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In Person
"The Weather Underground" plays on April 14 as part of the IFP/Chicago Facets film series.
Details from Facets.
Small Screen
Catch it on the small screen April 26th on PBS' Independent Lens series.
Full details from Independent Lens.
On DVD
The DVD for "Weather Underground" will be released in late May.
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"The ubiquitous Miss Dohrn, a brilliant University of Chicago law school graduate, mapped her anti-war campaign during an eight day seminar with representatives of Hanoi and the Viet Cong. She journeyed to Havana at their request.
Now a fugitive sought by the FBI, Bernadine was heard from last week when she claimed credit for blowing up for the second time this year a police memorial statue in Chicago's Haymarket Square."
– From FBI Files on The Weather Underground
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(Continued from Page Two)
One thing we learned that it was better to have someone give you an entré. I first contacted Bill Ayers, who I knew personally through my work in education (in the School Reform movement in Chicago). Our paths had crossed enough that I could call him up. I'll never forget telling him that I was interested in doing a piece on the Weather Underground. His first response was, "My apologies."
We weren't the first people to try to do this, but he was open to talking with us and he was open to letting people know that we were interested in talking to them, though he also let us know that we were on our own when it came to approaching those people. Even just having him making an introduction let us talk to people, who would let a few more people know. After that it was a process of sussing out who was available to talk on camera and who could only talk off-record, which was also helpful.
How much of what was discussed could you simply not use?
In all of the interviews we reached a point where they refused to talk about something, usually surrounding how some things got accomplished. To this day I think they are masters of information control, which is the primary way they were able to maintain their clandestine network and not get caught. At that point we realized that we were talking to people who weren't even necessarily talking to each other, which became a level of fascination in its own right.
You used a lot of archival footage. Where did that come from?
Sam and I met as researchers and we both fell in love with researching. We're essentially research geeks and we could both spend days in archives looking at old footage, so that was really one of my favorite parts of working on the film. A lot of it came from the networks. ABC in particular had a really great open, well-organized archive where you could go online and sort of do it yourself. A lot of the best stuff also came from filmmakers making short films at the time. If you look at the list of the credits at the end of the film, there’s tons of stuff from all over.
It looks like you used a pretty wide array of formats in shooting the film...
Yeah, the outdoor shots were shot on 16 and all of the talking heads shots were shot on a variety of different formats. Sam's talked a lot about how he wanted it to have this sort of textured feel, sort of rough and varied like history is. He's a real artist as an editor and I think that the artistic sensibility of the film came from him and is what drew me to the project. I sort of view myself as more of a story shaper and that was my greater strength and what better than what I could contribute in editing, which was largely sitting in the back yelling at him, which was a big part of making the film – fighting.
What does the future hold for you as a filmmaker?
I've got some ideas going on, but nothing with wings. You know, funding was such a to-the-death struggle that I'd like to think that getting funding on the next one would be easier.
People come up to me all the time and say, "You got nominated for an Oscar, people
must be coming up to you all of the time asking you to do their films." Not me,
man. It's funny, a guy from the Chicago Tribune who was doing an article on Steve
James (featured
in Issue 003) called me up on the day of his deadline, apologizing, saying
he had no idea I lived in Chicago. I was like, "Listen, it's no problem, nobody
does."
...
Written by Richard Sharp
[1] [2] [3]
004: Bill Siegel
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