Director Matt Dougherty, E.P. Jane Campion Explore Riveting “Anti-Guru” U.G. Krishnamurti In ‘The Natural State’ – Telluride Film Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Was the Indian born “anti-guru” U.G. Krishnamurti a destroyer or a builder? Was he cruel or compassionate? The answer to both questions may be “yes.” Such questions, in fact, may not be the right ones to ask about the man variously described as a teacher, philosopher, maverick mystic, and enlightened person. What seems crucial is the impact he had on people and the distinct possibility that he gave those who orbited him what they needed most – knocking down their ego or dismissing them as trivial, in some cases – to achieve spiritual freedom. The Natural State, a documentary about U.G. and his seismic effect on so many, holds its world premiere Saturday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It’s directed by Matt Dougherty and executive produced by Jane Campion, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who knew Krishnamurti personally. Watch the trailer below. Watch on Deadline “There was a real generosity in the way he helped people. And sometimes the help was harsh,” Campion tells Deadline in an exclusive interview. “You did feel like sometimes that whoever was talking to him, he would appear to pick up — in a contrary way or in a sympathetic way — their tone or their sensibility.” A Sine Altera Production Among those who desperately sought guidance from U.G. was Julie Thayer, a wealthy woman and mother from New York who left behind her life there to follow Krishnamurti in the Swiss Alps or just about anywhere else he went. She filmed him constantly, obsessively documenting his every move and utterance, and that archive, including journals she kept, became the basis of The Natural State. “I stumbled on Julie’s journal online,” Dougherty explains. “And while you read it, you see so much of it has to do with her actually filming all this material… I just contacted her… and right away she was like, ‘Yes, if you want to do something with it.’ She didn’t know me from another guy in the street. She agreed right away, which was pretty amazing to me. Neither of us had any idea what we were signing up for though, that’s for sure.” It became a 10-year-journey to get the film made. Approaching the story with proper assiduity would not be quick work, and Campion likens the quest to Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale. She jokes, “I start to call him ‘Moby Matt’ now because he’s been on this project for so long.” As the film shows, Julie Thayer became immediately convinced of U.G.’s wisdom and that he was just the person to “destroy her ego,” the totalizing goal she sought. Campion, meeting Krishnamurti the first time, was less persuaded of his gift. She tells Deadline she and others met U.G. at a hotel in Sydney when he was visiting Australia. Executive producer Jane Campion Courtesy of Grant Matthews “It was a pretty strange event. He didn’t seem anything like an enlightened person,” she recalls. “We were not convinced at all… We just thought, what a bizarre little old guy.” She continues, “I felt sorry for him being in Sydney with nothing much to do. So, I invited him to my place for a cup of tea, and he and everybody came and there’s a little group of people following with him or around him. And I noticed that he made his own tea and washed his own cup and really didn’t want any of the trappings of being looked after at all.” Later, U.G. and Jane went for a stroll. “We were walking together and I started to get incredibly strong bodily sensations. It wasn’t like I thought, ‘Oh, this is amazing. I’m walking with the enlightened man.’ I was thinking this is just odd bod. But these sensations were so powerful that I said to him, ‘What are you doing? You’re doing something.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not doing anything.’ This is how strong [the sensations] were that I had had menopause at the time and I was bleeding the next day. And I’d also had the sort of rash on my top arms and that had completely cleared up. It was like I had some sort of cellular, I don’t know, transference, and I felt enormous love.” Director Matt Dougherty Courtesy of David Schulze Dougherty came onto the documentary project well after U.G.’s death in 2007 (at the age of 88). He wasn’t sold on U.G.’s legitimacy. “I come from a background of my parents having been in a fundamentalist Christian cult, so I was very skeptical and jaded about any of these teachers,” he admits. “I was sort of like, ‘Maybe this person’s enlightened, but wait, what do they want? There’s some angle somewhere, I’m sure.’ And then when I came across U.G., he seemed very different than all these other people. He was sort of the opposite: ‘Go away, nothing to sell you, nothing to get.’ So, then that really fascinated me. Maybe this guy really has it, or maybe this is just some sort of reverse psychology, clever con.” Krishnamurti didn’t so much teach as listen to those who felt compelled to gather around him, and then reacted to what they were saying. Sometimes his words could appear mean, and these dressing downs came to be referred to as “blastings.” His precepts, if they can be called that, were unorthodox. He didn’t believe in cause and effect, he felt language was misleading, viewed “thought” as a purposeful human distraction, and that pursuing enlightenment, self-improvement, etc. was absurd. He did believe in a natural state of humans – one that was biological and divorced from conscious thought. “He did always promote the idea of the natural state, which is the body has the wisdom and it’s at ease, natural. That’s all there is,” Campion says. “The mind is really a kind of little devil that we have to live with… I mean, God, I get so sick of mine.” Krishnamurti’s compassion for others was not of an obvious kind. Referring to him, Dougherty invokes Nietzsche, “This quote of his that, ‘a good friend is a hard bed to sleep on.’” He adds, “Is that just a justification for abusive behavior or is it something that very few people will be able to pick up on, but if they do, something transformative can happen to them? So, keeping that as a kind of question, these are the frames that we can look at it with. How can you ever come to a final answer? Each person will have their own.” Campion harbors no doubt about U.G. “It’s maybe corny, but I loved him,” she says. “It’s as simple as that for me. I wasn’t asking is he real or isn’t he real? I knew I couldn’t know. I felt a lot of love and the freedom, the sense of him being a free man was something like a gift to experience… To me, it was like a surrealist guru, like a Duchampian kind of someone who exhibits a toilet and says that’s art.” So fascinated by U.G. was Campion that created a television series inspired by him, Top of the Lake. “I felt like after he died that I wasn’t going to meet anyone like that again,” she observes. “And I wanted to create a kind of idea of a postmenopausal women’s camp where they all gathered together to be with a female version of U.G., which was GJ, played by Holly Hunter. And I’d shown Holly Hunter the tapes of U.G., and she started to get a few mannerisms down. At first, she was absolutely terrified. I think she wanted to drop out of it… and then she had a great deal of fun with the character.” Of U.G., Campion says, “I’m an apologist for him, always.” Dougherty doesn’t feel the need to be so partisan, accepting the concept of “perceptual indeterminacy.” “My motivation was to give U.G. the U.G. treatment as well because he’s taking everyone else apart. So, it’s important to take him apart too,” he insists. “That’s a question the film asks is does our expectation of an awakened or enlightened person fit within the conventions or norms of our society? But even still, it’s sort of like you have to take the piss out of him. You can’t just let him sit on a pedestal because that would also be the worst betrayal for someone like him in a way. He did not court that.” U.G. Krishnamurti won’t be on a pedestal per se in Telluride, but in a temple of cinema, there to ponder on the big screen. Watch the trailer for The Natural State here: