January/February 2005

An interview with William Arntz
by Ravi Dykema

Quantum physics, high-minded metaphysical concepts, interviews with scientists, scholars and channels, and soldout shows from Pittsburgh to Peoria? Who the bleep would have thought it possible?a

Part documentary, part drama, What the #$%*! Do We Know is the biggest surprise indie phenomenon since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.The movie, a combination of metaphysical concepts and quantum physics, has been playing to sold-out audiences in feature film venues. Fueled primarily by word of mouth, support from local spiritual groups and editorial promos from alternative magazines and newspapers, it shows no signs of slowing. Who knew that the seed of an idea, germinating for 25 years in the mind of William Arntz, the movie’s mastermind, would take such a quantum leap, outselling the likes of The Exorcist and The Lord Of The Rings in some theatres? Here, Arntz talks about his inspiration for the film, his hopes for its impact and the next installment.

RD: Did you come to Boulder with metaphysical aspirations?

WA: Oh, no, I moved to Boulder because I was starting up a software company and it was getting to the point where I had to decide where it was really going to live— other than my garage. I had always thought that someday I would live in Boulder. I just kind of decided, “Well, geez, I guess the time is now.”

 

RD:And you had a couple of very successful companies, is that right?

WA: Yes. When I moved to Boulder, we built that software company up to a pretty decent size, then we sold it to a bigger software company. Of course, the company I sold it to made a fortune on my product. Kind of pissed me off. So I started another software company based here in Boulder, then sold that one. Then I took the proceeds from the second company, and used them to finance this film.

RD: How did you first get the idea for the film?

WA: You know, that’s kind of a funny story. I made a 16 mm film about 25 years ago that was part animation, part documentary and part live action. It had to do with a lot of metaphysical and spiritual things, so my colleague, Mark Vincente, jokes that I’ve been working on What The Bleep for 25 years. But, you know, after I did that movie, I started reading and getting more involved in meditation and whatnot. About that time, Fritjof Capra’s book, The Tao of Physics, came out, and I had been a physics major in college. So between that and the meditation stuff, I became really interested in science and spirituality. I had always been interested in weirdo science—you know, the science that, when you hear about it, your mind just goes, “What?” These ideas had been germinating in my head for years. Then seven or eight years ago, I joined Ramtha School in Washington, where many of these ideas are part of the curriculum. Because I found the information so interesting and so applicable to my life, I thought, “You know, someone should make a movie about this.” That someone turned out to be me. And it was one of those ideas that just wouldn’t go away. After about a month, I finally said, “Well, I guess I’m supposed to do it.” And off I went.

 

RD: Can you name the point in your life when you started getting interested in “weirdo science?”

WA: It actually happened my last year in college, of all places, and I was completely not spiritual. I had been brought up in the Lutheran church, and I rejected that because of all the damnation and the weird dogma. I remember being in 9th grade and asking, “If a little Hindu kid is a year old and dies, are they going to burn forever in hell because they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior?” The answer was, “yes.” Even in 9th grade, that was the switch. I just said, “This is bullshit,” and completely walked away from all of it. I wasn’t at all interested in anything religious or spiritual, and I particularly did not like the “G” word, “God,” because it brought up all those things. Then in college, I started studying relativity and quantum physics, and I kept thinking that science was going to tell me what time really was, and what space really was. I was hoping to be a physicist, but I was also just personally interested in the answers to those kinds of questions.

That’s why I took all the weirdo classes—relativity, cosmology, quantum classes, because that was peering a little more inside the kimono, right? All the while, I just kept thinking that these books and classes and professors were going to eventually tell me the answers. I finally realized they were just describing their observations and putting them into equations. But they weren’t telling me what time really was. So I started looking around. At that point, I sort of fell in. I went from physics into metaphysics.

 

RD:And your burning question was,“What’s time?”

WA: It was. I was fascinated by the concept of time, and what it really is. Einstein comes along and says there’s four-dimensional continuum timespace; they’re not really separate. Well, if they’re not really separate, you can move in space. Can you move in time? And if you can’t move in time, why not? These are the sort of questions you have when you’re a physics undergraduate; you think you’re going to figure it all out. That was what got me started on the metaphysics books, because people were telling me, “They at least talk about that stuff.” At first, reading those books, I would skip all the stuff about meditating and working on yourself and purifying your emotions, and all those kind of spiritual aspects. I figured that was for someone else, and I would get to the more esoteric science part of the whole thing.

 

RD:Whose teachings really stood out for you?

WA: Rudolph Steiner, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, 1947). He talked a lot about the higher worlds, and the dimensions beyond the space/time dimensions. He had a very scientific outlook, the way he explained it. Then I read Gurdjieff, because he gets into a lot of this stuff, too. Then someone gave me an Alice Bailey book—those are really pretty out there. Once I got beyond being a science nerd about the whole thing, someone gave me Carlos Castaneda and said, “You have to read this.” At that point, it was pretty much “game on!” Castaneda’s books are so wonderful, and they give such practical examples. Then, having read all this stuff, I started thinking, “Man, I’d like to experience some of these altered states all these people are always talking about.”

RD: So what did you do?

WA: During all this, I made that 16 mm movie, and I had gotten to the point where it was time to decide what I was going to do. If I was going to do a movie career, I had to go do it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to hang out in L.A. So I moved to San Francisco, dropped out and became a hippie. I’d go to various lectures there, and I met my first spiritual teacher in San Francisco. I had finally gotten to the point where I realized it was good for me to have a spiritual teacher. Otherwise, my ego was taking over. I knew I needed a teacher to kick my butt.

 

RD:What was his name?

WA: Frederick Lenz, also known as Rama. I studied with him for about 12 years. He called us “the granola crowd” because we were all very much into health foods. At one point, he said to us, “Well, guys, things are going to change,” and he started sending everyone to computer school. His reasoning was that the state of mind it takes to do really fine computer programming is very similar to the state of mind you go into when you do the longtime meditation in Buddhism, when you meditate on the tangkas (scroll paintings). When you meditate on those, the idea is to get to a point where you can hold every aspect perfectly in your mind at once. Then the magic happens. He told us that, to create a good computer program, you have to do the same thing. You have to hold all the organizational structures in your mind perfectly so you know how to program. And he said, “The nice thing is you’ll know whether you’re holding them right, because if the system crashes, I guess you weren’t focused.” And he said, it had the nice caveat that you earned a decent amount of money doing it. So he was the one who, over the years, decided that the task for the students was to write software, create software companies and sell them off. And that’s why I did the software companies. It was our task. One of his favorite lines was, “You know, I could teach you the path to enlightenment by stacking wood, but at the end of the day, you haven’t got a pot to piss in. No one respects you if you’re a meditator in the West, but they’ll respect you if you make a lot of money programming. So, we’re doing programming, guys and gals.” So off we went.

 

RD: So you started your software companies as obedience to your teacher, or because it really attracted you and you wanted to do it?

WA: I was never very good in the obedience thing. It was more that it was what we were all doing, and I liked the idea of creating software, selling it off and making a bunch of money, and the idea of my mind being freed from the gravitational pull of money. That’s not in my awareness any more. I’m not worried about whether I can pay the rent or where the next job’s going to come from. I’m not worried about any of that. All that has been handled for the rest of my life. Also, I thought that once I had financial freedom, I’d really get serious about my spiritual practice. That was the theory. It turned out that once I had that financial freedom, I didn’t meditate as much as I thought I was going to. I realized that I was just using having to work and stuff as an excuse not to do the practice. That was an eyeopener.

 

RD: Have you talked to Frederick Lenz about your film?

WA: No, he left the body about six years ago. It’s too bad, because he loved movies. But he really got into the whole software thing. It wasn’t just about writing software. He told us, “You’ll really hone your intuitive skills when you’re in the sales process. There’s always one thing that’s a real hot spot for everyone, even if it seems small to you. If you’re intuitive, you’ll pick that right up, and you can address it.” He said part of it was using your awareness in order to achieve what you intend,and part of it was just an exercise in intent—in intending something and then creating it. So he was using software and marketing as the vehicle for the practice of intent.

 

RD: So why did you invest so much of yourself and your money in the message you convey in What The Bleep? What do you hope viewers will take away from it?

WA: That’s a good question. When I got started, it was going to be a $125,000 documentary that would maybe play on PBS on a good day. But as I started getting more and more into the material, I started getting this inner sense that there were millions and millions of people out there who were really looking for a different way to look at the world, who wanted a new paradigm or wanted their minds to be stimulated. I started getting this really strong. It was almost like a vacuum that was pulling me.

 

RD: But some people who have seen the film still might not have gotten the message you intended. Give me a mini-story about a typical person who’s living a certain kind of life.What is it they’re looking for?

WA: I think one of the main points we make in the movie is that you create your reality, and that the world doesn’t work from the outside in; it works from the inside out. So, if you’re creating your reality, a lot of things you use as crutches, like, “Oh, I’m a victim” or, “The world is so unkind to me,” drop away. On one hand, that realization—that we create our reality—can make people feel naked and vulnerable, because they don’t have all the pieces. On the other hand, people might think, “Wait a minute. I’m powerful. I can create my reality. I can make it what I want. I can make something of this life. I don’t just have to sit here and suck whatever comes out of the TV into my consciousness. I can really do things.” One of the things we hear a lot from people is that they come out of the movie feeling very empowered...

 

RD: ...so that they’ll do things. What are you hoping they’ll do?

WA: That’s up to them. The film differs from dogmatic religions; we don’t tell people what to do. You create, and it’s your call as to what you create. It’s your decision what kind of life you want to make for yourself. The film kind of says, “Figure it out for yourself. This is not a cookbook where we tell you how to live your life.” There are certain tools, techniques, awarenesses, but we can’t tell you what to make. In the movie, we included all the science to back up that idea. When you say you create your reality, everyone goes, “Yeah, right, whatever.” But when you start getting into more of the physics, and you start explaining it from a scientific point of view—how there seems to be an interaction between the mind and matter—that’s when people start going, “Holy shit, I can really do this stuff.” I guess the three things we want people to take away from the movie are, first, the idea that you create your reality and second, that bit about being addicted to emotions. People find that very liberating, when they can say to themselves, “Oh, it’s just a biochemical thing.” Third, it’s just to think for yourself, to take in new ideas, examine them, chew them over, look at your life in different ways and question what’s going on in your life. That’s what Adam Wolf says: “Living in the mystery is part of the lifestyle.” Does that answer your question?

 

RD:Are there any other films that are similar to What The Bleep?

WA: I don’t know of any. And people seem to be hungry for this kind of film. We were the second largest opening week of the past 12 months, beaten only by Lord of the Rings. We beat out Harry Potter and Spiderman and all the big ones in the theatre complex where we opened in Boulder. On our opening night, we were sold out—we filled a 700-seat theatre. The managers were saying, “What the bleep’s going on here? It just keeps selling out and selling out and selling out.” Of course, when we made the film, everyone in the entertainment business, all the theatre owners and distributors, said, “First of all, you can’t make the subject matter interesting and entertaining. Secondly, even if you do, there’s no audience for it.

We’re professionals. We know there is no audience for a movie like this.” So we’ve been slowly trooping around the country proving them wrong.

RD:Your investment really was a leap of faith, wasn’t it?

WA: Oh, yeah. But as I was saying, at first I thought it was going to be a small documentary, then I started feeling this pull. Then I got the bright idea, “I don’t want to make it a little documentary. I want to make a theatrical piece—one that people will go to on Friday night and buy popcorn and enjoy and learn stuff, with the idea being that entertainment is more than just mindless drivel.” That was when the budget started taking off in an uncontrollable fashion.

 

RD: Did you finance it yourself, or did you find a bunch of other investors?

WA: No, I’m the only investor.

 

RD: Wow.

WA: Yeah, I dug deep. But it was one of those things. Once we got started, I felt that this was a real opportunity, something that our culture was really looking for. I thought, “Man, this is my one shot, and I’m just not going to do it half-assed. We’re going to do it right, whatever it costs. Hopefully I don’t have to sell everything.”

 

RD: Have you encountered skeptics, those who say,“Oh, that’s not the way reality is at all?”

WA: Yes, we’ve gotten a fair amount of that. In fact, what’s really interesting is that we’ve gotten more pushback from the scientific people than we have from the religious people. Basically, what the skeptics are saying is, “That’s all hogwash. It’s new age science and new age physics.” Now, to me, if you’re going to discount the science as not being real science, you should probably use science to do it, not your opinion that it’s new age science. But it’s interesting that 98 percent of the people who say the science is bogus, don’t give us science as to why. They’re just shooting off an opinion: “Oh, that’s nothing but new age physics.” Okay, then, tell me why. I respect your opinion, but if you want to play science, let’s play science. Give me the reason. Disprove what I have said in a scientific manner.

 

RD: Have you heard that argument?

WA: No. When you say that to people, they just kind of look at you and blink, but they don’t come back with science. The only one was a guy in Denver two weeks ago who, during a Q-and-A after the movie, brought up a very interesting point. It was a fairly technical point about quantum physics and probability and possibilities and this and that. It was one of those things you could talk about for hours. When someone debates like that, using the science, I really respect and enjoy it, because it opens up a dialogue, as opposed to someone just saying, “Yeah, that’s just a bunch of new age horseshit.”

 

RD: But you use testimony from several experts in the movie. What are their credentials like?

WA: The scientists have impeccable credentials. Like Candace Pert. She was the one who really discovered the whole peptide receptor site mechanism, which was huge breakthrough in biology. Huge! According to her books, the only reason she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for it was because she was a “she.” It was amazing research. And Andy Newberg, M.D., the guy with the curly hair and the glasses, has written books and done research on how brain function is associated with various mental states—in particular, the relationship between brain function and mystical or religious experiences. He’s very respected. Bill Tiller, the older guy with the white beard, was head of his department at Stanford—again, very respectable. Then we have a group of folks like Amit Goswami and Fred Alan Wolf. I would call them scientists/philosophers, who get more into the metaphysics. The more detailed, scientific work they’ve done is well thought of, and their views do take certain leaps in the film. We use the physics to suggest certain things, and guys like Fred Alan and Amit Goswami take it a step further. Among the hard core, middle-of-the-road scientific community, they’re probably not as well thought of. But, you know, Einstein wasn’t well thought of for many years, either. You can always find someone to agree with you, and you can always find someone to disagree.

RD:Among the people who might see your film, there are people who have encountered these kinds of ideas before.And then there are people who haven’t.Are you hoping to reach those people? And what you would say to a skeptic from that crowd?

WA: If we only touch people who are already familiar with and accepting of these concepts, we’re just preaching to the choir. And that’s good. But our intent is to get to the people who haven’t been exposed to this kind of thinking or information, this way of looking at the world. My sense is there are a lot of people out there who, once they’re exposed to these ideas, just go, “Oh yeah!” When our first assistant director saw a first

cut of the movie, he just looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve always kind of thought this way, but I never really quite knew that I did. And now that I see this, BOOM! It just all makes sense.” We’ve actually heard that a lot from people. I get e-mails in which someone says, “A friend dragged me to this movie; they didn’t think I would like it because I never like this kind of stuff, but I just went along for whatever, and oh my God—it’s great!” There are a lot of people who, in the words of a friend of mine, are “metaphysical lost souls”—the people who really resonate with this sort of information once they get it. To me, the big home run is getting to the folks who aren’t in the choir, but who, when they see the movie, say, “Oh, this is so cool.” We’ve had a lot of stories of this happening. One of my favorite ones was when we opened in L.A. A couple of weeks later, one of the people who worked on the film was walking through Gold’s Gym, and there were a couple of big, beefy guys in the corner, serious weightlifters. They were talking about the film, how much they liked it and how they found it really useful. This guy stopped in his tracks. He was like, “Of all the people, I never thought these guys would like it!” We get a lot of stories like that, and it’s really inspiring. The answer to the second part of your question, about skeptics from that group: Generally, you’ll get some people who say, “Well, I don’t know about it. Yeah, it was... whatever.” We don’t get a lot of pushback unless we’ve hit a nerve in someone. You know how it is: You push someone’s buttons and they’ll get very hostile with you. Some of the stuff about being bio-chemically addicted to emotions, some people react strongly to.

RD: Have you heard from scientists who really resonated with the ideas?

WA: Yes, in fact one of the cool things that happens is, during the Qand- A sessions we do after some of the shows, someone will say, “Have you heard of Dr. Blahblahblah?” And we’ll say “No.” And they’ll say “Wow, I’m surprised you didn’t read his books, because this is so much in line with what he writes about.” It turns out there are a lot of people out there—scientists and such—who I didn’t even know were around, who say, “Yeah, this is great.” We’ve actually heard from quite a few scientists who really like it. Some scientists are very open minded, and they’ll say, “I don’t quite agree with a lot of what you say, but it’s a very interesting discussion, one that I’d like to have with my friends.”

What the skeptics are saying is, “That’s hogwash. It’s new age science.” Now, to me, if you’re going to discount the science, you should probably use science to do it, not just your opinion.

 

RD: Have you had any scientists come and say,“Gee, why don’t you make a movie about my ideas?”

WA: Oh, yeah. In fact, people are always handing us books and screenplays, and that sort of thing. We were on a conference call yesterday with Deepak Chopra, and he’s got 93 hours of interviews of scientists talking about science and religion. He’s had this sitting around, he said, for a couple of years because he doesn’t really know what to do with it. He saw our film a few days ago, and he said, “Oh, my God. These guys figured it out.” So we got on the phone with him, and he was sort of pitching us.

 

RD:All he needs is an editor...

WA: ...and a soundtrack. So anyway, the answer is yes, a lot of people are coming to us with ideas. One of our long-term goals in making this film was to prove to the entertainment industry that there is an audience for this kind of stuff. Then, hopefully, other films that are more interesting and provocative than the mainstream will get made. How many times can you see Spiderman swing around on his web? We know he’s going to win in the end; ultimately, aside from a couple of rushes you get during the movie, why bother? One of our goals is to prove to the industry that there is a vast market for more meaningful films. It’s interesting—in the book world, everyone knows there’s a market for this kind of subject matter. Look at the New York Times book reviews. And you know there’s a market, because your magazine has been in business for all these years. But when it comes to film and TV, this market has never been tapped.

RD: I think part of the reason is the mass nature of movies and TV.The Tao of Physics doesn’t have to sell more than about 40,000 copies to be pretty successful.

WA: That’s true, but if you look at the New York Times bestseller list, there’ll be a book by the Dalai Lama in the top five for six months. Carolyn Myss had a book there for months and months. Gary Zukav’s Seat of the Soul was there forever. These kind of mind/body/spirit books have a substantial audience. In fact, it’s the largest growing segment of the book industry.

RD:William, if you could have your wildest dream come true, what would be the next movie you’d make?

WA: My next project is going to be a rabbit-hole version of What The Bleep that we may release in theatres, or on DVD. By “rabbit-hole,” we’re referring to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and posing the question, “How far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go?” We have 60 hours worth of interviews, and only about an hour and a quarter in the film. We couldn’t go into a lot of the science in the depth we would have liked— there just wasn’t enough time. But in the rabbit-hole version, which will last about three and a half hours, we can go much deeper. For example, wave particle duality: We have many more interviews and substantiating information that we just didn’t have time to present in What The Bleep. After that, I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about it. I’ve been working on this project for almost four years, and I’m thinking my next project’s going to be me on a beach somewhere. I need time to regroup, time for more of these truths to lie fallow. If I were to come up with something right now, it wouldn’t be the same quality. I wouldn’t say I’m burnt-out, but I am running on fumes.

 

RD: But now you’re in the harvest time.

WA: Yes, but there’s still a lot of work. We do so much marketing on our own. We don’t have a $20 million budget for the release.

 

RD:What have you been doing to promote the movie?

WA: First, we sort of find the “choir,” as we call it, within the local community. We call the Unity churches and the Religious Science folks, people like that, and tell them about the film. By now, a lot of people have heard about it from press kits and word of mouth. So we sort of get everyone buzzing about it, because we know if we do well in the first week, it will probably run for at least eight weeks. It’s a matter of priming the pump and getting people into the theatre the first time. A lot of people see it three or four times and bring more people. From what I’ve heard in the Q-and-A sessions, at least half of the audience sees it more than once. Probably 25 to 30 percent of the audience sees it three or four times, sometimes more. One guy in Seattle says he saw it 30 times. That’s kind of scary.

RD: Sounds like he might not have a lot going on.

WA: Well, it makes you wonder. But we do get a lot of e-mails from people who see it several times, and a lot of people say it’s best the third time. Up until then, there’s so much information coming at you. We purposely didn’t tie everything up in neat little bows, and we purposefully didn’t come to all the conclusions. We didn’t say, “Okay, the bottom line of quantum physics is this, and the reason why emotional addictions and quantum physics fit together is this.” We wanted to get people to think, to figure out the connections for themselves.

We did something really bizarre in the film industry. We assumed that the audience was smart, and that they would actually enjoy putting the puzzle together. That’s proven to be true. There are many more smart, aware people out there than you’d guess by reading the newspapers, or by looking at pop culture. Of course, in Boulder, we’re a little insulated from that. But in the country at large, it may come as a surprise how many people are smart and aware. I think it will be fun to find out.

 

RD: How did your film do in Denver?

WA: It was amazing. We played at the UA Colorado Center, the multiplex with an IMAX theatre. The second week we were there was the week they opened The Exorcist, which was the big movie of that weekend. And we out-grossed The Exorcist. They were shocked. They were like, “Holy shit! What are you guys doing? You didn’t even really advertise!” We told them, “Yeah, we know. It’s word of mouth. People talk.” And people thought we’d be lucky to get the film into tiny little art houses. I had a couple of dreams about this movie. One was having an article in Nexus, having read it all those years. And second, for about three years, I’d drive by that theatre on Arapahoe, the one with the biggest screen, and I’d say, “Our movie’s going to play there.” For three years, every time I would drive by, I’d say, “We’re gonna play there.” And we did.