Tuesday Talk… with David Van Taylor

I’ve never met David Van Taylor, but I’ve been using one of his films in my class for probably fifteen years. I regularly make allusions to it to people who have no idea what I’m talking about, which affords me the opportunity to tell them about one of the most incredible election campaigns of my life and to plug his film. A few years ago I saw his name on Facebook on a mutual friend’s wall and we’ve had fun quoting the film to each another every chance we get. Although David is not a classroom teacher (any more!), I see the role of documentarian tantamount to that of educator as viewers of his work will certainly affirm.

Where did you grow up? What did your parents do for a living?

I grew up in Washington DC. When people hear that they sometimes ask, “Did your parents work for the government?” and my jokey answer is, “No, they worked against the government.” My dad was a civil rights lawyer and advocate for over 50 years. My mom was a labor lawyer who ultimately became a judge of the Superior Court.

Having attended Georgetown Day School, what are your thoughts on public vs. private schools?

I went to the local public elementary school through grade six, and mostly got a very good education there. (I also skipped fourth grade, which I would never recommend to anyone.) My parents had to swallow hard to send us to a private school, since my dad was all about reforming and integrating public education. But Georgetown Day had a strong mission—it was founded as the first integrated school in DC, and remained a very progressive place. I learned a lot about diversity in both places. And the small class sizes at GDS certainly made possible a very personal-feeling education. I wish everyone had that opportunity.

You majored in sociology and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. What drove those interests?

When your dad’s a civil rights lawyer, it’s not such a big stretch. But despite my liberal upbringing (and having attended diverse schools before college), Afro-American Studies was hugely eye-opening. I remember vividly the introductory class where department chair Nate Huggins explained how the interests of slave owners shaped provisions in the US Constitution. Suddenly American history made so much more sense!

I assume that’s where you met Jake Slichter. I’ll ask you the same question I asked him: what did or would you have said to people of color who questioned your presence in Black history classes?

Well the first thing to say is that Jake and I majored in Af-Am at a time when very few people of any race were doing so. (This was pre-Skip Gates.) So mostly I felt gratitude from faculty and fellow students that we were helping keep the department alive.

But there were also tensions. While I was there, Huggins offered an appointment to his friend Lawrence Levine, a brilliant social historian who had written a groundbreaking book about slavery. Levine was also a white, Jewish man, who happened to be my dad’s first cousin. Thus, there were public protests against his appointment, which he ultimately declined.

I knew Levine personally and had been greatly inspired by his work; I could have easily felt aggrieved on his behalf. But I took my cue from Larry, who accepted this turn of events with equanimity, and acknowledged the protesters’ very real concerns about the overall lack of diversity in Harvard’s faculty.

I guess this is a long way of saying: it’s crucially important for white people to understand Afro-American history and culture; but it’s also important that we not try to dominate and colonize the field, either.

The good folks at IMDB inform me that your first credit (as apprentice editor) wasn’t until 1986, and your first full documentary wasn’t until 1992. What did you do in the years after graduation?

After driving a cab in Boston for a year, I moved to New York and worked as a public school teacher! There was a teacher shortage, I was interested, and I had a distant relative who was the principal at PS 189 in Washington Heights.

The job was fantastically engaging and completely grueling. I taught science to 400+ second and third graders each week; most of them were native Spanish speakers, and I spoke no Spanish. And beyond the circumstances, I had no training and little in-born aptitude for teaching young children. I only lasted one year.

The life of a documentary filmmaker is not easy, but whenever I’m inclined to self-pity I remember that teaching elementary school is way harder. And that even my most skilled and inspiring teaching colleagues worked for very little money or recognition.

When did you decide that you wanted to go into documentary filmmaking?

I’ve always loved film. After failing as a teacher, I applied to NYU’s graduate filmmaking program. I didn’t get in. So I started working as an apprentice editor, mostly on feature films.

Documentary wasn’t really on my radar. But when I came across the subject for what became my first film, I realized that documentary could bridge what had previously seemed like the horns of a dilemma: did I want to express myself as a creative artist, or did I want to help reform the world?

So I launched into this career, with only the barest preparation. That lack of preparation has its pluses as well as minuses.

I feel like I have pretty good idea of the minuses. What are the biggest pluses for you?

Making films is like raising children in several ways, including this one: If you really knew in advance what it entailed, you might not take the plunge. Thankfully, people tend not to know; so they take the risks that are required to keep the human species going, or to create great art.

When you spot a story that could make a promising subject for a documentary — how much cooperation do you need to predetermine from the various parties before you decide to move forward with the project? Have you had to abandon projects because you just weren’t able to get enough access?

To make a film project fly, you need three things: time, access, and money. Several decades in, my career is littered with projects I’ve had to abandon for lack of any one of those. It’s just not easy to get them all lined up.

So I’ve learned to ask a more basic question first: Do I care enough to pursue a given idea through all the inevitable-but-unpredictable vicissitudes? Even a project that seems eminently marketable is likely to encounter major challenges. If I can’t find the passion that will keep me going no matter what, I’ll walk away from an idea very early.

Would you be willing to share the topics of an abandoned project or two?

I’d love to make a film about humans that takes the usual form of a nature documentary: shot from a distance with long lenses, watching the dialogue-free movements and interactions of small or large groups, and interpreting it all in a disembodied voiceover. But I guess I don’t love the idea enough to make it happen.

How challenging is it to stay neutral (at least outwardly) when talking to people who you fundamentally disagree with? I guess you wouldn’t have much of a film if you turned combative, eh?

Combative people can make great documentaries. I love Michael Moore’s films, for example, or Marcel Ophüls’. But my interests lie elsewhere.

In the very first interview I did for our religious-right history series With God On Our Side, a televangelist railed against homosexuals (I have two sisters who are lesbians), and against all the “terrible judges appointed by President Carter” (who appointed my mother to the bench). Yes, it was hard not to defend my own family.

I kept quiet, at first, by telling myself I’d “give ‘em enough rope to hang themselves.” Ultimately, though, I’ve found a higher purpose. It’s only by suspending judgment that we can really get to know other people—whether those people are our political opponents or our closest loved ones. And only by understanding other people can we form real connections and make change in the world.

I’m not suggesting that empathy (or god forbid, “civility”) is the be-all and end-all of achieving justice. Sometimes you have to be very clear about where you stand and what you reject. But without empathy, I don’t think you can get very far in forging a better world.

I imagine you don’t want to try the patience of the audience, but how do you find the balance between telling the entire story and having a film not be too long?

Length is super-subjective, whether it’s in a book, a movie, a concert, or anything else. Dramatic structure is much more important. If the audience feels like a confident story-teller is unfolding something for them, they’ll stick around for a long time.

That said, it’s helpful while editing to keep reminding yourself that less is more.

Your full-length directorial debut was Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest. The background of the film is parents sued the heavy metal band Judas Priest because their sons shot themselves, and blamed subliminal messages in their music for these actions. James Vance survived his 1985 suicide attempt and blamed alcohol… and Judas Priest. Did you feel he believed what he was saying or telling his mother what she wanted to hear?

Great question! Due to his physical and emotional injuries, James had been thrown back into a child-like dependence on his mother. Plus he had tremendous survivor guilt after watching his best friend kill himself and not fulfilling his end of the suicide pact. So I doubt that even he could completely distinguish between his own beliefs and what his mother and Ray’s mom desperately wanted to hear.

It’s also true that his love of Judas Priest was forged originally in direct opposition to his mother’s beliefs, so the two were already quite entangled.

I’d like to think that a case like this would be immediately dismissed as frivolous in 2019, but I’m not so sure… you?

I think we have passed out of the manias of that era … and onto other, equally bizarre manias.

Your next film was A Perfect Candidate about the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Virginia. It has been called “the best political film ever,” and not by you! The election pitted incumbent Democrat Chuck Robb against Oliver North, but also featured the recent governor of the state, Douglas Wilder, and a mainstream Republican, Marshall Coleman, running as independents. I could spend this entire interview on this film — both what’s in it and what is not — but I’ll try to keep it to just a few questions:

Your film is primarily focused on the North campaign and its campaign manager, Mark Goodin, a fascinating figure who I lovingly refer to as “the root of all evil.” Did you try to get similar access to Robb’s campaign and were denied, or did you think that it was more compelling focusing on North and Goodin?

I went into the filmmaking completely entranced by North and his people. Ultimately my collaborators—co-director RJ Cutler and director of photography Nick Doob—convinced me that we needed something to juxtapose and contrast with Ollie. Chuck Robb turned out to be that, in spades. And I ultimately think there’s a fascinating and revealing arc from Robb’s initial “I’m going to focus on the positive” to his climactic pseudo-rap about Ollie’s many shortcomings, which is mudslinging at its very finest. But we never found the whiff of a great behind-the-scenes story in the Robb campaign.

There’s a key scene in the film where you’re interviewing Goodin in the back seat of a vehicle and he’s being unusually candid about “the entertainment value of politics” which he says supersedes a serious discussion of solutions for what’s ailing the nation. Did you know as the interview was going on that you’d struck gold, essentially found a core part of the film?

Yes! Goodin basically threw himself in the back of our car and unleashed that soliloquy just two weeks before the election. We had been filming off and on for ten months, but at that moment we all knew we were dealing with a very different film. And many of the really deep access moments (which end up sprinkled throughout the film) come from the two weeks after Goodin did that, when he also realized he wanted a deeper story told.

I love the segments with Don Baker from the Washington Post, but wonder what the thought process was in terms of telling the larger story. Did you think the campaign footage and interviews needed a different perspective for the audience?

We latched onto Don from very early—much earlier than we did with Mark Goodin—for reasons we couldn’t necessarily articulate at the time. He was obviously a sparring partner for North, and much more “relatable” of an antagonist than Robb. Then, he turned out to have his own complicated relationship with Robb.

Ultimately, Don is the closest thing to an Everyman character for most of the audience. Which makes it all the more fascinating and delicious when his own beliefs take an unexpected turn.

The title of the film comes from a sermon in which the pastor tells a parable about a parishioner looking for a perfect church which he uses to explicitly point out that voters will never find a perfect candidate, so please, please hold your nose and vote for the odious Chuck Robb. In your estimation is voting always a situation where we have to select between the lesser of evils? Is that such a bad thing?

I don’t know if we’re always choosing between the lesser of two evils, but the 2016 presidential election certainly shows what can happen when too many people refuse to vote for someone who is not “a perfect candidate.”

Of course the pastor is speaking about more than elections. It’s important to remember, in the political realm as elsewhere, that none of us is perfect and that we should approach our criticism of others with due humility.

For years I’ve shown the film after screening Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts. It’s hard not to be struck by the singer who opens your film with the “Don’t you know it’s your fault” song or by the ultra-right wing views espoused by the fictional character and Oliver North. But here’s a swerve: how much of a parallel do you see between the North campaign the Trump campaign and presidency?

FYI I’m pretty sure that the singer who opens our film was directly inspired by Bob Roberts—an example both of life imitating art, and of people learning lessons that artists never intended. [Tim Robbins refused to release a soundtrack for fear of this sort of thing happening! – Ed.]

Trump has certainly taken some pages from North’s playbook. I’m pretty sure he’s used the montage-of-black-and-white-liberal-baddies at least once. And more broadly, North taught the whole nation a lesson in the power of shamelessness when he went before Congress and declared that his law-breaking was “a neat idea.” Trump has taken shamelessness to new heights.

I saw that you directed three episodes of the show Intervention. I became aware of the show because a friend of mine’s family was featured in one episode. Were you concerned about the show being potentially exploitative of the subjects? Or that people might behave differently because of the presence of the cameras?

I actually directed eight episodes of Intervention. I guess they didn’t all end up on IMDB.

The showrunner was Dan Partland, who had been a co-producer of A Perfect Candidate. I came in after they had really set up their system, and I was tremendously impressed by how the production was completely structured around the therapeutic imperatives set by the professional interventionists. Documentary always runs the risk of exploitation, but to me Intervention was about as sensitively run as it could be.

And yes, you also have to worry in any documentary whether and how people are modifying their behavior for the cameras. One rule of thumb articulated by the Maysles-Leacock-Pennebaker-Drew crowd is that you only want to film people when they’re doing something that’s more important to them than being filmed. That was certainly the case on Intervention, whether we were filming the addict shooting up or the family trying to convince them to go to rehab.

All that said, I’d love to hear more about your friend’s family’s experience.

You can actually read about it in his memoir, Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America, available at a book store near you.

In Advise & Dissent you examined the Senate confirmation process for the Supreme Court. The film focuses on two activists/political operatives, the liberal Ralph Neas and the conservative Manuel Miranda (poor guy’s Google searches are completely corrupted at this point!). Why did you choose to frame it this way as opposed to the politicians? Access or something more?

In my mind, the film is structured around a quartet of characters, arrayed along two axes: Inside vs. Outside and Left vs. Right. Sometimes they line up on one axis, as when insider Democrat Leahy votes with insider Republican Specter for John Roberts, breaking the heart of outsider Democrat Neas. Sometimes they line up on the other axis, as when Specter votes for Alito, pleasing outsider Republican Miranda and breaking the heart of Leahy.

It’s a complicated setup and perhaps not entirely successful. I’m not sure most viewers follow the emotional or political nuances I intended. But I do believe it’s a revealing portrait of our political system at a pivotal moment, especially as embodied in the character of Arlen Specter.

You once wrote that the confirmation process had “become politicized to the point of undermining healthy debate, but in seeking to address that problem, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.” At that time could you have imagined the Merrick Garland debacle?

No. But as Tom Stoppard once wrote, “Credibility is a constantly expanding field.”

The film ends with a list of the very conservative decisions Samuel Alito and John Roberts had been a part of in their first year in office. Have you been at all heartened by the chief justice’s occasional independence?

I have been somewhat heartened, because Roberts has stopped short of some truly ruinous decisions. But there are plenty of ruinous decisions where he has not stopped short.

Furthermore, we shouldn’t be seduced by anecdotes. Comprehensive statistical analyses show that Supreme Court justices overwhelmingly tend to rule just as the presidents who appointed them would have hoped—the reputation of Roberts or Souter notwithstanding.

After Judge Robert Bork’s rejection by the Senate, most nominees have chosen to dodge political questions, arguing that they shouldn’t answer hypotheticals nor discuss cases before the Court. The idea, it seems, is to give absolutely no ammunition to the other side. How would you like to see the process change at this point?

I wish we had a more honest discussion of ideology and judicial philosophy in confirmations. Given what we know about how justices rule (see above) and what the Framers intended, obfuscating the very real politics of judicial selection only makes the process more manipulative and, perversely, more political.

If nominees won’t speak openly about their ideology, the press and the Senate should do a better job of discussing their records. Bork’s opponents did that quite effectively, casting his moderate reassurances to the Senate as a “confirmation conversion.

I also wish the Left would do a better job of articulating its judicial philosophy. Judges who enforce the 14th Amendment and the rights of discrete minorities (for example) are not “judicial activists”; they’re servants of of real-world justice.

Quite a bit of your work has focused on the influence of the Religious Right in the United States, starting with its rise in the 1950s through the George W. Bush administration. What’s your perspective on how the Religious Right has embraced a president whose behavior is so antithetical to their ethos?

The religious right’s embrace of Trump is in many ways shocking to me because I’ve devoted decades of my life to understanding and empathizing with conservative evangelicals’ concerns about an increasingly secular public square.

I still believe many grass-roots evangelicals have sincere and not-particularly-racist motives. But I also believe, as our series With God On Our Side makes plain, that power corrupts. And as a wise man once said, “What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”

You recently produced a segment for the PBS NewsHour, “How to Help,” on economists who are trying to find out what works best to fight global poverty. What have they found works best? How does the current administration’s agenda impact these efforts?

The segment looks at a program that has done very well in many countries by offering aid to ultra-poor people that is short-term but multi-pronged, giving them: productive assets (goats or bees); training in how to manage and market those assets; food support as they grow their small businesses; savings incentives; and life coaching.

Even beyond the specific aid, our segment explores how economists are now using rigorous methods to determine what works and what doesn’t in foreign aid. That methodology can appeal to people on both sides of the aisle. Interestingly enough, the Trump administration’s recent attempts to slash foreign aid fell to resistance from both Democrats and Republicans.

What’s up next?

A lot! Much of which I can’t talk about now. But here’s a teaser on one: I’m writing a “documentary oratorio for chorus and orchestra.” If you want further explanation, you’ll have to wait.

Looking forward to it! Thanks for the time and thoughtful answers.