Three years ago, I got an email out of the blue from a young guy named Matt VanDyke. He introduced himself, said he had seen my films, and told me he had recently returned from Libya where he had been helping rebels overthrow dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He said he had over 100 hours of footage from the experience and thought it would make a great documentary.
I was intrigued, but explained that I only worked on projects where I had complete creative independence and control, and he said he understood. A few weeks later he came to New York and spent an afternoon telling his story to my producing partner, Elizabeth Martin (who is also my wife), and me.
Matt was a fascinating person, provocative and hard to pin down. His story was rich with questions about how we become adults, about adventure and idealism, and about the nature of war in the "age of the selfie." After he left, my wife and I argued for hours about his story and the issues it had raised.
Generating those kinds of discussions is the reason I make documentaries. So we thought, "Let's make a film that replicates the experience we just had, where the audience sits down with a stranger and hears an amazing, controversial story — and then walks out of the theater to grapple with it."
When I was younger I used to love hitchhiking because it brought me in touch with people whom I would otherwise never meet — people whose lives and world-views were completely different from mine. I loved asking questions and digging for the stories that made them who they were. And I always found myself stretched by the experience — a tiny bit wiser about the complexity of human experience.
We knew that different people would interpret their 85-minute "car ride" with Matt VanDyke differently. Was he Lawrence of Arabia? Don Quixote? Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild? Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War? Or some combination who had changed and morphed over the course of his life?
The film would raise questions through the telling of the story, but it wouldn't answer those questions for the audience. It wasn't going to be a 60 Minutes-style investigative report where I tried to win arguments with my interview subject. And it wasn't going to be a Hollywood movie, sewn up neatly at the end. In the spirit of The Kid Stays in the Picture or The Fog of War, I would let the subject of the film offer his uniquely subjective take on his story, and invite the audience to wrestle with it on their own. This was going to be a film for people who liked to chew their own food.
So I took a cameraman to Baltimore and over the course of a few months, recorded 20-something hours of interviews with Matt.
As a filmmaker, one of the things that struck me about Matt's story was the role that cameras played, not simply in documenting his life, but in shaping it.
Salman Rushdie has said that telling stories about our lives gives us control over them — how people see us and how we see ourselves. Today, more and more, we tell these stories with cell phone cameras, Facebook and Twitter, and often the images that we create affect who we actually become.
When Matt begins his journey — his "crash course in manhood" — he tries to project a braver, more confident version of himself for the camera, even taking on a tougher sounding name, "Max Hunter." But what begins as simply "image making" turns into reality, and Matt explains that he actually started to become the character he was playing on film. The filming somehow made it real.
We see American soldiers in Iraq performing for his camera during a raid, self-consciously trying to come-off as their idealized image of soldiers. And we see Libyan soldiers doing the same. Even as they engage in dangerous high-minded acts of self-sacrifice, they want to have footage of themselves looking like the Hollywood action heroes they grew up watching. And at the end of the war, some rebels even pause as they kill a captured Gaddafi to shoot gruesome selfies of themselves at the scene.
As I edited the hundreds of hours of footage, I began to notice the power of homemade images in almost every scene, from the Australian adventure footage that inspired Matt's initial journey, to the Arab Spring activists whose cell phones didn't just document their revolutions, but drove them. Matt even uses his camera to help control his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: putting a frame around an experience somehow turns it into something he can control. And toward the end, Matt explains that even though he had been a part of the Libyan rebellion for months, it was seeing himself on national television that truly validated his role as a rebel fighter. Television made it real.
To me, this movie is a provocative adventure story that flashes light on questions that interest me. How should we achieve "manhood," and how we should even define the term? Where should we place ourselves on the spectrum between a fearful life trapped in a cubicle and ill-considered recklessness?
What is the difference between bravery and thoughtlessness? And what is the complex mixture of selflessness and narcissism that drives us? What is the power of friendship, and what are the dangers of wading into foreign wars?
How does creating and maintaining our online personas affect who we really are? And how is modern war changed by a world in which anyone can be a filmmaker, and anyone can be a movie star?
This has been a deeply engaging film to make. And my favorite part of each screening has been to sit back when the movie is over and just listen to people argue about the questions it raises.
— Marshall Curry, Director/Producer/Editor