An
Interview with Gordon Quinn
 Gordon
Quinn, co-founder of Kartemquin
Films, spoke to Lindsay
Webster at American University, Washington DC in November 2003
as part of Webster's honors thesis research "What is story?"
1. Do you think it is appropriate
to say that all filmmakers—documentary and feature—are
storytellers?
2. How would you define a good story for a documentary
film?
3. How are narratives films and documentaries alike
and different?
4. Where do you think the story really comes together?
At what point? With whom?
5. Whose story is a particular film telling?
6. Is this an assumption that audiences won’t
get it, so let me hammer it in one more time?
7. What advantage is there to telling a story like
The New Americans as a film rather than writing a feature
journalism article about these people?
8. How did you pick the individuals for The
New Americans?
9. How far into the process of making The New
Americans were you before you knew you had a great story?
10. At the screening of the excerpt of The New
Americans at the University, you mentioned that you had to
cut one story, the Vietnamese story? Why?
11. How does personalization make for a compelling
story?
12. Is there ever a danger in too much personalization?
1. Do you think it is appropriate
to say that all filmmakers—documentary and feature—are
storytellers?
GQ: I think that most filmmakers are storytellers
in the broadest sense. Even if it’s an industrial film, there’s
a story there; you’re trying to tell how a product is made
or what it does. I think because of the changes in the way that
visual media are evolving that sometimes there’s different
levels of story. There’s the visual story that’s being
communicated to you that can sometimes be at odds with other elements
in the way the story is going. But I think that’s what we
do, we tell stories in one way or another.
2. How would you define a good story
for a documentary film? What elements are needed to make a story
work for the documentary film format?
GQ: I think there are a lot of different kinds of
documentaries. For the kind of documentaries that we do, almost
anything can be a good story. Any subject, any person any situation
can be a good story. What you want to have is some ability to follow
some narrative line over time, and know where it’s going.
There are very personal films that start with the subject themselves,
which can tell a terrific story that takes you some place. Then
there are films, like some of our films, which are more verité.
There’s the film, Taylor Chain I:
Story In A Union Local (1980), which is just the union
negotiation. You might say, “Gee, a film about a union negotiation,
that sounds really boring.” In fact, we structure it and we
take what happened over five days and we make it into a narrative
that has its own drama to it. You get that it has an emotional dimension;
it has a plot dimension. You ask, “How’s this thing
actually going to come out? What will happen?” All of the
elements of classic storytelling are there.
3. I think a lot of people say,
“Documentaries are a totally different entity. There are interviews
and there is b-roll. And then there’s the Hollywood film;
now that’s a real story.” However, I think that you
start to realize that there are a lot of similarities in how you
construct documentaries and features. What do you think?
GQ: I think the techniques that we use are more aligned
with the narrative you would see in a fiction film. We don’t
even use the phrase “b-roll.” I hate the word “b-roll,”
which means you’ve got a talking head and now, because people
will get bored looking at that, I’ll put in some images. When
we use an image or cut away from something, I want it to be furthering
the story. I want it to be something that has a feel to it. For
instance, when we’re interviewing Naima, she literally took
us to the place. [Naima is a young Palestinian immigrant featured
in The New Americans]. She says, “I want
you to see where I went to school as a child, where my mother worked.”
She takes us right there, right into that room and she says, “This
is the room that I grew up in, this dormitory.” She sits herself
down and the light is coming in the window. It’s absolutely
perfect. She’s lit beautifully and that’s where she
wants to tell her story. It’s like she was almost directing
it. She’s talking about how much her mother did for her and
how she feels about her mother. Then we cut away to her walking
with her mother down the same stairs we saw her come up, and she
reaches over and she adjusts her mother’s veil. That’s
not “b-roll.” That’s something where what she’s
talking about in the voiceover and the gesture that you see on the
screen is telling you even more than what you could see if you were
looking at her [in an interview].
So when we think about how we tell a narrative, it
does have more to do with going from one place to the other, an
accretion of details. It’s just as in a feature film, where
they go to a great deal of trouble to have costume designers and
set decorators that tell you more about the character and who they
are. It drives me crazy when I see these documentaries where the
interviews are done in limbo. Why don’t you talk to the guy
in his office where I can just see if he’s messy or neat?
Can I see the books on his shelf? Give me the wide shot and let
me see what he’s wearing. Years ago, Jerry and I used to do
these corporate videos [Jerry Blumental, my partner with whom I
did the Taylor Chain films, The Last Pullman
Car, and Golub]. You come in to interview
the CEO and he’s there with his secretary and he’s cleaning
up his desk. I go, “No, no, leave all that!” Even in
a corporate video, I feel that [all of those details that are put
into the frame] tell a better story just as in a narrative. It doesn't
have to be direct; I don’t necessarily cut away to some detail.
Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. But, just seeing
what’s in the bookcase here in this office tells me something
about the person that uses this office.
4. You’ve worked on films
as a producer, director, editor, executive producer and cinematographer.
Where do you think the story really comes together? At what point?
With whom?
GQ: In documentaries, certainly the heart of the
storytelling process is in the editing room. That’s key, that’s
where you structure these things, that’s where you get into
working and debating story elements. “What comes first,”
for example. If I give the audience all this information up here,
they’re going to be bored because that’s just a lot
of facts and dry material. But, if I show them the scene without
any context, they’re not going to know why this is so dramatic
or emotional. We often struggle with the order of things and how
things need to go together. It’s flow and pacing—all
those things you do in traditional storytelling.
But there are other places where the story takes place
too. There are parts of the Palestinian story [in The New
Americans] where, as we’re shooting, you’re
dealing with a character, Naima, who has an idea of what her story
is. The things that she does, the places she tells us we ought to
go and the things that she says that are a part of her story creates
a sense that she’s having an impact on the story and the storytelling.
5. Whose story is a particular
film telling? Is it the producer’s story, is it the director’s
story, or is it the subject’s story?
GQ: I think that there’s always that tension
between the producer-director’s vision and the subject’s
sense of what their story is or what they think is important. That’s
a dialectical relationship, so that if both parties enter into it,
something new comes out of it. In one class [during Mr. Quinn’s
visit to American University], I showed the scene from Hoop
Dreams of Sheila’s graduation, where at the very
last minute, you see the room is empty [Sheila is the mother of
one of the young basketball stars]. It’s this incredibly powerful,
emotional thing. She’s graduated from this class and it means
a tremendous amount to her. This big wide shot shows you that her
little ceremony is in this empty room with all these empty chairs.
Then you cut to the basketball game where people are hanging from
roof to rafters; it’s crowded and everybody’s there.
That’s the producer-director making his comment and how we
value things in our society. Everyone sees it and everyone gets
it. We had an argument when we were working on the film. I didn't’t
like the shot. I felt at that moment, I wanted to be with Sheila.
For her, her room was not empty. It was kind of unfortunate; it
was a small little ceremony of a few people in a very big room.
If you’d put it in a smaller room, you wouldn't’t have
had that shot to make. So, for me at that point, whose story it
is, where that point of view is, shifts in a dialectical way as
you go through the process of the film. I felt I wanted to be with
Sheila at that moment, that that was the right place to be. And
for her—her sons were there—it was like the room was
full. Steve [Steve James] felt he wanted to make this other point.
Both are valid. It’s not like one is wrong and the other is
right. It’s just that those are the different ways of viewing
story and where that point of view. It [point of view] shifts throughout
the film usually, or at least in really good films. I think there
are some films in which one of their weaknesses is that they don’t
respect that dialectical relationship. Where the thing should shift
a little bit because someone has come into it, they kind of won’t
let it go there.
I see it a lot in the magazine format shows with
the on-camera person and their importance to be the person who is
bringing you this story. Sometimes [the magazine shows] actually
have something that’s terrific; the story’s actually
there. Then they bring in this person to tell you what I’m
seeing. It’s like, “Give me a break, I don’t need
you here, let the story speak for itself.” Other times they’re
giving you a perspective, or they’re telling you a part of
it; they’re doing some framing that can be legitimate. But,
even in these journalistic situations, you have to get out of the
way and let the material connect with the audience. “Okay,
you brought me here.” It’s almost like you’ve
gone to an event with someone. They’ve taken you to this incredible
thing—they’ve taken you into the inner city and you’ve
gone into a little neighborhood church, and you’re hearing
the most incredible gospel music and you’re seeing these people
moved and they’re emotional and it’s incredibly powerful.
And, the person who brought you is like, “Isn't’t this
amazing! Can you see how powerful and emotional it is?” It’s
like, “Let me just watch!”
6. Is this a type of “dumbing-down”?
Is this an assumption that audiences won’t get it, so let
me hammer it in one more time?
GQ: I don’t even think it’s that anymore.
I think that pretty much the media is more sophisticated. I told
this story when I showed the piece from Home For Life, my first
film from 1966, where clearly these people are treating the old
woman badly because they feel guilty. But, in fact, any of us could
understand that. We don’t need a psychologist or an expert
to explain it to us. We’re very sophisticated in interpreting
human behavior and I think the media pretty much understands that,
even the Primetimes and the 20/20s. I think it has more to do with
what they’re selling and the story is often secondary.
7. What advantage is there to
telling a story like The New Americans as a film
rather than writing a feature journalism article about these people?
What does the visual medium bring to that story?
GQ: That’s a complicated question because I
have read things that are extremely well written where the person
really comes to life. They’re quoted, they’re put on
context and it’s very powerful and emotional. I work in film
because I love the potential for all the complexity and detail to
be in the image. [I love] that the audience is going to see things
that I didn't’t even see and that they’ll come up to
me afterwards and tell me about these things or the feelings they’ve
had from what they’ve watched. It’s like, “Oh,
geez, I didn't’t even see that.” I talked about gesture,
and when you describe a gesture in the abstract and in words, there
are dimensions that don’t come across even though they could
be very powerful. When you see a gesture, it’s very, very
different. I think for me, it’s the complexity of detail that’s
in the visual image and visual storytelling that means so much to
me. I think it’s important that we understand, that in terms
of narrative force and the real power of storytelling, that one
doesn’t necessarily have an advantage over another [visual
versus written storytelling]. I was reading an article about. .
.an adult education program at the college level for people in New
York. It’s a beautifully written piece. Then I was looking
at a proposal that one of our producers is trying to do with a similar
program in Chicago, and she’s paraphrased the article. I said,
“No, no, no, just go back and quote the whole thing because
in taking out bits and pieces of how he told the story, it’s
lost some of its emotional impact.” Sometimes a writer will
describe a gesture in a way and it really resonates at many levels,
so I don’t necessarily want to privilege one over the other.
But for myself, I’m a visual storyteller. I tell stories with
all the complex detail that you can see in real life.
8. How did you pick the individuals
for The New Americans? What was it about their
stories that you thought would be great for the film?
GQ: In some of our films, we have more of a process
[of picking subjects], although we usually don’t. With The
New Americans, it was a variety of things. The Ogonis [Ogoni
refugees from Nigeria] we found through the UN High Command for
Refugees. They [the UN High Command] said there’s a group
coming over. They [filmmakers] went over there and had a couple
of days to sort of say, “These are the people we’re
going to start following.” Actually, we honed it in a little
bit more after they got here. There we some other people that were
being followed in the refugee camp, part of the same group, that
we didn’t follow.
With Hatem and Naima [a Palestinian couple], we worked with a community
organization. What was important was to find someone that was coming
over that we could get to know before they left. Basically, we felt
if we had that element, we had a good story. It’s almost like
casting for a feature film. You’re looking for characters
who are expressive, who you could see emotionally. There are some
people that it’s a lot harder to deal with because their emotions
aren’t on their face and they’re not out there, and
they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t necessarily
think that they shouldn’t be on film; you’re just going
to have to find a way to capture their story. But with the Palestinian
story, we went and met Hatem and his family and we were like, “Okay.
I got a gut feeling. This is it, this will work.” We liked
him, we liked his family and we figured let’s go do it. We
showed up in the West Bank at Naima’s doorstep and said, “Hi.”
Well, he [Hatem] called her and asked if she wanted to do it and
she said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” So [with Naima]
it was like, “We’re here to tell the story of your life
for the next couple of years.”
9. How far into the process of
making The New Americans were you before you knew
you had a great story. How much of the film could be scripted or
thought of in advance? How much were you just waiting to see?
GQ: I’m a great believer in waiting. I think
if you have enough patience, almost anybody, any place can become
pretty interesting. With The New Americans, we
certainly had a sense right away with Naima. Within the first week,
we knew that not only Naima, but also her family and her sisters
and her mother and her brother—all of these people were going
to be good characters for us.
10. At the screening of the excerpt
of The New Americans at the University, you mentioned
that you had to cut one story, the Vietnamese story? Why? What was
it about that story that made it not as strong as the others?
GQ: It wasn’t so much that [it wasn’t
as strong]. It was the story that was started last and so it was
less far along. It was about a thirteen-year-old girl who was being
reunited with her biological father, her biological father who she’d
never known. It was very different from the other stories.
Sometimes you’ll have two characters and their stories have
so many similar elements that you’re like, “Okay, let’s
focus in on one.” Hoop Dreams is a good example
of this situation where we were following these two boys, figuring
that one of them would become the main character as the story progressed.
But, it was like their lives, their stories—everything—was
completely different. The drama of the different paths that they
were taking, the intertwining of it, made it very powerful.
11. Most of the films that you
work on seem to focus on a particular individual or a group of individuals.
How does this personalization make for a compelling story? What
do audiences identify with in seeing a certain individual(s) drawn
out?
GQ: I guess my feeling is that’s the easy part.
If you think about feature films or you think about novels—in
many works of art, the easiest thing to understand is something
that’s about an individual person or a particular person.
Or, it’s often the relationship between a couple of people.
That’s what we’re very used to in terms of storytelling.
What’s more of a challenge is when the story really is about
a group of people, like in Taylor Chain I: Story In A Union
Local. That film is not about this one guy and whether
he’ll lose his job. It’s about this group of people,
and in the union negotiation, it’s about the negotiating team.
There are some characters that come to the foreground, but really,
it’s the group that you’re trying to tell the story
about. I think that’s a more difficult challenge to figure
out, but sometimes we really feel that [the group] is where the
story is and we struggle with how to make that work.
12. Is there ever a danger in
too much personalization? Might audiences come away saying “I
want to help Person A that I just saw” and lose sight of the
greater issue at hand?
GQ: Yes and no. Certainly that happens. In Hoop
Dreams, I had friends who were dentists who saw Sheila’s
teeth and were like, “Oh, we’ll fix her teeth. We’d
love to fix her teeth.” We had the same thing in Stevie,
which couldn’t be more personal and unique in its way. If
you look at the stories we portray in The New Americans,
you know two things. You know this story is this person’s
unique, particular story and you also know that there are a thousand
or a hundred thousand more just like them. They’re not exactly
the same—and that’s the other thing I think is so important
to us in doing a film about immigration. Once people are labeled,
once you say, “Immigrants are draining the economy,”
or “Immigrants are crucial for the economy,” or whatever
generalization you make and statistics and facts [you give]—all
those things are important. In some of our films, in The
Last Pullman Car [1983], in The Chicago Maternity
Center Story, we quote a lot of statistics. We bring [statistics]
into certain kinds of stories, but we always want to make that connection
that that’s not all these people are. They’re not just
immigrants. They’re teenagers and they’re mothers and
they’re fathers and they’re someone trying to get an
education or they’re someone who cares about their job. All
of those dimensions of those people are as important or more important
than the fact that they’re immigrants.
So, our worldview is when you deal with the general,
it’s the tension between the two. Again, it’s that dialectical
relationship between the generalization and a very particular person
and their story. One could say that that’s a danger. I tend
to think that it isn’t in that so much of the media deals
in generalizations or statistics. We’re always explaining
to people that we’re not journalists because they’ve
been burned by journalists. The journalist comes in and he’s
working for a sound byte. He doesn’t care who they are. What
he cares is, “Is this an immigrant who can say to me that
he has been abused under the Patriot Act?” That’s all
he wants to know. Once he gets that sound byte about, “Yes,
they stopped me and they saw that I was a Muslim and then they took
me in and treated me unfairly.” Boom, that’s it, and
that’s all he is as a person. We’re really saying if
you want to know about the impact of that Act and what its meaning
is to immigrants in this county, you have to know the person. It
didn’t happen to a statistic. It happened to somebody who
has a complicated life and all these other issues, and that incident
reverberates through that. We’ll put in [facts and figures],
but let’s connect it. We’re not telling these stories
about people who are just immigrants. They’re so much more
than that.
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.
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