Chapter DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
Engineering Nonfiction Cinema
D.A. PENNEBAKER
Pennebaker began in film over forty years ago. With a background in engineering from Yale, M.I.T., and the Navy, his expertise made him extremely instrumental in developing equipment for recording sound synced to the pictures captured by a film camera. Together with Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock, and Robert Drew, Pennebaker developed the first fully portable 16mm synchronized camera-and-sound system, revolutionizing the way films could be shot. Now they didn't have to rely on voice-over narration, but could go in the field and capture life as it happened. With this ability, Pennebaker, Maysles, and the others developed the nonfiction filmmaking style of direct cinema, or cinema verite, in the United States. One of the first of this sort of film he worked on, Primary, an account of the 1960 Democratic primaries, established Pennebaker as one of the leading documentary filmmakers in the country. His legendary films, such as the 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back and the 1969 concert film Monterey Pop, are among roughly fifty films in his filmogra-phy. With his partner, Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker continues to be prolific— with such films as 1994's Oscar-nominated The War Room, a look at Clinton's winning presidential campaign, and 2001's Down from the Mountain and Startup.com.
CHRIS HEGEDUS
Hegedus joined Pennebaker in the mid-seventies and began editing with him on Town Bloody Hall (1979), a document of the dialogue on women's liberation between Germaine Greer, Norman Mailer, Diana Trilling, and other feminists. She and Pennebaker have collaborated on countless films including many rock music and music-oriented films. Their recent Only the Strong Will Survive follows several legendary rhythm and blues performers such as Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, and Carla Thomas. With Jehane Noujaim, Hegedus codirected 2001's Startup.com, a chronicle of an Internet company's meteoric rise and fall during the height of the dot.com mania.
Who are the filmmakers that you most admire?
There's a couple of obvious ones. Ross McElwee is a very good one. Fred Wiseman—probably most people think we and him make the same kinds of films, and we think far differently. But we probably do make, in many ways, the same kind of film. Anyway, I know that the kind of work he does on them is really hard and, truly, it's driven by a real understanding of how to do it. But remember, he doesn't use a camera himself—while he does sound on most of his things, he uses a crew if he can, or at least he uses a cameraman so he doesn't see the same movie that Chris and I might see where one of us is behind a camera.
There's others who didn't quite make it until now in terms of high profile—Joel DeMott and Jeff Krienes. They moved down to Alabama because it got really hard for them, and I think Jeff now deals in equipment a lot. But they are two of the best filmmakers of their kind that I know—anywhere in the world. And when certain kinds of things come up we go right straight to them. I'll give you an example. We did a film, Depeche Mode 101 (1989). Actually, we love the film.
But in the beginning, everybody thought we were gonna make a film like Don't Look Back (1966) about these four guys [in Depeche Mode]. Well, they're just not Dylan, and there's no way you could ever make them look like Dylan. We wondered how to do this film for a bit, and then we decided to put together a trip. A bus trip, by a group of fans, and that was gonna happen because the band was going to go out on their tour and end up at the Rose Bowl and put on their final show at the Rose Bowl, and the fans would get to go for free. Somebody would select the seven or eight fans. Well, those two [Jeff and Joel] went along on that trip and made just an absolutely marvelous film, which saved our film in many ways. [Adding the bus journey story to our footage] made it funny and about something; whereas, just about the band it wouldn't have been much. And the band even recognized this early on and said, "Those are the celebrities." There are people like this [Jeff and Joel] who know how to do this, and some of them keep doing it and some of them just get worn out by lack of money and by lack of interest and lack of places to sell it.
Chris, who are the filmmakers you admire?
Chris:
In some ways I started not thinking of documentary filmmakers as people I admired. I came out of an art background. I was first introduced to European cinema, and my hero definitely was Fellini. I liked Godard. And the whole European movement I was very inspired by. And then, by following the art movement, I liked filmmakers—I remember Maya Deren being very influential to me because she was the first woman filmmaker that I ever came across. It was my first realization that you could do this as a woman. And then, of course, I saw the early work done by Penne [Pennebaker] and Ricky [Richard Leacock] and Al Maysles with Drew Associates and that was extremely influential to me. Especially the film Jane (1962) done by Penne, because it seemed almost like a fiction film because you had an actress in it, and the story was very dramatic behind it, very strong characters, and seemed very much to me that you were making a fiction film, but with real people. Those were my early influences.
The movement that Ross [McElwee] was part of up at M.I.T. doing personal cinema—Ed Pincus was a big influence for that whole group up there in Boston doing the diary films. And I've always loved the diary film. I don't have the courage to do the diary film myself as of yet, but I love what Ross does. I love what Joel and Jeff have done, and Pincus was an early influence in that style for me, as well as people like Michael Moore.
Chris:
Nick Broomfield. I think they've all added their own personal kooky twist to that style. You know who I love? Barbara Kopple. I think she's been a real role model for women filmmakers and has taken risks with subject matter that other people haven't gone near.
Yeah, she's fearless.
How do you choose your topics, or are you mostly commissioned? How do you come to your films?
It's peculiar. They kind of come to us, which isn't to say we stand out in the street and wait 'til an idea hits us or a person runs up with a script. Because they're not scripted, very little initial work can be done on them before you actually even decide to make a film about them. And somebody who sees one of our films . . . people would come to us and say, "This is a terrific film. Why aren't you making this film?" Usually, you say, "Well, we don't have any money and we don't have any access." And if they can provide either or particularly both, you take it seriously and you consider it.
How did The War Room come to you?
Chris:
We'd been interested in making a film about someone running for president, which was really the initial idea for The War Room, and Penne had
- D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, filmmaking partners since the 1970s, shooting The War Room at the Democratic convention.
actually tried to do it with Robert Kennedy when he was running for office and, of course, was never able to complete that film. And the election before The War Room, we had put out proposals, tried to do that election, follow a man trying to become president.
We even went to a TV station—WGBH. Chris:
. . . offered us $25,000. For a ninety-minute film. Chris:
That's it, so in the end we couldn't afford to do it—take that risk at that point, so we didn't do it. So the next election came up with Clinton, and several people came to us that year with different ideas of the same thing—watching the election—and none of them really followed through. Then Wendy Ettinger and R.J. Cutler—two aspiring filmmakers who had been working in theater and radio—walked in the door and said they wanted to do a film about his election. They had actually gone to the Museum of Broadcasting and watched Penne's film Primary, and they heard about us from that and they landed on our doorstep. And we basically said, "Yes, we'd love to do a film, but the two things we need are money and access. And why don't you go out and see if you can get that and if you can, come back and see us." So we sent them away.
We all were gonna try in the access—it was gonna be like that thing where everybody's connected in some way, so we were all calling up anybody that we knew who was connected. I think about a week later they came back in and said, "Well, we've done it. We've got money and access." Wendy had gotten $60,000 or something—her own family money she was going to sink into it, and access basically turned out to be . . . the Perot campaign denied they were running; Bush wouldn't let them in. But they got access to the Clinton campaign staff and that was basically it. At that point Clinton was a very unfavorable candidate in New York City. People didn't like him here, especially on the Upper West Side where we lived. So it kind of seemed like you were getting the booby prize. But there was a little money there, which is always enticing for independent filmmakers, so we decided just to jump in and see if we could continue getting into the other campaigns.
Most of the film was James Carville and George Stephanopoulos in the War Room, which was very risky because if they lost, the value of a film about the losing campaign staff wasn't going to be too salable for us. There is a risk in any story where you're following real life and you don't know what's going to happen.
Tell me about The Energy War.
Ross McElwee worked for us really long ago on a film we made called The Energy War (1978). We had three crews, and they all had to maintain poetic silence because we were so afraid the Republicans found out that our people [filming] the Democrats were talking to each other and they might have a fit [if inappropriate information fell into the wrong hands]. So we met in secret enclaves and talked on the phone in dark of night. That was a terrific film to do because we were on it for about two years. We went deep into the heart of darkness with cinema verite, believe me, with all those politicians.
Chris:
It was almost like if we had done The War Room part two, where we went to the White House and followed Clinton trying to pass a bill. That's basically what it was, but it was with the Jimmy Carter administration. And we followed this bill where the story line was—you'd think it was a boring subject, like their start-up in government. This was a bill about natural gas, but it ended up being the fiercest battle in Congress ever with the longest filibuster ever—it was fascinating.
Do you find you need to be personally interested in your topic to make a good film, with all the time that you have to put into one?
Chris:
I think you have to envision that the subject has some kind of dramatic arc to the story, and you have to hope that the characters end up being interesting characters. But sometimes you don't know that right off because quite often you're just meeting them for the first time and you have to go by an initial sense. Certainly, that was the case for me meeting Kaleil
[Startup.com]. I felt he had a certain sparkle and charisma. I thought he seemed photogenic and definitely, in terms of the subject matter, it seemed like what they were doing was going to be a very big, ambitious idea.
How long were you filming for Startup.com?
Chris:
Startup.com, we filmed a year and a half. D.A.:
Sometimes you might have an abstract interest and not even know if there is a story or have any idea how to proceed. I've been interested in doing something on physics and I've talked to several physicists. I know something about physics since I was trained, in a way, in physics in college as an engineer. So I had this sense that there is some story, but as yet it hasn't jumped in the window and announced itself. It's just an idea, which may never happen. It might not even make a good film. But it is something that I'm interested in.
A doctor came to me once with a pair of twins and one of them was brain damaged and blind and the other one they weren't sure about. And they didn't even know if they were paternal twins, and he wanted me to spend time with the two of them and see, if by looking at what I filmed, they could figure out, because they didn't get much chance to study them. And at the beginning, the idea of a brain-damaged child, I thought, was just a terrible idea. I didn't want to do it at all. But I got so intrigued by this child and so engaged that it really was an enormous learning process for me. I never try to prejudice myself in front whether I think it's interesting to me or not, because usually, if you stick with it, you're gonna find out something you didn't know. So it's a peculiar thing.
The process, the filming process, is very much revelatory—it's like a research program in something you didn't think you needed to know about—you end up getting really into it. It itself is a reward beyond whatever the filmmaking is, and I think when that happens you're able to make the film better. It's easier to do the kind of work—because it is hard work— and the concentration and the focus is easier to maintain if the thing gets to interest you, whether it starts out that way or you don't even think it's gonna. If it was totally uninteresting the whole way through, I think it would be a very hard film to make.
Would you do a film you were commissioned for if you weren't initially interested in the subject, trusting that, in the process, you'd get interested?
Well, you might get interested in the money and the money alone. We've done things like that where we needed the money to do another film—to finish another film, and it was with joy that we greeted that money. And in the end that showers off on the film. We did one in Germany with a rock star there—the film would never emerge from Germany—and we had a great time doing it and we got to like the guy a lot. But it was straight for money. There was no question in our minds. And we tried to put him off three or four times, and he wouldn't be put off. In the end, there's always something about the process that you can take joy from a little bit.
Chris:
I think there's always something interesting to be learned in every situation if you just go at it like that—and, especially, if you do it with a friend, which is nice about doing it with Penne as a partner. You can make it your own adventure in some ways and it definitely is an adventure that's less painful if you aren't getting paid for it. We usually have done these films with very little budget.
Does funding get any easier?
I was going to ask you the same thing. Should I get off the bus now? Or is it going to get better? It's like writing long poetry. You just don't do it for money. Like winning the lottery—some people make a film and it goes on to make a lot of money. But you find if you study a detailed following of what happens, the people who initiated the film very seldom realize a lot of money in the end. I think Michael Moore is one of the few I know who actually ended up with some money, and he's busy spending it on other filmmakers to try to get them to make more films. But that was a one-off and a peculiar thing, and don't expect it to happen again. And you don't make any judgments by it because it doesn't hold up for what you're really doing. Every year, you make one or two films and they take all of your resources and energy and sometimes a lot out of your family life, but you kind of are obsessed and you do it.
Chris:
I always say no one asked me to be a documentary filmmaker. You're doing it for other reasons. But in terms of the funding aspect, there's always something new that's changing in terms of the market for these films because of the technology and the exhibition of it. Digital technology is really changing the whole exhibition of feature films and the making of a feature film, as well as documentary films, because the technology has been put into the hands of so many people now that the prices for these shows has come way down and there's a saturation. It seems like if you're in this field long enough, there's always something like that. I remember there was a really big fear when home video came out that that would take over films being projected in theaters. And then again when cable came out there was all this hope that there would be all this new programming opportunity, which really didn't happen for the documentary filmmakers. But things shake up. There's always something new.
We have an old film that's in 16mm and it's never going to be a big moneymaker. It's a film called Town Bloody Hall—it's Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Michelle Johnson. . . . Well, that film, I mean, it's played in Europe in theaters in 16mm, which you try not to think about because it's such a terrible way to show a film. But you think, "I'll just put that aside and when I come back it'll be over." But in this case, we have somebody downtown at Cowboy Releasing, at their screening room, and he wants to run it as a film. Well, we aren't going to do a 35mm blowup of that film for one little running, which is an experimental running, but we can show it in video. We happen to have a PAL video we did because BBC paid us to do a PAL video from the print. Actually, we had to go back to the original film to do it, so it was not inexpensive. We probably lost money on the BBC deal. But we now have at least a PAL video, and this guy is willing—in his theater, he has a setup for video projection—he'll show it in video. That's a big jump for us. That means a lot of our stuff, if we can ever get the money up to get it out of film and into a video format, we can get it theatrically shown without having to go that next step, which is so expensive and so wasteful, to make a 35mm print for projectionists all around the country to wreck at their expediency. So in a way, I already feel the thing changing underneath me, and it gives me hope that a lot of stuff we've been sitting on for years, if we can just get around some of the things like music rights, can be shown theatrically because television has always been pretty much cut off for us. They don't buy from us. They make their own.
Chris:
We can sell things for television after we make them. D.A.:
Yes, after. They buy them as theatrical films. For us to do programming for TV, it doesn't seem to work out that way. Even Europe, where we've always had a market—that's kind of drying up because they have cheaper sources now and they really don't care as long as the stuff is documentary and can be proven to be so. They're not that interested in where it comes from or who did it. So you have to face the idea that it is a market that could dry up on you and then you'd be left with no place to sell them. I think these kinds of films are always going to be someplace that will show them in some fashion. You're not ever going to be cut off—it may get more expensive and you may have to figure out cheaper ways to do it.
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