UNEASY Cinema Verité: Robert Drew

I interviewed five of the masters of the Direct Cinema (or Cinema Verité) movement in the late nineties (three are pictured in Uneasy). I’m not usually one to be interested in technique or technology but I was fascinated to learn how they were able to shoot such amazing footage with such small crews (usually two or three people), using available light and running sync sound.

One of the funny issues that came up for me is that my approach to interviewing and photography are very different. With Robert Drew for example the interview came first and was very congenial and relaxed, we even drank highballs as we talked. But then after came the photos, and he seemed a little shocked when I became bossy and controlling.

Do you wear suspenders often and how long have you been wearing them?

I've been wearing them ever since I topped 200 pounds. When you're shaped like a Southern sheriff you wear your belt really tight and it interferes with the blood flow to the brain. So, I thought I thought much better with suspenders on.

Did someone tell you to wear suspenders?

I'll tell you what the defining moment was for me. I was in Panama to shoot a video tape film, River Of Hawks, for National Geographic. Hawks aren't that friendly to each other and you rarely see them in formation flying, so this was quite a spectacle. I'd been planning for months and down there for weeks hoping this would happen. I was the camera person, Anne [his wife & partner] was shooting sound, and we were at the Tropical Research Station of the Smithsonian Institution. The guy we were with said, "They're going to come right over that hill," and suddenly, right over that hill came what looked like WW2 bombers, endless streams of them. I was so thrilled and excited. I was shooting a big heavy Betacam camera and I tilted it up, arched my back, pressed the button. I began getting the great picture that I thought I'd never get, it might only last a minute or two, and my pants fell down. Why did my pants fall down? Because I was wearing a belt. So my wife would say, "Bob, stop, you've got to pull up your pants," and I was saying, "Get away, be quiet"; I wasn't going to stop for anything in the world.

Did you get the shot?

I shot for about five straight minutes with my pants down around my ankles surrounded by scientists who I hoped were looking at the birds. Anne was right, it was a terrible sight.

But the key thing is, did you get the shot?

Yes, I got the shot.

There were a few times I would have dropped my pants to get a shot. 

Let's move on to another topic. I was watching Crisis this morning, and I'm fascinated by John Kennedy. To see this was incredible. Why have I never seen this before?

I was pondering recently myself the way history gets made and written. This has got to be the most intimate, human, real-time film ever made on a President, or a attorney general, or on these legal issues. This is a heart of the matter. When I made it, I thought that broadcast journalists everywhere would cheer, and they would see that a new element had been added to their spectrum. But a New York Times editorial panned it, saying the President is taking time out to act during a crisis. If you've seen the film, that's obviously not true. It just indicates that the film was taken partly with hostility by the press. It was seen as competition and disregarded for what it was. I had to swallow a little bit and say, OK, people aren't going to get everything I do. They're not going to see it, some people anyway, and we're going to have opponents, you're just going to have to face that.

To me there is something special in the Verité films that doesn't exist in the more informative or message oriented documentaries.

There are a couple of things that work there. One is that the documentaries you're calling message films are the TV network documentaries. If you think about it, they're all word logic. They're all based on narration, illustrated with pictures. If you look at my best work, or that of my associates, it's picture logic, it's filmmic logic. Therefore, if you're using the medium of television or film, for what it can do uniquely and best, then whenever you do that, it's interesting. The word logic documentaries are using the medium not for what it does uniquely and best but for which only crippled filmmakers can turn out.

What do you mean by crippled?

In terms of not being able to see the possibilities of the medium and how to use them. They can't make real films so they have to make word films, narrated films.

You were talking earlier about how Cinema Verité is one of the most difficult things to do. Why? All of you need is patience, and sensitivity to what is good footage. I think that patience would be the hardest thing.

The difference is, in still photography you're after the moment, in motion picture photography, you're after the flow. And the flow can take a short time or a long time. You have to be so fired up about it that you're willing to go past your meal, go past midnight, go past Thursday, Friday, Monday. So, you're right, patience is the main thing.

I'm curious as to why this isn't the way people make films.

I wish I could answer you. Except to say that perhaps none of us has shown how to do it successfully in big enough clumps to make a difference. I've made films in the last 10 years that are better than any films you know about, that I made in the early years. They go by, one at a time, in different venues, one on PBS, one on network TV, one on a sports station or whatever and whatever goal I can reach in one hour doesn't get recognized. Now if I put on 100 hours, now that would be recognized. My aim in the beginning, was to make a form of journalism that would make the television medium really work, and I thought that 50 hours a year would be a minimum. Leacock and Pennebaker and others were horrified at that vision, of turning out 50-100 hours a year. But I felt that the audience had to be trained what to look for, to do their own looking. The most I ever got on the air in a series was, maybe, eight hours.

What was the series?

It was called the Living Camera Series, and it had Jane and The Chair and a lot of those films in it. I think in a way it's a failure of programming, but I'm going to skip down to the end. What we've been doing, what I've been doing, is showing that candid photography can work in all strata of society and among all different groups of people; the streets of LA, business centers of New York, political centers in Washington and more and more. My films, if somebody ever cared to stop and look, are a record of my time and also appoint all sorts of direction that journalism could take. That is, prime time programming that engages people. I'm saying we haven't succeeded yet, and we may not in my lifetime. But here's what's happening: the numbers of channels of television are expanding beyond infinity almost, the competition is getting fierce and a number of the channels are headed by conglomerates, like Disney. Those guys were ambitious. Those guys want audiences. They are going to find out that reality programming will bring the audiences on a certain level, at a certain cost, which is beneficial to them.