Stranger Than Fiction: So Anthony talk about what’s happened since the film has come out and been shown in Aberdeen.

Anthony Baxter: What we’ve done so far is is really only shown it at festivals—Hot Docs, the Sheffield International Documentary Festival—the Edinburgh festival rejected the film, it’s Scottish government funded. When we were making the film we got no funding from the creative agency in Scotland, Creative Scotland, we got no funding from the Scottish broadcasters. Essentially, all the people you see listed at the end of the film are people who contributed to it through the Crown funding, which was the only way we managed to get the film finished. Because it was rejected by the Edinburgh Film Festival we showed it in Aberdeen, and had a green carpet premiere and all the residents came out. It was quite an extraordinary night, I was quite worried to see how they would react to the film, and they reacted very positively. I’m very grateful to them for the time they gave me while making it, so that was a real high litmus test. The cinema then said, we’d really like to keep it running. We’ve notched up the fasted advance ticket sales since Harry Potter. So they kept it running over three weekends, and were just astounded that the people were in the cinema—a 280-seat cinema, and they were filling it out. They wanted to keep it going but we said let’s just have a little breather until we get the Glasgow and Edinburgh premieres done. We just heard this week that Michael Moore has selected it for the Traverse City Film Festival, which will be the official U.S. premiere. And then hopefully another screening or two in the states. The Hamptons Film Festival are going to take it as well. It’s exciting but I’m learning, because this is my first feature-length documentary film. I thought that once you’d made the thing it would get snapped up and that would be it. You’re probably doing the circuit for the better part of a year. So that’s where I’m at now, and coming here has been great, to preview it and put it in front of an American audience for the first time.

Audience: How did you get the Golf Channel footage?

Baxter: We didn’t get permission to use the Golf Channel footage. We knew that if we asked them for it, they wouldn’t give it to us, because Donald Trump has editorial control over the programs. We consulted our lawyers and decided to use it under Fair Use. However, we just got a letter from the Golf Channel before I got out here saying they were going to take legal action against us for using it. We’ve consulted with a very good Fair Use lawyer, but I think it’s a very important piece of footage because in the context of watching the Golf Channel here in the U.S., if you watched that show, it wouldn’t really mean much. Donald saying, oh, there’s a house and I want to get rid of it. And you’d probably think it’s a crappy old house and there’s probably some guy who’s moving out of there anyway. But in the context of the actual film, when you got to know David Milne, and you know that actually that’s his property that he’s talking about, I think it’s important. That’s why I thought it was entirely justifiable to use it. We’ve obviously had to pay out more money to hire a lawyer, but I think it’s important to stand your ground on these things.

Audience: You spoke a little bit in the credits about not getting any interviews with the government officials. Obviously, people were in cahoots. Can you speak a little bit about your efforts to uncover that kind of stuff?

Baxter: I was amazed really. The reason I wanted to make the film is that I live 40 miles south of where this was happening. And all the local newspapers had been saying, this is a fantastic thing for Scotland, there are economic benefits and Donald Trump is an amazing tycoon from New York, he’s going to deliver all these local jobs, it’s going to be fantastic for the area. And I just didn’t believe it. And also, because I had done a documentary for the BBC about man-made coastal erosion, I knew a little bit about sand dunes and nobody seemed to be talking about that side of the story. It seemed to me that the newspapers were certainly in some kind of cahoots. They had obviously taken an editorial line, which is fine, but the level of that editorial line was kind of shocking, I found. When I started to film up there, and I found things like the water supply being cut off to an 86-year-old woman, and the way the police were reacting to the local residents really shocked me. My Canadian colleague Richard Phinney, a producer on the film, we’ve done a lot of work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, hostile environment training, and there I am in Scotland dealing with this on my doorstep, it was quite extraordinary. I couldn’t help feeling the residents had a point saying, when we make a complaint to the police, they don’t do anything. But when Donald Trump’s workers make a complaint, they come running. When we approached Creative Scotland, which is the agency for promoting film—I always thought when you were a Scottish filmmaker and you wanted to make a film of a Scottish story, they would be there to help and support you. But no, it seemed in this case they promised us 10,000 pounds development money. The day I was going to get the e-mail saying it was coming through, I instead got an e-mail saying, you’re not getting it. When I spoke to the officer from this agency, she said, I’m livid, it’s never happened before. I just kept having this feeling, there’s nothing to dispel that feeling either. There just seemed to be something bizarre here. And the promises just didn’t seem to hold up under scrutiny, these economic predictions. I never really got answers, but more questions in a way.

Audience: Did they charge you after your arrest?

Baxter: They charged me and my colleague Richard with this bizarre charge in Scotland called breach of the peace. Essentially, the guy who we were interviewing about the water being cut off, it was him who made the complaint to the police. The charge was that we had breached his peace. It’s an extraordinary charge, it only exists in Scotland, it doesn’t exist in England, for example. To give you an idea of how bizarre it is, if your neighbor is playing loud music every night of the week and you complain about your neighbor making that noise, you can be charged with a breach of the peace for making that complaint. It’s a criminal offense, it could stop me from coming here. When I went to get the camera back—I was amazed to get it back with the footage in it six days after they’d detained it. They said, we’ve decided there is enough evidence to charge you with this offense. However, we’re going to give you a written warning. And the written warning is the same one that Michael Forbes gets in the film about moving those marker poles. It says in this warning, there’s enough evidence to charge you, but we’re using our discretion. However, you’re name will be on the adult criminal offenders register for two years. So I wasn’t happy about that, so I challenged that. So when you challenge that you are challenging the police’s authority, which they don’t like at all. The prosecution authority in authority almost has to act. But the Crown office, which decides whether the case goes to court or not, looked at it and threw it out. But the police never told me that, a reporter called them up and found that out. I never had any official word from the police about it.

Audience: A couple of years ago there was a story about McDonald’s opening up a franchise in a tiny little town in Scotland, and there was a family, the McDonald family, that had been there for 80, 90 years. And they put a lot of pressure on the family to change the name of their restaurant. It seems similar to your story.

Baxter: I went to see last night Battle for Brooklyn, again a very similar parallel to this story. There are these films and stories like the one you describe—you think there’s a one-off. But it just seems that it resonates, everybody’s got one of these situations, almost, in their backyard.

Audience: McDonald’s then threatened not to open the restaurant and said there will be seven jobs not brought to this tiny town.

Baxter: So often the jobs are just miniscule numbers, which was the case here. When Donald Trump says we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people planting grass it’s just not true. I know for a fact the people planting the grass—they got local schoolchildren to do the first batch, and they were overseen by teachers. They did have a few workers, but you could count them on one hand. Mickey Foote, the Clash producer, said to me one day, I’ve got more loose change down the back of my sofa than Donald Trump is spending on this golf course.

Audience: Has the golf course been finished? They’re not going to build it anymore, is that correct?

Baxter: They’re still building the first 18-hole golf course, which is the one I followed them doing the start of. What they’ve decided to do is put on hold the hotel and the housing for the moment. But as the economist says in the film, just getting the planning permission is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Securing that planning permission means that Donald Trump can now sell that to another developer. It could just be littered with houses by another developer in 10 years time.

Audience: First of all, do you think that Trump has seen the film, did you send him a copy? Secondly, did you get any support from the BBC in London or News Night?

Baxter: The local Trump organization spokesperson went on television to say that I was a fraud and the film was a failure and I hadn’t had the courtesy to give them a copy. My response to that was that nobody at that point had seen the film, so why should the Trump organization see it before the local residents. I said, you can come to the local cinema like everybody else. They were invited to come to the Aberdeen screening. Then Trump said, I’ve heard the film is boring but I could watch it on my airplane going back to New York. Again, we said, no, you can’t get special treatment, come to the cinema. So we actually sent him an invitation to come tonight. Maybe there is somebody from the Trump organization here, but he was invited so that was that. News Night is a show that did a feature on the story, and the BBC in Scotland commissioned a film from a local production company. What we found all the time with broadcasters and the story, the first thing they would say is, have you got access to Donald Trump? I would say, no, I don’t particularly want it because I think that that would change the shape of the film. I know that the company that did do the film for the BBC had done work for the Trump organization prior to making their film. I just don’t think that sits well with me. I wanted to come from an independent point of view and to speak to him without getting wined and dined or whatever. I felt it was important to be completely neutral in this. So often, broadcasters these days will say, have you got access? It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. And what’s next? I talked about this earlier, about how it was going to take me a long time to get this out there, so I’ll be working on that. I am planning to do a film in Afghanistan next year about a children’s hospital in Kabul, it’s something I’ve been trying to make for about three years. Again, for this one we had no funding at all except for the Crown funding, so it was incredibly difficult. Speaking to other filmmakers we said we could maybe do one of those in our lifetime, but it’s incredibly exhausting and difficult to keep going. I think the next one I make I want to try to get a little bit of funding beforehand.

Stranger Than Fiction: I was watching this film knowing what was coming and feeling so much anxiety for that moment, it was her first day on the job, plus a camera. I’d love to just hear more from both of you about the making of this film. I think it’s important for a contemporary audience to understand the vicissitudes of filmmaking. It wasn’t like carrying around a videocamera with 60 minute tapes.

Ryden: We had to get sound and sync it up later with the camera. The sound deteriorates at the square of the distance, so it has to be very close. I had to be very close to her the whole time.

STF: You didn’t have a boom pole.

Ryden: No, no. I still had to stay out of the picture. He [gestures to cinematographer Sidney Reichman] can’t hear what’s going on, because the camera is noisy and he’s using a zoom lens. He’s getting all these wonderful shots but he doesn’t know what’s going on, she might be saying what she had for breakfast, and we don’t really want that. We had to communicate with each other by signalling. He has to notice what my hand signal says about what’s going on. It’s not as easy as it is now, when they wear their own microphone, your subject, and it’s all electronic. We had to have signals. Every once in a while I’d have to do something to send a signal to the camera, and we would later sync it up. So I’m crawling around on the floor very close to the subject, trying to get good sound. He is seeing wonderful things but a lot of the times what he sees doesn’t look wonderful, but it is because of the sound. We were very good at communicating, I think.

Reichman: The communication often times is kind of subtle. Because I’m watching the subject through a lens, not watching Hope. I’m zooming back and forth and doing this according to what I feel will give the best content or best emotional quality to the shot. Hope is crawling around on the floor trying to get the microphone up close. Sound is very important, and a lot of people going around with video cameras today don’t realize the importance of sound in the sense that the little microphone is on the camera, and you just shoot the picture, which looks good. But the microphone is too far away. To get good sound you have to be close. And we used a shotgun microphone which was about two feet long covered with a rubber windscreen. The shooting of this film was interesting because at that time, we were on the forefront of what you could do with 16mm film in documentaries. This equipment that we used had recently been developed by D.A. Pennebaker, Ricky Leacock and a kind of mad technician whose name was Mitch Bogdanovich, who was able to do anything and everything with cameras and lenses. The tape recorder and camera were not connected with a cord, which had been the case up until that time. And the fact that we were separated enabled Hope to get close. If we had been connected with a cord, it would have been much more difficult, besides which we would have had to worry about getting tangled with the cord. The fact that we had this kind of equipment at the time was really kind of a breakthrough. For most of you folks shooting on video it doesn’t seem to be much of anything.

STF: Sid, if I’m not mistaken, the cameras you were using had 10-minute loads. You had to change your reel every 10 minutes. Talk about going on that boat. What kind of equipment are you taking?

Reichman: The equipment that we used was a modified sound-on-film camera. The top had been cut off and we used 400-foot magazines which held 10 minutes of film. Hope and I were the only people on this crew.

Ryden: We needed somebody to help us carry things.

Reichman: I had a camera on my shoulder. I was carrying a couple of magazines in a modified World War II gas mask case over my shoulder. In my pockets I had two or three or four rolls of 16mm film in tin cans. I had an extra battery in my other pocket. I was wearing a safari jacket that was bulging out on all sides of me because I had to carry everything. Hope was carrying the tape recorder and spare tape. We were like a two-man band.

Ryden: I had to be very careful not to get in front of the lens but at the same time I had to hear what was happening, signal, stay away from the camera and still be very close, otherwise I wouldn’t know what’s going on.

Reichman: Hope would let me know, and I would try to listen, but nonetheless you get focused in on the picture. I did learn to listen because sometimes the cameraman has to do this by himself. Hope doesn’t always know what’s going on and I don’t always know what’s going on and sometimes you’ve got to sense what’s going on and do it. So I had to listen, just as Hope had to look. We worked together this way.

Ryden: We had difficult spots, especially on the boat. It was very hard for me not to get in the way of the picture. The water was so rough and it’s hard to get a steady camera shot of anything at all. When we got there, they took the patient to a hospital, and then we wandered around trying to figure how how we were going to stay overnight. It was dark, there were no hotels and everything was closing up. I said, there’s a restaurant there that’s just closing. Maybe they’ll let us stay for the night. So we went inside and the woman was shutting down the shutters. I said, can we sleep here? And she said, okay, and put two tables together, so we slept on the tables. In the morning we got up to see what happened in the hospital and continued from there. We had no accommodations on the island, and we figured out how to stay there.

Reichman: It was very primitive and for me it was a kind of coming of age experience, just as it looked like it was for Margerie. For me it was my first hour-length tv special. I had shot a half-hour film for the CBC which Pennebaker put me on. He just put me on and had faith, and I came back with stuff that was useable and I think that was the next thing. Looking at that, Bob Drew, I guess felt that I was worth a gamble, and sent me out with Hope on this, halfway around the world. I was also an equipment technician, and the trick here was keeping the cameras and tape recorders in sync. I had the knowledge to be able to check these things almost every night. The cameras were being driven by a synchronis inverter, which drove the camera at precisely 24 frames per second, as long as the batteries were charged. When the battery started to drop in voltage, the cameras would run out of sync, and you wouldn’t know it because the cameras just keep on running away. It was a problem trying to make sure the batteries were charged properly and that we had enough of them. When the cameras started to slow up you would see all kinds of flickers in the picture. This was a problem. The technology was on the forefront of the camera and tape technology of that time. The tape recorder was a Nagra 3 tape recorder, very high quality, professional portable tape recorder had attached to it a little Bulova Accutron tuning fork watch made in this country, back when we made things like that. The watch put out a 60-cycle signal which was recorded down the center of the tape. The camera was running at precisely 24-frames, being driven by a 60-cycle signal also. When we got back these two signals were basically compared and resolved. We made a recording from the four-inch tape which was precisely in sync with the picture. We had a light just so we could find a sync point. Hope would point the light at the camera, and then she’d press a button. I would take a picture at the same time and that would put a tone on the tape and give us a sync point. Sometimes we didn’t even get that, we’d have to do it by lips. We didn’t use the clap sticks that you sometimes see.

STF: Hope, you have recently been in touch with Margerie.

Ryden: I have. This story came about because I thought it would be interesting to do something on the Peace Corps, this was the first thing done on the Peace Corps. Rita had been out there and was coming back, and that seemed like a good point, because somebody was going to have some feeling about it, and that’s what I thought I needed for a story. One person was going to have some feeling about what she had done, and the other one is going to be a little scared. And that’s the start of a story, something’s bound to happen. To find that story, I went to Bill Moyers who was then the PR man for the Peace Corps. I said, I’m looking for a story and I want something that’s changing. Somebody’s leaving, or somebody’s going there, I need something like that. I’m sure that in a transition like that there’s going to be a lot of emotion. When we went to film the beginning, which was the schooling in Illinois, what happened was, Kennedy died the day we were filming. I lost part of the crew, everybody went to Washington. I thought, maybe we should stop, but I continued to shoot, because the way we shot was that if you had a subject who was just saying things to you, you could never ask them to say them to you again. We just didn’t do that. Everything was spontaneous in the way we worked. Some of the people said we should stop and respect what’s just happened and not shoot them studying. We didn’t, because I didn’t see how we could have the film work if we said, we’re going to repeat it and have it look a little artificial, as if you’re in school. I wouldn’t do that, I refused to do it. I think it built some resentment, that they thought we didn’t respect what had happened, but that’s just what happened to us. We were feeling just as bad as everyone else.

STF: It’s funny because I never quite calculated that timing. You talk about January 1964 and, of course, you didn’t really need to explain that at the time this film was shown, because everybody knew that. It’s only now some 50 years later that we need to be reminded that that had taken place. One thing that strikes me is that a lot of films from the Drew Associates period of that time were very much U.S.-based films, if you think of Crisis or Jane. There’s a few that were made abroad about Nehru and Kenya, but they aren’t the more successful ones. I wanted to ask about that initiative to tell a story overseas. You get the sense from watching this film what a different era it was for travel, communication and so on.

Ryden: I had a lot of experience traveling because in those days the planes were prop planes and I was a stewardess. I had gone to so many places and had so many long layovers because if it takes you 14 hours to go over flying, they can’t say, we’ll pick you up. You wait for the next flight to come, which was three or four days later. I was quite used to going to a new place like Malaysia and spending time. It wasn’t really any shock for me to be in a place like that.

STF: I think that you told me once that when they got rid of prop planes and jet planes that were quicker took over, then you quit being a stewardess because there were going to be no more long layovers.

Ryden: I was on the first commercial jet. When the got to Paris in six hours. The next day they said, pickup. And I said, what? They said, there’s no reason for you to have a layover here. It had taken about 18 hours previously to get there, so they wouldn’t be allowed to pick you up. When that happened, I decided, I’ve got to get out of this work. That’s when I looked for something else and decided to become a filmmaker.

STF: Stewardess to filmmaker, just like that.

Ryden: I was so used to traveling anyway and I was so used to being in foreign countries and meeting people, whether they were passengers. It seemed like the natural thing for me to try to do.

STF: When you watch the film today, what are the memories that you have of that period. What are the things that didn’t make it into the film

Reichman: I think a piece of almost everything we shot made it into the film, I don’t think we shot any sequences that did not make it into the film.

STF: Which is blowing the minds of the documentary filmmakers in the audience who shoot 100 hours.

Reichman: We shot a lot. But there were not major sequences that didn’t get in. As you mentioned before, it was 10 minutes. You’d shoot for 10 minutes and then have to put the camera down and put a new magazine in it and rethread it very carefully so you’d get the right sized loops. Meanwhile, things were going on behind you. You couldn’t stop and say, wait a minute, it’s time for reloading. We just had to keep going.

STF: Hold that blood bag right there—

Reichman: Don’t laugh, that kind of thing has happened, where people will tell you to stop or just do it over. This was not that kind of filmmaking. We literally were filming what was happening. And if it kept happening while the camera was off we just picked up from there. It was tricky because everything was 10 minutes. Now you put in an hour of videotape or these days, memory cards. In fact, that’s a problem for cameramen because at least when I was shooting this every 10 minutes I could put it down and reload it. But with video you never put it down. You just slam another roll of tape in or another card and keep going.

STF: Hope, when you watch it what do you think of from that period.

Ryden: I think about being so close up to the subject. I had to be tucked under a chair or something, out of range of the camera. I had so much feeling about what she was feeling. He had the protection of a lot of noise going on and he didn’t know what was going on emotionally. Sometimes it’s difficult when you’re with someone who’s very emotional and has a problem. You want to cry with them, but you got to be tough and keep going. You’re really there when it’s happening, it’s different than just asking people to talk about when it happened in the past.

STF: You recently spoke to Margarie Benning. Did she have any memories of this?

Ryden: Oh yeah. She wanted to come but she sort of backed out and said she was too tired. I was disappointed because it would have been great fun.

STF: Did she share any memories with you about this period?

Ryden: Not really. We were all looking for Bill Moyers. I wanted him to come because he found the story for me, but nobody could locate him.

Audience: I found it interesting that you didn’t use subtitles for the language at all. Did you consider using subtitles at all?

Ryden: No, and I thought the girls were very good with the language because they just had a little schooling. I thought they understood it very well and spoke it very well. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, so I wouldn’t have been able to do that. But I think the language was kind of music in itself.

Audience: Where is Rita now?

Ryden: I tried to reach her too, but I wasn’t able to find her. I wanted her to come to this. She married, in fact, they both did.

Audience: Did you follow her any further?

Ryden: Not further, but you saw quite a bit of her in the movie. I didn’t know either one of them.

STF: How long were you there the whole time?

Reichman: I think it was about a month, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure. I asked Hope about that before we came up here. I thought it was about a month,  Hope didn’t recollect. The thing developed slowly, and it took a while for us to accommodate ourselves there. This was my first trip to the far east and my first time in such primitive conditions. I was so fascinated by it I wanted to shoot everything—the people, the cows, the trees, the whole environment was so beautiful and primitive. Today I hear the island of Langkawi has changed totally. It’s now a gathering point for visiting yachtsmen who sail the far east. They have luxury hotels, I discovered looking at a cruising magazine. It blows my mind to think of that place as a luxury resort.

Ryden: We both got very sick. We decided to go home different ways. Sid wanted to visit Israel, and I wanted to go to Hong Kong. We split, and we didn’t know that we were both getting sick. I got to Hong Kong and I thought, I am so sick I’ve got to see a doctor. So I went to the doctor and he was very nice and I thought, maybe I’d like to go to China, but I don’t know how to get in. So he slipped me through and I went to China and saw a little bit. Then I got sicker and sicker. I went on to Hawaii and I thought, I’m not going to make it, I’m so deathly ill. I didn’t know that he was deathly ill too, going the other way. I got home to New York, couldn’t even get out of the taxi. I went to the hospital where I stayed for days. I didn’t know that he came back and went to the hospital. We didn’t know about each other except our two doctors met at a cocktail party and bragged about this tropical disease that was so interesting and they found out that we were both sick. That’s how we found out the other was sick. What the symptoms are is elephantiasis.

Riechman: Luckily you have to get infected over and over again to suffer those frightening effects. Without the reinfections that disease is self-limiting, self-terminating.

Audience: I just thought you captured the emotional feeling when Rita left and was going out on the boat. You felt yourself what Margie must have felt, it came across so beautifully. Here she was with all of this load that was going to come to her, she didn’t know what was going to happen. She wasn’t as scared as I would have been.

Reichman: Hope mentioned before that somehow I didn’t get as emotionally involved because I was shooting. Let me tell you, when you are shooting up close, you can see the emotion in their eyes, you can get very emotionally wrapped up. I have to confess that on some films I’ve worked on I’ve teared up at some times. This one was a similar kind of thing. You are emotionally involved, you can’t let that prevent you from shooting, but if you can’t feel it, you can’t shoot it. At least you can’t shoot it well. A lot of this is winging it. When the boat was leaving I was off by myself, and I think Hope was talking to Margerie.

Ryden: My connection with Margerie and Rita is very important because their feelings can’t be expressed unless they feel like they have a good listener who cares. You’re close to them, so they won’t be themselves unless they really think that you care. It’s really important. One of the best ways to have that relationship is not to talk, just listen and nod. Because you don’t want to bring yourself into it. They’ll be a lot freer with themselves if they think you approve and like what they said. You have to have a relationship when you’re close to them, not through the camera lens.

Reichman: That’s true, nonetheless, I’m having a relationship through what I see. But I’m not having a relationship directly with them because they don’t notice me unless I move in very close. I’m back further but I’m often looking at a close up in the lens, so I can see what’s going on in their eyes. But you have that direct relationship with them because you’re right up with them with the microphone.

Ryden: People are afraid of microphones, I’m afraid of this one. That’s something that they have to overcome. I felt that they just had to be directly with me and know that I really cared about them and was listening.

STF: There is a new film out this year, The Loving Story, that played at the Tribeca Film Festival. Nancy Buirski, the filmmaker, is in the audience tonight. She draws heavily upon footage that you shot of the Loving family in the 1960s. The Loving family was a black and white couple that were the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case that overturned antimiscegenation laws in the country. You filmed this footage with the intent of making a film in the 1960s. It never got finished and sat in your closet for 40 years until Nancy called you up. What was that project in the 1960s and how did it feel to see it come together now?

Ryden: Well, she did a magnificent job of putting it together and I didn’t finish it. I intended to finish it but I didn’t have the money. So it sat there and time passed and I did other things and went in other directions. I always thought I was going to finish it, but I didn’t. Even when I went with ABC and the antimiscegenation problem was resolved by the Supreme Court I was working as a filmmaker for ABC and I did all of their news clips for things and I said we’ve got to go and do this. I got all of the footage with their camera people, which was a lot harder to do, because they weren’t used to noninterference. She did use some of that too. She did a magnificent job of finally getting it put together, and it’s a beautiful film.

Stranger Than Fiction: So much of telling this history is dependent upon images. You really cracked into a treasure trove of archival material. Can you talk about that search?

Chad Freidrichs: We had a lot of participation from the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. The film is about 80% archival footage in total, and about 50% of that came from various archives in St. Louis. But I also have a little system in my house where I transfer film, I have a telecine which is a device that transfers 16mm film to high-definition video. When I got this device, and I got it for a song on the internet, I was able to pursue other 16mm films that weren’t necessarily in archives. For those of you who are DIYers and archival filmmakers, I would highly recommend eBay. Thousands and thousands of 16mm films are available for about $10 apiece, and then you can incorporate them into your film and tell your story. With the help of fair use and public domain, which are two legal concepts that have been expanded very recently in the archival field, I see all sorts of things being done in archival filmmaking that just weren’t possible a few years ago.

STF: We were talking about some of the experiences you’ve had sharing the film with people that are in the film. Can you elaborate on that?

Freidrichs: It’s such a great thing for people who experienced that interview with us to come to the screening afterwards. When you’re interviewing somebody about something that meant a lot to them, that was traumatic to them or whatever, when you see them go through that interview it’s almost like an exposure of these thoughts that they’ve never been able to get out. To go to St. Louis and talk to people who lived in public housing, its a wonderful experience. It’s something I never would have thought, before the experience of making this film, that I would have had this sort of connection with the residents, but it’s something that you just develop. A few weeks ago at the Los Angeles Film Festival there were a couple people from Pruitt-Igoe, and they just came up to us afterward and said, thank you for making this. When you have a historical subject like this that is so iconic, the meaning of it tends to get flattened often. People forget that the people who lived there often lived very normal lives. It’s often discussed as something with deviant residents, or that all the residents there were criminals. That’s something that I think a lot of the people who lived there responded to—we just showed normality. When you have a population that big, you have people living normal lives, and that’s often forgotten.

Audience: At the end of the film it’s mentioned that developers have bought up land around [the Pruitt-Igoe site]. I fail to see any development around that area.

Freidrichs: If you actually drive around the Pruitt-Igoe site, it looks like a wasteland. But there are a lot of areas around there that have low-income housing constructed over the past 15, 20 years. Granted, as soon as you push out very far from the site, you start to see that there’s not any development there. But around that core, there is some development. One thing I like to point out, and this is really important to understand the Pruitt-Igoe story and where St. Louis is headed today, is that there were 850,000 people in St. Louis in 1950. The population today is 320,000. You have so many vacant properties, especially on the north side around Pruitt-Igoe, it’s really tough to overcome.

Audience: My mother moved into Pruitt-Igoe in 1954, and my sister and I were born there in 1961. Her objective when she moved in was to better herself, because she had 10 children to raise. It was used as a tool to better herself. But in ‘64 it became the wrong type of place, so she moved five blocks away until they closed it. But she continued to raise her kids in the city because she understood the value of the city. We all became well-educated because she used it as a stepping stone, not as a crutch. So I want to thank you for being some positivity to Pruitt-Igoe. I wanted to ask you, is the government holding back on selling that property? Why is that lot still vacant?

Freidrichs: There have been various schemes to redevelop Pruitt-Igoe. It’s been discussed as a golf course, as a fishing pond. Currently, it’s almost like a nature park if you were to clean it up. The most compelling theory that I heard, which has since been debunked, is that the foundations of the old buildings were going to be terribly expensive to extricate. Part of it, I think, is that it’s easier to work with smaller parcels of land than it is such a giant property. Part of the land they built a school on, that’s something the government built. The rest of it, I think there’s nobody who wants that big a piece of land on the north side. That would be my hunch, but I haven’t talked to anybody from the Land Clearance Authority. The Housing Authority sold them the property about 10 years ago for $1 million. They have every interest in redeveloping it, I’m sure they would like to make their money back eventually. But I think they want to sell it as one piece as opposed to parceling it out, that’s my suspicion.

Audience: The film had fantastic interviews. How did you run across these people, how did you find them?

Freidrichs: Various sources. Ruby Russell, the woman who talked about the rent strike, we actually saw news footage of her with a graphic with her name. So we tracked down every Ruby Russell in St. Louis, about three currently, and one was the proper Ruby Russell. We were very fortuitous to have an article written about the project early on, where we put a call out to people saying, would you like to participate, are you a former Pruitt-Igoe resident. There’s a very famous documentary called Koyaanisqatsi that has clips of Pruitt-Igoe being imploded, and on the YouTube site they have that clip. One woman was commenting on that clip, saying how she remembered when she lived in Pruitt-Igoe they used to skate back and forth in the galleries, and they used to play these records, all these wonderful memories. When you’re looking for residents, and you’re looking for the positive, that kind of visceral relationship was really important. So I called her and said, would you be interested in being in our documentary? She said, no, but I have this sister who lives in St. Louis who used to be a police officer. That’s how we got Valerie, that woman crying at the end. I feel very fortunate. Ultimately we interviewed nine former residents, we ended up using five. Sometimes you just get lucky. I think with this subject, I think that it means so much in so many different ways to so many people, it was very easy as us as filmmakers to tease out those stories, and to get people to relive those experiences in front of the camera.

Stranger Than Fiction: So you say at the beginning of the film that you started out not necessarily with the intention of making a documentary. You were thinking about doing interviews for a fiction story. Can you talk about how it turned into a documentary?

Carlos Hagerman: I think it turned itself into a documentary. I think that some of these stories are around and they want to be told. They pick up the director that is more, maybe, distracted, and go wherever they want. We didn’t set out to do a documentary, we set out to do research, to write a script. For quite a few years I had been trying to get resources to do a fiction film in Mexico and I was getting tired of knocking on the same doors. Then, one day, John [Grillo] starts telling me this story. And he says, Carlos, why can’t we do this. I said, okay—an empty beach, 25 people in shorts, no art design, no lighting, no production, a camera. Yeah, we can do that. We had to know what happened, so we started interviewing the witnesses. We had a really tight schedule. We were with Roberto Balderas for two hours and then we were with Raphaela Martinez for two hours. But of course, you come to Roberto Balderas and after two hours you cannot end the talk. And after six hours you run out of tape and you have to have an assistant producer—hey, can you run to the supermarket and get some more tape? We spent days with them and it was wonderful. I knew that something was happening at the moment, but it was after that first visit that we came back with all the material and I started doing a demo for applications. I said, wow, who’s going to tell the story better than them. It became an homage to storytelling, I guess.

STF: Martha, I want to ask you as a producer. In a way, it’s a hard film to describe because it’s a simple film and so much of its artistry comes in the telling. For you, what were some of the challenges in working on the film as a producer?

Martha Sosa Elizando: I think that it was a pleasure. This film is very special to me because it was an incredible creative process with Carlos. I’m also very curious about the creative process in a director’s head or a writer’s head. I’m kind of a co-pilot. It was a real joy because this film speaks about many things that I was wondering about. What is family? What does it mean to be from one place or another? Where do you belong? And I think that those issues are—we speak about them in this film in a very direct and simple way. Things, as they are right now in our country, having a film that speaks of another part of what we are is important. People in Mexico are building the country, and most of them are like the people in this film. There are some Americans that go there and find something, some life. It’s a very personal matter to me to be with Carlos and to believe in his way of storytelling, so it’s been great. So, challenges? Yes, but it’s been more for the fun of it.

STF: I wanted to ask you about the scenes where you recreate the shark fishing. They have such a sense of vitality and fun. But actual shooting is not that fun, people have to do things over again and these aren’t actors. Can you talk about how you kept the sense of fun?

Hagerman: They are from Acapulco, so keeping them having fun is not a challenge at all. Trying to work is a challenge, because you are the one who is working more than having fun. What I told them was that we were going to do an homage. It was not about getting the shot. It was, why don’t we go to the same place that this happened and do the same thing? They were there, so everybody’s telling each other—no, no, no, it was over here. No, no, no, it was over there. I said, can we decide where it was? They were up to it, they were wonderful. And that ceviche was made and we ate it with a lot of beer. When everybody had finished their food and drinks, I said, well let’s pull that line. It was a beautiful day—it was very tiring, yes. But it was so important, that day in their lives. It was something they can truly say, it was one of the most important things that happened to them. For me to try and make it as if we were doing it again, it was for them a joy to be part of.

Audience: Who’s story did you feel that you were ultimately talking about? Was it Perro Largo or the characters that he was interacting with?

Hagerman: That’s a very good question. It took like 17 cuts to figure that out. It was the most difficult part of the process actually. We didn’t have that much material. Usually in a documentary you get hundreds of hours, we only had about 60 hours. The balance between John’s story and Robyn’s story and Long Dog’s story kept on tricking us. It became very melodramatic so we had to go back. And then we had to add the anecdote, so we had to go back. And then we had to add some depth, and then it was boring. It was very tough to have a motor running, especially in a documentary in which you only see people talking all the time. People were telling me, you’re crazy! Talking head documentaries are out. I couldn’t help it, this was the film I had. At the end, I can say it was fun, but it was very hard work. But I think it’s the story of Long Dog and how he affected the people around him and changed their lives.

STF: Can you talk about the music in the film, because it’s so instrumental to the film.

Hagerman: It’s my favorite part. I think that a big part of the post-production budget was for the film. I think that in a film like this nostalgia has a very profound way of bringing you to the time and place. For Mexicans, Acapulco is that sort of place where you have a memory of your childhood. You can ask almost anyone, we went a lot of times on vacation to Acapulco with our parents. These songs that were playing on the radio at the time just bring you back. And the shark song was the most popular song in Mexico at the time, so everybody knew that song. You just start to hear it, you hear Robyn singing it and start to wonder what’s going on. There’s always this contrast—are you from where you were born, or are you from where you live. It’s always this clashing, the jazz musician and all these standards and the big bands of the 60s in Mexico. I was all the time in love with the music. I had to take out some songs, but I was always like, but don’t take out Tito Puente, please! A lot of what you see, the beach scene, was actually acted upon the song. We had a large stereo playing when people entered. I have the dream of making a musical one day, a Mexican musical. We already have the script.

Audience: What was your target audience, and how has it been received in Mexico.

Sosa Elizondo: As you know, documentaries don’t get the same opportunities as fictional films do. Right now we’re working on an alternative way to release a film theatrically in Mexico. We think the film is more enjoyable when we watch it together, it’s not a film that should just be seen on tv. It has to be seen with a bunch of people like today. We’ve been having a good festival circuit, we’ve been going everywhere. I really don’t know about the target, because when you make a film like this, Carlos was always thinking about what we are talking about. He was always going deeper and deeper and deeper, like the hook in the shark. First it was an anecdote, then we were talking about families, then we were talking about differences, then we were talking about wounds. We were talking about many things and it was really the job of [editor] Valentina Leduc and Carlos to find out what it’s about. We were not thinking if it was a film for children or not. I think it’s a film for everyone who wants to have a good time and discover what modern families are all about.

Hagerman: One of the things that I like to do, is, when this is screened in Mexico, I go to the bathroom just before it ends. And then everybody comes into the bathroom and people start talking about it. “If I had known I would have brought my mother, you should bring your father!” Everybody’s talking like that in the bathroom. I guess we are going to have a good audience if we manage to convince people to go and see a documentary. If that happens I think word of mouth is going to be positive. At least we have had the film play in Brazil and people were laughing. And in Italy everyone was in a rage. It’s not the type of film where everybody comes out and says, we should save the world tomorrow. It’s the kind of film that people come out of and say, hey, let’s go and get a beer. So let’s get a beer.

STF: Can you say something about your film Those Who Remain?

Hagerman: Those Who Remain is a documentary about nine families that we followed during a year in Mexico in six different states. It’s kind of a voyage to the emotional consequences of migration, and it’s a family film as well. It’s the intimacy of the families that are longing for someone, and how they miss their loved ones. We are very excited because it’s opening in the U.S. in AMC theaters near Mexican communities July 8. We start at a test screening in Houston, Texas. Of course, the problem with documentary is that you see the statistics and Mexicans don’t go to see documentaries, how are we going to put the documentary there. But since the film is talking about their lives we’ve had very strong emotional reactions from audiences. We hopefully will get a nationwide release in September. We won’t do a bunch of prints. We’ll go little by little with a lot of outreach from help from the consulates and the organizations that are backing us up. We are trying to do this new thing, and hopefully that will open up a circuit that will allow more movies into a new market of Mexican American audiences in a more commercial way. We’re very excited.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

After the Q&A, the audience attended a packed reception at a nearby bar, enjoying free shots of delicious Mezcal, courtesy of the sponsor Pierde Almas (Oaxaca’s finest!).  A perfect finish to the evening.