This weekend my husband and I are attending a reunion at our alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Our son also graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and our niece will enroll in the MFA program in writing there in the fall.
Characters in movies like “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” “Baby, It’s You,” “The Notebook,” and “10 Things I Hate About You” and in the television series “Will and Grace” and “Entourage” attend or have attended Sarah Lawrence. By the way, any alum immediately spotted that “Notebook” scene set in a Sarah Lawrence classroom as a fraud. But Brian De Palma’s “Home Movies” had scenes actually shot on campus. Some very talented people in the entertainment industry are fellow alums, including:
1. Brian De Palma, director of films like “Blow Out” and “Scarface”
2. Oscar-winner Jane Alexander (“All the President’s Men”)
3. Cary Elwes of “The Princess Bride,” “Twister,” and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”
Fred Schepisi is a soft spoken Australian director whose films include “Roxanne,” the charming update of “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring Steve Martin, and the thoughtful drama about connection and disconnection, “Six Degrees of Separation,” starring Will Smith. His new movie is an endearing romance called “Words and Pictures,” starring Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche as teachers in a posh prep school. He talked to me about the challenges of making a movie for and about grown-ups in a world of multiplex fodder and working with Binoche to bring her real-life skill as a painter to her character, an artist and art teacher.
How do you make a smart and witty grown-up romance in the middle of an audience that’s all about superheroes and explosions?
I guess that world doesn’t interest me all that much.
So it’s a challenge to get the financing?
Absolutely. You have to cobble all the money together actually. Curtis Burch did a extraordinary job on this one and in a way that most people don’t manage these days: just find of a whole group of people in Texas who are interested in quality movies and prepared to help finance it. So for once we kind of had the about half the money from private equity and that makes it easier for you to kind of look around for state rebates and what we refer to as foreign sales, you’ve got a real chance then. It was a credit to the Texas investors to go for it. I certainly hope that we will be able to reward them so they’ll keep going for it. There is a quality market out there. All across Europe there are people wanting to see good material as I think there are everywhere and the second challenge is making sure that you get it told there, get the word out there so that people begin to see quickly; which gives you the chance to last.
There are fewer and fewer outlets in terms of theatrical distribution for good material. So it’s kind of important to let the market know that’s where you are and what it’s about. And I think people are starting to discover that there is a whole generation out there that want good movies and will go out and see them.
And what was it like to work with Juliette Binoche on the art created by her character, who is struggling to adapt to physical limitations from rheumatoid arthritis?
I knew that she had painted in another film; I knew that she painted portraits. I did not know the extent of her talent and experience but I figured that if she had a love of art that would help even if she was faking; Which you know I expected we might have to do, as did the art department.
But it became clear to me very quickly that she is an extremely, diversely talented person and that it would be better if she did it all. So we decided together to go on a journey and certainly it’s very freeing that somebody’s actually painting rather than using a lot of trickery to make it look like they are. But she was prepared to go on the same journey the character has to go on, going from being a portrait painter to finding other ways of expressing herself. A few times we had to shift the schedule around as she hits certain points to give her a little more time to develop that, go further with it and get to a point where she and I both agreed that yes, this is the way to go, these are the artists who should be influencing us and then letting her find her own voice; some of which we actually did live on camera. Sometimes she would reach certain stages so then we would re-create them on camera and it was quite a journey and she was fabulous.
What was that rig that actually she took from another artist, that rig that moves the big brushes around?
We were excited about that because it was exactly right for somebody who’s got rheumatoid arthritis and can’t really hold a brush. It has no weight and just moves with the slightest touch. It’s the perfect thing to explore for that character and also an interesting way to watch somebody paint.
How do you come down between words and arts? Which side are you on on that?
Sometimes either one expresses something that the other can’t and therefore that makes it more powerful. I’m sure you know that when something is really brilliant in a particular media; whether it’s painting or whether it’s words on a page all words on stage, when it’s really brilliant it’s almost impossible to translate to the other media. It has a power of its own. But sometimes the things together have even more power and then there’s music and dance.
When you were growing up what were the movies where you said, “That’s something I’d like to do.” Did you watch a lot of Hollywood movies?
I was very lucky. Somewhere around the age of 14 or 15 I discovered what people referred to as “continental movies” as we call them in Australia. They were European and British movies. I think I went to them for more prurient reasons in the first place. What I found was these wonderful worlds I was transported to; and these wonderful ideas and that’s when I knew that’s what I would like to do.
And it was the 40’s and 50s, for me mostly it was the 50s but you were still seeing movies from the 40’s and then I belonged to film societies and used go also to what was in fact the oldest film festivals in the world, you’d see films from Japan and from Persia and from India and I was always transported about their ideas and the culture and the experience and the surprising thing for me was I always found something myself in them.
You were working with established, experienced actors and with teenagers on this film. Was that a challenge as a director?
A lot of your work is done in the casting, that’s probably the most difficult part and in a way half your job is done if you get that right. And sort of seeing if the chemistry is going to work between people and what it is that makes it work and encouraging that.
Actually all of the kids in the classrooms are from Canada. We tried not to cast the clichéd way. We used the “cultural diversity” approach and just let them be fresh, led them contribute, let them come up with the youthful way of doing thing. It was quite a lot of fun, it really was. And then we were lucky to get Christian Scheider, Roy Scheider’s son, to play Clive Allen’s son. He’s done stage things but that was his first film and he had just the right soul for the part.
What’s next for you?
I’m going to a film called “Olive Sisters,” set in Australia. It’s an Italian family who have come out and farm and grow olives and do their work and face the prejudices of people in the late 50s; prejudices about how they dressed and what the ate, and who they were. And next year, I am pretty confident we’ll be doing the film of the Broadway musical, “The Drowsy Chaperone.”
Oh, I love that show! Please promise to talk to me again when that one comes out.
“American Nurse” is a deeply moving documentary about the men and women who are, as the bumper sticker says, “patient people.” The film explores aging, war, poverty, and prisons through the work and lives of nurses. Jason Short drives up a rugged creek to reach a home-bound cancer patient in Appalachia. Tonia Faust runs a prison hospice program where inmates serving life sentences care for their fellow inmates as they’re dying. Naomi Cross coaches an ovarian cancer survivor through the Caesarean delivery of her son. Sister Stephen, a nun, runs a nursing home filled with goats, sheep, llamas and chickens, where the entire nursing staff comes together to sing for a dying resident. And Brian McMillion, an Army veteran and former medic, rehabilitates wounded soldiers returning from war. This film will touch, uplift, and inspire you. It was a great pleasure to speak with writer/director Carolyn Jones. I also spoke to Sister Stephen, and that interview will be published later this week.
Did this project start as a book?
Yes, it began as a book. I’ve actually published a number of books. And Living Proof: Courage in the Face of AIDS is probably the most similar for me kind of emotionally to this one, more so than any other project. I’ve really spent my career taking pictures and telling stories of people that I think are admirable, that I think we can learn something from, that we can be inspired by. I’m always eager to shine a light on those stories. So I was asked to do a book that celebrates nurses back in the end of 2011 by a global health care company came to me. They wanted to sponsor a project that would be a photo-journalistic study of nurses all across America and show the best nurses, meet the best nurses. It was a perfect sponsorship for someone like me. They had absolutely no editorial control and so it was kind of like a PBS sponsorship where they would just support the project and get behind what I was doing. I think they knew what kind of work I like to do so it was a really great match. Anyway it started off that way and I have to say as I travelled across the country my mind was completely transformed by the over one hundred nurses that I had the chance to photograph and interview. By the time I was two months into the project I knew this was an extraordinarily special group of people that I was going to want to get to know.
They’re really dealing everyday with this critical balance between being very caring and compassionate and yet holding on to some kind of sense of themselves where they don’t get washed away in it.
And that’s a very, very fine line to walk. I had no idea what nurses do. I mean zip! I had gone through chemotherapy with breast cancer and my nurse really got me through that on a personal level so I knew what that kind of nurse does. But I really knew nothing about the diversity and the depths of knowledge that nurses have and all the different things that they deal with so when that lid got blown off I was really struck. My first feeling was “Oh good heavens they’re all saints!’ and I honestly would talk to someone and just think, “You are just from a different planet than I am.” And it got very interesting: “Are you born like this? Are you born to be caring for your fellow man and completely non-judgmental?” They seemed to me, to be people that were just on a higher plane than the rest of us.
And then I kind of got comfortable and caught my stride and I realized that a lot of the qualities that nurses have are qualities that I believe as human beings are innate within us. I believe we will care for our neighbor for the most part and I believe we will help one another given a certain set of circumstances. So I started to get a little bit comfortable with it. Maybe somewhere within me I had some of the qualities that let me inhabit the same earth that they do. And then by the end of the project I was convinced they were saints and decided that they have a completely different DNA structure than I do! And I will never be anything like them, they’re incredible. Everything I want to be, everything that I think matters during life and at the end of life are things they think about and act upon everyday and just to be in their presence makes you a better human being.
Do you think that we as a culture do enough to support them, particularly with regard to the way that we structure health care?
No! I mean, not even close.
We’re so far off from understanding what nurses do and how they can contribute. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. We have got this group of people in this country that are non-political, can’t be bought, they see us holistically, they know how we suffer, they know what makes us healthy, they know where we find joy, they know how to make the hospitals run smoother, they know the full effect of war on our young men and women coming back from fighting, they know what poverty looks like, they know what working in the coal mines look like, they know what end of life is. They should be a part of every conversation, there should be always a nurse sitting at the table to remind us whatever choice we’re making, whether it’s about health care, going to war, food stamps, closing down a school, I don’t care what it is, they can tell us what effect this is going to have on our health and ultimately on our children.
And it’s critical that we stop and listen to them because we don’t have another group of people with this incredible treasure chest of knowledge. We don’t have them; there isn’t anybody else that we can turn to that is as, dare I say, pure and straight forward and non-judgmental and non-political as this group. They are capable of great things because they do have something innate that they are born with that make them different than the rest of us. But they are educated constantly to be non-judgmental, to look at things at face value, to accept everybody and try to understand the cause of someone’s behavior rather than just react to it. And it’s absolutely invaluable and I think this country needs them desperately and doctors are great, this is not a project that is trying to say nurses are great and doctors aren’t. That’s not my message at all.
We don’t know many things about our nurses and “Nurse Jackie” just doesn’t cut it. I’m a huge fan of Edie Falco. She’s brilliant and I wish she had lent herself to something else because it did a great disservice to nurses. I haven’t met a nurse in the last three years that had anything good to say about that. It’s not who they are. And I was lucky enough to meet some of the finest in this country.
How did you find the nurses you followed in the film?
First we would settle on a topic like returning war veterans and what the military had to say about what those women and men were facing. And so we went to the place in America that had more returning war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan than any other place in the country. That was the VA Hospital in San Diego. Then we went to that hospital and asked them to nominate a few nurses that not only can speak to this issue but also represent the hospital really well, that are like the finest nurses in the industry. So that’s the way we functioned all across the country. We were able to meet nurses that were nominated by their peers and by their supervisors, and all of them are kind of the best of the nurses in that particular facility or place where we were. And so I say that because I’m not trying to say that all nurses are without fault either, they’re human just like the rest of us. But there are more great nurses than any other pocket of a profession that I have certainly encountered in my life and I’ve been interviewing and meeting people for over 25 years. This is an extraordinary group.
It reminds me a little bit of documentaries like “Twenty Feet from Stardom” or “Only The Strong Survive,” where we turn our focus to the people at the side and not the ones that usually get the leading role. Their job is to help other people.
I happen to love stories like that because you find the richness in life there. And you can do a deep dive in and find out makes things work and I love that. But I think in this case in the process of uncovering that I discovered that there is a reason that they don’t have a loud enough voice right now. We don’t know what they do, we have this preconceived notion of what nurses do and it involves holding hands and taking your temperature, and caring for people and being empathetic and all of those things.
We don’t realize how smart they are; we don’t realize the kind of education it takes to become a nurse and we don’t realize how they continue to educate themselves. I heard this so many times, they’ll get a patient who…it could be anything, a burn victim that is hurt in a different way that they didn’t encounter before. They dig in and find out how to help that person. And they get more certifications to be able to help the next person who is dealing with the same thing. That’s just the way their minds work. That’s why there are so many darn letters after all of their names. They have like this long list of number of letters, all of them. Half the time I couldn’t keep straight to who have what but that’s because they are so well educated and they continue to educate themselves because they’re driven by taking the knowledge that they had from the person that they just cared for and using it for the next person. And it’s remarkable.
And what do they do to keep from not falling apart over the tragedies they see around them all the time?
I was thinking, “Do you all get in your cars and drive for 45 minutes and sing Dionne Warwick songs or something to let it go?” But they all do different things. So for some of them there are groups of their colleagues in the hospitals, so there might be something that happens and they’re able to meet right after someone has died, and they can talk about it and kind of get beyond the moment by finding strength in others. Some of them actually do get in their cars and cry or sing or just try very hard to leave that moment behind them and drive home and then walk in the front door, take of their scrubs and make dinner for their families. That just blows my mind on so many levels, it’s incredible! And some of them aren’t able to cope, frankly. Some of them have a difficult time having personal relationships because it’s so hard to talk. Nobody wants to hear that stuff. Nobody wants to know what your day was like.
Naomi Cross is a Labor and Delivery nurse at John Hopkins and is also a Bereavement Counselor. So she’s the one helping moms when their babies don’t live. She’s married to this guy named Jason Cross. We should clone him because he’s so supportive and so aware of how important the work that Naomi does is. And he cooks and he’s there and that’s the way they solve it. They have a young boy who is just adorable, he’s in the film as well, and they kind of have found this balance in life so that she can get in the car and go home and walk through the door and leave it outside most of the time and just enjoy and build herself back up with the love of her family.
But it’s not easy and it takes a very, very special person to be married to a nurse because of what they go through in a day. The film takes us over the threshold into the patient’s room so that we can see them caring for other people. You actually see a baby come into this world and you see a prison nurse attending to a nasty wound on a man’s leg and you get a little glimpse, a little understanding of how dramatic and profound these moments can be that nurses go through. And a lot of the nurses who have seen the film have said things like: “I can’t wait to show my sister and my mother and my cousin or even my husband or my wife because now they’ll get it. Because there isn’t any way for us to understand. They put their hands inside our bodies, they deal with gruesome things and they’re fearless.
I’m going to speak to one of the nurses in the film, Sister Stephen.
Oh my gosh! Sister Stephen transformed me, I want to you to know. There is more life at Villa Lerado than any place I’ve been. I live in Manhattan and I think we very often spend time in the here and now. Oh come on…we all do right? We are very focus on right now and one of the things I think is wrong with the way we live, we’re so trying to hang on to our youth we’ve forgotten that there is a cycle to life, that we’re born and we die. And we try to stay young for so long.
Sister Stephen has the full cycle of life at Villa Laretto. She’s got all these animals that she uses as animal therapy. I’m not just talking about a couple of ducks. She’s got llamas and woodpeckers and monkeys and these animals all give birth and she brings those baby animals either into the facility herself and puts those little babies into the laps of the elderly or she puts the elderly in wheelchairs and takes them out to witness all those baby animals on the farm. And then on top of that this woman is a genius, she also brings in respite kids from the town, kids that have all kinds of different problems either developmental problems or problems at home. She brings them in and they help her care for the animals. And those young people relate to the elderly in such an extraordinarily beautiful way.
We need to be reminded that our time here is so precious. She reminded me of that. I think of her every day. She’s reminded me that we are born, it beautiful here, we are lucky to be here. We need to cherish it, we need to make the most of our time and then we leave. And that can either be a beautiful moment or a difficult moment but that’s the way it’s going to be for all of us. And I think she lives that every day. She taught me more in the amount of time that I have known her probably than anyone else in my life and she’s a very, very special human being.
Gia Coppola is the 27-year-old writer/director of a new film called “Palo Alto,” based on a book of stories by James Franco, who appears in the film. Other performers in the movie are, like Coppola, Hollywood-bred. Coppola is the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”) and niece of Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”), and her young cast includes Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric, niece of Julia), Nat Wolff (son of “Thirty-Something’s Polly Draper), Christian Madsen (son of Michael), and Jack Kilmer (son of Val). “Palo Alto” is the story of high school students, centering on the vulnerable character played by Roberts. Coppola spoke to me about the cast — including her own mother — and about what it was best that she didn’t know before she started.
You have a superb cast in the film. Tell me a little bit about the casting process.
That is 90% of the job. It was really just kind of going with my gut. When I met Nat Wolff, he just seemed to really understand the characters. And even though he had not really played that sort of part before, it just seemed like he understood it more than anyone of the other kids I met and had the sort of skills to kind of go there. I saw him in a movie “Stuck in Love” and you could see he was sort of capable of going there. And then with Emma, she kept coming up in the conversation and I kept running into her randomly and it just felt like there was some sort of cosmic pull. I was a big fan of her work and she was super supportive and really fun to have around. So I was glad to have her as part of the project.
She’s got a wonderful vulnerability.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s very complex in a sense. It was great to work with her, she’s really talented.
And you cast your mother in the film?
It was a lot of pulling us as many favors as I could and kind of get everyone to get together. I always knew my mom was a good actress. She didn’t want to do it but I begged her.
Was it hard to give her direction?
No. It was fun. She just kept always looking at me after the take and spiking the lens . (Laughs) It took a while to get her there.
How did you work with the costume designer and what did you ask for?
Courtney really got it. We really wanted something that was realistic. We just let the kids they wear their own close. We were low-budget so a lot of it was my clothes or my friends clothes. Just kind of letting them put the outfit together. Jack already had great style and our goal was dirty Converse rather than brand-new, clean ones.
I understand that you read this book before it was even published.
When I met James he had just finished his book and he wanted to make it into a movie. He thought from my pictures that it could be a good fit. He presented a few different ideas and this appealed to me most. I hadn’t really made a feature film before so it was to my advantage to not really know that working with short stories might be harder than it is. It was great because Jame really set the tone to give me freedom and have my own interpretation but then also very supportive and he kind of took me through it. He said, “Pick the stories you like the most” and then we made a test film of one of the stories to hear the words off the page and see what wasn’t working and what was working. I was able to discover that it should be an ensemble piece and combine the characters and make it fit for the screen.
I thought the music was especially good.
I mean I wanted something that was modern but also still classical and I was a big fan of Devonté Hynes. He took the kids’ emotions seriously and didn’t try to belittle it even though in hindsight it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
You came from the world of photography, moved to short non-narrative films and then now this narrative film. What was the biggest challenge in doing that?
It really felt like a collaborative experience and I was working with the same people on my smaller projects and so it was very comfortable and we all pitched in and we were all very enthusiastic. It was my first film and the boys was at my mom’s house and we are very much like a family. So the hardest part was saying goodbye and not getting to see these people every day after we kind of were in this grueling schedule of working six-day weeks.
Because of your background in photography, what were you looking for in terms of the cinematographer?
I worked with Autumn Durald who I worked with on my smaller films and we have a great kind of working relationship where we kind of communicate beyond words and it was just a lot of sending each other pictures. She really knows my aesthetic. My mentor in college was Stephen Shore. I loved his color palettes and his taking mundane things but finding them fascinating. I like the camera to be still and not very shaky and have everything happen within the frame.
The author of the stories, James Franco, also appeared in the film. Did he give you much feedback about the screenplay or about directing?
He really wanted me to have my own interpretations so he gave me a lot of liberty to do that. I kind of kept him updated, sending him pictures of what we were doing. And whenever I had a question I would email him or something and he was always very helpful. It was great to have him on set because he would tell us the inspiration behind all the characters. And he is a director so he could help me when I got stuck on set. It was really nice to have him, he’s a great teacher. He was really able to capture what it felt like to be a young teenage girl. I really connected with it and I was really impressed because it is not an easy thing to do.
Interview: “Fed Up’s” Laurie David and Stephanie Soechtig
Posted on May 12, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Oscar-winning producer Laurie David is back with an even more inconvenient truth: our food is killing us and the government is powerless to stop food companies from making it worse. I spoke to David and director Stephanie Soechtig about the film.
I want to start with the end — to me the most interesting part of the movie was what I call the Citizens United problem,orporate involvement in making policy decisions about health and nutrition and disclosure. One of the most devastating revelations of the film was the story about the way the industry softened findings of a World Health Organization report on the impact of sugar on health.
SS: What’s interesting about the WHO report was just how hard it was to actually find that story. Peter Jennings, who appears in a clip, was the only American newscaster who covered that. I found it initially, in a paper from the UK, and I contacted the head of the World Health Organization at the time and asked him more of the story but I couldn’t find anything in the press on this other than that one Peter Jennings clip. We really had to dig hard to unearth that and it really didn’t get any mainstream press attention in the US. And the headline in the UK paper was “George Bush is beholden to sugar barons and he is jeopardizing the future of American children.” It was an incredibly damning letter the WHO had sent to Tommy Thompson at the time. I’m a journalist by trade and had I seen that, it would have been my lead story. It was a really damning letter and it got no coverage. So it was just interesting to see just how the media was a bit complacent in what happened as well.
And what do you think is the reason for that? Do you think it’s because of their advertisers? Do you think that they sensed that there isn’t an interest in this as an issue?
SS: Yeah, a hundred percent. Look at the recent effort of the voluntary guideline to stop marketing to kids. Some of the people that were up there lobbying against it were some of the major networks and you saw Viacom and Nickelodeon and all of them up there because they are reliant on the advertising dollars. So everyone has a dog in this fight it seems.
LD: No one cares about the health of the American public.
Another area where that came up was the lack of transparency around sugar on labeling of food. What went into the decision not to have a percentage displayed?
LD: I think that the industry has been fighting that from day one. I don’t think that anybody even tries to do it anymore. It’s all part of the conventional labeling, completely accepted. That’s got to be some serious under the table stuff that’s gone on to keep that off the label. But you know what’s funny about it? What the truthful daily recommended amount of sugar that you need per day is? It is zero, zero! You can imagine how damning that number would be for all these products!
That chart that you show about the amount of sugar in our food is really shocking. Every morning I take calcium vitamins and because of the movie I looked at the sugar content and I was shocked! As soon as I’m done with this jar I am going to try to find some calcium that doesn’t have sugar in it.
SS: Exactly! And that is the whole point of the movie. We want to level the playing field for people. It’s heartbreaking that families think they are doing the right thing, think they are making the healthier choice and what they are eating is making them sick. It’s not right! And just look at yogurt as a great example right now. Yogurt is marketed to death as a healthy choice for breakfast and if you look at the sugar content of most of these fruit filled yogurts, honestly it’s a dessert.
The other thing that surprised me was about the takeover of full lunchrooms by fast food companies. Is that based on lobbying at the local level or is that a purely economic decision — where did that come from?
SS: We met with a principal and she was just as distraught as anyone that her student body was able to buy diet soda and candy bars for breakfast. And she felt that her hands were tied as well too. She said, “There’s nothing I can do about it.” And I think everyone just feels a little hogtied about the policies. What is missing is a common sense approach. We all know that tomato paste isn’t a vegetable and that french fries aren’t vegetables. And I think that we were all really shocked when we saw the footage that these kids were sending us back that they had slushy machines and McDonalds in their cafeteria.
How did you find the kids that struggling with obesity and their and the families?
SS: We spent a little over a half a year just calling schools, churches, synagogues, different hospitals, doctors that specialized in diabetes and obesity and we’d say, “We’re looking for some families that could give us sort of a look into their world. What was making it so hard to make good food choices?” And it was incredibly difficult to find people. It was incredibly labor-intensive. But it’s incredibly courageous of the families. You saw how candid they were with. It all just kind of fell into place I think the way it was supposed to because we found these incredible families who really opened our eyes to things that we had no idea were happening.
And yet they didn’t really make much progress.
SS: We weren’t making a reality show. This wasn’t “The Biggest Loser.” We didn’t send trainers to them. This was asking them to show us what was happening in their lives. They were our field reporters on the ground showing us life on the front lines. So how could they make progress? What they showed us is how much misinformation is out there. And the answers to what is happening is this film. So I think the real story now is to see what happens once they’ve seen the film, what progress they make then.
LD: You saw the end of the movie that Tina and Brady started cooking real food and they changed their lifestyle. Tina has lost 100 pounds. Of course, Brady has had a tougher time. It’s the entire food carnival environment we are living in. So Brady went on to get a job at Bojangles and his school asked him to sell candy bars to raise money. Te second he left his house, this is what he is dealing with so it is not a big surprise he gained the weight back.
SS: I don’t know why are so shocked that his school asked him to sell candy bars. I mean, there are Girl Scouts selling cookies right on every corner. It’s crazy.
And the ads for these foods are always saying, “You deserve this,” or “This is going to help you get your energy back.”
SS: And happiness is used as a marketing tool for everything! I mean it’s really outrageous, it’s outrageous!
What kind of research material are you developing for people to have to follow up and learn more?
SS: We have a great website. We have some school curriculum on there already and a discussion guide. And one of the goals of the movie to get our 60 minute version of it into every school in the country. We made the movie with kids in mind, we want kids to see movie and be empowered by it. Another thing we are doing and it’s never been done before, we have dubbed a Spanish language version of the movie which is going to be released on May 16th in certain markets. So I think we’re doing as much as we can and we are hoping that the single most important thing is for people to come out to the theaters and see this film.
And I have to say, the things I think we put out are so powerful. I mean, look at our poster. I think the poster really breaks through the haze of media stuff out there. I think it is iconic. It was one of the most popular Instagrams the week it came out. We have an incredibly powerful trailer which kids are posting on their Facebook page and helping us get the word out so I think that we’ve got lots of ambassadors and social media support so I hope we are getting the word out.
LD: I think the film really unfolds like a murder mystery thriller. It is not a dry educational documentary. It really plays like a film more than a typical documentary.
. And 
is probably the most similar for me kind of emotionally to this one, more so than any other project. I’ve really spent my career taking pictures and telling stories of people that I think are admirable, that I think we can learn something from, that we can be inspired by. I’m always eager to shine a light on those stories. So I was asked to do a book that celebrates nurses back in the end of 2011 by a global health care company came to me. They wanted to sponsor a project that would be a photo-journalistic study of nurses all across America and show the best nurses, meet the best nurses. It was a perfect sponsorship for someone like me. They had absolutely no editorial control and so it was kind of like a PBS sponsorship where they would just support the project and get behind what I was doing. I think they knew what kind of work I like to do so it was a really great match. Anyway it started off that way and I have to say as I travelled across the country my mind was completely transformed by the over one hundred nurses that I had the chance to photograph and interview. By the time I was two months into the project I knew this was an extraordinarily special group of people that I was going to want to get to know.