Documentary

Exclusive Interview with Steve Hoover on ‘Almost Holy’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Almost Holy poster

“Almost Holy” is one of the most harrowing documentaries I have seen in years as it follows the efforts of Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian pastor, who helps the drug addicted kids lost in the streets of Mariupol, Ukraine. After the Soviet Union fell, social services in Russia were severely cut to where many of its citizens fell into a life of drugs and prostitution, and Gennadiy pulls them off the street to give them the help they need at his Pilgrim Republic rehab facility. While many view him as a hero, others consider him a vigilante for his unorthodox tactics. The way he sees it, he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to do good deeds, and the documentary invites us to make up our own minds about him and what he does.

“Almost Holy” was directed by Steve Hoover whose previous works include the critically acclaimed documentaries “Blood Brother” and “Seven Days.” I got to speak with him while he was in Los Angeles.

Ben Kenber: How did you first become aware of Gennadiy?

Steve Hoover: I had friends who worked on an assignment in Ukraine doing a promotional piece for a nonprofit and they were traveling to a lot of different cities in Ukraine, and their last stop was Mariupol at Pilgrim with is Gennadiy’s rehab center. They were forewarned that this guy was fascinating and to not revert too much onto him, and the way they’ll describe is not intentionally, but he stole the show for them. They detoured from the project and followed him for several days and just filmed everything, and they described Gennadiy as having loads of stories and he just talked and captivated everybody in the room. These are friends of mine that I work with and they came back to Pittsburgh where I am based after that trip and they were like, “You have to see this guy. He’s open to being in a documentary and he has years of archival footage. Do you want to direct it?” And I was like, “Well, why don’t you direct it?” Anyway, they offered it to me to direct, so that’s how I got connected to Gennadiy and things went from there.

BK: What I found fascinating about “Almost Holy” is that you never judge Gennadiy. There are reasons to judge him especially when it comes to the way he gets kids into his rehab program. How were you able to keep a very objective perspective while making this documentary?

SH: I wanted people to have a similar experience that I had. I didn’t want them to have my exact experience. I found that I walked into this situation thinking that I knew and understood the story, but as documentaries go you never do. In general, I’m interested in people’s motives and complications of people’s motives, and I like to explore why people make the decisions they make because I find people so easily boil people’s motives down to very simple things. I just don’t think that’s ever the case. Why Gennadiy does what he does, there is not an easy answer for that. I think he’s somebody you could frame in a lot of different ways. People have made him look very heroic, and I wanted people to see what I saw and didn’t want to give people answers because I don’t ever feel confident in being like here’s how you should think or here’s how you should think about this person. You don’t have to do any work, just react emotionally to this.

BK: How would you say your vision of this documentary evolved from when you first started shooting it to when you were editing it?

SH: I think because my friends that had met Gennadiy had limited exposure to him, they thought the story was something. So what they communicated to me was what I thought the story was going to be; that Gennadiy only stays in Mariupol and pulls kids off the streets and rehabs them. That was what I thought I was walking into. I didn’t have personal correspondence with Gennadiy beforehand, so the first time I saw him was the first time I ever talked to him. Some people will do extensive talks with the subject to try to figure out if this is worth it, but I just fell into Ukraine which, for me, was fun because it was this exploration and it was very much an adventure. I quickly started to realize that the story was more interesting than that. How does he get more interesting than adopting homeless kids and rehabbing them? His story had evolved with the needs and problems of his city and what was around him, and I came to realize that adopting kids from the street through these night raids was a back story and that it was so much more ill-defined which made him more developed and interesting. When we started the conflict hadn’t happened. There wasn’t even like, “Oh now’s a good time to do something in Ukraine because there might be a conflict.” There was nothing. That all dramatically impacted the narrative of the film because the conflict forced its way into everybody’s lives in Ukraine, so for a while I wasn’t sure. In the middle of it there’s the Euromaidan revolution and I was like, I don’t think we need to get into that. But it just kept creeping closer and closer and then it just was on the doorstep and in his life and everybody’s lives. At first it was like okay, I can avoid this, but then I realized how much it actually helped the story because here you have a figure who cares deeply about Ukraine and has been an advocate, a social worker and a lot of makeshift things. Whether it’s the prettiest execution of those offices or makeshift offices doesn’t matter. He’s somebody who was trying to make a difference in his country, and all his years of work is now being threatened by a force he can’t control and that became more interesting to me. That’s how it changed.

BK: The documentary has a wonderful industrial score by Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross and Bobby Krlic. Did you work with them closely on the score, or did you let the composers just work on it on their own?

SH: We had sent Atticus some clips of Gennadiy as a work in progress and said this is what we’re doing, would you be interested in being a part of this? He took interest for his own reasons, and he’s somebody who is creatively beyond me in what I do. He has incredible sensibilities and is someone you could absolutely trust. I was interested in seeing how these visuals inspire him and what he made of them, and he would send me bits of his work and his inspiration. The way I like to work is exactly like that, where composers would give me music. My last film had six or seven different composers and I only knew one of them personally. The great thing is Atticus had been working on it at his own time and pace based out of inspiration. Atticus, Leopold and Bobby, they provided a really excellent pool of material that I felt was inspired by the industrial backdrop of Ukraine. It’s interesting because there are definitely darker, bleak and intense moments, but there also these moments of hope in the score. There are moments that bring such character to the film. It was great working with him (Atticus) creatively. It wasn’t just like, “Hey what are your thoughts on the score?” I looked to him a lot for feedback on picture and on the edit, and he was very involved and very helpful. I respect his creative sensibilities a lot.

BK: The documentary also has the wonderful privilege of being executive produced by Terrence Malick. How did Malick become involved?

SH: With our last film we had worked with Nicolas Gonda who is also an executive producer on this film, and he is Terrence Malick’s producer. So we worked with Nicolas and, similar to developing a relationship with Atticus for the film, we had some work in progress and basically pitched the idea of creating an executive producer relationship for Nicolas and Terrence Malick. They took interest, so that’s basically how it happened.

BK: How many years did you shoot this documentary over?

SH: The film covers years, and a lot of that is due to Gennadiy’s archival footage. He had footage from 2001 to roughly 2008, and then we came into the picture in 2012 and shot. I wrapped the edit at the beginning of 2015, but I was still pulling news sources and things like that. So we were with the story for three and a half years.

BK: Are there any movies for you that helped influence the style of this documentary?

SH: I think more in postproduction. There’s a movement within documentary and creative nonfiction to make documentary films seem more dramatic and entertaining or to just push the creative boundaries of documentaries, so I like those ideas and those sensibilities. My last film was kind of a happy accident. I was sort of rebelling against polished productions because I had been doing commercials and music videos for years, and I wanted to do something that didn’t matter what the picture looked like and was more heart. I didn’t know very much about documentaries towards the end of that. I was like, what if I could care about the image but still give it heart or authenticity? So that was sort of what drove a lot of my creative decisions with “Almost Holy.” I wanted it to be more classic filmmaking. I didn’t want to bring the slider or certain things. I just wanted it to feel like a classic film with just traditional lockdowns and nice shots as much as possible. We were on the go a lot so that didn’t always work out, but even with when people were talking I made sure we always had two cameras running to film it like a narrative film so that I could cut dialogue later so you could feel the conversation like you would in a film.

BK: That’s interesting because a lot of directors come from the world of music videos and commercials, and it seems to be that that world is more about style than anything else. So to escape from that has got to be very fulfilling in a sense when you come to a documentary like this. Would you say that is the case?

SH: Yeah. With the last film that was very much the case, and then with this one it was kind of like marrying the two worlds. I have these years of experience with the crew that I work with, and these guys are very talented. What if we applied all of that in a running gun setting? Everyone adapted very well to it. We were in places where we had a minute to set up our shots and we would be stuck on a lens and we just made do, but I feel like it was very rewarding. It was hard, it was really hard. It was basically five filmmakers and then six people with the translator trying to make this happen. We had an insane amount of gear, but everyone pulled their weight and I think they did a fantastic job.

I want to thank Steve Hoover for taking the time to talk with me. Please visit the “Almost Holy” website to find out how you can view it (www.almostholyfilm.com).

Copyright Ben Kenber 2016.

Exclusive Interview with Timothy Kane and Annika Iltis on ‘The Barkley Marathons’

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

The Barkley Marathons poster

There are marathons, there are ultra-marathons, and then there is the Barkley Marathon. If you haven’t heard of this one that’s okay because, like “Fight Club,” the number one rule is you don’t talk about it. But that’s bound to change after you watch the documentary “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young” (please take its subtitle seriously). It sheds light on this race which has developed a cult following over 25 years and gives its participants 60 hours to complete the equivalent of five marathons. Once you watch it, it will be very easy to understand why, out of the hundreds who have run it, only 13 people have actually completed the entire thing.

“The Barkley Marathons” introduces us to the event’s co-founder, Lazarus Lake, a man who is as idiosyncratic and unpredictable as the race itself, and he approaches the proceedings with an almost devilish sense of humor. Hundreds of people apply for it, but only 40 are accepted. Those accepted get a letter of condolence informing them they have been selected and only have to pay an entrance fee of $1.60 and bring with them a t-shirt or license plate from their home state or country. It all takes place at a park in Tennessee where the start time is not revealed right away, and the race begins at a yellow gate when Lazarus lights up a cigarette. What happens from there is really something to witness.

Directing this documentary were first-time filmmakers Timothy Kane and Annika Iltis, both of whom had worked as camera assistants on “Mad Men.” I got to speak with them and they described what inspired their decision to find out more about the Barkley Marathon and of the numerous challenges they faced throughout filming.

Ben Kenber: The documentary was inspired by an article you read called “The Immortal Horizon.” What was it specifically about that article which spoke to you the most?

Timothy Kane: Well when we read it we didn’t know anything about the Barkley at all and had never heard of it. We also didn’t know anything about the author, so everything was kind of new to us. We read it in the Believer magazine and what we learned was that Leslie (Jamison) was really, at that time, just a fiction writer and this piece on the Barkley was her first journalistic nonfiction piece. So when we read it, it really had a narrative style to it. It read kind of like fiction that it made it even, you know, more impossible to believe than just the facts do alone. Her writing really piqued our interest and made us want to get on a plane and go to Tennessee and find out what it was all about.

BK: I heard it was really hard to track down Lazarus Lake. How did you manage to find him?

TK: Well that’s sort of inside information.

Annika Iltis: Yeah, we’re trying to keep their anonymity as much as possible. In the opening of the film we say we’re going to tell you the truth but the truth is malleable. As much as it is a documentary and everything that you see in there happened, we tried to keep the Barkley world the same as when we started the film, and I think part of that is keeping Lazarus’ privacy and Raw Dog’s privacy as much as possible. Of course we know this film will probably change that.

BK: The way people describe the Barkley Marathon, it’s a lot like “Fight Club” in that the number one rule is you don’t talk about it. There must been a lot about the marathon that you could not include in this documentary, but how much of it percent wise did you manage to get in this film?

AI: In terms of like the geography of it, a very small percentage. I think it’s hard to say even what percentage it would be because over 26 miles of the loop, or 26.2 miles, we had about seven camera operators during the shoot. We moved around a little bit, but we did everything with Lazarus’ blessing and we only went to places that he was happy with us going to and that wouldn’t affect the runners’ navigation and that wouldn’t affect the race as much as possible. But we weren’t interested in running alongside them. That was never something that we wanted to do. It wasn’t something that we’d want to watch either. A lot of the action really happened around the gate. What we got was great for the film we were making.

BK: Regarding the seven camera operators, were they ever visible to the runners or were they put in spots where the runners couldn’t see them?

AI: They were visible, but all the places that they were placed were places where that were obvious points along the course. So navigation wise it was very obvious to where the runners knew where they were along the course that when they saw a person with a camera, they weren’t like hey there’s a person there so I must be going in the right direction. They knew where they were. And there weren’t many of us; it was a very skeleton crew. We kept it simple, and because of that we were able to get a deep part of the action without overwhelming people.

BK: What was the most challenging part of making this documentary for you two?

AI: (Laughs).

TK: There were so many things. Annika, one of the first things she mentioned was the vastness of the terrain. Trying to navigate around it was a challenge, and trying to be at the right place at the right time over a 20-mile square area through six or seven mountain ranges, that was a major challenge. It was a challenge to gain the trust of the runners. That was a big thing early on for us to try to make sure that they understood what we were trying to do. We’re trying to be as respectful of them as possible and to not affect their race. They worked hard to get there and we were just guests, so we didn’t once do anything that would jeopardize their experience.

BK: Were the runners open right away to being filmed or did that take a lot of trust building tween you and them?

TK: We did on the first registration day a lot of interviews and Annika was instrumental in getting a lot of those, and at that point there were definitely some people who were maybe nervous about the race coming up but were not sure what we were doing. In hindsight I’d say there was a little bit of hesitancy, but once they started running I would say that everybody was so focused on what they were doing that they really didn’t take much notice of us which was good for us.

AI: And once they knew what kind of film we wanted to make, which was basically capturing the soul and spirit of the Barkley more than exposing its secrets, then people were on board.

BK: It was interesting because part of me wanted to see more of the course, but after a while it’s easy to understand why you don’t see that much of it. Plus, it is said that the course changes from year to year.

AI: Yeah it does change most years. We were lucky to have one of the runners; he was going to wear a Go Pro camera throughout the course and offered up his footage, so we got to see parts of the course through that. But honestly to keep the narrative structure of the film and the pace of the film, we really wanted the film to feel like you were actually there watching this race that weekend and feel like you are part of the Barkley. So to keep that going I don’t think we could’ve put more of the course in there because it just would have been more running footage and more landscape footage, and we weren’t interested in that. We wanted to keep the narrative pace up.

BK: But even though we don’t see much of the course though, we do see what it does to the runners’ bodies as they come back with dozens of scratches on their legs. It doesn’t take long to feel how painful those scratches are.

AI: Yeah, that’s all from the briars. They are pretty rough and there’s just so many hours running on your feet and with moisture. You see that part in the film. It’s very difficult on the human body but also mentally for the runners, so we tried to capture that as well.

BK: Another thing I liked was how it showed that even though many of the runners don’t finish the Barkley, you still have to pat them on the back because at least they still gave it a shot and finished one loop. There’s something to be said for that.

AI: I think anyone who actually makes it to the starting line there has already accomplished a lot because that’s not the easiest thing to get there. Part of what was really important to us while we were focusing in on different people was including people with the varying idea of success and failure. We wanted to make sure that we showed all of those points because it is a very personal thing how people view their own accomplishments there, and that was a big part of the Barkley and why we focused on the various people that we did.

BK: Have you kept in touch with any of the runners since finishing this documentary?

AI: Oh yeah, we are in touch with quite a number of them. We’ve been back to the Barkley almost every year. We missed last year, but almost every year since we get in touch with a lot of folks, we see the ones we can and, as silly as it is or maybe not, we feel sort of a part of this thing now because it’s a very unique experience and having been there for three years is something we look forward to every year. I think the people that we’ve met in the experience of making the film is really, for us, the greatest accomplishment probably.

BK: It would be interesting to see a sequel to this documentary showing what the experience of running the Barkley has had on the runners’ overall lives, and that’s regardless of whether they finished it or not.

AI: It’s interesting because honestly I don’t think it really affected most of their lives very much, and that’s because it’s a very personal thing that they do. Most of the people who go out there are not doing this for any sort of a claim by any means. They are doing it for a very personal reason. Most of them have high level degrees in science and engineering, they have regular lives and they go back to work on Wednesday or whatever day of the week it is. They can talk about their experience, but I think in their daily lives this is just something that they did and then they go on and do the next thing which is amazing but that’s the kind of person who goes out and tries this.

BK: Did either of you have to pay the $1.60 fee or a license plate in order to get permission to film this documentary?

AI: (Laughs). I don’t think we did actually. We talked about it. We did bring lots of chocolate. We paid a lot of other tolls probably over the past four years to get through all the hurdles that we had to get through, but Lazarus did not require any of those items from his (laughs).

BK: Both of you came to this project after finished filming season five of the show “Mad Men,” and you’ve said that this was a great opportunity for you to create your own material. How fulfilling was it to go from working on someone else’s material to working on your own project?

TK: It’s hard to say. It’s almost like we are still so close to it. We are still in awe of so much of the work that’s going on that it might take a little bit of time to pass before we can really look back on it and see what we learned from it. We certainly learned a lot, but in terms of doing a film it’s something that we sort of dove into and it’s basically taken up all of our free time for four years the way a passion project does I guess. It’s really pushed us to new limits. We had a lot of creative battles back and forth with each other, and those things are interesting and hopefully we’ve grown as people and as filmmakers.

BK: Many documentary filmmakers I have talked to have said that it usually takes a number of years for their project to come to fruition in terms of filming it and then finding distribution for it. Did you have any idea of how long it was going to take to make this documentary?

TK: We had no idea, but we didn’t put a time limit on it because the nature of our work, being sometimes 70 hour weeks, we would have to take full chunks of time off, like six months at a time. In some ways we were tired of working on the movie every day, tired of talking about it at work trying to push something forward, but in terms of moving forward with the narrative of the editing or whatever needed to be it was very difficult to start something because we had such little time. You would start something and then all of a sudden you would have to get ready to go to sleep or go to work. I think if you had told us it was going to take four years we may have thought twice about it. But we do get this from everybody that does documentaries, and as a matter of fact a lot of people told us that’s not long at all.

AI: That’s like an average actually. We’re probably on the short side of the lifespan of a documentary in terms of getting it out there.

I want to thank Annika Iltis and Timothy Kane for taking the time to talk with me. Please visit the doucmentary’s website at www.barkleymovie.com to find out how you can watch it.

Exclusive Video Interview with ‘Gleason’ Director Clay Tweel

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

Few movie going experiences in 2016 will be as hopeful or as emotionally draining as the documentary “Gleason.” It takes a good long look at the life of former NFL player Steve Gleason, a defensive back for the New Orleans Saints, who was best known for blocking a punt from the Atlanta Falcons on September 25, 2006. This game marked the first time the Saints had been back to their home stadium since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, so it made their welcome back celebration all the more thrilling.

In 2011, Steve was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gerig’s Disease, an incurable disease which slowly robs the body of all its motor functions and eventually leads to death. It was around that time that he also discovered his wife Michel was pregnant with their son, and this led him to start a video diary for their unborn child so that he could leave as much of who he is as a person to him before the disease takes its toll. While his situation is bleak, Steve still lives life to the fullest and is determined to be there for his wife and son no matter what.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with the director of “Gleason,” Clay Tweel, while he was in Los Angeles. Tweel previously directed “Make Believe,” a documentary which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 LA Film Festival, and “Finders Keepers” which premiered to rave reviews at Sundance in 2015. For “Gleason,” Tweel had to go through 1,500 hours of footage to give us the documentary that is now arriving in theatres everywhere.  He explained how he managed to whittle down that footage, how “Gleason” compares to the film “The Theory of Everything” which also deals with ALS, and of how the health struggles of a family member and the late, great Muhammad Ali inspired him to get the director’s job for this.

Please check out the interview above, and please be sure to see “Gleason” when it arrives in theatres on July 29, 2016. You can also watch the trailer below and visit the website at www.gleasonmovie.com.

‘Zero Days’ Interview with Eric Chien

Posted on by The Ultimate Rabbit

 

Zero Days poster

Alex Gibney is the most prolific documentarian working in movies today, and his latest documentary, “Zero Days,” may prove to be his scariest yet. Its main focus is on Stuxnet, the self-replicating computer virus invented by the United States and Israel to infiltrate and sabotage the Iranian nuclear centrifuges at Natanz. This movie reveals that the virus was part of a massive clandestine operation which involved the CIA, the NSA, the United States military and Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad to build and launch secret cyber bombs that could plunge the world into a devastating series of attacks which could shut down electricity, poison water supplies and turn cars, planes and trains into deadly weapons. But what’s especially terrifying is how the use of this virus could happen without anyone, even our own government, knowing who is responsible.

I recently got to speak with Eric Chien, one of the people Gibney interviewed extensively for “Zero Days.” Chien is a Distinguished Engineer and the Technical Director of the Security Technology and Response division at Symantec. He was one of the lead authors of Symantec’s groundbreaking research on the Stuxnet virus and has since become one of the foremost authorities on it. I first asked him about how the virus relates to a number of devices or programs we have seen in various science fiction movies.

Zero Days Eric Chien

Ben Kenber: When I look at the Stuxnet virus, I can’t help but think about Skynet in the “Terminator” movies or the black box in “Escape from L.A.” or Joshua/WOPR in “War Games.” These things came to mind especially one I was told that the Stuxnet virus is autonomous, meaning that no operator commanded it to attack in that it attacks on its own without human intervention. What are companies like Symantec doing to contain this virus, and is it even possible to contain this virus?

Eric Chien: There is no such thing as 100% security. If anyone else comes to you that is trying to sell you something and they say you are 100% protected, you should just run away. The thing is it’s a cat and mouse game. And to be honest it’s not even the most sophisticated and complex things that can have the biggest impact. Some things that can actually be very trivial and totally unsophisticated can have a huge impact. We’ve seen, especially coming out of North Korea, a lot of wiping attacks, and what that means is that they get a piece of malicious software in your machine and they just erase all your data. This is a very simple piece of malware to create. It could literally be 10 lines of code to get on and wipe your machines, and that could have a huge impact. We saw it have a huge impact in Saudi Arabia where their networks were totally wiped. Basically South Korean broadcasters and all their biggest banks, all wiped all at the same time. Obviously it was North Korea. 99% of all the malicious software we get is cybercrime, people trying to make money essentially. Right now we are seeing a huge uptake in what we call ransomware, and they are not even going after individuals anymore like they used to. Now they are going after corporations or entities, in particular hospitals. Hollywood Presbyterian got hit by a ransomware attack where the attackers got in with a simple program that basically just encrypted all their files, and they said if you want your files back you have to pay us. They held their data for ransom. They (the hospital) paid $17,000 and had to close their hospital, they had to transfer all the patients out, all their MRI machines, nothing was working and they lost all their patient data. So that’s why they had to pay because they didn’t have the backups.

BK: How much did you work with Alex Gibney on the documentary?

EC: Alex and his team, a guy named Javier Botero was his co-producer and a main research got, came in and I sat for five hours for a one on one interview. Then Liam (O’Murchu) came afterwards, five hours, one-on-one interview. And that was it, and then he produced all of that. We have done things where I have sat for 10 hours and got way less out of it, so we were actually quite impressed. They came in very well-prepared. At one point I was talking about something and Javier said, “Oh but that’s Stuxnet .5, isn’t it? The earlier version?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s .5. They were just really, really well prepared and they knew the right questions to ask, and obviously even when I said something wrong at one point he reminded me that I was not talking about the right thing. All the graphics you see of code on the screen are not random pieces of code. They are exactly the pieces of code that we are talking about at the time that they are displayed. After we had done our interviews they came back asking for this and that, and it was really interesting to see how meticulous they were being.

BK: I visited the Symantec office in Culver City and noticed they have a War Room there. Did you ever go in that room to discuss the Stuxnet virus?

EC: Yeah. We were in that War Room, but we actually have a War Room you probably haven’t seen which allows us to do encrypted communications with other offices, and we call it our Halo Room. Basically it’s… It’s hard to describe. Imagine you cut this table in half so you have kind of a half table, and there’s this really big screen that kind of curves in front of you like this and it’s like full HD. The other office has half a table on their side, and so it looks like they really are there. All the sound and audio is all directional, so someone over here you hear them over there. So we use that room more frequently because in our other War Room that we have, it’s just classic teleconference which is great, but this room obviously affords much more interaction.

“Zero Days” opens in Los Angeles and will be available to watch on iTunes starting July 8. I want to thank Eric Chien for taking the time to talk with me.

Click here to visit the “Zero Days” website.