JON FOY'S RESURRECT DEAD

For the last six years, Jon Foy has been filming a movie about the mysterious Toynbee tiles. His documentary, Resurrect Dead, follows the investigation carried out by Justin Duerr, Steve Weinik, and Colin Smith as they set out to discover what the tiles mean and who made them. On their search, the three detectives uncovered increasingly bizarre clues: a decades old newspaper article, a David Mamet play, a Jupiter colonization organization, and a Toynbee message that "hijacked" local news broadcasts. In the end, Foy comes closer then anyone else to solving this four-decades-old mystery.

Vice: For anyone unfamiliar with the Toynbee tiles, can you briefly explain what the movie is about?
Jon Foy: Basically someone has been encrypting these messages about the dead into the streets and cities across the US and South America for almost 30 years. So, It’s kind of this bizarre unsolved mystery type story. We set out to play detectives and solve that mystery.

Right, and it seems like you solved it. Tons of people have tried to resolve the mystery, but no one’s come nearly as close as you, right?
Yes and no. I mean, there are still a lot of things we haven’t solved. But I certainly feel satisfied with what we’ve found out.

What remains unsolved?
Well, it’s kind of hard to talk about that without spoiling the movie but, in short, we never figured out the South America connection. Certainly we don’t know the full story and there’s lots of disagreement within the ranks. So, you know, there are many ongoing questions.

The Toynbee Tiler is somewhat similar to guys like Stickman—also from Philly—in that both plant stuff into the pavement, but they’ve got totally different ideologies. Can you talk a bit about that?
Stickman--although I have never met him--I‘ve heard was inspired by the titles. He’s quite prolific. He's in Europe and all over the globe—he's really outdone himself. His methods are a little different too: Stickman, I believe, uses the stuff for road surface markings. The main difference between Stickman and the Tiler is that the Tiler only "does graffiti" by the strictest definition, i.e. unwanted artwork in the public. The Tiler doesn’t come from the graffiti circles, or a graffiti mentality at all. It’s a whole different thing. The tiles were really born out of an attempt to get that message out. Usually graffiti is someone spreading their identity or, maybe in some cases, claiming turf, claiming territory--that sort of thing.

Yeah, with graffiti the medium is the message; with the tiles the message is the message. What I find most captivating about the tiles is the message itself. What do you think the Tiler is saying?
I want to qualify first by saying there’s a lot of speculation and some things we don’t know. That said, I think this person grew up with faith in the Christian gospel and I think they believed in immortal life. At some point, I think their faith was shaken and they came to the conclusion that it fell on science to bring people back to life. That’s the basic materialist concept: that people are basically an assembly of molecules and that by putting a dead person’s molecules back together in that same configuration, a person can live again. In the message, the Tiler basically says they got this idea from Arnold Toynbee. He thinks that if we start resurrecting all the dead people, we can basically assemble heaven. In other words, it’s up to human beings to build heaven and bring every dead person back to life to fulfill the promise of the bible. Then you start getting into the nitty-gritty. For instance, all these resurrected will require a lot of room, therefore this whole project will need to utilize outer space. 2001, the Kubrick film, deals with concept of humanity taking an evolutionary step forward. The Tiler is sort of thinking along huge lines here, peeking around the corner to see the arc of human civilization. That’s the message of the tiles. I think it’s a pretty interesting and profound message. Of course, the devil is in the details and the plan falls apart when you consider, for instance, that Jupiter is a gaseous planet. You can still appreciate the basic concepts, though. This person was motivated to change civilization by getting us to build an afterlife in space. I think that if you honestly believe that, you’re kind of like a space age Paul Revere, ushering in this new page for humanity. Human beings don’t generally think about the arc of their civilization day-to-day. That’s not really what we’re thinking about.

Why did you start making the movie?
Well, at the time I was mostly playing in bands, I got into punk rock and kind of went in that direction for a while. Then I happened upon the tiles when a friend pointed them out to me. I didn’t believe him at first, but then I saw them. I met Justin—the movie’s main protagonist--by prank calling the person who told me about the tiles, pretending to be the Tiler. Justin received this call by accident and so I wound up introducing myself and apologized for the prank. Right away I found out that he took the tiles pretty seriously. He started pulling out photos and talking about his investigation--I just got really into it. When I moved back to Philly I started shooting without really knowing what I was doing. It took about six years and I funded it myself, working as a house cleaner and doing all sorts of other jobs. I was a guinea pig doing experimental drug studies, and stocking shelves at a food co-op.

Yeah, the odd job hustle. Do you have an idea for a future project?
I have a lot of ideas. I had a lot of time to daydream over the years painting houses and doing stuff like that. When I got back to Sundance, I was really excited to start pitching my hair-brain schemes to people. I would like to do another feature documentary—I’m kicking around a couple subjects. It’s hard to know until you start shooting something and I don’t want to over think it. These days my time is so tied-up; it’s pretty much been that way since Sundance. A lot of the time I’m just thinking about music. I really fell head-over-heals into this idea of film scoring. I am thinking of just writing some music, seeing if I can write some music that can stand on its own. Maybe like concert music, or maybe try to put together a musical or something like that.

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