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Featured Artist
Gordon Quinn and “The New Americans” - An Interview (cont'd)
13. There’s a danger in generalization too?
14. Is it ever possible to start out with what you think is a great story idea and then have it turn into something you’re really not happy with?
15. Speaking of this case with Stevie, can “real life” ever get in the way of storytelling for documentary filmmakers?
16. Do you think that Hollywood has shaped false standards of what makes a good story?
17. Do you see any of your films as potential inspiration for a Hollywood film?
18. How do you feel about narration in documentary filmmaking?
19. Certain types of stories require certain approaches, like more context provided by a narrator?
20. What would you say is the role of the filmmaker in society?
21. You brought up September 11th in The New Americans, but you just let us watch the characters deal with the situation.
22. What would you say to those who label social advocacy films or advocacy media as propaganda?
23. The question of propaganda versus advocacy is more about the disclosure of intentions?
24. If you constructed a scale with investigative journalism on one end and social or public awareness media on the other, where on that scale would you place yourself?
13. So, there’s a danger in generalization too?
There are dangers on both sides, exactly. The real corrective is to find a dialectical relationship between the two.
14. Is it ever possible to start out with what you think is a great story idea and then have it turn into something you’re really not happy with? If so, what happened along the way?
I don’t know if I’ve ever not been happy in the end. It’s a complicated question. Certainly, Stevie turned into a very different film from what we set out to make. He [Stevie Fielding, the subject of the film] commits this terrible crime we didn’t know about. That’s a good example. We would not have set out to make a film about the kind of crime that Stevie committed [child molestation]. But when he committed it, we had no choice but to go forward with it and it made this incredibly powerful film.
15. Speaking of this case with Stevie, can “real life” ever get in the way of storytelling for documentary filmmakers?
For us, the story we tell is about real life. I can’t imagine real life getting in the way of storytelling. There are things that make their way into our films that you could not put in a feature film because you would say, “That’s not real, that’s corny. You can’t do that.” Because we’re filming real life, when Sheila [Hoop Dreams] says, “and people said I’d never amount to anything,” well, give me a break, that’s a corny line to put in there about an inner city person who’s just achieved something. But she said it and there’s no question that it’s real. There’s things that Tonya [Stevie’s girlfriend] keeps saying in Stevie, and it’s like, “I can’t believe she just said that. What is she, an escapee from Touched by an Angel?” It’s right out of one of those plots. But in the context of her saying it, and who she is, you’re just moved and taken aback. At the end, when she’s saying to Steve [Steve James], “Well, I think something good came out of this filming,” she’s just amazing in that way. That’s incredibly exciting when that kind of thing happens; somebody’s taken you somewhere you didn’t expect to go.
Just to digress for a minute about where stories come from. One of the raps that I run about Hoop Dreams: I say, if we had taken the script of Hoop Dreams to Hollywood, it would’ve been rejected. They would’ve said, “This is ridiculous, this isn’t real. Inner city kids don’t talk like this. Where’s the ‘mother fuckers,’ where’s the language? This is not how inner city kids talk.” Well, we didn’t cut it out of the movie. The reality was those boys don’t talk that away about their parents and they don’t talk that way around these white filmmakers. We didn’t craft the film to be like that.
I was negotiating with PBS [about Hoop Dreams], and they asked if there was any language in the movie. I said, there’s one, Arthur [one of the young basketball stars] says “fuck” once in relation to a song he’s singing along with and I think it can stay in there. There’s no other language in the whole movie. But they [Hollywood] would look at that, because their idea of the inner city comes from the last movie they saw. Hollywood feeds upon itself and the media feeds upon itself. I think that happens in journalism too. It’s bizaar—I’ve got three national news shows going on, on three different channels. You flip between them and they’re all on the same story, as if they got together and planned it together. The news unfolds in the same way. It’s like, “What’s the point?” Once in a while there are some differences, but they’re slight, which tells me there’s a tremendous amount of shaping and control and a predetermination of what the story is. There’s very little dialectical relationship, because if you’re going out into the field, or you’re really trying to figure out what the story is without some kind of control and influence on it, you’re going to go to different places. They’re going to find different stories; they’re going to prioritize things differently. The fact that everything is so similar is scary.
16. Going back to Hoop Dreams, one of my first reactions to the film was, “Wow, the boys didn’t make it to the NBA. I think that Hollywood has almost trained me to, when I sit down to watch a film, expect this happy, dreams come true ending. Do you think that Hollywood has shaped false standards of what makes a good story? If so, has this influenced how audiences approach documentaries?
Not really. I think there’s no question that there’s the “Hollywood story.” Sometimes I go to a movie and I really like it and I say, “That was a good Hollywood movie.” Erin Brockovich, great! That’s a big, good, fat Hollywood movie. I really liked it. It did what Hollywood does well. I think with those kinds of sports stories or mythologies–sure, Hollywood doesn’t know how to deal with someone who loses or someone who doesn’t make it. [Hollywood] was very interested in us and [Hoop Dreams] because they saw this is powerful storytelling. The problem that we always have with the powers that be is that if you’ve done something like that, what do they want from you? They want Hoop Dreams 2.
17. Elaborating on what you just said, do you see any of your films as potential inspiration for a Hollywood film? Can stories work as both documentaries and features?
Sure. There’s no question that films that were made after Hoop Dreams had real connections both in terms of plot and subject matter. Spike Lee was someone who really liked Hoop Dreams and he made a film [He Got Game (1998)]. It was about a young kid whose father had just gotten out of jail, but it concerned family tensions and a basketball story about high school and recruitment. It dealt with many of the things that Hoop Dreams did and was a pretty good feature. We had story rights for Hoop Dreams that were sold and the film was never made. Turner Broadcasting said, “Spike Lee ripped off your story.” It’s like, no he didn’t. Stories are a dime a dozen. I see some of the lawsuits that revolve around these things, and it’s like, “Give me a break. We don’t own that story.” That story’s out there. It’s how you tell it and how you flesh it out and what you make of it that makes the work that you’re going to make.
18. How do you feel about narration in documentary filmmaking?
I don’t have any problem with narration from a philosophic perspective. One of the things that people don’t notice about Hoop Dreams is that there’s a lot of narration, far more than you might think. It’s very carefully crafted. It’s doing more that just telling you bits and pieces of information that you need to understand the scene. It’s helping sometimes to create a tension or an emotional power or anticipation, and yet, you don’t notice it. Sometimes we hide it, like in some of the basketball games. It’s almost like you’re listening to an announcer, but you’re not. You know it’s something that we’ve crafted. [In one scene], there’s Arthur and there’s this huge guy and Arthur’s waiting to run, and he waits, and the narrator—if you don’t know basketball—is letting you know what’s happening there. He’s letting you know the tension of that scene. Arthur waits until the guy comes out and then Arthur runs around him. It’s a great moment, it’s a great sports moment, and the narration helps to set it up. So that’s one thing, there’s more narration in some of our movies than you might think.
There’s some of them without any narration from the early days. Refrigerator Mothers [2002] has no narration, although I think it could have had a narrator. Filmmakers like us, in this documentary venue, who are really into their craft, take a great deal of pride in being able to tell the story without any narration. I don’t really subscribe to that anymore. I did when we started, and if you look at some of our early films, you’ll see us putting in inter-titles and just going to very awkward solutions to not have any narration. Taylor Chain I has no narration; it has these titles. Ten years later, when we did Taylor Chain II: A Story of Collective Bargaining (1984), there’s minimal narration, but it’s there. One of the arguments people say is, “Well then, people view the narrator’s perspective as the voice of God.” We certainly don’t want to do that. We don’t want the narrator to create a barrier between you and actually encountering the film. In Stevie, Steve James is in the film and he’s also narrating it. There’s a lot of his voiceover that carries the plot. Then, some of our films like The Chicago Maternity Center Story and The Last Pullman Car are very analytic and have a lot of narration. It’s kind of going into a different kind of storytelling, storytelling not so much about people but about the economic and social factors that impact upon the characters that we’re following.
19. So, certain types of stories requires certain approaches, like more context provided by a narrator?
Yes. The Chicago Maternity Center Story was selected for a PBS series, but it and 3 other films where dropped because of their content. [When I was negotiating The Chicago Maternity Center Story with PBS], I kept saying, “Well, what do you object to? Let’s go through point-by-point and I’ll just change it.” I wasn’t necessarily going to change it, but wanted to know what it was exactly that they were objecting to. They backed up on every issue except the narration. They didn’t like the tone of the narrator’s voice because you knew she was from the women’s health movement. I said, “Well that just makes the film more honest. You know what the point-of-view of the filmmakers is. You know where we’re coming from. We’re not pretending that this is objective.” I think that narration can be a very legitimate part of the way you tell a story. In our films, it’s usually not the main storytelling device. It’s more of a transitional thing or something that helps you to put in context what you’re about to see.
20. On the Center for Social Media web site, it says that you make films that “observe and critique society.” What would you say is the role of the filmmaker in society? How overt should a filmmaker be in his/her “observations and critiques,” and how much should the filmmaker leave to the audience to pull away on their own?
I feel we have a point of view. We don’t claim to be objective. I don’t think that anything’s objective and I think that one of the ways to be the most dishonest is to claim a kind of objectivity when there is none. We try to give the audience a sense of where we’re coming from. We want the audience to understand our relationship to the subject—if there’s an intimacy there with the trust that’s been built. We want the viewer to understand that. We want them to understand who we are because ultimately, what’s trustworthy in a work has to do with the integrity of the maker. The truth-value comes from that [the maker] and not from some magic set of techniques that you can use that automatically makes a thing honest or true.
Particularly in the middle period, with The Chicago Maternity Center Story and The Last Pullman Car, we have an analysis. We’re saying this analysis is correct and we want the audience to see that this is the right analysis. We make that very clear in the way we present it. I think in the work we’re doing now, like in The New Americans, we’re not telling you something about immigrants, we’re letting you see it. We’re telling you that the humanity of these people is one of the most important things you can know about them. That’s what’s important. Start with that and then think about these other issues. That human story that we’re presenting to you, we’re saying, needs to be apart from any discussion of immigration in this country. So that’s our purpose. It’s not a purpose that’s more narrowly focused. We’re not saying, “Well, immigrants should be treated this way or that way,” or “This is the policy we’re backing.” That’s sort of outside the film.
21. That’s one of the things that I liked about The New Americans. You brought up September 11th, but it wasn’t like, “Now lets change our point-of-view and argue how immigrants are treated poorly since September 11th.” You just let us watch the characters deal with the situation.
Exactly. It’s like these are people you’ve come to know. This was an early lesson we learned when we used to work with some groups that were struggling against racism in various contexts. There were workers in plants who had fairly racist attitudes if you talked to them about politics. Of course, [they would say], “Oh no, not José, he’s my buddy. I work with him, he’s cool.” We think one of the most powerful weapons that you can use with people in terms of combating stereotypes is to confront them with complicated characters. One of the arguments that we sometimes get into with sponsoring organizations or people we’re dealing with is [they’ll say],”Take that out, that doesn’t look good.” It’s like, “No, that’s what makes the rest of the thing credible.” Everything doesn’t have to be flattering. Let these characters exist in all their complexity so that people have to deal with them as a full human being. That does change attitudes.
22. What would you say to those who label social advocacy films or advocacy media as propaganda?
That’s just a semantic argument. We’re surrounded by advocacy on all sides. An enormous amount of what I see on primetime television [is advocacy media]. I think the democratic side of the problem is that we don’t have a multiplicity of viewpoints out there. I think that advocacy is extremely important. I think that social advocacy films are very important. I think a lot of the stuff that’s being done now by young people and some of the ways in which they’re exploring the new media is tremendously important. The films that have been made about globalization and America’s impact in the world—I wish some of the stuff had a wider audience; that’s their challenge. I also think that it’s very legitimate to be talking to the people and providing focus to a movement. We did a lot of that in the sixties and seventies, and I’m sure glad to see people are doing the same thing now, or doing it in a different way. It’s important. For a variety of reasons, we have set ourselves to the task of trying to figure out ways to reach out to people who don’t think the way we do and reach that wider audience.
What’s important in an advocacy film is that it not be dishonest in its own terms. There’s no question that The Chicago Maternity Center Story was advocating for home delivery; it was advocating for the women’s health movement. It was advocating for keeping that particular institution open. All of those things were things that were part of the analytical structure we presented in the film. You know that when you watch the film. When PBS chose to drop the film, we formed a coalition to protest the censorship.
What I think is sometimes subversive or undermining is when films are propagandistic or advocating and they’re not being honest about it; they’re trying to hide it. They’re trying to say, “Well, this is just common sense,” or, “I’m just a reporter doing my job,” when, in fact, it’s a carefully crafted piece of advocacy. I think that’s what’s sinister. I have no problem, whether I agree with them or not, with someone who’s trying to make the best argument that they can for their side or their position.
When we made The Chicago Maternity Center Story, I had this argument with PBS. I was able to defend every [element]. I said, “I’ll take it out, but let’s just talk about that for a minute.” I said, “Here’s the reference for that or here’s where this comes from,” until they backed off and said, “Oh, I guess that’s okay.” Or, they’d say, “You can’t say this,” and I’d say, “You know, didn’t I just hear Dan Rather say that on the evening news the other night? Here’s the quote from him. If he can make that kind of a statement, why can’t we?” They sort of backed down.
There is one thing that’s in the film, that at the time we made it, was a piece of rhetoric and I was never comfortable with it. We put it in anyway and no one ever called us on it. It’s a line in the film where we’re talking about high-tech medicine and how it’s dehumanizing and how it doesn’t serve people’s needs. We’ve made quite a good case for that, both visually just from the advertisements and from statistics that we quote. Then, the narrator says, “But in countries like China, it does,” and it’s a shot taken from someone being operated on under acupuncture. Her eyes are open. It looks very high-tech but it’s very human. We had no evidence for that—what did we know about medicine in China? It was coming from another place and if someone had called me on that, I would have said, “Ah, you know what, okay, we’ll take that out.” But [PBS] didn’t even look at that. It was all this other stuff.
23. So, the question of propaganda versus advocacy is more about the disclosure of intentions? Propaganda is unethical in that it pretends to be objective. When you’re coming forward and saying, “Here, I’m giving my point of view,” that’s different.
Right. What I think is unfortunate is the role of journalists in a democratic society. I mean, now, forty percent of what you read that passes for journalism is just recycled PR and press releases from PR people. That’s outrageous. The other thing that drives you up the wall are these inequalities: certain kinds of opinions are backed by millions and billions of dollars and other kinds of opinion you’re collecting up dollars from people in the street to just take out an ad and say something. You know, money talks in that world. One of the great failings of journalism in our current period is that thirty years ago or twenty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, journalists still had some journalism to them. If someone had a carefully constructed a PR argument—a propaganda argument—where there’s a hole here, a hole here, a hole here—journalists would go after that. They’d say, “Wait a minute, you said this but that’s not right.” They’d point that stuff out and now they don’t. It just goes by. All these shows; they just get a bunch of different people on to yell at each other and there’s nobody there saying, “Wait a minute, that’s based on a press release that comes out of a…”
Constantly people will tell me these urban legends. Something will come up about the litigation and they’ll talk about the McDonalds woman—the woman who got the millions of dollars for spilling the coffee in her lap. It’s like, “Wait a minute, this million dollar settlement that you’re talking about, let’s back up and look at that.” You’re quoting to me from a press release that was put out by a company that was trying to discredit these kinds of lawsuits. McDonalds serves their coffee super hot—that’s a fact, everybody agrees with that. She dumped it in her lap, she had third degree burns, she was in the hospital for three weeks and it was not a million dollar settlement. The thing went through appeal process and this and that and basically, she got her hospital bills paid for. There are press releases where you can see one after the other that’s been put out—the comics use it, everyone uses it—and there’s no one out there saying, “Hey, here’s what really happened, here’s the real facts.”
24. If you constructed a scale with investigative journalism on one end and social or public awareness media on the other, where on that scale would you place yourself?
At the moment, we’re certainly not on the journalism side. We’re also not doing the kind of stuff that indymedia [Independent Media Centers] is doing or the advocacy media that we were doing twenty years ago. I think we are now very focused on feeling that there’s a need—particularly because of the way the media’s organized—for human stories and stories of complexity. If you think about all of the crime stories that are on TV, it’s almost as if they’re done to a cookie cutter. One after the other. Did he do it or didn’t he do it? Guilt or innocence? They show the trial and everything. What’s the point of it? What does it have to do with anything?
Whereas my feeling is Stevie is an attempt to deal with one of the most important issues we have around justice issues confronting us today in America: we have to find a way to hold people accountable for what they’ve done and the crimes that they’ve committed, and still care about them as human beings. That’s a very complicated thing and that’s what we’re trying to get at in Stevie. Several years ago, I was watching one of those [crime programs on television]. It was about a guy who killed his wife. They’re in the trial, and there’s the thirteen-year-old daughter in the front row of the trial and the camera is zoomed in on her to see how she reacts when she finds out whether her father is going to be convicted of this murder and sentenced to death. This is a thirteen-year-old girl. What justifies that kind of invasion?
In Stevie, there was never a question; we never asked whether we could interview the victim [the child who Stevie molested]. We interviewed the victim’s mother and the most debate we had is that shot where we’re talking to the victim’s mother where we pan the room of the victim. It’s her room but she’s not there. And we weren’t sure we wanted to put that in. The mother is terrific; she’s eloquent, she’s very intelligent, she gives us a wonderful kind of balanced view and complex view of Stevie. But we never even asked to interview the victim. What does that do to our story? People were asking, “Where do you draw the line?” Sometimes there is a reason that you’re going to invade someone’s life or you’re going to go someplace that’s very uncomfortable for them, but you’ve got to have some reason.