Either you’ll think director Alejandro Jodorowsky is a genius or a madman, but when you read his Penthouse interview excerpt below, you’ll see he’s both. As far as the movie goes, you’ll either love it or hate it. I happen to love it.

Penthouse: Many people call you a madman. Are you ?

Jodorowsky: Sometimes I feel myself absolutely mad. I say what I am doing here? Because I feel reality so unreal and myself so strange. I have a mind, a liver, a heart. Everything I look and I feel is inside myself. It’s not reality. What I am is enormous reaction. It is not the thing. I am not the feeling. I am what is felt. The man who feels. Everything is so subjective. If someone say to me, I am mad, I say yes, I am absolutely mad like all the civilization and like all the persons in this planet. I think all the humanity now is absolutely crazy and mad. And some day when my essence sees myself, how my ego is crazy and mad, I laugh-with love and compassion. And in the moment when you have the enlightenment you start to laugh. Because you see yourself, how crazy and mad you are. Then you feel compassion. I have great pity on myself because I am so mad and crazy.

Penthouse: You have a volatile temper. But how much of it is real and how much contrived?

Jodorowsky: If you go to water . . . if the water runs and finds a stone which impedes its flow, the water attacks the stone and moves it so that the stone goes with the water to the ocean. In every situation where there is a stone I lose my temper in order to move the stone. I must make a fight in order to get some reaction from the other person. But it is only in order to achieve that. I never lose my temper when I am with a person doing another thing. Not doing my work.

Penthouse: Were you exposed to sex at a young age?

Jodorowsky: Yes, I lived in a little town and when the sailors came to town there were prostitutes all over. I live a very sexual childhood. We started to masturbate ourselves at four or five years. All together. By seven or nine years they make love with the little prostitutes. One day a little friend, eight years old, came with a bucket and there was a male sex organ inside. He was friend of the daughter of one of the prostitutes. The prostitutes had killed a sailor and cut off his sex organ and he showed us. It was very strange. We went to a cemetery and made a little grave and we buried the sex organ.

Penthouse: You said once that the other kids persecuted you because you were the only white person.

Jodorowsky: They persecuted me for two things. I was white and my sex had the form of a mushroom. We masturbated together and the sex of the other boys was pointed.

Penthouse: You were circumcised ?

Jodorowsky: Circumcised ? I don’t know. Anyway, it was like a mushroom and they didn’t like me. I had no friends. I could not go with them to the prostitutes. I never smoke marijuana with them. I never violated the cats.

Penthouse: The what?

Jodorowsky: The cats. They used to violate cats and some female dogs. I never could do this. Also they like to drink dog milk. They kill the little dogs and then six of my friends drink the mother’s milk. They got drunk. That was my childhood.

Find the rest of the interview here.