| Interview: Brett Morgan on Chicago 10 |
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| Tuesday, 26 February 2008 | |
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Morgen is very clear on the fact that his film shouldn’t be considered a historical document so much as a call-to-arms in regards to modern politics. To that end, the film mixes archival footage with motion-capture animation, reenacting the trial from the actual court transcripts. When was the decision made to make the film animated? Morgen: We conceived of the project in 2002, but it took a little while to decide to do it animated. I knew what I didn’t want to do; I didn’t want to do talking head interviews and I didn’t want to pan and scan courtroom drawings. It seems so obvious in retrospect. You know, animate it! I knew I wanted it to be youthful. I don’t why it took a year for me to come it. I was reading a book about the trial and there’s a line from Jerry Rubin where he says, “Our trial is a cartoon show.” It was like a lightbulb went on above my head went “Ding!” So animate it! The movie, I decided at that point, was going to be very Yippie-centric. It felt like a Yippie thing to do, to tell history as a cartoon. Why that particular style? Why motion-capture? Morgen: I didn’t want motion-capture, originally. Originally, I wanted it to be like a Ralph Bashki film and I watched -- well, I call it Coonskin but it’s no longer called Coonskin. It’s called Street Fighting or something – I watched a lot of Bashki’s films. I love the interaction between animation and live-action background plates. I even thought that might save money because we wouldn’t have to animate all these BGs. I actually found Ralph in New Mexico somewhere. I had this image of him like The Tempest on a mountaintop somewhere. I got on the phone with him. He knew all these guys. He grew up in New York at that time. He was like, “Ah! I love it! We gotta make them animals! They gotta be animals, man! The human form looks terrible! We’ll make them animals!” Then I sort of had this epiphany where I realized that I don’t want this to be a 60’s movie and if Ralph does the animation, it’s going to be a 60’s movie. So I said, “I’m going to do my own thing,” and I went off looking for an animation house. I wanted it to be hand-drawn. If you know anything about animation, the big catch-phrase on cell animation is that they draw on the ones or the twos or the threes or the fours or the fives or the sixes. What that ultimately means, drawing on the fives or the sixes means that every five frames, you get one new drawing. Disney would be on the ones and twos. And I wanted it to be on the ones and the twos. I didn’t want it to be like anime or be a representation of what happened in the courtroom. I wanted the audience to just sort of get lost in it. So I hired this company in England called Bermuda and we developed the character design. I went over to see the first test and they were supposed to be drawing on the ones and the twos and they did it on the fives and the sixes. It was a scene of Abbie and the jury in the courtroom. They came in like this (Mocking slow, jerky movement) and I was like, “Whoa.” It was a really awkward scene. I was alone in England with 20 people who had worked on this test. I had to say, “This isn’t going to work. There’s no way.” And then they said, “Well, this is all we could afford to do,” and I said, “Well, this is bullshit. You were commissioned to do it on the ones and twos”. I left England and we had already blown through 15-20 percent of our animation budget at that point. I went back home and circled back to a company called Curious Pictures which was down the street from my office, ironically. I met with them again and they said, “Look, since we first met with you a year ago, we’ve developed a motion-capture studio here at curious. We think we can do this for the budget with motion capture.” All I knew was Polar Express and said, “Really? Don’t we need like $100 million to do that?” and they said, “No, actually you can do it on the cheap now.” I was worried that it would feel too 3-D and synthetic so I asked if there was anything we could do to make it feel less synthetic. I wanted a sort of hand-drawn aesthetic and it turned out that in the render you can determine the percentage of 3-D in the faces. We flattened it out so there’s almost no 3-D. We baked on the shadows so they don’t move like cancer. The backgrounds look very hand-drawn. We wanted sort of rough pencil lines. The thing with motion capture – which I realized through working with cell animation – even if we could find someone to do it for our budget, there would be no room for retakes. And there’s a lot of room for interpretation between me acting out a scene and you drawing a scene. Once I realized there was no money for retakes and knowing that I’m too much of control freak to have to live with something that I don’t think works, I found motion capture which gave me complete control over framing, action. I, myself, put on the mo-cap suit and was literally acting 12-14 characters in the film. I had absolute control over the whole process which was fantastic. It was really amazing. This is another film for you based on real events. What is it that appeals to you about history? Morgen: I don’t know. I’ve always liked history. I’ve always liked stories. What I don’t like about history is facts. I hated being in school and being tested on dates and places and names of leaders. I loved Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I love mythology. I love mythology a lot more than I love history. My movies are mythologies and not histories. They’re ultimately about capturing these experiences. Myth had a huge part in how I was going to approach this subject. Before written language, history was presented in the oral tradition. There were stories that were passed down from generation to generation. Each generation would take a story and add something to it. In time, fact becomes fiction and history becomes mythology and folklore. I wanted to do the myth of Chicago rather than the history. I felt liberated by the facts and presenting this as myth made perfect sense. The film was heavily Yippie-influenced and the Yippies were very inspiried by Marshall McLuhan. They would talk endlessly about mythology and that fact that Yippies were created as myth. There is no center of “Yippie”. It’s whatever you wanted it to be. There was one scene I wanted to use where Abbie talked at great length about myth on the witness stand because it was very much what I was trying to achieve in the film. The movie, as I said, isn’t really about 1968. I wasn’t born in 1968. How can I make a movie about ’68? What I can do is make a movie about the times I’m living in today by using the elements of the media in ’68 that are relevant today. That goes to explain why we used the music we did and why there’s a lack of historical context. Although it would have been really easy to take any historical documentary that was ever made about the ‘60s, close my eyes and say, “Take whatever’s from minute three to three-thirty and cut it in.” If you know the history and you were around at the time, you’re bringing that to the film. And if you don’t, what am I going to do? Trivialize it by showing Bobby Kennedy getting assassinated? It’s a timeless story; There’s a war. There’s opposition to the war. There’s a government trying to silence the opposition. It’s the story of Chicago. It’s the story Tinneman Square. It’s the story of Seattle. It’s all of these things. It’s because it’s not specifically dated in 1968. Did you ever feel that you had to step back from maybe romanticizing it all or did you say, “Screw it. This is my version,”? Morgen: Am I romanticizing it? That’s a good question. I don’t think so. No. It’s hard to say that it’s romanticized when you see the brutality mixed in. But yeah, I was extracting moments that I thought would be inspirational and sculpting characters that I thought would be inspirational. When you shoot a documentary – whether it’s verite or not – you shoot a bunch of footage and you sculpt a perfomance. I did a movie called On the Ropes – and this was a totally verite film – and I could have taken any one of those characters and made them out to be an asshole or painted them to be heroic. That’s what you do as a filmmaker. That’s what they’re called reality fictions. I definitely sculpted a perfomance out of Abbie Hoffman material. Look, I found myself greatly inspired by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. I loved their sense of theater and politics. I wouldn’t say romanticized as much as mythologized. Page 2: Interview with Brett Morgan on Chicago 10     
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