Advertisement
In Anthem
Document Personalities Shaping America in their film Anthem
|
| Kirstin Hahn and Shainee Gabel |
"We both came to the same window at the same time, which was that we need to get out of here and let go of this paradigm. There's got to be more than Hollywood and its issues/26/images of being an American," says Kristin Hahn, co-director of the new documentary, Anthem. "When you're in Hollywood, everybody takes it so seriously. For a second or two, you start to think it's actually reality. That's really when Shainee and I decided-we're not married, we don't have babies, let's go. We need to get out and see if the rest of America is really as cynical as it appears from this viewpoint."
So began the road trip that would bring Hahn and co-director Shainee Gabel to the backyards, living rooms, hotels and workplaces of 28 political, entertainment and social luminaries. Among them are Studs Terkel, George Stephanopoulos, Robert Redford, Hunter S. Thompson, Chuck D., John Waters, Tom Robbins, Michael Stipe, Dr. Ralph Reed, Krist Novoselic, Jack Healey, Geraldine Ferraro, George McGovern and a cross section of non-celeb, working Americans. To each of them, the filmmakers asked about the American Dream, their heroes, inspiration and how the landscape affected their lives. Criss-crossing the lower 48 more than six times, the pair turned their car into a mobile production office, calling in to check on interviews and rescheduling, staying with friends of friends and discovering that the answers to each of their questions were intimately related. It was a journey that would make Kerouac, Kerault or Steinbeck proud.
"We both really wanted to see the country and wanted to make a film. Having experienced enough of the inner sanctum of Hollywood, we did not want to wait for someone to tell us we could make a film. The idea of going around and pitching Anthem was a horrifying thought," laughs Hahn. Living in L.A. prior to their road trip, the filmmakers knew more than a little about the film industry. Gabel worked with both the L.A. Independent Film Festival and the IFP/West and Hahn produced radio specials, created the socially-conscious theater group Minsky/Hahn Productions and is executive producing narrative films.
"We came up with a list of 100 people we wanted to interview. People who, in our subjective opinion, were shaping the country-a list of mavericks. We sent out six letters and made a pact that if two out of six said yes, we would go. Two weeks later we got a call from Ben & Jerry and they said yes. Then George Stephanopoulos called from the White House, which was a complete shocker. That was the clincher for us.
"Neither of us owned a camera. I went to film school and Shainee was learning film through her work. She and I had always worked with crews and we decided that it would just be the two of us. We sent out proposals to raise money and raised enough to buy used video equipment. Over the next two months we sent out 150 more letters and most of them came back unanswered. We left anyway."
As for the women's accomplishment of reaching some of America's distinguished citizens, Hahn says, "A producer at CNN said that one of the coolest things about the film is the people we got. 'There's a lot of people that you got that we (CNN) can't even get interviews with,' he said. 'We wonder how you got them.' That shocked me. CNN? I think it was our persistence as much as anything. If we got their home number, we would call their home number. We got ahold of Hunter's (S. Thompson) home number and we would call him every four days and say hi. He never called us back. We called him 20 times just to say we're traveling around the country and will be heading toward you eventually. I think he was quietly enchanted by the fact that we were bugging the shit out of him."
When the pair returned eight months later (plus several follow-up trips to round out interviews), they found themselves with nearly 200 hours of footage and interviews to transcribe, log and edit. The final result, clocking in at just over two hours, leaves the viewer with a mixture of nostalgia for the America of yesteryear and optimism about the future. Gabel says, "A lot of people tell us they find the film empowering. Everybody wants to go take a road trip after they see it, which is the ultimate compliment for us.
"We wanted to demystify the whole process of ascension in America," says Hahn. "The fact that we have our own elite royalty that we all uphold and revere, we wanted to break through that, do the whole behind-the-scenes, behind-the-back-door interview. People expected us to stay an hour, but they were so nice and got into what we were doing and said, 'Do you want to stay for dinner, sleep over tonight?' I think Redford was so damn happy to not have been swindled into an interview where the last question was, 'Where do you get your hair done or how old are you really? How much money do you really make?' We asked questions that for the most part people talk to their friends and family about; how they feel about living in this country."
On the go with their tripod and video equipment, Gabel and Hahn soon learned that their choice of cameras was the right one. "Techies told us we were crazy to shoot on anything but Beta, but we found that the Hi-8 stock, for the look we wanted, was better. It had a warmer, grainier, film feel. The Beta was a little sterile. We shot with a Sony VX3, which is a three chip camera and has a pretty good low-light. In the beginning, we thought we would be able to light a bit, but we ended up shooting it all with available light. The fact that we chose that camera was actually fortuitous, because if we'd had to light, we would have had a real problem. The tape stock that we chose was Fuji MP which, in our opinion, is as durable as you're going to get with Hi-8. For all of the scare messages that you get for shooting on Hi-8 and how fragile it is, we didn't really have that much trouble as far as drop-out. We actually had more drop-out when we mastered onto Beta."
"We really wanted the film to feel like a trip and story that had some beginning, middle and end," Hahn adds about their method of weaving their own travels into vignettes along with the "talking head" interviews. "But in real life it was pretty damn long, disjointed and all over the place. We went through that and assembled it into a six-hour cut. We used an AVID 24 hours a day, got it down to four hours, then made friends watch it and kept whittling it down to two."
After nearly finalizing distribution with New Line,
the film found a home with Zeitgeist Films, a company that agreed
to give the filmmakers final cut. With final edit in hand, Anthem
was blown up to 35mm, the format Gabel aimed for from the start.
As for the question of whether the rest of America is as cynical
as it seemed from their perspective in Los Angeles? Says Hahn, "It
wasn't, which was an incredibly relieving and comforting fact." MM
SHARE THIS STORY |
TAGS |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Apostille on 6/21/11 at 11:19 pm
Despite sometimes quarrelling, O’Hegarty remained a source of wise counsel to all these men. Admired by both Griffith and Collins, O’Hegarty was privy to many private conversations and documents that reveal exciting new source material for the study of this crucial period relevant in shaping modern Ireland.
