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Mitch McCabe Knows No Pain
Mitch McCabe
Mitch McCabe, moviemaker and daughter of a plastic surgeon, is age-obsessed. But then again, who isn’t? McCabe’s mission to discover the origins of our country’s youth obsession, which has led to a $60 billion a year anti-aging industry, took the director on a cross-country trip, where she interviewed more than 200 people. The result is the documentary Youth Knows No Pain.
McCabe has been creating documentaries since college, an art form that allows her to combine her passions for photography and creative writing. But Youth Knows No Pain is her first feature-length documentary. Just days before its August 31st premiere on HBO, MM spoke with McCabe about the making of her latest film and whether her own opinions on aging industry have changed as a result of the film.
Eliza Chute (MM): This is your first feature-length documentary. What was the biggest difference between the process of making this film and the short-format documentaries you’ve made in the past?
Mitch McCabe (MC): The short answer: Money.
Longer answer: With my short films, I always did everything by myself and a crew sometimes helping for a day or some post-production professionals at the end. But with Youth Knows No Pain, I worked with a constant army of great, dedicated people, from a 24-hour family hub of four to eight people in New York, to others spread around the country.
I worked with animators, motions graphics designers, composers, a music supervisor and the headache and heartache of music licensing. I slept in the editing room, working with an editor for seven months (while I co-edited in another room). We had a posse of assistant editing interns prepping, transcribing and cutting footage in another room, some other summer interns churning through Vietnam surgery footage or breast implant shots, etc. and anyone who needed air running to get the whole operation Starbucks to keep us alive. By the end, there were seven producers. Suffice it to say, it was not a small operation. Oh, and did I mention the process of raising money?
MM: Plastic surgery has become a pop culture obsession. In what direction were you looking to go for this film? Did you want it to be journalistic or more of a human interest piece? Did that direction ever change along the way?
MC: The biggest turn the film took was that for a long while we had many different strands of the anti-aging world represented, from growth hormone to cryonics to life extension architecture. But when we tried to work it all into the same film with something as visual as plastic surgery, and as specific as the personal story of my dad being a plastic surgeon, all of those other topics just didn’t make sense against it. So early on in the editing process—and made clearer when we pre-sold it to HBO—we dropped almost all those threads and stuck to the basics that are in the film now.
I knew from the start that the film had to be a film—a story—and not a news piece; it had to set itself apart from the countless articles, shows and news segments on the topic of plastic surgery. Usually the point of those shows is rather one-note, updating you on the newest trend or technique, or a gawking event at what celebrity had gone too far. I wanted to focus on just the anti-aging world—from creams to injectibles to the nip-tucks—and explore what was behind the aging obsession and who the real-life, non-celebrity, non-super-rich Americans were who were buying the cosmeceuticals, Botox, hair transplants and surgeries. So in order to be a story, the film would be all about the casting. We had to find people who had a story to tell; people from all different areas, ages and both genders who fought the clock.
MM: This film is very personal to you, since your father is a plastic surgeon. How much personal information did you end up including and why?
MC: Personal films are always a tricky dance. When it came to the personal information, we went by strict rules as to what to include and exclude. If the material or narration didn’t directly address my dad, youth obsession or the other characters’ stories, it was out. So no talk about boys, tangential thoughts, other family members or anything else about my life.
As far as how much to put in, when we were editing we had a colored index card system on the wall: Yellow cards for the main characters, pink for interviews, green for me. We would squint and make sure that there wasn’t too much green and that it was spread far apart. It was like making a soup—you’d put a little too much in, you’d take a bit out, then it wasn’t enough and so forth. For some reason, 25 percent Mitch became our target.
MM: You interviewed more than 200 people for the project. How did you decide which interviews made it into the film and which did not?
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Try resveratrol for free on 9/21/09 at 12:48 am
Hi,
I was pretty against elective plastic surgery, and anything that pierced the skin. Dying gray hair and creams were okay, but beyond that was questionable...Thank you…
Try resveratrol for free- Comment by sienasimmons on 7/27/10 at 4:04 am
Mostly celebrities have done surgery for different purpose but they have experienced it. Some people are doing surgery for decreasing their pain also.
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