In the lead up to the festival, Filmmaker Magazine asked each film’s director to answer the following question: As an artist, why are you a filmmaker, and why is film, as opposed to all of today’s other forms, the medium for your story? There was of course a maximum word count; below is my unabridged reply to this thought-provoking question.
49 million people in the U.S.—one in four children—don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It’s a shocking statistic, but how to you turn a stat into a story? My answer is deceivingly simple: you make a movie.
No art form can truly make us feel another person’s pain, or joy, or hunger. It’s our own emotions and imaginations that bring any art form to life. But film, in my experience, is the most powerful conduit between one person’s experience and an audience. As a filmmaker, I consider making that connection to be among my most cherished responsibilities and fulfilling rewards. It’s a cycle of storytelling that has the potential to change all of us – the subject, the filmmaker, and the audience.
It reminds me of the great film experiences of my life – those experiences I’m aiming for when making my own films. Like the first time I saw Harlan County, USA by Barbara Kopple (who later became a close friend and mentor of mine). There are unforgettable moments in that film, like when Lois Scott, small town wife and mother, pulls a gun out of her shirt. Or when Barbara and her film crew are attacked while filming a picket line before dawn. Those are the cinematic moments that make you want to jump out of your seat and scream at the screen. Those experiences stay with us when we leave the theater. They change us forever.
There were moments in the production of Finding North that I’ll never forget. Like the feeling in my stomach when one of our characters, a young girl named Rosie, invited us to see where she lives with her older sister. It’s a powerful scene in the film and I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s fair to say that my reaction was a complex mix of heartache, sympathy and outrage. That those emotions can be recreated in a film is one of the medium’s true miracles.
As filmmakers, we were able to spend as much time with our subjects as we needed to tell their story. We were able to see them develop and change over time. We were also able to observe the political process, in all its tedious, frustrating and convoluted glory. Documentary filmmaking gives us that opportunity in a way that no other medium does.
All this requires filmmaking to be a collaborative process and an opportunity to bring together incredible teams of storytellers – another reason why film is my medium of choice. In this film, my partner and I were fortunate to work with an incredible team, our own “dream team” — from our Executive Producer Diane Weyermann and Producers Julie Goldman and Ryan Harrington, to the incredible DPs Dan Gold, Kirsten Johnson and Nelson Hume, and in the edit room, Jean Tsien, Madeleine Gavin and Andrea Scott — each brings to the film their unique experience, perspective and talent. Our score, which was created by the extraordinary T-Bone Burnett, adds yet another emotional layer to the story. Each element of storytelling complements the others. In the end, films truly embody the idea of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
Together this makes documentary film the medium of choice for this story and so many others. The true reward for me, though, is yet to come. That begins in Park City, in a room full of strangers, when the light first hits the screen, and the cycle of storytelling is completed.
