I sat down with internationally acclaimed Canadian Swiss filmmaker, Peter Mettler, to discuss his latest hybrid documentary, his seven-hour magnum opus, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (2025), which enjoyed its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
Since then, it’s been a busy time for the filmmaker, what with the subsequent landmark retrospective at TIFF’s Lightbox in October and other screenings already scheduled around the world. The film recently screened over two days at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)
Currently, the film will be presented in Montréal at RIDM (Montréal International Documentary Festival) in one full marathon screening on November 22 and then will be shown in two parts across November 24 and 25 at Cinéma Public. The public is invited to talk with Peter at an informal breakfast on November 23 at the Cinémathèque Québécoise café-bar.
Shot over three years, and meticulously assembled in a comparable interval, the film is a multi-layered epic journey that chronicles both the filmmaker’s literal travels across continents and his lyrical explorations within various conceptual territories. The award-winning artist, who has built a career on searching for knowledge, on gaining deeper perceptions of the unknowable and the unanswerable, has expertly intensified his previous tendencies here.
As much as this film is about the places that Mettler finds himself in, it is also about the people who he encounters. Work opportunities take him to locations like New Mexico and Cuba, where he interacts with strangers, while, closer to home, pandemic-lockdown walks with friends in the woods allow for a different level of exploration. The film is also a profoundly personal account of family relations, as he deals with the mortality of his own parents and later endures a brain injury that lands him in hospital in Switzerland.
There’s a quiet reserve in Mettler’s narration and in his interview style that masks the boldness of his approach. This is an artist that subtly stretches cinematic boundaries and blends genres and styles, even to the point of mixing documentary and fiction. Even though the title of this film, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, announces a certain obvious agenda -- a diary -- the film has many other elements interacting within it. It’s a philosophical treatise, a road movie, a home movie, a psychedelic trip, and beyond.
Meditative and enlightening, this is a unique documentary that defies categorization. Watching the film is like entering a dream state: it’s a different level of consciousness. Mettler points his camera at everyday subjects, into the landscapes and into the heavens, to uncover deeper realities. Once again, he displays a rare talent for bringing together seemingly unrelated topics and events and crafting connections that any alchemist would envy. But above all, he is seeking to capture the ineffable qualities that are right there before our very eyes or hidden just barely beneath the surface of things.
Screen Anarchy: It seems to me that this film acts as a compendium: you've gathered a lot of your past concerns, your own tendencies and the things that you've loved to explore into one film.
There was a section in part five, which I wanted to start with because it seems to be a good point to begin a discussion of your work at this point. When you're at the school in Cuba, and you were talking about how the founder of the school, Fernando Berri, believed that the word “cinema” is too conservative. How cinema is more of a mixture of forms, and that categories and genres were too limiting. You spoke in voice-over about how this was an idea that you yourself had already come to realize. Can you elaborate on that?
Peter Mettler: Well, I could say a couple things. The part about summarizing or collecting the things that I do, the way that I do them, was not at all intentional. And even at the beginning of the film, I'm addressing that. I call them tropes, the things that we do as artists repeatedly that we just can't help doing. Of course, I did it anyway.
At the beginning, I'm playing the piano and there's a wrong note, and I talk about hitting the wrong note and allowing that to take me in a different direction. I think that did happen in a lot of ways during the seven parts. I was confronted with things I'd never been confronted with: the death of my father, my own incarceration in the hospital, those sorts of things in life were firsts. But also letting myself go from a cinematic perspective, allowing things to come up.
Cuba was one of those things. It's a completely different culture. I hadn't been there before. It was very cinema centric, obviously, because we were in a school, so there were thoughts about what cinema is and how you approach cinema.
I've always been in this place of not really having a genre because it's fiction, sometimes it's essay, sometimes it's documentary. This film really goes with the flow of life and picks its forms along the way.
It was only in editing that we discovered Fernando Berri, what he thought about film making. I mean, the part about me sleeping in his bed and there being a discussion about whether that was a good idea and whether I dreamed his dreams, that was all true, but I didn't actually know who he was and what his films were until we were editing.
And then it was quite surprising to come across the quote that is used in the film that he needs to find another name for documentary because what he's doing is not the classical documentary. So, there was a kindred spirit there more than I had realized.
Did you feel like you happened upon him and what he was thinking, the way he saw things, at the right time in your filmmaking process?
Everything I happened upon, I believe I happened upon at the right time. That's kind of the nature of the project. It's not even about what I want. What's happening and what do I get out of that? What do I see? What associations do I make?
I think that's one of the nice things about any of us who get older. There's more accumulation and we see more interrelationships of things and of the profundity of those interrelationships as well.
That's sort of what you were doing all along in your career, wasn’t it? You were flowing like the water imagery that keeps flowing throughout this film and following a certain course that could change at any time.
That was the main agenda, really. The idea about how the grass is always greener on the other side was really a starting point. It was to have something to talk about.
Where did that idea come from, the idea to ponder the question of how the grass is always greener? What does that expression mean to you? Where did that come from? And the idea of asking people about it.
It came from a long time ago when I was in Indonesia. I'd befriended this kid who kept coming and hanging out with me and telling me stories, really interesting stories, about magic. It was a completely different cultural reality.
One day he took me to his village, and he was kind of embarrassed about it. There was no drivable road into the village, just pathways. And we get there and I thought, wow, this is paradise. And he said, look how awful it is here. To him, it was the worst.
You realize how different individuals in the same culture or different cultures have totally different ideas of what's worth pursuing and what paradise might be. Hence the expression, the grass is always greener on the other side. But I also liked what it insinuates in terms of evolution. It comes up in the film a little bit that we need change. We need to have the feeling that we're changing and evolving to keep us going. It's part of human nature.
There are a lot of facets to the question, a lot of possible answers to that question, which I really liked about it. I thought it was a useful question to ask. But again, my biggest agenda was just to be able to meet people and see things and to let one thing lead into another.
Originally in the proposal I made it even more narrative in the sense that if someone asked, or I asked someone what they wanted to be and they said an astronaut, then I would go meet an astronaut. Then I would ask the astronaut what their idea of greener grass is. And maybe it's, I don't know, a cottage, a lake and a cottage or something that he sees from the perspective of his spaceship, and then I go there et cetera. It's like a daisy chain. That was the original idea.
How did that change as you were going along?
I was working almost alone with friends helping me here and there, or even strangers helping me. I always wanted to be chronological, but the difference was that it became very personal because I didn't really have a production budget to speak of. I could just survive.
So, the first thing I did was film out the window, and then the next thing was to go with my neighbour somewhere. And it was all personal things that were happening, or invitations to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico [in part three where he takes a road trip to show his film Gambling, Gods, and LSD] and Cuba [in part five]. Those were just things that were happening in my life.
I brought the camera along and it became a diary, and then it really became a diary when COVID hit, and that isolation was forced upon us. Then my father died. It just gravitated towards this personal experience with the greener grass theme still being there in the background. It would come and go throughout the seven parts.
How much do circumstances play a factor? Certain circumstances in any given moment affect what anyone's doing at that moment. This film is, correct me if I'm wrong, your most personal film. I found it painfully personal. I mean, you've shared everything.
I know that you said in the film that the film camera is your way of sharing, but you went all in, and I'm applauding you for that. But I also marvel because that must've been so difficult. And the decision you had, the power of editing and the decision to keep filming – that was in your hands. Can you tell me about what motivated you to proceed like that?
I decided to go in a certain direction and why would I stop when even more meaningful things started to happen? And it was not hard for me to film. It was a bit difficult to film with my dad when he was dying, but I also felt that there was something worthwhile in it that was not personal, that was fundamental to human beings.
I think that's how it's read too. People see the personal story but relate to it in their own lives, in a bigger picture.
And it was about transformation. I love one thing turning into another. In the hospital [while visiting his father in part six] a pregnant woman came in urgent, and I thought, that’s the beginning and this is the end, and we celebrate the beginning. Why can't we celebrate the end, especially if it's not a tragic end, which it wasn't for my father.
It was a process of grieving as an artist. I, like other artists, have the good fortune that we have a medium to process certain things in life with. That was definitely the case for me with the film. I am the only one. I don't have brothers or sisters, there's nobody else. It was just me and my parents.
So that kept me going. It was not easy to edit some of the things with my dad in the hospital, and thankfully I had Jordan Kawai, who was co-editing throughout, and he assembled a lot of those difficult sequences that became actually very close to the final edit as well. That gave me a chance to, or it allowed me not to have to go through all the material and relive it in that way. It became something more condensed, almost symbolic, I guess.
Then me in the hospital [when the filmmaker himself is hospitalized with a mysterious illness in part seven], I probably should have been more worried, but I was in fact about to do a live show [mixing sound and image] beforehand. I'd been practicing and my mind was kind of tuned into the software I used to create effects. So, I was hallucinating in the hospital and imagining how I would do that with my mixing system.
When that happened, when you got sick and something happened that was beyond your control, the filmmaker who always had control, and then you're dealing with that --
I wasn't afraid. It was more interpreting the situation with my iPhone. The people there were amazing, the doctors, and there was a mystery involved in what was happening to me because they couldn't figure it out. I had to do all these weird tests, and the people were very engaging. And I don’t know, it was just the disposition I had was positive. That probably makes you have a better time, and it makes the doctors react better to you.
I don't film all the time. Since August 2020, I haven't filmed very much. I was on a mission when that happened. I take pictures all the time, but I turned that filming thing on and off. I think I've always done that.
It’s also complicated. Your work has always been complicated.
I really feel like what I wanted to do with the film was quite simple. I wanted to create a diary and observe the things that were unfolding and then turn them into some kind of cinematic experience and ask questions. And it's really pretty simple. It's a diary form that muses along the way.
I feel like I can't argue with you, but I feel like it's not as simple as that, Peter. Not … I can't accept that. (laughs)
There are too many other kinds of films going on in this diary film that it can't be. It can be, of course it can be. But I as the critic have to protest a little bit and say, but there's a road movie in there as well. Yes, there's a personal diary, but there's also observations, there's philosophizing about life --
There are other film forms I would say that emerge in that diary process. Absolutely.
I mean, there's psychedelic mixed layers, ecstatic, very dense sequences. There are quiet landscapes where you just hear the wind and a bird and see a deer flicking its ears. There's the home movie aspect of being with my parents and the drama of losing your parents at an older age.
Like you say, there's a road movie, there's comedy. It's all over the place in that respect. That's I guess the filmmaker part of the observer, which is also why there's a lot of references to other writers and even filmmakers in the process because I am not unique existing outside of the influence of the entire world. I'm completely under the influence of all the things I've seen and read, and they're being regurgitated in little bits or tuned in a different way.
Let’s talk about what you said in the film, and you mentioned here earlier, that every filmmaker is remaking one film over and over again. You even put in footage from your very, very first film from high school.
What continues is that personality, that human nature that is specific to each of us, whether you're a filmmaker or not. I'm sure you've met people from 30 years ago and they seem the same. I mean, they've aged, they've got more experience, but there's a certain coding or something in the person that doesn't change.
I think that's the same with artistic expression. In many cases also with the themes we pursue. My theme about the first film I made in high school was about a boy who buys the dream of death off a gypsy. But that's also a universal idea. We're all wondering what the hell happens when we die. And religions are based on it. Maybe it is the fundamental question. So, we're all making films about that all the time.
Religion or spirituality is a huge topic in this film. Spirituality in a way has always been present in all your films because you were always seeking to film the unfilmable, the ineffable. But here to some extent it seems to have solidified into the idea of religion. There's talk of God; there's talk of Buddha. Can you talk about that?
I don't think my perspective is that different, but my father brings up God, and I would more or less agree with him that God is nature, nature is God. He ends up saying that, so he takes it away from a religious practice, into more of a spiritual characteristic. He talks about, for lack of a better word, how we can use the word God to describe these things. And so that pretty much fits with how I've seen things for a long time.
At one point [in part six] I tell my dad in the hospital that one of the reasons I'm filming him is that it’s like a religion to me, but I don't really mean religion. I mean it's a way of understanding who we are. It's a spiritual practice; it's a spiritual pursuit. It's a reflection on life and death. It's about transformation. And these are things that we also hear from a Buddhist perspective, from the Dalai Lama, which is in footage that I shot way back in the eighties, which I also found in my basement.
The film is also a reflection of what happens in lifetimes, across lifetimes. What's happening in the film is things are happening within parts, across parts. There are echoes. It's like a reflection of the movement of a lifetime. Lifetimes cycles, natural cycles.
You see my father talking about World War II, and that puts into perspective also the cyclical nature of history, how you can perceive the things that are going on now. This was a few years ago when he said it, it worries him what's happening, and it's so reminiscent of what he experienced before the second World War.
So there's those cycles and there's the cycles of generations, the cycles of nature, which became very apparent during COVID for everybody because we were reduced to a kind of stillness, and we had more time to see the springtime for a change and go out in the woods where we could talk to people and you become more aware how much a part of nature you actually are.
And that was a big gift during the making of the film. What better subject could you have?