UNEASY Cinema Verité: Frederick Wiseman

This is the fourth Cinema Verité interview that I’m posting today.

What's appealing to me about Verité is that it's about humanity as opposed to something more specific. Is there something particularly appealing to you in making these kinds of films?

Those are the moments that have always interested me and that's precisely the kind of thing I was trying to get. Maybe it comes out of the fact that I'm interested in fiction and I read a lot of novels. It just seemed to me so obvious that here's this new technology through which you could make a record of ordinary experience. And ordinary experience has in it all the elements of great drama (if you happen to be lucky enough to be around when it's happening and recognize it for what it is).

Why have you gravitated towards institutions?

At the time, in the 1960s, when I was getting started that was relatively unexplored territory in film, and to some extent I still think it is. It just seems to me that when you have a group of people living together or at least living together part of the day and their applications have certain kind of rules in that society. There may be enough interesting things out of which to find a film. And what goes in that particular place might reflect in some way the things going on outside.

Have you ever had a situation where you showed a film, anticipating the participants to be angry with you, and they were truly delighted?

No. I've had the reverse actually. There were three situations where I showed the film to the people where they liked the film. But once the reviews came out, they didn't like the way they were characterized in print. They turned against the film. The most extreme example would be the first High School movie. When the principal and staff first saw it, they liked the film. But when one of the reviews said the film was a "middle-class debunking film" the principal then got defensive about it.

Do you consider it a failure on your part when people misinterpret your films?

Two people can look at the same event and come to very different conclusions based on a difference of experience and values. The classic example of that, for me, has always been in relation to High School, which played for a short time in a theater in Boston in 1969. One of the people who came to see it was Louise Day Hicks, a member of the School Committee of the Boston City Council. She was always in the paper because she was very articulate and very conservative. She saw High School and said, "Mr. Wiseman, that was a really great film. My question to you is how can we get schools like that in Boston?" To me that didn't make the film a failure. She clearly didn't have the same point of view as I did, but her values were so completely different than mine that what I might have thought was absurd, or funny or sad, she thought was great. I don't think that's a fault of the film.

Do you think that actually is the success of the film? That the people decide the dramatic aspects for themselves?

Well, put aside the question of the success of the film. It's an illustration of an important part of the technique because the film, when it works, places people in the middle of the film and treats them like adults. It asks them to think through their own relationship to what they're seeing and hearing.

Tell me some juicy stories about things that happened while filming -  dramatic moments.

I can't think of anything that would fit that category. It's an arena of gossip.

What do you think documentary filmmaking is about?

Whatever gossip I have is in the film.

What do you do when you know you're not getting the things you need?

Try to get it! It depends what you mean about what I need. If people aren't doing or saying the things you'd hoped, there's nothing you can do about it. You can make the decision to stop shooting. But the worst thing you can do is stop and start in the middle of a sequence. If you try to stop and start, you will inevitably be off when the good things start happening. I make up my mind that the sequence is worth shooting, and I continue until in my mind the sequence is finished, or people walk away . Because then at least I don't know what I've missed. You can't ever anticipate what people are going to say or do, in the terms of being on or off at the right time. In my view the most economical thing to do is to shoot a lot of film, because that's what gives you the choice in the editing room. Without the choice, you can't make good film. The whole thing is based on surprise, and you can't predict how that's going to unfold. If your gut instinct is telling you you've gotta shoot, then you shoot.