What’s up with you, Peter Mettler?

The music in Peter Mettler’s documentaries is always distinctive, immersive and plays an active part in the narrative, rather than merely providing a backdrop. His approach to new works is intuitive and musical, as he himself says. When, as a teenager, he began to play the piano less and took up filmmaking, he initially tried to translate his improvised melodies into images. His latest film While the Green Grass Grows (2025) has just been awarded the Zurich Film Prize and will be screened on 10 October at the Xenix – with Mettler in attendance. A good time to have a listen to his playlist.

Peter, in your audiovisual diary *While the Green Grass Grows*, which has just been awarded the Zurich Film Prize and at the Xenix, you bid farewell to your parents. In the film, your mother says: ‘I’m the kind of person who wishes to stay forever young.’ What music reminds you of her?

Nature – its decay and renewal – plays a recurring and important role in your films. What kind of music do you feel comes closest to the power of nature?

Whilst you were studying at Toronto Metropolitan University, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, you spent your semester breaks in Zurich loading cargo onto aeroplanes. What music helped you get through that?

Also whilst you were a student, you spent a year at a rehabilitation centre for heroin addicts in Neuchâtel, which later inspired your first feature film, *Scissere*. What sort of music has a healing effect on you?

Before you started making films as a teenager, you focused on playing the piano. Which piece from back then could you still play for us today?

Your early work is associated with the Toronto New Wave movement of the 1980s and 1990s. What music springs to mind first when you think back to that era and that movement?

Your 2002 film ‘Gambling, Gods and LSD’, with its iconic building collapse scene, was described by critics using terms such as ‘supernatural’, ‘mind-expanding’ or ‘transcendental’. What sort of music puts you into a trance?

Improvisation is a technique that you consider essential to the success of your films. Which musicians have mastered it?

Let’s say you’re starting a new film project and want to do everything differently this time compared to your last film: what sort of music might inspire you?

Peter Mettler is a cinematic adventurer. His work is characterised by a constant sense of wonder and by unusual forms of collaboration, and defies categorisation. Mettler’s films, in which themes such as transcendence, memory, cycles and the fragile relationship between technology and nature recur time and again, combine elements of the film diary, the essay, fiction and social critique. Mettler has been honoured worldwide with awards and retrospectives and is also known as a photographer, cinematographer and pioneering performer in the field of live audiovisual mixing. His latest film, *While The Green Grass Grows*, has just been awarded the Zurich Film Prize and will be screened screened on 10 October at the Xenix, in the presence of Mettler.