Koch

#koch
PBS Premiere: Sept. 22, 2014Check the broadcast schedule »

Filmmaker Statement

Making a documentary about Ed Koch was an easy call. To this day, I cannot think of a New Yorker as popular or as polarizing. Ed Koch's story is in many ways the story of the city.

I was born in the Bronx in 1958 and my family moved to the suburbs when I was 4. When I returned to the city to attend the Walden School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I was like a freed bird. New York in those days was dangerous, dirty and utterly dysfunctional; it was also magical. For most of Koch's mayoralty (1978-1989), I was either a student or a young reporter, and I would have given a kidney to cover City Hall for one of the city's major newspapers. It was not to be, and on some level this film is my way of making up for the lost opportunity.

Koch proved a perfectly complex character. He was funny and he could be a bully; he was charming and also narcissistic. He had a much-speculated-about private life, and he didn't mind if you asked about it, so long as you didn't mind being told to mind your own business. He was a man surrounded by friends and admirers, and he was a man alone.

Once we started shooting the film, it became clear just how personally compelling Koch — then — still was. He tirelessly hopped from campaign stop to campaign stop, from speaking engagement to speaking engagement. He bared his teeth at anyone who challenged him in a public forum; he still shined brightly when he was the center of attention. And he could not walk down a New York City street without being approached by an admirer.

Shooting the film went relatively smoothly. I had an ace director of photography in Tom Hurwitz, a relentless perfectionist who fearlessly kept his camera as close to Koch as possible, literally and figuratively. Thanks to my journalism background, I was relatively comfortable doing research and conducting interviews. With the exception of one former governor and one former mayor, virtually everyone we reached out to agreed to be interviewed. Koch's family members and friends opened their homes and their photo scrapbooks to us.

Editing the movie was a bit more challenging. Koch is my first film, and while I was fairly confident of the movie I wanted to make, I simply lacked the tools to make it. Thank God for film editors. Juliet Weber spent a month looking at hundreds of hours of footage and gave the film its structure, its pacing and ultimately its poignancy. She demanded a huge amount of creative freedom, and I'm glad I gave it to her.

Documentary subjects, particularly famous ones, can be difficult. In almost every case I am aware of, the main subjects kept certain topics off limits, or burdened the filmmakers with demands that effectively gave them control of the film. From the day his indispensable Chief of Staff Diane Coffey arranged our first meeting, Ed Koch gave me free rein. When I broached the subject of his sexuality over dinner the night before the shoot, he said simply, "Ask me anything." His only condition was that he see a cut of the film so he could suggest changes. When I refused to show him a cut until the very end of the process, Koch was angered, and for a few months we stopped speaking. But once we reconciled and he saw the film, he did not ask for a single change — despite getting roughed up in several scenes.

After a recent screening, a friend asked me just how one does make a movie. As we approached the end of this two-plus-year adventure, I would say that the key to making a good movie is to find a subject you're passionate about, and then go out and hire Jenny Carchman to produce the film for you. The filmmaking process rarely turns out as planned, and ours was no exception. There were delays, there were arguments and there was some staff turnover. Jenny held it all together, and was a true partner in every facet of the film.

From World War II and until only recently, it was almost an article of faith that the United States' big northern cities only deteriorated; they could never get better. Somehow, New York City defied that trend, and it did so I think because it kept itself open — to immigrants, to businesses, to artists and to poets. In my view, the very imperfect Ed Koch intuitively understood what made New York special, and I believe he is as responsible for the New York City of today as anyone alive.

A week before the film opened theatrically, Ed Koch entered the hospital for congestive heart failure. It was his third hospital visit in six months. In our last conversation over the phone, he said, "Don't let all the attention go to your head." On Friday, February 1, 2013, Koch opened in theaters. On that day, Ed Koch passed away at the age of 88.

— Neil Barsky, Director of Koch