UNEASY Cinema Verité: Richard Leacock

This is the third of five interviews with Cinema Verité greats that I’m going to post today.

What is the difference between your work and that of your colleagues?

I tend to fool around the edges. I think of myself as an observer. Sometimes inspired. I don't think of myself even as a filmmaker and I don't particularly want to, these great big things that go into movie theaters. Boring, most of them. All I can do is capture glimpses. I've only recently made clear in my own mind what I've always been trying to do; incidentally it has almost nothing to do with verité (which means "the truth"), but to create this feeling of being there. It's what I've always been involved in, even using much more clumsy equipment.

Well, especially with this kind of filmmaking, which thrives on the small moments.

That's what I live for, the minutiae. The most satisfying film that I've made was a film about nothing in particular. It's called Les Oeuss a La Couque, made ten years ago for French TV. Really, it's a love story about France and the lady I'm in love with, with whom I work. We spent two years with a tiny 8mm video camera, smallest camera we could get, just filming things that we encountered. A bus trying to get around a corner, a lady who ran a bar, country people going fishing, people make an MTV video, young ladies going shopping. All sorts of things, whatever hit our fancy. It's this area of minutiae that really intrigues me. 

What I love is to observe and to create little sequences that work together. I'm not aiming to make films, I'm aiming to combine writing and videoing in a combination where I can go deeply into subjects and use combos of stills, film, video, text and combine them on video disks. People can then really spend time, not throw-away entertainment. 

This may be fruitless. I'm aiming for small audiences, call me an elitist if you like. The kind of tiny number that TV doesn't even recognize. That's the audience I'm after. That's who I what to talk to, students and people interested in something. These discs have to be created by people who really looking out for something, not people who work on something for two weeks, finish a film and put it on the air.

What I have realized is that the small, almost throw away, things are my favorite bits in these films, like in Crisis where Bobby puts his daughter on the phone.

Let me talk about that particular moment. Do you realize that neither Penne or I had any knowledge that somebody was filming the other end of that conversation?

Amazing.

All we could do was pray, as far as I knew he could have been going to the bathroom, or he had been told not to shoot. It wasn't until weeks later, it was one of the most exciting moments of my life, when we discovered that we had both ends. It was incredible!

And you worked on Primary as well.

What interests me is that today people still look at Primary and are gaga about Kennedy. Most people think that we were pro-Kennedy in the shooting, but we weren't. As a matter of fact, we were all left-wing, especially me, I was a leftover communist. If anything we thought that Jack Kennedy was much too rich and his father was a fascist. And we all knew about Humphrey's voting record and were very fond of him. If you ever bother to play Primary and listen to his Kennedy's speech, that's the most saber-rattling going to war speech he ever made. "We can see the campfires of the enemy on yonder hill..." And everyone sits there and says, "Oh, aren't you marvelous", because he is charismatic. But be careful!

Tell me about Happy Mother's Day.

I thought that was the dumbest idea. It was 1963, Penne and I had just split with Drew, we didn't have a camera. We were broke. The editor of the Saturday Evening Post called me and said, "We bought the rights to exploit the Fishers". I said, "What?" The Fisher quintuplets. He explained that they'd bought the right to exploit them so they could make a film for TV. What would it cost? $20,000 or so. Could you leave immediately? Sure, but we'd need an advance. How much? About 10,000. 

So, we carried it immediately to the bank across the street and we went. We thought it was the dumbest idea we'd ever heard of. Only slowly did we get interested. So we made the film. The editor of the SE Post thought it was hilarious. It was the funniest film he had ever set eyes on. His publisher, dead silence. He said then, "This was not the film we had in mind". So they never paid us.

I'm unhappy with the way documentary films have gone. The films seem like they need to have a message. There's so much more elbow room in Verité.

The French film about nothing in particular undercuts with these individual sequences. I've been harshly criticized because people who run these festivals have said documentaries should deal with social problems. They should reveal, not deal, with social problems. But I'd like to make a film about people falling in love. I did a film in the Mumsey series on a fundamentalist family, it had to do with belief, Community Of Praise. My liberal friends didn't like it at all, I was sorely criticized because I didn't trash those beliefs. I don't think they need trashing.

Have they seen it? Did they like it?

Oh yes. I called them up afterwards and the father said, "Hey, we didn't realize we were so funny." I don't get shocked by many things, but during a Christmas shopping they had a prayer meeting in the car, asking for God them to find a parking spot. I thought that was very amusing. We got that on film but we also did a lot of non-filming. We would go days without filming. If you're constantly around them with a camera, you destroy any possibility of true revelation and you'll miss tons because you have to have a personal relationship, not just one with the camera.