"I was still in high school at the time. Sonic Youth was an important influence when I was younger. I was listening to their music a lot, and at some point I got interested in their more experimental projects, like Lee Ranaldo’s solo material. I got the chance to shoot my first short film in Nevada, while I was in school there. They had a VHS camera that we could use to make a short video piece. When I started to write and work on it, it was inspired by one of Ranaldo’s songs. It was a spoken word piece called “The Bridge.” It’s funny, because when I arrived down there I couldn’t speak English very well. I had trouble understanding what all the words meant. I was writing everything down to figure out what the piece meant. I could understand most of it: that it was about him and his father going in this old Chevy pick-up truck, delivering some furniture to his brother, or something like that. I found one of these old trucks–it was a GMC, not a Chevy, though. But I found this truck, and I was in the desert. The picture on the cover of the album was a photo by Ranaldo’s partner, Leah Singer. It was a black-and-white photo of an old truck in the Nevada desert, where I was basically. All these things came together at once. 

It wasn’t until a couple of years after I had finished the film that I finally understood why it was called “The Bridge.” What he’s actually talking about in the song is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. [Laughs.] I completely missed that part in my interpretation of the piece. The nice thing about it, though, is that my teacher insisted I send Ranaldo a copy. I was a bit shy doing this, so we wrote the letter together and we sent it to him. I didn’t expect him to write back, but he actually did. He wrote me a letter, saying that he liked the film. I was extremely pleased by his response: it was by first piece, so it meant a lot to me." - Karl Lemieux, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media

See also:

Kashmere, Brett. "Against the Current: A Two-Part Interview with Karl Lemieux (and Daïchi Saïto)",  INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media Manifest