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  cinéma vérité 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…

From the Personal Archive - Tom Ryan talks to D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus about their concert film, DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN (USA, 2000) - Part One

 CAPTURING THE MOMENT

 

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.

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.

**********************************

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.