Kirsten Johnson has traversed the globe as a film director, and as one of the most acclaimed and sought-after cinematographers working in nonfiction filmmaking today. She just shared the 2010 Sundance Documentary Competition Cinematography Award with Laura Poitras for The Oath, and shot the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary winner, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abigail Disney, two women she is currently, once again, collaborating with for an extended project in Congo. She also shot Ted Braun's Darfur Now (2007), and has collaborated with directors such as Raoul Peck, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore and Kirby Dick. A chapter on her work as a cinematographer is featured in Megan Cunningham's The Art of the Documentary: Ten Conversations with Leading Directors, Cinematographers, Editors and Producers. She has also directed the cinematography on films such as Throw Down Your Heart, Lioness, Motherland, Election Day, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Farenheit 9/11, Derrida, The Two Towns of Jasper, My Generation, and many others.
Her feature script, My Habibi, was selected for the 2006 Sundance Writers' and Directors' Labs and is the recipient of an Annenberg Grant. Her film, Deadline, co-directed with Katy Chevigny, premiered at Sundance in 2004, had its national broadcast on the NBC television network, and received the Thurgood Marshall Award.
As is the case with most people I talk with who have been devoted to making independent films for a long time, Johnson's career trajectory was far from a traditional one. The beginning of her film career was spent living in Dakar, Senegal, and then seven years were spent in Paris, France, where she attended La Fémis, the French national film school, receiving a degree from the Cinematography Department. Her work has taken her to close to fifty countries, and she is fluent in French, Portuguese and Wolof.
Just a week before
departing for Colombia to shoot part of Reticker's long-form new project, Johnson and I spent an afternoon
chatting together at a café near her home in the Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn. Here's our
conversation:
Still in Motion (SIM): So you’re
off soon on another adventure and working again with Gini
Reticker and Abigail Disney. I’m
assuming they want to work with you on every single thing they do for the rest
of their lives, or something like that?
Kirsten Johnson (KJ):
Well, Gini
and I have a collaboration that dates all the way back to
Asylum [shot in Ghana, 2001,
nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short], a film we did with [director]
Sandy McLeod.
That was the first
time we had worked together.
Gini had strong story ideas but she wasn’t confident about her
visual ideas at that time.
Now, of course, she’s a very
visual director.
It was one of
those things where we got on that shoot and it just was kind of remarkable how
we were all seeing and wanting to shoot the same things.
We call it the “stop the car” shoot
where all three of us, simultaneously, would shout, “Stop the car!
There’s something we want to
film!”
I think that that
collaboration was one of those things where we found a way to talk about ideas
together that has continued throughout the years.
We’ve done two Wide Angle shoots together, one in Rwanda and
one in Morocco, and then
Pray the Devil Back to Hell.
When Abby came on board, we all realized, too, that we could
play Speed Scrabble together [laughs].
Right now, they’re doing this very ambitious thing, a
four-hour series, done in co-production with WNET. But it’s a Fork Films production, which is Abby and Gini’s
company. There will be a broadcast
of the whole thing, accompanied by a broadcast of Pray the Devil as a part of the series.
SIM: I hope
you’ll take this next question in the right spirit because some people we know
and love sort of balk at this subject matter, but you’re a white woman, or a
group of white women, and you tend to shoot in locales where, as a female and as
a white person, and one with a camera,
you distinctly don’t blend in.
You’ve been doing this for decades now, so I’m assuming you’ve come up
with ways to negotiate that. Both
you and Gini, I know for sure, are incredibly open people and it wouldn’t
appear as if it’s that difficult for people to trust and open themselves to
you. But do you encounter
suspicion or mistrust, wariness?
And when you do, how do you counteract that?
KJ: I think
that’s a great question and it’s an important one. For anyone who knows me, they know that thinking about race
has been a part of my life, actually, since my childhood. I grew up going to a Seventh Day
Adventist school that was incredibly racially diverse but there was a lot of
70s confusion about race and a lot of racism. I really picked up on that as a kid and I was very concerned
and very confused and wanted to understand it. So I would say that I’ve been thinking about race since the
early 70s.
I always think “whiteness” matters, being an American
matters and it’s really important to understand that you represent something to
other people and that those affiliations have an impact when you go
somewhere. The question is always,
how can you be aware of that and yet deal with people where they are? I was just talking about this with the sound person we’re with on this trip, Wellington Bowler;
he’s African American. He’s one of
my steady collaborative partners. I also work a lot with Judy Karp, who is a
tiny white woman--as opposed to me, a giant white woman. I think all of us are really aware of
what our presences mean in a certain place. What does it mean to have a man in a maternity ward,
etc.? I think all of these factors
go into my presence.
SIM: Is race
thought of in the same way in those places?
KJ: It’s always
different wherever you go.
Wellington, sometimes, will be seen as a white person because he’s
American.
SIM: Wow,
that’s interesting, and kind of weird.
KJ: Right? Or we will be seen as urban people in
rural places. There’s no
question: I’m 6’2”; I am white; I
am someone, in these situations, who can be very communicative, comfortable. I try and engage with a lot of
humor. I have a presence; it’s a
big presence in certain ways.
There’s no missing me in these contexts. But it’s also how you behave, what level on which you give
people the respect they deserve.
One of the things I found early in my life through traveling in African
countries is, because of this history of colonialism, as a white person you
have unexpected privileges, and whether or not you use those privileges, how
you use them would be the better thing to say, dictates how things
go. Rather than being shut out,
you’re actually given access to things that are almost inappropriate for you to
be given access to. I’m constantly
reminded of the kind of privilege you experience as a white person. It comes back to you, how meaningful
that is. I clearly remember being
in Mali and there was a group of people gathered in the central square of this
village, all sitting under a tree waiting to meet with us. They had brought out chairs for us and
there were a lot of older men and women sitting on the ground. I just gestured to them and gave up my
chair. An older man took the chair
and I sat on the ground. It wasn’t
what they expected me to do at all.
Who knows really how appropriate it was? I saw a hierarchy I respected and that was the
hierarchy of age.
Being attentive to those cues is what makes it possible for
any documentary filmmaker, no matter what their skin color or what country
they’re working in, to gauge things. To gain a little respect from the people that are working or
living where you’re shooting is really important. But you have to earn the respect they, in turn, give you by
allowing you to be there, a white person in a brown world. There’s a lot of bad history under the
bridge.
SIM: Current
things being done by filmmakers, however, in the guise of being “sensitive,”
kind of concern me sometimes. It’s tricky. People don’t realize all the nuance involved, particularly
filming people’s stories. The
respect definitely comes from the person behind the camera, the person telling
the story. It’s
an innate quality, perhaps—in the true sense of that word, they just know how to do it.
KJ: There is an
innate thing going on. Sometimes, you’re in a sophisticated city, like Kampala, where everybody’s making music videos, for example. Or you’re in a village where they’ve
never seen a camera before. That’s
one thing people might forget: how technologically fluent the world is
now. Cell phones, video cameras,
all these things exist in the developing world. Respect for other human beings is just something you keep
learning your whole lifetime.
Being the
cameraperson really does put you in particular quandaries where your idea of what’s
respectful is often challenged.
It’s not so much the apparatus, the camera, that is perceived to be this intermediary
between me and the subject; that quickly falls away. For me, it’s always,
“Who’s holding the camera? How do
they move?” I feel like I’ve done
the same kind of work with a ridiculously huge camera and a teeny,
tiny one I can hold in the palm of my hand. But you often find yourself in these moments of total
ethical confusion.
Gini and I were
shooting in Rwanda on a project that was to talk about a lack of infrastructure
in the country. We were driving
and we saw a group of people carrying a screaming woman on a litter. We could see them and hear them from
down the hill. Gini quickly
realizes that this scene completely conveys our theme and decides also that we
are going to help them. There was a silence and I said, "Are we going to film
them, too?" [laughing] It was like this little moment. Obviously, if we had stopped the car
next to them and said, “May we film you?,” they would have put the litter down,
the woman would have been in pain.
We would have had to put her in the car immediately. So we decided that we would pass them,
go up the hill. I was going to get
out, be with the camera, and film them walking up the hill towards us. I know I’m not there as an aid worker;
I’m not there as a doctor. I’m
there as a filmmaker. But this
thing of having to ask people’s permission—they’re in an urgent situation,
etc. This stuff is just going
through your head as you’re standing at the top of the hill while people are
walking up to you. The woman was
in labor and had been for seven hours.
We put her in the car and it was another hour and a half to the
clinic. She ended up naming the
baby after our driver! But there
was that moment that wasn’t quite right.
But I got the shot and that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t done that. That dimension is
constantly with you. Those are
split-second decisions. As a
cameraperson, I feel that you are certainly a collaborator with the
director. But, you are also
responsible for maintaining your own ethical boundaries.
SIM: It does
seem like you’re working with filmmakers, for the most part, that have strong
ethical boundaries, as well. But
there can easily be a sense of confusion when your crew is in the thick of
something and you just roll.
KJ: It can be
confusing. There’s always this
moment of, “This world makes no sense!” when I’m filming beside workers that
make a dollar a day hauling huge sacks of rice with a camera that costs more
than they make in several years.
SIM: You
trained at La Fémis, the French national film school in Paris. Why did you decide to take yourself
there? What were you going to get
there?
KJ: I had kind
of a peculiar career trajectory.
It wasn’t about going to France.
I went to West Africa and that’s where I started, in Senegal. I was really interested in African
filmmakers. It was purely the
discovery of filmmaking and I thought, I might want to write about film or be a
critic. I really didn’t know.
SIM: What was
it about the filmmaking tradition there that was so enticing for you?
KJ: I think it
was the pace of it and the world that was being described in it. I had seen some of Ousmane Sèmbene’s
films, a couple of Cissé's films.
I saw that there was just a whole other thing going on. I was really
curious about it, probably stemming from my focus on race. I had this elaborate plan my senior
year of college [Brown University, Providence, RI]. There was a
possibility of getting something called a Watson Fellowship that would grant
someone $20,000 for the year and you could go anywhere in the world and do
anything you wanted. I wanted to
go to West Africa and be on set with filmmakers there—and to Brazil and to
Paris and to London. And think
about blackness in all these different places. I made it to the finals but didn’t get it. I didn’t have any back-up plan. At all. I sent some letters to various people, bought a one-way
ticket, and went and knocked on Sèmbene’s door.
SIM: Right out
of college?
KJ: Yeah. I got there and I lived there and just
loved it. I got to work on a film
and discovered I really liked production.
I worked as an intern on a film directed by Clarence Delgado based on a Sèmbene novel, Niiwam. He was Sèmbene’s assistant director. There was this whole crew of Senegalese
filmmakers from a very particular era.
Despite the sometimes crazy difficulties of shooting there, I loved
being on set. I had this
Senegalese boyfriend who was a photographer. I was realizing that I really needed to learn something
about how filmmaking worked. He
asked me why I didn’t go to the film school in France—it was free. So that was how I ended up there. But in talking to people, I was told
that there was no way they were going to let me into the directing department,
not being French. No American had
been accepted into that program. I
was told to try for a technical department and by default, I went for camera
because I didn’t know how to do anything, but I’d taken some photographs before
and that’s how I got into cinematography and fell in love with the camera.
I can give a lot of credit to the French and the way in
which they train people for the way I work. The films
I saw during my time there and some of the people we got to work with were
extraordinary—people like Raoul Coutard and Michel Fano, who’s an unbelievable
sound guru who taught everybody how to do documentary sound. Sound, in many ways, is the missing
piece in so many people’s documentary filmmaking. The level of sophistication and intent was displayed in some of the films I saw and what we strove for in our own work. A strong contextual base is really, I think, where I come
from and that has a lot to do with sound. That’s why I work with people like
Judy and Wellington. When I first
started shooting, I didn’t hear at all; I was so concerned with composition. Little by little, I’ve become more and
more quiet; I listen more and I realize how much more of the story is in the
ear than through the eye. That’s
been an evolution for me.
Initially, my instincts certainly weren’t bad. Especially in relation to people, they
were pretty decent. But for a long
time, I was moving too fast. I
wasn’t thinking about how to recognize a scene in the middle of a moment. All those things I’ve learned through
the back and forth of working and watching other people’s films, and those films that are
made with the footage I shoot. It’s
surprising sometimes [laughs].
Right now, I’m working with this German-Swiss director named
Mirjam von Arx. She and I are working on a film about the father/daughter
Purity Ball in Colorado Springs. The ball is an event staged to celebrate the father's role in the daughter's commitment to sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage. It’s in lieu of a prom since most of
these kids are home-schooled.
We’re shooting in one family’s home for one year, from ball
to ball. Mirjam is coming from a
European sensibility; you hold a shot a really long time and look. I was trained in France; I have that
sensibility, and yet it’s still a whole other level. I would shoot for about three minutes and start to move away and
she'd lean over and say, “No, no, stay.”
And it actually felt really wonderful to have permission to do
that.
I felt that way working on Laura's film, too [The
Oath]. She's a director that says, “Yes, we have the time.
Yes, take the time.”
Knowing that that kind of care and attention was going to be put into
the film was exhilarating. There’s a lot of expediency we’re dealing with
in camerawork a lot of the time.
If you do end up working on things that are going to be made into
television programs, it’s about getting the coverage and you may only have one
day in a place with a subject. [Poitras and Johnson accepting their cinematography award, Sundance Film Festival, 2010.]
SIM: This is
distinctly not in the American tradition of how films get edited and pieced
together. If the time was taken on
the shoot, we can’t really ever tell since we’re given such a rapid series of
cuts to take in at any given moment.
We aren’t usually given this luxurious sense of spending long, extended
moments with a subject or character.
Scenes clip along so rapidly.
KJ: There are
enough moments where there is action—and by action, I might mean just emotional
action happening between people. You can see it all in a wide shot and have a
chance to sit and look at what’s going on. A lot of times, you’re in a space that’s so small and you’ve
got one character on one side of the room and one on the other. The camera operator has to make the
choice. If we’re going to see two
people in this shot, I have to move, I have to change positions when I’m
cutting from one person to the next.
Thank goodness we’ve got the continuous sound to make us feel like it’s
all cohesive. But you’re still
making these choices. The mind
space that I’m in is going to decide when I choose to move and on whom to put my
focus. I try to develop those
things with the director in conversations where we’re discussing what we
want. What do we really care
about seeing?
SIM: Was that
the first time you worked together with Laura?
KJ: Yes.
SIM: She
usually has done all the shooting on her films. What was different about this project, about this situation,
where she decided to bring on a DP? Making this film was difficult on many levels.
KJ: Almost in
every way.
SIM: In My
Country, My Country, her naivéte and inexperience shooting in a place like
Iraq stood her in good stead, one might say. Meaning, I don’t think she really fully realized what
she was stepping into and needed to just go by herself to figure it out. This was before she met Dr. Riyadh,
this was when she was preparing to embark on that trip not really knowing what
story she’d find there.
The way The Oath is put together, working closely with you
and Jonathan [Oppenheim, co-producer and editor], the level of craft is so
deliberate and fine, with uncompromising intention, as in her other work. We move moment by moment
through this film and we see and hear exactly what’s intended for us to see and
hear. But we’re never told how to
feel. The collaboration involved
really speaks to that, I think. We
see the outside world of the city of Yemen; we’re out in the streets. And we’re in incredibly intimate
spaces, as well. When you first
discussed this project with her, what were her concerns, especially as they pertained
to shooting Abu Jandal, Guantánamo, and the possibility, at least at the beginning,
of getting footage of Salim Hamdan, Jandal’s brother-in-law?
KJ: I actually saw the
film for the very first time at its premiere at Sundance in January. I could not be more honored that I was a part of making this
film. I think it’s
extraordinary. I think that Laura
and Jonathan did a mighty work in the edit room. I will say that I think that Laura had the vision in the
beginning. From the moment she met
Abu Jandal, I think she understood what a complex person he was. She knew she would have to calibrate
the film with that kind of razor-sharp attention and elegance. She also knew she needed these
counterpoints. Her initial impetus
for making this film was to do a story about a detainee returning from
Guantánamo. Her interest in
Guantánamo was there; it’s a place she feels very strongly about
politically. She wanted to
represent it in a way that translated the energy of the place. [Pictured, Abu Jandal driving his taxi in The Oath.]
We did everything we were supposed to do in relation to the
military’s restrictions. We asked, every day, if we could film the prison but were never given permission. We kept asking and kept asking.
We were allowed access, as most of the journalists are, to very specific
things. And yet, we were also
given access to all the public places of the base. The places that you can go, you go with a
military escort. The prison,
itself, is off in another place. I
just filmed everything I was allowed to film and I filmed it with the energy
borne by sitting in the courtroom everyday. That’s what’s so extraordinary about Laura as a director and
producer. She couldn’t be in
Guantánamo because she was filming in Yemen. She said to me and Jonathan that she wanted us in the
courtroom as much as we could be there [during the trial of Salim Hamdan]. Now, mind you, we couldn’t film in the
courtroom. It’s an eight-hour day,
time she’s paying for us to be there. And listen. And
take in the story. We were there a
total of five weeks.
SIM: That’s
really incredible. I didn’t know
that.
KJ: Yes, amazing. So, basically, when I was
shooting the exchanges between the journalists and the lawyers, I knew, from
being in the courtroom that day, what the key moments were.
SIM: You had
profound contextualization, in other words.
KJ: Yes, and
very few people would feel confident enough, in both their collaborators and the
subject matter, to say the important part of your shooting is for you to sit in a
courtroom and listen. That
speaks volumes about Laura. It was
absolutely engrossing to be a part of that event, the first military commission trial of
its type.
SIM: Did you experience a good amount of frustration that
you couldn’t film?
KJ: Not being
able to shoot in the courtroom? It
killed me! I feel like I have this
personal vision of Hamdan. I was
sitting very close to him watching his emotional reactions to all kinds of
things. He would say these
incredibly cinematic things. At
one point, he was describing becoming slightly delusional after being in
solitary confinement for so long and he said that he felt like he had eyes all
over his body because he was constantly being watched by the guards. What I would have given to have him say
that on film, you know?
What’s so interesting, and I think is often true with
documentaries, is that your constraints are part of the story. The more you have to find a way to
embody them filmically, the better off you are. It’s a great thing in the case of The Oath that you don’t
ever see Hamdan except in that footage at the very beginning.
SIM: It is very
powerful. You’ve just articulated
what we can do creatively with nonfiction storytelling. I did not know about the situation you
just described when I watched that film and I’ve seen it twice now. But in thinking about those scenes with
the journalists and the lawyers doing their post-mortem sessions, there was
something ineffable and palpable in the way in which those interactions were
filmed and interpreted. You can feel the import of it from all sides, this vital
line of communication. There’s
almost a secret language being spoken but, as a viewer, you really get a very
nuanced understanding of what’s happening—it’s subtle, instinctual, anchoring. As opposed to the scenes where Jandal
is holding forth and talking incessantly, rapidly, about so much. In juxtaposition to the post-courtroom
footage, it’s quite disorienting, the wall of sound coming from this man who is
providing a boatload of exposition.
I always felt so off-center and that’s one of the things I love about
this film.
KJ: I’m so
thrilled that you picked up on that secret language going on between the
lawyers and the journalists. I
felt like that was something on which I had to quickly get up to speed. There is this roomful of amazing
investigative journalists, people like Carol Rosenberg and William Glaberson,
who’ve been following Guantánamo from the beginning. They understand all the legal intricacies. Then you’re there, listening to all of
these lawyers, many working pro bono, some of the very top attorneys in the
country and all of these military experts. You’re really dealing with three or four languages that are
unfamiliar to you. It was
stimulating and absolutely gripping. I would come down to the debriefing room after a day in the courtroom, anxious
to hear about how a lawyer would address what had happened.
I mean there were moments when you, literally, could see the
judge trying to decide, “Do I say this court is invalid?” It was the first trial of these
military commissions [on Guantánamo] and there was no precedent for any of it.
There were at least four times where the judge was faced with an ethical
decision, more about his role than anything else. “Am I the judge that goes down in history as the person who
recognizes this as something legitimate, or do I take a stand and say it’s
not?” Those were stunning moments.
The journalists would ask questions of the prosecution and
watch the prosecutor set his jaw and insist that it was all working fine. To paraphrase one of the military prosecutors, he said something like, “We want the public to relate to these trials like they do to the Space Shuttle. Shuttles are constantly going up into space and people know that they are, but they aren't really paying attention." That was his hope--that these kinds of trials
should become so commonplace. And
yes, I would be shooting in my head and visualizing all these powerful shots of
these people making these moment-by-moment decisions. But it’s nice to know that is all
getting through on some level. You do put in all that time of understanding the context of what’s going
on—it’s really important, understanding the deeper narrative. And then you do your best on the fly to
tap into that. That’s what’s so
amazing about filming real things; it’s all there,
all the complexity, the power balances.
Can you let the viewer see them?
SIM: What falls
flat so many times about capturing vérité? A lot of times it really has very little dimension. The fanciest cutting and other
production values are not going to hide the fact that one has captured less
than compelling footage.
KJ: It’s an
incredibly challenging job to be tuned into what matters and to find the way to
film it. It’s exhausting. Often, you’re in for eight, ten, twelve
hours in a day. You can get in a
mode of shooting too much, obviously.
But staying on point and staying focused on what really matters in the
story takes a huge amount of concentration, a physical flexibility in
space. It’s a thing that a
director gives you. They give you
what you need. I need twelve
bottles of water a day [laughs].
They give you what you need in order to stay in that zone, able to
film. If a director gives you the
support and allows you to stay in the zone, then sometimes, you can
actually start watching the film while it’s being made. It doesn’t happen very often but when
it does, it’s extraordinary.
SIM: And when a
director is, distinctly, not giving you what you need, or any of the other crew
for that matter? You also take on
the role of director and have a whole body of work you’ve directed. How does that inform the way you handle yourself on set?
KJ: That’s
something I bring to a shoot, my experience as a director, my thinking as a
director. I do think about what
happens in the editing room. I’m a
really active partner in the whole collaboration. I almost never would say to a director, in the moment, that
things aren’t okay, that they aren’t working. There’s too much going on. But every night, I’ll come back with my input, letting him
or her know that we needed more support in this regard; something was great in
the way it was executed; we’re not giving this character enough time, etc. Sometimes, I really will push directors
in terms of blind spots I feel they have.
We all have them. I expect
to be pushed on mine. Once in a
while, I will encounter someone who’s not interested in the elephant in the
room and for whatever reasons, it’s scary territory for them and they start
putting up all these subconscious obstacles to actually getting at it. I’m definitely not a silent partner at
the end of the day. I will do what
I can do in the course of a filming day and won’t call into question any of the
director’s choices. But at night, over dinner, I will talk about missed
opportunities and want to know why.
A lot of directors don’t really realize what you might be going through
unless you speak up. People forget
about the physicality of holding the camera, shooting. It’s the obligation of the crew to tell
the director what they need and how and when they need it.
I like to talk about themes with the director so I can watch
more for those elements that speak to those themes. That way when we’re filming something relatively interesting
but I see something going on that really is the embodiment of what we’re trying
to capture, I can just say it and be able to turn and start shooting what
should be shot. They get what I’m
doing because we’ve discussed it.
That’s the art of catching things on the fly. There should be a good amount of preparation so you can do
that. You have to know what you’re
looking for and you have to have the freedom to get it. Not communicating well about these
things can be disastrous, both for the film and the relationship. Hopefully, it becomes an unspoken thing
after a while. That’s how you
become really alive and light on your feet.
SIM: With your
background, your training and these locales that keep drawing you—can you talk
about light and texture in the way you see things? There’s a luminous quality to your work that’s very
particular. In those places you
shoot, in Africa, for instance, there’s a particular light that doesn’t exist
anywhere else. Is that part of
what draws you subconsciously, perhaps?
This is more a curious question more than anything since I’m obsessed
with light and reflection and how those things can cause emotional resonance
just on their own, doesn’t matter really what the image is. Is that something you think about?
KJ: Yes, it’s
something I’m absolutely interested in.
It’s hard to tease it out in some ways. Senegal was the place I went as a young person. It was the first place I was truly
free, in many different ways. I
have a strong, nostalgic engagement in that particular environment and it
speaks to why I love West Africa so much.
Absolutely I’m turned on by the madness of color there and the quality
of light on the equator.
Admittedly, though I’ve been slow in my developmental relationship to
what light can do. I understood
composition much more. Again, my
teachers were extraordinary—I had an opportunity to learn from Raoul Peck on a documentary that he
did here in New York. It was a
transcendent experience. It was an
essay film called Profit and Nothing But [2001] set in Paris, Haiti and New
York. He had planned to go to many
different places in New York to express these different ideas. We’d go somewhere and nothing would be
happening with the light and he’d say, “We’re out of here.” I’d never experienced that before from
a documentary filmmaker. He had
been a taxi driver and he took over from the AP who was driving slowly through
New York traffic and he drove us up and down the city chasing the light. He went where the light was. Something changed in me from that
experience. He also has an
incredible compositional eye. We
had a lot of locked-off shots and he’d have me set something up, come and look
at it and he would just move the lens incrementally, just a smidge and that
would be it, so much better. It
became my quest to set up as many shots as possible to please his aesthetic,
shots Raoul would keep. Certain
things really matter to me from that experience; I was so inspired by him.
SIM: Was there
another seminal filming experience that inspired you in that same
way—to notice something you never paid much attention to, yet, somehow, now
it’s a signature way in which you shoot?
KJ: You
mentioned reflection, too. I was
shooting a film, Derrida [2002], for Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick. Initially, we had all these great
conceptual discussions about how we were going to film things. One of the ideas was that we were only
going to film Derrida in reflection.
Which proved to be impossible, among many things, although it’s great to
try and push yourself. I always
love having to stay too long because once you stay too long, you get
through all of the “stock” shots, the obvious things to do. You get to a place of slight boredom
because you think you’ve seen every possible angle from which to shoot. Then,
suddenly, you’re finding things.
That was my experience in the courtroom in Deadline [co-directed with
Katy Chevigny, 2003]. I started
shooting reflections in the table, filmed the clock seven times, people’s hands
in a moment of grief or agitation.
You start to see differently because your eye gets tired of seeing the
same thing. You start to
search. You learn that there are
always more shots.
SIM: This is
when you realize there are two directorial minds—that of the director and that
of the cinematographer. It’s a
distinct advantage, especially in documentary.
KJ: In my
experience, everyone I work with in documentary, including the sound people,
thinks like a director. Your whole
team has to be thinking that way, respecting the director as the primary
person. When you don’t have that
in documentary, stuff just falls off the edge. That’s what it demands. It demands this team of people totally engaged in making the
same film.
SIM: Have you
ever lone-wolfed it—did your own directing, shooting, sound, with no one else
crewing?
KJ: I did that
this past summer in Afghanistan and I have to say I kind of loved it. It’s something I hadn’t done in
years. This was more of a
scout situation and it was in a place where there’s a lot of danger so it wasn’t wise
to bring too many people. There
was a clinic opening and a lot of people were making speeches. If I’d have been there with a director,
I might have felt obligated to “cover” the scene, the crowd watching, the
people speaking. I was perfectly
disinterested in that but what was amazing was that every person there was
completely stressed, everyone was
worrying their prayer beads, all in a state of deep agitation. I felt a lot of that in Afghanistan,
people are worried, stuff is churning.
I spent the entire opening of this clinic just filming people’s
hands. It’s gorgeous footage; I
have no idea what I’ll do with it. But, to me, it said a lot about the
emotional state of these people. Instead of that being a cut-away in a sequence in a scene of the
opening of that clinic, because I was by myself, I filmed what I wanted to.
But I do feel like I have relationships with directors where
I can say to them that I know which shots are going to give us what we need in
terms of capturing the emotional temperature of a situation. I ask them to allow me to
do my thing. I am comfortable
taking the initiative if I see something like that. But to not even have to discuss it was really fun. One thing I did find difficult working by
myself was not having a producer.
Having to decide where to stay, where to find food, all the logistical
stuff you take for granted when a good producer is just taking care of all
that—I missed that very much [laughs].
Half the time I’m shooting, I’m completely disoriented, since I’m so
present in the action around me.
SIM: What
kinds of stories haven’t you had an opportunity to explore, thus far?
KJ: I’m really
interested in having the time and space to tell really complex stories.
SIM: Complex in
what way? The stories you’ve told
have a complexity to them.
KJ: I feel like
something like The Oath has the kind of complexity I mean. I feel like we’re in a time where a lot
of “issue” documentaries are supported and expected. I’m supportive of that kind of work, certainly, but they
trap you in certain ways. They
might allow you to go into structural complexity, but not necessarily human
complexity. It’s sometimes too much
to get in, somehow. Where I’m
headed right now is that I’m feeling like I have a couple of ideas and a couple
of places I want to be where I can tell those complex stories. One of the things that I admire about
The Oath is that it manages to function on a complex level both in a human way
and in a political way, addressing something that’s really important to us
all. You have to take the time to
make the choices you’re making. To
do most things well it takes years of commitment, to not get sidetracked by
things that are less critical.
There are a lot of critical things to think and talk about right
now. Finding the way at them is
important.
One of the things that interested me about my time in
Afghanistan—and I don’t quite know what to do with this yet—was my interest in
photography and filming in Afghanistan.
There are all kinds of restrictions on who can be filmed and who
cannot. There’s an amazing group of
female videographers who film weddings.
The wedding parties are all single-sex and women dress completely
differently than they dress out in the street. It becomes illicit material that
everyone wants to look at and it can be dangerous, as well, if the video images of women dancing get outside the family and passed from cell phone to cell phone, for instance. Women
can get into trouble. That’s
fascinating to me, what can be photographed, what can’t be; there’s a lot to
explore there. This entire history
of imagery is hidden or purposely destroyed. I saw a lot of interesting stuff there and there would be
something interesting to make there, although right now, I don’t know how or
what it would be. I can get very conceptual
like that and realize, that’s not a movie!
SIM: Or it
could be. It’s always captivating
to discover narratives hidden in these types of “archaeological finds.” I like it when people make up stories
on evidence left behind where not much is explained anyway. There’s an archive, but of what we
don’t know. The baseline of the
story is rooted in reality. I
think you’ve earned your creative stripes to try on something like that if you
feel like it.
KJ: Well, I’m
glad to hear you think I’m entitled to that [laughter]. I’m
definitely interested in doing work that’s formally sophisticated and
emotionally true and is complex.
I’m trying to find ways in which I can do that with other people or on
my own. I realize now that takes
time and strong choices about subject matter and intense commitment. Again, I think of the work Laura does
and her commitment to the material on a number of levels.
SIM: Well,
there also needs to be a willingness, I guess, to be in that tortuous phase
where you’re really lost. Where
you do say, I don’t have a movie.
KJ: If you
don’t feel that way, you’re probably not making a movie, especially a
nonfiction one. It’s in those
moments, I think, where the work of discovery is being done. It certainly creates anxiety for me as
a director, but as a cameraperson, I really like being in that place where I’m
searching. There’s always
something interesting going on, you just have to find out where it is.
SIM: Who’s
making work these days that really excites you?
KJ: You know
what film I think about a lot is [Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana’s]
Because We Were Born (Puisque nous sommes nés). I want to show that film to everyone. I mean, come on!
SIM: It’s
gorgeous. They really reached a
creative pinnacle with this film.
It took them many years to get there. It’s filled with so many incredible moments.
KJ: There’s so
much happening on so many levels—it’s visually stunning and they tap right into
the dreams of those boys.
I can watch that movie with Gini or Judy or Wellington and we all know what it takes. You see that film and respect it for what it represents
which is the complexity of that relationship between those subjects and the
filmmakers. They were living with
them for months and negotiating their involvement with them day by day. That’s a high emotional risk, such
difficult terrain to journey through. Being in those kinds of situations for a long period of
time is a big deal. And in seeing
Duret’s film, I knew how many levels on which those filmmakers were
operating. It’s such an exciting
thing to see. You don’t look at a film like that and just take it in as
something stylistic. No. It is an approach, it’s time spent,
it’s understanding how a camera works, understanding how a story works. The choice of filming two little boys
who can talk to one another—all those things speak to a lot of experience. You see it all there. That’s the kind of thing to which I’m
aspiring.
SIM: I’m always
embarrassed to say this out loud, but I call it love. It sounds kind of dopey to say that, but that’s what you feel
when you watch a film like that.
It doesn’t speak well of my critical chops but that’s what it is and I
twist myself around trying to find a more academic word for it. It’s the energy created from the
people behind the camera and the people in front of it that supersedes circumstance; all have a hand in creating
something utterly unique and singular and I don’t understand how that cannot be
a thrill. You feel it in your
bones.
KJ:
Absolutely. Listen, some of
the situations that these people are in, the subjects of our films, are egregiously
horrible. And they’re still human
beings who are funny, who have hope, who are open. Truly, we have to honor
them. Filmmaking becomes a form of
honoring people, honoring the tradition of filmmaking, as well, stretching that
far, and further. It’s a mutual
gift documenting the truth that happens between director and subject. Laura did that with Abu Jandal. She surprised him.
SIM: It’s not
such a bad thing to sometimes be underestimated. Low expectations give you a
lot of leeway, a distinct advantage [laughter].
KJ: Yes, but
sometimes you need to own up, too, and show right away that you’re a high-level
player. A really great example for that, to me, was St. Claire Bourne, someone I miss terribly. Saint did not let anyone, I mean
anyone, sleep on the fact that he didn’t have a sharper question, was searching
for a better answer. He was always
on, always bringing up the level of expectation for everyone. He wouldn't let an interview subject off the hook. That’s especially important in interviews.
SIM: Sure,
especially when you have agendas which are in opposition to one another. It is the filmmaker’s responsibility to
weigh that, not the interviewee’s.
KJ: Yes, if
you let someone sleepwalk through an interview, they will. It’s our job to get at it. I know I’ve said this a couple of times
in the course of this conversation, but sound people are so underestimated in
the documentary world. I have
these incredible conversations with the sound people I work with. They are the people listening the
most. It doesn’t happen very
often, though, that the director is turning to them for input into what’s
happening. One of the things I try to ask of a director with whom I’m working, if he or she is okay with it, is
to give both me and the sound person an opportunity to ask a question at the
end of an interview. The director is caught up in the interview and we’re
there the entire time watching and listening. It can be tricky because sometimes it is inappropriate to ask and
the crew needs to stay out. But
most of the time when this is allowed to happen and the director is willing to
give it a shot, there will come Wellington or Judy, or whoever has been recording,
with a question that sends it out of the ballpark, the question that nails the
interview. I like to set up a
dynamic where that kind of thing is possible, reminding everyone in the room that we’re all filmmakers
together. [Soundman, Wellington Bowler, pictured.]
SIM: Can you
recall a particularly profound moment while filming that shifted your molecules
around, made you look at the world a bit more openly, perhaps, than you had
before?
KJ: I can say
I’ve had many, many of those moments. I can think of a lot of extremely
emotional experiences, particularly interviews, as we were talking about. The experience that always comes to
mind, however, is that of shooting Derrida (1930 - 2004).
Basically, he was very ambivalent about us filming him. He’d constantly cancel shoots. One day, he’d kind of had it and was in
the mood to call everything off. He
said he just couldn’t have all of the distraction going on; he needed to get
things done. He just needed to be
there in his house. He told us
that if it was just me who stayed and I didn’t say a word all day, we could stay there with
the camera.
I was incredibly intimidated, very respectful of who he
was. He made you feel as if your
speech was so superfluous; he thought people talked too much, like so many of my words were superfluous because he used words so carefully. He was so precise and rigorous. So I was left in Derrida’s house and I
vowed not to talk all day and went into this place where I just moved around
and filmed him doing what he was doing.
I opened the door, went out into the backyard, filmed him from outside
when I got too much of being around him [laughs]. I just kept moving around and doing my thing in complete
silence. It was quite liberating. I’m obviously quite a
talker!
I wanted to prove to him that I was smart. That mattered to me, you know, that
Derrida should know that the cameraperson wasn’t dumb. To have him tell me what he needed from
me, which was utter silence and for my presence to allow everything to happen
for him, was revelatory.
I’m currently working with a filmmaker named Kathy Leichter
on a personal documentary about her mother’s suicide [Motherland]. We’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s usually
just her and me in the room. She’s
let me know that, filming with me, she feels like she can display any type of
emotion—even intense anger—and it’s okay.
I feel like I learned I had that ability that day with Derrida. Kathy says she can feel it, that she
can feel from me that it’s okay.
People always have the right, after the fact, to request that something not be used in a film. But if there is trust established, it allows the subject emotional freedom. Kathy says she's actually willingly gone to very dark and difficult places because she feels like she's safe to do that with me. I’m not sure I’d know how to let myself emotionally go to certain points
with someone standing by. It was
thrilling to me to see someone allow herself to do that.
Can I ask you a question? Do you feel, in general, excited about what’s happening
formally in documentaries right now?
SIM: For the most part, I do. It’s a way of telling stories I’ve been
fascinated by for a long time, even before I became a maker or started
celebrating in rapturous prose all the incredible work I see. I want to
concentrate on people pushing the form in exciting ways, not the horror stories of elusive funding and how hard it
is to make films and how we can monetize all this in some way. I’m bored by all that. I see too many instances where people make their films on their
own terms using money they scraped together somewhere and made a beautiful,
personal piece of work.
It’s interesting that in this particular form—in most
creative endeavors, but particularly this one where you are investing years and
years of your precious life and it’s hard to keep the mechanism going, and
there’s so much mystery involved!—well, the most extraordinary people are drawn
to do this. Documentary filmmakers
are the most fascinating people to be around, they just are, mostly because the best ones tend not to be filmmakers. They're coming at cinema from another vantage point; they've been out in the world and lived a bit, traveled, learned languages. So yes, I have hope that the work of making nonfiction cinema is just
going to get better and better and better if my reading of the pulse and vigor
of this particular community here in New York is anything to go by. The aesthetic imperatives are becoming
something important to acknowledge and that’s a big leap, I think, and an important one.
KJ: Where we
can take hope, on a certain level, is that there are many films that do exist
where the craft is so strong, it cannot be denied. I think we just have to keep speaking publicly, indulging in active discourse and honing our unique sensibilities. But that
aesthetic imperative should be more of a baseline. I care about social justice as much as
the next person; I’ve spent my entire adult life filming stories that push that
agenda, right? But we have to be
careful about these alliances we make that can, if we’re not careful, create
literalism, reduce craft. I’ve
seen it happen. A lot more of the
funding is there for that than it is for other kinds of films.
I try to save certain periods or
opportunities where I can work for free or for very little money and have
blocks of time where I earn some money so I can take on these kinds of projects
that I know are never going to get funded. I worked on Kathy’s film for years because I knew it
wouldn’t be getting into any funding loop. Or something like Lisa Collins’ film about the Oscar Micheaux festival
in South Dakota [Festival of the Unconquered, 2004, currently in post-production]. She can’t take
that project to the Good Pitch, or whatever.
And it’s the most complex film about race there is. It’s about this
crazy town in South Dakota where they hold a festival and celebration of Oscar
Micheaux because he lived there for a short period of time. There are Indians coming from the
reservation, old ladies talking about race problems in Denver—it’s a wild film,
the funniest and most complex discussion about race you’ll see. That doesn’t fit a category; there’s no
NGO for that. And did I mention
it’s funny?
SIM: There
definitely need to be more comedic docs.
KJ: I need to make more of
them, too. The important thing is
to allow for the surprises that happen in a story. A story isn’t necessarily “character-driven” if its main
protagonist is chosen because he or she fits in a slot that serves the
explication of the issue. And we
don’t let people talk and tell their own story outside of the context of
illustrating a problem, especially if they’re “problematic” people like
criminals or terrorists. It’s
always got to be in this context of explaining the political issues
involved when, in fact, it could
just be the weirdness of a certain person [laughs] and how they got to this
obsessive place. That’s
fascinating. There should be a
space for films like that to be supported. Those kinds of things are very hard to predict in terms of
outcomes.
SIM: Well, we
all live for the going-down-the-rabbit-hole episodes of our lives and that’s
always what it is.
KJ: It's so important that we be surprised by what we find.
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