Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

ANOTHER GIANT LEAP
Talking to Jaime Catto about the world’s duality

by By Krista Sherer

April 07, 2005

1 Giant Leap is an exceptional film. Made in 2001, it’s a multimedia production set in 12 parts. It mixes elaborate visuals, brilliant music, spoken word poetry and interviews with Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Franti, Tom Robbins, Baaba Maal and other lesser-known but still fascinating people around the world. The film concentrates on the seemingly paradoxical themes of unity and diversity, taking viewers on an insightful journey that shows how we’re all interconnected by ideas like God, money, sex and death.



The geniuses behind this quasi-documentary—Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto of the United Kingdom—are now traveling the world creating a second Giant Leap. In fact, they were recently on Maui interviewing and filming local Hawaiian artists. As Bridgeman was busy recording the ‘Ulalena Band, Catto and I spoke about their journey.











Maui Time: How has Maui been treating you?







Jaime Catto: With beautiful hospitality, lovely people. We have a great crew working with us who are underpaid, by us. We’ve had an amazing diversity of people that we have met with a great menu from Hawaiian singer Willie K kind of stuff to the ‘Ulalena Band and everything in between, ya know. We have been really lucky with the weather, the whales. My family has been here and they’ve been having a cool time. It’s always too brief. You know our fans, or people in the media often consider us to be aficionados of world culture. But really we are like a stone that skims off the surface of places. We’re never anywhere for longer than a week or two. You have to honor the fact that we can’t pretend to anyone that we are going very deep into any particular culture. We try to gather as we go as much inspiration, wisdom, insight, music that fits with what we are doing as much as possible and hope we find like-minded people who don’t mind our fly-by attitude. ‘Cause we are very magpieish: we fly in, we grab and we go, and we try to be respectful. We try to make sure it is a benefit to the people that work with us. Sometimes it’s good and they get a platform. Sometimes it’s good for the indigenous issues to come up. Generally, we are not a charity project. We are coming through as artists trying to fill our boots with as much stuff that inspires us as possible







So for the people who don’t know about 1 Giant Leap, can you briefly explain it?







It is a new multimedia art, which is a mixture of great music interwoven with our music. So we put headphones on people and they play and they play along with our music and they might be really famous, like Michael Stipe or Bono. They might be unknown [internationally] like the percussionist of ‘Ulalena or a guy in a tree in India. And we weave this all together with interviews we do with the people we meet. We try to meet as many writers, gurus, gravediggers, prostitutes, skate kids and people from all walks of life as we can. We talk to them about big subjects like God, sex, money, conflict and all their insights get woven in with the music and the images we shoot as we travel, and it creates kind of a bank of wisdom or a bank of conversation that is often playful, often serious, often sad, often uplifting, always hopefully inspiring material that is a mixture of unity and diversity at the same time.







And so what is this second project about?







It is very similar to the first one except we are trying to look at everything through the lens of duality. So God becomes good and evil. It is trying to look at most ideas and show that there is another side to them or many sides to them. There is very rarely one side to anything and people who believe in absolute truths, I suppose, are the villains of our film. These are the people that believe there is only one way and it is their way, whether it be a religious person, political person or a trickle down economics person or a racist. Our thesis, I suppose, is that there are many ways to look at things. We’re doing good and evil, we’re doing man and woman, freedom and innocence, all sides of things, often showing that two opposite things can be true at the same time.







What was the inspiration behind this second project?







We’re artists. I wish I had some lofty inspiration answer to give you. I suppose the inspiration mainly is that these subjects are things that we talk about when we meet people. I mean really connect with somebody, not small talk. I hate small talk, so does Duncan. When you meet someone and you have a very short period of time to connect, and if you want to connect you are going to talk about things that matter to you. You’ll talk about your family. If you get really close, you might talk about your fears, you might talk about your worries about death, your obsession with money, demons or whatever. These are the conversations that afterwards you say, “I had a really great conversation with so and so. I really connected with them.” So we want to be a big catalyst for that, but for ourselves more than for the public. It’s a catalyst for our own mind and our own experience. We trust that it will be for everybody else, but we are not doing it for humanity. We’re doing for ourselves as artists, and it happens that it inspires other people. And that makes it part of what it’s about on its own.







So what music or film inspires you?







I would say to everyone to get the album Habla con Ella. It means “talk to her.” The score to Il Postino is great. Those two I could listen to over and over again. Duncan and I just started an online label called spaciousmusic.com and all the people on that inspire me. It’s not particularly commercial, it’s not poppy radio, it’s gorgeous stuff. It’s incredible musicians who I could never be as good as. I love Slovo who is also on spacious. I listen to a lot of instrumental music mainly. Miss Sarajevo is a great film and done by the guy that got Bono involved in the Bosnian War. And I liked The Incredibles. That was the film of the year. Holly Hunter, she’s a class act.







Who are some of the people you have interviewed?







Marianne Williamson, who wrote A Return to Love; Billy Connolly, who is a big Scottish actor and comedian; Stephen Fry, a great writer; Philip Pullman, who is the author of His Dark Materials trilogy; Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Roth again, Tom Robbins again, Ram Das again; Neil Donald Walsh, who wrote Conversations with God; some Baptist preachers, some racists and some nut cases. I couldn’t get Haruki Murakami to say yes and who is my favorite writer. I’m trying to get Carrie Fisher, Oprah Winfrey and I’m also trying to get villains and hear people that we don’t always agree with. Tom Robbins was great when talking about duality. He said we need to move out of the mind set that says either this or that and go into both and not just either/or.







Where have you traveled and where are you going?







So far we’ve been to Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Mali, Gabon, Kenya, Paris, Brazil, Mexico, New Orleans, New York, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Oregon, Los Angeles, now Maui, then India, Japan, China, Oman, Dubai, Egypt, Turkey and then that’s it.







What’s different for you this second time around?







One thing that is different this time around, which is such a cliche, is that last time we were just doing this little thing [filming] that went with our album. And this time we’re doing the second Giant Leap. We didn’t expect to get such a response from the first one. It became this thing in which we still get letters everyday from Chile, from Indonesia, from London saying, “You’ve changed my life.” So now that we are doing the second one, we have much more of an attachment to it being good. There seems to be something at stake here which I don’t think helps. On the positive side, I am traveling with my wife and kids this time around. My wife shot half the first one and this time she’s just hanging out, which is nice. But I think I really, really, need to go to sleep.







So, you’re ready to be done?







No. No, again it’s duality. I never want it to be over. Duncan and I will both say we’re the luckiest artists alive. We can go anywhere, work with anyone with any field of creativity, do anything we want with them, and then cut it into anything we want. You couldn’t get a whiter sheet of paper. So I never want it to end, and at the same time I can’t wait until it’s finished. And I can look at it and say it’s good. But you can’t control it. It might not turn out good. It might turn out good. We could totally ruin it. People could say, “What went wrong? They over-thought it. I think they were trying to be too clever.” MTW