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Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278


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we would come up to these rafts and these boats
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that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off
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and people would jump off
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and people would fall into the water
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and some of them couldn't swim.
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And so we found ourselves in this moment
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where we had a choice.
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We could film someone drown in front of us
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or we could put our cameras down
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and pull them out of the water.
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The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald,
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a two time Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker
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who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen,
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Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations
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off the coast of Libya,
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and 50 Feet from Syria, about the war in Syria.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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Now, dear friends, here's Sky Fitzgerald.
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Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today
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and 45 million people are on the edge of famine
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across 43 countries.
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How do you feel?
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How do you make sense of that many people suffering
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from hunger and famine in the world today?
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I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex.
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I mean, I think it's deeply disturbing to me
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that as a global community, we've allowed this number
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of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists
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and the resources to feed them exists.
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I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures
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is that many of those who are starving today
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or going hungry today are the net result of war
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and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations.
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And that's the most deeply disturbing part to me.
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You know your history and we all know that deeply embedded
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in the Geneva Conventions post World War II,
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the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use
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of starvation as a weapon of war because of what Hitler did
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during World War II.
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That's been reiterated multiple times over the years
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in international humanitarian law, including in 2018
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because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen.
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And yet to this day, starvation as a weapon of war
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continues to be used in Ethiopia,
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obviously in Ukraine right now and in Yemen
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with the blockade over the country.
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And that disgusts me that the law is in place
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but it won't be enforced by the international bodies
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and the nation states that make up
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the international community.
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So when the starvation is a result of human actions,
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human decisions, that it's especially painful
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to make sense of.
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For me personally, yeah.
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I think that if you and I sit in here,
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didn't eat for three days and had to lay our head
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on the sidewalk for a couple nights,
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I think we would take hunger and homelessness
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a lot more seriously.
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And I think that's, for some reason,
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that's missing at this moment in history, tragically.
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And I think until that we can generate enough empathy,
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that's immediate for all of us to understand
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what that means to go hungry.
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I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal
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the global community to solve it.
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I did just that by the way, fasted for three days recently.
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It was fundamentally different, I think,
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because the thing that would be terrifying to me
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is not the fasting, but the hopelessness
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at the end of the fasting.
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Like I wouldn't know when the next meal is coming.
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I always had the freedom to have the meal.
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The fear, not just your own ability to eat and survive,
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but your family's.
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If there's loved ones, that's the other thing I don't have.
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I'm single.
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So I feel like the worst suffering
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is watching somebody you love
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that you're supposed to be a caretaker of
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and you can't take care of them.
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And if all of that is caused by leaders
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as a weapon of war, that is especially painful.
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So how can we help?
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What are the ways to help?
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How do we alleviate this suffering?
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Well, I think on the humanitarian front,
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we have to be aggressive and attentive
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and intervene in significant ways.
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And I think on the political front,
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we have to hold players accountable for their actions.
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So the leaders that start the war.
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So when you say we have to speak up
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about the decisions and the humans making those decisions
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that lead to the starvation.
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For example, let's make it concrete.
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So when I was, I don't wanna jump ahead,
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but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen,
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I met a mother who, when she gave birth, weighed 70 pounds.
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The mother weighed 70 pounds.
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And so her daughter was starved in the womb.
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When she was born, she was born into a world
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with no breast milk, very little formula.
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So she was starved before birth.
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She was born into a world where she continued to be starved
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by a mother who herself was starved.
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I watched that child, her name is Asila, die in front of me.
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Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for,
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for a child in this world.
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She didn't have a chance to grow up.
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She didn't have a chance to discover love.
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She didn't have a chance to have a career.
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She was robbed of all of those things
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because of the insidious nature of hunger
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that she was born into.
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She didn't have to die, she was not starving.
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Her mother was being starved
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because of the blockade over the country.
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Now, who instituted that blockade?
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MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement
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and sort of tacit approval of the United States,
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our own government here.
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And so there are people who are responsible
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for the starvation of children
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and I think we need to hold them accountable.
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Now, that's incredibly difficult to do,
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but just because it's difficult
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doesn't mean it ought not to be done.
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And we'll talk about many cases like these
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throughout history and going on today.
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Let's talk about Hunger Ward.
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Let's dive in.
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You've been nominated for an Oscar twice.
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This is one of the times for a documentary.
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Can you please tell me what Hunger Ward,
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The Last Hope Between War and Starvation is about?
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Hunger Ward is a short documentary
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that really is an attempt to illustrate
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the effects of the conflict on Yemen,
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specifically on civilians.
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And we document it in both the north
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and the south of the country
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because it's a bifurcated country.
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The south is held by the globally recognized government
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in the south, which up until last week
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was run by, at least on the surface,
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by President Hadi holed up in Riyadh.
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He was essentially removed from office last week
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by, most people would agree,
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the Emiratis and the Saudis
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to put in place a presidential council.
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So we wanted to show that starvation was happening
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in very similar fashions, both in the south and the north.
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And we wanted to do this film
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because so few people in the west
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know anything about the conflict in Yemen,
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nor the US's complicity in it.
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And so my intent with the project
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was try to bring it to a larger western audience
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as an attempt to intervene
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and change the political status quo,
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which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.
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So US complicity, who are the bad guys?
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Now, the world, unfortunately,
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cannot be painted in black and white
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of good guys and bad guys.
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But for the purpose of conversation,
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who is causing suffering in the world in this situation?
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Who started the war?
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Why?
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And then, of course, the roots of war go back in history.
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But let's start at the top.
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Well, there are bad actors and there are less bad actors.
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I mean, I think that's always the case in war, probably.
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And everybody loses in war.
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Yeah, I concur with that statement.
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In the case of the status quo in Yemen right now,
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it's a completely asymmetrical war.
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And so the Saudi coalition,
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which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia,
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the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain,
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supplying weapons, but it's really driven
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and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia.
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And it's asymmetrical to a great extent
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just because of the incredible firepower by air
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that the Saudis use continuously to pummel Northern Yemen.
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When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes
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is hard to describe.
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And we show the result of only one in the film, really.
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But it's an asymmetrical war.
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The de facto authorities of the North,
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Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi rebel group,
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they don't have an air force, right?
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They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force.
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And so from a military standpoint,
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it's completely asymmetrical.
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The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground.
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They use only proxies to fight on the ground.
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What is the narrative they use to justify war?
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So there's a story on every side in war.
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Some of it is grounded in truth.
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Some of it is not at all grounded in truth,
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also known as propaganda.
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What's the narrative used by the Saudis for this war?
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The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis
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are an illegitimate government,
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and that it's really a proxy war between Iran,
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who supports the Houthis nominally,
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and the rest of the world.
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That's the Saudi narrative.
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The reality is something altogether different.
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While the Houthis do receive support from Iran,
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this is a war started by and sustained by MBS in Saudi Arabia.
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Who's MBS?
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Mohammed bin Salman.
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And who is he?
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He is the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
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What's his power?
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I'm asking basic dumb questions.
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He's the de facto ruler.
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Of the military and the...
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Yes, he seized control of the country several years ago,
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even though he, on the surface,
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is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia, he is.
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He's the crown prince.
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I'm sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man?
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What's your sense of the...
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Yeah, so I've never met him,
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and I likely will never meet him, hopefully.
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But he is, I know a lot about him through his actions,
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sort of in the MENA region,
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Middle East and North Africa region.
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And he is one of three, in my view,
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as an American sitting here in the US,
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three people in the world that I think
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has caused such an incredible volume of misery
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and suffering and murder on this planet
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that I think if he weren't around,
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the world would be a lot better place.
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And I'm not a violent person by nature,
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but there are three human beings
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that I think the world would be better off without.
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Do you mind, before I ask other questions,
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mentioning the three?
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Oh, yeah, Assad is one in Syria,
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and that comes out of an earlier project
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that I did in Syria and Turkey,
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and what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people.
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And Putin would be the third.
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Those three human beings are murderers on a scale
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beyond imagining.
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On MBS, are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker,
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as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker,
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with an open mind about a man like that
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who does evil onto the world,
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and what that must feel like
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to be inside the mind of that man?
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So basically, consider his worldview.
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With most evil people, with all people, probably,
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but with people who do evil onto the world,
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they think they're doing good.
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They're the hero of their own story.
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Right, and so to be able to place yourself,
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I feel like, for me, to understand a person,
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I have to literally, like the way actors
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kind of have to do, you know,
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live inside the body of the person they're trying to study.
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Inhabit the character.
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Inhabit the person.
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So are you able to do that, or because you
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are also studying the people who suffer
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as a result, as a consequence of their actions,
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you just, you put them in a box,
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and you say, I hate the person in that box.
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I'm going to move on.
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This goes back to your black and white statement
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at the beginning, right?
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It's like, the world as a whole, of course,
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you know, is every gradation of gray, right?
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My background is theater, Lex,
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and so I was trained long before I picked up a camera
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to inhabit other characters, right?
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I have two degrees in theater,
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and so that level of sort of like
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walking in other people's shoes
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and trying to understand and empathize
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with their worldview is fundamental
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to how I live my life and how I do my work.
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So in the case of those three that I named,
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Assad, MBS, and Putin, yeah, I can go there
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and think through how they came to be,
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who they are, right, from afar, right?
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And after I go through that process,
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I still don't think there's any way
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that one can justify what they've done.
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We're going to talk about each of those people, for sure.
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Well, I'm not an expert on any of them.
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Well, you're a human being,
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which makes you a partial expert on human nature
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because nobody's an expert.
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You're just as good as anyone else.
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Anybody who actually carries a camera
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and listens and observe others
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isn't especially an expert of human nature.
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Who's willing to take that leap
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and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders.
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I feel like to understand a leader,
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you have to first understand humans,
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and to understand humans, you have to see humans
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at their worst and their best,
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which is something that you've definitely done.
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So let's stick on Hunger Ward.
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This lens that you've chosen to look at this
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is through a single, maybe you can speak to that.
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You've mentioned the starvation as a result of war.
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What is the documentary?
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Like, what is the lens you've chosen
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to give the world a peek at the results,
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at the suffering that's a result of this war?
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People a lot of times will ask me
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if they've seen Hunger Ward, you know.
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They ask where the hope is, right?
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You read the byline earlier, The Lost Hope.
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And what I try to focus on in many of my films,
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including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context
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of war, as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen,
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I look for hope, and I look for inspiration,
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and I do that through people who are doing incredible things
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under the most difficult circumstances.
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So when I set out to do a film
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about starvation in Yemen, right?
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I mean, just listen to that statement.
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Where's the hope there, right?
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And yet what I found, what I discovered,
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were human beings that we could tell the story through
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who are incredible, inspirational human beings
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doing amazing things every day.
link |
00:17:20.960
One of those is Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner
link |
00:17:24.880
in the north of the country at a small rural clinic.
link |
00:17:27.400
And another is Dr. Aida Al Sadiq,
link |
00:17:30.040
who's a pediatrician in the south of the country.
link |
00:17:33.040
And so we chose to tell the story
link |
00:17:34.720
sort of through their experiences as caregivers,
link |
00:17:38.360
devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort,
link |
00:17:43.360
this entire generation of children
link |
00:17:45.760
that has been born into starvation.
link |
00:17:48.760
And that's an incredible, difficult task,
link |
00:17:52.040
but equally inspirational to watch these human beings
link |
00:17:56.480
devote every minute of every day to save a child.
link |
00:18:00.400
I mean, in my view,
link |
00:18:02.200
nothing is more important than that action.
link |
00:18:04.400
Maybe on that point, real quick.
link |
00:18:07.560
So there is suffering at scale, starvation at scale.
link |
00:18:11.400
There's, I mean, the numbers,
link |
00:18:15.680
maybe you can mention in Yemen,
link |
00:18:17.080
what are the numbers in terms of people in starvation,
link |
00:18:19.400
but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor,
link |
00:18:24.200
you always have, you're treating one person in front of you.
link |
00:18:28.200
So how do you make sense of that calculus,
link |
00:18:31.360
of like there's a huge number of people suffering,
link |
00:18:35.120
and then there's just the person in front of you?
link |
00:18:37.560
Is that all we can do as humans,
link |
00:18:43.160
is just to help one person at a time?
link |
00:18:45.440
Is that the right way to think and to approach these problems
link |
00:18:49.480
or can you actually make sense of the numbers?
link |
00:18:52.760
Speaking just as a human being,
link |
00:18:55.000
I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen
link |
00:18:58.560
that I think I'd be overwhelmed if I focused on that scale.
link |
00:19:06.960
You've probably heard that a child dies
link |
00:19:11.120
every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger.
link |
00:19:14.800
So we've been sitting here, how long?
link |
00:19:16.920
35 minutes or so.
link |
00:19:19.680
That's a good handful of children
link |
00:19:20.920
that have already passed away.
link |
00:19:23.080
So to overcome sort of, I think,
link |
00:19:25.120
that danger of psychic numbing, which can happen
link |
00:19:28.600
when you think about suffering on such a large scale,
link |
00:19:32.120
as a filmmaker, as a human being,
link |
00:19:34.800
I have to focus in on the individuals,
link |
00:19:36.680
on those human beings in front of me.
link |
00:19:38.840
And I think that's exactly what Dr. Al Sadiq and Makiya do
link |
00:19:41.840
to keep going each day.
link |
00:19:43.480
And one of the amazing things
link |
00:19:44.840
about these two healthcare providers
link |
00:19:47.840
that we showcased in the film is that
link |
00:19:50.200
they treat anyone who shows up, right?
link |
00:19:53.800
They don't have to have money.
link |
00:19:55.840
They don't have to have any resources.
link |
00:19:57.240
They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital.
link |
00:20:00.160
And it's incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility
link |
00:20:05.600
of their thinking in terms of how they make that work.
link |
00:20:08.840
Makiya, for example, I saw her in the north of the country.
link |
00:20:12.280
It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at.
link |
00:20:14.640
So it's like a magnet for all the cases
link |
00:20:17.160
in the north of the country.
link |
00:20:18.520
People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes
link |
00:20:21.560
for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition.
link |
00:20:25.520
And one time I saw a child come in
link |
00:20:28.760
and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in.
link |
00:20:33.040
And just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen,
link |
00:20:38.640
there had to be a parent or a relative there
link |
00:20:42.080
to stay with the child while they're at the clinic.
link |
00:20:43.960
And it was a male relative.
link |
00:20:45.560
And so what many doctors in that instance would do
link |
00:20:49.920
would just turn them away.
link |
00:20:51.760
And instead what Makiya did is she walked
link |
00:20:53.840
into one of the rooms, talked to one of the other mothers
link |
00:20:56.680
and convinced them to become the temporary guardian,
link |
00:20:59.400
essentially, of this child
link |
00:21:01.600
until a female relative could arrive.
link |
00:21:04.620
So, you know, she's flexible.
link |
00:21:06.160
She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems
link |
00:21:09.360
to deter solutions.
link |
00:21:11.000
One child at a time.
link |
00:21:12.200
Yeah, yeah, one child at a time.
link |
00:21:13.940
You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you.
link |
00:21:22.820
So when you're filming this as a filmmaker,
link |
00:21:27.000
what's that like psychologically, philosophically,
link |
00:21:33.540
creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller?
link |
00:21:39.660
What do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker?
link |
00:21:43.860
Or what's that whole experience like?
link |
00:21:45.820
Because you get to, like you said,
link |
00:21:47.420
you take it to the whole journey
link |
00:21:49.700
of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child.
link |
00:21:54.600
It's not something I want to film.
link |
00:21:57.460
It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen
link |
00:22:01.740
or seek out, but it happened.
link |
00:22:05.020
And the sad truth is that it happens every week
link |
00:22:07.740
at that hospital.
link |
00:22:09.220
And so when it happened in this instance,
link |
00:22:12.980
I felt an incredible responsibility
link |
00:22:15.820
to do justice to that reality,
link |
00:22:18.880
to acknowledge that a child had just died
link |
00:22:22.200
of starvation related causes.
link |
00:22:26.980
And to find some way, if the parents wanted us to,
link |
00:22:31.780
to integrate that into this story
link |
00:22:34.460
we bring back to a Western audience.
link |
00:22:39.360
And I've filmed many difficult things over the years.
link |
00:22:49.460
And usually I really love filming.
link |
00:22:54.260
And I didn't love filming Hunger Ward.
link |
00:22:56.380
It was not a process that I enjoyed
link |
00:23:00.380
on any way, show, perform, sadly, because of the content.
link |
00:23:04.180
Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them?
link |
00:23:06.860
I don't, but I did.
link |
00:23:08.820
And I had to.
link |
00:23:10.060
And when that happened,
link |
00:23:11.900
I felt an incredible responsibility again,
link |
00:23:14.900
to go deep, right?
link |
00:23:17.220
To go deep with that family,
link |
00:23:19.180
to tell the story of this hospital
link |
00:23:22.980
with every sort of ounce of focus and talent
link |
00:23:27.380
that I could bring to the story.
link |
00:23:28.740
Because people should know
link |
00:23:31.260
that children are dying of starvation right now
link |
00:23:34.980
as we sit here.
link |
00:23:36.100
And that that doesn't have to happen.
link |
00:23:37.940
And it is happening because of political dynamics
link |
00:23:40.300
that we can intervene on.
link |
00:23:42.660
Is there times you wanted to walk away,
link |
00:23:46.780
quit the telling of the story,
link |
00:23:51.220
come back to the United States
link |
00:23:54.700
where you can just appreciate
link |
00:24:02.380
the wonderful comfort you can have
link |
00:24:04.260
just sitting there and having food
link |
00:24:06.180
and freedom to do whatever you want,
link |
00:24:12.500
those kinds of things.
link |
00:24:13.860
Doesn't have to be in the United States.
link |
00:24:15.620
In a lot of places in the world.
link |
00:24:17.580
Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivor's guilt
link |
00:24:21.340
on some level definitely exists.
link |
00:24:23.860
One of the hardest things from Hunger Report actually
link |
00:24:26.220
was eating, right?
link |
00:24:28.940
Because we were in these malnutrition clinics,
link |
00:24:31.240
they're called TFCs, Therapeutic Feeding Centers,
link |
00:24:34.380
where over a long period of time,
link |
00:24:41.220
children lost the ability to eat normal food, right?
link |
00:24:45.340
And couldn't digest it and just were literally starving.
link |
00:24:49.580
And the practitioners were trying to bring them back
link |
00:24:53.220
to a state of thriving.
link |
00:24:55.740
But to leave those clinics, right?
link |
00:24:58.100
And to go to our camp or to go to our hotel
link |
00:25:00.860
and then to have access to food, right?
link |
00:25:03.380
Because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels.
link |
00:25:08.340
I mean, it was a very intentional act
link |
00:25:10.900
throughout the course of the shoot
link |
00:25:12.300
to look at a piece of bread, right?
link |
00:25:14.780
Or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child
link |
00:25:19.340
in the TFC and think about how the privilege
link |
00:25:22.940
of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest.
link |
00:25:26.540
So it certainly every day helped me appreciate, right?
link |
00:25:31.540
The privilege I had.
link |
00:25:33.340
Every bite you take.
link |
00:25:34.580
With every bite, absolutely.
link |
00:25:36.780
And so I wouldn't call it guilt.
link |
00:25:38.780
It wasn't exactly guilt,
link |
00:25:39.860
but it was definitely mindfulness, right?
link |
00:25:42.780
Meditate on the suffering of people who can't.
link |
00:25:47.460
That's right, exactly.
link |
00:25:48.780
So that knowledge sort of, it was catalytic in some ways.
link |
00:25:52.300
It sort of moved us forward really wanting
link |
00:25:55.100
to shape the most powerful story we could
link |
00:25:58.260
because we were surrounded by so much suffering.
link |
00:26:00.940
So much suffering every day.
link |
00:26:03.180
How did filming that movie change you as a man?
link |
00:26:07.900
As a human being?
link |
00:26:09.580
You've filmed a few difficult documentaries.
link |
00:26:14.220
That one is a heavy one.
link |
00:26:16.740
When you think of the person you were before you filmed it,
link |
00:26:20.100
and now when you wake up every morning
link |
00:26:21.660
and look yourself in the mirror,
link |
00:26:23.260
how is that person different?
link |
00:26:25.380
Every documentary I do changes me in a different way.
link |
00:26:29.500
Like I am not static in that sense, right?
link |
00:26:32.820
And preformed, it's like I change with every project
link |
00:26:36.220
because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right?
link |
00:26:40.580
And so in order to do them,
link |
00:26:43.180
I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them.
link |
00:26:46.420
In the case of Hunger Ward,
link |
00:26:48.020
you may remember the girl Omeima,
link |
00:26:52.020
who's the 10 year old girl who we showcase in Auden
link |
00:26:56.740
in the south of the country.
link |
00:26:58.660
And we were there when she was admitted to the hospital.
link |
00:27:04.740
And when she was admitted,
link |
00:27:08.340
this 10 year old girl weighed 24 pounds
link |
00:27:10.900
and she could barely stand up.
link |
00:27:14.060
And we started with the permission of the family
link |
00:27:18.020
to start to document her treatment
link |
00:27:21.620
and to see what would happen with this young girl
link |
00:27:25.020
who is so severely malnourished.
link |
00:27:27.580
And we watched her be treated by the nurses
link |
00:27:31.460
and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital.
link |
00:27:35.020
And slowly over the course of a couple of weeks,
link |
00:27:38.740
we saw her change.
link |
00:27:40.660
We saw her start to sort of gain strength
link |
00:27:44.060
and start to recover.
link |
00:27:45.780
And she also watched the caregivers very carefully.
link |
00:27:50.740
And I watched her watch them.
link |
00:27:54.180
And I'll never forget there was a moment
link |
00:27:58.540
where about two and a half weeks, I think,
link |
00:28:02.780
into her treatment, we walked into a room
link |
00:28:05.820
and I saw her offering a cap full of water
link |
00:28:10.100
to another younger child who was also starving.
link |
00:28:15.460
The shot's actually in the film.
link |
00:28:17.420
And so to see Omeima, this child who's starving,
link |
00:28:22.420
giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child
link |
00:28:27.100
who is also starving, moved me deeply.
link |
00:28:31.940
So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her.
link |
00:28:38.420
And as a human being, as a filmmaker,
link |
00:28:40.820
I was incredibly inspired by Omeima.
link |
00:28:44.180
That capacity for compassion is there.
link |
00:28:46.460
Even within a 10 year old girl who's starving.
link |
00:28:49.420
And so you asked what changed me.
link |
00:28:52.340
That's one moment, right?
link |
00:28:54.340
Rather than being crushed by such heavy content,
link |
00:28:57.060
it was actually the opposite,
link |
00:28:58.620
where I came away inspired by a 10 year old girl.
link |
00:29:02.300
And I didn't anticipate that.
link |
00:29:05.180
I didn't think that's what this content would do,
link |
00:29:07.340
but it's what it did.
link |
00:29:08.540
It reinforced for me sort of this incredible capacity
link |
00:29:13.020
we all have as human beings, right?
link |
00:29:16.100
To do good, right?
link |
00:29:17.860
To even within the most difficult circumstances,
link |
00:29:20.820
to choose who we become and what we do.
link |
00:29:24.940
And a 10 year old girl taught me that
link |
00:29:27.300
or reinforced that for me.
link |
00:29:29.140
Were you able to feel the culture of the people,
link |
00:29:34.140
so the language barrier,
link |
00:29:37.340
were you able to break through the language barrier,
link |
00:29:39.180
the culture barrier, to understand the people?
link |
00:29:45.100
Because even suffering has a language of sorts,
link |
00:29:48.940
depending on where you are.
link |
00:29:50.580
The way people joke about things,
link |
00:29:52.740
the way they cry, the way.
link |
00:29:55.740
This is an interesting thing I actually wanna ask you.
link |
00:29:57.540
Sorry, I'm asking a million questions.
link |
00:30:00.740
I find that the people,
link |
00:30:02.660
I've been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia,
link |
00:30:05.980
but in general, I've gotten a chance to talk to people
link |
00:30:09.420
who've been through trauma in their life.
link |
00:30:13.020
And there's a humor they have about trauma
link |
00:30:18.020
in hard times.
link |
00:30:20.140
It depends on the culture, of course.
link |
00:30:22.860
Certainly, Russian speaking folk,
link |
00:30:25.460
I mean, the more suffering you've experienced,
link |
00:30:29.300
for some reason, the more they joke about it.
link |
00:30:31.660
It's almost like they're able to see something deep
link |
00:30:35.020
about humanity now that they have suffered
link |
00:30:38.580
and they're able to laugh at the absurdity,
link |
00:30:40.500
the injustice of it all.
link |
00:30:42.260
And you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it.
link |
00:30:45.780
But that humor has a kind of profound understanding
link |
00:30:53.260
within it about what it means to be human.
link |
00:30:57.260
That I just, and then you, to really understand it,
link |
00:31:00.420
you have to know the language.
link |
00:31:02.060
So I guess I'm asking, were you able to really feel
link |
00:31:07.300
the humans on the other side of the language?
link |
00:31:09.740
I'd like to think so.
link |
00:31:10.980
I mean, as you noted, there are universities
link |
00:31:14.340
and there are universals in life that transcend language.
link |
00:31:19.540
I mean, suffering is suffering.
link |
00:31:21.940
Love is love.
link |
00:31:23.300
Compassion doesn't take place only through language.
link |
00:31:28.500
It's through actions.
link |
00:31:29.460
And so was there a language barrier?
link |
00:31:31.620
Absolutely.
link |
00:31:33.300
Did we try to bridge that through other means
link |
00:31:36.980
and sort of universal emotions and experiences?
link |
00:31:41.300
Absolutely.
link |
00:31:42.140
That's one of the things I always think about
link |
00:31:44.100
when I'm filming is how do we distill down to universals
link |
00:31:49.780
through imagery, through the vocabulary of cinema?
link |
00:31:54.620
Because I believe so deeply that
link |
00:31:56.420
that vocabulary should be visual.
link |
00:31:58.540
So the words, what's the most powerful way
link |
00:32:01.340
to express the universal?
link |
00:32:03.260
Is it visual or is it language words?
link |
00:32:07.900
I think it's visual.
link |
00:32:09.860
And we're talking about the human face
link |
00:32:11.660
or human face, human body, everything.
link |
00:32:14.300
Through actions as well.
link |
00:32:15.540
Actions, the dynamic.
link |
00:32:16.900
I'm thinking about a woman named Salha in the film
link |
00:32:20.100
who isn't named, but you see her multiple times
link |
00:32:25.380
throughout the film.
link |
00:32:26.220
And she's basically the matron of the ward in the South.
link |
00:32:29.420
And she's the gatekeeper for the ward.
link |
00:32:31.580
So no one enters that ward without her permission.
link |
00:32:33.980
She's literally the gatekeeper at the door.
link |
00:32:36.020
So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in.
link |
00:32:40.020
But then she also is sort of like
link |
00:32:43.540
the first point of contact for compassion in the ward.
link |
00:32:47.900
So when mothers and families are admitted,
link |
00:32:51.540
she forms relationships between the moms
link |
00:32:55.540
and the grandmothers, for example,
link |
00:32:57.540
who are admitted and who are living there on the ward.
link |
00:33:00.180
And she does it through hugging, right?
link |
00:33:03.620
She does it through bringing them food, right?
link |
00:33:07.340
And she forms these really rather quickly
link |
00:33:11.060
deep relationships of compassion with the families.
link |
00:33:15.660
And so it's amazing to watch
link |
00:33:19.100
and no language is needed, right, to bear witness to this.
link |
00:33:22.980
And she also suffers because of that, right?
link |
00:33:26.980
And so near the end of the film, if you recall,
link |
00:33:31.460
when another child dies and the mother is wailing,
link |
00:33:35.860
we actually cut away to Salha, who's in the hallway,
link |
00:33:38.980
who walks into another room and begins sobbing.
link |
00:33:43.020
She's not a family member,
link |
00:33:44.820
but she has a deep relationship with that family
link |
00:33:48.380
that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward.
link |
00:33:51.420
So that's universal, right?
link |
00:33:53.380
To see a woman weep because a child has died,
link |
00:33:58.580
even if they're not related to that,
link |
00:34:00.500
that's a universal sort of emotional experience
link |
00:34:03.500
we can all relate to.
link |
00:34:04.580
So that's what I mean by visual vocabulary.
link |
00:34:07.500
And it's especially powerful
link |
00:34:08.860
because she has seen much of this kind of suffering
link |
00:34:12.380
and she's still, maybe she has built up some callous
link |
00:34:17.020
to be able to work day to day,
link |
00:34:20.020
but there's still an ocean underneath the ice.
link |
00:34:25.060
She's kept her heart open
link |
00:34:26.700
despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day.
link |
00:34:30.060
Somehow she's a human being who's able to do that,
link |
00:34:33.020
which is a very difficult thing to do, right?
link |
00:34:35.420
She still allows herself to be vulnerable.
link |
00:34:39.180
And maybe that's why she can do what she does.
link |
00:34:43.300
What lessons do you draw from other families in history?
link |
00:34:45.980
So for me personally, one that's touched my family
link |
00:34:50.540
and one of the great families in history is in Ukraine,
link |
00:34:54.140
Holodomor in the 30s.
link |
00:34:56.260
32, 33, right?
link |
00:34:57.540
32, 33 with Stalin.
link |
00:34:59.820
Maybe you could speak to the universals of the suffering here.
link |
00:35:05.220
What lessons do you draw from those other famines
link |
00:35:09.820
if you looked at them or in general about famine
link |
00:35:13.220
that are manufactured by the decisions of,
link |
00:35:17.220
let's say, authoritarian leaders?
link |
00:35:19.260
Well, famine doesn't have to exist
link |
00:35:29.700
or the bulk of famines on this planet,
link |
00:35:31.820
I believe don't have to exist.
link |
00:35:33.180
And most of them, or at least a good number of them
link |
00:35:36.500
are manufactured by the leaders
link |
00:35:40.140
that choose to use famine as a weapon, right?
link |
00:35:44.060
And Ukraine is one of the obvious examples right now,
link |
00:35:49.740
with siege tactics that are happening
link |
00:35:51.540
in different parts of the country.
link |
00:35:53.460
And we built international humanitarian law for a reason,
link |
00:36:01.980
many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day.
link |
00:36:06.500
And it's there to prevent
link |
00:36:09.500
what's happening in Ukraine right now.
link |
00:36:11.500
It's there to prevent what's been happening in Yemen
link |
00:36:14.900
for seven years.
link |
00:36:16.340
And yet there hasn't been any teeth behind it.
link |
00:36:19.820
And that's what disturbs me is that we can see
link |
00:36:25.420
how these famines are being used as weapons in war.
link |
00:36:30.340
And yet we aren't sort of using the levers of power
link |
00:36:34.020
that exist in order to, I think, to call out
link |
00:36:39.020
in important and powerful ways those who are causing them
link |
00:36:43.500
and to make sure that we hold them accountable
link |
00:36:46.300
on the global stage.
link |
00:36:47.140
Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine
link |
00:36:51.300
in a way that hasn't happened for a long time.
link |
00:36:53.860
And that gives me hope, right?
link |
00:36:56.420
And yet I don't believe we've done enough.
link |
00:36:59.860
And I think the national community needs to do far more
link |
00:37:02.620
than we are both in Yemen, in Ethiopia,
link |
00:37:05.860
and in Ukraine right now.
link |
00:37:07.500
There are certain kinds of things that captivate
link |
00:37:10.500
the global attention, and it seems like starvation
link |
00:37:14.140
is not always one of them.
link |
00:37:16.700
For some reason, murder and destruction
link |
00:37:21.260
gets people's attention more.
link |
00:37:23.620
The death, of course, is easy to enumerate,
link |
00:37:26.980
but it's the suffering that's the problem.
link |
00:37:29.060
Yeah, yeah, you know, when we went to film Hunger Ward,
link |
00:37:32.820
that was one of the creative questions
link |
00:37:35.100
that I was really concerned about because starvation,
link |
00:37:38.900
you know, it's not a quick action, right?
link |
00:37:41.780
It's a long, slow, insidious process, right?
link |
00:37:45.780
Just like hunger, right?
link |
00:37:47.860
And yet when you're hungry, right, it takes you over.
link |
00:37:53.700
It becomes the most important thing, right?
link |
00:37:56.420
It's just absolutely fundamental to life.
link |
00:37:59.060
It's like drawing breath.
link |
00:38:00.860
And so I really, before I filmed Hunger Ward,
link |
00:38:05.300
I struggled to sort of answer
link |
00:38:07.860
how we could creatively approach that
link |
00:38:09.900
because, you know, someone's sitting in a clinic, right?
link |
00:38:13.460
Starving or being treated for starvation, you know,
link |
00:38:16.780
that's a pretty static scene, right?
link |
00:38:20.420
And what we found was that because of the volume of cases
link |
00:38:24.380
and because of the nature of sort of how quickly
link |
00:38:28.380
how quickly people were coming and going
link |
00:38:32.060
is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated.
link |
00:38:35.820
And there's something also about starvation.
link |
00:38:38.820
You get tired.
link |
00:38:40.260
It's almost like it's a quiet suffering.
link |
00:38:43.460
Yeah.
link |
00:38:46.100
And by the way, there's something about
link |
00:38:48.100
when I think about dark times,
link |
00:38:49.980
I mean, you'll hear me chuckle, for example.
link |
00:38:53.140
I don't know what that is.
link |
00:38:54.420
That's almost like, it's almost like
link |
00:38:59.460
you have to kind of laugh at,
link |
00:39:03.660
you can't help but laugh at like the injustice
link |
00:39:07.660
and the cruelty in the world.
link |
00:39:08.780
Somehow that helps your mind deal with it.
link |
00:39:10.780
I mean, I see this all the time.
link |
00:39:13.180
Like when you're struggling, you can't feed your family.
link |
00:39:16.380
You lost your home.
link |
00:39:18.620
The last thing you have is jokes about.
link |
00:39:21.620
It's humor.
link |
00:39:22.460
Yeah, it's humor.
link |
00:39:23.300
It's like, ah, the fucking man fucked me over again.
link |
00:39:28.180
And there's jokes all around that.
link |
00:39:30.460
And then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music.
link |
00:39:36.020
I don't know what that is.
link |
00:39:37.260
I don't know what that is.
link |
00:39:38.260
It's gallows humor, right?
link |
00:39:39.540
It's a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging
link |
00:39:44.340
and allowing yourself to move forward, right?
link |
00:39:46.780
Beyond the pain and the suffering.
link |
00:39:49.820
So you mentioned Ukraine and you mentioned Putin.
link |
00:39:52.780
What are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis
link |
00:39:58.340
and generally the suffering that's resulting
link |
00:40:00.700
from the war in Ukraine?
link |
00:40:02.420
Well, first off, I think the conflict
link |
00:40:03.980
is just gonna exacerbate, you know,
link |
00:40:06.260
sort of the global challenge we have with displacement.
link |
00:40:12.940
The last entire trilogy I did was about displacement
link |
00:40:17.540
to great extent due to war.
link |
00:40:19.540
And, you know, this is a huge displacement of human beings
link |
00:40:23.060
regardless of the cause.
link |
00:40:24.740
And that is gonna sort of have a ripple effect
link |
00:40:29.220
across the globe for many, many years to come
link |
00:40:31.980
regardless of even if the conflict ended today.
link |
00:40:34.940
So there's that.
link |
00:40:35.780
That's gonna set up a whole nother strain
link |
00:40:38.020
on sort of the global sort of resources
link |
00:40:44.020
that come into play to deal with refugees.
link |
00:40:47.740
You know, there were 79 million displaced people
link |
00:40:50.820
on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict, right?
link |
00:40:54.780
You probably know the numbers better than I do
link |
00:40:56.580
in terms of what the current estimates are
link |
00:40:59.340
for displacement from Ukraine.
link |
00:41:00.820
It's four to six million.
link |
00:41:01.940
So what are we up to now?
link |
00:41:03.220
73, 74 million individuals on this planet now
link |
00:41:07.100
who are displaced?
link |
00:41:09.260
That's a significant bump.
link |
00:41:12.060
I wish that the levers of power were used differently
link |
00:41:16.220
in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example.
link |
00:41:20.740
So what are the levers of power?
link |
00:41:23.380
Well, military might.
link |
00:41:24.500
Let's take that for one, right?
link |
00:41:26.740
So I have always felt after working in Syria and Turkey
link |
00:41:34.700
that we completely missed our opportunity
link |
00:41:39.460
as a player on the global stage with military capability
link |
00:41:44.380
to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands
link |
00:41:48.700
of civilians in Syria.
link |
00:41:50.860
We had the ability and we didn't leverage that ability.
link |
00:41:54.660
You know, the fact that I talked with so many Syrians
link |
00:41:59.740
during the course of doing that project
link |
00:42:02.020
who told me their stories of living in their house, right?
link |
00:42:07.540
And having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house
link |
00:42:12.460
and drop a 55 gallon drum full of explosives
link |
00:42:16.260
and shrapnel in their neighborhood
link |
00:42:20.700
over and over and over again.
link |
00:42:24.060
Not focused on any military targets,
link |
00:42:27.580
only meant to kill and sow fear, right?
link |
00:42:31.500
And early in the conflict, we could have stopped that.
link |
00:42:35.540
Before Russia got involved, we could have intervened
link |
00:42:39.020
and created a no fly zone.
link |
00:42:40.820
That we, the United States or coalition
link |
00:42:43.780
that we were a part of, yeah.
link |
00:42:45.340
And we didn't do it and we could have.
link |
00:42:47.380
And I think that's an example where we have
link |
00:42:49.500
the military capability to actually do good
link |
00:42:52.180
in a situation like that.
link |
00:42:53.420
And we don't usually use it for those purposes.
link |
00:42:55.700
And I think that's what a military ought to be used for
link |
00:42:58.660
beyond just defending our borders is to save others
link |
00:43:02.620
with the privilege that that power affords.
link |
00:43:04.860
What do you think about the power of the military
link |
00:43:07.460
versus the power of sanctions
link |
00:43:09.180
versus the power of conversation?
link |
00:43:12.500
They're all different tools, right?
link |
00:43:13.940
To be used at different moments.
link |
00:43:15.460
But if words fail, if sanctions fail, right?
link |
00:43:21.340
I think there are moments in history
link |
00:43:24.100
where power is justified, right?
link |
00:43:26.340
And I think Syria was one of them.
link |
00:43:28.140
I think when barrel bombs were dropping
link |
00:43:31.900
on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months
link |
00:43:34.700
with no intent to do anything
link |
00:43:37.380
other than kill Syrian civilians,
link |
00:43:40.060
that's an instance I think where might is justified
link |
00:43:43.540
to shoot those helicopters out of the sky.
link |
00:43:45.340
Here's the difficult thing.
link |
00:43:46.660
We've talked about Yemen.
link |
00:43:48.460
Where's the line between good and evil
link |
00:43:53.100
for US intervention in different countries
link |
00:43:56.820
and conflicts in the world?
link |
00:43:59.660
It's easy to look back 10, 20, 30 years
link |
00:44:02.300
to know what was and wasn't a quote unquote just war.
link |
00:44:05.740
In the moment, how do we know?
link |
00:44:08.740
I think it's incredibly difficult to answer that, right?
link |
00:44:11.620
And I think that's why leaders make the wrong choices
link |
00:44:14.980
so often, right?
link |
00:44:15.820
Is they second guess themselves.
link |
00:44:18.980
I think you take all the data at your fingertips,
link |
00:44:21.580
all the intelligence that you have, right?
link |
00:44:23.580
And you look at it all very carefully
link |
00:44:25.940
and you make a decision, right?
link |
00:44:27.980
There are some instances though
link |
00:44:30.420
where it's very clear what's happening, right?
link |
00:44:33.980
And leaders still don't act, right?
link |
00:44:36.380
In Yemen right now, for example,
link |
00:44:38.660
it's very clear what's happening, right?
link |
00:44:40.900
Children are being starved because of a blockade.
link |
00:44:44.420
All the US would have to do is ensure that blockade,
link |
00:44:48.340
now there's a two month ceasefire in place now,
link |
00:44:50.340
but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire
link |
00:44:54.020
and children will stop starving.
link |
00:44:56.300
That's pretty simple.
link |
00:44:57.860
You can trace, it's a direct connection.
link |
00:45:00.660
And we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal
link |
00:45:04.940
to make that decision because we're too interested
link |
00:45:08.020
in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia
link |
00:45:10.900
where oil flows from and so much influence
link |
00:45:15.980
because Saudi Arabia has so much influence
link |
00:45:17.660
throughout the MENA region.
link |
00:45:19.900
We want to keep that relationship tight
link |
00:45:22.140
despite sort of the moral wounds that come from that.
link |
00:45:26.300
About half the world is under authoritarian regimes
link |
00:45:30.580
and everybody operates under narratives.
link |
00:45:33.420
And there's a narrative in the United States
link |
00:45:35.820
that freedom is good, democracy is good.
link |
00:45:40.180
I have fallen victim to this narrative.
link |
00:45:43.540
I believe in it.
link |
00:45:46.020
I'm saying this jokingly, but not really
link |
00:45:49.620
because who knows the truth of anything in this world?
link |
00:45:53.700
I eat meat, factory farm meat,
link |
00:45:57.020
and I seem to not be intellectually
link |
00:45:59.740
and philosophically tortured by this, and I should be.
link |
00:46:02.580
There's a lot of suffering there.
link |
00:46:04.980
What do we do to lessen the suffering
link |
00:46:09.300
of the people under authoritarian regimes?
link |
00:46:12.620
Again, the same question.
link |
00:46:14.660
Military conflict, diplomacy, sanctions,
link |
00:46:20.340
all those kinds of things.
link |
00:46:24.340
Does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering
link |
00:46:28.580
for what you see in Yemen?
link |
00:46:31.780
Is it something that has to be healed across generations
link |
00:46:36.300
or can be healed on a scale of months and years?
link |
00:46:39.260
I'm just a guy with a camera, Alex, you know?
link |
00:46:42.140
But as a guy with a camera,
link |
00:46:44.580
I've seen a lot of things in a lot of places
link |
00:46:49.460
and I've seen the effects these decisions made
link |
00:46:54.380
by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens.
link |
00:46:59.300
And that's what drives my thinking on this.
link |
00:47:04.500
And that's what drives and motivates me each day
link |
00:47:08.380
to raise the red flag through my films
link |
00:47:11.260
and say, listen, Biden,
link |
00:47:15.940
you campaigned for president in part on a platform
link |
00:47:20.940
that said that we would regain our prominence
link |
00:47:25.980
on the moral stage of the world
link |
00:47:28.300
and that we would prioritize sort of a moral paradigm
link |
00:47:35.420
over relationships with authoritarian regimes,
link |
00:47:39.300
Saudi Arabia being one.
link |
00:47:41.500
And yet when the CIA report came out
link |
00:47:44.780
that clearly articulated in detail
link |
00:47:47.780
that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi's murder
link |
00:47:51.300
and for cutting his body into pieces
link |
00:47:53.460
and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy,
link |
00:47:57.460
what did Biden do?
link |
00:47:59.500
He didn't really make a pariah out of MBS
link |
00:48:02.380
like he said he was going to, right?
link |
00:48:05.180
What if he'd done something else
link |
00:48:06.860
and actually done what he said he was gonna do,
link |
00:48:09.180
which was make MBS?
link |
00:48:10.020
What if he had removed the ability for MBS
link |
00:48:13.580
to fly to the United States, for example?
link |
00:48:16.340
Now that's a sanction, right?
link |
00:48:18.060
That's a sanction that's individual and concrete
link |
00:48:21.700
and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS.
link |
00:48:25.100
That would have been Biden saying,
link |
00:48:27.340
this is unacceptable behavior, right?
link |
00:48:31.220
This is something which because you executed
link |
00:48:35.540
such a horrendous act on someone living in the United States,
link |
00:48:40.060
we are not going to give you a stage here at least, right?
link |
00:48:47.060
Within the borders of our country.
link |
00:48:49.180
Those are the things that leaders can do
link |
00:48:51.380
that I don't think they do often enough.
link |
00:48:53.300
And certainly our leader right now isn't doing it
link |
00:48:55.820
in the way I wish he were.
link |
00:48:57.260
He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine
link |
00:49:01.740
and been very vocal.
link |
00:49:03.100
But there's so many instances we could talk about
link |
00:49:05.420
where I feel like the political game and ship, right?
link |
00:49:09.940
Often falls into maintaining relationships
link |
00:49:13.420
like with MBS and Saudi Arabia
link |
00:49:15.180
rather than doing the right thing.
link |
00:49:16.820
Rather than as a nation, a leader of a nation saying,
link |
00:49:20.940
this is unacceptable.
link |
00:49:22.420
We have a higher standard than this.
link |
00:49:24.340
Cause I think when leaders do that,
link |
00:49:28.620
it becomes aspirational, right?
link |
00:49:30.580
It becomes aspirational for other leaders
link |
00:49:34.620
in the progressive world at least.
link |
00:49:36.220
And also it rings the alarm bells
link |
00:49:38.620
for other authoritarian leaders and says,
link |
00:49:41.740
you know what, there are lines, right?
link |
00:49:44.220
There are things that can't be done
link |
00:49:46.260
or there will be significant consequences.
link |
00:49:48.140
Like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore.
link |
00:49:51.500
And sanctions I think need to be concrete and individual
link |
00:49:55.180
to some, in addition to the larger scope.
link |
00:49:58.060
But when they're concrete and individual,
link |
00:50:01.420
I think often they're felt in a different way.
link |
00:50:04.420
You mean felt obviously by the individuals.
link |
00:50:06.860
And so the ripple effects of that
link |
00:50:11.700
might have the power to steer the direction of nations.
link |
00:50:18.420
Because of the nature of authoritarian regimes, right?
link |
00:50:21.500
Individuals have so much power.
link |
00:50:22.780
Exactly, right.
link |
00:50:23.620
So if Putin is put on trial in the Hague at some point,
link |
00:50:30.300
or at least there's the threat of that, right?
link |
00:50:32.140
Now that's likely never to happen of course
link |
00:50:34.380
because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right?
link |
00:50:37.220
And he's never gonna allow that to happen.
link |
00:50:39.300
But just knowing that that danger exists
link |
00:50:45.780
is going to change his travel plans in the future, right?
link |
00:50:49.740
MBS not being able to fly to the US,
link |
00:50:51.980
he's gonna feel that and be embarrassed by that.
link |
00:50:55.940
So I think they have a special meaning and consequence
link |
00:51:00.860
in authoritarian regimes because of that.
link |
00:51:03.580
So you said you're just a guy with a camera.
link |
00:51:06.100
Yeah.
link |
00:51:07.780
I would say you're a brilliant guy with a camera.
link |
00:51:13.940
I'm also a kind of guy with a camera.
link |
00:51:15.980
You're a guy with a couple cameras.
link |
00:51:16.980
A couple cameras.
link |
00:51:17.820
I have more.
link |
00:51:18.660
A couple mics too.
link |
00:51:20.340
You got a couple mics, a couple cameras, robot over here.
link |
00:51:23.180
When you can't beat them with quality,
link |
00:51:25.620
you bring the quantity.
link |
00:51:27.300
That's right.
link |
00:51:28.500
So to me, that's also an interest partially
link |
00:51:31.740
because I also speak Russian and a bit Ukrainian.
link |
00:51:37.820
I wanna study that part of the world.
link |
00:51:39.900
I wanna talk to a lot of people.
link |
00:51:41.620
I wanna talk to the leaders.
link |
00:51:42.860
I wanna talk to regular people.
link |
00:51:44.540
To be honest, and I would love to get your comments on this,
link |
00:51:48.700
the regular quote unquote people
link |
00:51:51.380
are way more fascinating to me.
link |
00:51:53.420
As a filmmaker, how do you figure out how to tell this story?
link |
00:51:58.340
I'm sure a guy with a camera,
link |
00:52:00.300
you're looking at war in Ukraine,
link |
00:52:02.420
but also what's going on in Yemen and Syria
link |
00:52:05.900
and other places in the world.
link |
00:52:07.140
I mentioned North Korea.
link |
00:52:08.380
That's a super interesting one.
link |
00:52:10.260
Hard to bring cameras along.
link |
00:52:11.740
China, in Canada, the truckers.
link |
00:52:16.580
There's all kinds of fascinating things
link |
00:52:18.460
happening in the world.
link |
00:52:19.780
So you as a scholar of human suffering
link |
00:52:23.780
and human flourishing,
link |
00:52:26.300
how do you choose how to tell the story?
link |
00:52:29.180
How do I choose a story?
link |
00:52:30.140
How do I choose how to tell a story?
link |
00:52:31.220
Both a story and how, I assume those are coupled.
link |
00:52:35.900
So how do you choose which story to tell?
link |
00:52:38.100
And how do you choose how to tell that story?
link |
00:52:41.980
Well, in terms of how to choose which story,
link |
00:52:48.380
it's a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly.
link |
00:52:52.980
I go often on instinct,
link |
00:52:55.540
but there's also a highly intentional piece of it
link |
00:52:58.860
for me as well.
link |
00:53:00.140
And the intentional piece is,
link |
00:53:03.380
I guess I'd call it the do I care threshold,
link |
00:53:06.900
or the so what threshold.
link |
00:53:08.500
You personally, just something in your heart
link |
00:53:11.300
just kind of gets excited or hurts or just feels something.
link |
00:53:15.700
So one of the things that disturbs me
link |
00:53:17.380
about American culture, Lex,
link |
00:53:19.020
is that we seem to be a people
link |
00:53:21.380
that's fascinated by reality television, for example.
link |
00:53:24.180
Like look at how many of us here in America
link |
00:53:27.660
watch reality television, right?
link |
00:53:30.340
That deeply disturbs me.
link |
00:53:31.620
Not that I've never watched an episode,
link |
00:53:33.340
I've shot a whole season of it once to make a living, right?
link |
00:53:36.020
So it's like I know it, right?
link |
00:53:38.580
But I feel like the things we should be paying attention to
link |
00:53:42.620
are the things, personally,
link |
00:53:44.780
are the things I choose to film, right?
link |
00:53:47.860
As a human being, as a dad, as a filmmaker,
link |
00:53:53.540
I think we should be paying attention
link |
00:53:55.900
to the fact that children are being starved in Yemen.
link |
00:53:58.860
I think we should be paying attention
link |
00:54:00.500
to the fact that Ukrainians are being displaced
link |
00:54:03.220
by the millions.
link |
00:54:04.580
So there's this so what threshold that I use.
link |
00:54:07.100
And I feel like it has to be a topic
link |
00:54:09.580
that if we don't cover and we don't put out in the world
link |
00:54:14.100
in the largest possible way,
link |
00:54:16.140
in the hope of intervening,
link |
00:54:17.580
in the hope of marshaling maximum resources
link |
00:54:20.300
and attention to solving the problem,
link |
00:54:22.780
that's what I'm dedicated to as a filmmaker.
link |
00:54:25.460
Because I didn't pick up a camera initially
link |
00:54:29.100
to film puppy dogs, right?
link |
00:54:31.820
To make people smile.
link |
00:54:33.420
I believe the camera is a tool for change.
link |
00:54:36.460
I believe the camera is a powerful tool
link |
00:54:40.140
that we can use to raise awareness and marshal resources
link |
00:54:44.220
and help people understand the impact
link |
00:54:47.660
that these geopolitical decisions have
link |
00:54:50.140
on real people's lives.
link |
00:54:51.780
And that's the intent I create each film with.
link |
00:54:57.460
Now, how I choose each story,
link |
00:54:59.340
that's the magic potion piece of it, right?
link |
00:55:01.860
And often one flows rather organically
link |
00:55:04.820
into another, frankly.
link |
00:55:06.660
So you just kind of, like you said,
link |
00:55:08.140
you go with instinct a little bit.
link |
00:55:09.940
To some extent, but oftentimes I choose the next project
link |
00:55:12.900
based on relationships I've developed in the last film.
link |
00:55:17.380
Right?
link |
00:55:18.220
And so one often flows into another
link |
00:55:20.540
through relationships I develop.
link |
00:55:21.900
And then a colleague will share a detail
link |
00:55:24.540
about something that's happening in a certain place.
link |
00:55:27.340
And I'll go, hmm, really, I didn't know that, right?
link |
00:55:30.860
And usually it's before it's hit the world stage
link |
00:55:33.860
in a big way.
link |
00:55:34.900
And so I start to do due diligence.
link |
00:55:36.740
And often that, it reveals it to be a much bigger
link |
00:55:39.340
and more pressing topic that I wanna learn more about.
link |
00:55:43.620
Before I talk to you about Syria and Lifeboat,
link |
00:55:50.020
you mentioned a camera is the best weapon.
link |
00:55:52.860
Maybe just, well, I can't take out a tank, right?
link |
00:55:57.860
But it's a good weapon.
link |
00:55:58.780
Second, top three.
link |
00:56:00.660
Yeah.
link |
00:56:01.500
I love the humor throughout this.
link |
00:56:03.300
I really appreciate it.
link |
00:56:04.860
We were talking about such dark topics.
link |
00:56:07.140
Yeah.
link |
00:56:07.980
It resets the mind in a way that allows me to think.
link |
00:56:12.540
So thank you.
link |
00:56:13.900
As a filmmaker, I almost wanna talk
link |
00:56:20.620
about the technical details.
link |
00:56:23.740
Uh oh.
link |
00:56:24.580
How do you choose to shoot stuff?
link |
00:56:29.020
Again, so maybe you can explain to me.
link |
00:56:31.700
I work with incredible folks that care about lenses
link |
00:56:37.860
and equipment and so on.
link |
00:56:40.540
And I tend to be somebody that just wants to kinda go
link |
00:56:50.340
as like a gorilla shooting, like not plan too much,
link |
00:56:56.220
just go with gritty.
link |
00:56:58.580
I'm trying to come up with words that sound positive.
link |
00:57:01.020
Do a positive spin on what I try to do.
link |
00:57:04.060
But like gritty, don't over plan, use,
link |
00:57:08.500
like we had a big discussion if you see this light.
link |
00:57:10.780
Yeah.
link |
00:57:12.180
It's on a stand that's a very ghetto stand.
link |
00:57:15.700
Yeah.
link |
00:57:16.540
You need a sandbag on that, man.
link |
00:57:17.460
Exactly.
link |
00:57:18.300
So no sandbag and like the stand is actually bending
link |
00:57:23.820
under the weight of that thing.
link |
00:57:25.260
It could fall on us.
link |
00:57:26.380
It could fall.
link |
00:57:27.220
It probably won't reach us, but it could fall.
link |
00:57:28.060
But the danger, live under that danger.
link |
00:57:30.940
Embrace that danger.
link |
00:57:32.660
Love it.
link |
00:57:33.500
Yeah.
link |
00:57:34.380
Because that thing is easier to transport
link |
00:57:36.500
than a heavier one.
link |
00:57:37.740
Yeah.
link |
00:57:38.580
Sandbag, that's extra weight.
link |
00:57:40.260
So if you keep, like people tell me
link |
00:57:42.860
there's the right way to do stuff.
link |
00:57:44.660
Like here's these giant cases with all the kinds of padding
link |
00:57:47.900
for transporting stuff.
link |
00:57:49.260
I transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag.
link |
00:57:52.220
Yeah.
link |
00:57:53.060
So that's just a preference because that's somehow
link |
00:57:56.220
that chaos allows me to ignore all the stupidity
link |
00:58:00.660
of loving the equipment and focusing on the story.
link |
00:58:04.780
So that said, I've never shot anything like worthwhile.
link |
00:58:11.180
Like there is power to the visual.
link |
00:58:15.620
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
00:58:16.460
Like definitely.
link |
00:58:17.820
And so finding a certain angle, a certain light
link |
00:58:22.940
whether it's natural light or additional artificial lighting
link |
00:58:27.260
just capturing a tear, capturing when the person forgets
link |
00:58:32.260
themselves for a moment and looks out into the distance
link |
00:58:35.740
missing somebody, thinking about somebody.
link |
00:58:38.460
All of those like moments you can capture a lens,
link |
00:58:42.260
a camera can do magic with that.
link |
00:58:44.900
I don't even know the question I'm asking you
link |
00:58:46.420
but how do both technical and philosophical,
link |
00:58:51.140
how do you capture the visual power that you're after?
link |
00:58:54.180
Yeah.
link |
00:58:55.340
So, so many of my films I think are built
link |
00:58:59.820
on the premise of access, right?
link |
00:59:02.980
Built on this notion that the biggest hurdle
link |
00:59:10.420
to the story is getting there, being there in the room
link |
00:59:14.860
or being there on the boat while a crisis is unfolding.
link |
00:59:19.860
And that access typically is really nuanced
link |
00:59:23.180
and difficult to gain.
link |
00:59:26.020
And then trust flows from that, right?
link |
00:59:28.940
Cause usually it takes a long time to gain that access
link |
00:59:32.780
because that access is so hard fought.
link |
00:59:37.020
It necessarily informs how we film, right?
link |
00:59:43.380
To be in a room at Sadaka Hospital in Southern Yemen
link |
00:59:47.380
I can't have five people in that room, right?
link |
00:59:50.820
I can't have a boom mic over a scene.
link |
00:59:54.220
I want in creatively the opposite of that as well.
link |
00:59:58.220
So it's not just a logistical question,
link |
01:00:00.060
it's also a creative question to capture intimate moments
link |
01:00:04.340
where families are dealing with suffering children
link |
01:00:08.340
and dying children and caretaking is active
link |
01:00:11.700
and ongoing all the time.
link |
01:00:13.300
You don't want to interrupt that moment.
link |
01:00:15.340
And so that informs how I do things.
link |
01:00:17.460
So we go fleet and nimble and small.
link |
01:00:21.220
Those are all really good words.
link |
01:00:22.900
But so it's logistical on the one hand,
link |
01:00:26.100
but it's also a creative choice, right?
link |
01:00:28.100
So when we filmed Hunger Ward,
link |
01:00:30.340
two people were filming the entire film, right?
link |
01:00:32.940
Me and my director of photography.
link |
01:00:34.860
That was the two people in the room?
link |
01:00:36.380
Two people in the room.
link |
01:00:37.220
That's it.
link |
01:00:38.060
Yeah, that's it.
link |
01:00:38.900
The whole film, right?
link |
01:00:39.740
We had a field producer as well in this part of the country,
link |
01:00:41.500
but in terms of camera, it's just two people
link |
01:00:43.740
and we're doing everything.
link |
01:00:45.060
And we have lenses that are long enough
link |
01:00:49.860
that we don't have to move to camera.
link |
01:00:52.060
We don't have to move to capture the film.
link |
01:00:53.620
So we can tuck into a corner sometimes, right?
link |
01:00:56.620
And so just what's long mean?
link |
01:00:58.300
That means they're standing farther away
link |
01:00:59.940
and they can look.
link |
01:01:00.780
Zoom lens, it's not a prime lens.
link |
01:01:02.220
So it's not a fixed focal length, right?
link |
01:01:04.060
Because a fixed focal length,
link |
01:01:04.900
you have to move a lot more in order to capture action.
link |
01:01:07.740
With a zoom lens, maybe a 105 at the long end,
link |
01:01:12.900
I can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away
link |
01:01:16.860
instead of having to get right up on someone, right?
link |
01:01:18.980
So you're less likely to interrupt the scene
link |
01:01:21.940
and you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes.
link |
01:01:25.900
So I'm very intentional about that piece of it
link |
01:01:30.180
so that we can capture those vulnerable moments
link |
01:01:33.540
and not interrupt them.
link |
01:01:36.340
That's really fascinating too, because the access,
link |
01:01:41.540
I don't often think about this,
link |
01:01:42.860
but that's probably true for me as well.
link |
01:01:44.860
Part of the storytelling is to be in the room.
link |
01:01:52.180
And that's the hard part.
link |
01:01:53.700
For me, most of my films, that's the hardest part.
link |
01:01:56.380
Actually, as hard as Hunger Ward and Lifeboat were to film
link |
01:01:59.860
and 50 Feet From Syria,
link |
01:02:02.540
the getting there piece of it for the last two
link |
01:02:04.740
was much harder.
link |
01:02:06.180
Yeah, and it's also, it's a creative act.
link |
01:02:09.340
It's, I don't know if it is for you,
link |
01:02:12.540
but it's the kind of people you talk to.
link |
01:02:15.140
It's like how you live your life.
link |
01:02:18.660
Like the kind of people I talk to right now,
link |
01:02:21.100
they steer the direction of my life
link |
01:02:22.780
and steer the direction of things I'll film.
link |
01:02:25.620
So it's not just like you're trying to get access.
link |
01:02:28.340
It's like, it's everything.
link |
01:02:30.980
It builds, it builds and builds and builds and builds.
link |
01:02:34.580
It builds on itself, yeah, yeah.
link |
01:02:36.420
I mean, part of the thing, even saying,
link |
01:02:38.820
talking about some of these leaders
link |
01:02:40.140
and conversations with them,
link |
01:02:41.860
it's almost like steering your life
link |
01:02:45.020
into the direction of the difficult,
link |
01:02:47.820
of like taking the leap.
link |
01:02:51.100
And if you're a good human being
link |
01:02:56.180
and a lot of people know who you are as a human,
link |
01:03:00.460
like not as a name, but as really who you are,
link |
01:03:04.140
that like putting that attention out there,
link |
01:03:06.940
it's somehow the world opens doors
link |
01:03:10.980
where the access becomes,
link |
01:03:14.300
the access that once seemed impossible becomes possible.
link |
01:03:18.500
And then all of that is a creative journey
link |
01:03:21.020
to be in the room.
link |
01:03:22.180
I think that probably is,
link |
01:03:23.620
I mean, it's true even for fiction films probably,
link |
01:03:26.620
is like everything that led to that,
link |
01:03:30.220
like to be in the room, the journey to be in the room
link |
01:03:33.380
and to shoot the scene is maybe more important
link |
01:03:37.700
than the scene itself.
link |
01:03:39.780
And like really focus on the creative act of that.
link |
01:03:42.820
Yeah, that's really fascinating.
link |
01:03:43.980
And especially, I mean, with a documentary,
link |
01:03:45.980
you get one take.
link |
01:03:47.700
Yeah, you can't say, hey, reset, right?
link |
01:03:49.980
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
link |
01:03:51.140
Ah, that is so interesting.
link |
01:03:53.140
As you were in some of the most difficult parts of the world
link |
01:03:57.900
in the room with some of the most difficult stories
link |
01:04:00.780
to be told.
link |
01:04:02.060
And yet, I think that's why I keep doing these stories.
link |
01:04:05.780
Because once you have that lived experience for me,
link |
01:04:15.260
it's moving.
link |
01:04:16.860
It moves me to bear witness
link |
01:04:20.780
to these inspiring people under difficult circumstances.
link |
01:04:26.740
And I can't come back to the US afterwards
link |
01:04:31.740
and walk down the grocery aisle
link |
01:04:35.660
where there's 50 different choices for canned peas, right?
link |
01:04:40.220
And not sort of feel that lived tension, right?
link |
01:04:45.060
That lived tension of the privilege
link |
01:04:47.260
that I have here in the US.
link |
01:04:49.220
And then I have a choice about what to do
link |
01:04:52.060
with that privilege, right?
link |
01:04:54.020
And the last thing I wanna do is start
link |
01:04:58.380
doing stories about dandelions, right?
link |
01:05:01.140
There's far more important things to do
link |
01:05:02.740
on this very limited time that I have on the planet.
link |
01:05:05.700
And I think that's catalytic for me.
link |
01:05:12.140
Like I feel that mortality each day.
link |
01:05:17.420
And my goal is to tell as many of these stories
link |
01:05:25.780
before I'm gone.
link |
01:05:26.700
Could you speak to the getting access?
link |
01:05:31.980
Is this just, you know, is there interesting stories
link |
01:05:36.180
of how a weird or funny or profound ways
link |
01:05:43.020
that led you to get access to a room?
link |
01:05:45.100
Each one is a different adventure.
link |
01:05:46.860
And it's definitely an adventure.
link |
01:05:47.700
It's an adventure.
link |
01:05:48.540
Everyone's an adventure, yeah.
link |
01:05:49.860
Probably one of the easiest ones I ever had
link |
01:05:51.980
in the recent past was for 50 Feet from Syria
link |
01:05:54.980
where I literally broke my hand in a bicycle race.
link |
01:06:01.980
And after many months of trying to get an appointment
link |
01:06:06.060
with an orthopedic hand surgeon, a specialist,
link |
01:06:09.180
I finally did and he was Syrian American.
link |
01:06:11.700
And the Syrian conflict had just begun
link |
01:06:14.820
and we just started talking about it.
link |
01:06:16.620
And after he looked at my hand in the first five minutes,
link |
01:06:21.060
he's like, yeah, you need surgery, great.
link |
01:06:23.260
But then somehow we started talking about Syria
link |
01:06:25.860
and like five minutes in, he just stood up
link |
01:06:28.380
and like put the privacy curtain around us,
link |
01:06:30.700
supposed to be a 15 minute appointment or so.
link |
01:06:33.060
And we talked for an hour, right?
link |
01:06:35.340
So, you know, those moments
link |
01:06:37.380
of sort of mysterious confluence happen, right?
link |
01:06:40.820
And I think you have to be open to them when they do happen
link |
01:06:43.340
because I'm a storyteller, I'm always looking as well, right?
link |
01:06:46.700
So, because he then contacted me later and said,
link |
01:06:50.460
Skye, I am going back to the Syrian border to volunteer
link |
01:06:54.180
as a surgeon, do you want to come with me?
link |
01:06:56.580
That was an easy one.
link |
01:06:57.460
That's probably the easiest one I could give you.
link |
01:06:58.960
But it came out of this interesting moment,
link |
01:07:01.220
very personal moment, right?
link |
01:07:02.900
Lifeboat and Hunger Ward are completely different.
link |
01:07:07.380
And I had to really work hard to gain access
link |
01:07:11.340
to those stories.
link |
01:07:12.420
So you intentionally thought like what,
link |
01:07:15.800
I want to get access to the story.
link |
01:07:18.340
And then what are the different ideas?
link |
01:07:20.500
And they often might involve a doctor or a dentist
link |
01:07:24.500
or just being maybe intentionally and aggressively open
link |
01:07:31.200
to experiences that lead you into the room.
link |
01:07:35.580
So it's funny you mentioned the doctor
link |
01:07:38.900
because I have similar experiences now.
link |
01:07:42.740
I've just gotten access to all kinds of fascinating people
link |
01:07:47.740
in the same way.
link |
01:07:50.000
They're all around us.
link |
01:07:50.840
They're all around us.
link |
01:07:52.160
You just have to look.
link |
01:07:53.000
Yeah, exactly.
link |
01:07:53.840
It's like there's fascinating people everywhere
link |
01:07:55.520
who are doing incredible things,
link |
01:07:57.240
but we have to be open and keep our eyes open
link |
01:07:59.480
and realize that there are amazing human beings everywhere.
link |
01:08:04.160
Yeah, there's networks that connect people
link |
01:08:07.720
just through life.
link |
01:08:09.080
You meet people, you share a beer or a drink
link |
01:08:12.560
or just you fall in love
link |
01:08:14.800
or you share trauma together.
link |
01:08:18.600
You go through a hard time together.
link |
01:08:19.920
And those little sticky things connects us humans.
link |
01:08:22.560
And if you just keep yourself open
link |
01:08:24.840
and embrace the curiosity.
link |
01:08:27.880
And then also the persistence, I suppose.
link |
01:08:30.040
Like how long have you chased access?
link |
01:08:36.160
Does it take days, weeks, months, years?
link |
01:08:39.640
Lex, I'm not the most talented filmmaker in the world.
link |
01:08:43.080
I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
link |
01:08:46.160
I think if there's qualities
link |
01:08:48.200
that have served me well in my career,
link |
01:08:50.640
it's persistence and tenacity, right?
link |
01:08:53.200
I've always been sort of a slow burn human being.
link |
01:08:56.960
Like I would never hit a home run,
link |
01:09:00.240
but I hit a first, right?
link |
01:09:03.240
A single to first,
link |
01:09:04.160
and then I'd hit another single to first.
link |
01:09:06.560
So I ran a marathon when I was 18.
link |
01:09:09.460
And I think that is illustrative
link |
01:09:11.520
of sort of how my career has been.
link |
01:09:14.480
I just keep going.
link |
01:09:16.040
And I believe in this notion of incremental evolution
link |
01:09:20.640
that with each project, I try to learn from it
link |
01:09:23.980
and take away lessons learned and improve my craft, right?
link |
01:09:28.160
And improve how I leverage that craft
link |
01:09:33.000
and improve how I tell the story
link |
01:09:35.280
from a narrative standpoint each time.
link |
01:09:37.880
So that on the next project, it's a little bit better.
link |
01:09:41.800
And that's the arc of my career
link |
01:09:43.740
is learning, learning, evolving, evolving,
link |
01:09:47.400
so that I can make a little better film the next time.
link |
01:09:50.480
How do you gain people's trust?
link |
01:09:53.280
Like for example, there's a line between journalists
link |
01:09:56.640
and documentary filmmakers.
link |
01:09:58.520
Nobody really trusts journalists.
link |
01:10:00.320
Yeah, right, exactly.
link |
01:10:03.840
But a documentary filmmaker,
link |
01:10:06.480
of course I'm joking, half joking.
link |
01:10:09.480
I don't know which percentage joking, but some truth.
link |
01:10:12.160
But documentary filmmaker is a kind of storyteller,
link |
01:10:15.560
an artist, and somehow that's more trustworthy
link |
01:10:18.880
because you're on the same side in some way.
link |
01:10:22.560
I don't know.
link |
01:10:23.400
Maybe on the same side, yeah.
link |
01:10:25.360
Is there something to be said
link |
01:10:26.640
how you gain the trust of people to gain access?
link |
01:10:29.600
Are you just trying to be a good human being?
link |
01:10:34.160
Is there something to be said there?
link |
01:10:35.560
Well, so I do draw a distinction
link |
01:10:37.360
between journalism and filmmaking
link |
01:10:40.120
because I think you're right, they're different.
link |
01:10:42.520
And there are some filmmakers who do hue
link |
01:10:44.600
to sort of the journalistic tenets
link |
01:10:47.880
of who, what, where, when, why,
link |
01:10:49.620
fair and balanced on both sides, right?
link |
01:10:51.400
Make sure everyone has a voice.
link |
01:10:52.780
I don't.
link |
01:10:53.620
If you say fair and balanced,
link |
01:10:55.080
you're rarely either fair or balanced.
link |
01:10:58.300
I've seen that with journalists.
link |
01:10:59.680
Journalists often, unfortunately, in my perspective,
link |
01:11:02.800
sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant,
link |
01:11:05.520
but they seem to have. Go on a rant, do it.
link |
01:11:07.640
They seem to have an agenda.
link |
01:11:09.760
As opposed to seeking to truly tell a story
link |
01:11:12.160
or to truly understand,
link |
01:11:15.720
especially when they're talking to people
link |
01:11:21.280
who have some degree of evil in them.
link |
01:11:24.240
Well, we all have an agenda, right?
link |
01:11:25.740
I think in anything we do,
link |
01:11:27.040
whether it's like to seek truth
link |
01:11:30.480
or some larger principle,
link |
01:11:32.580
I always have an agenda.
link |
01:11:35.980
I chose to work with civilians and caretakers in Yemen
link |
01:11:40.820
on Hunger Ward rather than to go interview MBS, right?
link |
01:11:45.800
That's what I'm interested in
link |
01:11:46.900
is bringing that to the world, right?
link |
01:11:50.540
But in terms of building relationships and trust,
link |
01:11:55.800
it's really, I think about transparency
link |
01:11:59.100
as much as anything else
link |
01:12:00.700
and going in in a collaborative sense.
link |
01:12:03.340
So I don't think of the people
link |
01:12:09.440
that I film with as subjects, for example.
link |
01:12:12.580
I think of them as collaborators.
link |
01:12:14.340
So it's a different mindset that I go into projects with.
link |
01:12:17.700
That's beautiful.
link |
01:12:18.540
And it's based on relationships, right?
link |
01:12:19.900
You have to build relationships with other human beings,
link |
01:12:22.260
however you can, and that takes time
link |
01:12:24.920
and it takes listening and it's active.
link |
01:12:28.660
So I've talked about the notion of consent before,
link |
01:12:32.940
which is so important in nonfiction film.
link |
01:12:36.680
And I hew to this idea that
link |
01:12:42.140
you don't just slide a piece of paper in front of someone,
link |
01:12:45.180
have release form and have them sign it, right?
link |
01:12:47.240
And then you're done.
link |
01:12:48.580
That's not the nature of true consent in my mind.
link |
01:12:51.740
It's you have to work on a foundation of active consent
link |
01:12:56.740
every single day that you're working with someone.
link |
01:12:59.120
And that's based on relationship, right?
link |
01:13:01.240
And it's based on dialogue.
link |
01:13:02.500
So it's trust that I'm always aiming for.
link |
01:13:05.800
It's the building of relationships,
link |
01:13:07.760
which I'm always aiming for,
link |
01:13:08.620
which is why yesterday I got a bunch of photos
link |
01:13:13.160
from Dr. Al Sadiq in the South of Yemen.
link |
01:13:15.320
And she sends me photos all the time
link |
01:13:17.360
of the children that she's currently treating
link |
01:13:19.920
because we have an active relationship
link |
01:13:21.720
that's continues on and probably will
link |
01:13:24.560
for many years to come.
link |
01:13:26.160
So it's going to continue.
link |
01:13:28.360
And that's the only way that I can do these kinds of films.
link |
01:13:32.020
Let me ask you about silly little details of filming.
link |
01:13:36.720
Before we go to the big picture stories,
link |
01:13:42.660
cameras, lenses, how much do those matter?
link |
01:13:46.080
You mentioned director of photography.
link |
01:13:47.880
What's your, how much do you love the feel,
link |
01:13:52.880
the smell of equipment that does the visual filming?
link |
01:13:56.940
You know, there's some people, they're just like,
link |
01:13:59.100
ah, they love lenses.
link |
01:14:03.100
How much do you love that or versus how much
link |
01:14:05.900
do you focus on the story or the access
link |
01:14:08.220
and all those kinds of things?
link |
01:14:09.060
I'm not a tech geek, but because during the bulk
link |
01:14:14.180
of my career, I've worked as a director of photography
link |
01:14:18.460
myself for other people in order to pay the bills
link |
01:14:21.540
over the years, you know, I know the technical side of it
link |
01:14:25.660
because I've had to know it and I've had to train myself
link |
01:14:29.040
and learn it.
link |
01:14:29.880
So I see them as necessary tools.
link |
01:14:33.740
And again, because I believe, you know,
link |
01:14:38.500
film and cinema is and should be visually driven
link |
01:14:43.140
and not verbally driven.
link |
01:14:45.680
I want the best tools possible within my means, right?
link |
01:14:49.460
And within the logistical ability of the project
link |
01:14:53.860
because we have to go so small, right?
link |
01:14:56.260
I can't afford nor can I bring a huge $100,000 lens.
link |
01:15:00.860
So if I gave you a trillion dollars.
link |
01:15:02.820
A trillion dollars?
link |
01:15:03.800
Yeah.
link |
01:15:04.640
Wow.
link |
01:15:05.480
Unlimited.
link |
01:15:06.300
Yeah.
link |
01:15:07.140
There's still huge constraints that have nothing
link |
01:15:08.460
to do with money.
link |
01:15:09.300
Yeah.
link |
01:15:10.140
Like you just said.
link |
01:15:10.960
Yeah.
link |
01:15:11.800
So what cameras would you use?
link |
01:15:13.840
You know what I'd do with a trillion dollars?
link |
01:15:16.060
I could do a lot with a trillion dollars.
link |
01:15:16.900
You're not allowed.
link |
01:15:17.740
You're only allowed to fund the film and no corrupt stuff
link |
01:15:21.740
where you like use the film to actually help children.
link |
01:15:24.900
No, you're not allowed to do any of that.
link |
01:15:26.420
What I would do with a trillion is I wouldn't invest in it.
link |
01:15:28.540
Well, I guess I would invest in current.
link |
01:15:29.860
I would increase capacity to do more films.
link |
01:15:33.460
What I would do.
link |
01:15:34.300
So I would buy basically the perfect little,
link |
01:15:37.740
you know, mini equipment set, right?
link |
01:15:40.760
But then I would train three teams maybe
link |
01:15:43.980
to do the same thing that I've been doing
link |
01:15:45.940
so we could multiply and scale up.
link |
01:15:48.340
More and more stories.
link |
01:15:49.300
Yeah, that's what I would do with the money.
link |
01:15:51.060
But the actual setup.
link |
01:15:52.500
Would remain small and nimble.
link |
01:15:54.700
Yeah.
link |
01:15:56.620
And what about lighting?
link |
01:15:59.820
Do you usually use natural light?
link |
01:16:01.780
Do you ever do?
link |
01:16:04.260
I mean, sorry for the technical questions here,
link |
01:16:06.300
but highlighting the drama of the human face.
link |
01:16:11.760
Yeah.
link |
01:16:13.940
That's the visual.
link |
01:16:14.820
That's art.
link |
01:16:15.660
That's like, to reveal reality at its deepest is art.
link |
01:16:23.060
And do you use lighting?
link |
01:16:24.980
Lighting's such a big part of that.
link |
01:16:27.100
Do you ever do artificial lighting?
link |
01:16:28.460
Do you try to do natural always?
link |
01:16:30.120
You know the best lighting instrument in the world?
link |
01:16:33.260
Is the sun.
link |
01:16:34.740
At the right moment of the day.
link |
01:16:37.020
And so I predominantly use natural light
link |
01:16:40.780
at certain moments and just shape natural light
link |
01:16:49.020
during the course of these small human rights stocks.
link |
01:16:51.700
That's not to say we don't bring instruments sometimes,
link |
01:16:54.680
but when we do, they're very small and again, compact.
link |
01:17:00.020
So for example, I have this small little tube kit
link |
01:17:05.340
that's just three instruments, right?
link |
01:17:07.020
That you can charge with USB.
link |
01:17:08.400
Because electricity is often a major issue where we go.
link |
01:17:11.940
So there's just three little tube lights with magnetic backs
link |
01:17:15.020
that if we find in a situation where, you know,
link |
01:17:17.780
we can't get enough exposure for a hallway or something,
link |
01:17:20.780
and we have the time to throw it up,
link |
01:17:22.800
we'll throw it up if people are walking,
link |
01:17:24.540
if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot,
link |
01:17:27.140
for example, at night, just so we can see them, right?
link |
01:17:29.980
So it's instances like that.
link |
01:17:31.520
Or if we do do an interview, which we don't do very often,
link |
01:17:35.580
but if we do, just so we have a key light on the face, right?
link |
01:17:40.740
And always bring a reflector or two, you know,
link |
01:17:43.380
just to shape natural light as well in ways.
link |
01:17:46.820
But it's about shaping rather than producing light for us.
link |
01:17:53.060
Got it, as we sit surrounded by black curtains
link |
01:17:55.860
in complete natural light.
link |
01:17:57.620
So just so you know, this room is like a violation
link |
01:18:02.140
of the basic principles of using the sun.
link |
01:18:08.480
So behind the large curtains are giant windows.
link |
01:18:13.120
Yeah.
link |
01:18:13.960
So this whole.
link |
01:18:14.960
Should I rip them open?
link |
01:18:15.800
Should I rip open the curtains real quick?
link |
01:18:19.060
How much of the work is done in the edit?
link |
01:18:21.400
That's another question I'm curious about.
link |
01:18:24.280
And how much do you sort of anticipate that?
link |
01:18:28.880
Like when you're actually shooting,
link |
01:18:30.720
are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen
link |
01:18:38.000
or are you just collecting, as a human,
link |
01:18:40.800
collecting little bits of story here and there
link |
01:18:42.920
and in the edit is where most of the storytelling happens?
link |
01:18:46.560
I've developed this sort of mental paradigm
link |
01:18:49.400
for myself over the years that speaks to that.
link |
01:18:53.960
And I call it the three creations, right?
link |
01:18:56.720
And so when I'm doing a film, the first creation for me
link |
01:19:00.960
is my preconception or visualization
link |
01:19:05.860
of what the film is going to be before I shoot it, right?
link |
01:19:09.440
So I have this entire vision of what a film's gonna be.
link |
01:19:15.080
And sometimes it can be pretty specific.
link |
01:19:16.920
Like I'll think through the scenes
link |
01:19:18.640
if I know the locations and everything,
link |
01:19:20.800
and I'll have this idea of what I'm gonna create, right?
link |
01:19:24.440
And then I'm there filming, right?
link |
01:19:26.760
And always without fail, reality is something
link |
01:19:30.960
altogether different than what I thought it would be.
link |
01:19:33.880
But it's still good to have the original idea.
link |
01:19:35.520
Yeah, yeah, but if I tried to hold to that original vision,
link |
01:19:38.560
right, and to create a film out of that idea,
link |
01:19:41.400
they'd be crap, all the films would be crap.
link |
01:19:43.440
So I have to adapt, I have to evolve my approach
link |
01:19:46.200
and then embrace what is actually occurring
link |
01:19:49.880
with the people actually doing it and then reenvision.
link |
01:19:53.060
So that reenvision is very active
link |
01:19:55.180
during the entire filming process.
link |
01:19:57.120
And so that's the second creation,
link |
01:19:58.960
that's the rethinking and revisualizing
link |
01:20:02.880
based on what we're actually experiencing and seeing
link |
01:20:05.720
what this film is going to be.
link |
01:20:08.000
And then I finished filming, right?
link |
01:20:11.380
And we bring the hard drives back
link |
01:20:13.080
and we plug in the hard drives in the edit bay.
link |
01:20:16.600
And oftentimes, because it's two of us filming
link |
01:20:20.420
most of the time, I haven't seen all the footage.
link |
01:20:23.720
Because in the field, it's all about just filming, right?
link |
01:20:26.920
And then just transferring the footage
link |
01:20:28.740
and getting on safely, you know, clone to multiple drives.
link |
01:20:31.840
I don't have a chance to review everything.
link |
01:20:33.600
I can't do rushes like you do on a large feature.
link |
01:20:36.400
So because I'm filming half of it,
link |
01:20:38.480
I know what I've filmed, right?
link |
01:20:40.800
But I haven't seen everything
link |
01:20:42.200
the director of photography has filmed, right?
link |
01:20:45.080
So the next stage for me is reviewing every single frame
link |
01:20:50.080
of what's been filmed.
link |
01:20:51.920
And that's where discovery happens the third time, right?
link |
01:20:56.040
Or the second time rather is,
link |
01:20:57.760
wow, now I thought we'd filmed this,
link |
01:21:01.580
but actually there's this over here.
link |
01:21:05.040
And then I have to open up this second vision
link |
01:21:07.400
and turn it and transform it into a third vision
link |
01:21:10.080
for the film based on what's actually on the hard drive.
link |
01:21:12.880
So is this like a daily process?
link |
01:21:15.640
So what I do, my process is that
link |
01:21:17.880
if it's a really difficult project,
link |
01:21:21.040
I'll take a break before I go through this
link |
01:21:23.400
just for healing, you know,
link |
01:21:25.160
and some space away and fresh eyes.
link |
01:21:27.400
And usually that's about a month.
link |
01:21:29.120
And then once I reengage, I reengage whole hog,
link |
01:21:32.480
I reengage fully and I review every single frame.
link |
01:21:37.140
And as I do that, I create a spreadsheet.
link |
01:21:40.560
And for Hunger War, that spreadsheet was,
link |
01:21:43.240
I don't know, 1500 lines long or something
link |
01:21:45.880
where it's basically log notes.
link |
01:21:48.100
And I watch every scene and I take notes
link |
01:21:51.320
and I know really what we have.
link |
01:21:54.200
And once I've gone through that process
link |
01:21:55.880
that takes about a month
link |
01:21:57.320
and I really know what we came back with,
link |
01:21:59.880
I create an outline for the film from that.
link |
01:22:02.800
And that's the third visioning, right?
link |
01:22:05.720
That's usually completely different
link |
01:22:07.580
than my original vision for the film to some extent, right?
link |
01:22:10.800
But I have to stay open to that entire process
link |
01:22:14.280
or I'd be trying to create something
link |
01:22:17.080
that I can't really create.
link |
01:22:19.640
So I think those are the three creations for me.
link |
01:22:22.680
That's so cool to know what we have,
link |
01:22:27.500
just to lay it all out and to load it in into your mind.
link |
01:22:31.960
Cause like, this is the capture of reality we have.
link |
01:22:35.820
It's a very kind of scientific process too.
link |
01:22:37.820
Cause you know, in science,
link |
01:22:39.480
you collect a bunch of data about a phenomena
link |
01:22:41.880
and now you have to like analyze that data,
link |
01:22:43.700
but now your phenomena is long gone.
link |
01:22:46.040
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
link |
01:22:46.960
Now you just have the data.
link |
01:22:47.800
Just the data and you have to write a paper about it,
link |
01:22:51.240
like analyze the data, it's similar things.
link |
01:22:54.000
You have to like load it all in.
link |
01:22:55.440
Where's the story?
link |
01:22:56.900
How do you, that last probably profound piece
link |
01:23:03.440
of doing the editing, like in your mind,
link |
01:23:07.060
like how to lay those things out?
link |
01:23:10.240
Well, it's almost like the scientific process, right?
link |
01:23:12.200
I have a hypothesis, a creative hypothesis, right?
link |
01:23:15.320
Not a scientific one.
link |
01:23:17.040
But then I'm testing the hypothesis
link |
01:23:19.080
during the course of filming, right?
link |
01:23:20.960
And I have to stay true to what the data tells me
link |
01:23:24.280
in the end creatively.
link |
01:23:25.740
So it's very similar to the scientific processes.
link |
01:23:27.520
I don't know what we should, we should probably coin that.
link |
01:23:30.200
Yeah, that's pretty good.
link |
01:23:31.200
Creative scientific process or something like that.
link |
01:23:34.660
But then you actually do the edit and then you watch,
link |
01:23:38.260
that's also iterative in a sense,
link |
01:23:41.300
because maybe when you have a film,
link |
01:23:45.200
that's 20, 30, 40 minutes, or if it's feature length,
link |
01:23:50.260
like do you ever have it where it sucks?
link |
01:23:54.600
Like it's not at all.
link |
01:23:55.440
Is there a stage where it sucks?
link |
01:23:56.720
Like a stage where, right, right.
link |
01:23:58.720
Like it's where it's like, no, this is not,
link |
01:24:01.380
this is not what I was, like when it's all put together
link |
01:24:03.900
in this way, this doesn't, this is not working right.
link |
01:24:07.000
This is not right.
link |
01:24:08.780
Or do you, is it always like an incremental step
link |
01:24:12.100
towards better and better?
link |
01:24:13.000
It's incremental.
link |
01:24:13.920
Yeah, it's incremental.
link |
01:24:14.920
Yeah, and there's always some moment in the editing process
link |
01:24:18.360
where there's a breakthrough,
link |
01:24:19.960
where suddenly I understand how it fits together more fully.
link |
01:24:24.360
And you have to be, like you said, resilient.
link |
01:24:26.120
You have to be patient that that moment will come.
link |
01:24:28.560
Yeah, exactly.
link |
01:24:29.480
Are you ultra self critical
link |
01:24:31.440
or are you generally optimistic and patient?
link |
01:24:35.400
I don't think those are mutually exclusive.
link |
01:24:38.520
Right, so you just oscillate
link |
01:24:40.240
or are they like dance partners or something?
link |
01:24:42.440
They're dance partners, yeah.
link |
01:24:44.120
Definitely dancing all the way through the process.
link |
01:24:47.400
By way of advice, you know, to young filmmakers,
link |
01:24:52.680
how to film something that is recognized
link |
01:24:58.380
by the world in some way.
link |
01:25:00.600
I would say, you know, first off, learn your craft, right?
link |
01:25:05.340
Because I think craft is incredibly foundational, right?
link |
01:25:11.360
To creating a powerful story.
link |
01:25:14.440
And sorry to interrupt, but when you say craft,
link |
01:25:16.560
do you mean just the raw technical,
link |
01:25:18.740
the director of photography, like the filming aspect?
link |
01:25:21.760
Is it the storytelling, is it the access, the whole thing?
link |
01:25:24.480
I think craft is more than just knowing
link |
01:25:25.920
how to push record on a camera or what lens to use, right?
link |
01:25:28.720
That's part of it, right?
link |
01:25:30.480
But I think at least in nonfiction,
link |
01:25:35.080
you know, I'm a product to some extent
link |
01:25:38.640
of having to know how to do it all, right?
link |
01:25:42.560
Having to teach myself how to do it all.
link |
01:25:44.720
Because I didn't go to film school, you know?
link |
01:25:48.020
But I became so enamored of telling stories through a camera.
link |
01:25:54.600
What was the leap, by the way,
link |
01:25:55.720
from theater to storyteller?
link |
01:25:57.960
Oh, I just needed an extra class in grad school.
link |
01:26:00.880
I was in a MFA directing class
link |
01:26:03.760
and I needed an extra class and I just sort of like
link |
01:26:06.240
talked my way into a television directing class
link |
01:26:09.720
and fell in love with it.
link |
01:26:11.720
And the actor became the director.
link |
01:26:14.160
Yeah, yeah.
link |
01:26:15.500
Well, yeah, I mean, I wasn't an actor,
link |
01:26:18.200
but I had to act and I had to know the craft of acting
link |
01:26:21.640
because I was in the theater, you know,
link |
01:26:22.960
to work with actors. Did you love it, though?
link |
01:26:24.720
Did you love acting? The theater?
link |
01:26:27.000
Yeah, theater?
link |
01:26:28.180
The first, yeah, as an undergraduate, yeah.
link |
01:26:30.820
But then I learned pretty quickly
link |
01:26:32.040
that I was pretty bad at it, or at least not very good,
link |
01:26:36.440
and that my skills lay elsewhere
link |
01:26:39.320
in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story.
link |
01:26:42.520
When you started taking a class,
link |
01:26:45.560
but also telling stories as a director,
link |
01:26:48.760
did you quickly realize that you're pretty good at this
link |
01:26:53.760
or was it a grind?
link |
01:26:56.080
That's a good question, Max.
link |
01:26:58.680
I think, I definitely knew right away
link |
01:27:02.280
that it was more my wheelhouse, right?
link |
01:27:05.440
And I think part of that was because
link |
01:27:09.560
I grew up in sort of a world of imagination.
link |
01:27:14.160
And I think that active imagination as a child
link |
01:27:18.040
really lent itself well to the skillset
link |
01:27:21.080
that a director needs, right?
link |
01:27:23.960
To shape story, to shape narrative, to shape performances.
link |
01:27:26.760
So I think it was a much more natural fit for me.
link |
01:27:29.640
Was I excellent at the beginning?
link |
01:27:31.840
Heck no, no, I think few people are, but I learned.
link |
01:27:36.000
Where was the biggest struggle for you?
link |
01:27:37.920
Is it, so your imagination clearly was something
link |
01:27:41.600
that you worked on for a lifetime.
link |
01:27:43.600
So I'm sure that was pretty strong.
link |
01:27:46.480
Books, came from books.
link |
01:27:47.920
Books.
link |
01:27:49.320
But the actual conversion of the imagination,
link |
01:27:52.000
you said shape the story.
link |
01:27:53.960
Where was the skill most lacking
link |
01:27:56.840
in the shaping of the story initially?
link |
01:27:59.080
Technical side.
link |
01:27:59.920
Just technical side.
link |
01:28:00.760
Yeah, like, you know,
link |
01:28:01.580
cause I taught myself everything.
link |
01:28:03.840
What kind of microphone should I use, right?
link |
01:28:05.640
What kind of camera?
link |
01:28:06.480
What does this lens do?
link |
01:28:07.560
What's that lens do?
link |
01:28:08.720
I didn't know any of that.
link |
01:28:10.100
And so I essentially was,
link |
01:28:11.440
I have been self taught, technically.
link |
01:28:14.200
How do you get good technically,
link |
01:28:15.600
would you say, when you're self taught?
link |
01:28:16.840
Just doing it over and over again.
link |
01:28:18.240
And what kind of stories were you telling?
link |
01:28:20.840
I began shooting local commercials for.
link |
01:28:24.280
For money?
link |
01:28:25.160
For money, yeah, yeah.
link |
01:28:26.000
So you're doing professional projects?
link |
01:28:27.840
Yeah, yeah.
link |
01:28:28.680
And so I kind of learned on the job as I did it.
link |
01:28:31.240
How many hobby projects did you do,
link |
01:28:32.840
just for the hell of it?
link |
01:28:34.080
Or were you trying to focus on the professional?
link |
01:28:35.880
Well, I was trying to make money, right?
link |
01:28:37.320
Right out of grad school, just to pay the rent.
link |
01:28:39.400
And that's a forcing function to,
link |
01:28:42.440
I mean, I personally love having my back to the wall
link |
01:28:45.680
or financially you're screwed if you don't succeed.
link |
01:28:48.920
So that's nice.
link |
01:28:50.480
I mean, I lived out of the trunk of my car
link |
01:28:51.960
for a couple of years after grad school,
link |
01:28:53.720
just freelancing, just like,
link |
01:28:56.360
but that couple of years really helped me learn fast
link |
01:29:00.320
because I had to learn fast.
link |
01:29:02.480
So I did a couple of voyages around the world
link |
01:29:05.880
for this group called Semester at Sea,
link |
01:29:08.160
that is a floating university
link |
01:29:09.580
that where they go out three and a half months at a time
link |
01:29:11.880
with about 500 college level students
link |
01:29:15.120
and about 35 professors.
link |
01:29:16.520
And so you're shooting every day for three and a half months
link |
01:29:19.480
in like nine different countries.
link |
01:29:20.760
And so that really was like instrumental to me
link |
01:29:25.240
becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly.
link |
01:29:27.680
And you were doing most of the work yourself?
link |
01:29:29.240
One man, one man band, yeah.
link |
01:29:31.240
The second voyage, I at least had an editor with me.
link |
01:29:35.440
Yeah, but I was shooting everything.
link |
01:29:36.920
Yeah, what's the perfect team?
link |
01:29:38.800
Is it two people for nonfiction asking for a friend?
link |
01:29:43.640
Some kind of interested in some storytelling,
link |
01:29:45.840
not of the level and the sophistication that you're doing,
link |
01:29:50.040
but more.
link |
01:29:51.040
I think you have to allow the story
link |
01:29:52.400
to dictate what the size of the film should be.
link |
01:29:54.280
For these small human rights docs I do,
link |
01:29:55.980
I think two or three, it means you work your butt off,
link |
01:29:59.600
because you're doing everything, right?
link |
01:30:01.360
But it allows you to tell intimate stories
link |
01:30:03.640
and have that access.
link |
01:30:04.560
I'm doing a film this summer that's a scripted piece
link |
01:30:08.560
where we'll probably have 25 crew people.
link |
01:30:10.520
Oh, wow.
link |
01:30:11.360
So it's a completely different endeavor altogether.
link |
01:30:14.520
But doing it yourself, what do you think about that?
link |
01:30:18.560
Even though you have that trillion dollars.
link |
01:30:21.360
Oh, I have that trillion dollars again?
link |
01:30:23.040
Sweet, you can write that check before I leave, right?
link |
01:30:25.160
Yeah, I will.
link |
01:30:26.000
Okay, great.
link |
01:30:26.820
I've never seen a check for that big.
link |
01:30:30.280
It's gonna be interesting.
link |
01:30:31.120
How many zeros is that?
link |
01:30:31.960
I write them so often, I've lost track.
link |
01:30:36.160
Or the United States government sure as heck
link |
01:30:38.280
writes them often.
link |
01:30:39.360
Okay, anyway, I mean, is there an argument
link |
01:30:42.240
can you steel man the case for a single person?
link |
01:30:44.840
Not for me, not for me, and here's why.
link |
01:30:53.640
What I've found is that by being a team of two filming
link |
01:31:01.580
with a field producer, by two people filming,
link |
01:31:05.600
it allows us to double our footage first off, right?
link |
01:31:10.440
So we have twice as much footage in the time
link |
01:31:13.240
we're filming to come back with as opposed
link |
01:31:14.980
to one person filming.
link |
01:31:15.820
So you're each manning a camera?
link |
01:31:18.360
Yeah, constantly.
link |
01:31:19.840
And how much, sorry to keep interrupting,
link |
01:31:22.800
how much interaction and interplay there is?
link |
01:31:25.240
Sometimes the director of photography is in another room
link |
01:31:28.160
filming a different scene, if it makes sense.
link |
01:31:30.020
Sometimes we're cross shooting in the same room, right?
link |
01:31:32.760
Just depends on the needs of the moment.
link |
01:31:35.400
So we come back with double the footage is one thing.
link |
01:31:38.040
But as a director, so that's, you know,
link |
01:31:40.480
given how access is sometimes shaped by the events
link |
01:31:45.240
so that we can only, something, you know,
link |
01:31:47.800
in Lifeboat, for example, you know,
link |
01:31:49.680
a rescue operation may only happen three days, right?
link |
01:31:52.880
So you want as much footage of that as you can.
link |
01:31:55.000
But the other piece of it that's really critical for me,
link |
01:31:57.360
I found is that by having another human being
link |
01:32:00.360
I'm filming with, who I'm co shooting with,
link |
01:32:02.760
it frees me up as a director to not always
link |
01:32:05.860
have to be shooting either.
link |
01:32:07.480
I can do all the other work to build relationships, right?
link |
01:32:11.560
To have side conversations with people,
link |
01:32:14.040
to sort out the right way to tell a story, right?
link |
01:32:18.680
Or to transfer footage, knowing that the director
link |
01:32:21.600
of photography is still filming during all that.
link |
01:32:23.360
So it frees me up to think of as a director
link |
01:32:26.460
rather than just an image acquirer.
link |
01:32:29.960
Yeah, cause there's also, I don't know how distracting it is.
link |
01:32:32.440
You've obviously done it for years, but setting stuff up,
link |
01:32:35.640
it preoccupies your mind.
link |
01:32:40.640
Like pressing the record button,
link |
01:32:42.480
and like framing stuff and all that,
link |
01:32:43.960
that still takes up some part of your mind
link |
01:32:46.440
where you can't think freely.
link |
01:32:48.240
That's my choice, right?
link |
01:32:49.480
That's how I work best.
link |
01:32:51.040
That said, the caveat there would be
link |
01:32:53.040
that's not the only way to do it, obviously, right?
link |
01:32:55.000
Like one of my favorite documentaries of all time
link |
01:33:00.040
is a documentary called A Woman Captured, shot in Hungary,
link |
01:33:03.920
by a single filmmaker with a single camera
link |
01:33:07.120
with a single lens, right?
link |
01:33:09.480
And it's brilliant, and powerful,
link |
01:33:12.160
and moving, and interventional.
link |
01:33:16.080
It's incredible filmmaking, and it was a single human being
link |
01:33:19.320
who created that film with a collaborator or subject.
link |
01:33:23.480
So it can be done, it's just not how I work best.
link |
01:33:26.800
Yeah, how much personally would the other person,
link |
01:33:29.980
how important is the relationship with them
link |
01:33:34.180
outside of the filming?
link |
01:33:36.360
Like.
link |
01:33:37.200
With the director of photography?
link |
01:33:38.020
The director of photography, say.
link |
01:33:39.620
Like, how much drinking, and if you don't drink,
link |
01:33:44.500
whatever the equivalent of that is,
link |
01:33:46.060
do you have to do together?
link |
01:33:47.580
How much soul searching?
link |
01:33:48.940
Or is it more like two surgeons getting together?
link |
01:33:52.460
Is it surgeons, or is it a jazz band?
link |
01:33:55.940
Well, it could be either, right?
link |
01:33:57.980
Hopefully not at the same time, though,
link |
01:33:59.240
because I don't think surgeons and jazz bands
link |
01:34:00.980
go well together, probably.
link |
01:34:02.580
They're both good with fingers, I suppose.
link |
01:34:05.740
Exactly, but I'd rather maybe not play jazz
link |
01:34:08.220
while they operate on me.
link |
01:34:09.860
But I think, for me, I think there are moments of both,
link |
01:34:15.500
but usually not at the same time, right?
link |
01:34:17.580
There are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing,
link |
01:34:20.860
you really have to be that task driven, right?
link |
01:34:25.000
To capture as thoroughly as possible
link |
01:34:27.100
whatever's unfolding, right?
link |
01:34:29.300
But I think there's other times
link |
01:34:30.380
where you do improvise like jazz, right?
link |
01:34:32.880
And where you have a lot of choices ahead of you,
link |
01:34:35.940
and you're doing maybe a dance
link |
01:34:38.780
with the other camera person, right?
link |
01:34:41.060
In order to capture a scene as creatively
link |
01:34:43.220
and fully as possible during a fixed duration.
link |
01:34:47.420
How much, you said shaping, because it is nonfiction.
link |
01:34:51.340
But I feel like there's so many ways
link |
01:34:53.380
to tell the same nonfiction,
link |
01:34:55.420
that is bordering on fiction.
link |
01:34:57.820
Yeah.
link |
01:34:58.660
Well, it's storytelling.
link |
01:35:03.060
And how much shaping do you see yourself as doing?
link |
01:35:08.820
Like how important is your role?
link |
01:35:10.300
How you tell the story?
link |
01:35:14.620
I suppose the question I'm asking is,
link |
01:35:16.460
how many ways can you really screw this up?
link |
01:35:20.420
Every day you can screw it up.
link |
01:35:22.860
I mean, that's really the,
link |
01:35:24.780
I think what you're asking about
link |
01:35:25.980
is really the ethos of documentary filmmaking, right?
link |
01:35:29.540
I allow a lot of things to guide my choices.
link |
01:35:34.100
One of them being, am I being fair, right?
link |
01:35:38.100
Not balanced, but am I being fair to what I'm witnessing?
link |
01:35:43.460
Does the camera capturing in a fair way
link |
01:35:46.420
the truth of the reality?
link |
01:35:48.580
Some fundamental truth of it.
link |
01:35:49.420
And it also speaks to consent, right?
link |
01:35:51.620
Am I being fair in a sense of consent?
link |
01:35:53.900
Do I have active consent in this moment, right?
link |
01:35:56.460
Regardless of whether I have a signed piece of paper.
link |
01:35:58.620
I always find some way to document it,
link |
01:36:00.300
whether it's just direct address to camera
link |
01:36:02.420
or a translated release.
link |
01:36:05.460
So there's, actually that's an interesting little,
link |
01:36:07.740
so they say something to the camera that they consent
link |
01:36:10.620
or they sign the thing.
link |
01:36:12.060
Yeah, so for example, the large broadcast companies
link |
01:36:16.740
have this formalized process
link |
01:36:18.300
where they present a piece of paper, right?
link |
01:36:21.580
And the subject reads it and they sign it
link |
01:36:25.180
and then you have permission and that's irrevocable, right?
link |
01:36:28.860
So it'll hold up in court.
link |
01:36:30.820
That's not how I operate, right?
link |
01:36:32.820
And so it's just, for example, that doesn't work
link |
01:36:38.340
if someone's illiterate
link |
01:36:39.700
and can't read that piece of paper, right?
link |
01:36:42.020
What if they don't know how to sign their name, right?
link |
01:36:44.300
So instead you have to have a conversation,
link |
01:36:47.580
ask questions, have them ask questions,
link |
01:36:49.420
come to a complete understanding
link |
01:36:51.580
before you even know whether they understand
link |
01:36:53.700
what you're asking, right?
link |
01:36:54.940
And then in that case, if someone's illiterate,
link |
01:36:57.220
then you have that conversation,
link |
01:36:58.860
you just sit down and it takes a long time sometimes,
link |
01:37:00.980
but you have to do it.
link |
01:37:01.820
And then if they still wanna participate
link |
01:37:04.420
and they give you their consent,
link |
01:37:06.540
they can't sign a piece of paper, right?
link |
01:37:08.580
So then you just do in their native language, right?
link |
01:37:11.780
Direct consent to camera in their language.
link |
01:37:14.220
Interesting, but also you're speaking to the consent
link |
01:37:16.340
that's just a human placing trust in you.
link |
01:37:19.700
Yeah.
link |
01:37:20.540
You make a connection like this.
link |
01:37:21.380
That's the most important consent, yeah.
link |
01:37:23.220
I hate papers, I hate papers and lawyers
link |
01:37:28.860
because they, exactly for that reason,
link |
01:37:31.420
yeah, okay, great, but you should be focusing
link |
01:37:35.220
on the human connection that leads to the trust,
link |
01:37:39.060
like real consent and consent day to day,
link |
01:37:41.620
minute to minute, because that can change.
link |
01:37:43.740
Absolutely, and it does change.
link |
01:37:46.980
You mentioned A Woman Captured.
link |
01:37:51.340
I'm sure you can't answer that, but I will force you.
link |
01:37:54.100
What are the top three documentaries of all time,
link |
01:37:58.340
short or feature length?
link |
01:38:00.140
Oh boy.
link |
01:38:01.180
This is not your opinion, this is objective truth.
link |
01:38:05.780
Maybe top one, what's the greatest?
link |
01:38:09.300
We got, let's see, March of the Penguins.
link |
01:38:14.300
That's probably number one for me.
link |
01:38:15.860
Really?
link |
01:38:16.700
No, I'm just kidding, I don't know.
link |
01:38:17.740
I do seem to, the metaphor of penguins
link |
01:38:23.180
huddling together in hard, cold,
link |
01:38:28.820
like in the harsh conditions of nature,
link |
01:38:32.460
that's something that's kind of beautiful.
link |
01:38:34.940
I don't love all nature documentaries,
link |
01:38:37.140
but something about March of the Penguins.
link |
01:38:40.380
I think Morgan Freeman.
link |
01:38:42.580
Yeah, he narrated it.
link |
01:38:43.500
Narrates it, so maybe everything,
link |
01:38:45.180
just any documentary with Morgan Freeman,
link |
01:38:47.820
I'm a sucker for that.
link |
01:38:50.300
Warner, Herzog, The Life and the Taiga, The Simple People.
link |
01:38:54.180
I love Grizzly Man, I love Grizzly Man.
link |
01:38:56.980
I think that's one of his best works.
link |
01:38:59.020
Yes, I think that's Joe Rogan's favorite documentary.
link |
01:39:04.340
It's both comedy and, I mean it's.
link |
01:39:06.860
Tragic comedy.
link |
01:39:07.700
Tragic comedy, yeah.
link |
01:39:09.900
Is there something that stands out to you,
link |
01:39:11.740
I mean I'm joking about best,
link |
01:39:13.900
something that was impactful to you?
link |
01:39:15.740
Just to put it out there,
link |
01:39:16.660
I don't think there's any way to say
link |
01:39:19.060
that they're objectively the best three documentaries
link |
01:39:22.420
of all time, but for me,
link |
01:39:23.660
and you may find this interesting given your background,
link |
01:39:25.660
is that I think my top three are all
link |
01:39:32.140
from the Eastern Bloc, actually.
link |
01:39:35.540
So Aquarella by Viktor Kosokovsky is one of my favorite,
link |
01:39:41.980
and it's a couple years old now,
link |
01:39:43.780
which is sort of a meditation on the place water has
link |
01:39:47.420
on our planet and on our lives.
link |
01:39:50.580
I think A Woman Captured that I mentioned,
link |
01:39:53.340
which was shot in Hungary.
link |
01:39:54.580
Is it a feature length one?
link |
01:39:56.220
Both are feature lengths, yeah.
link |
01:39:58.500
It is just brilliant,
link |
01:40:00.540
and it I think has yet to find distribution here in the U.S.
link |
01:40:05.340
But it's the perfect example of what they call verite,
link |
01:40:09.540
or direct nonfiction filmmaking.
link |
01:40:13.380
A European woman, this is the synopsis,
link |
01:40:15.620
a European woman has been kept by a family
link |
01:40:17.660
as a domestic slave for 10 years,
link |
01:40:20.140
drawing courage from the filmmaker's presence.
link |
01:40:23.580
She decides to escape the unbearable oppression
link |
01:40:27.300
and become a free person.
link |
01:40:28.620
Wow, so the filmmaker is part of the story.
link |
01:40:32.540
Part of the story, it didn't start that way,
link |
01:40:34.740
but during the course of the story,
link |
01:40:36.340
the filmmaker comes to understand
link |
01:40:39.540
that this is actually modern day slavery.
link |
01:40:41.940
And rather than just allow it to be,
link |
01:40:45.380
actually enables and assists this woman
link |
01:40:48.420
to free herself from slavery and become a free woman.
link |
01:40:51.020
I wonder, sorry, on a small tangent
link |
01:40:52.660
before we get to number three,
link |
01:40:53.700
like Icarus is interesting too.
link |
01:40:57.060
How often do you become part of the story,
link |
01:41:00.980
or the story is different because of your presence?
link |
01:41:06.060
Like you changed the tide of history.
link |
01:41:10.140
Yeah, well, back to just like one person at a time
link |
01:41:12.740
that we keep talking,
link |
01:41:13.580
we keep coming back to that theme on some level.
link |
01:41:16.980
So this could tie in interesting
link |
01:41:19.180
to one of my favorite films actually.
link |
01:41:21.180
So the last two films that I would mention
link |
01:41:24.780
for my top four list would be,
link |
01:41:26.660
the third Eastern Bloc one
link |
01:41:28.300
would be a film called Immortal in 2019,
link |
01:41:31.940
which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman
link |
01:41:35.460
that sort of examines the place of the state
link |
01:41:41.620
in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state.
link |
01:41:46.020
I mean, that's my own synopsis,
link |
01:41:47.220
but that's one of my takeaways
link |
01:41:49.100
from the brilliant 60 minute doc or so.
link |
01:41:52.180
Again, Russian filmmaking is really quite good and powerful.
link |
01:41:57.180
The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film,
link |
01:41:59.900
Titicate Follies, which was filmed in the US decades ago,
link |
01:42:04.900
inside basically the bowels of an insane asylum
link |
01:42:09.220
or a mental health institution.
link |
01:42:11.180
And I bring up Wiseman because he is really the godfather,
link |
01:42:17.420
so to speak, of direct cinema or cinema verite.
link |
01:42:21.900
And when early in my career,
link |
01:42:25.260
I really believed in what he expressed
link |
01:42:29.700
as the place of the verite filmmaker,
link |
01:42:32.940
which is simply fly on the wall,
link |
01:42:36.380
which is only observational in nature, right?
link |
01:42:41.140
And I believe that that's how I should be
link |
01:42:44.300
as a nonfiction filmmaker,
link |
01:42:45.620
that I was there only to bear witness, to observe,
link |
01:42:48.860
and not to intervene in any way, shape, or form.
link |
01:42:52.340
And that was the sort of foundation
link |
01:42:56.980
for how I operated for many, many years.
link |
01:43:00.060
And then some things happened.
link |
01:43:01.860
So one of those things that happened was I filmed Lifeboat.
link |
01:43:07.540
And during the course of filming Lifeboat,
link |
01:43:10.980
which covered rescue operations in the Mediterranean
link |
01:43:15.300
off the coast of Libya,
link |
01:43:16.580
in the first three days of that rescue mission,
link |
01:43:22.620
we came upon over 3,000 people, asylum seekers,
link |
01:43:27.140
floating in flimsy rafts in the water.
link |
01:43:30.700
And we were on the Zodiacs and we were filming.
link |
01:43:35.340
And within the first couple hours,
link |
01:43:39.220
we would come up to these rafts and these boats
link |
01:43:44.220
that were in really dire shape,
link |
01:43:46.540
and people would be pushed off, and people would jump off,
link |
01:43:49.900
and people would fall into the water,
link |
01:43:52.140
and some of them couldn't swim.
link |
01:43:57.660
And so we found ourselves in this moment
link |
01:44:00.260
where we had a choice.
link |
01:44:02.060
We could film someone drown in front of us,
link |
01:44:05.300
or we could put our cameras down
link |
01:44:06.980
and pull them out of the water.
link |
01:44:08.740
And so that's what we did.
link |
01:44:10.540
We put our cameras in the bottom of the water,
link |
01:44:13.860
bottom of the Zodiac,
link |
01:44:14.820
and just started pulling people out of the water.
link |
01:44:17.420
And if I was Wiseman, according to his paradigm,
link |
01:44:24.100
then we should have just filmed.
link |
01:44:25.980
And I didn't anticipate that moment beforehand.
link |
01:44:30.580
I had no sort of foreknowledge
link |
01:44:32.420
that I was gonna find myself faced
link |
01:44:34.340
with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian.
link |
01:44:38.300
But there was no question in my mind
link |
01:44:40.020
that I had to put my camera down
link |
01:44:41.340
and pull that fellow human being out of the water.
link |
01:44:43.860
And I don't regret it at all.
link |
01:44:45.460
So I've come to a different place.
link |
01:44:46.900
I've evolved to what I believe for the kind of film
link |
01:44:49.820
that I do is more appropriate.
link |
01:44:52.860
I can go to sleep at night knowing that,
link |
01:44:56.740
regardless of how the film would have been different
link |
01:44:58.460
if I hadn't made that choice,
link |
01:45:00.780
I made the right choice as a human being.
link |
01:45:02.820
So I think of it as being a human being first
link |
01:45:05.420
and a filmmaker second in moments like that.
link |
01:45:08.340
That's beautifully put, but I also think
link |
01:45:11.780
you could be a human being in small ways too,
link |
01:45:16.100
like silly ways, and put a little bit of yourself
link |
01:45:19.140
in documentaries.
link |
01:45:20.940
I tend to see that as really beautiful.
link |
01:45:24.420
Like the meta piece of it?
link |
01:45:26.340
Yeah, just put yourself into the movie a little bit.
link |
01:45:31.020
Because break that third, fourth, whatever the wall is,
link |
01:45:35.220
is realize that there's a human behind the camera too.
link |
01:45:38.820
For some reason, me as a fan, as a viewer,
link |
01:45:41.700
that's enjoyable too.
link |
01:45:42.900
I think there's a real authenticity there
link |
01:45:46.780
behind the story, especially with these hard stories
link |
01:45:49.180
that you're doing that there's a human being struggling to.
link |
01:45:53.060
Like observing the suffering
link |
01:45:57.420
and having to bear the burden
link |
01:46:02.660
that this kind of suffering exists in the world
link |
01:46:05.140
and you're behind that camera living that struggle.
link |
01:46:09.060
And there's small ways to show yourself in that way.
link |
01:46:12.420
As you know, I don't do that in a big way.
link |
01:46:16.500
But I actually, there are subtle moments
link |
01:46:18.940
where I allow that presence to live just for a second.
link |
01:46:23.180
Like I hate belly button docs, that's what I call them.
link |
01:46:26.580
I don't know.
link |
01:46:27.420
What's a belly button doc?
link |
01:46:28.260
A belly button doc is navel gazing, right?
link |
01:46:30.420
Where it's sort of a narcissistic filmmaking
link |
01:46:33.900
where someone just studies their own place in the world.
link |
01:46:38.380
Right, I think.
link |
01:46:39.220
I see, yeah.
link |
01:46:40.060
I think my, I'm more concerned
link |
01:46:44.740
with how I can intervene, right?
link |
01:46:48.980
Yeah, well, you're trying to really deeply empathize.
link |
01:46:52.580
Yeah.
link |
01:46:53.420
So like, if you do empathize, who am I?
link |
01:46:55.980
I don't wanna center myself in these stories.
link |
01:46:57.980
It's not about me, right?
link |
01:46:59.380
I am so unimportant.
link |
01:47:02.020
What is important is what's happening,
link |
01:47:03.660
what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon.
link |
01:47:06.300
And I think it's selfish and narcissistic
link |
01:47:09.180
to push myself into these stories unnecessarily.
link |
01:47:13.380
Now that said, I think there is some small value
link |
01:47:16.180
in what you're saying just to remind viewers
link |
01:47:18.900
that there's obviously a filmmaker at play.
link |
01:47:21.020
So sometimes the way that I do that
link |
01:47:22.980
is just like through a question on camera.
link |
01:47:25.700
I'd allow the audio to live of a question
link |
01:47:28.660
or during a conversation I'm having with someone
link |
01:47:31.140
so they can just hear how it's posed, for example, right?
link |
01:47:34.820
And to me, that's enough.
link |
01:47:37.180
Yeah.
link |
01:47:38.020
I do like moments when people recognize that you exist.
link |
01:47:43.620
They look at the filmmaker past the camera
link |
01:47:47.220
and yes, you ask the question in an interview
link |
01:47:49.620
or something like that and they respond to that.
link |
01:47:52.540
Yeah.
link |
01:47:53.660
Like they respond to this like new perturbation
link |
01:47:57.140
into their reality that was created by this other human.
link |
01:47:59.980
Yeah.
link |
01:48:00.820
I especially like when those questions
link |
01:48:02.820
or those perturbations are like a little bit absurd
link |
01:48:07.620
and like add something very novel to their situation
link |
01:48:11.260
and that novelty reveals something about them.
link |
01:48:15.260
So as opposed to capturing the day to day reality
link |
01:48:18.260
of their life, you do that plus the perturbations
link |
01:48:21.620
of like something novel.
link |
01:48:23.020
Yeah.
link |
01:48:24.340
But of course, there's all kinds of ways to do this.
link |
01:48:26.860
Let me, what was number five, by the way?
link |
01:48:29.900
I only gave you four.
link |
01:48:31.020
You just.
link |
01:48:31.860
I'm just gonna stay at four.
link |
01:48:33.500
There's a short doc I like, I mentioned,
link |
01:48:35.180
they're called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima.
link |
01:48:38.500
I know, I know.
link |
01:48:39.500
I apologize.
link |
01:48:40.340
I know, I know.
link |
01:48:41.180
It's dark.
link |
01:48:42.220
It's a great title though, right?
link |
01:48:43.060
It's a great title.
link |
01:48:43.900
Yeah, great title.
link |
01:48:45.300
No one's seen it, but it's great.
link |
01:48:47.780
It says what it sounds like.
link |
01:48:49.380
Yeah, yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like,
link |
01:48:51.380
but really brilliantly executed.
link |
01:48:55.140
Well, let me ask you about Lifeboat
link |
01:48:56.420
because it's extremely, I don't.
link |
01:49:04.180
It's a really moving idea.
link |
01:49:07.740
Just the fact that this exists in the world,
link |
01:49:10.540
that there's, as a metaphor, as a reality,
link |
01:49:14.540
that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately.
link |
01:49:18.740
It's the desperation of it.
link |
01:49:21.740
And now with these refugees, the desperation of that,
link |
01:49:25.020
of trying to escape towards a world
link |
01:49:28.340
that's full of mystery, uncertainty, doubt,
link |
01:49:32.460
could be hopeless at times,
link |
01:49:34.220
and you're willing to do a lot for your own survival
link |
01:49:38.060
and for the survival of your family
link |
01:49:39.740
and all those kinds of things.
link |
01:49:40.740
That's kind of the human spirit,
link |
01:49:42.820
and you just capture it in Lifeboat.
link |
01:49:47.420
Can you tell me the story behind this film
link |
01:49:51.020
as you started to already tell?
link |
01:49:52.540
Can you tell me what is it about?
link |
01:49:56.460
So Lifeboat really seeks to sort of lift up
link |
01:50:03.460
and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean
link |
01:50:10.060
when it was at its height in 2016.
link |
01:50:15.140
And it came to be for many reasons,
link |
01:50:18.980
but one of those reasons is colleagues
link |
01:50:23.700
in the NGO community really shared with me
link |
01:50:26.540
that when the borders between Greece and Turkey
link |
01:50:29.700
were shut down, that the flow of Syrian asylum seekers
link |
01:50:35.620
that was initially going across from Turkey to Greece
link |
01:50:39.620
was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean.
link |
01:50:42.540
So I started to research that
link |
01:50:43.860
and discovered that was exactly the case,
link |
01:50:46.660
and then further stumbled upon the fact
link |
01:50:49.420
that nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it
link |
01:50:54.340
and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers
link |
01:50:57.420
often drowning in these flimsy crafts
link |
01:50:59.380
that were pushed off from the shores of Libya
link |
01:51:01.780
because the EU wasn't doing its duty
link |
01:51:06.060
to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint.
link |
01:51:09.540
And so the net result of that was that
link |
01:51:11.860
this whole sort of like humanitarian community sprung up
link |
01:51:16.940
and it was civil society based
link |
01:51:18.820
that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers
link |
01:51:22.100
to just ensure that fellow human beings
link |
01:51:25.500
weren't drowning, simply put.
link |
01:51:27.380
And one of those was the small little NGO called Sea Watch,
link |
01:51:30.980
which when they discovered what was happening,
link |
01:51:33.300
just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers,
link |
01:51:38.740
bought a research vessel, retrofitted it,
link |
01:51:41.740
and motored down off the coast of Libya
link |
01:51:44.380
to start pulling people out of the water.
link |
01:51:45.980
And again, I found that inspiring, right?
link |
01:51:48.700
I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers
link |
01:51:52.300
was doing something that our leaders wouldn't, right?
link |
01:51:56.860
And it was something as basic and simple
link |
01:51:59.500
as saving human beings.
link |
01:52:03.060
And I thought there was an inspiring story there.
link |
01:52:06.220
And as it turned out, there was.
link |
01:52:08.380
Have you ever saved someone's life
link |
01:52:13.620
as part of making these documentaries directly?
link |
01:52:17.580
And directly, I think you probably have countless lives,
link |
01:52:22.100
but directly, were you put in that position?
link |
01:52:25.020
I don't wanna, I mean, I certainly poured people
link |
01:52:29.420
out of the water who couldn't swim, I did that.
link |
01:52:33.540
And that's again, speaking to the basic humanity,
link |
01:52:35.700
put down the camera and help, yeah.
link |
01:52:40.580
So this is people coming from Libya,
link |
01:52:43.540
trying to make it across the Mediterranean Sea
link |
01:52:46.260
on a crappy, tiny boat.
link |
01:52:48.900
From a filmmaker perspective, how do you film that?
link |
01:52:51.420
Was there decisions to capture the desperation?
link |
01:52:55.900
Well, we were going back to this idea of access
link |
01:53:01.180
and how that's so fundamental to my approach.
link |
01:53:03.420
And we were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation
link |
01:53:10.060
on this Sea Watch vessel, which was 30 meters long.
link |
01:53:12.900
And we were two of a crew of 15, right?
link |
01:53:16.740
So we had to multitask all the time
link |
01:53:18.700
because the only reason we were on that boat
link |
01:53:21.740
was by agreeing that if needed,
link |
01:53:25.460
we would do whatever necessary, right?
link |
01:53:27.740
To help, right?
link |
01:53:30.700
And so it was very active on multiple levels
link |
01:53:33.140
and we were making decisions each and every day
link |
01:53:38.020
that were not only filmmaking and creative decisions,
link |
01:53:42.220
but also decisions about how to live that duality, right?
link |
01:53:53.580
Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously.
link |
01:53:56.980
And the greatest example I can share of that was,
link |
01:54:01.980
or with my director of photography in that project,
link |
01:54:04.500
Kenny Allen, Kenny's a big guy.
link |
01:54:08.940
It's like, he's got like arms like tree trunks.
link |
01:54:11.940
And he, because he was so physically able and strong,
link |
01:54:18.300
the head of mission really tasked him
link |
01:54:22.740
to be on the Zodiacs to pull people out of the water
link |
01:54:24.860
because he could literally with one arm reach down
link |
01:54:27.100
and just oftentimes pull someone out, right?
link |
01:54:30.460
Whereas usually it would take two or three people, right?
link |
01:54:33.100
And so when we were at the height of triage
link |
01:54:37.060
and there were people in the water all over
link |
01:54:39.380
and rafts were sinking,
link |
01:54:41.780
Kenny was out pulling people out of the water.
link |
01:54:43.780
And this went on for like 24 hours, right?
link |
01:54:46.380
And at the end of that first day,
link |
01:54:48.380
I remember like looking over on the deck
link |
01:54:51.260
and seeing Kenny like help people up from the ladders
link |
01:54:54.380
to walk them back, right?
link |
01:54:56.260
And his camera was nowhere to be seen, right?
link |
01:54:59.780
And so I walked over to him
link |
01:55:01.300
and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said,
link |
01:55:03.740
Kenny, where's your camera?
link |
01:55:07.060
And he didn't know.
link |
01:55:08.820
He had no idea where his camera was, right?
link |
01:55:11.140
And so I just said, Kenny,
link |
01:55:15.340
we're here to do what you're doing,
link |
01:55:19.380
but we're also here to film it, right?
link |
01:55:21.980
To make sure that we document
link |
01:55:24.260
what is unfolding in front of us
link |
01:55:26.140
so that we have a record of it, right?
link |
01:55:28.180
So we can bring it to a larger audience.
link |
01:55:30.780
So you need to go find your camera
link |
01:55:32.460
so we can also document it.
link |
01:55:34.900
And that kind of pulled him out
link |
01:55:36.500
and he went and got his camera and started filming again,
link |
01:55:38.420
but that gives you a sense of sort of this world
link |
01:55:40.940
that we had to live in in order to get the story done.
link |
01:55:43.940
But I think to be a great director of photography,
link |
01:55:47.300
to be a great director,
link |
01:55:48.980
you have to lose yourself like that in the story too.
link |
01:55:53.860
But usually with a camera in your hand, right?
link |
01:55:55.940
But sometimes you forget the camera.
link |
01:55:58.100
I mean, there's a,
link |
01:56:00.620
I feel like if you're obsessed with the camera too much,
link |
01:56:06.220
you can lose the humanity of it.
link |
01:56:08.100
You get obsessed with the film and the story.
link |
01:56:10.420
It can become clinical.
link |
01:56:11.500
Yes, it can become clinical.
link |
01:56:12.420
Absolutely, and it's, you know, yeah, absolutely.
link |
01:56:15.700
And we don't wanna become,
link |
01:56:17.020
I don't wanna become clinical in my film, certainly.
link |
01:56:19.420
Let me ask you a strange and perhaps edgy question.
link |
01:56:23.500
So some filmmakers believe it's justified
link |
01:56:26.180
to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story.
link |
01:56:30.860
Warner Herzog, I read this somewhere,
link |
01:56:36.020
teaches young filmmakers to pick locks
link |
01:56:37.940
and forge documents and so on.
link |
01:56:39.620
Oh, I didn't know that, interesting.
link |
01:56:41.460
What do you think about that?
link |
01:56:42.540
Bending the rules in service of telling a story.
link |
01:56:46.100
You would, of course, never break the law,
link |
01:56:49.460
but is there, does that, just generally speaking,
link |
01:56:54.460
speaking, bending the rules and so on?
link |
01:56:58.420
You know, just to elaborate on this question, perhaps,
link |
01:57:02.180
I'm distinctly aware that there's parts in the world
link |
01:57:04.820
where the rule of law is not, like,
link |
01:57:11.140
enforced as cleanly as it is in the United States,
link |
01:57:15.260
as fairly as it is in the United States,
link |
01:57:17.380
that there's a kind of, there's a lot of bribery,
link |
01:57:20.900
there's a lot of, like, you don't really know to trust,
link |
01:57:25.220
you don't know if you can trust the cops
link |
01:57:27.580
or basically anybody.
link |
01:57:30.300
So, like, the rules are a very hazy kind of concept.
link |
01:57:34.540
And a lot of them, especially, like, it's funny,
link |
01:57:36.540
but authoritarian regimes often have
link |
01:57:38.180
a giant bureaucracy buildup that's full of rules.
link |
01:57:40.860
There's more rules than you know what to deal with,
link |
01:57:43.020
and you can't actually live life
link |
01:57:44.500
unless you break the rules.
link |
01:57:45.940
Anyway, laying that all out on the table,
link |
01:57:49.180
do you ever contend with that,
link |
01:57:53.020
on what are the rules I can break or should break
link |
01:57:58.060
to keep to the spirit of the story?
link |
01:58:00.860
I think you have to ask yourself, are the rules just,
link |
01:58:03.300
and why are they in place, right?
link |
01:58:05.100
So, for example, coming into the airport
link |
01:58:07.380
in southern Yemen, right?
link |
01:58:10.060
If I just tried to walk through the airport
link |
01:58:11.900
with all my equipment, even with all the permissions
link |
01:58:14.140
beforehand, like we had, without having a fixer
link |
01:58:18.020
at the airport beforehand to make sure
link |
01:58:20.540
we didn't go through the standard line, right?
link |
01:58:24.620
We would have been caught up for three hours at least
link |
01:58:28.260
negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying
link |
01:58:30.940
a bribe to get it through, right?
link |
01:58:33.500
That's just reality in a place like Yemen.
link |
01:58:36.660
And so, of course, knowing that, right?
link |
01:58:39.700
Having talked to colleagues who had taken
link |
01:58:41.460
that path previously, I took a different path, right?
link |
01:58:45.180
Where we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out
link |
01:58:48.500
beforehand, right?
link |
01:58:50.060
Rather than spending three hours of our time
link |
01:58:52.260
and paying a series of bribes, right?
link |
01:58:54.260
Instead, we're going to get it fixed beforehand
link |
01:58:56.980
so that we can walk through a different line
link |
01:58:59.220
and have no one look at any of our equipment.
link |
01:59:02.180
That's a pretty good trade off in my mind.
link |
01:59:06.420
What about security when you're traveling in these places?
link |
01:59:09.300
Do you ever have bodyguards?
link |
01:59:12.820
Well, several questions around that.
link |
01:59:14.620
Are you ever afraid for your life
link |
01:59:16.820
when you're filming in a war zone?
link |
01:59:19.620
Is there any way to lessen the probability of death?
link |
01:59:27.180
I don't have a death wish.
link |
01:59:28.420
I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can.
link |
01:59:32.020
But one of the ways I can't do it in a conflict zone
link |
01:59:35.140
is by having armed security with me.
link |
01:59:37.500
And the reason for that is because,
link |
01:59:39.300
especially in a place like Yemen, right?
link |
01:59:41.740
If you have armed security, you become a target
link |
01:59:44.300
in a way that if you're operating under sort of
link |
01:59:47.980
the auspices of international humanitarian law,
link |
01:59:52.020
I actually have more protection.
link |
01:59:53.580
So I don't bring security.
link |
01:59:55.460
If you're working in Northern Yemen, for example,
link |
02:00:00.660
you're going to have someone from the de facto authorities
link |
02:00:03.700
with you anyway the entire time you're there.
link |
02:00:06.740
So the authorities are with you in form anyway.
link |
02:00:10.940
Regarding fear, yeah, of course.
link |
02:00:17.340
I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right?
link |
02:00:20.740
And I think we have a weird mindset,
link |
02:00:26.980
this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US,
link |
02:00:29.980
which I don't pay tribute to.
link |
02:00:34.180
I believe as a natural human emotion,
link |
02:00:37.780
it's an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to.
link |
02:00:40.180
And I think rather than pretending to be brave,
link |
02:00:47.340
I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place
link |
02:00:52.860
to keep you alive.
link |
02:00:54.540
And I think it's a matter of not letting the fear arrest you
link |
02:01:01.100
and allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway.
link |
02:01:04.740
Don't you think as a documentary filmmaker,
link |
02:01:07.620
the fear is a really good signal
link |
02:01:10.500
for potentially a good thing to do
link |
02:01:12.820
because there's a story there?
link |
02:01:14.900
So is fear is an indicator that you shouldn't do it
link |
02:01:17.340
or is it an indicator that you should do it?
link |
02:01:19.220
It's probably an indication you should do it, right?
link |
02:01:22.980
And strangely, I think that's why,
link |
02:01:27.700
I think that if there's something unusual
link |
02:01:30.500
about the work I do in some part,
link |
02:01:32.260
it's because of these types of stories, right?
link |
02:01:35.180
They're hard to access, but you also have to have
link |
02:01:38.020
a threshold of willingness to do them when you can't,
link |
02:01:46.940
there is no guarantee of physical safety, right?
link |
02:01:50.180
And maybe that's why you should do them.
link |
02:01:52.860
I'm very much motivated by the things that scare me.
link |
02:01:56.260
They seem to direct the things that are worth doing
link |
02:02:00.300
in this all too short life.
link |
02:02:01.980
How often do you interact with our friendly friends
link |
02:02:05.100
at the police departments of various locations?
link |
02:02:07.580
Like, because of the humanitarian nature of your work,
link |
02:02:12.900
are you able to avoid all such friendly conversations
link |
02:02:17.020
or are you often making friends with our?
link |
02:02:21.620
I try to avoid the friendly police people
link |
02:02:25.220
all over the world as much as possible,
link |
02:02:28.260
but in some instances, it's important to be proactive,
link |
02:02:33.260
right, and make sure that they know what you're doing
link |
02:02:36.380
before you do it.
link |
02:02:37.580
So it's all about the context and the situation.
link |
02:02:41.620
For example, working in Northern Yemen,
link |
02:02:43.620
you couldn't film for five minutes
link |
02:02:45.620
if you didn't have paperwork,
link |
02:02:47.260
because you'd be taken away.
link |
02:02:48.700
So you have to make sure you have all those permissions
link |
02:02:50.740
ahead of time.
link |
02:02:53.740
50 Feet from Syria, I would love to talk
link |
02:02:58.740
at least a little bit about this film.
link |
02:03:00.700
First, can you, high level, can you tell
link |
02:03:03.900
what this documentary is about?
link |
02:03:05.420
Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising,
link |
02:03:09.380
and we returned to the Syrian Turkish border
link |
02:03:15.740
with a Syrian American orthopedic surgeon
link |
02:03:18.780
who was volunteering, operating on refugees
link |
02:03:21.420
as they float across the border from Syria into Turkey.
link |
02:03:24.820
And it was an attempt at the time,
link |
02:03:27.660
before a lot of films had come out about the conflict,
link |
02:03:30.580
to really show again the effects of the war on civilians.
link |
02:03:38.660
You've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now,
link |
02:03:41.820
but people knew there was a major conflict in Syria,
link |
02:03:47.020
but didn't really understand the form that that was taking
link |
02:03:50.060
and the impact it was having.
link |
02:03:51.740
And so we embedded into the,
link |
02:03:55.420
at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey
link |
02:03:58.660
that was sanctioned by the Turkish government
link |
02:04:02.020
to treat Syrian refugees.
link |
02:04:04.900
And so we filmed there with surgeons
link |
02:04:08.220
as they operated on war victims.
link |
02:04:11.060
And we also went into Syria into some of the camps as well.
link |
02:04:14.060
So in this film, there's a man who crosses the border
link |
02:04:17.780
every day to retrieve the wounded
link |
02:04:19.540
and fair them safety and care.
link |
02:04:21.580
And you also mentioned about heroism in the United States.
link |
02:04:25.300
Can you tell me about this man and just people like him?
link |
02:04:29.940
Like what's the heroic action
link |
02:04:32.700
in some of these places that you've visited?
link |
02:04:35.780
So in that instance, you know,
link |
02:04:37.540
I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right?
link |
02:04:41.100
Because he was a human being who of his own volition,
link |
02:04:46.180
no one was paying him to do this,
link |
02:04:48.820
but he was spending much of his time.
link |
02:04:53.580
He was just a local businessman
link |
02:04:55.380
who really saw the need in the camps
link |
02:04:57.740
right across the border 10 K away.
link |
02:05:00.260
And he saw the medical need in particular
link |
02:05:04.260
and how hard it was to get people
link |
02:05:07.380
in desperate medical conditions across the border
link |
02:05:11.180
where there was a clinic just right across the border.
link |
02:05:13.700
But because of the security and the layers of security,
link |
02:05:17.940
they couldn't get out by themselves.
link |
02:05:20.020
So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person
link |
02:05:24.020
to build relationships with the Turkish guards,
link |
02:05:26.940
which was relatively easy.
link |
02:05:28.940
And then he built relationships
link |
02:05:31.340
with sort of the guards in the no man's land
link |
02:05:34.460
between the Syrian guards
link |
02:05:36.220
and sort of those who lived in the middle area.
link |
02:05:38.460
And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp.
link |
02:05:41.260
And he would drive out there daily and bring them food,
link |
02:05:44.940
right?
link |
02:05:45.980
Talk them up and build relationships.
link |
02:05:47.620
And so every day he would bring these guards food
link |
02:05:49.940
and build relationships with them.
link |
02:05:51.500
And what that meant was eventually, right?
link |
02:05:54.380
He had this avenue of access to and from the camps.
link |
02:05:58.740
And so he started using it
link |
02:06:00.340
and he would drive this avenue of access
link |
02:06:05.100
through the three layers of guards each day.
link |
02:06:08.020
And then they would open the gates for him
link |
02:06:10.420
because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes.
link |
02:06:13.940
And he would receive the most desperate medical cases
link |
02:06:18.420
that were coming from all over Northern Syria, right?
link |
02:06:21.900
To receive medical treatment.
link |
02:06:23.500
And he would, as you see in the film,
link |
02:06:25.380
he would ferry them into the back of his car, right?
link |
02:06:28.980
And then drive them to the hospital
link |
02:06:31.700
where they would receive operations.
link |
02:06:33.540
And then he would bring them back if they wanted
link |
02:06:36.620
after they'd healed and recovered back to Syria,
link |
02:06:39.460
if they wanted to return out post recovery.
link |
02:06:41.900
And he didn't get paid for that.
link |
02:06:44.060
He was spending his own money to do it
link |
02:06:46.580
because he saw other human beings in need.
link |
02:06:49.580
And it's like we were talking about earlier.
link |
02:06:52.820
That's heroic, right?
link |
02:06:54.620
That's selfless.
link |
02:06:55.940
That's aspirational for me, right?
link |
02:06:59.940
Here's someone who is spending their time on the planet
link |
02:07:03.940
doing something of value and good to other human beings.
link |
02:07:07.700
I mean, if you draw parallels to Schindler,
link |
02:07:09.380
I feel like the fascinating thing about Schindler
link |
02:07:13.620
is that he's kind of a flawed human
link |
02:07:18.260
and is not the kind of human that does these things usually.
link |
02:07:21.660
But he just can't help it.
link |
02:07:23.500
And that's like the basic humanity.
link |
02:07:25.060
Despite who you are, the basic humanity shines through.
link |
02:07:30.340
I think the whims of war test people in those ways, right?
link |
02:07:34.940
They ask of you things that you may not even know
link |
02:07:39.620
were going to be asked of you.
link |
02:07:41.220
And then it speaks to who you are fundamentally
link |
02:07:43.700
as a human being.
link |
02:07:44.980
They reveal who you are as a human being, just as you said.
link |
02:07:51.020
Let me ask a kind of stupid technical question
link |
02:07:55.180
about publications of movies and so on.
link |
02:07:58.180
I've been recently becoming good friends with Thomas Tall,
link |
02:08:02.340
who was the producer.
link |
02:08:04.180
His company, Legendary, funded some of the big
link |
02:08:06.340
sort of blockbuster films and so on.
link |
02:08:08.540
And so obviously money is part of filmmaking,
link |
02:08:11.420
but also the release of movies.
link |
02:08:13.820
And me as a consumer, with Netflix, with YouTube,
link |
02:08:21.740
that's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of YouTube
link |
02:08:23.700
is it's like out in the open.
link |
02:08:26.860
Access, especially historical access.
link |
02:08:30.380
Like over time, you can look back years later.
link |
02:08:33.940
If you pay some money, you can watch
link |
02:08:35.860
some of the great films ever made.
link |
02:08:38.340
YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, I don't know what other services
link |
02:08:41.420
there are, HBO, Paramount.
link |
02:08:44.100
Paramount Plus.
link |
02:08:44.940
Paramount Plus.
link |
02:08:48.260
Anyway, there's all these platforms.
link |
02:08:51.260
Spotify now.
link |
02:08:55.980
I understand they want to create paywalls and so on.
link |
02:08:59.020
It makes sense, but I'm a huge fan of openness
link |
02:09:02.500
and I'm really kind of torn by this whole thing.
link |
02:09:04.660
Anyway, that's a discussion for perhaps another time.
link |
02:09:07.300
But the short question is why is it so hard
link |
02:09:11.820
to watch your documentaries and other films,
link |
02:09:15.700
other incredible films on the internet?
link |
02:09:20.020
If I want to pay unlimited amount of money,
link |
02:09:24.100
I want to pay a lot of money to watch it.
link |
02:09:26.420
Why is it so hard?
link |
02:09:27.940
Well, Lifeboat is streaming free on the New Yorker.
link |
02:09:32.180
Yes, I saw that, which is interesting.
link |
02:09:35.420
That doesn't make any sense.
link |
02:09:37.340
And then also Hunger Ward is on Paramount Plus,
link |
02:09:41.660
but also it's also streaming free.
link |
02:09:45.660
So you can either go through a paywall
link |
02:09:47.940
or you can watch it with ads with Big Macs interspersed.
link |
02:09:52.180
Big Macs.
link |
02:09:53.060
Sometimes.
link |
02:09:53.900
Yeah, the contrast.
link |
02:09:55.660
It's tough.
link |
02:09:56.980
Well, no, it really reveals the power of the documentary.
link |
02:10:01.300
No, but it's still not, even those platforms are,
link |
02:10:04.380
I mean, they're not as easily accessible
link |
02:10:07.780
because you have to like, you have to use,
link |
02:10:09.580
you have to think and you have to chase a particular.
link |
02:10:13.300
You have to chase it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
02:10:15.180
I guess from an economic standpoint,
link |
02:10:17.020
the answer to that is pretty clear, right?
link |
02:10:19.420
It may not be what people want to watch.
link |
02:10:22.780
Maybe people want to watch reality.
link |
02:10:25.540
Maybe people want to watch animal rescue shows
link |
02:10:30.540
here in the US, which is exactly why in part,
link |
02:10:36.260
I think it's so vital that we continue to do stories
link |
02:10:40.640
on things that aren't about flowers and puppy dogs, right?
link |
02:10:44.300
I would push back on that.
link |
02:10:45.260
So there's TikTok and you could say,
link |
02:10:51.060
well, look, humans just want to watch really short content
link |
02:10:55.880
because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing.
link |
02:10:58.260
That's partially true.
link |
02:11:00.100
But they also watch two, three, four, five hour podcasts.
link |
02:11:06.220
On TikTok?
link |
02:11:07.380
No, there's different platforms for that.
link |
02:11:09.700
It's a place called YouTube, I'll teach you about it.
link |
02:11:12.060
Okay, yeah, I've never heard of it.
link |
02:11:14.340
It's a good place to publish documentaries, I think.
link |
02:11:18.900
Humans are interested in a lot of things
link |
02:11:21.860
and I've seen many times a thing that you think
link |
02:11:25.900
is a niche thing become a very big thing.
link |
02:11:29.060
But for them to become mainstream,
link |
02:11:30.980
they have to have a platform
link |
02:11:32.300
that allows for the mainstream to happen.
link |
02:11:35.060
The access.
link |
02:11:35.900
The access, the dumb, simple, frictionless access.
link |
02:11:39.940
The frictionless access is a really important thing.
link |
02:11:44.780
Paywalls create friction and not just because of the money.
link |
02:11:49.500
It can be free, but if you have to click on a thing
link |
02:11:52.100
or maybe sign up or put your email,
link |
02:11:55.620
it prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy
link |
02:12:05.020
and you know you would enjoy,
link |
02:12:06.660
but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying
link |
02:12:10.820
because you can just open up TikTok and keep scrolling.
link |
02:12:14.240
So that's just something to say about platforms
link |
02:12:17.000
because I think the things that need platforms the most
link |
02:12:21.660
are things like your films.
link |
02:12:23.940
The things that I think a lot of people would love watching.
link |
02:12:27.260
They're very important and they can have viral impact
link |
02:12:30.460
on the world that is fundamentally positive.
link |
02:12:32.860
You know, it's just, it makes me sad
link |
02:12:35.460
that there's not a machine for celebrating those films.
link |
02:12:41.900
There are lots of machines to celebrate them,
link |
02:12:44.180
but they're just not as always accessible as YouTube, right?
link |
02:12:47.520
I mean, as soon as you write me that check
link |
02:12:49.080
for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here,
link |
02:12:51.340
then I'm gonna put all my films on YouTube
link |
02:12:53.340
because then I won't have to worry about, you know,
link |
02:12:55.380
selling them in order so I can make the next film
link |
02:12:58.020
because you know, film is not just an art.
link |
02:13:00.860
It's also an industry, right?
link |
02:13:02.900
And that tension between the two is a constant interplay
link |
02:13:06.540
that is a reality for me.
link |
02:13:08.740
So I always have to think about
link |
02:13:11.980
how can I access the largest audience,
link |
02:13:14.800
but also, right, go out and shoot the next film, right?
link |
02:13:19.300
So that longevity question is also an issue
link |
02:13:22.320
and the finances are part of that sort of equation
link |
02:13:26.820
that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again.
link |
02:13:29.540
How often, as a creative mind,
link |
02:13:32.260
do you feel the constraints, the financial constraints?
link |
02:13:37.580
I wish I could do a lot more films
link |
02:13:41.140
that I can't always because of financial constraints.
link |
02:13:44.820
So it's the number of films.
link |
02:13:46.180
Yeah.
link |
02:13:48.100
And is a film that you do currently,
link |
02:13:51.540
is a film that you do at any one time
link |
02:13:53.900
as you're filming it already funded
link |
02:13:56.460
or is it the funding from previous stuff
link |
02:13:59.040
that you're trying to use?
link |
02:14:01.140
Before Hunger Ward,
link |
02:14:05.100
I would just take a flyer on my films, right?
link |
02:14:08.200
Where I would just say this meets the so what threshold.
link |
02:14:12.920
This is a story that has to be told and I want to tell it.
link |
02:14:17.540
And then I could just go shoot it.
link |
02:14:19.620
And usually on credit, usually on a credit card, right?
link |
02:14:22.820
So based on a belief that Lifeboat was done that way.
link |
02:14:27.460
Yes.
link |
02:14:28.300
Right?
link |
02:14:29.120
50 Feet from Syria was done that way.
link |
02:14:29.960
So you're on a boat, broke.
link |
02:14:32.220
Yeah.
link |
02:14:33.060
Yeah, but it's free food, right?
link |
02:14:34.880
And free lodging because there's a bunk on the boat.
link |
02:14:37.100
But I do that not intending to stay broke, right?
link |
02:14:41.620
But based on a foundational belief
link |
02:14:44.080
that if I bring to bear
link |
02:14:47.520
all of my sort of quiver of creative arrows to it, right?
link |
02:14:52.980
That I can create something of value, right?
link |
02:14:56.640
In the world, but hopefully also financially
link |
02:15:00.220
that then I can sell to someone.
link |
02:15:01.980
And you know, every time I've done that Lex,
link |
02:15:05.020
I've gotten into the black.
link |
02:15:06.940
So it's a risk and I have to have a certain risk threshold
link |
02:15:11.140
financially to do that.
link |
02:15:12.380
But I believe so deeply in these stories
link |
02:15:14.420
that I'm willing to do that.
link |
02:15:15.640
I didn't have to do that with Hunger Ward.
link |
02:15:17.160
Luckily I had funders for that film.
link |
02:15:21.420
Yeah.
link |
02:15:22.500
Yeah, take risks in this life.
link |
02:15:24.420
It's gonna pay off.
link |
02:15:26.660
Which reminds me of, let me ask you,
link |
02:15:28.340
I already asked you for advice about,
link |
02:15:31.060
for a filmmaker, how to win an Oscar.
link |
02:15:34.260
Well, I haven't won an Oscar.
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02:15:35.780
How to get nominated for an Oscar, that's true.
link |
02:15:39.500
Or just how to make great documentaries,
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02:15:42.080
how to make great film.
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02:15:42.920
But let me ask, even zoom out bigger.
link |
02:15:44.920
You mentioned some of these things,
link |
02:15:48.220
doing the things that you think matters.
link |
02:15:50.420
What advice would you give to young people,
link |
02:15:52.920
high school, college,
link |
02:15:55.920
dreaming of living a life worth living?
link |
02:16:01.000
What advice would you give them about career
link |
02:16:03.800
or maybe just life in general?
link |
02:16:06.000
How to have a life they can be proud of?
link |
02:16:09.820
Yeah, I don't know how you're gonna react to this
link |
02:16:11.240
given sort of your expertise.
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02:16:13.020
But I would say put down the smartphone,
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02:16:17.320
step away from the monitor, right?
link |
02:16:19.480
Because real life is not a screen, right?
link |
02:16:23.640
I believe that sort of the foundational skills
link |
02:16:27.040
which are conducive and important to success
link |
02:16:31.680
aren't necessarily those technical skills
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02:16:34.800
which we're going to learn in trade schools or university.
link |
02:16:39.440
I think they're more foundational than that.
link |
02:16:43.280
They're learning how to interact and listen.
link |
02:16:48.160
With humans?
link |
02:16:49.000
With humans, yeah, to really see and listen, right?
link |
02:16:54.840
And observe.
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02:16:55.840
And observe, right?
link |
02:16:58.560
And how to step out of your door
link |
02:17:00.600
and if the electricity goes out, right?
link |
02:17:03.020
And you're five miles away from your house,
link |
02:17:05.040
you don't need a smartphone to get home
link |
02:17:07.320
because you've set visual markers for yourself
link |
02:17:10.220
on how to get back to where you live, right?
link |
02:17:12.500
I think we're in danger right now
link |
02:17:16.000
of living in a world where
link |
02:17:18.800
if the satellites stop functioning, right?
link |
02:17:22.400
Then a whole lot of people
link |
02:17:23.480
have become completely dysfunctional, right?
link |
02:17:27.760
Because we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives.
link |
02:17:30.900
So I think there's a lot of foundational skills
link |
02:17:33.200
that have nothing to do with technology
link |
02:17:34.800
that we need to learn and everything rests upon those.
link |
02:17:38.000
So I would say learn those foundations,
link |
02:17:39.160
learn how to write well.
link |
02:17:40.800
Read a lot, right?
link |
02:17:43.360
It's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom
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02:17:45.640
that comes out of that.
link |
02:17:47.400
So reading is kind of the equivalent of listening
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02:17:49.520
and observing and writing is
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02:17:53.200
kind of integration of all of that
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02:17:57.020
that you've observed and listened to
link |
02:17:58.480
and tried to express something with that.
link |
02:18:00.280
So I think my training in the theater
link |
02:18:02.600
has served me so well in the documentary world, right?
link |
02:18:06.720
Because it's all about interaction
link |
02:18:08.960
and listening and talking and dialogue, right?
link |
02:18:11.920
And that's what I do in documentaries, right?
link |
02:18:14.200
Is I listen.
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02:18:15.840
Yeah, we mentioned fear.
link |
02:18:20.040
Being an introvert, I'm very afraid of people
link |
02:18:22.640
but I'm drawn to them and fascinated by them
link |
02:18:25.840
because of that.
link |
02:18:26.960
Enjoy listening to them.
link |
02:18:28.240
Totally.
link |
02:18:29.080
And observing them.
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02:18:31.960
And you mentioned reading.
link |
02:18:33.120
You mentioned books as a catalyst,
link |
02:18:35.380
as a stimulator of your imagination.
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02:18:37.960
Is there books in your life, a couple, one, two, three,
link |
02:18:42.380
that kind of left an impact
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02:18:46.240
or a little bit of a spark of inspiration
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02:18:50.920
early on in life that stand out from your memory?
link |
02:18:54.400
I was given The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
link |
02:18:58.360
as a graduation present from my high school
link |
02:19:01.840
English teacher.
link |
02:19:03.040
And I still have that book in a special place
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02:19:05.880
on my bookshelf because I think it speaks
link |
02:19:08.600
to the nature of human experience, right?
link |
02:19:11.780
And I return to it all the time
link |
02:19:13.840
because there's wisdom there, you know?
link |
02:19:15.760
But there's many, many books.
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02:19:18.240
Fiction or nonfiction, what connects with you usually
link |
02:19:21.760
in the past, for the imagination?
link |
02:19:23.040
I read mostly nonfiction most of the time.
link |
02:19:26.480
Ten Points is a book I love a lot.
link |
02:19:28.920
What is Ten Points?
link |
02:19:30.560
Ten Points is, I think his name is Bill Strickland.
link |
02:19:34.120
He was the editor of, I think, Bicycle Magazine.
link |
02:19:37.720
And it's sort of his personal memoir
link |
02:19:40.200
of his experience growing up with a lot of abuse
link |
02:19:44.080
and how that transformed him as a human being.
link |
02:19:46.700
You know, one instrumental book for me
link |
02:19:49.260
that I bumped into in my early 20s,
link |
02:19:52.000
boy, these are all nonfiction,
link |
02:19:54.160
except for The Princess Bride.
link |
02:19:56.960
Have to mention, it's an outlier.
link |
02:19:59.160
No, no, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
link |
02:20:03.280
I read that in my early 20s,
link |
02:20:05.440
and I found so many of the principles in that book.
link |
02:20:11.280
What are the habits from that one?
link |
02:20:14.480
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
link |
02:20:16.860
is one of them, you know?
link |
02:20:18.760
The notion of proactivity is one of them.
link |
02:20:21.800
It's really, and so I've held onto some of those principles
link |
02:20:25.060
through my life as well, for sure.
link |
02:20:27.920
What have been, you've observed
link |
02:20:33.880
suffering darker aspects of human nature
link |
02:20:37.080
in your own personal life.
link |
02:20:38.880
What has been some of the darkest moments in your life,
link |
02:20:42.960
darkest times in your life?
link |
02:20:45.160
Is there something that you went through
link |
02:20:49.400
and then perhaps you carry it through your work?
link |
02:20:53.000
Yeah, probably one of the darkest moments
link |
02:20:56.520
was an experience that I had, again, in my early 20s,
link |
02:21:00.840
and I was living in Southern California,
link |
02:21:04.240
and the Pacific Coast Highway
link |
02:21:08.760
that goes north and south along the beach,
link |
02:21:10.600
and there's that little concrete path
link |
02:21:13.980
that people jog and ride their bikes,
link |
02:21:15.440
and I was riding my bike on the PCH,
link |
02:21:18.960
and I was coming up to a corner on it,
link |
02:21:21.960
and I heard this tremendous crash, and it was really loud,
link |
02:21:28.920
and I came around the corner,
link |
02:21:31.520
and it was a car accident, a car crash.
link |
02:21:34.680
It was a multiple vehicle crash,
link |
02:21:38.000
and what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car,
link |
02:21:44.480
and then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car
link |
02:21:48.040
and hit a Volkswagen van,
link |
02:21:50.240
and it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van
link |
02:21:52.760
when it hit it and then landed.
link |
02:21:55.060
So three vehicles, and it just happened,
link |
02:21:59.480
and lying in the middle of the road
link |
02:22:04.160
was a body decapitated,
link |
02:22:08.560
and there was another person from one of the cars
link |
02:22:12.460
lying in the middle of the road, still alive,
link |
02:22:15.360
and then on the hood of the Volvo
link |
02:22:17.920
was this woman who had come through the windshield,
link |
02:22:21.120
just a mess, blood everywhere, moaning back and forth,
link |
02:22:28.160
and a bystander ran into the middle of the road
link |
02:22:32.680
and started administering first aid
link |
02:22:34.800
to the person lying in the road,
link |
02:22:37.040
and I stood there watching the scene
link |
02:22:42.440
and every fiber of my being,
link |
02:22:45.720
wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo
link |
02:22:50.720
and do something, anything, right, just to be there,
link |
02:22:54.640
and it was obvious to me that she was gonna die,
link |
02:22:59.400
but I felt like at least if I ran there,
link |
02:23:01.640
I could offer some comfort for her last moment,
link |
02:23:05.760
and right then, the sirens started to blare,
link |
02:23:09.760
and I knew that there'd be paramedics there
link |
02:23:13.760
within minutes, that people would come to help,
link |
02:23:18.080
and I froze, and I was scared,
link |
02:23:23.080
and I didn't do anything,
link |
02:23:24.880
and I watched while this woman died on the hood of the Volvo,
link |
02:23:33.760
and that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness,
link |
02:23:38.760
the fact that I watched and didn't act,
link |
02:23:42.600
I feel is one of the great failures of my life,
link |
02:23:46.600
that I wasn't able to act in a moment of need,
link |
02:23:49.400
no matter how small,
link |
02:23:51.840
and from that, I made a decision out of that experience
link |
02:23:57.680
that if I ever found myself in a situation
link |
02:24:00.840
where I had the ability to act and I could act
link |
02:24:04.280
to help another human being,
link |
02:24:06.280
I would act to help another human being in such need
link |
02:24:10.800
that I would act, that I wouldn't let fear freeze me.
link |
02:24:16.400
Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action
link |
02:24:22.200
and do something and intervene in whatever way I could,
link |
02:24:25.640
even if I didn't have the skillset.
link |
02:24:28.560
And in some ways, all of that echoes in your documentaries.
link |
02:24:33.720
I'm not gonna let fear stop you from trying to help.
link |
02:24:37.160
I think that experience, that experience of failure,
link |
02:24:40.800
what I framed as just human failure on my part
link |
02:24:46.280
is foundational probably to my work.
link |
02:24:49.600
I don't want that to happen again, Lex.
link |
02:24:52.000
I don't want to be that person who watches.
link |
02:24:54.960
I want to do what I can when I can.
link |
02:24:58.680
If we zoom out, you were just one human
link |
02:25:02.720
that witnessed that, that trauma.
link |
02:25:06.680
One human that witnessed so much suffering
link |
02:25:09.640
in different parts of the world.
link |
02:25:11.520
And as we zoom out across space and time and look at Earth,
link |
02:25:15.760
why do you think we're here on this Earth?
link |
02:25:21.400
What's the meaning of human civilization?
link |
02:25:24.840
What's the meaning of your life, of individual human life?
link |
02:25:29.840
And broadly speaking, what is the meaning of life?
link |
02:25:33.640
Skyfish, Cheryl.
link |
02:25:35.760
Oh boy, yeah.
link |
02:25:41.840
For me, I can speak personally on that only.
link |
02:25:44.920
And that's that I believe that the meaning of my life
link |
02:25:49.040
is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go.
link |
02:25:52.680
You know, I, when I was in theater in grad school,
link |
02:26:01.920
I directed a play called Shadowlands by C.S. Lewis.
link |
02:26:06.040
And there's a quote from that, it goes like this.
link |
02:26:09.000
We are like blocks of stone
link |
02:26:10.880
out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.
link |
02:26:15.040
The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much,
link |
02:26:19.000
are what make us perfect.
link |
02:26:20.480
Now, I would take away the perfect part, right?
link |
02:26:23.480
But I think I've remembered that quote for so many years
link |
02:26:27.560
because I believe in the underlying notion
link |
02:26:30.840
that the blows of the chisel,
link |
02:26:33.520
which are the experiences that we go through,
link |
02:26:36.040
shape us, right, necessarily so,
link |
02:26:39.080
and hopefully shape us into a better human being.
link |
02:26:42.640
And in my case, a human being that I hope
link |
02:26:45.840
can make the world a little better,
link |
02:26:47.800
you know, through those blows.
link |
02:26:50.640
Before it's over.
link |
02:26:51.760
Yeah, before it's over.
link |
02:26:53.760
Before you go, as you said, do you think about that?
link |
02:26:57.000
Do you think about the going part, your mortality?
link |
02:27:02.000
You ever think about that?
link |
02:27:03.160
You said you don't have a death wish,
link |
02:27:04.640
you try to minimize risk, but eventually it's gonna be over.
link |
02:27:07.760
Yeah, for all of us, absolutely.
link |
02:27:10.040
Well, speak for yourself.
link |
02:27:11.360
Well, you've got other plans as well.
link |
02:27:13.560
I tend to merge, you know,
link |
02:27:15.680
you've got other plans as well.
link |
02:27:18.240
I'm going to merge with robots, embody, no, not at all.
link |
02:27:23.360
Yes, for all of us, unfortunately or fortunately,
link |
02:27:26.440
or who the heck knows.
link |
02:27:29.440
But do you ponder your mortality?
link |
02:27:33.240
Are you afraid of it?
link |
02:27:35.400
I live with my mortality, knowing that it's fleeting,
link |
02:27:39.840
that my life is fleeting and that I'm gonna go
link |
02:27:43.160
into the ground, just like everyone else,
link |
02:27:45.160
or maybe as ashes, you know?
link |
02:27:48.840
So I live with that knowledge every day,
link |
02:27:50.280
but I don't allow it to stop me or hold me up.
link |
02:27:54.360
Rather, I really, it drives me, right?
link |
02:27:58.080
It drives me to try to get as much done
link |
02:28:00.120
as I can before I go, right?
link |
02:28:02.960
Yeah, so the knowledge of your death
link |
02:28:05.680
is a kind of dance partner,
link |
02:28:07.720
and you try to dance beautifully.
link |
02:28:10.760
This guy, you're an incredible human,
link |
02:28:13.080
incredible artist and filmmaker,
link |
02:28:16.080
and it's a huge honor that you would sit
link |
02:28:18.000
and spend your really valuable time with me today.
link |
02:28:20.840
I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
link |
02:28:22.320
I did too, thanks for having me, Lex,
link |
02:28:23.840
and thanks for doing what you do.
link |
02:28:25.920
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
02:28:27.440
with Sky Fist Gerald.
link |
02:28:29.040
To support this podcast,
link |
02:28:30.400
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
02:28:33.160
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
02:28:35.320
from Elie Wiesel.
link |
02:28:37.400
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
link |
02:28:41.600
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
link |
02:28:45.760
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
link |
02:28:49.760
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
link |
02:28:54.760
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.