Abstract
In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta converse with filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth about his documentary film Inequality for All (2013), which is a passionate argument on behalf of the middle class. The film features Robert Reich—professor, best-selling author, and Clinton cabinet member—as he demonstrates how the widening income gap has a devastating impact on the American economy. The film is an intimate portrait of a man whose lifelong goal remains protecting those who are unable to protect themselves, as Reich explains how the massive consolidation of wealth by a precious few threatens the viability of the American workforce and the foundation of democracy itself. In this dialogue with the film director, Kornbluth describes his personal socioeconomic background that inspired this project, his creative collaboration with Reich in attempt to evoke critical consciousness among the public about the truth of income inequality, and his vision of creating an emotionally intimate story that balances righteous despair and anger with a tone of political hope.
It’s exciting to interview you, because your film targets the class issue more than any other film we have focused on.
I’ll share a little about my background that led to that. I was raised reasonably politically. My parents were both communists in New York, and I hated it. I was very resistant to the political framework that everything was put in because it made me feel particularly disempowered as a young person. In fact, I rejected politics and activism because I just didn’t feel like what I had to say was connected to what was necessarily cultural or political, and I never felt like any of my political views had an effect on the outcome of elections. As I grew up, I started making comedy films and became particularly obsessed with the flaws of the human condition—the complexities that make people interesting moreso than political activism. The dogma of political activism felt to me somewhat at odds with the humanistic point of view that I saw as my own.
But as I got older, and particularly after the economy crashed in 2008, an interesting thing happened—which was bringing this humanistic point of view to issue-based material in my filmmaking. This creates a different experience in watching film for people, because the big problem with issue-based content is that people experience it a lot like eating their spinach. But what I try to do is make films that are entertaining and personal character journeys at the same time—tackling that “big picture” stuff. So I’ve tried to put those two things together for myself, and I think that has been helpful. Tone for me is probably a much bigger deal than it is for a lot of issue-based filmmakers. I like things that are, for lack of a better word, likable. I like to think about the characters I’m putting forward. I want to feel like there’s warmth in the movies that I’m creating. And that sense of tone—the fact that I think about it at all—creates a different experience. Talking to other issue-based filmmakers, that doesn’t seem to be anything they think about. And for me it’s a big issue. Like, what is the tactile and emotional experience one has with the film, in addition to what the overt message is? That’s the subject of much of my time and energy as I’m making the projects.
You said you felt disempowered growing up. Can you say in what way? Was that because your parents were both communists, and you felt like you were just getting propaganda all the time?
This will be fun, talking to therapists about this stuff. What an amazing gift to a filmmaker who is obsessed with this stuff anyway and doesn’t get to talk about it enough! I grew up in Washington Heights in New York City, and at the time I was just about the only White kid in a virtually all Dominican, Puerto Rican, and African American community. And it was at the time a very low socioeconomic neighborhood. It was the place where crack cocaine entered the country, and also the place where breakdancing started. And these aren’t necessarily things that I was very good at—either drug trade or breakdancing. I felt a little bit out of place. It turns out my parents were intellectual types, and we were in this kind of lower socioeconomic stature, and as I developed I felt like I just didn’t have a home. This happens to a lot of people who wind up in the arts—you just don’t feel like you connect with anything. It’s like, where are my people? Are they White, upper middle-class, intellectual types? Are they the kind of people who are from the streets of New York City? I felt like I could hang a little bit in both worlds, but neither one was certainly my own. My parents both died when I was reasonably young, and we wound up in a small farm town in Michigan, in what I call militia breeding ground Michigan. Everybody was White; nobody was Jewish. The big difference was if you were a Lutheran or Catholic. That was the only differentiator, and just how Republican you were was also a big dividing line. And so, you take an atheistic Jewish kid and put them in that background situation, and I just didn’t feel like I had a home. I guess I’m talking about politics in the New York zone or I’m talking big picture stuff in this Michigan zone, but I felt accepted in neither one. I’ve heard this story often from artists of color—that they didn’t feel plugged in or like they knew how to do it. But the idea that you could tell your own story was a tremendously empowering experience. Obviously, my experience isn’t exactly the same as theirs, but I found some similar ideas there. I just felt like nobody was telling this story, my story.
I also didn’t grow up in a particularly artistically encouraging household. Nobody was making me paint or go see movies. I didn’t really see any of this stuff growing up. But then I saw a Mike Leigh movie called Life is Sweet. It was an “independent movie,” and it was speaking about really messed up people trying their best to muddle their way through life. The film’s depiction of the sense of struggle with who you are, the self, felt magical to me. And in the film, the parents were both trying to help their kids work that struggle out. I felt some empathy towards all of them, and that was it. I lost my mind. I was like, oh my god, nobody told me you could do that. I felt like the dam just broke instantly for me. And I felt like that was all I wanted to do ever again. We talk about empowerment, it’s this feeling like I must tell this story, you know? There’s a story that’s tied up inside me, whatever that is. I didn’t even know if I knew what it was, but I felt like that was all that seemed to matter. Everything else seems like a waste of time.
It is really helpful to hear how disempowerment can turn into empowerment as an artist. How did that translate into you making Inequality for All? What did that film mean for you in this context?
Well I can tell you I didn’t study economics, and I had never made a documentary before I made that film. What happened was I was sitting around with my friends in 2008 and talking about what had happened when the economy crashed. We were all worried about it. I didn’t know if I was going to have a job or be able to survive going forward. I was desperately watching the news. And I felt that the more I watched the news, the less I understood about what had happened in the economic crisis. I was also at a particular stage in my filmmaking in which I was disenchanted with the Hollywood machine, and I didn’t feel like I was on my way to doing something of meaning in that world. So I was up in the Bay Area talking about this stuff. And then a few things happened. I worked with Robert Reich in a comedy called Love and Taxes. He and I got along fantastically well. We shared a sense of humor and just immediately hit it off.
And then I was watching the news and saw this graph, which eventually was in Inequality for All. It’s what I call the “bridge graph”—the two peak years of economic inequality. I had the experience of “Ah ha” when I saw the graph, and immediately thought about my journey growing up in Washington Heights and Michigan. I thought: oh my god, that explains more about my experience with not just the financial crash, but the kind of economic and political situation that occurred to me over my lifetime, than anything else has. I’m 46, so basically a creature from Reagan onwards. If you grew up lower to middle class from then until now, your experience has been getting worse and worse. It started out bad, and it’s gotten worse in a certain way. The folks that I knew growing up have had the same life story: this story of struggle, struggle, struggle, in which their parents were doing better than we did. And there is some sense of underlying despair. So when I saw that graph, I thought: holy smokes! That’s what happened!
So at first I thought this film was going to be a personal story for me. But I was talking with Reich about it, and he said, “I think about this stuff all the time. I’ve been obsessed with it for 40 years.” I actually didn’t know all of his background yet at that point. I knew that he was in the Clinton administration and Secretary of Labor, but I didn’t know his story. I didn’t know him as a human being. The deeper we got into it, the more clear it became to me that his journey could be told against this larger story of widening economic inequality. When I teach film, I teach students that a narrative isn’t an issue. A narrative needs to be a sympathetic protagonist with a goal and obstacles to achieving that goal. So you’ve got to know who the person is, what they want, and what’s in their way—that’s how I understand storytelling. It comes very much from the narrative fiction-based world. So if I want to make a movie about economic inequality, I don’t think to myself that I’m going to make a film about an issue, because I don’t understand that as a film. I think about it as—how does it map against a character’s journey? So when I saw Robert Reich and his story, and I lined it up against economic inequality, what Reich asked me was: “is this going to be about me or is it going to be about the issue?” I said that if I have to choose, I don’t know how to make the film. It’s basically got to be both or else there’s no film to be made. There was a sense for a long time that it was an either or choice—about making a film about the issue or making the film about a character. But for the way my brain works, it had to be the same thing or else it wouldn’t work. So when that fell into place with Reich—with all his experience with the Clinton administration, working in the 70s, and tracking him through time—I felt like it was something new in the issues space. And I felt like I knew what the film was.
It also felt like a personal film for me—telling the story that I was dying to tell. And it was magical to me that you could do both at one time. Because if I look back at my film career, it was about trying to choose between whether I wanted to be a “commercial filmmaker,” or one who was driven by personal choices. And this was the first time for me when the two things were very consciously in line in a way that felt unexpected. So it was Reich’s story, but I felt personally connected to it in every way. The big story of widening economic inequality, in a strange way, is very much not only the story of my life, but the story that I thought I was maybe born to tell. It’s like I grew up with this background of economic workers versus capital political activism, but I rejected it. And then I came back to it at this later stage in my life.
You said that when you saw that graph in the news, it was an “Ah ha” moment which explained more to you than anything else had. Psychologically, your film seems to be about something that’s been shrouded in mystery coming to light. Is that what you were trying to do through your filmmaking, replicate that “Ah ha” moment for other people? And is there something therapeutic about that?
Wow interesting. That is exactly what I was trying to do. I talked about it like unveiling a mystery. We had over 200 hours of footage for the film—you’re looking through a dozen lectures of Reich throughout the term, and I filmed them all. Reich talks about this mystery happening in the 1970s with the economy, right. So structurally, you have this sense in the film when you’re telling people that widening economic inequality is real at the beginning, and laying it out in statistical facts. Although it has been questioned by certain people of different political persuasions, I was trying to make a nonpolitical statement that says: Shut down everything that you’re bringing politically to the table, and just look at this. This is what happened.
But now let’s talk about: why did this happen? And so much about it to me was a mystery. I thought of myself as the first audience for this film. In fact, it was lucky that I hadn’t had the economic background which would lead me to think people knew more coming into this story than they did. Because I didn’t know that the standing argument was X but really was Y. It seemed to me like you really wanted to walk people through that in a way that made sense to them, the same way I needed it walked through for it to make sense to me the first time. I needed to know why it happened that way. It’s shocking, this widening economic inequality. And it’s pervasive, all over the place. But like, what was the deal? How did that happen? So I really wanted to make sure that I honored all of the questions that I had throughout the process. I didn’t want to be smarter than the film. I didn’t want to make a film that felt like it knew more than the people who should watch it. But I also didn’t want to dumb it down. For my collaborators, that felt like competing goals for the film. But to me, it wasn’t. I wanted it to seem literate and honor intelligent people, but not to assume they knew anything more than they knew.
And there are a few therapeutic pieces to that. Firstly, I’ve always said it releases endorphins to hear the truth as a film. It feels good to have your paradigm shifted and to have this argument laid out clearly, and in an entertaining way. It releases endorphins; I feel good when I watch a thing like that. I’ve always liked to have the film idea seem true, and to have its storytelling structure change the way I think. In a way, that’s a differentiator for me from other filmmakers. I love the world of ideas. I love talking about things. I love it when somebody lays something out for me that feels like it speaks to some truth. People have talked to me about physics this way sometimes. I have some friends who are math and physics type people, and they say, you find some beauty in an argument. Even if it doesn’t have any practical application. I’m one of those people. I like that stuff, and I feel like that maps onto the film fairly well. And maybe that’s why it helps people to see it. When I was playing the film at the Sundance Film Festival, the head of Sundance is a really smart person who presumably reads newspapers all the time. She’s kind of a reserved person. She came up to me after the first screening of the film and gave me this monster hug, and she said, “I get it. I understand it now. I didn’t understand what this thing was until now.”
So it’s this sense that you can find emotional joy from learning something that maybe you should have known, but didn’t even know how to ask. Something in there feels healing for people in some way. That sense that you can watch a film and get something that you maybe have been angry about for 10 years, but you didn’t how to articulate it. People have expressed some version of that joy to me about the film as I’ve spoken with them. I don’t know exactly how to put my finger on what that particular thing is, but it has felt incredibly healing for them. People write me all the time from all over the country: “I didn’t get this beforehand and you explained it to me.” And it’s not that they necessarily feel dumb, it’s just that they didn’t know how to ask.
You mentioned that as you start watching more news, things become more confusing. There’s not a clarifying process to news watching, instead it gets more obscure. These biased opinions or perspectives makes the whole process of understanding exactly what’s been going on really challenging.
So much about the political process is just about which team you’re on. It’s just that tribalism which people talk about as running counter to our understanding something, a lot of times. Like, you must choose a team and you mustn’t question whatever your team believes. On the left there are probably a bunch of things like that, but I can see them most easily on the right.
To add some psychological language to it too, I think there’s a certain amount of frustration that builds up in a person. They know something is going on. They know problems are happening, but they can’t explain it. The sources that should be explaining to them aren’t doing their job in a way that’s clarifying. And so there’s a certain amount of resentment and underlying hostility that builds up. Like, you’re being screwed but you’re not really sure where it’s coming from or who’s doing it. What you’re talking about is: I finally have this film that lays out very clearly, and from a very reputable source, exactly what has been going on and why some of these accusations in the news media are occurring.
It’s true. You feel frustrated. I felt frustrated. To put it less on other people and personalize it, I felt a deep frustration. I knew things were broken and messed up, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But I felt smart enough to get it. I didn’t feel like this should be over my head, and I was frustrated that it was presented that way.
I think a lot of people internalize that stupidity. They’re like, I’m just too stupid. I can’t make sense of this, economics is too complicated. So that’s why I’m not getting it. I think a lot of people walk around with that mentality. In the film, it was the CEO you interviewed who said something like, it’s the job of the people who are telling you the news that the problems are within the system. But really what’s happening is that they’re sidetracking you from the larger issue, which is that there are very specific things that occurred to create the economy the way that it is now. It’s like class warfare.
I think that’s a good insight. I often say that maybe dispositionally I’m easygoing, but when you tell me I can’t understand something, I think, fuck you. I can, you know? Like, you can’t hide this stuff from me, I’m coming for you. I still don’t describe myself as an activist per se, but as far as that thing, I was pissed off about it. I was deeply angry. I was like, you can’t tell me that this is more than my poor little brain can process. I can process it. And in fact, I’m going to come get you now. It was a little bit like: I’ve had it with that, that’s not OK with me. Probably it’s growing up poor and getting the poor kid’s chip on my shoulder. It’s like I was told my whole life that I wasn’t from the right world to get this stuff, so then I would make a point of it to go into class and sit in the front row and say, listen man, bring it, try to give me a B.
Liberation psychology is a theory that talks about how the oppressive status quo is maintained through cultures of silence that intentionally mystify people by obscuring the truth. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the gravity of the psychological effect of that on people—to think they’re stupid, to be confused, to actually go crazy because the truth is being withheld from them. What I found to be so therapeutic about your film was truth-telling, breaking that culture of silence with knowledge as power. But also how painful it can be to learn the truth.
I totally connect with that. In fact, it was magically fortunate for me because I’m a White guy, and could crack through these circles because my parents were caring and thoughtful enough to tell me . . . I remember my mom sitting there smoking, and she said basically: “Get in the room. They’re gonna keep you out of the damn room. But you don’t let them keep you out of the room. You break down the wall, and you say that thing.” Like, don’t let them obfuscate from you endlessly. And this particular piece you’re talking about with the liberation psychology resonates with me a lot. Personally I was lucky enough to be told, “don’t take that.” And to internalize that and whatever the tools were that I have to bring to the table. I’ve felt that to be a responsibility—because I can do that, I should. This fact that I can translate the knowledge to storytelling is lucky and a gift. So I felt lucky to be able to do that. I felt that powerfully in the making of the film.
I felt a sense that, on a personal level, I was trying to pull the veil back. Like when you’re on a mission, and you just have to do it. I woke up every day and basically worked on the film until I passed out at the end of the day, and then I just didn’t do anything else. I had to read everything to understand the stuff, I had to do the work of making the film. It was incredibly gratifying in that respect, on a personal level. I’m glad that you had the chance to watch it and feel some of that on the other end too.
Thank you. I watched it for the third time, and it was fascinating to see the change. I watched it twice when it came out in 2013, and now so much has changed even in those six years in terms of inequality under the Trump administration.
In particular, it’s this question of the effect on democracy. Another thing I think the film does, which I feel is important, is that so many issues within activism are siloed. What we missed, in my mind, is the issue of race for Inequality for All. But to a certain extent, there’s this idea that economic inequality, democracy, climate, race, and gender issues all come back to power. There is a piece to the film that feels gratifying because it speaks to people who should care about economic inequality, even if they don’t find that to be their personal issue—that even if you have decent, solid, middle-class life, you need to care about this if you care about democracy. Even just the corruption piece as well. I feel like that particular thing was an important contribution to how people talk about issues. And I think that’s resonating in ways that I have been grateful for.
My work now is focused mostly on race, which I feel like we missed a little bit in that film, or didn’t focus on enough in my opinion as a component piece. But there’s this question about why racism should matter to people who aren’t on the receiving end of people being racist to them. And the issue is, these things are all connected, right? You guys probably might get this in a more instinctive level than others because you experience frustration, or you see people coming into therapy with frustration, or you think about it on a psychological level. But to a lot of us this is, relatively speaking, new news. That these issues—democracy and economic inequality—are linked for inequality for all, and that that’s a bigger thing than either issue individually.
On one hand, your film touches on hope and power, but on the other hand there is despair. I watched your film in 2013 when it came out, and then I watched it again for this interview. So much has changed, and then not much has changed—except for maybe more knowledge. There is a part in your movie where Robert Reich is talking to the workers union, and he is truth-telling to them about the oppression they’re experiencing in their own company. The truth dawns on their faces, and it’s very painful. At first they are protecting their employers, but then they realize how much money they make versus their own conditions. Going back to psychology, it’s the feeling of realizing that truth, and the potential despair of how big that truth is. Can you talk a little bit to the despair of the truth?
It’s a statistical truism that the more people understand about widening economic inequality, the less they feel empowered to do something about it. It’s got this horrible contradiction at the center of it which says: of course you need to understand this stuff. But then what? The big question within the issue-based filmmaking community is: how do we know what’s effective in a film? And therefore, the question is: what do you measure in terms of effectiveness after you watch the film? So what they’re trying to do is figure out that when you watch the film, what actions do you take afterwards that show that the film made an impact? This has deep and meaningful implications in terms of what types of films get funded. The initial conclusion is that you should essentially only make films about food consumption, because you can influence people to eat better, organic, healthy foods. But you can’t necessarily say that when people are watching a film about widening economic inequality, they do something about it. Because audiences have this experience of, what can I do? What can I, as an individual, do? The joke in the big issue film industry is that you screw in a light bulb. Because that’s what they tried to say in An Inconvenient Truth to do in the final credits: you screw in a light bulb to fight against climate change. So what’s the equivalent thing for widening economic inequality? What can you do? I think that this is a big and meaningful piece, because obviously a lot of different conflicting things are true. It’s certainly true that it’s a lot easier to control what you do with food intake. Basically, any decision that comes down to who you are as a consumer is easier to control than a decision about who you are as a citizen.
I think a lot about how to increase civic engagement. Nobody wants to hear about writing their congressman anymore, that feels stupid and trivial. Nobody is writing letters of opinion because they feel like they’re screaming into the void. But when you get down to food, or you get down to buying products that are built with child labor or something, they can do something about that. They can not buy from that particular company. They feel so much better about it. So there is a big problem with empowerment around the big issues, because you don’t have an action that you as an individual can feel meaningful about taking. I’m doing a project with W. Kamau Bell now, a comedian who lives up here, which is around this exact issue. Like, how do we get people to activate around a particular thing?
I used to say about Inequality for All that how you understand the problem dictates what kinds of solutions are on the table to fix it. The film is doing something—it’s like you need it, it’s speaking to you. It’s changing the framework. And I think people should feel despair from it honestly, because I feel like you have to experience some pain to get out of it. In the film, Reich says: “When the difference between the world you want to live in and the world you do live in is made clear to you, that friction is the space where activism happens.” But there’s no question that there can be a feeling of: I don’t want to get out of bed anymore, I just want to wallow in the despair. But that can’t be the solution, and that can’t be the end result of watching a film like this if we’re going to make it anywhere. I think all of us who make this stuff tow a really fine line. You must in some ways totally destroy the world’s comfortable worldview so that we can build a better one. But you can’t lead people into such despair that they can’t take some action.
I made another film with Reich after Inequality for All called Saving Capitalism. I was in a much gloomier mood making the film than I was for Inequality for All, which I think has some humor to it. But at the end of the movie, he dances. And Reich does this with the idea that resistance can and should be joyful. Personally I feel like what you want to do is get people to the emotional state where they’re experiencing that dissonance between the world that they want and the world that they live in. And then you want to say: this is the reason to get up in the morning. This is the joy of it all. This is the thing we get to fight. It’s the fact of being alive. But this is probably something I need to work more on, because I do feel like people are struggling with despair sometimes when they learn too much about an issue.
You opened up the despair, but you didn’t keep audiences in it with Inequality for All. Particularly with your character of Robert Reich, you did move us through the despair. By the end of the movie you show people talk about what they’re going to do to fight the inequality. I don’t know if you were explicitly trying to do that, but you moved us through it.
Absolutely. We incorporated the bully’s story—Reich’s story of having his mentor killed, and then learning to stand up to the real bullies. We call it the bully story, it’s his story about being short. I’d been planning that story throughout the whole film. Every joke he tells us is about being short. We try to not go any deeper, but I try to give you just enough where you’re thinking about what the experience of his height might have been like for him. And then he tells that bully story at the end. That this is an endemic condition that he has, but he’s used this endemic condition of the little guy who is fighting for the little guy. So the bully story is a meaningful emotional tool that Reich used to activate empowerment. It sends the message that you must take whatever you’re given in terms of this systemic widening economic inequality, and fight the same way this little guy continues to fight. You’ve watched him fight throughout the movie. Maybe we can, if not be like Reich, invest in the character of him and grow with him. And feel like, if he can fight, then I can too.
Also, what’s weird and interesting about this interview is that it’s like therapy.
Can you say more about how this interview is like therapy?
One of the joys of this for me is that as a filmmaker, people want to hear who I think is going to win in the election, and about these policies for which I am no expert. I have an opinion. But the things that I like talking about are the things that I did while making the film, which we’re talking about here. I’m talking about the emotional journey. That’s what the filmmaker’s job is. At some point when people were saying, “How are you going to make this film? You’re not an economist.” It’s like, what the hell does that have to do it? That’s what storytelling is. This is emotional. I’m a human being who experienced these things. That’s what storytelling is for me—it’s emotional catharsis. When I’m teaching filmmaking, I say that each scene is a transformation machine; something must go into a scene, change, and come out the other side different. If it doesn’t, throw the scene away and make a scene that does. These are the basics of storytelling that are essentially emotional. This is an emotional process, it has nothing to do with the other stuff. So the opportunity to get to talk about the emotional piece to the film, and that underlying emotional journey, is frankly what we should be talking about when we’re talking about film. And we don’t get to. You make a film like this and people want to know: what do you think about X or Y policy? I’m not afraid to give people an opinion, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with insight as to why the film came into being, why the film was made, or why I think you even enjoyed it, frankly. So this conversation gets somewhat closer to that, and it’s fun and pleasant.
That’s a really great compliment, thank you so much. Some other people we interviewed have been saying that as well, so we feel like we’re onto something with that. We really appreciate you saying that.
Some of my scholarship tries to make the argument that filmmakers are inherently psychologists. You have to be a good psychologist to make a good film, right? So maybe we have the official title of “psychologist” here, but we’re doing these interviews understanding that you are going to have a lot of psychological wisdom in just the mere fact that you’ve made such as a moving film. So we’re picking your brain for your psychological insight as well.
Well I didn’t study film. My degree is in interpersonal communications from Michigan State University. For 3 years in college, I watched people interact with the sound off, and had to code their facial expressions for communicated versus experienced emotion for some project that a professor was doing. I’ve always thought that I don’t have any real skills as a filmmaker. I’m not a camera person. I’m not an editor. Reich describes me as an emotional thinker. I like to not just have intellectual thoughts, but also process the emotional piece around the thinking. Because I feel like that’s what I’m doing with the storytelling. You know, the head and the heart. But emotional thinking is really the piece I want to try to understand in people.
The last question we have is: how do you think film, as an art form and language, can express psychological experience in a manner that’s unique to its medium?
People say all the time that facts don’t move people, stories do. I believe that. But I don’t know if they have to be mutually exclusive. I found three shapes in economics that felt like they echoed over and over again for me—the bridge and a circle of some sort. And people are like, “I don’t want to make a movie with graphs. I don’t want to watch a movie with graphs. That’s boring, graphs are boring.” But I was like, “You just haven’t seen emotionally evocative graphs.”
So the psychology comes down to: how do you take the truth, put it in a story, and get it to be something that people can emotionally learn from? Some organizers will tell you that you should interact interpersonally, talk people through the truth as it relates to their lives, and over some months our interactions possibly find some common ground. I don’t disagree with that. But otherwise, you simply must put the truth in a story. If the truth is going to get through, you can’t just tell people the truth. You must put it in something that has some emotional resonance. And we know the journey of storytelling is the story that is universal—this story of going through something and coming out the other side. The tools that we learn as filmmakers are the vehicles that connect us as human beings to one another. If we apply them carefully, we can get people to hear the truth differently than if they heard it elsewhere. The craft of filmmaking helps in that respect.
That’s really interesting and unique—using film to help people hear the truth differently. I find that to be something I haven’t heard before, and I think that’s cool.
They definitely hear the truth all the time, but nobody can hear it with open ears. One final anecdote—there is a guy, a head programmer at Sundance named Trevor Goff from Utah. He watched the film with his mother-in-law and she was a fox-flopping Republican. They sat there together on the couch, she pops the film in the tape, and they didn’t speak for the hour and a half afterwards. He says after the film he got up and made some tea, they sat down in the kitchen, and then they had a conversation that they had never had before. And his mother-in-law said that she heard all that stuff before, but now she heard it differently. Her ears were now open, in a way. So I felt pretty honored by that story. I think it speaks to your hopes and dreams for what you’re aspiring for when you make something.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
