Interview: “Chaplains” Director Martin Doblmeier

Posted on November 3, 2015 at 11:15 pm

US Army Chaplain Paul Hurley, a Catholic priest, says mass for the troops at a Military base in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Journey Films

Martin Doblmeier has made more than thirty movies about faith. The latest from his Journey Films is “Chaplains,” showing this month on PBS. It is a profound and moving documentary about chaplains of many different faiths in a variety of settings: war, business, an assisted living facility, prison, the US Senate, NASCAR, and a children’s hospital. It was George Washington himself who first asked for chaplains in the US military. The movie covers Army chaplains representing centuries of tradition as well as chaplains in new and developing roles. In an interview, Doblmeier talked about how the film came about and what chaplains bring to people literally dealing with life and death.

“We have been around this world now for about 30 years making films and I know a lot of chaplains. And I realized that there had not been any kind of significant film that talked about the work that they do. And they work so quietly, under the radar most of the times. And I just felt maybe we could do something that helps to raise the profile and bring some attention to who these people are and the great work that they do. So once we started to dig into it and we realized that it was something that was becoming more common across faith traditions. There certainly had been chaplains dating back to the fourth century. St. Martin of Tours was the one who actually begun what has now become the idea of chaplaincy and it’s been going on now quietly mostly in the military or in a hospital setting but over the last couple of generations has expanded now into the prisons. Even the corporate world is looking at it as an interesting model, that’s why we put Tyson’s in there. We had known about Tysons for many years actually. I keep notes in piles. The foundations liked this idea because it had something of positive value. And with their support we were able to get it up and get it going. For me I think it’s a really interesting storyline about people who want to live out a faith tradition in the 21st century in their particular place. And what a wonderful model for how not just to tolerate the faith tradition of others but actually to honor it, and engage with it and to see it as a way to sort of forming a sense of meaning in our lives.”

Congregational clergy spend almost all of their time with people who share their faith traditions and culture, but chaplains work with people who of all faiths and of no faith. “In a congregation really pretty much the language is common, the rituals are common, the practice is common, and people generally understand that the pyramid of structure is with the pastor or the Imam or the Rabbi being the person in charge of the spiritual growth of that particular community. It’s a totally different paradigm in chaplaincy, most often because they are working in secular settings, they don’t really have a place that you would consider to be a power position in those settings and so they are negotiating every day not only with the institution but how to deal with the individual that they come across. And it’s a very different way of being present in those kinds of environment than it would be in a congregation. I think it’s a wonderful model but it presents its own challenges. One of the things we wanted to bring out in the film is that you’re working in a spiritual realm, that it is very difficult, nearly impossible to somehow document the impact that the chaplain would have in a hospital setting or in a prison setting.” Because they are in secular settings, they constantly need to find ways to demonstrate their value in terms that the people responsible for those settings can understand. “There are implicit success points that you can look at but at the same time in institutions that are under a lot of pressure for accountability and quantifiable data to be able to say this person is actually contributing a lot to our overall mission here in the secular settings is a challenge. Chaplains don’t often have that kind of data. So there is a constant stance of — ‘Will I still have this job? Will I still be able to continue to perform this work after the next review happens?’ I had a real sense of admiration for them, the commitment that they have despite the fact that in many cases the roles that they play in the hospitals or in the prison settings are always being evaluated and reevaluated.”

The movie shows that the work of the chaplains often extends past the boundaries of the community they are serving. “For example in the police department my assumption was the police chaplains would be meeting with perpetrators or prisoners or people who have been arrested or incarcerated for whatever reason. In fact, more often than not the police chaplains were mostly ministering to the police department. And I find that to be the case in a lot of different ways. So in hospital settings the hospital chaplains often ministered to the patients and the patient’s families, the people involved but they also minister a lot and provides support, emotional support, spiritual support to the staff, to the doctors and the nurses. So they do provide this sort of wider setting of what’s going on and I think we tried to show that in each one of the different segments because I think there can be a lot of misunderstanding to what their role is but they continue to sort of be present and available to those people who need them, very different to the settings in the military.”

The chaplains in the films are less concerned with rituals and theology than being present in the lives of people who are struggling by showing their faith through compassion and understanding. They are not proselytizing or doing missionary work. “It was nice to be able to put some of the voices in of the soldiers were very young who said that they appreciated the chaplains even though sometimes they are not believers. The chaplains fulfill this unique role because if someone is having a lot of emotional issues in the military about what was happening they would feel more comfortable going to a chaplain because it is not documented in the same way as if you go to the military psychiatrist to speak to somebody about that. So there are a lot of nuances that creates this real need to be able to have chaplains available.”

Perhaps the most unexpected setting in the film is Tyson’s Food. Doblmeier says that the success of this program, particularly in providing support for employees from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. “There are companies now that are providing chaplain services like you provide independent IT services. Corporations that have evangelical leadership feel as though it is important for them to be able to have access to chaplaincy. So that they can literally hire in through an agency chaplains to come in and serve their people. We wanted to do it because Tysons Foods is huge publicly traded company and it has not just a handful of chaplains to come in and sort of maybe address some of the spiritual needs. It has 120 full and part-time chaplains and has had them now for you while. So this is a genuine commitment on the part of this corporation. John Tyson is not an evangelical; he is an Episcopalian. He just feels as though this is a good thing for a company. And this is a publicly traded company which comes under a lot of scrutiny; all the dollars that are spent are scrutinized because there is shareholder and stakeholder interest but he still believes that the bottom line is best served by having a team of chaplains there.”

Doblmeier says that what chaplains can do is help people facing challenges like loss, risk, and illness with “a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. And the role of the chaplain is again not to give them their own meaning and infuse them with the notion of their own spirituality and sacredness but to help the individual tap into innately what they believe is the source and meaning of life. That’s the kind of support that the person is really coming up for. Sometimes there is such a close link between the individual and the chaplain that the individual may start to choose openly, freely the spiritual path of a chaplain and that’s quite okay but a good chaplain doesn’t seek to bring that person into a fold, they seek to have that person find what’s going to really be substantive meaning in their own life. And sometimes it’s very brief. These hospital settings can be just a matter of days and so the skill you have to have is to have the ability to get a quick spiritual assessment. In other cases its long-term, that chaplain is in the prison setting is trying to help somebody who may never get out of that 5 x 8 prison cell that they live in. How do you find purpose and meaning in your life then? They are really to be present to the person to help that person discover or in some cases rediscover what gives them a sense of purpose after a loss, spiritual or emotional loss and then help them get them back on track.”

Juliette Binoche and Director Patricia Riggen on “The 33”

Posted on October 28, 2015 at 10:19 pm

At a special screening of “The 33” at Washington DC’s Newseum, director Patricia Riggen, stars Juliette Binoche and Lou Diamond Phillips, and producer Mike Medavoy spoke about making a movie about the rescue of 33 Chilean miners. I was able to record a brief part of the presentation, with the end of Binoche’s description of the ore in the mine as a metaphor of what the miners really found when they were trapped for two months, and Riggen’s very sweet description of Binoche’s preparation for her very un-glamorous role.

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Interview: James Vanderbilt on “Truth,” With Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford

Posted on October 22, 2015 at 3:06 pm

James Vanderbilt wrote and directed Truth, based on journalist Mary Mapes’ book about the controversial story that ended her career at CBS News. Working with Dan Rather, she produced a news story with explosive allegations about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service in a story broadcast on “60 Minutes Wednesday” shortly before election day 2004. The allegations were based in part on two memos purported to be from the personal files of Bush’s late supervisor. After the broadcast, bloggers claimed they were forgeries. CBS organized a commission led by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi, which produced a 224-page report, finding that the story was biased and inadequately supported.

The movie is based on the book by Mapes, with her side of the story. It stars Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford. Vanderbilt talked to me about his film, journalism, and legal standards of evidence and how all three relate to the challenges of truth and storytelling. “There are no rules and regulations in terms of how you put story on the air. It’s always a judgment call which is not obviously how things are done in the legal profession. So felt, I think, that they were in very new territory speaking to people who were Lawyers about how news is built and delivered and what their process was.”

Throughout most of the film, Mapes is exceptionally strong and decisive. But when her father publicly accuses her of having a left-wing agenda, she is painfully vulnerable. “I think it was the moment that broke her a little bit. One of the things that drew me to the story was her as a person and her as a character. You meet this woman who is at the height of her powers in many ways. She is extraordinarily bright and funny, she has the best job in her field, the perfect job, she works with the face of CBS news and she’s the one behind that putting those stories together for him. She’s just done the story of her career with , she has a great husband, she has a great kid. And so when we meet her it seems like it’s perfect, everything is perfect. As all of this goes down those pieces of armor that we all sort of have starts to get stripped away. We all have that scared kid inside us and those pieces of armor of protecting that kid, but they can disappear. And that moment with her father near the end was finally exposing her as a raw nerve. You think that scene is going to go one way and it goes another. And she just can’t do it. And when she told me that story I was floored that that really happened. And also seeing the relationship that she and Dan had first-hand from watching them interact I started to kind of go, ‘Oh this is what this is about, about this relationship, and fathers and daughters,’ and that’s really the emotion behind the piece. And that’s really why that whole storyline matters.”

Eleven years after the events of the film, Vanderbilt says that “Investigative journalism is in a very dangerous please right now. And I think investigative journalism is incredibly important and longer lead stories don’t get done. In the film there’s a moment where they go ‘Oh my God we only have five days to put this together’ and journalists I talk now go ‘God, I’ve got five days?'” He does not confuse his role with journalism, though. “My job first and foremost as a filmmaker is just to make an interesting film. I have to tell a compelling story. It’s up to you to decide whether we succeeded or not, but that’s the most important part of it for me. The subject matter in the story we are telling obviously is about investigative journalism so I wanted to do as much of that for ourselves as possible to try and put as many different ideas and point of view in the film as possible, too.”

Vanderbilt said that he especially loved talking to Dan Rather as a part of his research for the film. “The great thing about what I get to do is I get to sort of step into everybody’s job. I sit down and say, ‘Okay so what’s your day like? When do you wake up? Do you read papers in the morning, do you go online?’ And I love that process. Journalism is the only other thing besides what I do I ever considered going into because they are both storytelling. So I’ve always been fascinated with that world. Getting to sit with Dan Rather, just to sit with him, forget about the movie,0 was a great experience and getting to pick his brain, getting the details, not in terms of the factual like ‘Did this happen and this happen and this happen,’ because that is recorded other places and of course we went through that with him as well, but the feeling of the newsroom: ‘How did you feel when this happened? What was your experience like when this happened?’ And getting to watch him — you get to go to dinner with him and you can ask him questions — but then you observe, how is he treating the waiter. How is he having a conversation? My wife was at the dinner and at one point, like we all do, he used a curse word and he immediately apologized to her and immediately for me as a writer I go, ‘Oh, that’s great! That’s such a personality telling detail.’ And so there’s a moment in the film where he says ‘bullshit’ and then he apologizes to the makeup artist. But that’s the stuff that makes him human. And so with Dan a lot of what I was trying to do is to portray him as he really is in life and take this, the human quality of him, the stuff that you don’t always see through the television and bring that into the character. He was absolutely and extraordinarily gracious to all of us. And there were many opportunities for him to say during this whole process, ‘I’m anchoring the news five nights a week and doing all of these other stuff. I got that information from my producers.’ He could have thrown that team under the bus like that and that never happened and I felt that was a very telling interesting facet of him as a character.”

Cate Blanchett was so committed to the role that she actually learned to knit and practiced for hours for the few seconds her character was knitting on screen. “It is maybe five seconds in the finished film and Cate Blanchett was the type of person who goes and learns to knit for that moment. So that’s the level of actor you are dealing with.” And Vanderbilt encouraged Robert Redford to play Dan Rather by reminding him of the commitment to journalism he showed in producing and starring in “All the President’s Men.”

The title of the film is a bold choice. “The name of the movie is ‘Truth’ not because I know what the truth is. It is because it is the thing that everybody’s trying to get to in the movie. And it’s difficult to find. It’s elusive and tricky and you go down the rabbit hole looking for it sometimes. And clearly people lose careers over it but it still that thing that we all should be pulling for and we should want our journalists and media pulling for at the end of the day because that’s what keeps our society free.”

Interview: Writer-Director John Swetnam of the Dance film “Breaking Through”

Posted on October 11, 2015 at 3:49 pm

John Swetnam is the director of “Breaking Through,” the story of a young dancer who achieves viral fame and then sees it strain her relationships with her friends. I talked to him about the best way to film dancers “There was a Fred Astaire number that I showed my DP . It was one of these numbers where it was incredible because the camera hardly moved, it was sort of this really long wide shot that panned back and forth as they danced and I just loved it because it was like — they can dance! That was one of the things that was really important to me. In a lot of dance movies what happens is, you get the best actors you can, but not necessarily the best dancers so sometimes you have to have a body double or you have to have a lot of editing tricks to make the dance look good and make it look like they can dance, where I was really interested in just showing amazing dancers. It was a thought that I had after seeing every dance movie probably ever made. But I just wanted to put a camera around them, just shoot it handheld, have long takes and just watch them dance, not try to do anything else just let them be dancers. So that was a huge influence for me and that was the first thing I said when I was making ‘Breaking Through.’ I said, ‘I just want a handheld camera and just point it at them and let them be great and not try to hide that in any way.'”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzrCnVMbpNs

The dances in the film are in a variety of settings, including one inside a car, a challenge, especially with a limited budget. “I’ve worked more in the studio system where you have lots of money and lots of time to do these things where with this movie the biggest thing from the beginning was we just want to make a movie. So we were just like: ‘What is it going to take?’ So we didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of time. And I’m working dancers who were not actors. Almost all of them I found through auditions or on YouTube and they never acted in anything before. So it’s like super challenging already because you have a tight budget and you have a tight shoot and you working with people that have never acted before. So the whole thing was really really difficult. But when we got to the dance numbers that actually became the easier part because they were comfortable compared to the dialogue scenes. So that was the fun stuff. It was just like putting them in a cool location. They had done the choreography a couple weeks before, they just shine. I always had the idea for the car thing as I always see YouTube videos where you put the camera up in the front and they came up with the choreography and did it really fast. They nailed it every time and had such a blast doing it, and I thought it was really fun. And then the couple dancing scene which is one of my favorites. Keone and Mari Madrid are a huge YouTube dancing couple and their choreography is really about couples and storytelling. That was the one number that they choreographed and it was incredible because you’re telling the story between two people. You have this amazing dance number going on at the same time it’s servicing the characters and narrative. I had originally planned to shoot that at an abandoned basketball court with a spotlight. So originally it was supposed to be on a cement parking lot and then Enis, the choreographer said, ‘What if we just move it over here where they shot that last scene where they’re talking on the bench?’ We moved it over there to the sand and the dust literally just happened. But we did not plan for that, nothing. It was this kind of one of those ‘Holy cow this looks pretty cool!’ It was one of those lucky moments.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvkQEqypTpk

Swetnam is not a dancer himself (other than “the occasional wedding or night club”) but he loves working with them. “I really love the energy of dancers. There’s something about working with dancers. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have the egos of actors but there’s something very sincere about them. It’s just so hungry and ambitious and cool. I’m actually doing another dance series that I am shooting in the fall. I do enjoy it. I do other things but hopefully the dance world will let me just stay in it as long as I can.” He wanted the movie to reflect the changes in the way that dancers and choreographers connect to their audiences. “They’re taking control for themselves now. Choreographers and dancers can create their own online presence, and they themselves become a brand, a name that you will recognize. And I think that that movement is already happening. The subculture that I talk about in the movie is not only real, but it’s growing exponentially. Bigger brands, bigger companies are getting involved. It’s blowing up where these kids have millions of followers that are making lots of money, making their own videos, and they are becoming sort of their own kind of celebrity. And I just think that for anyone who wants to dance they’re so many places to dance out there now. If you want to see a great dance number you can go on YouTube and there’s thousands of these really well done dance numbers. If you want to learn how to dance they have tutorials. It’s just opens it up to everybody I dig that and I think it’s just moving more and more in that direction and I want to be a part of that space as these online dancers and that community continues to grow.”

The movie touches on some serious themes as well. “I wanted to get as many ideas in it as I possibly could and one was seeing the other side of it. It’s not just about Youtube and celebrity. It’s about the access because of the internet. With kids whose videos get leaked there are sometimes pretty tragic consequences. So I at least felt like I had to try my best to get that in there because it’s part of that world. A lot of people just want to tape everything film it and get it online. And there’s a danger to that as well you know because anyone can do that and you have to be very very careful about what you put out there, and what you allowed to be put out there. So it was important to show that side of it as much as I could. It’s important especially for young people. Maybe they just feel like ‘Don’t let that happen to me’ kind of thing. So it was important. I like to try to have some kind of message. I don’t want to be a preacher or I don’t want to be on a pulpit I just like to put something out there for people to check out and talk about.”

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Interview: Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel on the Documentary “Finders Keepers”

Posted on October 7, 2015 at 3:30 pm

Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel have made some of my favorite documentaries, including “King of Kong” and “Make Believe,” bringing us into worlds that at first seem exotic and downright weird and seamlessly making us feel a part of small fringe communities like competitive video gamers still in cutthroat battles via the near-antique “Donkey Kong” or teenage magicians. Their latest is Finders Keepers, the story of one of the most improbable lawsuits ever filed — over ownership of a severed leg. John, the man whose leg it was wants it back from Shannon, the man who accidentally and unknowingly bought it in the disposition of storage facility contents seized for nonpayment and wants to keep it because he thinks it is his ticket to fame and fortune. I spoke to Carberry and Tweel about finding the funding for the film via Kickstarter and normalizing a story that seems at first to be outlandish and grotesque.

Co-producer Ed Cunningham first started covering the story. Carberry explained, “Initially Ed was coming off King of Kong in 2007 and looking for his next thing so this was kind of like his baby for awhile. He went out of his pocket for a bit flying out there with his little handycam. After a couple of years there wasn’t really much funding behind this and I came across Ed’s footage and we thought, ‘Okay, this needs to happen.’ It’s amazing by then crowdfunding came along and we got the Kickstarter together for eighty thousand dollars. That paved the way. It got us go out and shoot the bulk of the story and get into the edit room.”

They talked about creating sympathy and even identification with the characters. Tweel said, “We try to structure our documentaries in the same way that a lot of narrative fictional films are structured, kind of like a screenwriting type of format and so in doing that we are trying to tell the most universal story possible, whether it’s about arcade video game players or teenage magicians or two guys fighting over a leg. We’re constantly in search of the underlying truth in the ways in which our audience can connect with these people. And so really we struck gold here not just because John and Shannon are funny and quirky but they are also very vulnerable and honest and so are their family members. And so we were able to get to the kind of deeper levels to the story that you can relate with, like you can relate with a sister who has a drug addict as a brother and she is trying to protect him but also he’s hurting her. We felt like the parallel stories of these guys kind of mirror each other in so many different ways and that was something Bryan and I were very much interested in exploring.”

Ed Cunningham was the one who first made the people in the film feel comfortable talking very candidly in front of a camera. Tweel said, “Basically, he just laid everything out on the line. A) He was able to give them “King of Kong” and say, ‘This is the treatment we give. This is just a fair account. We’re not going to be playing this up or anything.’ But once you have a camera pointing at someone for long enough, they are just describing it like you’re a friend on the block or something. It’s completely natural for them because they’re with it they’ve been with it for so long so when they are talking without grinning or whatever about them hanging the leg in a tree in the front yard or something it’s because that’s their life. It’s not strange to them. And after working with them for a couple years it wasn’t strange to us either. The first time we screened at Sundance for the people we couldn’t believe the laugh it was getting because it had become incredibly normal for us having worked with it every day.” It also helped that Cunningham and Carberry were both born in Virginia, so the people in the movie did not think of them as Northerners trying to make fun of the hicks in the South.

One of the most fascinating elements of the film is that the documentary itself contrasts with at least three different “reality” television shows that became involved, including Judge Mathis, who finally resolved the dispute and sent John to rehab. So this is a documentary that includes the impact of a more heightened version of what they do. Carberry said, “I think that the reality TV version of the story is they are coming at it from a different angle and they are not there to give more of the context behind the story that we are. So we as much as possible like to let people talk themselves and let things kind of happen organically where reality TV is more operating on machine, a little bit like they have schedule and they’re cranking up shows. We’re just trying to show how that affects our characters.” “They are more hands on and we are hands off,” added Tweel.

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