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In the early winter of 2008 I went into hibernation to edit WATERLIFE from 200 hours of footage shot all over the Great Lakes -- and was immediately reminded that this is the best, and worst, stage of making a documentary.
The concentration and continuous creative process of editing is great and the editor I work with, Chris Donaldson, is an old friend, so we have a lot of laughs. But the buck truly stops in the cutting room (because by the time you get there, the bucks have all been spent). Sometimes you don't have what you want or need, but you have to make do anyhow. With WATERLIFE, we had the opposite problem. Cinematographer John Minh Tran had done a brilliant job, the people we had met were wonderful and the places we had been were extraordinary. Going through the footage was like sifting through diamonds that were flecked with the odd bit of mud. It was a good problem to have, but one that, once again, illustrated the constant tension in documentary between showing the complexity of reality and making a product that will be palatable to an impatient and over-mediated public.
Making a documentary film requires the building of a virtual community. Documentary makers are always dependent on the kindness of strangers for access to the people and places we need to tell a story. At it's worst, of course, that means wheedling into people's lives and making a spectacle of them, as so much "reality television" does. But, at its best, documentary is a collaboration between filmmakers and a community which presents a reality that is important to some group of people - sometimes all of us, sometimes a particular few -- and that will, as a finished product, be somehow useful to some or to all.
WATERLIFE, a film that spans the whole Great Lakes and explores the factors bedeviling them, was designed from the get-go with community in mind. I wanted to make a film that would reveal the lakes to the millions of people who live on them, consume them, and are, literally, shaped by them - yet who ignore them and what's happening within them (and, thus, within themselves). Practically speaking, my collaborators and I wanted the film to bolster the work of the thousands of environmentalists, scientists, policy makers and citizens who spend endless hours trying to educate their neighbors about what's really going on beyond the beautiful blue horizon. As Brent Gibson, communications director for Great Lakes United, said about the film after seeing it: "WATERLIFE translates into images a story told too often with facts, figures, and numbers. To truly understand how powerful - and especially vulnerable - the Great Lakes are, you must see them and you must experience them." So, it's kind of like what scientists call a "mutualistic symbiotic relationship", like sharks and remoras - documentary filmmakers can speak in ways that environmentalists can't, but without their knowledge and help, we would have nothing to say. (Which, I guess, makes us filmmakers the attendant, parasitic remoras.)
One of the goals I set for WATERLIFE was that it show the extraordinary beauty of the Great Lakes as well as all that undermines them. As many other writers have pointed out, one of the incredible things about the lakes in the 21st century is the peculiar blindness of our relationship to them. Most of the 35 million or so who live on the lakes have no idea that our fate, and that of the lakes, are intertwined.
Sure, the lake may be hard to ignore if you live in Sault St Marie or Collingwood or Bay City. But if you live in Toronto or Cleveland or even Chicago, with its much-celebrated waterfront, you could go months without ever laying steady eyes on that vast tract of blue and you might never, in your whole life, swim in it or boat on it. You probably don't even know that you drink it and pee into it; most people cannot begin to imagine what's inside their plumbing or inside their skin. And the mass-mediated consumer culture, in which you cheerfully wallow, is devoted to preserving that innocence.
The first time I saw AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH I was bowled over. I was impressed at how well it communicated the manifold threats that global warming entails. And I was impressed that Davis Guggenheim, the director (the unmentioned truth is that it's his film, not Al Gore's) was able to impart emotion to what critics dismissed as a Power Point presentation. But what astounded me - and everyone in the documentary community - was that the general public embraced the film. Michael Moore had long before shown that documentary could be commercially successful as well as politically transformative. But what AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH specifically revealed was a huge hunger for serious treatments of environmental issues -- and that triggered a big reaction in my trade. Suddenly broadcasters and other investors were all over anything "green".
After three nearly fruitless years of trying to fund WATERLIFE, our new film about the Great Lakes, the money suddenly fell into place. In the end, the film became a co-production between our company, Primitive Entertainment, and the National Film Board of Canada, with supporters that included Mark Achbar's Big Picture Media Corporation, the Sundance Channel (which will broadcast the film in the US in August), History Television in Canada, Telefilm Canada (a government investing agency), NHK (the national broadcaster in Japan) and a fund set up by broadcaster Canwest and the Hot Docs film festival. Finally, the dreary challenge of filmmaking was behind us, and the fun challenge began: deciding what, exactly, the film should say -- and how.
Almost everyone is compelled by the sight of water, regardless of its form. We are rejuvenated and calmed just by watching it, whether in a hard rain bouncing off the road, waves sculpting a sandy shore, clouds rolling by or drops sending ripples across our bath. For filmmakers, water imagery is pure catnip; its endlessly changing patterns, moods, colors and meanings - from baptism to drowning -- are the reason you see it so often in movies and commercials. As a documentary filmmaker, I love it as an image and metaphor, but also care about it as a subject.
Documentary makers like to believe that our films show our audiences new realities – but those films are also like Rorschach tests in that people tend to see in them what they are already inclined to see.
No character in WATERLIFE draws a more powerful response than Josephine Mandamin, the Anishinaabe grandmother from Thunder Bay who walked around the Great Lakes to raise interest in their plight. But the responses are polarized.
When we were shooting WATERLIFE we met hundreds of people all around the Great Lakes – though we were only able to include a few of their stories in the final film.
Last week, when the film premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto we met many more –film enthusiasts, interested citizens and passionate environmentalists. The film prompted many questions and, again, time constraints meant we were only able to deal with a few of them – and superficially at that.
So over the next months, as WATERLIFE rolls out in Canada and the United States, I’m going to use this forum to introduce some of the people whose stories didn’t make the film and try to address some of the questions that the film is raising.
This week, I'll respond to some of the questions asked at the screenings.