For Epstein, the success of The Times of Harvey Milk would launch one of the great documentary careers in American cinema; his works (most of them co-directed with Jeffrey Friedman) also include the gays-on-film doc The Celluloid Closet, the moving AIDS piece Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and the documentary Paragraph 175, about gay men who survived Nazi concentration camps. In 2010, Epstein and Friedman made their narrative debut with Howl, a fascinating exploration of the landmark poem by Allen Ginsberg, portrayed indelibly in the film by James Franco.
One thing I didn't know until I listened to your commentary was that you were already working on a film about the phenomenon of Harvey Milk before he was assassinated.
We were looking at what was going on in California, the Briggs Initiative campaign -- which was really the first big gay rights battle [had voters approved the initiative, openly gay and lesbian schoolteachers would have lost their jobs] -- and I was interested in telling that story, and through telling that story I saw that Harvey Milk was really the embodiment of everything I was going for in that other story.
Take me back to the day he was shot -- in addition to the shock and tragedy of it, as a filmmaker, how did that affect you in terms of realizing that this was now going to be a big part of the story you were telling?
I think it affected me by just internalizing what that day was like and what happened. I'm getting chills just thinking about it right now. I was in a store buying coffee with a friend who I was working on the project with, a photographer, and I went right to City Hall and experienced that scene that I was later able to render, just that kind of absolute stunned silence outside of City Hall. And then I immediately went to Harry Britt's house, who was Harvey's good friend and became his successor, and a number of us were involved in planning the candlelight march, and I was a participant in that, and right on the front steps, watching Dianne Feinstein in her shining moment that night. So I think it was really having that life-changing experience and knowing that [no coverage of Milk's death] that I had seen up to that point was presented in a way that would have the same kind of emotional value that it had for me.
And that's really what I aimed to do with the movie -- to really have any viewer who might watch the movie understand the significance of Harvey Milk, and why his assassination and Moscone's was such an incredible tragedy and life-changing occurrence.
The film really brings together the idea of "the personal is the political."
Yeah, which is why we chose those eight people who are on camera, because they were able to tell that story very personally, as opposed to people who might have had more of a political connection to the story.
In the commentary, you discuss the drama The Battle of Algiers as a movie that inspired you. And again, it's that mix of the personal and political that makes The Times of Harvey Milk such a standout, even among documentaries about politics and political figures. Were there other non-fiction films that you found inspirational?
There were films that I was inspired by, and others where I learned that I didn't want to go in that direction. Of the former, Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple's film, I saw that and realized how she and those filmmakers took me into a situation that I never otherwise would have known about or even thought about, and made me feel so invested in, the Appalachian coal-miners. And that was an inspiration, to think that that's really what I wanted to do with this provincial story in San Francisco -- that anyone who saw it could come to understand what was at stake.
Another film, Jon Else's The Day After Trinity, was the first film which was about a big piece of history told through the perspective of one character who was pivotal to that history. But also, the craft of the filmmaking in that film -- it was the first time I saw, or was really aware of, how to use music in a documentary. Music was very important to The Times of Harvey Milk, and Jon's film really helped me to understand that.
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.