Interview: John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson of “Calvary”

Posted on August 6, 2014 at 8:00 am

Brendan Gleeson in "Calvary" — Brendan Gleeson in “Calvary”

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson met with my friend John Hanlon and me to talk about “Calvary,” where Gleeson plays an Irish priest in an oceanside community that is filled with sadness, regret, and loss.

Some of the movie’s most important scenes take place on the beach. McDonagh spoke to us about the landscape and the way it helps to define the characters and tell the story. “I’m a big believer in the choice of locations when writing a script because I think you need to get the location right. It’s an added character in the movie. And ‘The Guard’ was all shot in county Galway. My mum is really jealous, so I said, “When I shoot my next movie I’ll shoot it where you’re from in County Sligo. All those landscapes was where I used to go on summer holidays so I knew a lot of the places which makes it also easier when you’re location scouting because I can give the location guide ideas. I will say, ‘This is this space, this is that place’ and I already know what it looks like.”

“In terms of its use in the film, there was a much more brooding and somber atmosphere to the movie I realized, after getting all that footage; going up in the helicopter, going around those landscapes, around the mountain. You can imagine in screenplay, it says ‘Shots of the town’ but once you get that kind of brooding, somber feeling of Benbulben, the big mountain. I started to notice that every time we went to an exterior location with the mountains in the background it’s this looming presence over the whole thing. And I realize its meaning, and it’s only after seeing a rough cut of the film, I realized the mountain doesn’t care what we think or what’s going to happen to us. We’re all going to be gone and the mountain will still be there. There’s a lot of talk about detachment in the film, it’s that the spiritual quality of the earth that it will go on without us with all our concerns I suppose. But that only became apparent when we saw the footage. It just wasn’t in mind when I was writing the script.”

One of the characters in the film mentions that the waves are a big draw for surfers. “I wanted the surfers in the backdrop,” McDonagh said. “They are surfing all the time and all this terrible stuff is going on basically on the mainland and they don’t care either. It was actually in the script, I cut it but the confrontation on the beach in the end was going to have cut away to a character who had been introduced who was a surfer she doesn’t know what’s happening and she continues to surf unbeknownst to the terror that’s going on at the end of the beach but I cut that out. I was thinking it would be kind of a mythic backdrop. I’m a big fan of the John Milius film ‘Big Wednesday’ so I thought that gave it a mythic backdrop.”

McDonagh and Gleeson had just visited the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the National Gallery. “I was just going to see all the tourism sites; so we just passed the National Gallery and saw that it happened to have the Wyeth exhibition going on. I used his work as a visual reference all the way through the film. He has a lot of frames within frames, looking through doorways, he has oil slickers hanging on the wall so we had the cassock hanging on the wall and all that kind of stuff. That was a big influence on the movie so yes that was quite strange coincidence to be at the Gallery. That’s almost the universe giving you a thumbs-up.” He described the inspiration of Wyeth’s images. “There’s one of a man lying with his hat over his face in a field of barley with a dog and that became picnic scene by the split rock with Brendan and Kelly. Wyeth often would have a symbol of mortality like a skull on a cupboard” and that also inspired a scene in the film. He contrasted it with his previous film with Gleeson, “The Guard.” That “was very colorful; lots of art popping colors in there. This is kind of a more somber movie and a lot of the scenes, there’s a lot of whites and blacks, obviously the cassock was black. But we still had big splashes of color. When I had the doctor telling his hellish story, it’s all red behind him. And that pub is basically hell on earth.”

I asked Gleeson where he learned to listen as sympathetically as the priest character he plays does in the film. His answer was one word: “Marriage!” But then he talked about the importance of listening for an actor. “It’s like a fundamental thing, part of our craft for a start is that. And another few actors don’t really kind of wise up to it and a lot of young actors instinctively do, that you’ve got to listen, you’ve got to be present enough to listen and it’s quite a hard thing to do if you’re young and you are learning your lines and you’ve got your lines banging away in your head and you’re intensely trying to know this one, to remember that this is actually a interaction. Some actors are quite greedy in that way and it’s very dull working with people like that, it just is. And it’s amazing when you work with young actors who haven’t really taken on board or haven’t had the experience of when they realize that actually listening is a huge part of what’s involved and that it informs everything you say. And if you are properly prepared, then you actually can answer anything no matter what the other person says. If your character is rooted then you can respond to that pretty much even if your lines are set in stone, you could still use them to respond in a different way depending on how everything comes. So for a start, I know from working with actors over the years, the generous actors listen. And what was great about this particular cast was that everybody who came in was worth listening to. All the lines were exquisitely written but also the commitment of the actors and the generosity of these like right through to generation in the way of mostly Irish actors but like obviously Marie-Josée Croze and Isaach De Bankolé. There was this common thread among them all, they were wonderful actors but also generous to a fault and understood the notion of listening themselves. So it’s joyous to work on something like that where you feel there is proper interaction and it’s the way, it’s the only way to work actually when it comes down to it. You can get efficiency the other way but to have a proper sizzle between what’s actually going on and that human kind of connection is really important.”

McDonagh added, “And also visually, on ‘The Guard,’ it’s mostly sort of medium shots. This was all going to be driven by big close-ups, getting a lot of close-ups right from the very first scene. And there are lots and lots of close-ups all the way through the movie. I don’t know if I spoke to the actors about that but I think it became apparent; we are only going to do a couple of takes and a big wide and then we’re going to go in quite close to it.

Gleeson said “this is earned by the nature of the dialogue, by the intensity of the scene, by what we know or don’t know already about the person so there is an intrigue in what’s going on their faces. But you’ve got to learn it. If people take shortcuts to that, it’s such an assault to have too many close-ups where there is no real truth behind it. So I guess yeah, even though it was good and it felt intimate too in the way that John took all the shots but there was an intimacy. And I suppose in a way once someone is communing with his God or attempting to or failing to, that kind of intimacy, that notion, that you are slightly inside somebody’s head instead of looking from the outside, can be hugely valuable.”

McDonagh said,”We were talking about it yesterday; one of my favorite scenes in the movie is with Brendan and Marie-Josée and the crows in the chapel and that’s a very simply shot sequence. It’s just low angle, blind angle close-ups basically but if the actors are great and the dialogue is pretty good, it becomes cinematic.”

“It is a tilted shot too,” added Gleeson. “Her husband’s dying, it’s very gentle and even the music over the top of it; there is a feeling of sanctity and there is a feeling of maybe refuse in that church but the tilted shot means the world’s misaligned. They are two low angle shots and there is an odd diagonal that goes across. We shot it to the other ways but it was too obvious in a way. You want it slightly skewed.”

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Interview: Mike Cahill of “I Origins”

Posted on August 4, 2014 at 11:30 am

Mike Cahill writes and directs singular, provocative stories where science and faith combine — and sometimes clash. In “Another Earth,” Cahill’s college classmate, sometimes co-writer and friend Brit Marling starred as a girl who befriends the man whose family she accidentally killed in a car accident as a planet identical to Earth comes close enough to establish contact. In “I Origins,” Marling plays a scientist who works with her husband in seeking the origins of the development of the eye. Her husband, played by Michael Pitt, is the ultimate man of rationality until developments make him begin to suspect that there may be some things that cannot be explained by reason. He talked to me about science, art, and his own experiences with the supernatural.

Why do you think that science and poetry and art focus so much on people’s eyes?

That’s a great question because eyes are our generation our civilization’s dinosaur footprint, which is to say it is the thing that has some significance but we don’t know what it is. I was once on this Island in Brijuni, and there were these ancient Roman ruins and these dinosaur foot prints right next to them. I realized that the civilization there had risen and fallen while their kids splashed around in puddles of the dinosaur footprints and yet that civilization did not discover dinosaurs. They had mythology, they had stories of dragons, they may have had belief in mythological creatures but they didn’t actually know that two hundred and fifty million years ago, reptilian creatures evolved and then were destroyed by comets or whatever.
The greater significance was never uncovered until recently, in the 1800’s. So the eyes I feel is similar in that sense that we’ve been staring at them, wondering about the mysteries. Creationists call them “irreducibly complex.” They’re fascinating. They never change throughout your lifetime. The cells in your body are flushed every seven years or something like that. But your eyes are the same throughout your entire life, which is insane. And it gives is this magical mystical wonderful thing that we cannot completely wrap our head around but it just captivates us. Our eyes are the window to our soul.

I understand that this film is a prequel to a film that you had already written. Is that right?

Yes that’s right, that is correct. I’m going about it in the weirdest way in the history of Hollywood which is very new to me. I have only made one movie before this. I sold the script for another film to Searchlight and it was called “I.” We were working on that and figuring how to make that. In the meantime, just because I’m a creative person who gets really empty and wants to make something and not sit around, I asked Searchlight, which owned all the rights, if it was possible to make this prequel of this sort of backstory independently and they graciously gave me the freedom to do so and then they ended up buying it. So the next step is to make the sequel now, the original script.

Is that the plan?

In the ideal universe, yes. There is also a life involved.

You have a “stinger,” a surprising little scene after the credits. That’s unusual in a small-budget drama.

That’s my Marvel ending.

You seem really enthralled by the intersection of science and questions that are — at least as far as we know — beyond science?

Right. The metaphysical, the beyond the physical, beyond the testable… I am very fascinated by that, definitely.

And have you had experiences in your own life that you would consider to be kind of supernatural, outside the bounds of scientific explanation?

Yes, many.

And do those inspire some of your stories?

A hundred percent yes. I’ve had experiences in my life particularly with finding things. Once I had a vest that was stolen and I had walked thirty blocks through DC randomly and found it again as if I was getting signals sent to my brain. It was very inexplicable… and I am very rational, scientific minded generally.

I think if you are very rational one rational conclusion is that not everything can be rationally explained.

Yeah, exactly and the key to that for me in this film was when Sofi describes the worm. Ian is taking a living being which has two senses and modifying it to have a third. The light which is unperceivable and inarticulable and unimaginable to worms, that light influences the world of the worm, the world that is perceivable such as they can smell so the light of the sun and the rhythm of the light of the sun influences like and apple rotting for example which a worm finds pleasing. That light is indirectly influencing the perceivable world of the worm and it’s a horribly loaded word, a spiritual realm, the metaphysical realm is actually a more appropriate word, can very much be interacting indirectly with our world. And we can’t trace things to it, we can’t things and things like co-incidences or those magical moments that you don’t have the words to describe.

Did you study scientists in their labs to get the details right?

I put a lot of research in to make the sciences as bulletproof as possible. Ian’s worm experiment is a real experiment. We also studied others like molecular biologists and neuroscientists and we were invited into a laboratory. Then I brought Michael and Britt with me and the scientists were so gracious. They explained how the experiments worked, the lingo as well as the mannerisms and just the sort of lifestyles. And for me, like I know so many scientists in my life and I admire these people and I know they have often been misrepresented in films and sort of clichéd and I find scientists to be the most exhilarating, interesting, passionate, poetic, funny people; and some of them at least, and real extraordinary and yet ordinary people. It was a really exhilarating moment for me because people who are celebrities in my mind are the scientists, the people with curiosity. We know more on Wednesday than we did on Tuesday only because of scientists. And we can take that for granted because there was the middle ages and the dark periods of civilization where we knew less on Wednesday than we did on Tuesday.

And that does not necessarily conflict with the spiritual. The Dalai Lama is very scientific. He loves science; you give him a watch, he will take it apart and try to figure out how the mechanics of it works. And he really says if there is some sort of scientific proof that challenges the tenet of his spiritual belief, he would change his spiritual belief. I put that in the movie. If you are a person of faith, science should not frighten you at all. We are working on two different realms here.

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Interview: Michel Gondry of “Mood Indigo”

Posted on August 2, 2014 at 3:50 pm

Michel Gondry is one of my favorite directors, with a distinctive style of romance and whimsy, best known for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Be Kind Rewind.” His films usually feature intricate contraptions with a very hand-made feeling. His latest film, starring “Amelie’s” Audrey Tautou, is based on a popular French novel first published in 1947 novel by Boris Vian with a title usually translated as “Froth on the Daydream”. Gondry is the perfect choice for a film that features a “pianoktail,” a piano that makes cocktails according to which tune is played on its keys, and a character who becomes ill because a water lily is growing in her lung. The book has been filmed twice before and turned into an opera, but in Gondry it has found the perfect person to translate its bittersweet allegory to cinema.

I spoke to Gondry about why handmade items still matter and which item from the film he would like to have in real life.

In a world of CGI effects that feel realer than reality, it is very endearing to see a film that is filled with charming items that all feel very handmade.

I am surrounded by function, and I am not very good at decorating or being organized. It is very messy most of the time. But I like to make things and to have people make things for my movies. It is very nice when you can see the construction and the results, when you can take it in your hand and it moves and functions, where you can see the mechanics and the guts inside. You want things to be made my people, not things made by things. You don’t want robots to be designing the items you are going to buy like it’s a sign of better quality. I don’t see it that way. A lot of the films I saw when I was growing up, you could tell how things were made and I found that exciting. It stimulates the creativity of the viewer. You would be inspired and want do make the things yourself. If you show how it is made, people will think about how to make it themselves. It’s a democratization of creativity.

The actors have to believe that they are in a real world. The fact that everything was made, there was no green screen, helped them. They have to jump into this world so they can feel the emotion they would feel in the real world.

If you could have one of the movie’s contraptions in real life, what would it be?

I have the airplane. I like some of the cars we did. One was made by two very famous French cars from the 60’s and 70’s. Storing items costs more money than building them. It’s too bad.

The book that inspired the movie is still very beloved in France, isn’t it?

Yes, I was about 15 when I first read it. Everyone has their own take on it. That puts some pressure on me to not fail them — some people say, “Don’t make this book into a film because we love it!” That scared me a little. But I have to forget about that and the best I could.

The movie’s US title comes from an American song and American jazz plays a role in the film.

Duke Ellington is very important to the story. The character Chloe has a name inspired by a Duke Ellington song. And I grew up listening to Duke Ellington. Two heroes in the house — Duke Ellington and Serge Gainsbourg, who was in a way sort of a student of Ellington. So I did put a lot of Ellington music in the movie and it was very important to honor that spirit.

What did you tell your actors about maintaining a reality in a partially fairy tale setting?

They asked me a lot of questions about who their characters were and where they came from. I don’t like to intellectualize the background of each character. It should come from themselves. They just have to be themselves and believe in the moment. I don’t think they need to create a heavy psychology. The psychology of the emotion comes from the situation and what is going on. They don’t have to imagine a full and complex story for each character.

Am I right in seeing some influence by George Méliès in your work?

Yes. He was a magician first and used the camera to complexify his tricks. And he discovered most of the effects that were used in cinema until CGI. He had the ingenuity and creativity and complete freedom in his work that I really got inspired by.

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Interview: Richard Linklater of “Boyhood”

Posted on July 17, 2014 at 8:00 am

Richard Linklater is one of my favorite directors. Films like “Waking Life,” “Before Sunrise”/”Before Sunset”/”Before Midnight,” “Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock,” “Bernie,” and “Me and Orson Welles” display his restless intelligence and remarkable range. His latest film, “Boyhood,” was an under-the-radar twelve-year project, filming just a few days each year, so that we watch the main character, Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, grow up before our eyes. It was an honor to have a chance to talk to him about the film.

“This is an odd movie, because it’s a period piece film, but we were filming it in the present tense,” he explained. “You don’t get that opportunity very often.” Knowing as you film that what you are shooting won’t be seen for another decade, “you kind of look at that differently. Film’s a powerful recorder of the present. If you look at a silent film, even if you don’t like the movie, it’s a great record of how people lived and what fashions were. I had no agenda, but I thought this would demarcate its era, just by its own existence.”

He said he wanted the film to reflect the way that children process time differently from adults. “When you’re young, you hear a song and it’s very specific — fifth grade, eighth grade. When you get older, it gets kind of mushy. It doesn’t mean as much. It gets a little more undifferentiated.”

It is an extraordinary, unprecedented form of storytelling but he said he wanted it to be an ordinary family at the heart of the story. “These are not superheroes. They’re people trying to maneuver through life like everybody.”

Mason’s parents, played by Ethan Hawke (Mason senior) and Patricia Arquette (just billed as “Mom”) are separated, at in the film’s first scenes, Mason senior returns after an extended time in Alaska, to see his children. He said he wanted “the off-screen separation to be a little mysterious,” to maintain the point of view of the children, showing us that children “just feel the effects. I didn’t want to give the audience information that is outside the viewpoint of the kids.” Because the actors themselves interacted so little in filming, they were each able to develop their own ideas about what had happened in the relationship. “Both of the parents are admirable and a little triumphant in varying degrees. He wanted to be a dad and he is. He is a big figure in their lives. And she wants to provide for her kids and get an education and she does. She’s kind of a great woman, flaws and all. Who doesn’t have that?”

He had the big picture, “the big issues, moving, the end, the last shot” early on. “I kind of work that way, big structure planned out, and then kind of macro/micro within it a lot of leeway to be inspired. In most movies, you’re very rushed during production. It’s great to work like a sculptor. I’ll work three days, and then edit, and then think for a year. Film doesn’t give you that and I wanted to take advantage of it! Watch at home at 2 in the morning, thinking ‘What does the story need? Is this part working? Oh, I need to put back in this relationship. I never made a film that felt like it wanted to be itself so much. They always say films are like your kids, but I never believed that before. With this one, I actually do. It’s its own living, breathing person who I’m now sending off to college. Reluctantly.”

And Linklater’s own living, breathing daughter is in the movie, playing Mason’s older sister, Samantha. Linklater said that as the younger brother with older sisters in his own family, “it was hard to carve out space for myself. They have such an impact on you.” The girls were such a powerful force in his life and he wanted Mason to have a sister who was part thorn in his side, part witness, part support system. “They have that rivalry, but as they get older they support each other.”

Mason sees a range of models of masculinity in the film — his father, two stepfathers, even a teacher who really takes him to task in a scene set in the red light of a photographic darkroom. “It’s a male world. They’re in your face. The male world is in your face, compelled to shape the youth and be in your face all the time. Men want to be mentors. Moms will still straighten you out, but they’re more accepting. A step-parent is a fraught relationship anyway. These guys who are suddenly in his life — no one asked him — they have influence and authority over him that he feels maybe they haven’t earned. That’s his perspective. They’re probably not as bad as he sees them.” In what Linklater called “one of the most violent scenes you will see this year,” Mason’s long hair is cut short at the direction of his stepfather. Linklater told us that Coltrane’s look of mute, impotent, fury was all acting. Linklater insisted that Coltrane grow his hair for a few months before the shoot so they could do that scene, and the reality was that he was relieved in the hot Texas summer to get it cut off.

Making the film this way meant no opportunity to go back and re-shoot a scene or add in something extra. That was fine with Linklater. “Work hard and if that’s the best you could do at that moment, you should be okay with it and make your peace with it. I’ve never done a lot of reshoots. I believe in making it work. That’s the good thing about movies and art in general.”

Many thanks to Rebecca Cusey for sharing this interview with me and for her thoughtful questions.

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Interview: Director Steve James on the Roger Ebert Documentary “Life Itself”

Posted on July 5, 2014 at 3:32 pm

Roger Ebert said that Steve James’ documentary “Hoop Dreams” was the greatest film of the first decade of the 21st century. He wrote, “A film like “Hoop Dreams” is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”

Those last two words became the title of Ebert’s autobiography. And when it came to make a documentary about Ebert’s life, James was the one Ebert wanted to make it. There were no restrictions or approvals from the subject. Ebert wanted his story told the way James thought best.

I spoke to James about making the film and the great loves of Ebert’s life.

Roger loved it when his friend Bill recited the last page of The Great Gatsby. Why was that so important to him?

I think Bill really nails it in the film so I’m just going to steal his thoughts on it. Number one it’s a great piece of writing and Roger loved novels. He probably loved novels as much as he loved movies.
In fact when he was younger, quite young he was one of those guys that had charted out his life. He was probably about 17 when he said, “OK, I’m going to be a newspaperman and then I’m going to be a political columnist then I’m going to move to New York to be a novelist.” He charted that out.

So literature meant the world to him and that passage meant a lot. But I think what Bill says in the movie is true. It’s that it was about a self-made man. Now in Gatsby’s case there was a lot of artifice there. It wasn’t with Roger but that notion that you can come from modest or nothing background and make something grand of yourself I think appealed to Roger as a small-town kid from Urbana who went on to the big city and sort of conquered the world in his own way but in an honest way. And then you know it’s about loss. I think Bill talks about in the movie about the loss of Roger’s father and death and the way in which death sort of haunted Roger. When he lost his father at that young age, it was not something he ever really got over according to Bill. Bill tells stories about other passages that he loved too that of course Bill committed to memory. He would quote something and then Roger would say, “Tell me again.” Or they would be at a dinner table and he would say, “Bill, give me the last page of Gatsby or this Yeats poem. And Bill is one of those guys that just commit a lot of great stuff to memory including a great editorial passage from when Roger was in college that is just remarkable.

He was a fully formed writer at the beginning as Bill says.

Yeah. I mean if I was a writer I would have hated this guy. I mean really hated them, just hated him. He wrote so well, plainly but with spiritedness and well chosen adjectives.

How did you find someone to do the narration who sounded so exactly like Roger?

Really I owe this to Chaz and her team. They were looking for someone to come in and read some of his great reviews, audio recordings. We had been for editing purposes using the book narrator. He did a perfectly good job but he didn’t sound anything like Roger. So we had been using him in editing because it’s convenient, but I knew I wanted to replace him and my thinking up until they found Stephen Stanton was that we would just find someone who kind of sounded like Roger but we weren’t going to try to channel the actual Roger. But then when she said, “We found this guy, you should hear him,” I was just like, “Oh my God!” And then my next concern though was, he was doing like a review on the show so it was kind of swashbuckling Roger and all that, it was kind of big and broad. So then I had him I reach out to him and had him read some of our narration passages that we had chosen that are much more intimate and he said, “Okay, I’ll do it but send me whatever kind of intimate recording.” So I sent him Roger’s Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross and we just sent him another interview that was done in Champaign with him where he was very relaxed and kind of speaking more quietly, more conversationally. He is not an impressionist; impressionist does not do him justice. He is an actor who can act in other people’s voices. He read the memoir himself before we did at the recordings. He listened to these tapes religiously and then he came in and he took directions like, I would say, “Oh, that was great but I feel like it could be even a little more private like we are just across the table together and you are speaking” and then he would boom! He was remarkable! He is so good that even though in the movie, in his voice, in doing Roger’s voice, he said, “When I lost my ability to speak…” there are a lot of smart people who say, “How did you get Roger to record it?” That irony of, “No way, that can’t be him,” just doesn’t even dawn on some people because they are just so immersed and that is what I wanted it to be. I did not want to fool you which is why I made sure you know if you are listening closely enough but on the other hand I want you to immediately forget it because it’s Roger’s words.

How do you as a filmmaker bring together several very distinct episodes in his life?

You could call it a three act, four act, or even five act life. He had a lot of adventures and he went to a lot of places in his life. He left a small town, he went to Chicago and became a newspaper man and fell into this job reviewing movies and then there was drinking and then he gave that up. Then there’s the TV show and then Gene’s dying and then the cancer and then the blogging. I mean it’s like there are so many aspects to Roger’s life. Plus he loved to go to the Cannes film Festival and he loved to go to the Conference on World Affairs and a lot more.

I felt like I wanted to use the present as a springboard to the past, something he does in a memoir in places which was really moving to me and so I wanted to do that. But otherwise when I do interviews, I do interviews with people for hours on end and we talked about a lot of stuff and not all that got in the movie but when you start to put the movie together, you start trying to identify what are the strongest strains in his life and I guess what I kind of came to realize is, and I did not realize this from the start but I came to realize that the film is kind of ultimately a series of love affairs. It’s a love affair with writing, it’s a love affair with movies, it’s a love affair even with Chicago of course. And then there’s Chaz.

And kind of like what all those love affairs add up to, in a weird way it is a love affair with Gene Siskel. It’s a torturous one but it’s a love affair. It’s like he had a series of love affairs but he was never not true to his wife. It all adds up to this kind of love affair with life. I mean he called the book Life Itself, not My Life and Movies or Me at the Movies. “Movie” is not in the title. It’s life itself that was the grand movie of his life, you know what I mean?

Was it hard for you to maintain objectivity as Roger became seriously ill?

I never worry about trying to maintain objectivity in that kind of journalistic way. Because like for instance I knew that this ultimately was going to be an admiring portrait of Roger Ebert because I wouldn’t have wanted to make it otherwise. I am not that kind of filmmaker. I want to be around people I am interested in. And so I knew that so it was never going to be objective in any kind of purely journalistic way. I did not go out of my way to find someone who hated Roger or something. But I went out of my way to find people critical of his contributions. I knew that I wanted it to be honest, though, and I think there is a difference between honest and objective. Honest is it may have a point of view and I feel like all my films do but I try not to make my point of view blow out of the water and eliminate anything that’s contrary to it, that’s contrary to who this person is or that there is other ways to look at this person. And so that was important. I mean when I saw how stubborn Roger could be with Chaz, I was a little surprised until I thought about it, “Well, you don’t get to be Roger Ebert and you don’t survive all he’s been through without being stubborn.” And I am not talking about just doing this; I’m talking about 20 years with Gene Siskel. You don’t get to be that way without having a stubborn streak in you. He had had a toughness about him that was essential to his success. He also had a generosity about him that everyone commented on that didn’t just happen late in life. Although he became even more generous, it was there all along.

In the film we hear filmmakers talk about how instrumental he was in helping them. How did he help you with “Hoop Dreams?”

First, he and Gene reviewed the film on the show when it was just going to Sundance. For them to even review it was remarkable because it had no distribution and it was three hours long and they knew that. And so they watched it and then they decided they were going to go on the show while it was at Sundance and they said something to the effect of, “You can only see this film if you are at the Sundance film Festival but we really feel that this film should be seen by a wider audience.” And they just sort of planted this flag. Sundance made an enormous difference because up until then, it was the three-hour documentary about two kids playing basketball that no one ever heard of and nobody was really going to see it. It was getting some buzz with the audiences a little bit but the distributors weren’t. And then suddenly, it was like we were a hot ticket at Sundance and we had ended up with three or four different offers and none of that would have happened without what they did, no way that would’ve happened even if they loved it.

And then over the years, Roger continued to write very thoughtfully about my work and support my work. Three years ago when “The Interrupters” came out, when it premiered at Sundance, we had sent a screener to him, just hoping that he would watch it. I don’t tweet but someone told me, “Roger just tweeted this wonderful thing about the film at Sundance.” He knew that we were premiering there; he knew exactly what he was doing. He had 800,000 Twitter followers; it was picked up, it was tweeted all around and then he continued to champion that film right up through the end of the year and was outraged when we did not get shortlisted for the Oscar. He was just such a supporter of my work. For me to be able to kind of do this film means a lot.

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