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ROSS McELWEE

INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON
PORTRAITS BY KRISTEN BLACK



Ross McElwee’s films are memoirs, not documentaries. Since his watershed moment, the cult classic Sherman’s March (1986), through the films that have followed—Time Indefinite (1993), Six O’Clock News (1997), and Bright Leaves (2003)—McElwee has a released a string of autobiographical films that, taken together, are unlike any other body of work in cinema. Ross McElwee himself is the main character in his nonfiction works, but they never feel like navel gazing or self-absorption. Instead, we see an earnest and funny and honest quest to understand self and life and all the scary stuff that we all have to fight with, most importantly love and death. With his big themes and his careful narration and his recurring characters, McElwee’s films feel more like Proust than Pennebaker.

We recently caught up with Ross via telephone from his office at Harvard, where he teaches filmmaking to a bunch of very lucky kids.

Vice: I’ve read that you majored in creative writing as an undergraduate at Brown.
Ross McElwee: That’s true.

I’m wondering who the literary inspirations on your film work might have been.
Well, I’m from the South and, obviously, there were many southern writers who were important to me when I was in high school. Eudora Welty and Faulkner are the obvious ones. Thomas Wolfe was another writer who had a big influence on me. Nobody reads him now, but—

I love Look Homeward, Angel. But the language is very ornate and I’m not sure if people want that now.
It’s very ornate, and he’s very prolix, and the books are very thick. It’s no surprise that nobody’s reading him anymore, but I loved his books. I thought they spoke directly to me even though, clearly, he had a national audience. It wasn’t just obscure southerners who doted on his work. In fact, in my film Bright Leaves, there’s a little homage to Thomas Wolfe. In one shot in which I’m walking through a display of cemetery markers, I walk past an angel. It’s pretty indirect, but it’s there.

Yeah, that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I get it now.
There’s no reason why it would occur to any sane person. But it was my private tip of the hat to Thomas Wolfe.

Well, that’s interesting. Since your films are very personal, do you put a lot of secret messages in them?
I do not, but there are a couple of others. In Sherman’s March, there’s one somewhat more overt homage to Buster Keaton when I’m standing at the ruins of Old Sheldon Church in Charleston. It was totally destroyed by Sherman’s troops, but the brick facade still stands. I stood in the doorway consciously thinking of Steamboat Bill.

Right, right. This is going to make me go back and watch your movies with entirely different eyes now. I’m going to become like the conspiracy-theorist Paul-is-dead guy about your films.
Well, don’t expect to find too many secrets.

Did you move into filmmaking because writing didn’t work out for you?
I found it so difficult to write well. I was very dedicated to it through high school into college, but it takes a certain perseverance and personality that, ultimately, I perhaps didn’t have. I also was seduced by still photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. There were courses that I could take there as an undergraduate at Brown, and I think they opened the door to visual media. I started to see the world in a more visual way than I had growing up in North Carolina.

Another thing that occurred to me is that the writing life can be a very, very insular and often lonely life, and your film work involves a great deal of being social.
It certainly does. But I think that any writer would probably say that his or her work entails getting out in the world and collecting experiences and then transmuting them somehow into fiction. It’s a little more overt in documentary filmmaking because one has a camera on one’s shoulder, and those interactions become the direct material from which you make the documentaries. So filmmaking did force me out into the world more, and I think I liked that. And, you know, one possible way in which filmmaking can be quite different from the solitary confinement of writing—as you describe it—is that it involves crews of people working together. But of course, that’s not how I work. So in that sense, my enterprise is still a somewhat solitary one.

Maybe another corollary is the editing room. The writer goes out and gathers material and goes into his garret, and you go out and gather your material and go into editing.
I think that that’s exactly right. I’ve very much relied on the input of a handful of people whose advice I strongly believe in, but in the end being in the editing room is still a very solitary experience for me.

You mentioned still photography sparking something for you. Are there any particular photographers you would name? Southern photographers, perhaps?
I was very taken by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Those were the two big figures when I was taking photography courses, and, you know, I think that their influence is still being felt.

Absolutely, especially Cartier-Bresson I think.
He’s very much in the spirit of the kind of filmmaking that people like Fred Wiseman, and Jean Rouch in France, capitalized on. They sort of did what Cartier-Bresson was doing and turned it into 24 frames a second.

Frank and Cartier-Bresson were also influences on William Eggleston. Did his work inspire you? He is a fellow southern artist.
You know, I was about to name Bill Eggleston as being one of the people whose work I found interesting, but I think he is a little more estranged from the world that he’s photographing. I feel much more of a kinship with Cartier-Bresson. Robert Frank was also somewhat alienated, or somewhat detached, but also got, I don’t know, closer to people than Eggleston for me. I can’t explain the difference, but there’s something a little too gothic about Eggleston’s work to appeal to me directly.

I like his work a lot, of course, but I think I know what you mean.
Oh, I very much respect his work. I went to the big retrospective at MoMA when it happened.

Perhaps we should talk for just a moment about the writing, the narration, in your films. In your work, we often see these moments where you’re talking directly to the camera about how there’s sort of a lull in the shooting and you’re not sure whether to go here or there or even to keep going at all. You’ll be in a motel room talking to the camera about your bewilderment or your indecision at that moment. Then there’s also your voice-over narration, which sounds like it’s being done during the shooting. Now, do you write while you’re on the road making a movie, or does all the narration get written and recorded as you edit?
Well, that’s a good question. I do some of both. Even though I abandoned writing in the sense of trying to write discrete pieces of fiction or nonfiction, writing stayed in my life and my work because I write these voice-overs. I have tremendous respect for Fred Wiseman and those who practiced really pure cinéma vérité, where the filmmaker is not a part of the story at all. I find that work very, very engaging and inspiring, but I felt that that approach didn’t suit me somehow.

Can I ask, did you ever make attempts at what could be called pure cinéma vérité?
Oh, yes, I did. My early film Space Coast is an example of that. Cinéma-vérité films are traditionally made in crews of two, sometimes three, people, and in that sense, Space Coast is vérité. There are three or four short lines of narration identifying people, but that’s it, and it’s a 90-minute film. I’d say that the narration is less than a minute total, and it’s also factual narration. It’s not subjective, but then that was something that I thought could be explored more with voice-over, and it had not been done a lot at that point.

The subjective thing.
Yes, subjective possibilities. It’s almost a novelistic approach.

Yeah.
So to answer your question, my writing is done in the field, where sometimes I’ll write a phrase or an idea down and slip that into my pocket and hope that I encounter it later on, in the motel that night or whatever, but 90 percent of what I do is forged in the editing room months later. That’s where I respond to the images, trying to remember how I felt at that time or maybe realizing that there’s some other thing that was going on at that moment that I was filming that I wasn’t even aware of at the time and commenting on that.

You really deal with the big themes, as far as I’m concerned: death, family, romance, and love.
They don’t get much bigger than that, do they?

Those are the things that people talk about over the course of 40 years of psychoanalysis, and those are the things about which you make films. And I don’t know if it’s possible to grapple with those things in a personal documentary without some element of writing coming into it.
Well, there may be, but it has not made itself apparent to me. And I can’t say that I enjoy writing, but it does bring me satisfaction when it works, and for that reason it seems like something worth doing, this melding of quasi-cinéma-vérité documentary footage with this very subjective writing.

There are many moments in your films where it sounds to me like I’m eavesdropping on something you’re saying to a shrink. Is filmmaking therapeutic for you in the way that analysis might be?
On some level, all art must be therapeutic, or artists and art wouldn’t exist. So I think it’s close to what therapy is, but I haven’t been in therapy a lot—probably ten times in my life.

I was going to ask you that.
[laughs] Well, there’s the answer. I think the reason that I haven’t done more of it is because the films provide me a way to therapeutically approach problems and disturbing things that I see in the world and in my own life. That’s not to say that it’s as efficient or successful as therapy, and it’s not to say that I don’t believe in therapy. In fact, there was a time when I was quite sure as an undergraduate that I wanted to be a Jungian psychologist of some kind.

Wow. Jungians are kind of cooler than Freudians.
Right, and I did know the difference. But ultimately, I was just too engaged by getting out in the world with the camera and that, lo and behold, became a way that perhaps those two things could happen simultaneously. But I have to say that it’s not at the forefront of my thoughts as I start shooting anything or editing anything. It’s not like, “Oh, this needs to be shaped in this way because it’s going to be therapeutic for me and the problems I’m having.” It’s not that conscious.

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

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Comments

Anonymous, on Sep 22, 2009 wrote: I want to know what happened to the girl that went to try out for the film in "Sherman’s March."
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: im sorry but freudians win hands down
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: From the first photo I would have sworn this was Roe Ethridge photography. Nice work.
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: and this is a great interview by the way. thank you vice for running LONG INTERVIEWS with interesting people rather than the vapid little soundbytes on the same tired subjects that everybody else does.
Anonymous, on Sep 16, 2009 wrote: I have an even bigger crush on mcelwee now than i did when i watched sherman’s march
Anonymous, on Sep 15, 2009 wrote: the photography is amazing.
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: Hell yeah to Kristen Black photography!! :D
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: hm, whats cinéma vérité?
	rufiomania, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: no it hasn’t. i think he has the pick of the litter so he picks people he likes. i would do the same.
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: dear vice, has anyone ever noticed what an obsequious little turd pearson is when he’s interviewing hot shots?
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: literary inspirations for his films? thats kind of interesting, I wonder how that worked
	lowbrow, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: i’m getting the feeling my netflix queue will double before i finish this film issue. any chance this will become a yearly thing?
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: ’In Paraguay’ sounds great, but I understand not wanting to put it out widely. Not only is it highly personal to him and his wife, but their daughter will have to live with it for the rest of her life. Perhaps she should have some say in its distribution. However, if that’s the case, we won’t be seeing anything from the project for quite some time.
	tanger, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: "Wow. Jungians are kind of cooler than Freudians." this would make my friend’s day but because of that she is still a dork and not cool at all.
	The Host, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: I don’t think many directors put hidden things into their films. Hitchcock did the cameo thing in his but they were always so blatant that it wasn’t really a challenge finding them. Who am I so obviously overlooking?
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: I always got the impression Harvard people looked down upon Brown. Now they have a Brown grad as one of their premier professors? Very interesting.
Anonymous, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: Truthfully, I did not know Harvard had a film school. Ivy League art kids. That’s kind of sad and intimidating at the same time.
	duck duck goose, on Sep 14, 2009 wrote: what’s faggy about fact?
Anonymous, on Sep 11, 2009 wrote: "Ross McElwee’s films are memoirs, not documentaries"...thats a pretty art faggy sentence.