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FORD FOUNDATION DIRECTOR ORLANDO BAGWELL: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Orlando
Bagwell, and I'm the director of the Ford Foundation new film fund called JustFilms.
And I have to say this -- [Applause] Thank you. It's a five-year initiative, and I have
to say it is -- because I'm a filmmaker. I started as a filmmaker. It is a five-year
initiative where Ford is making a commitment of $10 million over five years, meaning $50
million going to documentary filmmaking. [Applause]
The short film you just saw, the short piece you just saw is from a film called Gasland,
an Academy Award nominated film this last year. How many of you saw this film? That's
a good thing. That's good for this audience. And it's a film -- [Laughter] No, I'm saying
because -- and you talk about documentaries and oftentimes people don't see them, so I'm
really happy to see that so many hands went up. It's a film that's both dramatic and funny,
it's also investigative and very personal. It's made by a filmmaker who is a first-time
filmmaker, as a matter of fact, first-time filmmaker named Josh Fox. And the thing about
it that's interesting is that he was offered -- the gas company came to his house and offered
him $100,000 to drill on his land, and he decided he wanted to make a film to figure
out what this is all about.
Now, that might seem kind of strange, but in fact that's something about the way in
which documentaries are being made now. They're in the hands of many different kinds of people
and many different people and therefore there are many more being made right now. The question
is how do we get a chance to see them. How do they reach us, and how do they connect
with us is that in fact they can do what they want them to do: to make you think about the
issues that they raise, feel those issues, and do something about it.
So what are we here to do today? The question is how do you do that. And what we're going
to look at is how do filmmakers, how do our panel of filmmakers take issues like environment,
criminal justice, poverty, and take these issues and translate them into stories that
connect with you and have meaning to you and to those you care about, and take issues that
are complicated and allow you to then take that storytelling and take it to someone else.
So in essence, it's really about how do we make justice entertaining. And to understand
that, we've got a great panel who are about to come up and really rock the show today.
[Laughter] So let's bring our panelists out. [Applause]
[Music]
LISA CORTES: Good afternoon. I'm Lisa Cortes. I'm going to be your moderator [Laughter]
MICHAEL MOORE: Sorry.
CORTES: -- this afternoon. Before we launch into our discussion, I just wanted to share
with you some thoughts that I've had about where we are. I feel that we've been sitting
by the campfire telling stories, and now we're at a place where there are various platforms
that are competing for -- at the campfire. It's interesting that the Lumiere brothers
believed that film was going to be a medium without a future and they suspected that people
would bore of images that they could just easily see by walking out into the street.
But we know that people are oftentimes blind to injustices that are right in front of them.
I'm actually a narrative filmmaker, and I saw with my film Precious that films can change
conversations. It's most fitting that at the end of this day that we are going to talk
about the vital role of the arts in society and how I believe that films have to and must
lead the edge of social change. And that's why we've gathered these visionaries. They've
all used their voices to entertain, inform, and engage us. And with that said, I'd like
to kind of jump into a conversation we started in the green room, which was the genesis of
this panel at Sundance. Michael, I understand that in speaking you were -- your feeling
was that docs have a very important role, but they have one of the smallest audiences.
Am I quoting you correctly, because, you know, we are being streamed?
MOORE: Yeah. That's not just a quote from me. That's the truth. I mean, that's most
nonfiction --
CORTES: Whose truth?
MOORE: Huh?
CORTES: Whose truth?
MOORE: The box office page in Variety every week? [Laughter] Documentaries are down at
the bottom of the list. And I've always found that to be somewhat disconcerting because
Americans and I think most people around the world, they like nonfiction. They are drawn
to it, and they're drawn to it in other art forms, whether it's books -- you open up The
New York Times Book Review this Sunday, there'll be three to five times as many nonfiction
books reviewed as fiction books. Nonfiction books sell huge amounts of copies. Nonfiction
television, half or more of the top 10 shows every week are nonfiction, reality shows.
Most of them are crap. Not always, though. 60 Minutes has been in the top 10 or top 20
rated shows for the last 30 years. So people are drawn to -- they're not opposed to seeing
stories that are real.
But yet, when it comes to going to the theater, going to a movie theater, they are not inclined
to want to give up a Friday or Saturday night to go and I think participate in something
that feels like medicine. They've worked hard all week, and they go to -- people go to the
movies to escape, to relax, to be entertained. And my point is that I think that my plea
to other documentary filmmakers is to make more films, not more documentaries. Make films
that happen to be nonfiction, but make it as a film first. Be a filmmaker first, not
a person who's got an agenda or a cause or something that is very important and noble,
but noble doesn't put people in those seats. They're there because they've heard that there's
a good story here up on the screen, and they want to see that story, whether it's a tragic
story, whether it's a funny story, whether it's -- whatever it is, they love a good story.
And I don't think people on some level care whether it's nonfiction or fiction. They care
that it has compelling characters, a great plot, a beginning, a middle, and an end, all
the things you learned in seventh grade English. [Laughter]
CORTES: Laura, I know that when we were talking earlier you kind of had a counterpoint to
this.
LAURA POITRAS: Well, it's actually not a disagreement with Michael's point in terms of us being
filmmakers. I mean, all of us here happen to be political filmmakers or make films that
have political, overt political content. But we're first and foremost storytellers. And
that's what we have to -- I mean, that's what our job is to do, is to tell stories.
What I think the disconnect is, is more of a distribution disconnect. I mean, I think
actually the availability of digital technologies is opening up a flood of innovation in nonfiction
storytelling that I'm seeing every year, where you just think the bar can't get any higher,
and then it does. So something like Gasland, which is just an extraordinary achievement
as a film and then also something that raises our awareness about an issue as a secondary
byproduct of an artist who's working and telling his story with passion and conviction and
all those things, and a good story. So I believe that it has to be grounded in storytelling
first, but how do we create, how do we bridge, how do we get the audiences? I mean, I think
that that is -- it's a huge problem.
CORTES: Well, we have this JustFilms initiative, which is huge for the Ford Foundation, and
I think what I'm hearing from you guys is that content is being created, and how are
we going to fill seats. I mean, I want to hear from you, like, for all of the wonderful
intention here where are we going because it doesn't matter if it's created and nobody's
showing up. So Spike.
SPIKE LEE: Well, not everything is made for theatrical distribution. The two New Orleans
things I did, they were made for HBO. They were not meant to be shown in theaters. They
were made strictly for HBO. They financed it, and they wanted it first, and it's for
them. Now, the other one, my first documentary, Four Little Girls, Sheila Nevins let us get
a small theatrical opening so we could be eligible for the Oscar nomination, which we
did get. But I think really Michael is the only one I know that gets his films, people
going to like they're regular movies. I mean, so he has the -- [Laughter] he has the plan.
He's the guy. I don't know how he did it, but he's done it again and again and again.
The highest-grossing documentaries, which one was that?
MOORE: Fahrenheit 9/11.
LEE: Ever. Ever, ever, ever.
MOORE: The film that said Obama was not living -- or Osama was not living in a cave. [Laughter]
Because my point seven or eight years ago was that they kept talking about Osama bin
Laden and the focus was always on the fact that he was a Muslim and so all the fear that
was whipped up and all the whatever against Muslims. And it struck me as odd that he was
also a multimillionaire. At that time of 9/11, they said he was worth at least $30 million.
And I thought, "Why wasn't that an equal thing to focus on, that fact that a multimillionaire
murdered 3,000 people, and why weren't multimillionaires suddenly starting to be profiled at airports?"
[Laughter/Applause] Because he was every bit a multimillionaire as he was a Muslim. And
I just kept saying, my website guys were just showing me the -- I was on Larry King a few
years ago, and Larry King was saying, "Well, where do you think he is?" And I said, "Well,
he sure as hell ain't in a cave." [Laughter] And Larry King -- the look on Larry King's
face was like, "What do you mean? They all say he's there in the --" "No, he's not there!
How -- Larry, how many rich people do you know, and how many of them do you know that
would live in a cave for -- Only Batman! Batman's the only rich guy --"
CORTES: So, Michael, I have a question for you because I think you've created a very
interesting voice as a documentarian. Well, I mean, are you an investigative journalist?
Are you a documentarian? Or are you just a great storyteller?
MOORE: I'm a guy who wants to go to the movies on a Friday night and walk out of there going,
"Whoa!" Like the night I walked out of Do the Right Thing. Like the knight I walked
out of Get On the Bus, [Applause] in my opinion his second greatest film. That, I mean, we
all want that experience when we go to the movies. There's nothing unusual about that,
right? Every time you go to the movies, you hope that two hours later when you walk out
of there you just go, "Man, that was a great way to spend two hours!" And then you, and
you can't get it out of your head, right? And you talk to other people the next day
about it. And so I'm always -- when I'm making a movie, I have myself sitting in an invisible
theater seat somewhere, and I'm sitting there with 200 other people, and I'm thinking, you
know, "Is this connecting to people on that level?"
And is it journalism? Yes. I think it's journalism. I think, I mean, part of it is I put out a
lot of information that oftentimes doesn't get discussed. The journalism in my movies
doesn't get discussed at all, because it's all about the controversy and the position
I take, which is -- you know, I have a book coming out in the fall, and so I just did
my first interview yesterday for the book. And the first question out of the reporter's
mouth was, you know, "How will you answer your critics because they claim sometimes
you make these outrageous statements?" And I said, "Well, I just -- I used to be really
defensive about that. Now I just cop to it, and I say, they're right. I make outrageous
statements." Twenty years ago I made my first film, and
I said that General Motors was a company that wads going to fall, and it was going to take
a lot of Americans down with it. And when I said that, and I remember that was the first
time I was on Larry King, it was like I was nuts, out on some limb. I said there wouldn't
be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. How the hell do I know? I'm not a weapons
inspector. I don't know anything about Iraq. But I said it because my common sense button
just came -- [Laughter] The same one that said he's not in a cave just said that, you
know, they're not going to -- And I was booed off the Oscar stage for saying that.
And so I've had to live 20 years of this career of making these films and saying these things
and being attacked and gone after, but I don't care because I think I put a lot of time and
investigation and thinking into this. Part of the movies are journalism, part of them
are an op-ed. And an op-ed is journalism. And I think that those films are worthwhile,
too.
And as we were saying back in the green room, Spike's films on Katrina, the first one was
four hours long.
LEE: They both are.
MOORE: They're both four hours, okay. So there's eight hours. You can't go to a movie theater
and watch eight hours.
LEE: Right.
MOORE: They are supposed to be on television, and Americans need to see this truth that
didn't come through in the mainstream media about what was really going on before, during,
and after in New Orleans. And it's powerful, powerful stuff. And I think the support of
the Ford Foundation for this is so incredible because the nightly news now is down to -- it's
an irrelevant thing. I mean, nobody cares anymore what's -- when I read that yesterday
that Scott Pelley was replacing Katie Couric, and I like Scott Pelley, but I just thought,
"Wow, they've just kind of given up, haven't they?" [Laughter] They're just like, "Just
let Scott Pelley read the teleprompter and see how --" [Laughter]
CORTES: Someone said to me that they get all their news in 140 characters from their tweets.
I think just in keeping with the bigger conversation of engagement, audience, Ian, your work with
American Blackout, looking at voter disenfranchisement in Ohio and Florida, and kind of where are
you in terms of what you're creating, how you're going to get audience, and what's your
approach?
IAN INABA: I'm probably the only filmmaker on the stage that, you know, became a filmmaker
after the invention of the internet, or after the popularization of the internet. So I've
always been a digital filmmaker. Like, I only became a filmmaker because I didn't want to
have to rely on getting a movie deal or getting a distribution deal or a TV deal. I knew that
if we were making things even in our bedrooms, we could put them out on the internet and
we could find an audience for them. And so as we ventured into kind of longer form work,
because I had started making longer form work, it was really a battle to get it seen.
I mean, I think that one of the problems that we have in long form documentaries is that
not many of them have happy endings, right? We don't have the Hollywood ending. It's really
hard to write it. And so you're faced with that challenge that people don't want to watch
a depressing movie, and then on the closing credits be told to change their light bulbs
or what the one hopeful thing is that they can possibly do. [Laughter]
So since then, I've actually started to rededicate myself towards shorter format work because
I think that that's where it's more digestible. It's where people -- you can kind of meet
people where they are, you can deliver it online You can package it along with actions.
You can start a communication and a dialogue with people and take them along a pathway
to engagement, to actually creating that positive ending.
So we actually have the opportunity as filmmakers to not only inform people, but then to get
them engaged and let them change the end of the movie. Because the movie we're telling
is the real world, right? So I think that's why it's really powerful. As Michael was saying,
the nightly news is irrelevant, but because of that we also can't wait two years to tell
a story about something that happened five years ago. It's way too late. The history
is being written now instantaneously.
MOORE: I think what you're saying is right on. I so agree with this. And I think the
short form should not be put down as like, "Oh, people have a short attention span, or
whatever, that this is the only way we can reach them." I think short documentaries,
short nonfiction -- I mean, the number one watched short this week in America is not
something that was on the CBS Evening News. It's not something that was on MSNBC or Fox
or whatever. This morning I looked on it. It's over 6 million views as of this morning,
and that's now just in the last four days, 6 million people have watched the best nonfiction
short film I've seen so far this year: President Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner.
INABA: Right. It's true.
MOORE: And his co-star, Scott Meyers.
INABA: Seth Meyers, yeah.
MOORE: Or Seth Meyers. But people -
LEE: And Donald Trump.
MOORE: Huh?
LEE: And Trump!
MOORE: Yeah!
LEE: And cutaways of Donald Trump. [Laughter] His stern face.
MOORE: Because every good story needs an antagonist. [Laughter] And it wouldn't have been as good
as it is had Trump not been there. Thank God for the Washington Post to have invited him
to sit at their table. I just thought that was --
LEE: They gave him a good table, too, right? [Laughter]
MOORE: They gave him a good table!
LEE: Not instructed by anybody.
CORTES: So, Laura, we look at this last week -- when we look at this last week and you've
spent a lot of time obviously with The Oath and Guantanamo Bay, could you have told the
same story with short form? And can you tell us also about -- what I want to know is how
did you navigate that terrain to gain the access that you did to tell the story, and
how it all came to you.
POITRAS: It took a long time to get to build the trust, so I couldn't have done it really
quickly. I mean, it's a story that I filmed in Yemen, and it follows a guy who was bin
Laden's bodyguard for years, for four years, and he's driving a taxicab in Yemen. And it
took a long time for me to actually get the camera in his taxicab. And so it couldn't
have been done quickly, and it probably couldn't have been done soon after 9/11. I don't think
I would have -- I think it would have been -- it was kind of this window where I could
-- where maybe we could digest this history a little bit and look at it maybe a little
bit more like adults. And so it was kind of the -- it needed time, and it needed to be
-- it probably couldn't have happened earlier than it did.
But the process is lengthy. I mean, it takes a long time. I mean, I think there are certain
art forms -- I mean, it takes a long time to write a novel. It takes a long time. And
I think that there's room for all of us: for nonfiction that's working quickly and that
can turn things around, I think it's fantastic. And I think there are some projects that do
need the time to develop and do deserve eight hours or more of our attention, and that don't
have happy endings. I mean, we're not living in a time that everything has a happy ending.
CORTES: Spike, in your transition as a -- from telling narratives to features, what were
the elements that were important for your storytelling?
LEE: I get asked that question a lot, you know, that I wear different hats. I don't
look at it that way. For me it's -- filmmaking is filmmaking, which is storytelling. So whether
I'm doing a commercial with Michael Jordan and we've got 30 seconds to tell the story,
whether it's a music video for Michael Jackson, I tell the story. Whether it's Do the Right
Thing or Malcolm X, three hours, that's telling the story. Documentaries. It doesn't really
trip me up going from form to form. It's telling the story. And all the stuff I've liked, you
know, going to NYU Film School, were great storytellers whether they were documentary
filmmakers like Dave Pennebaker or the Maysles brothers, or Scorsese, Billy Wilder, Elia
Kazan, you know, they tell great stories. So I never, ever worried about the form. And
I had to establish myself as a narrative filmmaker first before I could do documentary. I always
wanted to do documentaries.
CORTES: Whereas Michael is a character in his work, and, you know, we kind of knew you
as Mars, or just as a very strong presence in your dramatic work, why is -- would you
ever --
LEE: No need. I mean, look. Everybody has their own way. I'm not in my documentaries.
All three of them don't have narration. No documentary I've done is narration. We just
let people talk. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's just the style that -- also
I've got to give love to Sam *** who's done -- cut all my documentaries, produced
them with me. So our aesthetic is no narration. No voice of God stuff. I'm not in it. And
we just let the people tell a story. That's the origin of all of them. Four Little Girls,
we wanted to let the parents, relatives, friends, speak about the four little girls that were
blown apart by the sticks of dynamite that were set in the 2nd Street Baptist Church
in Birmingham, Alabama, that September in 1963, and have those people talk about who
those girls might have become if they had been allowed to live.
When the levies broke, I was in -- ironically I was in Venice, and before I left here, I
remember vaguely hearing about a hurricane that was coming, and then my wife, Tanya,
called me and said, "Turn on the television." And then I saw, you know, my brothers and
sisters on the roofs with signs and bed sheets saying "Save us. Help us." And I said, "I
want to find -- I want to talk to those people who were on those roofs." So that's just really
letting the people tell the story. But you've got to find -- you've got to get the right
people, though. If you don't get the right people, you don't have a documentary because
there are no scripts. We don't write scripts. We just go out and shoot.
CORTES: And how did you find the support? Did you just call HBO Films and say, "I want
to do this?"
LEE: Sheila Nevins. She's -- except for Jim Brown: All American was done -- still HBO.
It was Ross Greenburg, that's the sports department. Everything else has come from Sheila Nevins
at HBO.
CORTES: So do you all feel that --
LEE: And also, great assist from Ford Foundation, too. [Laughter] Both times I had to make a
phone call so we could get the thing finished, so I'm glad to be here! [Laughter] Call me
any time! Anytime, anytime.
CORTES: So when Ford doesn't answer people's calls, and you need to go to other sources,
what are the challenges and do you feel that -- how do you have to --
LEE: Hit the Lottery.
CORTES: -- change or adapt? So let's -- you know, I think we need to share. [Laughter]
INABA: I mean, early on, you know, we would take clips from wherever we could get them.
And we'd worry about the rights issues after the fact. That's another beauty about putting
things out on the internet is that there's a lot more leeway that's given in terms of
the quality of the footage. You know, people are now conditioned to watching little 3-by-5
windows on YouTube. So you can get away with a lot more, right? I remember early on we
were making things called guerilla news videos, and we had a pipe coming in with a cable box
-- into a video editor, and we'd just take images straight off the cable networks, and
we'd re-edit them, and then we'd put them back out on the internet and find a little
audience for them. So we do whatever we can to make films and tell the story.
CORTES: You use a lot of citizen journalist, yeah?
INABA: Yeah. And that's another thing. So for American Blackout, it was a great thing
that Michael, you know, put a call out in 2004 for filmmakers to go to Ohio because
what happened in 2000 in Florida really wasn't documented that much. I remember looking through
all the archives of all the news footage, and there was very little footage of people
being turned away at the polls, even though the reporting had substantiated that. And
so when people started showing up with video cameras, everyday people, to document this
stuff, then all of a sudden we had a body of evidence, and we could see these long lines,
particularly in the inner city neighborhoods that were making, you know, particularly black
voters wait for hours in the rain. And so I think that that's the thing, is that now,
you know, more and more of our lives are going to be captured on video. I mean, it's being
done right now. Michael's doing it on his cell phone. And there's going to be a lot
more material to kind of work with. And now the issue is how do you make compelling content
out of it. You know, YouTube will go to light streaming soon. There's going to be people
on their cell phones out in the streets capturing things. We've been seeing it from the Middle
East. Some of the most compelling images that are coming out of the Middle East are from
people's cell phones. And this is the ability to shape our understanding of the world and
contextualize it and no longer rely on news networks that are slashing their camera departments
and no longer have investigative journalists. So more and more we're going to have to rely
on citizen journalists, I think, to capture and document the happenings of our lives.
CORTES: Laura, did you use any -- have you gone -- used this approach?
POITRAS: Just the US military. I have some material that was filmed by the US military
that are in my films, which I guess would count as citizen journalists in some interpretation
of that. But in terms of, I mean, support systems, I've relied on television as a main
-- and then foundations that are here, Creative Capital, Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance.
These are people who have come forward. You know, people don't line up to invest in films
about the occupation of Iraq, at least not the ones that I make. So I'm relying on a
support system that involves broadcast and foundations.
CORTES: And on the question of challenges.
POITRAS: I mean, where do you want to start?
CORTES: Jump in.
CORTES: I mean, it's hard. It doesn't ever get easy, right? I mean, you think you've
made a film, and you think, okay, well, you've made a film, and you know what to expect.
And you think, okay, the next one, the next one should be -- it should get easy. But it
doesn't. I mean, making art isn't easy. And you learn when you're confronted with a whole
new set of challenges, like, "Oh! Oh God, I didn't have to worry about this on the last
one." And then you have to, you know, get past those. So every, you know, work of art
you're confronted with challenges.
MOORE: I don't have these problems because capitalism works in my favor. [Laughter] And
this is a system that I don't believe in. I think it's an immoral economic system. It's
unfair. It's unjust. It's not democratic. Doesn't mean I don't think people should be
able to go and do their own thing and make money and better themselves and do well. When
I make that statement about capitalism, people don't understand what that means. But the
form of capitalism we have now is to -- it's set up so there's a pie on the table, and
one guy gets to take nine slices of the pie, and then the last slice is left for everybody
else to try and grab the crumbs from. So -- But I get to make my movies because they make
money, and so the studios -- I get money for my films because they make -- it's just a
simple thing. I make the money, so they give me money to make the next one. It makes them
money.
So I have different kinds of challenges. When I set out to make a film about the health
care system, suddenly none of the insurance companies will insure my film because I'm
making a film about the insurance companies. And --
CORTES: What did you do?
MOORE: Well, I got held up.
CORTES: Did you go to Canada and get -- [Laughter] See? That's why I'm here.
MOORE: No. Well, I usually do have to go to other countries to get help. But in that case,
I found like the one insurance company that's run by a Democrat [Laughter] and -- But I
still -- like, I'll give you a -- I'll just tell you what it is. The premium -- we have
to get what's called Errors and Omission insurance, all of us do for our films. And that -- and
part of that is because the studio needs to be covered, but also the theaters need to
be covered. So no theater in America will show a movie that has not been insured. So
if the insurance companies don't want to insure a film, that means that film will never be
seen. It won't be shown on -- HBO won't show it. Theater chains won't show it. So the actual
power of what you see is in the hands of the insurance companies when it comes to this
E&O insurance.
I paid about $60,000 for the insurance for Fahrenheit 9/11. That's a film you think would
have a very high premium. You'd think I'd be sued a lot, et cetera, et cetera. Of course,
you know -- and wasn't. The next film, Sicko, I couldn't get anybody. They just completely
refused, and they thought that's how they would shut me down until this one guy. And
he said, "I'm a small company. I'm going to have to charge you a horrible premium because
this could wipe me out." And so the insurance was something like 4- to $500,000 from 60,000
for Fahrenheit, which seemed like a much more dangerous film than Sicko, which was just
stating the obvious, that, you know, if you get sick you should have a right to see a
doctor and not have to worry about paying for it. So that's a --
But I think what they were saying about citizen journalists, even the footage from the military,
I get -- some of the best stuff that's sent to me is sent from soldiers in Afghanistan,
Iraq. They film the truth of what they see. They send it to me. I put it up on my website.
And I'm able to show the American public things that the military won't show, the mainstream
media won't show. I'm able to show that. That's why they've had to change their story
about the killing of Osama in just -- it's changed now each day because they videotaped
it. And they know that the chance of that videotape eventually getting out is going
to show that he didn't use a woman as a human shield, there was no fire fight in his room,
he didn't -- he wasn't armed, et cetera, et cetera. And so they've had to try and get
the story straight and get ahead of what they know will be the transparency of the digital
revolution that we now live in because that will tell the truth eventually.
LEE: It will get out, too.
MOORE: Huh?
LEE: It will get out.
MOORE: And it'll get out. Of course it will get out.
CORTES: Before we go to questions, I do want to go back to the beginning and to Sundance
and to the question of how do we make this work, maintain its relevance, but at the same
time find audience. And kind of what are your thoughts? And whether it's your theatrical
or it's on television, but where you are in terms of how you look to engage and expand
audience. So I'll go to you, Ian.
INABA: Well, I always have one general principle, which is you've got to tell people something
they don't know because there is so much information and misinformation that's out there, that
that really is the thing that people are going to remember, right? Just like, "What did I
learn from this experience?" But then you've got to make it compelling, so you have to
figure out some way, whether it's through drama or comedy or motion graphics, to keep
people engaged there.
In terms of finding the audiences, you know, the last four -- three or four years, I've
actually been embedded with organizers who have shown me really the art of using the
internet to engage people and to create communities, longer standing communities because once people
have taken an action around a certain issue, you know that they're going to be relevant
or interested in content that's related to that issue. So we can start to build audiences,
and we can start to identify people. I mean, that's the thing I think that we really haven't
done yet in terms of using the internet as an interactive medium, is really taking documentary
to the next level, which is to find audiences, to engage audiences, and to kind of include
them in that longer term.
POITRAS: I think in terms of looking at social media and how it plays in, I got a little
bit overwhelmed at some point, that I feel that I was getting a lot of stuff that all
felt like promotion. So I think we should avoid like just dealing with promotion. I
think we should say that this is information that actually people want in their lives,
and will enrich them. And so that's like, for instance, like twitter, I learned so much
about news because I get to choose what information, who's going to be distributing information
and not selling me something. And I spend a lot of time. Like that's where it seems
as much as I check e-mail, I'm looking and seeing what's happening in the world, what's
happening in Egypt, what's happening in Yemen right now. And so it has to be something that
we are -- that people actually want, not just that we're trying to use these tools to promote
things.
LEE: Well, I think you can ask that same question of any art form: How do you get a better audience
or more engaged? I think it just comes down to storytelling and not everybody can tell
a good story. Sometimes you're making a film that it's not even a good story. So first
you've got to know what a good story is. You've got to get that from the get-go. And what
Michael's been able to do is that, you've got to, you can, no matter how serious the
subject matter is, a little humor is not going to hurt. Some of my favorite films, very serious
stuff that you still find humor in them. So I think that's a good formula for trying to
broaden out an audience.
CORTES: Are we going to see humor in your next -- What's your next -- do you have another
doc on deck?
LEE: No. But I mean... Nothing I can speak of. But, just look at the two New Orleans
stuff. I mean, people down there are hilarious, but they just lost their home, children. But
they still were -- a lot of funny stuff, which I wasn't telling them to be funny. I was just
filming them, and, you know, that's part of who they are.
MOORE: I think I agree with him. I think humor -- I don't know why more people don't understand
that that's such an incredible vehicle with which to deliver things. And I think that
that -- I mean, in twitter and these other devices, I've in my own way figured out how
to use them. And when I smell a rat or something doesn't seem right, when they say that they
buried him at sea according to Muslim tradition, I'm like, you know -- so I just sent out a
tweet that said, "Yes, I've been to many friends' funerals in Detroit, many Muslim funerals,
and afterwards we all get on the chopper and dump the body in Lake Erie." [Laughter] I
mean, that may seem disrespectful to some people, but I'm using humor to make a very
serious point, that I think I'm not -- my leg's being pulled a bit here.
And I agree with Spike. I think that all -- you could ask that question you asked of all art
forms, "How do we build a bigger audience?" I'll give you a good example. Opera. I'd say
ten, five years ago, to me it seemed like opera for the most part was going to be one
of these dying art forms. It was going to be a dead art form some time in the 21st century
because there wasn't a new generation coming up learning to like or to go to opera. And
people like me come from factory towns in Michigan, have no idea what opera is, never
went to one, never understood it. Finally I got dragged to one at Lincoln Center after
ten years of being here. I was really blown away by it. I just was like -- it was like
an incredible evening.
And so now I have my own art house in Michigan that I restored and I run, and I beam in the
opera. It's up in northern Michigan in the middle of nowhere. Nobody's been to an opera.
I can't sell enough tickets. I have 600 seats in the theater. It's sold out. Every Saturday
we beam it in from Lincoln Center. We do the re-run of it. They can't get enough of it.
And these are just factory workers, farmers. But I knew that if they were just exposed
to it, they would go [Makes sound] enough of them would go -- just as if you would see
her film The Oath, it's -- you are sitting on the edge of your seat, your jaw is open.
You cannot -- it's like, "Wow! This is incredible. How did --" And she just drove around with
Osama's bodyguard and the trial of his driver that took place. You just start to -- I mean,
all this information that you learn and you start to see it in a different way, I think
it's so important.
I think with the mission of the Ford Foundation, with whatever you're doing here with this
JustFilms, is so critical that part of this is how to find that audience, how to get it.
Because I believe the audience is there. There's just a disconnect. They're not exposed to
it. They're not given a chance to try it out. I know once they try it out -- It's like I
tell people all the time about Spike's film, Get On the Bus. You know, it's not a film
that a lot of people saw, but I'll always tell people about it. "You've got to see this."
And every time they go, "Wow! How did I miss that?" You know, it's --
LEE: It's easy. [Laughter] No ads!
MOORE: Yeah, but it's -- but I believe --
LEE: Thank God for DVD, right?
MOORE: Yeah! And once 1,000 people see it, those 1,000 tell ten people each, "You should
check this out." And now 10,000 have seen it, and then 100,000 see it. And it's one
of the critical things that the Ford Foundation has the ability to do: to be the spark, to
be the engine-that-can kind of rev up this great information that's being put out by
these documentary filmmakers. And I know the audience is there, and they will see it. And
last summer at my film festival -- I just want to put this in there -- that a group
of us, about two dozen documentary filmmakers, we formed a group called the Documentary Insurgency.
And our mission is going to be to get nonfiction film seen by a mainstream American audience
because we believe the audience will love it if they just have a chance to check it
out and see it.
CORTES: And is it about community screenings? What are the kind of steps that you're going
to use?
MOORE: Well, we're going to start with Mike's Movie Night. And I'm going to set up a deal
with 300 theaters around the country where on Monday nights you'll be able to go to your
LEE: During football season?
MOORE: Huh?
LEE: During football season?
MOORE: Yeah. [Laughter]
LEE: I don't know, man. I'm going to be ...
INABA: You can catch it on DVD, Spike. [Laughter]
LEE: Monday night football!
MOORE: When I was a kid, PBS had I think it was their American Film Theater or some -- they
made these films. Do you remember this? They did The Man in the Glass
Booth, and The Iceman Cometh?
CORTES: American Masters.
MOORE: No, it wasn't American Masters.
SEVERAL: American Playhouse.
CORTES: Playhouse.
MOORE: American Playhouse.
INABA: Right.
MOORE: And they had -- and it was a subscription series, remember that? And it was on Monday
and Tuesday nights -- Tuesday for the people who were watching football -- I'm just starting
small.
LEE: I'm just messing with you.
MOORE: But my idea is that if I -- the idea is to beam this in like the opera, into 300
towns across the country. I'll introduce the film and the filmmaker via Skype on the screen
or wherever we're at, you know, and then show the film. And then the director will be, at
the end of the film will do a Q&A, and you'll be able to actually ask questions, whether
you're in Boise or Iowa City or wherever of the filmmaker at the end. And then have -- and
the idea is to have Tuesday night as a sort of bump night to where if there are so many
people that see it on -- that can't get in, we can get them in on Tuesday. So I mean,
I'm going to do my part to help be a catalyst to bring exposure to these films that I see
that I absolutely love and I just go crazy when --
And not just American films. One of the best documentaries in the last decade is a film
called Czech Dream. And these Czech documentary filmmakers decided to see what would happen
if we built a Walmart type store here in Prague, except it wasn't really going to -- they built
a fake store, but they filmed the whole campaign to get all the citizens of Prague, because
now we're in capitalism and we're going to have like a Walmart. And everybody got so
-- and it's just an amazing thing to watch this transformation of a society that just
was getting led to believe that they had to buy a lot of stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff
that was going to make life, you know, better. It's just a genius film if you get a chance
to see it.
CORTES: So Monday nights.
MOORE: Yeah, starting this next year. That's one of the things that I'm going to do. But
I think that there are things -- other things that can be done to just -- you've just got
to prime the pump a little bit like we did with the opera. You know, I've created thousands
of opera -- Metropolitan Opera fans up in Traverse City, Michigan, in Kalkaska, Michigan,
you know. I mean, you have to understand these are -- this is in a county that voted twice
for Bush and again for McCain. It's conservative. It's slightly redneck. It's not Ann Arbor.
[Laughter]
CORTES: And on that note, we're going to go to Q&A. Is someone traveling with a microphone?
So where's our first question? Back there?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah. I have a question, and also really what I have is a recommendation.
I think that -- oh, I'm Pat Cruz from Harlem Stage, from that community that's also a part
of New York City. I just wanted to say. But what I did want to say is that I think that
there are organizations like ours all over the city, all over this country, that would
welcome programming by documentary filmmakers. One of the smartest things we've ever done
is form an alliance with the Black Documentary Collective, and we showed American Blackout,
among many other films. We're doing it on a monthly basis. It's great programming. It's
a great way to engage the community. And I encourage all of us to do those kind of cross-disciplinary
activities and also extend a reach such that community is in fact the world that we all
inhabit. So I just wanted to say thank you for your work, but also to say that each of
us here who are doing programming, doing presenting, can work with you to make those -- to bring
those works to communities that want to see them. Thank you. [Applause]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My name is Malika. And I'm with an organization called Breakthrough
that uses media arts and culture to do human rights education in India and the United States.
For five years, we did something called the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India, which
showcased human rights documentary and it was in five major cities, and then for the
rest of the year it traveled to small towns, rural areas, colleges across the country,
to like between 80 and 90 venues. And these were films from all over the world.
And what I wanted to do is sort of expand the idea of audience to a global audience.
We've talked a lot during the day about a globalizing world, how barriers are breaking
down. And what was most extraordinary for us as an organization was, you know, a lot
of these films were in other languages and if they were subtitled, they were subtitled
in English, and a lot of the audiences watching these films didn't read English and didn't
understand the language that the film was in, but they followed the story. They followed
the story and they connected their stories to the stories of people from all over the
world. And it was really quite an extraordinary thing. Sometimes you would have to rent like
a video van with a generator with a big television screen because there was no electricity in
the neighborhood, you know, to show some of these films. And like the entire village would
come out and watch these films.
We were never able to raise resources for this film festival, and it kept getting bigger
and bigger. Then Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Gulf countries, wanted to make the film festival
part of their orbit. And it just got so big and with no resources, after five years we
were like, "You know, we can't do this anymore." And people still ask us, "What happened to
the Tri-Continental Film Festival?" So I just want to, you know, frame the idea of audience
in sort of this global context because now these stories are so interconnected.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I just want to -- the panel spoke a lot about sort of the institutional
aspects of documentary-making and showcasing. But I wanted to hear more about your thoughts
on a lot of people are having a sort of dialogue about YouTube, the frontlines, for example,
in terms of real people documenting, and that being considered real stories that are sort
of unedited for the purpose of any commercialism, and how do you see that-
LEE: What do you mean unedited? You just roll the camera and show everything?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I mean, they're not -- they're in it for real sort of in a way documenting
what's going on in their countries for what we can call I guess some truth in journalism.
And so this has been I've noticed a provocative argument in the making of documentaries, especially
in journalistic photography, particularly in New Orleans, I've seen a lot of unedited
sort of non-filmmaker footage that sort of contributes to really telling a story.
LEE: Well, footage is not a documentary though.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, no, I understand that.
LEE: I mean, we used a lot of-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm asking about you-
LEE: We use a lot of stuff that people shot, but it's not a documentary, you know?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Correct. But in terms of using that, in terms of using that footage.
Because you usually film your own footage or, you know, maybe license excerpts-
LEE: No. You get footage for a documentary film, man, you get footage wherever you get
it from.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right. But I'm talking about, for example, on YouTube, there could be an
excerpt that's -- we're talking about short form -- that can be an unedited short form
piece-
MOORE: And we can get stuff from YouTube now.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: -that is a documentarian in a way.
MOORE: I mean, we'll take footage from any-
LEE: If it's good, you take it.
MOORE: If it's the right stuff, it doesn't matter where it came from.
CORTES: Are you anti-sampling?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. So as everybody's saying, obviously financing and reaching audiences
are the huge obstacles for documentary filmmakers. And, you know, Michael, Spike, you are among
the best known of documentary filmmakers because both of you have a brand, Spike because of
your acclaim as a narrative filmmaker before going into documentary, and Mike, I think
partly because not only are the films good in both cases -- and I don't mean to negate
what you've done -- but because you have become a character in your films, and you both speak
out, and so you have a huge persona that is both political, as well as artistic and cultural.
That -- people now talk about, "What's Michael Moore's next documentary?" Spike's movie about
New Orleans, that helps for financing, and that's why you guys get eyeballs. I mean,
because there are a lot of great documentary films. I didn't know about yours before today,
and I will look for it. Would you encourage other documentary filmmakers to become brands,
to become personas, to become -- you know, there's a tendency with documentary filmmaking
for the documentarian to take the back seat, but in this crowded marketplace where you've
got to figure out how to sell, would you encourage filmmakers to become more prominent in and
of themselves?
LEE: I wouldn't.
MOORE: I agree. I would not.
LEE: I mean, that was, I don't know if you could use Michael and myself as examples.
You have to do what's best for you, and if you're trying to put this stuff out front,
and you ain't got it, then you're doing it-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, but I'm saying -- yeah?
LEE: -you do a disservice to the film and the subject matter. And so, you know, I teach
at NYU, and I tell my students there's no one way to do everything. So he does it my
way -- I mean, Mike, you do it your way, I do it my way, but that's not saying --
MOORE: I do do it your way. [Laughter] Freudian slip.
LEE: No, but to think that someone started off as a filmmaker, I'm going to do it, I'm
going to be like Michael, I mean, I think that's disastrous to me.
MOORE: I agree. Can I also say-
LEE: Go ahead, go ahead.
MOORE: When I was in Flint and I was starting to make Roger & Me and I didn't know how to
make a film, I didn't go to film school. One of the things I did was I bought Spike's book,
"Spike Lee's Gotta Have It." And it's a book on the making of She's Gotta Have It. And
that became my textbook of -- I really just followed his way, even though I was making
a documentary, all the way through to -- you know, I'm going to need a lawyer. Who did
he get? Okay, I went and got Arthur Klein [Laughter] I just did -- I didn't know Spike.
I just, whatever Spike did. And I just told the crew, "Whatever Spike says to do, that's
what we're going to do."
LEE: But here's what Michael doesn't know. I was just doing what Jim Jarmusch did. [Laughter]
Because Jim Jarmusch was two years ahead of me at NYU, and so when you're in a film school,
you know, you're not -- even though Scorsese went there, Oliver Stone, we didn't know who
he was. But when you have somebody that you went to school with and makes it, you know,
with Strangers in Paradise, so then it becomes doable and whatever. Jim went to Cannes, and
we just did whatever he did.
MOORE: But I think it's a mistake for a filmmaker to put -- like Spike said, they really better
think about that because the camera is not a friendly place, and it doesn't like a lot
of people. And by the way, I'm not a character. That is me in those films. And that --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I mean ...
MOORE: I'm not-
LEE: I knew you were going to say something about that! [Laughter] I was waiting to see
how long it was going to take!
CORTES: It seems like you reinvent yourself, though.
MOORE: No, no.
CORTES: There's no reinvention of you?
MOORE: No. There's no -- I know. I look, and I'm the same way I was in Roger & Me, except
a little heavier. I'm just the same-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Your persona is part of the movies.
MOORE: You have been with me for an hour now. Do you see really that much difference between
what you see on the screen and what's sitting right here? I'm -- really, it only -- in fact,
I think that I've been able to get the audience and lucky to have the audience I have because
I've tried to be very true to myself and be myself. And I think it's not -- I've never
liked seeing myself in the film. I mean, come on, if you look like me, you wouldn't want
to see yourself blown up 50 feet on a screen. So it's painful. I have a sign in the edit
room that says, "When in doubt, cut me out." [Laughter] I'm serious. And I'm down -- in
my last film, I'm down -- I'm in Capitalism: A Love Story less than 10 minutes because
I'm constantly trying to keep me out of the way. And I come in when I think it's necessary
because nobody else is going to take the crime scene tape and wrap it around the New York
Stock Exchange. So I'll do that. But- [Laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We've been talking all day about arts and social change, and I think
for most of this panel, we've been talking primarily about the art-making itself, the
storytelling, how do you find an audience, how do you get them to see the film, and sort
of the transformation that happens when someone sees the film. I think Ian started to touch
on it before, but I was wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about the social
change aspect, and what do you do once people have seen the film, been provoked by some
of the thoughts, and turn that into kind of an in-organizing movement and kind of move
that towards action that might lead to more systemic change?
LEE: Well, you know, before someone else answer that, not everybody film is made -- not every
documentary is made to have a social movement behind it, you know. So that's not just across
the board. I think that stuff really depends on the type of film.
MOORE: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, there's no social movement or cause behind that, and
yet it's one of the best -- again, one of the best documentaries of the last decade.
And it's mostly not stuff that he shot, but the found footage of the man who shot himself
with the grizzly bears up in Alaska.
INABA: But I think for the films that -- you know, where there is a social purpose or there
is potentially a spark that happens in the audience that can be activated then, you know,
we've tried a lot of different tactics of, you know, in American Blackout, when Michael
made the call out for filmmakers to go to Ohio, it was called Video of the Vote, and
we continued that with the people that really were passionate about the issue after seeing
the film. And so now that's an ongoing movement of people on every election day who go out
with video cameras and document any problems in their neighborhoods. And so there are ways
to figure out what do the people who are activated by the film, what do they want to do, what
do they care about. And that's really the role of an organizer, right, to figure that
out and to figure out how to engage those people.
MOORE: But if you put the social cause ahead of the filmmaking, ahead of the art, the film
will suck.
INABA: That's right.
MOORE: And nobody will go see it.
INABA: Right.
MOORE: And their nose will tell them that this feels like a sermon or a lecture, and
if you want a lecture, you should sign up for a college class. If you want a sermon,
you should go to church or temple. And if you want -- but if you want -- I mean, people
go to the -- you've got respect why they're going to a movie theater. And if you want
to be a filmmaker, then make a film. And if you do the filmmaking part right, what you're
trying to say socially or politically will come through with flying colors if you have
made a film, a film.
CORTES: So we have time for one last question. It better be killer-diller.
PANELIST FROM "ARTISTS ON THE FRONTLINES OF SOCIAL CHANGE" SESSION AND AUTHOR ARIEL DORFMAN:
I'm going to finish this. [Laughter] I just wanted to say, and we talked about this, Michael,
a couple of years ago in the Full Frame Festival, I think, you know about that. And what you're
saying I think is very important for this audience also to hear. One of the reasons
why you cannot decide ahead of time what the message is going to be is because then you're
killing the film. Because it turns out that the reason why you're doing the art is because
you don't know what the hell. You don't know. It's a search. It's a quest. I think Clive
spoke before about quest, question. And I think that's what really is -- that's why
it's so organic that you're in those films. It's not because you want to show yourself
off. It's because that's how you told the story. It was the only way. Nobody else was
going to do that, right?
So I think it's very important for us to understand that the filmmakers, the artists, the musicians,
the writers -- especially the writes because those are the ones who are the most lost of
all, right, I mean, in the sense that they spend hours and hours by themselves in the
madness of their own studio, if they're lucky enough to have a studio -- trying to figure
out what the world is. Just like when you, right, I mean, when you did My Country, My
Country, you had no idea how that was going to turn out, right? And one of the things
that I think is really wonderful about documentary filmmaking is that there's not one great documentary
film, not one, that is not changed in the middle of it. Right? Remember, Michael, you've
told me this many times.
You set out in one direction, and everything moves just like my own characters come and
they say, "No way! You think I'm good. I'm really evil. I'm going to do something to
really kill that person." I mean, they just come up and do something like that, right?
So I would think because there are so many funders here and so many organizations, don't
only fund the art that knows what it's doing because very often the art that doesn't know
what it's doing is the greatest art of all. [Applause]
MOORE: I think what he just -- I can't put a large enough underscore and exclamation
point on what Ariel just said. You know, you don't know me, but maybe you think that I
would -- I start out a film, I have strong political convictions, I have a didactic way
of looking at things. If you actually knew me, you'd be very surprised to know many things
about me that I'm not any of that, and I live my life in a very different way, actually
a very conservative way.
And I -- what he's referring to, this conversation that we had, I told him that I set out to
make Bowling for Columbine because I wanted to show how if we just had more gun control
laws in this country, we'd have less *** and less of this tragedy. And so I set out
with that idea. And this has happened in every one of my films. I set out with this idea,
taking essentially the liberal position on we need more gun control, and I end up in
Canada, and I find out by going to their statistics office in Ottawa that the Canadians actually
have more guns per capita in their homes than we do. There are about 10-million-plus homes,
households in Canada. There are 7 million guns. That is not the percentage in this country
in terms of per capita in the household. And I thought -- and they have 200 gun murders
a year in a nation of 35 million people. They have all these guns laying around, and they
don't kill each other.
And it shocked me, and I just like started thinking, "Oh my God! Maybe the National Rifle
Association is right when they say guns don't kill people. People kill people." And I started
to rethink the film, and I thought, that's essentially what is going on here. But I'm
going to alter a bit what the NRA says to "Guns don't kill people. Americans kill people."
[Laughter] That there's something about us. Other countries have guns. In Switzerland
it's the law because they don't have a standing army, the male head of household -- you know
what that law is? There has to be a gun because they need to call up a militia. There are
all these guns in Switzerland. The Swiss do not kill each other. Why?
And so the film became an exploration as to why we do that, and I end by asking Charlton
Heston that question, and then his answer was -- he gave the answer, was because we've
got essentially all these ethnic people that Canada and these other countries don't have.
And then he heard what he said, and then he walked off the set.
But every film has been like that. Sicko, I started out to go after the fact that why
do we have 50 million people in this country that don't have insurance. It's a horrible
thing. And then I decided halfway through the film, we're not going to put anybody in
this film without insurance. You know, if we have to make a film to tell people there's
something wrong about that, then we should just leave, you know. I said, "No, the film
is about people who have insurance," because I started hearing all these stories from people
who have insurance and then when they get sick, the insurance does everything they can
to find a preexisting condition, to find some way out of paying the bill, to find some way
to screw people. And actually that -- you don't think it's going to happen until it
happens to you because you think you're covered. You think you have this so-called full coverage.
And that became the film.
So my encouragement to all filmmakers, documentary filmmakers and any kind of artist is to do
exactly what Ariel said and allow yourself to do sort of this free-fall into finding
-- asking the questions and finding the answers, and not starting out knowing so much in advance
what this is going to be about. Because the problem as you said with this -- with grant-making
and all that, you've got to fill out these forms and you've got to say, "Here's what
the film's going to do" and all that. And then you become a slave to what I promised
the Ford Foundation I was going to do. But what if halfway through the film I find out
that actually it's not better gun control laws we need, it's an examination of who we
are as a people.
CORTES: Thank you. I'm going to thank our panelists. [Applause]