An Interview with David Riker
continued

The 'Quinceniera' (sweet 15 dance) in the 'Home' segment of "La Ciudad"

 

DZ: Well, let's talk briefly about the other side of the equation, which is who the film is for and how, both, putting it this way, both, when you made the film, what was your idea of who the audience would be and how it would get to that audience, and now that the film is out and has been in theaters and, you know, a lot has happened to it, how do you assess that, the, you know, the success or things that you've learned in the course of dealing with that aspect?

DR: Okay, a few ways to answer it. The first is, I started the film as a short, while I was at film school, it was the story of The Puppeteer. The film school, by the way, was not happy with the plan, and several of my teachers said that it would be a mistake, an unpardonable mistake to make it in Spanish because it would be a foreign film. And this was not in a one on one, this was in front of a group of film students. And I've said this before now, so I've come out about this and I'm happy to come out again. My directing teacher asked me to rent the film The Hunt for Red October [audience laughter], which you know I would still like my money back for that [much audience laughter]. But he wanted me to look at the opening scene because he said there's creative ways to avoid this problem of language.

DZ: Oh, because it's in a Russian sub, right...

DR: It's in a Russian submarine, and the opening shot, there's I guess a Russian guy speaking in Russian I suppose, and it's subtitled and then the director had this extraordinary idea of using a zoom lense to zoom in slowly on the Russian commander's mouth, and then reverse out on the zoom, and he speaks in English [audience laughter]. And the rest of the film is in English. You know, and this was not a... it's easy to laugh about it now, but I rented it, and I looked at it, and I was thinking of what kind of lense is that [audience laughter]...

And, the film ended up winning the festival at the university, and then it went on to win what is every film school's greatest hope, which is the Academy Award for a student work. And I was flown out to Los Angeles, first class, and I had a limousine pick me up, and for two weeks, I was treated like a celebrity out there. And I met with all the studios, and I met with agents and production companies.

It's kind of a little... it's actually very well organized. They do it all the time, so they know how to do this kind of event, and maybe sixty times, I was told we love this story of The Puppeteer, and we want to make it a feature film. With a short film, no one is going to see it, there is no means to distribute it, but a feature film that will play in the multiplexes of America, if you make a few changes to it.

And I knew it was coming. You make it in English, and you make it in color, and you make it with professional actors, and you make it a feature length story, and then we'll make it with you, and there's a lot of money to make a film like that.

And I came back to New York momentarily dazed. And I went as far as to start thinking about making The Puppeteer a feature film, not in English, keeping it in Spanish but making it a full length film. In fact, I was so... for about two months, I was fully engaged in the question of how to make it a feature length story... It's a story of a homeless man who survives as a puppeteer, and who has poor health because he has tuberculosis that he contracted in a shelter, and because of that he refuses to stay in the shelters. And he wants to put his daughter in school.

And I started thinking maybe I could expand the film and actually reflect some of the realities I'd learned about, which is that homeless people with tuberculosis in New York City, if they refuse to take their medicine, are arrested, and put in Riker's Island in a special tuberculosis lockdown, and that the State had the power to do this. And I visited Riker's Island, and as you know by now, my name is David Riker, so when I was trying to get in, I tried for the first time to use that to my advantage [much audience laughter] and didn't succeed, but then I found a way through an activist in the health clinic there, [sounds like Mountifurer?] health clinic to get in as a medical researcher, and I made it into some of these tuberculosis lockdowns and talked to some of the homeless people.

So I was distracted, but it raised the question for me that this should be a feature film, not a short. I understood that without it being a feature film, it had very little chance of it being seen. At the same time, the film was shown as a short in the community where it was filmed, in the South Bronx at a church. And during the course of a day long festival, the film was shown constantly, and several thousand people from the South Bronx came to see it.

It was really like a celebration, not just for the film, it was a community festival, but they all would come in to watch the film, and after each screening, they said: "This is a beautiful film, this is the first time I've seen my own neighborhood on the screen, but it's no good, because as soon as I got comfortable in my chair, it ended. You know the film was over before it began. You got to make it a bigger film." And they passed the hat without my prompting, and at the end of that day, I had dozens and dozens of people who volunteered to help. The local bodegas were gonna make ham and cheese sandwiches, and coffees, and gipsy cab drivers were gonna drive around the crew... and I realized that the combination of their reaction, and what I learned in Hollywood was that I needed to expand it.

I then set about the process of making the feature film. But I didn't for once think about the market. From that point on, I didn't give a moment's thought to the market, except that it was going to be a feature length film. I didn't care whether or not it would be commercial, whether or not it would have a chance of being seen.

More recently, I've been, at universities where I've been teaching younger film makers, and they're all concerned with the market. It's an obsession, which is to try and make a film that will have success with the market. If it's a film about Latino immigrants, definitely, you're gonna make it in English. And if you could have a multi-racial cast, in an inner city film, and put that love spice in there, definitely you're gonna do it.

You see what I'm saying? And my experience of not thinking about the market is that I could think about the story itself, I could think about the film. I knew it was never going to be seen, I should put it that way, right from the start. And so I was liberated. I didn't have to think about it. And at every point, I could make the decisions based on what would be best for the film, what would be best for the story. And it took a long period of time, but when it was completed, I should say, half way through, I had shot two of the stories with very little money, grant money, student loan money and money that I earned while I was making the film, someone from ITVS, which is the Independent Television Service which was formed by an act of congress in 1989, I think, specifically to get money into the hands of film makers that would bring "unrepresented voices to PBS." And if you look carefully at what that means, it means everybody, that is none of us are reflected on PBS. It's not just a question of the African-American experience or the Latino, or the South Asian experience, but it's the experience of young people, it's the experience of elderly people, it's the experience of workers. You see what I'm saying? We're all under represented.

DZ: The British upper-class is not under represented on PBS.

DR: That's right. That's the only group that's already represented and the Antique Road Show [audience laughter], but so they came on board and they gave me money to complete the film. And I knew it would be shown on PBS. But I still didn't think about the market.

When the film was completed, it premiered in Canada at the Toronto Film Festival, and to my amazement, I went into the first screening which was for press and industry, I think they call it the industry, the place was packed, people were sweating, and it was a almost entirely white middle age group of film connoisseurs and professionals in the film business.

And when it ended I went straight to the men's room to hide and I heard these men coming in and talking about the film like they had discovered some great film. And then a guy from the New York Times called me and said I got to talk to you at six in the morning and it was surreal, because from the start, I thought that the film would never reach a broad audience, I certainly didn't think that it would have a theatrical release, it had everything going against it, it was shot on 16mm, it was grainy, it was shot in black and white, it was in Spanish, it did not have professional actors, and it wasn't a single narrative story, it was these four stories, and yet... so you never know, you see what I'm saying, you don't know how people will respond.

Subsequent to that press and industry screening, I received a number of distribution offers from companies that specialized in art house films, and I was advised by people that were with me that I should hold out for Sundance Film Festival, because there, one of the bigger film companies might buy the film and it would have a broader release, and I did that, we held out, there was a lot of strategy sessions and wasted time, Samuel Goldwyn Company wanted to release the film and all of the executives were into it, they were passionate about it, they just needed Samuel himself to see it. And I was like, this guy Samuel is still alive? [audience laughter] Can't believe it! And they said...

DZ: He's not but he has to see it...

DR: He's alive, he's an old man, elderly man, and they shipped the print, not a video tape but the whole print for him to see it, and then he said, no we can't do anything with it. So Samuel Goldwyn [audience laughter]

But there was a period I was thinking, okay maybe it will be seen very widely. In the end, it was the people who came up to me that day, the next day in Toronto who never wavered in their interest to release the film, that I ended up distributing it with. It was Zeitgeist Films. They had done a great job with a film called Manufacturing Consent about Noam Chomsky, you might have seen, and they were right at that time distributing a film called Chiapas about the Zapatistas' uprising.

I met with them and I said, "I believe that this has two audiences: the art house audience, so- called, people who are interested in films from other parts of the world, and the Latino community." And Zeitgeist, as well as all the other companies, said, we don't believe there's an audience in the Latino community and we're not prepared to commit to put it in those neighborhoods.

So I had to make a decision. Do I try and do it myself, or do I go with them and see how it goes. From the beginning, every time I asked a garment worker or day labourer or Cipriano to be in the film, they had a question, who are you making it for? And I would say, primarily, I'm making it for people who don't understand what you're going through right now, as a way of combating the ignorance that exists, a way of undermining the xenophobia, of undermining George W. Bush, because they're talking about the new immigrants being some kind of invasion that needs to be defended with a military wall, and I want to undermine that.

But at the same time, I hope that the film will be useful within the community, within the Latin-American community precisely because part of the deal of being an immigrant in the U.S. today is that when you come here and you cross the boarder, you are made invisible. I say it's an unwritten rule, because it goes without saying that you're going to be silent when you're up here. You're gonna work on the edges of the city, in the backs of the restaurants, and in the backs of the hotels, and in people's homes doing domestic work and you're going to be in factories that are out of sight, no one is going to see you. You're gonna work in silence, and that the act of being in the film would be an act of breaking that silence, and becoming visible, and so for the Latino community it could be exhilarating to see up on the screen what is refused to be seen. So I started seeing it had two audiences.

When it was released, Zeitgeist used a method it always uses which is to put it in an art house theater, it was put in the Quad theater on thirteenth street, and the very first weekend, it was clear that Latinos were coming to see it, immigrant workers were coming to see it. They were walking around thirteenth street, lost, asking people, where is the film "The Immigrant" playing. You see what I'm saying? They had just heard through the grape vines that there was a film about them. They didn't even know the title.

On the first weekend, so many people came from as far away as Philadelphia, Jersey City, parts of Connecticut, Hampstead, Long Island, they were coming with their babies. And I learned on the Sunday that the theater was turning them away because the Quad has a policy, no children under five. Right, that's a place to watch a movie in perfect silence [audience laughter]. But by Monday, the numbers had been so good that the owner of the theater agreed to wave the policy, it would now be open to everyone, and the film, instead of playing two or three weeks I think played there almost three months, and the reason it did is because the Latinos were coming in addition to the art house.

But still, the distributor wouldn't open it in the Latino neighborhoods. I had to wait until it finished in the Quad, I had to get special permission from them to let me open it up in Latino theaters, which I don't know how to distribute a film. I knew, because it was on Univison and Telemundo [TV stations], it was in the Latino press so much as a kind of historic accomplishment of the community that there was an audience for it, and I also knew that the main chain of Latino theaters had already asked Zeitgeist, "Could we have the film?" And Zeitgeist said no because they didn't trust them that they would be paid.

So now I went to these theaters and I asked them if they were still interested, they said they were, and I said, "I don't know how do to this but I know I need money for ads, will you advance me money?" And these theater owners gave me $2500 bucks each, something which if you've ever dealt with theaters is unheard of, that they give you money before they even get the film. They gave me cash, I had $7500 bucks.

With that I knew I could buy a few ads, and make leaflets, and make a third print, cause we needed three print, and then I had an idea to ask the theaters to do something else they had never done, which is to let people see the film without paying. I went to the theaters, and I said, " I have a brilliant idea [audience laughter], it's going to make you a lot of money, let everyone come in for free from Monday morning until Friday at five o'clock, and as long as they are in public schools, as long as they're school groups, open up the theaters.

To begin with, nobody comes to your theaters until the evening, so why not let the community see it, but also I can use that to get things rolling." They were looking at each other like it's absurd, but somehow I convinced them to do it, then I got some of the Latino politicians who love an opportunity to be on the news [audience laughter] and who saw it as a worthwhile cause to agree to do a big press conference and there we were in front of one of these theaters up in Washington Heights with all the community leaders, and politicians

And the theater owners who had borrowed suits off the peg to be there, you know, for the first time in front of the cameras, and we had a slogan which was "Las puertas estan abierta", "the doors are open": Every school age children can see the film and the theaters were packed. Teachers had something to do, they could afford it, and the kids went home and told their parents and so at the weekends, the theaters were packed.

And it was Cipriano and myself and about half a dozen other actors were there every day, every night, handing out leaflets, talking to the audiences, we would get up on the stage Ð we would raid the theaters Ð we would go up on the stage six of us, before the film began, there would be hundreds of Latin-American immigrants and their families -- the fact that the actors that they had heard about on TV were on stage made it really very moving -- and we would hand out thousands of leaflets which they would take out.

Also because there was this "children go free", I was able to go to Univision which is the number one television station for the Latin-American community, and get them to put a free PSA on and they ran it five or six times a day for six-seven weeks. That would have cost about $200,000.

So we were beating every week the new Hollywood films, and for the first time I began reading the trades because I would see like "Scream II" is coming out and we would take it as a challenge [audience laughter] and then it would happened.... Saturday night, screen one at the theaters would be "La Ciudad," packed, and screen two they would be screening to an empty room, you know. And it showed that the only reason that Hollywood dominates is because we let them dominate. Do you see what I'm saying? They have a system, it works for them but it's not because that's what people want to see. The minute they were offered an alternative that had some sort of meaning to them, they went to it.

ÉWe outlived five or six filmsÉ in total the film played almost five months in theaters in New York City and it's a shame half of you didn't make it, but... I'm winded, you know, I haven't talked this much in a long time.

DZ: That's an incredible story. In Los Angeles, it's interesting because a similar phenomenon happened where the film opened in the New Art Theater which is one of the art theaters on the West side, and in L.A. It reached a point where the L.A. Times had a feature article about how people were taking the bus from East L.A. to the New Art Theater in the hundreds to see the film. And that's, I mean, that's a trick, you know, L.A. public transportation is a bit different from New York, it takes probably an hour and a half to two hours to get there.

[In the LA Times article,] Zeitgeist was saying that they were going to try to open it up in other theaters, but they never did, it never happened. But it was enough of an unusual phenomenon for the L.A. Times to take fairly big notice of it. I think that there's a lot to learn from your experience in bringing it to the Latin-American community, both in terms of how, but also in terms of what it really meant for the community. Let's open it up here. I know there's a lot of other questions, and let's... actually, let me ask [?sounds like Sepriano?-TRACK 8 1:36] before, to just, would you like to come say a few words?

DR: For those of you who saw the film, Cipriano Garcia played the role of a young Mexican in New York City, from the town of Tosingo in the state of Puebla, who falls in love with a woman on the first night that he arrives in New York, and he learns that she's from the very same town.

And as an example of how we worked, Tosingo is the town that Cipriano is actually from, and during the course of the life of the film, beyond making it, he has been at all the events I've been talking about -- raiding the theaters and handing out leaflets, he's been doing them all, so I'm really happy that he's here. [audience applause]

Cipriano Garcia: First, let me thank you for the invitation, I'm pretty happy to be here, and I'm happy to see you once again, actually I haven't seen you for months! So it's nice to be here with you guys, for those who have seen The City, I'm really thankful, you know, I believe that it's really great to be part of The City, to make something different from what Hollywood has actually been making for years.

I am an actor. When I came to the audition, I was just thinking, it's my first opportunity, I gotta be my best, that is what I thought. I never thought I would be end up in theaters all over the United States, and Latin-America, Europe, and basically so far it's been a beautiful experience, that I enjoyed pretty much so far. Thank you very much.

DZ: We'll open it up for some questions...yah?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: David, I was wondering what you actually learned in film school that made its way into your later art, what you learned actually that was helpful and also, more things that were unhelpful in film school.

DR: I'm glad you asked the question because I really want to be careful not to attack my education.

When I was thinking of going to film school, I went to a number of film schools to ask people who were in the programs, "Is this worth it? What are you learning?" , and they all told me it's not worth it, it's a waste of money and time, and if you have twenty thousand dollars, just go make your own film. And I would leave thinking, that doesn't seem right, they're getting all that knowledge that I don't have, and then they're telling me it's not worth it. So when people ask me if it's worth it, my answer is it is, not because of what the film school is giving you, but because the act of going into any kind of intensive study is the act of figuring out for yourself what you are trying to do.

In other words, when I was looking at film school, I was walking around trying to figure out what's the best program, what teachers, what kind of cameras do they have, what kind of resources do they have, thinking that what I was gonna learn was out there. And what I found out was that what I was going to learn, I was already carrying around inside me. But in order to learn it, I needed to stop running around like crazy doing a million other things, and tell the communities that I had been working with and tell my friends and my family, I'm cutting out, you know, I'm stepping back, and I'm going to spend some time really selfishly figuring things out.

So at one level, you don't have to be in a film program or in an arts program to do that, but it allows it. It allows you to stop for a minute the daily cut and thrust. I was deeply involved with the community organizing in Roxbury's African-American community at that time. We had video programs going on, we were setting up screening facilities in the neighborhoods, we were actively training people, and I had to pull out of it, and I felt a burden when I went to film school to begin with.

But it was there that I began to study other films, it was there that I began to, for the fist time, be able to look at world cinema, and see how stories can be told in a way that is very expressive, multi-layered, poetic, I was able to see how political story tellers have worked in film, I was able to observe how people had worked with non-actors before, and see for example how, despite the fact that their faces bring a tremendous presence to the film, very often it's very stilted and stiff, and cardboard-like.

And so when I was making La Ciudad, I was constantly conscious of how to avoid that. All of the work of improvisation and dramatic workshops that I did were to avoid that. And I also became conscious of the fact that unlike the other arts, I think without exception, film making is an industrial endeavor that requires an immense amount of resources from around the planet. It's not possible to be just an artist, as you might be as a writer, as a painter, as a singer, a rapper, a musician, that in film, you're demanding access to an immense amount of resources. And if you're working in film, you're dealing with chemical industry, you're dealing with the mining extractive industry, you're dealing with thousands of people.

You know, Titanic I eventually learned, it was made, it's the first film that's the product of a maquiladora in Baha, California, that one of the studios set up, and the number of people who made that film was ten thousand. Ten thousand people were involved during the entire process of it. A film like La Ciudad also had more than a thousand people who were involved, who brought different skills, different equipment, different resources.

So it was at film school that I understood a different kind of responsibility as well, which is if we're gonna demand from the world this amount of resources, there's a responsibility that comes with that. It means someone else isn't going to be using those resources to make a film. So learning about world cinema, having time to really... I'm going to say, find my own voice, you know which sounds, even as I say it strange, but in a way that the main difference between La Ciudad and the documentaries I made was that, that it's not an agitational work such as I did before, but it's something different and part of it was the result of having a lot of reflection, studying work Ð studying work, I don't mean going to see it when it plays in the theater, I mean renting it and watching it thirty times without the audio on, with the audio on, watching it with your eyes closed just to listen, counting the number of shots in a scene, trying to understand why a scene gives me a certain feeling, studying the optics of lenses, beginning to understand how sound can change the emotional content of a scene -- real kind of craft study.

And my only disappointment was that I didn't leave after five years with a community of collaborators that share the kind of approach I have. Very few people that I met that are interested in this kind of work. And it's also why, I mean I really, I appreciate the chance Ð I haven't heard from any of you yet Ð but to be here, because it is very very hard to do this work on our own, in other words to be in that world that I'm in without feeling the connection that I need with a movement of other artists and activists.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: David, the story of self-distribution in New York City here was really pretty fascinating... I was wondering if you were able to take that model and use it in other cities, did you travel with your film elsewhere... if you could talk a bit more about your experiences outside the art house market, outside New York.

DR: No, but not because it couldn't be done. It's because I personally couldn't do it. The model was so sound, for example for those six weeks in Queens and in Washington Heights, the film earned a quarter of all the income that it made in a year of playing in sixty cities. And it's clear that if someone had taken the same model... it was really a blueprint going for the schools, opening them up, getting them free, there was a precedent set that Univision would offer free ads, that the same could be repeated in at least eight or ten cities were there's a very large Latin-American population.

But for me it would have been another year. And I've been trying to move on to other work for a long time, and also I knew that the film was going to be release on PBS, and that I would need to devote many months to the PBS release, so I offered to the distributer the model and the blueprint and it never happened. And it's sad it never happened. One of the things we did was set up a 1-800 number, which I learned from Gerry Brown's presidential campaignÉ.

[to be continued]