by Paul Cronin
Perhaps the most important scene in the film comes towards the end. After 125 executions, Fred Allen, the captain of the tie-down team, talks about how, out of the blue, just before an execution, he started to cry and shake violently. He had been an advocate of the death penalty for a long time, but being the last person to look into the eyes of those about to die gave him an insight into the process that he couldn’t entirely explain. This man of extraordinary dignity and stoicism turned his back on the job literally overnight, and by doing so forfeited his pension. In the film he talks about “living your dash”, the dash between the dates on your gravestone, everything from the time you’re born to the moment of your death. When I look at Fred Allen, I see the best America has to offer. His story is a powerful argument against capital punishment. With his integrity and experience, Fred is a national treasure, as trustworthy as anyone on this planet. He talks about sitting quietly, watching nature around him. “I have time to watch the ducks and the birds,” he says. “I watch the hummingbirds. Why are there so many of them?” I couldn’t have found a better ending to any of my films. I nearly fainted when he said that, and told him there and then he would have the final word. I’m blessed Fred offered up such a mysterious and profound question. It doesn’t get any better.
Into the Abyss might also be a tale of God, because He is invoked by almost everyone in the film. The real question is: why wasn’t He there to protect the innocent victims? The same question was asked by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Auschwitz in 2006. “Where was God in those days? Why was He silent?”
Your first film project was about people in prison, and one of your most recent too.
In the early sixties there was much discussion in West Germany about ensuring that the penal system became more about rehabilitation and resocialisation than punishment per se; it was an unrealistic dream, even if I do still think such attempts are worthy. This was the subject of an early project of mine – before even Herakles – that thankfully never came to pass. I had gone to Straubing prison as a seventeen-year-old and met several men serving life sentences, but eventually dropped the idea. It was a well-meaning but immature project and I’m glad the film never materialised, though I did remain in touch with the prison warden for a while. My fascination with maximum-security facilities – where the most violent of all offenders end up, and where seemingly all traces of civilisation have disappeared – has clearly never left me.
Into the Abyss points to the decay and lack of cohesion in families today, which means the fundamental issues of the film go far beyond the criminal case. Jason Burkett’s father Delbert is also in prison, where he will almost certainly spend the rest of his life; he knows his son is never going to make it out either. It’s powerful to hear him talk about how we should raise our children, about the baseball games and birthdays he missed, about how he should have encouraged his own children to finish high school – all the things that constitute the healthy upbringing of a child – and what he did wrong. Delbert testified on Jason’s behalf at his son’s trial, explaining that his children never had a chance, that their mother had to bring up all four of them on her own, that none of it was Jason’s fault. He even said he wished he could do Jason’s time for him, that he blamed himself for everything. When you hear Michael Perry talking about happier times – about a canoe trip in the Everglades he took as a thirteen-year-old, surrounded by alligators and monkeys – he seems oblivious to the fact that he’s on death row. “I haven’t felt this free in ten years,” Perry told me at the end of our conversation. “While we were talking, I never felt I was in a cage.” He spoke about the joyous moments he had experienced and what went wrong, about how close he was to a better life. Thirteen days before I met Perry, his father died. Perry was executed eight days after I filmed with him. I wanted to find out more about his family and upbringing, but his mother declined to appear on camera.
Perhaps by including Delbert Burkett in the film – a truly tragic figure – I’m asking audiences to assess themselves and think about how they live their own life. Over the years I had become somewhat dismissive of the kind of “family values” you see on television and in films, which is easy to do because they always prevail, with revolting regularity, in Hollywood happy endings. It was all too petty bourgeois for me. But today, as the father of three grown children out in the world living their own lives, and after talking with Delbert, I see things with fresh eyes. I don’t think this kind of change necessarily happens with age; it’s more about insight and actively dwelling on such things. Delbert reminded me that family loyalty is a priceless gift, that a parent must never abandon their child no matter what, that a parent’s primary duty is to stand up to injustice on behalf of their child. Delbert was mature enough to admit what he did wrong as a father, even if his deep insights came too late.
Jared Talbert talks about learning to read while in prison.
I recorded a conversation for Into the Abyss with a woman who had worked in a bar in Cut and Shoot, a town near Conroe, where the murders had taken place, and who had known Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. She had a young man in tow and introduced me to him, saying, “This is Jared Talbert. You might be interested in talking to him because he also knew the murderers.” I asked Jared to step aside while I filmed with this woman, then turned the camera ninety degrees – we didn’t even move the tripod – to record a conversation with him. The second I shook Jared’s hand I felt his callouses and knew he was a working man; I had those same callouses on my hands when, as a youngster, I worked as a welder. We connected immediately, and I said, “Now it’s your turn to talk, welder to welder.” He told the story of being stabbed through his chest with a fifteen-inch screwdriver, and of his friend throwing him a knife so he could defend himself. But Jared wanted to see his children that night, so he chose not to pick up the weapon and fight back. Half an hour after the attack on him he was at work, roofing a house. He spoke of how proud he was of his skills as a mechanic and his work in the local body shop, and told me how he had learnt to read only recently.
For me Jared is truly heroic, the best of the best. I have always been fascinated by the eloquence of illiterate people; some of the most enthralling conversations I have ever had were with people unable to read. How do you orientate yourself in a city when you can’t read the street signs? How do you involve yourself in the most basic daily routines when you can’t look at your address book? Memory becomes ever more important for such people. Jared and I had spoken with each other for only fifteen minutes, after which he needed a ride home so he could pick up some tools and get to work. I drove him back to his place. For ten minutes we rode silently in the car, though I felt he wanted to say something to me, and I know I wanted to say something to him. When he stepped out of the car, I turned to him and said, “Jared, wait a second.” I walked around and stood in front of him. “I would like to tell you something,” I said. “People always ask me whether spending time with death-row inmates is a life-changing experience. My answer is always no, it doesn’t change my life. It might change my perspective, but it doesn’t change the course of my life. Having met you doesn’t change the course of my life either. But it does make it better.” He paused for a second, hugged me briefly, almost in embarrassment – a hard quick hug – then turned around and walked off. I never saw him again.
In the cafeteria at McMurdo Station, when we were making Encounters at the End of the World, I met a journeyman plumber and welder called David Pacheco. It wasn’t easy to establish a rapport with him, so instead of shaking his hand when he left, I turned to the side and gently elbowed him. He loved this and did the same. We knocked elbows together and were immediately in business; it was an instant, non-verbal form of communication. A few years before that I was watching a Thai film and noticed a man in the background with an intense, intimidating look. I immediately decided I wanted him for Rescue Dawn as the mute. His name was Chorn Solyda, and it turned out he spoke only a Cambodian dialect that nobody else understood,
so on set we jokingly called him Walkie Talkie. Although no one could actually have a conversation with Chorn, I directed him anyway, without words, using my body to describe what I wanted. Decades before that, when I was making The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, something interesting happened. It was difficult to get Steiner to open up in front of the camera because he was embarrassed about being the focus of attention. One evening the crew and I grabbed him, hoisted him up onto our shoulders and ran through the streets. At that moment, because of this immediate physical sensation with the man, the film suddenly became quite clear to me. Only then did I know how to respond to the shots we had of Steiner flying through the air and really understand how to use them properly. At the same time, he became more comfortable talking on camera, as if he had reacted to this physical contact himself. It still wasn’t easy to dig into him with words, but I felt a newfound connection.
These encounters with Jared, David, Chorn and Walter – these tactile experiences – are the story of my life, of all the people I have met and places I have visited, of my love of life and of moving around the earth. I feel most comfortable when it comes to physical contact, to being able to handle rolls of unexposed celluloid or a camera I can balance on my shoulder, to landscapes where I can touch the ground or grapple up a mountain or climb through the trees and vines of a jungle, where I can drive through the sand dunes of a desert or steer a boat through raging rapids. I spot these ideas, places and people and engage fully, without hesitation. When making a film, whenever possible, I serve as the actors’ stand-in in front of the camera while the shot is being framed and the lights are set up, and I always do the slateboard myself because I like being the last person between the crew and the performers. It gets me closer to the action and also helps me know when everyone is ready; sometimes I stall and pretend to deal with some technical issue because I sense an actor needs a few more minutes to prepare. I never use a megaphone when directing; I prefer to gravitate physically towards the person I’m talking to, rather than shout from a distance. A grown man should have a good whistle, which is the most professional signal you can give a crew. Mine is vicious.
Would you ever make a television commercial?
I would rather work as a taxi driver. I don’t want to make a moral issue out of this, so let me remind you what I said earlier about television and how the world of consumerism fragments our gift of storytelling. I have turned down many offers to direct television commercials over the years, though I did make a film called From One Second to the Next, part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” anti-texting-and-driving campaign. AT&T explained that because of my death-row films, and because they wanted somebody who was able to look into the emotional depths in a raw and direct way, they thought of me. What they proposed immediately reverberated. From the start I knew that showing wrecked cars and mangled bodies wasn’t the way to make this film. What I wanted to do instead was reveal the inner effects of the catastrophes. It was also important to make clear that deep and lingering wounds were experienced by both victims and perpetrators.
AT&T wanted four thirty-second spots. I knew that the moments of great suffering, of silence, would be of vital importance, and that I needed more time to tell the stories properly. Audiences had to get to know the real-life people involved in these tales, which couldn’t be done in only thirty seconds. I explained to AT&T that as well as making the four spots, I would shoot a longer film, for no extra money and within the same period of time. This wasn’t particularly welcome, but I took the initiative anyway. From One Second to the Next contains four separate stories, each about how a catastrophic event invades a family. Entire lives are either wiped out or irrevocably changed in a single second, and in the case of those drivers who caused the accidents, they will forever carry with them a profound sense of guilt that pervades every action, every dream and nightmare. The film is more a public-service announcement than a commercial per se, and has nothing to do with consumerism. The whole AT&T campaign was actually about trying to dissuade people from excessive use of a product, not about selling anything to the public. It was about raising awareness, and within three weeks of the film being released more than two million people watched it on the Internet, in addition to it being screened at thousands of high schools and hundreds of safety organisations and government agencies across the United States, which means millions more people saw it within a very short period of time.
There was an immediate reaction to the film; hundreds of emails came in from children and their parents. One teenage girl told me she sat her mother down and said, “You text when you’re driving me to school. That’s not going to happen again.” At the time the trend was shocking: something like a million accidents every year because of cellphone use, compared to almost none just a few years before. I heard about some mind-boggling cases, like a young man who killed a child because he was texting his girlfriend, who was sitting next to him in the same car. This is a phenomenon that represents a profound shift in our civilisation. I appreciate what the cowboy says at the end of the film: “Why don’t they just talk to each other?” One thing that surprised me when I made the film was an almost complete absence of legislation relating to texting and driving; there were no relevant laws in many American states. If you ran over someone because you were texting, all you had to fear was a ticket. Just imagine, the same as for parking in the wrong space!
Spoken like a true grandfather.
The purpose of From One Second to the Next was simple: to make people aware of the consequences of their actions, which means the best evidence of its effectiveness is if the film correlates with a noticeable drop in fatalities on the roads. Many people told me it will help save lives, but I haven’t checked the statistics. All I can say is that if there is only one accident less because someone has watched the film, the whole enterprise will have been worth the effort. There’s an interesting philosophical question here. You can quantify certain events – such as the number of accidents and fatalities every year – but how can you quantify things that haven’t happened? How can we quantify the number of people not texting while driving? How many wonderful wives have you never met in your life because they left the plaza fifteen seconds before you got there?
Time magazine declared you one of the hundred most influential people on the planet in 2009.
I’ve never been ambitious for anything, be it a career, social status, wealth or fame; none of those things have ever particularly impressed me. In fact, I find the very idea of ambition completely foreign. It has always been noticeably absent in my thinking and actions. I would never describe myself as being influential and was genuinely surprised when the magazine told me I was being included. I immediately wrote back saying I didn’t belong, that I would rather be counted as one of the anonymous three hundred Spartans, those foot soldiers who fought and perished with Leonidas at Thermopylae against the Persians. However, allow me to say one thing. When we were talking about the Rogue Film School, I said about how it has become clear over the years that young people see me as some kind of alternative to a certain kind of filmmaking, that I have developed tools to cope with the obstacles we all encounter when making films, that I have become some kind of beacon in the distance that gives people a sense of direction. They recognise that, against all odds, I have managed to make film after film despite the usual industry constraints. I seem to be a sign of hope for young people. Whenever I introduce one of my films, there is always a crowd of people wanting to talk to me; it’s been like this everywhere I go for nearly forty years. A young man or woman might tell me how they quit their job or dropped out of school and started making their own films after seeing one of mine. In that respect, me being on the Time magazine list isn’t completely grotesque.
Perhaps this book has helped contribute to that feeling amongst your admirers.
I couldn’t say.
What people seem to respond to in these pages isn’t necessarily the talk about specific films, more your methods of functioning in t
he world and how you have gone about producing your work over the past fifty years.
Perhaps, yes.
It’s been more than ten years, and never have I heard you say whether this book is in any way important to you.
You are as much a prisoner of this project as I am.
True. There’s little enough dignity in this work. Years ago you even told me you cursed the day you decided to co-operate.
True.
Are you happy we worked on this together?
I live my life with as little reflection as possible, but recognise that this book is the only competent comment on my work out there, and that there is ever likely to be. In that respect, I’m glad it exists.
You wouldn’t lose any sleep if A Guide for the Perplexed didn’t exist?
No.
How do you think the book would read if we had met regularly over the decades and discussed your approach to filmmaking?
Some of the basics probably haven’t changed; my fundamental perspective on the world is the same. There’s a tone I might recognise if I listened to forty-year-old recordings. People occasionally tell me I have “reinvented” myself over the years. Untrue. I leave that to someone like Madonna; she doesn’t have much of a self, so has adopted a variety of roles throughout her career. I’m basically the same person I was when I was fourteen, with my shifting fascinations and way of looking at the world, even if I’m open to new ideas and have cast aside certain attitudes I had when I was younger. I try to live in my time, though I would have made a competent Palaeolithic hunter, bow and arrow or atlatl in hand. When I think about what animal I would have gone after if I had been around back then, the horse stands out. Their flight pattern is fairly predictable, which means they could be steered into a trap, like a pit dug in the ground and covered by leaves and branches. A stag would zigzag and most probably escape, while a bison would attack instead of running. It actually turns out I’m not entirely correct about this. When I spoke to various scientists during production of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I discovered that after sifting through Palaeolithic garbage heaps, it was determined that reindeer – not horses – were a primary source of meat back then. Regardless, I would have been a good Neanderthal. I can always get a fire started when needed.