men, they have to act in a certain way. On one hand, you uncover the brutality that's gendered into the family situation. On the other hand, as much as there are things your father did that you really dislike, even hate, the film suggests an ambivalence about him and about his influence on you.
Yes. I agree with what you said about gender, that abuse is more likely because of the inhuman situations that are intrinsic to a society that divides roles along gender lines. But
is also like
: it's about the damage either parent can do when they're trying to shape their child in their own image. Most parents, either instinctively or consciously, try to instill their values in their child. They have a lot of ambitions themselves and, consequently, a lot of ambitions for their children. They force their children into activities or try to instill certain ideas in them that are not good, not natural for the child. I can see from watching the children of friends and relatives that part of who we are is formed by our parents and part of us is there from Day One. If you have a kid who's not naturally ambitious or aggressive and you try to make him that, you're just going to bend him out of shape. On the other hand, if you have ambitious children and don't encourage them, you can be very destructive.
To answer the second half of your questionabout my ambivalence about my father: people have said to me, 'It can't be all that bad, because look where you are,' or 'You're not a destroyed person; you're capable, you've made films, you've lived a relatively good life.' I recognize that, and that's the source of my ambivalence. Certainly, I've learned to do things from him that have stood me in good stead over the years, just as I have from my mother.
Moreover, since the film is about how I've been affected by
childhood, it would have been grossly unfair not to acknowledge how my father was affected by his. I tried to speak to that by including the story about his younger sister drowning and showing how he spent many years afterward trying to overcome his guilt and loss. I put that story right before the one about him punishing my sister and me by holding our heads under water for too long, because I wanted to give a context to
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that punishment, to show that although we were devastated by his punishment, we were being punished by someone who had suffered his own childhood traumas.
One of the most painful things to realize in making the film was that we all inherit so much sorrow and hurt from our parents. We aren't the product of perfectly balanced adults; we are each created by people who have a legacy of their own, which goes back through each family line. On my good, days, I try to believe that each generation rids itself of a bit of the violence of the prior generations, that with education and greater material well- being we wouldn't have such widespread abuse. But unfortunately I think the solutions are extremely complex, and I can see that simple notions like education are hardly an answer.
The most obvious example of your ambivalence is the source of the title, which refers to the incident of his throwing you into the pool for you to 'sink or swim,' since you wanted to learn to swim. At the end of that story, you admit you've remained an avid swimmer.
But the swimming was fraught with all kinds of anxiety, which is why at the end of the film I tell the story about wanting to swim all the way across the lake and realizing that maybe I'm not physically capable of it, and am certainly very frightened at the thought of doing it, but feel compelled to do it anyway, because of him. It's at that moment that I finally say, 'No, I don't have to do that. I can enjoy swimming, but on my terms, and I won't take on his standards for what makes a good swimmer or a brave swimmer,' and then I swim back to shore.
Although there's an irony there, too, because you swim halfway across the lake and then back, which means you actually swam as far as all the way across.
I think the ambivalence reveals a great deal about the stubbornness of human nature. Many children who are born into situations that undermine them in certain ways still manage to survive beyond the situations. The question is why parents build that degree of uncertainty and anxiety and fear into the family setup. If you want your children to learn something, why not teach them in a way that is constructive and supportive, rather than by terrorizing them? It's been standard practice for parents to get children to learn to do something by scaring them in one way or another about what will happen if they don't learn to do it. I don't think that's the way people learn. It's certainly not the way you learn to do something you later enjoy.
I think in his generation there was this feeling that unless you were capable of terrorizing your kids a little, you weren't a serious parent. Scaring them was almost a way of demonstrating how much you cared. As a young parent, I remember debating in many situations whether I was wimping out and doing my child damage by not being
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tough enough to do something that in the long run would be good, even if in the short run it was bad. And I think your father's generation felt this even more strongly.
Did you talk with your siblings when you were making this film?
Yes. My sister is a year older than I, and my brother six years younger, so I was interested in their different memories of childhood. My sister and I shared a lot of the experiences I mention in this film, and we lived longer with my father, so she was able to confirm many of my stories. She had other stories she wanted me to include in the film, but I stayed with those which had the most resonance for me. Since my brother was much younger, and was only five years old when my parents got divorced, he didn't know about, or hadn't shared, some of the events in the film, but I valued his perspective a great deal. He has slightly more distance from my father and was concerned that the material be presented fairly, that it not function simply as vendetta, which was also a concern of mine. In fact, he had a funny reaction to
. He said, 'Jesus, I hope you never make a film about me!' I certainly can't blame him for that sentiment; it's
