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Q&A with Wyatt Rockefeller

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

It felt like there were unexpected and interesting story turns at every corner. What sparked this idea for you?

Wyatt Rockefeller: The spark for the idea came, really, from a feeling. I was in the woods with my Dad, and it was snowing. And you know when it snows, it can absorb all of the ambient noise. So it’s quiet in a way that you almost never experience at other times. There was something very eery about that. And I remember looking over at the tree-line, and imagining someone watching us through the trees… looking up ahead at my Dad in his old coat, I imagined a guy patrolling the outskirts of his farm, I imagined what he might be guarding against… and by the time we got inside, I basically had the whole plot up to when Jerry puts down the gun. It just hit me at this gut level, “oh wow, that’s really dark,” which is a good sign! And I think when something kind of writes itself, that’s also a good sign. But it wasn’t actually until later (because I was writing something else at the time, so I shelved it) but when I had the idea to set it on Mars — as it could be, one day, after we’ve partially terraformed it to be habitable like Earth — that I thought, OK, this could be a feature. Because originally, I thought it was a short. But then by putting it on a different world, it unlocked visual and thematic opportunities that I thought would make it worth a few years of my time, and an hour and a half of an audience’s time.

I’ve always thought of the “villain” as their isolation

Even after finding a great location, there must have been many things you did to create the illusion of being on a different planet.

WR: This was the fun part! This was my first feature, and there were definitely moments on set where I wondered what I was doing. Why did I have to set my first feature on Mars!? This was supposed to be this small, feasible film… and I’ve gone and set it on Mars. I’ve set the bar pretty high. If they don’t accept the world, if they don’t accept that we’re on a different planet, we’re not going to get into the story. So we had a high bar right out of the gate… sorry for the mixed metaphor there! But thankfully we had found an amazing location in South Africa. So we did have a solid base to work off of, and we were able to build these remarkable sets. Noam Piper, the production designer, really did a fantastic job. But we did still have to take it on faith… I was really, I think, insecure about the world we were creating. Those were wooden sets. I used longer lenses than I probably would have normally, because I wanted the background to be a little more out of focus, and to just kind of hide things. I think maybe I was overly sensitive to that, actually. We really had to take it on faith — through production and through the edit, even — that at some point, the world was going to show up. And it really came with the VFX (which there are actually a fair amount of, even though they’re very specific and we had to be sparing with them — and the color and the sound. And with the color, to be very specific about it, the moment you take the blue out of the sky, you leave Earth. And the moment you make them kind of tan (or whatever), you land on Mars, or a similar planet. And that was big. And also, with the dome… the colorist and I spent a lot of time just creating the environment. Because we couldn’t afford to have all that be VFX, in all the shots where you see it in the background. We spent a lot of time creating these color aberrations that you wouldn’t notice the first time you were to watch, but if you were to watch through again, you’d pick up on. And then, finally, with the sound. The sound is important to any film, because it’s a 2D image, but the sound is what puts you in to this three dimensional space, it’s what really brings you into the film. To give you an example, in her bedroom, when her Dad is putting her to sleep, creating that soundscape to really make them feel isolated… we brought in these kind of arctic wind sounds, which have this very specific, very haunting kind of feel to them. We brought those in for the outside, and then for the inside, we added effects like the slight tapping of a loose wire, that would sound like it was reverberating through the walls, and just create this sense of abandonment and hollowness. That was my big note to the sound designer: I want this to feel hollow and empty, both inside and within the dome itself. And I think that is what really put us in this other world.

The character of Steve was really a pleasure. How did you conceive of and construct him?

WR: That was one of the more rewarding elements of this process. Because Steve is a mix of VFX and puppetry. And so, he was the product of this wonderful collaboration between departments. My starting point — I actually initially thought of him… or thought of “it,” rather — as a kind of smaller, future version of the Mars rovers as they are now, especially Curiosity. Because I was naively thinking, “oh, we can basically have a remote control robot on-set that we can build on the cheap.” But we really did want to start from the idea that his function would dictate his form and design. And that he wouldn’t be able to speak, because it is so important— his arc is sort of the reverse HAL. The question is, is he capable of human compassion, or is he just a tool (as Jerry says)? So it was important that he be relatively inscrutable. And we had VFX for the more complex movements, but we really needed to be very judicious about that, so we built a puppet. Which was also necessary because I wanted something for the actors to play off of. And really nailing down what his specific functionality would be, so that we could then design him in a way that made sense for that specific functionality. So we changed from wheels to legs, for example, because if he’s going to be walking over fertile soil at some point, he’s going to have to be able to step carefully.

The subtlety with which you shaped his character was so effective. Even the slight head tilt he gives at one point was so wonderful.

WR: A lot of that credit goes to William Todd-Jones, who is this really veteran puppeteer. His first movie was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. He knows how to communicate via creatures! But that was really fun on-set, just really figuring out how to convey a personality, and an emotion, just purely through movement. And it was, I would say, comparable to what Spielberg has said about Jaws: “At 25 frames per second it’s a shark, at 26 it’s a robot again.” There’s just those little moments where suddenly it all just flows and works together and the the robot suddenly comes alive.

Did you first conceive of Jerry as a villain?

WR: Well… Yes, Jerry is the antagonist, for sure. But I’ve always thought of the “villain” as their isolation. And I really wanted people to… I want people to come out of the movie wondering, “what would I have done in that situation?” I want them to feel for all the characters, and for them to say to themselves, “I hate what Jerry does, but I understand why he does it.” And that’s been really cool to see! People saying, “I want to hate Jerry, but I see where he’s coming from.” I remember sending the script to friends while I was still writing, and a friend — who is also a filmmaker — said, “you’ve got to make Jerry more likeable, because otherwise Remmy is let off the hook too easily. It’s kind of too easy to hate him, and to turn on him.” She made the point that you’ve got to make that choice much more difficult for the audience. It was really helpful to get both her perspective and my wife’s perspective, because from a female perspective — which I obviously don’t have — that scene where he makes a move on her… they told me they’d been in situations a little like that, where they thought it was as business meeting and it turned into something else that they didn’t want it to be. To have that perspective was just so helpful, because…I think movies have this capacity to put you in someone else’s shoes. And when you’re writing, and when you’re trying to make this idea a movie, you’re basically trying to do that, you’re trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes. And the best example, where I felt really proud of getting close to that, was when we shot the scene when Nell [Tiger Free] shoots Ismael [Cruz Córdova]. In the script, he goes for his gun, and then she shoots him before he can shoot her. Which is actually pretty weak, because he’s taking the choice away from her— it’s just self-defense for her at that point. So I put it to Nell: What would you do, if he doesn’t pick up the gun? Would you pull the trigger, or not? And she thought about it… and we had actually just shot the attempted rape scene the night before. And she really “went there,” she really went through that. And she thought about that experience… and she said, “yeah. After what he did to me? Yeah, I’d shoot him.” And so that’s what we filmed. And I was really proud of that, because we were going off of her actual lived experience, rather than what I’d thought when I was writing made the most sense for the plot and for the characters.

Q&A with Morgan Neville

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

You chose to make this film fairly soon after Anthony Bourdain’s death. Did your perspective change over the course of shooting?

Morgan Neville: Well yes, it changed because there was so much I learned. The first time I sat down with Chris [Collins] and Lydia [Tenaglia], his producers, we were just talking about the possibility of this film. I was talking about all these ideas about culture and how important it was and going on and on, and they stopped me and said “but yeah, you have to remember he could be such an asshole.” They said he was the nicest asshole they ever met, but I think what they were saying is that it’s important to not puff him up too much, giving me permission to not put him on a pedestal. I think Tony hated that and I believe he was willfully ignorant of his own influence and importance. As he says in the film, “I’m not a journalist, I’m not here to inspire, I’m not into politics,” but of course he was all those things. He really willfully tried to pretend that he was doing a little show on cable that no one needed to pay attention to. I think it was his own survival mechanism of feeling like he didn’t have the kind of reach he did. When he died, everyone in his universe was utterly flabbergasted by the range and the depth of the outpouring of grief over his death because he willfully tried to keep everyone in a bubble. There’s that part of it.

I started shooting about sixteen months after he died, and I filmed over a course of a year. During that time, I stepped into a world with a lot of people experiencing every stage of grief—anger, denial, you name it. And I could see people processing what was happening even while I was shooting interviews sometimes. There were a lot of people I spoke to that said they hadn’t talked about it until they sat down with me. For me to sit down with someone and tell them we can talk for hours about everything that happened and what they are feeling, it was an invitation that people don’t often get particularly in the wake of something like a suicide, which people can bottle up. Suicide is tied to these feelings of shame or guilt, all kinds of complicated feelings that can make it hard for people to discuss. I remember his agent told me that shortly after Tony died, an American suicide prevention society asked if they could use Tony’s name on a campaign for suicide prevention. And she had said no, Tony would have hated being a poster boy for anything like that. And then they came back to her while we were making the film, a year later, and asked again to use his name for a similar campaign and she said you know what, Tony doesn’t get to say anymore. To me, that was so revealing of the kind of evolution of how people in Tony’s life were dealing with it and I feel like this film was made in the middle of these shifting emotions. I think the film reflects a lot of that and if I made the film five years from now, it would be different. I don’t know if it would be better or worse—it would be less raw, but it would also be less immediate. I think the rawness of the film is reflective of what I experienced while making the film. My thinking about the film and Tony and who was the film for was changing while I was making it. It started being about Tony and then my own thinking was well, there’s part of this story that Tony shouldn’t like. There’s part of the story that was dealing with the crater that he left behind. And who knows; he might have liked that too. The one thing about it was that he believed in a brutal honestly about all things, and he was pretty good at self-loathing too. If you go back and look at all his books, he beats himself up almost always first and foremost before he’ll beat up others. He always takes himself to task.

He was someone who was always about chasing the edge

We do get a bit of his backstory, but the film really begins with Kitchen Confidential. Why did you choose to begin the story at the point?

MN: Part of it is that I was trying to make a film and not a miniseries. With someone that had a big life and with the amount of footage we had, you could’ve made something really expansive. But I still love the feature-length mode of storytelling to digest something down. I’m not writing a book, I’m not Wikipedia, I’m just trying to find an essence of understanding of who the subject is. And I felt like all of his early years, he wrote about them so well in Kitchen Confidential. And if I were to try and tell those stories, it would be a little like trying to put out a greatest hits album, like oh remember that story and this guy that Tony wrote about that one time? There’s also virtually no archive of that period and so much of it would have been based on Tony’s recollections and other third-party perspectives. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that the extraordinary story here is that someone in middle-age, who has been a chef for years—an unspectacular one at unspectacular restaurants—is suddenly given this life-changing opportunity. All these things he dreamt about his whole life are suddenly given to him and it completely transforms his life, and what that does to him with the both the good and the bad things that come along with it. As I was thinking about shaping it as a film, the first act of the film is really the end of his old life and him working in kitchens. And then the middle part of the film is the new guy that has it all, with the fame and the ability to travel. He has a wife, he has a kid, he has this life that would have been utterly unimaginable to himself even a few years before. And then we have the third act of the film, which is him coming to terms with the fact that the life he had, the kind of have-it-all life wasn’t making him happy. He couldn’t reconcile the things that he liked about it with the other things that gave him his edge. And he was someone who was always about chasing the edge and pushing himself creatively. He had all of these great attributes… extreme wanderlust and extreme curiosity and extreme open-mindedness and he was an extreme seeker. Those were the things that made him great but they were also the things that made him unable to just sit back and enjoy things. He had a very hard time feeling content. It’s ultimately the kind of psychological issues that he had all along and they weren’t going to go away. He’s someone that was never able to figure out boundaries in life. I think a lot of people of a certain age think well maybe I’ll push myself creatively professionally, but in my personal life, it’s okay to stay at home and be fifties TV dad. To not worry about being cool or living up to expectations. I think there was this completely restless part about him; it was the thing that always gave him his energy and it was both his superpower and his fatal flaw.

We know the end of the film is moving towards his suicide. How did you approach and navigate that whole subject?

MN: It was hard. We spent a lot of time working on it. The question I kept asking myself in every scene was “what is Tony thinking in this scene?” and what I kept seeing and learning about was Tony’s change in behavior. He always had depression and manic episodes; he’s talked about that. It’s said in the film—his ups became bigger, his downs became bigger and there was this sense from everyone in his life that he was becoming unmoored. He started therapy ten weeks before he killed himself. This is someone who had never gone to therapy except for once on camera (which we had footage of), and in high school when he got caught with pot. So he understood that he was out there on the edge somewhere. I wanted people to understand where he was at, and I wanted to get at that question of why would someone that has the life of Anthony Bourdain ever kill themselves. And without giving a tidy answer, because there isn’t one and he hated tidy answers, but to at least give a sense why all those threads that connect his life, the threads that connect his depression and addiction and obsession were there all along. I think trying to put those into a context was probably the most important part of it for me. It was not about trying to give answers but ask a lot of questions and present the messiness of who Tony was, particularly at that time in his life. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever edited. Especially from the beginning of the film where there’s so much energy and hope and excitement about his life taking off and all these opportunities to where it goes. Tonally we tried to get the whole film to reflect where he was going tonally, and where his emotions were going. It was a big feat and the other part of it was me wanting acknowledge not only that he killed himself, but what he left behind in his wake. And that was me just reacting to getting to know all these people on and off camera, and experiencing that impact through them.

Q&A with Nicole Riegel

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

The film is visually stunning. Can you talk about your approach, and how you worked with your collaborators?

Nicole Riegel: I knew the color palette I wanted to use before I began collaborating with my production designer and cinematographer. I knew I wanted to shoot on film; I had shot some short films on digital — but I came out of a film program in the midwest that was heavy on documentary and trained us on film. It was very old school, and so I think that really informed things. But with the colors, I worked with Lance [Mitchell] to… you know, we looked at a lot of I guess you could call it “color theory,” not to be too big of a nerd, but it’s so important to me, and I wanted to assign Ruth a color that no one else in the film really had, and also a color that connected her to home. I think you can tell relationship and story through color. So she’s in red as her color, and to signify both her passion and her singularity, and that she doesn’t really fit in that town. It’s a brighter red. And then sort of the matriarchal characters — Ronda, or Linda maybe — we kept them in a palette more along the lines of deeper pinks, or light-reds or burgundies… and we kept those as if they’d faded away, through the years, in that town. I had the help my wonderful costume designer Ciara Whaley to do this. The idea came from the question, “what are the natural colors in the town?” And the town just naturally has lots of red, white and blue… but very faded red white and blue, which I found to be quite haunting. And then blue became the brother’s color, and it was like, how do we go through the whole film and tell story just in color, and have this transference of color at the end? And with the cinematography, I’m a very big fan of Andrea Arnold, and Ken Loach, and documentaries like Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery, the film Wanda by the late Barbara Loden, the film Rosetta by the Dardenne brothers… those were all huge influences, and I wanted the crew to feel invisible and to have minimal footprint, and for it to be handheld, and for it to be on super-16mm, because it’s a community in America that feels left behind. It doesn’t matter if they actually are or not— they feel that way, for all sorts of reasons we could unpack! And some of those I agree with and some I disagree with, but the fact remains that they feel that way. So to me, 16mm feels very left behind, and that’s how we arrived at that choice.

Nobody cares enough about this community to go there

What was it like making this movie in your hometown, and was there any hesitancy from the production company about going there?

NR: There was zero convincing of the folks at [the production company] Level Forward that I had to make the film the way I did. However, for four years leading up to that, over seventy people wouldn’t allow me, or give me permission, to make the film in the way that I wanted to. And this is such a… there are so many autobiographical elements to it that I could not allow a group of wealthy individuals (because let’s be real, that’s who finances independent film: high net-worth individuals who usually give you private equity, unless they’re more established companies), and this is a story that is about my life, and my childhood, and I needed control over my story. And it needed to be authentically told and not have Hollywood sets brought in, or be filmed somewhere else and then passed off as my hometown. Of course there is a level of artifice in every film— even in documentary. But I needed as little artifice as possible in order for this to be a film from the heart, and I needed to be very cognizant of how I was representing the people from my town, and because I come from the community — and although there are certainly ways in which I differ greatly from where I come from — but one thing on which I am completely aligned on with everyone from the community is that we role our eyes when we see Hollywood make films about Appalachia, because we know that it’s going to be a film that portrays us as ignorant hillbillies. The film Deliverance comes to mind, even though it’s not even remotely close to where we shot Holler. All of these stereotypes come to mind. There’s actually a beautiful documentary by Ashley York called Hillbilly that goes into a lot of what I’m talking about, and she’s from Appalachia as well. And I just had to get in front of it. I had to get in front of the stereotype. And it was so important that the film was shot on film, that it was shot on location, and that I could bring lots of local talent to the screen to play fictionalized versions of themselves. And I knew I could earn their trust, because I’m one of them! I’m literally from the town. They are going to trust me to an extent. And so I went through years of just telling people this is how I will make this film, and them saying ‘no’ to me. Or I couldn’t even get in the door, at all, to make the film. No one would even have a conversation with me about making the film this way. Or they would ask, “well is it a documentary,” and I would say, “well, no, it’s not a documentary… it’s a sort of docu-fiction hybrid,” and that was definitely not a popular response. But I really just had to keep moving on, and chipping away, year after year, until I found a company that said, “wow, that is actually the perfect way to make this film… that is the only way the film could be made.” And I will always believe that the challenge in those conversations is that this is a film that’s about class, and Hollywood and Appalachia have a very… tense relationship with one another because of class. And I think that is really… I’ll just say I think there’s a lot there to unpack!

The storytelling beats were inevitable and also surprising, somehow. Can you talk about creating those moments?

NR: First of all, in crafting the story, it’s all told from Ruth’s point of view. And I wanted us, as the audience, to stay on the pulse of Ruth the entire time, so you can feel the confusion, the frustration, of being her. And when I was seventeen, my school guidance counselor told me I would probably never go to college, I wouldn’t be a film director… and that guidance counselor was also part of a very limited system that didn’t really know what to do with kids like me. And that guidance counselor was my absolute lifeline. I’m the first generation in my family to go to college. I remember they set up meetings for high school seniors, and I was really looking forward to that meeting all year, because this was the one person who was going to help me pursue the arts. And the response I received was exactly what you see in the film between Ruth and the teacher. So the story started there. That is where my journey started in life, and that is where Ruth’s story begins. And after that, the story hinges on, how will Ruth go to college? How will this one girl in Appalachia get there? And I wanted us, as the audience, to feel just how fragile her existence is. To feel that, because of her station in life, she can’t even check out a library book. That is the drama of Ruth’s life. She’s dealing with the mom, she doesn’t want to leave the town… she finds a way to earn this money, but then she’s — routinely throughout the film, as you’ll notice, she’s discouraged by a lot of people, and she’s discouraged by a lot of men in particular. Men say very discouraging things to Ruth in this film. And, as I look back on what it was like to grow up, as I look at my life now… sure, women have said discouraging things to me. But, a lot of men in particular have said discouraging things to me, and I wanted that in the story because that is her fragile existence at an impressionable age, because I think at that age, you absorb a lot of negative messages, a lot of discouragement. And it takes an insane amount of resilience to come out of that in one piece. And all of this was baked into the initial idea of how to tell the story. How do I tell people, through a movie, how fragile my existence was? And with Hark, I see that relationship as a potential path she could go on. You could look at every character around Ruth in the story, including Linda, her mom, her brother, Hark… as potential paths for Ruth. Which one will she choose? Which one will lead her away from here? Which one will take her to higher education? And with Hark, he has this line in the film that I still find very powerful, which is, “at least here you can see the top.” And I think that idea really gets at the mindset of a place like that for a lot of people. “This is safe, here I can see the top. Outside the borders of this town, I am unseen and I am not wanted, and I am condescended to.” That’s the mentality, and I wanted the story to tap into that, and it achieves that through the character of Hark. And then the last thing I’ll say about the story is, people think Hark is the antagonist in the film, and there are many antagonists: You could look at the teacher as the antagonist, you could look at Hark as the antagonist… the intended antagonist in the film is the system that all of these characters are trapped in. And it’s faceless. Sometimes you hear a voice in the film, and people think that’s the antagonist. The antagonist in the film is faceless because the antagonist would never visit my hometown, and show their face. Nobody goes there. Nobody cares enough about this community to go there.

Q&A with Pedro Kos and Shawnee Isaac Smith

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

How did the project begin and how did you two come together?

Shawnee Isaac Smith: I’ll start since it was twenty-one years ago when I met one of the Immaculate Heart sisters and was so inspired by their story that it stuck in my head like “someone has to do a movie about this, it’s amazing.” Having been brought up Catholic, I was inspired by women in the church and how they stood in their own power. That stuck with me when I met somebody who was a former IHM (Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) and I said would you mind introducing me to these women, and asking if you can stand in for me as a reference to do this doc. So I started filming them and they welcomed me into their community and shared their stories and their vulnerabilities and their pain and suffering. I got to know some courageous women that continue to inspire me to this day. I carried the footage and the stories and maintained those relationships for years but couldn’t find funding to direct it myself. Later on, one of our producers, Kira Carstensen, said I can put together a team for you to make this happen. She introduced me to Pedro and it’s funny because I always assumed if I didn’t direct, it would be a woman. But Pedro had such an amazing background in Catholicism and the understanding of this order, and as he’s said, it went into his heart as well as mine. It felt like a great symbiotic relationship.

Pedro Kos: When Kira and Shawnee approached me with the story, it was like an arrow through my heart. Having had my own issues with the institution of the church as well, this story was a breath of fresh air and really captured my imagination while speaking to the moment we were living in. With each day and month and year after I came on board, it felt even more current as a story about this awakening of these oppressive structures that govern our lives. It was really a meditation on how change happens. I dove in and began spending time with some of these incredible women and filming a bit as well. Shawnee was extraordinary in capturing the firsthand accounts that she had mentioned and the materials she had collected. And then we continued to dig and unearthed some hidden gems and that’s how it came together.

It was really a meditation on how change happens.

It’s amazing to hear this was a twenty-one-year timeline with all the older interviews. Was there a sense of urgency because of how long this project has been in motion?

SIS: When I initially made the agreement with the community, I promised them that I’d interview all the elders for their archives, even if it was a story I didn’t want to use in the film. It was heartbreaking for me—and still is—whenever one of them passed away because I had always envisioned them getting a standing ovation in front of an audience for who they were. We lost Patrice Underwood, the one at Selma, right before we launched at Sundance.

PK: Because it’s taken so long, many of the greats are no longer with us.

SIS: Each year I’d say, this is the year the documentary has to come out, we need this! In retrospect now, I can’t think of a better time for it to come out. So many of the issues have come full circle and there’s a whole generation that can be inspired by these women now. Pedro and I saw that in the editing room where we saw young editors that wanted to meet these amazing women. It was so heartening to see that they were touching the younger generation as well as the generation that lived that time and that experience.

There’s an extraordinary amount of archival footage in the film. What was the process like unearthing it all?

SIS: I had some of it, but then Pedro brought in a great archival partner, Gabriella Ricketts, who was an amazing spelunker of the archival world and able to find all sorts of amazing treasures.

PK: It’s like a treasure hunt. We kept digging and Gabriella was our lead Sherlock Holmes. Because a lot of this material is from decades ago, sometimes you have to follow clues to unearth things. Usually, you start with your main suspects—the networks and newspapers—but also follow the trail of personal photographs and connections. So you might have a photograph of this person or that person, or guess who was filming here or there. Shawnee was also able to contact filmmakers. The Immaculate Heart community was very much a cultural hub in the 1960s. Their students were vibrant and they also had a very vibrant adult education section, so plenty of people were coming and taking courses. Filmmakers and lots of artists too. There were filmmakers like Baylis Glascock, Thomas Conrad, Haskell Wexler, and they were filming what was going on and the different happenings at the college. They were very generous with their works and we were able to tap into that as well. It’s really a combination of so many different elements. And we discovered within the Immaculate Heart archives audio recordings of their meetings, correspondence, notes… we tried to make this as an immersive experience as possible. I kept using the word tactile, like put me there from the sounds that you’re hearing to the visuals. We tried to bring all these disparate elements together with the animation and the graphics as cohesively as possible.

SIS: One of the interesting little archival finds we had found was that Cardinal McIntyre had a bit of a speech impediment. So he never wanted to be on camera and we couldn’t find any archival footage. Finally we found that one little bit that was a goldmine for us, since we had never heard what he sounded like.

That’s so interesting; I was wondering why he wasn’t covered more heavily in the film that way.

SIS: He also didn’t have the theology that the Immaculate Heart women did. He was not that well educated theologically so he was a little insecure in that area as well. He came from a stockbroker background.

Pedro, what it was it like coming into  and editing a project that had been in the works for so many years already?

PK: It was both thrilling and daunting to do justice to this incredible story and this wonderful material and I’m eternally grateful to Shawnee for welcoming me into the family. We really bonded with this common vision of how to tell this immersive story. We were both really inspired by these women and by Corita’s art bringing this major cohesive element in how we told the story and how to create this roller coast ride. In a way, they were part of their time, they wanted to be a part of the world and their work, what they were doing especially with creative art was a character. And in a way, it communicates with our time too, with our current moments. Usually before a project like this I put together a sizzle reel and we went out and tried to bring on new resources and partners and geared up for the full edit a few years ago. I just kept digging, and there was a wealth of riches. Shawnee did, I think, fifty interviews. There are some extraordinary women that didn’t make into the film. We joke that we could have made a ten-part miniseries and still would’ve had footage on the cutting room floor.  

Q&A with Theo Anthony

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of All Light, Everywhere.

When police capture footage with their body cameras, they are essentially engaging in filmmaking of a sort we’ve never seen before. In this film, you approach the issue from all sides, and even insert yourself into the story directly. Can you talk about that decision, and how you thought about the various meta elements of the project?

Theo Anthony: That idea of accounting for the act of observation in observing is something that I’ve always been drawn to, as a big science nerd! I’m still a science nerd; I love math and sciences. A lot of my inspiration comes from my experience in those fields. In terms of the “meta” nature of the film, I knew we were making a film about cameras, that we were going to be talking about cameras, and obviously I was making the film with a camera. So, yeah, there was really no separation, like, “here’s a meta moment.” There was no breaking the fourth wall, because there was no wall! We were just trying to describe the artifice from the start, and to do so without having any illusions about our own involvement. There’s clear acknowledgement throughout that we were bringing our own artifice and point of view to the screen, just as the body cameras do. I think that was our goal the whole time. But I will say that, you know, I think that there was a moment – a much “cleaner” version of this cut – where I was not as much of a presence in it. We had all of these really well choreographed scenes that we spent a lot time planning, and it moved very dream-like from scene to scene. And I think that, just sitting with it more and more, and just the nature of the subject matter (surveillance, policing, and etc.), obviously what’s happening in the news every single day, and in particular the murder of George Floyd last summer… it made us realize that all of these ideas we were talking about needed to be grounded in a very material, concrete way. That meant that I, personally, had to be in the film. Because having me in it was also implicating myself explicitly instead of just implicitly. It helped ground the film, and made it clear I wasn’t trying to remove myself from critique, which I think would have been very hypocritical, given what we’re talking about here with body cameras and surveillance. That was something that we just had to embrace, to really be true to the spirit of this film.

I think that these people really believe that they’re doing the right thing.

Access is crucial for any documentary, but for this film it was even more remarkable, given the vast range of people and types of environments you shot it. Can you discuss your approach and philosophy?

TA: Every section in the film, with the exception of the one community meeting scene, was preceded by months if not years of emailing back and forth, and really doing my research to see what else had been done, to see what other types of interviews they had granted, and just to always sort of pitch ourselves along the lines of what we knew they already felt comfortable doing. With Axon, for instance, you can go on YouTube and look at Steve [Tuttle’s] interviews and he has basically done everything he does in our film before – maybe not in the same sequence, but he has his whole performance, and he has his whole thing. We felt that his performance, in which he sort of channels this corporate identity, was the purest form of the argument for Axon’s cameras that we could present, and we really put a lot of faith in our audiences to receive that and critique it for themselves. There’s another style where you sort of try to trip him up, or back him into a corner… and that’s just not what we do, with anyone, regardless of whether or not I personally agree with them or not. From an even wider perspective than that, though, I think the thing to understand is that a lot of these surveillance companies, all these military-industrial companies that are retrofitted for the civilian market… the way that the pitch themselves is always about “transparency,” and that you’ll get a better understanding because you’ll be able to see these things, and once you see these things, you’ll be able to act on them, and hold these institutions accountable. And that’s great in theory but it never works in practice. In the end… what does “transparency” even mean? There’s a lot of great writing on this, Kate Crawford and Mike Ananny have this amazing piece that I always try to plug, called “Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability.” Kate has done some amazing work in the field of A.I. ethics, and things like that. So, yeah, with “transparency,” what they’re essentially always pitching is, “we think transparency is great,” which is true, but we always respond with, “well, we’d love you to be transparent about how this process of transparency is going.” At which point they usually say, “great,” and we’re in. Because I think they really believe it, you know? I mean, Steve wakes up every morning– I mean, he was a nice person to us. Which doesn’t excuse anything! But at the same time, he was perfectly nice to us. I think that these people really believe that they’re doing the right thing. So I think that when you approach someone with good faith, even if you don’t necessarily agree with what they’re doing, I think there’s a lot space to work with there. Or, if they deny our request to access – after we ask them to show off the transparency they’re supposedly engaging in – they’re really being flat-out hypocritical. You know, we filmed this in 2017. And that was the beginning of the Trump years. And I don’t think that a lot of the things we did then would necessarily work any more. I’ve spoken with a lot of journalist friends of mine who feel that, in the last four years alone, there’s been such a trend towards every corporation having their own PR company, their own in-house production company… and that the line between “sponsored content” and “journalism” has been obfuscated for a long time, and it’s only getting more so. If there ever was a line to begin with! I think that people have really wised-up to the old muckraking journalist in their midst.

There is a statement made in the film that police body cameras are only meant to show the officer’s perspective, and that showing anything outside of that one perspective would be problematic. There is no discussion about getting at the objective truth of a situation, which seems wrong somehow.

TA: Well, that’s very intentional– that’s supreme court-derived jurisprudence at work. To get in the weeds for a second, “use of force” policy has a very involved legal framework around it. What constitutes a “justifiable use of force” in the United States is determined by a standard known as “objectively reasonable,” which was established by a case, Graham v. Connor, in which a pair of police officers beat up a diabetic Black man who was having an episode in a bodega. The officers claimed that use of force was justified because they didn’t know he was having a diabetic episode at the time. So what the supreme court said was, well, these cops had no idea that this man was in medical danger; he was behaving erratically. So therefore they were justified in their use of force. That man lost that case against the police officers. And now that’s the law of the land. So when we talk about “objectively reasonable,” which basically means the use of 20/20 hindsight is not allowed, the way that these bodies cameras are designed is to never go beyond that “objectively reasonable” framework. You never want to show anything more than what the police officer could have known at the time. If you look at what local officials and politicians are telling you about these cameras, or what Steve is telling you about these cameras… the reality is a far cry from the notion of the “all-seeing eye of God” that this body camera supposedly represents, if you listen to them. It’s actually just a really, really crystalized enshrinement of the police officer’s incredibly limited perspective. But it’s not just due to Axon. It’s the entire court system that has deeply adopted the outcome of Graham v. Connor. I think there’s some really cool work right now to elevate the standard from “objectively reasonable” to “necessary and proportional.” This new standard says that, in order for a use of force to be justified, it can’t just be, “oh, we didn’t know at the time,” instead you have to ask the question, “was it actually necessary to break that person’s leg? Was that action proportional to the threat being posed to the officer?” And that’s not all that needs to happen, but stuff like that just seems so common sense. It’s a really uphill battle, but it’s starting to happen in different jurisdictions, which is definitely a welcome development.