pathetic. I've made films that flirt with filming the pathetic in other people's lives, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I hope I've avoided doing it in
.
Do you think of yourself as a Southern filmmaker? The South has not played a particularly conspicuous role in independent filmmaking.
I don't feel a responsibility to film the South. When I made
and
the South seemed very rich in possibilities, and as you say, not so many other people have explored it. I'm glad that you've asked this question because I do think that aspect of
often gets overlooked. It's not merely an autobiographical film; it's a film about a region, to some degree about a way of life. I don't think I would be satisfied doing purely ethnographic films of the South. There are certainly filmmakers who choose to do that. There are a number of documentaries that deal with the customs, the rituals, and the arts and crafts of the South. These themes are a peripheral interest
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to me. But I continue to be very interested in the way the South resists the homogenization that seems to have made most other parts of the United States indistinguishable from one another.
As to whether I consider myself to be a particularly Southern filmmaker: it's not important to me that I be described that way. I'm sure I could have gone to California and made a film that in some senses would have been an equally accurate portrait of California life. But because I am from the South, I have a particular slant on the South that non-Southerners might not have, which includes having access to people and places an outsider might not come across. I take advantage of the fact that I'm Southern in making my films, but I don't really think of myself as a Southern filmmaker, and I hope that the films I've made are of interest to people outside the South. Of course, there is a tradition of Southern fiction (Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe . . .), and the label as used there to indicate a genre of literature that was created by writers from the South but transcends the region, transcends the label of 'Southern,' is what I'm striving for.
The parallel between Sherman's march through the South and yours suggests that you also think of yourself as a Northerner.
I am trying to draw a parallel between Sherman and myself, which is accurate in some ways and comically ironic (I hope) in other ways. I do have some things in common with Sherman although some of the parallels have been reversed. He's a Northerner who was coming down South; I'm a Southerner who went up North. But I also take it a step further and posit myself in the role of an exiled Southerner living up North who returns to the South again. I both identify with Sherman and find my personality and what my life stands for as being in contradistinction to what Sherman stood for. I both consider myself to be a Southerner
to no longer be a son of the South. In some sense the South is alien territory for me.
There's also a parallel in the fact that you and Sherman met mostly women.
Yes, most of the Southern troops were in Virginia at the time, with Robert E. Lee, entrenched around Richmond. Left behind were women, children, and old people. There's also the basic difference between Sherman and me in that Sherman was quite successful in his campaign. He achieved his military objectives. If one considers the purpose of my journey finding an ideal Southern woman to marry, to fall in love with, whatever, I'm unsuccessful in my 'campaign.' Time and time again, I meet with outright defeat or at best there's a draw.
Is there a sense in which you use the camera as a weapon? Is that an implicit parallel?
In no way am I really trying to use the camera as a weapon.
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But, of course, the act of filmingno matter how gently, how sensitively it's donetakes advantage of people's vulnerability. The act of filming is an invasion of privacy, in a metaphorical sense perhaps a rape of some kind, pillage of some kind. In the scene when Karen, the attorney and ERA activist, tells me to stop filming, she has to tell me not once, but three times. That suggests an indictment of the act of filmmaking.
The scene of Burt Reynolds at work in Charlotte is interesting, both because Reynolds is a Southern star and, from my point of view, becauseironically, since you're not allowed on the set
is at least as interesting a film as he's appeared in. Did you originally plan to 'invade' the set?
At first, I did go through proper channels. Had I talked myself onto the set, I might have gotten some interesting imagery of Hollywood filmmaking and of the creation of the Southern hero as represented by Burt Reynolds. But even when I requested permission to be on the set, I understood that if they denied it, I would then explore the point of view of the outsider peering over the fence, or I might take a stab at going behind the scenes only to be stopped. As things turned out, I pursued both and ended up with the second, which seemed to me to work out fine. The scene is a successful emblem for the difference between two styles of filmmaking: the single- person documentary approach is posited against the very complicated Hollywood way of making films, where you have celebrity casts and large crews, and security forces to keep people at bay.
The way the Ross McElwee persona develops in
