The Times of Harvey Milk's Rob Epstein on Docs, Reality TV, and Keeping Harvey Alive on Film

Obviously, Milk has helped to make a new generation aware of Harvey, and it's brought renewed attention to your film. But for me, watching Sean Penn in that role is like watching someone play a movie star in a biopic, where you have such a vivid sense of the real person on film that you never completely buy the performance.

Well, all I can say is that one of the reasons that The Times of Harvey Milk has proved to be an evergreen is because Harvey lives in that movie. And that's one of the things I'm most proud of, is that that's where he continues to live.

I didn't notice it until you mentioned it in the commentary, but there's less of Harvey in the movie than I remember there being. It's really about the people around him.

Remember, he was only in office for 10 months; he didn't have much time to really establish himself as a public figure. There was not a lot of material on Harvey, so we probably used every frame we could find.

On the DVD, you talk about giving the Milk production permission to use your footage of the candlelight vigil. Were you involved in any other way?

I wasn't formally asked to be involved; Gus asked me to read the screenplay, which I did, and to see a cut, which I did. But other than that, I wasn't formally involved.

Do you think there are other films you've made that might loan themselves to a non-fiction version? Paragraph 175 leaps to mind as something that could co-exist as a narrative.

It could, but I don't think they'll be lining up at the box office for that one. [Laughs.]

Well yeah, but I'm sure Milk was a tough pitch, too.

And it took a long time to get made.

There's a brief discussion of Randy Shilts' book The Mayor of Castro Street on the DVD. Did it come out while you were still editing, or did both projects hit at the same time?

It was around by the time we were editing, but Randy and I were sort of on parallel tracks in terms of research. I was doing the interviews probably about the same time -- I can't remember which year Randy's book came out -- but the film was really independent of the book. The book is great, but we did all our own independent research.

Were you decidedly avoiding reading the book before you finished so as not to muddy the waters?

Yeah. The structure is very different.

In the time since the Celluloid Closet movie, how do you think Hollywood has changed?

Oh, I think Hollywood's changed a lot. I think things are much more open there, just in terms of, internally, how Hollywood functions. The mechanics of Hollywood are different now, because people are out in their professional positions, which when The Times of Harvey Milk won the Oscar, that wasn't the case. It was a very brave thing for Academy voters to vote for it at that point. It was a real statement, but I think we're in different territory now. In terms of what comes out of Hollywood as product, television's a lot more advanced with regard to presenting gay characters than the movies are, but that's because television doesn't have to sell tickets, which is what it comes down to.

I loved Howl.

Thank you.

Were you expecting the film to have more of a theatric
al impact?

Yeah. Howl landed about where we expected -- not where we had hoped, but about where we had expected. We knew it was an experimental film. We were really pushing the envelope in terms of form, and that's what we were interested in doing, really sort of transitioning from documentary to scripted narrative and using a lot of documentary techniques with the narrative, and that was in part necessitated by the budget -- we shot the film in 14 days -- and partly because we thought that's what the story loaned itself to. We certainly would have liked for it to have caught fire theatrically, but it got out there, we're pleased that it definitely got out there and got some good reviews.

As a documentary filmmaker, do you see things getting better as far as docs getting distribution and finding audiences? It seems like its become a more viable genre for theatrical distribution over the last decade.

Absolutely. I think distributors are more open, but they're looking for that film that's really somehow breaking the mold in terms of what it's about, and those are the ones that really break through. But it's interesting, I was just looking at the box office receipts for the Oscar[-Nominated] Shorts, that are playing in theaters now, and it's doing really well. It's been in theaters for a couple of weeks and the gross is over $1.2 million for documentary shorts, so that's great.

Do you think that reality TV is warping people's perception of what documentary does?

Yeah, it's a mixed bag. I think reality TV has kind of bastardized the documentary form, but you know, hopefully, things will begin to balance out and audiences will get more discerning about what's really the artful documentary as opposed to the disposable reality television form. I think will balance out in the end -- I'm hoping that's the case.

And what's next for you? Are you going to continue to move towards narrative?

Well, both. We're developing documentary projects, and also we're in pre-production on a [narrative] feature, Lovelace.

About Ada Lovelace?

Linda Lovelace.

Is it the one that -- ?

Not the Lindsay Lohan one.

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