Keir Moreano “Unspooled” interview
I was intrigued by Keir Moreano’s documentary film “Unspooled” when I first read about it. It’s the tale of an ill-fated student film shoot — it follows a crew of NYU film students trying to work on one guy’s senior project.
I’m a former NYU film student — some might say “failed,” but I would counter “come to my senses,” as I left the program after three years there (some would argue, and I would agree, that the third year there was on paper only) — and I look back on the experience as a very odd thing indeed. It’s a time of ego feeding and arrested development for some, for others its a time where you figure it all out and start looking at creativity as a career path.
For many, it’s the last time that creativity is allowed to be totally self-indulgent.
I liked Moreano’s film a lot because it got inside that world and really showed the combination of professionalism and fumbling that lies in its atmosphere. It’s also a movie that can speak to anyone who is trying to achieve something and who has realized that among the insurmountable odds that they face might just be their own ability against biting off more than they can chew.
Moreano is originally from Seattle, where he currently lives.
JM: Your film really captures how delicate and collaborative a process filmmaking is — and it really presented the tug of war between the impression that the director completely makes the film and the reality that its the result of multiple personalities and capabilities coming together to make this one thing. Was that something you wanted to reveal?
KM: I think you touch on something that is really true, which is that it’s such a highly collaborative thing, and it isn’t something that people think about when they start to make a film. I think that a lot of people come in thinking that they can do it on their own because that’s the way they’ve always done it. I’m of the generation that grew up with digital cameras and Final Cut Pro, all high schools had video programs, and so I think that a lot of people came into it feeling like, “Oh, yeah, I can do this on my own and I’ll just get some people to help out, to act and get everyone pizza,” and, of course, the reality of it is that it’s highly, highly collaborative. I think my film testifies a little bit that, in the end, it’s not even one person’s film, it’s a collective experience and a collective ownership over that experience. I think it’s hard to be an auteur.
JM: And the bigger the vision gets, the more you really need other people. That struck me, the film is about growing pains in film school. What’s the time frame of the film — you shot it in 2003, but at what point did you decide to put it together as a full length film and do the interviews?
KM: “Unspooled” is a my second film, my first film is called “As the Call, So the Echo,” and this is now out there in the world — it’ll be on PBS in New Mexico. After the success to that one, I turned my attention back to where it all began for me, because after “Bemoana” I really spun off in a completely different direction. I came to film school wanting to make movies about UFOs and dinosaurs and ended up completely opposite. My first day of class was 9-11, so I think that had a pretty big impact on me. Conversely, “Bemoana” had almost an equal impact in the sense that I realized that narrative directing wasn’t something that I really wanted to pursue. Ultimately I found that the non-fiction of our lives is so much more stupendously bizarre than our fiction. I kept thinking as I was going through the experience, “I could never write this, no one could ever write this, this takes 23 people all interacting in a real life move — like life!” My experience in Viet Nam was a very powerful one — I was in a medical hospital — and I wanted to reflect on how I had gotten from point a to point b. It took me five years to make the film and I would say all five of those years were used. Just like Maurice, I had to collaborate with six or seven other people and edit the film from the ground up, but I pretty much knew leaving the set that I wanted to create a documentary about it, whether the film was ever finished or not, it was just something that was a pretty big moment in my life.
JM: How did you go about gathering all the interviews?
KM: What happened was that Gordon Arkenburg and Matt Santo, the camera department, I recruited them to go on my Viet Nam excursion, so we became really good friends after that. Through them — because they were sort of the leaders of the shoot in a lot of ways — I started contacting everyone else and once people knew that Matt and Gordon were signed onboard, everyone else was willing to participate and be interviewed. Maurice was the real trick, he did not want to talk to me for a long time, it took me years and years to track him down after that initial interview — which he gave almost immediately after the fact. I think he was still in shock.
JM: I was very surprised that he appeared in the film. The later interview, you feel that this is his closure with the film.
KM: I think part of it was him letting go of the film, for sure, I think that was part of his motive for talking to me in the first place. We often talk together and we talk about it, and he’s like, “Oh, man, you’re the only one I can talk to this about.” I’m like his film shrink. I just knew all these things about him that would take him forever to explain to another person.
JM: What else is he doing these days besides working on a screenplay?
KM: When I leave him in the film, he’s in Brooklyn, collecting unemployment and being a screenwriter, like a lot of my fellow students. I know he works now as an associate producer for Partisan Pictures, Denis Leary’s company. Last time I talked to him, I know he wanted to write for cartoons, but definitely he’s not really into the live action thing anymore, he’s let that go.
JM: After the whole experience and graduation, he must have had a period where he needed to re-evaluate what he wanted to do.
KM: I think this was an epic event in his life, I think this is a defining moment for him, and so I would say that he struggled quite a bit. He struggled so much with this that he actually went back and did some re-shoots on the actual film. He actually got Matt and headed up in the woods with Nicole and Larry and they actually started to shoot parts of this film again that hadn’t survived or that still needed to be shot. He even actually recorded some ADR for the actual film. But it’s just like he said in the film, this film didn’t make sense to him and he wanted to move on with other things and he just had to let it go. By the time I had caught up with him, three years later, he had really come to terms with the fact that this was not going to be a film and it was not going to be finished.
You have to understand, when I came to film school, I was in awe of Maurice, because we all grew up with the Blair Witches and the Good Will Huntings, we all grew up with these success stories with these Indie films that became huge, mega successes, so I think we all know that’s possible, and then coming to NYU, a really good film school — Maurice had everything going for him. He had all this money from his father, he had these sexy stars, he was in the best film school in the country, he had this location to shoot at, he had a great crew, what could go wrong? From my perspective, Maurice was going to be the next Scorsese, he was going to be the next big thing. For me, when he gave up on it, I don’t think he realized that I was looking up to him, in a sense, and I think it completely spun me off in a really different direction. There was no way I could have gotten those resources together, so he was the one.
JM: Did the grain of documentary filmmaking come to you while filming this footage?
KM: I’d always had an inkling. I had done some things before to even get into film school, but I think when I began the process of documenting the set, I was looking for a way to learn so that when my turn came to make my senior thesis, then I would be able to learn from the mistakes of others, but what ended up happening was that the story I was telling behind the camera ended up being even bigger than the one we were telling in front of it. I just became slowly aware that the process of putting this think together was a lot more interesting than the film.
JM: The experience seemed to give you the opportunity to have to think on your feet often, which is a standard tool for a documentary filmmaker.
KM: I didn’t know I was making a documentary at the time — there was a little bit of intention, but only as much intention as film students usually bring to school, which is that I had been shooting with a video camera all my life, I had been using it as a video diary. There was only five hours of footaqge I took up on that set, I did not come intending to shoot a whole doc. And I was participating with the whole crew as well, so I wasn’t sleeping either. A lot of the footage is just shaky and crazy because I lost my mind, I just wasn’t there.
JM: That reflects the experience well, the style really brings you in. Were you able to interview the actress afterwards?
KM: Nicole refused to be interviewed. I bugged her many, many times. She’s a rising Indie star, she was in “Half Nelson” and “Descent” and a whole bunch of other little projects. Nicole and I are good pals, we’re on good terms and everything, but I don’t think she wanted to revisit this. She’s also a method actor, so in order for her to get herself into the character, she really had to go to extreme lengths and I’m not really sure that’s something she wanted to revisit.
JM: When you show the film, if it’s not for a film person or an ex-film student, what do you hope people get out of it? What sort of lessons are in there?
KM: I find that people who are not involved in the film industry react to it in a far more positive way. Much to my shock, I’ve found that there’s a lot of universal appeal in the film. I think that the story just goes back to people pursuing their dreams and sometimes people pursue impossible dreams. Movies dominate our culture, we’re all movie makers and we’re all movie critics, and there are a lot of wannabe filmmakers out there. There are a lot of people who thought about making a film or have a script or thought about writing a script or, just like the rest of us, were in love in with movies and leave theaters all the time saying “I could have done better” or say “This would make a great movie.” I think that people get to live vicariously through this guy who does have it all — I mean, he’s at the best film school, he has the money, he has the support of his father, he has a location — and get to see what it really takes.
You can ask about a lot of lessons in this movie, but I think the ultimate question I try to raise is “Is this fate? Is this hubris?” and I think depending on who you are, you draw different conclusions. I tend to find that people who are over 40 find my film incredibly funny, they laugh throughout most of my film — it’s really a comedy for them. People below the age of 30 find it disturbing and dramatic. That just goes to show you that it’s just about your perspective whether this was a foolhardy thing to do or whether it was a legitimate, smart career move.
JM: Was there anything that you were able to pull out of it that, at the time, you didn’t see?
KM: I would echo the sentiments of Gordon, when he said that all of our impressions of what it takes to make a film comes from watching movies and in no way does watching movies prepare you for understanding how a movie is made. There are different processes — it’s sort of like if you are really in love with eating chocolate, deciding you want to be a chef and then not realizing that you have to go to chef school and deal with all this other stuff, learn how to make chocolate. There’s a really big difference between the piece of art and learning to make the piece of art. I think that’s the biggest boon that I pull from film school, because a lot of us head into the experience wanting our lives to echo the three act structure where you’re the rising hero that’s going to go take over the world and, unfortunately, life’s not really like a movie and you learn that as you start to make movies and you realize how incredibly detailed it is to just make a film, it’s not like it just unfolds. And you learn that more and more as you get used to the illusion of your craft. You realize how many things are faked, how many angles are faked, how many props are faked, how many locations are faked, how many accents are faked — the entire thing is an illusion and once you get behind the curtains, you realize that, in a lot of ways, you’ve been in love with something that didn’t exist.
JM: You enter kind of dazzled but you necessarily don’t have the mechanics of it down. Do you find that time in film school can be an indulgent, fish bowl sort of situation can make it hard to see the difference between what you want to do and the reality of the situation?
KM: For me, film school was a really positive thing. I think for a lot of my fellow students — well, there are only so many seats around the campfire, so to speak, and not everyone can go off and be a director. Not everyone should go off and be a director and spread whatever’s in their brain out there. But I think, yeah, there’s definitely an indulgent thing in film school.
There’s a really big difference between college and the real world to begin with, but the difference between film school and the real world is like a canyon, it’s like a gulf. The financial task of becoming a filmmaker is much like somebody who goes to a liberal arts school as an English major and then ends up doing marketing for a company or something like that. In a lot of ways, the journey in film school is also similar, you go to school to learn this craft and then a vast majority of us end up having to make money with the craft, which is totally different. There are many, many people I know — many people — who were hoping that their film would break out of the student film festival and ended up having to go shoot wedding videos in New York or whatever. And that’s just part of the experience of going to film school, having some of that innocence dashed, but I think in the worse case scenario, it can be extremely dangerous to forget what the real world is like, which is basically that film is a business, and if you forget that then and you walk out of film school as just a writer or director, then you’re in trouble, because there are a lot of people out there who want to be writers and directors. If you come out of film school with some craft, then you’ll be employed. The only people I know who are successful at this point in terms of actually making their living in the film industry are people who have craft — the camera men, the editors, the people who learned lights, but people who came out of film school far ahead of any newcomer who might want to get into editing, say. The editors or the camera men came out way, way ahead of someone who came out of a South Dakota film school who decides they want to be an editor — but the directors and writers, nobody can quantify that. It’s very hard to demonstrate that you’re good at directing or writing. It’s easy to demonstrate that you’re good at camera because you never pay for it.
JM: Part of a director’s skill is a really, basic work place skill that many people either need or have — just to be a good manager. It’s a management position. Is that something you ever thought about in film school, the hardcore job aspect?
KM: In order to be successful in film, you have to be a personable guy, you have to be able to work with people. I think the best of film school is that people who are isolated or reclusive or introverted or rude or whatever, the people who can’t really deal with people, don’t get very far and, in a sense, I think that’s a very good thing, because they won’t make it very far in life with that attitude, by being non-collaborative, because, obviously, film requires that highly collaborative element. It’s nothing that our teachers tell us — “Learn to be professional because it’s a transferable skill” — I just think it’s something that you learn naturally if you stop getting invitations to work on people’s films. It might be because of you, not because of the project.
JM: What sort of video did you shoot prior to film school?
KM: I grew up making a lot of silly videos with my friends about zombies or horror movies or whatever I wanted. I shot a couple little documentaries, the sorts of things you get involved with as a kid. When I was in high school, I had bad vision and I didn’t realize it, so it was really bizarre because I would shoot with these cameras and I’d look at them on TV and I was like “Wow! This is such a crystal clear image! This is amazing!” and I didn’t realize until I got glasses that I couldn’t see the world clearly after 25 feet or whatever. I just thought the world was like that after 25 feet, you couldn’t see it or it would start to fuzz out a little bit, it just didn’t occur to me. And then once I got glasses, I was like “Oh, my god, this is the way the world works, this is amazing!” so for a certain period of my life, the camera was my only way of really seeing the world, so I think it was like an obsession, just because of that.
JM: Is there any technical part of filmmaking that you like doing best?
KM: I like editing, I do a lot of editing, I’m editing a film right now and I’m working on a couple of other projects. Editing is definitely a way that I make my bread and butter in between projects. After “Unspooled” — or before, depending on how you look at it — I met this man in New York City who had seen one of my films and he wanted to make a movie about beverage tea. The guy came from some means and had never made a film before, so recruited me, sort of the young hot shot out of school or whatever, and we made a film called “The Meaning of Tea,” where we ran around the entire world — Morocco, Taiwan, Japan, India, and all over England and France and made this film — and that’s where I cut my teeth, it got me to where I am at the moment. And I also produced and edited that film, and that was a return for me in terms of having more control of it. I think documentary has always been my thing, I haven’t really veered off to too many other tracks.
JM: You’ve just described the part of film that really is an adventure, apart from the professional track part of the career. You got to indulge in the mystique side of filmmaking, part of the allure that brings some people to filmmaking. You mentioned the idea that film was all illusion, but you’ve had a pretty real adventure.
KM: I really meant narrative film — when you have a scripted, narrative film, it’s all an illusion. Documentary is different because you’re witnessing life as it takes place and I think that’s the magic that I fell in love with. I came to film school imagining that I wanted to construct these imaginary tales and I ended up realizing that what I’d really like to do was be in the movie and I found that experience consistently in documentary. And documentary has allowed me to travel all over the world, which has been great, and just meet really interesting people and ask some questions that I would never ask without a camera in my hand and I think that’s been a wonderful experience for me. From my perspective, everything has been really positive. I’ve been definitely struggling, it’s not like I haven’t had my rough times, but I’m really happy that I veered off into documentary, just for my own spiritual growth.
I kept in good contact with a lot of folks from film school and I’ve seen my counterparts on the narrative side and I think the biggest difference is that they have a lot of screenplays, a lot of great writing, a lot of contacts that they’ve been working, but no actual production work, because it’s so expensive to make a narrative. Me, on the reverse, have three feature docs under my belt and a bunch of shorts and a variety of TV and whatnot, but I have no sort of fiction to account for. We just took different approaches and because it is so hard to make a narrative because of the financial burdens, I think that I decided that I wanted to get hands on as soon as I could. And also I just didn’t want to write as much as some of my friends did. But I don’t think there’s a good or a bad way, obviously I’m praying everyday that their screenplays will get picked up and I’ll get to document their set.
JM: Is there any subject matter for a documentary that you’d like to cover?
KM: Right now I’m working on a film called “The Goddess,” which is a slight departure for me, it’s more of a historical film, exploring the ancient deity that some people believe in as the real God, I suppose — and also asking the questions “Is God a man?” and “What does the gendering of God in the Christian tradition mean for our society?” I’ve done tons of research and I’m interviewing experts in the field, professors who have written books about it, and I’m just fascinated with not just the historical evidence but also with the modern day influence of that question. So I’m trying to put together funding to do trips to Crete and Jerusalem and back to India — I was just living there for a couple of months doing research on this — and just really diving into the subject and asking that question. “Why is God a man?” That’s the question.
JM: The obligatory question for is probably “Do you have any advice for young filmmakers,” since you made such a cautionary tale about filmmaking. If some kid said to you, “How do I do it?” what would you say?
KM: The only thing I would say to someone who wants to be a filmmaker is that you’re in film school to make mistakes. If you go to film school and you start making your first film and you don’t make a mistake, I would be really worried. You’re there in film school to make the valuable mistakes that in a professional environment would end your career. Like you would never work again if something of the magnitude of “Bemoana” happened on a professional set. I would just say to go easy on yourself and realize you’re out there to make mistakes — and if you can learn from them, then you’ll be successful.
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