STF: Tim, as you were editing this film, how much was the experience of post-traumatic stress syndrome on your mind, as experienced by a journalist?

Hetherington: I started making the film because I was in hiatus from working on Restrepo and basically I’d been a resident of West Africa for many years. I was living in Liberia, I covered the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast. I was editing Restrepo and I did an interview with a journalist from the BBC who was making a series of programs about artists that are ethically challenged, which kind of made me laugh. I showed her some of the footage from Liberia that didn’t make it into the film Libera: An Uncivil War. I saw the look on her face and she was really shocked. I wasn’t shocked by the footage but I was really shocked by the look on her face, and then I felt really disturbed by that reaction. I realized, wow, what’s happened to me? It was the first time in 10 years where I thought, well what’s all this done to me? So I made the film thinking about trauma and what it’s done to me, and the film is really my first attempt to locate myself in the work. I’ve always made the work without myself in it, I’m not in Restrepo, I’m not in any of the work I’ve ever done. I felt very it very important that as a documentarian that there’s a distance that I’m recording and witnessing from. And this is the first time where I was like, let me make something as a way of exploring the material myself. So in that way it was a kind of self-indulgent film to make.

STF: You include a kind of self-deprecating moment where you’re talking sort of fumblingly to, I take it, a journalist, trying to describe what it is you do. Do you find it difficult to have that conversation?

Hetherington: There’s a process in which you have to extrapolate what’s really going on when you’re doing this type of work. When I first go into it I try to pretend it’s because I really believe in these issues, but in the end you actually realize there’s a lot of your own personal motivation in there. Also, I think if you’re not open to self-doubt, if you’re not saying what am I doing and is this working, then you have issues. I think being able to say I’m primarily there for myself, the byproduct of my work has utility and is useful. Being honest about yourself and those motivations is obviously difficult, and it’s difficult to explain that to people sometimes.

STF: There’s lots of moments that make you wonder what’s going on. One in particular is the driving scene near the end, can you talk more about what was happening?

Hetherington: When we made Liberia: An Uncivil War, Jonathan Stack was the director, and I was with another guy James Brabazon and we were the only outsiders to live with the rebel group in the forest that eventually pushed Charles Taylor from power. Liberia: An Uncivil War is the two sides of that war, Jonathan in Liberia and me and James in the bush with the rebels. That was during a retreat. If you’re with an army when it’s retreating it’s very unpleasant because everybody is demoralized. They had almost run out of ammunition and they were being shot at from two sides. There’s one road to get out so it’s like a big traffic jam being shot at. It’s very frantic, as you can see. The exposure’s gone and the car behind us was blown up, so it was a very frantic kind of moment. Coming from that into the hotel scene where you have the plastic on the grapes—there’s a kind of romance about covering wars and I think that it’s interesting to peel that away and reveal the reality of what it is. There’s all these things that are not so romantic about it.

STF: What was the process like digging through these outtakes and putting connections together that didn’t exist before?

Hetherington: It wasn’t really about finding the most violent footage, as such. It also finding the strange stuff that puts you in a strange kind of zone. Working through stuff backwards was a really big thing for me. This is an experimental art film, basically. I just allowed myself to do things that challenge both myself and the viewer, like turning the frame upside down. Not the most obvious things. The most important thing—instead of finding the most grotesque or funny moments that I filmed—I wanted to give the viewer the simultaneity of the experience. The fact that you can be in Times Square one day and then you can get into a plane and go into another reality, and that all these realities coexist together. What we see in the news media is a kind of separation on the screen, when in fact those realities are happening right now. In Egypt there are tanks on the streets and there are people who may be there from this world, and all these worlds coexist. There are refugees living in New York who have had terrible experiences in Chad and are here for a reason, and that kind of simultaneity of experience was at the heart of making the film.

STF: Restrepo has been out and doing wonderfully. What is next for you?

Hetherington: I have a number of ideas floating in my head. My work goes from art stuff to mainstream—I’m an image maker and I’m interested in the still and moving image, and the different forms that it can take. But one of the things I’ve been thinking about its the fact that a lot of reporters are formatted into how we receive news and information about the world because of economic necessity. People get sent to areas by Time magazine or they get sent there by ABC and then they make these things. And there are obviously constraints because they’re being employed. On the other hand, you have narrative films that are imagined afterward, or there are documentary films that are usually done through talking heads which are kind of reconstructed. I think it’d be really interesting to go into these situations, like in Egypt, and to try to make films. Try to film it and make it, not because you’re doing it for television, to try to get myself outside of the financial burden of being there and then just being allowed to make work that is somehow doing something else, but is yet documenting. That’s something I’m really interested in.

STF: In a way it seems like you had that kind of liberty in Restrepo, am I right?

Hetherington: Yeah, we did. Everything in life is small footsteps, so Restrepo started to go one way and I thought, that’s interesting. You know, I’m interested in science fiction and ideas about opening up genres. I was like, wouldn’t it be great to make a science fiction film in Afghanistan, sort of mixing places and ideas.

Following is the Q&A with Nesson and Murray.

STF: Sara, can you talk about how you came to meet Robynn?

Nesson: It happened on Martha’s Vineyard. I was hosting a retreat for about 30 veterans who had come out from all over the country. I had been working with Iraq War veterans who were involved in paper-making and Warrior Writers workshops for a little over a year. Then I thought, why don’t we combine these two workshops and have all these vets come together and have a retreat for all of them? I lived on Martha’s Vineyard for seven years, and I was living in Vermont at the time but I had a friend who gave us 70 acres of land for everyone to come to. Robynn was one of the vets that came, and I didn’t stop filming her since then.

STF: Robynn, what was your first notion of letting Sara film you?

Murray: Sara actually didn’t set out to make a film about me. Sara was making a film about Combat Paper, and I thought that I was going to be a small part of a big film. Then I got a call from Sara, and she goes, by the way, I made a documentary about you, can I use it? I had to think about it because it’s inviting people into my life, and I realized that to do that would be to show people what happens to veterans when we get home, and that’s more important to me.

STF: Robynn, this film has been out for six months now, what’s that been like?

Murray: For me it’s been very odd, because I get people who have seen the film or worked on the film, and I kind of feel like they get to know me but I don’t get to know them. Mostly the overall reaction has been positive, but there’s been a few jerks who’ve said, you’re an anti-war veteran, I want to punch you in the face. Whatever, screw them anyway. I’m just glad I could be a part of this with Sara.

STF: Robynn, can you bring us up to date on what you’ve been doing since this film was made?

Murray: Eating a lot more, because I’m not broke, I can afford groceries. I moved out to the country, I got a lot of counseling. I still have PTSD problems, but I have the coping skills to deal with them. I’m in a great relationship, I have two dogs, and I still paint and I still write. I’m nearing the completion of a book of poems, essays and short stories.

STF:  Sara, it sounds like you’ve had a long involvement in this area. What were the challenges in bringing a story out of this? There’s a lot to choose from out of all this material.

Nesson: When I first got involved I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. It’s definitely challenging to work with someone who’s suffering through any kind of trauma because you take on a lot of that. It’s painful to hear the stories, but you’re exposed to their energy and that’s very difficult. When I adapt to situations I take on other people’s energies really easily so for me, I needed to learn my own coping mechanisms. In trying to find the story, Robynn was in this other film that I was working on for a couple of years, Iraq Paper Scissors, and I just didn’t know what to do with it. I wanted to focus on the VA aspect of what veterans were going through, that elephant in the room that they were dealing with, and the bureaucracy, and the fact that they had no life experienced and they were forced to prove that they had trauma. It’s an emotional trauma, it’s a psychological trauma, so it’s much more difficult to prove. What these vets were trying to tell me was, hey, no one’s paying attention to me. And that’s why I wanted to try to make this film, to paint a bigger picture to show what they were going through, and I never thought it would go this far. So I had Robynn in this other cut, and I brought it out to L.A. and I showed it to this person, who is now my producer, at a producer’s workshop. And he said Robynn clearly stands out as her own story, you have two films here. From there I started working on the film about her, and I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want her to freak out before I knew what was happening with it. And when HBO finally picked it up, I was like, I guess I can tell her now.

STF: Robynn, from your perspective, where is this country in facing the issue of PTSD, and treating vets the way they should be treated? And what needs to happen to make it right?

Murray: Unfortunately, I think the country learned too late what PTSD was doing to our troops. The U.S. actually waited until the rate of troops committing suicide coming home was higher than that of those who were being killed in combat. I remember going to visit Fort Drum and asking the colonel, do you have more beds for PTSD? Because these soldiers, these people, not just men but the women, are forced to be macho, we have to blend in. And when you want help, not only is it hard enough in the beginning to just admit that you need help, because everyone’s going to know. It’s like high school, everyone knows everyone. And then there’s that stigma attached. So when you’re still active duty and you want to make an appointment and your command doesn’t want you to, they can still shut you down. Inside the military you really have to fight. I remember telling a military doctor while I was still in, hey I’m thinking of committing suicide, and this is a man that said I didn’t even have PTSD. He fell asleep during one of our sessions. Luckily, I think with vets supporting other vets, and with organizations like [Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America], Disabled American Veterans and Iraq Veterans Against the War—I think we’re just now as a country starting to move in the right direction, but the VA needs a lot more funding, the vet centers need a lot more funding.

STF: Sara, have you given thought to how this film might be used in a public education campaign?

Nesson: I just got an invitation from an international organization on traumatic stress and they want to show the film. I’ve just been bombarded with invitations from universities and small, grassroots organizations, to other film festivals. I think it’s a really great opportunity to get the word out there. Like Robynn was saying, nobody knows that there’s an epidemic of suicide among vets—there’s 18 a day, which is outrageous if you think about it. The whole reason I wanted to make this film was to bring the public closer to a veteran, through Robynn. Just to personalize the experience to get people to understand what they’re going through. Because I think there’s a disconnect between the public and veterans today.

Audience: Are there certain things you are doing now to help other soldiers going through the same thing?

Murray: I’m actually on the board of directors for Iraq Veterans Against the War now, and I speak at high schools and colleges on anything related to my military service. PTSD related to combat or even PTSD from military sexual trauma and I really like speaking to students, they’re very receptive.

Audience: How do you think this documentary will contribute to the dialog about female combat veterans?

Murray: I think that for the people that watch it, it personalizes it more. They’re not just hearing or reading about this happening to women, they can actually see my face. They see me going through these problems, they see me crying, they see me breaking down. Through most of the film my wrist is bandaged because I punched I don’t know how many holes in walls because I didn’t know how to deal with that anger. I think the job that Sara did of capturing that process is phenomenal, and it’s a great jumping off point. People feel like they know me after the film, so hopefully they’ll want to help other people through me, I hope.

Audience: Sara, how hard was it not to put down the camera when Robynn was breaking down in the attic scene?

Nesson: That was probably the biggest challenge of all of the shooting that I did. The editor muted my voice out, but I was trying to comfort her with my voice. I wanted to wrap my arms around and put the camer down, but thank God Annie, her mother, came up and hugged her for me. So I kind of got lucky with that.

Audience: What was it like for you and Sara to come together and share narratives through the film project?

Nesson: There’s many different ways of looking at that. Between Robynn and myself we developed a vision for what we were doing. On the larger scale, there’s Warrior Writers that does writing workshops with veterans and all kinds of art-making with vets. There’s Combat Paper. Just getting these projects going and inviting civilians to participate in them really brings a focus, a common goal together. Just using Martha’s Vineyard for a microcosm for how communalizing can work—bringing veterans into a community created the best of so many people. So many people came out in droves to support them. We had people coming out leading them in yoga and meditation and massages and people offering their homes and cooking for us. We had people bringing us mattresses and blankets and asking, what can I do to help? I think sometimes it’s a mutual effort of finding each other and making it a collaborative effort.

Murray: For me, during the filming of this and being involved with Warrior Writers and Combat Paper, one of the problems I had after I got home was, I felt like no one understood me. I felt like every civilian had nothing in common with me I couldn’t talk to them, they would never understand what I was about or even if I told them something they would think I was completely nuts, and I kept myself separated. My friends were either vets or still in the military. And what I found through organizing, through being an activist and through being an artist now, is that I’ve been introduced to these wonderful people that I’m so glad I could get used to again. I really don’t know what it was. The military itself is such a different community, there’s a different language that people have to understand, it’s like a different culture, and I was reintroduced to a normal culture.

STF: Do you have a personal connection to the garment industry? People you knew, people in your family?

Levin: Yeah, my grandparents ran a hanger and dress form business in Brooklyn that was my great-grandfather’s. He immigrated here and in many ways his story is like a lot of the stories you see here. He was a poor Jewish kid that came here as a teenager. He invented and patented, I think around 1910, an adjustable dress form for the company Acme Dress Form, and did very well. And the other side is, my father refused to go into the schmatta business, he ended up becoming a journalist, but both my mother and father became labor organizers. My father-in-law actually worked for [labor leader] Sidney Hillman as a union organizer. When you look back, you discover, like so many others, yeah I’m connected to this story too.

STF: Do you have any memories as a child of visiting these factories?

Levin: I have to admit that I’ve been kind of fashion illiterate and ignorant most of my life. In fact, when I was making the film I remember once I was on the beach with two of my sisters and I was reading Women’s Wear Daily. And I overhead my sister saying, what happened to Marc? They had never even seen me look at anything, although I live right in the Garment District on 26th Street right next to [the Fashion Institute of Technology]. I’ve been surrounded by it, and I live, actually, in what used to be a garment factory—my studio is in the Starrit-Lehigh Building, which used to be a small industrial building and has now been taken over by fashion marketing, media companies and so on.

STF: For a film that’s historical in nature, it had a very personal feeling, that’s why I asked.

Levin: Well, it’s not just me. One of the things that was an eye opener was how many people, if you just scratch the surface, are in some way connected. When we went to Toronto and opened the film there I was stunned. I never realized that there was a huge schmatta business up there. And Sheila Nevins, who is the head of HBO non-fiction and a force in her own right, we discovered that she had a very profound connection to the story. She had heard stories that her great aunt had been in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. And during the making of this film Daphne Pinkerson, the producer, did a lot of research, and we were able to discover that Sheila’s great-aunt actually died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She was one of the young women who jumped out the window and died, we found her death certificate. That became such a powerful force, not only in the making of the film. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened only a few blocks from here, in the Ash building right off of Washington Square, and this March 25th is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and it’s going to be a major event in New York City. We’ve done a kind of memorial film that is the story of what happened as told through the descendants, through people who are somehow connected to all sides of that story.

The genesis of this film was, I had for years been on Sheila’s case about doing something that speaks to the economy and how things are changing and she would always say go with your friend Bill Moyers, or go to Frontline, that kind of thing. And then in the summer of 2007, well before the crash, she said, maybe it’s time to do something, let’s start looking. And I was actually looking in the hedge fund world because I had some family in that world, and they were beginning to get uneasy about the whole subprime crisis. It was the beginning of a panic, little did I think it would develop into what it did. So I went to her and said, I think I can get access to this world, no one’s ever really been inside, no one understands. And she said, hedge funds, no one really cares about that, that’s on Bloomberg, CNBC, we don’t do that. She said, what about the garment center? And I looked at her like she was crazy. I mean the garment center, does that even exist anymore? Is anybody even making clothes? And she started looking at what she was wearing—this is made in India, this is made in Thailand. And I said, you want me to do something on the schmatta business? And she said, scmattta—great title. And I said, yeah, what’s the film? And she said, you’ll figure it out. I think you’re right, there is a personal element, and I think that’s what we struggled with—not only because we were connected—to try to get some human voices, some humanity, some people from all different elements of this world who were affected by it. One of the original ideas was the last season in the garment center, which you see some of the characters struggling with. So I think that idea of personalizing it was there from the beginning.

STF: I also have a connection to the garment industry. My grandparents and my parents were among Cubans who came to the U.S. in the 1960s and my grandmother and my mother worked in some nonunion shops in Queens. So as a kid I remember going to these factories and you’d have the long tables and people cutting fabric, so watching this film reminded me of that world.

Levin: I’m amazed at how many people had some connection to this business.

STF: When you brought Sheila the death certificate of her great aunt, was there a moment there?

Levin: There’s a coffee table book coming out about [the Shirtwaist Triangle fire] and she wrote the introduction to it, and it’s a letter to her aunt Celia. She broke down, it was very moving, and I think in a way she felt in some way—Sheila, Cecilia—she may have been named after this great aunt. It was a very personal, very moving moment. But I think she may be willing for the first time to step out on a personal level and speak about that.

STF: The rags to riches to rags story is one that is mirrored in wider society. We get to this high point in American labor, and then people are trying to take us back into the 19th century.

Levin: I think it’s appropriate that you bring that up because the State of the Union is tonight, and then Mike Pence, who is a very conservative fiscal Republican, is giving the response. And then, if that’s not conservative enough for you, Michelle Bachmann is doing a tea party rant. So it actually began in the late 70s and early 80s, this push to deregulation. There were both political forces and technological changes: the automation, outsourcing, that you could find cheap labor anywhere, globalization, containerization. But deregulation was obviously a huge part. The political will was that we have to liberate capital. We’ve done enough for the working people—that was the New Deal—now we have to rebalance it and do more for capital. Obviously there’s a lot of debate to that. I guess what I found fascinating was one, I never thought about looking at these tectonic economic shifts through the lens of fashion, which is what this movie is.

Fashion is such a popular culture force now, it’s such a language that people understand, and it’s obviously a way of interesting people. If you were going to say we’re going to do a history of the political economy people would say, thanks but no thanks. This is a microcosm—the auto industry, the steel industry—all of that manufacturing. The statistic is the mindblowing centerpiece, that we made 95% of clothing in the United States in the early 60s and now it’s down to 2% or 3%. That’s a huge question, where do we go? There’s a line in the upcoming film Remembering the Fire, where one of the relatives says, you hear all this talk about deregulation. You know what deregulation is, look at these young women lying on the street. This idea that business doesn’t need to be supervised, doesn’t need to be regulated, that it will self-regulate, that the marketplace will take care of itself—how this myth has taken hold and has such power. And even after the crash of 2008, here we are three years later and we’re hearing the same mantra. That was one of the unique things about this endeavor, which is, let’s look at it through this lens that’s different than you normally would.

STF: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with HBO? You have now made a number of films with them—Soldiers in the Army of God, Protocols of Zion—both excellent films that everybody should see. Can you talk a little bit about how that started?

Levin: I started as a kid with the Maysles, I was 18 years old, I dropped out of Wesleyan University. I’m still friends with Al [Maysles], I look up to him as one of the great figures and as a mentor. What happened was, they were making Gimme Shelter—this was in 1969, 1970—but somebody told me they were doing a film on the Rolling Stones on 1697 Broadway. I just walked in there, and somebody shoved a bunch of 16 mm cans in my hand and said, take that around the corner. So I did, and I came back, and did that for the next couple days. And it was after three days that David Maysles came up to me and said, who the hell are you? And I said my name is Marc Levin and I’d love to just be an intern, an apprentice. I wasn’t getting paid, I didn’t care, I wasn’t thinking about labor organizing or anything. At some point David [Maysles] came down with mononucleosis, and I would go to the hospital and I would screen these scenes, and he would give me notes, and I’d come back. So I’m about to leave, and he says Marc we have something very important to discuss. [Maysles Studios partner] Charlotte [Zwerin] came to me and said all the editors are going to go on strike if I don’t pay you. I knew nothing about it. And he looked at me as if I was a subversive who was trying to organize the shop. And I was like David, I’m not asking for anything. He said, well you don’t have a choice, they’re going to go on strike unless I pay you. So you have a big decision to make. You can either get paid—I think it was $75 or $100 a week—or you can get a credit on the film. So being a wiseass kid, I’m thinking, a credit, what am I? I’m a nothing, I’m an intern. I’ll take the $100. And about seven years ago they re-released Gimme Shelter and I went and saw it, and I felt bad that my name isn’t on it. It’s one of the great films of all time. So I guess it was my first lesson in showbiz. That’s how I started as an editor.

I was able to hook up with Bill Moyers. I came up more through the journalistic background and documentaries were white papers on CBS, they were PBS documentaries. Sheila, I see, as a figure who came out of that world—she worked for Don Hewitt, she worked at PBS. But she created this bridge—this world of nonfiction that we see now that cable empires—Discovery, A&E, National Geographic—built around nonfiction storytelling. She was really the one who said, this doesn’t just have to be do-good, educational. This can really be something that attracts an audience. I started working with her I think in ‘89 or ‘90 on a film called Mob Stories—all of the subject matter that she was the first to kind of popularize—my understanding is that some of those documentaries were getting higher ratings than the Hollywood movies. That was an eye opener. So they’re seeing these documentaries, and they start thinking we need to create programming. She’s unique in the corporate world in that the way she works is impulsive, it’s from the gut, it can change direction. All I can say is that that spoke to me, and also that she said, I want somebody to watch this, I want an audience, and I believe we can get an audience. So for me that was a huge growth, from strictly looking at it from the news world, to oh wow, this is human drama, and it can be shaped. I’m doing a series now called Brick City which is really an outgrowth of that work, which many people compare to The Wire. It’s nonfiction but it’s not a reality show, and it’s not a documentary in the conventional sense, but it plays very much like you’re watching The Wire meets West Wing. So I see her as a person who certainly helped me, helped the audience, and helped a whole generation of filmmakers move in that direction. At the same time she’s a difficult woman to work with. So you have to know how to be part of that creative dialogue, but it played to my strengths and I give her tremendous credit. At one point she said, where do you think all of the children and grandchildren of these people that made it into the middle class that worked some way in this industry, what’s happened to them? And this was post-crash, in the fall of 2008. So right now I’ve been following for the last six months four families who really had a good life and knew the best of the American dream but have been out of work for over a year and probably will never regain the position that they once had in life. So it’s this slow-motion free fall. And, unlike this, it’s a very personal story.

STF: I believe Barbara Koppel’s first gig was as an intern on Gimme Shelter, and her first day she went to Madison Square Garden and they had about 40 road cases of equipment and they said, “Stand here and make sure nobody steals anything.”

Levin: I was with her last night at Sundance, and I certainly remember when she made Harlan County U.S.A. back in the 70s and that was certainly a seminal event in thinking that somebody who was a contemporary making a documentary that opened up on the Upper East Side, it won an Academy Award. It just kind of opened up so many avenues of thinking, well there are different ways of making film. You don’t have to just run to Hollywood and do it that way.

Audience: Can you talk a little bit about when in the post production process the music and sound design comes in, and if you conceptualize the music before you shoot, while you shoot, after you shoot?

Levin: This is a musical, first of all. That’s the secret to why it was on HBO. So it has a certain kind of entertainment and showtime element. [Musician and composer] John Zorn is a friend of mine, the guy is a genius. This is the only film I think he will ever do where it’s a combination of original score and licensing of major songs. John came in, I knew he had an interest in this area, and I just showed him some footage when we were just starting. Some of the geometry of the garment center, and some of the characters to give him a taste of some of the different personalities, from garmento to cutter. And the next week he came back with an album. And he had obviously been thinking his own thing, and he went in the studio with a trio, and they just had a magic moment and they came out with 12 pieces, I think 10 of them are in the film. It was a loop and [editor Richard Lowe] and I would play that music, and that gave us a rhythm and a kind of texture that we started working off of. We would cut scenes to it. So music was key. Now, Rhapsody in Blue, which opens and closes the film—that wasn’t just taken out of the air. That was played at Marc Jacobs incredible show that he had in 2008, literally, I think a day before the crash. When Gershwin wrote that song in the early 20s it was very much about New York City, trying to capture, in music the chaos and diversity of the growth of this metropolis. And it was literally at that time that he wrote that that the garment district was being born. It was originally in the Lower East Side, just people working in the Tenement, then it was around [Greenwich Village]. The wealthy people that lived on 5th Avenue and all of the famous shops on 5th Avenue, they got upset that there were all of these immigrants that didn’t speak English that would come out of the sweatshops during their lunch hour and be on the street. So they said, we need to move this out of here. And at that time, the midtown area was actually a prostitution and gambling area, and so the garment center and these immigrants were moved into that area. Music was key to the process and kind of a type of feedback. Music was essential, and I know John appreciates the film, but I will admit that came up to me and said, that’s the last time I will ever score a film where there’s anybody else’s music in it. So I’m happy that he allowed us to mix his original score with a lot of licensed music that carried us through the 20th century.

Editing, in the end, it’s rhythm. It’s about finding a rhythm of storytelling. We talk about beats just like musicians talk about beats. I think that music is essential in filmmaking, because it’s very much about the rhythm of storytelling, even in narrative.

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

STF: What did you expect the reaction to this film would be? Today it’s an unusual film, in the 1970s it feels like it would have been an even more unusual film.

Albert: Well, we expected, of course, that it would be an enormous success, and especially that the critics would love it. In fact as I was just looking at the film—we came in toward the end and saw the last 15 minutes or so—I was thinking to myself, now I really know why I’ve been spending my life making documentaries. We got a review from the New York Times which was devastatingly negative. Comments like, “Why are they showing us all of this flabby flesh?” As if a woman in a movie had to be no older than 35, which is, I suppose, the Hollywood rule. But even worse than that, Edie wrote a letter in response and submitted it to the New York Times, and the letter was utterly beautiful, full of understanding. And a month later, they still hadn’t published it, so I called the editor, who I happened to know, and I said, “Are you planning to publish it? Have you received it? Oh, you’ve received it.” He said, “We can’t publish it, she’s schizophrenic.” It’s difficult for people to draw the line between madness and eccentricity. These two women—as I see it, and I hope as you see it too—it’s a love affair. And they understood every bit of this film. If we had tried to fake even one single moment of this film, they would have thrown us out of the house. Instead, when we showed the film, I remember, Edie got up and said, “The Maysles have created a classic.”

STF: Muffie, I wanted to know what you expected of the film.

Muffie: It didn’t surprise me in a certain way that there was controversy. The bitterness and vituperativeness of some of the critics was really surprising. And I think I expected, and it was also true, that part of the criticism came from the idea of exploitation of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s relatives. And there was something about that connection that made people feel that we were trading on their aunt and cousin’s fame, that kind of thing. I don’t think I expected people to feel the sagging flesh problem and I didn’t expect people to really feel that Edie was crazy. I think she was, as Al said, completely eccentric, but clearly in control and dealing with things, and dealing with her mother. And I was surprised at how people used that as a way of not seeing what the film was really about, which was this really interesting relationship which to me was like a bigger version of many many kinds of dependency relationships that people have—with their spouses, with their friends, with their parents, with their kids, et cetera.

Albert: What scared the critics and maybe even a small number of the audience here, is that they were so open. And for some people to be very open is a threatening kind of thing. But that’s the beauty and strength of their relationship and their character. That they would dare to be that open and take the chance of that kind of vulnerability.

Muffie: One of the things I was surprised about was—I was pretty young when we made that film—was how when you showed people a film that you’d made about them, the people who let you into their lives and then you show them the film, they know themselves. They aren’t surprised by what they see, or shocked or even upset, and that was the case with the Beales. They felt that we had presented them as they were and they recognized themselves, and that’s been my experience with all the documentary subjects I’ve been involved with.

Albert: I can tell you also that they were so mature and so levelheaded, that if Michael Moore had been filming them they would have thrown him the hell out of the house in a minute. They were that open because they trusted us. And having that kind of trust is a sure sign of sanity and maturity.

STF: Al can you talk about your interaction with the Beales after the movie, years later?

Albert: One moment that I remember so well is that two years later, when Mrs. Beale was dying, Edie was with her at that moment. And she turned to her mother and said, “Is there something more that you want to say?” And her mother turned to her and said, “There’s nothing more to say, it’s all in the film.” That gives one a great deal of satisfaction.

Muffie: I used to get cards through the mail from [Little] Edie saying, “Time for another film.”

Albert: I got many letters from her, and one of them, at the top she wrote, “Long overdue love letter.” And there was another letter where she wrote, Dearest Al, followed by 50 Dearest Als, and finally, a salutation at the end.

Audience: How did you present the idea of the film when you first approached them?

Albert: I don’t think there was anything to tell them, they were kind of waiting for it all of their lives., As Arthur Miller put it so well: finally, attention must be paid. Which is kind of weird because they’re recluses apparently running away from things, but when they had the opportunity to be trusted and to be liked as much as we liked them they sensed that immediately. I guess they saw it in our eyes, I don’t know what it was, but there was an immediate attraction which was maintained all the way through the film, and for many years after that.

Muffie: They were also performers so they liked having an audience.

STF: Muffie can you talk about piecing together the structure of this film in the edit room? Because it’s such a delicate subject.

Muffie: It took us two years because, beyond being delicate, nothing happened in a way that yields a traditional structure in the way of a beginning, middle, denouement and end. I remember Susan and I used to ride our bikes over there in the summer—many summers—following the filming. And you’d come up to the house and you could hear them through the open windows because it was summer—singing, arguing—the same songs, the same arguments. So the piecing together took forever—and Albert and David were completely amazing in never saying, “Why’s this taking so long?”—was a matter of trying to figure out a way to create a change in the audience in the way that you feel about them. And it took a long time to figure that out. Interestingly, the last scene where they fight and Edie cries, which we call Pink Day, was one of the first scenes to be cut. And even though it didn’t happen toward the end of filming, we always knew that that was in some way a climactic scene, as much as we could get of one. So the rest of the film was kind of building and trying to get you to understand what was going on in a deep way.

Albert: We had some particularly successful days in filming, and when those days occurred, they would usually say, “It’s been a banner day.” So they knew when things were right and when things were wrong.

Audience: Were there any days during filming when you thought it would be a good idea to back off? At any point had you thought, maybe this is not a day to film?

Albert: I can’t remember that, but that does happen, not all the time, but many times it happens in filming, and you better damn well back off when something is too personal. It requires a great deal of thoughtfulness and skill to have that kind of sensibility where you know when to film and when not to. Because there are many times, as in the scene that you mentioned where Edie was crying, there were many times when things aren’t that delicate where you have to make that decision. But it’s so important to get it when it’s proper to even if there’s a great deal of hurtfulness. It’s between those two extremes of being so careful that you miss something that they would like as well, and going in the other direction of exploiting them.

Muffie: I’ll also say from watching all of the footage and listening to all of the wild sound, that the Beales tired the Maysles out just as much as the other way around. You guys would go off and rest in the car and David would leave the mic on the table that was between the two beds, and so we got a lot of discussion and a lot of sound. We even constructed some scenes around that wild sound that was gotten after the Beales had exhausted the Maysles.

Albert: I have to insert a little promotion here. My daughters, Rebecca and Sarah, have come up with a book that was published called Grey Gardens. And at the very end of the book there’s a CD culled from over 100 hours of soundtrack where the camera wasn’t running, and it’s just wonderful, wonderful stuff. And also, more recently we thought there’s such wonderful stuff that didn’t make it into the film, and let’s make another film. And we did, it’s called The Beales of Grey Gardens. Both that film and this one are available from Criterion.

Audience: I’ve never seen a film that brought forth the scent and smell so much. And I’ve always wanted to ask, how did that house smell?

Muffie: Horrible.

Albert: There was only one big obstacle, and that was the smell.

Muffie: And the fleas, don’t forget the fleas.

Albert: And the fleas. There’s a moment where [Little Edie] is talking to Jerry on the porch, and if you look closely, and if I were unkind enough to have done a close up on her legs, every single inch of Edie’s legs were covered with fleabites. When we would arrive at Grey Gardens we’d get out of the car and spray ourselves so we wouldn’t get bitten by the fleas.

Muffie: I think you wore cat flea collars on your ankles and wrists. But one of the worst experiences I remember was getting offered food in there. It was really hard to eat.

Albert: I’m not sure now, but we probably had a lot of cat food.

Audience: I found it fascinating that they didn’t curse at all, unless that was cut out. And also they weren’t smokers, which was very common at that time. And I wanted to know if Jackie [Onassis] ever saw this, and what did she think if she did?

Albert: I don’t know, did you hear of anything of what she may have said?

Muffie: I heard that she snuck in incognito at one point when we were showing it in a theater, but she definitely communicated with them. And [the Beales] talked about how Onassis would sing with them on the phone. But she would also bring them clothes and give them some money, stuff like that.

Albert: I remember my brother had a chance meeting with Jackie after the film, at an airport, and asked if she would see the film. And she said, oh I might sneak in. Which in a way, if you were a psychologist, it’s easy to interpret that. Both Jackie and we had a kind of strange relationship with them in that they loved them very much and were very close and very dear, but it’s a little difficult to make that public.

Muffie: And as for cursing, I had never thought about that. They actually never did curse, but I think it was a class thing. I think it was in that era, in that class, where they just didn’t use any of those words.

Albert: I get irritated every time I watch a film where there’s so much swearing, which doesn’t add a bit to it, especially if it’s a narrative film where it’s always under the control of the filmmakers. It’s disgusting.

Audience: I was wondering what you thought about modern documentarians, modern documentaries. What you thought about filmmakers like Michael Moore.

Albert: Well, Michael Moore—he’s off on his own track. I think his political philosophies I probably agree with one hundred percent, but his tactic of being out to get people I think makes his films that much less close to people. I can’t see him getting as close as he should with that kind of attitude. But he’s kind of an oddball that way, there are so many filmmakers who are getting close to people, and who are very successful at that.

Muffie: I’m a huge film lover—both documentaries and feature films. And I’ve just been so impressed by the new crop of documentaries that have been coming out. I was just talking to someone yesterday about the relationship between documentaries and feature films, and among the many amazing things about documentaries are that unlike even the very, very best feature film, when you walk out of a documentary you wonder what’s happening to those people now, because they exist. So there’s a kind of mental afterlife that goes on in the audience where you think about the people and what’s going on. And often in Q&As you see that because will ask you what happened to her or what happened to him. And I think documentaries, because of the equipment being so cheap, there’s a kind of new flowering of possibility. We met someone last night who went off on her own to Iraq and made a film. And being a solo person wasn’t possible when Albert and I were starting out. Even though when Albert and I were starting out there was this huge change in equipment such that it was lighter and more portable and people began to do things that had never been done before. That kind of thing is happening in a new way, so it’s really cool.

STF: We were talking before the film about other things happening in the Maysles Studios in the 1970s. You were very active making commercials, making other films. I was quite surprised to learn that there’s an entire film about Grand Funk Railroad that has never been released before. Muffie, can you talk about what it was like working at Maysles Studios in the 1970s?

Muffie: I think that the company supported itself doing commercials. I think, a lot because of Gimme Shelter, there were several rock n’ roll films made. To me it was like this amazing place because it was so casual and friendly. Everybody worked hard but it was easygoing and everybody was like a family. I think that it probably continues to be that way.

Albert: When you make a film like Grey Gardens or Salesman, you have a special devotion to the people in the film. They become your friends forever. I was asked recently if I had become unfriendly with anyone I had ever filmed, and I can’t remember that ever happening. And so many of them, I kept up to date with. Salesman—which was done 40 years ago—one of the salesmen visited me the other day, and two of them have passed away, but during their life there was constant communication. And part of that is because we treated them so well as subjects in the film.

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Follow thompowers on Twitter for more updates throughout the Sundance Film Festival.

STF: Start by telling us how you got drawn into this material and story.

Lemkin: I actually went to Cambodia in September 2006 with a plan to develop a film about the Khmer Rouge going to trial. So I was interested in meeting two or three of the Khmer Rouge leaders, and Thet Sambath was my fixer, he was my translator. And I realized very quickly that Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, was the key guy to really get to know. But when Sambath and I went together to film with Nuon Chea, he told me nothing. And I realized that the two of them had a very interesting relationship, even though Nuon Chea was saying nothing. And on the way back to the capital city of Phnom Penh, in those days it was about a 10-hour drive because the road was really bad—Sambath told me all about what he was doing for the previous, at that point, seven years. So gradually we evolved a plan that we would make a film together. He hadn’t planned at that point to make a film. He was just simply trying to find out what had happened. And it was actually seven years before he picked up a camera, about a month before I met him. And he didn’t pick up a camera to make a film, he picked up a camera because I think after about five or six years he had started to record on minidisc the conversations that they had had. And he recorded about 1,000 hours of their conversations, and he was recording them because he thought at any moment this old man may die, and no one will believe what he was getting. And then just before I met him, he had started to videotape these conversations, again, with this idea that he wanted to prove that this man, this person that was so feared and reviled and mythologized in Cambodia had actually really spoken to him in this way.

STF: Can you talk about the experience of showing this film in Cambodian exile communities?

Lemkin: It’s been really exciting actually. We made the film as a sort of universal statement so that it could have some kind of appeal and meaning to anybody who wants to watch it. But when it comes to Cambodians—I suppose ideally the audience for this film would be Cambodians in Cambodia. But the film has not been given a permit to be shown in Cambodia. It’s been shown in a very limited way there. But in this country, which has a very large Cambodian diaspora—there’s about 300,000 Cambodians living here, perhaps 90% because of the killing fields. The refugee float that came in the late 70s and early 80s was all caused by the disruptions that happened in Cambodia and Indochina during that period. So all of these people are living here, and the younger people, what they call the “1.5 generation” which are the people born in Cambodia or the refugee camps in Thailand and then come to live here and grow up as Americans, and the second generation—born here in the U.S.—find a huge gap between them and their parents, who are first generation refugees who don’t really want to talk about this traumatic experience. And this film, perhaps because it’s done through the prism of a younger person—if he’d come to live in the U.S. he’d have been a 1.5 generation migrant—they can relate to that. Because in a way the film is not really about what happened in the Khmer Rouge, the film is really about how does somebody who was affected by the Khmer Rouge as a child find out and come to terms with what happened to them as a child. So people have been really, really I think energized, galvanized by it, particularly in the large [exile] communities. There are two large communities. One is in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. Another one is in Lowell, just outside of Boston. With the community in Long Beach we very recently did a project where survivors of the killing fields met by video conference, live, the people who are in this film. So for the first time ever, the victims of the killing field spoke to the perpetrators, and they had a three-hour dialogue. Although [the film] is about very difficult, dark, violent and horrible episodes, the people see a way forward, out of this miasma. And this process that we went through in Long Beach is leading to a lot of community activity—both in Long Beach and in Lowell.

STF: What’s it been like for Sambath to have this film out now?

Lemkin: I think he’s really excited. The film is doing well here, but it’s also having a huge impact in places like the Balkan region, where people are seeing a lot of echoes with their experience. For Sambath, I think that’s a very exciting idea—the idea that his very lonely work, that he’d done for so many years, has been able to touch people. And not touch people in some kind of passive, curious way, but actually touch people in a very kind of active and forward-looking way. So he’s very pleased and very satisfied with what has happened. But at the same time that has to be tempered with the fact that it’s still quite dangerous to deal with this story in Cambodia. It’s dangerous for him. There have been some times where he has been driving near his farm, near where his father was killed and where Nuon Chea also lived, so the location in itself is quite symbolic. But it’s very far away from where he and his family live in Phnom Penh. So he’s quite often driving in rural areas, and there’s been a few times this year when he’s been run off the road in his car by people unknown. And also—I just mentioned the Long Beach project we did a couple of months ago—the people who were in that, Khoun and Suon and another person who was not included in the final cut of the film, the three of them crossed back into Cambodia from Thailand and were tracked by police and people. And they have received visits from, shall we say men with guns in the last few weeks. So the whole thing is very much on a knife’s edge. I don’t think the film can be, in the immediate future, shown in Cambodia around communities and villages because it’s still quite a dangerous story to tell.

Audience: What did you learn about mass murder through this film?

Lemkin: In a very simple nutshell, it’s done by ordinary people. And no matter how we might think that we could not do it, I think all of us could be involved in it if the situation is such that that kind of thing happens. Because I think the two people that we really focus on in this film, Khoun and Suon, are not people who have ever done any kind of criminal, violent, evil—if you want to put it that way—behavior since. And in that three year period, from 1975 to the beginning of 1979, they were responsible for killing, I mean Suon killed about 300 people. Khoun killed over 3,000 people, but I don’t think they’re different from us. I learned a lot of things, but I think that would be at the top.

Audience: Have any of Sambeth’s tapes been used in the prosecution of Nuon Chea?

Lemkin: So Nuon Chea was arrested in September 2007. The process of the United Nations trial is that he was investigated for, it turned out, three years for an indictment which they then served in September 2010. It’s 750 pages long and he’s charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The investigating judges asked for us to provide the film to them as part of their dossier of evidence against Nuon Shea when the film was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival of January last year. We declined to provide it to them, not because we want to impede the trial or the tribunal process or the justice process, but because the context in which this film was made and in which these interviews and accounts were obtained were such that—principally Sambath—but Sambath and myself had presented ourselves as not being agents of the court. We were not working for the court, we said to these people—Nuon Chea and everybody else we filmed and asked please tell us what you did, what you know happened 30 years ago—we are not officers of the court. We are interested in getting this information into the public domain. So for the first four months of 2010 the court attempted to subpoena material. I live in Oxford, England, and someone came to my house from the court to try and take the film. And we declined, we resisted that for the reasons I have given. And it has been very controversial, we’ve come under criticism for it. But we’ve stuck by that. The trial itself of Nuon Chea will start as early as March or April of this year, so possibly in two or three months, but more likely in June. It will last two years minimum, possibly three years. He’s on trial with four other people. And when the court issued their order in which they kind of desisted from their subpoena operation—they said they would no longer pursue us through the courts—they said they would actually use the film. The film will be shown on PBS in June or July and they’ll get a copy then. So we have no problem with the film being used in the court, but there is a problem with actually handing it over directly because that is not the context in which the testimony was granted or obtained.

Audience: After you decided to make the documentary with Sambath how did you convince Nuon Chea to let you film him?

Lemkin: Basically, Nuon Chea had been working with Sambath for seven years—well maybe about five years sort of in depth at that point. Sambath and I made the film together, we own the film together, we are joint partners, it was a joint English-Cambodian venture. So Nuon Chea was very happy to be filmed by me, working with Sambath. What he wasn’t happy to do, however, was to answer very secret and difficult questions about what he and Pol Pot had gotten up to and what they had decided in various meetings. So when you see in this film the very kind of internal, the most secret admissions that he makes, I was not there. I couldn’t be there for him to say that kind of thing. He was very happy for it to be used in the film, but he wasn’t comfortable to speak like that in the presence of a foreigner. So the way that we worked was that some of the material that you see in the film when Nuon Chea is talking precedes my involvement with Sambath. So it’s from August 2006. And then we had about a year of filming where I wasn’t there by any means, all of the time, but Sambath was going and interviewing him and we were working on what questions and what kind of things needed to be done.

Audience: Do you think that there’s somebody responsible for these killings, and if a finger is pointed at somebody, shouldn’t it be a leader?

Lemkin: To be honest, I don’t really think that when you get 1.7 million people killed like this, that you can pin it down to one person. We’re making a second film from the material that we have, and in that film you’ll see that Nuon Chea’s own family was completely devastated by the killing fields. He lost 40 of his own relatives—even his uncle was killed. And when his uncle was killed and he learned about it at the secret central committee meeting in late 1975, he was actually too scared to raise any objection. And I think that gives you an idea of when you get into this world of mass killing, you are dealing with things that are much, much greater than individual people. Forces that are more elemental, more scary, more structural, more profound are at work. And I don’t think that blaming one person or another person, or even five people or ten people gets you to a point where you really understand what’s happened.

Audience: Initially we were led to believe that they were political killings, but later it seems to be more ethnic. Could you comment on that, and what does Sambath think about that?

Lemkin: Essentially, what had happened—and this will come out in our second film which will be on the DVD when we release it—what happened the Khmer Rouge is that you have two sides of a very secret communist party that had grown up underground and was very secretive in the way it operated. Suddenly it captured state power in 1975 and ran the country. But in coming to state power it was not a unified, controlled organism. It was actually a party in which there were two parts who were in very deep conflict with each other. The Communist Party of Kampuchea [Khmer Rouge] had been set up by Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Indochinese communist party, in 1930. And all of that goes back to the struggle against French colonialism. So the problem inside the Khmer Rouge was that Pol Pot and Nuon Chea came to power within the Communist Party as people who said, “We are true Cambodians.” As [Nuon Chea] says, “I fight for the nation, I don’t care about individuals, the nation is more important.” What he means by that is, “We are the true representatives of the Khmer people. We are the true representatives of the Cambodian spirit that goes back to Angkor Wat,” and that great civilization that had been in place 1,000 years earlier. The other people who were in the Khmer Rouge were much more happy—this is simplifying it hugely—to deal with the Vietnamese big brother that was next door, and which regarded the Cambodian communist party as basically an adjunct. That thereby became an ethnic conflict, because people who were seen as being ethnically connected to Vietnam were [considered to be] in a suspect community. So when the ethnic minorities were being targeted, as you see in the film, these people were not being targeted because they were ethnic minorities. They were being targeted because that ethnic minority was determined as being a group that might have sympathies with Vietnam. And the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia within the communist party, within the Khmer Rouge was the primary problem. And this kind of nationalism—which became a very racist, supremacist chauvinism, which is what Nuon Chea and Pol Pot really advocated to separate themselves from Vietnam—is really at the heart of why this violence became so extreme, and had such resonance in the country. And it has huge resonance even now. The reason why the story is still scary is that the government is quite worried that if the government puts Nuon Chea in the witness box in say, June of this year, and he starts making statements about, “I am the true spirit of Cambodia”—actually there are many people in Cambodia who believe that. There are many Cambodian people here, in America, who believe that there is a real pure nationalism about the Khmer Rouge that should be celebrated. Because they still now see Vietnam—Vietnam came in in about 1979 and actually militarily occupied the country for nearly 10 years until the demise of the Soviet Union, which was its backer—even now, many people see the current government as being a Vietnamese stooge. So you still have a huge problem of nationalism and ethnic identity in Cambodia. And, forgetting communism—because I think communism maybe has nothing to do with it, nearly—the appeal of Nuon Chea going on television every night and saying, “I am the true Khmer. We were fighting for the sovereignty of the country, we were defending the country,” will still have a huge resonance in Cambodia, even today. I mean, it seems unbelievable, but it is the truth.

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