Split Tooth welcomes Bell back for a career-spanning discussion and a look at his new 10-part series on George W. Bush, Miss Me Yet
Though its total runtime amounts to just over a few hours, Christopher Jason Bell’s body of work feels immense. Across a number of boldly experimental shorts and a pair of features, Bell has playfully wrestled with key moments in American history, turned a critical yet clear-eyed gaze at contemporary working class life, offered a stage for game performers to stretch the definition of ‘non-professional,’ and, best of all, blurred the lines between fact and fiction.
I first became aware of Bell when we premiered Boundaries here on Split Tooth last year. Last month, Williamsburg’s Spectacle Theater hosted screenings of his latest project, a 10-part found footage series depicting George W. Bush’s presidency and its aftermath.
We recently spoke about the series, Miss Me Yet, his career up to this point, the unique potential of doc-fiction hybrids, the influence of video game storytelling, and more.
UPDATED: Miss Me Yet is currently streaming on Means TV
Shorts & Features (2011-2022)
Split Tooth Media: Who are some of your inspirations in the world of doc-fiction hybrid?
Christopher Jason Bell: The obvious touchstones are Iranian New Wave directors, Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The Mirror by Panahi was a big one for Incorrectional. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is a huge influence. When I saw it, I remember thinking, ‘Americans are doing this, too?’ What a history that film has. A maybe less obvious influence is [Nuri Bilge] Ceylan, the Turkish filmmaker. His early micro-budget stuff, the way he used non-professional performers, it was really inspirational how he built the stories with them. There’s this movie called The Little Fugitive. It’s an old American film, from three filmmakers, and they used a bunch of non-performer children. John Krish would use non-performers in his government PSAs. Do you know John Krish?
I don’t.
He was a British filmmaker who was employed by a government department to make PSAs and he went nuts. Really crazy stuff. There’s one about how children shouldn’t play on train tracks. It’s a half-hour film that uses all these non-actor children. And they made up all these things kids shouldn’t do, like throwing rocks at the train. Then he shows the kids throwing rocks and people getting hit and they tally up a score. People are all bloody. It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. Part of my enjoyment is not just the creativity or the ‘what the fuck?’ factor, but the idea of using a children’s game to structure a PSA.
Another is Nagisa Oshima. Three Resurrected Drunkards, one of his earlier films, has to do with the bigotry Korean people faced from Japanese people around the time. There’s some experimental stuff in the film and at one point they go around the city to interview random passersby. They ask, ‘Are you Korean or Japanese?’ And people answer or ask why. They stop and become investigative journalists for a five-minute sequence of just documentary footage. I always thought that was really inspiring, the way you could break and reform the story you’re telling. Once you break it open you add so many layers to the story you’re telling. There’s so much potential.
At first glance, you don’t seem to draw inspiration directly from your life; you don’t seem to “write what you know” in the usual sense. That is to say, you’ve never made a film about a filmmaker living in New York. Did you ever feel the impulse to make more directly autobiographical films?
It’s good you say ‘at first glance’ because there’s a lot of me in the films. When I write a treatment or a script, that’s usually all my experience distilled down. You start to bring in collaborators and they affect it as well. There’s inevitably a lot of me in everything, but I just don’t find myself that interesting. After college, I moved to Brooklyn and that was during Mumblecore 2.0 or 3.0. Everyone was a filmmaker, everyone was having sex with each other. And the big Mumblecore thing at the time was romantic comedies, DIY romantic comedies that weren’t really very romantic or very funny. And I do like some of those movies. And I try not to be a hater, especially 10 years after the fact, but I didn’t really relate to it or want to add to it. I remember thinking that you could make a Mumblecore movie with retirees or make a Mumblecore movie in a different country. Literally anything besides people hanging out in their Brooklyn loft apartment. Who’s that filmmaker who did Tiger Tail in Blue?
Yeah, maybe if more people were making films like his it wouldn’t have been an issue. But not a lot of other filmmakers were experimenting or pushing things.
One of the earliest films on your Vimeo page is a sort of piece of ephemera called Masoud, a number of sequences you shot with an actor who wound up dropping out of what would become The Winds That Scatter. It has a lot in common with much of the completed work that’d follow. We hear some direction off screen; the lead actor is playing a character who shares his name. Can you tell me about this experience and how it would inform your work going forward?
I can’t say it’s the first time an actor dropped out of a project. I went to film school and you get pretty used to people just not showing up. I was pretty young when we shot the stuff with Masoud, probably around 24. I don’t think I was as clear as I should’ve been about what we were doing and how long it was gonna take, that kind of stuff. It was a lot for someone who hadn’t sought out an opportunity to act in a film. I’m sure that had something to do with it. Maybe he realized how time consuming and weird and difficult and, honestly, pointless it would be. Everything can fall apart. Have I ever stopped feeling like everything would fall apart? No. And is there any way around it? No. And it’s because everyone’s different and it costs so much money. It always feels like something is going to happen and it’s all gonna fall apart. Like COVID. I’m always incredibly anxious until we get to the day and I know everybody’s there and we can do it. Then I feel a little bit better. It wasn’t the first time. Won’t be the last time.
You have another short, behind-the-scenes-style film on your Vimeo page called The Movie. I assume it’s from the making of The Winds That Scatter. It captures a scene getting interrupted by a passerby, the sort of thing I imagine happens a lot when you’re shooting in public places. I’m interested in the impulse to preserve this example as well as any reasons you think you have stopped sharing this sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. Is short-form video just too ubiquitous to bother?
It’s actually from after I made Winds. I didn’t live in New York anymore, but still worked there and was commuting into the city. In the film, I’m just waiting for my transfer train. Like a lot of these things it just sort of unfolded in front of me and it was like, holy shit. I ended up adding another layer to it in post production. It was intended as a series of short films acknowledging their hybrid nature. The project was conceived by Ahmed Khawaja and Zach Weintraub, but it never fully came together. I still do that from time to time. I’ll still film single-take slices of life. Why don’t I share them anymore? I don’t know. I think part of it is that nobody cares. I haven’t really captured anything like that interesting enough to share. Maybe something has changed in me that I can’t really define. There’s also just the logistics of me not doing a train commute anymore to work, I’m now driving, so a lot less able to sit and look around and ponder and all of that.
One of the most striking sequences in The Winds That Scatter sees our protagonist, Ahmad, mess around with an Atari game. Was finding that game just a happy accident or was there any direction in the choice of cartridge? Some of the imagery is quite striking and seems to suit the film in interesting ways. There are backgrounds reminiscent of a Middle Eastern rug, a moment where characters seem to be sprinting toward a border and getting hit by a wall, and then the player avatar is sort of cowboy shaped.
I like all your interpretations. Will those be included, what you’ve said?
I don’t know. Probably not all of that. Most of my hacky attempts to prove I really ‘get it’ tend to get axed. Often for the best.
Oh, I like all of it. I hope it won’t get cut.
I bought an Atari on eBay and it came with a handful of games and that was one of them. I don’t remember the name of the game. Maybe Firestorm or Fireslayer? You mention surprising echoes with the film and of course this would be the one I’d pick of all the games in the collection. Growing up, my grandma had an Atari. Lots of weird games stuck in my head. There was one where you’re a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad eating flies. Something about the simplicity of games like that was formative. I could’ve looked up specific games, but just ordered that bunch. And that one out of the bunch worked really well, in part for some of the reasons you mentioned. You see a lot of the gameplay, but are any of the objectives clear?
Not at all.
I have no idea either. And Ahmad would be playing and I remember asking him if he had any idea what he was doing. Neither of us had a clue about the objective. It creates this strange mood, something you can’t quite define. It’s a kind of confusion mixed with a certain kind of logic. I knew it had to be in the movie. It seemed like the perfect thing for someone with no job and no idea of how to proceed. Also, if you change the frame rate of the camera, you’ll get a smooth look at things playing on a TV without lines. But what if you don’t? What if you keep everything the same and embrace the line going up and down the screen. It contributes to the kind of inexplicable mood and has a distancing effect, too. You have to remain, in some ways, an active participant. You can relate to the experience of struggling to figure out an objective or you can take in the visuals and think about what they might mean. Either way, you end up on a different journey.
The video game sequence is just one example of showcasing a different style of visual narrative storytelling. There’s a sequence later on in a mosque where you observe a painting of Mecca. Is that something you’re conscious of when capturing an image like that, the different kind of narrativization at play?
I’d say there’s a practical explanation and an intellectual one. There’s always, ‘I think this looks cool’ and then, like we talked about with the video game, an exploration of narrative logic. There’s a narrative here that somebody thought out, imagining a specific experience for the viewer. But it can be perplexing to us because it’s not how we typically think about narratives — and not just because it takes the form of a painting. To an American audience, a narrative is the hero’s journey, a very narrow idea of progress. It’s very linear and characterized by a false notion that we’re in the best era for everything, that the right thing won out. If you think about it in terms of cinema, there’s still an attitude that something silent or black-and-white or from another country is somehow lesser. And it’s one thing to hear that from your parents or your cousins or whatever, but for people who really love and care about movies to have such a limited perspective and idea of progress is another. It’s not the only story. It’s not the only way to tell a story. And you can find versions of another story within a story. Within my longer films, I think that acknowledgement goes hand-in-hand with an emphasis on stuff happening outside the frame.
Could you speak about the work you did with Ahmad to create a kind of personal history for the character?
Ahmad had a lot of free rein in some obvious ways. For one, I don’t speak Arabic. There’s a scene after he plays Atari where he has a long phone call. I basically just said, ‘Someone’s gonna call you, here are the things I want you to touch on, and I trust that you’ll do that.’ He was conscious of the separation between Ahmad the character and Ahmad the actor too, bringing stuff from his own life while tweaking them to suit the narrative. The scene at the jewelry store, for example, when he’s basically replaced by that kid. Ahmad noted that he’d have responded differently, but knew to think and act as the character to serve the film.
To me, the sequence in Winds That Scatter with the rusted-out machinery in the woods was perhaps most suggestive of Ahmad’s inner life and the journey he had taken prior to the events of the film. Could you speak to some of the feelings being sublimated throughout this sequence?
There’s this thing we had growing up in New Jersey called Weird New Jersey. People would find weird stuff and send in pictures to a magazine. Making a micro-budget film and not wanting to just shoot in an apartment all the time, I found myself thinking about interesting locations outside the city. We went and checked it out and thought it fit. It suggests the state of de-industrialization across the country. Nature is overtaking it and you’re left to ask why it’s there in the first place. It’s this weird husk of a thing that continues to exist despite being totally isolated and not having a purpose. All those bizarre feelings and questions sort of roll up together and affect the rest of the film.
Without drawing attention to itself, the film’s visual style is more careful than a lot of the contemporary indies you allude to. Who were some of the inspirations for the asymmetrical frames and patient camera movements throughout Winds?
In addition to those filmmakers I mentioned at the beginning, Michael Haneke, the Dardennes brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul really blew me away. And some more slow cinema stuff. Tsai Ming-liang, Chantal Akerman, Andrei Tarkovsky. My DP and I would go to museums a lot, but when you go to a museum there’s so much to absorb and your mind is racing. So there wasn’t any one thing that we took inspiration from. Especially because for us the proper mindset involves not needing something to happen one specific way. Everything I do has to be fluid, for many reasons. I’m working with non-professional actors. I’m often working in locations that I could get kicked out of at any point. I have to be willing to experiment in how doc elements come into play. I think a lot of times hybrid movies don’t embrace the unpredictability, they don’t let life in. Or they’re letting it in and then strangling it to ensure it conforms to the narrative restrictions. We try not to do that. We’ll basically make a plan as best we can while making sure there are holes that life can get in. We have movies that we’ll watch or paintings that we’ll look at, but I can’t necessarily point to specific artists. We would go and kind of take in as much art as possible and just keep conversations going.
Opening and closing credits always play a somewhat illusion-breaking function. In a few of your films, though, they are particularly interesting in how they blur the line between fact and fiction. In Mohammad So-and-So, you include your direction to an actor named Mohammad playing a character of the same name. The closing credits of One Times One confirm the artist behind the drawings we see, seeming to address a question raised by the synopsis. And then at the end of Living Near People you include some provocative quotation marks. What do you think about credits as a way of adding or reducing distance?
They’re part of the film. They can be part of the storytelling. You don’t have to tune them out. I think a lot of people tend to do that and then the closing credits they won’t see at all. Obviously you just turn it off or leave the theater, but I think it could be another layer or another storytelling device. I really love this author Harry Mathews and he did this book called The Sinking of Odradek Stadium. Basically, you don’t know what the title means. It’s just a cool title. And when you get toward the end of the book, they reference the title, and the title itself is another storytelling element. And you don’t realize that until you see it. It’s incredible. You get to that part and the title transforms in front of you on the page and you still have pages left to read. Whoever thought of making a title significant in that way? I think part of having little layers and doing different things with the credits is my version of doing that.
Left is like a structural film at times. We watch someone order and wait for McDonald’s in real time, for example. What was it like shooting in an airport and how much of your approach was informed by the restricted atmosphere?
This was sort of a nightmare logistically. Besides the actors, I was the only crew member. Nobody bothered us, surprisingly. It might’ve been the size and nature of the DV camera. I’m not sure. This was a take on a short by Tsai Ming-liang called Madame Butterfly, which is a one-take film following a woman in a bus station. At least that’s what I remember it being — I saw it during a retrospective in NYC years ago, and I remember being really struck by its nature. And then I was never able to find it again. So I wanted to do something similar and landed on an airport instead of a bus station. I thought there would be better opportunities, visually, if you had a chance to maybe catch an airplane in the background. That didn’t really work out, but there is something more high-stakes about an airport for obvious reasons. I was also interested in taking the real-time nature of things to its limit and putting a very dramatic premise at its core. I’ve always wanted to do more things like this, lo-fi single-takes, or at least films with as few cuts as possible. It’s such a nightmare logistically though. I’ve tried to do it twice before — the one you know is And By We I Mean Me — and each project ends up being something radically different. I think I will do something somewhat similar eventually, but it would take the form of a Frederick Wiseman film or something like Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes.
The performances in Incorrectional are really incredible, as is your attention to detail in the interactions between your characters. I was particularly taken with the believably tenuous rapport between the central kids. There’s a sequence where the primary friend/antagonist character is telling a story that doesn’t really go anywhere and goes on for forever and you capture it in such a way that we clock his realization that he’s running on fumes as well as the increasingly strained politeness of the listeners. Tell me about working with this trio of teens.
They were great. I had cast Rayvin [Disla] first. He was in my friend’s film, Go Down Death. I thought he could be really great for what we were trying to do. I asked him if he had any friends who’d want to be in a movie. Building that sense of comfort and familiarity was important in casting. And then it was kind of an earlier example of what I’d go on to do with Dale in Trammel where I’d ask him, ‘Talk about this’ or ‘Tell a story about that.’ Here, it was similar: ‘What’s a story you might tell?’ or ‘How would you react in this situation?’ and then seeing what worked and making sure we stayed as close to how a real person might behave. You mention that sequence with the story that kind of peters out. How do you keep that in? You know an audience is going to say, ‘That story went nowhere.’ And that’s the point. All of our stories go nowhere. Your inclination as a storyteller is to remove that or cut it up to make it more compelling. You have to keep resetting yourself, you have to go against the grain. The cast was great. It was all so easy.
So they were friends in real life? That comes across. There’s another particularly great sequence where the two guys are deflating an argument by wordlessly making each other laugh and pantomiming a fight.
Yes, they were friends. And you reminded me that that scenario was directly from my life. I had a crush on a girl who liked my good friend. They kind of ran with that scenario. Not that it’s never happened to anybody else, but it brings us back to the question about autobiographical influence. It was about seeing what performers could bring to an experience I remembered based on their experience as friends.
Around 30 minutes in, the film sort of disintegrates. An actor stages a mutiny, starts to question your authority, and basically drops out. Was this all planned or was it at all something you had to account for and shape the film around? I wasn’t expecting it and it took a film I was enjoying into another universe.
It was all planned. The original idea was, ‘What if I made a regular movie and broke it?’ It wasn’t really something that I had seen before. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm or The Mirror are close, but I wanted to do something that started out as a regular movie. My original thought was you could take a movie with Brad Pitt or some huge star in it and have it break into a documentary and totally transform it. I knew I couldn’t do that, but the question became ‘how can I do it?’ That was the concept from the beginning. I wanted to use the documentary form to pick up the pieces and replicate the feeling of a crazy-big argument, a chasm opening up. How do you feel after a blowout argument? It’s devastating. What do you do? You’re sort of bewildered and you take a long time to get yourself together. I wanted to replicate that feeling within the storytelling itself, within the structure of the film. That was always part of the plan. Part of what was exciting was how loose the documentary portion was. Just capturing life was exciting to me. We just knew we wanted the vague arc to be reconciliation. We got some stuff that was almost spooky in how well it tied into what we were doing. Rayvin was in a film and we went to a festival screening. We went to a psychic. There were a lot of opportunities to capture spontaneous moments like the Q&A or the reading.
In my experience — while I love this sort of doc-fiction hybrid — audiences can often feel befuddled, even cheated, when a movie reveals itself to be something different than what they were initially sold. How was the audience reaction to Incorrectional?
I’ll preempt this with a note that I’m very insecure and I make films that I think would be exciting and interesting to me. If I haven’t seen something before, I want to do it. I did think Incorrectional was really interesting, something I hadn’t quite seen before. I thought I’d do it here and that other people might find it interesting. To your question, from what I could tell, audiences did like it and find it exciting. When I talked to audiences or people I knew who saw it, they’d sometimes describe feeling challenged or even lost, but that was good. You should feel challenged by the structural shift. What Incorrectional really needed that it never got was help, some sort of support — programmers and critics passing it along and fighting for it. It did happen to a certain degree, but it didn’t make much of a dent. And hey, that’s fine at the end of the day. It is what it is. Audiences liked it and it ended up playing the Torino Film Festival in Italy which was gratifying. The programmers there really loved it and helped it along and tried to get it elsewhere. Here’s one funny anecdote that I’ll share because it’s been long enough: We were in consideration for a film festival. I knew a guy who was on the team and he sent it to the head programmer. He said the programmer was literally offended, used the word offended, that I’d continue filming after the movie broke down. You don’t have to like it, but that surprised me.
Boundaries has some of the hallmarks of your work — one-sided conversations, characters separated by partitions, but its lead character is like few others you’ve depicted. I think the only one of your films to focus on a well-off, Conservative business owner, is And By We I Mean Me. How do you think they compare?
I’ve never related the two, but I see why you did. It’s very much the same character. I think both have a rattling montage, too, which seem like cousins to one another. Aside from obvious aesthetic differences, Boundaries is partially about a guy who does what he does to provide for his family and justifies it that way. He pays no mind to what the job actually is, and when he does think about it he justifies it in his head, too. That he could do something else or that he is doing something bad does not stay in his mind for too long. The lead of And By We is a guy cut from the same cloth, but he’s both more removed from whatever his company does and also more into being a manager — like a big power trip, watching the workers from a glass window above. He cares for his father, but he also relishes in the control over his father’s final days.
Related: Read our interview with Boundaries star Frank Mosley
You capture a lot of one-sided conversations in your films. Left is partially constructed around them. Boundaries too. Why the decision to capture both Dale’s and the landlord’s side of the conversation that opens The Finger?
There’s a power dynamic between you and someone who is above you, like a boss or manager, in this case a landlord, that I find very interesting. They’ll have an ‘I came from nothing!’ poise ready to go when it suits them, but also a finger-wagging condescension when they want to thrust their power over you. I wanted to make sure that came through and colored the rest of the film, that we remembered each and every word he said instead of leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination.
The Finger is largely a film of barriers. Can you talk about the role walls, doors, and other partitions play in the film?
I kind of do that a lot. I focus on alienation, isolation, things that separate us, etc. I definitely wanted to drive that home, but I also wanted to do these things to set up the ending. Dale lets everything in his apartment run, like a last big ‘fuck you’ to the companies that he cannot pay. It’s desperate and out of immense frustration. As things start to turn off one by one, particularly the light, I wanted to break the fourth wall and keep adjusting to give him light. Even though, by the end, the image is garish and noisy. I wanted to break down that wall, so to speak, to provide something more positive and fight against the dour ending.
Watch Trammel on Vimeo:
The lead actor from The Finger, Dale Smith, returns for Trammel to play a character named Dale. Can you describe the ways you blend fact and fiction here?
The stories that Dale ends up telling here are ones that come from his real life. We did a few exercises where I just gave him random topics to talk about and he went with it. I then took a lot of the best ones and put them in order of funniest to most dramatic.
And it helped inspire your next feature?
Yes! The feature is called Failed State and the DP of Trammel, Mitch Blummer, came on as co-director for it. We took Dale out of the country and plopped him into the city, following him as he delivers random packages to various customers. It’s a lot bigger, we shall say.
Miss Me Yet (2023)
If I remember correctly, you tweeted that Miss Me Yet has basically been in the works since the start of the George W. Bush presidency. When and how did you begin developing the project in earnest?
Sometimes I’ll have an idea that I just can’t stop thinking about. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become, ‘I wish there was a movie like this.’ If I keep saying that, I have to do it. I was saying that a lot in 2014 and 2015. You were starting to see Bush hanging out with Michelle Obama. You started to see think-pieces about how unprecedented Trump was and more pictures of Bush being cute. Stuff like that. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to go through the Bush presidency?’ You could do all these things and end with him on Ellen. You have the Iraq War, you have this, you have that, and then the last scene is him on Ellen. I thought back to all the harrowing things, all the contradictions you could show. I’d say 2015 is when I decided I really had to do it and started pulling footage.
You include a lot of the iconic moments you’d expect, but you also avoid some of the moments you might expect. I noticed that we don’t see Bush throw out the first pitch after 9/11 or the megaphone moment at Ground Zero. Was there anything you were conscious to avoid, maybe anything where the optics wound up on Bush’s side?
The boring answer is that sometimes I just had to move on and keep the story going. How much of the immediate post-9/11 stuff could I ultimately include? I was even leaner in earlier cuts. I certainly never cared to make him look good, but even in neutral moments I aimed to recontextualize things through the clips before or after. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t have room for. We barely spend any time with Dick Cheney. Bush’s relationship with Chavez in Venezuela is really interesting. It’s probably interesting enough for its own film, but I couldn’t really go into it.
9/11 is depicted primarily through footage of people watching it on TV. How did you go about framing this especially iconic footage?
There were a lot of Ground Zero things in earlier cuts and I really shied away from showing the planes hitting the towers, the smoking buildings. Some things are so ingrained that we didn’t need them. While I was researching for another project, though, I came across a ton of videos of people on 9/11 watching videos of the attacks and coverage in retail stores. This was the way to cover it, I thought. People who went into Circuit City, were stopped in their tracks, and watched on in befuddlement, and around them we can see people coming and going, then also gazing at the chaos on TV. My favorite is the tire store. Most people in these videos are quiet, but in that one you can clearly hear a customer declaring that he thinks there will be a war, and that we hadn’t had a war in a long time. It’s a really fascinating thing to hear, especially in that context. There’s not much to it, but it’s also everything, and it’s not something you would ever hear from someone again. I wanted to make sure to capture that kind of behavior from that day.
There are so many wonderful rhymes and echoes with contemporary America. Right off the top, you introduce every episode with the video behind that famous snapshot of Bush giving someone the finger. It turns out he was flipping off a woman named Karen. Were there any especially interesting Eureka moments in the excavation and editing?
I was especially interested in showing the audience more of a famous clip than they’re used to seeing. I thought that could be interesting, like sitting with him in the classroom on 9/11 before they start reading the book. Or, the golf cart driving up to ‘now watch this drive.’ We know the clips, but really just in isolation. When you recontextualize these moments, it becomes almost like watching a Hitchcock movie. The audience knows something is about to happen and can anticipate it, but nobody on screen knows what’s going to happen or when. As for echoes, I knew there were things I wanted to include. When he talks about evil, he’ll reference Osama Bin Laden and equate him to “Lenin and Hitler.”
During the opening titles, you describe the series as an attempt to “recreate the feeling” of the years following 2000. Beyond winces of recognition or comparisons to Trump, what do you hope for the viewer to take away?
I think a good way to put it is that I’m trying to recontextualize familiar events and imagery. In terms of Trump and culture war stuff, we’ve had a version of that since the ’80s or ’90s and there was a version during the Bush years. They all go hand in hand and I wanted to show how a lot of the things we’re talking about today were there under the surface. I’m trying to remind people of the violence that we often don’t see that’s occurring every day. We often talk about these powerful people in terms that make them seem more human, like Bush sharing candy with Michelle Obama. In humanizing these figures, we often forget all the dehumanizing things that they’ve done. People died then and still die today and when we talk about these politicians we shouldn’t forget about that.
It struck me while watching the film that some of the imagery you were using was practically ubiquitous. I’ve seen the 9/11 footage a million times, that K-Swiss commercial you use has been stuck in my head for 20 years, but some of the footage of the aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan was definitely on the other end of the familiarity spectrum. We’d have never seen that stuff on TV and it’s not hard to imagine the mainstream full-on suppressing it. Did you mean to juxtapose the images in that way, something inescapable vs. something hidden?
For sure. Part of it is the heightened contradictions of everything. You hear about the heightened contradictions of capitalism, but how do you replicate that on film? You have a funny fast food commercial and then you see something harrowing and it recontextualizes both images. And it sounds manipulative maybe, but I would counter that is how we go about our day. We’re dealing with this stuff. Mainstream news may not necessarily show Iraq, Afghanistan, terrible things happening — or if they did they didn’t show it a lot. But those images are out there and they’re more easily accessible than they used to be. It’s one of my many hat tips to Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid. Part of the idea of Metal Gear Solid 2 is that by feeding the population so much media, so much information, nothing has to be actively suppressed. There’s just so much out there that nobody knows what to pay attention to. These videos are available to watch, but would anyone think to do it? Would anyone be able to find it?
You use few intertitles, opting to mete out most information through the clips themselves and the closing title cards. How’d you arrive at this decision? Did you ever consider an approach more like Adam Curtis’, with voiceover and frequent title cards?
No, I didn’t have any title cards at all initially. I got some feedback from someone younger than me who said they weren’t able to follow what was going on at all. Some of the additional context came from putting in videos to help you along. With the closing title cards, I thought about what I really wanted to drive home. I did go a little overboard with that. Another piece of feedback I got from a friend who’s Iraqi was basically, ‘We get it.’ I was also conscious of not wanting to provide too much text for someone to read. It’s a lot to ask. I wanted to stick as best as I could to the original concept, telling the story through archival footage and no additional narration. You have to be an active viewer in a certain way. I’m obsessed with watching archival footage and eight years of a presidency gives you time to watch video quality evolve. We start with SD footage and gradually watch it get better. There’s a kind of storytelling in that. I’m also making another nod to Metal Gear Solid. At the end of the games there’s hours of cutscenes, but Kojima will also include a really slow scroll of text. Sometimes it’s just a timeline. It’ll say ‘1954: Guatemala Invaded’ right next to ‘1960: Snake Is Born.’ It’s all interwoven. And there was some push-pull in determining the right amount of text to combine with video storytelling. ‘How much is too much?’
You mentioned earlier that many notable figures couldn’t make it into Miss Me Yet or wound up pushed to the margins. We don’t get very much of Al Gore and even less of John Kerry. Were you wary of diverting attention away from Bush or was there a deeper meaning to the way he overshadows them?
I never thought too much about what was going on with Kerry. I didn’t think he was ultimately very interesting to watch. With Al Gore, it mostly came down to how much of the debate I wanted to include. One thing I definitely wanted to keep was Gore talking about the labor theory of value. He talks about the 1 percent taking everything from the 99 percent of people who create wealth. It never would’ve occurred to me that Al Gore would talk like that. I’m not sure he would’ve done anything about it, but it was another echo with contemporary times. People were talking about this in 2000, fucking Al Gore was talking about it. His concession was obviously important to include. It never occurred with me to really check in and see what he was up to because nothing happened. Nothing changed. Part of the pop culture element came from my interest in expanding beyond ‘things would be better if we didn’t have Bush.’ I wanted a more structuralist argument than a Great Man Theory kind of thing. Part of me thought if I had too much Al Gore, I might start to tip the scales too much. Would things have been different? Sure, but would they have been much better? I don’t know. You can’t risk giving Al Gore too much credit.
How would you characterize your attitude when Barack Obama was elected in ’08?
I was very happy. I had just graduated college and I didn’t know much, but I voted for him and I was excited. After the dust settled and drone strikes began, much less so. As I’ve learned more through the years and drifted much, much further to the Left, I have very much soured on him to say the least.
We’ve talked a lot about different modes of storytelling and the use of screens in your films. Tell me about that hagiographic interactive exhibit at the Bush museum where visitors are walked through the 2008 financial crisis.
I was so lucky to have found that. It’s not from the usual sources, but I had read about it. There were only two videos from museum guests and I used the better of the two. It’s like being directed and one of the themes I wanted to underline throughout the series is the way the system replicates itself. It’s telling us the same stories again and again. This is the most overt example in the series and it hopefully makes you go back and look for other ways they were selling this narrative.
Could you talk about the final post-presidency episode and the way it wraps things up?
I actually haven’t shown it at the public screenings, so almost nobody has seen it. One question I’ve gotten in Q&As is whether anything really surprised me. I was really surprised by some stuff in putting together the post-presidency episode. Keeping in mind the Ellen appearance, I was surprised by some of the heat he got on his first book tour. That footage was fun to play with. I was kind of shocked when Bill O’Reilly grilled him. You’d figure he loves Bush. Or Matt Lauer, who wasn’t a hard-hitting journalist, he pushes him on some things. That last episode is really flying toward the Ellen moment. It’s kind of a shame, but it doesn’t make sense to screen. We’re in it and even when you split the film into the two administrations it’s still over 90 minutes before the Q&A.
When did you arrive at the decision to direct a series rather than one film?
When I was initially aiming for a feature I figured it would need to be 80 or 90 minutes. I was struggling to do it all justice in even two and a half hours. A filmmaker friend of mine, Zach Fleming, suggested a series and at first I thought, ‘Fuck that.’ But I thought about how much information it was and how most people consume content this way anyway. It’s tough to sit through a movie, but most people have no problem bingeing a series. And if people are gonna binge it anyway it’s kind of like watching a movie. I also realized if it was a series, I wouldn’t have to limit myself to just a few minutes per year. So then I got really excited, I got to go back and put in a bunch of stuff I’d had to cut. I can’t control how people watch it, but when you watch it straight through, it’s a lot. And it’s supposed to be a lot.
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