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The Curse of Quixote
Documentarians Louis Pepe & Keith Fulton get Lost in La Mancha with Terry Gilliam
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| Louis Pepe & Keith Fulton |
The Terry Gilliam School of Film may not be an education in conventional moviemaking, but it's certainly provided writer/directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton with a world of experience. First chosen to shadow the auteur on the Philadelphia set of 12 Monkeys (both were graduate students in Temple University's film program at the time), that initial "golden opportunity" has resulted in an enviable documentary career.
On January 31st, IFC Films will release Lost in La Mancha, Pepe and Fulton's chronicle of Gilliam's failed attempt to bring the story of Don Quixote to the big screen. More than a portrait of one of America's true maverick moviemakers, the film is a lesson in perseverance, auteurism and what truly happens behind the scenes.
Jennifer Wood (MM): At what point did you realize that your straight "documentary" film was turning into a real-life drama?
Louis Pepe (LP): That's is a really interesting question, because in many ways we were looking for a "real-life drama" from the start. We're big fans of the American direct cinema movement (the Maysles brothers, Leacock, Pennebaker, Wiseman) and we set out with the ideal goal of creating a purely observational documentary with no narration or interviews-one in which the drama would come entirely from the observed moments in the subjects' lives. This is why it was so important to us to have an angle on the potential conflicts from the outset.
Our proposal, which at the time was called Gilliam/Quixote, was all about the struggle to achieve one's artistic visions and really played off of the whole Don Quixote metaphor-tilting at windmills, impossible dreams, all that stuff. We laid out a plan to focus on pre-production, the period in which all the elements of the production must come together to get the movie off the ground. Because of Terry's previously unsuccessful attempt and his decade-long desire to make the film, we knew that this would be an emotional and dramatic period. But from the start, we were counting on a happy ending, a triumph.
Keith Fulton (KF): So, when things started to go wrong, we just saw them as bumps on the way to that happy ending. In hindsight, they read differently, of course. But as they were happening, they seemed to us like the standard flow of the process-three steps forward, one or two steps back-especially for the early stages of a production. Even the first week of shooting with all of its freakish disasters fit certain expectations, as the first week of any film production is usually one of the roughest times.
It wasn't until the crew stopped shooting and headed back to Madrid that the thought of an unhappy ending entered our minds. And at that point, we were in too much of a panic about what we would tell our investors (who were completely independent from Terry's financiers) to consider that the story unfolding around us was even more dramatic than the one we had set out to capture.
MM: Did you ever consider stopping production when it became evident that Terry was not going to be able to finish his film?
LP: In the midst of our panic, we called a friend of ours to get advice on what to do. "Keep shooting! Shoot anything that's going on! Interview anyone who will talk to you! Just keep shooting!" But while the advice sounded solid, it didn't feel right. Even on the last few days of shooting we had started to feel like vultures. And now that the crew was back in the production offices scrambling for a plan, hanging around with the camera felt downright exploitative.
At this point, we called Terry and told him that we were uncomfortable shooting; that it seemed unethical to continue making a documentary about his misery. He replied, "Screw ethics! Someone's got to get a film out of all this mess, and it doesn't look like it's going to be me. So it had better be you. Keep shooting!" That was pretty much the blessing we needed.
MM: Being a directorial "team," how do you split up the work involved in making a film? Do you have separate designations that you each handle, or is everything a team effort?
KF: We like to compare ourselves to the Maysles brothers, the Hughes brothers, the Wachowski brothers, the Weitz brothers, the Farrelly brothers, the Coen brothers, and the Brothers Quay-except we're not brothers!
When we first started collaborating about 10 years ago, we said to each other that we could probably make a better film together than either of us could on our own. Since then, we've tried to learn what each other's strengths are and to allow for an organic way of working where each of us is instinctively doing what we're best at.
During the production of Lost in La Mancha, Lou did most of the shooting while I did the field producing. In our collaboration, I am the more aggressive but impatient personality, and Lou is the more timid but patient one. This would translate into me gaining the access into a meeting and Lou having the patience to sit there for two hours waiting for the two-minute interchange that made the scene. While Lou would be in one place shooting, I would be investigating the next scene to shoot, lining up an interview, or trying to extract information from someone about what was going on.
LP: Because so many things are going on during a film shoot, it's really useful to have two brains working on it at the same time. This was especially crucial when Terry and his crew moved from the relatively contained space of the production office to location. For that part of our shoot we were constantly on walkie-talkies with each other, trying to gather-in real time-all of the shots that would tell the story of any particular event in the day. For example, when the big storm was blowing in (and it blew in really quickly) with each shot that I was framing up, Keith was already planning the next one and telling me where to turn.
MM: Do you think that this same collaboration could work in the arena of feature moviemaking?
KF: We're hoping so, because that's what we're trying to tackle next! Many of our filmmaking heroes are those few filmmakers who've consistently shifted back and forth between documentary and fiction projects-filmmakers like Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders. What most industry people don't seem to appreciate is the ways in which these two types of filmmaking inform and support one another. Documentary filmmaking is storytelling, after all. It's like the reverse of fiction filmmaking. You write the script after you shoot. And in terms of honing the storytelling craft, there's no more rigorous exercise than trying to edit something without a script.
MM: How did you shoot Lost in La Mancha?
LP: The film was shot mostly with a Sony PD-150 DVCAM camcorder, though we did some interviews and the staged script readings with a JVC DV-500. Sound-wise, we kept Terry leashed to a Lectrosonics wireless kit with a Tram microphone (which he never shut off). Other audio was gathered with a Sennheiser ME-66 on the camera or an ME-67 on a pistol grip. We never boom scenes because of the intrusive nature of a boom.
MM: Do you think that your camera/medium choice was well suited to this project?
KF: Shooting DV with a small camera and a one or two-person crew was really the best way to go on this project. So many of the situations were in small offices or taking place between only two or three people, that a larger camera and crew would have been too obtrusive. It's always struck us as odd to have the documentary crew hugely outnumber the subjects. But shooting DV really allows you to be as unobtrusive and portable as possible, which is a great asset to capturing truly intimate observational footage.
MM: What are some of the biggest challenges you find in making a film about the making of a film-in putting yourselves in the middle of a high-stress atmosphere, where you need to always be cautious about where you're standing, etc.?
LP: One of the biggest challenges with the subject matter is that you're making a film about people whose careers are all about making images. These are people who not only understand what you are doing when you point the camera at them, but people who have chosen to be behind the cameras and not in front of them. So a lot of times what you're doing is trying to get them to not be so self-conscious in the presence of the documentary camera.
Fortunately, the small camera package is a huge help with this. Because the camera is so small and can be held at chest level instead of on your shoulder, it's a lot easier to be just another person in the situation rather than "the documentary crew."
KF: You also learn very quickly how to stay out of the way, how not to be in people's faces at their difficult moments and how to leave a tense situation before you're asked to. You always want to be in a situation where you're going to be welcomed back the next day, so you develop an instinct for knowing when your presence with the camera is going to be viewed as obnoxious, sensationalist or exploitative. So much of shooting a documentary ends up being about the relationship of trust that you build with the subjects.
MM: Has observing Terry's experiences in the film industry made you more interested in shooting your own features-or more cautious?
LP: Watching Terry's experiences made us neither more nor less eager to continue making our own films. If anything, it was a sobering experience to see that even a director of Terry's stature is subject to many of the same difficulties that one assumes disappears as one establishes a career. Bad weather, not enough money, uncontrollable locations, unavailable actors-these are all factors that we associate with low-budget independent filmmaking.
We always assume that large-scale feature filmmaking is somehow impervious to certain difficulties and vulnerabilities. But when you think about it, that's because so much of what we see represented about filmmaking is all of that glitzy and glamorous Entertainment Tonight footage. You know, the stuff that would have us think that filmmaking is as simple as a clapper board, a camera rising up on a crane and a bunch of happy actors all slapping each other on the back.
KF: The reality of filmmaking-and this is probably the most important thing we learned from watching Terry-is that it's an incredibly fragile process. No matter where you are in your career as a filmmaker, it will always be a balancing act between art and commerce, between your artistic aspirations and the grim reality of available resources.
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