, the two movies about his life, and why Chloë Sevigny is such a fitting narrator.

How did you two meet and decide to do this project together?

Stephens Michael and I were friends, and I came across Lilly in college. His books circulated in the psychedelic college world and bookstores. So I knew of him sort of as a figurehead before I really knew about the dolphin research and his more “legitimate scientific career” before things got weirder in the ’70s. For a while, I thought this would be a great film, but it would be a big undertaking because it’s almost like he led three or four different lives. And each one of them is complex and full of other characters. And so I was talking to Michael about it in the early days of the pandemic, and he also found Lilly’s story fascinating. And so we started from there.

Almereyda The two movies that are based on his life and work are both fascinating and very different from one another. And it’s rare for a person in his lifetime to have two movies based on his experiences. I also knew a book that didn’t figure in our film, but it’s a very moving book called Easy Travel to Other Planets (by Ted Mooney). It’s a fiction book based on the dolphin experiments in the Virgin Islands. And our movie could almost be called Easy Travel to Other Planets – it’s a good title, and it’s a poetic book that made an impact on me. Lilly is referenced and actually quoted in that book. And as Courtney said, he’s a figure that over the years has been easy to track in a superficial way, but we started digging in. And part of the adventure was to meet people who knew him, as you see in the film. That was very rewarding.

The film is structured and flowing in a very natural way, and a lot of material seems to be shown in chronology. But as you both mentioned, Lilly was involved in so many things. How difficult was it to come up with a satisfying structure for all the material and issue you are exploring in the movie?

Stephens In the end, that’s the magic of editing. I think Michael and I both tend to gravitate towards material that you can really construct in the editing process and really make sense of. Yeah, there is so much more. There was a lot that didn’t make it into the film. We wanted to do justice to a chronology that could take us not just through a person’s life, but also through a changing America. and changing pop culture realm. A lot of people, once I start explaining Lilly, say, “Oh, the dolphin LSD guy.” Or: “Yeah, the altered states guy.” All of those things have entered the culture and almost feel preordained now. It feels so logical that dolphins, LSD, and UFOs are in the same basket.

Almereyda We’re both fond of a filmmaker called Chris Marker, who made films that are very resourceful on low budgets and have a collage-like feel. And even though they are patched together, there’s a design and even an elegance to them. So that was a model we both shared. One thing I learned as we stumbled forward was Lilly’s concept of E.C.C.O., the Earth Coincidence Control Office. And as soon as we entered this project, the coincidences began to multiply. In 2023, I was invited to be on a (film festival) jury in Morelia, Mexico, where the husband of the woman running the festival was good friends with John Lilly’s son who had just died. Wow, that’s a very odd and unlikely outcome. But Lilly’s son had settled in Mexico. He wasn’t on good terms with his father, but he presided over this archive of home movie footage, which was completely unknown and not digitized until more or less the moment I set foot in Morelia. Suddenly it was available, and we were the first interested party to have access, so that was a great stroke of luck. And there were many like that throughout the process, where you couldn’t anticipate how the road would wind and reveal itself as we moved through it.

How long did you work on the film and what other material did you dig up?

Stephens It was for the better part of two years, and probably into three. That home movie material has never been seen. And there are other archival materials that do circulate of his life. We were also really happy to work with Stanford, which has a huge collection of media associated with him – his notebooks and all kinds of materials are in their archive.

Did you guys have a discussion early on about what take you wanted to share on this person or whether to stay away from judgments like that?

Stephens That conversation was ongoing and always very dynamic. We had different feelings about Lilly and different kinds of tolerance for different aspects of his personality. In the end, we wanted to give space for people to bring their own intelligence and their own levels of skepticism or their appetite for weirdness to the film. And so hopefully, it has different access points.

Almereyda Admiration for whales and dolphins was elevated as we continued. The guest appearances of whales and dolphins became important, and the people who are still alive have a lot of affection for them. Their testimony was a way of acknowledging how Lilly’s ideas were absorbed into and in some ways transcended by very practical or generous applications so that it’s not just limited to Lilly but reaches beyond him.

How important was it for you two to highlight the complexity of Lilly and his work and at the same time make it easily penetrable for audiences?

Almereyda Oh, we hope it’s both accessible and mysterious. And in that way, it’s a true response to how wild this guy was and how his ideas, as wild as they are, do have currency. They’re resonant. For me, the deepest resonance has to do with appreciating whales and dolphins as sentient beings, as creatures that share the planet with us, and that’s still a very moving idea. To the degree to which the movie actually has dramatic or emotional content, I often find that those scenes have to do not with Lilly himself, but with dolphins. Lilly had multiple lives, and multiple themes are tracked in the film, but we keep circling back to dolphins, and that felt really essential.

Stephens That’s right. We hope to make a lot of room for people to encounter Lilly, and I think that we keep our cards close (to our chest) in terms of any final judgment. But in every part of his life, many parts of which could be construed as self-absorbed or irresponsible, in many ways, there’s also this opening that takes place. Sometimes that’s a little violent – these modes of scientific inquiry that we couldn’t do today that were happening in the ’50s and ’60s, kind of renegade science or pretty unhinged self-experimentation. And as Michael says, there were other people who were sometimes the carriers of those effects or those messages into a larger world. And the entry of not just whales and dolphins, but also of self-exploration as a modality that isn’t just a party cultural modality of the ’60s, but becomes a more internal gesture – with a lot of those things, it’s not that Lilly should be perhaps anybody’s guru, but he made a space for those things in ways that were dramatic. And I think they have all entered the culture, of right now in ways that are pretty immediately perceivable.

Can you talk a little bit more about these parallels or strands that still touch the presence and issues that we still deal with?

Stephens We could have done, and we chose not to do, a grand updating of some of these things in the present because it just would have been a whole other film to talk about. Cetacean communication now is very ongoing, and making use of AI or ketamine therapy or psilocybin therapy are all in the news week by week. But it felt like the confines of this film were to think about the late 20th century, maybe in the broadest sense, how certain kinds of technologies of the military and even intelligence became the new age and became accessible to individuals. The isolation tank, communicating with other species, all of these things had very early roots in (the question) how can this be exploited?

One of the benefits of somebody like Lilly, which can be both off-putting about him and a real gold mine for us, was that he was a showboat. He did like having a public presence and he was a bit of a cult leader figure. So, yeah, he was happy to be well-documented. He disappeared a little bit in the ’70s, and we had to really go digging during that decade. But other than that, there was a lot of available material to look at. … Later on in his life, I do think that his labs became a little bit performative. They existed to be exciting in an almost glamorous way. You could swim with dolphins – and maybe they’d talk to you.

Almereyda Lilly does bounce off of the present, and for me, he was always projecting himself into the present. So it was gratifying to find people who had worked with him who knew him and who carried forward his ideas. A high point in the experience of making the film and in the film itself is when we interviewed (French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker) Alejandro Jodorowsky. He was able to improvise his own memory, he was able to enhance his memory with a degree of metaphoric precision by saying Lilly was a poet who didn’t know he was a poet. And to me, that put the whole thing into focus because I couldn’t always respect Lilly as a scientist, but as a poet, I felt he was often very compelling. He was dealing with metaphors and myths that have real relevance still, that have an impact on how we think about our place in the world. It’s about the recognition of mystery and being open to the mystery of consciousness and being open to the fact that we’re not alone on the planet, that other creatures have been here longer than we are and require respect. … Even though we were funded very graciously by a grant from the Sloan Foundation to make a film dealing with scientific ideas, it intersects with ideas that can be called poetic ideas. And there’s a poetic logic to how the film is organized.

How did Chloë Sevigny get involved as the narrator for the film?

Almereyda Although Courtney and I have each narrated our own documentaries, we agreed it would be best to enlist a third party to narrate this one. We both like Chloë’s voice and felt that somehow she embodies a spirit of independence and adventurousness shared by John Lilly and dolphins. It helped that I’ve known Chloë casually since the ’90s and was able to reach out to her directly.  

Stephens My feeling about Chloë was that she is also someone with deep ties to the American underground and subculture – the realms in which Lilly’s books and ideas ultimately circulated – and someone who might have a John C. Lilly book on her bookshelf and could anyhow guide us through weird worlds with a sense of curiosity and experience.

Courtney, your previous film Invention, which you co-wrote with Callie Hernandez, was about a similarly larger-than-life character. It fictionalized the aftermath of the death of her father who was an alternative health guru…

Stephens Michael and I both have filmographies that vary in their form a lot but probably have ideas that are continuous and move through in terms of the people who fascinate us or the kind of archetypes that draw our attention. And yeah, it wasn’t lost on me that I was working on these two films that are kind of about these wizard characters. I am working on a film that deals with the Wizard of Oz. I was doing it before, and now I’m returning to it.

Michael, do you what you are working on next?

Almereyda It’s very mysterious because it’s hard to get money right now, but I agree that there’s an affinity for these figures. I made a movie about Nikola Tesla, and I’ve done a number of portraits of people who are mostly artists. But the scientific streak, I think, is aligned with an artistic streak and an artist’s sensibility. But it’s hard to tell how many cards in the deck will translate into an actual movie at this point.

Thank you for talking about your film. And I don’t know if you two and I should take this as a badge of pride, but a friend recently said that the kind of movies I watch are often weird…

Stephens We should share with you that one of the working titles for the film was Weirdness.

The 54th edition of IFFR runs through Feb. 9.