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Q&A with Jamie Dack, Leah Chen Baker, and Jonathan Tucker

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Palm Trees and Power Lines.

Was there an importance to telling this story at this particular time? What sort of feedback have you received?

Jamie Dack: I was writing this script at a certain time in my life where I was starting to look back on some relationships I had when I was younger—one in particular. I think due to my age, and time passing, I had started to look back on it differently. The Me Too movement was happening at that exact time and it definitely affected me. We were living in this time when women were beginning to re-examine things that had happened to them. That was part of the inspiration. It’s been super validating as storyteller and a filmmaker. People consistently come up to me after screenings and share their own stories and ways in which they identify and relate to the film.

If she has to go through it, I felt the audience should have to go through it with her.

Can you talk about creating the feature from the short it was based on?

JD: I made the short in 2017 and it premiered in 2018. As I said, a lot of people said that they identified with that story. That was the nudge that I needed to keep going and explore this further. I began adapting it… I usually call it an adaptation rather than an expansion because it really did change. The short deals with a rather small betrayal. I kind of kept that element, which is that this guy betrays her but in a much smaller way and she continues to hang out with him again. Those are the basics of the short. As I was writing the feature, I was also very interested in what I had been reading about sex trafficking and grooming. I decided to write the script by following the stages of grooming. I really wanted people to understand how she ended up where she did and to never think of her as making dumb decisions, but instead to understand how she got to that point.

Leah, how did you and Jamie come to work together? Did you meet at NYU?

Leah Chen Baker: Jamie and I both went to NYU but we didn’t overlap there. When I was a first year, her short film Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at Cannes and really impacted me when I saw it. I was introduced to Jamie and I knew she was going to expand it into a feature. I loved her hand as a director on the short and when she shared the full-length script, I knew I had to be a part of it. Making this film felt a bit like going to film school together. It’s a very intimate process.

Jonathan Tucker: I want to add to what Leah just said about it feeling like going through film school together. Having made a lot of movies with bigger budgets with people with longer resumes, it didn’t feel like participating in a film school project, to their credit. It was so elegantly and professionally run. Or they hid everything very well!

Jonathan, it’s an incredible and challenging role and you bring such nuance to the part. What appealed to you about the project?

JT: The script was excellent. But excellent scripts don’t make excellent movies. Good scripts with excellent directors can make excellent movies and excellent scripts with good directors can make good movies. You don’t always know. Talking to Jamie and seeing her short film and her obsession with storytelling and filmmaking and then reading the script, well, the choice to do this film was crystal clear for me.

Given the limited budget, what was really important to you to focus on in order to make this film feel natural and authentic?

JD: I remember during my first semester of film school, my professor said that casting is half the job. I don’t know if it’s half or what percentage it might be, but it’s huge. Your cast makes or breaks your film and it’s one of the things I’m the proudest of in this film, particularly Jonathan and Lily’s performances. In terms of budgetary constraints, I actually felt that the limitations were helpful to us in some ways. It allowed us to focus on what was really important. We really put an emphasis on the vulnerabilities that leave Lea ripe to Tom’s manipulation, specifically the suburban malaise and the boredom and aimlessness that she’s feeling. That was intentional to set up the dynamics of their relationship.

JT: It’s important to highlight how deliberate Jamie and Leah’s work was to create an authenticity on the screen. It wasn’t by accident. There was so much deliberation and execution based on years of work. Jamie started production back in 2017, so five years ago. It’s really a credit to their craft of filmmaking.

What were some of the challenges as a producer, in regards to budget?

LCB: We had big dreams of what we wanted to accomplish in terms of budget. We shot in LA primarily, and LA is expensive. We also shot during the peak of Delta, so it was pretty interesting to consider what could happen with this budget during Covid. Jamie already had such a clear vision and an amazing cast and our crew was fantastic, because this was also a meaningful step in many of their careers as well—that made a huge difference in terms of energy and partnership. Given all that, the biggest thing we needed was time. We really had to dig into what we were going to prioritize and what we needed more days on. That preparation helped us a lot and Panavision was a huge partner to us in terms of getting more time to make this film, because of the grant they gave for indie filmmakers. That’s how we were able to shoot for twenty-five days.

Jonathan, can you talk about working with Lily?

JT: Everyone in the room today got to experience the magic of her work, which is innate and honed and guided by Jamie. It’s a privilege to be able to have the closest position to someone’s performance. It’s such a thrill being an actor and sitting a foot away from a young person at the beginning of their career. It’s really in coverage when I can be a little more cognizant of what’s happening around me in her performance and how to calibrate that for her coverage. People pay hundreds of dollars to go sit on Broadway so they can be in the front row, and in this I was just front row and it was fabulous. If she navigates the business and continues to work on her craft, she’ll have an amazing ride ahead and I’ll have gotten to say I sat a few feet away. It’s one of the true joys of being an actor.

Can you talk about staging and shooting that last scene in the hotel?

JD: I knew that I didn’t want that scene to be graphic and I didn’t want nudity. I often respond to what you hear behind a closed door, or maybe what you see is fuzzy and that can actually make something scarier. I knew I wanted to set the camera far back. The actors actually did that take twice. It’s a ten-minute take and we cut it down but I also knew I wanted it to play in real time. If she has to go through it, I felt the audience should have to go through it with her.

JT: I remember we shot at this hotel in Thousand Oaks off the 101, and the art department had a wall covering that was very specific that Jamie had wanted for this tableau shot, this pivotal shot. Lily and I had a scene in that room prior to the one you’re asking about. Somehow the attachment device to the wall covering was bubbling, so we did a few takes and finally Jamie was like, it’s not going to work, we’ll have to come back and do another day here. And I thought, I’ve been in like forty-million-dollar episodes of TV and they’ve been like, eh, the audience won’t notice it or figure it out. And working on this tiny movie, figuring out how to put a new wall covering on and wait another day, good luck! But it was such an important part of the movie and Jamie had such a specific vision of how this was going to look and Leah was going to make sure that was protected. I think it’s a great example of the value they put on executing this deliberateness of the vision. I had never seen that on a movie this scale. They knew exactly what needed to happen, and they were willing to figure out how to make that happen.

Q&A with Rian Johnson, Janelle Monáe, and Ram Bergman

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Glass Onion.

When did you first conceive of this film?
Rian Johnson: The idea for this film came very very early, even when we were still making the first one, Daniel [Craig] and I, on-set, we didn’t want to jinx it — because we didn’t know whether the first one would be something people would want to see — but we said to ourselves, if this does alright… it would be really fun to keep this party going! Just because we were having such a good time with each other. And, the only thing I really knew was that I didn’t want it to be… if we were going to keep making these, I wanted to go back to the source of the inspiration for all of this, which for me is my love of Agatha Christie’s work. So I knew — as opposed to continuing on the story of the first one, or bringing back the characters from the first one — I wanted to do what Agatha Christie did with her books, which is, she took big, wild, different swings every single time. I think there’s sometimes a perception of her work that she kind of told the same story over and over, but anyone who really knows her books knows that the opposite is true: she mixed genres. Besides just changing the setting and the characters and the type of murder, she did basically a proto-slasher movie with And Then There Were None. She did gothic romance with Endless Night. She did serial killer thriller with The A.B.C. Murders. She was all over the place, in the best way! And so, that was the only thing I kind of knew, was that let’s keep making these, and let’s give them each their own reason for being, and let them each stand on their own, the way that Christie’s books did.

I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience

As a producer, how do you take the vision that Rian just articulated and try to execute it? 
Ram Bergman: It’s all in this man’s head! He’s the one who comes up with it. My job is just to facilitate, make it a reality. But it all comes from his brain.

Can you talk about how you came to the project?
Janelle Monáe: I think I just… manifested it, working with Rian! I had seen a film of his called Looper, have you guys seen Looper? Yes! And I was blown away. I thought to myself… “if I ever get an opportunity to work with this guy… I have to do it.” I went down a whole rabbit hole: I watched Brick, which was, you know, a high school version of a ‘whodunit,’ something innovative in that space, and then he kept it up with everything he had done up to the first Knives Out, which I loved! I was a big fan of that film. So I had already said “yes,” and then I read the script, saw the twists… looked at the character, and I was like, “hell yes!” And then they said, “we’ll be shooting in Greece… might you be available?” And I said, “f*ck yes! Get me on the first flight out! Off my couch!” So it was just a no-brainer, and then Daniel Craig… obviously who is so iconic in this role… was so gracious for inviting me to be a part of this. The whole cast, there was nothing about this role — which I got to have an opportunity to have so much fun with — that wasn’t appealing. I mean, Rian wrote this character to be so mysterious, so layered… so fun! Humorous. You have those big emotional moments… and there was action. It was a dream, as an actor, to be able to portray this role.

How did Covid impact the production?
RB: Honestly, my job was to make sure that Janelle, and Rian, and everybody else had fun… that they continued to be able to make the movie, in spite of the pandemic, and that none of them got positive covid test results! That was my goal. Because if one of them got it… we would be f*cked. We would have to be shut down for a few weeks… and blah blah blah. So, luckily, they had fun and none of them tested positive. So, I did my job.

JM: That’s very true. Ram, I think you should also tell them that you hired a spy, for each of us… I swear, even when I would step outside for a breath of fresh air… someone would appear out of nowhere who would say, “get back in that room! Get back in there!” But… we thank you for that. Thank  you.

RB: It’s all true!

How do you begin to write a story like this, with so many turns?
RJ: Well, I start… I write really structurally. So I’ll spend the first 80% of the process outlining. And I just work in little moleskin notebooks, and I need to be able to work the whole story out until I have the structure of it, and I have it really outlined, completely, scene by scene. I end up with the whole roadmap. And only then, at the very end, do I sit down and actually typing. And, I mean, the intricacies of the mystery are one thing— but anyone here who’s a writer knows that the real work goes into making the experience of watching it… I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience. The object is to make the audience have so much fun, they forget they’re supposed to be solving something. And that’s where the majority of the work goes, just the basic story work: what’s driving the audience’s interest? What’s keeping them engaged? What do they care about? How do we make the ending satisfying, above and beyond just the reveal of ‘whodunit?’ It’s just the basic stuff that, you know, you bang your head against the wall with for any other type of script. It’s the same stuff with something like this.

Janelle, can you talk about how the fashion in the film helped inform your character, especially since you were playing multiple people?
JM: Yes— shout out to Jenny Eagan, our wonderful costume designer. She was just… really so collaborative. She had great ideas, and I think after talking to Rian, and them talking, and we had a talk… and I feel like, at that first fitting, I just thought, “Ah— there’s Andi. Ah ha! There’s Helen… oh, there’s Helen being Andi…” You just have those little things in the costume that make such a difference: the dress that I had on, the type of fabric (it actually wasn’t a dress yet at that point), and I just thought it said so much about who she was. We got into the Grecian thing… there’s so much we haven’t even talked about, just in terms of the names of the characters! Helen… Cassandra… that whole Greek mythology angle. And it’s a lot. To answer your question, the clothes had to talk before I talked. Because a lot of those initial scenes with Andi, she actually didn’t talk. So the way her glasses looked, the dress that she had on… you felt like this was a person who was put together, but also hiding something. And her clothes were her mask. Helen’s sweater when she’s talking to [Benoit] Blanc… it’s so frumpy, and the t-shirts and all of that… and, it moves with her. Yeah, so: I think the clothes… Jenny Eagan, Rian, me… bam!

Q&A with Edward Berger

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of All Quiet on the Western Front.

It’s an incredible piece of filmmaking. How did you come up with a shot list?

Edward Berger: I spent months and months and months with the DP, James Friend, who is a friend of mine.  We’ve known each other since Patrick Melrose. During prep, I spent more time with him than with my family, unfortunately. We locked ourselves in a room for three months in Berlin, and we’d do 10-14 day stretches at a time. Meticulous is the right word. We were obsessed with finding the right shots to tell the story. The movie didn’t have much money—compared to American films, laughable—so we really needed to plan and know exactly what we were going to do. And we spent those months storyboarding everything, especially the battle scenes, completely. If you were to put the storyboards next to the movie, it would look exactly the same. Maybe a shot was dropped, or two were swapped, but it’s really what we conceived. It’s the part of planning I really enjoy. I would also say that in a film like this, very often you might use two, three, four, five cameras to capture everything and make sure you have the coverage. We shot everything single camera. There was a second camera there that we would use to plan ahead, but 99.5% of the time, we shot with just one camera to get exactly the precise moment that we felt would let the audience experience what Paul was feeling. That was the main motivation, to give the audience the feeling of what Paul has in his stomach.

Everything is there to put you in Paul’s shoes.

Your DP said that his collaboration with you is one of the most unique he’s had with a director.  

EB: We’re both obsessed with precision and architecture in the film. It’s not haphazard and we don’t try to find the shot on set. It gives me true pleasure to set up a shot and in that shot, have every department create the illusion that this is reality. Let it be production design, the SFX, makeup, the smoke that’s in the background or the explosion that is nearby, the wear and tear on the costumes, the music… everything is there to make that moment feel real. Everything is there to put you in Paul’s shoes. We both really love the crafting of each shot.

I heard that during the battle sequences you put a whiteboard with the storyboards next to the camera. That’s a technique I’ve really only experienced in commercial work. Can you talk about that?

EB: With commercials, they are making short stories but they have more time, and it’s for the client. For us, it was more a means to keep our sanity. On any movie, I think you have to think about the whole film. This shot will pay off there later, etc. But on the battle scenes, if I had to think about the whole film, it would have broken me. I really needed to break those down into little bits by really planning those scenes of the movie ahead of time, in our hotel room with storyboards. This shot will flow into the next, here’s what we need here, and so on. You really imagine the film again and again on the wall in a stark hotel room. We kind of planned the whole film and had hundreds of hours of discussions with the departments so that they knew what we needed to achieve on any given day. And on the day when James and I drove to set, sometimes in the morning I’d almost be in tears thinking about how we’d never get it done, and he’d prop me up. And the next day he would be down and I’d try to prop him up. We also didn’t have much leeway. If we didn’t finish a certain scene, there was no way to pick it up the next day. There was no time. We’d get to set and say, let’s just do one shot at a time. That really helped mentally, one a shot at a time. It’s very gratifying, and gives you joy and relief. Then you go to the next shot, and at the end of the day you realize we did these seven shots or these twenty-two shots and we accomplished what we wanted! It was like a mental crutch.

I can’t believe this was your lead’s first movie role—he was phenomenal. Did that change the way you approached your process at all?

EB: Felix Kammerer’s headshot was the first one I received, from [producer] Malte Grunert’s wife. She said, you should look at this kid, he’s in Vienna in the Burgtheater— the most preeminent theater in Europe. She told me he had mostly small parts and had just finished drama school, and he’s never been in front of a camera. Which was kind of great. We had always wanted to discover someone because we wanted the audience to have the feeling that they are discovering someone. If you haven’t seen this person before, you can encounter him with innocence, just like he went with innocence into this war. In a movie like this, you want your lead to be a whiteboard that the audience can project onto, not a familiar face. He came to about four or five casting sessions, and in the second one I put him in a uniform and heavy boots. He’s not a solider, and that was helpful. He’s an intelligent kid who went to a good school; he’s a dancer and light in his movements. Putting those heavy boots on him really grounded him. When you wear different shoes, you walk differently. That’s what happened to Felix and he grew into this role. I also think he has sort of an old-fashioned face. He could be from any era. You looked at him and he looked like he could have lived a hundred years ago. All of the young actors, in the makeup and costume tests, they were all so excited about the shoot. For many of them it was the biggest film they had done and they were so excited to start this adventure. Looking at them, it rang true. These kids were away from home for first time, and their grandfathers had been heroes from previous wars that had been won very quickly. They were really told that in three weeks they’d be in Paris and it would be over and they’d return heroes. They didn’t have TV back then so they didn’t know what it was really like. They were exposed to propaganda and populist speech and were manipulated.

How did you come to find that searing three-note musical score?

EB: Volker Bertelmann [the composer] and I are very good friends. We’ve done three or four movies together. I showed him the film and said three things. First of all, I wanted the music to sound like something we’ve never had before, to be different. Because to me that puts the movie in a different realm. In some movies, you want the music to disappear, but in this movie, I felt we needed to lift it into someplace else. Second, I wanted him to destroy the adventures, to make them dirty and not beautify anything. And the third thing was, again, what does Paul feel in his gut? The fear, the rage, the thirst for blood, the coldness, I wanted him to find a sound for that. I showed him the film and two days later he said, I think I’ve got something. I listened to it and I immediately said, don’t change anything. That became the theme. The nice thing is that is sounds quite modern, and I like that it’s not historically accurate. That drumbeat whips around your ears. A certain note of destruction is what I was looking for. The instrument used is a hundred-year-old instrument that Volker inherited from his grandmother. He refurbished it and it’s called a harmonium. He played these three notes, and in the harmonium you basically puff air with foot pedals. You hear the machine, the creaks and cracks of the harmonium. It’s another theme of the film—the machinery and industrialization of war. Humans becomes killing machines. They lose everything that is warm and human. It fit the theme of the film and then he put it through a distortion app, and that’s how it came about.

Do you think there was something that a German director could say about this story that no one else could?

EB: That’s the only reason why I made it. It’s a German novel and it’s part of our cultural heritage. It really sits deep with me and I read it when I was very young. When my producer called me to ask if we should make this movie together, I went home and thought, what a great idea. It’s been sitting there, but should I really make this? There’s another film that was made that’s probably on the top lists of many filmmakers, so the potential for failure was huge. I went home and discussed it at the dinner table, and my kids are usually not interested in my work. But the moment I mentioned the title, my daughter whipped around and said, I just read it in school—she was seventeen at the time—and you have to make it, it’s the best book I’ve ever read. So if a girl of age seventeen, ninety years later is still impacted by the book, it must have some relevance today. I made the movie because in America, in England, you can look back at the scars from the wars as much as in any other county. But there’s also a sense of pride. Americans can tell a hero’s journey because their fathers went to help liberate Europe from Fascism. The English defended their country because they were attacked. There’s something honorable there. There is a sense of legacy and pride you can look back on. In Germany, there’s nothing but shame, guilt, horror, terror, a sense of responsibility towards what happened. I grew up with that and still feel it, even generations later. It’s in my DNA. I thought if I made a film, creatively, I’d have something new to add the conversation. And it might be interesting for other countries to see how Germans tell their story, with that history.

Q&A with Chris Smith

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Sr.

Is it correct that you had a very small crew, during production? Was that always the plan?
Chris Smith: When we first went out to Robert Downey Jr.’s house in the Hamptons, he said that we couldn’t bring a crew. Which I only found out two days beforehand. And I personally had not picked up a camera in almost ten years. I had shot my first five movies, but as the business evolved… and people were using cinematographers, it was just sort of something that I wasn’t doing any more. So this actually got me back shooting, which was a great, liberating thing for me. On Hundred Foot Wave, I went over with, you know, just a C300, and I had a sound kit and a light… I think, generally, the production values of documentaries has changed so much in recent years: people are shooting with Alexas, and it’s really fancy. This film was just me, and Kevin [Ford] shooting, and maybe sound once in a while…. but it was very low-fi. That kind of got me excited about this kind of opportunity with documentary, which is so liberating, and which feels so real… and is how I started thirty years ago!

This film changed my life, and the way that I make movies, completely.

“Follow the film” is a filmmaking ethos that we learn about in your movie. Can you discuss what that concept means to you?
CS: There are two things I should say about that: during our very first interview, we were going through Robert Downey Sr.’s filmography, and he talked about Rittenhouse Square, which was a documentary he did — the last film that he did — and he said that they learned early on to “trust anything, and anything can happen.” And I thought that was such a guiding force for this project. Like, it was something that… you realized, that if you open yourself up to… I mean, I’ve always looked at documentaries as, the best that we can do [as documentarians] is to reflect back the world that we’ve been allowed into. And the experience of making this film definitely challenged that! I thought it was an interesting challenge to try to do. This film changed my life, and the way that I make movies, completely. You know… I’m someone who has a little bit of OCD, so I’m always trying to control everything in film, because… you know, if the sun is moving, you’re worried about the lighting, for instance. In the past I might have said, “we can’t shoot here— the conditions aren’t perfect.” And one thing that Sr. imparted on us… for example, when we were interviewing him in that theater and a siren goes off, and you hear me say, “wait, we’ve got to hold up for the siren,” he just says, “oh, it’s fine! It all fits.” And, to me, it made me think about the world around us differently. We did a series on big wave surfing, called Hundred Foot Wave, which I shot right after this, and the main interview happened during a hail storm. So it went from cloudy, to bright sun, back to cloudy, back to bright sun… and hail was hitting the windows… and the pipes started banging… and normally, I would have gotten in my own head, and frustrated, and decided to cancel the interview— we’ve just got to do it at a different time. But coming off of Sr., I learned to sort of accept the chaos of the things we can’t control. And that, to me, was probably the best thing to come out of this experience.

With this film, you’ve likely introduced many people to Robert Downey Sr.’s films. Was it a challenge to incorporate his work into your own?
CS: I think one of the main missteps we made, when we first started working on the movie, is that we actually tried to make it a retrospective of his career. And that is where we failed, I think. In the final cut, there’s enough in there that, if you’re interested, you can go back and you can watch those films. But it was… we were sort of being lead by the work, as opposed to actually being lead by his life, and his relationship with Jr. So that was something that took a while to figure out. Because when we started, he also wasn’t ill, you know? The first day we shot, we went out to lunch and walked somewhere. So I never looked at it as, “we’re going to be documenting the decline of someone’s life.” He seemed like he had a lot of energy, and a lot of opinions! So I just thought it would be great— an interesting portrait of this person. So I think, in my head, when we started… it was just looking at the life of an artist. And then it evolved. But those things that you start with can stay with you, and can kind of become almost like an obstacle— and that was something that took a while to let go of, and to realize that, no, we don’t have to do an exhaustive retelling of his career: if people want to learn more about his movies, they can do that. I don’t think that’s the role of— that’s an element of this film, but it’s not the primary focus.

Throughout your career, you’ve followed many kinds of subjects and told many kinds of stories. But it seems like ‘portrait of an artist’ stories hold a special place for you, given that your first film American Movie, has some similar themes to Sr.
CS: American Movie was interesting in the sense that [the subject of the film and I] were living almost the exact same life at that time: I was living in the edit room when he was down there editing… They told me I could use their facilities, so I was sleeping behind the flatbeds. It was interesting because, like, a lot of it was just me and a camera… and the situation was mirrored in that what was happening to him was also happening to me. I had a film at Sundance, and anyone I told I was making American Movie as the next film told me it was a terrible idea. And I don’t disagree with their criticism! Because making a movie about making a movie is not usually a good idea. But I just felt like… I had a conviction that maybe there was something there. But in terms of why you’re drawn to certain things… the only thing I can go off of, is that it’s an instinct. Just sometimes, certain things seem interesting to you, at whatever point in your life you’re at. And in this case, meeting Robert Downey Sr… he was just an interesting person to spend time with. And I felt like if I enjoyed that experience, I would hope it would transfer to other people.

Q&A with Laura Poitras

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

You really weave so many stories together so beautifully in the film. How did you and Nan weave in and out of each other’s lives?

Laura Poitras: Nan and I have intersected, sometimes literally or sometimes we’ve come across each other’s work. I was first introduced to Nan’s artwork when I was studying filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. That was the late 80s and she had already published the book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which I think is how the larger audience came to know her work, those that weren’t in New York. But she was also still traveling with the slideshow and she would come to the Bay Area to screen. I never got to see it with her projecting, but I did see Ballad in the early 90s. She was always a groundbreaking woman and artist who was just creating a new cinematic language. I find her still photographs to be so cinematic, right? They suggest stories that you lean into with the framing and the mise en scene. And then obviously the sequencing creates a storytelling in the slideshows. When I made Citizen Four and was traveling with it, we met at a film festival and then we reconnected around the Sackler issue and pain. We were working on a letter—there had been another situation of toxic philanthropy in the art world and a mutual friend invited both Nan and I for breakfast. It was during that breakfast that she told me about the film because Nan had already begun filming her actions with the intention of making a film. During this meeting she said she was looking for collaborators. She was also was looking for producers and we started talking about Howard Gertler, who she had just met and who was one the producers on How to Survive a Plague, about the AIDS crisis. I kept thinking about the project and volunteered for it after that.

I was struck by your background and her background and the two of you doing this together. There must have been a point where you had this conversation about how this was going to work.

LP: With non-fiction filmmaking, there is always something of an organic process that happens. You go in with a set of ideas and then they evolve and change. I was originally very compelled by the contemporary story of Nan taking on the Sackler family and these protests and the sort of direct action that felt very in line with my previous works. I was a little nervous about the artist biography part just because there are so many films about renowned people and I wonder how they function as stories… do they rely on the renown of the subject versus standing alone as films? So I had a little hesitancy there, but I couldn’t not do it. I couldn’t not go into her or go into her work. It was a very specific thing that happened. I was working on the film and saw her piece about her sister which is called Sisters, Saints and Sibyls. There’s a short excerpt where you see the three screens. It’s a devastating work about her sister. And there are certain lines in that, after her sister’s suicide and after her mother says to tell the children it was an accident. It sort of felt so much about what drives Nan. Like this relentless pursuit of truth. This idea of pretending it was an accident, I think that catapulted her at a very young age into being someone who is in resistance to what mainstream society is thinking. That’s what her family was thinking, or what the 50s and 60s thought of young girls and sexuality. I think at a very young age Nan was thrust into oppositional positions. When I saw this piece, I felt like it was so important that the film include her sister. But I didn’t know if that was something that Nan wanted. I would have obviously respected if she didn’t want to talk about something so deep and so painful. We talked and I told her why I thought it was important to the film, and she said that it was something she would talk about in the film. And we worked very closely on how the story of her sister is told in the film.

There’s something so fierce about Nan and she’s been on the right side of history for so long

Were there other specific parts of this film that you felt strongly about including in the film that you two had discussions about?

LP: Going back to the theme of portrait versus biopic, I was very clear that I wanted not to make a film that was, this happened, then this happened, and that was just following the beats of her life. I wanted to be selective around the story we were telling and particularly that it’s casting a critique on the larger society. This is the cruelty of society—of this society, not all societies. With the editing team, we first had Joe Bini who is a really incredible editor and who had worked with Werner Herzog and Lynne Ramsay, among others. He worked on this document by going through the material and built this dramaturgy document which had this kind of weaving and these themes. And each of these chapters had a theme. The first theme was “Merciless Logic,” which is a kind of like, this is who we are as a society. This is a society that destroys people, a society that crushes people that rebel, it’s a society that is conservative and allows the Sackler family to profit off many generations of Americans dying. And the government says nothing. I knew very early on that it was going to move in the direction of cinematic societal critique. And I knew very early on that the exhibition she did in New York at Artists Space was going to be a pinnacle of the film, at the beginning of third act. It was something so important that Nan twice stopped herself in that situation and was looking around and saying, generations are dying, my generation is dying here. And the government is doing nothing; people are doing nothing. I knew there would be a convergence between the contemporary pain thread and what happened around the AIDS crisis and particularly this exhibition, which was an unapologetic celebration of queer sexuality, while also acknowledging the devastation of this community. It’s kind of hard to imagine all that Nan endured. Someone who found her family and David Armstrong in the work she did and the trans communities in Boston and New York and then lost so many of those close friends. I knew I was always going to have include that, from early on. Then who to focus on kind of emerged from that. There’s a lot of people in Nan’s life that aren’t featured in the film because we had to make certain choices. David Armstrong was clearly important, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz… what a man. If only we had his voice today.

Well in a way we do, because of his art. Can you talk about the interviews and over what period of time they took place? I was very moved when we were allowed to hear Nan say “could you please stop,” and I wonder if there were other moments like that.

LP: We wanted the audience to feel that something was happening over time and the interviews didn’t just happen in an afternoon. And that there was a back and forth. They took place probably over a year and half. They were audio only in Nan’s apartment in the same room where the meetings would happen, in the living room. I would come over and I sort of joke we’d procrastinate for a few hours because it was not easy stuff to get into. We were specific in each of them about what we would talk about, so she knew ahead of time. Sometimes someone else would be there. When we talked about Barbara [her sister] it was important for both of us to make sure someone else was there to make sure we were okay in how we processed it before and after. That was her close colleague, Alex Kwartler, who is an executive producer on the film and was very involved by working with her and making sure it was safe, because it was really intense stuff that she shares in this film. So we did these over a year and half, we did the first round and made a rough cut, we showed it to Nan, and then there were things she wanted to back and talk about more.

Were there things you thought you knew about Nan and her work where you realized, I didn’t really know this at all?

LP: In the second chapter called “Another Realm,” I hadn’t realized she was so young when she was sent to foster care and was kind of on her own at such a young age. And then this whole body of work that MIT gave with the polaroid cameras. That story I didn’t know the extent of—the fact that she still had these photographs, and that they feel like the work of a mature artist. Those David Armstrong photographs are so beautiful and she was such a young person making them, yet she was so fully formed as an artist. That was an incredible discovery. There was one of her first pictures of David and Tommy in the sand pit, and we had that photograph from far away, and late in the editing process she found the close-up. It was just these two beautiful queer men in a time when being queer, there wasn’t language for it.

Can you talk about the questions that you chose to answer, and the questions that you chose not to answer?

LP: We were not interested in teasing the audience or withholding anything. I think with any film, there’s a time when the audience has the emotional capacity to connect to something. And in the film we’re talking specifically about her sister. There were times when things in the third part were earlier, and we experienced that the audience was not ready. There were certain things we wanted to lay out, and certain things we chose to withhold because we felt like the audience’s emotional capacity had shifted over time. For instance, there’s this very powerful line where Nan says “that’s the problem. How do you show the world that you did experience it, you did feel that, it did happen, that’s why I take pictures.” It’s a very thesis-like statement. We tried that once earlier in the film, and it just felt like random exposition. A thesis statement, but not in a good way. But hopefully when you hear it at the end, it’s with emotion and says something about not only her sister, but why she does what she does as an artist. That’s just storytelling. You try things, maybe this doesn’t work here but it’s important and we’ll come back to it. I did think that this film takes you on a journey or down rabbit holes and you don’t know why you’re going down it, and then you learn later. For instance, some people know some of the characters like Cookie, but some people don’t, they don’t know she was such a force, and we don’t want to manipulate that.

What has been interesting for you as you’ve traveled with this film?

LP: I think the thing that’s been moving is how this film emotionally resonates with people, and sometimes in very different ways. Sometimes people have experience with addiction or they have a sibling that they’ve lost, or coming out. It’s powerful to see the different ways it resonates and that’s what we wanted. In the editing, we really wanted it to stay with people and move them in some way. When you direct non-fiction, you’re having your own experiences, and you hope that the audience has some of those as well. There’s something so fierce about Nan and she’s been on the right side of history for so long. She had to makes these choices at a very young age, and they’re not easy choices.