takes you from a discussion of the car to his son to his daughter's death to my mother's death. To me, that's preferable to piecing together five different shots to create the same impression. This way you can see the emotional shift in his eyes, hear it in our voices, as we move from discussing something that's mundane to something that's of profound importance to both of us. It's the kind of thing you could never set up ahead of time because people will put up their defenses. If I'd said, 'I'd like to talk a little bit with you about the death of your daughter,' he might have done it, but it would not have happened organically the way it did. That's something I feel very strongly about. Another instance of this is when I'm talking to Mary, the fashion model, near the opening of the film. I haven't seen her since we were kids. We start off talking about something very superficialwhere we used to play Supermanthen the conversation turns to her kids, then to her feelings about divorce. Again, it's all one shot and you can track the development of the dialogue in her eyes. There's a moment of real sadness there that to me is absolutely amazing.
Did you assume from the beginning that the film was going to be a survey of Southern womanhood?
McElwee: I think that the way in which the film begins to put itself on track is fairly accurately described in the film itself. I knew I didn't want to make a
-like documentary of the South. I thought I would do a synthesis of
and
I would film some of my relatives, but basically the film would not be so much about me as about my homeland. I would have a personality, but initially I didn't know it would be as important to the film as it turned out to be. I began filming the Scottish games, thinking, 'Well, here's an interesting event.' The imagery was sort of bizarre: these guys tossing huge phallic poles around, guys in kilts wrestling on the groundall of it in the American South. It had a surreal quality.
The breakthrough occurred with my sister on the following day, when she saidsomewhat seriously, somewhat joking'You should use the camera as a way to meet women.' She's sincerely upset about my having ended my relationship with my girlfriend, and she's looking for ways to get me back on my feet. I think she perceived me as being incapable of resurrecting my lifea lot worse off than I really was. (Obviously I had the wherewithal to get a camera on my shoulder and start filming something.) But at the point when she gave me her advice about how to use the camera, I experienced a minor epiphany. The next thing that happened was the announcement that Mary was in the neighborhood. Why
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not look her up
and see what happens? The miniportrait of Mary went well. She was gone the next day, so there was no potential for filming her more, but it was a start. And it was a microcosm of how the film might work.
Then I met Pat, who was a natural film subject. She loved being filmed, had no self-consciousness whatsoever, was somewhat outrageous, articulate, and had bizarre outlooks on life. And she had nothing to do but allow me to film her. It was perfect.
One complaint I've heard about
is that you center on women who are bizarre, a little wacky, maybe objects of patronizing humor.
I see them as being independent and intelligent for the most part. But eccentric, yes. I don't see anything wrong with having chosen women who are eccentric, who are unusual. Having decided to film women who are independent in the South means they're going to have to be somewhat eccentric. The fact that they decided not to embrace the more traditional conservative values of the South, nor to accept the roles that most Southern women seem to accept, made them by definition somewhat eccentric.
You know, I hear myself saying these things and immediately feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure I have the sociological background to even begin to define who's eccentric and who's not, who's conventional and who's not. And yet I feel somehow that the women I filmed are out of the norm, and that's why I decided to film them. I can only say that I wasn't attempting to make any statement about the status of women in the South or in the United States. I felt no obligation to select a group of women who were somehow representative of something. I think the women in the film are wonderfully individualistic; some are eccentric, some seem quite normal to me. A lot of them are struggling with life, and I'm interested in that kind of struggling. We all do it.
doing it in the film. I was interested in capturing some of that. A lot of documentaries try to package things very neatly from an ideological point of view. In some ways it leaves the viewer with a false sense that problems have been solved, points of view have been neatly defined. I think that's very dangerous. Life isn't like that.
A more valuable question to ask is, are we laughing with people or at them. Pat, the woman in search of Burt Reynolds, is an aspiring actress. Some of the things she says are quite outrageous, but she has a sense of self that in my view enables her to get away with saying the things she says. I think she's a fascinating and complicated and very unique person in the film, very entertaining, very funny; she knows that we're laughing at a lot of the things she says, but she's pleased with that fact. It's part of her way of presenting herself to the world. She's seen the film and is
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Pat Rendleman in McElwee's
(1986).
delighted by it. She's even had her agent circulate it to studios in California, hoping that she can get work.
It's true that a lot of the situations that I end up in or that the women end up in are humorous or comic, but it's important to have a sense of humor about life and about oneself. I see the situations as being funny, but not
