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Q&A with Amber Sealey, Elijah Wood and Luke Kirby

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of No Man of God.

What was your initial reaction to the script?

Elijah Wood: I came into the script about five years ago, at a film festival in Austin, Texas, called Fantastic Fest. We were seating for a film (I can’t remember what the movie was), and the writer of the screenplay leaned over — knowing my company, and the kinds of movies we’re interested in making (genre films) — and he said, “I have this script about Ted Bundy that is about a portion of Ted Bundy’s life that is not as well documented, about his relationship to Bill Hagmaier, the FBI profiler, in the last four years of his life.” And our eyes kind of darted open! And we were super-keen to read the script. And we read the script, and we were blown away by it. Particularly because it’s this sort of chilling document about something that really happened between these two men over the course of these four years. And the script was so sparse in a way, in a beautiful way… that it sort of left room for these two people to discuss what they’re discussing over this period of time. I just found it really chilling, and moving as well.

Amber Sealey: My first thought was, “another Bundy movie?” And my next thought was, “me directing a Bundy movie?” But I was intrigued because I knew of Elijah’s company, and I was obviously a fan of his work, so I read the script and then it was such an easy, smooth read… like I just tore through it. And I found that I had a take! And then I met with Daniel Noah and Elijah and pitched, and I thought, “well, we’ll see if we’re on the same page.” If we’re on the same page, this conversation might get interesting. And it did— just right away there was a kind of… chemistry that we had. And we were talking about the same kind of things that we thought were really important to put forward in the film, and why we felt it was important to make this film even though there were already so many Bundy films out there. So we were just really on the same page, and I signed on.

Luke Kirby: I was in the middle of production of a play called Judgement Day, an Ödön von Horváth play, up at the armory in New York. And that play had a lot of… there were some themes about commitment to the state, sexual confusion, religion… it had a number of things. And I read the script for No Man of God, and it also moved very smoothly, it kind of offered that compelling reading experience, just by virtue of the writing being so fluid. And there was something within the story that kind of resonated with the play that I was doing. It sort of felt like there was a theme that was kind of culturally resonant that I attributed also to the play, and it felt like this was maybe a natural progression somehow. That maybe in some ways, the character I was playing in that play (which was written during World War II) was sort of an antecedent to this character. But I was really kind of reluctant and worried about the responsibility that comes with telling a story like this, so I kind of evaded it for as long as I could! And then Amber and I met in a park in Los Angeles. It was March 16th 2020, right before everything kind of collapsed and shut down. And we were able to just have a very thorough and open and honest conversation that was not just sort of, you know… effervescent and bubbly and looking forward to working together, but was more comprehensive in terms of the actual substance of what were going to do to tell this story. And Amber had such a compelling… well, personhood! And I was sort of drawn in, and as time wore on through the land of pandemico, I got on board.

everything has a whole new appearance when you’re researching this kind of stuff

LK: In terms of getting ready, once the die is cast, you’re just sort of committed. And no matter how hard you try to move away from it, at that point you do have a job to do. So, I sort of found myself almost physically kicking and screaming within myself. I didn’t feel especially… I didn’t have a lot of appetite. There were things that were kind of infecting me that didn’t feel great, but you know, in some ways — because were were in COVID and I was quarantining with my wife, and we were put up in a house in Los Angeles, and I had a pool, and we had this kind of very quiet lifestyle and I had her as my support… And I was able to jump in the pool and sink to the bottom and scream every once in a while. But there was really no way around it kind of infecting your perspective for the duration of the shoot. One of the things I do is I go for long runs. And every dark corner, every bush, everything has a whole new appearance when you’re researching this kind of stuff. And the world feels very dangerous and very scarily alive. Even, you know, any music you listen to is going to be completely altered by what you’re thinking about. I remember listening to Leonard Cohen’s album Death of a Ladies’ Man and suddenly it had this insanely different, disgusting perspective… and I’m sure Leonard Cohen would slap me with his Zen stick for even making the connection. But yeah, it’s just an impossible thing. The good fortune was that, you know, Amber and Elijah are excellent people, and by virtue of that, the whole crew was excellent people. We were sort of in an environment that felt very comfortable, very easy, fun was very present and curiosity was very present. So I was just happy to come to work and be with people, because it had been a long time since any of us had been with anyone. It was really kind of a delight in that way.

What would you hope your audience would do, think, or feel after seeing this film?

AS: I find that when I’m making a film, if I think about, or worry about, what the audience is going to think or feel, I sort of start drowning. Because the weight of those expectations, or, you know… I guess you could call it my “hopes” for what kind of experience people will have with the movie… it feels too heavy for me to bear. So I really try to just focus on telling the truth of the story. And making it, I guess to put it simply, a film I would want to watch myself. And I always like to assume that the audience is really smart— they’re going to see things in it that I don’t even see in it. And I love the concept of, every audience member is going to bring their own story to the film. It’s all subjective, right? We love things, we hate things, we see this, we don’t see that… and I kind of love that about film, in general. Someone can love something that someone else hates. I assume that whatever it is an audience brings with them, it’s fascinating to me. I love talking about film, I love hearing what other people got out of it, what it made them think or feel, and I love answering questions and hashing things out. So, in a sense, I don’t really have any expectations. At the same time, all I can talk about is what was interesting to me about this story and this film. What’s interesting to me is that two things can exist at the same time: we can be interested in this kind of person — the Ted Bundys of the world — we can be interested in why they do what they do, and how they do what they do… and we can know that this interest is maybe glorifying people that we shouldn’t glorify, or it’s putting our attention in the wrong places. Those two things can exist together, and they both need to be looked at. So, to me, you can make an entertaining film about someone like Bundy, and you can also ask really intelligent questions at the same time. It doesn’t all have to be just gore, or other salacious stuff. I guess I just hope that people think and feel something! And that they want to talk about it, bad or good. I hope that people pay attention to where we, as a society, put our attention. I think we are trained to put our attention on certain things by the world. By our phones, and computers, and the media we consume… we are trained to look at certain things. And I always like to ask, “yeah but what about that thing, or that person, off in the corner?” So that’s what I hope it makes people think about.

EW: I think what’s really unique about the film is that it doesn’t editorialize for you. It leaves you, in the audience, with the pieces of the puzzle to put together yourself and it allows you to walk away with your own feelings of what you just witnessed, about Ted and about Bill. And I love that about the film. I love that different people take different things away from it. Those are my favorite kinds of movies— the movies that don’t necessarily have tidy conclusions. They don’t tell you what you need to feel or think; they kind of leave it open for you.

Q&A with Andreas Koefoed

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

You’ve done a lot of music documentaries but I believe this is your first film based in the art world. How did you get involved?

Andreas Koefoed: A producer friend of mine got in touch and told me about this incredible story. He was in touch with this British art critic—Ben Lewis—that was writing a book about the whole affair. That was where it started. I felt like it was a really fantastic story on so many levels. The painting is discovered in 2005 for almost nothing and then twelve years later it becomes the most expensive painting ever sold, maybe even the most expensive object ever sold. That was mind-boggling. But then on top of that story, you add the whole authenticity story and that made it even more intriguing. I figured out that half of the world’s Leonardo scholars would say it is a da Vinci, and the other half would not. I felt there was potential for it to be almost like a farce, but about something that is very serious and also about human longings and the cynicism in the financial and political world of the art scene. There are so many layers to the story. So the challenge was how to fit this all into one narrative.

I felt there was potential for it to be almost like a farce

The structure is really fascinating because you introduce the journey of this painting through currency and tracking. That holds the film from the beginning as a way in for the audience.

AK: It took a long time to find the right structure and also the right way of telling the story. We knew pretty quickly that we wanted to tell it through the firsthand sources. We got in touch with the two art dealers who found it, the restorer, some of the experts, the curator at the National Gallery. But then at some point we didn’t have access to the firsthand sources like the oligarch—Rybolovlev—and especially Mohammed Bin Salman. So there we had to change the point of view a bit and go through some of the journalists and the people who had observed the story from the outside, or had dug into it as investigators. At some point we figured out that we had to deal with three different worlds that are in different ways secretive. In the first act, it was the art world, so we’d dig into the world of art dealers, restorers, experts and so on. The second world, which is the second act of the film, is the financial world. Simply by following the painting’s journey, we would automatically reach and then spend the time in the financial world and be able to look at the financial aspects of the story… the way extremely wealthy people are speculating in buying art, and how a lot of the world’s most fantastic art is locked away in freeports and lost for humanity in a way. And then in the third act, it’s the secret part of the political world where you go into that geopolitical game between nations where suddenly a painting can have big significance. In a way, the story fell really naturally into three acts. In a way it all made sense but it took us a long time to find each little story in the bigger story, and how much play should we give those stories without losing the main thread of the story—which was the painting and its increasing value. It was a difficult balance because we got interested in, for example, Bouvier’s story in the second act, or Modestini’s story in the first act. Every time we spent a little too much time with them, trying to understand their backstory or their world, then the film would kind of lose its narrative spine because we’d almost forget about the painting. So we found that every two minutes we had to go back to the painting, to the narrative spine of the story. We had five writers and researchers but it took us a long time to arrive at the final narrative structure.

How did you shoot the painting and the restoration process?

AK: It was a challenge that we weren’t there while it was actually being restored. We never got the chance to film the actual painting, so we needed to get really hi-res photos from the process and then in some cases, print and use them for re-enactments. And we were lucky that the restorer, Dianne Modestini, was willing to let us film her while she was restoring other paintings and we could use that as visualizations of her restoration process with this painting. It would have been really difficult to find an actress to do re-enactments and then jump in and out of interviews with Modestini. In a way, by just filming her in her studio working on paintings, we were able to use that as a re-enactment. Then of course we had the painting in the different stages, so we were able to show how it looked it the clean state, and how she restored it. It’s really a remarkable difference between the clean state and the finished version. Some people say that she went too far, but as I’ve understood the restoration practice, it is a fully recognized approach to restoring a painting to bring it back to how you think it originally looked, back to life so to speak. Based on the painting that is still there, you imagine how it looked originally, and that is completely recognized within the art world. But some people would say it would have been better to make it an archeological restoration, where you keep it in the clean state, but you fill out some small gaps and holes and make sure the panel is alright and so on. But there’s nothing wrong with choosing one method or the other.

Can you talk a bit about the color correction and the overall look of the film?

AK: In general, the film has a dark and blueish tone, which underlines the mystery aspect. After the first round of color correction, we had to really make the look of the film a bit more subtle, especially when it had to do with the painting because we couldn’t manipulate the colors of the painting. It had to look real and as close to the original as possible. But of course, I’ve only seen the original in a reproduction.

We tried to use the painting in different ways in the film, by letting the characters in the film being interviewed with this direct eye effect, because Christ in the painting also looks straight into your eyes. So with the different shots we tried to give the feeling of Renaissance paintings with the light and so on, by keeping the background dark and letting the person stand forward and be touched by the light. We tried to live up to da Vinci in the visual style, but of course that was impossible. It’s a documentary and we can’t control that much. But it was an inspiration. Storytelling-wise, he has this sfumato technique where he doesn’t paint clear outlines, he builds the shapes up with layers and layers, like thirty or forty layers, and then the shapes start to emerge. In a way, that resembles the story in that there are so many layers you can try to scrape off but you will never really reach any core or any truth because it’s opaque in a way. Another aspect from Leonardo’s art that we tried to reproduce in the film is that his characters are all in a movement, and they all show an intention, and you get a glimpse into their psychology. I wanted to do the same with the characters in the story. They present themselves in one way, and at the same time you get a feeling of how they are on the inside. That was a fun way of trying to implement da Vinci’s thoughts into the film, despite the questions about whether or not the painting is actually by him.

Q&A with Pascual Sisto

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

Can you discuss the way the film begins, and ends, with a family dinner scene?

Pascual Sisto: I think they are two very important scenes, but I will first say that, as a point of interest, they were shot on the same day because of practical reasons. So we had to work psychologically with the actors and we discussed everything because one scene is of course at the beginning, before they know anything that has happened, and then the other one is at the end, with all of the psychological baggage that they have with them after their experience. So it was very interesting to shoot them back-to-back, because it was almost… I talk a lot of times about these images that you see in the newspaper, “spot the differences,” and one of them has a hat, and the other one doesn’t… so it was like that, but it was for things you cannot see. So it was like comparing two images, and noticing the unseen changes in the images. So when we discussed that with the actors, they immediately got it. In the beginning we set up the scene as a normal family having dinner, they’re all very casual, they’re all looking at their phones and devices, and doing a regular every day contemporary dinner. And at the end, there are subtle differences, and of course… I wish there would be an opportunity (I hope someone on YouTube maybe will do it one day) of putting them back-to-back so you can compare the behaviors! Of course in the second scene, we are zooming out from John’s face, and I think it’s a little bit of, like, this idea that we’ve been always so focused on him and his internal world, and then slowly we reveal that he is back in this family setting, back with the family. Every time I’ve seen it (and of course I’ve seen it many times), I look at each one of the different characters, and there’s something interesting in how they all play the two scenes differently. If you notice, Brad, the father, there’s something about him… in the closing dinner scene, he’s looking at John for the most part, and they’re not saying anything, they’re not speaking, of course. But the way he looks… not that he’s respecting him more, but he obviously seems him differently in the second scene. However, the setting — for an outsider who hadn’t seen the film — would look the same. If we were walking by their window, we would probably not notice a difference between the starting and ending dinner scenes. So that, for me, is what the essence of this film is. Internally, many changes can happen, but externally things can seem to be the same.

silence is what the film is about in many ways

You’ve known the writer Nicolás Giacobone for some time, and this film is adapted from a short story he wrote. What was that process like?

PS: He loves short stories, so that’s probably his natural habitat in many ways. We have a relationship— we’ve been friends for years now. I would send him my projects — film and video projects, or art projects that I would do — and he would send me his writings, and we would trade comments back and forth. And he sent me this one. He told me later that he always had it in mind that it could potentially be a good film, and when he sent it to me I responded right away. The short story (I’ve explained this before, obviously), it was nine pages, and it was very brief and to the point. It was like bullet points, one sentence after the next, it was like a first-person diary sort of thing, all from John’s point of view. So it was like seeing through his eyes: “Today I did this, today I played PlayStation… and then I gave them some sweaters because it was cold.” And as a reader you think, “gave who some sweaters…?” So you have to piece the story together as it happens. I think eventually he changed it, because the final version was a bit different than the initial one he sent me. So that was something that was always moving forward sort of step by step. It had a lot of strange, quiet pacing to it already. And I responded to it, we started discussing it, we discussed the idea of potentially making it into a film without saying anything specific, and we never really confirmed it, but then after a few conversations he already had a first draft of a script! He’s incredible in that way. And he wrote the draft himself entirely, and then from then on we started crafting more of the shooting script, the production script, with more elements that we thought would work. So I would say it was good to know him and to be involved while he was writing it, because it allowed both of us to make it in a way that would be great for me to actually shoot.

The tone of this film is so precise and unusual. How did you control it as you were making the film?

PS: I think the most important part of that— a lot of the times we talked about this, because it’s not seen. You know, a lot of people see John as this sociopathic character, and they ask why the family wouldn’t be more horrified. But you have to realize that those characters are looking up from that hole and they’re seeing their family. They’re seeing someone they watched grow up for twelve years of his life. So you can’t be that horrified. As a family, you wouldn’t be horrified. As an audience member I can understand that you might be horrified, because you’re seeing a bunch of strangers in crisis. But as a family, if you look up and you see your parent, or the other way around, it’s a completely different relationship. So I think, from the beginning, they’re trying to come to terms with it, just as John is trying to come to terms with it. He also doesn’t realize what he’s done right away, he acted on a certain impulse; he doesn’t even talk to them until the final scene. So there are things that he’s dealing with. But with the family, the way that we dealt with it was that it was something they should always keep in mind: When they’re looking up, the’re seeing their son. It’s very apparent in the mother’s role, a lot of times she looks up and she’s always worried about him, she’s like, “are you ok?” Still, even then, checking on him. So that is what takes the edge off of this horrific act, to me. And then we also discussed with the actors the emotion of the scene. We never wanted to make this sensationalist; this film could have easily become a slasher film, it could have easily become a horror film, and we were never interested in that. So for me, the containment was important. The fact that they’re in this claustrophobic little space, and how they deal with their emotions. Because when they scream, they hear their loudness resonate in this small room. So it’s like, you don’t want to panic in this sort of setting, you almost want to keep calm and just go with things as they are. I did do a lot of research about the psychology of people who had been kept in captivity, and they’re almost always people who had been kept in captivity by other people (not their sons), so it’s a completely different set of rules. But there were generally seven or eight stages of how these people in captivity behave: First they’re looking, they’re in denial, they don’t know what it is, they start getting angry, then they start blaming each other, then they start losing their minds and going crazy… then they fully surrender, eventually, and in the end they inhabit this space and they make it their home in a way. So they fully surrender to it in some cases. Not always, but frequently. We tried to make every scene represent some part of their descent into this. There’s the scene where Michal C. Hall is blaming the mother for something he doesn’t know, so they’re coping with this experience in their own ways, and they’re losing their minds at one point in there. So that was sort of like the tone inside the hole. The rest of the tone within the film we really tried to borrow from a lot of different genres, but we never fully wanted it to be a “genre film,” so we always say that it takes the language from a lot of these genres (thriller, horror, etc.), but doesn’t fully become them. So I think staying in the periphery of all this was important to us, and was always important to us, and I think it was accomplished through a combination of everything: Acting, the way we shot it, the location, the silence, the sound design (which for me is really important, the silence is really important to me), and I think that silence is what the film is about in many ways.

Q&A with Ting Poo and Leo Scott

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

How did this project manifest?

Leo Scott: I was editing a half hour comedy where Val Kilmer was playing himself as a motivational speaker in this sort of parallel universe. It was such a great performance, so bonkers and I wanted to tell him that. The director Harmony Korine insisted that I tell him and gave me his email address. I wrote him and within thirty seconds he replied to me and that was beginning of our sort of friendship. Val then asked me to help him edit together some of the plays he was doing as he was touring as Mark Twain, his one-man play Citizen Twain. I would edit these together and send them back to Val. He then asked me to help him film behind the scenes, and I started recording that process. A year or two after working with him on that he asked me to help him digitize this mountain of tapes that he had been gathering for decades and I couldn’t believe how enormous this archive was. I would take away these boxes and digitize them with the help of an assistant. Even after nine months I wasn’t even through them all… every different format you could imagine and incredible materials that would blow your mind. We started making a piece around the Mark Twain character, around the idea of acting and creating a role. After early assembly we had to abandon the project because Val was dealing with some health issues. We put it aside but it was always there in my mind. It wasn’t until two or three years later when Ting, my friend and collaborator and fellow editor came to me since she had seen some of this material a few years earlier.

Ting Poo: Leo and I had reconnected after a few years and I always remembered him in his garage with all those tapes. I had seen some of the material before and it had stuck with me. You don’t forget something like that in terms of film history—never before seen footage from all these iconic movie sets. But also, on a human level that he recorded his own personal life with so much diligence and all these intimate moments with his family and childhood. I asked Leo, whatever came of all that amazing stuff? And he said we had put it aside, but now might be a great time to pick it up. So we went to Val and asked if he’d be willing to make something bigger out of it, encompassing a life story of his career and personal life and he was up for it. We cut together a short three-minute piece that represented what our vision for what the film could be tonally. We really wanted to lean into this kind of first-person story told from his perspective, because the footage really lent itself to that. It was seeing his life—his incredible life—through his lens and his eyes.

It was seeing his life—his incredible life—through his lens

Was there any one moment that really crystallized for you two that this could be a feature film?

LS: I think it’s more than just the interesting footage from movie sets. It’s Val and his life and his incredible arc and all the different sides to him. It’s difficult to do a first-person story in feature length because very few characters would sustain that… even those ones that would be interesting certainly wouldn’t have filmed their whole lives like he did. It’s an incredible combination to have this amazing life and have had it filmed. It’s more about the man in the middle than any particular piece of footage. But obviously you can name any number of memorable things that I knew had to go into the film. From him cutting his hair in the video with the fireplace in the 90s to Slab Boys, his early Broadway performance or seeing the young Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon and Kevin saying “is that a real video camera Val?”. There are thousands of golden little pieces scattered throughout the archive.

TP: There’s also an artistic nature to the way some of it is shot—aside from all the behind-the-scenes movie footage, the things that catch his attention and the sort of dreamy nature in which he would shoot himself sometimes. He’d do little camera tricks where he’d appear in frame all of sudden, like on a beautiful landscape in New Mexico. That’s someone that’s trying to make an artistic moment in camera, because that’s how it was done back then. It’s those little things that pointed to his personality as an artist. There was footage where he wasn’t just documenting the situation, but it was an artist trying to speak.

The opening felt pitch perfect right down to the Harry Nilsson song. I imagine you could’ve found a thousand different ways into the film. How did you choose the opening?

TP: The Nilsson song was in there pretty early and it helped that Val is a big fan of his. We asked Val who his favorite musical artists were and a lot of them made it into the film. The sequence itself where we introduce Jack as a voiceover character, we probably played with that over and over again and didn’t really get it right until the end. There was part of us that wanted to leave him as a reveal to the very end, so that this voice would come in and maybe the reveal that it was his son would’ve been more emotionally effective. But then he ended up sounded so much like Val that we didn’t want people to be hung up throughout the film wondering who is this, is this Val, is this someone they cast to sound like him? We didn’t want it to be a distraction. So we decided to do a little bit up front and then reveal him right away so that you can then get lost in the voice. And then after a while, it really does feel like it’s Val speaking to you.

LS: In addition to that, we did like this idea of Val making scrapbooks because that’s something he does and has done before; he has made physical art as long as he’s been making movies. The scrapbook motif is also inspirational for how we put together the film—the idea of a scrapbook and how he puts things together and these interesting juxtapositions that he finds. They’re very unique to his mind. He’s been doing these since the late 90s, and if you got to see any of them, they’re quite extraordinary. We wanted that to inspire the way we put the film together. Putting things together that make sense in a maybe slightly obtuse way…

TP: More of a cinematic, impressionistic scrapbook of different moments of his life.

Which themes resonated to you early on and perhaps evolved or changed during the filmmaking process?

LS: I feel like you set out to make one film and you write it down, and our paper version of the film evolved so much and it’s a completely different shape now. There are a lot of similar ingredients but I’d say the themes that we set out with did come through and I feel we did succeed in making Val feel understood.

TP: I think our biggest goal was to represent a very complex and intense creative spirit. We wanted to do justice to this person that we had gotten to know because people just don’t know who he is as a person, and he’s a really remarkable human being to be around. Hopefully you get some sense of what it’s like to be around him from watching the film. 

Q&A with Lucy Walker

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Bring Your Own Brigade.

It was fascinating to learn that you had already been in the process of making a film about wildfires when the Camp and Woolsey fires occurred. Can you tell us about that?

Lucy Walker: That’s right. The reason I was able to really embed, and I knew what I was looking at and could just jump in, and start asking the right questions was because I’d actually been working on the film already for about a year at that point, when those fires came along. I had been mulling, for years, “why isn’t there a film about this wildfire thing that’s happening?” There are so many incredible filmmakers making incredible documentaries! I was kind of waiting for somebody else so I could understand what was going on, and really reflect on it. And it wasn’t for years until I thought, “oh, maybe that’s me.” I’m very interested in our environment and how we live. And I was living in California — I’d moved to California — and I saw the hillsides on fire, and I was very frightened and very curious. And I kind of think I sensed this kind of cognitive dissonance… I knew there was something off, I knew there was something I wasn’t getting about the picture. Why couldn’t we put the fires out? Why are we living right there, with the fires, and people are just driving down the freeway? I knew there was something that I knew I sort of wanted to make sense of that wasn’t making sense to me. And I think the film was that journey. When it really crystalized for me that I was going to make a film about this was when the biggest fire in California history came along, and that was the Thomas fire, which ignited in December 2017, and I thought, “OK, this is a contained story that I can use as just, you know, a way of focusing in on this big international problem.” I’m just going to focus on one fire, I thought I’d make a short film about it. And I befriended the firefighters and learned how to embed, and really got situated, and there was a terrible debris flow, and it was a terrible incident. And I filmed some good footage which I thought would make a good short film (I love making short films; this is by far my longest film, actually, I really don’t like making films longer than they need to be, and I think this needed to be this length). And I was making my film about the Thomas fire, the biggest fire ever in California history, when an even bigger one came along a few months later! And I thought, “oh my gosh, what is going on?” There’s an even bigger one already?! This is a worse problem than I thought. I can’t make a film about just one fire, I need to make a film about what is really going on in the big picture. So that’s when I really committed to getting to the bottom of this fire problem, which was a really really tall order, as I now know. 

firefighting is not a magical robot computer world

How did your conceptions of wild fires change during the course of making this film?

LW: To be totally frank, it’s much easier as a filmmaker when you have a single story with an easy narrative. It’s much harder when you have a story that is nuanced and takes time to really do justice to. And yet, I was committed. I wasn’t going to reduce and simplify, even though the film budget and work hours and peace of mind all suffered because of it. I mean, it would have been easier… actually, it wouldn’t have provided peace of mind for me if I had simplified it, actually. The peace of mind has come now, knowing that we actually did follow the story all the way to the end, I think. But it would have been much easier if it was a simple, quick story. And it took a lot of support from producers and financiers to go down the road we chose. It was a long road, and I think everyone was sort of wishing there was a shortcut to this subject! But listen, if there was a shortcut to the subject we wouldn’t be in the problem that we’re in, and I feel like by actually following… I set out thinking I was going to make a “climate change film,” because I was looking up at the hillside, where I live, and I’m seeing climate change, and it’s come to our community. I don’t need to go to Bangladesh, or Brazil, to make a story about climate change. I can start right here in my own community. And I was really excited about that. I wanted to really look at my own environment, and think about the climate change that was at home. And then I got into it, and I thought, “oh…” It was really clear, when you get into it, that it’s not just climate change. And actually also our original investors were like, “wait… it’s not a climate change film, Lucy?” People are excited about your climate change film and then you give them the news that it’s actually not a climate change film any more… and that by going authentically and accurately into it, we’ve got to deal with the fact that it’s perhaps not how I originally pitched it. But you’ve got follow the truth— that’s actually the thing we’re all doing here. So then I think, because I had that mission to follow the truth about the story, for me it came back again to being a climate change film, because for me — obviously the climate is a huge factor driving these fires, and as the film says, it really is the “performance enhancer” — when I started to see in that town council meeting (which I did not expect to end up in the film; that was just us doing our due-diligence and homework, and learn everything and listen to everything and being really interested in which of our characters might show up at the town council meeting), we were king of rolling on it for those purposes. We didn’t expect in that moment to capture anything that would really end up in the finished movie; we were just doing our homework. And there we were on a Tuesday evening, with me sitting tiredly in the front row, and we accidentally caught this moment where you see the decision making process in Paradise. And you see how hard it is politically to align around making better decisions for the community. And I knew we witnessed something great, but it was really the more you reflected on it that you had the thought, “that is the story…” Even with what we’ve seen this town go through, even these people are finding it so hard to make change. And that became really fascinating, and I thought that it actually is a climate change film after all, because that’s an angle on climate change I hadn’t really considered, but it’s really important. How do you get people to agree, especially these rugged individualist Californians.

The first section of the film is nearly overwhelming, emotionally. Can you talk about your decision to put that difficult material at the beginning of the film?

LW: I felt like it was really important for people to understand how bad it was. And it’s hard, you know… right now I live in Venice Beach, so pretty close to Malibu. I could commute for those shoots, which is pretty rare for me! And so, it was just that thing with the disaster zone where, you know, there’s a roadblock, and on that side there’s a disaster zone, and on this side, it’s business as usual— the party goes on. And over there people are crying, and a tornado came, and their home is gone, and their business is gone… and you know, tragedy has struck. And it was so difficult to reconcile those two realities, I thought you’ve got to show people how bad it is. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be gratuitous with it. I felt really strongly that I didn’t want to make a powerful horror movie and show off my filmmaking skills just because that would be intense and affecting. I actually wrestled with whether to include such graphic footage at all, because I didn’t want to traumatize or trigger the audience. And yet, I felt like I was investigating it exactly because it’s that bad. What the firefighters go through, what the residents go through… it actually is “hell on earth.” And to not do it would mean you wouldn’t sit in that council meeting and have that kind of cognitive whiplash of thinking, “I could understand this if I hadn’t seen that. But I saw those things earlier, so now I don’t understand this.” And I think that, for me, was important. And also, the way that we edited it, I actually wanted people to see the clues. Every detail that we chose in there is meant to hopefully give people a solid first-principles grip on the situation. They themselves understand how difficult it is to get evacuation orders out, how confusing it is, how the firefighters and also the residents are making individual decisions that really will save themselves and their neighbors and their homes or not. All the details. I talked to hundreds more people than made the cut, and the details that are in there I feel like are clues. So each one of them is not just building the arc of the story, but each one is, rather, hopefully giving you as an audience member a really solid grasp of how things actually happened. Because I spoke to a lot of people who didn’t quite “get” the situation, and therefore had funny assumptions about what was possible as the fire was being fought and etc. I think if you ride along with a firefighter you realize very clearly that firefighting is not a magical robot computer world; it’s a bunch of tired people driving around doing their very best. Very good people with very good equipment, but a limited amount of it that the taxpayers have to pay for. And they’re trying to solve really overwhelming challenges moment by moment. And I think to really convey that, I had to really put the audience in it. And always with my work, I’m trying to convey what it’s actually like. And what it’s actually like is that it’s that intense. I mean, you hear me having a panic attack in the film! I’m a little less scared now, but not really. I find fire really frightening. It was really intimidating even in my case, when we weren’t very close to it and I found it really just absolutely petrifying. So I wanted the opening section of the film to reflect all of that accurately.