Interview: Sarah Colt on the PBS Documentary “Walt Disney”

Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Sarah Colt’s two-part “American Experience” documentary about Walt Disney is a fascinating look at one of the towering figures not just of film history but of American history. Disney revolutionized film and the way we tell stories with his animated features, nature documentaries, and family entertainment. He created a new industry and a new way for families to vacation together with Disneyland and the Disney World properties. He was a pioneer of new technologies from sound recording to photocopiers and animatronics. And he built one of the world’s most successful businesses. It premieres September 14 and 15, 2015, on PBS stations.

Director Sarah Colt told me that the Disney company opened up its vast archives for her with no restrictions and no right to review the film before it was made public.

It was really an amazing thing and we were thrilled. It made the project possible. From a documentary film maker’s perspective who has worked on a bunch of historical films this was like a dream come true. Because I was making a film about an artist, a filmmaker, and an animator. So not only was there material of him and the behind the scenes kind of stuff that you are always looking for but also his work. To be able to use big chunks of “Snow White” as part of the story was just amazing. So that was just incredible. I’ve never made a film about a filmmaker before. That was very fantastic to have all that material. And their photograph collection is very well organized. They have a really good database and we could access what we needed. The footage of the behind the scenes kind of material was harder to find because the Disney Company. They are not a professional archive and that’s not their main purpose so not surprisingly their collection is not necessarily all in one place, it’s in lots of different places and it was a lot of work. They totally helped us but it wasn’t a one stop thing where you just look in a database and there’s all the material. There was a lot of hunting and talking, asking questions and then were these big moments of excitement when we found things. I’ll give you an example, the footage of Disney playing baseball with his colleagues. I had seen it once somewhere in another film but we were not finding and nobody at Disney could find it and then all of a sudden they found it and not only did they find it but it had sound. Most of the footage from that era as you probably know doesn’t come with sound attached, so we do sound design. So when you hear those voices cheering Disney as he is hitting the balls and running the bases, those are the voices of the people there and those kinds of finds were very exciting because they helped to really tell the story in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do without that kind of material.

Disney’s fascination with using new technology is a theme of the documentary and there is a charming example of one of his earliest cartoons, before he had his own company, with a real little girl interacting with animated characters, like this Laugh-o-Gram production from 1923, featuring Walt Disney himself.

He was an innovator, no question in a lot of different areas, and technology was definitely an important part of his ability to innovate. So he was always pushing things. It wasn’t that he was actually inventing things but he would see how other people were doing things and he had these ideas to take them to the next level. I think sound is a great example of that and we use that as our main example of his technical innovation in the film. Other cartoonists were using sound and experimenting with sound and sound was becoming a part of the movie business. But what Disney did with sound was to take it and really make it an integral part of what the film was about so that the film didn’t make sense without sound, instead of the sound just being kind of layered on top of it. He had a way of pushing things and what I think is really interesting too is that he understood the potential. It wasn’t that he figured all these things out, it was like he had an idea and then he would surround himself with the most talented people in every category. If you’re thinking about artistry, the most talented artists, when it came to technology the most talented people with that, so a perfect example is his collaboration with Ub Iwerks. You know Ub Iwerks was very talented but also he really was technically amazingly savvy. So Ub helped Disney take things to the next level. I don’t think alone either of them could have done what they did but together they did these amazing things. So Disney was always collaborating with the top people. Now he was always in charge, there was no question that he was the visionary, he was in charge but he recognized talent and he was able to attract talent. And that’s how I think his technological innovation happened because I don’t think, he certainly wasn’t technical wiz, it was more that he was figuring out how to do that with other people’s talent.

But the documentary is frank in showing that he cultivated talent and he appreciated talent and yet he alienated a lot of the talent, resulting in a strike and defections to a rival studio, both which hurt him deeply.

He was a complicated boss. I think he was a very good leader. He knew how to create a sense of excitement, he knew how to translate vision and get other people excited about it but at the same time I think he could be quite insensitive. He treated some people very kindly, very well and then treated other people not as well and he was very unaware of how he alienated people. As the film portrays, the strike is the ultimate example of something that could have probably been avoided by a leader who had been more aware of himself and what was going on around him. He was blind to things that were happening right in front of him and so he could be a very difficult boss. I think he was very demanding. He demanded the highest level of performance from people and some people did very well under that but some people were mad that they were not being properly compensated. They were working long hours without being recognized for the work they were doing. I think he could be very difficult and so he was charming but he was also I think demanding and difficult.

One of the film’s most moving sections concerns the brief time Disney spent as a child in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, which he thought of always as the happiest time of his childhood. Disneyland’s Main Street and many of the settings of his film reflected his idyllic memories of Marceline.

Right from reading the first biography it was clear that Marceline was a hugely important place and whether it’s a real place or more of an imagined memory of a place it was crucial and so it was clear that we needed to include it in both his upbringing but also how he remembered it. And so we were especially happy to have footage of his return to the town with his brother as adults. It was just such a wonderful way to be able to take note of how important Marceline had been to him as a child and how important it was to him. And then what better way to see him as a middle-aged man in a suit kind of visiting this little town in the Midwest and how important it was. So I feel like that’s where my job as a documentary filmmaker is so fun because it’s like you’re using these finds that you have, we found that footage and I was like, “Okay, this is the scene and this is going to be how we really show how it builds into Disneyland and what does Disneyland mean and so Marceline is in a way kind of a version of a Disneyland for Disney. For Walt Disney it is this place in imagination, a place where he felt safe, a place where he was with animals and nature and an escape from the troubles and the problems of real life and so I think that’s what Marceline represented for Disney and then Disney takes that and makes Disneyland.

Colt wants the film to show people Disney as a person, a man of vision, a man of sentiment, and a dreamer who always liked to remind people that it all started with a mouse.

When people hear “Disney” they may think of the company or its products. It’s very easy now especially with the amazing success of the Disney company since his death to forget who he was and that he was a real person. I want people to be able to take away that he was human and that he was human both an exemplary human being and also he had flaws, and he was complicated and that some of his greatest successes came out of difficult things from his own personal life and experience. And that it’s a layered and much more a kind of deep and interesting story than the legend of Walt Disney.

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

Interview: Director Morgan Matthews on “A Brilliant Young Mind”

Posted on September 8, 2015 at 3:54 pm

Morgan Matthews made a documentary about brilliant teenagers competing in the Math Olympiad, many of whom were on the autism spectrum, and that inspired his feature film, “A Brilliant Young Mind,” with “Ender’s Game” and “Hugo” star Asa Butterfield. Sally Hawkins plays his mother and Rafe Spall plays his teacher, once a brilliant young mind himself but now bitter over his struggle with multiple sclerosis. I spoke to Matthews about the film.

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

“I was making a series of films about unusual competitions and I had made one film about the world’s taxidermy championships for the BBC which has gone down quite well. I followed people from around the world who were entering their mounted animals into this competition. And so that had picked up some awards and got some attention so BBC and I got together and decided to make a series of films and so I ended up making documentaries about a million-dollar pigeon race, the world hairdressing championships and the world Elvis impersonating championships. They are all quite fun and very good characters but we felt that one of them might go wrong or fall done for whatever reason and so we were looking for a kind of backup subject. The producer I was working with at the time came across the International Mathematical Olympiad and it was really interesting. And I went to meet the wider pool of students who were all competing for a place on the team and their tutors and was just so taken with these wonderful characters and this world that they inhabited which was one that was largely alien to me. Here we had children and young people aged between 13 and 17 who were doing the most extraordinary things. They were all really unique characters in their own right and everyone of them very interesting to talk to. And they were going on this incredible journey. And so I instantly felt there was another film here and I went back to the BBC and showed them some of the footage and they agreed and commissioned it as a separate film actually from the series which became a standalone 90 minute feature-length documentary.”

One of the key moments in the film is when a character says that if you are not gifted then you’re just weird. Matthews says that applies to any teenager — or anyone looking to find their niche. “It doesn’t just apply to the world I experienced during making the documentary with those gifted teenagers. In any kind of discipline or subject whether it’s sport or an academic subject and particularly with young people, they can be the best in their class, they can be the best in their school and then when they get together in these hothouse environments with other children who are sometimes more gifted than them, it can be quite a difficult experience. On one level it can be incredibly enriching for them and actually liberating in the case of the kids on the math squad because for years they have been at school and they might be going to quite high achieving schools but the people around them are operating at a much slower level and even their teachers so it can be quite frustrating for them and then they get together with Olympiad students and all they want to do is math and math at the level that they can operate at. And so it can be a very exciting time for them but it can also be disconcerting because sometimes they are not the best anymore and if you’re not the best then where does that leave you? And I think there were a couple of students who experienced that having been the very best in their class, the very best in their school to suddenly be challenged by the fact that they weren’t the best in that group of students and sometimes even make the team became quite difficult for them. But on the whole I think it’s very enriching experience for those students who went through the competition. There are also clearly especially the time I was making the documentary, a significant number of those students who were on the autistic spectrum and in that environment that was okay. They didn’t experience negative reactions from their peers within the Olympiad environment because they were kind of with kindred spirits with people like them not necessarily the same as them; everyone on the spectrum is very different as well but people who accepted differences on the whole. Although there was one student who was more I suppose noticeably on the spectrum. He was sometimes quite abrasive and rubbed some of the other students up the wrong way and they ended up ostracizing him really and for me that was quite sad to see that a group of students many of whom had experienced bullying themselves and had been ostracized themselves in their normal everyday environments were suddenly doing that one of their own.”

He spoke about making the mathematics in the film real — and expressing the beauty of math — to audiences who would never be able to grasp what the students were doing. “It was very important that the math in the film was correct and because I knew it was being scrutinized by mathematicians,people who know. And there are many examples of films that have a mathematical theme or context where maths is represented in very complex looking equations on blackboards that are actually either gobbledygook or just not relevant to the type of mathematics that those students or those people would be studying and mathematicians pick up on that all the time and get frustrated by it and it kind of blows the illusion of the film, the suspension of disbelief. So it is important for me to have correct math in the film and we involved a mathematics consultant who was one of the original Olympiad students in the documentary. He made sure that everything was correct and came up with interesting problems. But he and I had a bit of a battle sometimes because he had a not so hidden agenda which was to make math in the film accessible to a wider audience. And for me when I experienced the Olympiad, what was amazing about it was here is all of this math which just appeared completely inaccessible and extraordinarily complicated and yet there was these children who were able to do it and that to me was what was so extraordinary. So we had to find a balance of not completely alienating people from the mathematics but also being truthful to the level of mathematics that was being done by these kids and sometimes that was just around language for the kinds of problems that we used. Instead of the necessarily mathematical symbols, they use words to express problems. It is very important to be able to represent this world efficiently, a world which most of us cannot see and that Nathan sees all around him. mathematics is all around him in engineering and everything and in nature. And so he sees this but it also empathizes through his condition, synesthesia where he sees colors in pattern, especially patterns which involve light. And so that beauty is enhanced in points in the film where we see through Nathan’s eyes, the beauty around him and that he’s quite an introverted boy. He is often in this other world looking around him absorbing all of the mathematical patterns around him and I just wanted to be able to represent that so we used color and pattern to give the viewer a sense of that.”

Butterfield’s character is based on a real competitor in the Olympiad. “Asa was able to meet Daniel and Daniel was able to articulate. He is an interesting boy, Daniel, well, a young man now. He doesn’t think he is a very good communicator and that makes him very shy but actually if you spend time with him in a room and sit down for a few hours he’s able to articulate his experience brilliantly and what goes on inside his head. He will explain that he doesn’t know what to do with his face and he doesn’t know how to read the facial expressions of other people and the stress of trying to work that out becomes so overwhelming that he will avoid communication altogether. And so he was able to explain things like that to Asa which helped him form Asa’s performance. So even though Asa doesn’t say very much as Nathan he knows what’s going on inside of his head and I think that’s really helpful but he does have those wonderfully expressive eyes as well and that was also really I think central to his performance, that he was able to convey so much through them and that he is just so endearing in that way.”

Matthews used music very effectively to help tell the story, too. “It’s cathartic and it draws out the emotion. There were characters in the film who aren’t necessarily able to tell you how they feel. I think the music helps us with that.” Especially meaningful was the use of music by Keaton Henson, who “has terrible stage fright and he is unable to perform in public most of the times so he rarely ever does very small shows. And I met him and there was something about him being quite an introvert and shy person that just was in keeping with Nathan’s character. But when he sings, when he plays, these beautiful and very emotional songs come out and that just seems very appropriate to me.”

Tribute: Wes Craven

Posted on August 31, 2015 at 10:53 am

We mourn the loss of director Wes Craven, who knew what scared us and knew how much we loved being scared. His series films included “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “The Hills Have Eyes.” My friend Simon Abrams interviewed Craven for The Village Voice last year. He spoke about the dream quality of horror.

The power of the nightmare is that it addresses something that is universally recognized. In that sense, it’s very real, but not something that’s normally treated as reality. That’s a profoundly important world, it’s just not easily explained or mapped out by the rational mind of human beings.

And he spoke about his collaborative process in working with actors.

For instance, with Robert Englund, I always encouraged him to make his own. In fact, from casting on, I realized the power of that man. He was ready, and enthusiastic about exploring that persona in a way that came from his own imagination, as well as mine. The physicality of the character, for instance, was not necessarily on the page; much of it was was Robert experimenting and improvising based on a theme.

He described his fundamentalist upbringing and his thoughts about God.

There was certainly a point in my life where I thought, “The God people talk about is a God I can’t touch, I can’t find.” Not to say that I now feel that there’s nothing transcendent in the world. Anything having to do with the living film is astonishing. I don’t have the religious thing of looking to the Pope, or looking to a religious figure for a concept of what God is. But religious teachings of what’s most important in life, or one’s conducts — those teachings have never left me. I was raised on the teachings of Jesus, whether or not he was an actual living man, let alone the son of God. That way of looking at the world has never really left me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdb_HSvf2Zk

The Washington Post obituary quoted Craven on this subject as well.

“I came out of a very religious background,” he said in 1984. ”As fundamentalist Baptists, we were sequestered from the rest of the world. You couldn’t dance or drink or go to the movies. The first time I paid to see a movie (‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) I was a senior in college. … My whole youth was based on suppression of emotion. As they say in psychological circles, my family never got in touch with their rage. So making movies — these awful horror movies, no less — was, I guess, my way of purging this rage.”

Certainly, his focus on horror was a response or a way of processing the hellfire images and tragedies of his childhood, including the loss of his father when he was very young.

His films were gruesome and graphic, with cannibals, rapists, and serial killers, made even scarier because they took place not in gothic castles but in suburbia and other places that we think of as safe and familiar. What could be more terrifying than a killer who gets you in your sleep? And yet, Craven thought of his films as funny as well as scary, and his fans do, too. He equated comedy and horror as providing the same kind of release.

Craven did make a non-scary movie, “Music of the Heart,” a fact-based story with Meryl Streep as a violin teacher. But his own heart was in horror, and his films will be scaring people as long as there are ways to show them.

May his memory be a blessing.

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Interview: Ravi and Geeta Patel on the Adorable Documentary “Meet the Patels”

Posted on August 26, 2015 at 3:29 pm

“Meet the Patels” is a warm, funny, and irresistibly captivating romantic comedy documentary about Ravi Patel’s efforts to find love according to the traditions of his family’s culture. His parents, Vasant and Champa Patel, are immigrants from the Gujarati region of India. For centuries, marriages have been if not exactly arranged than lovingly orchestrated by the extended families. This system continues, now with computer assistance but still powered by parents, aunts and uncles, most of them named Patel. Geeta is a documentarian who was trying out a new camera on a family trip to India, just after Ravi, an actor (“Scrubs,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) broke up with his non-Indian girlfriend of two years, in part because he was worried he would not be able to make a life with someone who was not a part of his culture. When he agreed to try out the intricate system of Patel matchmaking, involving speed-dating, a sort of Match.com for Gujaratis, a huge gathering like a combination convention and mixer, Geeta and Ravi decided to keep filming and see what developed. The chance to find out about this extraordinary system is fascinating, but what makes the film so much fun is that anyone with a family can relate to the pressure from parents and the often-daunting search for love. And the adorable Patel parents, whose very happy and devoted marriage was a result of this system, really steal the movie. I really enjoyed talking to Ravi Patel and his sister, Geeta, who co-wrote and directed the film.

Who is meeting the Patels here? Is it you meeting 10 million Patel brides-to-be or is this the rest of the world meeting your family?

Ravi: It’s both. Yes, it’s about this time in my life when I had a non-Indian girlfriend that I didn’t tell my parents about. And I was approaching the age of 30, and my parents are freaking out because I was single and I’m married and there is this thing where I’m supposed to marry a girl also named Patel. Not in an incestuous way, like in a caste and the same culture type of way.

How many people who have seen the film who are not Patels and who are not even Indians have said, “Oh my God, that’s my family?”

Ravi: You would not believe it. It’s been such a pleasant surprise. We sold out every screening we’ve had last year, won a ton of audience awards and probably the audience is represented by 98% non-Indians. I would have never seen or foreseen that response with such a diverse group of people from every walk of life, every ethnicity, every nationality, every culture. It’s been really cool. Because I guess everyone knows what it’s like to look for love and everyone knows what it’s like to have a family.

How did making the film affect your relationship as siblings?

Ravi: I didn’t think this movie was going to take so long. We started this filming about 2008. Geeta has another documentary that she just made for PBS. And I thought we would just make like a cool little Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock-type thing where I’m a journalist. I didn’t know it was going to be such an incremental thing and I didn’t know what it took to cooperate with someone as a director especially when that person is your roommate, especially when your roommate is your sister.

So it was hard. We both are pretty opinionated. The whole family is very opinionated and it was hard. We fought a lot, we butted our heads creatively. You tend to be a little more real with your siblings. I got really mean, we made each other cry but then somewhere in the process knowing that we couldn’t fire each other because we are related, we had to find a way to get through it. We wanted to make a good movie, we wanted to be siblings. And so I think ultimately we had to learn how to love each other more, how to respect each other more, how to see the world through each other’s lenses. I think the result was a better movie and we are a million times closer as siblings than we could have ever dreamed of. I could say that for actually the entire family and as writers and directors where collaborators. I would have never said a few years ago that after this we would do another one, yet here we are writing and directing and developing other projects as well.

Oh, I love to hear that. Well Geeta, why don’t you give me your side of things?

Geeta: It was one of those things where Ravi drives me crazy, he is impossible. In just the process of like picking the restaurants for dinner I’m about to kill him. And so every day of making this movie was excruciating and I thought, “One more day, one more day, we can get through a year.” And you can imagine the film took 6 1/2 years to make and I think halfway through the film like Ravi said we wanted to kill each other, we realize we don’t want to do this anymore. And dad has always been very influential in our lives. He has always been someone who, as you saw in the film, is incredibly spiritual and he said to us, you guys need to love more. And you think that you have tried, you are throwing your hands up and saying, we have done everything this is just the way it is going to be but he says, “Try again, try harder, there is no limit.” Because I wanted to get along with him, I had for the first time in my life I had to see things through his eyes and see my own flaws. Because of him I feel like I am a better person, I’m a healthier person, I have adjusted so many things about myself and it has made my life a lot richer. And I definitely think that I have changed his life, let’s be honest, I feel like he is so much better because of me. It’s been great.

Your parents are just completely adorable and wonderful. Tell me a little bit about the challenge of presenting them on screen and how they feel about it now.

Geeta: Well first of all they didn’t know they were going to be in the movie. So that was the best part of the whole thing. They were so raw and so open because they had no faith that we were really making a movie. They thought we were doing one of our gazillion projects that never get finished and we were just messing around with the camera. So they were completely kind of oblivious to what it really would turn out to be. Wouldn’t you say Ravi?

Ravi: They are who you saw in the movie. They are cinema gold I think. They’re just charming and totally unaware of the camera and they are just comfortable. So that part of it was in retrospect, I’m shock that it was so easy.

Geeta: And Ravi and I were like, “Okay mom and dad, you’re going to walk on the stage and we’re thinking they’re going to be nervous, they’re going to stumble. Oh my God! They got up on stage as if they are walking to the living room. Like all these people, standing ovation, you know Michael Moore I remember was sitting there waiting for them and they are just talking as if there were hanging out by the pool.”

And are they trying to fix people up that they meet?

Geeta: Yes. And everybody asked them to set them up and it has been really hilarious and really awesome that they actually do. And they follow through.

We have a lot of views in Western culture about what we look for in a romantic partner. Is the traditional Indian way less focused on romance?

Ravi: Yes, for sure I think being raised here as Americans the things we look for are more related to kind of chemistry in love, the spark, personality traits like sense of humor. Whereas my parents come from this model of marriage where love is actually the least important thing because it happens after you find that person. The two things that matter first when you are looking for someone are commitment and the compatibility. And these are the kind of biodata statistics that you see in these Indian biodatas forms in the film.

Geeta: What is interesting is that we see a lot of stories about arranged marriages being kind of strange and alien and weird and even when we were growing up we would tell our friends our parents were arranged and they want us to marry Petals. They look at us like, “Oh my God I’m so sorry.” Like, “Oh, that’s so weird,” but for us we never felt that way because the thing is honestly our model for love, our parents are the happiest couple we’ve ever met. Our cousins who have been married through the matchmaking system, they are really happy. These families are really healthy. And look at this country, it has the highest divorce rate, over 50%.

This idea of marriage is in crisis, so many people are choosing to live alone because they just don’t want to bother with the complications of kids and a relationship is so hard. We seriously have a problem. And yet there are all these kind of — for lack of a better word — what people think are orthodox families from different cultures who were actually doing all right. Even though we may not agree with certain political things about it, I’m sure there’s room for growth and movement. That doesn’t mean we see things as black and white. I think this film is really about the gray area, what is there that we can learn from these communities? I mean, yes we may not agree on everything but we all have the same questions in life, and it’s the greatest enigma, which is what is love? And how do we find it and when we find it how do we keep it?

Tell me about the animation which I thought was very effective in the film. How did you come up with that style and what do you think is the purpose of the animated segments?

Geeta: “When we started making the documentary we didn’t want to film our parents going through hard moments.

Ravi: We would set the camera on their faces in these times and it would make them uncomfortable.

Geeta: We had to think about this, we are like, “Wait a minute, we don’t want to film the turning point,” and we needed to find a way to tell the story of those moments. And we both love radio and we listened to “This American Life” all the time and as Ravi always says, radio is more visual than visual. And so we decided to challenge ourselves with making those animations that were basically the missing moments, bringing them to life through storytelling, and not just storytelling but really good storytelling and really honing each of those sections in the way that “This American Life” does.

And so we met with Ira Glass, we studied radio, all those manifestos. We really kind of made sure and I think we spent about two years just on the animation sections. First we made sure that the audio was solid and we tested like crazy and closed our eyes, and once that was solid we started looking into animation after we tried a million other things. Animation was also the last thing we came upon. We didn’t know how it was going to work but everything kept feeling too contrived, way too polished, and we needed something raw. And when we did the audio storytelling it felt really perfect. We then went to maybe four or five animators and at one point we were doing a test screening and there were storyboards put in. And Ravi was like, “Wait a minute these storyboards are so raw and unfinished and it fit. So we told the animators, “Stop there, we don’t want any more.” They are like, “What, we don’t want people to think that we are bad animators” and we said, “You’re not bad animators, but please stop right here” and that was a hilarious conversation because they were so confused and we were like, “This is it right here!”

So will the next project be about marrying Geeta off?

Ravi: That’s what my mom says.

Geeta: Oh God no! God no!

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Interviews: Jewish Views on Sex and Intimacy in “The Lost Key”

Posted on August 14, 2015 at 3:48 pm

“The Lost Key” is a documentary that explores contemporary society’s confusion of sex and intimacy, and how the ancient principles from Jewish theology can restore the holy connection between husbands and wives. I spoke to director Ricardo Adler, whose own divorce inspired him to explore these traditions, and Rabbi Manis Friedman, who introduced him to Kabbalah’s ancient secrets to attain the highest form of intimacy. The film portrays the dramatic transformation of Ricardo’s new marriage, and the reactions of other couples to this revolutionary way to sexual connection. Adler says that “‘The Lost Key’ reveals forgotten wisdom that could inspire society to rediscover intimacy, one bedroom at a time.”

I asked Adler how he got started with this project.

Adler: I grew up in just a regular, modern, traditional, secular Jewish home. And at some point when I was getting divorced, as the film says, I just decided to start exploring different things, and I ended up discovering that in my own Jewish roots there’s all the answers I need in life. In fact, a lot of the things that I discovered in Judaism and in Kabbalah include some of the ideas that I used to like about other belief systems. You know, Buddhism, Taoism, and etc, so that was kind of nice. And then that process, you start going to school and meeting rabbis and talking to different types of people. After about a year of having started that process, the local Chabad house here in Venezuela organized a shabbaton with Manis Friedman. So he came down, and I must say, I was fascinated by him and his talks and just the way he conveys the knowledge. In fact, he gave one talk where he answered a question I was asking myself for over 20 years, which is,
“What’s the purpose of life? Why are we here?” In one hour, he answered a 20 year search. So I just loved him. So I proposed the idea to him and to my surprise he said yes. And here we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogZMUCX3lA

What is the difference between sex and intimacy?

Rabbi Friedman: So the difference is a number of things. Number one, what we’re referring to generally, casually to as sex is impersonal. It’s an activity, it’s a performance, it’s a thing. It’s something you do. And this thing can be good, it can be bad, it could be better, it could be worse, like anything. Intimacy means connecting person to person beyond all things. So if we have to put it in a simple phrase, the lost key is the ability to connect to a person beyond all things, which is really what we all want and need.

Why do we get so many contrary messages?

Rabbi Friedman: Actually I think that the experts of the mental health field very recently are saying that it was a mistake to emphasize the pleasure of the relationship and to make people paranoid about whether they’re getting the maximum pleasure, the greatest pleasure, the 25 new secrets to greater sex, constant, constant bombardment, when in fact, people don’t really need more pleasure, they need closeness. Because with all the freedom that we have, and with all the openness on the subject, I think Americans are pretty much, and even so-called happily married couples, the moment they’re quiet and sober, they would admit that they basically feel alone. It’s a very lonely society. Even though we’re very social and we’re very cosmopolitan and we’re outgoing, everything is open, everything is free and casual, but in the end, we feel alone. Because until relate intimately, we really are isolated and alone.

Adler: I think this started with the so-called sexual revolution of the 60’s which emphasized pleasure-based sex and you should have sex with as many people as you want and all this stuff. And then that led to a sexual invasion of society. Sex is used to sell everything. And so that’s what sells because it’s an emotional directive. They are talking to something that is very dear, very important and intimate to any human being, and that’s the pleasure of sex. So it sells, it works, that’s who we are today. The story’s not over. Here we come, hopefully, with a different message. And it’s not just us. I think there’s a lot of people that are really looking at sexuality views today and just saying there’s something wrong here. I mean, if sexuality is your number 1 cause for divorce, along with financial issues, there’s something going on, right? We have a new thing called sexual addictions we didn’t have before. Something’s going on. You have all these young people with these self-esteem problems; something’s going on. We think it’s the lack of intimacy in sexuality.

The adults in the film seem to know very little about intimacy. Who should teach kids and teenagers about this? And when?

Rabbi Friedman: It should be the parents or the teachers. It shouldn’t be a secret subject, a taboo subject that you have to find an expert to talk to your children about it. It should be a natural part of life. You don’t sit your children down and your child and say, “We’re going to have the talk. Now you’re old enough or whatever it is and we’re gonna have the talk.” That sends a bad message. Why don’t you just talk about it the way you talk about anything else in casual conversation? I don’t mean make it casual. It’s not different from the rest of life. You don’t have “the talk” about money, you don’t have “the talk” about jobs, about career, it comes up in casual conversation—you talk about it. So you hear a story of kids who got in trouble or whatever, so you talk about it. It’s not “the talk”. Don’t treat it like something other than life itself.

In the film you talk about not having any devices like phones or television in the bedroom. How do couples create physical and emotional space for intimacy?

Rabbi Friedman: If the bedroom is sacred, then walking into the bedroom actually supports the intimacy that you’re going to engage in because it promotes that feeling of intimacy. You set it aside for that purpose and that kind of generates that kind of energy. So when a husband and a wife walk into a bedroom and close the door, it creates an intimate atmosphere, an intimate mood that supports the emotions that you’re supposed to feel but you can’t always. So you come into a bedroom with all sorts of concerns and distractions, and you’re worried about your bills and you’re worried about your job and you’re worried about your extended family, and now all of a sudden you have to focus to become intimate? That’s not easy. So if you can have some support from the room, from the environment, from the atmosphere, it’s very helpful. I mean, you need help. You do. We all need help to achieve intimacy.

Are there lessons in the film for those who are not Jewish?

Adler: The film is for any married couple. The idea is that you are one before you got married and you can reclaim that oneness within marriage. So intimacy is for any couple whether you are Jewish or non-Jewish, old or young, black or white etc. etc. If you are married you can be intimate. You can have a beautiful healthy marriage and this is one way to get there.

Rabbi Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, just thinking about the benefits to the children born from the relationship. When husband and wife are truly focused on each other, it invites the baby into a world in a much healthier way than if the baby is an afterthought. Nothing you get from your spouse can be more important than your spouse. And that includes love, the love you get from him is not as important as him, otherwise you’re married to love. And it includes the physical pleasure of intimacy, because if that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re married to it, not to him. And also, the difference between sex and intimacy is that after sex, you feel a little diminished. You feel a little loss of dignity or self-respect or respect for the person you’re with. It’s just the nature of the behavior of the act that it takes you down a little. Whereas intimacy, after you’ve experience intimacy, each time you feel more innocent than before. Because to be intimate, you have to get past all things to just be you and I, the I and thou, and that is the most innocent part of ourselves.