When You're Not Filming You're Herding - Interview with Lucien Castaing-Taylor
- Posted: 21st Apr 2011
- Category: Articles
- Tags: sheep, cowboys, american west
by Ali May
Sweetgrass is a bold and fascinating piece of observational documentary, it is a candid look at the dying tradition of Western pastoralism and the ancient, uneasy relationship between man and beast in which we are taken on the last meandering journey of a family of Montana sheepherders across hundreds of thousands of acres of dangerous and remote wilderness to the summer pastures.
Ali May spoke to Harvard anthropologist and director of the film Lucien Castaing-Taylor about pushing yourself to the absolute limits for your filmmaking, crying cowboys and how a summer of filming spiraled into an eight year project.
AM: Sweetgrass has been described as "an unflinching look at the reality of today’s modern-day cowboys," this isn't the life I imagined when playing cowboys and Indians in the school playground! - How did it feel to be a real cowboy albeit for just a few months?
LCT: For me it felt amazing! You know, I’m British, I’m from the north of England and to suddenly find myself in the Rocky mountains with people who were so different from me and to have the privilege of being able to get to know these people or to get to know a totally different culture where people have such a different relationship to place and landscape and animals and nature than I could ever have had in the UK was incredible. If I have done anything in life this is probably the thing that has most moved me and I feel very lucky that it’s one of the things that I have had the opportunity to live through.
The film is about them as cowboys but it knows that it’s toying and playing with the icon of the cowboy, like when Pat, the younger of the two herders, was cussing at the sheep in language too strong to even make its way onto television, and then later when he calls his mother and cries to her on the cell phone, it’s such an anti-iconic anti-cultural kind of image that goes against the grain of all the mythology of cowboys. But there are also so many quintessential shots where they look just like cowboys – I mean just physically they both do by wearing cowboy hats and riding horses. We [Castaing-Taylor and wife and producer Ilisa Barbash] didn’t try to avoid portraying them as cowboys but we did try to play with them and re-contextualise them in a way.
AM: Sweetgrass took about eight years of filming and development. It was by anyone’s standards a fairly long running project - can you talk us through the film making process and why it became such a large project?
LCT: It needn’t have taken as long as it did, we were filming over a few years from 2001 until 2004 intensively and then I carried on filming occasionally until 2007. So we shot over 200hrs, which doesn’t sound like much, it’s just five forty-hour weeks, but in actual fact, to look through, 200 hours is almost infinite!
I went up there for lambing in April 2001 for the first time. About 80% of what ended up in the finished film was shot in the summer of 2001 when we hardly knew them, this was actually the best footage!
Also Sweetgrass wasn’t commissioned or produced by anyone so we didn’t have a budget, we were just doing it on the side more or less for free by ourselves whenever we could find the time. Our day jobs are pretty grueling and we had two small kids at the time, then in 2002 we moved from the Rocky Mountains to Boston on the east coast of the US and trying to make the film from Boston was much harder: it’s a combination of all of these things that made it take as long as it did. I mean, I guess that if we had stayed there in the Rockies we would have shot there from 2001 to 2004 and probably released it in 2005. So essentially it came out four years late!
AM: Sweetgrass has been described as an “anthropological work of art” - as an academic would you say that you are freer as a filmmaker from the constraints of “popular” or television documentary? Was this something you were conscious of when making the film?
LCT: In a way yeah, I mean I don’t think anthropologists think of this as particularly anthropological, because anthropologists write about culture around the world and you can watch this film and bring away from it what you bring away from it but you won’t know much about the people, and if you do learn something about their lives I’m not sure it’s something you can put into anthropological prose.
So I don’t think of this as academic filmmaking, I guess I think of it as a type of independent filmmaking, which has certain disadvantages but also its advantages. The disadvantages are that the financial resources for this type of filmmaking are super limited, it’s not as if we have a producer who says, here, here’s £300,000, go off and make a movie. On the other hand we don’t have a producer telling us what to include or what not to include, and that’s quite free.
We barely even think about an audience, we’re not thinking about an academic audience or a non academic audience, we’re just thinking about trying to make a film as strong as we can and as interesting as we can, trying to do something with the film that hasn’t been done before.
AM: The soundtrack of Sweetgrass has been described as aesthetic minimalism because of its lack of music and narration, did this pose any particular challenges narratively and what was the rational behind your decision to not use music or interviews?
LCT: We thought about it a lot. The problem with voiceover is that voice over is usually disembodied so it’s this interpretative response to voiceover that reduces the image track to the status of an illustrated lecture, so the image track just ends up illustrating or complimenting the message itself. It ends up just being elaborated in language - like reading an essay or a journalistic article.
The same thing with music; music can impart a sensibility to a film that is not coming from the images or from the sync sound itself so it’s usually a crutch, I mean Jean Rouch said that music is the opium of the cinema, it drugs your audience when the material isn’t strong enough on its own terms to really maintain that interest.
That’s a generalisation, because sometimes it can work pretty well of course, but I think that typically voiceover and music are really lazy ways to kind of indoctrinate people when the material isn’t strong enough to work by itself.
AM: What technical issues did you have to battle with when filming for so long in such a remote location - how did you manage for batteries and lugging around all that equipment for example?
LCT: Well it took a toll on my body obviously, I mean the camera I had on a harness which helped, I had all these wireless receivers and I had the DAT recorder, when I was filming I must have had 30 plus pounds on me while I was running around!
I couldn’t have a battery charger either – there was no electricity, so all I had were solar panels up the mountain and solar panels are very sun hungry, they need a lot of sun to work, I had the highest milliwatt and milliamp hour batteries I could possibly get, I remember they were $1000 each battery and I had 6 of them! Even then I would say that maybe 1/3 of the time I couldn’t film because I had no power, I was just waiting for the sun to come out!
On the other hand when you’re not filming you’re herding, you’re listening and you’re learning – you’re still working on the film but just in another kind of way, so it wasn’t time wasted that’s for sure.
AM: You put quite a lot of yourself into this film didn’t you? Your wife has said that when you got down from the mountains after filming in 2001 you were unrecognisable. You were even diagnosed with trauma-induced advanced degenerative arthritis caused by carrying the filming equipment day and night and needed double foot surgery?
LCT: Yeah but I didn’t know that I was doing that to myself, I just knew that I was in pain. I very deliberately wore hiking boots because it’s a wilderness area and if you break your ankle up there you can’t even be medevaced out of it. I knew that I was going to be running around and hopping from boulder to boulder and I didn’t want to break my ankle because filming would be over, so I was wearing these tight boots but I didn’t realise that my toes were actually grinding down and that I would have no cartilage left in the end - I only have myself to blame I guess!
AM: Is it all just part and parcel of the film making process for you or was this an exceptional project and what is it that drives you such extremes to make these films?
LCT: I think it was just particularly stupid on my part but I do think to make a good film is demanding and it can take over and colonise your life – I’m now collaborating on a new film about industrial fishing out of New England and its unbelievably gruelling, but I think that in order to try and do something really interesting with documentary, in order to reveal something about the world that has never been depicted before you usually have to push yourself to the absolute limits.
Sweetgrass is released on DVD on 23rd May 2011 by Dogwoof. Read Ali May's review here.