'American Factory' Oscar-Winning Director Julia Reichert on the Full Documentary Roundtable

Name: 'American Factory' Oscar-Winning Director Julia Reichert on the Full Documentary Roundtable
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T16:39:34+00:00
Duration: 1 h 1 min 47 s
Channel: Hollywood Journal
Description: Julia Reichert ('American Factory'), Alex Gibney ('Citizen K'), Lauren Greenfield ('The Kingmaker'), Asif Kapadia ('Diego Maradona'), Todd Douglas Miller ('Apollo 11') and Nanfu Wang ('One Child Nation') joined for the annual documentary roundtable.

Hollywood Journal

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Julia Reichert ('American Factory'), Alex Gibney ('Citizen K'), Lauren Greenfield ('The Kingmaker'), Asif Kapadia ('Diego Maradona'), Todd Douglas Miller ('Apollo 11') and Nanfu Wang ('One Child Nation') joined for the annual documentary roundtable.

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00:00:00Hi, and welcome to Close Up with the Hollywood Reporter documentary.

00:00:12I'm Rebecca Keegan, and I'd like to welcome Asif Kapadia, Lauren Greenfield, Nanfu Wong,

00:00:18Alex Gibney, Julia Reichert, and Todd Douglas Miller.

00:00:23Welcome, everybody. Let's dive in.

00:00:24Thanks for having us.

00:00:26I'd like to start with talking about choosing your subject.

00:00:28You guys are going to spend years sometimes with these people and these topics.

00:00:34How do you decide what to do? Nanfu, why don't you begin?

00:00:37Well, first, that was actually a challenge because our subject was the one-child policy,

00:00:42and China has more than a billion people.

00:00:45So almost everyone has a story about the one-child policy to talk about.

00:00:49So eventually, we decided we want to do 360 degree with the policy,

00:00:53people who carried out the policy and people who were the victims of the policy.

00:00:58What turns out, when we started meeting people,

00:01:01we realized even the people who carried out the policy, they are part of the victims, too.

00:01:06So that was actually, we decided officials, midwives, women, and people who does propaganda,

00:01:13and we decided to choose one of the representatives of each.

00:01:17We have a lot of archival. Almost all the archival are produced by the state.

00:01:22So it's showing the state propaganda, and almost that's all the role that the archival played.

00:01:29And when I grew up, I grew up in the propaganda.

00:01:33Everything I saw was propaganda.

00:01:34Propaganda.

00:01:35So there were songs, theaters, movies, and before I could even speak, you know,

00:01:40I learned songs, meaning that I don't know, like communism and socialism and everything.

00:01:46And this became the back of my mind, and I don't even question it until now I'm making the film.

00:01:52And for the first time, I'm looking back to my past and realized how they had affected the way that I think

00:01:58and realized how much my ideology and worldview was shaped by the propaganda.

00:02:04And now I'm finding them again.

00:02:06Luckily, because how much the state produced, I believe Russia is the same.

00:02:11That is everywhere.

00:02:12So we would go on internet, YouTube, you know, and then also antique bookstore.

00:02:17We would find a ton of those propaganda.

00:02:19Here in the U.S. or in China?

00:02:21Both.

00:02:21Like even YouTube has a lot of people uploaded it.

00:02:24But of course, back in China, there were way more.

00:02:26Six years before I was born, China launched its one-child policy.

00:02:33I grew up seeing reminders of the policy everywhere.

00:02:38They were painted on the walls, printed on playing cards,

00:02:44calendars, matches, snack boxes, posters.

00:02:51All of them blended into the background of life in China.

00:02:56What about the subject in terms of topic, Todd?

00:02:59How do you decide this is an area I want to spend a lot of time on?

00:03:03Well, it kind of chose me, I think.

00:03:05You know, I grew up in Ohio.

00:03:08And I think there's an Ohio connection here at the front of the table.

00:03:11I'm in Ohio, too, actually.

00:03:12Are you really?

00:03:12My dad is from Ohio.

00:03:14You have to be kidding me.

00:03:15All right, there we go.

00:03:16And then went to Ohio University.

00:03:17Oh, you're kidding.

00:03:18I've spoken there.

00:03:20I love that place.

00:03:21But you can't grow up in Ohio and not hear the names Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, the Wright Brothers.

00:03:26That's where, you know, aviation was founded.

00:03:28Not North Carolina.

00:03:29Not North Carolina.

00:03:30That's right.

00:03:31The most presidents, I believe.

00:03:33Right.

00:03:33But, you know, I think it was distilling the myth of all of that for me.

00:03:39You know, there had been so much made about Apollo 11.

00:03:41The mission had been covered, you know, at nauseam in films and fiction and nonfiction.

00:03:46So it was really a research project to kind of drill down into those myths and see, you know, that who these people really were.

00:03:54And once you start researching what the astronauts and who they were, then you start figuring out that it's this massively big project that wasn't just about the astronauts.

00:04:04There was hundreds of thousands of people that were involved in this, almost half a billion people around the world that were involved to make this mission a success.

00:04:13So that's really where it started.

00:04:15And also 20,000 companies.

00:04:17You know, I can't, I don't think we can get 20 companies to talk to each other nowadays.

00:04:21But back then to have that kind of cooperation for the common goal was the pinnacle of human history.

00:04:27Now, five minutes, 52 seconds and counting.

00:04:31Booster flight.

00:04:31GPSS, verify, go for launch.

00:04:33GPSS, verify, go for launch.

00:04:35GPSC, verify, go for launch.

00:04:37Booster flight.

00:04:37SRO, verify, go for launch.

00:04:40SRO, verify, go for launch.

00:04:41LLM, verify, go for launch.

00:04:43LLM, go for launch.

00:04:44LLM, verify, go for launch.

00:04:46Flight channel, go for launch.

00:04:472, 6, 7.

00:04:48We have some 7.6 million pounds of thrust pushing the vehicle upward, a vehicle that weighs close to six and a half million pounds.

00:04:59Lauren, what about you, Imelda Marcos?

00:05:00Why did she cry out to you?

00:05:02I mean, Imelda Marcos was kind of a natural subject for me from, I've been looking at wealth and consumerism and materialism over the last 25 years in my photography and filmmaking.

00:05:12And so she was always this kind of iconic reference point, like even when I filmed Jackie Siegel's shoes, I'm thinking about Imelda Marcos.

00:05:20But I actually did not know that she was alive back in Manila and had become a congresswoman again until I read this article in Bloomberg by this reporter, William Malor, that was actually about this animal island that she created.

00:05:34And that's the thing that got me hooked, people knew about the shoes, but the ultimate extravagance to me was depopulating an island in the South China Sea, kicking off the indigenous people and bringing in exotic animals from Africa.

00:05:49So that's what got me hooked, but I guess like in all my films, it ended up being something very different and ended up really taking me down a political path and looking at money, which I looked at before, but really money as it relates to power and political dynasty and the kind of rewriting of history.

00:06:10Access is a big part of society.

00:06:40Subject choice as well.

00:06:42Julia, in your case, you were dealing with this Chinese entrepreneur who gave you extraordinary access, even when he was going through some rocky times.

00:06:50Can you talk about navigating that relationship?

00:06:52You know, I live in Dayton, Ohio, and it's, you know, kind of known as like a blue collar place that has a great history of invention and, you know, a great history of manufacturing and so forth.

00:07:04And I think that's partly why the chairman, Chairman Zhao, chose Dayton as where he was going to have his American factory.

00:07:14And I think he chose that General Motors plant.

00:07:17You know, the General Motors plant was where we had made an earlier film, my partner and I, called The Last Truck, closing of a General Motors plant like 11 years ago.

00:07:27And really, it's kind of a mega story, that film, the closing of the plant, the leaving of the American capitalists, and then the coming of a Chinese capitalist to our town to offer jobs to people.

00:07:39So, access, I think the chairman was proud that he was doing that.

00:07:46I felt he was bringing jobs to our community.

00:07:48He was going to produce high quality glass.

00:07:51It's one thing to get access.

00:07:53It's another thing to get trust.

00:07:56Two different things.

00:07:58And I think the reason we got the trust of the American blue collar workers is because they had all seen The Last Truck and they knew that we understood their journey and we had followed it for 10 years.

00:08:09Almost at that point.

00:08:11The chairman could see we could make a good film.

00:08:14He saw it was an Oscar nominee.

00:08:16I think he thought, these are my guys.

00:08:18And once the chairman said yes, you know, it's a Chinese company, privately owned, so everybody had to say yes.

00:08:28So even though there were some uncomfortable meetings around tables like we are right now, where people said things that, you know, they might have been made uncomfortable by, they had to go, you know, the chairman said yes.

00:08:42And he never took back that access.

00:08:45So this society, in America, it's also not a bad place.

00:08:49If you're looking for a fight, you might have a problem.

00:08:53Actually, in China, many of them are right.

00:08:54People are moving the same.

00:08:57Right?

00:08:59The man is moving the same way, but it's not that way.

00:09:01You're in that position.

00:09:02You're in the same way.

00:09:05Can you hear me?

00:09:06You hear me?

00:09:07Okay.

00:09:08This is our knowledge.

00:09:10We need to help them, help them.

00:09:12If a potential subject is looking at your previous body of work, Asif, they might look

00:09:21at Amy, your Amy Winehouse documentary, and see that this is a warts-and-all movie.

00:09:26So with Maradona, you weren't going to, this was not going to be some sort of glowing

00:09:30portrait of him.

00:09:32How did you take that into account as you were sort of negotiating that relationship?

00:09:37It's a really interesting question, because with Diego Maradona, he happened to be a big

00:09:41fan of Ayrton Senna.

00:09:43So it was actually the film I made previously.

00:09:45He'd seen Senna and had loved it.

00:09:47And the two of them were at their peak around the same time.

00:09:50So when Maradona was playing football in Italy in the 80s, Senna was racing cars at the same

00:09:56time.

00:09:56So when we were doing our research, I never thought about this, but on one page would be

00:09:59Ayrton Senna winning a race, and the next page would be Diego Maradona winning a championship

00:10:03at the same time.

00:10:04So he really liked Senna as a man.

00:10:06Also, I think partly because he was like the other Brazilian.

00:10:09He wasn't Pele, he was like one of his rivals, I guess.

00:10:13And so Amy helped us in a peculiar way when my producers were doing the deal with Ayrton

00:10:18as people.

00:10:19Amy went on this kind of awards run and won an Oscar.

00:10:23And so he posted on his Facebook page a picture of me with the Oscars saying, this guy just won

00:10:29an Oscar, his next one's about me.

00:10:30Now, so it's funny enough, actually, he hadn't seen the film.

00:10:33He just knew, okay, this kind of makes him legitimate, and therefore he should be making

00:10:37my story.

00:10:39I don't think he'd seen the film until I started interviewing him.

00:10:42And then I think he and his girlfriend watched it.

00:10:45And perhaps then they got a little bit nervous once they saw the movie and realized, actually,

00:10:50this is going to get heavy at times.

00:10:52Her story did.

00:10:52So funnily enough, he is kind of part Ayrton Senna and part Amy Winehouse as a character.

00:10:58You know, he's this Latin American macho hero, but also very vulnerable.

00:11:02And that's not the way he's been seen before.

00:11:04So yeah, funnily enough, the previous films really helped.

00:11:07Alex, what about you?

00:11:08I mean, you have a body of work that I would think would scare potential collaborators away.

00:11:13That's true.

00:11:13Has that ever been the case?

00:11:15Sometimes.

00:11:15But sometimes people find peculiar things.

00:11:17I mean, weirdly, the subject of my film, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, saw Enron.

00:11:23Now, it happened that he knew Ken Lay as a business contemporary because he was in the oil

00:11:29business in Russia in the 90s.

00:11:31And so he sort of enjoyed it.

00:11:33It was kind of brash.

00:11:34But I think also he had been persuaded by people around him that, you know, I was good.

00:11:41And I think he was ready to be honest in a way.

00:11:46So I don't think it particularly scared him.

00:11:48He's also, I mean, speaking of macho, he's kind of a macho guy.

00:11:51But we had to sit down for a number of conversations ahead of time just so that he could understand

00:11:56where I was at and more than anything, how seriously I was going to take the enterprise.

00:12:01And I think he was convinced I would.

00:12:02So we went forward.

00:12:03How did you communicate that to him?

00:12:07Mostly by listening and also by being honest.

00:12:11You know, when I didn't know something, I didn't pretend that I knew it.

00:12:14I said, I don't know, but I'm here.

00:12:16I'm ready to learn because this was a high bar for me.

00:12:19I mean, I'm not a Russia expert in any way, shape or form.

00:12:22I got interested in the subject in a way after our 2016 election.

00:12:26But I am a student of power and abuses of power and certainly see patterns like that.

00:12:32So I think by being straight with him, that was the way I ultimately gained a measure of trust.

00:12:38And I think that trust maintains itself even after the film has come out, which the first half of it is very critical of him.

00:12:45The second half, you know, looks at him in a very different light as somebody who became a dissident.

00:12:51So I, but I think he was, he was okay with that.

00:12:54He's very talented, KGB-ish guy, very talented.

00:13:02If you like the left, Putin with you will be like, that you will believe that he is left.

00:13:09If you like the nationalists, Putin will be like, that you will believe that he is slightly a nationalist.

00:13:16If you like the conservatives, talk to him, you will feel like he is a conservative.

00:13:22He is a talent.

00:13:25In Todd's film, you sort of see the upside of power.

00:13:28In other words, power gets things done.

00:13:29That is true.

00:13:30And there is a certain way in which this magnificent mission could harness all these tremendously talented people for a single purpose in a way that was quite inspiring.

00:13:41And then in us's film, you see the power of a human being who is not physically gifted or not physically imposing, but who sort of wills his way.

00:13:50Yeah, they're fighting against power.

00:13:51The characters that I'm interested in, Senna, Amy, are kind of fighting the establishment.

00:13:56That's his part of it is, you know, wherever he goes, he's like the poor guy.

00:14:00He's from a really tough place.

00:14:02So he always wants to fight against the rich, wealthy North in Italy's case.

00:14:06And so a lot of it is fighting against corruption with Senna.

00:14:09With Amy, it was against the media.

00:14:11So I'm quite interested in the people kind of almost struggling to beat the power.

00:14:14That's part of their motivation of who they, what keeps them going.

00:14:18Characters that interest me often are those sorts of people, yeah.

00:14:21I feel like Todd's film is from a time when power could be used for good.

00:14:25That there was a common goal and people were thinking about others.

00:14:28And I think that in our time, we're dealing with a lot of reflections of power being used corruptly and abuse of power.

00:14:36We kept saying that.

00:14:37That was like a big thing among, you know, all of us working on it.

00:14:40We said, you know, how great is it we get to jump in a time machine with everything going on today and just, you know, get exposed to something positive.

00:14:48But also the dynamic of power.

00:14:50I'm interested to hear maybe from you guys.

00:14:53When you put a camera into that situation, like how does it change the power dynamic for the subjects that you're following?

00:15:01And did you see them change over the course of filming?

00:15:05Because you all just did a tremendous job of documenting it.

00:15:10But I could tell a shift definitely in each one of your films.

00:15:14Your two films about individuals.

00:15:17Yeah.

00:15:17I mean, look, Mikhail is not Oprah.

00:15:22He's not naturally sort of giving.

00:15:24And he was very stiff initially.

00:15:27But we shot an interview over nine days, four days before I went to Russia and five days after I came back.

00:15:34And that was really important and instructive, too, because having come back to actually give him information about how people saw him in Russia, because he's not allowed to go there, was really interesting.

00:15:45So we ended up getting into a deeper and deeper and deeper discussion over time.

00:15:51And I think that's inevitably what happens.

00:15:52I think most of us want to tell our story.

00:15:55The key thing is being convinced that the person to whom you're telling it is trustworthy, is going to be able to be willing to be generous and listen.

00:16:10I had kind of the opposite thing because I had a very unreliable narrator and in a way was savvier about the media than any of us.

00:16:19She said perception is real and the truth is not.

00:16:22Right.

00:16:23And she also said the media is more dangerous than the gun because the gun just kills you to the grave and the media kills you to infinity and beyond.

00:16:32And really had no character development because she kind of stuck to her story and it was really the world around her that changed.

00:16:42And I think my view of her and relationship to her really changed as I realized how unreliable a narrator she was and also how dangerous it was that what seemed like maybe funny or frivolous in the beginning became deadly serious by the time she's aligned with Duterte.

00:17:04You mentioned 2016, which, of course, we all know what happened in 2016.

00:17:09And I think that was crucial for like you were interested in finding out what happened in Russia.

00:17:17You were interested in finding out what happened with democracy in the Philippines, with the democratic experiment in Russia.

00:17:24We were interested in finding out what was going on in Trump land where we live, like why did these people vote that way?

00:17:31I mean, we kind of knew.

00:17:33But I think that's something we're all interested in right now is the state of the democratic ideals, I guess I would say, in the world.

00:17:44And you're saying how fragile they are.

00:17:46Exactly.

00:17:47And that's kind of the undercurrent of what Citizen K is all about.

00:17:50Yeah.

00:17:51But also how contagious this model of kind of rapacious self-interest and nationalism is all over the world, whether it be Brexit, whether it be, you know, Hungary, whether it be China, whether it be Russia or the United States.

00:18:10You know, it's it's terrifying. And it's as if the zeitgeist for the world changed and there was a permission to do things in a more and more.

00:18:23Buggish way.

00:18:30You're obviously relying on archival footage in Apollo 11, and we've talked about gaining the trust of a subject.

00:18:36How do you get the trust to handle that material?

00:18:39We had made a short film about Apollo 17, and that was very well received inside the halls at NASA and from technical experts and historians.

00:18:50And it was really an attempt to just it was almost a purely technical, you know, curiosity for me.

00:18:57But then I started looking at the photographs they took and the film footage that they took.

00:19:02And it's just immensely beautiful.

00:19:04All of the Apollo Air cinematographers are ASC members, American Society of Cinematography members.

00:19:11And there's a reason for that.

00:19:12They shot some of the most iconic, you know, shots in cinema history.

00:19:16It really comes back to that trust.

00:19:19And once we started working with the material, they saw that, you know, we had kind of gone on in, all in on it.

00:19:26We invented a prototype scanner, a film scanner, still to this day, the only one in existence to handle large format film that could scan it in 16K.

00:19:36But then there was also the story aspect.

00:19:38We started working with NASA's chief historian, Bill Berry, the astronauts, their families, and just inviting them into the process.

00:19:47You know, you guys have had 50 years of talking points on this mission.

00:19:51What hasn't, you know, been in a fiction or a nonfiction film that you would like to be included?

00:19:57And just saturating ourselves in the story.

00:20:00I'd read, you know, all of their autobiographies.

00:20:02So when you're talking to Michael Collins, who was the command module pilot, who, in my opinion, wrote one of the greatest books of all time, not just astronaut books, called Carrying the Fire in 1974, Fresh Off the Mission, he described certain things that I hadn't seen depicted before.

00:20:17So I knew if I was going to make a movie, I was going to include them in there.

00:20:21And then it was a wonderful way to work to go, okay, well, we also have, you know, a scene that maybe Michael or Buzz Aldrin or, you know, Neil Armstrong's no longer with us, but his sons, Mark and Rick, were very involved to say, let's get this sound just right.

00:20:38Or let's, this is what this felt like.

00:20:40Or these were the alarms that were going off during the landing.

00:20:43You know, we had documentation to back that up and the exact kilohertz tone and all of that.

00:20:48So once they knew that we were all in on just the little minutia, I knew, from a technical standpoint, I knew that we can do something creatively exciting with the story.

00:21:01Asip, you also have a lot of archival footage, sports footage.

00:21:04I'm the other end of the spectrum.

00:21:04I'm eumatic.

00:21:06VHS and eumatic.

00:21:08The worst period.

00:21:09You'll get 65 mil.

00:21:10Oh, it has a certain style.

00:21:12That's the wonder world for you.

00:21:13In some ways, we've gone backwards.

00:21:14My first short film was a eumatic, and so I've gone nowhere in 30 years.

00:21:19So, yeah, it was one of those things where...

00:21:21You're right.

00:21:21We went that way, and now we're back.

00:21:23Yeah.

00:21:24We're back to high quality.

00:21:254K.

00:21:26We have to do 4K now.

00:21:27It's imperfect.

00:21:28I'm kind of old school.

00:21:29I did start shooting on film, and I like something about, I mean, I've been working with archives, so in a way, part of it is you work with whatever you can find and get.

00:21:38And if it's truthful and honest and emotional, it's in.

00:21:42And I think that, for me, has always been the challenge of kind of switching my brain from when I did feature films, and I would shoot on 35 mil, super 35 mil, and kind of obsessed with kind of trying to create some sort of perfection.

00:21:54And then my documentary is saying, I'm quite happy to just go with it.

00:21:57It's real.

00:21:58Well, you know, on Senna, we had YouTube clips in the film, and in this film, there are VHS shots, and often when I've shown a film around the world, one of the favourite shots people have is a particular moment with Diego Maradona where we just look at his face for a couple of minutes with no sound, no audio.

00:22:13It's just him sitting there contemplating his life towards the ending as it's all starting to go badly, and that's VHS.

00:22:19And we found it somewhere in Naples in the back room of a football fan who had these tapes, hadn't been played for 30 years.

00:22:27So it's kind of a similar universe, but literally we found these tapes.

00:22:31We had to find a VHS deck to play it on, and some of the tapes chewed up literally as we put them in a machine, and I had to kind of rip them out and sellotape them back together again.

00:22:39And then within this material was this great material footage of this guy who, around the world, is incredibly famous.

00:22:47Not that well-known here in the United States, but around the world, he's massive.

00:22:50And people who like him and are kind of obsessed with him, and for him, he's like a bit of a godlike figure.

00:22:55They feel like they've seen everything.

00:22:58So the idea that something may exist that they've not seen before is quite a big deal.

00:23:02And to try and tell a story that people feel like they may know again in a slightly different way, that was the challenge.

00:23:07It's so interesting, Nanfu, growing up surrounded by propaganda, that you would choose documentary filmmaking as your profession.

00:23:15Do you see any link between those two things?

00:23:17I had never even seen a documentary until I came to the U.S. in 2011.

00:23:22I came, and I was 26, and thought I was going to become a journalist who could write about the injustice in China.

00:23:30To Ohio, by the way.

00:23:32Yeah, in Ohio.

00:23:33And then I took a documentary class, and there I saw so many documentaries for the first time.

00:23:39I mean, I told Alex that I saw Taxi to the Dark Side twice in the class.

00:23:43And, but that was that moment, I was like, oh my God, I never knew that documentaries could be like this.

00:23:50Because in China, with the censorship and the restriction, the documentaries are about Chinese magnificent landscape, our history, and great Chinese food.

00:24:01And that's about it.

00:24:02And I thought that was what documentary was about.

00:24:04Until I finally thought, it could be about social issue.

00:24:08It could be compelling and about characters.

00:24:11And that was like, okay, I want to do this.

00:24:13I went to a video production one-on-one class for freshmen.

00:24:18And the teacher said, I'm going to play a video for all of you, and I want you to raise your hand every time you see a cut.

00:24:25So every three seconds, the class raised their hands.

00:24:28And I was like, what are they seeing that I'm not seeing on the screen?

00:24:31Nothing was wrong.

00:24:32At the time, that was 2011.

00:24:34I didn't know what a cut was.

00:24:36So it was a long journey.

00:24:38I bet.

00:24:38And you've edited your films, too.

00:24:40Yeah, you edited it.

00:24:40Now you know what a cut is.

00:24:44Now I can see a cut and know the intention, a lack of intention behind it.

00:24:49Well, yeah, let's talk about editing.

00:24:51I mean, Todd, you must have, I don't know where you even begin with the volume of material in the editing room.

00:24:58Yeah, I think, you know, like everyone here, we all end up with a large volume.

00:25:02Mine just happened to be in a crazy format that no one was prepared to deal with.

00:25:08So we had to generate a lot of back-end systems.

00:25:11I mean, not only I talked about the film scanner, but also we had to develop storage solutions because there was no hard drives that were capable of taking all this material.

00:25:19So, and then to get all that, to me, to edit was a challenge.

00:25:26But then when we did, you know, I don't use any assistant editors.

00:25:29I like to edit my own things, probably the same way.

00:25:32And it's just, you know, I think if you were to come to our office in Brooklyn, it looks like the work of a madman.

00:25:39I mean, all the, you know, every picture they took, they took 1,025 images.

00:25:44And we had over 500 reels, which equated to, you know, hundreds of hours of footage.

00:25:49And then probably the biggest was the audio.

00:25:52We had over 11,000 hours of audio to distill down.

00:25:56But in going through and taking the time to go through all of it, you discover all those little hidden moments that, you know, we were talking about earlier that maybe someone missed.

00:26:08And we also became, it became a part of history.

00:26:13We were affecting history.

00:26:14And working with NASA's historical division, we realized very quickly that the project took on a new context.

00:26:21And we're still working, you know, to affect the historical record in a positive way and document all the work we did.

00:26:28But where we started was a nine-day timeline.

00:26:31The mission itself lasts nine days.

00:26:33So in that sense, at least we had a beginning, a middle, and an end, which is critical, I think, for, you know, as anyone would argue, you know, here, or not argue.

00:26:44That's the hard part, knowing when to end.

00:26:46And I knew that at least we had an ending.

00:26:48So if I can get through all of that and just start with that nine-day timeline and just put a, drop everything on a timeline, every still that was photographed, every piece of footage, every audio.

00:27:00And then we knew exactly what time it happened.

00:27:03And then it's just a question of just getting out, you know, a knife and cutting it all down and making it into something.

00:27:11And it just takes time and reputation.

00:27:13Well, you both edit.

00:27:14Edit, yeah.

00:27:15I don't know if everybody edits their own.

00:27:16I don't.

00:27:17I mean, I used to be an editor.

00:27:18Right.

00:27:19But I don't edit.

00:27:19I actually depend on an editor who has a different head than mine.

00:27:23Yeah.

00:27:23And very often that is really useful, particularly for interview material, because I'm in the room, I feel a different vibe with the person than what is on film.

00:27:33Likewise, with material, I get out in the field.

00:27:36You know, I'm suffused with what it feels like to capture the material.

00:27:40And then I bring it back.

00:27:42It's like, well, that wasn't so good.

00:27:43Or that was awesome.

00:27:45And you don't really know.

00:27:46So having that other pair of eyes is, I find, really useful.

00:27:50And particularly in terms of structure.

00:27:52Because getting back to structure, I'm thinking, you said 11 days.

00:27:55I think, oh, for a structure like that.

00:27:57Yeah, dear.

00:27:58Yeah.

00:27:58I don't know if you want to put that on your editor.

00:28:01I would have felt bad giving it to somebody else.

00:28:03Because, you know, we were looking for something that was much more unruly and yet giving a sense of, you know, both treating this person's life.

00:28:11We had an antagonist, Vladimir Putin.

00:28:13We were telling the history of Russia since post-Soviet era.

00:28:17But also, we never wanted it to be, now we'll begin at the beginning and now we'll end at the end.

00:28:23We always wanted the present and the past to exist simultaneously.

00:28:26So finding a way to mix all of those elements structurally, that's the first and hardest part.

00:28:32And that's a kind of back and forth that I enjoy with the editor.

00:28:36Where the editor shows, the editor in this case was Mike Palmer.

00:28:39Mikey would show me something, I would respond, we'd look again, I'd go back and look at something else.

00:28:44So it's that back and forth I find really useful.

00:28:46My partner, Jim Klein, and I edited our first films together.

00:28:50And then Steve Bognor and I edited those films together.

00:28:53Although Steve was definitely the lead editor.

00:28:55So all the films, we have never had an editor.

00:28:58We were very lucky to have the support of participant media.

00:29:02So we could actually hire an editor, which we would have never been able to do before in that sense.

00:29:08So we actually were able to hire the editor, whose name is Lindsay Utes, and she is a fabulous editor.

00:29:14She would sometimes see a scene, like there was a worker who gets injured, Bobby Allen.

00:29:19And he comes back to work after being away for like six weeks with a really bad injury.

00:29:25And, you know, it's another day and we're there and we're filming him coming back.

00:29:28And she's sitting at the editing table crying, right?

00:29:33Because she sees the emotion of the workers welcoming him back, poking at his belly that he had developed.

00:29:41This scene is not even in the film.

00:29:43But the working class camaraderie and warmth at bringing him back.

00:29:47She was sitting in front of the thing crying.

00:29:50Now, I would have never, ever thought that.

00:29:53I would have never seen the emotion in that scene.

00:29:56So Lindsay brought a verite sense and a big tune into the emotion of the scenes, which we knew in our film we needed.

00:30:05I don't think we could have edited that film ourselves the way it is.

00:30:10I think it was a tremendous collaboration.

00:30:13Editing is writing.

00:30:14I mean, you don't know necessarily what the, you know, what it's going to be.

00:30:17I mean, Anasif, you've done this in your films.

00:30:20I've got an amazing editor, Chris King, who's really tough.

00:30:23I think that's really what I, I love working with a really tough editor.

00:30:26He works.

00:30:27I'm in the same room with my own Avid, but I'm always looking ahead.

00:30:31So I'm letting him cut.

00:30:32And then everything happens at the same time.

00:30:34So we're shooting, we're doing interviews, we're still doing research while we're cutting.

00:30:38There's never a kind of neat where one stage starts and another stage begins.

00:30:42So I'll be off traveling.

00:30:43In our case, our lead character is living in Dubai.

00:30:45The story takes place in the south of Italy.

00:30:47And most of the interviews happen in Buenos Aires.

00:30:50So while I'm off traveling, he's cutting.

00:30:52And then I would come in and review things.

00:30:54And he's really hardcore on the material, which is what I like.

00:30:58And we don't always agree.

00:30:59And I think that's part of the fun of it.

00:31:01That's really important.

00:31:02And to have people that are going to push you and to see things a new way.

00:31:05Yeah, we had a lot of disagreements that I think, in a way, shaped the film because we were coming from such different places.

00:31:12The Animal Island was something that I always believed in.

00:31:15And my editor just did not think it was going to work.

00:31:19And in a way, with the editing being writing, I kind of did the writing part.

00:31:23And he really was kind of narrative and visual and just kept saying, like, come back to the theme.

00:31:29We were editing for almost two years, which I've never done before.

00:31:32And part of that was we didn't have an ending until Duterte was elected.

00:31:38And that changed everything.

00:31:40You know, the history repeating itself, going back to dictatorship.

00:31:44What started as a kind of almost historical film became a kind of history of the present because the election dredged up all of this history.

00:31:52And so we did it in a more nonlinear way where my editor, Per Kierkegaard, used to always say, like, don't tell things before you need to.

00:32:02So we could kind of withhold some information.

00:32:06And so the martial law torture, you don't find out until quite late.

00:32:11And that kind of changes your whole feeling about the Marxists.

00:32:15Aren't we all historians around this table?

00:32:17I mean, just think about our films.

00:32:20Well, you become an expert in your subject matter, too.

00:32:22A degree.

00:32:23I'm doing a degree on a subject.

00:32:25Three years on a subject.

00:32:26I know everything about it.

00:32:27Just before, just after.

00:32:28Every time I see one of Alex's films, I feel like you know more about that subject than anyone else on the planet.

00:32:34When you finish your film and your Ph.D., you have the process of finding someone to distribute it, which is its own journey.

00:32:44Some of you around this table have some really interesting ones.

00:32:46Julia, you went to Sundance, as filmmakers do, and you took the meetings.

00:32:51Can you tell us about the meeting where you found out who would be?

00:32:54Well, yeah, I'll tell you a little bit.

00:32:56So you go to Sundance.

00:32:57We all know this, Jen.

00:32:57You have no idea if you're going to have good reception, if anyone's going to be interested, if audiences are going to walk out, if it's a Stinko film, whatever.

00:33:05So you go, and we got meetings.

00:33:08It was like, okay, we're getting meetings.

00:33:10Great.

00:33:11So one of them was with Netflix.

00:33:13Okay.

00:33:14And so we walk into a room, and about 25 people file into the room from Netflix.

00:33:22And then, so everybody went around and introduced themselves, and two people said, we're from Higher Ground Productions, which kind of went around, and we never, nobody ever heard of Higher Ground Productions.

00:33:35And, you know, Lisa Nishimura looked at us like this and gave us a pitch, and it was a fabulous pitch.

00:33:44I mean, we, our heads were spinning at that, about what they could do with our film.

00:33:48And they had actually made up little posters already, even though they hadn't seen the film yet.

00:33:54No, because the film premiered at Sundance, right?

00:33:57They had made up six little posters, which they uncovered.

00:34:00But anyway, this is not the really cool part.

00:34:04So at one point, then, Lisa turns, and I said, I wanted to introduce our two people from, you know, Higher Ground Productions.

00:34:10And so, you know, they start talking, and they say, well, the president and first lady saw your film a few days ago.

00:34:17And I don't think we heard anything after that.

00:34:19Like, president and first lady, what are you talking about?

00:34:22And so after a while, they started using the words POTUS and FLOTUS.

00:34:26And we realized they were talking about the president, Obama, and Michelle Obama.

00:34:34And it's like we started tuning back in.

00:34:36We were like, oh, we work for them.

00:34:38We love them, which we shouldn't have done, really.

00:34:40So anyway, it turns out that they chose our film to be their first release.

00:34:53How has the emergence of the streamers impacted the marketplace for your films?

00:34:59Has it changed much?

00:35:00Oh, I think it's been positive.

00:35:01Yeah.

00:35:02Yeah.

00:35:02I mean, I think the demand has gone up.

00:35:06And I think also the streamers have done a good job of creating what you call communities of interest.

00:35:15You know, there are other avenues who are upping their game.

00:35:18But now, in part because I think, you know, all the filmmakers are doing, you know, are on their A game.

00:35:26You know, the stories are better and better and better.

00:35:28But now there's an outlet for them and financing for them, which is a really exciting moment, which, you know, I can tell you that, you know, 30 years ago, you know, I was warned, please, when you go looking for a job, don't say the word documentary.

00:35:40Right.

00:35:41I remember that.

00:35:42Yeah, of course.

00:35:44I think for me, though, at least, you know, in the future, I was kind of moving away from that a little bit and getting back to what I was talking about earlier with the large format filmmakers like Francis Thompson, who you were lucky enough to meet.

00:35:59Those guys were able to do to make cinema in a place that was a direct response to what was going on in the 50s, which was the big threat television.

00:36:10So everybody's going to go and just sit in their house and watch movies and television shows.

00:36:16What they did was started to shoot on large format, Cinerama.

00:36:21Let's get people in a communal environment and have community discussions around those films.

00:36:25There's an actual need to have that, you know, you know, conversation and that experience in that environment.

00:36:33So I'm really excited to kind of push into that direction a little bit more and explore it with future projects.

00:36:41We had an interesting kind of hybrid release because around the world, it's been theatrical.

00:36:46And in the U.S., HBO picked it up.

00:36:48In Latin America, it's also a streamer.

00:36:51So it's been an interesting kind of thing.

00:36:52I still love seeing films with an audience and hearing people laugh or clap at times.

00:36:59We've had amazing screenings.

00:37:00And then also getting emotional collectively.

00:37:03But also you want your work to be seen.

00:37:05And so it's been an interesting journey from Ciner to Amy to this film, Diego Maradona, where, you know, the industry keeps changing.

00:37:12And sometimes you're literally you're starting a film and you're having meetings.

00:37:15And by the time you complete a film, the world's changed again.

00:37:18And it's shifted so quickly.

00:37:19Yeah, I just wish that I mean, I'm with Asif.

00:37:22I love to see my films in a theater, too.

00:37:25And I love that collective experience.

00:37:26That said, I want them to be seen.

00:37:28I kind of wish the theaters would up their game.

00:37:32You know, there are a lot of interesting experiments in theaters in this country surrounding the idea of subscriptions, for example, like Film Forum in New York, the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville.

00:37:42You know, where you you get this sense of community.

00:37:45People are going to show up to talk about the films.

00:37:47And so it's an experience that's more than just packing, you know, people in for for, you know, Spider-Man 10.

00:37:54And it's it's it becomes more of a communal experience.

00:38:00I'm hopeful that theaters will now up their game just as the streamers.

00:38:04That would be you know, I've learned a lot from being working with Netflix, actually, because, you know, I don't I actually when we went with Netflix, we didn't even have Netflix at our house.

00:38:15But but what I've seen is I like you guys, like all of us, we like that sort of what limbic experience of that sort of communal emotion that we get from sitting with our fellow citizens watching a movie.

00:38:31But what's happened with our film through Netflix is the people in rural America are watching our film.

00:38:39It's like it's popped up more than normal for a Netflix film.

00:38:42And that's a lot of working class people.

00:38:45That's a lot of people who work in factories all throughout the Midwest and South.

00:38:48They don't live in big cities, even cities.

00:38:52They tend to more so my experience live in small towns, suburbs.

00:38:57And that's, you know, that's something I learned through Netflix.

00:39:02None of those folks would come to our art theater in downtown Dayton, even to see our movie.

00:39:07Right. They wouldn't. But they're watching it by the millions on Netflix.

00:39:11So I have to say, as much as I love the theatrical experience, I agree with you, I think it's like more democratic in a way.

00:39:19Like my last film was on Amazon. I think it went out to 150 million people.

00:39:24And the thing that I've done that was most seen was a little spot called Like a Girl that went out to over 200 million people.

00:39:32That's in terms of the audience, but also in terms of the filmmakers.

00:39:37Like we're at parody at this table, which is incredible.

00:39:40And I think that the diversity of the storytellers is just so much better now that there's so much opportunity from the streamers.

00:39:50And, you know, I feel like when I came to filmmaking late because I came from photography,

00:39:56but when I started, there was basically like a couple of outlets.

00:40:00And you had to kind of be liked by those particular people.

00:40:07And now there's just so many opportunities and so much opportunity, I think, for diverse voices and for younger voices and for different budgets.

00:40:17And it just seems like more democratic in terms of the storytelling and the access.

00:40:22Yeah, I feel like in our case, it was the best scenario that we could have expected during the making of the film because we financed the film through broadcasters.

00:40:32We had PBS funding and we had RTA, BBC, all those funding.

00:40:36And then when we went to premiere at Sundance and Amazon was interested in doing a global distribution.

00:40:41And that was so, you know, we were so happy because that means multi-platforms are going to see the film.

00:40:47So it released over 70 theaters in the U.S. alone and it's going to be like globally distributed on Amazon and it's going to be on PBS.

00:40:56So it means that it's going to reach so many different audiences in different demography.

00:41:02It's going to be on PBS and Amazon.

00:41:03Yes.

00:41:04I had a similar experience where Amazon put a significant amount of money in for the streaming rights.

00:41:10And then once the film was at a festival, then we sold the other rights, including the theatrical.

00:41:15So there's all sorts of mix and match opportunities.

00:41:18How does the fact that we're living in the era of so-called fake news, where there's this mistrust of mainstream media, impact the documentary world?

00:41:28Well, I feel like a lot of our films have been about fake news.

00:41:31That's right.

00:41:32I mean, all of those disinformation in the Philippines and in Russia.

00:41:35That's right.

00:41:36In the time of fake news.

00:41:36And it's not so new, this idea of fake news.

00:41:39It's been around for a long time.

00:41:40And, you know, Lauren's film, Nanfu's film, and my film, you know, deal to a great extent with how the government tries to create fake news.

00:41:49And money.

00:41:50And money.

00:41:51But I think, you know, what everybody here at this table is doing is creating films where you change your mind every 15 minutes.

00:41:59Right.

00:41:59You're taking a journey.

00:42:00And that's the antidote to fake news.

00:42:02Yeah.

00:42:02Is to invest in a deeper truth that's not so simple to express or understand except by the watching of a film.

00:42:09Also, we're not beholden to anybody.

00:42:11I mean, this is independent documentary film.

00:42:13And so, in a time, even when in our country, news is profit-driven, we're not doing this for ratings.

00:42:20We can actually be true to kind of our subject matter and, in a way, bring in truth-tellers or have the film be truth-telling in a time of manipulation, both by governments and by corporate interests.

00:42:35Yeah, by the way, that's the biggest change in terms of the economics of the film business is so much more of the business now is driven by consumers paying to see the film rather than advertisers renting viewers, you know, for sponsorship purposes.

00:42:56I think it's interesting that several of our films examine power, the nature of power, yours very directly.

00:43:07I mean, your main character says you have to be willing to strike and hit to get power.

00:43:13I mean, Imelda clearly uses her manipulative abilities to gain power, and she brings her own family in.

00:43:21You see the power of propaganda, which is phenomenal in your film.

00:43:27And even in our film, in this small little factory, you see the power that those jobs, that plant, has over people's lives.

00:43:37You know, you see the power of what's going on in our country capitalism-wise.

00:43:41Like, you see people being beaten down.

00:43:45You know, workers who made a living wage no longer can do that.

00:43:49Workers who want a union, the powers that be keep that from happening.

00:43:55I also think we have to work, I feel in this era of fake news, we have to work harder at veracity, at, like, our films feeling real.

00:44:03Like, I think of yours, you being in the film, and you're a very believable, lovable character.

00:44:08Yeah, I mean, I have so much experience about disinformation because I grew up in China.

00:44:15And it's really making me also, you know, sad to see how it's happening outside of China and almost all over the world, including the U.S. recently.

00:44:24But I feel like that makes the independent filmmaking so much more important because we're there and we're showing how disinformation took in shape and how that is affecting people.

00:44:35And once we present that to people and they start to see in it, see in how the fake news were generated.

00:44:41And I think that's way more important than just reading news every day.

00:44:46Thinking about audience, is there one person who you really would love to have see your film?

00:44:50Young people for me.

00:44:51It's the biggest, I mean, when we do screenings to see people that live through it, have their experience, but then they bring young, you know, whether they're their kids or a science group, it's phenomenal.

00:45:03We were in theaters on IMAX screens for a week in March, and we got kicked off the screen for Captain Marvel.

00:45:09And I said, we had the real superheroes.

00:45:12And that's kind of the point with all of that.

00:45:14You know, I enjoy, you know, going to a cinema.

00:45:16I realize it's a rare experience that a documentary could get in that space.

00:45:22But the beauty of all of what's available now with all the multi-platforms is it comes down to the story.

00:45:28And there is a need, I think, for, you know, these bigger, even large, screens.

00:45:34There was one woman, she was the first mission controller, and mission control, her name was Poppy Northcutt.

00:45:40And we had a screening, and she comes out and does Q&As with us.

00:45:43And I had this Brazilian woman come up, and she had read about Poppy.

00:45:48She was 10 years old in Brazil.

00:45:50And in 1974, she read an article about Poppy being the first female in mission control.

00:45:56And it inspired her to go get her Ph.D. in England.

00:46:00She now works at JPL, and she's in the Guinness Book of World Records for finding the most volcanoes on a moon orbiting Jupiter.

00:46:07So, and I saw them meet for the first time, and they had tears in their eyes, and they were crying about it.

00:46:12And so, for me, it's always that inspiration.

00:46:16I think a lot of us could say that, you know, it's who, you know, who the youth and the next generation being inspired by the work you need.

00:46:22I kept thinking with your film, I'd love, you know, have you shown it to the people who believe it never happened?

00:46:27You're going to get a room full of conspiracy theories and say, come on then, now tell me this didn't happen, because there's plenty of people out there.

00:46:33Speaking of young people, I've got to tell you, I have two grandkids, five and nine.

00:46:37And I really wanted my nine-year-old grandboy to see our film, but I wasn't sure if he was quite ready.

00:46:43You know, you don't want him to get mad and squirm around in the seat.

00:46:47So we brought him to the Dayton premiere, which was on a big screen, and I watched him.

00:46:52He sat on the edge of his seat, and he once told me he wished we didn't make documentaries.

00:46:56Why can't we make them animated?

00:46:59Why can't we make our films animated?

00:47:00So afterwards, he said to his dad, what if they were me?

00:47:08What if that happened to me?

00:47:11In other words, that is what we all want, is for people to look at the film and think, what if this happened to me?

00:47:16What if I were them?

00:47:18And my nine-year-old grandson, that was my most important person, and he had, like, the most simple, great reaction.

00:47:25The only other person would be my mom, who's long dead, but I always had her in the editing room.

00:47:32I always had my mom over my shoulder because she would keep me grounded so that everything we make would be very understandable to just a regular person.

00:47:44At the beginning, I did want to make this film and to try to reveal some sort of truth about, essentially, Diego Maradona's not particularly reliable storyteller himself.

00:47:52He's created a myth. You know, you ask him a question about something, and he will tell you his version of the truth.

00:47:58He never looks back, never made a mistake in his life.

00:48:01So, you know, our films are about this guy, Diego, and Maradona, and the person I was meeting was very much hardcore Maradona.

00:48:06So, initially, it was always, at some point, I wanted to sit down and show it to him while we were making the film.

00:48:12And we had a really good relationship during the making of the film, but at the ending, the relationship sort of broke, and I lost contact with him.

00:48:19The team around him never quite let me get to him again. So, he's still not seen the film.

00:48:24He's not seen it?

00:48:24People in Argentina have seen it. People in Italy have seen it. People in all over the world have seen it.

00:48:27And I still haven't been able to show it to him. So, funnily enough, now I've got to the stage of saying, well, at some point he may see it, he may not see it, but the film exists.

00:48:36Ironically, like, the people that we want to see the film most are the people who can't see it, it's Chinese people, because I've had, we make film, hopefully, that would challenge the official narrative in China.

00:48:50And the people there, because the information was so restricted, that they tend to believe the propaganda.

00:48:56Still, my friends all turned against me and say, why do you make a film that damaged our national image?

00:49:03Oh, my God.

00:49:33Yeah, it just showed me how effective the propaganda was. She lived her entire life there.

00:49:40Yeah, of course, I really wanted people in Russia to see this film. And ironically, I'm told that they are seeing it, because it's been already rapaciously pirated and shown everywhere on the Internet.

00:49:50But weirdly, the other thing we discovered in the cutting room is that there are eerie echoes of the United States in this film that is purely about Russia.

00:49:59And so, you know, I'm excited for viewers here to see it.

00:50:02Do you think Trump would watch this movie?

00:50:04No, I don't think Trump has the attention span to watch anything more than...

00:50:09Are there sharks in it?

00:50:11Maybe the trailer. Maybe you could watch the trailer.

00:50:13What was that latest video that the...

00:50:15Violent one.

00:50:16The violent one, yeah.

00:50:18My situation is similar to Non-Fuz. I would love for it to be shown in the Philippines.

00:50:22But I think, I mean, the president there, actually today it was in the New York Times, Duterte said he would like to kill journalism.

00:50:31And 13 journalists have been killed since he came into office.

00:50:34It would be amazing to show it there.

00:50:36But I think we'll see.

00:50:38I think that can't be said more forcefully enough.

00:50:43You know, we live in a relatively comfortable world.

00:50:46But at this moment in time, there are a lot of filmmakers and journalists who are at risk, and many of whom are dead because of these rapacious authoritarian regimes who are going after them.

00:50:57And I think, you know, one of the things we can do is to keep trying to wave a flag to say, back off.

00:51:03Yeah.

00:51:04That's in your film.

00:51:05Somebody said uncontrolled media is a threat, right?

00:51:08That's right.

00:51:08And I think that's like all why the governments wanted to really control the media and why what we are doing is so much more important to not let them control our story time.

00:51:19Right.

00:51:19And we work closely with so many Filipinos who took great risk in helping us and being in it.

00:51:25And it would be extremely hard to make this film and go back to living in the Philippines.

00:51:32Which subject could you keep following indefinitely?

00:51:35Well, I've been following.

00:51:37Julia is on the case.

00:51:39She is relentless.

00:51:41It's sort of like the.

00:51:42Every citizen of Ohio will be documented.

00:51:45No, no.

00:51:46No.

00:51:46I mean, the sort of what's happening with the American dream.

00:51:49Yes.

00:51:50I mean, the fate of the American working class, the blue collar middle class.

00:51:53I've been following that for at least a dozen years.

00:51:56And, you know, since I'm myself from a working class background, I have that whole background, too.

00:52:02And being working class meant you got vacations.

00:52:05You owned your home.

00:52:07You had security.

00:52:08You know, if you were a union person.

00:52:10But that's something I'm certainly going to continue to follow.

00:52:15It tremendously interests me.

00:52:17I also think it's very important.

00:52:20I mean, I think we would all agree that there's a battle going on for the heart and soul of America.

00:52:27Where is it going to be fought and won?

00:52:30Most is in the Midwest.

00:52:32It's not going to be on the coast.

00:52:36It's going to be where I live, the Midwest and South.

00:52:39And so I want to follow, like, why are people in my part of the world thinking the way they're thinking?

00:52:47I mean, I'm not going to go into it.

00:52:48I think I have some understanding of it.

00:52:50But I think that needs to be followed and understood.

00:52:53So I'm going to keep doing that.

00:52:54On that, I mean, I think, I wonder if all of the filmmakers have a theme that they keep returning to.

00:52:59Because I feel my character is always outsiders fighting a system.

00:53:03Often all of the films, fiction films, not consciously, but one of my tutors at film school did notice it in all of my short films as well.

00:53:10So like an outsider fighting a system and kind of succeeding and then somehow the system wins is a recurring theme.

00:53:16I don't know if you all have things that you always find yourself.

00:53:18Yeah, it's obvious.

00:53:20I've been looking for more than 25 years at the kind of corrosive influence of money and media influence and the values of capitalism.

00:53:31And this film is the first time it kind of takes a political turn.

00:53:36It might have been cathartic, these last two projects.

00:53:39I might be ready to move on.

00:53:40But I feel like looking at class and inequality and media influence is always kind of in the background of everything I do.

00:53:47I think to me, like looking back at the three films that I had done, I was fascinated by freedom because probably because of the lack of freedom that I grew up.

00:53:58So the freedom to choose, the freedom to choose, the freedom of speech, freedom of expression, all those things that are fundamentally, I think, something that I'm intrigued and wanted to explore.

00:54:10I've always been interested in power and abuses of power and weirdly more interested in the perps than the victims, in part, because I think if you understand how crime works, they do a better job of eliminating it.

00:54:25But in all my films, there's usually a couple of everyday heroes.

00:54:31In a film I did, Julie and I were talking about the Catholic Church called Mayor Maxima Cuppa, there are these deaf men who couldn't have been more weak in terms of the overall, but they actually went up against the Pope and sued him.

00:54:43So I guess I'm becoming more and more interested in heroes, everyday heroes, and also in more aspirational characters like artists in terms of being able to speak out in interesting ways.

00:54:55After spending a lot of time in the dark side and becoming more interested in heroes and people are looking toward the light.

00:55:03When did you know you wanted to be a documentary filmmaker?

00:55:06Was there a moment or...?

00:55:07For me it was so easy because it was 2011 when I took documentary classes.

00:55:13Yeah, like I said, I finally saw documentaries and didn't know that this form existed.

00:55:19And it was that moment I said, I wanted to do this.

00:55:22And the next steps are figuring how.

00:55:25And at the time I had not touched a camera or, you know, know how to edit or anything.

00:55:30So it was basically starting from scratch.

00:55:32And I was 26 and I didn't think that a career would be possible.

00:55:36So I looked at the American young kids, high school, middle school, and I felt they knew more than I did.

00:55:42I guess there was a moment of working on Senna, was the first documentary that I made.

00:55:48And just having a moment of kind of falling in love with the imperfections in the footage.

00:55:54And just having an instinct that somehow there's a way of connecting all of this material to tell a story that is truthful and honest.

00:56:01And actually working in fiction films, you spend a lot of time trying to create some sort of truth.

00:56:06And this idea that it might already exist if you can just find a way to edit it and construct it and use all of the cheats that you have in fiction film.

00:56:14Music and sound and obviously cutting, editing.

00:56:16So somehow this hybrid, I've always been interested in a hybrid when I was doing fiction films, of something that is somewhere in between documentary and fiction, but also for me making them feel like movies.

00:56:29I mean, when I was in college, I spent a year going around the world studying visual anthropology and got exposed to some amazing filmmakers like Penny Baker and Chris Marker and Jean Rouge and knew I wanted to look at culture.

00:56:42But became a photographer and it was 10 years before I had the opportunity to make film because at that time you could go out and take pictures and spend time and not have a lot of funding and be able to do your own work and kind of find your own vision.

00:56:57But in film, it was much more difficult and I was rejected by basically every film school.

00:57:05And so 10 years later, after my after my second book, I then made my first film and and loved kind of having that transition with kind of being able to push the narrative more.

00:57:17Because film schools are really looking smart now.

00:57:19I've kind of like come full circle because I started on a documentary about a mentally handicapped man in Ohio where I grew up and just tracked him for four years and I got to see the transition from film to video, which was very interesting.

00:57:35So I went from shooting on 16 and cutting my hands on celluloid to ending that film four years later on video and going, I'm going to shoot digital now.

00:57:45That was so much easier on video and then did a couple small fiction projects.

00:57:51And then we did a film called Dinosaur 13 and that was going to be a fiction film.

00:57:55And they started. It's a it's a good example of following the story and letting the story really impact the format and how you want to tell it.

00:58:03But we had approached them and then they started handing over archival film and nothing really beat the real thing in that, you know, in that sense.

00:58:12So it shifted into a documentary.

00:58:16And then with this, with Apollo 11, now I feel like I say full circle because now I've been exposed to this wonderful world of large format film.

00:58:24And to be in the edit suite with it and to talk to my close colorist and I've worked with for years and to see things in that celluloid, not knowing that there was this amazing group of large format filmmakers that were working 50, 60 years ago,

00:58:40postmodern filmmakers that were shooting on this stuff and making very compelling docs that nobody's seen because it's been sitting in a, you know, in cold storage for, you know, 60 years.

00:58:51So for me, um, that's, uh, that's kind of how I got into it.

00:58:56And now I'm back to where I started in some respects that I want to continue to push, you know, uh, for me, it was the sixties.

00:59:04I grew up in the sixties as you did.

00:59:06And that shaped all our lives.

00:59:08I think no matter what side you were on, you know, the movements of the sixties, the anti-war civil rights for me, the women's movement.

00:59:15Um, and you know, we were all about creating on an alternative culture.

00:59:20So it's like, well, you know, none of the movies, none of the TVs, none of the stuff you read in mag, none of the images of women were made by women, not a one.

00:59:30They were all men.

00:59:30Right.

00:59:32So we, and it's like, I'm not going to go get a job at NBC or Hollywood.

00:59:36I figured we had to create our own culture.

00:59:38So that's how the first film came about.

00:59:40Second and third films, um, were all made in the seventies kind of coming off of that.

00:59:46But as when the third film union maids, people started saying like this, here's Julia Reicher, the filmmaker.

00:59:54And I saw myself as an activist who used media, used photography, used radio, used film, not like a career choice.

01:00:03It never felt like a, it still doesn't really feel, it feels like a life, right?

01:00:08Not a career.

01:00:09I think breaking the process for me, the kind of very formal structure of fiction films, how you write a script, raise the money, cast it, shoot it and edit it.

01:00:17And for me, the enjoy, the brilliance of kind of making documentaries, I can throw it all upside down.

01:00:23I can instinctively go where the story takes me.

01:00:26It's not a huge crew.

01:00:27It's not a huge, you don't have so many bosses.

01:00:29You can essentially go into meetings and say, I want to make this story.

01:00:33Give me two years.

01:00:34I'll come back to you with a film.

01:00:35And that's kind of how we've been lucky enough to work with our team.

01:00:37That's right.

01:00:38And that should, I mean, by the way, I might argue that that might be a way forward for scripted films.

01:00:43In other words, like, here's an idea.

01:00:44I've got, you know, give me some money.