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Q&A with Alexander Payne and David Hemingson

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

Can you start by telling us about your exposure, not only to the screenplay, but also to the world of Barton, and what drew you to visit this type of space?
Alexander Payne: I didn’t know the world. I went to an all-boys school, but it was a Jesuit school in Omaha. I had the idea for the movie, but I knew that one day I was going to have to do research and go out and visit these schools and talk to people and everything, and I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. And then I received a pilot script written by this guy that took place in a private school, a boarding school, and it was good enough that I called him up and asked if he would consider writing a story for me in that same world. Well, it turns out he does know that world. He’s from Connecticut. He didn’t go to a boarding school, but he went to a private day school. And Giamatti went to Yale!

David Hemingson: I wrote this pilot about my own experiences at the Watkinson School in Hartford, where I went for six years. And it was kind of a deeply personal story, because it involved my father, who was teaching there at the time, who I was estranged from, and my mother, who was a registered nurse. We were from a lower middle-class family and it was a strange transition for me. And I had an uncle who was a World War II veteran, a guy named Robert Hale, who was this remarkable guy. He’s the prototype for Paul. I mean, just like, baroquely profane, fantastically kind of stoic. He was like a modern-day stoic.  And he kind of raised me in some of the strictest and most hilarious terms at times, but through it with a lot of love. A lot of aphorisms that are shot through the movie are directly from him.

AP: Once we had the screenplay, I went out there with script in hand and really through just being there and location scouting, was able to soak up that environment.

DH: You were there for how many months? Eight or nine?

AP: I’m always in a place for a lot of months before shooting. I gotta soak up the atmosphere and get it right, or some version of it right. A lot of that came through location scouting. Location scouting is really a magnificent process because that’s when you kind of get to know where you are, because for every house in the film, you’ve been to 30. For every school in the film, you’ve been to 30. And you meet people and talk to them and you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community. It’s limited, it can be superficial, but given the limitations, it sure helps me. My big experience previous to this was going to Hawaii for The Descendants. I was there for about nine months before shooting to get it right. In that movie I was trying to portray a certain class of people and it took me a while to get to know them so that I felt I was representing them accurately.

you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community

What was the process like between you two as you developed the screenplay?
AP: Well the the screenplay developed in a really—to use an overused word—organic way. I knew he was a fine writer. I gave him a premise that I had been sitting on for about a decade. He did the writing, but we developed the story and the feel and the texture of it together. The soul of it. By the time we’re done, it’s personal to us both. And I feel it’s directable by me. And he feels good about it.

DH: It’s great because I worked about 27 years in television and this my first produced feature, so I’ve had a lot of experience and a lot of different genres, you know?

AP: And adapting yourself to different showrunners, right?

DH: Yeah, I had to work with showrunners, but working with him honestly has been, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s really great…

AP: Why would you possibly think I’m tired of hearing that?!

DH: He’s a very generous guy, he smells great, he’s a lovely dude. No, it was a lovely experience and it was great because I didn’t go to film school. I’m kind of an autodidact that way. I was an attorney. But I quit my practice when I was in my 20s to do this because I hated being a lawyer. But I spent 27 years doing this, and he has this incredibly deep and vast knowledge of film. And I kind of had to go to film school on his back by going to CineFile at the corner of Sawtelle and Santa Monica in LA, a great resource. Two guys there, JP and Greg, they’re phenomenal. And they have like 30,000 movies, so in the process of developing the script, I read short stories, and I’d send him a short story and be like, well, this feels like an area. And then I’d get down to breaking it into a loose outline, and we’d start talking about movies—Hal Ashby, for example. I watched all the Ashby, I watched all the Altman, and saturated myself with all these movies and we kind of went from there.

This film is deceptive in a lot of ways. Because it feels like it was an indie film made in the 70s, but it’s made today, with tremendous care and detail. I mean, you have a helicopter that flies. It’s incredibly ambitious in its scale.
AP: Helicopters actually aren’t that big a deal! I was like, oh we got a helicopter. They’re actually not that expensive to rent. But finding the period one was. We had to get one.

DH: Finding a place to land it was quite a piece of work.

It’s this character-driven film but it has so much, like you said, pomp and circumstance happening in the 70s.
AP: We were just chatting outside and I brought up something that happened last night. We screened the film up in Pleasantville at the Jacob Burns Center. And a guy comes up to me afterwards and he goes, I’m a property master. I have to ask, where did you find those rowing machines? You know, they’re pretty hard to find. I said, thanks for noticing! For a three-second shot in the movie, you’re the first to notice! They’re not in the screenplay. Somebody had the idea, I think the production designer said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got rowing machines? We finally tracked them down at Harvard, and they had to go up into the attic or in the basement to pull them out, and then we brought them to St. Mark’s School where we were shooting. It’s a three-second shot, but yes, there’s a deceptive scope to the movie. Even for the smallest details, we tried to make them accurate.

The screenplay is kind of fascinating because we believe we’re going to follow these four kids through the whole film, and then you pull them right out!
I wanted to do that on purpose because when I was writing, I started to think about Dead Poets Society. And I love it, but I don’t need to do that. I don’t need five kids, I don’t need to service all their arcs. I don’t want to!

AP: He’s too lazy (laughs)!

DH: I’m way too lazy. But no, I wanted to get down to three people with very distinct issues that they were holding over on their own lives. In other words, people with pain, people with damage that weren’t getting past it, and I didn’t want to do it for eight people. I wanted to do it for three people. Obviously, it was going to be Paul, and I very much wanted to do it with Mary, because she felt very spiritually and emotionally like my mom in many respects. And then with Dominic [Angus Tully], I felt I was plugging in a lot of my angst and indignation as a kid into him. And I just wanted to see these three people, as opposed to like eight people. I wanted to make it a more concentrated experience.

How did you cast Dominic? He’s tremendous.
AP: It’s tough casting kids. Because you want them to be believable. And not seem too old. I went through this on Election 25 years ago. It’s challenging to get teenagers who look like teenagers, and not like actors in their 20s pretending to be teenagers. The professional kids are often much too professional and too polished. And then you have to worry about the non-professionals and the non-actors having the chops to do it. Anyway, it just takes time. And the casting director here in New York—a woman named Susan Shopmaker—fielded about 800 submissions. We didn’t find Angus. We felt maybe we missed one. We found some of the other parts, but not him. As the auditions kept trickling in, dwindling, but trickling in, we finally did what we were going to do anyway, which is go out to the schools where we were supposed to shoot the movie and just contact the drama departments and ask, who you got? And there he was at Deerfield. When we shot, he was a senior at Deerfield, playing a junior at a version of Deerfield. From Deerfield, I also picked up another actor. The blonde kid in class who says, “He does what in the Cobb salad? I eat that Cobb salad.” He was an actual junior at Deerfield. And not an actor!

Q&A with Reinaldo Marcus Green

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Bob Marley: One Love

Can you talk about the research that you did, and about the consultants that you brought in to make sure you got it right? I was so impressed with how authentic this story was.
Reinaldo Marcus Green: So, I’ll start with the consultants. We had a gentleman by the name of Neville Garrick, who we represent in the film. He had done the album art work, and he also did the lighting for all of the shows. And so Neville was still alive. Rest his soul – he passed away recently. But he was on set every day.

Neville was in the room with Bob. So, we had people that knew Bob and that were in his close circle. They were very, very helpful in, you know, bringing out character details and nuances… of helping us understand what these moments in Bob’s life were like.

When Neville was helping us, obviously he is older now, everybody has their own recollection of what it was like. So you have to… you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but certainly he was there the night Bob got shot, he left, he was the one that drove Judy home. So we knew enough and then we had to fill in the blanks.

there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius.

So Neville was a big, a big part of our puzzle. Fae Ellington, who’s a cultural icon in Jamaica, she was there for language and dialect, and to make sure of the historical accuracy of what we were doing. The film takes place in 1976, 1977, and that required a certain understanding of the time period. They use certain words in patois today that they didn’t use back then, for example.

And of course the family helped tremendously. Ziggy was on set pretty much every day. And it was great for us because he walks like his dad, he looks like his dad, he moves like his dad…. Just having that spirit around was really, really helpful.

And, again, it’s usually the characterization. Like, you know, Bob skipped two steps or whatever it was. Those kind of little details that really help add specificity to the performance.

The casting in the film is incredible, particularly the choice to have Kingsley Ben-Adir play the title role.
RMG: Well, I didn’t know Kingsley’s work that well before casting him, or I should say that I didn’t realize that I knew his work. I saw the movie One Night in Miami, but I had forgotten that it was him. And so, you know, when we were searching, we looked everywhere – all over the world – to try to find Bob, and obviously we were looking for a needle in a haystack.

To state the obvious, we were never going to find Bob himself, so I needed someone that had enough of Bob’s attributes. And after about eleven and a half months, maybe a year, Kingsley’s tape showed up. And there were just a lot of really great actors that didn’t even want to tape for the role, because it’s Bob. It’s really scary, you know, and so many things might not go right.

You know, he really captured the look, the feel, the movement of Bob, all of that stuff. And so, when Kingsley’s tape came in, even though he has short hair, and he’s quite a big dude (he’s like 6’2”… he’s a big guy), but still, there was something really interesting about the tape. He had me leaning in, and, you know, not quite grabbing the popcorn, but sort of, that was kind of the feeling… like, man, there’s something really interesting, super intriguing, going on here. It was everything he wasn’t doing, you know? I’d seen so many tapes that were mimics of the Bob interviews online, and he didn’t do that, it was really an interpretation of Bob, and I thought that was very smart of him. And I knew I wanted to meet him, and now, of course, I’m thinking, “okay, if I put him in a wig, and prosthetics, like… how do we get close to evoking Bob?

But he brought that believable baseline character. And so that, that’s really, was the start, you know. But I didn’t know if he could sing, or dance, or do any of that stuff. But I wasn’t concerned about that. I mean, obviously I was— but ultimately it’s about the vulnerability of the performance. I knew if he was a great actor, he’d be able to get the level we needed.

And Kingsley, he did the work. I mean, he lost 40 pounds. He taught himself how to play guitar, how to sing, all the choreography. Just the work that he had to do in seven or eight months, to really just dive into creating Bob.

At the time shown in the film, Jamaica is a nation that is just coming out of colonial rule. Can you talk about that element of the story, and how you incorporated it into the film?
RMG: You know, the first script was a great skeleton for us, and kudos to Terrence [Winter] and [Frank E. Flowers] for getting us there. There was a lot more backstory in their draft. And there was just a lot more movie, to be honest, which was great—if we were making a limited series or something it would have been perfect. It was so, so big, it just was too much story to pack into one film. We were trying to find, like, what is the heart of the movie? What is the movie that we’re going to tell in two, two and a half hours? What’s the most critical time in Bob’s life that we thought would capture the essence of the man?

Now, can you possibly do it all? There’s been 500 books written about Bob. Whose truth is it, right? There are so many stories, you can focus on the Wailers, you can focus on Peter and Bunny. There’s just so many different avenues. But this avenue just felt like the right one for us. It’s 1976, there’s an assassination attempt on Bob’s life… Jamaica was in political turmoil. I didn’t know the intricacies of that when I took this project on, you know? But how do we make that accessible to people that don’t know about Jamaican politics or history? And all the stuff about how the CIA was maybe involved… there’s a lot of, so we had to try to set people in place in time right away. And Bob was at the center of that, but he was not yet a global star. He was a national star. And it was Exodus that really put him on the map, put the music on the map, and that just felt like a critical time to focus on. Like, he went from being just a musician to a revolutionary, truly.

It’s what brought his music to the masses. Now, he also created Kaya at that time, which our movie doesn’t go into, but there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius. Obviously, he gets his cancer diagnosis during that time and our movie ends before then, but it just felt like that was the right period of time to try to capture in Bob’s life that gave us some insight.

I’m still learning about him. I mean, you know, I wanted to try to show us the man behind the buttons and the pins and the bags. And, you know, Bob is still something of an enigma to most people. He’s a tricky one to pin down. But hopefully we got some juice from his family, and from things that we didn’t know about.

I understand you premiered in Jamaica. What was the response there like?
RMG: It was incredible. That was incredible. I mean… I was nervous. I was a wreck! So yeah, I was a wreck. That was crazy. Jamaicans… They do not play. Like, they were coming into the theater saying,, “nah.” But then leaving they were like, “you did your thing…” So it was the energy of, ‘we’re okay. We did our thing.’ “It was good,” they said. And “good” in Jamaica is “excellent” anywhere else, I swear! It was very humbling. It’s a humbling place to premiere your movie. They are people who have been through a lot, and the fact that they accepted Kingsley as Bob Marley is a pretty big deal, so I think we did alright.

Q&A with Martin Scorsese

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

Marty, the book and the film tell the same story, but they tell it in a different way. Can you talk about the process where you saw this film as a love story, a marriage story, and an Osage story?
Martin Scorsese: I think it goes back first to my love of the American Western genre that I grew up with in the 1940s and 50s, and that was capped off in the early 60s with The Wild Bunch. Then that ended. New world, new time. We came in, we started making films, I made my own scores. I rarely worked with composers because they were part of the Hollywood studio system. I eventually got to work with the likes of Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein. In any event, I’ve always kept away from it. When I was given the book to Killers of the Flower Moon, I was even more cautious because it had to do with oil. I remember movies like Boomtown and things like that. But I don’t like oil in the street, in the mud, and that sort of thing. I had read the book, but I hadn’t really understood about the nature of the Osage Nation, and how sophisticated and how rich they had become. The scene you’re seeing at the beginning in black and white with the airplanes? That’s their actual 16mm footage. We couldn’t fake that one. The rest of the prologue we shot, and Ellen Kuras directed it for me. We have an old camera from 1916 where we do hand cranking, in black and white. And that was based on their actual footage. All of this was really fascinating. I said, then what happened? They were the richest people in the world, per capita. Then all of a sudden, they’re dying off, just like that. Eric Roth and I started working on the script, and no matter what I did with it, I found that Leo DiCaprio playing Tom White felt too familiar. I felt I had seen it before.  

The violence is done through love and trust

Yeah, you would have basically been making Thunderheart.
Right, or at best, I kept seeing Henry Fonda on the porch of My Darling Clementine, with his legs up on the post. Or the best of Clint Eastwood. We were trying to find the way to make it different. Eric and I were trying to find different ways, and I kept thinking, what’s going on here, really? And, the biggest influence was the visit to Oklahoma that first time. Because I’d never seen land like that—I liked it, I loved it. I tried to create with the Atmos some of the sense and the feeling of being in the prairie. You see differently and you get to know people differently. We started by having a meeting with Chief Standing Bear. At first, I was rather cautious. And so was he. 

How did you make initial contact with him?
When the producers first gave me the book, I told Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas and Rick Yorn that the first thing we have to do is make sure it’s okay with the Osage. First, let’s see how far they’ll go with us. Not a hagiography, right? And it went very well. It was in Pawhuska, in the Chief’s office with him and his wife, Julie, and Addie Roanhorse, and Chad Renfro. They were very polite. But they knew the movies I made. And they were concerned about victims and depicting the violence. I was told the meeting would take about half an hour. But instead, it lasted two and a half hours. I started telling stories, we were listening, laughing a little bit and I told him about Silence. He could see Silence.

And Kundun.
And Kundun. One of the guys said, listen, you need to be careful. You’re going to have Mollie Burkhart—Mollie Kyle—as a character and you’re going to be putting words in her mouth. She’s a person that we admire and a person we love. And he was absolutely right. These people are all dead and we’re going to be putting words in their mouth.  After that meeting, we felt more comfortable. Then there was another meeting and they said, well now you have to make this film. Then they took me on location scouting. That’s when I fell in love with the place. There were three main places— Pawhuska, Gray Horse, and Hominy. Three units of the Osage Nation. And because most of the events occurred to the people in Gray Horse, the people in Gray Horse insisted that we meet them too. I felt that that was going to be even a bigger difference, and they organized a dinner for over 250 people, and they were in full regalia. It was beautiful. And, during this traditional dinner, a number of the descendants got up and started talking about it, and that’s the story. Once I heard them, I said, what are we doing with the Bureau guys? I’ve seen that movie. I like those movies, but…

But you haven’t seen this other movie.
Exactly. And then these guys are getting up to speak and talking about their uncle coming in the room and dying in front of them. Margie Burkhart got up—she’s the great granddaughter of Ernest Burkhart. And she said, don’t forget that it’s not just victims and villains, it’s not that straightforward. Ernest and Mollie were in love, she said. Remember that they were in love, and that stayed in my head.

There’s a lot of complexity there. Did you really see it as love story? I kept questioning whether he loved her.
Absolutely. And her too. How much did she know? She must have sensed something. But she trusted and loved him so much and he tells her, “I’m behind you.” When we shot that scene, there were other takes, but that was the take where I believed him. I said, he is behind you. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Of course, they’re giving her this medication, but nothing’s going to hurt her, you know? It’s just going to slow her down. That’s it. Does he understand what’s really going on? No. He’s weak and he’s afraid, and he may be a little dim at times. But the reality is that he doesn’t really believe that Uncle King, that Hale is going to let it go that far. I think Ernest really begins to get it when Hale says, you just got to sign this paper. When Steve Spielberg saw the picture he asked, So Marty, what’s on the paper? I said, I don’t know—are you going to sign papers from that guy?! We didn’t even know when we were shooting if he was going to sign it. Then Leo just took it and signed it. He’s so weak; he gave in. It was perfect.  

You have to be really smart to play dumb.
He would sometimes laugh about it and ask me what was going on in his head. I said he has to be totally delusional about his uncle.

And he deceives himself about the marriage.
The marriage between the two of them, they really loved each other. Everybody kept saying that. Even the FBI guys at the end in the book, they kept looking at each other and asking why she was still in the courtroom. What is it with her, when is she going to realize the truth about this guy? And then she broke up with him afterwards. After, yeah. But I thought, well, that’s the metaphor. The violence is done through love and trust.  

One of the things I really loved about the film, and all your films, is the anthropology. All the details… the cups and saucers, the chairs, everything. It’s amazing. It really looked like Oklahoma.
Well, that’s Jack Fisk. He’s great. Paul Thomas Anderson suggested him to me. We were talking about this… I had to change so much of the crew after Covid. And I put Jackie West on costumes. Originally, when they talked about the rich Osage, I had imagined Mollie’s house to be almost like Tara in Gone with the Wind. And Jack did the research and pointed out to me, it’s more like this and that. Oh my, I said, so we don’t have her coming down the big staircase? My biggest question to him was, how do we know that they’re rich? And he said, well, they spend money differently. And we realize, of course, the cars. It’s a joke, they used to say Europeans would buy cars and when you get a flat, you just go buy another one. Well, it’s a joke, but in reality, a hundred years ago—you know, no roads. You get a flat tire in the middle of a field, you might as well leave the car there.  

That’s right, because you can’t get the inner tubes for them. (To the audience) These are old people talking up here!
You might as well leave the car there, go buy another, and eventually go pick it up, if you can. But the thing that Jack pointed out was that to them, cars were like horses. So, no problem if you had six horses, but if you have six cars, you don’t know what you’re doing with your money.

NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW NAMES 2023 HONOREES

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NBR Awards Gala to Take Place on Thursday, January 11, 2024 in New York City

New York, NY (December 6, 2023) – The National Board of Review (NBR) announced today their 2023 honorees, with top awards including Killers of the Flower Moon for Best Film; Martin Scorsese for Best Director for Killers of the Flower Moon; Paul Giamatti for Best Actor for The Holdovers; and Lily Gladstone for Best Actress for Killers of the Flower Moon.

“Killers of the Flower Moon is the stunning masterpiece from one of our greatest filmmakers, Martin Scorsese. The NBR is proud to award this complex, important, and deeply resonant epic as our Best Film and Scorese as our Best Director,” said NBR President Annie Schulhof. “We are also thrilled to honor Bradley Cooper with our 2024 Icon Award – an equally impressive actor, writer, producer, and director, who brings his passion, artistry, and dedication to everything he does, including his latest beautifully sublime film, Maestro.”

Established in 1909, the NBR recognizes excellence in filmmaking. This year 245 films were viewed by a select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals, academics, and students, many of which were followed by in-depth discussions with directors, actors, producers, and screenwriters. Ballots were tabulated by the accounting firm of Lutz and Carr CPA.

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate the art of cinema, with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Breakthrough Performance, and Best Directorial Debut, as well as their signature honor, Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography. This year, the National Board of Review has established a new award category, Outstanding Achievement in Stunt Artistry, to celebrate the accomplishments and work of stunt artists.

The honorees will be feted at the NBR Awards Gala, hosted by Willie Geist (Host, NBC News’ Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist and co-host, MSNBC’s Morning Joe) on Thursday, January 11, 2024 at Cipriani 42nd Street, in New York City.

Below is a full list of the 2023 award recipients, announced by the National Board of Review:

Best Film: Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Actor: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

Best Actress: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

NBR Icon Award: Bradley Cooper

Best Original Screenplay: David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Best Adapted Screenplay: Tony McNamara, Poor Things

Breakthrough Performance: Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One

Best Directorial Debut: Celine Song, Past Lives

Best Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best International Film: Anatomy of a Fall

Best Documentary: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Best Ensemble: The Iron Claw

Outstanding Achievement in Stunt Artistry:
Director Chad Stahelski
Stunt Coordinators Stephen Dunlevy & Scott Rogers
Fight Coordinator Jeremy Marinas
John Wick: Chapter 4

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto, Barbie & Killers of the Flower Moon

Top Films (in alphabetical order):
Barbie
The Boy and the Heron
Ferrari
The Holdovers
The Iron Claw
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things

Top 5 International Films (in alphabetical order):
La Chimera
Fallen Leaves
The Teachers’ Lounge
Tótem
The Zone of Interest

Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order):
20 Days in Mariupol
32 Sounds
The Eternal Memory
The Pigeon Tunnel
A Still Small Voice

Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order):
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
All of Us Strangers
BlackBerry
Earth Mama
Flora and Son
The Persian Version
Scrapper
Showing Up
Theater Camp
A Thousand and One

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to the support of cinema as both art and entertainment. Each year, this select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics participates in illuminating discussions with directors, actors, producers and screenwriters before announcing their selections for the best work of the year. Since first citing year-end cinematic achievements in 1929, NBR has recognized a vast selection of outstanding studio, independent, foreign-language, animated and documentary films, often propelling recipients such as Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road into the larger awards conversation. In addition, one of the organization’s core values is identifying new talent and nurturing young filmmakers by awarding promising talent with ‘Directorial Debut’ and ‘Breakthrough Actor’ awards as well as grants to rising film students. With its continued efforts to assist up-and-coming artists in completing and presenting their work, NBR honors its commitment to not just identifying the best that current cinema has to offer, but also ensuring the quality of films for future generations to come.

Join the conversation @NBRfilm

Press Contacts:
Andy Gelb / Shawn Purdy / Lindsey Brown – SLATE PR
andy@slate-pr.com / shawn@slate-pr.com / lindsey@slate-pr.com
To request credentials to cover the NBR Gala Red Carpet please fill out the application form HERE

Q&A with David Petersen, Steven Melendez, and Mary Recine

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

How did the project begin?
David Petersen: So it began at a dog park, where all projects have to start! I had another film that began at a dog park, so this is my second one. Richard Termine is a photographer at the New York Times, and had photographed Steven since he was a kid, I think, and the company for a long time. He had just seen a film I had made about an opera, the making of an opera, another kind of weird film, and he said, “oh David, I’ve got a great idea for a film. You know, these kids have been dancing and this little ballet company’s been around for 30, 40 years. You know, they’re giving these kids an opportunity to dance, and one of them… Has danced all over the world.” That turned out to be Steven. And of course the first thing that came out of my mind, being a realistic filmmaker, is, “where’s the money?” And he said, “well I don’t have any money. But, you know they are close… they’re just in Midtown.” So I said, “well, you know, maybe… I do have my own camera… I could go down there.” So I went down there. And eleven years later, here we are.

It’s as hard to get into shelters as it is to get into maximum security prisons

And Steven, what made you agree to be a part of this project?
Steven Melendez: I didn’t actually know what the project would be when we set out. I certainly didn’t know it was going to take 11 years! I think Diana [Byer], who green lit it for the organization, definitely didn’t know it was going to be 11 years. I think she had in her mind that it was a three week project. And at that time, you know, I was, I was still principally a dancer, and I saw myself that way. And at that time, I hadn’t yet actually come to terms with what it meant to use or take ownership of my past, of my upbringing. And so the journey that the film shows is equally my journey of learning that actually being known as the “homeless dancer” maybe isn’t such a weird thing. Now I can own that title a little bit differently than I did when I thought I was just trying to make a name for myself as a performer. But working with David was fantastic. I mean, he’s a real artist and one thing that he says often is to pay attention to what he’s filming. I don’t know how he says it, “pay attention to what you’re filming,” or, “listen to the works,” I don’t know, whatever it is. And how it manifests on my side was that I felt really comfortable being able to tell him, “you know, David, you’re pointing the camera the wrong way. Actually, you’ve missed the important part here.” And one of the things that I’m really proud of about this film is that it talks about two subjects, homelessness and ballet that I think a lot of people have stereotypes in their mind of, and it doesn’t show a single one of those stereotypes. Not all homeless people are drug addicts or prostitutes. And not all ballet dancers have bloody toes. There’s a lot more to both of those worlds than I think a lot of people recognize and realize.

It’s not terribly uncommon for a documentary to take a long time, but the project sounds like it changed in scope over time. Could you talk a little bit about that journey, and how the story developed?
DP: Well, it started with me and a camera and a student named Jean Claude, who I taught at CUNY and Staten Island. And then things shifted when Mary Recine got involved– and we’d worked at PBS for a while. She’s a producer, and she came on, and that’s how we really got into the shelter. It’s as hard to get into shelters as it is to get into maximum security prisons. And I’ve filmed at maximum security prisons, because they get bad press. They always get bad press. So it was difficult. But this particular shelter, the director knew Steven, and thought of him as a great star and a wonderful, brilliant kid, which obviously helped a lot!

Mary Recine: Yes, getting into the shelters was everything. Of course, we knew that immediately. We realized we didn’t want to make a film [solely focused on] a dance program. We wanted to make a film about a journey, and we wanted to watch and see what would happen with these kids. And we knew Steven was going to take us on that journey. But we knew the story was more than Steven, and more than New York Theatre Ballet. So that was essential. Getting into the shelter was… it was extraordinary to be able to do that. They just said, no, and no, and no. But we wouldn’t give up, and we just kept going until they let us in. We reached out to Misty Copeland [because of her belief in the accessibility of the arts] in 2017, and we were trying to get ITVS to help fund the project. And Misty kindly lent her name to it, and now she’s involved, as is [her producing partner] Leyla [Fayyaz] to amplify [that the arts should accessible to everyone]. And that’s so important. As Steven said, we’re looking at ballet through homelessness and homelessness through ballet. And not many people really respond to that when you try to pitch that. I’ve [worked on] films about Nina Simone and Joan Didion… and people want the famous people films, you know. This was very hard to, to make happen. But it was a true joy.

Steven was a character early on, but how did you find the other characters in the film?
DP: There were a lot of kids we followed that didn’t make it into the film. Steven touched on that too. We followed this little kid named Victor, who was very sweet, and he wasn’t at that time in a shelter. He was in public housing. He was home insecure. But he was… he didn’t come to the shelter. So we had to try to get into the shelter and that’s what took so long. Then we met Yolanssie and Sharia, but then there were other kids like Antalyna, who is a really interesting person. We met a bunch of kids. We followed some of their families. But, you know, they’re always dealing with so many struggles and challenges that they just, you know, like all kids in this program or any kind of program that offers opportunities, if you’ve got challenges, you just can’t keep it going. So then they fell off. But Steven, you mentioned one thing that I thought was great about what the 11 years of production did do for the film. Can you talk about that?

SM: Yes: you know, a lot of times people (both when trying to understand homelessness and ballet, actually), people try to understand all of the meaning of it through a snapshot. You know, you go to the performance when your child is performing, and you assume somehow that that tells you about everything that they have learned that year. But in fact, that’s the product of a long process, and the process takes a whole year, if not longer, maybe a whole lifetime, a whole childhood, and the value of what that child has learned is so much greater than three minutes that they’re doing their dance with their classmates on the stage for their parents and grandparents. And it’s the same, honestly, when we talk about homelessness: you look at families, you can go to a shelter for a day, and maybe on that day you will see something that is jarring, or shocking, or maybe you won’t… but if you go back again and again and again, what I think you realize is that the people in these situations are not actually so dissimilar to the rest of us. And I’m sure there are some statistics on this. Something like 20% of the people in New York State are homeless or home insecure. There’s 100,000 migrants now who are living homeless on the streets. I mean, I don’t know all the numbers, I’m not a statistician. But it’s really jarring and the reality is that there are a lot of people who, as a society, we like to think are not like us… because we don’t want to believe we could be like them. For example, my mother when we were in the shelter, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital. She left the shelter every day in a white lab coat. She was one of the five people in New York State who could run the particular machine that occupied her entire office. And that machine happened to be used for separating the red blood cells from the white blood cells from the plasma. And the work that she was doing was on AIDS research in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. And she lived with her two children in a homeless shelter for three years because the home that we had which was a beautiful, actually I guess you saw it in the film, it was a beautiful home. It had a yard, it had a garage, it had a basement, it had a sinky floor, it had an attic, it was a beautiful home. But the landlord just dropped dead one day, and that’s sad for him, but what ended up happening was his home went into probate, and the person who took it over said, “okay, you’ve got to get out,” and it was really shocking and you know, you think, y’all are in New York, so you know, what does it take to move with a drop of a hat? You have to have it in your savings account: First month, last month, moving fees, deposit, all that stuff. And you need to find an apartment that’s appropriate to have two children in, that’s near a public school that’s appropriate. And certainly all that doesn’t happen overnight. So in the very immediate term, you have to pay for a hotel that night and the rest of that week while you search, and you pay the broker’s fee. And meanwhile, you have a full time job and two kids. Right? It’s sort of an impossible situation. And once you slip a little bit down the hole, there’s no way to claw yourself back out. The infrastructure of the city just isn’t built for that. So, I think what a film like this, filmed over 11 years, highlights is actually how – will use this word and I’m sure it’s the wrong word and I can’t think of anything right now – how “normal” homeless people are. That the families are real families. Not every homeless family has a broken home, right? The fathers and the mothers are there and they all are loving and they care and they have the best interests at heart for their children to aspire and to be more successful in their future than the parents were. And I think it’s really easy to quite literally step over the homeless and allow them to live on the margins of society. And I think we allow that as a society because we refuse to recognize how similar we are actually to them. Or they are to us, or I am to myself from ten years ago. So, yes, the amount of time it took to make this film is important. It’s important to see these stories over time.