00:04Access is a big part of subject choice as well.
00:08Julia, in your case, you were dealing with this Chinese entrepreneur who gave you extraordinary access,
00:15even when he was going through some rocky times.
00:17Can you talk about navigating that relationship?
00:19I live in Dayton, Ohio, and it's known as a blue collar place that has a great history of invention
00:28and a great history of manufacturing and so forth.
00:31And I think that's partly why the chairman, Chairman Zhao, chose Dayton as where he was going to have his
00:39American factory.
00:40And I think he chose that General Motors plant.
00:44The General Motors plant was where we had made an earlier film,
00:49my partner and I called The Last Truck, closing of a General Motors plant like 11 years ago.
00:54And really, it's kind of a mega story, that film, the closing of the plant, the leaving of the American
01:00capitalists,
01:01and then the coming of a Chinese capitalist to our town to offer jobs to people.
01:07So Access, I think the chairman was proud that he was doing that.
01:13I felt he was bringing jobs to our community.
01:15He was going to produce high quality glass.
01:17It's one thing to get access.
01:20It's another thing to get trust.
01:23Two different things.
01:25And I think the reason we got the trust of the American blue collar workers is because they had all
01:30seen The Last Truck
01:31and they knew that we understood their journey and we had followed it for 10 years almost at that point.
01:38The chairman could see we could make a good film.
01:40He saw it was an Oscar nominee.
01:43I think he thought, these are my guys.
01:45And once the chairman said yes, you know, it's a Chinese company, privately owned, so everybody had to say yes.
01:56So even though there were some uncomfortable meetings around tables like we are right now where people said things that,
02:03you know, they might have been made uncomfortable by,
02:06they had to go, you know, the chairman said yes.
02:09And he never took back that access.
02:17I think it's interesting that several of our films examine power, the nature of power.
02:23Yours very directly.
02:24I mean, your main character says you have to be willing to strike and hit to get power.
02:31I mean, Imelda clearly uses her manipulative abilities to gain power and she brings her own family in.
02:39You see the power of propaganda, which is phenomenal in your film.
02:44And I even in our film in a small little factory, you see the power that those jobs that plant
02:52has over people's lives.
02:54You know, you see the power of what's going on in our country capitalism wise, like you see people's being
03:01beaten down.
03:02You know, workers who made a living wage no longer can do that.
03:06Workers who want a union, the powers that be keep that from happening.
03:18I'd like to hear about the editing room for you.
03:20What was that process like?
03:22I will say we have my partner, Jim Klein, and I edited our first films together.
03:27And then Steve Bognar and I edited those films together, although Steve was definitely the lead editor.
03:33So all the films we have never had an editor.
03:35We were very lucky to have the support of participant media so we could actually hire an editor,
03:42which we would have never been able to do before in that sense.
03:45So we actually were able to hire the editor, whose name is Lindsay Utes, and she is a fabulous editor.
03:51She would sometimes see a scene like there was a worker who gets injured, Bobby Allen,
03:57and he comes back to work after being away for like six weeks with a really bad injury.
04:02And, you know, it's another day and we're there and we're filming him coming back.
04:06And she's sitting at the editing table crying, right?
04:10Because she sees the emotion of the workers welcoming him back, poking at his belly that he had developed.
04:18This scene is not even in the film.
04:20But the working class camaraderie and warmth at bringing him back.
04:24She was sitting in front of the thing crying.
04:27Now, I would have never, ever thought that.
04:30I would have never seen the emotion in that scene.
04:33So Lindsay brought a verite sense and a big tune in to the emotion of the scenes,
04:40which we knew in our film we needed.
04:43I don't think we could have edited that film ourselves the way it is.
04:47I think it was a tremendous collaboration.
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