He made his name with 1971's El Topo (The Mole), the underground movie to end them all. Since its release, the film has been the stuff of legend, with movie geeks fighting over fifth-generation copies with the dialogue dubbed into German - one New York video library famously demanded a 0 deposit before they would let their one and only copy out of their sight.
It follows the eponymous black-clad gunslinger and his young (and naked) son through a desert filled with symbolic characters and shocking imagery (crucified sheep are a major theme). He falls asleep for several years in a cave and emerges to lead an army of cripples against a corrupt and decadent frontier town.
The Holy Mountain (1974) is every bit as gnomic, with 12 seekers after wisdom - representing the 12 signs of the Zodiac - destroying their material possessions and following a bearded mystic (played by Jodorowsky himself) to the Holy Mountain, hoping to become immortal amid more crucified sheep, kids disembowelling tarantulas, a giant sex robot, and guns made from crosses.
But let's start with El Topo. It's not so much a Western as an Eastern: the cyclical plotline seems to show a strong Buddhist influence, while the bizarre characters encountered by El Topo and his son have more than a hint of the martial arts movie to them. "Well, yes, and then after I made it, you had things like the TV series of Kung Fu appearing - it seemed to start a whole wave of film-making," Jodorowsky considers. "I never set out for it to be a cult movie; I mean, when I made it, I was working in isolation, in Mexico, and I just had no idea how people would see it."
Violence is also a major Jodorowsky preoccupation - those crucified sheep for a start. The Holy Mountain memorably features a blood-soaked re-enactment of Cortéz's conquest of Mexico performed by toads and chameleons. This interview took place against a background of ethnic cleansing and NATO bombing in Yugoslavia; El Topo opens in a slaughtered village, the streets literally awash with blood. The image is still very raw, and must have been even more so when it originally appeared, as the Vietnam war dragged on and on. "Violence you will find here, in your world, in your local area... Since I came into this world, there has been nothing but wars, wars, wars. The violence has never stopped in my life. If I want to show the sublime, if I want to show beautiful, mystical things, I have to show violence. I never show violence as pleasure, but like an art - like Picasso did with Guerníca."
There's a lot of psychedelic imagery in both films. Was he, uh, experienced? "Oh yes. El Topo was meant to be everything inside my mind but, with Holy Mountain, I wanted to show everything I didn't have in my mind - I wanted my mind opened, but I wanted it opened well. I hired a guru, and he gave me LSD, and directed me for eight hours. Later, a woman called Maria Savina - she's a bruja, a shaman woman - and I took mushrooms, and she brought me on a cosmic journey. But, for me, that was enough. I don't recommend that young people should just take it for parties - not without that goal of knowledge and under-standing. It's terrible! A mystical quest is not just for ecstasy!"
His characters are outsiders or outcasts of one sort or another. There's a wonderful scene in El Topo where an armless man carrying a legless man becomes a sort of pantomime John Wayne... "Why not? I like it that way! There's a lot of ugliness in art - and I don't separate art from life - you've got Goya, Rembrandt, Breughel, Velazquez... There are dwarves, ugly people of all sorts throughout the history of art. Anything that's normal, I don't like."
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