I met Bullet in the summer of 2002, a couple of years after he arrived in Budapest and a couple of weeks after I did. We were both part of the same ragtag Bohemian circle of friends that included expats and refugees, poets and pornographers, artists aspiring and actual. Our mutual affection came on a wave of shared experiences–past and present–and a tide of cheap Hungarian beer.
He probably glowed a bit more brightly for me than I did for him because when I first set eyes on his art or closer to the truth, when the eyes of his art cast a spell on me, something rooted. It was the way two souls can silently touch when art does its job. It takes time for an impression like that to form. It would be hasty to deem the manor house haunted after glimpsing a ghost behind the parlor curtain. You have to spend time in that mysterious place, not waiting for the ghosts but sitting with them.
After a year, I left Budapest, and my friendship with Bullet receded, but it did not disappear. He lived across the ocean, but I was still sitting with his ghosts. I was not just intrigued by his haunted, beautiful, confrontational figures. Somehow, I understood them. Beauty compromised by some pained distortion. There is an instant between rest and despair, the moment of shock before the pain arrives. There are young eyes burdened by a century of grief, captured in a fleeting instant when salvation is still possible. Bullet danced around that instant. He conveyed beauty in its purest form, and he subjected it to the will of demons.
I could no longer spend time with Bullet or attend his exhibitions, so I did what I could do given the separation. We exchanged an email from time to time. I read his art blog. And I wrote about the spirit of his work. During quiet hours in a cabin in West Virginia, in a WWI-era home in the Midwest, and on a porch in Malibu that has since turned to ash. I read treatises on the strange emotional power of art and visited museums and galleries in search of a feeling.
I knew that ghosts are real, and I went after the proof the way an alchemist chases the formula. All of this with no promise of ever being as close to Bullet as we were in that glorious year of our mutual becoming. And that is the power of art. That was the power of his art. And that's precisely what I'm setting out to explore in this film about his life.
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