Doc Channel Blog

The other nonfiction films to win last night are An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which was named Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You, and How to Survive a Plague, which picked up the Gotham for Best Documentary. The former film, which is also now high on my list, is a hybrid sort of essay, but I'm told I would or could count it as a doc. As for the latter, well, I've been writing about my love for the AIDS treatment chronicle for a while.

McCarthy told Indiewire, where the film was voted "project of the week" earlier this month, "The film wrestles with the questions; what difference does love make to a child's personality, what are the biological and evolutionary functions of love? Why do we need it so desperately, how do our relationships with our mothers and father influence the way we build friendships and negotiate our love lives?"

The scientific experiment aspect sounds ethically challenging and also rather intriguing. I'm not sure exactly what to expect, only that it will have some comparative link to experiments done in the past with monkeys, birds and other children, footage of which will be included through the doc. Partly because I'm a new father, I'm very much interested in films tackling the scientific address of children's behavior.

In addition to a fascinating report recently on 60 Minutes on babies' morals, I've seen features involving the uncertainty of how technology will affect (and is affecting) the children of the future. There was Welcome to the Machine at SXSW and the recently released short film (and accompanying TED book) Brain Power by Tiffany Shlain -- watch it here.

The Dark Matter of Love looks to be a more human story than those films, though, sure to appropriately trigger and touch the emotions of the audience, and I hope that it reaches its financial needs and finds its way to us soon.

Otherwise, there's not a whole lot for the doc dorks that isn't focused on documentary filmmaking or really heavy discourse on documentary ethics. Some that I've liked and mainly picked up as assigned or recommended by professors include Michael Chanan's The Politics of Documentary and the compiled New Challenges for Documentary. A necessary book on a specific section of docs, I also recommend Chris Berry's The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Record.

As for books and essays about specific films, which might be the best for the casual but very interested doc fan, there's William Rothman's Documentary Film Classics, which features chapters on Nanook of the North, Land Without Bread, Night and Fog, Chronicle of a Summer, A Happy Mother's Day and Don't Look Back. There's the BFI Film Classics books on the Maysles brothers' Salesman and Grey Gardens, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Harry Watt and Basil Wright's Night Mail and Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia.

And there's the compiled Documenting the Documentary, which includes close readings of many works, including Nanook, The Man with a Movie Camera, Triumph of the Will, The Plow That Broke the Plains, Titicut Follies, Sherman's March, The Thin Blue Line, Roger & Me, Paris is Burning and many others. There's even an essay on the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap.

For profiles on specific filmmakers, you can go with Megan Cunningham's interview compilation The Art of the Documentary, in which you'll find conversations with such leading directors as Errol Morris, Ken Burns, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and Chris Hegedus, along with editors and cinematographers. There's also Rothman's Three Documentarians: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch. And a number of whole books on the lives and work of the likes ofRiefenstahl, Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, Joris Ivens, Werner Herzog, the Maysles brothers and more.

The aforementioned Documentary Superstars concentrates on Herzog, Morris, Albert Maysles, Morgan Spurlock, Michael Moore, Frederick Wiseman, Peter Davis, Alan Berliner, Peter Davis, Kevin Macdonald, Davis Guggenheim, Amir Bar-Lev, Sacha Baron Cohen, Spike Lee and others.

Of course, I assume a lot of people who are into documentary films are more likely to simply read nonfiction books of any number of subjects that interest them. I tend to enjoy nonfiction literature to fiction in the same manner that I prefer documentary to fiction films most of the time. I've just been turned onto the work of Erik Larson (I'm currently reading In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin), whose writing I consider to be more of a literary equivalent to documentary cinema than the majority of nonfiction authors.

How it's about it: The elder Burns takes a bit of a departure here, though not as much as it might seem. It's still a historical account with first-hand and expert witness interviews, the five now-grown men among them. It's not too different from the numerous wrong-man docs and coerced-testimony exposes we see on a regular basis, but it is a story of current concern because these wrong men are suing the City, which declined to participate in the doc and is now trying to get its hands on the filmmakers' footage in hopes that it will help them with theirdefense against the lawsuit.

Here is part of my response to the film from a Toronto Film Festival dispatch at Movies.com:

What I found more interesting than the coerced testimonies and other familiar flaws of our judicial system is where this is a civil rights doc with its racial components compared to Southern Jim Crow-era stories such as Emmett Till’s, and where it’s like an appendix to Ric Burns’s New York doc series (complete with historian Craig Steven Wilder on screen), and where it turns attention on the issue with mainstream media narratives and public prejudices of alleged criminals, even when they’re acquitted or later absolved. The real story is about how terrible our society is in relation to the terrible problems of the judicial system, not the latter in and of itself.

Recommended if you like: Paradise Lost trilogy; New York; Murder on a Sunday Morning

Also recommended: This is a great week for Ken Burns, who also just debuted his latest PBS doc, The Dust Bowl, which is a more typical film from him and yet also one of his best. It's an important, currently relevant history of the long Great Plains disaster of the 1930s. And it's also now on DVD/Blu-ray. Additionally, while I haven't yet seen the film, West of Memphis, which covers the same story as the Paradise Lostfilms, is obviously focused on similar subject matter. That comes out next month.

Awards: Winner of the Audience Choice Award at the 2012 Chicago International Film Festival. Nominated for a 2012 Grierson Award.

In theaters: Now playing in NYC at IFC Center, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Maysles Cinema. Opens November 30 in L.A., Chicago and New Jersey. Expands on December 14 to St. Louis, Boston, San Francisco, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Concord (NH), Detroit, Denver, Portland (OR) and Washington, DC. 

If this is truly the last Up film, as has been presumed likely, it will be a satisfying conclusion. Not that I want it to be the end.

This won't be the first documentary on Cobain, as we know very well. There's already Documentary Channel favorite About a Son as well as Nick Broomfield's sensational, conspiracy theory-fueled Kurt & Courtney. This sounds like a more traditional profile than those films, yet not necessarily all that conventional. Morgen told the Post:

"We are going to do the movie sort of like a third-person autobiography — [as] if Kurt was around and making a film about his life."

And for the Viewfinders competition, the jury picked Rafea: Solar Mama, which also won the fest's SundanceNOW Audience Award, calling it "a story whose genuine hope and uplift, whose urgency of matter, are only a coda to its deeply intimate, novelistic portrayal of a fractured marriage and the complex dynamic between men and women in a faraway but important culture frequently closed to outsiders."

From the shorts competition, the Grand Jury Prize winner is Riley Hooper's Flo, which that jury said "captures the spirit of Flo Fox and of a rough and tumble New York downtown art scene that hopefully will continue to subvert our expectations.” They also named two films for Special Jury Prize mention, each "powerful and intimate short films that capture the struggles of a pair of families as they battle through emotional confusion following devastating and violent tragedies." They are Doug Block's The Children Next Door and Bao Nguyen's Julian.

James Balog: We can't attribute any one storm to climate change, but there's no question that there's a pattern that has been predicted for many decades by specialists in this field. They've been pointing out the high probability of volatile, violent extreme weather events during an era of changing climate. We think that there's a pretty good chance that the pattern of extreme events we've been seeing in recent years in North America, Europe and Asia are pointing towards the fact that we're already in the middle of a period of changing climate. So, I think it's interesting and certainly curious and ironic that the events in our film and what we're seeing in the Arctic are all lining up.

JO: I think the steroid analogy that's in the film is a really appropriate one. People ask, "Is Sandy the result of climate change?" That's the wrong question. If you ask that question, you're going to get a bad answer. It's like asking, "Is one specific home run the result of steroid usage?" There's no way to track it. It's scientifically so difficult to prove that.

So, one of the statistics that's in the film is that there has been a five-fold increase in natural disasters in North America in the last 30 years. That is completely in harmony and in unison with what the scientists have been predicting is the consequence of climate change. That's the reality we're entering. And these "once-in-a-lifetime" events -- they're calling Sandy "once in a lifetime" -- we're seeing them happening more and more frequently. That is the consequence of climate change.

JB: Final point on that: even Governor Cuomo pointed out that events that were thought to be once-in-a-hundred-year events are now happening every few years. That's not just in this part of the world. It's in other parts of the world, as well, including where we live in the Rocky Mountain West.

Right. It's obviously not once in a lifetime, and that shows through your film. I watched it after Sandy, and a lot of the images of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and what not, they just looked the same as what I was seeing on the news.

JO: When we put that footage in the film, we were trying to demonstrate what those consequences are and what they would be. I'm from Staten Island. I grew up there. And my grandmother's home was devastated by Sandy. The flood water was three feet high inside the first floor of the house, and it's completely ruined. These are real consequences. The estimate I just heard is that Sandy has caused New York alone $33 billion. Just for New York. That right there is a direct dollar amount that you can link to the consequences.

So, is this a good time for Chasing Ice to come out, or will people not need the extra argument? It makes me think of, say, a gun control documentary opening on the heels of a school shooting. People always say, "This isn't the time to talk about it." Especially in a political sense.

JO: We have a very short attention span in this society. And typically in the media. So, it unfortunately takes a wake up call for people to recognize the concerns. But this is an issue that's a very, very long-term issue. It's going to be effecting human civilization for centuries. If we don't do anything about it now, the consequences will just be that much worse in the future.

JB: The other thing that can't be overlooked here is that the source of big catastrophic events, of whatever type they are, get addressed if there is a financial, institutional constituency that is focused on altering behavior going forward. So, if you have airplanes flying into major buildings, and you happen to have a national defense establishment, then by all means you're going to have the national defense establishment working very hard to make sure that airplanes don't fly into big buildings again.

As it happens, we don't have a national defense establishment that is concerned with climate change. We have a scientific establishment that is extremely and deeply aware of what's going on with the effects of the environment, but those organizations, like NASA and NOAA, they're not charged with being advocates for dealing with this. That's not their job. Their job is to collect basic research.

So, when you have this thing floating past the public consciousness for days, weeks or months, there is nobody who's there to pick up the baton and say, "Dammit all, we're going to fix this right now." I think -- knock on wood -- we're going to see the Obama administration in the second term handling this with much more vigor and energy than they have previously.

But it also has to be said that in changing the automotive fuel standards, which are expected for cars sold in this country over the next 13 years, they have done the world a major, major service. And it's under-appreciated by most Americans.

JO: Yeah, most people don't even know about that.

Let's go back to the film itself. How did you guys come together to make it?

JO: We met through a mutual friend. When James was getting the project started, I was just offering to shoot on the very first trip to Iceland. That's where it all began. And James invited me to Greenland and then to Alaska. I kept following him and shooting video footage of everything that was going on with the project.

We weren't planning on making a film at the beginning. The intention of the video that we were shooting was for archive purposes, for posterity and for promotional videos, things like that. It evolved over the course of a couple years into us realizing that we had the footage and the images to make a feature film out of it.

Was there a thought of this being a hands-on improvement over An Inconvenient Truth? That film mainly presents visualized data. You're showing the real evidence. And I think it's important to see people actually going out and doing this sort of adventurous investigating. We're at a point where we all just find out stuff from our computers while sitting in our bedrooms. Doesn't that hurt our ability to understand what's going on with the world, our not really experiencing it?

JB: The experiential point is astute. Back in my teens, I started to realize that I was much more interested in experiential learning than I was in desk learning, book learning. I learned plenty from books, but it was the experience that really burned the understandings of lessons, methods, feeling for things into my brain and my body.

We didn't necessarily think that in going out and engaging with climate change experientially that it would someday have this amazing result in terms of a film, edited from our experiential process. We just went out and did what we had to do, and the cameras were there and recording these remarkable events.So, it's certainly true that for the audiences, for them to see that there's actually people who've lived through these things, it is much more powerful than charts and graphs. There's no question about it. And that seems to be what really captivates people about this film.

Jeff, was your intention with the film to carry the message on the issue, or was it first and foremost the story of a man who is working for a cause?

JO: I describe the film as being about James. I don't refer to it as a climate change film. In fact, when we first started working on the film, I didn't want it to be about climate change. We called it "The Photographer." We made it much more about James's past projects and on his family life and personal life. Because we wanted to stay away from An Inconvenient Truth and other climate change films that had just come out recently. It was really through feedback and through lots of test screenings that we had done and talking with the audiences, hearing that they were very curious about the ice and what was going on with the ice and more about the issue.

So, we ultimately shifted in the editing and framed it as being about -- I really look at the film as being the story of the Extreme Ice Survey and everything it took to make this project happen and James's history in working with the subject matter and how he got the idea for this project. That's how I describe it.

JB: I also see it as very much an adventure film. And obviously about the artistic process, as well. There are a lot of different layers to it.

JO: About the artistic process, it was a real joy and pleasure when editing the film, having so much powerful photography available to us all the time. When we were calling it "The Photographer," we were wanting to make it more about the insight into how James worked as a photographer and how he thinks about taking a picture or what goes into making a really powerful image. Even though we shifted away in the title, we tried to keep a lot of that content in there, the process that it takes to make something like this.

The Extreme Ice Survey is continuing. Has it grown since what we see in the film? Do you have cameras in the Southern hemisphere now?

JB: As we sit here today -- we just counted this the other day --- we've got 34 cameras out at this moment at 16 different glaciers. Then we have repeat photography sites, which are places where we know exactly where we shot pictures in years past, and we revisit those sites every so often. Those sites are in France, Switzerland, British Columbia, Canada, and Bolivia. For the moment. We're almost certainly going to be branching out into South America over the next 12 months. And quite possibly into Antarctica.

I've been to one glacier in Argentina, the Perito Moreno. Will you set up there? And has anyone attempted to do long time-lapses of the normal calving cycle before?

JB: There's a South American glaciologist that has been doing that to some degree, I guess. We keep seeing little fragments of time-lapse on that glacier particularly popping up on YouTube. But we haven't had the financial resources to really build a proper liaison with those glaciologists from Chile and Argentina. That's one of the things I intend to be doing over the next few months. My first task is to find out what they've done already, and then we'll carry on from that point forward.

And what's next for you, Jeff?

JO: My team and I have a couple of films in the pipeline that we've started to develop, but really all the effort and all the energy has been going into promoting Chasing Ice and getting it out there as much as possible. Our whole team will be full time on this for another few months at least.

JB: And the Extreme Ice Survey will go on basically indefinitely at this point. When we started, we thought it would be a three-year project. At three years, we thought, okay, five years would be pretty good. And once we got to five years we couldn't stop. The historical record was too important, too substantial, and our obligation to record these landscapes so that people of the future could remember what they look like, was too great.

How it's about it: It's been 10 months since I saw the film, so I'd like to share some parts of my review from Sundance at Movies.com:

Alexandrowicz, in shadowed but audible appearance, interviews -- or interrogates -- numerous retired Israeli military men, all former judges, prosecutors or legal advisors, in order to better grasp the framework and 45-year execution of the law. In a way it’s to simplify some of the documents the filmmaker has come to be familiar with in his own research. As he reads some of these materials to his cooperative subjects, in voice-over he summarizes for us in layman’s terms. And he requests for the interviewees to speak in easily comprehensible terms as well.[...]

it so perfectly comes together in the end as a rare human rights issue film that’s cerebral rather than emotional in its approach. Alexandrowicz acknowledges and admits to the usual faults of cinema, that he’ll end this film and go on to another, that we’ll go back to everyday life when the credits are over, but that the true person of interest in this cause doc will remain unjustly imprisoned. The film is quite direct in the end, and [...] we feel like we’ve been on a long yet necessary road to get to the real point. [...] At times I wanted to laugh at the abstract absurdity of what the film was unraveling before me, but it’s not really a humorous matter at all.

Recommended if you like: The Fog of War; Occupation 101; Six Days in June

Also recommended: I still have yet to see this, but all year I've noted that Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi's 5 Broken Cameras, which was in the same program at Sundance as Law in These Parts, seems to be a great companion film. It's very different, a more personal and individual account of the occupation, from the perspective of a Palestinian villager (Burnat) documenting a five-year physical and legal struggle with Israeli forces.

Awards: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary World Cinema at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Winner of a Special Jury Award at the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Hot Docs Documentary Festival. Winner of the Best Documentary award at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival.

I personally wouldn't otherwise be interested in a One Direction concert film, but after seeing Spurlock's Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, which I feel put me right into the event, I think he'd do a good job of showing me what it's like to be at their show, for better or worse. Regardless, it will no doubt be his most successful documentary yet, as most of these 3D concert films end up making tons of money.

While Life in a Day had the added prestige of being directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald, Springsteen & I has the less-known Baillie Walsh at the helm curating the footage. He's mainly known for directing music videos (Kylie Minogue's "Slow," for one) and the Oasis film Lord Don't Slow Me Down. His last film was the drama Flashbacks of a Fool, which stars Daniel Craig.

As many will note, this is not the first music doc to go with the collaborative crowdsourcing approach. There's the Beastie Boys concert film, Awesome; I... Shot That, which is obviously different since it was all shot at the same place during the same time. Part of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never sounds more similar to Springsteen & I, the montage of YouTube clips from fans showing love for the pop star.

Still, there is something novel about this film in that, unlike most docs like Life in a Day, it seems to have more of an allowance for old material. If someone made a tribute to The Boss on YouTube years ago, apparently that could qualify, as could something filmed 30 years back. There is a lot of room here for different ideas, and I look forward to seeing what Walsh and Scott take in and dish back.

I think documentaries can be special because if you add the element of time and give a sense of the trajectory in that there’s a real story here, it can get under your skin even more. I’ve always liked that idea, to encourage people to think about time and what happens to people, how they evolve and how characters can change over time. So I don’t have a problem adding little updates, but in terms of the film itself, I totally agree with you. It’s like, look, a lot of energy went into this, I hope you can appreciate it, I think it’s really satisfying, and I hope you can see what I saw. And things happen so quickly these days. The Island President only premiered last fall and then a big turn of events happened shortly after in February. Combine the speed of developments with the fact that documentaries take a long time to be finished and then, unfortunately, often a long time to be released. By the time the DVD comes out, there seems a need for an update, especially if it involves current events like this does. Unfortunately even distributors and sales agents and people who know documentaries often get confused between a documentary film and news. In a lot of ways there are some similarities -- we use the same equipment and in some ways there’s the same visual language -- but it kinda ends there. When you’re making a documentary you’re really thinking about a story and an evolution of character. In some ways it’s like a Shakespearean character outline more than it is a news story. Not to be too highfalutin about it. You’re really in that space more than you’re in the space of thinking about current events -- when I’m working. So when people say, “Hey, do you want to go shoot an addendum or change the ending?” I would not consider that. What I would consider is, maybe there could be a little short made or a clip, outside of the film, that allows people if they’re interested to go to a website. Or when it plays on TV, another thing. But the film is the film. Oh right. I almost forgot about the whole New York Times Op-Doc thing. You had the opportunity to provide an update that was separate from the film through that outlet. And a lot of filmmakers are getting to do that now, which I think is a really great idea. I love that idea. It’s a nice little niche to fill. We’re living in funny period where DVDs are kinda dead now, but one nice thing about them was that you could put other stuff on them. Like for Lost Boys of Sudan we were able to put some deleted scenes and update stuff and a Q&A. With web distribution, or video on demand, there’s not really a mechanism for that yet. I think there will be soon.

There’s access to some of that stuff, but there’s not a lot and I don’t think many people know about them. It’s not organized yet. You could put stuff on YouTube or on websites, but I think Op-Docs is a nice thing because it’s starting to organize it. I think it’s an organizing principle. I could see at some point maybe every film will have an Op-Doc kinda thing. You could show it in class if you watch the film and it could be a point of discussion.

I love that kind of stuff, educator editions and additional material. They’re wonderful. That’s part of the beauty of the special role that documentaries play in our culture, the ability to engage people and have the conversation spin out, have it just be the beginning of a conversation. I think it’s a peculiar technical moment where we are right now. So would you consider a sequel if Nasheed’s story called for one? I’m so not in that space right now. But I never say “never” to anything. Nasheed is a relatively young guy, and I’ve always wondered in the back of my head, “Who knows? This guy could go on to have an amazing life.” He’s clearly a unique individual in the world, and I can’t imagine him giving up. I will definitely keep up with him and track him, because I like him and think he’s a fascinating guy. If that leads to another documentary some day, that’d be great.

The circumstances of him winning the presidency in 2008 and going on to have his first year in office and leading up to Cophenhagen was to me a magical combination of a lot of things. So that led to the film. But you never know, maybe something could happen again where enough circumstances come together. It just seems to be something that more and more filmmakers are doing. But are you typically the kind of documentarian who can let go of subjects easily and move on to the next thing? You’ve worked on a lot of films, including stuff you’ve only been a cinematographer or cameraman on. Aside from Nasheed, do you like to stay in touch with characters? It depends on a lot of things. Generally with independent docs that we ourselves control and fundraise for and stuff, it’s usually a long enough relationship that it doesn’t go away quickly. For example, with Lost Boys of Sudan I’m in touch with those guys. And The Rape of Europa, unfortunately many of the main characters have passed away, but we’re still in touch with some of them. One of the crazy, cool things about documentary filmmaking is it gives you the license to go into these people’s lives and see it from such an intimate point of view. So it’s intense, and often you have a relationship afterwards. That part of it I actually really like, because when you get to the end of the film you can have a real relationship. You don’t have to hold back, and both sides can breathe a sigh of relief and be a little looser in the relationship. I like to maintain relationships with people I have gone through something with. I don’t know where it leads. It’s always different. What is the biggest difference, besides the obvious with time and focus, between directing your own doc and shooting someone else’s? For me, with some directors who I really know well and who trust me, I can get a similar kind of feel in the field when I’m shooting and following characters and get a vibe for the story. But there’s nothing like knowing that you’re making your own film. When you know you’re the one going to be dealing with it in the editing room and crafting the story, and you know what you have and what you hope to get, the more time and energy you can spend on a project, just by nature, is going to be that much deeper and more meaningful to you -- to me, as a filmmaker. It’s hard to place that when I’m just working as a DP. There are a lot of things as a DP that I can do and concentrate on that’s maybe hard for me when I’m directing as well. When I’m just a DP I’m more focused on making the picture all it can be and that it tells the story. Whereas when I’m directing and shooting, I might actually give a little bit up on my artistry of photography and give priority to the story, which is ultimately more important. That’s not to say I don’t love that photographic aspect of doing my own thing, but ultimately when I’m directing it has to be about the story.

Fortunately for verite filmmaking the story and the camera are kinda one. When you’re shooting a scene there’s no difference between the coverage of it and how you’re telling the story. It’s one and the same. That’s the pinnacle of documentary filmmaking for me, being in a scene, shooting it myself, covering it and knowing it’s important to the story. That’s a thrill and it’s exciting and it’s photographically really satisfying. I’m curious about your involvement on The Phantom Menace. I see a credit here for you listed as “documentary cinematographer.” What did that entail? I was kind of an in-house documentary filmmaker at Lucasfilm from ‘96 to ‘99. I ended up making all the documentary materials that were connected to Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. If you get the DVD, on the second disc there’s a feature-length verite film called The Beginning, which I made. And there’s dozens and dozens of short docs that we put out on the Internet that were updates from the set and little stories. If you’re a Star Wars fan, it’s really interesting because a lot of the style with The Island President is similar to The Beginning. It’s a lot of scenes of following George [Lucas] around as he was writing, designing and ultimately shooting and editing Star Wars. That’s what I thought it was. The way IMDb lists it, it looks like you shot footage that’s in the actual movie. Like there was documentary footage in The Phantom Menace or something, which would be wild. Yeah, I have a credit on the film itself as "documentarian." But really I was kind of an in-house filmmaker. I had a team and shot literally thousands of hours of footage. It was just awesome, because I was pretty young, right out of film school, and it was a great way to get my chops shooting tons of verite footage. There was total access. Obviously I didn’t have 100% creative control but at least I had the access. At the beginning, in ‘96, when I started there, I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. George was about to start writing the next chapter of “the Bible.” It felt like a total honor to be included in that. It was an exciting time to be there. Of course Star Wars [Episode 1] came out and a lot of original fans were disappointed in the movie, but at the time, before the movie came out, that anticipation was so intense and palpable. It was just cool to be inside of that. If you’re a Star Wars fan and interested in that scene, or even if you’re not, as a film fan it’s interesting to see Lucas and the actors. It’s very real. Even though there are a few things I would do differently in a director’s cut, the vibe of the film is pretty authentic. You really get to feel what it was like.

I like to ask filmmakers for some other doc recommendations, either some favorite classics or something you’ve recently seen or maybe something that had an influence on you or your new film. Films that were influential on me, obviously from The Island President you can tell I’m a big verite fan. Early Wiseman and Maysles and Drew and Leacock and all that stuff I fell in love with early on. I’m a disciple of Jon Else, who now directs the documentary program at Berkeley. He’s an incredible director, if you know The Day After Trinity, about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. Then in college films like The Thin Blue Line and Roger & Me really got me excited about being a documentary filmmaker. One of my favorite documentaries of all time is Crumb, because I feel that film gets so authentically inside someone’s life, in such an incredible way. Recent films, I loved Valentino, which was a couple years ago. I thought that was a wonderful portrait. To Hell and Back Again is amazing. I was actually a big fan of Restrepo too. It blew me away. Some documentaries are great because they’re great storytelling, and other documentaries are great because they’re so brave. They show you something that you’ve never seen before. I felt like Restrepo was like that, like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m looking at this! This camera is in a firefight!” To Hell and Back Again might have had more of an impression if I hadn’t seen Restrepo. I thought it was a shame Restrepo didn’t win the year it was nominated because I really felt that was the kind of film that could potentially be remembered years and years from now. It was so brave, and so unlike anything that had been done and really took advantage of new technology in a really cool way. I actually think we’re living in a time when there’s so much cool opportunities for documentary filmmakers. We can make images like we’ve never made before, in terms of the technology. There’s no excuse why your film can’t look fabulous. That doesn’t mean that they’ll all be great, but I think we’re finally at a point where the technology has really popularized it. We told ourselves that back in the ‘90s, but now it’s really true with these latest cameras and editing software. So I think we’re at a very exciting time for documentary filmmaking. And the other thing that’s happened, with the downfall of the press and international budgets for investigative reporting gone away, documentaries take up some of the slack. What better way is there these days to find out about an issue in depth than to watch a really well-made documentary on the subject. Like Detropia. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve heard people raving about it, and it just seems like a really thoughtful approach to what’s going on with the economy and the U.S. and the auto industry and all that. It’s exciting. I felt that way with No End in Sight, which I’m thinking about because I’m staring at your IMDb page. I hadn’t followed the whole story about the Iraq War so that was a useful film for me to get caught up. Exactly. And that’s a film that I would have a really hard time visualizing, because it’s not my penchant. But you have to hand it to Charles Ferguson. He has that kind of mind and an almost academic approach, and he just goes for it. He doesn’t let up. He’s like a bulldog when it comes to getting his teeth into a story. Now the world has a really excellent document that tells that story in a way that hadn’t been told before. Anyway, I obviously feel passionate that documentaries play such an important role in our society. So do I. And I wish more people felt the way we do. Before we end, is there anything you’re working on now, or do you have a next directorial project in mind yet? We’re not currently working on an indie doc. I have a company that mixes it up. Obviously I shoot for other people and we make commercials. We’re constantly working to make a living, but right now we’re not pursuing an indie doc. Hopefully we will soon. I don’t know how other directors do it, but in our little world we’ve found that unless you’re 100% focused on every aspect including distribution it just doesn’t happen right. So we’re working on The Island President harder than we’ve ever worked on it. 100% focused on launching it and having it find an audience. That’s what our job is right now.

There’s also the issue that you mentioned before regarding dictators being toppled and democracy being brought to so many countries in recent years. Or attempted anyways. The Island President is such a celebration of that change. So what effect does the news about last month’s coup in the Maldives and Nasheed’s resignation have on the film’s story now? One thing you should know since you saw the film in Toronto is we did add a card at the end that tells you what happened. In very simple terms. We felt the need to update people. The events of the coup make the story that much more poignant and precious. Here’s a guy who, really once you see the film you can’t argue, is so committed to transparency and honesty in government and really trying to fight for the cause of people, of human rights. I think he is fairly pure in his goals in those ways. So having been deposed, in a way, makes the current events a little more sticky. But I think in the long run the film is the same. It’s about a guy who, against all odds, is trying to fight for right. And he occasionally succeeds and is able to push the ball forward, and then there are setbacks as well. At the end of the day, who knows what’s going to happen in the Maldives? My personal feeling is that it’s going to be very difficult for the autocratic forces to maintain control of a population that has now tasted freedom and transparency and freedom of the press and all that.

They’ve actually seen it. The Island President was released in theaters there, and people were blown away that a president can be that open. Under the dictator there was one state-run television station. Now there are seven independent stations -- well that is until the dictator took power again. So I think it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle. I really do believe that somehow this is going to come to a head. I can’t tell the future, but I know that Nasheed hasn’t given up hope.

Right, and so if the film is meant to be an allegory and about all of us, the response of schadenfreude is really quite ironic.

I tried to make that point by including the stories of the minor characters, who make similar mistakes and have similar realizations. Like Cliff, the limo driver, who bought nineteen homes and then lost them all and went through bankruptcy and the trauma of foreclosure. In a way, that’s not that different from David, but of course it’s on a different scale.

The power of the story and the power of the Siegels and their generously sharing their life with me in such an intimate way is that they allow us to see ourselves. There’s something about their characters, maybe from their humble origins, where they kept a down to earth quality. I think it’s also because they’re so incredibly candid in front of the camera and open up their lives so much. There’s something about them that allows us to see our virtues and our flaws.

It’s not really schadenfreude in the sense that suggests we’re taking pleasure in someone else’s pain, and I think that’s kind of the trick of the movie. Maybe you start out thinking that, but by the end, what audiences have told me is they’re surprised that they have sympathy for the characters. They go in expecting not to and then go through a journey where that changes by the end.

I'll admit, in spite of your name being attached, I felt like I was going to be watching a feature-length reality show pilot with this subject matter. Do you think that could be a possible appeal to audiences? I think it's great if people will be surprised at how terrific and relevant the film is.

That’s exactly been a technique in my photography. I’ve talked about that before, like in a project like "Girl Culture." Are you familiar with my photography at all?

I’ve seen some, and I know that this film came about through a picture you had taken of women and their Versace purses, one of which was Jackie.

Well, in my pictures there tend to be very saturated colors. At least with "Fast Forward" and "Girl Culture," my first two books, which are very much about the popular culture, there are saturated colors, and the prints are glossy surfaces. In "Girl Culture" the project is about how the body has become the primary expression of identity for girls and women and the exhibitionism of modern femininity.

It kinda seduces you with bright colors, shiny surfaces, sexy bodies and the kind of language of the popular culture. It takes you in for a much darker journey about how girls define themselves this way, and how it’s become really a self-esteem crisis for girls and with emotional and physical and all kinds of very serious consequences.

I remember there was a museum show at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, and this docent told me that this jock came in from the University of Arizona and he saw this picture that was in the front. It was of this beautiful model at the beach in Miami, unbuttoning her bra and being photographed. You see the camera on one side and the model on the other. And he said, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna like this show.” Then he went through the expedition, and when he came out the other side, he said to the docent, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry. I had no idea what this show was about.”

So that’s kinda what I love. The reason why we have to look at these issues is because they’re part of the popular culture that is so influential in our lives. For me, The Queen of Versailles is nothing like a reality show, and when I started, the idea was to show a cinema verite portrayal of wealth, because we never see what it’s really like. We always see this fabricated, sensationalized, constructed, fictionalized, packaged portrayal, which is so influential in shaping our values and aspirations.

Because that kind of aspirational wealth is so important in our culture, I think it’s really important to examine, for a deeper investigation into why these things are important to us and why we obsess over them and what does it say about us as a culture and our values. So the reference to reality TV is important, because it’s a sociological look at what is underneath that.

Without getting too much into the lawsuit if you'd rather not, what is your take on the seemingly increasing issue of subjects going public with dissatisfaction with how they're portrayed in documentaries? This also fits with audience and critical response because Tabloid and The Imposter subjects have gotten upset with laughs and personal attacks. Obviously The Queen of Versailles has been met with a lot of laughs as well.

I think that’s hard. Jackie has been to several film festivals and really loves the film. She was with me two days ago at the premiere in New York and did the Today show with me and is out promoting the film. But when she saw it -- and actually when David saw it too, he seemed quite happy with it -- what’s hard is seeing how other people see you. And there’s no way to really know what that’s going to be like. Jackie really likes the film, but she’s been hurt by some of the blogs and what people say about her online.

That’s always kind of a risk in something that happens with -- I don’t want to say a private person in this case, because David and Jackie Siegel were public people, and this is not the first time that that experience has happened. You don’t see yourself the way other people see you, even if you’re fully aware of the whole process and what the film is about, and you’re there for all the footage.

As a filmmaker, the way I address that is by spending a lot of time, doing as much research as possible, really being careful about the storytelling process, and the integrity of that, and honoring the access that I'm given. That’s why it was important to me, and I was really pleased, that audiences felt empathetic with the characters, especially with Jackie. And part of that is their candor in front of the camera.

Yeah, it upsets me that those who debate me on the issue, their response is that, “Well, they agreed to be on camera, so they’re fair game.” I don’t agree with that.

You have a lot of responsibility as a documentarian telling stories about people’s lives. You have a responsibility to the truth. You have a responsibility to treat them with respect and honor what you saw. And I take that really seriously. And many subjects in the film, by the way, have seen the film and liked it.

In the case of David Siegel, we’re talking about very specific business interests. And I definitely feel like that is not what I can use as the guiding force in my editing. I need to be honest about what I saw and not use either concerns of vanity or concerns of business get in the way of telling the story either.

How do you know when a story of a real life concludes?

This story was amazing. It was very clear in a way I had never experienced before. With THIN, my last feature-length film, it probably could have gone on forever, although Sheila Nevins at HBO gave me really good advice to stay in the clinic and don’t go home with the girls. So when “my girls” left, that was the end, even though I did a tiny bit of postscript. But it was very hard to know when to end that film.

This film was very clear, because I came in on the dream of the house, that then got surpassed by the tower, and that was the most important thing to David. It was what he spent the last year and a half just fighting for his life for. And when he lost it, and the Versailles house was also in foreclosure and being put up for auction by Bank of America, that was the end for me.

I was wondering where you thought the film was headed narratively or thematically before the financial crash came and sort of helped steer the story. And it’s interesting that there's the scene with David signaling that it's time to wrap. Might he have now preferred you kept documenting them until his fortune was back up?

I think he did prefer that. I kept that in about “can we wrap it up,” because in that moment he was impatient with talking about what was such a painful subject. So that’s why I included it, and it kind of signaled to the audience that the end of the film was coming. But actually he did want me to come back. He said he wanted me to come back in a few months.

When he first lost possession of the tower, it was too painful to talk about. And he didn’t want to talk. So I talked to Richard instead, and he laid out the whole thing that happened, and he said that it was like losing a loved one. He said that his dad said it was like he pulled the plug on a spouse when he lost Vegas. Jackie said the same thing, that it looked like he was in mourning. So he said come back in a few months.

But for David, he really would have liked me to document a victorious ending, which hasn’t happened. What’s in the film is basically what has happened. He says in the film that he’ll work ‘til he’s a hundred and fifty years old if that’s what it takes to make things right or get back on top. Only time will tell if that actually happens.

He says in that scene where he’s in the den at night and the papers are all piled up around him and he’s talking to his dog, “Maybe we’ll just move into the house on our own.” He’s so depressed. He said to me later, “If I save Vegas, if I find an investor in Vegas, that will be my greatest achievement.” I think he does say it on camera. But then he said later, “If I find that investor, I will fly out to L.A. so you can interview me. I’ll save you the trip. No, we should meet in Vegas. You should do it in Vegas.”

And he said, “If I lose Vegas, you’ll be there, and if it blows up you’ll be there.” He put all the options on the table, of what could happen. He often was great in his honesty about the options, whether it was bankruptcy or losing it to the lenders or keeping it by finding another investor. But in the end, he’s a man who likes to win. He wants to win, and that’s a part of his character. So in a way, the lawsuit is also consistent with his character. But surprising, of course, given the access and the cooperation through the end of the filming.

As a photographer, is it really important for  you to have a good looking film? Many documentarians don't seem to put that as a priority, and in certain cases it's not even that possible.

Did you like the look of the film?

Yeah. It looks great. You obviously put thought into the cinematography and I’m guessing did some post production work to make it look like a good movie.

Well, definitely in the cinematography, and yes, it is important to me as a photographer. The aesthetic language is one of our greatest tools in filmmaking. The colors and the composition are really important in the storytelling process. At the same time, I also learned from THIN that the moment trumps everything.

I had a wonderful cinematographer, Tom Hurwitz, and then a couple other shooters who worked on it at other times -- Shana Hagan and Sarah Levy, who are all extraordinary -- but there were times when I was the only one there, and I’m not as good a shooter as they are, and if I got it on a little camera, some of that’s in there too. Because I think at the end of the day, people do forgive the image quality for the story. And I would never sacrifice the story for the image quality. I feel like I work with editors who know that and will let me do that. Even if I say, “Oh no, that shot looks bad. Don’t put it in.”

In this film, there are a lot of interviews, so in the interviews I framed those like what we call environmental portraits in photography, where the whole composition and what’s around the person tells as much story about that person, and in this case also about the narrative arc, as what the person is saying. It’s really clear in this film -- and there are five interview with Jackie, five interviews with David and multiple interviews with most of the other characters -- there’s even a physical transformation that goes on. David, in the little less than three years that I shot, looks like he ages ten years. And Victoria, the daughter, has a similar kind of transformation.

So yes, it is important to me. I guess the way I express it is I work with good cinematographers who also have a feel for my look as a photographer. Tom Hurwitz and Shana Hagan both were very knowledgeable about my photography and steeped in it, and they tried to take a point of view that was consistent or similar to my photography -- very close, wide angle, very intimate. I think it’s the first film that I’ve done that actually translates the sociological and aesthetic voice of my photography into the film.

With THIN, I felt like the access and my relationship with the subjects was just like my photography. But the look of it was not. And maybe that wouldn’t have been appropriate for that film. There’s a monotony to the imagery in THIN that was appropriate to the claustrophobic nature of that film, but that’s not how my photography is. My photography is colorful and different and brings together a lot of contrasts and has a lot of irony and social commentary in it.

That’s one of the things that attracted me to the film, was the space, the characters, their larger-than-life quality, their big, fun, exaggerated quality. And also the space in the house. I was fascinated by the decor, what it said about them, what it said about our values. I was fascinated by the photographic representations of themselves, the way they commissioned portraiture, their choice in art. There was a lot of aesthetic components to the space and to their lives that really drew me to the subject. And in the end, I was able to make portraits of both of the houses and have them kind of become characters.