Matthew Barney
American visual artist and filmmaker; cast Mailer as Houdini in Cremaster 2 (1999) and built his film River of Fundament (2014) on Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings.
Matthew Barney is an American visual artist and filmmaker. He cast Mailer as the magician Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2 (1999), part of his Cremaster film cycle, drawing on Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. After Mailer’s death he built his epic film River of Fundament (2014) on Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings, filming partly inside a full-scale reconstruction of Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home — the project that frames Abby Margulies’s 2013 Tablet essay Norman Mailer Speaks to America From Beyond the Grave. John Buffalo Mailer recalled that his father counted Barney “one of the few geniuses” he had met.