Sherman’s March

Time Indefinite

Six O’Clock News

Bright Leaves

Vice: I’ve read that you majored in creative writing as an undergraduate at Brown.

Ross McElwee:

I’m wondering who the literary inspirations on your film work might have been.

I love Look Homeward, Angel. But the language is very ornate and I’m not sure if people want that now.

Bright Leaves

Yeah, that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I get it now.

Well, that’s interesting. Since your films are very personal, do you put a lot of secret messages in them?

Sherman’s March

Steamboat Bill

Right, right. This is going to make me go back and watch your movies with entirely different eyes now. I’m going to become like the conspiracy-theorist Paul-is-dead guy about your films.

Did you move into filmmaking because writing didn’t work out for you?

Another thing that occurred to me is that the writing life can be a very, very insular and often lonely life, and your film work involves a great deal of being social.

Maybe another corollary is the editing room. The writer goes out and gathers material and goes into his garret, and you go out and gather your material and go into editing.

You mentioned still photography sparking something for you. Are there any particular photographers you would name? Southern photographers, perhaps?

Absolutely, especially Cartier-Bresson I think.

Frank and Cartier-Bresson were also influences on William Eggleston. Did his work inspire you? He is a fellow southern artist.

I like his work a lot, of course, but I think I know what you mean.

Perhaps we should talk for just a moment about the writing, the narration, in your films. In your work, we often see these moments where you’re talking directly to the camera about how there’s sort of a lull in the shooting and you’re not sure whether to go here or there or even to keep going at all. You’ll be in a motel room talking to the camera about your bewilderment or your indecision at that moment. Then there’s also your voice-over narration, which sounds like it’s being done during the shooting. Now, do you write while you’re on the road making a movie, or does all the narration get written and recorded as you edit?

Can I ask, did you ever make attempts at what could be called pure cinéma vérité?

Space Coast

Space Coast

The subjective thing.

Yeah.

You really deal with the big themes, as far as I’m concerned: death, family, romance, and love.

Those are the things that people talk about over the course of 40 years of psychoanalysis, and those are the things about which you make films. And I don’t know if it’s possible to grapple with those things in a personal documentary without some element of writing coming into it.

There are many moments in your films where it sounds to me like I’m eavesdropping on something you’re saying to a shrink. Is filmmaking therapeutic for you in the way that analysis might be?

I was going to ask you that.

laughs

Wow. Jungians are kind of cooler than Freudians.

Yeah, and like a lot of art, which is always therapeutic for the creator, it’s very rarely a totally conscious thing like, “I’m going to work on my daddy issues now in this painting.”

One thing that comes across about you in your films is that you often have that movie camera hoisted over your shoulder. There are many scenes of people who are close to you commenting on it or even getting a little tired of it. Do you always shoot with a particular project in mind, or do you just shoot your life knowing that it might become part of a project?

Bright Leaves

That makes a lot of sense. Bright Leaves is in many ways, maybe pervasively, about tobacco, but it’s also very personal.

I’m starting to see your entire body of work as being sort of one big accumulating movie. Do you know what I mean? Sort of like, maybe, the “Up” series by Michael Apted, or a novelist’s journals or something like that. For instance, I watched some of your things out of chronological order. I saw Time Indefinite before I watched Charleen, and so I was seeing the tragic arc of her boyfriend, Jim, in the wrong order. But the interesting thing is that it was almost more moving for me in that way than it might have been to see it in a conventional way.

That’s sort of a tangent, though. I mean, what I’m really asking is—

And since it’s dealing with real life, it’s a very special kind of poignancy. I suppose what I’m getting at is that, since your body of work up to this point has been cumulative, are you locked into that for the rest of your career? Or do you think you ought to branch out and say, “I’m going make a documentary about something that has nothing to do with me”?

It wasn’t that expected?

Sure. A lot of people even in their early 20s know and love that film.

I looked you up on IMDb, and there’s something called In Paraguay listed for 2008, but I can’t find any more information about it.

Because of its personal nature?

On a smaller scale, do you often, when you’re editing a film, find footage that may just go a little bit beyond what you think might be right for public consumption in terms of your private life?

Time Indefinite

Sherman’s March

Yeah, but that’s kind of an act of aggression or jealousy at that point, isn’t it?

Which is fascinating to see.

Oh, but your intentions and those of reality-TV producers are night and day.

Sherman’s March

Absolutely. And I think it would have brought a sort of dullness to the film if we didn’t dislike you at certain points during it, because it’s often very sympathetic to you.

Your film Time Indefinite is all about death and grappling with the idea of mortality. I just turned 34, and I never really feared or worried about death much until my 30s began. And so that film resonates a lot for me now. I guess what I’m looking for is you to reassure me that you stop fearing death a little more as you get out of your 30s.

Ha. But are your feelings regarding mortality the same as they used to be? Do you gain more acceptance as you get older, or do you have the same anxiety you had as a younger man?

Ugh.

It’s very helpful.

Great.

Speaking of things that are dying, have you moved away from film and started to use digital media?

Right, yeah.

It just doesn’t seem real, does it?

Bright Leaves

More expensive than making the transition to video, ultimately.

In Paraguay

How did it look?

That’s what it is. It’s romantic. It’s nostalgic.

That’s good. I think that cinematography in documentary films is often neglected in terms of being commented on, and that’s a shame because there’s a lot of great images in documentary work. A lot of your cinematography is really beautiful. Do you have heroes in terms of documentary cinematographers?

The name is familiar, but I don’t think I’ve seen his work.

Seventeen

Oh my God, yeah, that’s his name? Seventeen is the kids in Gary, Indiana?

I love that movie, but I thought that a woman made it.

It’s hard to find, but I have a pirated DVD of it. I love that movie.

Les Blank

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

The women of Sherman’s March (plus a couple of shots of Ross). Click for enlargements.

There’s a moment in Time Indefinite. It happens when you visit your grandmother in the nursing home. You walk outside to where the car is parked and sort of look across the street and have this quiet moment gazing across the street.

I love that. I thought it was beautiful. And I wonder when you were shooting, did you know you were doing that? Because that was very quick thinking if so.

I think there’s a tree in the left of the frame.

Yeah, exactly. Is it possible to be an artist from the South and not have a little bit of Faulkner in you? I don’t know.

How do you feel about Flannery O’Connor?

That stuff, that kind of southern grotesque, does often color the northerners’ view of southerners.

After so much time living in the North, do you start to lose something southern about you? Do you feel a sense of regret that you’ve lost time that could have been spent in the South? I guess that what I’m really asking is, what’s southern about you?

Yeah.

In my perception, it seems like the South has more of a discernible, unified identity in Americans’ eyes than the North does. There’s a widely accepted idea of a sort of southern temperament. Perhaps it’s a cliché or a stereotype, but there’s often some truth to those things.

That’s pretty good.

There are all these rumors about a feature adaptation of Sherman’s March.

Sherman’s March

Sherman’s March

It’s a risky proposition.

Oh! See, I want to see that more than I want to see the fictionalization.

That’s important. I mean, I don’t know. It scares me a little bit. The only precedent I can think of is the narrative adaptation of Grey Gardens starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

I don’t think I can. I don’t want it in my head. Drew Barrymore as Little Edie? I just don’t think I can do it.

laughs

It was an HBO film. It was made for TV. And let’s not forget the Grey Gardens musical.

Yeah, it did. If you look at Broadway lately, all these shows are recycled from films—everything from Hairspray to Coraline, even The Toxic Avenger. There’s a musical Toxic Avenger!

Yeah. So I feel nervous about the Sherman’s March thing because I think filmmakers need to make some new stuff and stop mining other people’s work. But I’m a grumpy dick.