Mass is a requiem, conceived on the occasion of President Kennedy’s murder. A sad time for many people. I had just come back from a long lonely trip to where I’d been born in the Dakotas. …One night after I was back I stayed up all night and listened to the requiem masses being played on the radio, especially Mozart’s. It was so beautiful. You know, Celtic people love to weep over the beauty of things. One of the many really nice ways to respond to the world is through sadness. …The requiem mass is a non-Celtic way of celebrating death joyfully. So I knew I was making a mass, but again it was new information for me.

…We can’t leave out of this discussion of Mass the tribute to the American aborigine, the original people who were considered by the celebrants of the Holy Mass as unholy savages. The hero in the film was a tribute to the native people of Dakota, the Lakota Sioux in general and all their tribes… It was also a tribute to the poet (and specifically to Jean Cocteau). I portrayed the gift of poetry as deceased, gone. The film is a celebration of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!

Bruce Baillie
A Critical Cinema 2, interviewed by Scott MacDonald (June, 1989)