Following the death of Diane Keaton last October, her feature directorial debut garnered some due acknowledgment. The film, Heaven, was released in 1987 and received a good amount of press for a work of its kind. But it was mostly forgotten afterward. Outside of it being made by one of the greatest actresses of her generation, the film may have been a difficult sell (the curiosity, at least, contributed to its respectable $78 million box office gross). I think it’s hilarious, a quirky collage of ideas of what the afterlife will be like. And a sly revelation of how media informs such ideas.

Keaton was hesitant to label it a documentary, but its mix of new interviews and repurposed archival footage fit the definition. There are no experts on the subject, which is too unknowable for there to be any. Representatives from Christianity are the closest thing, maybe, but what do they really know that the comments from man-off-the-street participants aren’t just as valid? Only one famous face is among the talking heads: Don King. Another non-stranger is Keaton’s grandmother, who died during the production, impacting the actress-director’s attitude while finishing the project. I wonder if it wouldn’t have come off so cynical without that personal experience.

The context of Heaven’s creation is interesting. Keaton had recently published a book of old Hollywood photographs, in which she shared her idea of Heaven in the introduction. The same year as Heaven’s release, Keaton directed the first of two Belinda Carlisle music videos, for a song titled “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” The documentary and the video have a similar aesthetic at times, most notably in shots where hard shadows cross people’s faces. The documentary, with its abstract sets and stylish cinematography (shot by David Lynch collaborator Frederick Elmes), was often compared to music videos. Roger Ebert, though, negatively compared it to Gates of Heaven. I’d liken it more favorably to Errol Morris’s early films (Heaven’s editor, Paul Barnes, incidentally, next worked on Morris’s The Thin Blue Line).

Keaton’s Heaven is a dated product of its time and occasionally feels like a beginner art student’s first experimental film. For those of us cinephiles who base our concepts of Heaven on what we’ve seen in the movies and who may consider film itself to be Heaven, we can appreciate the compilation montage side of the documentary. Most of the contemporary people interviewed are kooky or even downright absurd, however, and were obviously only selected for their amusing soundbites and ridiculous arguments (Keaton recognized that most of the people she talked to who didn’t make the cut were boring). But they’re perfect for a topic that can’t rightfully be taken too seriously or with any certainty, which is so fascinating for a documentary to tackle.

Following the death of Diane Keaton last October, her feature directorial debut garnered some due acknowledgment. The film, Heaven, was released in 1987 and received a good amount of press for a work of its kind. But it was mostly forgotten afterward. Outside of it being made by one of the greatest actresses of her generation, the film may have been a difficult sell (the curiosity, at least, contributed to its respectable $78 million box office gross). I think it’s hilarious, a quirky collage of ideas of what the afterlife will be like. And a sly revelation of how media informs such ideas.

Keaton was hesitant to label it a documentary, but its mix of new interviews and repurposed archival footage fit the definition. There are no experts on the subject, which is too unknowable for there to be any. Representatives from Christianity are the closest thing, maybe, but what do they really know that the comments from man-off-the-street participants aren’t just as valid? Only one famous face is among the talking heads: Don King. Another non-stranger is Keaton’s grandmother, who died during the production, impacting the actress-director’s attitude while finishing the project. I wonder if it wouldn’t have come off so cynical without that personal experience.

The context of Heaven’s creation is interesting. Keaton had recently published a book of old Hollywood photographs, in which she shared her idea of Heaven in the introduction. The same year as Heaven’s release, Keaton directed the first of two Belinda Carlisle music videos, for a song titled “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” The documentary and the video have a similar aesthetic at times, most notably in shots where hard shadows cross people’s faces. The documentary, with its abstract sets and stylish cinematography (shot by David Lynch collaborator Frederick Elmes), was often compared to music videos. Roger Ebert, though, negatively compared it to Gates of Heaven. I’d liken it more favorably to Errol Morris’s early films (Heaven’s editor, Paul Barnes, incidentally, next worked on Morris’s The Thin Blue Line).

Keaton’s Heaven is a dated product of its time and occasionally feels like a beginner art student’s first experimental film. For those of us cinephiles who base our concepts of Heaven on what we’ve seen in the movies and who may consider film itself to be Heaven, we can appreciate the compilation montage side of the documentary. Most of the contemporary people interviewed are kooky or even downright absurd, however, and were obviously only selected for their amusing soundbites and ridiculous arguments (Keaton recognized that most of the people she talked to who didn’t make the cut were boring). But they’re perfect for a topic that can’t rightfully be taken too seriously or with any certainty, which is so fascinating for a documentary to tackle.

When I was an undergraduate studying film, I thought everything was the director’s decision.

At that time, I was taking a lot of film classes. But these were not craft classes — GOD NO! I was not self-confident enough to make art in front of peers and professors that would be judged for a grade. My artistic pursuits in that era were entirely private or gift-based: elaborate comics-strewn letters to friends, mixtapes, collage-y journals, etc. It took a few years of watching kids make movies at my job at a community media center, Children’s Media Project, before I got the confidence to make my own. A story for another day!

Anyway, back to film class. I mean, I understood metatextual and marketing elements like posters and trailers were different, and very occasionally we would read about some time the director was in conflict with the studio and had to change something against their will, or craft elements (costume design, music, acting) for which significant credit was due to other members of the film team.

But generally speaking, what I learned was to analyze these films like every detail was full of meaning. Now that I’ve making films professionally for well over a decade, I can confirm: everything is indeed full of meaning, but not in the way I imagined.

Reality check: things go wrong all the time!

Much is said about the supposedly great power of the documentary director. I mean… I guess so? Personally, it feels like everything I do is in negotiation with 10,000 forces I do not control.

My favorite movie podcast is What Went Wrong.1 The genius of this show is that the hosts understand just how hard it is to make any movie at all, let alone a good one. Their frame for each story is, “What went wrong on [X movie]?” This frame applies equally well to classic films as to legendary bombs, films you love to death and films you’ve never heard of. They have never applied the “What went wrong” frame to a documentary, but I often wonder what would happen if they did.

I made this 30-second PSA for Instagram recently about just one of the many things that went wrong on my children’s music documentary Happy and You Know It:

Even this casting “decision” (I say “decision” because it was not my decision, it was Raffi’s decision to not appear in the film!!!) has an ethical dimension to it. I understand why someone even called it “an unforgivable sin” to leave him out.2

But even as the great and all-powerful director: you don’t always get to decide who’s in your movie or what you’re allowed to film. Sometimes, #raffisaidno.

My Raffi example is silly. But the issue of access is not.

In real life, you don’t always get the access you want. When it is an ethical imperative to get it, and what do you do when you can’t?

Michael Moore famously turned his inability to get access to General Motors CEO Roger Smith into the central gag of Roger & Me (definitely the first, and probably the only, documentary my family ever rented from the video store to watch together). That poster image of him pointing his mic at the empty chair is brilliant and iconic!

But there’s a wrinkle in the Roger & Me story. Or at least a potential wrinkle, depending on who you believe…

Read more

When I was an undergraduate studying film, I thought everything was the director’s decision.

At that time, I was taking a lot of film classes. But these were not craft classes — GOD NO! I was not self-confident enough to make art in front of peers and professors that would be judged for a grade. My artistic pursuits in that era were entirely private or gift-based: elaborate comics-strewn letters to friends, mixtapes, collage-y journals, etc. It took a few years of watching kids make movies at my job at a community media center, Children’s Media Project, before I got the confidence to make my own. A story for another day!

Anyway, back to film class. I mean, I understood metatextual and marketing elements like posters and trailers were different, and very occasionally we would read about some time the director was in conflict with the studio and had to change something against their will, or craft elements (costume design, music, acting) for which significant credit was due to other members of the film team.

But generally speaking, what I learned was to analyze these films like every detail was full of meaning. Now that I’ve making films professionally for well over a decade, I can confirm: everything is indeed full of meaning, but not in the way I imagined.

Reality check: things go wrong all the time!

Much is said about the supposedly great power of the documentary director. I mean… I guess so? Personally, it feels like everything I do is in negotiation with 10,000 forces I do not control.

My favorite movie podcast is What Went Wrong.1 The genius of this show is that the hosts understand just how hard it is to make any movie at all, let alone a good one. Their frame for each story is, “What went wrong on [X movie]?” This frame applies equally well to classic films as to legendary bombs, films you love to death and films you’ve never heard of. They have never applied the “What went wrong” frame to a documentary, but I often wonder what would happen if they did.

I made this 30-second PSA for Instagram recently about just one of the many things that went wrong on my children’s music documentary Happy and You Know It:

Even this casting “decision” (I say “decision” because it was not my decision, it was Raffi’s decision to not appear in the film!!!) has an ethical dimension to it. I understand why someone even called it “an unforgivable sin” to leave him out.2

But even as the great and all-powerful director: you don’t always get to decide who’s in your movie or what you’re allowed to film. Sometimes, #raffisaidno.

My Raffi example is silly. But the issue of access is not.

In real life, you don’t always get the access you want. When it is an ethical imperative to get it, and what do you do when you can’t?

Michael Moore famously turned his inability to get access to General Motors CEO Roger Smith into the central gag of Roger & Me (definitely the first, and probably the only, documentary my family ever rented from the video store to watch together). That poster image of him pointing his mic at the empty chair is brilliant and iconic!

But there’s a wrinkle in the Roger & Me story. Or at least a potential wrinkle, depending on who you believe…

Read more

Just in case I haven’t written enough about The Imposter, here is an interview with Bart Layton, the director of this phenomenal crime-film documentary that I really can’t stop thinking about. Of course, that quality made talking with Layton all the more desirable and satisfying. We could have discussed this doc, about a 23-year-old European who passed himself off as a missing teen in Texas, and perhaps nonfiction cinema in general, all day. He’s one of the guys who really knows what’s what.

Almost as much as watching docs, I love having conversations with filmmakers who give us such fascinating nonfiction stories and display such a knack for telling them – not to mention who understand what’s so deeply stimulating and provocative about the medium as a whole and therefore their contribution to it. Hopefully, you enjoy reading it at least half as much as I enjoyed having it.

I tried to keep the talk as spoiler-free as possible, so I apologize if I ruin anything for people who haven’t yet seen the film.

This film is built around interviews with some of the most unreliable witnesses I’ve ever seen in a documentary. And so, since you stick solely to their words, they’re basically unreliable narrators. Was it always your idea to work with such tricky storytelling?

Well, no, because obviously when you enter into something like this, you don’t know. You can’t predict what kind of responses you’re going to get. You can’t necessarily predict what exactly the story is that you’re going to be told. Of course, I’d read about it and had a good idea, but I think that’s very different. When you see something reported, written down, it’s very different from looking a person in the eye and hearing them tell their stories.

I think – and this might be what you’re getting at with this idea of unreliable narrators – normally in documentary filmmaking, you set out in pursuit of this objective truth in some way. With this, it was totally different, because as soon as I sat down with Frederic [Bourdin], “The Imposter,” I realized he is a master manipulator, and he tells you this story, and you find yourself getting drawn into it. At the same time that you’re very aware that this guy is not a reliable, credible witness, you have these emotional responses to him because that’s what he does.

So that really was a key thing for me in terms of the structure. I felt like that was a really big part of this story. I didn’t feel like it should be filtered. What would be really interesting would be to allow the audience to experience that. For them to be on the receiving end of his manipulation, in a way. You become aware that he’s telling you this story, and you sit with him and feel sympathetic towards him at times, and you begin to understand that this is sort of twisted logic. You realize that you’re kind of falling for it.

This isn’t necessarily an investigative film where you’re going to find one neat answer. Actually, what there is are four or possibly five different versions of the same events. Subjective versions of the truth, if you know what I mean. That was what the story was. That was a really interesting way to try and tell this.

We went on this quite interesting and often quite bewildering journey in making this, going from one interview one day, convinced you knew exactly what happened, to the next interview with the opposite opinion. That is quite an unusual thing to experience, and so I felt like that was something I wanted to try and reflect, to recreate for the audience on some level.

You are confronted by unreliable witnesses, but you know that. The first thing he tells you effectively is, “I’m a liar, and this is how I lie.” And you go on that journey with him, and we all fall victim to him in a way. Does that make sense?

Do you think audiences should be trusted with the ability to understand that maybe not everything they’re hearing is the truth? There is some finger-pointing in the film, for instance, that is hard to shake at the end.

I think you make a really good point. Ultimately, like you say, you have to look at where these allegations come from, but at the same time, Frederic isn’t the only person in the film who makes that allegation. I think a lot of it is this idea that we all believe what we choose to believe. Yes, on one level, there are these allegations. And you’ve got to remember, at one time, there was an investigation that was launched. You hear the FBI agent say they used a polygraph. We all know that a polygraph is totally meaningless, effectively. But not only that, they gave the polygraph three times until [the test taker] failed it.

All of these things speak volumes, really. You’re right. We’re relying on audiences to navigate their way through a minefield of information. My experience so far is that the vast majority of audiences have got it. What the big debate is, when people come out of the movie, is not really what happened to Nicholas Barclay. It’s why did this family choose to accept this person into their lives, and how much of that is to do with a desperate willingness to believe something that you need to be true. It’s not just about his deception. It’s about self-deception as well.

My experience is people have judged that quite well. They understand. And the final shot of the film is this empty hole in the ground. It’s intended to be a metaphor for the fact that there isn’t a neat answer to this. There’s this hole which we all fill with our own conclusions and versions of what happened. I hope people get that. Of course, those allegations are made, but they’re in the public domain. They’ve been made before. And as you saw, the FBI took them seriously. But it’s also clear they don’t have any more information than we do.

There is also an issue of trust with subjects. With well-produced docs like this that focus on telling a good story rather than delivering a certain objective truth, participants can get upset, as we’ve seen with Errol Morris’s films Tabloid and The Thin Blue Line, both of which came to mind while I watched The Imposter.

That’s a great compliment. I’m not sure it’s justified, but it’s a lovely thing to say.

Is that a concern for you, or was it a concern while making it, that your subjects might dislike the way they’re portrayed?

It was a concern, but there was a big article in New Yorker magazine written about this case, and I think it’s fair to say the family is reflected in a much more negative way in that. You don’t hear from them. Of course, they’re reported, but most people come away feeling it’s an open/shut thing that the family had some knowledge of something very sinister, that there had been foul play or whatever. The majority of people who come out of this film don’t come away with that conclusion. They come away with this big debate, which is more accurate.

Of course, the family were concerned that in doing this, there would be a repeat of the New Yorker. They’d read that, and they didn’t approve of it at all. But when we showed them the film, they said that it was honest and fair and true to their experience. Ultimately, you try to balance it out. I know that there were things in it that they really wanted to say, which they ultimately got the opportunity to say. I think they were very pleased that they did.

How did you convince everyone to participate? Did the family know that Bourdin would be so prominent or even featured in the film? He almost comes across as the star, whether you like him or not.

I think they felt he comes out of the film in a way that he deserves to, ultimately. You go on this journey with him, but at the same time, you know from the very beginning that he’s a manipulative liar, and at the very end, you know he’s a manipulative liar. I think the family felt that was a fairly accurate portrait. I think most people get a sense of what he’s like.

What I wanted was for the audience to be receiving it. I wanted you as a viewer to interact with him on some level, similar to the way I interacted with him in the interview, where I’m thinking, “Am I getting manipulated?” That question is something that I wanted to defer onto the audience. This is why he looks straight down the lens. He looks you in the eye. He’s slightly larger in the frame. The motivation being to give you, the viewer, a more direct contact with him.

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I think there’s a good chance of some viewers accepting him as a kind of hero, or antihero, or at least a “cool” kind of criminal. I kept getting a Usual Suspects thing with him, like he was a mythical character along the lines of Keyser Soze.

I’m sure. As you might notice, The Usual Suspects was sort of a reference point in the film as well. He is a kind of a Verbal Kint character, isn’t he? So, are you wondering if people will walk away with admiration for him?

I don’t know about admiration. I’m mostly just fascinated with him, which is neither positive nor negative. I didn’t think of him as a terrible, terrible person. But I don’t think of anyone in the film as the heroes or villains or good guys or bad guys. Partly because they’re real people and partly because you just don’t know if you can trust anyone’s story.

I think that’s right, and I think what you identify is a difference between fiction and documentary. It’s worth saying that there was a fictionalized version of this film called The Chameleon. And it is much more black and white. I haven’t seen it. I didn’t make it all the way through, but it was pretty much black and white. The family is painted as murderers. Of course, documentary and reality isn’t black and white. It never is. There’s a lot of grey area. People say they wish there was a neat conclusion to this, less ambiguity, but life isn’t like that.

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And it’s not as fun when you leave the theater and don’t have anything to talk about with the person you’ve been sitting next to.

I completely agree. There’s a way of making this film that is very different, which I wouldn’t have been interested in doing. That is a kind of investigative documentary into the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay and also into [the question of] how did this guy manage to get access to the United States. I think that’s a much less interesting film.

With this film, what I wanted to do was take you on the journey that all of these people go on. They tell you the stories they want you to hear. And the documentary is really about deciphering it. You do go on all of these people’s journeys. You go on the sister’s journey. People aren’t screaming at the screen going, “How could you be so gullible?” They’re thinking, “Wow. How extraordinary that these people could be so blinded by the need to believe something.” I think that’s where it gets really interesting and where it gets bigger than one story.

I want to talk about the production style, particularly the reenactments. It seems to be brought over from your television work, specifically Locked Up Abroad, which I’ve seen a bit of.

Well, that was a series that I created a long time ago. I directed the first ones, but haven’t for a while.

But that series has some similar reenactment stuff in it.

It does, but I think this film is on a completely different level, really. With this sort of stuff, you can’t take TV and try to upscale it and hope that it will work for cinema. People just won’t buy it. You have to set out with a totally different set of objectives. You have to actually be cinematic and feel like a movie. Of course, there are similarities, but I hope that it looks quite different.

But reenactments are becoming more accepted in documentary cinema, where they used to be primarily just a part of true crime reality shows like America’s Most Wanted. And this film and James Marsh’s films, to which The Imposter has been compared, are produced by Simon Chinn, so I’m not sure if that’s just something he’s interested in. I’m curious what his role is like for this particular film, actually.

To be honest, I had conceived of the structure and the look of the film before. Part of the reason Simon came on board was because he had this track record with Man on Wire, and people felt there were similarities because it was about a French guy, and I was planning on doing these high-end dramatizations.

I was something of an unknown quantity from an investor point of view. I think people liked that he would bring that experience to it. Simon was a great source of support and experience in the edit, but he wasn’t involved in the way in which it was structured or shot. He’s an executive producer.

James Marsh is someone I know really well and whose movies I really like. I think both of us feel that there is a perception… that drama in documentary is a dirty word. There’s this perception that that makes it less of a documentary. That may be right, but I think rules are… I don’t know who writes them.

This kind of objectivity, unless you’re going to make a documentary with a piece of CCTV footage, which is unedited, I’m not quite sure how anyone imagines you’re going to get some kind of objective truth. There are subjective decisions. And this film is all about subjectivity. You’ve got all these different people telling you these different things.

What I wanted to do with the drama was, if a great storyteller tells you a great story, you have a visual experience. You have a kind of movie that plays out in your head. That was what I was trying to visualize. So with my dramatization, which is why I wouldn’t call them reenactments or reconstructions or anything like that, I was trying to make you aware as a viewer that it’s not like I’m trying to say this is what must have happened, a kind of forensic reconstruction of events.

With those scenes where you get the overlap between the interview and the drama, part of the intention is to make you aware that you are spending time in someone’s story. You’re spending time in someone’s memory. In their version of the events. So there were little motifs. For example, when you come into one of these scenes, you come in with a POV shot, or you come in over someone’s shoulder or following their hand along the wall, or whatever. The idea with that is it’s kind of like a shorthand for saying, “This is whose story you’re in.”

That’s one of the reasons I thought of The Thin Blue Line, and this is probably the best nonfiction film since to deal with that Rashomon-like idea of subjective memory and perspective. Part of it is the dramatizations. In The Thin Blue Line, each visualization is a little bit different from the one before, because it’s supposed to be illustrating the latest interviewee’s version of the events.

One of the interesting things about that, what Errol was trying to do was, in a way, find a bigger truth. Using reconstruction, he was trying to find this kind of bigger, more accurate truth than all of the unsatisfactory accounts. Whereas with these dramatizations, they’re not trying to identify a different truth. They’re trying to illustrate the story that this person wants you to hear.

You’ve obviously thought about the film a lot.

Yeah. It’s definitely one of my favorite documentaries of the year. Even if there were things that I hated about it, or whatever, just the fact that it makes me think makes me love it.

If anything, what were the things that you hated about it?

There’s nothing that I hate about it. The only issue I’ve had with the film, really, is that I can’t stop thinking about certain things said in the film that have made me come away with clouded judgments of certain characters, and I think there is some danger to having these ideas and presumptions put in the audience’s heads. [To be perfectly obscure for readers who haven’t seen it.]

That’s interesting, but that is also not the general consensus for most people. Most people’s thesis is that they were so desperate to believe. They were willfully blinded in a way. I get what you’re saying, but hopefully, after this conversation, you begin to see some of the thinking around the way in which those accounts are presented. Otherwise, the alternative is you take this thesis that this person or these people are bad, fundamentally. Then you refuse to present the audience with anything that goes against that thesis. You don’t allow him to tell his sob story about his childhood, or don’t let him tell you anything that lets him off. That is more dangerous.

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I just hate that in America, even though people are legally innocent until proven guilty, media-wise, we tend to focus on guilt first. As soon as someone is suspected of something or put on trial, in our minds, we think guilt before innocence.

That’s very true. Whenever those big newspaper headlines talk about someone’s alleged guilt, it’s difficult for you to then see them as a completely innocent individual after that. You’re right. But I think when you come towards the end of the fil,m you’ve spent two-thirds of the way not even considering [guilt]. Then you get this turn of events and consider that, and you’re reminded again of where the allegation came from. I don’t have more information than you do about that.

I’m really excited to see what you do next, because this is basically your debut feature, right?

Yeah, it is. I mean, I’ve made feature-length documentaries, much more serious BBC/Channel 4 sort of stuff, in addition to other things. But I’m still interested in challenging the conventions of the genres, and I think there is a lot of stuff written and spoken about documentary that is naive.

So, are you interested in sticking with documentary? A lot of people with this kind of storytelling talent with documentary often get wooed into fiction.

I’m woo-able. But I always come back to this idea that when there are these kinds of stories, which are stranger than fiction, that there is something really important about preserving the truth. That’s what makes this story so extraordinary. I don’t think it could be better as a fictionalized version. Anything can happen in the movie world. People climb walls and fly. But almost stranger things happen in the real world, and I’m quite interested in figuring out how that comes about.

Well, then, go find another one of these stories that I can’t even believe I’ve never heard.

I am working on one at the moment. An American story. It’ll blow your mind.

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This interview was originally published on the Documentary Channel Blog.

Just in case I haven’t written enough about The Imposter, here is an interview with Bart Layton, the director of this phenomenal crime-film documentary that I really can’t stop thinking about. Of course, that quality made talking with Layton all the more desirable and satisfying. We could have discussed this doc, about a 23-year-old European who passed himself off as a missing teen in Texas, and perhaps nonfiction cinema in general, all day. He’s one of the guys who really knows what’s what.

Almost as much as watching docs, I love having conversations with filmmakers who give us such fascinating nonfiction stories and display such a knack for telling them – not to mention who understand what’s so deeply stimulating and provocative about the medium as a whole and therefore their contribution to it. Hopefully, you enjoy reading it at least half as much as I enjoyed having it.

I tried to keep the talk as spoiler-free as possible, so I apologize if I ruin anything for people who haven’t yet seen the film.

This film is built around interviews with some of the most unreliable witnesses I’ve ever seen in a documentary. And so, since you stick solely to their words, they’re basically unreliable narrators. Was it always your idea to work with such tricky storytelling?

Well, no, because obviously when you enter into something like this, you don’t know. You can’t predict what kind of responses you’re going to get. You can’t necessarily predict what exactly the story is that you’re going to be told. Of course, I’d read about it and had a good idea, but I think that’s very different. When you see something reported, written down, it’s very different from looking a person in the eye and hearing them tell their stories.

I think – and this might be what you’re getting at with this idea of unreliable narrators – normally in documentary filmmaking, you set out in pursuit of this objective truth in some way. With this, it was totally different, because as soon as I sat down with Frederic [Bourdin], “The Imposter,” I realized he is a master manipulator, and he tells you this story, and you find yourself getting drawn into it. At the same time that you’re very aware that this guy is not a reliable, credible witness, you have these emotional responses to him because that’s what he does.

So that really was a key thing for me in terms of the structure. I felt like that was a really big part of this story. I didn’t feel like it should be filtered. What would be really interesting would be to allow the audience to experience that. For them to be on the receiving end of his manipulation, in a way. You become aware that he’s telling you this story, and you sit with him and feel sympathetic towards him at times, and you begin to understand that this is sort of twisted logic. You realize that you’re kind of falling for it.

This isn’t necessarily an investigative film where you’re going to find one neat answer. Actually, what there is are four or possibly five different versions of the same events. Subjective versions of the truth, if you know what I mean. That was what the story was. That was a really interesting way to try and tell this.

We went on this quite interesting and often quite bewildering journey in making this, going from one interview one day, convinced you knew exactly what happened, to the next interview with the opposite opinion. That is quite an unusual thing to experience, and so I felt like that was something I wanted to try and reflect, to recreate for the audience on some level.

You are confronted by unreliable witnesses, but you know that. The first thing he tells you effectively is, “I’m a liar, and this is how I lie.” And you go on that journey with him, and we all fall victim to him in a way. Does that make sense?

Do you think audiences should be trusted with the ability to understand that maybe not everything they’re hearing is the truth? There is some finger-pointing in the film, for instance, that is hard to shake at the end.

I think you make a really good point. Ultimately, like you say, you have to look at where these allegations come from, but at the same time, Frederic isn’t the only person in the film who makes that allegation. I think a lot of it is this idea that we all believe what we choose to believe. Yes, on one level, there are these allegations. And you’ve got to remember, at one time, there was an investigation that was launched. You hear the FBI agent say they used a polygraph. We all know that a polygraph is totally meaningless, effectively. But not only that, they gave the polygraph three times until [the test taker] failed it.

All of these things speak volumes, really. You’re right. We’re relying on audiences to navigate their way through a minefield of information. My experience so far is that the vast majority of audiences have got it. What the big debate is, when people come out of the movie, is not really what happened to Nicholas Barclay. It’s why did this family choose to accept this person into their lives, and how much of that is to do with a desperate willingness to believe something that you need to be true. It’s not just about his deception. It’s about self-deception as well.

My experience is people have judged that quite well. They understand. And the final shot of the film is this empty hole in the ground. It’s intended to be a metaphor for the fact that there isn’t a neat answer to this. There’s this hole which we all fill with our own conclusions and versions of what happened. I hope people get that. Of course, those allegations are made, but they’re in the public domain. They’ve been made before. And as you saw, the FBI took them seriously. But it’s also clear they don’t have any more information than we do.

There is also an issue of trust with subjects. With well-produced docs like this that focus on telling a good story rather than delivering a certain objective truth, participants can get upset, as we’ve seen with Errol Morris’s films Tabloid and The Thin Blue Line, both of which came to mind while I watched The Imposter.

That’s a great compliment. I’m not sure it’s justified, but it’s a lovely thing to say.

Is that a concern for you, or was it a concern while making it, that your subjects might dislike the way they’re portrayed?

It was a concern, but there was a big article in New Yorker magazine written about this case, and I think it’s fair to say the family is reflected in a much more negative way in that. You don’t hear from them. Of course, they’re reported, but most people come away feeling it’s an open/shut thing that the family had some knowledge of something very sinister, that there had been foul play or whatever. The majority of people who come out of this film don’t come away with that conclusion. They come away with this big debate, which is more accurate.

Of course, the family were concerned that in doing this, there would be a repeat of the New Yorker. They’d read that, and they didn’t approve of it at all. But when we showed them the film, they said that it was honest and fair and true to their experience. Ultimately, you try to balance it out. I know that there were things in it that they really wanted to say, which they ultimately got the opportunity to say. I think they were very pleased that they did.

How did you convince everyone to participate? Did the family know that Bourdin would be so prominent or even featured in the film? He almost comes across as the star, whether you like him or not.

I think they felt he comes out of the film in a way that he deserves to, ultimately. You go on this journey with him, but at the same time, you know from the very beginning that he’s a manipulative liar, and at the very end, you know he’s a manipulative liar. I think the family felt that was a fairly accurate portrait. I think most people get a sense of what he’s like.

What I wanted was for the audience to be receiving it. I wanted you as a viewer to interact with him on some level, similar to the way I interacted with him in the interview, where I’m thinking, “Am I getting manipulated?” That question is something that I wanted to defer onto the audience. This is why he looks straight down the lens. He looks you in the eye. He’s slightly larger in the frame. The motivation being to give you, the viewer, a more direct contact with him.

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I think there’s a good chance of some viewers accepting him as a kind of hero, or antihero, or at least a “cool” kind of criminal. I kept getting a Usual Suspects thing with him, like he was a mythical character along the lines of Keyser Soze.

I’m sure. As you might notice, The Usual Suspects was sort of a reference point in the film as well. He is a kind of a Verbal Kint character, isn’t he? So, are you wondering if people will walk away with admiration for him?

I don’t know about admiration. I’m mostly just fascinated with him, which is neither positive nor negative. I didn’t think of him as a terrible, terrible person. But I don’t think of anyone in the film as the heroes or villains or good guys or bad guys. Partly because they’re real people and partly because you just don’t know if you can trust anyone’s story.

I think that’s right, and I think what you identify is a difference between fiction and documentary. It’s worth saying that there was a fictionalized version of this film called The Chameleon. And it is much more black and white. I haven’t seen it. I didn’t make it all the way through, but it was pretty much black and white. The family is painted as murderers. Of course, documentary and reality isn’t black and white. It never is. There’s a lot of grey area. People say they wish there was a neat conclusion to this, less ambiguity, but life isn’t like that.

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And it’s not as fun when you leave the theater and don’t have anything to talk about with the person you’ve been sitting next to.

I completely agree. There’s a way of making this film that is very different, which I wouldn’t have been interested in doing. That is a kind of investigative documentary into the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay and also into [the question of] how did this guy manage to get access to the United States. I think that’s a much less interesting film.

With this film, what I wanted to do was take you on the journey that all of these people go on. They tell you the stories they want you to hear. And the documentary is really about deciphering it. You do go on all of these people’s journeys. You go on the sister’s journey. People aren’t screaming at the screen going, “How could you be so gullible?” They’re thinking, “Wow. How extraordinary that these people could be so blinded by the need to believe something.” I think that’s where it gets really interesting and where it gets bigger than one story.

I want to talk about the production style, particularly the reenactments. It seems to be brought over from your television work, specifically Locked Up Abroad, which I’ve seen a bit of.

Well, that was a series that I created a long time ago. I directed the first ones, but haven’t for a while.

But that series has some similar reenactment stuff in it.

It does, but I think this film is on a completely different level, really. With this sort of stuff, you can’t take TV and try to upscale it and hope that it will work for cinema. People just won’t buy it. You have to set out with a totally different set of objectives. You have to actually be cinematic and feel like a movie. Of course, there are similarities, but I hope that it looks quite different.

But reenactments are becoming more accepted in documentary cinema, where they used to be primarily just a part of true crime reality shows like America’s Most Wanted. And this film and James Marsh’s films, to which The Imposter has been compared, are produced by Simon Chinn, so I’m not sure if that’s just something he’s interested in. I’m curious what his role is like for this particular film, actually.

To be honest, I had conceived of the structure and the look of the film before. Part of the reason Simon came on board was because he had this track record with Man on Wire, and people felt there were similarities because it was about a French guy, and I was planning on doing these high-end dramatizations.

I was something of an unknown quantity from an investor point of view. I think people liked that he would bring that experience to it. Simon was a great source of support and experience in the edit, but he wasn’t involved in the way in which it was structured or shot. He’s an executive producer.

James Marsh is someone I know really well and whose movies I really like. I think both of us feel that there is a perception… that drama in documentary is a dirty word. There’s this perception that that makes it less of a documentary. That may be right, but I think rules are… I don’t know who writes them.

This kind of objectivity, unless you’re going to make a documentary with a piece of CCTV footage, which is unedited, I’m not quite sure how anyone imagines you’re going to get some kind of objective truth. There are subjective decisions. And this film is all about subjectivity. You’ve got all these different people telling you these different things.

What I wanted to do with the drama was, if a great storyteller tells you a great story, you have a visual experience. You have a kind of movie that plays out in your head. That was what I was trying to visualize. So with my dramatization, which is why I wouldn’t call them reenactments or reconstructions or anything like that, I was trying to make you aware as a viewer that it’s not like I’m trying to say this is what must have happened, a kind of forensic reconstruction of events.

With those scenes where you get the overlap between the interview and the drama, part of the intention is to make you aware that you are spending time in someone’s story. You’re spending time in someone’s memory. In their version of the events. So there were little motifs. For example, when you come into one of these scenes, you come in with a POV shot, or you come in over someone’s shoulder or following their hand along the wall, or whatever. The idea with that is it’s kind of like a shorthand for saying, “This is whose story you’re in.”

That’s one of the reasons I thought of The Thin Blue Line, and this is probably the best nonfiction film since to deal with that Rashomon-like idea of subjective memory and perspective. Part of it is the dramatizations. In The Thin Blue Line, each visualization is a little bit different from the one before, because it’s supposed to be illustrating the latest interviewee’s version of the events.

One of the interesting things about that, what Errol was trying to do was, in a way, find a bigger truth. Using reconstruction, he was trying to find this kind of bigger, more accurate truth than all of the unsatisfactory accounts. Whereas with these dramatizations, they’re not trying to identify a different truth. They’re trying to illustrate the story that this person wants you to hear.

You’ve obviously thought about the film a lot.

Yeah. It’s definitely one of my favorite documentaries of the year. Even if there were things that I hated about it, or whatever, just the fact that it makes me think makes me love it.

If anything, what were the things that you hated about it?

There’s nothing that I hate about it. The only issue I’ve had with the film, really, is that I can’t stop thinking about certain things said in the film that have made me come away with clouded judgments of certain characters, and I think there is some danger to having these ideas and presumptions put in the audience’s heads. [To be perfectly obscure for readers who haven’t seen it.]

That’s interesting, but that is also not the general consensus for most people. Most people’s thesis is that they were so desperate to believe. They were willfully blinded in a way. I get what you’re saying, but hopefully, after this conversation, you begin to see some of the thinking around the way in which those accounts are presented. Otherwise, the alternative is you take this thesis that this person or these people are bad, fundamentally. Then you refuse to present the audience with anything that goes against that thesis. You don’t allow him to tell his sob story about his childhood, or don’t let him tell you anything that lets him off. That is more dangerous.

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I just hate that in America, even though people are legally innocent until proven guilty, media-wise, we tend to focus on guilt first. As soon as someone is suspected of something or put on trial, in our minds, we think guilt before innocence.

That’s very true. Whenever those big newspaper headlines talk about someone’s alleged guilt, it’s difficult for you to then see them as a completely innocent individual after that. You’re right. But I think when you come towards the end of the fil,m you’ve spent two-thirds of the way not even considering [guilt]. Then you get this turn of events and consider that, and you’re reminded again of where the allegation came from. I don’t have more information than you do about that.

I’m really excited to see what you do next, because this is basically your debut feature, right?

Yeah, it is. I mean, I’ve made feature-length documentaries, much more serious BBC/Channel 4 sort of stuff, in addition to other things. But I’m still interested in challenging the conventions of the genres, and I think there is a lot of stuff written and spoken about documentary that is naive.

So, are you interested in sticking with documentary? A lot of people with this kind of storytelling talent with documentary often get wooed into fiction.

I’m woo-able. But I always come back to this idea that when there are these kinds of stories, which are stranger than fiction, that there is something really important about preserving the truth. That’s what makes this story so extraordinary. I don’t think it could be better as a fictionalized version. Anything can happen in the movie world. People climb walls and fly. But almost stranger things happen in the real world, and I’m quite interested in figuring out how that comes about.

Well, then, go find another one of these stories that I can’t even believe I’ve never heard.

I am working on one at the moment. An American story. It’ll blow your mind.

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This interview was originally published on the Documentary Channel Blog.

Paul Thomas Anderson and composer Jonny Greenwood have noticed that music from their film “Phantom Thread” was used in “Melania,” and they want its immediate removal from the film.

Here’s their statement (via Variety) — it reads as though the pair are seeking to nix the inclusion of Greenwood’s “Phantom Thread” composition due to Universal’s failure to notify them about its use.

It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the “Melania” documentary. While Jonny Greenwood does not own the copyright in the score, Universal failed to consult Jonny on this third-party use which is a breach of his composer agreement. As a result Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have asked for it to be removed from the documentary.

The Phantom Thread song in question is “Barbara Rose,” which Greenwood composed for the movie.

Brett Ratner has recently spoken about how the $40 million-budgeted “Melania” spent a significant amount of money on music. At the documentary’s premiere, Ratner said the project had “spent more money on music in this than I did on Rush Hour.” That was his way of saying that expensive music licensing and production were part of why the film cost so much.

There’s zero chance Ratner and Amazon/MGM adhere to Anderson and Greenwood’s request. Zero. The film is currently playing in theaters, and if Greenwood and Anderson want to take this up with anyone, it would be Universal, which by all accounts sold the rights allowing the music to appear in Ratner’s film.

Other musical cues that appear in the film include The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

On Monday, Rotten Tomatoes publicists were in full spin mode, insisting the gap for “Melania” scores—between the film’s 99% audience rating and its paltry 7% critics score—was not the biggest discrepancy in the aggregate’s history. Sure, because if you squint really hard, 99 minus 7 is just… a rounding error?

However, now RT is admitting that, yes, the 92-point difference is indeed the widest ever recorded for a movie. Are we shocked? These discrepancies continuously happen with films aimed at conservative audiences. That 2024 “Reagan” movie starring Dennis Quaid? 18% critics score, but 98% audience.

However, “Melania” is one for the history books—or at least Rotten Tomatoes footnotes—a film beloved by ticket buyers, most of whom voted for Trump, and reviled by critics, most of whom didn’t. It is officially the champion of extreme rating disparities.

Truly, a historic accomplishment.

Is it any wonder Amazon/MGM refused to screen “Melania” for critics? Press had to buy a ticket on opening day to review it. Quite honestly, is it possible for anyone to evaluate “Melania” with complete objectivity? One look at the lone four reviews on RT, and they all come from conservative-minded outlets: The London Evening Standard, The Epoch Times, The Standard, and The New Republic.

Those who bought a ticket got exactly what they expected, fully ready to embrace the doc, and critics had their knives sharpened the minute this project was announced—the result is something akin to a social experiment in mass schadenfreude.

Now, is “Melania” a good documentary? I wouldn’t know, and I have no interest in seeing it in theaters—maybe I’ll catch it when it hits streaming. At this point, though, it doesn’t really feel like a proper film; it comes across more as a vanity project aimed at female MAGA supporters curious enough about the first lady to buy a ticket.

Melania

(USA, 90 min.)

Dir. Brett Ratner

Prod. Brett Ratner, Fernando Sulichin, Marc Beckman, Melania Trump

Someone in the music department has a wicked sense of humour. Melania begins with one of the absurdly expensive, and totally random, needle drops that arise through this portrait of Melania Trump. As America’s Worst Lady exits Mar-a-Lago, the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” appears on the soundtrack. It aims to be a slick moment as Mrs. Trump struts through her opulent Florida mansion and its gaudy grounds. In voiceover, Melania invites audiences along for the ride leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration of her husband. Her spiel ends and a black SUV whisks her away. As Melania sets the stage for her self-produced vanity project, “Gimme Shelter” crescendos.  and Merry Clayton’s iconic vocals cry “Rape! Murder!” on the soundtrack. For a brief moment, Melania has the seeds for camp political theatre.

However, this feature-length vanity project doesn’t little interest in politics aside from some self-serving oopsies. Directed by Brett Ratner, best known for the allegations of sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct against him, the star-studded Razzie winner Movie 43 and the equally star-studded The Epstein Files, returns from the ashes as a shlockmeister of documentary. There’s no mistaking it: Melania is reputation-saving hokum. But it’s mostly just pathetic.

Melania follows Mrs. Trump over the first twenty days of January 2025 as she readies for the inauguration. Her duties include preparing the Whitehouse for the family changeover, perfecting her wardrobe, and throwing a candlelight dinner for VIPs. In voiceover, Melania explains how being the First Lady involves huge responsibilities and big decisions. Cue an extended scene of Melania trying on her inauguration day suit. She provides some feedback about the fit of the waist and the width of the collar. Such is the weight of being the First Lady.

Her designer and his assistants fawn over her, too. They love having a First Lady who used to be a model. Mrs. Trump gives precise and clear feedback. Things get really serious when she gives tailoring instructions for sharper top for her hat. World peace is small potatoes where Melania operates.

This gnat-on-the-wall portrait of trivial frivolity says so much about the sphere of entitlement that characterizes the Trump dynasty. Their reality concerns itself with providing caviar-filled golden eggs to the wealthiest elites—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—in the name of making America great again. Melania plays musical chairs with White House furniture, choosing new Slovenian glassware to represent her country (fair enough) and ridding the home of Democrat dressings. The overlay of empty rhetoric about uplifting Americans paired with scenes of styling her personal tastes at taxpayers’ expense proves informative. However, it’s nothing that we don’t already know.

To Mrs. Trump’s credit, she displays a good eye for style and often comes across as polite and kind, if insincerely so. It’s all for show. The documentary observes her comfort with fashion and design. But there’s more to politics than differentiating between blue and cerulean.

Even when Melania captures the First Lady in action discussing her initiatives, like the “Be Best” campaign to protect children’s mental health, everything about the staging comes across as inauthentic. There’s no acknowledgement that she aims to protect kids from cyberbullying (a worthy cause) while her husband enjoys infamy as one of the pettiest and most prolifically vitriolic social media users who spews poisonous misogyny and users his platform to throw global politics into chaos while weaponizing his followers. Her meetings with French First Lady Brigitte Macron and Jordan’s Princess Rania merely offer photo-op platitudes.

Moreover, as the trio of cinematographers, including Barry Peterson (Tower Heist) and Oscar nominees Jeff Cronenweth (The Social Network), and Dante Spinotti (The Insider)—none of whom has much experience in documentary—capture Mrs. Trump in the corridors of power, the design of the film itself feels equally forced. Every scene plays like a set-up as the film with carefully (ish) staged shot/reverse shot sequences that fall back on dramatic practices instead of trusting vérité to capture the mundane fashion fittings. The doc doesn’t do Melania any favours, either, with its misogynistic eye for the First Lady’s responsibilities. As narration shares Melania’s thoughts about elevating the position of First Lady, the action to match it makes her seem delusional as she concerns herself with looking good and playing house.

Even glimpses at her family life ring hollow. In one scene, Melania sits with her father and he talks about the family and her late mom. The film quickly fades out her father’s voice and replaces it with Melania’s phony narration. Nobody gets to talk about Melania but Melania. That scene, naturally, precedes some voiceover about the importance of family.

At one point, Melania’s true self cracks through the narration when she talks about all the horror her husband’s endured, like slander and surviving an attempted murder. Her anger icily penetrates the film as she guards herself against a rant about liberals. But the closest that Ratner seems interested in penetrating global politics comes when he observes Melania’s feedback on Trump’s inauguration speech. She adds “and unifier” to his pipe-dream of being the world’s “peacemaker.”

More revealing is an awkward exchange with a White House employee to discuss the transition of First Families. She explains how moving the Bidens out and the Trumps in, all within five-hours, summons the “Olympics of interior decorating.” It turns out that nothing can go in or out until the changeover becomes official. That great nugget invites an even better one.

The woman proudly tells Mrs. Trump how much it means to her and her Laotian parents to live the American dream. As she extols the wonders of a country that allows anyone to make a life for herself, Melania appears visibly uncomfortable. Her eyes dart to the camera as if signalling Ratner to give the lady the hook and bail her out. The contrast between the sentiment in the room and the havoc wrought upon new Americans throughout the Trump administrations is jarring. Ratner lets the camera roll as Melania squirms, caught between the positions of being an immigrant and someone who enjoys great power in America by disenfranchising others who, like her, came there in search of a better life.

Melania might actually be documentary gold in the hands of a talented filmmaker with something to say, albeit a left-leaning one. One could easily recut this material to critique the emptiness of the Trump clan and the dangers of being completely uninterested in politics in one of the most powerful positions in the world. However, Ratner insulates Melania to normalize what she represents. The most insightful question Ratner throws at Melania is a query about her favourite song. She says it’s Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and they do some Carpool Karaoke. At the end of the film, title cards extol the milestones that Mrs. Trump’s said to have achieved in the first year of her husband’s second term. It’s a Manchurian Candidate-like add-on after the portrait of Melania’s kindness and bravery. But the tacked-on roll-call of supposed do-goodings just accentuates Melania as the nadir of uncritical celebrity docs.

No matter how much garish streamer-quality lighting Ratner throws at the First Lady, the film reflects the many preconceptions of Melania Trump that one might bring to the film. Melania aims to humanize its subject with this insider’s view, but it’s ultimately confirmation she’s an vapid ice queen with nothing insightful to say. But besides being the laziest kind of propaganda, it’s also just bad PR spin. At least Leni Riefenstahl could make a decent shot.

Melania is now playing in theatres.

It is coming soon to Prime Video.

The post Melania Review: Trump Doc Fails to Be Best appeared first on POV Magazine.

The best-reviewed film from this year’s Sundance Film Festival was non-fiction: David Greaves’ “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” A remarkable work, it brings the Harlem Renaissance to life through candid interviews, rare archival footage, and the voices of the artists, musicians, and writers who lived it.

After a heated bidding war to acquire the documentary, Neon has secured U.S. distribution rights and plans to release it in theaters later this year. At various points, Netflix, Sony Pictures Classics, and Mubi were also in the mix.

Shot in 1972 by William Greaves at Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse, the film captures a gathering of Harlem Renaissance figures—musicians, writers, artists, and actors—as they reminisce, debate, and reflect on the movement they helped shape. Forgotten for decades, over four hours of footage were later curated by Greaves’ son into this 100-minute documentary.

The Harlem Renaissance was crucial, emerging just decades after the abolition of slavery and giving Black Americans a powerful platform to assert their cultural and intellectual identity. It was the cultural boom they needed to feel unshackled from the past.

On paper, this doc might sound dry, but it’s more than a history lesson; it offers intimate, salon-like conversations with some of the most notable figures of the movement—it’s a vibrant hangout movie. An utterly fascinating one at that.

This film feels like a piece of history suddenly unearthed for us all to witness. A rare treasure suddenly arriving, its very presence feels damn-near miraculous and could reshape the way we view the Harlem Renaissance — a time and place that seems to have been lost to memory, yet here it is, vivid and alive, demanding to be seen with a fresh set of eyes.

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” currently holds a 94 on Metacritic and 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s almost safe to say it will likely be Oscar-nominated next year for Best Documentary.