2008 IN REVIEW: Emailing with MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH's Morgan Dews

Lucky number 13 of our series of interviews with some of 2008's top nonfiction filmmakers...

Morgan Dews' MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH had its US premiere in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, but, like Tommy Davis' ONE MINUTE TO NINE, it had already had a strong run on the international film festival circuit before it hit stateside, even though it's a truly American story.

Based on audio tape diaries and audio correspondence between his grandparents in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the film is a beautiful, dreamlike accounting of a troubled family in the midst of changing times, particularly differing attitudes toward sex, mental health and psychiatry.  It gets a US limited theatrical release via Gigantic next month.

In this exchange, Morgan talks about his discovery of the archival material at the heart of his film, convincing his family to trust him with their painful past and what he's learned about film festivals after his go 'round with MUST READ.

So part of the background of MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH is the discovery of a series of letters and audio recordings left by your grandmother, which reveals not only a very surprising dynamic between her and your grandfather, but also shines a light on the era in which they lived.  Tell me about the discovery of your grandmother's archives and your decision to make a film about them.

I grew up very close with my grandmother Allis. I spent a lot of time up at her place in Vermont and had pretty much free rein of the woods and attic and shed. I'm not sure if she showed me their old 8mm home moves or I just dug them up, but from a very early age I was setting up screenings and watching them.

My mother and uncles were already sick of them as children. All they could remember is their father chasing them around with huge lights and making them do multiple takes coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. My brother and cousins weren't interested in them so when Allis died in 2001 I took the 200 odd reels back with me to Barcelona.

I took my time splicing them onto bigger reels and taking notes on all the footage. There was only a little more than eight hours of material, but all that film is unwieldy. I thought I could use Allis' letters or a memoir that she had written and make an interesting short film out of the material.

Then in spring of 2004 two interesting things happened. First I got a package of cds from my Uncle Bruce. He had found the dictaphone letters in a box somewhere, bought a machine on eBay and transferred it all to CD and sent it out to the whole family. Now these are about ten hours of audio letters my grandparents and their children sent back and forth when Charley, my grandfather, was away on business.

Secondly, I went out to dinner with Bruce's ex-wife Barbara.  We hadn't seen each other since their divorce in the 80s.  She hadn't had such a great relationship with Allis. When I told her I had all of Allis' home movies she asked me if I was going to be using the tapes. I asked if she meant the dictaphone letters and she said no. She said about the time Bruce had been sent to the mental institution, Allis had driven around with a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder making diaries to give to her shrink.

I was pretty excited. Barbara assured me that these tapes still existed. I made some calls and sure enough, they were still out in the shed. I arranged for them to come to my mothers for our first big family Thanksgiving since Allis died. We got a reel to reel tape recorder and I spent thanksgiving week putting it all onto a hard-drive.

Once I got home and heard the tapes I realized that there was a very different film in there. It also really excited me that the material mirrored the outrageous pressure to conformity of the fifties that lead to the social upheaval of the '60s. This story is really about what that process looks like inside a suburban home with the shades drawn.

The tapes are so intimate and revealing, I kept wondering whether there was ever any thought within your family that maybe it's not such a good idea if Morgan turns these into a movie?

Yes. In fact when I told my mother and uncles that I was making a film out of these tapes they were pretty taken aback. "Yikes!" they said, "and listen, that's a box of random recordings of the worst moments of the worst years of our childhood. We don't even know what's in there."

I said that in order to find funding for the film, they were going to have to trust me and sign release forms. They said, "Make your film and show it to us, and if we're OK with we'll sign the forms."

A lot of people told me that this could be a real disaster. But I think when people put their stories in your hands you have a big responsibility to portray them in a way that they find acceptable. I don't think having a release relieves you from your responsibility. Plus this is about how my family disintegrated forty years ago. This is something that we're all still recovering from and the last thing I would do is something to make things hard for us again.

So instead of them trusting me, I had to trust them. At the same time, I didn't want to pull any punches. I worked for about two and a half years making the film I wanted to make. I consulted pretty steadily with the family just to understand the material and get their input, so they knew where I was headed. When I finally sent them out the rough cut on DVD, I thought, "If they don't like it, I can always remove them and make the story more about Allis and Charley and less about the kids."

Thankfully, they were very impressed with the film. They thought it was a fair and accurate representation of what happened and also a very lyrical, poetic look at the era.

This fall, in the space of about three weeks I was able to get them all to come to festival screenings near their homes to see it with an audience and help me with Q & A. It was really great for them because, although they have a really unique take on the film, they got to see that this very specific story about their family really resonates with people.

Listening and learning from audiences about the film and what it means to them has been the most gratifying thing about taking it to festivals. The first time I screened it I was so embarrassed about revealing all of these family secrets that I couldn't even stand near the door as the audience came out. There was no Q & A, so I really didn't know how it went over. A man in his sixties came up to me and smiled and said, "Don't worry, we all have family."

Beyond these tapes are the creative decisions that you make both as a director and an editor in conveying the material.  I've seen it described as a collage, but it's also beautifully dream-like, as if your grandparents' voices are floating in and out of our consciousness. Talk about that decision and how you approached it - and how did you separate the director hat from the editor role?

A lot of the beauty of the film and it's dreamlike quality follow directly from practical questions and the choice to only use the original material. Even the story is dictated by this. I was really jazzed by the idea of making an immersive experience that put you into this household and never let you out, never gave you the breathing space of a narrator, experts or even the family members reflecting back.

I made a decision to sit back and listen to the story the tapes were telling and shaping that into a dramatic story. Like you do writing fiction, I listened to what my characters were saying - on tape. I tried to detach myself from what I knew about my family, throw all that out and concentrate on what was being said. The fact that everything happens just before I was born helped a lot.

The tapes and the difficult story they tell run from 1960 to 1970. The films run mostly from 1948 to 1958, a much happier time for my family. There are only about 20 home movies spanning the entire 1960s. It almost seems that they stopped making films, that were public presentations of the family, when things got bad and switched to audio to record the turmoil.

What also seemed like a tremendous challenge in the beginning turned out to be a blessing. There's this implicit contrast between public and private views, between the happy and sad, between before and after. I noticed that this jumbled up way of presenting things evoked the way reverie works to present memories. Because the connections between the visual and the auditory are frequently poetically and allegorical, even lyrical, and the voices fade in and out, the film becomes like a fever dream.

Films like this are really made in the editing. I feel very strong as an editor and I felt that if I didn't do the editing it would be much less my film. With my producer hat on and since I financed the film myself, this made even more sense, since I cut myself a good deal on the editing fees.

As a director you're always looking at what's best for the story. When I worked with Lisa Kwon, the fantastic design director, she was looking at the minutia and presenting me with creative solutions for animations, titling and credits and I was looking to make that work with the larger story. Are the elements on screen long enough, is the emotional timing right? Working with composer Paul Damian Hogan was the same he was deep in the thick of it and I was giving him feedback about how I wanted elements to work with the story.

So as far as editing and directing, it was mostly just a question of concentrating on different scales, of stepping back from sequences and cuts you'd edited and asking yourself, as a director, "Does that fit, does that help tell the story?"

You played a number of international festivals, including a 2007 premiere in Sao Paulo and a European premiere at IDFA that same year, long before you had your premiere in the US at the Los Angeles Film Festival.  How did you come up with your festival strategy and what were your favorite experiences over the past 15 months?

Like most of the things about my film I did things backwards and made tons of mistakes out of impatience, but in the end everything worked out fantastically. Normally I think everyone dreams of premiering their films at Toronto, like you did with ABOUT A SON, or one of the other six brand name festival that almost only accept premieres (Cannes, Venice, Sundance, Berlin, and for docs IDFA).

Because Sundance had shown a short film of mine and invited MUST READ (under the working title Allis and Charley) to their producer's conference, I made the terrible mistake of applying with a 'rough cut' in fall '06 for the '07 festival. Thank god they turned it down! It was barely ready for Sao Paulo in October and it would have been a disaster to show the film in January.

Sao Paolo may seem like a strange choice but someone told me some really lovely things about it as I was finishing up a sound mix that summer in Barcelona and I thought, "What the hell? The deadline's around the corner and the entry's free." My thinking was pretty erratic on the subject was, "It's a Latin American premiere and that still leaves me with European, American and Asian premiere."

The question of festival and premieres is really tricky. The top festivals are spread throughout the year and the idea is that you really should wait a year while to hear from them each in turn. I had been working on my film for two and a half years on my own nickel and I simply couldn't wait that long to see if it was going to fly or not. I really needed to know. Getting into Sao Paulo was a good sign.

They really treated us fantastically. Sao Paulo is an amazing city and a really great festival. One of my good friends Joan Lopez was there with his film UTOPIA '79, and I made some great friends there, Wayne Price, who did THE DOORMAN and Ed Gass-Donnelly who did MY BEAUTIFUL CITY.

It was a bit dicey for a moment with IDFA because they pretty touchy about premiere status and have the biggest documentary film market in the world. It looked for a little bit opening in Sao Paulo was going to disqualify me for IDFA, but I was upfront with them and in the end everything worked out for me.

One thing I did throughout the entire festival process and even now is just never stop working on the film. We're set for theatrical release on the 20th of February and I'm still tweaking things. That is the really beauty of HDCam or Beta as a projection format. You aren't locked until you make a film print. Part of the fun for me has been watching it with so many audiences and taking in their feedback on things. In fact, audiences eventually convinced me to re-score the film because the previous score getting in the way of the story.

The third festival I went to was Punta de Vista (POV) in Pamplona. It's probably the smallest festival I've been to but one of the best. Within minutes of arriving I was eating Chorizo with Ross McElwee, Carmen Cobos and Luciano Barisone! Every afternoon there was a lunch with all of the filmmakers and jury and they awarded me my first prize, a special mention. Because of this little festival I think I was invited to another five.

This is where I sort of developed my strategy: apply to the best festivals you can first and then apply to anything that looks good - if someone recommends it, if it has a cool website whatever. Always ask for a fee waiver. For a film like mine, that I made pretty much in the wilderness, festivals are the perfect place to find your audience. The more the merrier.

Los Angeles was also a festival that totally blew me away. Not only did I meet and bond with tons of filmmakers who are now my friends, they also set us up with great industry meetings and lunches, and super screenings. Outstanding! The other great thing about festivals is prizes. I won the International Grand Prix in Marseilles, Best First Doc in Lisbon, an Audience Award in Florence and two special mentions. Great for the ego, plus 11,000 euros is good for the pocket.

You've signed a deal with Gigantic Releasing, which made news somewhat recently with their announcement of a digital arm to do day-and-date releasing of some of their films.  What's the release strategy for your film?

Gigantic and I got together through my executive producer Alison Palmer Bourke, but it made it much easier for me that they released Wayne Price's movie THE DOORMAN. In a way that made Sao Paulo the most important festival for me.

The release strategy is to open in theaters in NY on February 20 at the Quad Cinema and in LA on Laemmle's Sunset 5 on Feb. 27 and - day and date – open nationally via Gigantic Digital. Based on reviews, box-office and demand, we may then open additional markets in theaters.

We've been invited by Thom Powers to do a sneak preview and Q & A as part of his series Stranger Than Fiction on Feb. 3rd at 8 pm at the IFC Center in New York City. I can't tell you how excited I am about that!

It's really clear that digital is the only way to give small films a longer roll out. Everybody knows that these are interesting times in film distribution and I am really excited to be part of a project that's trying something new. This can give us a chance for people to find out about the film by telling one another. I think our festival experience has been all about that, getting the most people possible to see the film. Word of mouth is absolutely the best way to for audiences to find you.

Previous interviews:

James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE)
Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (TROUBLE THE WATER)
Jeremiah Zagar (IN A DREAM)
Yung Chang (UP THE YANGTZE)
Patrick Creadon (I.O.U.S.A.)
Margaret Brown (THE ORDER OF MYTHS)
Marina Zenovich (ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED)
Ellen Kuras (THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON))
Darius Marder (LOOT)
Scott Kennedy (THE GARDEN)
Daniel Junge (THEY KILLED SISTER DOROTHY)
Tommy Davis (ONE MINUTE TO NINE)

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