Penny Lane
Penny Lane is back in the director's chair with her new documentary Our Nixon, which will be screened at the Open City Docs Festival in London this weekend.
We caught up with her to chat about the new film, the inspiration behind it and what lies ahead.
- Our Nixon is your new documentary film so can you tell me a little bit about it?
It's an all-archival, feature-length documentary featuring never before seen Super 8 home movies filmed by some of Richard Nixon's aides during their time with him in the White House.
- You are in the director's chair for the film so where did this project start for you? And what sparked your interest in this subject?
All originating credit has to go to Brian L. Frye, my co-producer. He had known about the home movies long before we even met and had wanted to do something with them for quite some time.
When he told me about them, what sparked my interest was 1, the fact that hadn't really been seen, and 2, the sort of implicit juxtaposition of the banality and silliness of home movies and the darker, much more serious image many people have of the Nixon administration. We both figured there would be something interesting in that.
- H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, three top White House aides, documented their time with Nixon and this footage was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation. So how/when did you learn that his footage existed and how did you go about getting your hands on it?
Brian had heard about it from a friend named Bill Brand, who had been hired to preserve the material by the National Archives about a decade ago.
Because the material is public domain, anyone could have done what we did, which was to make video transfers of the Super 8 films.
- How easy a process was it getting your hands on this footage?
It was easy in the sense that we knew where it was and how to get it. It was hard in the sense that it took quite some time to actually facilitate and pay for the video transfers!
- Can you talk a bit about the editing process because you had hours and hours of footage to cut together and make a story flow through it, so how difficult a process was that?
It took about two years all told to finish the film, which isn't very long in terms of what it takes to make a feature length documentary. Brian and I edited for about a year on our own, just working through what kind of story the home movies seemed to want to tell.
We brought in our genius editor Francisco Bello for the last six months of the edit, and he helped us to refine it and make it sing. (He also helped us get outside our own heads, where we had gotten a little bit lost, I think.)
The most difficult part was balancing all the different things we wanted to do, like figuring out how much basic historical context was needed to be able to enter the story, and how much we wanted to get into Watergate versus how much we wanted to stay in the happy days before Watergate, and how much was the film about Nixon and how much was it about his aides, how much "other" archival we wanted to use versus how much home movies. Things like that.
- You only used archival footage throughout the whole film so why did you decide to make this film in this manner?
We were pretty committed to this approach from the beginning, although we always thought if we absolutely had to depart from it by doing our own interviews or adding a voiceover, we would.
To Brian and I, using archival sources is more than just a gimmick or a neat idea. Archival forces you as the historian-storyteller to confront certain aspects of how history is experienced and "written" in ways that secondary sources never do.
Specifically, it forces you (or it should force you) to confront a multiplicity of ways of seeing the same events from a variety of perspectives, and to see how those views change over time.
Archival also brings history into the present tense, which creates an immediacy that can't be replicated any other way.
On a side note, we also only used moving images (no still photographs), which was also a conscious decision, reflecting our desire to make the events depicted in the film read as present-tense, real-life experience more than as fixed, frozen moments of the past.
- When you started out on this movie you had an idea of the story that you wanted to tell but how did that story evolve/change as you watched all of the footage and then got into the editing room?
I think the story was always the same: we knew it would be about the three cameramen, and how they got from young idealists walking into the White House in 1969 to men who went to prison for their involvement in one of America's greatest political scandals.
The trick was figuring out how to actually communicate that story, which took time. We slowly added elements, like the news clips and TV interviews, which helped us bring their voices to the foreground.
- This movie paints a very intimate and rather complex image of this president so how did your view/opinion of him change as you were making this movie?
I don't think I had a very strong or fixed view of Nixon going into it, other than the sort of stereotypical received wisdom, about how he was paranoid, things like that.
But certainly, by the end of the project, I felt that certainly there is some truth to the idea that he's been badly treated by history. I think Watergate has eclipsed almost everything else about him, which is understandable but also too bad.
I also think that if you listened to 4,000 hours of my personal conversations, it wouldn't be hard to cherry-pick enough moments to tell whatever story about me you wanted to tell -- you could probably find plenty of evidence that I am petty, or stupid, or paranoid, or whatever you're looking for.
So, I think more than anything the film forced me to confront Nixon and his men as complex human beings and not just these one-dimensional stock villains that so many seem to want to make them out to be.
- Did you discover anything in the footage that surprised you?
Probably the most surprising things were 1, that Nixon's men looked so much younger than I expected, and 2, seeing the faces of just thousands and thousands of real people who were Nixon's supporters really made me think about how popular he was in his day.
- What do you hope people will take away from the film when they watch it?
It is a really open-ended film, so what people will take from it will depend to a great extent on what they bring into it. More than anything, though, I hope they will register that our characters are human beings.
- How have you found the response to the film so far?
Beyond our wildest expectations. It's been a truly amazing response. Humbling, really.
- You have made a series of short documentaries but Our Nixon marks your feature length debut so how did you find the leap into feature film?
It's a million times harder. But also in some ways more rewarding. For me it was somewhat like the difference between doing some artwork on your own and running a small business to create a product.
The part where it was just me alone "doing some artwork" was maybe 5% of the total labor involved. But it's also been amazing to reach such a larger audience!
- What is it about the documentary genre that you seem to like so much? Would you like to ever tackle a fiction project?
I doubt I will ever make fiction. It just doesn't interest me. I've never been much for creating new images, or making things up.
I see my role as more of a curator, almost... someone who finds interesting ways to discover and organize the seemingly infinite amount of information and images and ideas that are already out there.
- Finally what is next for you?
I'm working on another feature doc featuring lots of archival and a main character who is sort of both a good guy and a bad guy.
It's called NUTS, and it's about a man named John Brinkley who pioneered a surgical cure for impotence involving the transplantation of goat testicles. It was of course a scam, but don't tell that to the tens of thousands of men who had had the surgery and swore by it!
Open City Docs Fest runs 20-23 June in central London, please visit www.opencitydocsfest.com for the full programme with the Opening Night Gala of The 12 O’Clock Boys Directed by Lotfy Nathan on Thursday 20 June.