Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan
Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan have been making documentary and fiction films for more than 20 years. Jeannie recently served as series producer of PBS's Postcards from Buster. Her previous credits include coproducing and directing Running with Jesse for the PBS series Frontline, editing two films for the acclaimed series Eyes on the Prize, and editing dramatic films including Blue Diner, Lemon Sky, and Concealed Enemies.
Steve Ascher's work has appeared on networks around the world, and his films include the documentary Life and Other Anxieties and the drama, Del and Alex. He is the author of The Filmmaker's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age (with Ed Pincus), a best-selling text, and is completing a third edition for publication in 2007. Steve has taught filmmaking at MIT, and both he and Jeannie have taught at Harvard.
This husband-and-wife team have made several films together, including the two discussed here. Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern is a feature documentary about the Jordan family's struggle to save their Iowa farm. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and was nominated for an Academy Award. So Much So Fast, also a feature documentary, premiered at Sundance in 2006. It tells the story of Jamie and Stephen Heywood, brothers whose lives are changed when one is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). I spoke with the filmmakers separately for this interview in 2003, and with Steve again in 2006.
Troublesome Creek documents the Jordan family's struggle to save their Iowa farm. You began the film after a receiving a phone call from Jeannie's father, Russ.
STEVE: Russ called and said he thought this would be his last year of farming. If we were going to call ourselves filmmakers and not make a film about this, there was something wrong. To be able to do a story like this, to have that kind of access—I thought of it as both an opportunity to tell this story and also for Jeannie to be able to tell some of the wonderful stories she'd been telling around the dinner table for years about growing up in Iowa.
He felt that he'd have one more year of planting and harvest followed by an auction. [The Jordans' plan was to auction off their livestock, equipment, and personal belongings in order to pay off their debts and keep the land itself, 450 acres.] That gave us the possibility of a narrative spine. It would have been much harder if not impossible to just make a film about day-to-day life on the farm, and be able to get into the kinds of issues that we did. We filmed four times over the course of about a year and a half.
How did you plan for the visual storytelling? Did you write up outlines, a treatment?
STEVE: We had to write up various things in order to raise money, but they were never really part of our thinking. With stories like this, in part you're following events and the events dictate what you're filming. But you have in your mind certain themes that you're interested in. In this case, the year on the farm, which included all the tasks that had to be accomplished—planting, harvesting, preparing for the auction, the auction. Then there are themes about Russ and Mary Jane, their marriage and their raising of children; there were themes about Jeannie's childhood; and themes about the changing landscape all over the Midwest, all over rural America. You're kind of advancing all of these fronts together, and you shoot things that can work toward them.
At the start of the film, there's a sequence in which a cat jumps from the roof of a barn into the arms of Jeannie's brother, Jon. It serves as a metaphor: as Jeannie says in voice-over, "My family in a nutshell—incredible luck, incredible timing, and teetering on the brink of disaster."
STEVE: That's a real tribute to editing. We had been filming for over a week, on the first shoot, and nothing had happened. We filmed mostly just goings-on at the farm. A cow had died, and we were doing a stakeout, waiting for the rendering truck to pick it up. Just waiting, for hours. And then we heard people shouting, and there was this cat on the roof. At the time we were just incredibly depressed. If the big event is a cat on the roof, we're really in trouble.
JEANNIE: Plus, when the cat jumped, we were moving the camera. I saw the cat jump, and Steve got the end of the cat jumping. But we didn't get the cat jumping. So it was a disaster. We filmed the wrong thing and we didn't get the climax of it. But in Troublesome Creek, I cut every inch that we shot. So I just went at that. I thought, I'm going to see if I can find a way to make "missing the cat" work. I know we have "after missing the cat," and I know we have "before jumping," so let me just cut it and look at it. And I realized that missing it was part of the story and the metaphor, and that the metaphor was unbelievable. The fact that Jon would even walk up there and say, "Come jump into my arms, little kitty," was absolutely a thing about my family that's always driven me nuts. Totally unrealistic, and it worked.
Once I got it cut and realized it was a metaphor, I also realized that if this were the first thing you really saw in the body of the film, it would set you up to be ready for anything. I knew—because we'd been trying to raise money for the film for years at that point—that people had the most prosaic, small-minded reaction to what farming is or what people who farm are and that I had to fight that.
STEVE: The problem with doing a film like this is as soon as people hear the words farm or farm documentary, their eyes glaze over. "Oh, it's another farm film, and it's going to be sentimental," or "It's going to be, 'Oh, poor farmers.'" And when they actually see it, they're stunned to find out these people are funny, they're intelligent, and the film is doing all sorts of things that they just didn't expect. Our hope was that the film would resonate with universal themes and become something that's about the passing of time, and about a marriage, and about the history of America.
You shot only 27 hours of film footage, in 16mm, for a program that runs about 88 minutes. That's very conservative.
STEVE: That was mostly imposed by budgetary problems. Every time we'd get out there, we'd budget a certain amount to shoot, and invariably we would have shot that amount halfway through the time. And then we'd have these agonizing meetings up in the bedroom trying to decide how much more stock we could order, which we knew we couldn't afford to process. Most of the footage of the film we never saw for about a year. [It was stored in the freezer at their home in Massachusetts until they could process it.] The joke was that instead of having dailies, we had yearlies.
Would you shoot it in video today?
STEVE: Probably we would, but at the time we felt strongly that the landscape of Iowa and the texture of the farm would only come across in film. The beauty of the landscape, the feel of the animals, and the smells and the corn in the summer—all of those things are an important part of why farmers do what they do, because it's such a tough life. That had to come across, mixing the financial tension and strain with the rewards of being a farmer; it played into the structure of the story. So we made sure that the seasons were very much a part of the film. Ultimately, we blew the film up to 35 mm. There's no comparison between the beauty of the 35 mm image even to 16 mm projection.
But by the same token, there were a number of scenes that we missed or gave short shrift to because we were so limited in the amount of film we could shoot. In a typical evening, we might shoot a roll or a roll and a half of film. That's 10 minutes or 15 minutes of material, which is hundreds of dollars.
You filmed the Jordan family during an extraordinarily difficult time. Were you ever concerned that the filmmaking would add to their burden?
JEANNIE: I have a very political family. The farm situation, the farm question was something I was raised dealing with, a really viable big political issue in this country. So trying to capture what it was that we felt was so tragic and shortsighted about it, through what was happening to us, I knew they'd all be behind that. I also knew I wasn't going to betray them in any way. I wasn't going to show anything that they didn't want me to show or say anything that was a breach of their privacy.
The only time that I felt bad was when we asked my parents to go to Rolfe, where I grew up. [The filmmakers bring the Jordans to a farm they'd rented for several years before taking over the family property.] I knew that the house had fallen apart, and they didn't. It was very painful for them. So when we edited it in, I asked them if they didn't want that there. My mother wasn't talking by that time [because of her illness], but she agreed with what my dad said, which was, "If you don't see what eventually will happen, you don't understand what you're talking about. You can say farmers go out of business and farms go away. How do they go away? They fall apart. They tear them down." And he said, "You have to show something like that; this is as good as anything else."
STEVE: They never asked us to stop filming. We're very careful even with subjects that we've been filming for years, we still feel very hesitant about what we film and when we're being intrusive. In Jeannie's family the most you would get might be a look of "Why are you filming this?" or, as we approached the time of the auction, one of the reasons that Jeannie becomes more of a character on screen is that her sisters were saying, "You don't think you're going to be able to just film this without helping, do you?"
The idea that you can respect the privacy of your subjects and still present an honest story might surprise some filmmakers. Do your students ever ask about that?
JEANNIE: It's not so much that they ask about it as that I tell them. A lot of students do personal films; that's kind of what all of our first instincts are. Lots of times they'll have crossed the line. A young filmmaker I know did a film about her mother dying of cancer, and it was very raw. Her mother was a very beautiful woman who, when she knew she was being filmed, would get really done up, as much as she could. But sometimes her daughter would walk in the room filming, and her mother wouldn't be prepared for it, and she'd complain a bit. One of the things I said to the filmmaker after I looked at one cut is, "I want you to look at this through your mom's eyes. And I want you to look for moments where she looks good. As much as you can tell the story with those, I think that it will still work and you don't have to embarrass her. You don't have to make her feel like, "Oh, I look so horrible." Her mother probably wasn't going to see this film, but still, it's trying to instill that kind of respect. We all have a natural instinct to protect, but I think that a lot of students, when they're young, think that means you're not being honest; that you have to show something bad or raw to tell a good story.
The stories in Troublesome Creek—both the overall story of the Jordan farm and the individual stories that Jeannie tells, such as "Daddy Date Night" (in which she recounts nervously preparing for one-on-one time with her father, even writing out talking points in her hand)—manage to be both very personal and universal.
STEVE: When I think of the universals that mean the most to me in the film, they're about time and family connections and the passing of history, a history that means so much now but will be completely gone in a certain number of years. You're looking for true moments. Part of it involves giving the audience room to think and images that are suggestive of those themes. The drive from the house to town, the shot is out the back, facing backward, and you're seeing this beautiful plume of dust that was kicked up, backlit by the sun. And I remember shooting it, hanging out the car door, and thinking it was beautiful, but it's also clearly a visual metaphor for leaving the past behind. And it's while Jeannie's narrating this wonderful Daddy Date Night story.
As their daughter, are you revealing information to your parents, through this film, for the first time?
JEANNIE: Yes, absolutely. Mother knew that I was scornful of her Pollyannaish view of the world, as in the scene of me giving her shit because she thought that Charlotte at the bank was her best friend. But Daddy, we were all scared of him when we were little. We aren't anymore; he's mellowed incredibly. But he was moody, he was worried, and he was just a formidable guy. He was also 6-foot-4 and has those eyebrows. So in doing the film, the one thing I could not do is depict our childhood without some hint of that. So there were two places in the film: Daddy Date Night and the Bergman reference. ["Russ came to the idea of optimism late in life," Jeannie says in narration. "The Russ I knew growing up could give a Bergman film a run for its money in the Moody Darkness Department."] But if you say something good right afterwards, which is, "He's completely turned around and is the optimist of the family," he comes away from it thinking, "I'm the optimist." But he noticed the other. We were visiting Steve's mom and stepfather. We were sitting on the porch on Martha's Vineyard, and my dad said, "Bergman." I said, "He's this Swedish filmmaker, makes really, really, depressing films, but really good films." And he said, "When you were little, did you think I was like that?" And I said, "You were like that Daddy, I didn't think you were like that." Then we had a really interesting talk. One of the things I asked him was, "Did that hurt your feelings?" And he said, "No, because everybody seems to like me anyway, who saw the film."
Tell me about the westerns that we see the Jordans watching throughout Troublesome Creek.
JEANNIE: The first time we were there to shoot, it was like, they're going to watch TV every night. They're not going to talk about anything. This is a disaster. And then part of us started realizing, wait a minute, what they're watching, by and large, are westerns. We decided we could use that as a metaphor.
STEVE: Russ loved westerns, and the whole issue of his struggle with the bank is informed by cliched storytelling notions of good guys and bad guys, cowboys and farmers, and making a stand against your enemy. Lonesome Dove was on the night before the cattle auction, and it felt like some incredible piece of serendipity or fate that this story about the end of the West would be on the night that Russ was about to shed the cowboy part of himself. When you're a farmer with animals, you're partly a plant grower and you're partly an animal wrangler. And this was going to be the end of his wrangling days.
Troublesome Creek is narrated by Jeannie. Did you always know that she would narrate?
STEVE: Jeannie thought that hopefully the film could stand on its own without narration. In the end, the narration is a very important part of moving the story along and giving you access to layers of knowledge and storytelling that go into the past, that you just can't film. Jeannie would sit down and write stories about, for example, Daddy Date Night. She'd write a few pages and then she'd give it to me and I'd pull things out of it and then she'd rephrase them and place them; it's a kind of an organic back and forth. Collaboration can be hard, but there's so much about how you interpret the material and what's really going on in a scene, and what does the audience need to know and when, that it's very hard to make these films alone.
I think of the film as both biographical and autobiographical. And it's always walking the line between "as seen through" Jeannie's eyes, she's narrating; my eyes, because I'm shooting; but also seeking to make that presence disappear at moments when we want the audience to just be immersed in Russ and Mary Jane's story without thinking about the perspective from which you're viewing them.
The film also conveys a strong point of view without becoming a rant.
JEANNIE: To be a political film, Troublesome Creek had to be charming. You had to like these people, to identify with them. If I had ranted, which was in me to do, I would have lost a part of the audience because the bias would have been too obvious. The bias is obvious, but it's tempered. I'm not positive I'm right. I had to show that I was angry that there are only three million farmers left, but I'm not saying I know how to fix it or whose fault it is. It's history; it's just happening.
STEVE: As partners, Jeannie and I had very different perspectives on what was going on. Jeannie had lived it and knew it intimately, and I was from New York and didn't know anything about farms. So we combined an insider's and an outsider's perspective. The film by turns takes you deeply inside the family and then steps outside and looks at the story in a more distanced way. I think that's a way that you can take a personal narrative and help the audience to see it in larger terms.
We felt that the film's biggest influence would be if it were a compelling narrative that people would want to watch. All of the other issues emerge from the story and are there to be talked about. We took it around the Midwest, and the fervor of the discussions that would come after the film—it raises the questions to a level that people feel passionate about. We saw that as its biggest kind of political contribution.
Is that why you avoided some "traditional" documentary elements, such as interviews?
STEVE: We didn't want to do interviews. We absolutely did not want any expert testimony about anything having to do with farming or economics that would make it seem like that this was a subject being studied as opposed to a subject that was being lived. At one point, [though] we felt we had to sit Russ Jordan down to try to get him to tell us his side of the story—
JEANNIE: —Steve and I had this whole list of questions to ask him—
STEVE: —And the result of that is the banker joke that he tells. And that's it. That was his response to, "How are you doing? What do you think is going on with the bank?"
JEANNIE: That's denial, but it's a good way to do it. At least it's funny.
So Much So Fast begins with a prologue, a transition from Troublesome Creek. We learn that after you'd shot the film, Jeannie's mother, Mary Jane, was diagnosed with ALS. Five years after her death, in 1995, you began filming the Heywoods: one brother has ALS, and the other quit his job to start a foundation and find a cure.
STEVE: When Mary Jane got ALS, there was nothing you could do about it, and it was hard to even find out anything about it. This was in the very early days of the Internet. By 2000, everything had changed. There was a real explosion of research, and the Internet made it possible to find out what was going on anywhere in the world. We had been looking around for a way to do something about ALS that wouldn't just be about somebody being sick and deteriorating, and in the Heywoods we saw the possibility of an extremely vital story with a lot of growth. And also, they're a very dynamic family, and very funny. That was very important to us, that we could get at the story with a lot of black humor.
When we first talked to the Heywoods about filming, we talked about how close we needed to be in order to do this story. Actually, Jeannie said first that Mary Jane would never have let us make a film about her illness, and so we totally understood if the Heywoods didn't want to do it. Which I thought at the time was perhaps one of the worst pitches ever made to a film subject! But Jeannie also talked about how we're really asking to become members of their family, in a certain way. And given the amount of time we spent together over those years—which included a lot of time of not filming—we did become very intimate. We went on vacation with them, for example. A small portion of the time was filming, but most of it was just hanging out and eating and doing all of the other things that you do.
How did you decide how much of the illness to show, and what to leave out?
STEVE: Stephen Heywood welcomed us filming anything. At one point, he started gagging, before he got his feeding tube. And I put the camera down and went to try to help him, and afterward he said, "Why didn't you keep shooting?" And my feeling was one, I can't shoot when somebody's in that kind of distress and I might be able to do something, but also, I just really didn't feel that that was something the audience needed to see. We're already asking the audience to see and think about things they normally might turn away from.
In becoming close to your subjects, do you risk losing your perspective, your objectivity? How can you be inside but also outside at the same time?
STEVE: I would say that So Much So Fast is much more about intimacy than it is objectivity. I don't particularly believe in objectivity; I believe that you can give a truthful account and an account that may be balanced in various ways, but I don't think objectivity really comes into it. That said, both Jeannie and I are capable of both being very close to the people we film and stepping back when we need to. We were both deeply involved with the Heywoods' lives, but at various times would say, "We're making a film here, we can't play a role." There's a scene in the film where Jamie is quoting Melinda, from couples counseling, where she said, "These people are making a film about us and they were wondering when I was going to crack." And I know that I never had that conversation, which is what I tell Jamie, and he thinks that Jeannie did, but she didn't. We wouldn't take sides in that way, because it would be inappropriate. But we decided that we had to leave that scene in, even though it deeply misrepresents our relationship. We felt that film subjects are often misquoted and have no control over what is said about them; we might as well subject ourselves to the same treatment. And we couldn't narrate our way out of it.
Jeannie once talked with Jamie about the prime directive from Star Trek: When you go back in time, you can't move a rock on a planet or you'll change its history forever. And Jamie said, "Well, you can move the rocks on my planet any time you want."
In contrast to Troublesome Creek, you shot So Much So Fast on video. Was that a storytelling choice?
STEVE: Yes. With Troublesome Creek, we had defined the story in such a way that we were only going to shoot for a certain period of time. Whereas with So Much So Fast, it was much more open-ended. There were many more story lines that we were following: Stephen Heywood's experience with ALS; the foundation growing from three people in a basement to a multimillion dollar research facility; the family itself; and aspects of ALS separate from any of those things. All of those different story lines called for a much higher shooting ratio.
How many hours did you end up shooting?
STEVE: About 200. But for a project that was shot over four years, that's still not extraordinarily high.
Did you find it took longer to edit than Troublesome Creek?
STEVE: It does take longer to edit, in that you've got a lot of stuff to wade through. And also, in this case, we were following different story lines and trying to do them all justice. At one point we had a really interesting cut that was about 2 hours and 15 minutes, but our feeling was that it was just too much to sustain the emotional arc. The executive producer at German television, one of our backers, said, "You really have three films here, that are individually interesting but no one person could follow them all." Which kind of supported our feeling that the film had to be 90 minutes or less, given the intensity of what you're watching.
What were the three films, and how did you choose between them?
STEVE: One of them was about the family, one was about the foundation and the business of trying to run this non-profit research organization, and part of it was the science. We gave a lot of priority to the family side of it. But we're hoping people will see this film in a lot of different ways. It's partly a topical film about an orphan disease and how people cope with it. But it's also about time and life, and we hope that audiences will find themselves in the film, and see the metaphors that are there for them.
As you approach material in the editing room, do you think about act structure?
JEANNIE: Act structure? No. I tend to be a natural storyteller; it's something I kind of grew up with. I start from the beginning of the footage, and I'm cutting whenever I see any kind of a story. The story might be Wendy, Stephen Heywood's wife, gets tired of watching [their son] Alex try to open his sippy cup and goes over and opens it for him, but there's a whole back and forth between them. I'm probably not a good person to talk to on some level just because I really don't want to think about the big picture until I have all the little pictures together.
Isn't that the same as editing sequences?
JEANNIE: It is, it's making sequences. And I'm stringing them together and then I'll get Steve to come in and we'll watch them together. So that whatever reactions I have already in my mind, he'll have his own. Because he had his own to begin with because he shot them. So we just kind of leapfrog over each other and try to sneak up on whatever is in the material that the other one doesn't see.
In contrast to Troublesome Creek, Steve is the narrator of So Much So Fast, and in addition is occasionally heard and even seen on camera. How did that come about?
STEVE: When filming the men, it worked out better if it was just me alone. If we were both there, Stephen [Heywood]'s focus would get split, and it just wasn't working. So I would shoot them and have these conversations—much more conversations than interviews. Initially I didn't even mic myself, but Jeannie encouraged me to do it. And then, because the conversations took on the importance that they did, she felt strongly that I should be the narrator, to continue that voice and be the audience's access to the story.
You're currently producing a third feature-length documentary, about an artist who's assumed responsibility for her mentally challenged sister. What's it like to create these kinds of films, which you describe as "nonfiction novels" because of their complexify and layering?
STEVE: I remember when we started So Much So Fast, the first time we went out with equipment—after not doing that kind of filming for a long time—we looked at each other: "Are we really going to do this again?" It's a tremendous commitment, and you have to develop this incredible kind of symbiosis with your subjects, where you're getting close to them. On some level you feel kind of parasitic, that you're living off their life in a certain way. In another way you feel invisible because you're filming all of this, but you don't know if they see you as a person or as a someone who's making the film. Those are questions along the way. But the reason to do it is you end up with a kind of film that you can't get any other way.
I think for both Jeannie and me, it's a matter of needing to really get on the inside of something, to be able to tell a story with that detail and deep knowledge. Having wrestled with those issues over that length of time makes for a much deeper film, and there's also the throughline of time, how the world changes over time. As much as we'd like to finish these films faster, they get a tremendous amount of power from showing life unfold.
Any last words of advice on storytelling?
STEVE: Think before you shoot, know what it is you're looking at, and have a sense of what you want a shot to convey. Shots don't just happen; they're an expression that is concocted between the camera person, the subject, and serendipity. And you should always be thinking, "What is it that I want to take out of this scene, what do I want audiences to see?" You're always putting yourself in a seat in the theater when you're shooting, or you should be, and thinking, "What am I revealing? When do I want you to know that this character is sitting over here or that this person is frowning?" And that's a calculation that you're doing both when you're shooting and you're editing. How to structure a scene to reveal things.
JEANNIE: Be respectful of the privacy of who you're covering, especially if you're making personal films. Even if you're doing a very intimate film you can do that. Unless there's some real evil that you're dealing with, I think that people need to be careful and respectful of who they're shooting.
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