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“Now the Main Person Talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan”: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office John Lilly’s very Californian trajectory from Cold War scientist to New Age visionary, aided by prodigious consumption of LSD and ketamine, feels quaint from today’s vantage. The Silicon Valley inventors and tech pioneers who could be considered his present-day counterparts mostly went the opposite route—first taking psychedelics and proclaiming lofty ideals, then turning to ever more terrifyingly real fantasies of world domination. Such comparisons account for the wistful experience of watching John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s documentary portrait of Lilly, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam.
That’s not to say the film paints a rosy picture of its subject. Through a bounty of archival material, narrated in voice-over by Chloë Sevigny, as well as interviews with a handful of his surviving collaborators, Almereyda and Stephens nimbly run through five decades of Lilly’s life and, by extension, of American history. During the 1950s, Lilly’s research into brainwashing and mind control aligned with the government’s militaristic aims. His later experiments with dolphins, exploring the possibility of communication with humans, coincided with the emergence of the counterculture and soon dovetailed with an escalating interest in and enthusiasm for psychoactive drugs. Although his ambitions were humanistic and utopian, Lilly had no qualms about injecting dolphins with LSD and keeping them in captivity for years. By the 1970s, he had largely discredited himself as a scientists and took on the role of hippie guru in the vein of Timothy Leary, expounding publicly about a hierarchy of cosmic entities that controlled life on Earth, among them the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). Believing the planet to be under threat by technology, he considered lived reality to be a “consensus simulation” and our language an impediment to grasping the truth.
As wacky and objectionable as much of this biography might sound, in our age of broken-down communication and spiraling hostility, it’s difficult not to empathize with Lilly’s lifelong aspiration to transcend language and attain interspecies—or even intergalactic—understanding. When I spoke to Almereyda and Stephens in Rotterdam, they confirmed that this was part of their motivation for telling Lilly’s story today. Following their IFFR premiere, the film makes its North American premiere at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, followed directly by True/False Film Fest.
Filmmaker: What came first, the wish to work together or the intention to make a film about John Lilly?
Stephens: I was working on the idea of making a film about John Lilly early on in the pandemic. I understood that it would be a gigantic project, because Lilly is such a multifaceted character and the archive is huge and deep. I had mentioned it to Michael, who at the time was talking about archival documentaries. I had known Lilly’s work more from his writing and less the sort of scientific stuff, while Michael had his own associations.
Almereyda: My attraction was based on Lilly’s imprint on pop culture in two wildly different movies [The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Altered States (1980)] that emerged from his life and work. I had also read a really wonderful novel called Easy Travels to Other Planets. It grafts Lilly’s story onto a fictional story, but Lilly is invoked in a very direct way: he’s quoted and there’s a love triangle between a woman, a man, and a dolphin. It’s more sexually… it’s a literary novel, it’s not trashy [laughs], though there was opportunity for it to have been. A lot of people tried to make that into a film, I’ve since learned, and the author [Ted Mooney] died within the last few years. So, there were other associations that signaled to me the possibility of making a film.
Filmmaker: I had not heard of John Lilly before, but watching your film I realized there were many things that I knew about him: the two Hollywood films, some of the dolphin experiments.
Stephens: A lot of people have a haze of Lilly that has come to them through pop culture, without knowing that there’s a person at the center of a lot of these disparate elements. I grew up in the Bay Area and his books did circulate, more in a used bookstore, psychedelic interest sort of way. I think the story that gets the most play, and it’s a bit sad, is the story of Margaret [Howe] and Peter [a bottlenose dolphin] living together in the flooded house. I say sad, because the story has been sort of mistreated. There was a BBC documentary called The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (2014), an hour-long film about that experiment, which actually interviews Margaret. But when that film came out some ten years ago it led to a whole new array of mockeries of the experiment. Lilly really did stay a kind of underground figure. He’s a contemporary of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg, all kinds of people who were much more public, psychedelic guru figures, whereas Lilly is always a bit of the dark horse in that group. He did love showmanship and made a lot of himself, just not quite to the same extent as the others.
Almereyda: When I’d tell people that I was working on a film about John Lilly, they’d say, “Is he in pharmaceuticals?,” because there’s a company called Eli Lilly. It’s part of my own ticking clock to realize how, generationally, things shift, but I was warned when looking for money for the film that people aren’t interested in documentaries about things that happened before 1980. That may be accurate. My friend who is involved in the funding of a lot of films said that even before the turn of the century, our cultural attention span is short-circuited in a big way. When Courtney mentioned Lilly I was immediately intrigued, and the key factor that shaped the film was that he did leave a lot of tracks. There are recordings. I’d never made a documentary about someone who wasn’t alive. I’ve done biopics, biographical documentary portraits, but if you’re dealing with someone who isn’t alive, the challenge is that you have to reanimate them through that footage. We were lucky to have a fair amount available.
Filmmaker: You mentioned that the archive was vast. How did you approach it?
Stephens: His archive is held at the Stanford library and it is a very complete and extensive repository. For everything that we included, there’s a block of other material that we left out, whether it’s his psychological talks about ketamine or early scientific work. Before he got into dolphins he was doing strict government brain research and was very well thought of; he was a published scientist, an academic, and a lot of that research remains tenable.
We had advisors on the film who were very helpful to us who knew different aspects of Lilly. One was Graham Burnett, a scholar of the history of whales in popular culture and many other things. He had written this tome called The Sounding of the Whale, which deals with Lilly’s legacy. In an early meeting he laid out a theory that there were four Lillys, and that those different personae characterized different decades, different periods in American life: Cold War scientist, experimental scientist, New Age guru. We were looking to use the archive to weave its way through not just Lilly’s life, but through media, pop culture, to show how the ideas got transformed into movies and also news footage. It’s always really interesting to see what was considered fodder for the news at that time, because now the main person talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan. [Laughs]
Almereyda: It always seemed evident and necessary to make a collage film, that there would be modular units and that the film would reflect the multiplicity of identities through a patchwork of different kinds of material. This included interviews with contemporaries who were affected by him, who could actually remember him, whom he influenced and who carried his ideas to new places. Those interviews became important; I was happy to meet and talk to those people. It was a nice flash of excitement when I saw that Jodorowsky was in one of these books and that he’s still alive and well. It was a fundamental moment for me when we landed in Paris and talked to him. The first thing he said was, “Lilly was a poet but didn’t know he was a poet.” After spending a year and a half with Lilly and being dismayed about many aspects of his identity, I could recognize and embrace him as a compelling poet, as someone who dealt with mythology and metaphor. That, for me, sharpened the focus of the whole film.
Filmmaker: Jodorowsky is maybe the one interviewee who gets closest to having a properly positive estimation of Lilly. With the others, there’s an ambiguity to how they feel about him and his work. It’s surprising; in documentary portraits of such figures, one usually encounters more unequivocal praise and awe.
Stephens: It’s not a hagiography, that’s true. Everyone who went on the record had their version of admiration for Lilly, but they also had dissenting positions. There’s a recognition—and the film also tries to have this recognition—that while in close-up Lilly can be what we might now call problematic, if you zoom out you understand the legacy, the repercussions of some of his thinking. I feel there was a net positive on culture in terms of thinking about the rights and minds of animals, the therapeutic use of psychedelics—all kinds of things that have been finding their footing in the last ten, fifteen years. The people who knew him and had direct experiences with him were often dealing with someone who was not present in his lab, a megalomaniac in different ways, and we wanted to capture these aspects of his character as well. When someone leaves their mark, their methodologies are not always kosher. I’m interested in men like that, because that’s the world we’ve inherited—one shaped by men who are unsavory in close-up.
Filmmaker: I was also struck by the subtle emphasis throughout the film on romantic relationships. This extends beyond Lilly. The spouses of his collaborators are also always highlighted.
Almereyda: I’d argue that it wasn’t an emphasis, but it is a factor. Now that you point it out, I can admit that I probably forced that more than Courtney would have wanted. But to me it’s a measure of a person’s life, who they want under the same roof. The fact that Lilly had three wives, and the fact that he was involved in communication, is ironic. If one of the central issues of your life is communication but you have trouble communicating with those closest to you, there’s a fine irony to that.
Stephens: Why, because the marriages didn’t work out? That’s not a failure.
Almereyda: It’s not just the marriages. There are stories we didn’t tell: his role as a father, his role as a boss. Most of the testimony we got about that is not positive. I would argue that we did a fair job of allowing his life to register through his ideas and speculations, which were both powerful and in some ways highly imaginative. He evolved, as the film spells out, from being someone who is a pretty strict and respected scientist, to someone who was pseudo-scientific, at best. That evolution is fascinating and also questionable. If you’re pretending to be more scientific than you are, I’d say that’s a problem. But his impact, the speculation about dolphins and whales as sentient beings, as creatures worth sharing a planet with, that’s a profound idea.
Stephens: And the idea of having accountability towards them.
Almereyda: The fact that these ideas are now commonplace doesn’t remove the importance of his pioneering. That’s a level of respect I think the film grants him. It might be somewhat undermined or balanced out by what we can call hijinks, or worse, but he did have an awareness and a perception that has seeped into the culture in a fundamental way. That seems meaningful and worth celebrating.
I don’t want to get too self-referential, but I made a film about a social scientist named Stanley Milgram [Experimenter (2015)]. I had access to his archive at Yale that anyone could have, but partly because I got to know his wife, who survived him by about 25 years, it felt important to me to shape the story around that relationship. It just seems basic that who you choose to love, or try to love, is fundamental to who you are and what you make in the world.
Stephens: There’s another aspect that is very quiet in the film, which is the influence that these women had on his science—the different ways that women enter science.
Almereyda: That’s a very good point. They weren’t just romantic relationships, there was also the sense of influence.
Stephens: Totally. Toni Lilly, his last wife, I would say that was his golden era, in a sense, even though he was on ketamine for a lot of it. [Laughs] But it was also the most fulfilled relationship, or at least that’s what we’ve heard from others, and it feels as though it made possible a certain way of being in the world during that period. There’s also other women who weave their way through the film: Diana Reiss, who is a scientist of substantial renown; Gigi Coyle, who released the dolphins; Margaret, who did that experiment and dedicated herself to it in a very earnest, true way. What surrounds Margaret’s story in pop culture doesn’t honor this. The degree to which women can be named and find their way into influence in the mid-to-late 20th century was limited. I hope that the film acknowledges some of the ways that women don’t enter the record but do influence.
Almereyda: It wasn’t merely to open an awareness of his romantic relationships, it was to allow women into a story that is stuffed with men.
Stephens: In fact, that’s the whole agenda of the film! [Laughs]
Filmmaker: Could you elaborate on the line, towards the end of the film, when the narrator says that Lilly’s experiments can be considered allegorical?
Stephens: Lilly made space to dream about the idea of human dominance not being the go-to way of reading our position in the world. Even if we don’t have a UN that we share with dolphins and whales, to open the fantasy of receiving information and wisdom from other creatures, I think that’s beautiful. In a way, it outlasts any conclusive experimental evidence. It’s a way of thinking about animals that’s not necessarily, “How do you speak dolphinese?” That question wasn’t answered, but the longing is a valuable and beautiful contribution.
Almereyda: That’s well said.
Stephens: You wrote the line.
Almereyda: Yes, but you answered it well. There’s a sense of yearning and an acknowledgement of mystery when Lilly is at his best. I’d say that’s valuable and enduring.
Filmmaker: Why did you include the Earth Coincidence Control Office in the film’s title? It’s one of Lilly’s nuttier ideas.
Stephens: It’s the most accurate! [Laughs]
Almereyda: Right, it’s the one that grips reality in the most tactile way. [Laughs] We were slow to come up with the title and when this one arrived it felt like an umbrella for the kind of chaos and mystery that were constants in Lilly’s life, and for the level of coincidence that we encountered while making the film. It’s a provocative idea, to measure coincidence as a kind of fate, and there are many forks in the road that Lilly took and that we took in the making of the film.
The home movie footage, those are some of my favorite images in the film, and they became available to us pretty much by chance, through a series of connections that led me to the Morelia Film Festival. The husband of the woman who runs the festival was great friends with Lilly’s first son, who had died that year, and the material became available just then. No one had seen this material; it was not publicly available, it was not in the archive at Stanford. It humanizes Lilly and it’s also just physically beautiful material. We used only a fraction of what we saw, but to me that was very nourishing. That was not a small coincidence and I could name at least a dozen others that consolidated our understanding of who this guy is. In a sense, E.C.C.O. is a convenient way of talking about Lilly’s larger powers of forecasting and allegorizing the world.
Stephens: It also just zoomed out. Even if you don’t know what it means, there’s a suggestion of, not even aerial perspective, but of galactic perspective. It was nice to think about the trajectory of a fifty- to sixty-year period in not just a person’s life, but in the world and the evolution of human thought. Not to be grandiose–
Almereyda: Why not?
Stephens: Why not! Lilly does encapsulate a lot of the shifts of the later twentieth century in terms of public sentiment around animals and one’s own mind. Questions of how do things become as they are, how does reality become reshaped. This term that floats around now and is in the film, “consensus reality”—the idea of what is acceptable thought has changed so dramatically from when I was a kid, even. Those changes happened through so many complex vectors, and our point is that Lilly was one of those constellations in the sky. I don’t know if he led people anywhere, but he was along for a ride that, in a sense, America and the world went on with him.
