Interview: Brett Morgen (Chicago 10)

Director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) is a fast and voracious talker – he didn’t allow for many questions to be asked by the fellow journalists who met him last Monday in New York during promotion of his Sundance opener, Chicago 10. He seems to be preoccupied with sending out the right message about his latest project, a special documentary that mixes original animation and archival footage to explore the build-up of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, its consequences and its lessons. He wants to make sure that nobody mistakes it for one of those ‘too often boring’ and ‘very serious historical documentaries that play on PBS’ because his movie, he says, is meant to be entertaining, although he hopes young people can learn some lessons about what to do with their political lives today.

Eight activists were put on trial by the government after the week of protests hold in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in 1968. The extreme police violence against the protesters, mainly pacific hippies that wanted to voice their opinions against the Vietnam war, were some of the most violent responses of the government against activists of the time and the episode marked, in a way, the beginning of the end of an era. With the assassination that same year of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, all the hopes about changing the world started to fade.

Chicago 10 goes back and forth between the archival footage of what happened in the streets and the animated reenactment of a trial that was mainly a circus in which the judge, Julius Hoffman tried everything to silence and ridicules a group of counter cultural icons such as Abbie Hoffman (voiced in the movie by Hank Azaria) and Jerry Rubin (Mark Ruffalo) or activists like the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright). They were declared guilty although the sentence was overturned by a court of appeals. The number 10 refers to the eight processed plus the two defendant attorneys, William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass, that were accused of comptent by the judge.

With Chicago 10, the outspoken Morgen is also trying to make a statement: documentaries have to be entertaining so even if you won an Oscar –yes, he talks about Taxi to the Dark Side- it doesn’t mean anything because you are boring!

Brett Morgen

Q: Did you get to meet any of the Chicago 10 people?
A: The ones I would like to know are all dead. I didn’t want to make the story of the Chicago 10 as told by the few that are still alive. Memory is an interesting thing. All these events happened forty years ago, every defendant has written its own book about the subject and everybody remembers it in their own way. That’s why I decided to base the film entirely only primary sources (there are hundreds of hours of televised footage). I was experiencing this event as if it was happening today. So, my recollection of the day to day activities in Chicago is actually more vivid than the ones of the people who actually were there.

I wanted to do a film which experience is entirely cinematic. This film is not intended to be a history lesson, it is a myth, it s a retelling of a myth. Maybe I should have waited until everybody that was alive then died to approach this material but we wanted to create a theatrical cinematic experience and I don’t believe the theatrical cinematic experience is well suited for history lessons. In that sense I believe that ‘No end in sight’ is not a film, is a piece of broadcast journalism. It is great but I don’t want to have the same experience at home than at the movie theater. What we wanted is to exploit the full breadth of what cinema has to offer, as well as supply a visceral experience.

When I started to do this movie everybody told me ‘I am so happy that someone is finally doing this movie. Let me tell you what you should do’. And I said ‘ ¡You are the most heavily documented generation in history. It seems that everybody that was alive in the 60’s has written memoirs! So, let me do my own interpretation of it. And is not gonna be that different. I sort of celebrated a lot of the values and energy of that period. 

The truth is that Chicago 10 is not a film about 167 is about today. Baz Luhrman took Shakespeare and updated it and modernized it to Mexico City. We took events that happened forty years ago and ultimately wrote  a film about today. I wasn’t born then so I couldn’t do it any other way. That’s why when Allen Gingsberg goes to the witness stand and says: ‘Politics is theater and magic, is the manipulation by the media of imagery that hypnotizes the country into believing in a war that didn’t exist’, he’s  not speaking about the Vietnam war, he s referring to Colin Powell testimony in front of United Nations. That was my interpretation of it.

Q: Why you didn’t use the music of the time? Almost every song is from today.
A: The reason we don’t use the traditional music is because it has
became a cliché, something anachronistic. I don’t think ‘Blowing in the
wind’ would have the same effect today than two generations ago. Some
people criticized me because I didn’t put Judy Collins singing ‘Blowing
in the wind’, for many people that was THE moment of the trial. (She
was asked by the defense to replay whatever she was singing at the
march in Chicago and the judge made her stop and gagged her). For
people who was alive at that time that was a very tragic moment but my
fear is that for people of today that moment would make them laughing
and applauding for them to gagged her because  that song is moldy
today, is not the anthem of what the kids are listening today. It their
grandparents song.

And don’t get me wrong,  I liked the song. I remember  being at film
school and some people would laugh at the movie  ‘The searchers’. It
was a movie made in 1955 and that was an audience in 1987’, they would
laugh at the mannerism. And the teacher would say, angrily, ¡it is not
funny!. But I didn’t want to have people doing that on my film, to
laugh at the cultural trappings of the sixties.

Q: Are you hoping that people of an old generation won’t go to see the movie?
No, I hope everybody goes. We had very good response from young people
and older people who watched the movie in the test screenings. I’ ve
receieved some criticism for not including some cultural landmarks from
the 60’s like Bobby Kennedy or McCarthy but this is as much a film
about Tiannamen Square than about Chicago, as much about Seattle than
about Chicago. It is a universal and timeless story about a war, an
opposition to a war and a government trying to silence the opposition. 

Q: There is a fundamental difference between then and now and it is
that almost nobody is out on the streets trying to stop this war….
A:Today there is not a draft but protests have gone viral to a certain
extent. There are thousands of people protesting on the internet and I
think may be one of the lessons of the sixties is that those street
protests weren’t really effective…  In 2006 people protested with their
vote but what was the president response? To send 30,000 more troops to
Irak. So, personally I feel a little cinical about it now but what we
were trying to do is to put a mirror to the audience and ask them how
far are you willing to go?

Q: In which way do you think your film is subversive?
A: My film is subversive by creating a modern day mythology and not
issuing talking head interviews and not issuing narration and by
creating an historical movie that is told in the present tense. That ‘s
to me what is controversial about my movie, it is not political, it is
political in terms of film, not politics in general.

Q: Don’t you think that young people are gonna be jealous about the real conviction about ideas at the time?
A: I grew up in the 80’s and I was very jealous about the people in the
60’s and that is the last thing I wanted people to feel today. I might
have changed in the last six years. The film was conceived by Graydon
Carter and myself with that intent: people was so vital and passionate
back then, let’s try to tell this story as an example for kids of today
but now I think that today’s young people are as engaged and active as
then. In fact, people is coming out in record numbers in the primaries.
For example, they have an awareness of global warming and that’s beyond
politics, it s a moral play, transcends politics and party lines. There
is this ‘boomer’ myth that needs to be destroyed and this new
generation needs to be empowered and not belittled. But that being
said, I think there are certain things that they can see in Chicago 10
and appropriate for themselves. Among those things, the sense of
theater brought to the movement  is something I hope will inspire
people of today because inspired me. There are also lessons in the
other way like ‘This is the reason we shouldn’t be out in the street:
they got their heads smashed for nothing!’.

Q: You keep saying you are not political but you were aware this film is based in a political vein?
A: It’s a cartoon show! No, I’ m kidding. When I first met Hank Azaria
I told him that we were trying to remind people about this amazing
moment in history and at the same time we wanted to remind people about
the importance of taking a stand and he told me: ‘no, to me this is not
about politics, it is about morality’. Well, for me it is hard to
separate those two things. Abbie Hoffman said ‘politics is not about
who we support but about how you live your live’. In that sense this
movie is as political as ‘The kid stays in the picture’, just on
different levels.

Q: What was your main goal doing this film?
A: My main goal was doing a really entertaining movie about what
happened in Chicago. I think you have to do that.  Look at ‘Taxi to the
dark side’, maybe now, because of the Oscars, it will go up but so far
nobody has seen the movie. It was one of the worst releases of the
year, it didn’t make any money when it opened and it couldn’t have
better reviews and that is because it is a very sobering movie.  The
crowd probably thought they had already seen enough in television about
the subject and that they didn’t need to go to see it to the movie
theater. Hopefully now there will be a huge spike because of the oscar
but Abbie Hoffman and Michael Moore have taught us that the value of
infusing comedy and theater  into politics. If Robert Greenwald did a
film about the healthcare sistem, none of us would know that even
existed. Morgan Spurlock did well with ‘Supersize me’. If that same
subject was taking on by very bright filmmakers, McDonalds would have
the supersize option on the menu. There is a certain value in taking
political ideas and presenting them as entertainment.  I am always
confused about people who want to change the world doing documentaries.

Roadside Attractions releases Chicago 10 in theaters today.