E32 • Inspiring Action Through Activist Filmmaking • BEN RUSSELL, co-dir. of ‘Direct Action’ at the New York Film Festival + Berlinale

Ben Russell delves into the concept of observational cinema, sharing insights on his latest co-directing effort “Direct Action” (with Guillaume Cailleau), which portrays a radical activist community in France. It debuted at Berinale and just screened at the New York Film Festival. Past films discussed include Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson” and the observational films of Frederick Wiseman and The Maysles Brothers.

Ben shares his experience transitioning as a filmmaker from America to France, exploring the differences between American and European cinema, and the impact of public funding on film production. The discussion also touches on filmmaking techniques, audience engagement, and the importance of creating context for films. 

Ben emphasizes the power of cinema to inspire action and reflection, advocating for a more immersive and community-oriented approach to filmmaking.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Past Present Feature, Hosted by Marcus Mizelle
• 0:37 Introducing Filmmaker Ben Russell, co-dir. of "Direct Action" at NYFF + Berlinale
• 1:02 Transitioning from American to European Cinema
• 2:49 The Impact of Public Funding on Filmmaking
• 6:12 Observational Cinema: A New Approach + Kirsten Johnson's "Cameraperson"
• 9:53 Creating a Portrait of a Community
• 14:48 The Art of Long Takes and Minimalism
• 19:51 Audience Engagement and Film Distribution
• 24:47 The Role of Filmmakers in Activism
• 30:10 Reflections on Filmmaking and Personal Growth
• 35:05 The Power of Cinema to Inspire Action
• 36:07 Past Inspirations: Frederick Wiseman & Maysles Brothers + Duration of Runtime
• 40:21 Final Words of Filmmaking Wisdom

Transcript

Marcus Mizelle (00:01)
My encounters with duration haven't put me off. But I also understand that sometimes films feel really long and sometimes they don't. And time is like a relative quantity. And so it ebbs and eclos. How do you know when your film is the runtime that it needs to be? When it's that. I'm thinking about it myself, asking myself that question.

Welcome to the Past Present Feature podcast. In this conversation, Ben Russell delves into the concept of observational cinema, sharing insights on his latest co-directing effort, Direct Action, which portrays a radical activist community in France. It debuted at Burlingau and just screened at the New York Film Festival. Past films discussed include Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson and the observational films of Frederick Wiseman and the Maisel's Brothers. Ben shares his experience transitioning as a filmmaker from America to France.

exploring the differences between American and European cinema and the impact of public funding on film production. The discussion also touches on filmmaking techniques, audience engagement, and the importance of creating context for films. Ben emphasizes the power of cinema to inspire action and reflection, advocating for a more immersive and community-oriented approach to filmmaking.

What is it like to actually be from America but live in France? The kind of cinema that I make, it's pretty good because there's not a lot of support for non-character-driven experimental documentary or tourist work. In that sense, that's probably the main reason why I lived here first. I lived in Paris in 2011, 2012 for a few years and then went to LA and then came back. But yeah, it's just a lot easier to...

get work made here and without having to have a second job. It's interesting because it's quite difficult to make money here, but if you're able to do the things that you want and have health care and child care is crazy. It's really great. The quality of life is really good. So yes, if you have all of your stuff taken care of, then making money is maybe not such an important consideration. Do you speak French, I guess? I've been here for five years, so I'm not fluent and I never studied it. I had expected that I'd

I'd be better at it now than I am, but it's a slow build. So you're learning on the job training? For sure. My partner is French. My kid goes to French daycare and has to speak to people. So when you say you relocated from the United States to France, in part because of your sensibilities as a filmmaker, can you please go more into detail into that? I haven't met anybody that's done that actually yet. What does that process look like and what have the rewards looked like?

I was a full-time professor in Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, teaching film and video production in a studio art program. I'd already been making films for maybe a decade, but more like short films. I made one feature because I got the Guggenheim and I made it for, I think, $55,000, which is not a lot of money, shot in 16 and then turned on and then with a Steadicam operator. And it just seemed at that point in my career,

teaching full-time and being an artist filmmaker full-time felt tough to continue to have two full-time jobs. And I was working on my second feature, which is a collaboration with a British filmmaker named Ben Rivers. It was a co-production between a Norwegian producer and a French producer. And it just seemed like I should quit my teaching job and move to Europe and try to be a full-time artist filmmaker. My background is experimental cinema.

And so I know a lot of artists and filmmakers and the ones who I knew who were able to make a living without having a second job were living in Europe and were generally European. Yeah. So just figured I'd try it for a little while. And I've been in Chicago for five years and felt like it wasn't a place that I wanted to live in for the rest of my life. And it seemed like a decision to make at that point. And I've had remarkable luck since I left the States. I've made

Direct Action is my fifth feature. I've made a lot of other short films, installations, exhibitions, and I don't think that any of the funding or opportunities would have happened if I hadn't come over here. San Juan Capistrano de Marseille. Okay, here's a question for you. What would you say the main differences are between American cinema and European cinema? Well, American cinema is mostly private funded.

It's interesting to answer it in terms of financing, but I feel like financing really determines what subjects are. And because most of the money in the United States is private and investors generally want to get their money back. means that subject need to have a broader appeal because that's how folks imagine they'll get their money back is by appealing to more people. And what that does to ideas around, I guess, I don't

make fiction films at all. I'm not qualified to talk about a perspective on it, but it just seems like that's where a lot of this sort of safe rehashing of storytelling structures comes from is because there's a product that's been made that has a certain market value. And on the documentary side, it feels like that idea has also been contaminated by fiction. That most popular documentary work in the United States tend to be either character-driven

or based around marketable issues, what a film does in the world, like who it lands with, and ideas about reach or issue-based projects. And none of those are things that I'm really interested in as a filmmaker, as an artist. And I think because in France and Germany and the UK, especially where there's pretty robust public funding for cinema, it means that the burden is less on

box office returns than on the state just funding the mechanism. It's expensive to make films because technicians get paid super well and the taxes are high. But if you're French, then you're already part of the system and you're getting money from the state which is going into this. because the people are getting paid, in a certain sense, it doesn't matter so much if the films succeed in the box office. Although having said as much, there's like a

huge distribution system in France. And it's quite possible to make a film and have it seen by lots and lots of people in France and in the French speaking world. That hasn't necessarily been the case with my films, which tend to exist more in festivals and exhibition spaces. But this new film, Direct Action, is going to be released in cinemas here in November, which for a film that's three and a half hours long and has 35 shots is a bit surprising.

Observational cinema. Can we talk about that? You would call this an observational documentary, is that correct? I come from a critical theory film studies background and have much in the door of contemporary art practices. And so I'm pretty cagey about using the word documentary. I really prefer the term nonfiction, which has a bit more to do with the theoretical position, thinking that documentaries propose a certain kind of objectivity. And I don't really believe in that.

in terms of filmmaking, don't think it's really possible. my goodness. Okay. All right. Would you say all filmmaking requires manipulation at the end of the day? Yeah, for sure. But I think manipulation is A nasty word. Yeah, it's not a bad word. It's just like... It's seen as a nasty word, but it's not if you look up the definition. Right. I would say that all filmmaking involves a kind of construction. It's a character trait of the medium. And so if you lean into the character trait, then you can really...

get it to do the things that you want it to do. If you resist it or try to reason your way around it, then it's to me that those things feel a bit false, which is why I'm resistant to this idea of documentary. man. I love this conversation because I want to gain knowledge. I want to open my mind up. I want to think of things in different ways for sure. And I love documentary just very briefly because I've gone on and on about this on the podcast about how I was doing fiction, micro budget fiction forever. And then I switched to doc five years ago and I fell in love with the form. And I guess that's documentary in my mind.

But as far as taking real life people and bringing over the things that got me off as far as fiction filmmaking is concerned and bringing them over to the nonfiction side of things, I fell in love with the form because of its authenticity and the things you're always trying to create. I would propose that in thinking about the documentary, the nature of recording and actual spaces that a lawnmower in your Los Angeles background is a marker of where you are.

make sense that it's there. Okay, so before it gets lost in the audience any further, I'm going to read the Burle Nau synopsis. Direct Action is co-directed with Guillaume Caillot and Ben Russell. Direct Action is a tactical strategy of protest that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means. Direct Action is a contemporary portrait of one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France. A 150-person strong rural collective that successfully resisted an international airport expansion project in 2018.

created in an autonomous zone between 2012 and 28, survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state and spawned a new ecological movement in 2020. Using a collaborative and immersive observational approach, the film documents the everyday lives of a diverse ecosystem of activist squatters and anarchist farmers and those labeled by the government as eco-terrorists. Can the success of a radical protest movement offer a path through the climate crisis? 216 minutes long.

I just want to say I really enjoyed this movie and it's very hypnotizing, this film. And I don't see many movies like this. I've seen a few that are longer takes. You know what it reminded me of is the camera person, Kirsten Johnson's camera person. It's on my list of films to say, sure, sure. Yeah, I haven't seen it. It was the first time, I think that was an introduction for me. you can do this. As far as the longer takes, the more kind of like being in there and you're not being driven by some big time plot upfront or character journey.

so much as you're actually there. These two people playing chess for four minutes. It's just like, why not? It's just what's happening in that area. Was there a macro intent of trying to show the people in this region going through this thing? And then, I guess, talk about the approach that you guys used in trying to get this story across. What was the main kind of intent for you? For my part, I was really excited, and maybe generally am.

in the idea of portraiture and of trying to make a portrait of a place that is constituted of a group of people, that is also an ideology, that is also an environment, that is also a set of relations between humans and non-humans. And so it wasn't so much about explaining what a thing is, but rather showing how it exists and what it feels like to be there. And the it in this case is a...

radical, Westish community that was successful in resisting the state, which doesn't happen. Chiapas is one of the only other instances of that kind of event, and these people were very influenced by what had happened in Chiapas in Mexico. But so that was the idea was to make a portrait of the inhabitants of this place and to think about inhabitants broadly to not just mean humans, but also like horses and cows and...

structures and things. But I would say it's by virtue of living in France. Both Guillaume and I were quite aware of the fact that this is a community that had been very well documented and very well covered by the French press. There have been a few documentaries made, but in terms of representation in the media, they've been overrepresented for four or five years. Since the airport plan was canceled, which was in 2018, the president said, I never want to hear of this community again.

And so they were erased from media and it felt like a nice moment to go back in and to think about what a place that has been victorious in whatever way we understand victory to mean what it looks like and what it feels like. That was the entry point. I think for me, was really striking about being there was understanding that everything that was happening was ideological.

and everything that was happening was in service to this broader idea of ecological activism. And in that sense, every shot has a kind of like double valence. These aren't just people in Brittany, following a field with horses. Which is basically what? Southwest of Normandy, correct? Yes, I used to call it Northern France and I was corrected a lot as it's

central Western France, but it's very wet, it's very muddy, it's humid, and it's just farmland. It looked great on camera. What are the processes you have in mind? I'm sure a lot of it's just allowing things to happen and then you use the footage that you most respond to once you get in post. How do you go about filming this thing? The film is three and a half hours long and we actually shot only 12 hours of footage. And it's all shot in super 16 millimeters. There's already an economy of production, which isn't...

meant to be understood strictly in terms of money, but also in terms of time, because every role of film is about 10 minutes and you can't shoot something longer than 10 minutes unless you change the role, essentially. And everything was shot on a tripod. There's a of shots that stick in my mind, but there's a shot where you're looking at a car in a driveway for a good...

four minutes or something. And then you basically pan and then... yeah, the drone shot. Sure. It felt like it was on a tripod, it tilted up and then panned. It's on a tripod. Yeah, everything's on a tripod in this film. I know what it was. It's like this shot, like for a few minutes where this car's parked and you're just there. You're just there and you're seeing it. And then after a few minutes, just tilt pans all the way around and starts panning all the way around. It's like a 180. And then it catches the door frame that was behind the camera. And then the character walks in.

It's just like, holy shit, that one reminded me of some Tarkovsky, that one shot right there. You ask a little bit about the construction of the film. We had decided very early on that it didn't make sense to make a film where we asked people to talk. In part because there were some folks that we worked with and spent time with were so intelligent and so articulate and so used to presenting like a political self to the camera because they've been

reported on so much. And also because they were so thoughtful. There was a kind of wall of language that was always going to be in front of us if we allowed it. And so we decided to find the form that would match the content. And because we were dealing with such a radical subject in the political sense of the term, it felt important to some kind of radical form. And making a film in which we're really slowing things down and asking.

audiences to spend time with subjects to be present with. It felt like the most radical thing that we could do. One of the moments of experimental avant-garde cinema that I really like is structuralist filmmaking. You get a rule and you stay with the rule until the rule doesn't work. Once we had decided that we were going to shoot everything on a tripod and try to not move the camera very much, then that really determined how we...

that at the shots and how we spent time with people and it meant that we went once every two months for 10 days or 14 months, so we went seven times. And each time we spent time working with people first to understand what they were doing and also to understand if they wanted to be filmed, if they wanted to be a part of the thing we were doing. And then at some point we would shoot and we averaged one shot a day. But you're covering several minutes of your film in that

and that one shot too, which I mean, not to be sounding lazy about it, but man, that must be nice in post as far as, you don't have to figure out how these shots piece together. That must be nice. Editing's great. I love editing. It's one of the reasons that I make films. But yeah, we didn't have a lot of choices. We had a cut at some point that was five hours long and it felt like it was totally possible, but it just wasn't tight enough in terms of.

the organization, there was some repetition of events. What was really interesting is that as the camera operator, I felt maybe overly convinced that the moment I decided to film and the moment I decided to stop filming were sort of what the shot already was. And because Guillaume was next to me when we decided to edit, he really insisted on at least trying to cut these things down.

But in a way that can't really be described, when the shots were taken were reduced from their original structure, they just stopped making sense. And so suddenly, even though they were shorter, you kept wondering why they were so long. Whereas when we're aligned with whatever had happened in the moment of filming, they really works. Maybe it's similar to a longer kind of take in a fiction film or whatever where you would like it to speed up here or there. It feels like it's dragging within the shot, but you can't just cut it without losing the

feeling of being there and like having what comes after that. I'm very excited because this has got me thinking in different ways. It really has as far as the filmmaker. I'm not saying I'm going to just start doing observational cinema all of a sudden, but like just to be able to use it and put it in the toolbox. It's really cool. And another question before we move off of the visual language of the film, how do you know where to put the camera? Is it just instinct? Is it just feeling? Because I'm sure you have many options when you get on the ground and you're like,

wow, it could be this or that, but you have to commit to something like this more than most films, because you're rolling film, you're gonna roll for maybe 10 minutes. How do you know when you should commit to a shot? I've made a lot of films, so I think that I've come to really trust my intuition in terms of making things, but what I really love about working within a non-fiction mode is that I find that

if I spend time in a place or even if I just sit in one position, that because I'm thinking about what I'm going to be filming or how I'm going to be filming, that it really gives me time to understand what would happen from that vantage point if I were to set up a camera. As I just said, most of the thoughts in this film involve a certain amount of labor and the labor is necessarily repetitive. And so we would be there and we would work with people for

a few hours and then we would, the same thing would happen the next week or the next two months. And so we could come back and after having watched it and understood how bodies move in the frame and how they're happening in space, we could set up a frame that makes sense. And I think it's just a matter of attention really. It's a matter of just watching and listening and understanding what the logic of the long take is. Even though the shot, the frame isn't changing. You want things to change within the shots you want.

bodies to recede or hands to enter or things to move around. You want some kind of event at some point and then you want that event to happen or shift or change again. My first feature was this film called Let Each One Go Where He May, which was shot on a Steadicam on 16 millimeter and every shot is 10 minutes long and every shot is moving all of the time. Still trying to do that. I feel like I need to get that out of my system. Let's go. It's a great experience making that film involved.

walking with a stopwatch for 10 minutes and trying to understand what moving through space would be like and what needed to happen in certain moments in order to make the film feel dynamic in some way. What was that film of yours called? Let Each One Go Where He May. 2009, end. Man, director, screenplay, producer, editor.

Ben Russell. There's no writing. Okay, it's composed of only 13 total shots. It follows a surname of his man as he travels from the city to the forest. Where is this available? I need to watch this. All of my films except for a few of the features are on my website. Okay, nice. I like this conversation. I have so many questions. This is one of those interviews where I have more questions after the interview than during. How do you feel about the audiences that watch your films? Are there a lot of people out there that like these kind of films?

People are so used to what they're given over and over again. So I would imagine people just aren't familiar. This is the fifth feature that I've made. of the features of the five, three of them have had limited distribution in cinemas. They've all had pretty robust festival trajectories and have won a lot of prizes and are happening within like more esoteric spaces.

Because I'm not a fiction filmmaker and I'm not a documentary filmmaker, but I'm some place in between art making and cinema, I never really imagined widespread popularity as like a goal. So generally I would say I have people know my work. I've been doing this full time for a while now, 10 to 15 years. And I make a living doing it and I travel internationally.

doing it and I'm able to make the kind of work that I want to make. In terms of audiences, it seems like people are excited about the work and it's certainly not unique, right? There's a lot of precedent. have a lot of colleagues, comrades, friends, antecedents who have been making work like this. I think it's maybe one of the reasons why all of my work is free to watch online, even though it's really not the place.

where I want the work to be seen to make work to be shown in the cinema. And a lot of direct action has a pretty immersive 5.1 sound mix and a film about a collective is best viewed in the collective of bodies in the cinema. So I always understood the films online as just like references towards this other thing that I'm doing. The biggest thing that's always lost is that sound mix, isn't it? When it goes from theatrical to somebody's house.

I got a big TV. Yes, but what's your sound setup? I don't watch movies at home. At all? Yeah, I'm not interested. I love cinema so much and that's not how I want to experience things. It's not how I want to see things, even though I have a great projector and a nice wall and good speakers, but I just, really like being with other people in those spaces and I like the scale of it. Yeah. I showed my kid ET, the new 4k.

restoration on Blu-ray, which visually, my God, I'd never seen it like that. Because of course I didn't see it in the theater. I'd only seen it on VHS, but like seeing 4K and Blu-ray, and like I know the gaffer too of Jim Planette who did that film. And I just talked to him before this interview actually. I think I saw your name on James Planette on, did you do this? Yeah, you lit ET. Anyways, I was able to see it very clearly and nice. But as far as the sound, going back to what we were talking about, I'm not equipped for 7.1. They offer it on the thing.

on the Blu-ray, but I don't have that. And it's unfortunate because could you imagine, I just put it on two channel stereo and let Sony TV do its thing. To be able to see it that way was extraordinary. And just going back to exhibiting your films on a big screen, nothing beats that. Nothing ever will beat that. And I have so many DCPs that have so much dust on them that were used once or twice. That's such a crazy thing to think about. They came and went so quick, but it's this moment in time for two hours where my film showed on this big screen. And it's really cool. That's your space. That's your constant.

And also the fact that all your stuff is online and free to view is beautiful because my stuff's online and usually it's either AVI, which you gotta watch commercials to watch it or whatever. could pay two or three bucks to watch it, but I'm not making any money anyways. Just to be able to remove all of that and just to have it directly for anybody to view it is a stress. I don't know, man. It's just like nice to not have to think about dealing with handing it off to somebody else.

to then hopefully do the right thing and put it in the right place. I'm just always thinking, how can I move on from the stuff that I don't like? I'm thinking about you in terms of you moved from the California to France and you pursued what serves you more, right? As far as the cinema, the types of films and the types of environments that suit you. As a filmmaker, I'm just always asking too, what are the other ways to do this?

Yeah, I'm lucky to never have had really high expectations for the work, in part because I was coming through like noise music scenes and spaces that were really like pretty small and pretty local and really exciting to be in. The work was thrilling and the community was supportive and to know people who making things has always felt like a real privilege. So to see friends films at festivals, to see friends performing, it was always great. I've taken on a lot of different ways of

Making work and thinking about work, one of the things I used to do maybe 15 years ago, I would tour with film programs a bit. I did tours in the US, I did tours in Europe, I did tours in Australia. Film programs, what you mean by that? I've made at this point like 40 short films and five features and they're all like experimental-ish. And so I would put together a program of films with one other filmmaker and we would...

take on the model of a touring band and just find different small cinemas, art spaces, community centers, get like one big place to pay for us to come over and then just spend a month going around and showing our films in different places. It was a way to build community and to meet people, not intentionally, but it definitely has certainly helped to build an audience. To take things into your own hands seems to be a constant in this conversation. Yeah, I make my own work, right? I would say that...

Maybe the difference in Europe is that you can't get public money unless you have a producer, so you're obliged to work with a producer. But Direct Action is a film that I made with Guillaume, who produced it, and Brunozze, who did the sound. There's just the three of us. Every time we were shooting, and then Guillaume and I edited it when we worked with two other guys for sound. We had a very small team. in terms of crews, the biggest crew I've ever had is six people.

And I think coming out of an art practice is interesting because artists, imagine generally to be quite autonomous beings who do most of the stuff themselves. And doing that means that you have smaller budgets, but you're able to do things more precisely and yeah, more intimate. more money you want. Yeah. But the more money you want, the more you have to like.

answer to other people which I was having a thought here about a minute ago too when you start pursuing what you think others want and it becomes more of a market driven mindset as far as what am I going to make people are watching this stuff now maybe some people that's what they like to do but as far as like being a fulfilled artist at least for me it wasn't until like I really asked myself what do I need to talk about and need to say as far as my goal being a fulfillment

And not just for like myself, but to connecting with other people and offering something, either taking a stand or something that's not being talked about or getting strength to an underdog against the system in place, which I feel like has been my pattern since I switched to documentary filmmaking. I realized what I'm about. I didn't know what I was about until I started doing ducks. And it is like this like down with the man kind of thing. Anyways, I've found such joy and reward once I started honoring.

what I need to say versus chasing the market. I just think it's so wonderful that there are spaces and there's things to be achieved from like honoring your, you need to say. And I just want to continue to figure out where I fit in to get in where you fit in. want to figure out who am I as a filmmaker even more and where are the best places to play? Where are the realms that I belong to or can maximize my being as a filmmaker, which I feel like you seem to have figured out.

Yeah, one of the things that I also did for a long time and still do, run like cinema screening series. So I show other people's work and I do that because I love the work, but I also started doing it because I felt you also need to produce your own context. And so if you want people to be excited about the things that you're making, then you also have to get them excited about the space in which it exists.

And in terms of community, it's also been really great. I would say I've done a little bit less of that since moving to France and also since maybe having more success, feeling like maybe I don't have to do it, which I think it's something that I'm working to shift a bit because it feels important to be engaged. The work doesn't end and you can create your own space. of your film is totally the title of your film career. seems I've known you for an hour, but it seems as such. Any commonalities that run

through like a clothesline in your films? Well, I mentioned portraiture a while ago, and I would say that's one of the things that I always find with cinema is the possibility of looking at somebody and having them appear to look back at you. And to spend time with other humans in such a monumental way has always been like really viscerally affecting. So would say that's one of the levels of it. Maybe to rub up against that, I'm...

pretty invested in understanding collective bodies exist and what the possibilities are of living together to do things or working together to do things, which feels a little bit like what I understand cinema to be as well as this collective space that we inhabit for a brief period of time and to think about what it means to be there with one another engaged in this subject that's somehow a mirror to us. And with direct action, the community that we're portraying is so impressive.

It's nice of you to propose that my practice is somehow involved in a kind of direct action, but like the actual militantism of giving your existence over to a greater cause feels like something that I very much admire and wish that I had the capacity to do. But at the same time, I'm also happy that I don't because I would stop being an artist making films if I did, right? There's not a lot of space for

that kind of ambition or that local of an ambition within that community, which I don't mean as any sort of slight, but the goals are quite different between art practice and activism. It's a balance where you want to express yourself as an individual, but also your expression is related to the collective fight against the injustice. More precisely, I think that there's an urgency to activism that can't be applied to cinema.

because cinema takes so long to make. And because the resonance in the world is also quite ephemeral. I don't expect films to produce action, whereas I expect actions to produce actions. I expect films to produce like thoughts and emotions and feelings and proximities, but militant action produces concrete events, which maybe have a short lifespan or maybe have a long one, but the two things seem quite different to me.

and they're both consuming, so it's hard to do both, I guess. So like, expectations are important to be managed or thought about in life in general, when you have expectations and you don't get what you want, you get upset. So the best things come when you have no expectations. It's nice to just go and make a film and not have some sort of need for a specific result, right?

I'm going to read your bio. Ben Russell is an artist and filmmaker born in the USA in 1976 and is currently based in Marseille, France. His works focus on the intersection between ethnography and psychedelia and has been presented around the world. He was an exhibiting artist at Documento 14 in 2017 and his work has already been shown at the Berlin Alps several times, most recently in 2018 with the rare event in Forum Expanded. Berlin Alps great.

What are your thoughts? I had a complicated experience there because of Germany's draconian relationship to the war in Gaza. It was a pretty fraught time to be in a film about militants in a space when the war first started, even wearing a kaffir was illegal. so it was complicated. But I think the people who invited us there are no longer there. The director.

and his team were fired and so things have shifted a little bit and we'll see what happens next. I doubt that it will be as exciting as it's been, but my sense of film festivals is that the terrain is always shifting and film festivals are not autonomous beings. They're funded by the state and they have sponsors and they're beholden to local or regional production companies and so there are a lot of other interests at play, but...

But as a place to show a film, the cinemas in Berlin were maybe the best that I've ever seen my films in. What's the one, I think it's Alexander Platz, it's the one that Fritz Lang premiered probably all of his movies before he left, but him and I Metropolis as well, the precision of quality. But I've only just participated as an audience member with that festival and it seems very nice.

up until a certain moment, and it's a great experience. The regime's changed, it's like anything else. What's the first screen that comes in your mind when you've screened a film and you felt just fulfilled? Is there any one thing that comes to mind? I saw a show of mine screened on a projection screen that was mounted in the sea on the island of Tinos in Greece.

And that was probably the best experience of one of my films I'd had. How did they do the sound with that? What was that a 16 millimeter projector that brought a generator over the side of this cliff and set it all up. was like a crazy idea, but it was really great. One of the lovely things about coming out of this other world of cinema is that it's a malleable quantity. People do film performances and...

The idea of cinema just keeps expanding in all directions. It's really lovely to experience that. But I would say recently seeing direct action in Berlin was great. It was beautiful. The seats were really comfortable. The tentive. The film has an intermission. And so people are shaken a little bit out of their trance. And they don't quite understand what to do and then talk, which is also really nice. We understood it was going to be long.

tested it out in some capacity and understood that it worked. But the thing that we hadn't ever really experienced was the intermission with a group of people. And so the first time that happened, it was really like, thrilling to see the audience seeing each other and to negotiate themselves in that space. Yeah, I really enjoyed that. You're challenging these structures that people are having, people are used to a certain flavor. When they don't get the flavor, they don't see it as, that's not my flavor. They see it as, that's a bad movie.

That's boring or whatever. So I feel like the more I've thankfully stepped out of that world and looked around in Europe and whatever, international film scenes, there's still a lot of that, but it's so nice when you watch a film and to be challenged and to feel challenged as far as your patience or whatever. It's like you're eating a salad versus a cheeseburger, but it's better if it's good. But when you're done, you feel better for watching it as opposed to just something like instant gratification, sensational flashing that a.

and that your film was just hypnotized. And it was unlike things that I haven't seen before in a lot of ways. And Frederick Wiseman is somebody who I think about a lot, or thought about a lot in relation to this film because of the way that he thinks about institutional portraiture. And he came a little bit after the Maisel brothers in making the direct cinema and thinking about how do you make a portrait of the welfare state, for instance. That was the last of the film he did in the last year. Minus, how do you say that? Minus plus era?

I can't speak French. I haven't seen his recent stuff. I have to say I'm little bit scared of I should be watching his films. But he's made so many and they're so great. I think part of his conviction is those films are so long and they require a certain kind of attention and presence. And if you have a grand subject, makes sense to spend time with it. And to commit to it, which ties into what I wanted to ask you. Your film's three and a half hours long. Do you ever have a concern with

your runtime in regards to if the festival can program it or exhibition wise, consider that. To be honest, every time I've made a feature, I hoped it was really long, but none of the films have wanted to be long and this one wanted to be long and it was what we made. And interestingly enough, it's the one that's probably going to have the biggest life in cinemas. I think it's comparable in festivals. Like I said, it's going to get a release in France.

maybe in the US, also in Germany, a few other places. And for the distributors, they're worried about its length because effectively it takes up two time slots. It feels like trying to make the film the way the film wants to be made in a really important consideration. Before we went to the ZAD for our last shoot, we'd been working for a year and we'd accumulated a lot of material in a relative way.

which was pretty good if you're not shooting a lot and you're being selective, like a lot of it works. But we just weren't sure if it could sustain itself. And we did a test screening with 12 people, some of whom we knew and some of whom we didn't. And the screening was five hours and it wasn't hard to watch, which was like a really real curiosity because I've seen a lot of long films, Peter Watkins, La Commune or Thayton Tango, the Bellatar film.

James Benning has been somebody I think about a lot, who makes long takes, single static camera shot films like Ten Skies or the California Trilogy. And these are all long films. And there's a filmmaker, Lavdiaz, who makes five hour long narratives, which feel like the length they need to be. So my encounters with duration haven't put me off. But I also understand that sometimes films feel really long and sometimes they don't.

Time is like a relative quantity and so it it ebbs and it flows. How do you know when your film is the runtime that it needs to be? When it's that. I'm thinking about it myself, asking myself that question. The last doc that I did came out to be 77 minutes long and it felt real nice and tight. And then PBS said if I could make it into an hour, then they could put it on, PBS. And so I cut 22 minutes off. And of course it's the same film, same story, same journey, whatever. But it's just lean and mean. There's no breathing.

It's just more of an exact, precise version of the 77-minute version. And so I think both runtimes work, but it has two different vibes, two different paces and all this. So it's just interesting. Runtime is always very interesting. Like even a new film that I'm working on, it's about this private investigator in Los Angeles, but some people are like, you should do a three-part mini-series or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know. It feels like a 90-minute film to me. And I try to explain to some people, I'm going to make the runtime that it needs to be.

versus like trying to fit it into some idea of a market play. And to answer my own question, how do I know when the runtime is the runtime? It's like when you're in it and watching it, right? And the way it needs to be. It is more of a character journey, some commercial techniques added to the doc space. But for something like yours and your film, it inspires me because it makes me think about, hey, I can sit and be still too. I can really be meditative and hypnotic. And I was really attracted to your film as a viewer and it was really cool. So I just want to thank you for making

the stuff you make and teaching me a thing or two. Is there anything that you would tell your early filmmaking self after all these years? It's funny. The strange thing about having made a lot of films is that when I watched some of the things that I made a long time ago, I don't really remember the choices that I was making. And I know that I wouldn't make the same choices now because I'm not the same age. Other things have happened. But I'm always impressed by my confidence of gesture.

And I think that's something I want to fuck up my past self by telling me to do something different. I've had a lot of good luck and fortune and also like privilege in terms of who I am and where I come from and the status that I assume as in my way of speaking. it's afforded me to make a lot of different kinds of work. I don't think about them as risks, but I've just been able to like make the things the way that I want to make them.

while always thinking about their floor and what they do and who they're involved with, like what the ethics of them are. You said you don't expect direct action to be taken from a viewer watching your film, but what are the thoughts, if there's any one thought that a viewer could take away from watching direct action? What would you prefer it to be, if anything? What is really interesting about this film, what our experience has been, which isn't something that we expected, is that younger people

watch it and I'm just like, yeah, we could do that. Because in a certain way it lays out really clearly the kind of labor involved in militant action. You want to be an activist, what you need to do is build a community and think about everything you're doing and take the time to do it and to do it with other people. Film is such like a slow accumulation of parts.

By the time you get to the protest sequences in San Solín, they're shocking in their brutality, the violence that the state is inflicting on the protesters. But you've seen people building alliances throughout the film. And so it feels like a thing that's possible. And that, I think, is really exciting that folks could watch this film and think about it not just in terms of cinema, but also think about it in terms of life practice. Here is a horizon that...

that can be reached, that can be achieved in some way, that in the ZAD they have a saying, other worlds are possible, right? That it's not a utopia because it's happening. They're doing it. Like they won one struggle and they're continuing to fight other struggles and it requires a lot, but a lot in such a human way that it feels we've seen people responding to it really positively. And that's been great because I think that as much as I've talked about like being

intent to make work that exists in the margins or has some degree of obscurity. It's thrilling to imagine that it can actually do something. I think that's a nice aspiration to have or to place onto work that I'm going to do from here on out as well. Like that glimmer that turns into a belief of hope, right? I'm trying to convince myself that as a filmmaker, we're not that important. We're doing good stuff.

So there's power in this, there really is. The stuff that's affected me most in my life has been cinema, music, and art. And I know that for most people that I've come across with, that's also the case.

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