INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

ALLAN MILLER Summer 2006

"When you are dealing with highly successful and and well-known personalities, musicians with huge egos, somewhere inside them, they really do want the truth to come out. You just have to persevere."

Allan Miller Speaks to MOFFOM Founder and Festival Director John Caulkins on his Academy Award-winning Career in the Music Documentary Field

JC: How did you come to make your first documentary film about music?

Allan Miller: The first film I made about music was The Bolero, in 1974. The National Endowment for the Arts was just starting its division of public media. The person who was to fund the production of music films came to me and said, "We're just starting this, and we already have a department for visual arts and literature and those kinds of activities, but want to do one on public media for music." They knew that I had been a musician, and that I was making films. I was working for a public broadcasting station in New York.

I said that what normally happens is to figure out what they want to do and find somebody they trust, and then give them a lot of money to make a pilot film, to see how it goes. And it could be good, or it might not be good. They don't know very much after having done that. So I said, "Don't do that. Take the money and divide it into 10 and I'll help you find people who know both music and TV. It's important that the filmmaker know about music, and that the musicians know about filmmaking, and we'll identify 10 of them, give them each a little money and have them make an essay, 8-12 minutes long." So we would then have 10 shorts, each with a different approach to the problem - how to do this - and could then get them together to watch each other's films and discuss, and record what they're saying, and have a big picture of the spectrum of possibilities, to decide which direction to go in. They said, "That's terrific, a great idea. Thank you so much for reminding us of this possibility and avoiding giving one person all the money and then being stuck with it."

So I didn't hear from them for about 3 weeks, and then this woman called me and said, "You remember that idea you told us about, giving the money to 10 different people?" And I said "Yes." She said, "We're not doing it. We're going to give it all to one person, and you're him." That's the way I made Bolero, which was about the Los Angeles Philharmonic making a recording, and also talking about the "Bolero" of Ravel. It was half an hour long. The principles that I followed, having thought about it a long time, were very simple. Originally, people decided that the way to record a classical music performance was to put a camera in the best seat in the hall, and let the performance take place. Well, the camera is one eye, and people have two eyes, and they not only focus on one thing and see things peripherally, but their attention also goes from one side of the stage to the orchestra, and so on. So that style got to be boring, and because the orchestra was always dressed in the same black dresses and suits, it looked sort of monochromatic and felt visually uninteresting. That was recognized pretty quickly, and they decided that the cure was to cover the performance with pictures having nothing to do with it: scenery, sun through the leaves, slow motion horses going through fields, waves crashing on the beach. And of course that distracted viewers totally. So my goal has always been to make the visual performance of music so that it is interesting, but brings you back to the sound of the music, to the progress and expression of the music itself. It's very hard because the visual is so much stronger than the aural, so we've never really achieved it, but that was the principal goal.

In Bolero I divided the film into two halves. The first half was chatting with the musicians as they got ready to perform, because I discovered, living in Denver and working with the Denver Symphony, that so many people in Denver knew the players on their professional football and baseball teams, that when they walked down the street, it was always "There goes so and so." It occurred to me that part of the attraction of professional sports for a television audience was not only that people love sports, but that they had a personal connection to some of the players, which was emphasized by smart television people, who when they broadcast, always had interviews with them. The announcer would always call them by their first names and so everybody got to know them. So I thought it be great if the second oboist of the Denver Symphony was walking down the street, and people said "Oh, there goes Bill. You were really great in the Beethoven symphony last night." I thought that was not so far-fetched, to introduce performances of music by getting to know the players, and their varied personalities, as individuals. You can't explore their whole lives, so in warming up to the "Bolero" we learned about these various people, and where they came from, and what their goals were, and how some of them switched from law school, and one of them ran a store selling musical instruments. When you saw the performance, you remembered something about them. You were not just watching the performance, but watching people perform it, and that was the intention of Bolero.

The second part - the performance- was to concentrate on the individual performers and move the camera close to them, to the process of performing. It's the people and the process, not just the music. So you begin to be drawn in to the progression of the music, and when the music goes faster, the camera goes faster. That started a movement - the film won an Academy Award and got a lot of attention, and it started discussion among directors of performances, and documentaries about music, that you could do many more interesting things with the camera by treating the performers and the whole process in a documentary way, then if it's just pure performance. So more documentaries began to made about music, and more of them focused on the individual performers or the groups or the biographies, or something other than just plain performance. The best performance is in a concert hall, or listening to records at home. You can never top that for the purely aural experience, but as far as getting involved in the music and starting interest in the music, documentary turns out to be the best way.

The most recent film I made, is a series of seven master classes that I'm just completing with Daniel Barenboim, the famous pianist and conductor, with seven different major young pianists. Each one centers on a movement of a Beethoven piano sonata. The young performers, who happen to all be men, perform the 10 or 12 minute sonata on the piano, and Barenboim is sitting next to them on a second piano, in front of an audience. Then Barenboim coaches them and illustrates, and they play, back and forth. Then there are some questions from the audience. During the actual class part of it—after you hear the thing performed - you get so involved in Barenboim's personality, and him trying to help the young performer and seeing the progress of it, that you walk away humming the Beethoven sonata, and you've really learned the movement and enjoyed it, in a most unusual way. This is not a new format, as master classes have been done many times, the most famous of which was in the Sixties with Pablo Casals and Jascha Heifitz. (Web Editor's note: these television films were part of a famous series commissioned by the American broadcaster CBS in the early 1960s, directed by the Czech emigre and pioneer of experimental filmmaking Alexander Hammid.)

JC: In the case of The Bolero, or Barenboim in your last film, or to go back in time, of Leonard Bernstein's famous educational series, don't you think these celebrity artists add to the myth-making industry? For example, look at what happened with Jacqueline Dupre in the film Hillary and Jackie. I was speaking with the filmmaker Christoper Nupen, who made a documentary about Jacqueline Dupre, and he was very frustrated with the portrayal of Jacqueline Dupre - the star quality of the ones at the top of the billing, getting the attention and having the big films made about them, while sometimes more interesting stories about lesser known subjects won't be told.

Allan Miller: Well, both are happening. Of course the star power of a major musician is something that television can explore in ways that you cannot see when you're in an audience, and why not? Why not see how a great artist works, or use the image and dazzling accomplishments of a major performer to open the door for you? But most of the programs that use those stars do go beyond it. You do see the players if you see an orchestra perform, you see the conductor prominently, but you also see the interaction between him and the players, the interaction amongst the players themselves when they look back and forth to each other for cues. You see the tremendous variety of personalities in an orchestra.

I think that doesn't prevent people from becoming interested in everyday personalities to have a major star. There was a film made recently about the Philadelphia Orchestra and the role of the conductor Eschenbach in that film was negligible. He only appeared when the orchestra came together, players with whom you had spent half an hour or forty minutes getting to know at home. It was centered on the individuals, and the performance as a larger group was only secondary. There are many films made on the lives of individual musicians, even if participating in a group led by a star.

JC: You've covered many different artists in the films you have made. Who might be an example of someone who surprised you, where things unfolded in an unexpected way once you started to make the film? Do you have an example of someone who took you by surprise?

Allan Miller: I made a film in the early nineties about Kurt Masur, who had come from being the music director of the Leipzig Orchestra, during his first year at the New York Philharmonic. He had been not only been a very successful conductor, but had been involved politically with the changes from Communist rule in Germany. He had been forceful in preserving some kind of calm and keeping those who were in the streets from rioting during peaceful demonstrations against the regime. At one point when the Communists and the Berlin Wall had fallen, they even wanted him to be the President of the newly unified Germany. He had a rich background in East Germany and was very interesting as a musician. He came the New York Philharmonic and there was a totally different atmosphere there. He was brought in to try to revitalize the New York Philharmonic's focus on traditional 19th century European composers: Franz Liszt and Mendelssohn, not so much Mahler and Beethoven. But he had left the Leipzig Orchestra at a time when he had been there long enough that some of the players were a little restive and impatient with him, and said so. He had already been conducting the New York Philharmonic, and I had been to rehearsals where was rather stern with them, sometimes a bit too disapproving, and I could see the Philharmonic reacting, although there were glad he was there. So in my effort to try to find out what a conductor does and how he deals with an orchestra that he is the music director of for a long time, I interviewed him in New York about his troubles with these younger musicians in the Leipzig Orchestra who didn't like him. They were glad he was going, and they were quite vocal. I quoted them to him on camera, and at first, he first tried to deny what I told him the Leipzig Orchestra members had said. He tried to change the subject. Then he asked me to turn the camera off, which I did, and he said, "How can you talk to me like this? Can't we talk about the positive things I'm looking forward to doing?" I said if we want to make this a realistic film, we have to turn the camera on, and for it to go well, we have to be careful. I pressed him, and he got angrier and angrier but he kept talking, and when I finished getting what I wanted him to say about what a conductor does, in the context of the people from his own Leipzig orchestra saying things about him. Then he said, "Turn the camera off again." I turned the camera off and he came up to me and gave me a big hug. He said, "That was the right thing to do." That was a tremendous surprise! The point of this is, that when you are dealing with highly successful personalities with huge egos, somewhere inside them they really want the truth to come out. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? I'm not going to throw them in the water. Even if they hate you, you get somewhere, the same with any journalist.

JC: When you were in China with the Turandot Project, were you ever restricted on how you could film, on what you wanted to do? Or was it purely an art project, where you could do what you wanted?

Allan Miller: Strangely enough, when I was in China, in ‘97 or ‘98, making a film about the production of Puccini's "Turandot" outside the Forbidden City, the producers had gotten permission from the Chinese so far as to film things wherever we wanted. The Chinese authorities let us do what they already said they would. The only people that reacted against us were the managers of the Italian involved. I had lots of footage of hands in front of the lens. When I would ask some question or talk in a jovial way about rehearsal problems that the soloists were having, suddenly, out of nowhere would come their manager. Or the head of the Florence Theatre, who had brought them there, and who was very worried about us not showing them in the best light, not realizing that the best light was the most varied light! Once when we were filming Isaac Stern, there was something he really didn't want us to see. He asked us not to film him. It was a difficult political situation where he was arguing with people he didn't want to be seen arguing with, and finally I said to him, this film shows you as a wonderful musician and a wonderful teacher, such a wonderful expression of what Western music means, talking to these Chinese performers. If it's all wonderful, nobody is going to believe that you are a real person. But if you allow us to see a wart here or there, some anger, then the rest of it will be so wonderful by contrast, that you will be very glad of having it there. He was sensible enough to realize that.

JC: Your John Cage documentary took years to complete, and yet it's a wonderful film, so prolific in many ways. Why did it take so long to complete that film?

Allan Miller: Well, it took a lot of time to find the money. Most documentary film makers have the experience of shooting what they can afford, showing it to people, and finding money for the next step. It just took about five years till we got it all together. We completed that film in 1986, and he died three or four years later. He liked the film, although he didn't like us a couple of times while we made the film... Once we did an interview with him in France out in the sunlight, and the next day he suffered from some kind of overexposure, and he blamed us for filming him in that kind of situation. He couldn't blame us for the sunlight, because of the many things we had control over, that was not one of them. But he blamed us for asking all the wrong questions - which when asked, he was very happy to answer. So even John Cage, who left everything to chance, and said, "Every day is a beautiful day, get rid of all your preferences and be open to all experiences" still had very definite ideas about what he liked and what he didn't.

JC: We obviously have an emphasis in our festival on portrait documentaries of musicians. There is certainly a larger volume of films about musicians, and some are even getting cinema release and wider distribution on DVD. From where you started out and what you've come across in the current landscape, what may be some of the positive and negatives abou these developments?

Allan Miller: I don't see any negatives. The law of averages operates in favor of increasing volume. The availability of more portable cameras and other increasing technical capabilities, both picture and sound, means that everyone is a filmmaker these days. Every subject is valid and every style seems to have a fighting chance to have its version of reality and form of artistic expression distributed. That means that if twenty times as many films are being made and one out of ten was good, now its two out of twenty, so you are going to get the possibility of even more better films. What is happening is that people who were interested in all kinds of music, not only classical music, are turning to make films about it because now documentaries themselves - in all fields, not just the arts - are being shown in places that they were never being shown in before. On wider television networks, in many more theaters, and festivals are springing up everywhere, like yours in Prague. There is a bigger audience for documentary films in general, and more people are making documentary films and with more and more original approaches. I think it's wonderful. It used to be that documentary was a dirty word, and if you weren't doing features, you weren't a film maker. Today, in the first part of the 21st century, documentary films are leading markets in certain places. Of course feature films will play the role that they have always played, and DVDs will affect the market, but I think that's fabulous, just terrific.

JC: You trained as a musician before you became a filmmaker. Do you think that gave you special credibility with people whom you were interviewing or confronting to tell their stories to you?

Allan Miller: Definitely, I think people that knew I had been a musician trusted me with shooting the film and going places with them, even those who were not always previously open with filmmakers. But letting me edit and finish the film, or whether it was a good film, was not the point. The point is that the musicians were comfortable that the filmmaker was a musician. I think that is true of any subject. For a person who makes a film about a visual artist or politician, the more you know about the subject the better. By contrast, may of the people who were making films about music didn't know much about music, and didn't have personal experience or training. Now, there are a lot of musicians who are making films about music. The whole thing has exploded, which is really great.

JC: For many filmmakers, it's become prohibitively expensive to make the films the way they want to make them. For all documentary filmmakers, but especially those making documentaries about music. Last year we had a guest (Web Editor's note: UK filmmaker Don Letts, recipient of a MOFFOM Tribute in 2005) who made a film about punk music and couldn't manage to get anything from Lou Reed, as important as Lou Reed was to the beginning of punk music in the New York scene. Can you tell us about your experiences with similar problems?

Allan Miller: I don't think it's the artists who are being difficult in terms of charging money, I think it's their managers. The managers these days are a part of ever-larger conglomerates, who don't look at the use of archival material as necessarily a great way, for them a profitable way, to promote the careers of their artists. They would much rather sell recordings and films for broadcast. When I first began, most of the archival material that I was interested in was not even recorded by the networks or major recording companies. There were independent places or organizations whose business was to collect news broadcasts and other archival materials. They made a deal with the places where these came from, who basically said "Fine, do it, because we are never going to make a lot of money on it anyway." Back then, they didn't charge so much. Now you have to go to these great big places and to the major networks, the Warner Brothers type of things, or Miramax, which is not so large but is just as important in some ways. So the costs have gone up gradually, but the sources from where you can get archives from are more and more limited.

JC: Let's talk about the film that you are working on now in Prague – as you have been coming to Prague for many years. Tell us a little bit about the project.

Allan Miller: Well, a friend of mine, named Mark Podwal, who is also a very well-known artist and illustrator of major books about Jewish life, has become a scholar about Prague Judaism, the history of the Jews in Prague, their artistic achievements, the difficulties through the centuries. He works carefully with the Jewish Museum in Prague, and began to feel that the Old Jewish Cemetery sort of symbolized in many ways the perseverance under all kinds of physical and political difficulties. The Prague Jewish cemetery started in around 1439, and was closed because of plagues in 1787. But most of what happened to Jewish life is embodied by the stories of what happened to the people who are buried there. Like Rabbi Loew, in connection with Rudolf II, the atmosphere of the early 17th century. He asked me if I would be interested in doing a film, as I had come to Prague in 1987 to film The Guarneri String Quartet concerts at that time, and my wife Marie had interviewed the then-dissident Vaclav Havel. I had gone to the Old Jewish Cemetery at that time, and was overwhelmed by the atmosphere there, by the implications of it all. One could go anywhere in the cemetery at that time, but now there are special paths roped off...

I had always figured that was a very special place, and when he came to me to propose that we make a film about it, I was very eager to do so. Not realizing that the encyclopedic nature of his information, the amount of his information and the nature of his inquiry would be so overwhelming that one could make twelve different hourlong films about everything that was possible to say and show. Not just in the cemetery, but all the other archival material, all the incredible people who have had varying experiences there as children, as guides, as tourists. We have now finished shooting, and have 35 hours worth of material and this is the end of May, 2006. Now I have to go and filter all that out. Just yesterday we interviewed people as they left the cemetery, from America, New Zealand, England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Israel, and every one of them said what they felt about the cemetery. Some of them felt that it was very impressive, some of them wondered about the twelve thousand stones tilting against each other, why they weren't restored better, rather than leaving them to decay there. Some of them were glad that they had brought their families there, some of them thought it was historically interesting, and some of them just went there because their tour guides said to. Finally the last group to come out was an American family, a man and his wife and an older boy and a younger boy around 7. Each of the other three said various things about the cemetery and the little boy couldn't find any words to describe the way he felt about it. He was sort of shying away and lifting his shoulders, and for a filmmaker such as myself, whenever you interview somebody uncomfortable, you don't say a word, because soon their discomfort will lead to something that will just sort of come out, because you have to say something. This kid finally looked me in the eye and said, "It's cool, man!"