TRANSCRIPT:

Michael de Courcy: I remember film showings at Intermedia that I saw, Bunuel's L'Age d'Or, Godard films and stuff like that. In the Intermediate building, I guess it was the third floor, or the second floor...

David Rimmer: Well, Razutis, Al Razutis had just come up from California.

Michael de Courcy: Was he a draft dodger?

David Rimmer: Yeah. And he brought films up from from California and showed them at Inrtermedia.   So that's how the first real showings got started... (showings) of current avant garde films. It had been possible before to see the classic dada, surrealist films at UBC and Vancouver Film Club, I think it was called... but Razutis brought the more contemporary stuff. So then I realized that there was something going on there in cinema that interested me much more than English as a trade or something to do.

Michael de Courcy: So did he have, did Razutis actually own copies of these films?

David Rimmer: No, he rented them.

Michael de Courcy: So he knew where to rent them?

David Rimmer: Yeah, he knew where to rent them.

Michael de Courcy: Where was he coming from? Was he a filmmaker?

David Rimmer: He was coming from science really. He had studies I think in chemistry and physics and things like that in in the States, and probably in LA, and got disillusioned with everything, and particularly with the war in Vietnam. And he come up to see what he could do up here.

Michael de Courcy: So he wasn't necessarily making films?

David Rimmer: He making films too. Yeah, he was... we were both kind of about the same point in our filmmaking career developed both trying to figure out what to do, and both quite naively, I think, exploring the possibilities of film. I say naively, as a positive thing. And because I always say I'm very fortunate that I didn't go to art school, or didn't go to film school, because I was able to go in and make things which people would have told me were impossible to make out of this... a blessing, naivete, really. And that's something that has continued to influence me or affect me, from the Intermedia days. The idea that I can do anything I want in film. And so there's no rules, there's no theory, there's nothing, I can do everything. And I have the confidence to do everything from those Intermedia days, right? Because Intermedia was really my art school, because I didn't go to art school... spending four or five years working with Intermedia people taught me all I needed to know at that point about art and art making. It was exciting to those people too... those people who did know something about art were very accepting of the rest of us. We weren't, we weren't blocked from entering into the scene... We were, you know... we would do great extravaganzas at the Vancouver art gallery. And everybody was participating at an equal level. Yeah, there was nobody saying 'oh, you can't come in and you can come in' and you know, 'we got to shape a show .... It's just got to reflect some kind of theory.' It was just, we all just went in and did it.