Jan Kounen, the shamanic interview

From Dobermann on acid to ayahuasca therapy, Jan Kounen has never really chosen between camera and pipe. A cosmic encounter with a director who now prefers inner visions to outer explosions.

The child prodigy of French cinema, Jan Kounen made a name for himself with three decently mad short films: Gisèle Kérozène in 1990, Vibroboy in 1994 – the adventures of a killer armed with a vibrator – and Le Dernier Chaperon rouge in 1996 – starring Emmanuelle Béart and Marc Caro. In 1997, these three little fictions opened the doors to the big screen with Dobermann, a violent, eccentric thriller on amphetamines that has since gained a cult following.

From Dobermann to shamans

The rest of his career was confusing: he went to Mexico and Peru, immersed himself in shaman culture and returned with the western Blueberry, l’expérience secrète (2004) . A sensory cinematic trip under the influence, with Vincent Cassel in the title role and a memorable final duel under ayahuasca – the ancestral hallucinogenic beverage consumed by Amazonian tribes.
The same year, he continued his work with D’autres mondes (Other Worlds), an anthropological documentary somewhere between a mystical trip and a human adventure, punctuated by testimonies from scientists, neurologists and philosophers such as Stanislav Grof, Jeremy Narby and Kary Mullis. Kounen films himself in ceremonies, methodically and acutely bearing witness to this indigenous culture.

He also directed the spiritual documentary Darshan : l’étreinte (2005), about the life and work of Amma, the Indian religious leader Mata Amritanandamayi. In 2007, Frédéric Beigbeder chose the filmmaker to adapt his bestseller 99 Francs, starring Jean Dujardin in this ferocious satire of the advertising world. The film is Jan Kouenen’s biggest cinematic success, with over 1,230,000 admissions in France alone.

Kosmik Journey

He will then take this quest for traditional indigenous medicines a step further with Ayahuasca (Kosmik Journey) (2019), which recreates the effects of ayahuasca and the care of a Shipibo healer. Ayahuasca (Kosmic Journey) is currently on view in virtual reality at the “Shamanic Visions” exhibition.
Last autumn, with the release of the comic strip Doctor Ayahuasca and the books Ayahuasca. Cérémonies, visions, soins : le chemin des plantes sacrées – with François Demange – and Métavers : Et si il avait toujours existé? – with Romuald Leterrier, “a plea for harmonization between science, technology and spirituality” – Jan Kounen joined me for a Q&A on the Lucydelic podcast.
360° immersion into the visionary universe of an extraordinary artist who questions the boundaries between the graphic arts, the therapeutic dimensions of psychedelia and cinematic creation.

Zeweed: When did you first discover ayahuasca?
Jan Kounen: It was after Dobermann, a film that really shook me up. I’d reached the end of something, and I said to myself: “Why am I making another one? And what did I leave out of my life for twenty years, when I was so involved in cinema? I realized that, when I was fourteen, the thing that really shaped me artistically was the reading I did every year of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I was fascinated by this book, which led me to modified states of consciousness. I was also a bit of an anarchist, against religions, so when I threw out all my anger with this film, I was now free to approach these spaces. I began to read Thomas Merton’s Desert Wisdom: Aphorisms of the Desert Fathers, for example, as well as the works of the Indian master Svâmi Prajnânpad, and discovered both a different way of perceiving the world in different cultures, and the space of shamanism.

Zeweed : Do you take them regularly?
Yes, of course; it’s something that’s very present in my life, even today. I must have takenayahuasca between four and five hundred times over the last twenty-five years. I’m still in balance with these spaces and with the plants I’ve diété. I travel regularly to Peru.

The connection with nature is very strong, with these substances…
I say it at the end in the comic strip; we’re in a spaceship going through the cosmos, we think we’re the passengers and we destroy the ship and massacre the crew, but we’re part of it. We don’t even realize it, in fact. And that’s what you feel with ayahuasca – the interrelation; you’re not a passenger, you’re a member of the living ship: the Earth. Of course, you don’t need ayahuasca to feel that way! But with plants, that feeling runs through all your cells.

What should we think of the messages perceived during ayahuasca ceremonies?
When ayahuasca sends you a message, it’s not necessarily the spirits of the plant who have spoken to you. It could be your subconscious, your mind, your unconscious, your benevolent desire or your suffering ego. So, you really have to consider the proposal, especially when you believe you’re receiving a precise message that will change your entire existence; but, most of the time, there’s no problem.
When the plant tells you that you have a great cosmic mission, or any prophetic mission, it may simply be showing you the link between you and nature; but, for you, it’s your grasp, your interpretation, a simple relationship with your desire and not the reality of any request. If she asks you to come and live with her in the jungle, think again…

So, yes, you can have messages. They’ll take different forms. Ayahuasca can speak to some, show others, or contact you during your dreams. In my case, it’s very visual, but I’ve been developing visual art and imagination all my life, so I know this language. The first time I took this plant, I already had within me the tool that had been trained to communicate visually and aurally.

Are these memories that come back easily to you after a session? Do you take notes during the ceremony?
I talk about it in Doctor Ayahuasca; when I came back from the Amazon, in 1999, I said to myself: “My God, I’ve come back to another world, another reality; I’ve got to make drawings so I don’t forget, because maybe it’s over.” It was a door that opened, like an apparition you have, and then, all of a sudden, you tell yourself that maybe you’ll never have it again. So I started drawing. And, by the way, there are maybe fifteen of these drawings that are tiny little drawings and I’ve made whole pages of them, enlarged them.

I don’t remember everything precisely, but I know how to remember it. Memories are stored in a space that can only be accessed from the same state. You go to a state, you have an experience; you store a memory. You return to another state; the bookshop is closed. But when you return to this state, the bookshop opens as if it were yesterday.

It is said that ayahuasca is also a therapeutic beverage… Are there any studies to back this up?
What’s complicated in our world about the use of psychedelic medicine, psychoactives and plants, is that we’re working with a drug, whereas the question of set and setting is a priority – where? how? with whom? in what state of mind? NDLR. You can’t just hand over a glass and say: “You take it three times a day and it’s fine. You need someone to accompany you. The medical profession has trouble understanding this. Now there’s a movement afoot in France, and things are starting to happen in psychiatric hospitals.

France is a long way behind on these subjects, but the “Visions chamaniques” exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly gives ayahuasca recognition in its artistic and therapeutic space, and on this level, it’s unprecedented in the world. The French can discover the pictorial art of the Shipibo, an indigenous people, and also grasp the beauty of the visionary paintings by German artist Martina Hoffmann and American artist Alex Grey, who have rarely, if ever, been exhibited in France.

Why did you make a documentary about vape? Do you make a connection between cannabis, CBD, tobacco and entheogens?
It’s my activist film. Vape Wave (2016) is about something that seemed obvious to me, having discovered electronic cigarettes and the ease with which I was able to quit smoking. I made this film because tobacco is the thing that kills the most people in our society.
Tobacco comes first; then alcohol; then, I think, sugars and saturated fats, too much sugar; and then, little by little, we’re going to get down to pesticides, in salads and vegetables, and heavy metals in fish.

And that’s where vape comes in; in other words, it’s better to breathe air than to vape, but otherwise, we’ve gone from the most dangerous to the least dangerous. I investigated, I said to myself, “But it’s incomprehensible that there should be such obstruction of the development of vape by institutions, when the scientific data are clear.”

I’ve come to realize that what really damages democracy is the ability to lobby politicians, far removed from public health interests. The pressure exerted by industry is quite blatant – in every field. In the case of vape, it’s blatantly obvious: you have the solution to the biggest public health problem, and politicians won’t defend it.

Are you vaping CBD, THC?
It’s perfectly possible to do so. Weed, no, because I’ve done Amazonian and European plant diets and I’m a bit of a traditionalist, in the native sense. I’m careful about all the psychoactives that go into my body. Weed is also a medicinal plant; it’s a psychotropic, it has a spirit. But it’s a difficult plant to master, to “diet”, to really get into one’s spiritual space. So, not for me at the moment.
With psychotropic drugs, I’m no longer in a playful space; that was twenty years ago. But I’ve tried smoking CBD, and I find it interesting.