Interview with director Nina Davenport

Nina Davenport- Director of Parallel Lines.

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By Christopher Long
FIRST ONLINE Oct 23, 2006

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On September 11, 2001, filmmaker Nina Davenport was in San Diego on a freelance job, a long way from her New York apartment. Two months later, she got in her car to drive back home for the first time since the terrorist attack. But she decided to take the scenic route, as well as a camera. And the final product of her trip is a remarkable documentary called "Parallel Lines," the best 9/11-themed documentary I have yet seen. I reviewed the film here and I recommend you read that first before continuing.

Nina encountered a remarkable set of characters from California to Texas to Oklahoma to West Virginia, and many points in-between. Her conversations with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 reveal a diverse array of opinions, as well as a series of personal traumas that, in some cases, dwarf the national crisis altogether. Through this all, Nina was alone, serving as driver/cinematographer/director/sound recordist/everything else.

You name it, this was a true one-woman shoot, though not her first film. Nina Davenport has also directed the award-winning "Hello Photo" (1994) and the very popular "Always a Bridesmaid" (2000), which played on the Oxygen Network.

Nina kindly agreed to sit down and talk with us about "Parallel Lines," which was released on DVD by Docurama in September.

CL: Many 9/11 documentaries cover the same ground, and employ similar strategies: clips of President Bush speaking, cable news footage, etc. Your film avoids these overly familiar moments. Was this your plan when you began shooting?

ND: It wasn´t as a result of seeing the other films, of course, but I did want my film to stand out in the sense that I wanted it to be timeless, and not just the kind of thing that would only interest people who had lived the events. I wanted it to be interesting to someone fifty years from now.

I deliberately did not include very specific historical references such as when we invaded Afghanistan, how the war in Afghanistan was going, and so on. It´s still dated on the whole, of course, but I avoided material that would be confusing to someone who didn´t know the history that well. I was picturing a viewer for whom 9/11 is just a paragraph in an American history book, someone who doesn´t know all the details surrounding it. That was one conscious choice that I figured would separate my film from most of the other documentaries getting made.

Also, I´m an independent filmmaker. I can´t get my films out as quickly as other people, so I don´t want to compete with that. I´m more interested in making a film that is universal and personal, something beyond the specific historical moment.

CL: Your film reminded me very much of some of Ross McElwee´s documentaries. You thank him in the credits. Could you talk about your connection with Ross and what influence, if any, you feel he´s had on your work?

ND: I studied filmmaking at Harvard as an undergraduate and he was one of the teachers there. I never had him as a teacher, but I was a teaching assistant for one of his classes, and then I worked as an editor on "Six O´Clock News" (Ed. Note: Ross McElwee´s 1996 documentary). I am definitely influenced by him and the other filmmakers at Harvard who make personal films, including Robb Moss (Ed. Note: director of "Same River Twice," previously reviewed here). Robb was actually my teacher, so I am probably more influenced by him than Ross.

But I´m definitely interested by that style of filmmaking that is both very personal, and also brings out something that goes beyond you. My film "Always a Bridesmaid" (2000), also available from Docurama, which is about my love life, is actually much more like Ross´ films. I don´t think that "Parallel Lines" is ultimately about me. I´m in there simply as a New Yorker; as an American; and as somebody who´s far from home, but I don´t really get into anything specific about me.

CL: Your film has a very open-ended feel to it. You do have a narrative arc (a New Yorker returns home) and a theme (9/11) but you let the people you interview go wherever they want to go, rather than coming at it with a pre-set agenda.

ND: That´s true, and that pretty much summarizes my approach, the approach I learned at Harvard. I think most documentaries are made with a pre-set agenda, and the images and the action are subservient to whatever was written in the pre-determined script. There are documentaries where everything is written before anything is even filmed, and everything else is just plugged in.

I prefer to take the opposite approach where I know almost nothing about what I´m doing when I start. I really just had a hunch when I started "Parallel Lines" that if I just went out and talked with people, and really connected with them, that something interesting would come of it. I just let people take me where they wanted to. And then at a certain point, once I started to understand what the film was about, I started to guide the interviews – I would call them "conversations" – in a certain direction. That´s where I was picking up on what I had gotten from the person before. But it is a very different approach to documentary. The best films are the films that last over years, that people still talk about ten years later. Whereas the average History Channel documentary, nobody ever thinks about it again, a week or a month later.

CL: Many documentarians create the illusion that they are solo acts, but "Parallel Lines" seems like a genuine one woman shoot. Did you have any crew help at all during your six week trip?

ND: None at all. I considered putting in the voice-over that I was alone, but other documentary filmmakers told me that was obvious. But I always get that question at Q&As after the screening. People can´t believe that someone can shoot a film all alone. In some big budget films it takes ten minutes to scroll the credits, and then lo and behold, you have a film done by one person single-handedly and it seems kind of amazing.

There is a long tradition of that at Harvard. In fact, it even started before that at M.I.T. where Ricky Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker taught; Robb and Ross were also both students there. I feel like I´m part of the next generation (in that tradition.) But no, I was totally alone. I don´t think I would have gotten anything as interesting as I did if I had other people there. I had to make certain sacrifices with sound. For example, I might have liked to pan away from the person who was talking, but I was worried about the sound dropoff. So it does compromise your shooting style to some degree. But it always feels to me like it´s worth what you get in exchange, which is intense intimacy and the feeling the person is talking to you one-on-one.

CL: Do you think people were more open you as one person than they would have been if you had a crew with you?

ND: Definitely. And it might help to be a woman, and I´m only 5´3". Plus I´m from Michigan so I´m friendly. That might help too.

CL: Equipment is obviously essential to doing a one woman shoot. What camera did you shoot on?

ND: I used a PD150, with a microphone mounted on the camera. Occasionally, I would put a wireless microphone on the person I was filming. Usually not, though, because I wanted to get the process of approaching people into the film, where I would just casually walk up and start filming. Once you have someone put a microphone on you, it becomes a more serious and intimidating endeavor, so I didn´t use it too often. Sometimes I put a wireless on myself so I could hear my own voice. But it was a very small operation. I also did this FILMLOOK process afterwards, so it looks nice instead of (just) like video.

CL: What do you edit on?

ND: Final Cut Pro. Though I started on a Steenbeck.

CL: You note at one point that everybody you meet in the film seems to be a loner. Was it just a coincidence you met so many of these people, or did a lot of "non-loners" wind up on the cutting room floor?

ND: No, for a documentary, I used a pretty high percentage of the people I filmed. Probably a third to a half of the people I filmed ended up in the final cut. Instead of sifting through a lot of different people, I would stick with one person for a long time until I got what I thought was interesting, either about them or about American history. It had to contain an essential truth, and I would just keep filming until I got that even if the person seemed inarticulate or unattractive or whatever. I took the opposite approach, in a way, that reality TV shows take. They seek the best looking or most charming people. Instead, I tried to see into the person´s soul and find something beautiful in it. I wasn´t looking for loners, or any specific kind of person. These were just the people I happened to come across.

CL: Did you rely on serendipity to find them, or did you have certain strategies?

ND: It was almost entirely serendipity. Occasionally, if I went into a really small town, I would ask "Is there anyone you know who likes to talk?" That´s how I found Rooster, the one-eyed cowboy, and Wilborn Elliot, the WW2 veteran and bee-keeper. But generally, it was just whoever I came across. I didn´t have any plan when I left on the trip.

CL: Your film gives voice to a lot of people we don´t normally get to hear from on cable news shows. They function as an antidote to five years worth of TV "experts" who have interpreted 9/11 for us. They have a very different take on the subject. Was this an idea you came into the shoot with, or did it emerge as you were filming?

ND: It was part of my thinking beforehand. I feel like a lot of what you see on TV, and even in many other documentaries, are just sound bites that don´t go anywhere or have any real meaning. I wanted to avoid that. Even before I left, there were all these little speeches about 9/11, about what it means to be an American, but nothing that felt meaningful. I wanted to try to take it to another level, and get something deeper rather than just relying on shallow sound bites.

Though it wasn´t planned ahead of time, I do agree with you that the film gives voice to people you normally might not interact with. It proves that if you really look, everybody out there has a story. I became even more astounded that the film hasn´t sold here after the elections, where everyone in New York supposedly thinks the people in the red states are morons, and vice versa. I felt like this film was an antidote to that.

CL: 9/11 has been marketed to us as the nation´s great trauma, but you discover a whole series of personal traumas that make up America´s heartland. You also touch on the history of violence in America, and our cultural amnesia about it. Even though you don´t use clips of Bush, Rumsfeld, etc, your film is still political at its heart.

ND: I agree. Thank you for understanding that. If only the people buying films out there understood that, maybe it would have sold in the United States. Instead, it ended up in every country in Europe and all around the world where people don´t have the same (cultural) amnesia that we have. There was definitely a political agenda there, though I always try to hide it in my films and make it subtle. It´s my style, I guess. But I refer to the genocide of the Native Americans, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, domestic violence, poverty, even Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It touches on a lot of issues, both historical and sociological. I think the political and the personal really intersect in the film, and the personal and historical as well in a way that I hope is enlightening.

CL: Do you think this personal approach might have made your film a bit too challenging, or at least difficult to categorize, for most distributors?

ND: It´s sad that five years I´m still going on about this, but it´s so painful to me. The film wasn´t even accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival. That was the lowest point of the whole process for me. I just don´t understand how you can´t feel like you´re going so deeply into what these Americans are thinking and feeling in a way you just don´t see in other documentaries. It´s not so many people, but they´re representative of society, like the veterans, or the fifteen year old girl with a sixty year old boyfriend. There are a lot of archetypes in the film. I can´t understand why Europeans are so responsive to it, but people (distributors) in America just weren´t interested.

I was shocked by how well it worked out because it (started as) an extremely vague idea, a weird hunch. I don´t think I could have even begun to articulate anything that ended up panning out. I thought it was possible I would wind up driving across the country without a film. It just blossomed as I was investigating it.

CL: You didn´t get a theatrical distribution in America. Did your film play on cable?

ND: No, nobody bought it, not one single television station in America, not even Sundance.

CL: So this DVD is the first chance for anyone here to see it?

ND: Yep.

CL: How does a DVD distribution deal like this work for you? Do you get an advance and royalties?

ND: Theoretically, you get both. But to end up getting royalties with a DVD, you have to sell a lot of copies. I don´t know exactly how many, but it has to be a high profile film. I didn´t even get royalties for "Always a Bridesmaid" even though it seems everyone has heard of the film. I was on the Today show, for example, but even then I didn´t get royalties. The only place you really make money is in selling it to television. If I didn´t have European television supporting me the way they do, including the United Kingdom, it would be very hard for me to make my films.

CL: What is it like for a documentarian today to make a living? 2004 was supposedly "The Year of the Documentary." Has it made any easier for you?

ND: Not really. If you want to make quick turnaround television shows, then you can make a decent living. Not a great living, but a decent one. But if you´re committing, like I am, to making films that people will want to see 25 years from now, then it´s really hard. If anything, it´s harder now because there´s so much more competition. It seems like everyone is making a documentary, and the filmmaker´s talent or ability to tell stories well (on film) is not as important as the subject matter. Someone who has access to an incredible story, but has never made a film before is just as likely to sell to HBO, or whomever, as someone who has already made five films.

CL: Aesthetics are as irrelevant as ever in marketing documentaries?

ND: Yes, and it´s always been upsetting to me because I started as a still photographer and my first film (Ed. Note: 1994´s "Hello Photo") is very visual. I try to keep that as a part of my films, and to me it matters a great deal. If I was on a jury, I would award the documentary that was the best-filmed rather than just the one with the most amazing story. For me, it´s about how it´s crafted, but I´m in the minority on that front. I don´t mean to knock the people with great ideas, but only if you could combine those ideas with somebody who really knows how to make a beautiful film then you´d have the best of all possible worlds. And occasionally that does happen.

CL: What are you working on now?

ND: The working title is "Operation Iraqi Filmmaker." It´s funded by the BBC and the ITVS (Independent Television Service). It´s about an Iraqi film student who appeared on MTV talking about how the Americans had bombed his film school, and how all their equipment was obsolete because of Saddam. He couldn´t learn what he needed to, and he wanted to go to Hollywood. By chance, an American actor and producer saw him on MTV and invited him to work on an American shoot in Prague. Never having been on an airplane, never having left Iraq, he suddenly arrives in the West for this movie, and it follows his story for a year. That´s just the beginning of it. Ultimately it proves to be a metaphor for the invasion of Iraq, because everything turns out to be much more complicated than anyone expected. He´s very charismatic and charming, but also angry and hard to deal with. I´m currently editing it, so it´s hard for me to fully explain what it´s about, but I think it´s going to be a really interesting film.

CL: Is there anything else you´d like to say to our readers?

ND: Because the film did not air on U.S. television, I haven´t gotten much feedback from American viewers as I would have liked. I get e-mails from the rest of the world, but I would love to hear from American viewers, just to know what they thought about it.

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