Hey folks, Harry here... Beaks lands a great interview here with Sam Green and this is most definitely an interview worth reading - if you have a brain, that is. So that should mean those that don't understand this interview will rush to Talk Back to proclaim it a slow newsday while switch stroking with their mom's nylons, the rest of us will enjoy one helluva great interview, my hat's off to Mr Beaks! Good Show!
Having been knocked on my keister by THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND earlier this week, I leapt at the chance to talk with its co-director, Sam Green, who’s in town to possibly pick up a Best Documentary Oscar. Though it’s got some heavyweight competition, it’s certainly a worthy nominee. Feel free to track down my raving from earlier this week. As for now, here’s my conversation with Sam, recorded over a hearty breakfast at Kate Mantelini’s on Wilshire Blvd. (Note to potential diners: they ain’t fuckin’ around when they say “Thick” French Toast. Seriously, you could beat a man to death with those things.)
Are you overwhelmed?
Yeah, at times it’s overwhelming. The overwhelming part is all of the shit I’ve got to do, like get my friends tickets, or get free clothes. The details are more overwhelming than the actual “Academy Awards!” That’s just kind of exciting and weird and thrilling.
Did you have an inkling that you were going to get nominated?
We had been on the short list for documentaries, so it’s not totally out of the blue. I know it was down to twelve.
The short list is twelve?
Is twelve. And that had been announced discreetly a couple of months ago. So, it wasn’t like, “Oh, my god! How did this happen?” But, still, all of the twelve films were really good. And with the Academy, you never know. There was this movie about Charlie Chaplin, which I thought, “Okay, it’s the Academy Awards…” So, I was surprised. It was great.
And maybe a little relieved that Michael Moore isn’t nominated.
That’s true. But Errol Morris is.
Yeah. Great filmmaker. But I guess there’s less chance with him that you’ll get pulled on stage to make some kind of statement.
Unfortunately.
That was exciting, though. That’s what’s great about these awards shows.
Totally. I hope somebody… I hope if Errol Morris wins, he’ll say something.
I was really struck by this film. I have a mother who was at Berkeley in the late ‘60’s, so I’ve always had an interest in that hippie era, including what came after.
It’s weird, because I’m sort of in between you and your parents. I’m older. My parents are from the Depression, and I grew up in the 80’s. When I grew up in the 80’s, I was a teenager – thirteen, fourteen, fifteen – and starting to make sense of the world. I was always nostalgic of the 60’s. I thought, “Wow, there was so much going on then, and there’s nothing happening now. How did the 60’s become the 80’s?” It didn’t make sense to me. So, I read as much as I could about what had happened. This was something I remembered reading about, The Weather Underground, and it just really captured my imagination – these Bonnie and Clyde-type of kids, on the lam, bombing things, they were good looking and had a great language about freaks and pigs. I just liked it.
They are the forgotten revolutionaries. Everyone focuses on the Black Panthers, or—
Chicago in 1968. Woodstock.
And it always kind of ends… that is, everyone’s tempted to end it all with Altamont.
Exactly.
But here you’re showing that some of these kids kept fighting, and even ramped up their methods.
I think in a lot of ways there were a lot of things that drew me to it. But one of the things was to just muddy the waters, or make a bit more complex the cliché that has become the narrative of the 60’s, where it all ended at Altamont. Actually, this started in 1969 and went on until 1977. So, in many ways, I love the 70’s; it’s such a complex time. In a lot of ways, the 60’s really continued to 1977. To me, ’77 is way more of a pivotal year, where the Weather Underground ended and the Sex Pistols started playing. That’s a great moment there.
A sort of passing of the torch of rage.
Exactly. So, I had been interested as a teenager, and then later I realized, through some weird coincidence, that somebody I knew in Berkeley – I live in San Francisco – had been a part of the group. This was about six years ago. I was totally shocked, because I never really knew what happened to them. So, I started to go over to his house and just talk to him about it. I was curious, and the more I learned about it, the more it really just drew me in. I liked it because it was a complicated story that raised all sorts of complex questions with me. That turned it from this adolescent interest to a more adult interest. And it was something that I felt was relevant. I mean, this was 1998, so September, 11th hadn’t happened, but I still thought that these questions were interesting. Also, I thought it was a good way to get some of this history out in a way that my friends, who are not political, would respond to.
Well, 9/11 or no 9/11, the ambiguities are still there: violence to achieve piece. Going into this, were you afraid of romanticizing that?
Definitely. The thing that attracted me to it was the moral ambiguity and the complexity. I never really knew if I thought what they did was right or wrong. Myself, honestly, would never have been a part of it had I been around at that time, but it still interested me. It’s hard to say; everybody has this thing where they think, “If I was in Germany during the 30’s, I would’ve shot Hitler,” or, “I would’ve been out West in the 1800’s and defended the Indians,” or, “I would’ve worked on the Underground Railroad.” We all think of ourselves as moral people, and it’s easy to do because we’re never in that situation. But this was a moment where they really felt they were in that situation, and, in some ways, they *were* in that situation. Instead of just saying, “I tried as best I could, but I failed,” they went further. In a lot of ways, what they did was misguided, but the impulse is admirable in a lot of ways.
Also, I think a lot of political movies turn people off because they’re one-sided, or they overly romanticize the subject. I didn’t want to do that.
It’s interesting… I was thinking of the dynamic between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. They always say that Malcolm X made Martin Luther King more acceptable because he was the alternative. Here, they kind of came in at the tail end of the hippie movement, and they didn’t really have a counterpart, like a…
An alternative.
Right.
Yeah, there wasn’t that. By that time, the Martin Luther King equivalent had fallen apart. There was no room for a middle. Well, there was kind of a dynamic back-and-forth. People often say, “What was their legacy? What did they do?” They weren’t the only group doing bombings; there were tons of groups doing bombings at that time. In a way, I think they raised a specter of anarchy, or chaos. You know, if young people are putting bombs in the capital, and other young people are saying, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it,” that means there are a fair amount of seriously alienated people out there. And I think that… perhaps some people in the government did say to themselves, “We cannot let the country slip into this.”
Certainly the FBI took them *very* seriously.
Not very effectively, but they tried to.
Sure. In their best, corrupt manner.
It also was a sort of Keystone Cops manner. The Weather Underground people told really funny stories of the FBI agents trying to find them, and going to communes. What they did is… the FBI came in wearing suits, and they brought ice cream. And they would approach the hippie kids, like off in a field, and they would give them ice cream and then pull out some photos. Like, “Hey, have you seen this person.”
In suits.
Strange men in suits offering them ice cream.
Was there a willingness on the part of people like Mark Rudd to talk?
No. Initially, everybody was against it, and thought, “No way. You can’t do this.” Until our movie, everything about the group… accounts had been very negative, and even references to them were negative. It’s easy to make them look crazy if you deemphasize the context in which they came up, and play up the sex and drugs. It’s easy to turn them into crazy, mad dog, kids gone wild. I think they felt like the less said the better; it was never going to be a winning proposition for them to talk. It took a long time for Bill and myself to impress upon them that we were going to take it seriously, and that we were doing this independently; it wasn’t Fox News. So, we would meet with people for coffee, and just talk to them in an off-the-record way over and over again. And, eventually, people started to be comfortable with us.
Did you ever get a sense that they were almost embarrassed?
Because they lost?
Yeah. Or by the way they’d been treated by history.
I think maybe not so much embarrassed, but frustrated. I think part of why some people talked was that they did see an opportunity to set the record straight. I mean, I don’t think they felt that, “Hey, this is a puff piece. We can really get our side out there.” But, you know, I think they felt that this was… an opportunity where they would be taken seriously, which we tried to do.
I want to backtrack a second here. Now, your first documentary was THE RAINBOW MAN.
Yeah.
Which, again, what brought you to that?
Like with the Weather Underground, I would always get obsessed with things when I was a kid… like, I got super into Bigfoot. I just totally loved Bigfoot, and corresponded with all of the people who were Bigfoot experts. I was, like, nine or ten, and this is the same thing. With THE RAINBOW MAN, I was living (in L.A.), and… you know the story of who he was?
Yeah.
I was living here about ten years ago, and I read an article in the paper that he was being sentence to prison. I was perplexed and curious, because I knew who he was. I had never watched T.V. sports, my parents didn’t even have a T.V. when I was growing up, and yet somehow I knew who he was, which interested me. And, then, the idea that he was this happy clown – that was his character – and he had taken somebody hostage? It was so weird to me. So, I started to get articles about him, just out of curiosity, and then the more I read about him, the more weird the whole story was. And sad. The thing that really got me was the detail that, at the end, he had been homeless, living in his car in L.A. To me, that was the loneliest fate anyone could be dealt: to be homeless in your car in L.A. The ultimate, alienated…
Almost stereotypical.
Yeah. So, something about it just got me, and resonated with me, and that’s how it started.
Were you ever interested in narrative feature filmmaking, or was it always documentaries?
I love documentary. I mean, I love going to narrative films, but I’m much more interested in making documentaries. Like THE BRANDON TEENA STORY and BOYS DON’T CRY. The documentary interested me so much more. There are a couple of instances like that.
MONSTER?
Actually, I haven’t seen MONSTER, but perhaps that’s true. But with THE BRANDON TEENA STORY, the documentary was so much more complicated. In the documentary, it was unclear whether (the girlfriend) really knew or not, whereas in the movie she knew and supported her anyway. I just love documentary. Also, I found that because – at least, until recently – there’s no money in it, most of the assholes stay away and go to the feature film world, which is great. I want to stay as far away from them as possible. And I hope some of the people making documentaries now will move over to the feature film world, and stop stinking up the place.
It’s crazy. In the last few years, documentaries have really taken off. SPELLBOUND, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE…
Yeah, and it’s great. But it’s a double-edged sword, because it does start to attract the scumbags. I mean, any time there’s money in it, it’s going to happen.
Although the scumbags will only be attracted to the more commercial subject matter.
That’s true, but it kind of skews things. It sets up this expectation where the expectation is, “Okay, you’re going to make $1.5 million, and if you don’t, it’s a bomb.”
Getting back to THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, there’s the quote that appears twice in the film (I stumble over the quote a couple of times before getting it right): “When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things.” Is that your take?
Not quite. I think that’s an important point to make. This is just my own opinion: I think that’s an important point, and there have been horrible things done throughout history by people who think they’re right. In fact, almost all horrible things have been done by people who think they’re right. But if that’s all you consider, the only conclusion you can come to is to not do anything. And I don’t think that’s right either. I feel like there’s a lot of great things by people who think they’re right. I guess, ultimately, what I take away for myself is that you have to have a certain humility about your ideas, and recognize the fact that they’re just *your* ideas, and there’s a good chance that you’re completely misguided. I would think that with that in mind, people could still act, but you’d act in a much more considerate way. In a way that makes you less of a potential harm. I think that, in the context of this particular story, that idea is important, because it is the counterpoint to the point that they make, and the point I made, which is, “It’s Germany in the 30’s, etc.” Because once you have that, if you say to yourself, “There’s a genocide going on! I have to do whatever I can to stop it.” At that point, you give yourself a license to do anything.
One of the things that disturbed me is that I think the WU was very lucky to never have killed anybody. I mean, they definitely planned *not* to, and they took every precaution, but when you’re transporting and hiding a bomb… so much can go wrong. And that kept me at an arm’s length when trying to sympathize with them. Did that bother you?
I guess I see it as glass half-full, glass half-empty. I think there was some luck in the fact that there was never a night watchman who stumbled upon a bomb, but at the same time I think they took enough precautions, and developed a way of doing it that was foolproof enough that there wasn’t an accident. In a way, it is problematic to even take risks with people’s safety in the name of making a pint, but at the same time they minimized the risks enough that I’m not uncomfortable with it. I mean, I’m much more bothered by the fact that they did get to the point where they were going to kill people. That’s pretty monstrous and hard to accept. One of the things that kind of bothered me is how do you live with yourself later when you know you’ve reached that point. And some people, I think, are more bothered by that still than others.
Mark Rudd is a guy who I connected with most in that film. I understand the rage, I’ve got the same thing, but at the end… I mean, how do you get through to people? How do you break them down, and get them to think critically? Does it really take blowing up a building?
Well, obviously that didn’t work all that well. I sort of see it as crude PR. They would do bombings, and send out these communiqués, and the idea was to get these ideas out into the media. It was definitely focused on communicating through the media – a somewhat crude and ineffective PR.
We see the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the anarchists… I can’t remember what they’re called…
Black Block.
Yeah. I guess they’re the modern day equivalent of the Weather Underground, but now we see how the opposition tends to lump everyone in with the extremists. Earth Liberation Front is used to discredit environmentalists, while the anarchists are used to discredit the WTO protestors. I’m wondering if that kind of extremism can serve a purpose nowadays.
Sometimes I think that that kind of militancy can be positive. Like with the WTO in Seattle. That really rocked the country, and people talked about the WTO. It had always been this thing that existed, but nobody really talked about, and certainly didn’t debate in a critical way. The fact that there were huge demonstrations with union people and environmentalists… you know, a very respectable part of it. But also young, crazy anarchists running wild in the streets and smashing Starbucks… I think those two elements made it a big deal. And people reacted to the fact that, “Damn, people are upset about this.” I think in that case, it was actually productive. The problem with that is that it quickly loses its efficacy, so that now these conventions and big meetings, there’s just a photo of a crazy guy in dreadlocks, and that’s it. It’s complicated, and that’s ultimately one of the things that I told in the story. Violence is a real complicated thing. People think they can control it, but you can’t. It’s so charged. Mark Rudd makes the point that Americans are conditioned to think of violence that is not done by the government as either criminal or mentally ill, and I think that’s true. Even though in our own country, our own history, there’s a tradition of political violence – the Boston Tea Party’s a perfect example.
The American Revolution was guerilla warfare.
“Revolutionary heroism.” (Laughs.) But I’ve got to say every time that the Earth Liberation burns a bunch of Hummers, my immediate reaction is, “Excellent! That’s great.”
Me, too.
It’s weird. I think ultimately… to me, the story (of the Weather Underground) is inspiring. It’s in some ways a depressing story because it didn’t work, and the world’s still fucked up, but I was inspired by it. I’m not inspired actually by going out and doing bombings; I would never want anybody to actually see the movie and go do that. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. But at the same time, just the spirit of it is inspiring and resonated with me.
As I told Sam later, I walked away from THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND frustrated, but that’s the great thing about a movie like this. It’s an objective documentary that demands the viewer form their own opinions, while taking an unflinching look inward at their own beliefs. It’s an accomplished work, and I wish it all the best this Sunday. More than that, though, I look forward to the next film.
Good luck keeping the assholes away, Sam.
Faithfully submitted,
