Los Angeles Film Festival: Don Cheadle and Davis Guggenheim Talk Cinema as an Agent of Change
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Thursday, July 05, 2007
Don Cheadle |
When Davis Guggenheim directed his debut documentary The First Year, he had high hopes for the film about new teachers in inner city Los Angeles. “What if this actually changes the public school system?” he wondered. But the action he hoped to invoke never came. Years later he tried again, this time with An Inconvenient Truth. The film about global warming struck a chord with the nation and gained national attention and an Oscar for his efforts.
Guggenheim is one of many hoping to inspire audiences through film. Don Cheadle, best known for his role as Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda and as Basher Tarr in the Ocean’s Eleven series of films, is currently working on the documentary An Indifferent World about the crisis in Darfur and has helped raise $9 million for the region.
The Los Angeles Film Festival invited Cheadle and Guggenheim to the W Hotel in Westwood for an intimate poolside chat with host Ted Sarandos about filmmaking with a cause.
Is the filmmaker’s role to start dialogue or fix the problem?
Don Cheadle: The documentary that we are cutting now about Darfur [An Indifferent World] is about activism and about the crisis. When it began I think we were trying to do something with it, and we hoped to inspire people to become active themselves and have some sort of message that went beyond purely documenting the event, but I think that that is something that you can never count on or that you can never really fully quantify because you don’t know who it is going to touch.
Davis Guggenheim: We fought in the editing room with An Inconvenient Truth with the argument, “When do you prescribe to the viewer how to feel and what to do?” And I argued vehemently, you can’t. Even with An Inconvenient Truth when you watch it we say "This is global warming, this is real." We very rarely say “Take action. Do something.”
Davis Guggenheim |
Has the more radical approach of a Michael Moore film changed the system or changed filmmaking in a way?
DG: I was there opening night for Fahrenheit 911 and I was clapping and cheering and then I went home, and as I was driving home I felt dirty afterwards. He is just the opposite [of me], and I am very grateful to him because in many ways he opened up a market for documentaries and he is putting himself out there and he does what he believes. It is not my style. I think he’s a pamphleteer and he’s shaking things up and that’s great.
Does the topic suffers? George W. Bush was reelected after Fahrenheit 911 …
DG: Well, I don’t think we can blame Michael Moore for that.
DC: It galvanizes people sometimes in the worst way. Ultimately that is on the person watching. It was the first time I saw a documentary and people were standing up and cheering, gasping and reacting and pointing.
Is the news media not giving these topics enough coverage?
DC: I was watching MSNBC and they switch to “Breaking News” and it’s Paris getting out of jail. They were discussing the border, you know serious content and they just cut it, it wasn’t even like a crawl. They were like “We’ve got cameras there!”
DG: I think with global warming, I think for me I was reading the paper and you’d see a little report here or a little report there, but I couldn’t make any sense of it and no one had the courage to say this is real. And I think people naturally felt that there was a gap between what is real and what was being reported and they were reaching for another place another venue to find out what’s real… that’s why I think you are going to see a lot more great documentaries and people going to see them, because they aren’t getting it from Katie Couric and they are not getting it from the news.
Don, you have joined efforts to raise money for Darfur. I read that $5 million of the $9 million raised is already in the field. Do you ever feel this problem is so big that money can’t fix it?
DC: Well it is definitely going to take more than just money, but…those are dollars that are going directly into the camps…supplies, food and medicine and medical equipment and things of that nature…we are sort of at a watershed moment I think in several ways. One being that we have an election coming [laughs]. Thank God.
You are also the co-author of the New York Times best seller Not on Our Watch. It is kind of a multi media assault on the problem.
DC: I think I know what my assets are and I try to use them to the best of my ability. I’m not an expert of the area. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it and I’m a student of it so I try to bring other people into that. If someone sticks a mic and a camera in front of my face and says “What do you think?” I am able to respond intelligently.
Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda. |
Davis, how do you gage your experience and financial struggles while making The First Year to that of a film distributed by a major studio?
DG: It is very strange because the process of making the film is very different than the film having a life in the market place and the market place is so important now. My survival technique is detaching myself from it. You hope you will fall in love with another story again and feel passionately about it and you hope that you can serve that story and give it to the world and then you have to hope that people see it and then you walk away.
How often to do revisit that first project? Do you think about the people and where they are now?
DG: If you make a film you have to fall in love with your subjects and if you fall in love with your subjects then you continue to live it after it is gone…one of the teachers in Compton, I talked to her today…I think when you continue to make movies you want to go back to the early days when you felt that pressure and you didn’t know what you were doing. We had the same aspirations for The First Year as we did for An Inconvenient Truth…But one hit and one didn’t.
Don, there is no one who has the Indie cred and popcorn box office success like you do. You fit into both worlds very comfortably. Is it difficult to stay focused?
DC: It is very time consuming, and I agree 100 percent that it makes it very difficult…It was when Hotel Rwanda came out that I really saw the importance of that whole awards period which I always thought was just accolades and if you get them whatever, if you don’t who cares it is not why I made the movie. Then you realize “Oh, no, that’s the lifeblood.” If you don’t get those awards the studio is not going to spend the money on the roll out, the marketing is not going to go forward, people probably aren’t going to see the movie and you go “Oh shit now I’ve got to care about getting a nomination?” So really it is kind of bridging both of those dynamics of doing the work, putting in the time on the work that gets you to the place where you can then get the accolades and then you can do more work.
I’m guessing you shot Hotel Rwanda on less than the catering budget for Ocean’s Thirteen?
DC: Yeah, you hustle and you try to find the money and you try to work every corner you can and then it comes together and those are the most rewarding films I’ve been involved with because everybody is there for the love of the game. They are not getting a paycheck. Sometimes you are bringing your own clothes from your house, and then we say “Oh, can you stay in your car? We don’t have a trailer for you yet”…You really feel it is us against the world.
Elisabeth Shue and Davis Guggenheim |
As a viewer, which films inspire the two of you?
DG: I just watched Thin Blue Line again. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that movie, that film blows me away. [It is directed by] Errol Morris who I think has done more documentaries than anybody. It is about this small crime in Texas and these two guys involved and they tell him what happened…the film doesn’t say that this terrible thing happened and this is a wrong that needs to be righted, this is a film that takes you into the world and introduces you to certain situations and by the end you can’t believe that it happened…All because it is a good story not because it is trying to tell you how to be, it is a good story. I always thought of documentaries as cut and dry, like “Eat your spinach.” But documentaries can be about something, but they need to tell you a story.
DC: I think you are absolutely right about the story aspect of it because you can’t often times with that subject matter if you attempt to tell it from the uber perspective or meta story people can’t connect with it, especially I know with the Darfur situation we try to talk about it and people can’t even wrap their minds around what’s happening. You have to follow a human being and connect and identify with them.
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Photo(s) by Dave Edwards- © 2007- DailyCeleb.com- All Rights Reserved