I had heard already of Harry Smith I think through Robert Frank who had seen him in San Francisco end of the '60s before he came to New York, but he was very had already made his films, his main films, that is Early Abstractions, Heaven and Earth Magic and he worked there with several other film-makers. And I heard that he's very good and he's very difficult and very eccentric and very... so he, Harry... he was very much interested in music, of course. Now by the time that I'm talking, Harry Smith's Anthology of the American Early Folk Music and.. is a classic and he's more known actually in here in America and Europe as by the wider... he's known more by more people for his work in music that is collecting those incredible anthologies, than film. But when I met him for the first time, I knew only about his work in cinema.

And think when he came, I met him first at the screening of Andy Warhol's film Sleep, and he came in, and he looked at me, he went direct to me and he said, 'I hate you'. I said, 'Harry, now, are you serious?' 'I don't think we are serious because if you would say this seriously I think you know what it means, what it does, not somebody, if you say that seriously and if you really hate somebody'. Now, of course, I said that because I knew he's interested in sort of the deeper effects of relationships, so he looked at me, turned around and walked out to whomever he was... and he came back only much later. I think he went out, had three or four beers, then he came back. And he will then... then like a week later he comes in to the Film-makers' Cooperative where I was and drops his films in front of me, says, 'Here is my work, do whatever you want with it'. And that's where our friendship began. He was a terrific... I mean, encyclopedic kind of person who... an incredible memory. Whatever he read, he remembered, he could go and locate exactly on what page where it is. He collected, he left when he died, about 10 years, about 5,000 books which are now at anthology on... on linguistics, anthropology, folk arts of various countries, nations, tribes, a lot of native, and wherever he went, he snooped, he always bought books. If you give him, you know, money, even if he has to eat, he will spend first on the books and then food.