Herzog Interviews Bahrani | If Dreams Were Lightning

(no audio) - I've seen your film in Telluride, and it has been lingering ever since.

And what really lingers is the humanity of it.

When I saw the title of your film, and it was about the health crisis in America, I thought, "Oh, for God's sake, please let it not be a film, an issue film like you see always on television."

And I was totally stunned how beautifully done it is and how human it is and how this comes across.

But you have a certain attitude, how you are talking to people.

And for me, of course, there's also the question of casting.

Can you speak about casting, the characters that are central now?

- Yes, thanks for saying that, and thanks for coming, Werner.

Well, yes, I mean the way I came to the movie was I had done some things with ITVS in the past.

They asked, do I have an idea?

And I had been reading about these hospitals that were closing, and my father was a doctor in North Carolina, and he mainly was treating working-class patients.

He didn't like to see other types of people.

And we used to go to the mountains together in North Carolina, and I would go with him as a child, and I was curious about who these people were now so many decades later and what were they like.

And so the first step in the casting was finding the two doctors with The Health Wagon.

That seemed to be a way to meet people and weave together a story of what I was more interested in, which was the human interactions.

And so then it was a question about finding a array of characters that had good qualities of conversation and hopefully of some humor and were open to sharing more than just their health ailment.

And then the wilder ones, like, someone said, "This hospital has a paranormal activity going on.

You're probably not interested, right?"

And I said, "Of course, I want to go there very quickly."

(audience laughing) So that was, it seemed like the perfect way to set up the movie because it catches you off guard and you think, I was so happy that people were laughing because I imagine you do not expect to laugh in the movie.

And it was of course, very painful, painfully ironic that this could be a functioning hospital, but instead, you know, people are searching for ghosts and demons.

- And Ramin, was the network on board from the beginning?

Or did you somehow set out and then you found, you found the finances in the network and the distribution for the film?

- Yeah, they were there from the beginning.

And from the beginning, I told them, "I do not wanna make a film about facts and figures."

You can read that in a news article, but you cannot get into the lives of people in any other way, and I wanted you to feel something.

-Sure.

That's what I was afraid of.

"For God's sake, let it not be an issue film."

And you see it everywhere, and I'm sick and tired of this.

And now you come along and you make something completely out of the blue, so deeply touching like nothing anywhere around.

There's nothing around like this.

- You know, well, thanks for saying that.

I mean my background is Iranian, and my dad was born and raised in a very small village in Iran.

They didn't have running water.

He did not, I mean, at age eight or nine, he flipped the switch and understood there was electricity.

We've talked before in many ways, there's some similarity to your own childhood of being in the Bavarian jungle and having a difficult upbringing, and he had that.

And I think that's how he was, why he was drawn to being with the patients he was and probably why many of my films are about working-class environment.

And he knew how to talk to them, and I think I got that quality from him.

For example, one time, one time he got a phone call from his receptionist.

Kay Withers was her name.

I was very young.

And she said, "You need to come because there's a man with a gun, and he said he's going to kill you and then kill himself."

And so my dad went there to the parking lot, and the man was there with a gun, and Kay Withers wanted to call the cops.

And this is maybe 30, 40 years ago.

And my dad said, "No, for the love of God, don't call the police.

They're gonna kill him.

Let me talk to him."

So he went to the man and said, "What's happening?

What's bothering you?"

And he said, "Life is terrible!

It's nothing, and I hate you and myself, and I'm gonna kill you and then blow my brains out."

And my dad said, "But why?"

He said, "There's nothing worth living for."

And then my dad said, "I don't know.

I could go down the street and get us a hamburger and french fries and a Coca-Cola from Hardee's," the same Hardee's they mentioned in the film.

And he said, "Well, would you like that?"

- [Man with gun] "Hardee's."

- [Ramin's father] "Yes."

- [Man with gun] "Okay, yes, I want that, then I'll kill you."

(audience laughing) And so he went and got him the Hardee's, and the man ate it, and they ate some Big Macs or the, you know, Whoppers or whatnot, and that was that, and the man didn't kill anyone.

(audience laughing) And so it is funny, but he had that way of getting, and you know, I think that's probably where I got it from.

And, you know, I should admit some of the things I learned from watching your films since I was a young kid in North Carolina and picking the red tab, if any of you remember, was VHS and blue is for Beta cassette tapes, and I would pick the red tab, and I would watch your films or find them in the library, and that's where I came to understand not making the issue films and also, and what we talked about when I had made my first short doc some years ago was remaining silent and letting people- - Yes, and in particular, when they are done speaking, you let it, the camera linger, linger on them, and all of a sudden it becomes beyond the statement.

It becomes a deep tragedy, or it becomes a very human story, which is kind of not normal in the films, in the documentaries that you see on television.

They don't do that, but you do it, and I do it.

- Yeah.

And what's amazing is people will just start talking also.

They will start talking about things I never would've dreamed to ask them.

If you just remain silent, they have things they wanna say, and no one's asking them or listening to them.

So if you remain silent, they will also go off into some stories I never would've dreamed to ask about.

- Yeah, yeah, I think her name is Betty early in the film, yeah, how she speaks about men and her husband maybe is still coming around.

And the way she laughs, I mean, it's just wonderful.

You never see, I never see anything like this.

And I think there's a connection that's not the camera, and it's not the sound recording.

It's very much from a soul to another soul, and that's where real poetry in cinema begins, and you did that.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) - I would like to say one thing about the two medical doctors who have this mobile clinic.

I think they're heroic.

There's something unusual and totally heroic, although they're completely down to earth and tackling what's coming at them.

And at the same time, I'm trying to find out what is going on with American society, something that where, and I must say, I like America, but certain things are deeply, deeply wrong.

It is a country, America is a country, but it has difficulties to form a civil society.

And that's why you have the phenomenon of and the tragedy of homeless people.

You have the tragedy of people who are without coverage, health insurance coverage.

So how do you see your film embedded in a larger tragedy?

- Yeah, I mean, one of the things that struck me in the film was the very patriotic nature of the characters.

They are so much in love with the country, but you can see the fissures or the confusions or the cognitive dissonance in the characters when they say, for example, the Vietnam vet, "It's the greatest country on earth, but they don't take care of their own people."

This was a constant refrain, as was things that I didn't want to put in the film, but concepts that many of these people kept voting against their own interest, and you understand why, because they have been.

The concept that they have been forgotten is really true.

I mean, no one seems to have any clue what's, I mean, I would say many of us, we don't really know what's going on outside of large cities that many people live in now.

- (Werner) Yeah.

- I'm always very moved by the mother and daughter, when the woman talks about her dream of the big city and then you read this expression, or we say this expression, "the person crumbled before my eyes," but that's the only time I've ever seen it, when she says lose, that her, she doesn't wanna lose her home, and then she just, I've seen the movie a hundred times, 'cause you're editing and editing, and each time it happens, I'm just devastated by her.

- And you have the courage to stay on her.

You don't switch the camera off.

It's long enough that something else sinks in.

It acquires a different quality.

It's not just silence.

It's not just watching her in some sort of afterthought.

There's something, something which elevates a film.

And that's what I love about your film.

And of course behind every single person, there's a tragedy.

And you see many people gathering at the end, nobody of them speaks, and you know, what you have seen before, every single person that you see there, if you dig into their stories, there would be a tragedy and another tragedy and another one.

So you can go on for the next 2 1/2 hours.

- [Ramin] Yes.

- And it would be, it would be the same sort of tragic mishandling of something that belongs to a civil society.

- Right, yeah, and even when you see the wagon drive away, you know it's going to see people in another town and another town and another town, in another home.

But I really wanted that, any John Prine fans here?

I won't wanted, okay, I wanted that John Prine song in the end where the title comes from, those lyrics, because of what you said, their courage, their resilience.

But it is, I was reading recently that if the richest 1% not paid more taxes, just paid their taxes, it's approximately 200 billion dollars which is enough to pull everyone who is under the poverty line above the poverty line.

It's astounding, and when the politicians tell us, "Oh, I can do, I can solve all these problems without raising your taxes or you losing anything," it seems absolutely meaningless.

How could I not?

I should lose something.

I have to lose something for someone else to gain something.

It is not, we cannot pull, you know, we cannot create more matter out of the universe, right?

- Yep.

- So this part of it, after making this was the first time I began to think more and more, what am I supposed to do, and why am I not responsible?

- Well, as an American, to some degree, you are.

- Yes.

- You are voting here and you're a citizen, but I think you do your job well because you can't be everywhere.

You can't do everything at once.

The beauty of what you do is that you make it visible.

You let it sink in.

You point out that there's something deeply wrong.

You point out that all these people are not just the flyovers that can be neglected and ignored.

They're very, very deeply human.

And you want, you see, the moment I see these people, I'd like to be with them and go with them to the hamburger joint.

(audience laughs) And so fine, yes, I would rather like to be with them than, let's say, with a bunch of entertainment industry attorneys.

(audience laughing) Okay, well, I'm just thinking loudly, but- - [Ramin] There are 18 of them in the room.

(audience laughing) - No, no, no, no, I don't believe that here.

Okay, but I think we should find out what are your questions, or what are your observations?

Can you please be daring enough?

- [Audience Member] How did you find them, Ramin?

The women, these fantastic two women.

- Oh, how did we find the- - How did- - How did we find the women?

- [Audience Member] There's two- - The mobile- - Read about them.

- [Audience Member] You read about 'em.

- Yeah, we read about them and then went down there and, you know, discovered that they were amazing in person.

They had a lot of energy, and they reminded me of people from back home in North Carolina, and I liked the vibe of them, and yes.

- [Audience Member] When you started the process, how was it that, did you know that there was gonna be this kind of like lightness to these characters, that there was gonna be some, within this tragic ambiance, this tragic stories, that there was gonna be this levity to it that was gonna feel so human, that makes us feel really connected to them, and how's the process of discovering that?

- You never know what you're gonna get.

But I mean, I was born and raised in North Carolina, and people in the South have good humor by nature, and I like that.

I wanted the film to have humor, and it wasn't hard with some of the characters because they had a good energy and a good sense of humor.

And, you know, I always think back to Flaherty, the great first documentary filmmaker and his story about "Nanook of the North" when he was, which he made with the Inuit people.

And he would say about the Inuit people and how they did sculpture, he would say that the Inuit people don't look at a rock and say, "Rock, you are a whale."

Instead, they would look at the rock and think and look and then say, "Rock, what do you wanna be?"

And then the rock would say, "I'm a sea lion."

And they would see it, and all they had to do is strip some things away, and it was there.

So the approach, even in the fiction films, but certainly in these, is to go there and let them tell you what they are and what they're gonna do, which if you just ask a handful of the questions that are not facts and figures and you just pause and say nothing, they'll start to tell you who they are, and then you weave yourself with them.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Oh yes.

- [Audience Member] The husband and the wife, I was very struck, and it felt, I suppose, like a kind of tragic, violent soul to the picture for me.

And I wondered when you found that moment and how you shaped the experience maybe up to and afterwards, if that was a part of your structure.

- Danny and Melanie, yes.

It's obviously a very devastating and shocking moment.

I never forget when I got the phone call.

It was hard to process or even, I couldn't understand what they were saying to me on the phone.

Yeah, it changed the edit of the movie.

Their story was in a different place, and then it seemed impossible not to move it either to the very last part of the film, or I made the decision to put it before the group, the group setting, the community.

That seemed one step more.

But yeah, that changed where it came in the film and how that sequence was edited got altered a little bit to lead up to what the kind of revelation of what would happen.

And by the way, I think we understand, but just to say it out loud, healthcare in prison is not good, but it's startling that it's better than what some people have.

I mean, it's just astounding that it's better than what many people have.

- [Audience Member] A very dark joke, irony.

- A dark irony, sadly, yeah, tragic one.

It's beyond irony.

It's just tragic.

- [Moderator] Last question.

- Yes, last question.

Yes sir, here.

- [Audience Member] How difficult was it to get these people in rural areas to open up to Hollywood?

- Can you speak into to the microphone.

- How difficult was it to get rural people to open up to Hollywood?

- Just, I know- - Well, I- - [Audience Member] I'm from a rural area, so- - Where are you from?

- [Audience Member] Well, I'm from Northern California, the garlic capital of the world.

- Yeah, by the way, these stories are happening in not just in rural Appalachia.

They're happening in any, you could go to Ohio and find this story.

You could go anywhere and find this story in a rural part of that state.

I mean, I'm not really from Hollywood.

And I'm not gonna say just 'cause I live in New York, but you know, I'm basically an independent filmmaker.

That's what I've been doing my whole life, and I've never had a hard time getting people to talk or to open up.

I'm from a rural area.

I was born and raised in North Carolina, a small, a town there.

I don't know, I've never had a hard time talking with strangers.

People who know me well get frustrated with me because they always wanna know why I'm not more interested in them as I am with a stranger.

(audience laughing) I get inspiration talking to strangers.

- Yeah, but Ramin, it's very easy to talk to you.

When you speak to these people, you sense there's a soul coming across to them, and they recognize it.

Allow me one more remark.

Of course the film has to be out and should be seen in the communities, but I think as we are here in Los Angeles, it should also be seen by the Academy community because I think it's one of those films which is completely sticking out, not like a sore thumb, but a wonderful thumb, something completely wondrous and unprecedented.

And those who are members of the Academy or know members of the Academy should alert them to the film.

It deserves to be seen, and it deserves to be recognized by the academy.

That's what I think.

That's how I see the duty, I think the Academy has a duty here.

All right, thank you very much.

- Thanks for coming.

- Thank you for coming.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, thank you.