NUEVAS CONVERSACIONES SOBRE CINE DOCUMENTAL (V): INTERVIEW WITH MARC ISAACS

By Ricard MAMBLONA

Marc Isaacs es autor de documentales multipremiados y de reconocido prestigio internacional, como Lift (2001), All White Banking (2007) o Men of the City (2009), entre otros.La entrevista con este cineasta fue realizada el 30 de noviembre de 2009.

Do you think digitalization has something to do with the new age of documentary films?

Yes, absolutely. Personally, from my own experience when I first started working with anything to do with film and documentary I was working with a director who used to shoot on film, Super 16, and at that time that was probably just when the smaller Hi8 cameras were quite common. So my own experience is directly related to that change from the first camcorders that people had at home, and that change allowed me to start making films because the situations that I found myself in which would have been quite difficult to be given a chance to make a film if it was all shot on film with a crew, suddenly it was much cheaper and people, commissioners, everybody would take more risks. The change has been huge. I think that it’s completely changed the format of documentary.

You get so many films now that are very intimate and I guess that’s the biggest thing, that everything’s very direct, so there are so many films where everything is there. The emotions are really at the forefront. And sometimes those films aren’t driven by a form or a particular approach, it’s just the way everything is filmed and eventually after wading through hours and hours of material and some kind of narrative emerges from it.

So there’s that and then there’s people anyway just generally filming everything with phones or whatever and it doesn’t make them filmmakers, that’s for sure. Because there is a lot of rubbish out there. I ask myself all the time “What makes something a film?” And I don’t think that’s changed from years and years ago, it’s just that there’s a certain aesthetic difference and we as viewers are getting used to seeing material of all kinds of quality and different approaches, sometimes they’re considered and other times they just happen because of the way people are using the technology.

You were working in the past with Pawel Pawlikowski, and you were working in a cinematographic format, Super 16 mm. And now you always shoot with small digital cameras. Do you think these devices help you to approach reality more than the others?

I think so. It’s tricky… In theory there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to go out with a film camera and one other person with you doing sound and make similar kinds of films. People did in the past and you can still do that. And I think the people you’re filming with and the reality that you intervene in and relate to gets used to that. But having said that, it would be quite strange now to turn up with a film camera and a sound person all the time because people are not so used to seeing it any more. This leads on to the fact that when you turn up to a situation and you start to film reality and film people with a very small camera there’s something very informal about it, and very direct, and very unintrusive, in a way.

That raises other questions because sometimes I find that the filming situation isn’t intense enough so you have to then create a situation to have some power to it, cinematic power. I don’t think we can just go around and hoover up reality and that would be interesting, because so much of reality is very dull. It’s important to me to keep the focus and the discipline of how people would have worked when working with film, with a video camera.

Do you always work alone?

I always work with at least one researcher. Sometimes at the beginning of the project there are two or three people but that doesn’t mean they’re always around when I’m filming. It depends on the situation, and I react quite spontaneously in relation to that.

Does that allow you to get more intimate with the character?

Yes, I think it does. As the relationship develops there are always moments when I feel I want to be alone with them because I’m taking the lead in the relationship with them and to have more people around can interfere with that a bit too much. But, on the other hand, there are plenty of situations where it’s less intimate, where it’s quite good to have somebody doing the soundwork for you. I’m used to working alone, doing everything so it’s not such a big deal in that way. But there are definitely moments when you want that intimacy.

I think that documentary trends towards subjectivity and individualism. Do you think that going with a small camera makes you more like a writer?

Yes, I think that’s true. I think about it a lot when I’m not making a film. Like at the moment, I’m in between having just finished a film and I’m going to be making another one soon. But there’s definitely a feeling of “What happens if I can’t get money to make a film?” Well, then I start to think that I have all the resources, I could just pick up my camera and I would have a problem because I wouldn’t be earning a salary but, actually, there’s a kind of possibility of just filming. It would take a lot longer and a lot more effort, but it is possible to do that. And then also it’s possible to sit at home and edit your own material. Many people work like that.

I recently bought a very small A1 camera and when I’m the researcher of a film I often take that out and film situations. Sometimes they end up in the final film, other times it’s just to get me in the right way of thinking when I’m out researching. I want to get one of those little flip-cams because I think that would be a very useful research tool to get you thinking in the right way. It is like a visual notebook, definitely.

In your films we can see that you make some interventions, so we can see that you are there. Not in front of the camera, but we can see your reflection, and we can hear your voice, to provoke some reaction… Have you ever thought of using your voice in the first person to give some reflections on the film?

Quite often when I’m developing a film and out researching I think like that, and for me it’s a way of understanding the narrative that I’m trying to create and reacting to reality because, at that point, I haven’t made a story or a narrative from the material I’ve filmed: it just exists as rushes and I think I often write first person thoughts that would or could develop into a narration later on. Usually, or almost every time that falls away and becomes less important and that’s because in the film itself you can feel my point of view in the way that you just mentioned.

It’s not just that the individual stories are very strong and they take over everything, and I think that point of view for me is really essential, that there’s a clear approach and articulation in the film itself, however you achieve that. It could be very direct and fly-on-the-wall, so to speak, but as long as that point of view’s there then it is a kind of narration in some way. I have written a narration before but that was much more informational, for a complicated story that needed to be told in that way because some of the information was impossible to film, and I needed to fill in some gaps, but it wasn’t a kind of reflection. Well, sometimes it was but on the whole it wasn’t a reflection. But I wouldn’t rule anything out really, it just depends on the film.

In your film Men of the City, for example, we get to see your point of view just looking at some sequences. It’s your opinion, without words, and we can see that atmosphere you mentioned…

Exactly. That’s very important for me, to have that but in a way that leaves space as well. Because often there are reflections, which are fine, but it’s very different from the kind of reportage that almost tells you what to think. That voice positions itself as the voice of authority and I really disagree with that.

But it’s amazing really that so much of that still exists today with the news or the current affairs-type programme where they claim to be telling you the final word on Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever. And that’s a political thing because I consciously try to raise questions rather than tell people what to think, and to complexitize rather than simplify because the news is so simple. It’s like black or white, there’s no space, its function is just to disseminate information.

There are a lot of ways in which a filmmaker participates in the narration of the film; do you recognize that you are a character in your films?

For me it’s something that, when I started making films, I didn’t really think about that much. I just tried to be myself but I also understood that in a way you are a character. But I think it’s bad to become too conscious of that.

For example, in the Lift film, which is the first film that I made and I realized that it was important to see some reflections of who was there, holding this camera, but more than that, a lot of things happened just off of the screen, outside of the frame that I had to manage in a way. And it was managing my character, my role in the film. For example, people would want to talk about all kinds of things. Sometimes it was very boring. So I tried to manage the conversation in a way, keep it quite intense. Because at the beginning it feels quite distant. And that’s a cinematic, filmic thing to try and manage the relationship. So later on when you’re editing the film you start somewhere and you have this feeling of having a journey and you have somewhere to go with the characters. I think it’s difficult if the viewer feels it’s dishonest in some way but I think I am always conscious of my role in the scene, definitely.

I am thinking on Men of the City, when this man is looking for a job in the restaurant, and can barely speak in English, the audience is waiting for you to intervene, but you didn’t say anything…

I think that’s an interesting point because if I had intervened in that scene… It’s a balance really… I hope that by the time we see that scene with him, you understand my role in the film from what’s come before. And I wanted to shoot that kind of scene to illustrate how difficult it was for this guy in this situation. And the truth is that he would go around and look for work in that way, but I didn’t just turn up and follow him on a day when he was doing that. I had to think about where I could go with the camera to express that kind of scene. So it’s in keeping and truthful in relation with his life but it’s not something I just turned up and it just happened. And that’s because the way that he would look for work, for me, didn’t seem cinematic. It could be a brief conversation with a friend on the street and it would be gone before I had a chance to really film it, so I had to try and think of another way. And for me, I had to build up a relationship with somebody, and there’s an understanding between us and well… The reality is that he could have been offered a job, it wasn’t set up with me knowing there was no chance…

What is the so-called creative documentary, and what is the difference between the creative documentary and the traditional documentary?

It’s a difficult question to answer because, what makes something creative? I suppose I start from the situation that I want to make films that have a potential to resonate with people and become more poetic than stuck in a kind of realism - although realism is important to me and reality is the starting point of documentary -, but I want to build on that: to create something more expressive and more resonant. So all the time reality is always there, but sometimes it’s disappointing for me how that might translate into some kind of cinematic creative expressive experience for me and the viewer. So the creative part of it comes in somehow working with reality to produce something more expressive than what’s there. And that’s personal to me.

The documentaries that I like most are complete fictions, in some way. They never lose sight of a reality and that is the building block for everything that follows but there is a form and an approach, an attitude to the reality. I tend to react less to films that, as I said before, hoover up everything and then try to create a story out of that. It seems to me that if it’s all a fiction anyway then as long as ethically, morally your intentions are good, then why not make it the best cinematic experience that you can.

But I think you know that your films will end up on television, and they have some very creative or expressive elements that don’t fit with television…

Absolutely. Well, there’s always that dialogue going on inside your head. I try to find people in television that I can work with, who also understand that the film has a life beyond television as well. But it’s true that it does affect the way that you work because you know that at some point the person who’s giving you the money expects us to work for a television audience. But most of the time I feel quite happy, I don’t necessarily feel that I want to push the films in another direction, or make something very different if it was just for cinema, for example. Once I’ve got the money I tend to forget about that and just get on with it, although it is always there in the back of your mind. But I think that’s more to do with my personality, that I’m nervous of being self-indulgent.

Do you think Reality TV is having an influence on authorship documentary and vice versa?

Yes, I think there’s a question of narrative, isn’t there? And in the television world they definitely like a narrative to be clear and obvious, in a way. For me, I’m not so interested in doing that kind of obvious narrative. I think that every film has a narrative of some kind, but I like to discover that through the whole process, from the minute when I have an idea, I don’t know what the narrative is going to be and I’m discovering it and working with the reality. Sometimes I intervene; sometimes I make the decision to push things in a certain direction, and then later on, of course, in the editing that happens in a much more intensified way.

But the idea of making a film about a competition, unless it was an extraordinary one, wouldn’t really turn me on. But it’s true, the idea of reality television, of getting people to meet each other, from different worlds, you know there are films that exist where that was done in the 1960s and they talk to each other all the time. I guess television ultimately tries to take some of these devices that emerge from other more creative areas and make them very crude. Usually. Or the other way, I think you could have something like Big Brother and then I’m sure there was some feature film version which took the idea to the realm of complete fiction.

Yes, there are a lot of movies that have been quite successful, like Super Size Me, which has very televisual elements. But, what is the role of television in documentary?

Well, it’s always changing. Because television executives are always looking for new ideas. When the documentary soaps became popular, that idea grew out of very good single documentary ideas, often you’d find a good film about a subject and several years later it’s become a whole series but made much more like a soap opera. They’re always reinventing…

So that’s why it’s so difficult to define documentary?

That’s why I prefer to use the word “film”, because it’s very hard to create classifications and categories. You can see them, there’s definitely a certain documentary that’s concerned with child prostitution and AIDS in the third world, the “issue” documentary that exists, and then there’s reportage, and there are documentaries where there’ll be a celebrity…

And when the industry says that “this is a documentary”, do you think that means that this is going to be real?

When someone uses that word? Yes, although the television world is fine with calling something a documentary but in the cinema world they try to hide the fact that it’s a documentary, they would probably never use the word. I haven’t looked at Michael Moore’s film posters but I bet the word documentary doesn’t crop up very often. They try to hide it because the connotations are quite serious and boring and worthy, not something you want to take your girlfriend to on a Friday night to go and see a movie.

But outside of that there’s a whole other world of what I would call more creative art documentaries that television has almost nothing to do with. Projects that would usually have been funded through national film funds. If you take somebody like Johann Van Der Kerken, the Dutch filmmaker, who’s made something like sixty films, I’m sure none of them are on Dutch television but he lived at a time when the film funds were throwing money at him for years and years.

Do you agree that digital technology allows a vocalization of public opinion?

Definitely. There’s no question that because everybody can, it’s more democratic. It’s interesting what’s happening because I can see in myself that  if you had asked me about Youtube one year ago I would have been quite aggressively against it. But I think that after some time we get more used to watching things “smaller”, or watching things in different ways and it’s inevitable that these ways of viewing things and the different types of films that are being made: we’re becoming quite used to them.

I don’t think that the spirit of going to the cinema and watching a film in the traditional way will change very much. I think that will always be there. But you can carry around a film on your phone on the train and watch it, we’ll probably get more used to that. And I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a reality.

Some people feel that dangers may arise from digital technology…

What worries me most is that younger people growing up lose a connection to the past because there’s so much rubbish that we could just spin around and decent stuff gets marginalized and forgotten. The best films tend to be a little bit more difficult, a bit more demanding and I think we live in a culture where our attention span is very limited and people want things instantly. So I think it’s definitely true that good quality documentaries are having to fight harder to push this stuff aside and find their place.

 

I think Festivals are doing a good job in that respect…

Festivals are crucial for that, yes. But, on the other hand, most festivals, 90% of them are for people like us. There are very few festivals where you see the general public coming. You do find it but it’s quite hard because a lot of people just want to see images that aren’t very demanding most of the time. It’s not just in documentary, it’s true in many areas, it seems like there’s a “dumbing down”, generally, of culture, what music people will listen to, what books they’ll read… It seems to me that way, maybe I’m wrong.

Festivals are not only to watch movies, though, they do all sorts of things… There are parallel activities, and they create a community for the documentary world…

I think that’s great. If it wasn’t for the festival scene it would be quite depressing.  You make a film for television and it goes out once and it can get noticed and written about in that week, and it feels like then it’s forgotten and festivals keep the thing alive. And it also means that it could find its way onto Finnish television or Danish television or whatever and it just keeps a film that could disappear going for longer, and that’s crucial really.

Do you think that winning at a Festival guarantees a showing on TV or in cinemas?

Not at all. I think television is so esoteric, every television broadcaster will have its own agenda and specifications and demands. Maybe they’re doing a film about cities for a season so they think that’s really good, that fits in. The award-winning film may be far too long, they don’t want to spend time cutting it down; maybe it doesn’t fit with their perceived audience profile… So not at all. It’s never a bad thing, but I don’t think it directly translates into cash. Unfortunately.

What do you think about what the different platforms, Internet, etc. are doing regarding with documentary? Is it because there’s a hunger for documentary and there’s not enough space?

Yes, well, they’re exploring new avenues. In terms of my own work, it’s coming through a bit more now where. This year I’m definitely going to do a website and put some clips on the website. And I find myself often looking for clips on Youtube because you can find some amazing stuff on Youtube, really obscure, marginalized “well-known” documentaries within a certain circle; marginal stuff that you wouldn’t expect to find. I’m sure you can find the work of Herz Frank on Youtube, for example, which is really bizarre, but great because how else do you get these films?

When I’m teaching sometimes I project them as big as possible and it’s not great quality, it’s not the best way to watch it but at least it puts people’s eyes to it. So in that sense it’s great. Lech Kowalski’s Camera War is quite a bold project which, in terms of what we’re talking about is radical because this filmmaker is really against television, although some of his films in the past have been screened. He had a lot of support from ARTE, for example. But he started this project called Camera War which, I think the idea was to make one film every week for a year, and the result would be one long feature film. Some of the films are quite interesting, and they work quite well for that short format, but some of them aren’t particularly filmic. It’s quite an interesting idea.

Do you think that documentary filmmakers, unlike those who make fiction, are motivated by ideas that go beyond the purely economic?

It’s very personal. I think you’d get twenty different answers from twenty different people. For me, I think I need it. It’s my way of connecting with the world. And it’s a fantastic way of keeping engaged in life. I’m not driven by the desire to save the world at all. That’s not what drives me. It’s not that I wouldn’t make films that have strong feelings towards issues and those kind of themes but it’s not my first starting point, it’s more my way of being in the world. And that’s why sometimes I think: “Well, if nobody gave me money, at least I’ve got a tiny little camera and I could wander the streets and make my own films”. It feels very comforting to know that I can do that. I think it’s to do with self-expression; it’s my way of making sense of the world I live in. I can’t write but the camera really can become a notebook in that way. I’m a terrible writer…

How has digital technology affected the ethics of documentary?

It’s tricky because every filmmaker will have his own line. It’s a tricky thing because if you make films regularly then what you do becomes quite normal and you can lose sight of how intrusive it is. But I’m always fairly aware of it. I think the people that I’m filming with are the ones who keep me thinking about what’s right and wrong. Because, first of all, I’d spend a lot of time with them and I build up a relationship with them and if I propose an idea that’s maybe too far they will tell me in no uncertain terms: “That’s not me” or “I don’t do that”.  It doesn’t happen very regularly so I’m quite sensitive to that, also because it’s really important to me that the film is honest. 

I had a real problem with a film like Capturing the Friedmans for example, which I felt was a really awkward film to watch. It just seemed to celebrate this American depravity and I just felt the intentions of the filmmaker were just to tell a good story and nothing else, and for me that was a problem. There are a few films where I don’t know why the filmmaker’s doing it other than to tell a good story and to make a splash and get known. I’ve had some difficult experiences in the past with relation to this theme and it taught me a lot.

Because if you watch Calais, for example, and the woman talks about committing suicide sometimes you’re in the viewfinder, you’re in the scene and suddenly reality is difficult and awkward and there’s nothing like reality to bring you back to… “reality”, which is always something you have to think about, at every part of the process. And in editing, of course, that becomes a big discussion. In the last film, Men of the City I decided to not reveal quite a lot about the Bangladeshi guy’s daughter because there were some problems and because it was going to be difficult for her.

How much does the script change from the shooting to the editing?

Massively. It’s changing all the time, but it probably changes most in the editing. Because I don’t always know how one scene is going to sit next to another scene. I start to write a structure while I’m filming, after a couple of months when I have enough material to imagine it, and it always comes out completely different. There’s a certain logic to some things because there’s a moment when you meet somebody and that’s going to be the first scene, and there’s a kind of emotional climax that will be somewhere near the end. Because I always film with more than one person, so how those characters talk to each other, and how the themes come out is always a bit of a mystery to me. The editing process is where that really happens. It transforms…

It’s interesting how you can see in the editing room some stories that you didn’t realize when you were filming…

Yes, because things are said and you completely miss them. It’s true, that can happen quite a lot and it’s very satisfying. I do watch stuff after I’ve shot it, maybe just once or twice, I usually digitize it onto my computer, save it on the hard drive, as a way of backing everything up. In the early days I watched quite a lot because I get quite anxious about “Is this interesting?”; “where’s it going?” But over time then I start to forget about it. And then, when you discover it in the editing, it’s like discovering a new film, watching it for the first time….

Is it important to have an objective editor, someone who has not been in the shooting?

I think it’s good because if I were to sit down and edit my own films I think I would get very lost. What’s a pleasure for me is the collaboration, but you have to find the right person. I’m lucky enough to work with an editor with whom I have a really good relationship. What was fascinating about the last film was that all the themes that I was interested in, even if we didn’t talk about it very much he could just sense, you know? He pulled them right out to the front. And it’s quite hard as an individual to have the confidence to do that yourself. I need somebody else to say: “That’s good, let’s go with that and let’s push it, let’s be clear about it…” It’s hard to do that on your own, having spent a year and a half wandering around with a camera, it’s very difficult.

What do you think is the essence of documentary?

For me, personally, it’s capturing the poetry of everyday lives. Something in life that is poetic, bigger than the reality that it seemingly is, suggestive and mysterious… These moments are very few and far between but, if you have one or two of them in a film, then it’s usually a good film.

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