They think I am a filmmaker because I have a camera
- Posted: 24th Jan 2011
- Category: Articles
Josh Fox is founder and artistic director of International WOW, a politically charged theatre company that works with fringe groups who are victims of social or political crisis. His new work, Gasland, sees him take on the new challenge of documentary filmmaking in a bid to expose the poisonous tactics of the natural gas "fracking industry". Laura Thornley met up with Josh to find out just why documentary was the way to go?
Why did you choose to make a documentary and not something more akin to the work you do at International WOW?
Essentially the answer is I might have, and I probably will. Interestingly, what I discovered is that in my theatre work I interview the actors to find out the essence of their enquiry, what relationship they have to the subject we are making a play about. I found that with an actor you are aiming [to connect with] a certain part of their mind or heart and I think the same is true when you are asking people questions as a documentarian. Luckily I had that kind of relationship with some of the subjects. Some of the things people said in the film were just unbelievable, some of the monologues – like John Fenton with the cowboy hat, you couldn’t write a better speech.
It was exciting to find this new way of working. The thing that I find exciting about documentary is that it's journalism and there are very strict rules about how you go forward in that sense but then everything else is open; as a filmmaker you can employ a different kind of artistry, and that’s exciting.
Why did you choose to make the documentary personal?
The story is a true story, so it’s about me. But I was kind of dragged into that a little. I didn’t want to be in the movie (I’m a director) [but] I realised that I had to go into what happened to me otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. The film was developed in touch with people in this area the whole way. So we would make twenty minutes and then show twenty minutes at a speech about gas drilling, if we had forty minutes we would show forty minutes. We had a website called waterunderattack.com way before we had a title, so we were in touch with the audience all the time. And that allowed us to try out different styles. So we had parts of the film that had no voiceover but mash ups of different interviews, but they didn’t work as well. People liked the story and they liked the voiceover and we realised when there was a laugh it really moved things along and got people motivated.
How did you feel about turning the camera on yourself?
I became kind of a spokesman for this because nobody else has gone to all these places from the East coast. There are a few journalists who have made one or two trips out to Wyoming, but nobody had that direct experience of going all the way round the country. So that in itself became a big thing way before the movie was finished. Actually if you watch the film I try to keep myself out of it as much as possible and a lot of it is filmed by myself, so I wasn’t in frame. It was a nice discovery that people liked the voiceover. And as a writer, writing for yourself is very different to writing for an actor, it’s a different kind of intimacy, I guess.
I think [Matt Sanchez and I] approached this as artists before anything else and we had certain film heroes. For me, it's Goddard and Scorsese. I think you kind of see some of that frantic weirdness in there. So we had a little thing on the fridge, www.whatwouldGoddarddo?.com. This was a reminder not to get caught up in the details of the fight with Haliburton and the fight with the companies, don’t dash into that hole. People have to enter this through a different door and we had to remember that there is a degree of artistry involved all the time. Because it's just so easy for it to become political.
Michael Madsen, director of the doc Into Eternity commented in an interview with us that because his doc looked like art, the opposition had attempted to discredit its truth value. How do you feel about this?
Well the gas companies I think, no matter how the film was made, if it was successful they were going to come after it. They are coming after it. It's not just a question of artistry: they try to discredit everyone, whether it’s a politician, a scientist, the EPA administrator or a family in rural Pennsylvannia whose kids are waking up in the middle of the night with nose bleeds. The companies accuse them of working for the wind industry and it's absolutely outrageous. So that’s been its own interesting journey. Trying to figure out how to most effectively rebut those challenges. That is all [the gas companies] are about, creating doubt. If they do that then you no longer have an emergency on your hands, you have something that has to be looked into, and they can drag their feet and we don’t actually have to act. You see this with climate change all the time. 95% of scientists say it is a real problem, and then 5 scientists who work for the oil companies say there’s no such thing and then all of a sudden it’s a debate.
There is a point in the film where you declare: ‘They think I am a filmmaker because I have a camera’. Do you feel like a filmmaker now?
I certainly do now! I think I became a documentary filmmaker when I met all the other filmmakers. There is an amazing thing happening in cinema right now, I don’t think it exists in any other corner of filmmaking. There are about 50 documentary filmmakers out there, who have a relationship with the mainstream media, who don’t have a lot of ego, they are very fastidious in how they tell stories, who have a great craft. When you look at this era of documentary films, it’s amazing, what is actually happening. You want to see what the most cutting edge political thinking is on the planet now? That actually has a relationship with dire emergency and a mainstream audience? It’s there and it's amazing to meet those people. It was amazing for both Matt and I to have their acceptance. We were coming in as outsiders and people like Laura Poitras and Lucy Walker or Alex Gibney, these folk who are incredible [showed us] a level of commaradarie. I find them an incredible bunch of people. It’s a movement in film and it’s a movement in the world. It’s wonderful to be part of that. We are making two more documentaries right now, so we are definitely in it.
How useful do you think documentary can be, in impressing real change on a situation like this?
I think that the film was actually a galvanising point for a big movement that was already happening. It provided a place for people to confirm the truth that they were experiencing, so I think it became a rallying cry. Some of the events when we were showing the film around Pennsylvannia before the HBO premiere, we had thousands of people show up in the middle of nowhere, it was amazing.
We did this amazingly huge grass roots tour. I have been on the road for nine months at least and we hit 120-something cities and towns and the first one was in Williamstown, Pennsylvannia. I got off the bus and I am thinking if 100 people show up then this is good. But the organisers were saying ‘we think it's going to be a little bit more’ and I show up at the theatre and it’s a huge opera house, two or three balconies and it has two thousand seats. And I’m thinking this is going to be awful, there will be a few people here talking in this huge room.1500 people showed up while we were at dinner. We went across the street to have pizza and walked back in there and I was nearly on the floor. People had read so much about it and they were so concerned. I think the objective now is to extend that, to make connections with people in New York, Wyoming, Pennsylvannia, Australia, England and find ways to have the conversation the size and the scope that it is. This thing about gas drilling, this fracking, is a springboard into looking into the conscientiousness of renewable energy, fossil fuels and the transition. People who would not be interested in this before all of a sudden realise that this is affecting them too.
What’s with the banjo?
When I was 16 I went to a yard sale and picked it up, that very one in the film. I was really into Steve Martin records –he’s a really good banjo player, not many people know that. My dad is a folk singer, so I played the guitar since I was like four, before I could read. The banjo was a whole other weird thing. I’m not a good banjo player. I’m trying to figure out how to do stuff with it.
Is it connected to the sixties environmental movement?
A friend of mine came from New York City to Pennsylvannia to do campaigning for Obama. We were talking about gas drilling because it kept coming up at every house we went to. And my friend said I should look at what Pete Seeger did to connect the Upper Hudson valley to New York City. It was the same relationship. In my mind, not to be too pretentious, it’s kind of half way between Pete Seeger and Joe Strummer, you know with the gas mask. I was becoming like the Alan Lomax of gas drilling, gathering all these folk tales from people. It felt like a good way to connect to the American-ness of the story, the grass roots.
Gasland has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award. The film is currently showing at the ICA in London.
Read Laura Thornley's review before heading along.