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PANEL ON SOCIAL ISSUE DOCS AND
"DARFUR NOW"
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Totally deductible, AND we will have email blasts – that you can send out to everybody you know, to your lists, because we need to get bodies into theaters to continue to get this out there. We will have all that available on our website.
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Cathy Schulman:
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Yes, crucial. I’ll just finish about the things that can make a theatrical documentary work and then Ted can talk about the film…
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Cathy Schulman:
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Veritae is really important because these are active characters speaking for themselves. You also need a sense of scope, a sense of size, a sense of adventure, all the same things that apply to a narrative film, you really have to apply to a documentary if your goal is to hit the theatrical marketplace. And so certainly, you have to throw out everything you ever heard about a documentary before. It happens to be an art form that people like to be very
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Ted Braun:
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doctrinaire --
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Cathy Schulman:
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--about. Doctrinaire, perfect word. Ted’s a teacher. He has really good words.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Good tag team here, though, very good.
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Cathy Schulman:
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People tend to be very doctrinaire about the documentary art form and I actually think that if you’re looking at intersecting this art form with a theatrical release, you ought not to be too doctrinaire and you ought to look at what it is that makes regular movies work and what’s salable, what creates a sense of notability, what’s worthy of conversation and what’s self-distinguishing. And then …. what’s hip? All those things, same things you would do anyway. So, that’s what we did and …..
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Ted Braun:
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We’ll find out.
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Cathy Schulman:
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Yeah. This will be very embarrassing if all these people think it’s totally stinko …..
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Ted Braun:
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But you’ll remember this weekend as a cautionary account --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Yes. This will either have been a panel about what to do or what not to do. We just don’t know yet.
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Ted Braun:
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I was very fortunate in having Cathy as a producer on this for many, many reasons. Not least of which, because she’s so expert at her job, I didn’t have to worry about how to sell the film beyond presenting it well to her and presenting the story to the people that I met. She was able to address a lot of the marketplace and buying and selling issues.
My concern principally, and it was a luxury, was with the story telling. I approached the documentary in the same way that I would approach any theatrical film experience. It’s going to sound very old school, but I love going to the pictures to be taken someplace I’ve never been before. I love going to the pictures to be with people that are fascinating – whether they’re good or bad, they’re inspiring. And I love going to the pictures for a really rich, satisfying cinematic experience. I want the film to look amazing. I want it to sound amazing. I want to really be physically affected by having plunked the dough down and gone to the movie theater. All of those elements came into play as I was thinking about this film and I was thinking about who was going to be in the film, where we were going to film, and how we were going to film.
My principle concern as a director in the field was access. I had to be able to take the crew and the audience to places they’d never been before. If we didn’t have access, we had nothing. The second thing that was important to me, were the characters. I had to be able to be with the most fascinating people at the most fascinating moments of their lives as I possible could. And my third concern was trying to do that filming in a way that was as cinematically satisfying as possible. So, those were my three guiding lights when we were in the field shooting.
As far as choosing the characters? You face this challenge when you’re writing a screenplay, figuring out who your characters are, what they’re trying to accomplish and what internal and external struggles they face. These are the same issues you face as a documentarian. The thing you’re stuck with as a documentarian is that you have to do it all on the fly. Fred Wiseman, the great American documentarian who I was able to speak with once, said: “ I have no idea why you’re interested in making narrative films - they’re so static. Documentaries feel like it’s athletic. You’ve got to run. You’ve got to fly. You’ve got to make decisions. All this sitting in directors’ chairs and thinking, That’s crazy.” So, the business of deciding who to have in your film and of responding to them and their lives as they’re going on is incredibly exhilarating and it’s also very challenging. Would it be helpful for me to talk about the six people in the film and how --
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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I think it would be --
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Ted Braun:
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As I mentioned earlier, I knew this was going to be an ensemble picture. I knew I was going to have more than one character when I first sat down with Cathy Schulman and with Mark Harris who was actually the very first person that I approached about the project. Mark is a three-time Academy Award winning documentarian. Two of his features in the last ten years have won Best Pictures Oscars, both of which were about the consequences of the Holocaust, “The Long Way Home,” which is about European Jews from the end of the Second World War to the founding state of Israel. And, “Into the Arms of Strangers” which is about the Kindertransport. We talked about my proposal of nine main characters because I was so interested in all the different aspects of this - they were all great --
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Cathy Schulman:
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We had to introduce him to the 90-minute concept. He was going for the --
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Ted Braun:
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Yeah and I still believed I was making a two hour documentary when we started editing the film! But gradually, gradually we narrowed the characters we would cover down to about six. I had immediately settled upon two people that I knew I wanted to have in the film. One was a very young activist based here in southern California who I met within the first few weeks of looking into the project. His name’s Adam Sterling. He was at UCLA and had organized a group of students when he had learned about the crisis in Darfur to get the UC Regents to divest. He had succeeded. In the process he had met Don and one of Colin’s colleagues, a guy named John Prendergast who helped them mobilize the Regents to actually divest. At the time that I met him he was moving on towards getting legislation passed in the California legislature to divest the State’s pension funds of all their holdings in companies doing business in Sudan. He was a very self-aware guy. He was a dream, a lot of obstacles, struggles, and he’s good looking. --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Um-hmm, yeah --
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Ted Braun:
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He is good looking!
I’m speaking in a very off-handed way here, but one of the things you have to think about when you’re making a film is are your subjects going to hold the screen? Are they people that audiences will want to sit in the dark for two hours with.
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Cathy Schulman:
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What he’s saying is really important: As the subjects of documentaries you’re actually looking for the same things you’re looking for in movie stars. I mean you’re looking for a sense of charisma, an ability to captivate, an ability to have a camera around them without freezing. A lot of the research filming he did of the subjects was not only for the content of what they were doing in their lives, but also their ability to be filmed in a way that was natural, exciting and that they came alive when you’re looking through the lens. It’s crucially important.
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Ted Braun:
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The next person that I knew I wanted to have in the film was the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo at the Hague. An Argentinian lawyer, he had been profiled in the “New York Times” Sunday magazine and I was intrigued by what he was trying to accomplish on Darfur. I was intrigued by the fact that he was working on the global stage. One of the things that I was trying to accomplish with this film was to get as many different perspectives of the conflict on as many different levels as possible. I didn’t want all world statesmen. I also didn’t want to have only grassroots people- the people in the field. I wanted to get as global a view as possible. Ocampo seemed like someone who would be of real interest. And he was embarking on something new.
The International Criminal Court was, at the time that I met him, not yet three years old, and he was its first prosecutor. So, he was in the process of building an institution as well as investigating the Darfur case. But I had no way of getting to him. Even with all of the clout of the people associated with this, we were having trouble finding the proper introduction. And here’s something that is of value to you all. I just decided to pick up the phone and call. And that’s what I did. I picked up the phone and called and I spoke with someone in his office and they said send an email describing the project, which I did. As it happened, I was going to be in Europe at the beginning of June and said I’d be happy to come by the office if he were interested. They said yes, he’s available on such and such a day and such and such a time and he’d be happy to meet with you!
So I went and I had an hour to talk with him to describe the project. He was skeptical. He said this really isn’t the best time for us. I’m in the middle of the investigation. There are lots of issues of confidentiality. So I didn’t push. I listened to him, which is a very important thing to do when making a documentary. I listened. He started talking about the relationship between space and time and a global moral responsibility …that the further away people in the world are from a crisis, the easier it is for them to ignore it. (In addition to being a tough guy, he’s also a bit of a philosopher.) I said well, Mr. Prosecutor, cinema shrinks space and time. We can help with that problem. And the little light bulb went off and he said well, maybe if you came with some ideas about how we could work together, maybe there’s something we could do here. So, I went home that night and I called Cathy and Mark and said what do you think? Do we try this, that and the other? And I went back ----
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Cathy Schulman:
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And started talking about pointillism --
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Ted Braun:
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I did --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Actually --
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Ted Braun:
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I did, pointillism and the Third Man, yes --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Little dots coming together, some whole theory…
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Ted Braun:
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See, we’re a good team. We’re a good team.
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Cathy Schulman:
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Cut to the chase --
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