Transcript
00:00:00 we would come up to these rafts and these boats
00:00:05 that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off
00:00:09 and people would jump off
00:00:10 and people would fall into the water
00:00:13 and some of them couldn’t swim.
00:00:18 And so we found ourselves in this moment
00:00:21 where we had a choice.
00:00:23 We could film someone drown in front of us
00:00:26 or we could put our cameras down
00:00:27 and pull them out of the water.
00:00:31 The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald,
00:00:34 a two time Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker
00:00:37 who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen,
00:00:41 Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations
00:00:44 off the coast of Libya,
00:00:45 and 50 Feet from Syria, about the war in Syria.
00:00:51 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:53 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:55 in the description.
00:00:56 Now, dear friends, here’s Sky Fitzgerald.
00:01:00 Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today
00:01:05 and 45 million people are on the edge of famine
00:01:08 across 43 countries.
00:01:11 How do you feel?
00:01:12 How do you make sense of that many people suffering
00:01:14 from hunger and famine in the world today?
00:01:17 I don’t know if I can make sense of it, Lex.
00:01:20 I mean, I think it’s deeply disturbing to me
00:01:25 that as a global community, we’ve allowed this number
00:01:29 of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists
00:01:34 and the resources to feed them exists.
00:01:37 I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures
00:01:41 is that many of those who are starving today
00:01:46 or going hungry today are the net result of war
00:01:51 and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations.
00:01:56 And that’s the most deeply disturbing part to me.
00:02:00 You know your history and we all know that deeply embedded
00:02:06 in the Geneva Conventions post World War II,
00:02:09 the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use
00:02:13 of starvation as a weapon of war because of what Hitler did
00:02:17 during World War II.
00:02:19 That’s been reiterated multiple times over the years
00:02:23 in international humanitarian law, including in 2018
00:02:27 because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen.
00:02:29 And yet to this day, starvation as a weapon of war
00:02:33 continues to be used in Ethiopia,
00:02:36 obviously in Ukraine right now and in Yemen
00:02:39 with the blockade over the country.
00:02:40 And that disgusts me that the law is in place
00:02:43 but it won’t be enforced by the international bodies
00:02:46 and the nation states that make up
00:02:47 the international community.
00:02:49 So when the starvation is a result of human actions,
00:02:55 human decisions, that it’s especially painful
00:02:59 to make sense of.
00:03:00 For me personally, yeah.
00:03:02 I think that if you and I sit in here,
00:03:05 didn’t eat for three days and had to lay our head
00:03:10 on the sidewalk for a couple nights,
00:03:12 I think we would take hunger and homelessness
00:03:17 a lot more seriously.
00:03:19 And I think that’s, for some reason,
00:03:22 that’s missing at this moment in history, tragically.
00:03:25 And I think until that we can generate enough empathy,
00:03:30 that’s immediate for all of us to understand
00:03:32 what that means to go hungry.
00:03:34 I’m not sure we’re gonna sort of marshal
00:03:36 the global community to solve it.
00:03:39 I did just that by the way, fasted for three days recently.
00:03:44 It was fundamentally different, I think,
00:03:47 because the thing that would be terrifying to me
00:03:51 is not the fasting, but the hopelessness
00:03:54 at the end of the fasting.
00:03:55 Like I wouldn’t know when the next meal is coming.
00:03:58 I always had the freedom to have the meal.
00:04:01 The fear, not just your own ability to eat and survive,
00:04:06 but your family’s.
00:04:07 If there’s loved ones, that’s the other thing I don’t have.
00:04:10 I’m single.
00:04:11 So I feel like the worst suffering
00:04:14 is watching somebody you love
00:04:17 that you’re supposed to be a caretaker of
00:04:20 and you can’t take care of them.
00:04:23 And if all of that is caused by leaders
00:04:30 as a weapon of war, that is especially painful.
00:04:35 So how can we help?
00:04:41 What are the ways to help?
00:04:42 How do we alleviate this suffering?
00:04:48 Well, I think on the humanitarian front,
00:04:52 we have to be aggressive and attentive
00:04:56 and intervene in significant ways.
00:04:59 And I think on the political front,
00:05:01 we have to hold players accountable for their actions.
00:05:06 So the leaders that start the war.
00:05:08 So when you say we have to speak up
00:05:10 about the decisions and the humans making those decisions
00:05:14 that lead to the starvation.
00:05:15 For example, let’s make it concrete.
00:05:17 So when I was, I don’t wanna jump ahead,
00:05:20 but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen,
00:05:25 I met a mother who, when she gave birth, weighed 70 pounds.
00:05:32 The mother weighed 70 pounds.
00:05:34 And so her daughter was starved in the womb.
00:05:42 When she was born, she was born into a world
00:05:46 with no breast milk, very little formula.
00:05:50 So she was starved before birth.
00:05:52 She was born into a world where she continued to be starved
00:05:56 by a mother who herself was starved.
00:06:00 I watched that child, her name is Asila, die in front of me.
00:06:05 Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for,
00:06:10 for a child in this world.
00:06:12 She didn’t have a chance to grow up.
00:06:14 She didn’t have a chance to discover love.
00:06:16 She didn’t have a chance to have a career.
00:06:19 She was robbed of all of those things
00:06:22 because of the insidious nature of hunger
00:06:24 that she was born into.
00:06:26 She didn’t have to die, she was not starving.
00:06:32 Her mother was being starved
00:06:34 because of the blockade over the country.
00:06:37 Now, who instituted that blockade?
00:06:39 MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement
00:06:43 and sort of tacit approval of the United States,
00:06:46 our own government here.
00:06:48 And so there are people who are responsible
00:06:51 for the starvation of children
00:06:52 and I think we need to hold them accountable.
00:06:55 Now, that’s incredibly difficult to do,
00:06:58 but just because it’s difficult
00:07:00 doesn’t mean it ought not to be done.
00:07:03 And we’ll talk about many cases like these
00:07:06 throughout history and going on today.
00:07:08 Let’s talk about Hunger Ward.
00:07:10 Let’s dive in.
00:07:12 You’ve been nominated for an Oscar twice.
00:07:14 This is one of the times for a documentary.
00:07:21 Can you please tell me what Hunger Ward,
00:07:24 The Last Hope Between War and Starvation is about?
00:07:27 Hunger Ward is a short documentary
00:07:31 that really is an attempt to illustrate
00:07:34 the effects of the conflict on Yemen,
00:07:38 specifically on civilians.
00:07:40 And we document it in both the north
00:07:43 and the south of the country
00:07:44 because it’s a bifurcated country.
00:07:46 The south is held by the globally recognized government
00:07:50 in the south, which up until last week
00:07:52 was run by, at least on the surface,
00:07:56 by President Hadi holed up in Riyadh.
00:08:00 He was essentially removed from office last week
00:08:05 by, most people would agree,
00:08:08 the Emiratis and the Saudis
00:08:10 to put in place a presidential council.
00:08:12 So we wanted to show that starvation was happening
00:08:16 in very similar fashions, both in the south and the north.
00:08:19 And we wanted to do this film
00:08:22 because so few people in the west
00:08:26 know anything about the conflict in Yemen,
00:08:29 nor the US’s complicity in it.
00:08:32 And so my intent with the project
00:08:34 was try to bring it to a larger western audience
00:08:36 as an attempt to intervene
00:08:38 and change the political status quo,
00:08:40 which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.
00:08:44 So US complicity, who are the bad guys?
00:08:49 Now, the world, unfortunately,
00:08:52 cannot be painted in black and white
00:08:54 of good guys and bad guys.
00:08:56 But for the purpose of conversation,
00:08:59 who is causing suffering in the world in this situation?
00:09:06 Who started the war?
00:09:07 Why?
00:09:09 And then, of course, the roots of war go back in history.
00:09:14 But let’s start at the top.
00:09:17 Well, there are bad actors and there are less bad actors.
00:09:20 I mean, I think that’s always the case in war, probably.
00:09:22 And everybody loses in war.
00:09:24 Yeah, I concur with that statement.
00:09:28 In the case of the status quo in Yemen right now,
00:09:33 it’s a completely asymmetrical war.
00:09:35 And so the Saudi coalition,
00:09:38 which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia,
00:09:41 the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain,
00:09:46 supplying weapons, but it’s really driven
00:09:49 and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia.
00:09:52 And it’s asymmetrical to a great extent
00:09:54 just because of the incredible firepower by air
00:09:58 that the Saudis use continuously to pummel Northern Yemen.
00:10:04 When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes
00:10:08 is hard to describe.
00:10:10 And we show the result of only one in the film, really.
00:10:14 But it’s an asymmetrical war.
00:10:16 The de facto authorities of the North,
00:10:18 Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi rebel group,
00:10:23 they don’t have an air force, right?
00:10:25 They have a drone force, but they don’t have an air force.
00:10:27 And so from a military standpoint,
00:10:29 it’s completely asymmetrical.
00:10:31 The Saudis really don’t commit troops to the ground.
00:10:34 They use only proxies to fight on the ground.
00:10:37 What is the narrative they use to justify war?
00:10:42 So there’s a story on every side in war.
00:10:46 Some of it is grounded in truth.
00:10:49 Some of it is not at all grounded in truth,
00:10:52 also known as propaganda.
00:10:54 What’s the narrative used by the Saudis for this war?
00:10:58 The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis
00:11:01 are an illegitimate government,
00:11:04 and that it’s really a proxy war between Iran,
00:11:08 who supports the Houthis nominally,
00:11:10 and the rest of the world.
00:11:12 That’s the Saudi narrative.
00:11:14 The reality is something altogether different.
00:11:16 While the Houthis do receive support from Iran,
00:11:19 this is a war started by and sustained by MBS in Saudi Arabia.
00:11:25 Who’s MBS?
00:11:25 Mohammed bin Salman.
00:11:27 And who is he?
00:11:28 He is the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
00:11:32 What’s his power?
00:11:33 I’m asking basic dumb questions.
00:11:35 He’s the de facto ruler.
00:11:37 Of the military and the…
00:11:39 Yes, he seized control of the country several years ago,
00:11:42 even though he, on the surface,
00:11:44 is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia, he is.
00:11:46 He’s the crown prince.
00:11:47 I’m sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man?
00:11:52 What’s your sense of the…
00:11:53 Yeah, so I’ve never met him,
00:11:55 and I likely will never meet him, hopefully.
00:11:59 But he is, I know a lot about him through his actions,
00:12:03 sort of in the MENA region,
00:12:05 Middle East and North Africa region.
00:12:07 And he is one of three, in my view,
00:12:12 as an American sitting here in the US,
00:12:14 three people in the world that I think
00:12:18 has caused such an incredible volume of misery
00:12:23 and suffering and murder on this planet
00:12:27 that I think if he weren’t around,
00:12:33 the world would be a lot better place.
00:12:35 And I’m not a violent person by nature,
00:12:37 but there are three human beings
00:12:39 that I think the world would be better off without.
00:12:42 Do you mind, before I ask other questions,
00:12:45 mentioning the three?
00:12:46 Oh, yeah, Assad is one in Syria,
00:12:49 and that comes out of an earlier project
00:12:51 that I did in Syria and Turkey,
00:12:54 and what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people.
00:13:01 And Putin would be the third.
00:13:03 Those three human beings are murderers on a scale
00:13:08 beyond imagining.
00:13:11 On MBS, are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker,
00:13:16 as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker,
00:13:19 with an open mind about a man like that
00:13:22 who does evil onto the world,
00:13:23 and what that must feel like
00:13:25 to be inside the mind of that man?
00:13:28 So basically, consider his worldview.
00:13:31 With most evil people, with all people, probably,
00:13:35 but with people who do evil onto the world,
00:13:37 they think they’re doing good.
00:13:40 They’re the hero of their own story.
00:13:41 Right, and so to be able to place yourself,
00:13:45 I feel like, for me, to understand a person,
00:13:47 I have to literally, like the way actors
00:13:51 kind of have to do, you know,
00:13:54 live inside the body of the person they’re trying to study.
00:13:57 Inhabit the character.
00:13:58 Inhabit the person.
00:13:59 So are you able to do that, or because you
00:14:03 are also studying the people who suffer
00:14:06 as a result, as a consequence of their actions,
00:14:10 you just, you put them in a box,
00:14:13 and you say, I hate the person in that box.
00:14:15 I’m going to move on.
00:14:17 This goes back to your black and white statement
00:14:19 at the beginning, right?
00:14:20 It’s like, the world as a whole, of course,
00:14:23 you know, is every gradation of gray, right?
00:14:26 My background is theater, Lex,
00:14:29 and so I was trained long before I picked up a camera
00:14:32 to inhabit other characters, right?
00:14:34 I have two degrees in theater,
00:14:36 and so that level of sort of like
00:14:38 walking in other people’s shoes
00:14:40 and trying to understand and empathize
00:14:42 with their worldview is fundamental
00:14:45 to how I live my life and how I do my work.
00:14:47 So in the case of those three that I named,
00:14:50 Assad, MBS, and Putin, yeah, I can go there
00:14:53 and think through how they came to be,
00:14:55 who they are, right, from afar, right?
00:14:59 And after I go through that process,
00:15:02 I still don’t think there’s any way
00:15:04 that one can justify what they’ve done.
00:15:10 We’re going to talk about each of those people, for sure.
00:15:14 Well, I’m not an expert on any of them.
00:15:16 Well, you’re a human being,
00:15:17 which makes you a partial expert on human nature
00:15:23 because nobody’s an expert.
00:15:24 You’re just as good as anyone else.
00:15:26 Anybody who actually carries a camera
00:15:28 and listens and observe others
00:15:31 isn’t especially an expert of human nature.
00:15:35 Who’s willing to take that leap
00:15:37 and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders.
00:15:41 I feel like to understand a leader,
00:15:42 you have to first understand humans,
00:15:45 and to understand humans, you have to see humans
00:15:47 at their worst and their best,
00:15:49 which is something that you’ve definitely done.
00:15:52 So let’s stick on Hunger Ward.
00:15:54 This lens that you’ve chosen to look at this
00:15:56 is through a single, maybe you can speak to that.
00:16:00 You’ve mentioned the starvation as a result of war.
00:16:06 What is the documentary?
00:16:08 Like, what is the lens you’ve chosen
00:16:10 to give the world a peek at the results,
00:16:14 at the suffering that’s a result of this war?
00:16:18 People a lot of times will ask me
00:16:19 if they’ve seen Hunger Ward, you know.
00:16:24 They ask where the hope is, right?
00:16:26 You read the byline earlier, The Lost Hope.
00:16:32 And what I try to focus on in many of my films,
00:16:37 including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context
00:16:42 of war, as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen,
00:16:47 I look for hope, and I look for inspiration,
00:16:50 and I do that through people who are doing incredible things
00:16:54 under the most difficult circumstances.
00:16:56 So when I set out to do a film
00:16:59 about starvation in Yemen, right?
00:17:04 I mean, just listen to that statement.
00:17:06 Where’s the hope there, right?
00:17:08 And yet what I found, what I discovered,
00:17:11 were human beings that we could tell the story through
00:17:14 who are incredible, inspirational human beings
00:17:18 doing amazing things every day.
00:17:20 One of those is Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner
00:17:24 in the north of the country at a small rural clinic.
00:17:27 And another is Dr. Aida Al Sadiq,
00:17:30 who’s a pediatrician in the south of the country.
00:17:33 And so we chose to tell the story
00:17:34 sort of through their experiences as caregivers,
00:17:38 devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort,
00:17:43 this entire generation of children
00:17:45 that has been born into starvation.
00:17:48 And that’s an incredible, difficult task,
00:17:52 but equally inspirational to watch these human beings
00:17:56 devote every minute of every day to save a child.
00:18:00 I mean, in my view,
00:18:02 nothing is more important than that action.
00:18:04 Maybe on that point, real quick.
00:18:07 So there is suffering at scale, starvation at scale.
00:18:11 There’s, I mean, the numbers,
00:18:15 maybe you can mention in Yemen,
00:18:17 what are the numbers in terms of people in starvation,
00:18:19 but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor,
00:18:24 you always have, you’re treating one person in front of you.
00:18:28 So how do you make sense of that calculus,
00:18:31 of like there’s a huge number of people suffering,
00:18:35 and then there’s just the person in front of you?
00:18:37 Is that all we can do as humans,
00:18:43 is just to help one person at a time?
00:18:45 Is that the right way to think and to approach these problems
00:18:49 or can you actually make sense of the numbers?
00:18:52 Speaking just as a human being,
00:18:55 I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen
00:18:58 that I think I’d be overwhelmed if I focused on that scale.
00:19:06 You’ve probably heard that a child dies
00:19:11 every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger.
00:19:14 So we’ve been sitting here, how long?
00:19:16 35 minutes or so.
00:19:19 That’s a good handful of children
00:19:20 that have already passed away.
00:19:23 So to overcome sort of, I think,
00:19:25 that danger of psychic numbing, which can happen
00:19:28 when you think about suffering on such a large scale,
00:19:32 as a filmmaker, as a human being,
00:19:34 I have to focus in on the individuals,
00:19:36 on those human beings in front of me.
00:19:38 And I think that’s exactly what Dr. Al Sadiq and Makiya do
00:19:41 to keep going each day.
00:19:43 And one of the amazing things
00:19:44 about these two healthcare providers
00:19:47 that we showcased in the film is that
00:19:50 they treat anyone who shows up, right?
00:19:53 They don’t have to have money.
00:19:55 They don’t have to have any resources.
00:19:57 They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital.
00:20:00 And it’s incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility
00:20:05 of their thinking in terms of how they make that work.
00:20:08 Makiya, for example, I saw her in the north of the country.
00:20:12 It’s an incredibly rural clinic that she works at.
00:20:14 So it’s like a magnet for all the cases
00:20:17 in the north of the country.
00:20:18 People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes
00:20:21 for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition.
00:20:25 And one time I saw a child come in
00:20:28 and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in.
00:20:33 And just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen,
00:20:38 there had to be a parent or a relative there
00:20:42 to stay with the child while they’re at the clinic.
00:20:43 And it was a male relative.
00:20:45 And so what many doctors in that instance would do
00:20:49 would just turn them away.
00:20:51 And instead what Makiya did is she walked
00:20:53 into one of the rooms, talked to one of the other mothers
00:20:56 and convinced them to become the temporary guardian,
00:20:59 essentially, of this child
00:21:01 until a female relative could arrive.
00:21:04 So, you know, she’s flexible.
00:21:06 She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems
00:21:09 to deter solutions.
00:21:11 One child at a time.
00:21:12 Yeah, yeah, one child at a time.
00:21:13 You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you.
00:21:22 So when you’re filming this as a filmmaker,
00:21:27 what’s that like psychologically, philosophically,
00:21:33 creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller?
00:21:39 What do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker?
00:21:43 Or what’s that whole experience like?
00:21:45 Because you get to, like you said,
00:21:47 you take it to the whole journey
00:21:49 of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child.
00:21:54 It’s not something I want to film.
00:21:57 It’s not something that I certainly wanted to happen
00:22:01 or seek out, but it happened.
00:22:05 And the sad truth is that it happens every week
00:22:07 at that hospital.
00:22:09 And so when it happened in this instance,
00:22:12 I felt an incredible responsibility
00:22:15 to do justice to that reality,
00:22:18 to acknowledge that a child had just died
00:22:22 of starvation related causes.
00:22:26 And to find some way, if the parents wanted us to,
00:22:31 to integrate that into this story
00:22:34 we bring back to a Western audience.
00:22:39 And I’ve filmed many difficult things over the years.
00:22:49 And usually I really love filming.
00:22:54 And I didn’t love filming Hunger Ward.
00:22:56 It was not a process that I enjoyed
00:23:00 on any way, show, perform, sadly, because of the content.
00:23:04 Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them?
00:23:06 I don’t, but I did.
00:23:08 And I had to.
00:23:10 And when that happened,
00:23:11 I felt an incredible responsibility again,
00:23:14 to go deep, right?
00:23:17 To go deep with that family,
00:23:19 to tell the story of this hospital
00:23:22 with every sort of ounce of focus and talent
00:23:27 that I could bring to the story.
00:23:28 Because people should know
00:23:31 that children are dying of starvation right now
00:23:34 as we sit here.
00:23:36 And that that doesn’t have to happen.
00:23:37 And it is happening because of political dynamics
00:23:40 that we can intervene on.
00:23:42 Is there times you wanted to walk away,
00:23:46 quit the telling of the story,
00:23:51 come back to the United States
00:23:54 where you can just appreciate
00:24:02 the wonderful comfort you can have
00:24:04 just sitting there and having food
00:24:06 and freedom to do whatever you want,
00:24:12 those kinds of things.
00:24:13 Doesn’t have to be in the United States.
00:24:15 In a lot of places in the world.
00:24:17 Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivor’s guilt
00:24:21 on some level definitely exists.
00:24:23 One of the hardest things from Hunger Report actually
00:24:26 was eating, right?
00:24:28 Because we were in these malnutrition clinics,
00:24:31 they’re called TFCs, Therapeutic Feeding Centers,
00:24:34 where over a long period of time,
00:24:41 children lost the ability to eat normal food, right?
00:24:45 And couldn’t digest it and just were literally starving.
00:24:49 And the practitioners were trying to bring them back
00:24:53 to a state of thriving.
00:24:55 But to leave those clinics, right?
00:24:58 And to go to our camp or to go to our hotel
00:25:00 and then to have access to food, right?
00:25:03 Because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels.
00:25:08 I mean, it was a very intentional act
00:25:10 throughout the course of the shoot
00:25:12 to look at a piece of bread, right?
00:25:14 Or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child
00:25:19 in the TFC and think about how the privilege
00:25:22 of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest.
00:25:26 So it certainly every day helped me appreciate, right?
00:25:31 The privilege I had.
00:25:33 Every bite you take.
00:25:34 With every bite, absolutely.
00:25:36 And so I wouldn’t call it guilt.
00:25:38 It wasn’t exactly guilt,
00:25:39 but it was definitely mindfulness, right?
00:25:42 Meditate on the suffering of people who can’t.
00:25:47 That’s right, exactly.
00:25:48 So that knowledge sort of, it was catalytic in some ways.
00:25:52 It sort of moved us forward really wanting
00:25:55 to shape the most powerful story we could
00:25:58 because we were surrounded by so much suffering.
00:26:00 So much suffering every day.
00:26:03 How did filming that movie change you as a man?
00:26:07 As a human being?
00:26:09 You’ve filmed a few difficult documentaries.
00:26:14 That one is a heavy one.
00:26:16 When you think of the person you were before you filmed it,
00:26:20 and now when you wake up every morning
00:26:21 and look yourself in the mirror,
00:26:23 how is that person different?
00:26:25 Every documentary I do changes me in a different way.
00:26:29 Like I am not static in that sense, right?
00:26:32 And preformed, it’s like I change with every project
00:26:36 because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right?
00:26:40 And so in order to do them,
00:26:43 I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them.
00:26:46 In the case of Hunger Ward,
00:26:48 you may remember the girl Omeima,
00:26:52 who’s the 10 year old girl who we showcase in Auden
00:26:56 in the south of the country.
00:26:58 And we were there when she was admitted to the hospital.
00:27:04 And when she was admitted,
00:27:08 this 10 year old girl weighed 24 pounds
00:27:10 and she could barely stand up.
00:27:14 And we started with the permission of the family
00:27:18 to start to document her treatment
00:27:21 and to see what would happen with this young girl
00:27:25 who is so severely malnourished.
00:27:27 And we watched her be treated by the nurses
00:27:31 and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital.
00:27:35 And slowly over the course of a couple of weeks,
00:27:38 we saw her change.
00:27:40 We saw her start to sort of gain strength
00:27:44 and start to recover.
00:27:45 And she also watched the caregivers very carefully.
00:27:50 And I watched her watch them.
00:27:54 And I’ll never forget there was a moment
00:27:58 where about two and a half weeks, I think,
00:28:02 into her treatment, we walked into a room
00:28:05 and I saw her offering a cap full of water
00:28:10 to another younger child who was also starving.
00:28:15 The shot’s actually in the film.
00:28:17 And so to see Omeima, this child who’s starving,
00:28:22 giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child
00:28:27 who is also starving, moved me deeply.
00:28:31 So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her.
00:28:38 And as a human being, as a filmmaker,
00:28:40 I was incredibly inspired by Omeima.
00:28:44 That capacity for compassion is there.
00:28:46 Even within a 10 year old girl who’s starving.
00:28:49 And so you asked what changed me.
00:28:52 That’s one moment, right?
00:28:54 Rather than being crushed by such heavy content,
00:28:57 it was actually the opposite,
00:28:58 where I came away inspired by a 10 year old girl.
00:29:02 And I didn’t anticipate that.
00:29:05 I didn’t think that’s what this content would do,
00:29:07 but it’s what it did.
00:29:08 It reinforced for me sort of this incredible capacity
00:29:13 we all have as human beings, right?
00:29:16 To do good, right?
00:29:17 To even within the most difficult circumstances,
00:29:20 to choose who we become and what we do.
00:29:24 And a 10 year old girl taught me that
00:29:27 or reinforced that for me.
00:29:29 Were you able to feel the culture of the people,
00:29:34 so the language barrier,
00:29:37 were you able to break through the language barrier,
00:29:39 the culture barrier, to understand the people?
00:29:45 Because even suffering has a language of sorts,
00:29:48 depending on where you are.
00:29:50 The way people joke about things,
00:29:52 the way they cry, the way.
00:29:55 This is an interesting thing I actually wanna ask you.
00:29:57 Sorry, I’m asking a million questions.
00:30:00 I find that the people,
00:30:02 I’ve been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia,
00:30:05 but in general, I’ve gotten a chance to talk to people
00:30:09 who’ve been through trauma in their life.
00:30:13 And there’s a humor they have about trauma
00:30:18 in hard times.
00:30:20 It depends on the culture, of course.
00:30:22 Certainly, Russian speaking folk,
00:30:25 I mean, the more suffering you’ve experienced,
00:30:29 for some reason, the more they joke about it.
00:30:31 It’s almost like they’re able to see something deep
00:30:35 about humanity now that they have suffered
00:30:38 and they’re able to laugh at the absurdity,
00:30:40 the injustice of it all.
00:30:42 And you could also say it’s a way for them to deal with it.
00:30:45 But that humor has a kind of profound understanding
00:30:53 within it about what it means to be human.
00:30:57 That I just, and then you, to really understand it,
00:31:00 you have to know the language.
00:31:02 So I guess I’m asking, were you able to really feel
00:31:07 the humans on the other side of the language?
00:31:09 I’d like to think so.
00:31:10 I mean, as you noted, there are universities
00:31:14 and there are universals in life that transcend language.
00:31:19 I mean, suffering is suffering.
00:31:21 Love is love.
00:31:23 Compassion doesn’t take place only through language.
00:31:28 It’s through actions.
00:31:29 And so was there a language barrier?
00:31:31 Absolutely.
00:31:33 Did we try to bridge that through other means
00:31:36 and sort of universal emotions and experiences?
00:31:41 Absolutely.
00:31:42 That’s one of the things I always think about
00:31:44 when I’m filming is how do we distill down to universals
00:31:49 through imagery, through the vocabulary of cinema?
00:31:54 Because I believe so deeply that
00:31:56 that vocabulary should be visual.
00:31:58 So the words, what’s the most powerful way
00:32:01 to express the universal?
00:32:03 Is it visual or is it language words?
00:32:07 I think it’s visual.
00:32:09 And we’re talking about the human face
00:32:11 or human face, human body, everything.
00:32:14 Through actions as well.
00:32:15 Actions, the dynamic.
00:32:16 I’m thinking about a woman named Salha in the film
00:32:20 who isn’t named, but you see her multiple times
00:32:25 throughout the film.
00:32:26 And she’s basically the matron of the ward in the South.
00:32:29 And she’s the gatekeeper for the ward.
00:32:31 So no one enters that ward without her permission.
00:32:33 She’s literally the gatekeeper at the door.
00:32:36 So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in.
00:32:40 But then she also is sort of like
00:32:43 the first point of contact for compassion in the ward.
00:32:47 So when mothers and families are admitted,
00:32:51 she forms relationships between the moms
00:32:55 and the grandmothers, for example,
00:32:57 who are admitted and who are living there on the ward.
00:33:00 And she does it through hugging, right?
00:33:03 She does it through bringing them food, right?
00:33:07 And she forms these really rather quickly
00:33:11 deep relationships of compassion with the families.
00:33:15 And so it’s amazing to watch
00:33:19 and no language is needed, right, to bear witness to this.
00:33:22 And she also suffers because of that, right?
00:33:26 And so near the end of the film, if you recall,
00:33:31 when another child dies and the mother is wailing,
00:33:35 we actually cut away to Salha, who’s in the hallway,
00:33:38 who walks into another room and begins sobbing.
00:33:43 She’s not a family member,
00:33:44 but she has a deep relationship with that family
00:33:48 that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward.
00:33:51 So that’s universal, right?
00:33:53 To see a woman weep because a child has died,
00:33:58 even if they’re not related to that,
00:34:00 that’s a universal sort of emotional experience
00:34:03 we can all relate to.
00:34:04 So that’s what I mean by visual vocabulary.
00:34:07 And it’s especially powerful
00:34:08 because she has seen much of this kind of suffering
00:34:12 and she’s still, maybe she has built up some callous
00:34:17 to be able to work day to day,
00:34:20 but there’s still an ocean underneath the ice.
00:34:25 She’s kept her heart open
00:34:26 despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day.
00:34:30 Somehow she’s a human being who’s able to do that,
00:34:33 which is a very difficult thing to do, right?
00:34:35 She still allows herself to be vulnerable.
00:34:39 And maybe that’s why she can do what she does.
00:34:43 What lessons do you draw from other families in history?
00:34:45 So for me personally, one that’s touched my family
00:34:50 and one of the great families in history is in Ukraine,
00:34:54 Holodomor in the 30s.
00:34:56 32, 33, right?
00:34:57 32, 33 with Stalin.
00:34:59 Maybe you could speak to the universals of the suffering here.
00:35:05 What lessons do you draw from those other famines
00:35:09 if you looked at them or in general about famine
00:35:13 that are manufactured by the decisions of,
00:35:17 let’s say, authoritarian leaders?
00:35:19 Well, famine doesn’t have to exist
00:35:29 or the bulk of famines on this planet,
00:35:31 I believe don’t have to exist.
00:35:33 And most of them, or at least a good number of them
00:35:36 are manufactured by the leaders
00:35:40 that choose to use famine as a weapon, right?
00:35:44 And Ukraine is one of the obvious examples right now,
00:35:49 with siege tactics that are happening
00:35:51 in different parts of the country.
00:35:53 And we built international humanitarian law for a reason,
00:36:01 many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day.
00:36:06 And it’s there to prevent
00:36:09 what’s happening in Ukraine right now.
00:36:11 It’s there to prevent what’s been happening in Yemen
00:36:14 for seven years.
00:36:16 And yet there hasn’t been any teeth behind it.
00:36:19 And that’s what disturbs me is that we can see
00:36:25 how these famines are being used as weapons in war.
00:36:30 And yet we aren’t sort of using the levers of power
00:36:34 that exist in order to, I think, to call out
00:36:39 in important and powerful ways those who are causing them
00:36:43 and to make sure that we hold them accountable
00:36:46 on the global stage.
00:36:47 Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine
00:36:51 in a way that hasn’t happened for a long time.
00:36:53 And that gives me hope, right?
00:36:56 And yet I don’t believe we’ve done enough.
00:36:59 And I think the national community needs to do far more
00:37:02 than we are both in Yemen, in Ethiopia,
00:37:05 and in Ukraine right now.
00:37:07 There are certain kinds of things that captivate
00:37:10 the global attention, and it seems like starvation
00:37:14 is not always one of them.
00:37:16 For some reason, murder and destruction
00:37:21 gets people’s attention more.
00:37:23 The death, of course, is easy to enumerate,
00:37:26 but it’s the suffering that’s the problem.
00:37:29 Yeah, yeah, you know, when we went to film Hunger Ward,
00:37:32 that was one of the creative questions
00:37:35 that I was really concerned about because starvation,
00:37:38 you know, it’s not a quick action, right?
00:37:41 It’s a long, slow, insidious process, right?
00:37:45 Just like hunger, right?
00:37:47 And yet when you’re hungry, right, it takes you over.
00:37:53 It becomes the most important thing, right?
00:37:56 It’s just absolutely fundamental to life.
00:37:59 It’s like drawing breath.
00:38:00 And so I really, before I filmed Hunger Ward,
00:38:05 I struggled to sort of answer
00:38:07 how we could creatively approach that
00:38:09 because, you know, someone’s sitting in a clinic, right?
00:38:13 Starving or being treated for starvation, you know,
00:38:16 that’s a pretty static scene, right?
00:38:20 And what we found was that because of the volume of cases
00:38:24 and because of the nature of sort of how quickly
00:38:28 how quickly people were coming and going
00:38:32 is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated.
00:38:35 And there’s something also about starvation.
00:38:38 You get tired.
00:38:40 It’s almost like it’s a quiet suffering.
00:38:43 Yeah.
00:38:46 And by the way, there’s something about
00:38:48 when I think about dark times,
00:38:49 I mean, you’ll hear me chuckle, for example.
00:38:53 I don’t know what that is.
00:38:54 That’s almost like, it’s almost like
00:38:59 you have to kind of laugh at,
00:39:03 you can’t help but laugh at like the injustice
00:39:07 and the cruelty in the world.
00:39:08 Somehow that helps your mind deal with it.
00:39:10 I mean, I see this all the time.
00:39:13 Like when you’re struggling, you can’t feed your family.
00:39:16 You lost your home.
00:39:18 The last thing you have is jokes about.
00:39:21 It’s humor.
00:39:22 Yeah, it’s humor.
00:39:23 It’s like, ah, the fucking man fucked me over again.
00:39:28 And there’s jokes all around that.
00:39:30 And then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music.
00:39:36 I don’t know what that is.
00:39:37 I don’t know what that is.
00:39:38 It’s gallows humor, right?
00:39:39 It’s a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging
00:39:44 and allowing yourself to move forward, right?
00:39:46 Beyond the pain and the suffering.
00:39:49 So you mentioned Ukraine and you mentioned Putin.
00:39:52 What are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis
00:39:58 and generally the suffering that’s resulting
00:40:00 from the war in Ukraine?
00:40:02 Well, first off, I think the conflict
00:40:03 is just gonna exacerbate, you know,
00:40:06 sort of the global challenge we have with displacement.
00:40:12 The last entire trilogy I did was about displacement
00:40:17 to great extent due to war.
00:40:19 And, you know, this is a huge displacement of human beings
00:40:23 regardless of the cause.
00:40:24 And that is gonna sort of have a ripple effect
00:40:29 across the globe for many, many years to come
00:40:31 regardless of even if the conflict ended today.
00:40:34 So there’s that.
00:40:35 That’s gonna set up a whole nother strain
00:40:38 on sort of the global sort of resources
00:40:44 that come into play to deal with refugees.
00:40:47 You know, there were 79 million displaced people
00:40:50 on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict, right?
00:40:54 You probably know the numbers better than I do
00:40:56 in terms of what the current estimates are
00:40:59 for displacement from Ukraine.
00:41:00 It’s four to six million.
00:41:01 So what are we up to now?
00:41:03 73, 74 million individuals on this planet now
00:41:07 who are displaced?
00:41:09 That’s a significant bump.
00:41:12 I wish that the levers of power were used differently
00:41:16 in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example.
00:41:20 So what are the levers of power?
00:41:23 Well, military might.
00:41:24 Let’s take that for one, right?
00:41:26 So I have always felt after working in Syria and Turkey
00:41:34 that we completely missed our opportunity
00:41:39 as a player on the global stage with military capability
00:41:44 to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands
00:41:48 of civilians in Syria.
00:41:50 We had the ability and we didn’t leverage that ability.
00:41:54 You know, the fact that I talked with so many Syrians
00:41:59 during the course of doing that project
00:42:02 who told me their stories of living in their house, right?
00:42:07 And having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house
00:42:12 and drop a 55 gallon drum full of explosives
00:42:16 and shrapnel in their neighborhood
00:42:20 over and over and over again.
00:42:24 Not focused on any military targets,
00:42:27 only meant to kill and sow fear, right?
00:42:31 And early in the conflict, we could have stopped that.
00:42:35 Before Russia got involved, we could have intervened
00:42:39 and created a no fly zone.
00:42:40 That we, the United States or coalition
00:42:43 that we were a part of, yeah.
00:42:45 And we didn’t do it and we could have.
00:42:47 And I think that’s an example where we have
00:42:49 the military capability to actually do good
00:42:52 in a situation like that.
00:42:53 And we don’t usually use it for those purposes.
00:42:55 And I think that’s what a military ought to be used for
00:42:58 beyond just defending our borders is to save others
00:43:02 with the privilege that that power affords.
00:43:04 What do you think about the power of the military
00:43:07 versus the power of sanctions
00:43:09 versus the power of conversation?
00:43:12 They’re all different tools, right?
00:43:13 To be used at different moments.
00:43:15 But if words fail, if sanctions fail, right?
00:43:21 I think there are moments in history
00:43:24 where power is justified, right?
00:43:26 And I think Syria was one of them.
00:43:28 I think when barrel bombs were dropping
00:43:31 on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months
00:43:34 with no intent to do anything
00:43:37 other than kill Syrian civilians,
00:43:40 that’s an instance I think where might is justified
00:43:43 to shoot those helicopters out of the sky.
00:43:45 Here’s the difficult thing.
00:43:46 We’ve talked about Yemen.
00:43:48 Where’s the line between good and evil
00:43:53 for US intervention in different countries
00:43:56 and conflicts in the world?
00:43:59 It’s easy to look back 10, 20, 30 years
00:44:02 to know what was and wasn’t a quote unquote just war.
00:44:05 In the moment, how do we know?
00:44:08 I think it’s incredibly difficult to answer that, right?
00:44:11 And I think that’s why leaders make the wrong choices
00:44:14 so often, right?
00:44:15 Is they second guess themselves.
00:44:18 I think you take all the data at your fingertips,
00:44:21 all the intelligence that you have, right?
00:44:23 And you look at it all very carefully
00:44:25 and you make a decision, right?
00:44:27 There are some instances though
00:44:30 where it’s very clear what’s happening, right?
00:44:33 And leaders still don’t act, right?
00:44:36 In Yemen right now, for example,
00:44:38 it’s very clear what’s happening, right?
00:44:40 Children are being starved because of a blockade.
00:44:44 All the US would have to do is ensure that blockade,
00:44:48 now there’s a two month ceasefire in place now,
00:44:50 but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire
00:44:54 and children will stop starving.
00:44:56 That’s pretty simple.
00:44:57 You can trace, it’s a direct connection.
00:45:00 And we haven’t had the sort of the moral wherewithal
00:45:04 to make that decision because we’re too interested
00:45:08 in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia
00:45:10 where oil flows from and so much influence
00:45:15 because Saudi Arabia has so much influence
00:45:17 throughout the MENA region.
00:45:19 We want to keep that relationship tight
00:45:22 despite sort of the moral wounds that come from that.
00:45:26 About half the world is under authoritarian regimes
00:45:30 and everybody operates under narratives.
00:45:33 And there’s a narrative in the United States
00:45:35 that freedom is good, democracy is good.
00:45:40 I have fallen victim to this narrative.
00:45:43 I believe in it.
00:45:46 I’m saying this jokingly, but not really
00:45:49 because who knows the truth of anything in this world?
00:45:53 I eat meat, factory farm meat,
00:45:57 and I seem to not be intellectually
00:45:59 and philosophically tortured by this, and I should be.
00:46:02 There’s a lot of suffering there.
00:46:04 What do we do to lessen the suffering
00:46:09 of the people under authoritarian regimes?
00:46:12 Again, the same question.
00:46:14 Military conflict, diplomacy, sanctions,
00:46:20 all those kinds of things.
00:46:24 Does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering
00:46:28 for what you see in Yemen?
00:46:31 Is it something that has to be healed across generations
00:46:36 or can be healed on a scale of months and years?
00:46:39 I’m just a guy with a camera, Alex, you know?
00:46:42 But as a guy with a camera,
00:46:44 I’ve seen a lot of things in a lot of places
00:46:49 and I’ve seen the effects these decisions made
00:46:54 by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens.
00:46:59 And that’s what drives my thinking on this.
00:47:04 And that’s what drives and motivates me each day
00:47:08 to raise the red flag through my films
00:47:11 and say, listen, Biden,
00:47:15 you campaigned for president in part on a platform
00:47:20 that said that we would regain our prominence
00:47:25 on the moral stage of the world
00:47:28 and that we would prioritize sort of a moral paradigm
00:47:35 over relationships with authoritarian regimes,
00:47:39 Saudi Arabia being one.
00:47:41 And yet when the CIA report came out
00:47:44 that clearly articulated in detail
00:47:47 that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder
00:47:51 and for cutting his body into pieces
00:47:53 and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy,
00:47:57 what did Biden do?
00:47:59 He didn’t really make a pariah out of MBS
00:48:02 like he said he was going to, right?
00:48:05 What if he’d done something else
00:48:06 and actually done what he said he was gonna do,
00:48:09 which was make MBS?
00:48:10 What if he had removed the ability for MBS
00:48:13 to fly to the United States, for example?
00:48:16 Now that’s a sanction, right?
00:48:18 That’s a sanction that’s individual and concrete
00:48:21 and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS.
00:48:25 That would have been Biden saying,
00:48:27 this is unacceptable behavior, right?
00:48:31 This is something which because you executed
00:48:35 such a horrendous act on someone living in the United States,
00:48:40 we are not going to give you a stage here at least, right?
00:48:47 Within the borders of our country.
00:48:49 Those are the things that leaders can do
00:48:51 that I don’t think they do often enough.
00:48:53 And certainly our leader right now isn’t doing it
00:48:55 in the way I wish he were.
00:48:57 He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine
00:49:01 and been very vocal.
00:49:03 But there’s so many instances we could talk about
00:49:05 where I feel like the political game and ship, right?
00:49:09 Often falls into maintaining relationships
00:49:13 like with MBS and Saudi Arabia
00:49:15 rather than doing the right thing.
00:49:16 Rather than as a nation, a leader of a nation saying,
00:49:20 this is unacceptable.
00:49:22 We have a higher standard than this.
00:49:24 Cause I think when leaders do that,
00:49:28 it becomes aspirational, right?
00:49:30 It becomes aspirational for other leaders
00:49:34 in the progressive world at least.
00:49:36 And also it rings the alarm bells
00:49:38 for other authoritarian leaders and says,
00:49:41 you know what, there are lines, right?
00:49:44 There are things that can’t be done
00:49:46 or there will be significant consequences.
00:49:48 Like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore.
00:49:51 And sanctions I think need to be concrete and individual
00:49:55 to some, in addition to the larger scope.
00:49:58 But when they’re concrete and individual,
00:50:01 I think often they’re felt in a different way.
00:50:04 You mean felt obviously by the individuals.
00:50:06 And so the ripple effects of that
00:50:11 might have the power to steer the direction of nations.
00:50:18 Because of the nature of authoritarian regimes, right?
00:50:21 Individuals have so much power.
00:50:22 Exactly, right.
00:50:23 So if Putin is put on trial in the Hague at some point,
00:50:30 or at least there’s the threat of that, right?
00:50:32 Now that’s likely never to happen of course
00:50:34 because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right?
00:50:37 And he’s never gonna allow that to happen.
00:50:39 But just knowing that that danger exists
00:50:45 is going to change his travel plans in the future, right?
00:50:49 MBS not being able to fly to the US,
00:50:51 he’s gonna feel that and be embarrassed by that.
00:50:55 So I think they have a special meaning and consequence
00:51:00 in authoritarian regimes because of that.
00:51:03 So you said you’re just a guy with a camera.
00:51:06 Yeah.
00:51:07 I would say you’re a brilliant guy with a camera.
00:51:13 I’m also a kind of guy with a camera.
00:51:15 You’re a guy with a couple cameras.
00:51:16 A couple cameras.
00:51:17 I have more.
00:51:18 A couple mics too.
00:51:20 You got a couple mics, a couple cameras, robot over here.
00:51:23 When you can’t beat them with quality,
00:51:25 you bring the quantity.
00:51:27 That’s right.
00:51:28 So to me, that’s also an interest partially
00:51:31 because I also speak Russian and a bit Ukrainian.
00:51:37 I wanna study that part of the world.
00:51:39 I wanna talk to a lot of people.
00:51:41 I wanna talk to the leaders.
00:51:42 I wanna talk to regular people.
00:51:44 To be honest, and I would love to get your comments on this,
00:51:48 the regular quote unquote people
00:51:51 are way more fascinating to me.
00:51:53 As a filmmaker, how do you figure out how to tell this story?
00:51:58 I’m sure a guy with a camera,
00:52:00 you’re looking at war in Ukraine,
00:52:02 but also what’s going on in Yemen and Syria
00:52:05 and other places in the world.
00:52:07 I mentioned North Korea.
00:52:08 That’s a super interesting one.
00:52:10 Hard to bring cameras along.
00:52:11 China, in Canada, the truckers.
00:52:16 There’s all kinds of fascinating things
00:52:18 happening in the world.
00:52:19 So you as a scholar of human suffering
00:52:23 and human flourishing,
00:52:26 how do you choose how to tell the story?
00:52:29 How do I choose a story?
00:52:30 How do I choose how to tell a story?
00:52:31 Both a story and how, I assume those are coupled.
00:52:35 So how do you choose which story to tell?
00:52:38 And how do you choose how to tell that story?
00:52:41 Well, in terms of how to choose which story,
00:52:48 it’s a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly.
00:52:52 I go often on instinct,
00:52:55 but there’s also a highly intentional piece of it
00:52:58 for me as well.
00:53:00 And the intentional piece is,
00:53:03 I guess I’d call it the do I care threshold,
00:53:06 or the so what threshold.
00:53:08 You personally, just something in your heart
00:53:11 just kind of gets excited or hurts or just feels something.
00:53:15 So one of the things that disturbs me
00:53:17 about American culture, Lex,
00:53:19 is that we seem to be a people
00:53:21 that’s fascinated by reality television, for example.
00:53:24 Like look at how many of us here in America
00:53:27 watch reality television, right?
00:53:30 That deeply disturbs me.
00:53:31 Not that I’ve never watched an episode,
00:53:33 I’ve shot a whole season of it once to make a living, right?
00:53:36 So it’s like I know it, right?
00:53:38 But I feel like the things we should be paying attention to
00:53:42 are the things, personally,
00:53:44 are the things I choose to film, right?
00:53:47 As a human being, as a dad, as a filmmaker,
00:53:53 I think we should be paying attention
00:53:55 to the fact that children are being starved in Yemen.
00:53:58 I think we should be paying attention
00:54:00 to the fact that Ukrainians are being displaced
00:54:03 by the millions.
00:54:04 So there’s this so what threshold that I use.
00:54:07 And I feel like it has to be a topic
00:54:09 that if we don’t cover and we don’t put out in the world
00:54:14 in the largest possible way,
00:54:16 in the hope of intervening,
00:54:17 in the hope of marshaling maximum resources
00:54:20 and attention to solving the problem,
00:54:22 that’s what I’m dedicated to as a filmmaker.
00:54:25 Because I didn’t pick up a camera initially
00:54:29 to film puppy dogs, right?
00:54:31 To make people smile.
00:54:33 I believe the camera is a tool for change.
00:54:36 I believe the camera is a powerful tool
00:54:40 that we can use to raise awareness and marshal resources
00:54:44 and help people understand the impact
00:54:47 that these geopolitical decisions have
00:54:50 on real people’s lives.
00:54:51 And that’s the intent I create each film with.
00:54:57 Now, how I choose each story,
00:54:59 that’s the magic potion piece of it, right?
00:55:01 And often one flows rather organically
00:55:04 into another, frankly.
00:55:06 So you just kind of, like you said,
00:55:08 you go with instinct a little bit.
00:55:09 To some extent, but oftentimes I choose the next project
00:55:12 based on relationships I’ve developed in the last film.
00:55:17 Right?
00:55:18 And so one often flows into another
00:55:20 through relationships I develop.
00:55:21 And then a colleague will share a detail
00:55:24 about something that’s happening in a certain place.
00:55:27 And I’ll go, hmm, really, I didn’t know that, right?
00:55:30 And usually it’s before it’s hit the world stage
00:55:33 in a big way.
00:55:34 And so I start to do due diligence.
00:55:36 And often that, it reveals it to be a much bigger
00:55:39 and more pressing topic that I wanna learn more about.
00:55:43 Before I talk to you about Syria and Lifeboat,
00:55:50 you mentioned a camera is the best weapon.
00:55:52 Maybe just, well, I can’t take out a tank, right?
00:55:57 But it’s a good weapon.
00:55:58 Second, top three.
00:56:00 Yeah.
00:56:01 I love the humor throughout this.
00:56:03 I really appreciate it.
00:56:04 We were talking about such dark topics.
00:56:07 Yeah.
00:56:07 It resets the mind in a way that allows me to think.
00:56:12 So thank you.
00:56:13 As a filmmaker, I almost wanna talk
00:56:20 about the technical details.
00:56:23 Uh oh.
00:56:24 How do you choose to shoot stuff?
00:56:29 Again, so maybe you can explain to me.
00:56:31 I work with incredible folks that care about lenses
00:56:37 and equipment and so on.
00:56:40 And I tend to be somebody that just wants to kinda go
00:56:50 as like a gorilla shooting, like not plan too much,
00:56:56 just go with gritty.
00:56:58 I’m trying to come up with words that sound positive.
00:57:01 Do a positive spin on what I try to do.
00:57:04 But like gritty, don’t over plan, use,
00:57:08 like we had a big discussion if you see this light.
00:57:10 Yeah.
00:57:12 It’s on a stand that’s a very ghetto stand.
00:57:15 Yeah.
00:57:16 You need a sandbag on that, man.
00:57:17 Exactly.
00:57:18 So no sandbag and like the stand is actually bending
00:57:23 under the weight of that thing.
00:57:25 It could fall on us.
00:57:26 It could fall.
00:57:27 It probably won’t reach us, but it could fall.
00:57:28 But the danger, live under that danger.
00:57:30 Embrace that danger.
00:57:32 Love it.
00:57:33 Yeah.
00:57:34 Because that thing is easier to transport
00:57:36 than a heavier one.
00:57:37 Yeah.
00:57:38 Sandbag, that’s extra weight.
00:57:40 So if you keep, like people tell me
00:57:42 there’s the right way to do stuff.
00:57:44 Like here’s these giant cases with all the kinds of padding
00:57:47 for transporting stuff.
00:57:49 I transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag.
00:57:52 Yeah.
00:57:53 So that’s just a preference because that’s somehow
00:57:56 that chaos allows me to ignore all the stupidity
00:58:00 of loving the equipment and focusing on the story.
00:58:04 So that said, I’ve never shot anything like worthwhile.
00:58:11 Like there is power to the visual.
00:58:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:16 Like definitely.
00:58:17 And so finding a certain angle, a certain light
00:58:22 whether it’s natural light or additional artificial lighting
00:58:27 just capturing a tear, capturing when the person forgets
00:58:32 themselves for a moment and looks out into the distance
00:58:35 missing somebody, thinking about somebody.
00:58:38 All of those like moments you can capture a lens,
00:58:42 a camera can do magic with that.
00:58:44 I don’t even know the question I’m asking you
00:58:46 but how do both technical and philosophical,
00:58:51 how do you capture the visual power that you’re after?
00:58:54 Yeah.
00:58:55 So, so many of my films I think are built
00:58:59 on the premise of access, right?
00:59:02 Built on this notion that the biggest hurdle
00:59:10 to the story is getting there, being there in the room
00:59:14 or being there on the boat while a crisis is unfolding.
00:59:19 And that access typically is really nuanced
00:59:23 and difficult to gain.
00:59:26 And then trust flows from that, right?
00:59:28 Cause usually it takes a long time to gain that access
00:59:32 because that access is so hard fought.
00:59:37 It necessarily informs how we film, right?
00:59:43 To be in a room at Sadaka Hospital in Southern Yemen
00:59:47 I can’t have five people in that room, right?
00:59:50 I can’t have a boom mic over a scene.
00:59:54 I want in creatively the opposite of that as well.
00:59:58 So it’s not just a logistical question,
01:00:00 it’s also a creative question to capture intimate moments
01:00:04 where families are dealing with suffering children
01:00:08 and dying children and caretaking is active
01:00:11 and ongoing all the time.
01:00:13 You don’t want to interrupt that moment.
01:00:15 And so that informs how I do things.
01:00:17 So we go fleet and nimble and small.
01:00:21 Those are all really good words.
01:00:22 But so it’s logistical on the one hand,
01:00:26 but it’s also a creative choice, right?
01:00:28 So when we filmed Hunger Ward,
01:00:30 two people were filming the entire film, right?
01:00:32 Me and my director of photography.
01:00:34 That was the two people in the room?
01:00:36 Two people in the room.
01:00:37 That’s it.
01:00:38 Yeah, that’s it.
01:00:38 The whole film, right?
01:00:39 We had a field producer as well in this part of the country,
01:00:41 but in terms of camera, it’s just two people
01:00:43 and we’re doing everything.
01:00:45 And we have lenses that are long enough
01:00:49 that we don’t have to move to camera.
01:00:52 We don’t have to move to capture the film.
01:00:53 So we can tuck into a corner sometimes, right?
01:00:56 And so just what’s long mean?
01:00:58 That means they’re standing farther away
01:00:59 and they can look.
01:01:00 Zoom lens, it’s not a prime lens.
01:01:02 So it’s not a fixed focal length, right?
01:01:04 Because a fixed focal length,
01:01:04 you have to move a lot more in order to capture action.
01:01:07 With a zoom lens, maybe a 105 at the long end,
01:01:12 I can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away
01:01:16 instead of having to get right up on someone, right?
01:01:18 So you’re less likely to interrupt the scene
01:01:21 and you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes.
01:01:25 So I’m very intentional about that piece of it
01:01:30 so that we can capture those vulnerable moments
01:01:33 and not interrupt them.
01:01:36 That’s really fascinating too, because the access,
01:01:41 I don’t often think about this,
01:01:42 but that’s probably true for me as well.
01:01:44 Part of the storytelling is to be in the room.
01:01:52 And that’s the hard part.
01:01:53 For me, most of my films, that’s the hardest part.
01:01:56 Actually, as hard as Hunger Ward and Lifeboat were to film
01:01:59 and 50 Feet From Syria,
01:02:02 the getting there piece of it for the last two
01:02:04 was much harder.
01:02:06 Yeah, and it’s also, it’s a creative act.
01:02:09 It’s, I don’t know if it is for you,
01:02:12 but it’s the kind of people you talk to.
01:02:15 It’s like how you live your life.
01:02:18 Like the kind of people I talk to right now,
01:02:21 they steer the direction of my life
01:02:22 and steer the direction of things I’ll film.
01:02:25 So it’s not just like you’re trying to get access.
01:02:28 It’s like, it’s everything.
01:02:30 It builds, it builds and builds and builds and builds.
01:02:34 It builds on itself, yeah, yeah.
01:02:36 I mean, part of the thing, even saying,
01:02:38 talking about some of these leaders
01:02:40 and conversations with them,
01:02:41 it’s almost like steering your life
01:02:45 into the direction of the difficult,
01:02:47 of like taking the leap.
01:02:51 And if you’re a good human being
01:02:56 and a lot of people know who you are as a human,
01:03:00 like not as a name, but as really who you are,
01:03:04 that like putting that attention out there,
01:03:06 it’s somehow the world opens doors
01:03:10 where the access becomes,
01:03:14 the access that once seemed impossible becomes possible.
01:03:18 And then all of that is a creative journey
01:03:21 to be in the room.
01:03:22 I think that probably is,
01:03:23 I mean, it’s true even for fiction films probably,
01:03:26 is like everything that led to that,
01:03:30 like to be in the room, the journey to be in the room
01:03:33 and to shoot the scene is maybe more important
01:03:37 than the scene itself.
01:03:39 And like really focus on the creative act of that.
01:03:42 Yeah, that’s really fascinating.
01:03:43 And especially, I mean, with a documentary,
01:03:45 you get one take.
01:03:47 Yeah, you can’t say, hey, reset, right?
01:03:49 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:03:51 Ah, that is so interesting.
01:03:53 As you were in some of the most difficult parts of the world
01:03:57 in the room with some of the most difficult stories
01:04:00 to be told.
01:04:02 And yet, I think that’s why I keep doing these stories.
01:04:05 Because once you have that lived experience for me,
01:04:15 it’s moving.
01:04:16 It moves me to bear witness
01:04:20 to these inspiring people under difficult circumstances.
01:04:26 And I can’t come back to the US afterwards
01:04:31 and walk down the grocery aisle
01:04:35 where there’s 50 different choices for canned peas, right?
01:04:40 And not sort of feel that lived tension, right?
01:04:45 That lived tension of the privilege
01:04:47 that I have here in the US.
01:04:49 And then I have a choice about what to do
01:04:52 with that privilege, right?
01:04:54 And the last thing I wanna do is start
01:04:58 doing stories about dandelions, right?
01:05:01 There’s far more important things to do
01:05:02 on this very limited time that I have on the planet.
01:05:05 And I think that’s catalytic for me.
01:05:12 Like I feel that mortality each day.
01:05:17 And my goal is to tell as many of these stories
01:05:25 before I’m gone.
01:05:26 Could you speak to the getting access?
01:05:31 Is this just, you know, is there interesting stories
01:05:36 of how a weird or funny or profound ways
01:05:43 that led you to get access to a room?
01:05:45 Each one is a different adventure.
01:05:46 And it’s definitely an adventure.
01:05:47 It’s an adventure.
01:05:48 Everyone’s an adventure, yeah.
01:05:49 Probably one of the easiest ones I ever had
01:05:51 in the recent past was for 50 Feet from Syria
01:05:54 where I literally broke my hand in a bicycle race.
01:06:01 And after many months of trying to get an appointment
01:06:06 with an orthopedic hand surgeon, a specialist,
01:06:09 I finally did and he was Syrian American.
01:06:11 And the Syrian conflict had just begun
01:06:14 and we just started talking about it.
01:06:16 And after he looked at my hand in the first five minutes,
01:06:21 he’s like, yeah, you need surgery, great.
01:06:23 But then somehow we started talking about Syria
01:06:25 and like five minutes in, he just stood up
01:06:28 and like put the privacy curtain around us,
01:06:30 supposed to be a 15 minute appointment or so.
01:06:33 And we talked for an hour, right?
01:06:35 So, you know, those moments
01:06:37 of sort of mysterious confluence happen, right?
01:06:40 And I think you have to be open to them when they do happen
01:06:43 because I’m a storyteller, I’m always looking as well, right?
01:06:46 So, because he then contacted me later and said,
01:06:50 Skye, I am going back to the Syrian border to volunteer
01:06:54 as a surgeon, do you want to come with me?
01:06:56 That was an easy one.
01:06:57 That’s probably the easiest one I could give you.
01:06:58 But it came out of this interesting moment,
01:07:01 very personal moment, right?
01:07:02 Lifeboat and Hunger Ward are completely different.
01:07:07 And I had to really work hard to gain access
01:07:11 to those stories.
01:07:12 So you intentionally thought like what,
01:07:15 I want to get access to the story.
01:07:18 And then what are the different ideas?
01:07:20 And they often might involve a doctor or a dentist
01:07:24 or just being maybe intentionally and aggressively open
01:07:31 to experiences that lead you into the room.
01:07:35 So it’s funny you mentioned the doctor
01:07:38 because I have similar experiences now.
01:07:42 I’ve just gotten access to all kinds of fascinating people
01:07:47 in the same way.
01:07:50 They’re all around us.
01:07:50 They’re all around us.
01:07:52 You just have to look.
01:07:53 Yeah, exactly.
01:07:53 It’s like there’s fascinating people everywhere
01:07:55 who are doing incredible things,
01:07:57 but we have to be open and keep our eyes open
01:07:59 and realize that there are amazing human beings everywhere.
01:08:04 Yeah, there’s networks that connect people
01:08:07 just through life.
01:08:09 You meet people, you share a beer or a drink
01:08:12 or just you fall in love
01:08:14 or you share trauma together.
01:08:18 You go through a hard time together.
01:08:19 And those little sticky things connects us humans.
01:08:22 And if you just keep yourself open
01:08:24 and embrace the curiosity.
01:08:27 And then also the persistence, I suppose.
01:08:30 Like how long have you chased access?
01:08:36 Does it take days, weeks, months, years?
01:08:39 Lex, I’m not the most talented filmmaker in the world.
01:08:43 I’m not the smartest guy in the world.
01:08:46 I think if there’s qualities
01:08:48 that have served me well in my career,
01:08:50 it’s persistence and tenacity, right?
01:08:53 I’ve always been sort of a slow burn human being.
01:08:56 Like I would never hit a home run,
01:09:00 but I hit a first, right?
01:09:03 A single to first,
01:09:04 and then I’d hit another single to first.
01:09:06 So I ran a marathon when I was 18.
01:09:09 And I think that is illustrative
01:09:11 of sort of how my career has been.
01:09:14 I just keep going.
01:09:16 And I believe in this notion of incremental evolution
01:09:20 that with each project, I try to learn from it
01:09:23 and take away lessons learned and improve my craft, right?
01:09:28 And improve how I leverage that craft
01:09:33 and improve how I tell the story
01:09:35 from a narrative standpoint each time.
01:09:37 So that on the next project, it’s a little bit better.
01:09:41 And that’s the arc of my career
01:09:43 is learning, learning, evolving, evolving,
01:09:47 so that I can make a little better film the next time.
01:09:50 How do you gain people’s trust?
01:09:53 Like for example, there’s a line between journalists
01:09:56 and documentary filmmakers.
01:09:58 Nobody really trusts journalists.
01:10:00 Yeah, right, exactly.
01:10:03 But a documentary filmmaker,
01:10:06 of course I’m joking, half joking.
01:10:09 I don’t know which percentage joking, but some truth.
01:10:12 But documentary filmmaker is a kind of storyteller,
01:10:15 an artist, and somehow that’s more trustworthy
01:10:18 because you’re on the same side in some way.
01:10:22 I don’t know.
01:10:23 Maybe on the same side, yeah.
01:10:25 Is there something to be said
01:10:26 how you gain the trust of people to gain access?
01:10:29 Are you just trying to be a good human being?
01:10:34 Is there something to be said there?
01:10:35 Well, so I do draw a distinction
01:10:37 between journalism and filmmaking
01:10:40 because I think you’re right, they’re different.
01:10:42 And there are some filmmakers who do hue
01:10:44 to sort of the journalistic tenets
01:10:47 of who, what, where, when, why,
01:10:49 fair and balanced on both sides, right?
01:10:51 Make sure everyone has a voice.
01:10:52 I don’t.
01:10:53 If you say fair and balanced,
01:10:55 you’re rarely either fair or balanced.
01:10:58 I’ve seen that with journalists.
01:10:59 Journalists often, unfortunately, in my perspective,
01:11:02 sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant,
01:11:05 but they seem to have. Go on a rant, do it.
01:11:07 They seem to have an agenda.
01:11:09 As opposed to seeking to truly tell a story
01:11:12 or to truly understand,
01:11:15 especially when they’re talking to people
01:11:21 who have some degree of evil in them.
01:11:24 Well, we all have an agenda, right?
01:11:25 I think in anything we do,
01:11:27 whether it’s like to seek truth
01:11:30 or some larger principle,
01:11:32 I always have an agenda.
01:11:35 I chose to work with civilians and caretakers in Yemen
01:11:40 on Hunger Ward rather than to go interview MBS, right?
01:11:45 That’s what I’m interested in
01:11:46 is bringing that to the world, right?
01:11:50 But in terms of building relationships and trust,
01:11:55 it’s really, I think about transparency
01:11:59 as much as anything else
01:12:00 and going in in a collaborative sense.
01:12:03 So I don’t think of the people
01:12:09 that I film with as subjects, for example.
01:12:12 I think of them as collaborators.
01:12:14 So it’s a different mindset that I go into projects with.
01:12:17 That’s beautiful.
01:12:18 And it’s based on relationships, right?
01:12:19 You have to build relationships with other human beings,
01:12:22 however you can, and that takes time
01:12:24 and it takes listening and it’s active.
01:12:28 So I’ve talked about the notion of consent before,
01:12:32 which is so important in nonfiction film.
01:12:36 And I hew to this idea that
01:12:42 you don’t just slide a piece of paper in front of someone,
01:12:45 have release form and have them sign it, right?
01:12:47 And then you’re done.
01:12:48 That’s not the nature of true consent in my mind.
01:12:51 It’s you have to work on a foundation of active consent
01:12:56 every single day that you’re working with someone.
01:12:59 And that’s based on relationship, right?
01:13:01 And it’s based on dialogue.
01:13:02 So it’s trust that I’m always aiming for.
01:13:05 It’s the building of relationships,
01:13:07 which I’m always aiming for,
01:13:08 which is why yesterday I got a bunch of photos
01:13:13 from Dr. Al Sadiq in the South of Yemen.
01:13:15 And she sends me photos all the time
01:13:17 of the children that she’s currently treating
01:13:19 because we have an active relationship
01:13:21 that’s continues on and probably will
01:13:24 for many years to come.
01:13:26 So it’s going to continue.
01:13:28 And that’s the only way that I can do these kinds of films.
01:13:32 Let me ask you about silly little details of filming.
01:13:36 Before we go to the big picture stories,
01:13:42 cameras, lenses, how much do those matter?
01:13:46 You mentioned director of photography.
01:13:47 What’s your, how much do you love the feel,
01:13:52 the smell of equipment that does the visual filming?
01:13:56 You know, there’s some people, they’re just like,
01:13:59 ah, they love lenses.
01:14:03 How much do you love that or versus how much
01:14:05 do you focus on the story or the access
01:14:08 and all those kinds of things?
01:14:09 I’m not a tech geek, but because during the bulk
01:14:14 of my career, I’ve worked as a director of photography
01:14:18 myself for other people in order to pay the bills
01:14:21 over the years, you know, I know the technical side of it
01:14:25 because I’ve had to know it and I’ve had to train myself
01:14:29 and learn it.
01:14:29 So I see them as necessary tools.
01:14:33 And again, because I believe, you know,
01:14:38 film and cinema is and should be visually driven
01:14:43 and not verbally driven.
01:14:45 I want the best tools possible within my means, right?
01:14:49 And within the logistical ability of the project
01:14:53 because we have to go so small, right?
01:14:56 I can’t afford nor can I bring a huge $100,000 lens.
01:15:00 So if I gave you a trillion dollars.
01:15:02 A trillion dollars?
01:15:03 Yeah.
01:15:04 Wow.
01:15:05 Unlimited.
01:15:06 Yeah.
01:15:07 There’s still huge constraints that have nothing
01:15:08 to do with money.
01:15:09 Yeah.
01:15:10 Like you just said.
01:15:10 Yeah.
01:15:11 So what cameras would you use?
01:15:13 You know what I’d do with a trillion dollars?
01:15:16 I could do a lot with a trillion dollars.
01:15:16 You’re not allowed.
01:15:17 You’re only allowed to fund the film and no corrupt stuff
01:15:21 where you like use the film to actually help children.
01:15:24 No, you’re not allowed to do any of that.
01:15:26 What I would do with a trillion is I wouldn’t invest in it.
01:15:28 Well, I guess I would invest in current.
01:15:29 I would increase capacity to do more films.
01:15:33 What I would do.
01:15:34 So I would buy basically the perfect little,
01:15:37 you know, mini equipment set, right?
01:15:40 But then I would train three teams maybe
01:15:43 to do the same thing that I’ve been doing
01:15:45 so we could multiply and scale up.
01:15:48 More and more stories.
01:15:49 Yeah, that’s what I would do with the money.
01:15:51 But the actual setup.
01:15:52 Would remain small and nimble.
01:15:54 Yeah.
01:15:56 And what about lighting?
01:15:59 Do you usually use natural light?
01:16:01 Do you ever do?
01:16:04 I mean, sorry for the technical questions here,
01:16:06 but highlighting the drama of the human face.
01:16:11 Yeah.
01:16:13 That’s the visual.
01:16:14 That’s art.
01:16:15 That’s like, to reveal reality at its deepest is art.
01:16:23 And do you use lighting?
01:16:24 Lighting’s such a big part of that.
01:16:27 Do you ever do artificial lighting?
01:16:28 Do you try to do natural always?
01:16:30 You know the best lighting instrument in the world?
01:16:33 Is the sun.
01:16:34 At the right moment of the day.
01:16:37 And so I predominantly use natural light
01:16:40 at certain moments and just shape natural light
01:16:49 during the course of these small human rights stocks.
01:16:51 That’s not to say we don’t bring instruments sometimes,
01:16:54 but when we do, they’re very small and again, compact.
01:17:00 So for example, I have this small little tube kit
01:17:05 that’s just three instruments, right?
01:17:07 That you can charge with USB.
01:17:08 Because electricity is often a major issue where we go.
01:17:11 So there’s just three little tube lights with magnetic backs
01:17:15 that if we find in a situation where, you know,
01:17:17 we can’t get enough exposure for a hallway or something,
01:17:20 and we have the time to throw it up,
01:17:22 we’ll throw it up if people are walking,
01:17:24 if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot,
01:17:27 for example, at night, just so we can see them, right?
01:17:29 So it’s instances like that.
01:17:31 Or if we do do an interview, which we don’t do very often,
01:17:35 but if we do, just so we have a key light on the face, right?
01:17:40 And always bring a reflector or two, you know,
01:17:43 just to shape natural light as well in ways.
01:17:46 But it’s about shaping rather than producing light for us.
01:17:53 Got it, as we sit surrounded by black curtains
01:17:55 in complete natural light.
01:17:57 So just so you know, this room is like a violation
01:18:02 of the basic principles of using the sun.
01:18:08 So behind the large curtains are giant windows.
01:18:13 Yeah.
01:18:13 So this whole.
01:18:14 Should I rip them open?
01:18:15 Should I rip open the curtains real quick?
01:18:19 How much of the work is done in the edit?
01:18:21 That’s another question I’m curious about.
01:18:24 And how much do you sort of anticipate that?
01:18:28 Like when you’re actually shooting,
01:18:30 are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen
01:18:38 or are you just collecting, as a human,
01:18:40 collecting little bits of story here and there
01:18:42 and in the edit is where most of the storytelling happens?
01:18:46 I’ve developed this sort of mental paradigm
01:18:49 for myself over the years that speaks to that.
01:18:53 And I call it the three creations, right?
01:18:56 And so when I’m doing a film, the first creation for me
01:19:00 is my preconception or visualization
01:19:05 of what the film is going to be before I shoot it, right?
01:19:09 So I have this entire vision of what a film’s gonna be.
01:19:15 And sometimes it can be pretty specific.
01:19:16 Like I’ll think through the scenes
01:19:18 if I know the locations and everything,
01:19:20 and I’ll have this idea of what I’m gonna create, right?
01:19:24 And then I’m there filming, right?
01:19:26 And always without fail, reality is something
01:19:30 altogether different than what I thought it would be.
01:19:33 But it’s still good to have the original idea.
01:19:35 Yeah, yeah, but if I tried to hold to that original vision,
01:19:38 right, and to create a film out of that idea,
01:19:41 they’d be crap, all the films would be crap.
01:19:43 So I have to adapt, I have to evolve my approach
01:19:46 and then embrace what is actually occurring
01:19:49 with the people actually doing it and then reenvision.
01:19:53 So that reenvision is very active
01:19:55 during the entire filming process.
01:19:57 And so that’s the second creation,
01:19:58 that’s the rethinking and revisualizing
01:20:02 based on what we’re actually experiencing and seeing
01:20:05 what this film is going to be.
01:20:08 And then I finished filming, right?
01:20:11 And we bring the hard drives back
01:20:13 and we plug in the hard drives in the edit bay.
01:20:16 And oftentimes, because it’s two of us filming
01:20:20 most of the time, I haven’t seen all the footage.
01:20:23 Because in the field, it’s all about just filming, right?
01:20:26 And then just transferring the footage
01:20:28 and getting on safely, you know, clone to multiple drives.
01:20:31 I don’t have a chance to review everything.
01:20:33 I can’t do rushes like you do on a large feature.
01:20:36 So because I’m filming half of it,
01:20:38 I know what I’ve filmed, right?
01:20:40 But I haven’t seen everything
01:20:42 the director of photography has filmed, right?
01:20:45 So the next stage for me is reviewing every single frame
01:20:50 of what’s been filmed.
01:20:51 And that’s where discovery happens the third time, right?
01:20:56 Or the second time rather is,
01:20:57 wow, now I thought we’d filmed this,
01:21:01 but actually there’s this over here.
01:21:05 And then I have to open up this second vision
01:21:07 and turn it and transform it into a third vision
01:21:10 for the film based on what’s actually on the hard drive.
01:21:12 So is this like a daily process?
01:21:15 So what I do, my process is that
01:21:17 if it’s a really difficult project,
01:21:21 I’ll take a break before I go through this
01:21:23 just for healing, you know,
01:21:25 and some space away and fresh eyes.
01:21:27 And usually that’s about a month.
01:21:29 And then once I reengage, I reengage whole hog,
01:21:32 I reengage fully and I review every single frame.
01:21:37 And as I do that, I create a spreadsheet.
01:21:40 And for Hunger War, that spreadsheet was,
01:21:43 I don’t know, 1500 lines long or something
01:21:45 where it’s basically log notes.
01:21:48 And I watch every scene and I take notes
01:21:51 and I know really what we have.
01:21:54 And once I’ve gone through that process
01:21:55 that takes about a month
01:21:57 and I really know what we came back with,
01:21:59 I create an outline for the film from that.
01:22:02 And that’s the third visioning, right?
01:22:05 That’s usually completely different
01:22:07 than my original vision for the film to some extent, right?
01:22:10 But I have to stay open to that entire process
01:22:14 or I’d be trying to create something
01:22:17 that I can’t really create.
01:22:19 So I think those are the three creations for me.
01:22:22 That’s so cool to know what we have,
01:22:27 just to lay it all out and to load it in into your mind.
01:22:31 Cause like, this is the capture of reality we have.
01:22:35 It’s a very kind of scientific process too.
01:22:37 Cause you know, in science,
01:22:39 you collect a bunch of data about a phenomena
01:22:41 and now you have to like analyze that data,
01:22:43 but now your phenomena is long gone.
01:22:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
01:22:46 Now you just have the data.
01:22:47 Just the data and you have to write a paper about it,
01:22:51 like analyze the data, it’s similar things.
01:22:54 You have to like load it all in.
01:22:55 Where’s the story?
01:22:56 How do you, that last probably profound piece
01:23:03 of doing the editing, like in your mind,
01:23:07 like how to lay those things out?
01:23:10 Well, it’s almost like the scientific process, right?
01:23:12 I have a hypothesis, a creative hypothesis, right?
01:23:15 Not a scientific one.
01:23:17 But then I’m testing the hypothesis
01:23:19 during the course of filming, right?
01:23:20 And I have to stay true to what the data tells me
01:23:24 in the end creatively.
01:23:25 So it’s very similar to the scientific processes.
01:23:27 I don’t know what we should, we should probably coin that.
01:23:30 Yeah, that’s pretty good.
01:23:31 Creative scientific process or something like that.
01:23:34 But then you actually do the edit and then you watch,
01:23:38 that’s also iterative in a sense,
01:23:41 because maybe when you have a film,
01:23:45 that’s 20, 30, 40 minutes, or if it’s feature length,
01:23:50 like do you ever have it where it sucks?
01:23:54 Like it’s not at all.
01:23:55 Is there a stage where it sucks?
01:23:56 Like a stage where, right, right.
01:23:58 Like it’s where it’s like, no, this is not,
01:24:01 this is not what I was, like when it’s all put together
01:24:03 in this way, this doesn’t, this is not working right.
01:24:07 This is not right.
01:24:08 Or do you, is it always like an incremental step
01:24:12 towards better and better?
01:24:13 It’s incremental.
01:24:13 Yeah, it’s incremental.
01:24:14 Yeah, and there’s always some moment in the editing process
01:24:18 where there’s a breakthrough,
01:24:19 where suddenly I understand how it fits together more fully.
01:24:24 And you have to be, like you said, resilient.
01:24:26 You have to be patient that that moment will come.
01:24:28 Yeah, exactly.
01:24:29 Are you ultra self critical
01:24:31 or are you generally optimistic and patient?
01:24:35 I don’t think those are mutually exclusive.
01:24:38 Right, so you just oscillate
01:24:40 or are they like dance partners or something?
01:24:42 They’re dance partners, yeah.
01:24:44 Definitely dancing all the way through the process.
01:24:47 By way of advice, you know, to young filmmakers,
01:24:52 how to film something that is recognized
01:24:58 by the world in some way.
01:25:00 I would say, you know, first off, learn your craft, right?
01:25:05 Because I think craft is incredibly foundational, right?
01:25:11 To creating a powerful story.
01:25:14 And sorry to interrupt, but when you say craft,
01:25:16 do you mean just the raw technical,
01:25:18 the director of photography, like the filming aspect?
01:25:21 Is it the storytelling, is it the access, the whole thing?
01:25:24 I think craft is more than just knowing
01:25:25 how to push record on a camera or what lens to use, right?
01:25:28 That’s part of it, right?
01:25:30 But I think at least in nonfiction,
01:25:35 you know, I’m a product to some extent
01:25:38 of having to know how to do it all, right?
01:25:42 Having to teach myself how to do it all.
01:25:44 Because I didn’t go to film school, you know?
01:25:48 But I became so enamored of telling stories through a camera.
01:25:54 What was the leap, by the way,
01:25:55 from theater to storyteller?
01:25:57 Oh, I just needed an extra class in grad school.
01:26:00 I was in a MFA directing class
01:26:03 and I needed an extra class and I just sort of like
01:26:06 talked my way into a television directing class
01:26:09 and fell in love with it.
01:26:11 And the actor became the director.
01:26:14 Yeah, yeah.
01:26:15 Well, yeah, I mean, I wasn’t an actor,
01:26:18 but I had to act and I had to know the craft of acting
01:26:21 because I was in the theater, you know,
01:26:22 to work with actors. Did you love it, though?
01:26:24 Did you love acting? The theater?
01:26:27 Yeah, theater?
01:26:28 The first, yeah, as an undergraduate, yeah.
01:26:30 But then I learned pretty quickly
01:26:32 that I was pretty bad at it, or at least not very good,
01:26:36 and that my skills lay elsewhere
01:26:39 in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story.
01:26:42 When you started taking a class,
01:26:45 but also telling stories as a director,
01:26:48 did you quickly realize that you’re pretty good at this
01:26:53 or was it a grind?
01:26:56 That’s a good question, Max.
01:26:58 I think, I definitely knew right away
01:27:02 that it was more my wheelhouse, right?
01:27:05 And I think part of that was because
01:27:09 I grew up in sort of a world of imagination.
01:27:14 And I think that active imagination as a child
01:27:18 really lent itself well to the skillset
01:27:21 that a director needs, right?
01:27:23 To shape story, to shape narrative, to shape performances.
01:27:26 So I think it was a much more natural fit for me.
01:27:29 Was I excellent at the beginning?
01:27:31 Heck no, no, I think few people are, but I learned.
01:27:36 Where was the biggest struggle for you?
01:27:37 Is it, so your imagination clearly was something
01:27:41 that you worked on for a lifetime.
01:27:43 So I’m sure that was pretty strong.
01:27:46 Books, came from books.
01:27:47 Books.
01:27:49 But the actual conversion of the imagination,
01:27:52 you said shape the story.
01:27:53 Where was the skill most lacking
01:27:56 in the shaping of the story initially?
01:27:59 Technical side.
01:27:59 Just technical side.
01:28:00 Yeah, like, you know,
01:28:01 cause I taught myself everything.
01:28:03 What kind of microphone should I use, right?
01:28:05 What kind of camera?
01:28:06 What does this lens do?
01:28:07 What’s that lens do?
01:28:08 I didn’t know any of that.
01:28:10 And so I essentially was,
01:28:11 I have been self taught, technically.
01:28:14 How do you get good technically,
01:28:15 would you say, when you’re self taught?
01:28:16 Just doing it over and over again.
01:28:18 And what kind of stories were you telling?
01:28:20 I began shooting local commercials for.
01:28:24 For money?
01:28:25 For money, yeah, yeah.
01:28:26 So you’re doing professional projects?
01:28:27 Yeah, yeah.
01:28:28 And so I kind of learned on the job as I did it.
01:28:31 How many hobby projects did you do,
01:28:32 just for the hell of it?
01:28:34 Or were you trying to focus on the professional?
01:28:35 Well, I was trying to make money, right?
01:28:37 Right out of grad school, just to pay the rent.
01:28:39 And that’s a forcing function to,
01:28:42 I mean, I personally love having my back to the wall
01:28:45 or financially you’re screwed if you don’t succeed.
01:28:48 So that’s nice.
01:28:50 I mean, I lived out of the trunk of my car
01:28:51 for a couple of years after grad school,
01:28:53 just freelancing, just like,
01:28:56 but that couple of years really helped me learn fast
01:29:00 because I had to learn fast.
01:29:02 So I did a couple of voyages around the world
01:29:05 for this group called Semester at Sea,
01:29:08 that is a floating university
01:29:09 that where they go out three and a half months at a time
01:29:11 with about 500 college level students
01:29:15 and about 35 professors.
01:29:16 And so you’re shooting every day for three and a half months
01:29:19 in like nine different countries.
01:29:20 And so that really was like instrumental to me
01:29:25 becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly.
01:29:27 And you were doing most of the work yourself?
01:29:29 One man, one man band, yeah.
01:29:31 The second voyage, I at least had an editor with me.
01:29:35 Yeah, but I was shooting everything.
01:29:36 Yeah, what’s the perfect team?
01:29:38 Is it two people for nonfiction asking for a friend?
01:29:43 Some kind of interested in some storytelling,
01:29:45 not of the level and the sophistication that you’re doing,
01:29:50 but more.
01:29:51 I think you have to allow the story
01:29:52 to dictate what the size of the film should be.
01:29:54 For these small human rights docs I do,
01:29:55 I think two or three, it means you work your butt off,
01:29:59 because you’re doing everything, right?
01:30:01 But it allows you to tell intimate stories
01:30:03 and have that access.
01:30:04 I’m doing a film this summer that’s a scripted piece
01:30:08 where we’ll probably have 25 crew people.
01:30:10 Oh, wow.
01:30:11 So it’s a completely different endeavor altogether.
01:30:14 But doing it yourself, what do you think about that?
01:30:18 Even though you have that trillion dollars.
01:30:21 Oh, I have that trillion dollars again?
01:30:23 Sweet, you can write that check before I leave, right?
01:30:25 Yeah, I will.
01:30:26 Okay, great.
01:30:26 I’ve never seen a check for that big.
01:30:30 It’s gonna be interesting.
01:30:31 How many zeros is that?
01:30:31 I write them so often, I’ve lost track.
01:30:36 Or the United States government sure as heck
01:30:38 writes them often.
01:30:39 Okay, anyway, I mean, is there an argument
01:30:42 can you steel man the case for a single person?
01:30:44 Not for me, not for me, and here’s why.
01:30:53 What I’ve found is that by being a team of two filming
01:31:01 with a field producer, by two people filming,
01:31:05 it allows us to double our footage first off, right?
01:31:10 So we have twice as much footage in the time
01:31:13 we’re filming to come back with as opposed
01:31:14 to one person filming.
01:31:15 So you’re each manning a camera?
01:31:18 Yeah, constantly.
01:31:19 And how much, sorry to keep interrupting,
01:31:22 how much interaction and interplay there is?
01:31:25 Sometimes the director of photography is in another room
01:31:28 filming a different scene, if it makes sense.
01:31:30 Sometimes we’re cross shooting in the same room, right?
01:31:32 Just depends on the needs of the moment.
01:31:35 So we come back with double the footage is one thing.
01:31:38 But as a director, so that’s, you know,
01:31:40 given how access is sometimes shaped by the events
01:31:45 so that we can only, something, you know,
01:31:47 in Lifeboat, for example, you know,
01:31:49 a rescue operation may only happen three days, right?
01:31:52 So you want as much footage of that as you can.
01:31:55 But the other piece of it that’s really critical for me,
01:31:57 I found is that by having another human being
01:32:00 I’m filming with, who I’m co shooting with,
01:32:02 it frees me up as a director to not always
01:32:05 have to be shooting either.
01:32:07 I can do all the other work to build relationships, right?
01:32:11 To have side conversations with people,
01:32:14 to sort out the right way to tell a story, right?
01:32:18 Or to transfer footage, knowing that the director
01:32:21 of photography is still filming during all that.
01:32:23 So it frees me up to think of as a director
01:32:26 rather than just an image acquirer.
01:32:29 Yeah, cause there’s also, I don’t know how distracting it is.
01:32:32 You’ve obviously done it for years, but setting stuff up,
01:32:35 it preoccupies your mind.
01:32:40 Like pressing the record button,
01:32:42 and like framing stuff and all that,
01:32:43 that still takes up some part of your mind
01:32:46 where you can’t think freely.
01:32:48 That’s my choice, right?
01:32:49 That’s how I work best.
01:32:51 That said, the caveat there would be
01:32:53 that’s not the only way to do it, obviously, right?
01:32:55 Like one of my favorite documentaries of all time
01:33:00 is a documentary called A Woman Captured, shot in Hungary,
01:33:03 by a single filmmaker with a single camera
01:33:07 with a single lens, right?
01:33:09 And it’s brilliant, and powerful,
01:33:12 and moving, and interventional.
01:33:16 It’s incredible filmmaking, and it was a single human being
01:33:19 who created that film with a collaborator or subject.
01:33:23 So it can be done, it’s just not how I work best.
01:33:26 Yeah, how much personally would the other person,
01:33:29 how important is the relationship with them
01:33:34 outside of the filming?
01:33:36 Like.
01:33:37 With the director of photography?
01:33:38 The director of photography, say.
01:33:39 Like, how much drinking, and if you don’t drink,
01:33:44 whatever the equivalent of that is,
01:33:46 do you have to do together?
01:33:47 How much soul searching?
01:33:48 Or is it more like two surgeons getting together?
01:33:52 Is it surgeons, or is it a jazz band?
01:33:55 Well, it could be either, right?
01:33:57 Hopefully not at the same time, though,
01:33:59 because I don’t think surgeons and jazz bands
01:34:00 go well together, probably.
01:34:02 They’re both good with fingers, I suppose.
01:34:05 Exactly, but I’d rather maybe not play jazz
01:34:08 while they operate on me.
01:34:09 But I think, for me, I think there are moments of both,
01:34:15 but usually not at the same time, right?
01:34:17 There are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing,
01:34:20 you really have to be that task driven, right?
01:34:25 To capture as thoroughly as possible
01:34:27 whatever’s unfolding, right?
01:34:29 But I think there’s other times
01:34:30 where you do improvise like jazz, right?
01:34:32 And where you have a lot of choices ahead of you,
01:34:35 and you’re doing maybe a dance
01:34:38 with the other camera person, right?
01:34:41 In order to capture a scene as creatively
01:34:43 and fully as possible during a fixed duration.
01:34:47 How much, you said shaping, because it is nonfiction.
01:34:51 But I feel like there’s so many ways
01:34:53 to tell the same nonfiction,
01:34:55 that is bordering on fiction.
01:34:57 Yeah.
01:34:58 Well, it’s storytelling.
01:35:03 And how much shaping do you see yourself as doing?
01:35:08 Like how important is your role?
01:35:10 How you tell the story?
01:35:14 I suppose the question I’m asking is,
01:35:16 how many ways can you really screw this up?
01:35:20 Every day you can screw it up.
01:35:22 I mean, that’s really the,
01:35:24 I think what you’re asking about
01:35:25 is really the ethos of documentary filmmaking, right?
01:35:29 I allow a lot of things to guide my choices.
01:35:34 One of them being, am I being fair, right?
01:35:38 Not balanced, but am I being fair to what I’m witnessing?
01:35:43 Does the camera capturing in a fair way
01:35:46 the truth of the reality?
01:35:48 Some fundamental truth of it.
01:35:49 And it also speaks to consent, right?
01:35:51 Am I being fair in a sense of consent?
01:35:53 Do I have active consent in this moment, right?
01:35:56 Regardless of whether I have a signed piece of paper.
01:35:58 I always find some way to document it,
01:36:00 whether it’s just direct address to camera
01:36:02 or a translated release.
01:36:05 So there’s, actually that’s an interesting little,
01:36:07 so they say something to the camera that they consent
01:36:10 or they sign the thing.
01:36:12 Yeah, so for example, the large broadcast companies
01:36:16 have this formalized process
01:36:18 where they present a piece of paper, right?
01:36:21 And the subject reads it and they sign it
01:36:25 and then you have permission and that’s irrevocable, right?
01:36:28 So it’ll hold up in court.
01:36:30 That’s not how I operate, right?
01:36:32 And so it’s just, for example, that doesn’t work
01:36:38 if someone’s illiterate
01:36:39 and can’t read that piece of paper, right?
01:36:42 What if they don’t know how to sign their name, right?
01:36:44 So instead you have to have a conversation,
01:36:47 ask questions, have them ask questions,
01:36:49 come to a complete understanding
01:36:51 before you even know whether they understand
01:36:53 what you’re asking, right?
01:36:54 And then in that case, if someone’s illiterate,
01:36:57 then you have that conversation,
01:36:58 you just sit down and it takes a long time sometimes,
01:37:00 but you have to do it.
01:37:01 And then if they still wanna participate
01:37:04 and they give you their consent,
01:37:06 they can’t sign a piece of paper, right?
01:37:08 So then you just do in their native language, right?
01:37:11 Direct consent to camera in their language.
01:37:14 Interesting, but also you’re speaking to the consent
01:37:16 that’s just a human placing trust in you.
01:37:19 Yeah.
01:37:20 You make a connection like this.
01:37:21 That’s the most important consent, yeah.
01:37:23 I hate papers, I hate papers and lawyers
01:37:28 because they, exactly for that reason,
01:37:31 yeah, okay, great, but you should be focusing
01:37:35 on the human connection that leads to the trust,
01:37:39 like real consent and consent day to day,
01:37:41 minute to minute, because that can change.
01:37:43 Absolutely, and it does change.
01:37:46 You mentioned A Woman Captured.
01:37:51 I’m sure you can’t answer that, but I will force you.
01:37:54 What are the top three documentaries of all time,
01:37:58 short or feature length?
01:38:00 Oh boy.
01:38:01 This is not your opinion, this is objective truth.
01:38:05 Maybe top one, what’s the greatest?
01:38:09 We got, let’s see, March of the Penguins.
01:38:14 That’s probably number one for me.
01:38:15 Really?
01:38:16 No, I’m just kidding, I don’t know.
01:38:17 I do seem to, the metaphor of penguins
01:38:23 huddling together in hard, cold,
01:38:28 like in the harsh conditions of nature,
01:38:32 that’s something that’s kind of beautiful.
01:38:34 I don’t love all nature documentaries,
01:38:37 but something about March of the Penguins.
01:38:40 I think Morgan Freeman.
01:38:42 Yeah, he narrated it.
01:38:43 Narrates it, so maybe everything,
01:38:45 just any documentary with Morgan Freeman,
01:38:47 I’m a sucker for that.
01:38:50 Warner, Herzog, The Life and the Taiga, The Simple People.
01:38:54 I love Grizzly Man, I love Grizzly Man.
01:38:56 I think that’s one of his best works.
01:38:59 Yes, I think that’s Joe Rogan’s favorite documentary.
01:39:04 It’s both comedy and, I mean it’s.
01:39:06 Tragic comedy.
01:39:07 Tragic comedy, yeah.
01:39:09 Is there something that stands out to you,
01:39:11 I mean I’m joking about best,
01:39:13 something that was impactful to you?
01:39:15 Just to put it out there,
01:39:16 I don’t think there’s any way to say
01:39:19 that they’re objectively the best three documentaries
01:39:22 of all time, but for me,
01:39:23 and you may find this interesting given your background,
01:39:25 is that I think my top three are all
01:39:32 from the Eastern Bloc, actually.
01:39:35 So Aquarella by Viktor Kosokovsky is one of my favorite,
01:39:41 and it’s a couple years old now,
01:39:43 which is sort of a meditation on the place water has
01:39:47 on our planet and on our lives.
01:39:50 I think A Woman Captured that I mentioned,
01:39:53 which was shot in Hungary.
01:39:54 Is it a feature length one?
01:39:56 Both are feature lengths, yeah.
01:39:58 It is just brilliant,
01:40:00 and it I think has yet to find distribution here in the U.S.
01:40:05 But it’s the perfect example of what they call verite,
01:40:09 or direct nonfiction filmmaking.
01:40:13 A European woman, this is the synopsis,
01:40:15 a European woman has been kept by a family
01:40:17 as a domestic slave for 10 years,
01:40:20 drawing courage from the filmmaker’s presence.
01:40:23 She decides to escape the unbearable oppression
01:40:27 and become a free person.
01:40:28 Wow, so the filmmaker is part of the story.
01:40:32 Part of the story, it didn’t start that way,
01:40:34 but during the course of the story,
01:40:36 the filmmaker comes to understand
01:40:39 that this is actually modern day slavery.
01:40:41 And rather than just allow it to be,
01:40:45 actually enables and assists this woman
01:40:48 to free herself from slavery and become a free woman.
01:40:51 I wonder, sorry, on a small tangent
01:40:52 before we get to number three,
01:40:53 like Icarus is interesting too.
01:40:57 How often do you become part of the story,
01:41:00 or the story is different because of your presence?
01:41:06 Like you changed the tide of history.
01:41:10 Yeah, well, back to just like one person at a time
01:41:12 that we keep talking,
01:41:13 we keep coming back to that theme on some level.
01:41:16 So this could tie in interesting
01:41:19 to one of my favorite films actually.
01:41:21 So the last two films that I would mention
01:41:24 for my top four list would be,
01:41:26 the third Eastern Bloc one
01:41:28 would be a film called Immortal in 2019,
01:41:31 which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman
01:41:35 that sort of examines the place of the state
01:41:41 in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state.
01:41:46 I mean, that’s my own synopsis,
01:41:47 but that’s one of my takeaways
01:41:49 from the brilliant 60 minute doc or so.
01:41:52 Again, Russian filmmaking is really quite good and powerful.
01:41:57 The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film,
01:41:59 Titicate Follies, which was filmed in the US decades ago,
01:42:04 inside basically the bowels of an insane asylum
01:42:09 or a mental health institution.
01:42:11 And I bring up Wiseman because he is really the godfather,
01:42:17 so to speak, of direct cinema or cinema verite.
01:42:21 And when early in my career,
01:42:25 I really believed in what he expressed
01:42:29 as the place of the verite filmmaker,
01:42:32 which is simply fly on the wall,
01:42:36 which is only observational in nature, right?
01:42:41 And I believe that that’s how I should be
01:42:44 as a nonfiction filmmaker,
01:42:45 that I was there only to bear witness, to observe,
01:42:48 and not to intervene in any way, shape, or form.
01:42:52 And that was the sort of foundation
01:42:56 for how I operated for many, many years.
01:43:00 And then some things happened.
01:43:01 So one of those things that happened was I filmed Lifeboat.
01:43:07 And during the course of filming Lifeboat,
01:43:10 which covered rescue operations in the Mediterranean
01:43:15 off the coast of Libya,
01:43:16 in the first three days of that rescue mission,
01:43:22 we came upon over 3,000 people, asylum seekers,
01:43:27 floating in flimsy rafts in the water.
01:43:30 And we were on the Zodiacs and we were filming.
01:43:35 And within the first couple hours,
01:43:39 we would come up to these rafts and these boats
01:43:44 that were in really dire shape,
01:43:46 and people would be pushed off, and people would jump off,
01:43:49 and people would fall into the water,
01:43:52 and some of them couldn’t swim.
01:43:57 And so we found ourselves in this moment
01:44:00 where we had a choice.
01:44:02 We could film someone drown in front of us,
01:44:05 or we could put our cameras down
01:44:06 and pull them out of the water.
01:44:08 And so that’s what we did.
01:44:10 We put our cameras in the bottom of the water,
01:44:13 bottom of the Zodiac,
01:44:14 and just started pulling people out of the water.
01:44:17 And if I was Wiseman, according to his paradigm,
01:44:24 then we should have just filmed.
01:44:25 And I didn’t anticipate that moment beforehand.
01:44:30 I had no sort of foreknowledge
01:44:32 that I was gonna find myself faced
01:44:34 with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian.
01:44:38 But there was no question in my mind
01:44:40 that I had to put my camera down
01:44:41 and pull that fellow human being out of the water.
01:44:43 And I don’t regret it at all.
01:44:45 So I’ve come to a different place.
01:44:46 I’ve evolved to what I believe for the kind of film
01:44:49 that I do is more appropriate.
01:44:52 I can go to sleep at night knowing that,
01:44:56 regardless of how the film would have been different
01:44:58 if I hadn’t made that choice,
01:45:00 I made the right choice as a human being.
01:45:02 So I think of it as being a human being first
01:45:05 and a filmmaker second in moments like that.
01:45:08 That’s beautifully put, but I also think
01:45:11 you could be a human being in small ways too,
01:45:16 like silly ways, and put a little bit of yourself
01:45:19 in documentaries.
01:45:20 I tend to see that as really beautiful.
01:45:24 Like the meta piece of it?
01:45:26 Yeah, just put yourself into the movie a little bit.
01:45:31 Because break that third, fourth, whatever the wall is,
01:45:35 is realize that there’s a human behind the camera too.
01:45:38 For some reason, me as a fan, as a viewer,
01:45:41 that’s enjoyable too.
01:45:42 I think there’s a real authenticity there
01:45:46 behind the story, especially with these hard stories
01:45:49 that you’re doing that there’s a human being struggling to.
01:45:53 Like observing the suffering
01:45:57 and having to bear the burden
01:46:02 that this kind of suffering exists in the world
01:46:05 and you’re behind that camera living that struggle.
01:46:09 And there’s small ways to show yourself in that way.
01:46:12 As you know, I don’t do that in a big way.
01:46:16 But I actually, there are subtle moments
01:46:18 where I allow that presence to live just for a second.
01:46:23 Like I hate belly button docs, that’s what I call them.
01:46:26 I don’t know.
01:46:27 What’s a belly button doc?
01:46:28 A belly button doc is navel gazing, right?
01:46:30 Where it’s sort of a narcissistic filmmaking
01:46:33 where someone just studies their own place in the world.
01:46:38 Right, I think.
01:46:39 I see, yeah.
01:46:40 I think my, I’m more concerned
01:46:44 with how I can intervene, right?
01:46:48 Yeah, well, you’re trying to really deeply empathize.
01:46:52 Yeah.
01:46:53 So like, if you do empathize, who am I?
01:46:55 I don’t wanna center myself in these stories.
01:46:57 It’s not about me, right?
01:46:59 I am so unimportant.
01:47:02 What is important is what’s happening,
01:47:03 what’s unfolding in the world that we need to act upon.
01:47:06 And I think it’s selfish and narcissistic
01:47:09 to push myself into these stories unnecessarily.
01:47:13 Now that said, I think there is some small value
01:47:16 in what you’re saying just to remind viewers
01:47:18 that there’s obviously a filmmaker at play.
01:47:21 So sometimes the way that I do that
01:47:22 is just like through a question on camera.
01:47:25 I’d allow the audio to live of a question
01:47:28 or during a conversation I’m having with someone
01:47:31 so they can just hear how it’s posed, for example, right?
01:47:34 And to me, that’s enough.
01:47:37 Yeah.
01:47:38 I do like moments when people recognize that you exist.
01:47:43 They look at the filmmaker past the camera
01:47:47 and yes, you ask the question in an interview
01:47:49 or something like that and they respond to that.
01:47:52 Yeah.
01:47:53 Like they respond to this like new perturbation
01:47:57 into their reality that was created by this other human.
01:47:59 Yeah.
01:48:00 I especially like when those questions
01:48:02 or those perturbations are like a little bit absurd
01:48:07 and like add something very novel to their situation
01:48:11 and that novelty reveals something about them.
01:48:15 So as opposed to capturing the day to day reality
01:48:18 of their life, you do that plus the perturbations
01:48:21 of like something novel.
01:48:23 Yeah.
01:48:24 But of course, there’s all kinds of ways to do this.
01:48:26 Let me, what was number five, by the way?
01:48:29 I only gave you four.
01:48:31 You just.
01:48:31 I’m just gonna stay at four.
01:48:33 There’s a short doc I like, I mentioned,
01:48:35 they’re called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima.
01:48:38 I know, I know.
01:48:39 I apologize.
01:48:40 I know, I know.
01:48:41 It’s dark.
01:48:42 It’s a great title though, right?
01:48:43 It’s a great title.
01:48:43 Yeah, great title.
01:48:45 No one’s seen it, but it’s great.
01:48:47 It says what it sounds like.
01:48:49 Yeah, yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like,
01:48:51 but really brilliantly executed.
01:48:55 Well, let me ask you about Lifeboat
01:48:56 because it’s extremely, I don’t.
01:49:04 It’s a really moving idea.
01:49:07 Just the fact that this exists in the world,
01:49:10 that there’s, as a metaphor, as a reality,
01:49:14 that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately.
01:49:18 It’s the desperation of it.
01:49:21 And now with these refugees, the desperation of that,
01:49:25 of trying to escape towards a world
01:49:28 that’s full of mystery, uncertainty, doubt,
01:49:32 could be hopeless at times,
01:49:34 and you’re willing to do a lot for your own survival
01:49:38 and for the survival of your family
01:49:39 and all those kinds of things.
01:49:40 That’s kind of the human spirit,
01:49:42 and you just capture it in Lifeboat.
01:49:47 Can you tell me the story behind this film
01:49:51 as you started to already tell?
01:49:52 Can you tell me what is it about?
01:49:56 So Lifeboat really seeks to sort of lift up
01:50:03 and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean
01:50:10 when it was at its height in 2016.
01:50:15 And it came to be for many reasons,
01:50:18 but one of those reasons is colleagues
01:50:23 in the NGO community really shared with me
01:50:26 that when the borders between Greece and Turkey
01:50:29 were shut down, that the flow of Syrian asylum seekers
01:50:35 that was initially going across from Turkey to Greece
01:50:39 was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean.
01:50:42 So I started to research that
01:50:43 and discovered that was exactly the case,
01:50:46 and then further stumbled upon the fact
01:50:49 that nation states hadn’t really stepped up to address it
01:50:54 and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers
01:50:57 often drowning in these flimsy crafts
01:50:59 that were pushed off from the shores of Libya
01:51:01 because the EU wasn’t doing its duty
01:51:06 to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint.
01:51:09 And so the net result of that was that
01:51:11 this whole sort of like humanitarian community sprung up
01:51:16 and it was civil society based
01:51:18 that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers
01:51:22 to just ensure that fellow human beings
01:51:25 weren’t drowning, simply put.
01:51:27 And one of those was the small little NGO called Sea Watch,
01:51:30 which when they discovered what was happening,
01:51:33 just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers,
01:51:38 bought a research vessel, retrofitted it,
01:51:41 and motored down off the coast of Libya
01:51:44 to start pulling people out of the water.
01:51:45 And again, I found that inspiring, right?
01:51:48 I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers
01:51:52 was doing something that our leaders wouldn’t, right?
01:51:56 And it was something as basic and simple
01:51:59 as saving human beings.
01:52:03 And I thought there was an inspiring story there.
01:52:06 And as it turned out, there was.
01:52:08 Have you ever saved someone’s life
01:52:13 as part of making these documentaries directly?
01:52:17 And directly, I think you probably have countless lives,
01:52:22 but directly, were you put in that position?
01:52:25 I don’t wanna, I mean, I certainly poured people
01:52:29 out of the water who couldn’t swim, I did that.
01:52:33 And that’s again, speaking to the basic humanity,
01:52:35 put down the camera and help, yeah.
01:52:40 So this is people coming from Libya,
01:52:43 trying to make it across the Mediterranean Sea
01:52:46 on a crappy, tiny boat.
01:52:48 From a filmmaker perspective, how do you film that?
01:52:51 Was there decisions to capture the desperation?
01:52:55 Well, we were going back to this idea of access
01:53:01 and how that’s so fundamental to my approach.
01:53:03 And we were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation
01:53:10 on this Sea Watch vessel, which was 30 meters long.
01:53:12 And we were two of a crew of 15, right?
01:53:16 So we had to multitask all the time
01:53:18 because the only reason we were on that boat
01:53:21 was by agreeing that if needed,
01:53:25 we would do whatever necessary, right?
01:53:27 To help, right?
01:53:30 And so it was very active on multiple levels
01:53:33 and we were making decisions each and every day
01:53:38 that were not only filmmaking and creative decisions,
01:53:42 but also decisions about how to live that duality, right?
01:53:53 Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously.
01:53:56 And the greatest example I can share of that was,
01:54:01 or with my director of photography in that project,
01:54:04 Kenny Allen, Kenny’s a big guy.
01:54:08 It’s like, he’s got like arms like tree trunks.
01:54:11 And he, because he was so physically able and strong,
01:54:18 the head of mission really tasked him
01:54:22 to be on the Zodiacs to pull people out of the water
01:54:24 because he could literally with one arm reach down
01:54:27 and just oftentimes pull someone out, right?
01:54:30 Whereas usually it would take two or three people, right?
01:54:33 And so when we were at the height of triage
01:54:37 and there were people in the water all over
01:54:39 and rafts were sinking,
01:54:41 Kenny was out pulling people out of the water.
01:54:43 And this went on for like 24 hours, right?
01:54:46 And at the end of that first day,
01:54:48 I remember like looking over on the deck
01:54:51 and seeing Kenny like help people up from the ladders
01:54:54 to walk them back, right?
01:54:56 And his camera was nowhere to be seen, right?
01:54:59 And so I walked over to him
01:55:01 and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said,
01:55:03 Kenny, where’s your camera?
01:55:07 And he didn’t know.
01:55:08 He had no idea where his camera was, right?
01:55:11 And so I just said, Kenny,
01:55:15 we’re here to do what you’re doing,
01:55:19 but we’re also here to film it, right?
01:55:21 To make sure that we document
01:55:24 what is unfolding in front of us
01:55:26 so that we have a record of it, right?
01:55:28 So we can bring it to a larger audience.
01:55:30 So you need to go find your camera
01:55:32 so we can also document it.
01:55:34 And that kind of pulled him out
01:55:36 and he went and got his camera and started filming again,
01:55:38 but that gives you a sense of sort of this world
01:55:40 that we had to live in in order to get the story done.
01:55:43 But I think to be a great director of photography,
01:55:47 to be a great director,
01:55:48 you have to lose yourself like that in the story too.
01:55:53 But usually with a camera in your hand, right?
01:55:55 But sometimes you forget the camera.
01:55:58 I mean, there’s a,
01:56:00 I feel like if you’re obsessed with the camera too much,
01:56:06 you can lose the humanity of it.
01:56:08 You get obsessed with the film and the story.
01:56:10 It can become clinical.
01:56:11 Yes, it can become clinical.
01:56:12 Absolutely, and it’s, you know, yeah, absolutely.
01:56:15 And we don’t wanna become,
01:56:17 I don’t wanna become clinical in my film, certainly.
01:56:19 Let me ask you a strange and perhaps edgy question.
01:56:23 So some filmmakers believe it’s justified
01:56:26 to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story.
01:56:30 Warner Herzog, I read this somewhere,
01:56:36 teaches young filmmakers to pick locks
01:56:37 and forge documents and so on.
01:56:39 Oh, I didn’t know that, interesting.
01:56:41 What do you think about that?
01:56:42 Bending the rules in service of telling a story.
01:56:46 You would, of course, never break the law,
01:56:49 but is there, does that, just generally speaking,
01:56:54 speaking, bending the rules and so on?
01:56:58 You know, just to elaborate on this question, perhaps,
01:57:02 I’m distinctly aware that there’s parts in the world
01:57:04 where the rule of law is not, like,
01:57:11 enforced as cleanly as it is in the United States,
01:57:15 as fairly as it is in the United States,
01:57:17 that there’s a kind of, there’s a lot of bribery,
01:57:20 there’s a lot of, like, you don’t really know to trust,
01:57:25 you don’t know if you can trust the cops
01:57:27 or basically anybody.
01:57:30 So, like, the rules are a very hazy kind of concept.
01:57:34 And a lot of them, especially, like, it’s funny,
01:57:36 but authoritarian regimes often have
01:57:38 a giant bureaucracy buildup that’s full of rules.
01:57:40 There’s more rules than you know what to deal with,
01:57:43 and you can’t actually live life
01:57:44 unless you break the rules.
01:57:45 Anyway, laying that all out on the table,
01:57:49 do you ever contend with that,
01:57:53 on what are the rules I can break or should break
01:57:58 to keep to the spirit of the story?
01:58:00 I think you have to ask yourself, are the rules just,
01:58:03 and why are they in place, right?
01:58:05 So, for example, coming into the airport
01:58:07 in southern Yemen, right?
01:58:10 If I just tried to walk through the airport
01:58:11 with all my equipment, even with all the permissions
01:58:14 beforehand, like we had, without having a fixer
01:58:18 at the airport beforehand to make sure
01:58:20 we didn’t go through the standard line, right?
01:58:24 We would have been caught up for three hours at least
01:58:28 negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying
01:58:30 a bribe to get it through, right?
01:58:33 That’s just reality in a place like Yemen.
01:58:36 And so, of course, knowing that, right?
01:58:39 Having talked to colleagues who had taken
01:58:41 that path previously, I took a different path, right?
01:58:45 Where we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out
01:58:48 beforehand, right?
01:58:50 Rather than spending three hours of our time
01:58:52 and paying a series of bribes, right?
01:58:54 Instead, we’re going to get it fixed beforehand
01:58:56 so that we can walk through a different line
01:58:59 and have no one look at any of our equipment.
01:59:02 That’s a pretty good trade off in my mind.
01:59:06 What about security when you’re traveling in these places?
01:59:09 Do you ever have bodyguards?
01:59:12 Well, several questions around that.
01:59:14 Are you ever afraid for your life
01:59:16 when you’re filming in a war zone?
01:59:19 Is there any way to lessen the probability of death?
01:59:27 I don’t have a death wish.
01:59:28 I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can.
01:59:32 But one of the ways I can’t do it in a conflict zone
01:59:35 is by having armed security with me.
01:59:37 And the reason for that is because,
01:59:39 especially in a place like Yemen, right?
01:59:41 If you have armed security, you become a target
01:59:44 in a way that if you’re operating under sort of
01:59:47 the auspices of international humanitarian law,
01:59:52 I actually have more protection.
01:59:53 So I don’t bring security.
01:59:55 If you’re working in Northern Yemen, for example,
02:00:00 you’re going to have someone from the de facto authorities
02:00:03 with you anyway the entire time you’re there.
02:00:06 So the authorities are with you in form anyway.
02:00:10 Regarding fear, yeah, of course.
02:00:17 I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right?
02:00:20 And I think we have a weird mindset,
02:00:26 this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US,
02:00:29 which I don’t pay tribute to.
02:00:34 I believe as a natural human emotion,
02:00:37 it’s an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to.
02:00:40 And I think rather than pretending to be brave,
02:00:47 I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place
02:00:52 to keep you alive.
02:00:54 And I think it’s a matter of not letting the fear arrest you
02:01:01 and allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway.
02:01:04 Don’t you think as a documentary filmmaker,
02:01:07 the fear is a really good signal
02:01:10 for potentially a good thing to do
02:01:12 because there’s a story there?
02:01:14 So is fear is an indicator that you shouldn’t do it
02:01:17 or is it an indicator that you should do it?
02:01:19 It’s probably an indication you should do it, right?
02:01:22 And strangely, I think that’s why,
02:01:27 I think that if there’s something unusual
02:01:30 about the work I do in some part,
02:01:32 it’s because of these types of stories, right?
02:01:35 They’re hard to access, but you also have to have
02:01:38 a threshold of willingness to do them when you can’t,
02:01:46 there is no guarantee of physical safety, right?
02:01:50 And maybe that’s why you should do them.
02:01:52 I’m very much motivated by the things that scare me.
02:01:56 They seem to direct the things that are worth doing
02:02:00 in this all too short life.
02:02:01 How often do you interact with our friendly friends
02:02:05 at the police departments of various locations?
02:02:07 Like, because of the humanitarian nature of your work,
02:02:12 are you able to avoid all such friendly conversations
02:02:17 or are you often making friends with our?
02:02:21 I try to avoid the friendly police people
02:02:25 all over the world as much as possible,
02:02:28 but in some instances, it’s important to be proactive,
02:02:33 right, and make sure that they know what you’re doing
02:02:36 before you do it.
02:02:37 So it’s all about the context and the situation.
02:02:41 For example, working in Northern Yemen,
02:02:43 you couldn’t film for five minutes
02:02:45 if you didn’t have paperwork,
02:02:47 because you’d be taken away.
02:02:48 So you have to make sure you have all those permissions
02:02:50 ahead of time.
02:02:53 50 Feet from Syria, I would love to talk
02:02:58 at least a little bit about this film.
02:03:00 First, can you, high level, can you tell
02:03:03 what this documentary is about?
02:03:05 Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising,
02:03:09 and we returned to the Syrian Turkish border
02:03:15 with a Syrian American orthopedic surgeon
02:03:18 who was volunteering, operating on refugees
02:03:21 as they float across the border from Syria into Turkey.
02:03:24 And it was an attempt at the time,
02:03:27 before a lot of films had come out about the conflict,
02:03:30 to really show again the effects of the war on civilians.
02:03:38 You’ve heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now,
02:03:41 but people knew there was a major conflict in Syria,
02:03:47 but didn’t really understand the form that that was taking
02:03:50 and the impact it was having.
02:03:51 And so we embedded into the,
02:03:55 at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey
02:03:58 that was sanctioned by the Turkish government
02:04:02 to treat Syrian refugees.
02:04:04 And so we filmed there with surgeons
02:04:08 as they operated on war victims.
02:04:11 And we also went into Syria into some of the camps as well.
02:04:14 So in this film, there’s a man who crosses the border
02:04:17 every day to retrieve the wounded
02:04:19 and fair them safety and care.
02:04:21 And you also mentioned about heroism in the United States.
02:04:25 Can you tell me about this man and just people like him?
02:04:29 Like what’s the heroic action
02:04:32 in some of these places that you’ve visited?
02:04:35 So in that instance, you know,
02:04:37 I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right?
02:04:41 Because he was a human being who of his own volition,
02:04:46 no one was paying him to do this,
02:04:48 but he was spending much of his time.
02:04:53 He was just a local businessman
02:04:55 who really saw the need in the camps
02:04:57 right across the border 10 K away.
02:05:00 And he saw the medical need in particular
02:05:04 and how hard it was to get people
02:05:07 in desperate medical conditions across the border
02:05:11 where there was a clinic just right across the border.
02:05:13 But because of the security and the layers of security,
02:05:17 they couldn’t get out by themselves.
02:05:20 So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person
02:05:24 to build relationships with the Turkish guards,
02:05:26 which was relatively easy.
02:05:28 And then he built relationships
02:05:31 with sort of the guards in the no man’s land
02:05:34 between the Syrian guards
02:05:36 and sort of those who lived in the middle area.
02:05:38 And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp.
02:05:41 And he would drive out there daily and bring them food,
02:05:44 right?
02:05:45 Talk them up and build relationships.
02:05:47 And so every day he would bring these guards food
02:05:49 and build relationships with them.
02:05:51 And what that meant was eventually, right?
02:05:54 He had this avenue of access to and from the camps.
02:05:58 And so he started using it
02:06:00 and he would drive this avenue of access
02:06:05 through the three layers of guards each day.
02:06:08 And then they would open the gates for him
02:06:10 because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes.
02:06:13 And he would receive the most desperate medical cases
02:06:18 that were coming from all over Northern Syria, right?
02:06:21 To receive medical treatment.
02:06:23 And he would, as you see in the film,
02:06:25 he would ferry them into the back of his car, right?
02:06:28 And then drive them to the hospital
02:06:31 where they would receive operations.
02:06:33 And then he would bring them back if they wanted
02:06:36 after they’d healed and recovered back to Syria,
02:06:39 if they wanted to return out post recovery.
02:06:41 And he didn’t get paid for that.
02:06:44 He was spending his own money to do it
02:06:46 because he saw other human beings in need.
02:06:49 And it’s like we were talking about earlier.
02:06:52 That’s heroic, right?
02:06:54 That’s selfless.
02:06:55 That’s aspirational for me, right?
02:06:59 Here’s someone who is spending their time on the planet
02:07:03 doing something of value and good to other human beings.
02:07:07 I mean, if you draw parallels to Schindler,
02:07:09 I feel like the fascinating thing about Schindler
02:07:13 is that he’s kind of a flawed human
02:07:18 and is not the kind of human that does these things usually.
02:07:21 But he just can’t help it.
02:07:23 And that’s like the basic humanity.
02:07:25 Despite who you are, the basic humanity shines through.
02:07:30 I think the whims of war test people in those ways, right?
02:07:34 They ask of you things that you may not even know
02:07:39 were going to be asked of you.
02:07:41 And then it speaks to who you are fundamentally
02:07:43 as a human being.
02:07:44 They reveal who you are as a human being, just as you said.
02:07:51 Let me ask a kind of stupid technical question
02:07:55 about publications of movies and so on.
02:07:58 I’ve been recently becoming good friends with Thomas Tall,
02:08:02 who was the producer.
02:08:04 His company, Legendary, funded some of the big
02:08:06 sort of blockbuster films and so on.
02:08:08 And so obviously money is part of filmmaking,
02:08:11 but also the release of movies.
02:08:13 And me as a consumer, with Netflix, with YouTube,
02:08:21 that’s one of the reasons I’m a huge fan of YouTube
02:08:23 is it’s like out in the open.
02:08:26 Access, especially historical access.
02:08:30 Like over time, you can look back years later.
02:08:33 If you pay some money, you can watch
02:08:35 some of the great films ever made.
02:08:38 YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, I don’t know what other services
02:08:41 there are, HBO, Paramount.
02:08:44 Paramount Plus.
02:08:44 Paramount Plus.
02:08:48 Anyway, there’s all these platforms.
02:08:51 Spotify now.
02:08:55 I understand they want to create paywalls and so on.
02:08:59 It makes sense, but I’m a huge fan of openness
02:09:02 and I’m really kind of torn by this whole thing.
02:09:04 Anyway, that’s a discussion for perhaps another time.
02:09:07 But the short question is why is it so hard
02:09:11 to watch your documentaries and other films,
02:09:15 other incredible films on the internet?
02:09:20 If I want to pay unlimited amount of money,
02:09:24 I want to pay a lot of money to watch it.
02:09:26 Why is it so hard?
02:09:27 Well, Lifeboat is streaming free on the New Yorker.
02:09:32 Yes, I saw that, which is interesting.
02:09:35 That doesn’t make any sense.
02:09:37 And then also Hunger Ward is on Paramount Plus,
02:09:41 but also it’s also streaming free.
02:09:45 So you can either go through a paywall
02:09:47 or you can watch it with ads with Big Macs interspersed.
02:09:52 Big Macs.
02:09:53 Sometimes.
02:09:53 Yeah, the contrast.
02:09:55 It’s tough.
02:09:56 Well, no, it really reveals the power of the documentary.
02:10:01 No, but it’s still not, even those platforms are,
02:10:04 I mean, they’re not as easily accessible
02:10:07 because you have to like, you have to use,
02:10:09 you have to think and you have to chase a particular.
02:10:13 You have to chase it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:10:15 I guess from an economic standpoint,
02:10:17 the answer to that is pretty clear, right?
02:10:19 It may not be what people want to watch.
02:10:22 Maybe people want to watch reality.
02:10:25 Maybe people want to watch animal rescue shows
02:10:30 here in the US, which is exactly why in part,
02:10:36 I think it’s so vital that we continue to do stories
02:10:40 on things that aren’t about flowers and puppy dogs, right?
02:10:44 I would push back on that.
02:10:45 So there’s TikTok and you could say,
02:10:51 well, look, humans just want to watch really short content
02:10:55 because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing.
02:10:58 That’s partially true.
02:11:00 But they also watch two, three, four, five hour podcasts.
02:11:06 On TikTok?
02:11:07 No, there’s different platforms for that.
02:11:09 It’s a place called YouTube, I’ll teach you about it.
02:11:12 Okay, yeah, I’ve never heard of it.
02:11:14 It’s a good place to publish documentaries, I think.
02:11:18 Humans are interested in a lot of things
02:11:21 and I’ve seen many times a thing that you think
02:11:25 is a niche thing become a very big thing.
02:11:29 But for them to become mainstream,
02:11:30 they have to have a platform
02:11:32 that allows for the mainstream to happen.
02:11:35 The access.
02:11:35 The access, the dumb, simple, frictionless access.
02:11:39 The frictionless access is a really important thing.
02:11:44 Paywalls create friction and not just because of the money.
02:11:49 It can be free, but if you have to click on a thing
02:11:52 or maybe sign up or put your email,
02:11:55 it prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy
02:12:05 and you know you would enjoy,
02:12:06 but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying
02:12:10 because you can just open up TikTok and keep scrolling.
02:12:14 So that’s just something to say about platforms
02:12:17 because I think the things that need platforms the most
02:12:21 are things like your films.
02:12:23 The things that I think a lot of people would love watching.
02:12:27 They’re very important and they can have viral impact
02:12:30 on the world that is fundamentally positive.
02:12:32 You know, it’s just, it makes me sad
02:12:35 that there’s not a machine for celebrating those films.
02:12:41 There are lots of machines to celebrate them,
02:12:44 but they’re just not as always accessible as YouTube, right?
02:12:47 I mean, as soon as you write me that check
02:12:49 for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here,
02:12:51 then I’m gonna put all my films on YouTube
02:12:53 because then I won’t have to worry about, you know,
02:12:55 selling them in order so I can make the next film
02:12:58 because you know, film is not just an art.
02:13:00 It’s also an industry, right?
02:13:02 And that tension between the two is a constant interplay
02:13:06 that is a reality for me.
02:13:08 So I always have to think about
02:13:11 how can I access the largest audience,
02:13:14 but also, right, go out and shoot the next film, right?
02:13:19 So that longevity question is also an issue
02:13:22 and the finances are part of that sort of equation
02:13:26 that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again.
02:13:29 How often, as a creative mind,
02:13:32 do you feel the constraints, the financial constraints?
02:13:37 I wish I could do a lot more films
02:13:41 that I can’t always because of financial constraints.
02:13:44 So it’s the number of films.
02:13:46 Yeah.
02:13:48 And is a film that you do currently,
02:13:51 is a film that you do at any one time
02:13:53 as you’re filming it already funded
02:13:56 or is it the funding from previous stuff
02:13:59 that you’re trying to use?
02:14:01 Before Hunger Ward,
02:14:05 I would just take a flyer on my films, right?
02:14:08 Where I would just say this meets the so what threshold.
02:14:12 This is a story that has to be told and I want to tell it.
02:14:17 And then I could just go shoot it.
02:14:19 And usually on credit, usually on a credit card, right?
02:14:22 So based on a belief that Lifeboat was done that way.
02:14:27 Yes.
02:14:28 Right?
02:14:29 50 Feet from Syria was done that way.
02:14:29 So you’re on a boat, broke.
02:14:32 Yeah.
02:14:33 Yeah, but it’s free food, right?
02:14:34 And free lodging because there’s a bunk on the boat.
02:14:37 But I do that not intending to stay broke, right?
02:14:41 But based on a foundational belief
02:14:44 that if I bring to bear
02:14:47 all of my sort of quiver of creative arrows to it, right?
02:14:52 That I can create something of value, right?
02:14:56 In the world, but hopefully also financially
02:15:00 that then I can sell to someone.
02:15:01 And you know, every time I’ve done that Lex,
02:15:05 I’ve gotten into the black.
02:15:06 So it’s a risk and I have to have a certain risk threshold
02:15:11 financially to do that.
02:15:12 But I believe so deeply in these stories
02:15:14 that I’m willing to do that.
02:15:15 I didn’t have to do that with Hunger Ward.
02:15:17 Luckily I had funders for that film.
02:15:21 Yeah.
02:15:22 Yeah, take risks in this life.
02:15:24 It’s gonna pay off.
02:15:26 Which reminds me of, let me ask you,
02:15:28 I already asked you for advice about,
02:15:31 for a filmmaker, how to win an Oscar.
02:15:34 Well, I haven’t won an Oscar.
02:15:35 How to get nominated for an Oscar, that’s true.
02:15:39 Or just how to make great documentaries,
02:15:42 how to make great film.
02:15:42 But let me ask, even zoom out bigger.
02:15:44 You mentioned some of these things,
02:15:48 doing the things that you think matters.
02:15:50 What advice would you give to young people,
02:15:52 high school, college,
02:15:55 dreaming of living a life worth living?
02:16:01 What advice would you give them about career
02:16:03 or maybe just life in general?
02:16:06 How to have a life they can be proud of?
02:16:09 Yeah, I don’t know how you’re gonna react to this
02:16:11 given sort of your expertise.
02:16:13 But I would say put down the smartphone,
02:16:17 step away from the monitor, right?
02:16:19 Because real life is not a screen, right?
02:16:23 I believe that sort of the foundational skills
02:16:27 which are conducive and important to success
02:16:31 aren’t necessarily those technical skills
02:16:34 which we’re going to learn in trade schools or university.
02:16:39 I think they’re more foundational than that.
02:16:43 They’re learning how to interact and listen.
02:16:48 With humans?
02:16:49 With humans, yeah, to really see and listen, right?
02:16:54 And observe.
02:16:55 And observe, right?
02:16:58 And how to step out of your door
02:17:00 and if the electricity goes out, right?
02:17:03 And you’re five miles away from your house,
02:17:05 you don’t need a smartphone to get home
02:17:07 because you’ve set visual markers for yourself
02:17:10 on how to get back to where you live, right?
02:17:12 I think we’re in danger right now
02:17:16 of living in a world where
02:17:18 if the satellites stop functioning, right?
02:17:22 Then a whole lot of people
02:17:23 have become completely dysfunctional, right?
02:17:27 Because we’re so reliant upon the screens in our lives.
02:17:30 So I think there’s a lot of foundational skills
02:17:33 that have nothing to do with technology
02:17:34 that we need to learn and everything rests upon those.
02:17:38 So I would say learn those foundations,
02:17:39 learn how to write well.
02:17:40 Read a lot, right?
02:17:43 It’s a different kind of knowledge and wisdom
02:17:45 that comes out of that.
02:17:47 So reading is kind of the equivalent of listening
02:17:49 and observing and writing is
02:17:53 kind of integration of all of that
02:17:57 that you’ve observed and listened to
02:17:58 and tried to express something with that.
02:18:00 So I think my training in the theater
02:18:02 has served me so well in the documentary world, right?
02:18:06 Because it’s all about interaction
02:18:08 and listening and talking and dialogue, right?
02:18:11 And that’s what I do in documentaries, right?
02:18:14 Is I listen.
02:18:15 Yeah, we mentioned fear.
02:18:20 Being an introvert, I’m very afraid of people
02:18:22 but I’m drawn to them and fascinated by them
02:18:25 because of that.
02:18:26 Enjoy listening to them.
02:18:28 Totally.
02:18:29 And observing them.
02:18:31 And you mentioned reading.
02:18:33 You mentioned books as a catalyst,
02:18:35 as a stimulator of your imagination.
02:18:37 Is there books in your life, a couple, one, two, three,
02:18:42 that kind of left an impact
02:18:46 or a little bit of a spark of inspiration
02:18:50 early on in life that stand out from your memory?
02:18:54 I was given The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
02:18:58 as a graduation present from my high school
02:19:01 English teacher.
02:19:03 And I still have that book in a special place
02:19:05 on my bookshelf because I think it speaks
02:19:08 to the nature of human experience, right?
02:19:11 And I return to it all the time
02:19:13 because there’s wisdom there, you know?
02:19:15 But there’s many, many books.
02:19:18 Fiction or nonfiction, what connects with you usually
02:19:21 in the past, for the imagination?
02:19:23 I read mostly nonfiction most of the time.
02:19:26 Ten Points is a book I love a lot.
02:19:28 What is Ten Points?
02:19:30 Ten Points is, I think his name is Bill Strickland.
02:19:34 He was the editor of, I think, Bicycle Magazine.
02:19:37 And it’s sort of his personal memoir
02:19:40 of his experience growing up with a lot of abuse
02:19:44 and how that transformed him as a human being.
02:19:46 You know, one instrumental book for me
02:19:49 that I bumped into in my early 20s,
02:19:52 boy, these are all nonfiction,
02:19:54 except for The Princess Bride.
02:19:56 Have to mention, it’s an outlier.
02:19:59 No, no, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
02:20:03 I read that in my early 20s,
02:20:05 and I found so many of the principles in that book.
02:20:11 What are the habits from that one?
02:20:14 Seek first to understand, then to be understood
02:20:16 is one of them, you know?
02:20:18 The notion of proactivity is one of them.
02:20:21 It’s really, and so I’ve held onto some of those principles
02:20:25 through my life as well, for sure.
02:20:27 What have been, you’ve observed
02:20:33 suffering darker aspects of human nature
02:20:37 in your own personal life.
02:20:38 What has been some of the darkest moments in your life,
02:20:42 darkest times in your life?
02:20:45 Is there something that you went through
02:20:49 and then perhaps you carry it through your work?
02:20:53 Yeah, probably one of the darkest moments
02:20:56 was an experience that I had, again, in my early 20s,
02:21:00 and I was living in Southern California,
02:21:04 and the Pacific Coast Highway
02:21:08 that goes north and south along the beach,
02:21:10 and there’s that little concrete path
02:21:13 that people jog and ride their bikes,
02:21:15 and I was riding my bike on the PCH,
02:21:18 and I was coming up to a corner on it,
02:21:21 and I heard this tremendous crash, and it was really loud,
02:21:28 and I came around the corner,
02:21:31 and it was a car accident, a car crash.
02:21:34 It was a multiple vehicle crash,
02:21:38 and what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car,
02:21:44 and then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car
02:21:48 and hit a Volkswagen van,
02:21:50 and it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van
02:21:52 when it hit it and then landed.
02:21:55 So three vehicles, and it just happened,
02:21:59 and lying in the middle of the road
02:22:04 was a body decapitated,
02:22:08 and there was another person from one of the cars
02:22:12 lying in the middle of the road, still alive,
02:22:15 and then on the hood of the Volvo
02:22:17 was this woman who had come through the windshield,
02:22:21 just a mess, blood everywhere, moaning back and forth,
02:22:28 and a bystander ran into the middle of the road
02:22:32 and started administering first aid
02:22:34 to the person lying in the road,
02:22:37 and I stood there watching the scene
02:22:42 and every fiber of my being,
02:22:45 wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo
02:22:50 and do something, anything, right, just to be there,
02:22:54 and it was obvious to me that she was gonna die,
02:22:59 but I felt like at least if I ran there,
02:23:01 I could offer some comfort for her last moment,
02:23:05 and right then, the sirens started to blare,
02:23:09 and I knew that there’d be paramedics there
02:23:13 within minutes, that people would come to help,
02:23:18 and I froze, and I was scared,
02:23:23 and I didn’t do anything,
02:23:24 and I watched while this woman died on the hood of the Volvo,
02:23:33 and that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness,
02:23:38 the fact that I watched and didn’t act,
02:23:42 I feel is one of the great failures of my life,
02:23:46 that I wasn’t able to act in a moment of need,
02:23:49 no matter how small,
02:23:51 and from that, I made a decision out of that experience
02:23:57 that if I ever found myself in a situation
02:24:00 where I had the ability to act and I could act
02:24:04 to help another human being,
02:24:06 I would act to help another human being in such need
02:24:10 that I would act, that I wouldn’t let fear freeze me.
02:24:16 Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action
02:24:22 and do something and intervene in whatever way I could,
02:24:25 even if I didn’t have the skillset.
02:24:28 And in some ways, all of that echoes in your documentaries.
02:24:33 I’m not gonna let fear stop you from trying to help.
02:24:37 I think that experience, that experience of failure,
02:24:40 what I framed as just human failure on my part
02:24:46 is foundational probably to my work.
02:24:49 I don’t want that to happen again, Lex.
02:24:52 I don’t want to be that person who watches.
02:24:54 I want to do what I can when I can.
02:24:58 If we zoom out, you were just one human
02:25:02 that witnessed that, that trauma.
02:25:06 One human that witnessed so much suffering
02:25:09 in different parts of the world.
02:25:11 And as we zoom out across space and time and look at Earth,
02:25:15 why do you think we’re here on this Earth?
02:25:21 What’s the meaning of human civilization?
02:25:24 What’s the meaning of your life, of individual human life?
02:25:29 And broadly speaking, what is the meaning of life?
02:25:33 Skyfish, Cheryl.
02:25:35 Oh boy, yeah.
02:25:41 For me, I can speak personally on that only.
02:25:44 And that’s that I believe that the meaning of my life
02:25:49 is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go.
02:25:52 You know, I, when I was in theater in grad school,
02:26:01 I directed a play called Shadowlands by C.S. Lewis.
02:26:06 And there’s a quote from that, it goes like this.
02:26:09 We are like blocks of stone
02:26:10 out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.
02:26:15 The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much,
02:26:19 are what make us perfect.
02:26:20 Now, I would take away the perfect part, right?
02:26:23 But I think I’ve remembered that quote for so many years
02:26:27 because I believe in the underlying notion
02:26:30 that the blows of the chisel,
02:26:33 which are the experiences that we go through,
02:26:36 shape us, right, necessarily so,
02:26:39 and hopefully shape us into a better human being.
02:26:42 And in my case, a human being that I hope
02:26:45 can make the world a little better,
02:26:47 you know, through those blows.
02:26:50 Before it’s over.
02:26:51 Yeah, before it’s over.
02:26:53 Before you go, as you said, do you think about that?
02:26:57 Do you think about the going part, your mortality?
02:27:02 You ever think about that?
02:27:03 You said you don’t have a death wish,
02:27:04 you try to minimize risk, but eventually it’s gonna be over.
02:27:07 Yeah, for all of us, absolutely.
02:27:10 Well, speak for yourself.
02:27:11 Well, you’ve got other plans as well.
02:27:13 I tend to merge, you know,
02:27:15 you’ve got other plans as well.
02:27:18 I’m going to merge with robots, embody, no, not at all.
02:27:23 Yes, for all of us, unfortunately or fortunately,
02:27:26 or who the heck knows.
02:27:29 But do you ponder your mortality?
02:27:33 Are you afraid of it?
02:27:35 I live with my mortality, knowing that it’s fleeting,
02:27:39 that my life is fleeting and that I’m gonna go
02:27:43 into the ground, just like everyone else,
02:27:45 or maybe as ashes, you know?
02:27:48 So I live with that knowledge every day,
02:27:50 but I don’t allow it to stop me or hold me up.
02:27:54 Rather, I really, it drives me, right?
02:27:58 It drives me to try to get as much done
02:28:00 as I can before I go, right?
02:28:02 Yeah, so the knowledge of your death
02:28:05 is a kind of dance partner,
02:28:07 and you try to dance beautifully.
02:28:10 This guy, you’re an incredible human,
02:28:13 incredible artist and filmmaker,
02:28:16 and it’s a huge honor that you would sit
02:28:18 and spend your really valuable time with me today.
02:28:20 I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
02:28:22 I did too, thanks for having me, Lex,
02:28:23 and thanks for doing what you do.
02:28:25 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:28:27 with Sky Fist Gerald.
02:28:29 To support this podcast,
02:28:30 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:28:33 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:28:35 from Elie Wiesel.
02:28:37 The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
02:28:41 The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
02:28:45 The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
02:28:49 And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
02:28:54 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.