Lee Perry in 1992

The thing about shooting a movie about Lee “Scratch” Perry is that you always need to look out for flames. “Fire to him represents absolute truth,” says Adam Bhala Lough, whose film The Upsetter, about the legendary Jamaican producer, shows tonight  at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Lough will do a Q&A after the first show.

Perry, who burned his famous Black Ark studio down in the ’70s, now lives in Switzerland, where his firebug tendencies are confined to one room of his mansion. “His wife has restricted him to one little section of the house,” says Lough. “He sits in the studio all day making paintings and burning them.”

What Lough didn’t expect was the flames coming for him. He and codirector Ethan Higbee spent eight days with Perry in Switzerland, then a year and a half following Perry around the world. One day in Switzerland, Perry threw gasoline on a pile of paintings. “You see the camera going up and down. It was pretty dangerous. The camera really goes flying for a second.”

Perry opened his personal video archive to Lough and Higbee; the film intersperses that archival footage from reggae’s formative years, when Perry worked at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One and later his own studio, with original footage and photos the pair took special pains to dig up. There’s a photo of Perry with Bob Marley (“probably the only photo of them in existence,” Lough says) that Higbee bought from an amateur photographer after spending six years looking for one.

Lough, who grew up in Fairfax and learned to edit at a public-access TV station on Route 50, says they elected to let Perry narrate his story; in most music docs, he says, “where there are a bunch of music critics and friends telling artists’ story for them.” Benicio del Toro narrated the film after Ryan Philippe told Lough del Toro was a big fan.

The film’s most indelible moment, Lough says, is a climactic scene in a gift shop in San Francisco, when a drunk tries to start a fight with Perry. “Me and Ethan were shooting,” Lough says, and we almost dropped the cameras and fought this guy. Our hearts were pounding. Lee was able to defuse this situation.”

Lough’s previous film was The Carter, a documentary about L’il Wayne, but he says he’s taking a break from docs for the time being. He’s about to move from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, where he plans to shoot a horror film starring Marilyn Manson this fall. “Maybe I am a little bit spoiled,” he says, “but if i make another documentary the subject is gonna have to be amazing.”

Watch Lee Perry knight del Toro and pretend to decapitate the pope: