From the Personal Archive - Tom Ryan talks to D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus about their filmmaking - Part Two

D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus

In 2002 D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus spoke to Tom Ryan about their concert film, Down from the Mountain, and the art of low-budget documentary filmmaking. Part One of their conversation was published here on 2 November

PART TWO

Tom Ryan: Your work seems to have revolved around music and politics?

 

D A  Pennebaker: That’s kind of what we get access to. We would love to get access to large theatrical shows, but they go on stage and they don’t want us to be filming them dirty-handed, as it were, with our out-of-focus hand-held cameras. But, on the other hand, we can sometimes get backstage, as we did with Moon Over Broadway [their documentary about the Broadway play, Moon Over Buffalo].

I think that the problem the independent filmmaker faces is that he’s not a screenwriter, he’s usually not married to a famous movie star, he has none of things that studios want to put money into, so whatever he does he’s going to have to do on his own nickels. So it tends to be proscribed. You can get to the dancers, you can get to some musicians, though not all, you can get to politicians if they really don’t care what’s gonna happen to them. You learn to live with that and you make the best of it, and sometimes lightning strikes and you’re lucky.”

Chris Hegedus: I think that in the past when the process was a bit more expensive because we were shooting film and we were trying to raise money – not that it really helped – we would consider funding to shoot a film about a celebrity or a musician or a politician. But now that things have swung around and we’re shooting in mini-DV – startup is one of the cases of this – we’re able to go out without funding and explore subjects that programmers might not see as being interesting right off. I think that we may get into some subjects that normally we wouldn’t’ve.

DAP: We meet a different kind of person than the ordinary network executive or anyone working for a large-scale operation meets in terms of source material. We tend to meet musicians at the bottom of the ladder, and some of them are gonna be just as good at the bottom as they’re gonna be at the top. But they haven’t got there yet. So we get a chance to see things early on and, if we’re lucky, sometimes we get a ride. 

That’s kind of what we count on, because the big guys don’t have to do that. They can wait until the guy comes to them. That’s the only game in town when they get to the top and they don’t need us any more. But in the beginning we bring a kind of news value to incoming talent. 

 

Do you think that the whole “reality television” movement has brought the cinema  movement and the kind of work you both do into disrepute?

 

DAP: Mmm. That’s interesting. I don’t know what I think about that. I think that the 9/11 disaster was like a gigantic comet landing in New York. It wasn’t like the Zapruder footage which everyone thought was a one-off, an accident: that a guy with an 8mm camera happened to get a shot of the president of the United States as his head was being blown off. Even though he was surrounded by press, none of whom got it. 

In the case of 9/11, a lot of people got it, in different ways, in ways that are so astonishing that, if you could see the work being turned out by people who lived down in that area… We’ve seen things done by four or five people, and not just the French guys who shot the firemen stuff, without having any idea of how to structure or what they were doing. But they were so filled with the same anxiety that this thing drove into everybody’s brain… It was like, ‘How do I account for this? What have I done? Everything’s turned around.’ 

And the work hasn’t come out through broadcast. It’s not through any of the people that we normally expect to cover news. It was people who have these little cameras. And what I see is the dawn of a whole new documentary era in which people are going to happen to be there when something happens and don’t look for it on the evening news. 

You’re gonna get it in other ways, and what those ways are isn’t clear yet. Maybe on-line. Now it tends to be documentary films that people like ourselves make and try to smoosh into theatres when they can with a great loss of money for everybody. But they don’t have a way to get it into the lexicon, into the culture, because the studios are not going to take them on as film and because they can’t get to television. Television doesn’t want ’em. So they’re stuck with having to go in a weird way… 

But they’re doing it. And I think other ways are emerging and that you’re going to have an entirely new kind of documentary film which is not going to be at all what it’s been. And people are gonna get used to this and remember when documentaries weren’t as long and were about little penguins. They’re gonna be something that studio films can’t do and that television can’t do for the simple reason that they weren’t able to cover this event except from a distance. Not in the way that everybody, in their terrible angst, wanted it to be covered.

 

But your films have always been that kind of “guerrilla filmmaking”...

 

DAP: That’s because we had no other choice. What else could we do? Nobody asked us out to Hollywood and told us, ‘Hey, there’s 500 dancers in there. Go help yourself.’ You get used to doing what you do and you learn how to do it well and it’s like Thai food. I suppose people who live in Thailand consider it gratuitous and are more interested in getting steaks from Canada or something. But for us, this is what we do and we try to do it so well that people will respond to it in the same way that they respond to anything else that’s done well.

 

Do you find that people have changed over the years in the way that they respond to the camera’s presence?

 

CH: For me, I feel like it’s been a process. Probably in the very beginning when Penny and his fellow cinema vérité filmmakers started out, I think that people didn’t understand what the process was enough to really know about it. I think by the time I started making these films in the ’70s people were aware of it. Certainly politicians were much more aware of the camera than they had been, especially the sound. They knew what sound could do that would be harmful to them. 

Now everyone has a camera, it seems, and I think in some ways it’s gotten a little easier because so many people are filming and so many people want to be a part of it because they’ve seen other people on it and it’s threatening but not as threatening because everyone’s being sprayed with it at this point. That was especially the feeling I got during startup, that it seemed to be more accepted.

James Carville, The War Room

DAP: But you know I don’t think that James Carville [in The War Room] behaved any differently than Kennedy did 20 years before. To me, if you come in with a lot of equipment and five people carrying cameras and it’s a big deal and you set ’em all up and you command the forces of without, then of course that’s something that takes people away from their normal lives. But if that camera isn’t such a big deal, then it’s not a big deal for people. 

We had the same problems sitting in the war room as I had sitting in the Oval Office with Kennedy. He knew what it did, everybody did. They’re not dumb. They know what cameras do. But if you just seem to be interested in what they do, and not in how you operate your camera or trying to make an art form out of your movie or any of those things, then I think that’s what interests them because they really haven’t got time to help you make your little art film. Their only interest in the film is that get to see some little feedback of what they’re like. And that’s hard for them to get. 

They’re surrounded by ‘yes’ men, and the 6 o’clock news is showing something that’s scabrous or slanderous or whatever. So for them to actually see how they look when they work, that’s hard, and if they think that’s what you’re getting, then they’re interested in it. 

Like psychiatry. It’s something that really gets at them. And if you’re interested in that, in what they do, they understand that right away. Then the camera disappears. They don’t even see the camera. Sometimes when they say, ‘Gee, I never noticed you had a camera,’ that’s not quite true. But I understand what they mean.

 

But do you have to remain sceptical about your subjects, ever alert to ‘the trap of the camera’, to the way they might be putting on a performance simply because the camera’s there?

 

DAP: Well, with some people you might. But think with people that we’re interested in and that are doing what we think they’re gonna do, there are no surprises. That’s not such a problem.

CH: There are certain people that act for the camera, but if you film people while they’re doing things that are meaningful to them and that they’re very occupied with, they really can’t be bothered with you. And I think that people who act for the camera, like James Carville, act for everyone, which is why The War Room was such a terrific invention for him because there was a whole audience for him all the time.

 

In Down from the Mountain, John Hartford looks really ill when you interview him near the start, but once he’s on stage it’s as if something possesses him… [I subsequently learned that Hartford, who’s probably best known for composing “Gentle on My Mind”, suffered from non-Hodgkin lymphoma from the 1980s until his death in 2001.] 

 

CH: I know. It is incredible. I was really worried about him when I met him. He looked very sick and he was very sick. You go to shake hands with him when you meet him and he wouldn’t even shake your hand because he didn’t want to spread any kind of germs. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, how is he going to put on this concert and be the MC for it?’ 

But you know it’s like the way actors transform themselves on stage and musicians, a lot of ’em, are also actors. And he just got up there and he was splendid. He looked better than almost anyone else in the film with his hat and his outfit. He just came alive and it was amazing to watch.”

 

I understand you two met as a result of Town, Bloody Hall?

 

CH: No, we didn’t meet as a result of Town, Bloody Hall, but that was one of the first projects that we did together.

 

So…

 

DAP (whispering conspiratorially): She came in to see us looking for a job. I was really about to go bankrupt at the time, but I didn’t want to let her escape. So I said, ‘Yes, of course you can have a job.’ I hired her immediately. I don’t think we paid her very quickly, but we hired her.

CH: I was under the false impression that there was money to be made.

DAP: We had a good front.

Who do you think are the good documentary filmmakers these days?

 

DAP: There’s quite a few.

CH: “I think Nick Doob, our partner on this film, is an amazing filmmaker who’s just done a wonderful film called Schooling Jewel, about a high school student in mid-west America.

Germaine Greer, Norman Mailer, Town Bloody Hall

DAP: I think Ross McElwee. I think there’s a number of good filmmakers around whose work I don’t know very well. I’ve seen a lot of films in the past couple of years that tell me that people have figured out how to do it. It’s how Charlie Parker must have felt: that five years later everyone was playing like him. It makes you feel good.

 

Frederick Wiseman?

DAP: Sure. He’s a very hard worker and very obsessed and his films are very interesting. They’re hard, and you’ve really gotta pay attention to them, but they’re unique. There’s nobody else doing that.”

 

Albert Maysles?

 

DAP: Sure, terrific filmmaker. He’s a good cameraman and he has people around him who are good editors and they’ve worked out a way of working together that is very effective. People figure out how to do things their way. We don’t all do them the same way. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in front of an editing table, but he’s a fantastic cameraman. He shot with us on Monterey. He gets people who understand what he wants to do and they figure out how to do the editing…