CAPTURING THE MOMENT
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| Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker |
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. This is part one of their conversation
Tom Ryan writes: D.A. Pennebaker (1925 – 2018) had an extraordinary career. He was the Illinois-born filmmaker whose cinema vérité style and sensitivity to the circumstances of his subjects eventually brought him to the fore of American documentary filmmaking.
From small beginnings – a five-minute experimental short completed in 1957, entitled Daybreak Express and set to a 1933 Duke Ellington piece of the same name – the man with the movie camera on his shoulder charted a distinctive route across more than 50 years of US history. It’s not quite a case of you-name-it-he-was-there, but almost. Seeing his films is like watching a parade of 20th-century American icons.
He helped Gypsy Rose Lee make a short film about herself and shot a 15-minute one about Timothy Leary’s wedding. He worked on a project with Jean-Luc Godard featuring LeRoi Jones (in the early ’70s), shot three films for Norman Mailer, and made Town Bloody Hall (1979) about Mailer’s celebrated and fiery public debate with Germaine Greer and other assembled feminists.
He went on the campaign trail with John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, John Glenn and (in 1993’s Oscar-nominated The War Room) Bill Clinton, and he somehow managed to inveigle his camera into the Oval Office during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
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| D.A. Pennebaker filming Bob Dylan, Don't Look Back |
He shot documentaries about the theatre: Jane Fonda’s 1962 Broadway debut (for Robert Drew); the 1997 Moon Over Broadway about the birth, life and death of a Broadway show starring Carol Burnett. And about a host of musical subjects: Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of the UK, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Chuck Berry, Depeche Mode. He also filmed the recording of the original cast album of Stephen Sondheim’s Company.
Probably the most famous of his concert films is Monterey Pop (1968). But then there was Sweet Toronto, filmed at the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival of the following year with Bo Diddley and a host of others, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Not to forget the still-unreleased Wake at Generation, a record of the wake where Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, BB King, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix and others gathered at a club called Generation to pay their musical respects to Martin Luther King.
But one of Pennebaker’s most engaging concert films, co-directed by his wife, Chris Hegedus (born 1952), is Down from the Mountain (2000), a rousing, Grammy award-winning celebration of bluegrass music. And a film that owes its existence to the considerable clout of the Coen brothers, who’d fallen in love with the bluegrass sound after T-Bone Burnett helped them with their research for the soundtrack for their 2000 comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coens went on to arrange a concert with the musicians involved – including John Hartford as MC, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris and Ralph Stanley, the grand-daddy of bluegrass – bringing them all together for a one-off performance, which took place on May 24, 2000, at the Ryman Auditorium.
The brothers then approached Pennebaker and Hegedus with the idea of recording the concert. They in turn invited cameraman Nick Doob to co-direct the project with them. Hegedus, who began working with Pennebaker as the editor on Town Bloody Hall also shared director credits with him on the film as well as on most of his subsequent work, before continuing her career on a variety of projects after his death.
Pennebaker – the D.A. stands for Donn Alan, but Hegedus called him “Penny” – always worked according to his belief in the importance of “recording the moment” and that commitment was where I began my interview with the pair shortly after the Down Under release of Down from the Mountain.
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TR: In a previous interview you’ve talked about the importance to you of “capturing the moment”…
D.A. Pennebaker (laughing): I won’t be responsible for anything I’ve said in any previous interviews.
… but there’s also another side to what you both do, and that’s contextualising the moment. You’ve said “fooling around with it”, but it seems much more rigorous than that…
DAP: Yes, well it’s true that when we came to this, we just knew we were dealing with a particular genre. I know some of the songs. I’ve sat in hotel rooms while people that I’ve admired remembered and sang the things. I think of it as a kind of road music without knowing too much about it.
Theoretically I know they’re Scottish-Irish highland songs about transporting a people’s history. But then when you get closer to it, and to the people who sing it, you learn really what it is. It’s right in front of you and you have to learn that because you’re responding with a camera to what people are saying and doing, and that can’t help but colour the way you deal with it. You learn about its history from Ralph Stanley, you think, ‘Well, I didn’t know that. Maybe nobody else knows that.’ So maybe we should try to figure out how to get that into the film.
So when Emmylou says that when she first heard bluegrass music on her car radio she almost drove off the road, it intrigues me because I had assumed she was born with this thing in her mouth.
These are things that catch your interest so you try to see without making the film dreary, and a teaching film, but you do want to get the things that intrigue you into the film because you assume that they’re gonna intrigue other people.
I noted a lot of Pennebaker names in the credits…
DAP (laughing): Disgusting isn’t it? The mafioso! If you use your family, I find it saves money. It doesn’t always improve the output, but it saves money.
Chris Hegedus: Actually, it’s been a family affair for quite a while. It’s the Ma-Pa grocery store of filmmaking.
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| Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss, Down from the Mountain |
The idea of family is also central to Down from the Mountain? Was that planned going in?
DAP: No, no. You must understand: we plan nothing. We’re famous for being ‘unplanned’ when we arrive. And when you edit your footage you try to take advantage of any corners you can cut, any ideas you can put in there…
CH: Basically, it wasn’t planned because this group of musicians were put together by the Coen brothers for the soundtrack of their movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? So it was the Coens’ passion for this type of music that got everything going. And they wanted to do more with it after releasing their film. They wanted to put on a concert with all of these musicians in Nashville and they asked us if we would come shoot it. So that’s how we got involved and that’s why all these groups of family are in there.
DAP: It’s kind of family music to begin with.
CH: And I guess they’re family too, because they’re brothers.
The film does seem structured in such a way as to emphasize all of this?
DAP: Well, probably. I mean, we didn’t think about it that way. Initially, we try to put things together as they happen, in alphabetical order if you like. And then you look at that and find that it doesn’t quite work, so you start fooling around with it. You always try to keep what the basic essence of the thing is, whether you’ve filmed it or not. It’s got nothing to do with your filmmaking intentions.
These people perform on stage, the music is handed down over literally hundreds of years from family to family and somebody in the family remembers the songs and it gets to the next family, and so on. There is a lot of family business about it which we had nothing to do with either in the planning or anything else. But, in the end, you’re right, that shines through and you have to go with it.
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| D. A. Pennebaker |
Chris, you’re not credited with an editing credit here, but does the family working method mean that you always have an input into the process?
CH: Oh yeah. I was editing startup.com at the time [co-directed by Jehane Noujaim, and produced by Pennebaker] so I would come down and watch what Nick (Doob) was doing because he did the bulk of the editing on this film.
How do you decide what to leave out?
CH: I think it’s the same as what Penny was saying: if it interests you, it will interest others. We didn’t really shoot too much on this film. We spent just two and a half days with the people…
DAP: There was action we dropped, and mostly it was because of Ethan and Joel and their feeling of what constituted a proper bluegrass concert. And there were decisions made about what to leave out which, at the time, I felt badly about.
But still we had to make a 90-minute film. We’d shot a two-hour one and it had to be cut in some way. That’s always standing in the back of the room waiting for you, no matter how enthusiastic you get or how carried away you are with what’s there. Chris comes in and says, ‘Are you 90 minutes yet?’ and if you’re not, it’s back to the drawing board.
How many cameras to cover the performances? Five?
CH: It was Penny and Nick and Joan Churchill and myself. Four. We had some small cameras which we had off stage, but we didn’t use them for the concerts. We had them backstage.
Rehearsals?
CH: One or two. It was all really done in a quick low-budget way and, at the time, I don’t think the Coen brothers ever thought this music would take off. They hoped it would. They were excited about it, but it was very surprising that it’s become such a global phenomenon. They had a limited amount of money. They decided to shoot the concert about a month before it happened.
DAP: But everybody in the business that they talked to said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t make a concert film. Nobody will ever run it in their theatre.’ So they came to us and said, ‘We’ve got a concert that we want you to shoot, but could you not make it a concert film.’
CH: ‘And could you only spend two days on it because that’s all the money that we have.’
DAP: So we made a concert film but we kind of disguised it thinly.
Do you have to like the music to get involved?
DAP: I think you’d be missing something it if you didn’t like it. It’d be such a waste to put all that passion and focus and obsessive behaviour into making a film if you didn’t like it.
CH: But you don’t have to know about it. I know when we did the Depeche Mode film [Depeche Mode 101, 1989], we’d never heard their music before…
DAP: But we ended up liking it.
CH: I think the first time around every song sounded exactly the same to us. But in the end we really loved it and I couldn’t work out why I thought that every song sounded the same. I think you have to just be open when you’re gonna approach something that’s new.
DAP: It’s like learning Chinese. It seems complicated, but once you know it, it’s ‘Of course!’
Would you ever consider making a film about, say, Celine Dion… or Dion DiMucci?
DAP: Maybe. I would never say ‘No’ to anybody who bothered to approach us. Because they know something too. They’ve seen a film and they know how we work and, if that interests them, it sort of has to interest us. We don’t always make all those films, of course.
But it’s funny you mention it because I just saw a picture of her and she looks really an interesting person to me. But I have no idea. I don’t know all that much about her music. When I mention her to my 14 year-old, she says ‘Ugccch!!’ But you can’t be guided by that. She looks like a person who really knows what she’s doing somehow. And she’s got an interesting face. I dunno. I’d be receptive. Whether we could make it fly or not, or whether she’d end up wanting to do it, that’s between there and the gods. But I wouldn’t knock anybody out. I think there’s nobody in the world right now who’s doing anything that you shouldn’t consider as a possible subject.
It isn’t just musicians, it’s politicians. I’d like to be in that little bunker with what’s’is name, Arafat. The whole world is circling around him there and, they won’t let you out once you get in, I gather, so that’s the place for a camera. If you could really find out what those people are up to, that’s what everybody wants to know. That’s what documentary filmmaking is supposedly about.
Part two will appear shortly. In it, Pennebaker and Hegedus make some extremely prescient observations about the future of documentary filmmaking.
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