Interview: Amir Bar-Lev

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT is a documentary that begins with the scholarly inquiry, “Is Abstract Art a big con?” The film quickly becomes a nail biting mystery, a PG caper in which the lead detective is the filmmaker himself. 

Marla is a 4-year-old abstract painter who is made famous in the New York Times and on the national talk show circuit after a Bridgehampton gallery gives her a show.  Marla’s parents’ lives are turned upside down; first by the incredible sales of her work, upwards of $25,000, and then by a segment on “60 Minutes” where the father, an amateur painter, is accused of helping Marla and possibly painting the works of art himself.  In order to exonerate themselves, the parents turn to filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev who had already been filming the family for a few months.  They give him and his crew complete access to their lives.  Of course, what Bar-Lev wants most is footage of Marla doing a painting from start to finish.  What he captures on camera is astounding.

The film itself is a subject in its own documentary.  The parents candidly talk to the camera as if it is their friend, on their side.  However, the camera sees far more than they could ever anticipate and Bar-Lev calls upon the audience to be the judge of their innocence…or guilt.  As it becomes more and more feasible that Marla is not the sole author of her work, the family becomes all the more desperate to prove to the public that they did nothing untoward, that their daughter’s gift is pure.  While watching the film it becomes apparent that you, sitting in the theater, are the public the Olmstead’s so desperately want to convince.

Laura Newman: I’m really curious about how the camera changes the subject.  What did you notice while filming?  Did your subjects get more comfortable in front of the camera over time?
Amir Bar-Lev: I think like most things I try to get at with the film, it cuts both ways. It’s obvious that cameras affect what they shoot, what they are trying to capture and that a camera in a room changes a situation.  But it’s too easy to just focus on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle elements of the situation.  Those are in play.  At the same time the camera notices things that people don’t notice and is more accurate in a certain way than people. You can see that in MY KID COULD PAINT THAT because there are things that I miss by virtue of my own emotional attachments to my subjects that the camera picks up very well.  The perfect example is when “60 Minutes” happened.  My first reaction was, “There is no way these guys are behind a hoax like that because I’ve already filmed Marla painting.”  It was only after I went back and looked at the footage that I started to see that my camera was in a way, more accurate than I was.  Because there are things that happened during that painting I didn’t notice, they are there on the tape. The camera can be a very sensitive instrument.  It’s one of the enjoyable things about documentary as a medium; the camera is very dispassionate in a way.  Especially if a director doesn’t lead you by the nose to a perspective, it just puts things on screen that can be taken different ways and allows you to project your own import on them. 

LN: You do that when put the paintings side by side on screen and allow the audience to actually compare and contrast the paintings.  Can you talk about that segment?
AB-L: I really like that about the film.  That it’s a turning point for a lot of people.  They are up there and you as an audience have to look at them and decide what they mean.  That’s not to say that I don’t have an opinion.  I have an opinion and you can pretty clearly see my opinion in the film.  But what I tried not to do is manipulate the facts in a way to lead people to a conclusion.  I presented things as I saw them and you may conclude different things from the same material. What you see in that animation scene is that the two paintings that were done completely on camera, when I was filming, look remarkably similar to one and other, in their brush stroke and their composition and even in their color choices.  There are other paintings that were done that look remarkably different.  That the paintings look different from one another in and of themselves doesn’t mean that somebody else was involved in making them.  You as an audience have to decide whether those factors, the fact that people make wildly different paintings, the fact that cameras effect what people choose [to do], all these other factors [may be] enough in your mind to count for the differences in those paintings.

LN: What’s interesting about documentary filmmaking is that unlike fictional film, you don’t know from start to finish what you are actually going for.  How were your initial intentions in making the film different than how it turned out?
AB-L: One thing that interests me about that issue is that documentaries are, in most cases, an improvisation.  There are two poles on the spectrum: on the one hand, scripting something and boxing the story in and on the other, just witnessing it.  Documentaries, at least my documentaries, I’ve only made two, they are somewhere in the middle.  You are projecting a story, you’re writing something but you’ve got to be willing to bounce something back.  I find that immensely pleasurable intellectually to ride that bucking bronco and see where the story is going.  I think it’s funny how people have this negative response toward the guiding of the story.  They feel that if you guide the story you’re somehow being disingenuous.  There is no not guiding the story.  That’s why I like that line by Tony Brunelli, “Everybody’s trying to shape the story instead of just letting it be what it is.”  You could never let a story be what it is.  Nobody is not going to sit in a theater for a year.  I took a year of time and turned it into an 84-minute movie.  Just in the same way that a painting isn’t some window into a reality, the screen in a cinema and a documentary is not some time portal.  There is an opinion at work. It’s the director’s opinion. There is a process. You pretty much make the film you set out to make, even if it takes a bunch of twists and turns, you answer the questions that you have and you filter reality through that.  All these are sort of abstract, academic things to think about, but in this case it really has a dramatic element to it because [in the film] you can clearly see how people struggle with the fact that storytellers are really telling stories about themselves and not about them.  You will tell your story about what you want to say about my film, in the same way that I told the story of my year, not necessarily the way the Olmsteads wanted themselves to be portrayed.

LN: At what point did you decide, “I need to be in the film”? 
AB-L: It was a progression.  The making of the film became a plot element right after “60 Minutes” because the family shut out most, if not all of the media but they said I could keep working because my film could exonerate them.  So I knew that had to go into the film.  As far as making myself a part of it, I kind of got dragged along with that, kicking and screaming, over the next few months as we struggled to get that footage that would clear their name.  As far as physically being in the film, that wasn’t even really ever decided until editing.  There were a couple shots of me we got toward the very end, almost as safeties.  You know, “It may or may not go in this direction.”

LN: Before you started the film were you knowledgeable or a fan of Modern Art?
AB-L: Before I started the film, I knew very little about Modern Art and if anything could be said about my disposition towards it, I was a tiny bit skeptical.  And that was one of the things I was looking forward to in the film; really trying to explore whether there is anything to that sentiment, “My kid could paint that.” Whether Modern Art is all a big con or not.  I think for myself, I’ve concluded that it isn’t a con; that just because there aren’t those objective standards, that you could apply if Marla was a chess prodigy or something like that, doesn’t mean there are no standards at all.  It just means there are different kinds of standards.  You have to learn about Modern Art and engage with Modern Art in order to understand why people value some things and don’t value others.

LN: Why do you think people are so wild about her paintings?  I thought they were beautiful.
AB-L: There are a bunch of different reasons.  Beyond the fact that the paintings are beautiful, I think that people felt they were buying a piece of childhood itself when they bought Marla’s work.  By virtue of her youth, Marla had been less sullied by the world and her innocence allowed her to make these remarkable paintings because she hadn’t yet forgotten what all adults forget.

LN: Would you buy one of Marla’s paintings?
AB-L: First of all, I couldn’t afford one of her paintings! I do have 2 drawings that she made which I took home and taped on my fridge and one on my office filing cabinet rendering them instantly valueless. But they’re more value to me as something that a kid made that reminds me of the fun times I had with that kid, than an investment or a piece of art.

LN: Abstract Art is such a reaction to formalistic or representational art, the kind that has been in museums for centuries.  But she’s not doing that, she’s coming from an innocent place.
AB-L: Yes, that is what was so interesting about it.   My editor wanted to make the logline of the film: “Hate Jackson Pollack?  You’ll love Marla Olmstead.”  There was very much a sense that many of the people who bought her work professed to hating Abstract Art.  I think when an adult does it, it feels possibly cynical to people but when a child does it, because she’s not doing it for those reasons you mentioned, because she’s not in reaction to any era of art history before her or trying to provoke some kind of reaction from the art world, that somehow it’s okay to enjoy it.  One of the things that I think is a happy by product of the movie is it gives people who normally wouldn’t allow themselves the luxury of looking at art an opportunity to sit and look at art for a while and think about art and think about the meaning of art, think about the composition of paintings and ask themselves, “Well, how is this made? How is that made?  Could the same person have made them?”  So, many people, myself included, have this aversion toward staring at a painting.  Making this film helped me get through that aversion to a certain degree.  In the course of the 84 minutes that you watch the film the audience might find that they enjoy thinking about art more than they thought they would.

LN: I’m very curious how you got the funding. As a documentary filmmaker you’ve got to live while you’re working for those, what, two years?
AB-L: It was about a year of editing and a year of shooting.

LN: Did you have collaborators and funders throughout?
AB-L: No.  I didn’t get funding till midway through the post-production process.  I financed it myself before then and borrowed money from family and friends.  That’s because nobody was interested in this film until the potential scandal came up, which provoked a kind of complicated emotional reaction in me.  On the one hand, because I’d become friends with the family, I was upset and concerned for them.  On the other hand, I knew my film had just gotten finally fundable.

LN: And possibly good…
AB-L: I think it would have been good before then but networks aren’t really interested in docs about Abstract Art. 

LN: Do you ever wonder what Marla will be like 20 years from now?
AB-L: Of course I think a lot about it, what will happen to Marla.  But not to the degree that I’m going to do a follow up!  I’m concerned about what’s going to happen to Marla Olmstead and I recognize that in someway I’m complicit in her global recognizability.  I hope that the film is less about Marla and more about journalism and art and truth and things like that. I struggled with whether or not I should actually move forward with the film and it’s one of the reasons I felt it was really important to get the story exactly right as I saw it.  And it’s one of the reasons we edited for a year. Because I hope that in 20 years if Marla sees this film, she’ll feel that it was accurate.

Sony Pictures Classics releases Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That in theaters on October 5th.