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Haskell Wexler: The Last Indie Rebel
As the director’s cut of Latino is released, the Oscar-winning moviemaker/social philosopher looks back on his long career
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MM: Did you assemble your team here before you went down there? Or did you assemble most of your team there? I know your DP was already chosen, because he had worked down there before.
HW: The crew that I brought from the U.S. was Pam Yates, Tom Sigel, Scott Sakamoto and then, of course, the actors. All the rest of the crew were from Puerto Rico. But those were my key people. And the equipment was mostly my Éclair CM3, which is a French, portable 35mm camera.
MM: Four hundred foot magazines?
HW: Yes.
MM: There must have been a lot of variables in filming down there. How did you estimate your budget?
HW: Part of the expense was buying equipment, which normally you would rent. No house would rent to us because the government had told the insurance companies not to cover us. So a lot of the expenses were logistical. The actors weren’t getting big money. (laughs) We were there a long time. I don’t really remember what the budget was, but my mother paid for it. (laughs)
MM: How did you convince your mother to fund your film?
HW: Mom wanted me to do good things.
MM: She believed in what you were doing.
HW: Yeah. And then I had friends, too. One friend was the distributor of the Éclair camera, Benjamin Berg. He was my producer. And we were able to get equipment by way of Panama. We had some film, almost a week’s worth, which we sent up to New York to be processed. And a week’s worth was stolen. The insurance company couldn’t find the film; it was in huge boxes, and they said it was the first time that had ever happened. They determined that it was some governmental agency that stole the film. So we had to re-shoot almost a week’s work because that. But the insurance company paid us, because they were obligated to see that the film was delivered.
MM: You had a extensive documentary career before this ever happened. Were you in some way disillusioned by the documentary form and what it could do to change public opinion? You could have made a pretty hard-hitting documentary about this subject matter; why did you choose to make Latino as a narrative feature?
HW: I did make a film with Saul Landau called Target Nicaragua. But the boundaries between feature and documentary… I always feel that they’re blurred. I do think that both formats have to have something that dramatically engages people, and how you do that is where the art is. Seeing Latino now, it doesn’t fit into big-ticket entertainment, but I do think it lives as a part of history.
Today, documentarians are realizing that their films have to have humanity, because if you just have people declaring what’s politically and socially correct, you’re not going to engage an audience. And yet you don’t want to present things dramatically that are amorphous. You don’t want so much information, so much complication that audiences won’t respond other than to say “Well, wasn’t that interesting,” without ever thinking about how it relates to humanity, how it relates to peace, how it relates to what all people want out of life, where we can find elements of agreement.
I was talking at the Hammer Museum recently about photography and the obligation cinematographers have to communicate. Because it’s not just like you and me talking now; there’s the possibility that what’s behind the lens can be somebody’s truth… If you’re making a dramatic film, you have to know how to deal with actors, you have to know how to work on scripts, you have to know how to frame. Those techniques have to be integral to the ideas and with the drama. It’s not just knowing how to use the most advanced technical tools, it means having something going on in your heart and in your head that you want other people to feel, and while you’re doing it to be able to be able to listen to those people. Particularly in documentaries. We all learn from the people on the other side of the camera. If you don’t, you’re not going to make a very good documentary.
MM: Is it fair to say that you were frustrated by the inability to say what you wanted when you were making Target Nicaragua? Is that why you had to expand some of those ideas with Latino? What motivated you after you had already made the documentary to go back and explore further and get deeper and turn it into a narrative film?
HW: Well, hardly anybody saw Target Nicaragua (laughs). And I thought that people might see what we call a dramatic film. I wanted to make a dramatic film that I thought was honest, but my honesty is limited by my viewpoint. Still, looking back at it, I think it’s a good film. And I know that all the people who were experiencing the film weren’t “political.” They didn’t come in saying, “Hey, the Sandinistas are God’s gift to democracy.” It was good to have actors like that. Because if everybody was as “dedicated” as I am, it wouldn’t have made the film any better.
MM: But the reason you made it was to get these ideas across on a wide basis for the American public, I would imagine.
HW: The main thing is that it was a dirty secret, and it was only exposed because a CIA guy’s plane was shot down over Nicaragua and he admitted that he had been sent by the CIA. That broke things open, because the U.S. had always denied that they had anything to do with what was just a civil war in Nicaragua.
But even as I’m telling you all this so many years later, who the hell cares? Who the hell cares about the Sandinistas, Nicaragua and the Contras? The reason I want the director’s cut to come out now is to say that the people in power still, in our country, will pay and arm bad people to go into another country and kill their women and children, and do it all for “a good cause,” because we pay them. We pay mercenaries. We’ve seen this in Iraq and the Middle East now, too. That is not what America’s all about.
Fortunately, the situation did get exposed, and Ollie North was arrested. Of course, now he’s got show on Fox News. (laughs) And Rumsfeld lied to us—he went out and killed a lot of Iraqis and a lot of good Americans who thought they were defending America—and he wrote a book that was on The New York Times Best Seller list. No one’s putting him in jail.
MM: So Latino helped get the word out, and now you’re hoping that Cinema Libre’s director’s cut release will give the film a second chance?
HW: I hope so. I hope people see that the characters speak of themselves as “Latinos.” People need to realize that we’re all on this planet together. When we are able to demonize people that we can’t see or don’t know, then we can kill them, take them over and lie to our own people because “They’re the bad guys.” And then when our bad guys are acting so bad that their people get upset, we will replace ’em with bad guys who don’t act as bad as those bad guys. So we’re talking about theater, we’re talking about drama, we’re talking about fiction. They don’t act for the camera, but they still own the TV stations, run the army and find nicer ways to torture people. That’s the way it is, so we have to go with the idea of the people having power and having to be able to follow through with it.
MM: The film still seems timely. It was made 25 years ago and we’re still talking about some of these same issues now. How did the idea for a director’s cut come about?
HW: I asked Cinema Libre to release this director’s cut because of the concentration of military activity that is stealing from our country; robbing our schools, parks, libraries and jobs; and settling things through aggressive militarism. This whole idea of buying cannon fodder and aggressive recruiting… Young Latinos without jobs are going into the military because of promises [being made to them] that are not being kept.
MM: Do you feel that the U.S. public’s appetite has changed at all to the receptiveness of this message? It seems to be even more discouraging today, the way that the public is anesthetized, more involved with their computer gaming and sports and all the other distractions. Are there any hopeful signs that this re-release is going to have an audience that actually listens to the message this time around?
HW: Oh, I don’t know whether this director’s cut is going to make a big difference. I’m just one guy and my mom put up the money for the film. (laughs) If it does make any difference for somebody, then two things will happen: It will make the world a little bit better and it’ll make me happy because it’ll make me a good boy for my mom.
I hope that other people feel this way; sometimes we call it a “conscience.” I’m just personalizing with my mom, but that is how change happens. It also happens because we have to be aware of each other. That’s what happened in Egypt, that’s what’s happening in the Middle East. When people are aware of each other, they realize they have power. And those who have a platform—and the Internet and cameras give you that ability—have the responsibility of not just complaining about the way things are, but pointing them out. What’s more important? Human beings and life, or killing? Winning? Winning no matter what? I guess the word is responsibility.
MM: Also optimism. You still seem like a pretty optimistic guy, even though a lot of these efforts that you’ve made are, excuse the worn-out analogy, a bit like Don Quixote jousting at windmills. But you and I are Facebook friends (laughs). You have a Facebook account. When I came in here today, you were talking about a flip camera. You’re also a blogger. It seems to me that you’re still very much involved, and you’re adapting to social change in yourself and with your moviemaking. How do you stay so optimistic and forward-thinking?
HW: Optimism. You know, I also hear the word “hope” a lot. And I hear the word “dream” a lot. Those are emotional responses. You see signs of negativism and signs of optimism, and what you have to do is search them out and say, ‘I’m going to run with this optimistically.’ Many friends of mine don’t have jobs or the things that they need in their lives. They just want to be able to pay for their houses or apartments. But they see all the government’s resources going into the military or to feeding the corporate system, and that’s their political education. They say, “Why is that? Why can’t I afford health care? Who’s representing me? Who’s telling me the truth? Who buys or rents these politicians?” And I say when those questions are raised and answered, we’ll have optimism.
And they are being raised in the universities. Just yesterday there was a demonstration at UCLA. The students are complaining that the tuition is going very high. And there’s the healthcare issue. All of these bread-and-butter issues are tied in with our societal priorities, which right now are askew because of the lies we’re fed through most media. So that’s the obligation of those of us who [are part of the media]: To try—through our music, documentaries, feature films and personal conversations—to break that barrier. That is what gives rise to true optimism.
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This story was published in the Winter 2012 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Haskell Wexler: The Last Indie Rebel / As the director's cut of Latino is released, the Oscar-winning moviemaker/social philosopher looks back on his long career
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