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Q&A with Greg Barker and Wagner Moura

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

The story of how this film came to fruition is really remarkable: You directed a documentary of the same name in 2009, based on a book by Samantha Power. Since then, you’ve directed several more documentaries. But now you’ve returned to this story, and this time you’re doing so through narrative filmmaking.

Greg Barker: When you look back, it’s kind of hard to believe it took about fifteen years from the time I encountered the details of what ultimately became the documentary— Samantha Power was writing her book, I had spent a lot of my life living and working overseas, first doing journalism and then doing documentaries, and I knew people who had known Sergio serving in Rwanda and East Timor and elsewhere. And I knew Samantha from some work I had done on the Rwandan genocide, which dovetailed with her first book. And she was sharing these chapters about a book she was writing about Sergio. There was something about the scope of his life— the choices he made, the personal struggles that he had, his ability to see the world in all its complexity but his inability to see himself that really spoke to me. At the time I was making documentaries for Frontline, and I saw this as a feature doc that we could take to HBO. And we made it, and it worked, but there was something about the story, and Sergio’s internal story, that always spoke to me. And eventually, the narrative rights to Samantha’s book came up in 2011. I got those rights, and then started trying to make a movie. And eventually, three years ago or so, I found out that Wagner Moura was interested! And we kind of found each other, and obviously, that was like this perfect coincidence of events. And we realized on a long Skype call that we had the same ideas about the world, and about the film, and about the character that we wanted to unpack… and now here we are.

I’m just letting her story move me, because what she was saying was so truthful and so profound. 

There is a scene with an East Timorese woman, a non-actor named Senhorinha Gama Da Costa Lobo, that is completely amazing. Wagner, can you talk about that scene, and about casting that role?

Wagner Moura: I think that’s my favorite scene in the film. That was the most difficult casting we did. Because what she says in that beautiful monologue… those lines were taken from Samantha’s book; it was something a woman had said to Sergio in a refuge camp in central Asia. I personally think it’s very weird when you see a film about refugees, or human rights abuses, or other types of vulnerable people, and you never actually meet the people. You only talk about them. So it was very important for us to have a scene, where Sergio, who was a person with tremendous reserves of empathy and who had a great ability to connect with other people, it was very important for us to have a scene where we could see Sergio engaging with the people everyone is saying he’s there to defend or to help. All the extras in that village were from East Timor. Even though we shot in Thailand, we brought them in for that scene. For me, that was the most emotional part of making the film. Because all of them knew who Sergio was (he’s a very important person in their history), and many had even met him personally, and they were eager to share the stories they had about him. That particular woman’s role was very hard to cast, because no one actually speaks that way. But when we saw her, we just knew we had found the one. And what she did in that scene was actually pretty high-level acting: she connected her personal experience with the lines she was asked to say, which is actually very difficult to do. This was the only scene in the entire film that wasn’t rehearsed at all— it was a one-shot scene. We shot her dialog, and then we moved the camera and shot mine. And that was it. And as you can see in the film, I’m just basically playing myself in that scene. I’m just letting her story move me, because what she was saying was so truthful and so profound. 

Sergio has a remarkable ability to connect deeply with people he meets in the course of his work, but then seems almost totally incapable of connecting with his own family. Can you discuss how you approached this dual nature of the character?

GB: That was his great struggle. He was so effective politically precisely because he could absorb the experiences he learned from civilians in the field and then apply that to actually making and changing policy. But he almost had a blind spot when it came to his personal life. And since I had spent a lot of time overseas with journalists, I could understand the idea that makes someone think, “well, what I’m doing is so important and so immersive… my personal life will take care of itself.” A lot of people feel that way. And they can become cynical and jaded. And he was never cynical, but he was blind and sort of running away from his personal life. And we were very interested in that from the outset.

WM: It was such a massive contradiction: here was a guy who was literally trying to save the world, but couldn’t organize his personal life. He wasn’t able to be totally present in his own personal life. And this is something I see that happens a lot with people who get to a certain place in their careers. They’re completely dedicated to their profession. Sergio was sort of in that path. It’s sort of contradictory that a man like him, an intellectual, a graduate of the Sorbonne, a man who had the greatest education and training anyone could ever have, who was the biggest problem-solver in the history of the United Nations… had such a chaotic personal life. I would even say he displayed emotionally immature behavior. And that was actually important to show that in how we portrayed him, because when you’re making a film about a historical figure of great renown, one of the struggles is not to portray them as a saint. To not make a hagiography. Luckily for us, he had so many contradictions. And the story itself, the history itself, of the U.N. being in Iraq, and the U.N. being against the invasion, and Sergio being personally against the invasion, but at the same time having to be there… So the film is so full of contradictions that, in terms of filmmaking, I think it was a very well chosen story and character.

Q&A with Julie Goldman, Samantha Power, Greg Barker

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

What was the process like to bring this film together?
Julie Goldman: This is our sixth film together, so we have an established and unusual machine that works for our flow of producing. In this case, it was a lot of filming in New York and an enormous amount of logistics in getting access. We also just worked creatively together, looking at cuts and having conversations about the film. There were some tricky moments such as handing off $20,000 in cash to the field producer on the street corner in the middle of the night. From the beginning, it was very involved and required taking care of every obstacle so Greg Barker could do what he does best which is go out and make a great film.

“I’m either in intense and transparent overdrive or I’m asleep, so there wasn’t an inbetween way of doing this.”

How do you see this film as both a record of the final year of President Obama’s presidency and the telling of a story?
Greg Barker: In terms of producing for documentary films, Julie and John are incredibly creative. They’re hands-on with the details of production, but also present with making the art of the film that comes together in the cutting room. It was nice to have a team to rely on and confide in when things were going wrong or when I was worried about something. That was incredibly valuable as a director. For the actual making of this film, it was a leap of faith for all of us to do it and get the required access to make it work as a documentary. There was a lot of skepticism amongst the bureaucracy to figure out what this film meant. Most things done with foreign policy staffers and those discussions are classified, so it wasn’t possible to be in every room. I was hoping creatively be able to be in the war room, but I found that the human emotion and drama is what’s most important to making the film work. For me, it evolved into a view of where we see America’s role in the world and what should that position be.

What was it like having a crew shadowing you for a year?
Samantha Power: I’m either in intense and transparent overdrive or I’m asleep, so there wasn’t an inbetween way of doing this. I’m surrounded in my job by many people who do intense and driven work, but are also suspicious and skeptical, so I was cautioned that more skepticism was warranted on my part. I’d get ten page memos detailing all the ways this could and would go wrong. My view was that we’re not perfect and the Syria chapter in it is one emblem of that, but more exposure to the sincerity of the enterprise is better for the overall good as that exposure is most lacking with the public’s understanding of government. Transparency isn’t always to the good especially looking at earlier edits where there were more scenes of me constantly swearing! However, I do believe that this film is important to give people insight into the people working in government and that they’re just trying to do good and they care about the world around them. In a world where the faith in our institutions is extremely low, this is a bit of an antidote to that problem.

Why edit the film the way you did? What were you trying to lead the audience through?
Barker: I’m generally an optimist, so I tend to look for glimmers of hope. Otherwise it just feels like we’re lost as a country. The actual art of crafting this film was a challenge on the technical level. We were just shooting lots of things and assembling as we went along. I had two assistant editors that watched everything and logged the footage based on character emotional substance and different markers so we could easily find the clips we needed to find. The next step was having a few editors work. Around the time of the election, I knew we had to get a cut of the film before they left office, regardless of what happened in the election.

How much did the election of President Trump had an impact on the end of the film?
Barker: Obviously we were shaped by the election. I think what’s amazing is that when we first started filming, we were trying to figure out when to stop. I remember saying early on that I was going to continue filming until the morning of January 20th and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. There was something extraordinary about witnessing transfer of power and being in the offices of the White House on that day. For me, those next shots are about what comes next and about the way the system works, which has a beauty and simplicity to it.

Power: Those powerful shots come from Trump creating an actual deadline of kicking everyone out the moment he stepped into office.

Goldman: We always knew that we wanted to film until that day.  We just didn’t realize that it was this deadline moment where we really had to film then hurry out.