As a precursor to her longform piece on Salvation Mountain, Heather Quinn interviews filmmaker Patrick Rea about his documentary featuring the desert monument’s creator. 

by Heather Quinn

In an aerial view of the Imperial Valley, in the southeastern corner of California, Salvation Mountain (shown above) stands out as the sole splash of color against a relentless monochrome of beige and gray. Covered in thousands of gallons of paint, the structure stands about two stories high, made entirely of adobe pulled out of the surrounding hillside. On top of the mountain is a cross made from two old telephone poles reclaimed from the desert, and beneath the cross, in huge letters spelled out in adobe relief and painted bright red and pink against a clean white background is the message that is the Mountain’s raison d’etre: “God is Love.” Possibly the most well-known roadside attraction in the California desert, the folk art piece near the Salton Sea, over three decades in the making, was built entirely by Leonard Knight. Knight passed away this past February.

Patrick Rea started documenting Leonard’s story in 2008, initially gathering footage with the intention of producing a feature length film, something along the lines of The Straight Story, starring Richard Farnsworth. Along the way, he compiled his footage into a short documentary, The Love Story of Leonard Knight, which has been screening at film festivals since 2013. I spoke with Rea about his project and asked him what Knight’s story means to him.

Heather Quinn: What part of Leonard’s story inspired you to make a documentary?  Did you know Leonard before deciding to work on this project?

Patrick Rea: My wife went to take care of her grandmother’s affairs because she had died, so me and my daughter were alone for a couple weeks, and we decided to do things like remodel the house and go see films, like Into the Wild (Knight and Salvation Mountain were featured in the 2007 film). We were on a camping trip in the desert, and the next thing I know I’m sitting in a restaurant and my place mat had this picture of the Salton Sea and this little doodle that says “Salvation Mountain.” I turned to my daughter and I say, “Could this be the place that’s in the movie we just saw?” We’re talking about it and the waitress comes over and says “Yeah, that’s Leonard Knight and Salvation Mountain.” So we drove there, we met Leonard. He comes over and he gives us the tour and just launches into this epic, unbelievable story, and when he finished he sang songs for us. By then it was getting dark and we had a four-hour drive ahead of us, so we left.

On the way home I could not get it out of my mind that this is probably the most original person I’d ever met in my life. I didn’t know what his whole story was about, but I knew what he had just told me was what he told everyone, and behind that is the subtext of the real story. That began a series of trips in 2008, which led me to believe that Leonard would make a great subject for a documentary and that he’d make an even greater subject for a feature film about his life. I call it the greatest story that’s never been told. I believe that too. It’s not a slogan. I really believe it.

HQ: On your website, you wrote that you “unlocked the paradox behind one of the most fascinating living persons.” How is Leonard a paradox, and what’s the subtext of his story?

PR: It’s taken a long time for me to be mature enough to be able to understand what’s going on out there. All Leonard really did was talk about God, love, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, repentance, salvation, etc., always, and only in, the context of his testimony. Which he never called a testimony; he called it his love story. And in this process he’ll be talking about his story, and then all of a sudden he’s speaking about some of the weightiest issues and debates in all of Christendom. Are you a Christian, can I ask you that?

HQ: I guess I’d say I’m sort of agnostic.

PR: The reason I ask is because of these things, these doctrinal debates of issues or things like the doctrine of total depravity, the doctrine of irresistible grace. I started to edit these pieces, and I would realize he was talking about these doctrinal issues but that he wasn’t aware that he was doing it. He didn’t even know that the issue existed. Yet he spoke with authority about these issues, resolving issues that theologians have been grappling with for hundreds of years.

Even people who are not believers in Jesus are taken by the obvious sort of practical wisdom that’s coming out of this guy’s mouth. They get that Leonard is this wise guy who shouldn’t be a wise guy, because he’s a high school dropout and a hobo living in this godforsaken place and he has no formal training, so how is it then that he’s this oracle sort of person dispensing all of this wisdom when he really shouldn’t be? You know what I’m saying? But that’s the paradox that I was talking about. I’ve never met anyone like this, and I’ve met a lot of really smart people.

HQ: Do you think there’s an appeal to the story of Leonard Knight beyond Christianity?

PR: I don’t even think of this film as a Christian film. I didn’t make it to show at Christian film festivals. I didn’t make it to show to churches. I made it to show to everyone that Leonard built his mountain. Leonard built his mountain to show to everyone and I made my film to show to everyone. I never had the intention of making a film that would show in Christian film festivals and end up in Christian bookstores. I wanted to make a film that could get in theaters and film festivals.

HQ: One thing about Leonard that I was always taken with was his profound humility. It seems like your film highlights this aspect of his story as well. What can you tell me about that?

PR: You know like some people who are rags to riches, and they kind of forget where they came from? They begin to believe their own narrative. Leonard is somebody who really never forgot who he was, and I think that has everything to do with what he believes. I’ve never met anyone like Leonard who refuses to take any credit for anything. And that’s amazing because Leonard has developed engineering innovations with adobe and natural materials that have never been witnessed in the culture of the world. If you ask Leonard how he did it, the answer comes in two forms. One: he did it out of necessity because he had no money, he had no tools, and he had no resources. He had to work with what he had. And two: he says God helped him figure it out. And it works. Earthquakes have hit it, and when buildings were falling down both sides of the border back in 2010, Leonard’s mountain shook like a block of Jell-O and it’s not even cracked.

The last person to really talk about God and art that way was a guy named Michelangelo who refused to sign his statues or paintings or anything because he said it was so good he couldn’t have done it, God must have helped him. Some people say that’s the height of arrogance. When Leonard says it, he’s not saying, “I’m so awesome that God has to have helped me,” but Leonard really believes that. I told him that he’s like Michelangelo. He just turned to me and said, “Who’s Michelangelo?”

Keep an eye out for Heather Quinn’s longform piece on Salvation Mountain and Slab City, coming next week to The Riveter.

Heather Quinn lives in Portland, Oregon where she is an MFA candidate at Portland State University. Her writing focuses on California’s Imperial Valley, and she has been published in Cutbank and is forthcoming in The Rumpus.

Patrick Rea is a documentary filmmaker who, among myriad other projects, has focused on capturing the life of Leonard Knight since 2008. Learn more about The Love Story of Leonard Knight on the film’s website or Facebook page.