“Existing is Exhausting”: Eduardo Williams on ‘The Human Surge 3’

In August 2023, George MacBeth met with Eduardo Williams at the Casinò Locarno, which functioned temporarily as a press centre for the Locarno International Film Festival. This interview took place shortly after the premiere of Williams’ new film, The Human Surge 3.

Eduardo Williams is a filmmaker and artist whose works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within physical and virtual networks. His first feature, El auge del humano, won the Pardo d’oro in the Cineasti del Presente section at the 69th Locarno Film Festival.

George MacBeth is a writer and editor based in Berlin. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Art Monthly, Spike Art Magazine, e-flux, Screen Slate, and Mubi Notebook. He is also the editor of the e-flux Index.

“Existing is Exhausting”

GEORGE MACBETH: Locarno is where you premiered the first instalment of the Human Surge back in 2016. Now you return with its sequel (I’m calling this the “sequel” even though it’s titled number three) The Human Surge 3 (THS3). How does it feel to be back and to continue this sequence of films in the same destination?

EDUARDO WILLIAMS: Yeah, it feels good. Of course, crazy. I can’t believe seven years have passed. It feels great, I have lots of memories of being here and having a great time. I’m excited and curious, you know, about showing a new film as always, I don’t know—you never know what people will think or what will happen. So, I’m excited and I’m curious. I’m happy to show it and happy to premiere it here in the international competition.

GM: This time, as with the previous Human Surge film, you’ve chosen to shoot across three continents, which presumably throws up all sorts of production difficulties: we move from Taiwan, to Peru, to Sri Lanka. I’m interested in how it works with location scouting across such a wide canvas?

EW: Generally, in each country I went specifically with one location in mind, which I saw before online and then once there I spent like a month looking for our locations and getting to know people and seeing how my previous ideas before going there were changed by being there, by thinking with people…

GM: And what problems are thrown up by this commitment to, I suppose, adopting a more global vision for your film rather than choosing to film in one city or one location?

EW: It has brought limits on other things that couldn’t happen. For example, as I am shooting in three different places and each shoot is separate in time, I have time between one shoot and the other to rethink what I will do next time. So that’s something that is good for me and it’s useful. But there are problems. You know, of course, in each country, you have to adapt to new things, although in part that’s the reason for going, and that’s great, but it’s also sometimes difficult because you have to learn things and sometimes you make mistakes, or you have to learn how to adapt to different ways of working and each country has its rules. In Sri Lanka, for example, we had to get our script approved by the government, which in our country we don’t need. Someone from the government came to the shoot to inspect. So, each place has its own, like, specific things that you have to learn while you’re there.

GM: I think this also has a bearing on maybe the more conceptual aspect of the role of place in your films, which I would characterise as a form of kind of nomadic glocalism or glocality. We never see any of your characters change their locations. We never see them board planes, or trains, or automobiles right. And so, it’s the cut that produces their change in location. In commercial cinema, we’re fairly familiar with this move. This is how James Bond jumps from one place to another, or Jason Bourne. Meanwhile in arthouse filmmaking in the ‘90s we had this hyperlink cinema, as in Iñárritu’s trilogy, right, where you have all these different locations which together link into a coherent narrative vision such as Babel. But I don’t think changing place is doing this in your films. There’s not such an attempt to tie in all these locations into one specific totality. But I’m still curious about this kind of restlessness, this perennial change of locale and whether or not you could ever imagine making a sedentary film. Like a wholly, wholly—

EW: Set in one place?

GM: Yes, rather than this kind of nomadism. 

EW: Yeah, I can imagine it. Mainly because it's more of a personal thing, but now I feel like my nomadic life is making me very solitary. I go to many places, which is amazing. And I will meet many people thanks to that. And great people. But then I’m always leaving, so I never can—and I’ve spent more than ten years with this type of life already—I can never really make new relations that are a bit deeper, you know. My old relationships, we still love each other, and with my friends from Argentina, for example, but I do lose contact with many people. So, I’ve wanted to make a film in one place for a while. 

Also, I’m always trying to change. In the sense that, when I feel very comfortable with a certain way of making a film, I try to look for something that gets me out of there—so that I don’t get too comfortable, which I think is not good. Yeah. And maybe that relates to the restlessness. I think that this energy in the film communicates that maybe we want to change some things in our lives, but we don’t know very well how, but let’s at least try to get together—and go for it. Even if we don’t have the answers. So I think this energy relates to the restlessness of the people moving and getting together and sharing, even if we don’t know exactly where we should go or what exactly we should do. But just trying to do it together.

GM: I was curious, as I was watching, that I could find very few cinematic precedents for THS3. Rather I felt like I was in the presence of something emerging with a wholly different visual sensibility, and the most frequent association I had instead was with role-playing games or RPGs. There were a few features which kept bringing this to my attention. Particularly in the opening sequences, the lines that the characters exchange as they walk through the dunes, and then in the sequences that come after, reminded me very much of the slightly unreal kind of Verfremdungseffekt dialogue that you have in RPG video games like Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption. “And then I took an arrow to the knee.” People say things as you approach them, and then you can kind of drift away from them, and then other characters will say things and then you drift away from them. Then the other aspect, which brought this association home to me, is this recurring quest theme. The action, such as it is, in the film seems to be anchored or hung, or the direction of travel is determined, by these slightly arbitrary quests. For instance, one character says, “I have to meet some friends and deliver some eggs,” right? Or the blue egg, these kinds of MacGuffins. And the way these behaved I felt in the film also resembled the way a quest might work in a video game, you know, when it’s in your inventory, and you’re like, okay, this is what we all need to do. Was this something deliberate?

EW: It’s not I mean, it’s not conscious in the sense that when I’m thinking about it, I’m not thinking of any one individual game, and that “I want to do this.” But yes, I totally recognise it might come from there, because I played a lot of video games once. Not so much anymore, because the problem is that when I play, I cannot stop! And I have to work to survive, so, I can’t play so much. But I played some video games before a lot, and I think it stays in my mind. So I don’t need to think about them when I’m thinking of the film. 

But what you were saying of the quest, for example, is I realised I wanted to have these sort of things you have to do, and maybe they don’t have a lot of sense, like immediately knowing like, “yeah, you have to take the blue egg there.” But I think it gives this energy to advance. And this question of not being very clear about what does it mean, and I think that’s interesting to have some elements like that.

What you’re saying about the language in the film might come from that, but for me I recognise it more from “the chat.” Because for many moments of my life, more before than now but still today, I communicate with people more through chat than [face to face], so you have all these windows and you have all this like coming and going into different conversations, and maybe answering these messages then answering these, then going back. I think this rhythm of speaking through the Internet is very different from the rhythm of speaking life. Right? And I realised that although the way I construct the dialogues also is not conscious, when I think about it, I realise it’s there: the rhythm of talking online. It’s a bit different, and I think we can see it in the type of dialogues in the rhythm of coming and going conversations. So I relate it more to that. But perhaps it’s also related to video games. But in any case, it is related to digitality.

GM: I recognise this now you mention it. This kind of mosaic effect of fragmentary discourse. Another aspect which spoke to digital experience, particularly the exploration or navigation of images online, is the film’s very distinctive cinematography. I now understand from your Q&A yesterday, that this is the result of your head? Initially I associated this with the joysticks of a controller. So, I felt when watching that the jerkiness must have been the result of an actual kind of joystick controller determining the movements. And then I thought it could have been a cursor, because I was reminded of the exploration of other 360 environments like Google Maps. So it’s interesting to also hear you say that you found the locations on Google Maps before filming. Can you explain a bit more about the decision to use this new 360-degree camera, how it was introduced to you, and the kind of freedom that it afforded you? Did it allow you to realise things you hadn’t been able to do previously?

EW: Yeah, yeah. So just one thing, and then I’ll go back to why I chose the camera. What you were saying is true about the cursor and all that is true, mainly I did use my head [in a VR headset], but there are also some small moments where I still left like the digital movement that is not on my head because I like the mixture. So, some of the movements are not so organic. Because they are still like the keyframe.

Okay, so the first time I used this type of camera was once before in a short film I made in 2018 called Parsi. I was just looking for a small camera, and I discovered the GoPro 360. My main idea in using this camera was because I wanted to give it to the actors. With a normal camera, you have to put your attention on how to frame—what to frame. But with this one, you can just take it in frames of 360 degrees, so you don’t have to think about it. So, the actors could take it and not have to think about it very much. We just had to think how to take it, which is an important question. But then it was more relaxed. You can just take it and do your thing. And then, while I was using it, I discovered something that was more interesting for me in the end. This was what you mentioned, the framing with a virtual reality headset, which is, first of all, it’s like changing the moment in which we think about what to frame. It is not the same as when you think about what to frame during the shooting. Then when you think about it afterwards… I don’t know, I’m alone in a room in post-production, I don’t have all the shooting environment around me. So it changes in the moment and it also changes in how you do it physically.

You know, it’s not the same to frame like this: [gesturing with a viewfinder rectangle]. Just to frame moving like this [mimes the VR headset], what you want to look at and how you look at it changes a lot. So that's one way I discovered on the other short and the reason to do it in this one. But of course, this is a very different thing. It’s a feature film. The other one was like a more abstract painting with a poem, I mean, it was a short film. I wanted to use it in another way now. I edited the two hours of the film first in the computer, then I moved a little bit using the cursor and some of those movements survived the other part. But then what I also liked is that I could see all the things that the two hours filmed in the virtual reality headset. So, the movement of the film is influenced by the duration. How I framed the last scene, for example, comes from me watching all the film as the spectator does, I didn’t frame each scene separately. And also it gave me the idea or the possibility to feel the evolution of the movement and also changed what I want to look at. For example, I realised when I was looking like this [mimes VR headset], I wanted to look at different things I hadn’t noticed when I was looking at it on the computer. I wanted to look more at the plants in the jungle or when looking at a scene I was curious of what was happening there outside the scene. What were the people—the actors preparing to come in, let’s say—doing? So we have different movements, different attitudes, things I wouldn’t have thought about if I would have had to frame during the shooting. Then also in the shooting, for example, the question is, as I want to have all the 360-space available for editing, the idea would be to hide things. But sometimes I can’t hide, and sometimes we work from a long distance, so I need to see how to follow a camera. How to hide a sound person that has to think about the distance and how to hide. So of course, from the practical side, it brought many different ways of being in the scene or not, or not being there…

GM: Hiding the boom becomes more difficult!

EW: Exactly. Hiding the boom, you have to consider the distance between the machine that gets the sound, very practical things… But in the end it also influences how we do the scenes, you know in a more direct way and what we see in the final image. For me the main reason to work this way, and one I’m still very interested in, is like changing the moment when you think about how to frame a film and changing the physicality of how you frame it. For me, this makes it super interesting and it can be done also in many different ways—it could be a totally different film, I think.

GM: So this is what was fascinating to me about it as a gesture, because it suggests that the film that we all saw is just one artefact amidst a phase space of possible films that has come from the shoot, which is always true with any editing of course, but here it becomes so somatized, or kind of made bodily. This made me think of Michael Snow’s La Région centrale, which he filmed in North Quebec, with this autonomous, or semi-autonomous, kind of robot-arm machine. The American critic Annette Michelson said after watching it that: “La Région centrale is the first film in which we see the world entirely through shots which are not based on our everyday way of seeing reality.” There were several points in this film where this quote in particular kept returning to me, largely because I still thought of it as the product of a joystick, or some mechanical process, or some algorithmic way of determining where you were looking or what we were looking at. But also because of the extraordinary psychedelic sequence toward the end. I wanted to ask you a bit more about this sequence, which follows a long static shot in the jungle—maybe the longest static sequence in the film—and so we’re settled, and then we spiral into this kind of hallucinatory ayahuasca fractal trip. Which struck me as a very brave move. And also, one of these kind of punctual moments when you realise that cinema can do anything [EW laughs]. You know, it reminded me of the Tree of Life sequence that returns to the Proterozoic period. Did you hesitate at all about including this sequence, or where to place it in the film? What was the inspiration for it? It somehow seemed to arrive in the film as if from outside, and then affected everything afterwards for me. 

EW: So, before I answer this specifically, a few words about the [Michelson] quote. I was thinking about how, for me, this sort of strange way of observing that the film proposes is maybe hyperreal, you know, for me, it relates to how I see the world, which I tried to show in the film. In a way it’s way more real than what I really see. It has the sort of hyperrealism that you can get to through fantasy or through strangeness. 

But then going to this scene, this scene started, first of all, with the curiosity of leaving the camera alone in the jungle to see what happens; to see, or hoping that other animals would come or see what would happen just if we left the  camera alone. So we did it, several days at sunrise.

GM: So it was left totally unattended?

EW: Yes. For this exact take there was someone behind the camera, but this was because the camera was failing because it was too hot and humid. So we needed someone to check if it was still shooting, because sometimes we left for two hours and we came back and we saw it failed like fifteen minutes later. But in any case, it was this idea of letting the camera alone if we could or as long as we could to see what happened. Then this monkey approached, and it was an interesting movement. 

Then the first thing that interested me was to change the rhythm of observation, and you know, approaching this scene, the thing that happens in the jungle, that is, you look at wild animals and there is another way of looking at them. It’s nothing like a zoo, where they are shown to you. Instead, you have to find them through the leaves, and you see a tail… And I think [I also appreciated] the patience that this requires and this excitement, of discovering them and discovering something that is not made for me, not offered to me in this direct way. It’s also in general how I propose everything in this film. All the things I’m interested in sharing—I’m not putting them so upfront in such a direct way, because I’m interested in them being more open than if they were very directed, because I think this would foreclose the possibilities of how people are going to think and see them. 

I realised I think from the beginning that I knew I wanted this [sequence] to be more towards the end of the film; this moment of finally being, finally stopping and observing in a different way. It is the only scene we have with no humans, which I thought was interesting. Just trying to move the camera. What I liked about this is that when we see the scene with a monkey first of all, I felt it is the first time where we can forget about the camera more, you know, because it’s not moving. We were more in that feeling of what we can call nature or the plants and the non-human beings let’s say, and then, suddenly, the camera starts moving again and we remember about these robots, who let’s say we are the spectators of in the film. This brings back again like the robotic, or the let’s say technological side, that is very present in the film. In my films I really like to connect these and not to see the two as separate you know, as like: nature and technology, or even separating humans from nature as if we were very separate. The technology we create is part of nature, our phones are a part of nature as much as everything else. I really like this combination of many of the themes of the film in one scene, by movement and by form… Then I don’t remember how I thought about this crazy spinning, but what I know is I really liked it. I felt also in the film that we start going in circles. I think there is this energy [in the film] of, let’s say, wanting to look around a bit more. And also, this energy of circularity, like more and more charging this energy during the film and now it’s the moment where it finally explodes.

GM: Yeah, there’s also this extraordinary sequence in the street when there’s a case of mistaken identity between the two characters, and [the camera] was just swirling and swirling and swirling. 

EW: I think this circularity gets to this point where finally it finds its way out. I knew I wanted to look up and I knew I wanted to look for this place where all the [eight] images are stitched together, because you know, this camera has eight lenses. So the camera records eight different images and then there’s an app that stitches them all together. But the most difficult part is stitching up and down. Like a globe. Yeah. I think if you want you can do this a little bit better, to have this stitching even better and less [prominent], but I wanted to see this place where the image is stitched and find a way of trying to get out of this image, escaping it. And also finally, I really liked how we connect this. We were very in touch with nature. And I think when the camera starts spinning and you see the pictures, you get totally disconnected from this idea of nature. And you see how movement transforms space, and how in the same scene you passed from the scene with a monkey and being connected with like what we call nature, and then totally pixels and colors. And finally, it’s totally digital. I think this brings these things together in one movement. And then I realised more that after this spinning to the white image of the white pixel we return to the black of the river, and then we had this circular shape that is also again natural, because it’s just happening in the water. This connection from one to the other. And then finally when the boat passes in this perfect way…

GM: The boat then creates the sensation that we’ve all witnessed something that is somehow outside of the story of the other participants in the film, that the audience is somehow privy to this private sensation. They kind of glide over as if unaware of what has just transpired…

EW: Yes, I think it gives us an idea of “finally when we know where we’re going.” We’ve got this energy flowing and we are going there. Let’s say, yeah, and then they get to this mountain, and…

GM: Finally, I already asked you about the interesting use of language in your films. It often struck me as very literary. For instance, there is a point when two characters ask one another about their favourite bands, and one replies: “Everything is exhausting.” The relationship between the parts of the script appears to be what I would call kind of “paratactic.” By which I mean the parts of the script, the things people say to one another, don’t sum up to a larger kind of obvious sequential logic. It’s more like the relationship that obtains between the parts of a poem. So, I was wondering, do you write yourself? Or did you ever harbour literary ambitions in addition to your filmmaking career? What are your literary tastes?

EW: Well, I’m no good at writing I think, though at least I tried it when I was younger. But for me it’s easier to be inspired for ideas for a film while I’m reading, much more than when I’m watching. For example, when I’m watching I might like [the film] or not, but it’s very rare that by watching a film I have an idea for one of my own films—mainly because I try to watch things as much as I can not as a director but as a spectator. Of course, it’s impossible, but I tried to take myself more than a filmmaker. But also, because I think when you read you create the images in your head, so also that’s what I like—it’s why I wanted to do film, right! 

I was always very inspired by contemporary Argentinian literature mainly, but also other literature. For example, there’s the scene in the spherical houses [at the beginning of the film]. That’s directly inspired by a certain writer from Argentina, Pablo Katchadjian. Many of those dialogues are taken from different books of his. And then there’s other parts where I forget a little bit, because I take notes from different groups and then I don’t even remember what came from where. For example, the one you mentioned, of “existing is exhausting,” that comes from some picture I saw on Twitter of Sailor Moon! So inspiration often comes from the Internet, or very like weird places, but I really liked for example in that case, I prompted them “What’s your favorite band?” and then I added another question that I hadn’t answered [in the script] and they had to answer it. So she says, like, “What’s your favorite song of that band?” And I didn’t know what to invent. So I asked them to invent, and they replied: “The Life of a Flower.” And it was so great. So I try as much as I can to like, put something of myself in there and then see what [the performers] invent based on that or related to that. This type of mechanism was used a lot in the film, and I liked it. 

But yeah, I think literature is there. I mean also for example, the film I told you, in which I first used a 360 camera, is a long poem from an Argentinian poet called Mariano Blatt. He proposed that I make a film from his poem. So the film is twenty-three minutes because that’s the time he takes to read the poem, and the film is all the time him reading the poem, and then there’s other things on top of that, but there are other images. 

GM: Interesting. So then the film itself is a sort of literary composite as much as a visual composite. So you have the eight cameras and you have this compositing of all these different authors and voices and the voices of the performers themselves, all playing together. 

So, I just wanted to close by asking about future projects, and what you’re planning next?

EW: I have some ideas of our next film I would like to do but now it’s very, very, I don’t know now. Yeah, this [promotional cycle] takes a lot of time, so I’m focused on this, but I would like to make a film in a bit shorter time because the last feature film was seven years ago. I would like to make it a bit faster. And I mean, a simpler production way. This one [had] a lot of co-producers and other things, which were necessary to get it made. But I want to change that a little bit, and then maybe I want to try to stay more in one place—although it probably won’t happen! I have some loose ideas here and there, but I think maybe I still need to digest this film. And until I start showing it, and speak a little bit with some people, and understand what they saw, what they didn’t see, or what they thought until a [given] moment, I really cannot close very well the film in my head.

GM: I certainly need to digest it.