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1on1 – Talking about our divisions with The Reunited States folks.

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I recently had the opportunity to talk via Zoom with The Reunited States director Ben Rekhi,  and two of the film’s subjects, David and Erin Leaverton, who took a year to travel the US and talk with people about our divisions. For more on the film, see the Screenfish review or visit the film’s website to view the trailer. The film is now available an VOD.

Ben, where did you start in putting this film together and gathering the people for the different perspectives you wanted to get?

Ben Rekhi: I started this film about two and a half years ago, when I saw Susan Bro giving a talk. I was really struck by the fact that she was on the front lines of division and had lost a child to the violence, but she was able to come out the other side and talk about the need for conversation to avoid further violence. It really struck me that this was someone who had a voice of reason in a time when everyone was shouting at each other. She also had the moral authority to do that because she had suffered so publicly this loss. So, I approached her and I said “I don’t know how or when, but I want to be a part of helping to tell your story, because I think it can really help other people at this time. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s happening in politics and you have this clarity to articulate it from the heart.” She, after a few conversations, allowed me to follow her with the camera and start filming. That was the beginning of the film.

The second piece of that was meeting Mark Gerzon, the author of the book The Reunited States of America. I’d come up with the title thinking it was pretty original, but when I Googled it I realized someone already had that title and written a book about it, but it was also on the same topic. Mark had been studying polarization for thirty years and had this wisdom that was relevant for those of us who only woke up to it over the last several years. I met him and he introduced me to the other three storylines. I said I want to follow someone on election day in the midterms, and he said Greg Orman. I wanted to understand what young people can do about division, he told me about Steven Olikara. He called me out of the blue one day and said, “In all my years of doing this work, I’ve never come across anything as extraordinary as this family, the Leavertons, that are in an RV right now crisscrossing the country trying to find out what’s dividing us.” So I called them and as soon as I heard them speak, I was struck by their wisdom and clarity about what they had discovered. And especially being from a more conservative background and being willing to travel outside of their bubble and outside their comfort zone, in black community, in native reservations, in border towns. It really captured the human side of division because of these face-to-face encounters. To hear them really let people’s stories in and have a heart connection, it’s really emotional. It’s not easy. You’re hearing some tragic stories, that helps transform how you see. Not just as individuals but entire communities of people.

The film wants to show optimism about the possibility of overcoming the divisions the country is facing. How did that optimism hold up for each of you as the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol took place?

Erin Leaverton: That was a hard day. I think for anybody who desires to see our country divided, even if it didn’t diminish your optimism, it’s grieving to see these things with your eyes and to behold what we’re willing to do to one another.

David Leaverton: For me it was a very predictable outcome of the path we’ve been on for a long time. This is a path that’s pretty natural when you begin to dehumanize, when you begin to otherize, us versus them, good versus evil. These are some of the natural things that are going to happen. It didn’t diminish my hope in our future from the stand point of “is all hope lost because people stormed the capital?” No, but I believe it shows me the importance of the work of peacemaking, of bridge building, because people’s lives are being lost in this struggle.

BR: I was pretty surprised and shocked. I think that people expected violence to breakout around the election and when the results came—at voting stations, maybe in the streets. So there was kind of a collective sigh of relief when that didn’t happen. Like “Oh my God, our democratic institutional held up. People didn’t result to violence.” So when it happened at the beginning of the year, especially on the steps of the Capitol, attempting to kill Congressmen, I never would have seen that coming. It was a turning point that has made things harder in this field because, even for myself, I’ve been really trying to build bridges and this is going to make it harder, but have I also been missing blind spots about how deep this goes? So it’s forced me to do a lot of self-reflection. The distinction that has been helpful for me is that this was a small group of people—not small but several thousand, compared to several tens of millions—that would condone this, while most people would not. That distinction is important, but it’s harder to make that distinction for a lot of people. Right now, it’s kind of been a point of no return for a lot of people that you cannot get along with the lies. You’re an idiot if you think you can. In that regard we are in uncharted territory. But personally, it has not shaken my optimism this as we move forward. It shows the depth and the long game that it’s going to take to do that.

On a more positive side, did you see the Jeep commercial with Bruce Springsteen in the Superbowl?

BR:  What a coincidence! What luck! It’s the right place, right time. You can’t buy that kind of messaging.

DL: I can’t believe they used the words “The ReUnited States of America”. Of all the things that they could have put on there. It’s just wild. Who doesn’t like Bruce Springsteen? That’s pretty awesome. It was a great commercial. What I felt was that there’s a market for healing. There is a market for…

EL:  … common ground, finding a place where you can meet.

DL: That was encouraging to me that this isn’t kind of a splinter group of us weirdos talking about this stuff. These are kind of major iconic American brands that see the importance of this conversation.

David and Erin, a good part of the film is your journey, not just physically, but ideologically. How would you characterize that personal journey?

DL: I was blind, but now I see.

EL: I would say I was blind, but now I am starting to see.

DL: That’s probably more accurate.

EL: And that doesn’t mean I was a Republican and now I’m almost a Democrat. There seems to be a lot of confusion around like a political conversion taking place by leaving your bubble and traveling all fifty states. We abandoned our identities as Republicans because we found out that no one can be summed up in a political ideology. Humans are too beautiful and too complex and too infinitely valuable to be summed up in such overly simplistic term. So that’s what we mean by we’re no longer Republicans, is that we now are beginning to see we’ve come into a deeper understanding of the beauty of our fellow human beings.

How much resistance did you run into trying to find people to talk together?

DL: About the only resistance we really found was from our fellow conservatives. That was really surprising to us. We rarely found, I think I can count them on one hand, resistance from people who were kind of outside of my tribe. When we tried to connect with people of our own tribe, or our former tribe, whatever you want to call it, did we find that kind of level of resistance.  I think there something that when you kind of step out against the team, it’s something really sensitive, because so many of us have identified in this country by our political affiliations. And if you come from us and step outside of that, boy, it’s kind of like the unforgiveable sin.

EL: We were upsetting the apple cart of our upbringing, and it made it very hard to stick your toe back in and say, “Can we talk? We have some questions.” We had a lot of resistance there. It was really interesting and surprising at the time.

What do you see as the foundation for the division we face?

DL: That was so much of our focus, I think. We started this journey thinking that the problem in America was that we were politically divided. That was really our hypotheses, that if we can just go to different parts of the country and host a dinner for a few Republicans and a few Democrats we could kind of see each other as human, important, and realize our differences aren’t really that big of a deal, and by the time dessert hit we would kind of heal that divide. What we realized was kind of our political divisions were a symptom of something a whole lot deeper. So for us, along this journey, was constantly asking this question: how did we get this way? Going deeper and deeper. What’s causing this? What’s causing that? And it led us back before the founding of the country. It led us into the understanding of the rise of Christendom and colonization and it got into our story of whose land do we stand upon today and how was that land acquired? I think when you build something on land that was gained often through the shedding of innocent blood, whatever house you build upon that foundation is going to have a tough time making it. So for me, our solution isn’t to fix the brokenness of the last two or three presidencies when we’ve gotten divided, but I really think if we want to heal this land, we need to go into the very foundations of the building blocks of the United States of America and really look at those. “How did we come to be the good, the bad, and the ugly?” through a process of acknowledgement and truth, through a process of justice and conciliation. I think there’s a journey to healing. It’s not an easy and it’s not a short one.

BR: I would echo that, that the foundations of the country were built on genocide of native peoples and slavery. So, there’s kind of a fundamental split between what the ideals of our founding fathers and documents were, and the contradiction of what was actually happening. On the political differences, it seems over the last forty years that we’ve seen a steady rapid polarization increasing. A lot of that has to do with the end of the cold war and the loss of a common enemy that we used to have. This kind of superpower that was our existential threat untied us together, and once we lost that external enemy, we turned to our enemies inside. Then on our same side our policy and democracy reform has been slow to keep up with the changes. So a lot of political leaders are incentivized to move to the extremes to win elections and win primaries. There’s sort of a coupling of all these things that has created the atmosphere that we’re in now. The question is there is emergency crisis management—how do we put out the house that’s on fire?—while we also think of longer-term solutions.

What are the next steps you will be taking personally, or that you hope to see happen in a more general sense?

BR: We’re really hopeful that the film can be a small part of the conversation of turning things around, and saying we all have a role to play in this. We’re all either part of the problem or part of the solution of the problem of division. We think it’s so easy—and I was like this—it’s easy to say those other people on the other side, they’re the ones being unreasonable. But we end up throwing a lot of gas on the fire—in social media, in our friend groups—by not taking any ownership of our own side of the street. The narrative needs to shift to one of what can I be doing differently? How can I heal my personal relationships, my family relationships, people I’ve fallen out of favor with? So there’s this moment now where it feels like there’s a ground swell of awareness after the Capitol attack and with a new administration, like them or not, for a sense of unity, and trying to set that tone in words and in actions, people might debate that. But there’s a realization that this isn’t working. So all the solutions should be on the table because there are a lot of people digging in their heels and saying “until we agree on the facts we can’t move forward”. Or “Until they take the blame, we can’t move forward”. That is going to continue to make it even worse. There’s 300 million people in this country. How do we each take responsibility because as citizens it’s not just the rights that we have, we have responsibilities, because freedom isn’t free. We have to actually take action where we are with what we have right now. That’s something we have a choice over.

EL: I agree. I think we’re at a crossroads in many ways, in which we each individually have a choice to make. That choice, I think, collectively speaking, will determine where we go from here as a nation. There’s so much anger and animosity. I recently heard someone say, “It’s easier to be angry than it is to be hurt.” I think we have to decide to be courageous enough to feel the pain of the moment and engage in that pain in order to move into the actual choice of do we want to be united states? Is that what we want as a nation? We’re at a watershed moment, I think, where we get to decide. I don’t think a President can say we’re united, and poof it magically appears. We all have work to do in our hearts and our minds and with our words. This is like Kindergarten 101. Do you want to be kind? Or do you want to be mean? In some sense we’re actually complicating something that’s actually simple. It’s what do you want? We have to decide that as a nation. It’s not about are we all going to agree on the facts. We’ve never agreed on the facts. That’s never been part of our ethos. Disagreement is kind of woven into the fabric of who we are as a nation. We’ve forgotten how to do that with love and honor. If we don’t find our way back to that place, I think we’re on a very dangerous path moving forward. We all have a decision to make.

The Spirit of the Story: 1on1 with Casey Affleck (OUR FRIEND)

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It’s fair to say that Casey Affleck understands that the soul of a story can say more than the sum of its parts.

Known for strong performances in such films as A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Manchester By The Sea (for which he won Best Actor at the Academy Awards), Affleck frequently adds an emotional depth to his characters that helps their fictional stories feel authentic. However, with his latest film Our Friend, star Affleck had the opportunity to explore the real-life journey of writer Matthew Teague, a man whose life is turned upside-down due to a family tragedy. As thrilled as he was to work with the rest of the team behind the film, he recalls that he was also very excited about the soul of the story itself.

“Two things really appealed to me about this project,” he begins. “One was the people who were involved. I liked Gabriela [Cowperthwaite] as a director. I didn’t know Jason [Segel] or Dakota [Johnson] but I was interested in working with them and it turned out to be great. The other was just the spirit of the story, which has to do with sort of selflessness and being of service to others, showing up for people in our lives, even when it’s hardest. Somebody said that a great friend is somebody who shows up when you need them, even when being there is the last place in a world that they want to be. This is a story about me and Dakota, our family finding ourselves in a crisis and Jason Segal’s character showing up in just that way.”

After his wife, Nicole (Dakota Johnson) has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Matthew Teague (Casey Affleck) struggles to balance meeting her needs and raising their daughters. Seeking to help, close friend to the family Dane (Jason Segal) offers to move in for a short stay to help Matthew get back on his feet. However, as time marches forward, the lines between friendship and family begin to blur as Dane’s temporary gesture extends into an indefinite living arrangement at great personal cost. 

Though the trio had never worked together before, the chemistry between Affleck, Johnson and Segel is something to behold. In virtually every scene, each of the film’s leads feels emotionally present, creating something truly special onscreen. 

“I had gotten close to working with Jason once on movie but [we] didn’t end up doing it,” Affleck recalls. “I really think he’s a great, great big talent and a sweet guy. Dakota has been sort of on my radar for a while because she’d been just doing really interesting choices that seemed unpredictable. She’ll be in 50 Shades of Gray, Peanut Butter Falcon and Suspiria. She’ll be popping up in places and just seemed like there’s an interesting person there.”

Often times, bringing an actual person to life onscreen can create an added pressure to ensure that you represent their life story and mannerisms authentically. Asked if there’s anything in particular that he wanted people to know about Matthew Teague, Affleck felt that his most important job was not to try to ‘impersonate’ him but instead to honour the power of his story onscreen.

“I don’t really have an agenda about what people know about Matt Teague,” says Affleck. “Matt’s a writer and a nice guy and he brought this story to the public. He wrote an article, brought that article to a screenwriter and he shepherded the whole project all the way through. I was there to just to play a role as an actor. I told Matt on the very first day that I met him that he should not expect to see the movie and feel like he was looking in a mirror or something. It would be different than he remembered. The events in the movie might some way not be exactly like he remembered, but we would all try very hard to make sure that the spirit of the story was communicated. So, I want people not necessarily to know something about Matt, but to know something about what this story says about all of us.” 

Furthermore, in any biographical project, Affleck also understands that the person onscreen is never a full realization of their actual character. 

“In the telling of a story, people are changed,” he explains. “You’re not doing an impersonation. You’re not trying to say this is exactly as someone else is. I believe that the person you see onscreen is a combination of the imagination of the writer, the director, the actor, and the editor, et cetera.” 

In an interesting way, the fact that the film is based on friendship seems almost countercultural. At a time when the term ‘friend’ is most often associated with Facebook connections, Our Friend highlights the meaning of the word in all its fullness. Even so, instead of changing his views on the expression, Affleck’s experience on the film has reinforced what he already believed a friend should be.

“I don’t think that it has new meaning for me,” he explains. “I think that being a part of this movie was a way to contribute to something that expressed what I already felt about friendship. So, it’s more that I got to bring something that I was already sort of carrying to the movie and share that. I think it’s a funny sounding word ‘friend’ but it’s such a beautiful idea. I’d love to have a longer conversation about how and why human beings form relationships and what purpose they serve and how we can serve that purpose. That’s interesting to me and I really do feel like I love the spirit of what this movie is, especially around that topic.” 

Having become increasingly selective in his projects over the course of his career, Affleck found a healthy spirit within this story that was hard to resist. With its emphasis on healing after suffering, he feels that Our Friend is particularly special in the way that it offers a sense of hope to the audience.

“I used to think that, after [working on] a movie, I would walk away and just leave it behind completely,” Affleck points out. “Sometimes it feels like that, but I think that when you put a lot of yourself into a movie, sometimes the movie puts a lot back in you. For that reason, I’ve become a lot more careful about the kinds of projects that I choose to be a part of. When I was younger, almost out of necessity, I just took whatever. Whoever would hire me, I would take that job because that’s how I made a living. It is still how I make my living and I have to work, but I try to be as careful as I can about the spirit of the movie and the spirit of the part. Something like this, I feel like I can live with. I liked the message of this. Even though that the movie is will break your heart, it will also it’ll repair your heart too and sort of fill you back up. I think then when people watch the movie, that’s the experience that they have. They leave feeling sort of emptied and refilled and I’m okay with that.” 

Our Friend is available on VOD on Friday, January 22, 2021.

To hear our conversation with Casey Affleck, click here.

Good News: 1on1 with Paul Greengrass (News of the World)

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I recently had the chance to take part via Zoom in a roundtable interview with Paul Greengrass to discuss his film News of the World. The film tells the story of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an itinerant newsreader, who is tasked with returning Johanna, a young girl raised by the Kiowa, to her relatives. For more on the film see our review.

The first question dealt with the Western genre and which conventions were interesting to him.

I grew up with westerns as a boy. They played on television nonstop when I was a kid in the UK. I never ever thought I’d get to make one because they don’t make them very often and it never really occurred to me, to be honest to try. Three or four years ago I got involved in a Netflix project called Five Came Back. That was the story of the five great Hollywood directors who went to World War II from being glittering Hollywood successes and came back after their experiences in combat changed people. If you’ve not seen it, it’s very superb, I must say. I didn’t make it. They got five directors working today—Spielberg did Wyler, Coppola did Huston, I think. I did John Ford because I studied John Ford as a young man and I revered his films. So, I spent a very interesting month three or four years ago rewatching all his films. So, he was very much in my mind.

Then it’s strange how serendipitous film making is. A few years later they sent me the novel and I read it and I thought “This is really interesting because it’s The Searchers in reverse.” This is the John Ford story but turned the other way around. Instead of being the hero’s search for the girl out in the wilderness, the hero finds the girl and is going to take her home. I remember seeing that in the novel straightaway and thinking that sort of connected to John Ford. So, in my boyhood love of westerns, I thought, “I’m going to do it.”

The genre is a quintessential American genre, of course. But it’s much more than that really. It’s mythic. What is a western? A western is a kind of intimate drama, generally about identity. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who do we fear we’ve become? Who do we wish we could be? Various questions of identity played out against a vast, unforgiving desolate landscape. That’s a western in my book. At a time when America was becoming America. That’s what I tried to do. I tried in my way to make it feel contemporary, feel as if it bore on today. It’s set in 1870. It was a time of great division in the shadow of the Civil War. I think many of the feelings of bitter division and need for healing resonate with us today.

Communication (reading the news, interpreting the news, the struggle the Captain and Johanna had communicating) is a key theme in the film. He was asked about the role of communication in the film.

I think obviously the most striking thing from the movie is this is a world before television, before radio, before social media, before movies, in a remote place where the only entertainment, probably of the year, is when the newsreader comes to town with a couple of newspapers and reads his snippets of news and stories. In that way, he’s trying in his way to heal people—to heal the wounds of his community. Because storytelling fundamentally is a healing act. It’s what I do, what I’ve always done in my life.

We’re a storytelling animal. We tell stories to each other in church, after church, around the hearth, around the kitchen table, in cafes and bars, out on street corners, in our movie houses, in our theaters, in our concert halls. That’s what we do. The stories that we tell reflect who we are and draw our audience together with us. Sometimes they can divide us, but essentially storytelling is an act of connection.

That’s why I love that character, because he’s engaged. What has he got? He’s got nothing; he’s lost everything. All he has is a small satchel and a couple of old newspapers. But he has that most precious healing power of storytelling. As he goes on, as he goes farther down the road with the little girl, you see the strength of his storytelling more and more. Of course, the communication, that at first he can’t have with that little girl, the communication grows through the film. People can transcend language, can transcend their past; people can transcend the pain of the past, the pain of division. In the end we can heal. We just have to find the road to belonging, the road to where we think we ought to be. That’s why I made the film. 

Because I’m a parent. I’ve got three daughters. I’ve got two sons too. But my daughters were very much on my mind as I made this film. I wanted to make a family film, I suppose. I’ve dealt with, in some of my films, tough subjects. And I’ve done some straight entertainment. I wanted to make a family film that you could bring your children to, and it would feel like a healing story.

Referring to his earlier comments about the western’s themes being in conversation with today, how does he see the film being relevant to the things we’re seeing in the headlines today?

I want to preface it by saying you should never start a film—you should never try to tell a story by having in the back of your mind, “I’m going to tell this story so that you think x or you think y.” If you do that, you’re not telling a story, you’re lecturing people, you know? You have to start by which character do I really love, or characters that I want to spend time with? Which characters am I really interested in their destinies and what they want and where they need to get to? What story is really going to entertain me? What can I do to make this film an experience that will reward anyone who gives you the privilege of spending two hours of their time? That’s how you have to start if you want to tell a story and engage with people. In many ways that really what brought me to the film.

In Kidd, I loved the character of Kidd, because he exists, of course, before television or movies and all the rest of it. But how he approaches his world is how I think of storytelling, in my business. When he starts, he says “I want to take you away from your hard lives, just for an hour or two.” He’s going to tell a story and he’s going to entertain them; he’s going to tell them some local news, about things they really need to know. In this case about the meningitis epidemic. Interestingly, when I wrote that, that was well before the pandemic. Now you watch the film…. Of course, in 1870 meningitis and cholera were a daily threat in many many communities. Other than war, pestilence was the next thing.

So, it did become eerily more contemporary as we went along. But you don’t start like that. You start by saying “How can I tell this story in a way that people are going to want to go on that journey with those characters?” And then you have to ask yourself, “What do I want to feel?” I wanted to feel that they got to a healing place. And they do. They were characters who suffered much in their lives separately, and had perhaps not been able to face up to it. This journey is going to enable them individually to face up to what has happened to them and then enable them to move on in this odd family shape at the end, where they’re a family unit, oddly they have become that. I love that about the film. It’s about overcoming divisions, overcoming barriers of language, barriers of experience, and making a new start.

It was noted that Captain Kidd brought the news, Greenglass was asked to comment on the scene where Kidd is in a town where the town boss only wants his version of the news to be read.

Yeah, that’s quite contemporary isn’t it, that? Let me scroll back a little bit. The newsreader is such a great character. Of course, newsreaders, guys who wandered around from town to town reading the news, that really had a gospel root really. In my country, in the UK, those were the Methodist preachers, who emerged. They didn’t go into the churches, because they were non-conforming, but they gave their sermons out in the open air outside. Or course as they went around, from community to community, then later the same in America, they brought the Good News, that’s what they did. Slowly but surely, the Good News would become the news. They’d bring bits of local news, then federal news. So, it emerged with a sort of moral element to it. That’s to do with truth, isn’t it? Reverence for the truth has been deeply, deeply present.

I’m not American, but I’ve had a life long love affair with America. I first came to your great country when I was 18 years old. I love my country and I love America as much. Our countries in a way have a deep historical reverence for the truth. It’s an important concept, I think, in your affairs and ours. Of course, in times of bitter division, as we know in 1870, in the shadow of the Civil War, the concept of the truth was contested. That’s what happened, you know? One of the themes of the piece, I suppose, is Kidd having to confront that and standing up for the truth as he sees it. I think that is true of journalism today. It’s a noble trade, the trade of journalism. It’s vital to a democracy. It’s one of the ways we exchange opinions and express our disagreements. And ideas contend with each other in the public square of our newspapers and television screens. That’s called democracy. There has to be an underlying share idea of the truth. In times of strife, that gets tested. I think it was tested then, and I think it’s being tested right now in my country and in yours—and in many other countries, too, by the way.

He was asked about the spiritual journey he imagined for Captain Kidd, who felt the things that had happened to him were a judgment for things he had done during the Civil War.

I think that Kidd is a character who’s haunted. You learn as the piece goes along that he’s been reading the news for five years since the end of the war. You learn that fairly early on. You learn that he’s got a wife in San Antonio, and you’re not quite sure what the story is with that. His whole demeanor is haunted. He’s haunted and frozen and unable to connect with anybody. He’s just like the Ancient Mariner. He wanders from place to place, doing the best he can with the power of storytelling. But his soul is broken. That’s my reading of it. Slowly, through the burden, the responsibility of this little girl and going on this dangerous journey, slowly but surely, he’s healed; he comes to realize that he has to face his past. The full story is only revealed at the end when you realize that he feels that his wife’s death, the cause of his grief, was a judgment on everything that he had seen and done. I think that’s quite a common feeling people have as they get toward the end of their lives. You reflect upon what happened, and how things went, and you repent of the mistakes you made, and you hope to get to a better place. We all hope for redemption, don’t we? And that’s what Kidd hopes for. In a movie you can give it, maybe in a way in the real life you can’t. You can have a character find the grace that they’re desperately looking for. That’s what you find when he goes back for the little girl at the end.

Continuing on the idea of grief, and including the corporate grief of Texas under Reconstruction, how does one portray the idea of coming out of grief, especially looking at the world today?

The answer is that is what I was thinking about a lot before I started to make this film. You think about your own children, you think about the world they’re coming into as young adults, and you reflect on the divisions and bitterness in the world, and you want it to be better for them. But it’s going to be their journey, of course, to get there. They have to take their own journey, don’t they, to get to their destiny.

When I read this story, of the lonely newsreader, he meets this lost little girl, the kidnapped girl, and takes her back to her surviving family, it spoke to me like the journey itself was a journey out of division into healing, out of grief into grace, if I can use that expression, where you get the opportunity to have a new start, to turn the page, to grow again, to deal with the pain and the grief and look at it in the face and move on. I loved that about the story because I think Kidd feels very much as we are where we are today, all of us. Whatever we think about the world, that doesn’t matter. I think 99.9% of it, in your great country, mine, everywhere, wants better days to come—particularly in this pandemic. So, this film, with these two characters in the middle of Texas 150 years ago seems to me to take us on that journey.

News of the World is available on PVOD now.

Everything is Spiritual: 1on1 with Pete Docter and Dana Murray (SOUL)

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When you write about the afterlife, you’re definitely wading into dangerous waters.

Produced by Dana Murray and directed by Pete Docter, Soul tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle-school band teacher who yearns for something more. Passionate about jazz music, Gardner wants to be on stage yet he feels stuck. After his sudden death, Joe meets 22 (Tina Fey), a soul who has yet to begin her life on Earth and seems unable to find her ‘spark’. Together, the two fight to help Joe reclaim his live while also helping 22 to discover why life is worth living in the first place. 

Known for writing some of Pixar’s ‘headiest’ work (pun intended) such as Inside Out, Up and Monsters Inc., Pete Docter is certainly no stranger to the obscure. However, even for Docter, Soul’s interest in the afterlife provides one of the more complex conceptions ever dealt with by the company.

As they began to develop their visual representation of the Great Beyond, Docter understandably found the task to be an incredible challenge for himself and his team.

 “The afterlife was especially like danger, danger, danger,” he remembers. “There’s a lot of pitfalls and things that we could have stuck our foot in by accident… I think one of the first things we did was talk to a lot of different religious consultants like pastors, theologians, rabbis [and] shaman. We tried to understand from every angle how people across time have understood the soul. What does it look like? Are there any clues to us in terms of the design that we can use? We actually ended up staying away from the afterlife. There’s of course, the sort of cliché of going towards the bright light that we did.” 

“There was an early script where I actually wrote in the voice of God. I was thinking [that] if we’re talking about ‘Why am I here? Why am I not getting what I want?’, then it’s sort of a Job-like story. And I thought it’d be fun to have never referred to him or her. In fact, I thought it was horribly clever that every line would be spoken by someone else. So, it would be a woman, a kid, all ethnicities and races. But that was one of the first things to cut and probably good because the characters—like us—have to figure things out themselves, as opposed to be told.”

Of course, any conversation surrounding the afterlife leads to discussions about the nature of faith. Despite its exploration of the hereafter, Docter feels that Soul’s system of belief echoes more of the classic philosophers than it does theologians.

“I feel like obviously, beyond Christianity, I think a major goal of any faith is to try to bring sense for people in their lives,” contends Docter. “The idea of how do I know what I’m supposed to do. Am I making the right decisions? All those things are complicated and it’s super helpful to have help along the way. I actually feel like it’s maybe more of a philosophical film than a theological one. Essentialism, the idea that I was born to do this, [is] straight out of Aristotle or Plato. Then, we get to counter with the humor of 22 is for nihilism, the sort of ultimate meaninglessness of it all.

“I think where we come to in the end is existentialism, like a Soren Kierkegaard kind of thing of, ‘Hey, it’s not just meant to be localized over here and then the rest of my life happens.’ All of life is spiritual. Everything you do contributes to who you are as a person and so, the overall meaning of your life. I still struggle with that daily but I feel like having the chance to work on this film was a great reminder daily of how I can be bringing my full self into everything, being more present and… really trying to be. It’s tough because you have to balance that with [the fact that] the movie has to get done. I can’t stand here and talk about philosophy all day but it has made me more grateful and appreciative and desiring [to] practice that. Because… it’s not a personality attribute. It’s not something you’re given. You have to exercise every day, at least in my case.”

“I think, to me, faith and fate are really interconnected,” adds producer Dana Murray. “This year, especially, you just have to [realize that] I’m not in charge. I have to go and trust that my faith and fate that it’ll all work out. That’s threaded into the film, but also just timely of when it’s coming out, trusting in that.” 

One of the most unique aspects of the film is its presentment of Black culture. As the first depiction of an African-American lead character within Pixar’s canon, Joe Gardner was an exciting prospect for the company. Understanding that any portrayal of race deserved to be handled with the utmost care and sensitivity, Murray ensured that as many voices as possible were consulted so that Soul could visually provide the most authentic representation possible.

“We took it on as a huge responsibility to portray Joe and the rest of the cast [as] truthful and authentic,” she explains. “I think that 22 walking in Joe’s shoes is really special because we got to go into these Black spaces, like the barbershop and the tailor shop with Joe’s mom. I think that Joe is going through something that’s very universal and something that I think all of us, if we haven’t felt in our life, probably will at some point. I think he’s a character that so many people can connect to. Culturally, we wanted to make the black community proud. So, we brought on a lot of help. We had a ton of consultants and a culture trust and [then, there’s] our co-director and writer Kemp Power. All these voices were such a huge part in making these characters who they were. It was very important to us to portray them in a truthful way.”

“In fact, we, I think our initial concern was about religion,” Docter responds. “The longer term and the bigger concern became more about race and representing culture because there are a lot of pitfalls and things that we didn’t even know [that] we didn’t know. So, [there was] long learning there [for us[.”

Having said this, Docter recognizes that it was never the original intent for Soul to specifically depict Black culture in its story-telling. Even so, once that came into view, he also believes that it created incredible opportunities for learning that made the film’s development a richer experience for everyone involved.

“We didn’t set out to make the first African-American character,” Docter recalls. “It was really out of the decision that this guy who kind of reflects the artist’s journey should be a jazz musician and one of our consultants said, ‘Oh, jazz, you could more accurately call black improvisational music. It grew out of the African-American culture.‘ And we thought, it’s only right then to have our main character reflect that. As soon as we made that decision, I don’t think I knew how little I didn’t know. There was a lot that we needed help with. And [co-director] Kemp Powers, as Dana mentioned, was formative in bringing a lot of those details. But we also had extensive cultural consultants as well. People talking just about the black experience. People talking about music. We got to meet and work with Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones, [who are] these living legends, which was just fascinating and mind blowing. It was a huge responsibility that we knew that we wanted to portray this life of this man as accurately as we could, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because the movie gets better when you talk about those things in an accurate, specific way. Strangely, I think it becomes more universal the more specific it is. So, we had a lot of the benefit of a lot of really great people that helped us. It was a great learning experience.” 

Speaking of 2020, because the film features characters in ‘holding patterns’ with their lives, there’s also an aspect of Soul that connects with the current pandemic. Although the film went into production years ago, Docter also feels like the story resonates in new ways in light of today’s circumstances.

“I think it sort of turned out that way,” reflects Docter. “We started at five years ago and the world was a different place, but a lot of the things that we were investigating, like basically why are we waking up in the morning? What are we doing with our time? Those, I think, are things that we’re maybe asking ourselves more now than we do in normal times. Maybe that’s not always good. I think there’s some value to asking those questions. That was our hope really from the get-go… It’s not like we ever hoped to answer the question of what is life all about. That’s ridiculous to think that you could but, at the very least, we hoped that we would incite some good conversations and make people say, ‘Okay, we got to go get some coffee and talk about this’. (Or, now sit on zoom, I guess, and talk about it.)”

In addition, another fascinating theme embedded within the film is it’s conversation surrounding what it means to know one’s calling. Unlike other Disney projects that encourage you to ‘follow your dreams’, Soul takes a more grounded approach to the idea. In fact, Docter’s script even suggests that over-emphasizing the importance of our ‘dreams’ may be limiting to our ‘spark’.

“That was one of the great joys that came with [it],” he beams. “I think there is, oftentimes, a narrative [of] ‘find what you love, do it, and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ That’ll lead to happiness and fulfillment. Well, no, it doesn’t work like that. There are times of intense joy and fulfillment, but it’s not the answer to everything. So, it was really exciting as a storyteller because I think everybody believes so strongly in that narrative that, when we don’t give Joe the happiness and fulfillment that he was expecting, it’s kind of shocking to people. I don’t know that we really ever pulled this off but the hope was that the word ‘spark’ would be reversed in a way. At the beginning, Joe assumes, like hopefully the audience, that [his] spark is the thing you love and your passion, like music or a science, or whatever those specific things [are]. But, in the end, spark really means life. You know that your job is not to just do this one thing, but your job is to live in all the complexity and nuance that that entails. So, I hope that came across, but that was the intention.”

Since 1995’s release of Toy Story, Pixar has continuously offered though-provoking projects that excite the minds of people the world over. Asked what it is that he finds so stirring about these films, Docter highlights the unexpected impact that these stories have on the audience.

“I guess it’s just wanting to reflect reality or my experience of it,” Docter explains. “When I started in animation, it was all about the joy that I got out of it. Now, I realize that one of the great joys of it is the ability for Dana and I and the rest of our crew to connect with people we will never meet in parts of the world that we will never go. Through the work that we do, we have this amazing ability to connect people. I think animation has a wonderful ability (and I guess, filmmaking and storytelling in general) to allow the viewers to step into somebody else’s shoes and experience life from a perspective that they have not been in themselves. So, those are the most important things for me is just representing the world as it sort of seems to me and that I’m struggling with in hopes that you will see yourself in there as well.”

“Sometimes we don’t even know [the impact it will have],” echoes Murray. “I remember, after Inside Out, getting letters and stories from people like psychologists who are working with traumatized children. The only way these children could express themselves is by using the dolls or stuffies, like the characters of all the emotions. That was kind of like crazy to hear because you just you don’t know how these are going to impact people until afterwards. While you’re making them, you’re so focused and busy doing it that it’s not until later sometimes that you can take it in.” 

Despite the film’s difficult topics such as the afterlife, Murray explains that she has been thrilled with the types of questions that Soul inspires within her own young children.

“We both have kids. Mine are younger, Pete’s are kind of young adults now,” Murray points out. “So, my kids just saw the film and I think the conversations that I hope are happening are happening. I think the things that they really connect [with] are discovering this great before, because it’s really interesting. We all like to kind of think about where we came from and where we got our personalities. So, that’s been a huge topic. Then, also the things like their spark. They’re trying to figure out what are the things that I really love doing? What am I interested in? They’ve [also] really leaned into the music, which is really cool, [especially] the jazz music and the Trent and Atticus score. But they’re not asking about the midlife crisis. So, we’re definitely having the conversations that I hoped we would be having. I think kids are really smart and they ask big questions so there’s a lot in there for them.” 

“It’s something that we talked about. Dana and I worried about it but I think that, in a way, doing Inside Out was a kind of boot camp for this movie,” Docter continues. “That was pretty abstract. What we found was, if you make it visual, then everybody gets it. If it’s about words, you’re going to miss some people. But visually and through action, ‘this character wants this but this is in the way’. Now, I can understand everything. That’s takes a long time to do but we have an amazing group of very talented people who assisted us and actually just did all the work. They didn’t assist us or anything. They did the work.” 

With his ability to make even the murkiest of concepts accessible to children and adults, Docter argues that he never begins with any particular audience in mind when he starts to write.

“Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘Pick somebody and write for them.’ That’s not been my experience,” he states. “I guess, at the beginning, I was writing more just for myself. ‘Ooh, what’s fun? What do I want to play with?’ Then, along the way, Dana will say something about her kids [and I decide that] we need to write for her kids. So, it’s almost like building up layers as we go. I want something just selfishly that is going to excite me and connect with other folks that I talk with. But then I’m also knowledgeable that my kids and Dana’s kids and all these different people are going to see it. So, it’s not really a simple answer I guess, but it is almost like switching the channel a couple of times as we go, sometimes even daily, to make sure we’ve got something there for everybody.”

Soul is currently streaming on Disney+.

To hear our conversation with writer/director Pete Docter and producer Dana Murray, click here.

John Dower Pursues the Mystery of D.B. Cooper

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This undated artist’ sketch shows the skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper from recollections of the passengers and crew of a Northwest Airlines jet he hijacked between Portland and Seattle on Thanksgiving eve in 1971.

When Kenny Daglish made the transition from Celtic in Scotland to Liverpool in the English Premier League, John Dower’s Scottish father found his European football allegiance transitioning, too. Over the years, the Dower family avidly followed their team, attending the miracle win in Istanbul in 2005 and now enjoying the latest spoils of success under manager Jurgen Klopp, who has led them to Champions League and Premier League titles. But don’t confuse John Dower’s fandom with partiality as the unblinking eyes of a documentarian.

“I’d just love to tell the story of the man who I’m deeply in love with, Jurgen Klopp, who has done extraordinary things in a short amount of time,” he shared via ZOOM from England. “But directors are coldhearted assassins, and I put aside my love when it comes to filming. It would be great to hang out with the guys, but I’m not signing on for a film where the director doesn’t have the final cut. Besides, the best sports dramas are the ones where you don’t really see the sports. The film can’t replicate the drama of the game.”

Dower has done sports stories before, like his documentary Thrilla in Manila, but his latest looks into the legend surrounding D.B. Cooper. While other films had been made trying to investigate what really happened on November 24, 1971, Dower’s look at the hijacker who jumped out of a Boeing 727 with two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money investigates those who believe they know what really happened – because they know the real Cooper.

“We’re not trying to solve it,” explains Dower. “The FBI have tried unsuccessfully for fifty years so how is a guy from South London? If you’re at a pub telling the story, ‘It’s stormy night, it’s Thanksgiving Eve, a guy in a suit and sunglasses gets on a plane.’ It’s not dramatic enough because it’s one of the most passive hijackings ever!”

“He’s so polite, he might as well have been English.”

Dower knows that it would have been easy to mock or satirize the different individuals he interviewed for the film, each who is sure they knew the real D.B. Cooper. Of course they can’t all be right, but their passion for what they believe is captured, fairly, on camera by a documentarian who is more than willing to tell their stories.

“I respect their belief in their stories,” says the director. “Now, I’m not equating myself to him, but when [Steven] Spielberg was making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he said, ‘I don’t necessarily believe in UFOS but I believe in the people who believe in them. They’re not just the village crazies.’ They’re pouring their lives into why they believe this. As we got deeper, other suspects popped up, like a guy in Long Island who wanted several thousand dollars to tell us it was the guy from Catch Me If You Can. Once you ask for money, you’re instantly dismissed because you’re in it for something else.”

Nancy Abraham told Dower that as people walk up and down passing other people on the street, cheek to jowl, that each has story after story inside of them. It’s those stories that Dower has sought in pursuit of the Mystery of D.B. Cooper, but he’s clear that it’s still a mystery, and it’s not up to him to solve it.

“You’re kind of relieved they lost the cigarette butts,” Dower admits, referring to the lack of DNA evidence. “With the Internet, there’s not a lot of mystery left in the world. That’s the beauty, the purity of Cooper’s uncertain story. You can be part of completing the story.”

Dower believes that any belief system, any perceived story of an individual, has an element of craziness because it’s their story and not rooted in things that the rest of us would call realistic. But he says that the people he interviewed have “D.B. Cooper shaped holes” in their lives, and that as he listened to them, they convinced him. “Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story,” he admits.

Jaws was the first story that caught his attention like that, at twelve or thirteen, in the theater with his father. It was the first time Dower realized that a movie was made with care and thought, and one scene captured his attention in a way that he can still recount it forty-five years later.

“It’s that moment when they open the town back up and they’re all on the beach. They’re apprehensive, and they do a crash zoom in on Roy Schneider’s face. But then everyone comes rushing out of the water, and one kid is bloody eaten! Then they go crashing into the mother’s face. She’s not the woman you’d expect, not a soccer mom, but someone you could clearly tell was a slightly older woman, a bit spinsterly. This boy was her world and there was no one else. That’s when I realized casting was important, and the storytelling was amazing.”

Dower was drawn into the world of documentaries by films like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, the story of the trial and conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the murder of police officer Robert Wood, and Nick Brunfield’s Tracking Down Maggie, an access-free documentary that tried and failed to gain access to then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The action turned from watching documentaries to making them at the turn of the century, just as he came across Chris Smith’s American Movie, a documentary about the struggle of Mark Borchadt to get his horror film made.”I still watch it once a year, it’s so wonderful. They make a film about a guy in Wisconsin who is trying to make a horror film with his mate. It’s horrible and he just won’t give up. Documentaries are allowed to have moments that are funny, moments of levity.”

That’s why the strangeness of the various stories about D.B. Cooper’s potential next chapter appeal to him. They are a little off the wall, not as serious in sensibility to viewers, but no less true to the people who believe them. Still, don’t assume that this is a farce, because Dower knows there’s more at stake here, even if it’s hidden behind a wink and a grin. The film is asking questions about ideals that everyone takes for granted.

“It’s about belief, about memory, the stories we tell ourselves,” admits the director. “We all do it. Why are these people any different? I’d so love if one of them was the accurate story behind D.B. Cooper.”
It’s all still a mystery though – and that’s what makes it a story worth Dower telling. Even today, discussing money that washed ashore, mentioned briefly in the movie but not fully unpacked, reveals another mystery. “The fact that the money washed ashore, that element gives it another gear because the FBI showed the money couldn’t have been there that long. They did tests on the elastic bands, and there’s no way it could be there in that status. The money had only been there a year, not nine. Where did that money come from?”

“It’s almost as bonkers as him jumping out of the plane.”

Maybe that will be Dower’s next investigation, presenting the stories as he finds them. But like a good story, the audience is left to fill in the blanks and consider their own interpretations, based on their own beliefs, their own memories, and what they tell themselves.

The Mystery of D.B. Cooper premieres on November 26 on HBO.