John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Room (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
John C. Lilly may not have the name recognition of certain other twentieth-century scientists, but aspects of his work in neurophysiology and psychedelic psychiatry continue to reverberate throughout popular culture. His pioneering studies in the field of cetacean neurobiology during the 1950s and ’60s were the basis of Mike Nichols’s Day of the Dolphin (1973). He may be best known for inventing the sensory deprivation tank, the inspiration for Ken Russell’s vivid Altered States (1980). The latter film in particular grapples with Lilly’s late-career scientific standing, which was marred by his appetite for psychedelic substances and New Age mysticism.
Composed of material found in Stanford University’s archives, talking-head interviews, and previously unseen footage preserved by Lilly’s late son, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025) presents a nuanced portrait of this controversial scientific figure. Codirectors Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda prove particularly well-equipped for the task. Both have centered recent projects on enigmatic inventors: Stephens’s Invention (2024) was loosely based on cowriter and star Callie Hernandez’s father’s fascination with an experimental healing device. Meanwhile, Almereyda helmed the biopic Tesla (2020), starring his perennial muse, Ethan Hawke, as well as Experimenter (2015), which focuses on social psychologist Stanley Milgram and the radical behavior experiments he conducted at Yale. Instead of judging these ostensible eccentrics purely in terms of today’s ethical and scientific standards, both filmmakers have engaged with their fervent conviction in their hypotheses, even if they were ultimately incorrect or misguided.
The documentary’s title intriguingly emphasizes Lilly’s drug-induced belief in a hierarchy of cosmic beings that determines all of life’s coincidences, the “Earth Coincidence Control Office”; he later penned nine conditions that believers could follow in order to maximize their awareness of this galactic group. While the title foregrounds one of the most vexing aspects of Lilly’s career, the film is in no rush to unpack its absurdity. Stephens and Almereyda adhere to a chronological narrative, introducing viewers to a respected scientist who eventually succumbs to delusional folly. Narrated in a charmingly quizzical monotone by Chloë Sevigny, the film delves into some of the most shocking outcomes of Lilly’s studies—including one of his young female researcher’s borderline sexual relationship with a dolphin and Lilly’s falling into a temporary coma following an LSD overdose—while analyzing how his theories have infiltrated broader culture, from the ’70s-spawned “Save the Whales” campaign to the popular ’90s video-game series Ecco the Dolphin. Even if Lilly’s collective body of work is widely considered to be steeped in pseudoscience and errant in its calculations, our widespread cultural fascination with his theories has yet to yield. In this sense, Lilly’s is a legacy that warrants inquisitive engagement as opposed to snide derision.
I spoke with Stephens and Almereyda in late February, shortly after the film’s world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and before it traveled stateside to the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight and True/False. The codirectors detailed the palpable influence of Chris Marker, how composer Brian McOmber crafted the score and sonic textures, and their recollections of an emotional tarot reading from interviewee Alejandro Jodorowsky.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Obviously, I’m curious about what brought you together to collaborate on this project.
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: Courtney, you go for it, since you reached out to me.
COURTNEY STEPHENS: So, this was early pandemic. There was a lot of time to think about projects that were kind of archive-heavy and could be made during that time. So I started wondering if it would be possible to make a film about John C. Lilly, who was somebody I’d known about since my college days and always thought was fascinating. I started collecting material at Lilly’s archive at Stanford University, which is near where my mom lives. I was trying to feel it out. Of course, Michael’s made a lot of films that deal with these inscrutable scientific characters. We were talking about it and brainstorming how you could fund a film like this. That’s how we ended up collaborating.
NOTEBOOK: This directorial pairing makes a lot of sense. You both have previous experience in nonfiction filmmaking, and your recent projects have centered on off-kilter male scientists. What conversations did you have about shaping this film’s narrative and aesthetic identity?
STEPHENS: That conversation is unending. It was kind of the entire conversation, in a sense. Lilly is a really challenging figure to make a single portrait of. It’s almost like you could make two completely opposing films about the same man. So it was about trying to synthesize a view. We both had very different takes on him. We had different appetites for different parts of him. I think we were also put off by different parts of him. It was a useful friction.
ALMEREYDA: I like your phrase “aesthetic identity.” That’s an interesting way to think of it. Early on, a film I referenced and kept thinking about is a late and scrappy Chris Marker film called The Last Bolshevik [1993]. It’s a notably handmade movie where Marker is recounting the career of a man who was his friend, but it’s about someone who’s not alive to speak for himself. A lot of it is archival intermixed with interviews, and it jumps around a lot. It has an element of play. There’s an intermission where he photographs his cat listening to music, and there’s no reason for it to be in the movie except that you can’t imagine the movie without it. I wanted to make a movie that could be considered playful and surprising in that way. It’s been gratifying to get early reviews for this film using those words and characterizing the film in that way. The aesthetic identity—for me, at least—was rooted in that reference point.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: In the press notes, you state that you both possessed a “basic knowledge” of Lilly’s work when you began production. What were some of the most personally fascinating discoveries you made along the way?
STEPHENS: I actually would guess that this goes for both of us, but I think neither of us really knew to what extent he was a formidable, legitimate scientist before he formed his dolphin lab in Florida, started working independently, and then went off-grid. Realizing that he was contributing in a serious way to early neurobiological studies, was a publishing scientist, and this typical 1940s and ’50s suburban husband and father… To really understand that this was a whole decade and a half of his life and identity makes where he went all the more interesting, because he really was grounded in that scientific world, which is a very governmental world.
ALMEREYDA: For me, the surprises started to spread beyond Lilly. That’s one reason why the film opens out and includes more characters and connecting stories. It was exciting for me to learn, for instance, that dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors. That’s not something Lilly discovered, but something that Diana Reiss, who worked alongside Lilly—not with him, but adjacent to him in Redwood City—discovered. I found it irresistible and felt it had to be in the film because it’s a very moving thing that very few species have that capacity. What became thrilling about the film was to discover these things on the outer rim of Lilly’s influence.
NOTEBOOK: The film documents Lilly’s life and research in chronological order. What prompted this choice? Were there any interesting tangents that couldn’t fit into that structure?
STEPHENS: Oh, there were endless tangents. In the editing process, we did experiment with other ways of organizing the film—definitely around ideas or around certain kinds of people. But it was actually quite complicated. We had a section on this psychiatrist named Oscar Janiger who was working in Hollywood in the ’50s and giving LSD to people like Cary Grant. We even visited his son. He’s a fascinating character. He did a lot of creativity studies where he had people make art under LSD, before the idiom of psychedelic art existed, and those paintings are very interesting. So yeah, there were many tangents that we would have loved to indulge in a different form. They were, sadly, for a second film.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: To that point of psychiatry and experimentation, I recently watched Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (2002) for the first time, and I kept finding myself reminded of certain themes and insights while watching your film, specifically Curtis’s critique of the Esalen Institute—where Lilly was a guest lecturer—and its mission to strengthen the mind-body connection through experimental New Age practices. As you said, Chris Marker was an inspiration here, but what about Curtis?
ALMEREYDA: I made a film about Stanley Milgram, and I did pay attention to Century of the Self particularly. I’m an Adam Curtis fan. And I don’t know if Courtney wants to go on the record, but I don’t know that she shares my enthusiasm. We never talked about Adam Curtis, but clearly if you’re dealing with archival material and if you’re trying to make connections and be imaginative and far-reaching, he’s someone in the near background. I don’t think we made any studious attempts to mirror or match what he does, but to me he’s a formidable and wonderful filmmaker. Though when we were trying to flesh out the Esalen Institute section, I did look back at Century of the Self for some of that. That’s my favorite of his films. We were looking at some of the archive they used because we were also looking for material from that time period at Esalen.
NOTEBOOK: Speaking about archive, how did you both, alongside archival producer Hannah Shepard, sift through and organize everything?
STEPHENS: It wasn’t an organized process. We were very much scavenging and rummaging up to the last minute—just looking for ways to illustrate some of these stories on screen. Some of the stories that we tell had a big body of archive. A lot existed of Lilly because he was very much a public figure and he didn’t mind being one, so we did have a lot to work with. But Hannah was looking in a lot of more institutional archives and finding things. I was scavenging the internet a lot. I think what was more challenging was how to represent abstraction, how to represent psychedelic, more interior modes, which were part of Lilly’s story. Or how to represent communication itself, or the mysteries of some of these subjects. That’s hard to do. Images are definitive, and how to create these more dreamy spaces was also a task. We wanted the film to also be able to dream and for you to exit some of the more informational archives.
ALMEREYDA: Using Marker as an impossible model, the idea was to knowingly make a patchwork, a collage, a bird’s nest of a song. Shepard was really wonderful at gathering things we wouldn’t have known about. Then we did our own scavenging. The Stanford Library has a Lilly archive that Courtney was in touch with early on. And the fair-use laws that I’d used on other films came in handy. We also were lucky to discover the archive of Lilly’s home movies, which became available almost within moments of our making the film. I happened to show up at the Morelia Film Festival as a jurist, and the husband of the woman who runs that festival was great friends with John Lilly’s son, who had just died. This is one of those coincidences that opened a door. That footage is really remarkable and beautiful, and it had never been seen before really publicly.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: You also have a handful of interview subjects, including Alejandro Jodorowsky.
STEPHENS: He ended up reading my tarot cards as part of the visit, which I was very excited about. It ended up being the most intense tarot reading of my life. It sent me crying into the arms of his wife—but in a nice way, actually. Then I saw him again in Los Angeles several months later and was gushing to him about what’s happened since then, and he didn’t remember any of it.
NOTEBOOK: I’d like more insight into the crafting of the film’s music, which includes a score by Brian McOmber, formerly of Dirty Projectors.
STEPHENS: Brian swept in and provided so much interesting texture to a film that goes a lot of different places tonally and is engaged with electronic innovation. There was a lot of computer music within the archival material we were excavating, so he had material to use in that vein. There was also a lot of drone, ambient, kind of far-out galactic stuff that was useful for us. He's a musician that works in a lot of different modes, and we needed that because the story is very wide.
NOTEBOOK: Another vital sonic element in Chloë Sevigny’s narration. How did she get involved?
ALMEREYDA: We knew we wanted a woman, I think, to offset the male energy of the subject and the era. She came to mind, and we both like her voice. It’s almost that simple. I also happen to have known her for 30 years. So she was someone we could reach out to and get a response from, and that is more than a little bit crucial. Once we did reach out, it was relatively straightforward. She was a late addition, but the film, to my mind, really comes into focus when it's anchored by her voice.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Lilly’s theories have permeated popular culture much more than I’d realized. In terms of science fiction or science fact, what are the key differences between the way that the popular media previously addressed Lilly’s theories and what your film is saying about his legacy?
STEPHENS: We’re in an interesting moment because I think, in a sense, I came to feel like Lilly’s most poignant legacy had more to do with fantasy than science. I don’t mean that in a derisive way. I think he gave people a lot of space to dream about other species and commune with their intelligences. I actually think that’s quite beautiful. Now, I think we’ve caught up with ketamine psychotherapy, sensory deprivation, and mindfulness as a kind of key to health. These are not wild underground theories anymore; they’re in the New York Times. We’ve caught up with a lot of elements that a later incarnation of Lilly was interested in, but that’s maybe more of the science fiction. In terms of his legacy in marine biology, from the scientists we spoke to, he added a little bit of toxicity to the field in the sense that some of the dubious elements of his science made it hard for the scientists that followed him. On the other hand, a lot of the scientists got interested in the field because of Lilly’s early book [The Mind of the Dolphin]. Within a scientific idiom, I think that he had a very mixed legacy, and his actual findings past a certain point in the early ’60s have not had much resonance in the field. Does that seem fair, Michael?
ALMEREYDA: I was gratified by a review coming out of Rotterdam. I don’t usually read reviews, but this film is complicated enough and still percolating in my head, so the reviews have been compelling. One of the longer reviews came from an English fellow who just wrote a book about Terrence Malick [John Bleasdale], and he widened his focus to speculate about the state of the US and the idea that it’s important to recognize that science and pseudoscience are two different things and that wishful thinking is seldom adequate for the occasion. We need to recognize the difference. The film, without putting its thumb on the scale, would seem to recognize that difference. I know we took pains to be objective or to not be scornful of Lilly, but it’s hard to deny that his scientific ideas were ultimately less useful than his speculations.
NOTEBOOK: You said that focusing on different parts of Lilly’s career is what made your research interesting, but I wonder what motivated you to eventually name the film after his late-career belief in the Earth Coincidence Control Office?
STEPHENS: I think we felt that it had [a sense of] mystery and could frame the film within a very large collection of words. What do you think, Michael?
ALMEREYDA: It’s an umbrella term to acknowledge the level of mysticism and magic that he was aspiring to. We struggled for a title, but I think we both like where we landed. I hope there’s something tantalizing about the way the film does, in its final stretch, embrace or summarize this sense of mystery.