Conversation with Filmmaker & Poet Richard Bailey

Colette Copeland
November 2021

Tropic Pictures

I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Bailey after the recent release of his 3rd feature film, King Judith. I first met Richard Bailey in 2013 at the Dallas Video Festival through a mutual friend. The following year Bailey and I began collaborating, primarily on performance video projects in which Bailey served as the DP, and also as editor. In 2019, I interviewed him for the premiere of his film A Ship of Human Skin, which has garnered many top international awards at festivals for independent films.

Synopsis–King Judith is the story of a Detective named Miriam, who is investigating the disappearance of three women. The missing women are academics who’d been studying “lady of the lake” stories across the American south. The case turns dreamy and strange when Miriam starts having visions of Judith, a powerful ghost of the lake.

Joanna Schellenberg as Sister Woman

CC: After watching the film for the first time, I left thinking that I witnessed something very profound, but was at a loss to describe the over-arching narrative. So many of the scenes are self-contained mini-vignettes that address universal themes of faith, belief, desire, as well as the meaning of life. I also found myself questioning which characters were real, versus which were imagined and/or ghosts. The film has many elements that I consider signature Richard Bailey. Beautiful cinematic filming with dreamy, ethereal light, the aerial panoramic landscape, strong female characters, quirky male characters, the presence of ghosts or the paranormal and a crisis/questioning of faith.

Let’s start with the plot structure. The synopsis states that the film is about a female detective who is investigating the disappearance of three academics–Lisa a.k.a. Rabbit, Catherine and Rebecca. All three characters live non-traditional lives. I wouldn’t have pegged them as academics. Like many of your characters, they oscillate between prophet and pariah. I know that you re-wrote the script to accommodate filming during the pandemic. How did the narrative shift with the rewrite?

RB: I’m fascinated by stories of near death experience, particularly the visionary aspects of such an experience. Pictures of the partial past meeting pictures of a partial future. It’s as though time is broadcasting from two directions at once. A bit of research has persuaded me that the mind cannot imagine its own unmaking. When the body is in crisis, in the process of shutting down, the mind produces narratives, sometimes multiple narratives at the same time, as a means of diversion and adjustment. The mind’s message to the body—pull it together, live!

It was a back burner idea of mine to make a detective story about someone piecing together fragments of evidence that are visual snippets of past, alternative present, and wavery future. It turns out in the end that the detective is not actually a detective, not in the formal sense, but rather someone in a state of crisis following an auto accident. The pieces of evidence are the mind’s diversion from a catastrophic situation.

As you mentioned, I had to do a rewrite of King Judith, owing to the restrictions of the pandemic. Originally, it was a more expansive film. We shot a fair portion of it in September, 2020. But then we shut down while I tried to figure out the problem of our financing going away and how to film multiple actors in the same frame while still working in compliance with Covid guidelines—guidelines I continue to support.

The film was in a difficult spot. Some of the principal actors opted not to continue, which is understandable. It wasn’t possible to film the whole story that first intrigued them. Plus, everyone was adjusting to the new reality of the pandemic.

A month went by with the movie falling off in pieces, irretrievably, from my hands. Then it occurred to me how the detective story I’d had in reserve could serve the film. This storyline streamlined the whole narrative and eliminated all the logistical problems I’d been struggling with.

I rewrote the film in two weeks and secured enough financing for one more week of filming. We waited out the terrible winter that halted north Texas earlier this year, and then shot the detective storyline in just five days in March. That gave me enough footage to complete the film.

The detective’s name is Miriam. The academics are Catherine Rose, Lisa Holly (aka Rabbit) and Rebecca Lawrence. Each character has urban and rural aspects. The urban aspects signify the structures of erudition. The rural aspects signify the object of their studies—or in Miriam’s case the object of mystery—the lady of the lake, whose domain is in the countryside.

You mentioned the non-traditional lives of these academics. Their storylines were fragmented in the rewrite. What remains are visual elisions of the urban and rural features in their lives, plus their tumbling fascinations with modern and ancient ways of death. Our detective retrieves these fragments, non-sequentially, and ultimately puts them together like a mosaic.

I admit, it’s not a perfect mosaic. There are interesting loose pieces. But it all pretty much comes together at the end.

Nicole Fancher as Miriam Leaf

CC: Please comment on the prophet/pariah binary characteristics in your characters.

RB: I like outsiders. Everyone says that, I know. The culture is inundated with antiheroes, the result of this persistent situation in movies where mass culture masquerades as oppositional culture. A lot of the super hero product is like that. And so are a lot of horror movies.

My last two movies, A Ship of Human Skin and King Judith, concern women invested with the authority of prophetic visions. Women aren’t allowed to show such authority in the major faiths, and the restrictions create all sorts of dramatic possibilities. These characters are truly outsiders.

A very general definition of a prophet goes like this. It’s the rare person with a religious vision and the capacity to represent that vision in poetic forms—forms that are alarming in their originality and meant to preserve those aspects of human existence that are worth preserving. If we accede to them, it is not because we want to find an apocalyptic end. We accede because we want to help civilization along.

A woman who can perform prophecy will immediately be set upon by doubters. Will immediately be set upon by people aiming to discredit her or even kill her. This is not just an ancient situation but a contemporary one. A woman in this role is a true outsider. Particularly if you don’t play into the narrative convenience of having men interpret her for the audience or have men engage in long cinematic stunts to protect her.

The prophetic imagination is interesting to me, but that is mostly because I find so many dramatic possibilities in the subject. I’d say the films are chiefly about defending the notion of being different. Caring about people who find wonder in the normal details of daily life and then dramatizing the tensions that arise in such a life, distilling the toughest situations with humor. Humor is important in these movies—an absurd sort of humor.

CC: What is the significance of King in the title? (I remember that the conference curator shared the King of all folktales story) I also can’t help but draw connections between the story of Judith in the apocryphal bible, who was a powerful woman who saved Israel, but threatened the male patriarchy. This theme also appears in the conversation and subsequent “performance” in the film about the story of Phyllis’ seduction of Aristotle.

Sasha Maya Ada as Lisa Holly / Rabbit

RB: I have this belief—it isn’t very scientific, but I’m committed to it. I believe the source material for the King David story is feminine. Stories about goddess worship got converted to a masculine form when monotheism won the day. Thereafter, God became God the father. In this cosmic model, many heroes flipped from feminine to masculine.

In the last two movies, I subliminally play around with the idea that the King David story is originally a feminine story, and perform a little topsy-turvy with the image of a king.

The Mounted Aristotle story is also a very playful topsy-turvy story. It comes to us very mysteriously out of the middle ages and seems to turn the tables on the idea in Christian chivalry that women are a distraction from reason. It does so in a very ironic way, and a sexually humorous one.

CC: Who is Sister Woman? Is she a reincarnation of King Judith, a feminine aspect of God?

RB: That’s the first language to appear in the movie after the title sequence—“Who is sister Woman?”

To sketch the plot of the movie, Sister Woman steps out of the wilderness onto the civilized road just as the academics are approaching in their car, on their way to a conference. The academics swerve and are unable to correct from that swerve. They are tragically wrecked. And our detective, Miriam, has to sort out the consequences of the wreckage.

Sister Woman is a folkloric figure, as attractive as a goddess, who inhabits two worlds—the wilderness and civilization. She’s the source of inspiration for her hinterland artist friends and a force of dramatic change in the lives of the academics. Sister Woman is a person of interest in detective Miriam’s investigation.

Judith is the ghost of the lake. Her plasmic appearances throughout the film clot our principal characters, invest their lives with mystery.

Marquetta, who curates the academic conference, gives us a bit of back story on Judith. She’s a beautiful young Victorian woman with differences, who is made to suffer for those differences. She dies this very Victorian death—sacrificial and melancholy. As a ghost, she inspires ideas in the people she haunts—mysterious ideas having to do with rituals of living and a sense of the future outside the body.

CC: What is the significance of the ambulance/fire scene in the film and the symbolism of the great unfurling? At the end, Miriam seems to embody the character of the Lady of the Lake.

RB: There’s a saying among small budget filmmakers: If the problem doesn’t have a solution, then you really don’t have a problem; just present the materials you have.

I don’t have the money to safely film a convincing car crash. Instead, it is a car crash in the abstract. We see pictures of a small, isolated road. And we see pictures of a fire in the bar ditch with a flashing EMT truck in the background. These become visual puzzle pieces—flashes of intuition and recognition—that fit when Miriam contemplates what happened to the academics. And what happened to her, herself.

It’s true, audiences are denied seeing a car flip and catch on fire. But there is delight in putting a puzzle together. Mystery unfurls its revelation. These dreamy flashes of the time just before and just after the accident have visual appeal. Creating meaningful and appealing abstractions is one of the joys of working in cinema.

Emily Ernst as Judith

CC: The lady of the lake is a ghost story that exists throughout the U.S.. I am most familiar with the Dallas, Texas urban legend of the lady of White Rock Lake, but I also read accounts from other parts of the U.S. including Lake Placid. What is the symbolism of the lady of the lake and how is her story prescient today?

RB: King Judith isn’t a didactic film. It is, instead, an emotional one. But it does grant me the opportunity to state a problem I have with Lady of the Lake legends. These stories come out of the dark recesses of Puritanism.

The character Miriam has a short speech about the reductive nature of the legend. And Catherine, a highly intelligent character with wonderfully strange nightlife rituals, lives her life in utter critique of the legend.

The legend is basically to do with a woman’s negligence. In some versions the women loses her children to disease or accident. In another version she falls for someone who is not her husband. In yet another version a young woman dies by accident or even by her own hand just before she reaches the age of marriage. Each situation offends the order of religious society. The woman is punished for her negligence by not being allowed to die. Or not allowed entirely to die. She’s consigned to live alone near a body of water—water not being terrestrial, in a sense. She’s there to haunt any gentleman who strays off the path of good intentions. The moral is this: a gentleman shouldn’t allow himself to be tempted by the wrong sort of woman. It’s a terrible fate for him if he does.

I suspect the Lady of the Lake legends are the weak remnant of fertility goddesses. When plural gods became one God—God the father—goddess worship was outlawed. And yet there’s this lingering sense, owing to the fecundity of nature, that nature is feminine and has god-like ways. Christian legends were invented to silence this notion. These legends converted figures of nature’s fecundity into figures of womanly desire that will trap and ruin a man if he doesn’t stay on the straight and narrow.

King Judith is neither a didactic film nor a pagan one. But it does wonder deeply about the feminine aspect of God. And at the same time suggests how strange it is to say God is just one thing—a father, a mother, a creature, a myth, etc. God is mystery. The cosmic mystery of why there is life or anything at all. The film suggests individual lives are sort of like puzzle pieces in an ever-unfurling image of cosmic time. It also fits in some pretty good jokes.

Richard Bailey’s feature film A Ship of Human Skin is now available in wide release through Gravitas Ventures. His films have shown at Alchemy Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, Arizona Underground, AVIFF Cannes, Berlin Revolution, Black Maria, Dallas VideoFest, SXSW, and many other festivals. Tropic Pictures Website → Instagram →

A Ship of Human Skin: A Conversation with Richard Bailey by Colette Copeland →

Colette Copeland is a multimedia visual artist/writer whose work examines gender, death and contemporary culture. Sourcing personal narratives and popular media, she uses video, performance, bookmaking and installation to question societal roles and media’s influence on enculturation. Her experimental videos employ absurdist humor to explore the landscape of human relationships. She is currently working on a series about bearded women. Like Sister Woman in King Judith, Copeland exists in two worlds–the real world and the one in her imagination–a creative utopia, where societal pressures and conformity do not exist. Website →  Instagram →

For more interviews & articles by Colette Copeland on Arteidolia →