Zeitgeist Films

27th April 2012

Interview with Jennifer Baichwal

• R: Did you always know that you wanted to go into documentary film?
• J: I did not know that, and in fact, I first started reading Margaret Atwood in grade… eight [laughs], and I had a literature teacher named Miss Defortune who gave me all these Margaret Atwood books to read and… when I was going to the festival with her, to Sundance, I was sitting beside her on the plane thinking “I just can’t imagine the trajectory of, you know, reading this person’s books in grade eight and then here I am, what, thirty-two years later, sitting on a plane beside her, having made a film from one of her books. Anyway, I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was studying philosophy and comparative religion at university. I did a master’s, and I was sort of on my way to becoming a teacher, or having an academic life of some kind, doing research. I wrote my thesis and I was very demoralized by how narrow the academic medium is. You can argue that it’s elite – it’s so specialized that very few people have access to it. And I thought, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life in this narrow place?” I kind of thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to think about these same questions in a more lateral medium, a more creative medium?” And I just decided to make a documentary about personal identity, and I got a few grants from different organizations to do it. I had no idea what I was doing – NO idea. I made horrendous mistakes, like editing on VHS tapes with no timecode, with two VHS players – can you imagine? But I made this film about women [Looking You in the Back of the Head] and personal identity and that’s how it started. And that was a small thing. But as soon as I started doing it, I thought, “Oh god, I’ve really found the thing I want to do.” And then the big project that came after that – that little film was sort of my school – was the film about Paul Bowles [Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles], that’s here at Zeitgeist. That took about ten years to make. So that’s how it started.
• R: Do you think your research background has helped you as a filmmaker?
• J: I really do. I think that all the things that I was interested in then, I’m still interested in now. You know, research is a HUGE component of our films in general because we don’t – I don’t write a script, because I just think it’s ridiculous to write a script about reality. You can’t make reality conform to your predetermined idea of what should happen. Documentary really is about being in the moment and figuring out what’s going on and reacting to what’s going on. But you have to have a huge background of research to be able to be comfortable in that moment. You need to know what is happening around you, in a way. And awareness comes from, I think, for me, research. So I spend, often a year researching a film. Shelby Lee Adams [The True Meaning of Pictures] was a year. Payback took a year to figure out whether it could even be made into a film. So it’s a huge component to our work. But also the questions that I’m asking of the ideas that we’re exploring are very much the same ideas that I was thinking about then. They’re all very open-ended. It’s more creating a space to think about something than giving an answer to a question.
• R: In Payback, and even in Manufactured Landscapes, as well – I saw in the special features of that that some people had said that you weren’t so critical of this devastation to the planet, but you make it easy for the audience to come to that themselves without feeling that it’s been imposed upon them.
• J: Or they’re being preached at.
• R: Right.
• J: You know, many documentaries, maybe the majority of documentaries, are linear arguments. They have a thesis and the film is intended to advance that thesis in some way. I feel like I’m drawn to subjects that are not so black and white, because I really don’t think that things are black and white. I don’t think that it is that easy to come to a conclusion. I think there’s always contextual information that changes what you think about something, and I think I’m drawn to subjects that also do that, so Burtynsky’s work is very much – his photographs are completely ambiguous because they’re beautiful, but they’re about garbage, waste and destruction. You know, you’re caught in this very strange experience when you’re looking at them, and that is their power. That’s what leads you to think about them more. And in the case of Payback, you know, that whole book was a riff on “What is debt? What really is debt?” You know? And if you unpeel all the layers of what we normally associate with debt, it comes down to some very basic observations about human interaction. Money is a symbol of exchange. In essence, money is meaningless. It has meaning because we have given it meaning. So when you think about all the ways that we interact with each other every day and other species and the planet in general – it’s always kind of give and take, which is creating tiny little imbalances, or huge imbalances in the case of the Gulf oil spill, all the time. The question is, “How do you get that back into balance?” And sometimes you can’t. So that, to me… I’m drawn to open-ended inquiries.
• R: You talk [in Payback] about the debt to the planet. Has making your movies changed the way you live or think about sustainability?
• J: Ethics was one of my areas of interest when I was studying. I’m really interested in what is a moral life, and what is a moral life that comes from some other source, like a religious source or believing in some kind of philosophy, and what is a moral life that doesn’t have a source like that. So I do think about those things all the time, but every one of our films has brought me to places that I never would normally go to, and immersed me in worlds that I would never normally be exposed to. And that’s a huge privilege of this work, but it also sort of creates these indelible experiences that my consciousness is changed from. Being in the factory floors of China for example, or the slag heaps where things go to, where we discard them, was a profoundly changing experience. I mean, we’ve always been ecologically-minded, but that was – that took it to a whole other level with me. I do think that when you witness something you’re responsible for but would never normally see – that’s what Burtynsky’s photographs do, that’s what you see in Payback in the tomato fields. I don’t think we meditate on where the tomato comes from very much and I know there’s more and more awareness about tracing food, but you know, we assent to an economic system that has a bottom, and this is what the bottom of that system looks like – these people who work in those fields. It’s untenable. It’s outrageous that people have not just those kind of living conditions and working conditions in general, but that on top of that there are actual cases of slavery in that world, where people are exploited even beyond the usual, in shocking ways. I think that that, once you realize that, you go “Oh my god! I’m implicated in this! And I didn’t even know about it!”
• R: Even just by choosing to go to one store over another.
• J: Yes, don’t go to Publix. Don’t go to Publix supermarkets because they refuse to sign the Fair Food Agreement. What [the Coalition of Immokalee Workers] has achieved is extraordinary, but there’s still so much to do there. I think that a change of consciousness does lead to a change in behavior because you can’t go back. It would take a real cynic to not care.
• R: Yeah, to decide “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m not going to do anything.”
• J: Yes.
• R: But that’s how so many people are, I think. Not that they don’t care, but that people feel that their choices don’t make that much of an impact.
• J: Well I think when you’re given a choice, then you can make a difference. So you can make a choice to buy your tomatoes from somewhere that participates in the Fair Food Agreement. That’s not that hard.
• R: But you have to be informed that you have that choice.
• J: So you go online, on the website and find it out! Or go see the movie and find the [CIW] website at the end of the credits and find it out. We had this great Q&A with Raj Patel at Sundance, and someone said “What can I do? I’m just one person, I don’t know what I can do,” and [Patel] said “Don’t underestimate yourself! You can do a lot.” ¬Like, “hop to it” kind of thing, stop making excuses.
• R: You were approached to make this film, right? It was commissioned?
• J: It started with the National Film Board and this really wonderful producer there [Ravida Din]. To have a producer like that was an incredible experience because she was there whenever you needed her, even though we didn’t live in the same city, and endlessly supportive of all the sort of turmoil that I go through whenever I’m making a film. But she called and asked me. She got the rights to it because she’s a huge Margaret Atwood fan – in fact, she got the rights before she even read the book! And then she read the book, and phoned me, and I said “No. I’m sure these lectures are about money –” I hadn’t heard the lectures yet and I said “Here’s four people who I think would be way better at making this film than me, who are used to this kind of investigative essay-type film.” She said “I just want you to read it.” As soon as I read it and recognized that thing that I was saying before – that I’m drawn to a kind of open-ended, rich exploration of an idea – I was hooked. I thought, “How would I make this into a film?” I asked Ravida if I could have six or eight months to just try to write a treatment and think about it, and if at the end of that process I didn’t think I could do it or she didn’t think I could do it, then we’d just walk away from it. But if at the end of that process it seemed like there was something that would work, that could be intelligently translated into film – there has to be an intelligent translation, otherwise there’s no point in doing it.
• R: You don’t wanna screw up Margaret Atwood.
• J: Oh god, that too. The intimidation of that, for sure, but also just in general. Why make a film about something that is not inherently filmic, that doesn’t make sense in the language? And I think I came to the point of view thinking, “I can make this book into a film if I find real stories that exemplify in a visceral and emotional way, as well as an intellectual way, not an abstract way, some of the themes that she talks about in the book.” And that’s how it happened.
• R: So, with Conrad Black – I can see how you found him. I know that you interviewed many inmates to find Paul Mohammed, and the BP thing makes sense too, but I don’t understand how you found the Albanian men.
• J: Well, revenge is a big part of paying back, right? I was trying to think about revenge culture and what it meant. There’s revenge culture and there’s honor culture, which is a little bit more complicated because it often involves deep troughs of discrimination that have been going on for a long time. It brings up a whole lot of other issues, like human trafficking, another issue where someone owns you, you owe somebody forever. Often human trafficking ends up in cases of prostitution, etc., and that brings up other issues that are morally repugnant, so I was trying to think of a story that dealt with revenge that you could see both sides of the story. And I came across this article in the New York Times by Daniel Bilefsky – a writer born in Montreal, but he is a correspondent for Eastern Europe, and he had done this story on a boy who had been trapped inside his house for eight years or something, and I thought that’s interesting. And we went to Albania and just spent time talking to different people in the mountains who were involved in feuds. Some were really complicated, some were not that complicated, and what really struck me about this story is that you could see both sides of the story. And the fact that the children were involved in it was tragic. The impact on their life is horrific.
• R: I didn’t know who to believe!
• J: I know. I still don’t really know. I go back and forth. I mean, I spent time with one of them and, well, obviously you shouldn’t shoot someone if you’re having a fight with them. Like, let’s just say that can be a ground rule. But, beyond that, it’s tough to know how to get out of that. It feels like an intractable situation.
• R: Do you stay in contact with any of the people in the film?
• J: Oh yeah. All of the people in the film. We asked BP many times for an interview and they wouldn’t give us one, which is interesting. But the water keeper there – we’re very good friends with the Lake Ontario water keeper, and we do pro bono work for them and are involved with them. They’re wonderful. I keep in touch with the mediator in Albania – they’re still fighting. I check on them from time to time. Paul Mohammed is getting out of jail soon, and so he – we’re sort of hoping that he turns over a new leaf in some way. And the Coalition, of course. Once you spend time with people, I mean they just sort of become part of your life in some way.
• R: I read in the essay about Paul Bowles that you wished that you had spoken to him more right before he died.
• J: Or just hung out with him. All of my time with him was so specific. It was a lot of time, but it was all toward the end, sort of getting it down before he died. By the time I went back to show it to him, he was already quite ill. Ideally I would have just hung around for a few months to kind of just be with him, and I couldn’t, but I wish I had.
• R: It’s great that this movie’s coming out now, right off the heat of the Occupy movement and all these movements about student debt – at what point do you stop filming? Because, there has to be a point where you see things that could be relevant to your work, that would have been great to have in the film, that happened too late to be included.
• J: It was all happening when we were editing the film, and you’re right, you could just keep going. I know people who are working on Occupy stuff now and it’s a vital story that needs to be told. It’s not over yet. It’s still in the air. We were just in Hong Kong, and there was an Occupy site down at the bottom of one of the banks, which was great. When I said that whole “being in the moment involves a great deal of research” – for me documentary is about having a plan but being able to abandon the plan at any moment. And if you have no plan, which would mean you kept filming forever, bascially – you could do that, you could film everything and you’d film it forever [laughs], so you do have to limit yourself. Having too much of a plan creates a rigidity that you don’t see what’s happening around you. There has to be a balance between the two.