Unconventional Wisdom

Director Brett Morgen talks about his new film Chicago 10 and why documentaries don’t have to be boring.

by Matt Prigge

Like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, Brett Morgen believes a documentary need not look homely and plain, nor be strictly a form of journalism. His 1999 feature On the Ropes, co-directed with then-partner Nanette Burstein, was, as he puts it, a “documentary shot like a fiction film.” The Kid Stays in the Picture, an eye-popping take on super-film producer Robert Evans’, followed in 2002. Now comes Chicago 10, a phantasmagoric account of both the demonstrations and riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago 1968 and the Chicago 7 trial that followed—one that doesn’t even try to be a history lesson. PW spoke with Morgen while he was vacationing in Florida.

Did you always intend to make the film in this particular style?

“From the day it was conceived. The thing I thought we could offer was the experience of being there. When I think about working on a film, I ask myself, ‘Why does this story need to be told on film as opposed to a book or a stage production or a radio play?’ And I try to exploit the medium. The events in Chicago were conceived as political theater on a massive scale, with a cast of thousands. I wanted the film to capture that experience, chaos and energy.”

The demonstrations and riots during the Democratic Convention seem to get more screentime than the trial itself.

“Well, one of the themes was this idea of empowerment—that the events of Chicago really started with three guys sitting around smoking a joint, talking about how they should do something. Next they knew they’d created one of the greatest spectacles of the ’60s. At the end of the film all the protagonists have been swept off the plate, and all you’re left with are the people. One of the ideas of the yippies was there is no leader. They’re all leaders. The movie takes on the personality of a yippie.”

Did it change dramatically in the editing room?

“No. We evaluated more than 1,200 hours of film, 14,000 photographs and 23,000 pages of court transcripts. While there were a million different ways to tell the story, I decided to structure the film around the central riot of each day. I made a decision early on that this was not a traditional film about 1968. I wasn’t going to go into the Convention Hall because that was a story on its own. That’s not what this film is about.”

Chicago 10 has taken a drubbing by certain critics over its lack of context.

“I don’t think we can look to our films and filmmakers to keep up a definitive history of events. Let’s be honest: Would you want to read a definitive history in 35 pages, which is what a script is with all the spaces taken out? So what can film do best? I think films can give you an experience. This idea that it’s the filmmaker’s responsibility to tell the entire history of the 1960s is ludicrous to me. A.O. Scott’s review for the Times lists all these factoids of 1968, which are so elementary it’s embarrassing, that I didn’t put into the film. Are you concerned kids won’t know that stuff, because guess what? They don’t. Are you suggesting it’s better they know nothing about it?

“Or do we give them something that will interest them and engage them so they go and learn more about it? I spent four years studying the subject. It’s not as though I forgot about McCarthy on the way to the editing room.”

Do people undervalue the visceral elements of documentaries?

“A lot of reviews of documentaries tend to be about the subject, and there’s very little critical thinking of the style or the approach to the story the filmmaker has taken. If I was writing a review of Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, as important as the message of that film is, I would’ve trashed the presentation. To take something that should really be done as a book and compress it into two hours where you can’t understand the full history of it—that makes no sense to me. There’s no attempt to use any of the elements of film. My review would be, ‘Why was this done as a movie?’”

What have been your major documentary influences?

“There’s a film called The Nuer, an ethnographic movie about an African tribe from the 1970s. Hilary Harris made the film as a 60-minute montage—basically an asynchronous collection of sound and image that, put together, gave me an amazing sense of the rhythm of this culture. I could feel it, smell it, taste it more than I could some objective dispatch. That led me to think film should take reality and sculpt it in such a way to achieve a higher truth. I think that’s where film can be a very valuable tool. It can do something you can’t do in a book or other medium.”

Were you ever tempted to go back and make it more contextual for the naysayers?

“Here’s the one thing I regret. If I could do it over again, I would’ve opened up with Christopher Hitchens sitting in a Masterpiece Theater-style library, giving us the hard facts that A.O. Scott wants. And suddenly he’d melt like some fucking monster, like a house of wax, and then we’d open the movie. It’d be like, ‘There’s your fucking context. Now shut the fuck up.’”