“Some of the things he’s done, I can’t even bear to hear them to be honest with you,” Regan explains of Neil. “It makes you sick to your stomach some of the things he’s been responsible for. But as an individual, I have to say I do like the man. That contrast is very disturbing for me and I think it adds a power to the thing. I mean, I see somewhere in him a humanity of someone trying to break free.
“In his world, it’s eat or be eaten. So, I have a lot respect for him in mastering that world of violence and intimidation. And in a way, that’s kind of screwed him up because he finds himself in a world where he’s got kids and a family and those tricks that he learned don’t operate in the world he’s in now. He’s kind of lost. And here he is ten years later trying to live a normal life and he is struggling.”
In 100% White we follow pudgy, middle-aged skins that are half-assed clinging to faded rhetoric that burned passionate in youth and now seems as misguided as their faded Führer tattoos. Aryan-supremist dads barbecue for their extended colored family. They date mixed-race girls and channel their aggression into raves while pretending they’re still committed to their ideology. Banal daily routines become comical as skins put on blinders to shield their crumbling identity politics from themselves.
In Regan’s other film Cold Turkey, we see the aforementioned Lanre Feintola decide to kick a nine-year heroin and crack addiction with 7 days of cold turkey by bolting the door on his apartment. He invited Leo to document the process and, after some reservations, he agreed. “I was watching this man I’ve known for 15 years disintegrate in front of me and every time I went back to see him he was worse. He was absolutely falling apart and actually becoming psychotic, believing that he has animals living inside his body and stuff like this. That was from the crack. His body, his veins, were clogging up with all the crap, because he was using street heroin that’s mixed with all sorts of rubbish. He was dying there, you know.”
Leo falls silent for a second and decides it is very important to clarify the major pitfall of being an immersionist.
“Lanre was a photojournalist and he just lost the plot really. He was investigating this story on drugs and just completely became absorbed by it and really went down the tubes. I was following him for a year as he tried to pull himself out of that world and in fact he did pull himself out that world and got his book deal and cleaned up. But as soon as the film came out he went straight back down again. He could never stop – with his projects, with anything he’s done. He’s very intense, but he could never pull himself out.”
It’s amazing to watch how Lanre lives in a palatial apartment with a full-blown habit and no job, surviving this way for over a decade. “You saw yourself, he’s a great bullshitter,” Leo adds, “and he managed to convince the housing association to house him. The social welfare system is quite good and you can use it to your advantage.”
The first thing that hits you about these films is the futility of lies when someone is closely observed over several years. For over a year we see Lanre attest repeatedly that he’s gone clean, with sincere performances that would give Ari Fleischer a hard-on. Leo himself became fascinated with the immersionist coup of documenting subjects unaware of their own delusion. “The bullshit factor alone,” comments Regan, “which he believes and it’s so apparent that it’s bullshit. I went into this situation trying to be optimistic. I convinced myself and him of that. Without that we’d be wasting our time, but I think we were wasting our time.”
Eventually, when confronted by Leo with a camera in hand about where his life really was at, Lanre couldn’t take it anymore and jumped from the nearest window, breaking his leg from the second story fall. The truth was too much for him to bear. The last we see of him is a figure limping off into the night, running away from his life as a Will Oldham song comes on. In metaphorical terms, it’s universal to the human condition.
“I was listening to I See a Darkness while making Cold Turkey and became completely obsessed with it. I asked him for permission to use three songs from it and Will couldn’t handle it, because it was so close to an experience he was having. While he was watching the rough cuts, a friend of his had been through a cold turkey experience and had used his album, that music, to get through that experience. Whatever it was, it touched a raw nerve in him.”
Leo Regan’s next film Battle Center, is due out on Channel 4 (UK) this February. “I spent a year in a house in London, run by a very extreme church,” says Regan. “They wear combat jackets and kind of pull people off the street. Watching one guy who comes in off the street, a hitchhiker who has no experience of religion, and watching this guy convert in front of my eyes was an amazing thing.” Rather than joking about a commune of indoctrinated vagrants, Leo gives a more honest conclusion. “It’s all about love, that’s the bottom line. It is about love. In my opinion it is a very powerful feeling of love that would knock you out – very disturbing but very real.”
