Born in Chile and based in New York City, Sebastián Silva is a multifaceted artist whose body of work includes film, painting, illustration and popular music.
Q > What are the key experiences that have shaped your adult life?
A > Being gay made me keep a secret from a very young age. There is a certain privilege to that: you have more information than everyone, so you feel that you’re outsmarting everyone. This gives you self-confidence but this is juxtaposed with deep insecurity and self-denial so it’s a double-edged thing. You have to learn how to avoid the truth. In-the-closet gays don’t have a choice but to manipulate the truth and that makes you a storyteller. That can be a positive — as a creative person.
Then, there is rebelling against and undoing a religious education — Catholicism in my case. I remember very young, aged 11 or 12, realising that it was not going to be that at all. From then on, I had to figure out what I believed; what my way of communicating with the rest of the universe was going to be. I started gathering and exploring different spiritual practices, from lucid dreaming to Zen Buddhism.
At 19, I took psychedelics — mushrooms. And I had a mystical experience where my ego dissolved entirely. I had such an urge to share this that I went messiah crazy and started handing out this fanzine called AIL, which stands for “awareness improves life”. Until the day, I still feel my mission is to raise awareness.
Q > What are some of your filmmaking influences?
A > The Simpsons were huge to me; they really gave a more solid shape to my sense of humour and my sense of irony, as well as deepened my understanding of the world. I was also pretty obsessed with the animation Disney classics.
There are three movies that pushed me to become a filmmaker: Confessions of a Marriage and Harold and Maude and the 80s version of The Lord of the Flies.
Q > How personal is your work? What is the relationship between your work and life?
A > The Maid is very autobiographical. I shot it at my parents’ house where I grew up. Then Crystal Fairy is based on a remarkable woman I met decades ago that went by the name Crystal Fairy.
Nasty Baby is basically a dramatised slice of my life in Brooklyn. An irresponsible fable on the guilt of the privileged.
My first movie, Life Kills Me, is more of an essay — it shows my fascination with the idea of death, which has been a recurrent theme in my work. Magic Magic deals with death too, but also with mental health and alienation. But in that movie, death comes as a gift and as a relief. Which is something that I still believe: that death is a way out for a lot of people. How do we know that a life in pain and misery is better than dying?
Q > Given that you also make music and visual art, it’s clear you have a lot of very diverse interests and creative outlets. Do you want to carry on making films until you die or do you think you’re going to give it up at some point and stick to doing something else?
A > Two years ago, I needed to make sure that filmmaking was “my thing”. After making eight movies, that spontaneous impulse to share a story had become some sort of industrialised pattern. I wasn’t fully content with that and I stopped the race for productivity, took a step back and questioned my ambitions.
Responsible consumption of psychedelics together with spiritual work led me to have my ambitions simmer down almost completely. This was very liberating and it actually made me enjoy my craft even more. And now, unexpectedly there are a bunch of fun passion projects that are seamlessly moving without me trying hard to push them. The lack of ambition changed my perception and my relationship with work, entirely. I’m not chasing as much as things are presenting themselves to me.
I have also been doing a lot more drawings lately, exploring new approaches to visual expression. I’m really finding some things special after a while of being stuck and not liking my work. Unlike movies, I feel that drawing and painting is something that I have never questioned as an activity; at least, when I’m doing it, I know what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, and I knowhow honest I’m being with myself when it comes to putting things on a canvas or on paper. It’s a very subjective abstract search.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative process for you?
A > When inspiration is so aligned with what you’re doing, that the specific, almost indescribable plastic idea you’ve conceived in your head starts materialising in the canvas, or paper. The fatigue, the desire, the mockery, and your current colours and shapes all together for eyes to see.
On the other hand, the process of filmmaking is pretty anticlimactic. You have an idea and want to share it? Well, you’ll have to wait years before you can. That’s why I personally don’t feel so celebratory for premieres. It’s like celebrating your birthday months after it’s passed.
Q > What do we as a society and culture need to be talking more about?
A > Fear. Especially the fear of death and of genitals.
Sebastián Silva was born in Santiago Chile in 1979. After graduating from Catholic school in Santiago, Silva studied filmmaking at the Escuela de Cine de Chile for a year before leaving to study animation in Montreal. The Chilean filmmaker broke into the worldwide indie scene with the acclaimed dark comedy The Maid, which won the World Cinema Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance in 2009, along with a special prize for acting. He has directed seven other films, the most recent of which was Tyrel in 2018.
