Filmmaker Marshall Curry discusses the making of the film, Point and Shoot.
Marshall Curry: Thanks for having me.
POV: So, how did you come to be making this film? How did you and Matt first meet up?
Marshall Curry: I didn't know anything about the story. I hadn't heard about Matt, but got an email one day, out of the blue, where he introduced himself and explained that he had recently returned from Libya, where he'd been fighting with the rebels and that he had this amazing footage of his experience there. And that there was an amazing backstory to it, which intrigued me. And so he came to New York and met with my wife, who's a producer on the film with me, and told us this story. And it's an incredible story.
POV: So, what was Matt doing before he went on his journey, and what was the impetus for him to head out on this adventure?
Marshall Curry: As he explained it the first time I met him, he said, I was an only child of an only child of an only child, and grew up very coddled in his home where his mother and his grandparents raised him. He also has severe obsessive compulsive disorder. He feels like if sugar touches him, it'll contaminate him. He's afraid of trashcans. And he can't drive a car because he worries that you know if he's going down a road and he hits a bump, he'll start to think that maybe he's hit somebody and 20 miles later he'll turn around and drive back to make sure that he hasn't hit someone. But he realized that he'd never really been anywhere. And he hadn't really done anything significant with his life. And so he said, I decided to go off on a crash course in manhood, which the first time he said it I thought was just a great turn of phrase. And so he bought a motorcycle and he bought a video camera, and he set off for northern Africa and the Middle East.
POV: So, he was intending to make a movie, all along, of some kind?
Marshall Curry: I think it was his goal from the beginning to have this adventure and to capture the adventure, but also to remake himself. It wasn't just to make a movie, but it was through the process of making the movie, he hoped to become a new person, a different person, a tougher and stronger and braver version of himself. And he does that. I mean he puts himself in these extraordinary situations. And starts to create a character who he's playing. And, what he explains is that the real him began to change to become more like the character that he's playing.
POV: What is it about the camera that changes people to try and remake themselves into these different images?
Marshall Curry: Salman Rushdie has a great line where he talks about the way that we use stories to craft our lives, to shape our lives, to give ourselves control over the experiences that happen to us. And I think that today with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and Facebook and Twitter, now we tell those stories digitally, we tell those stories with cameras. And once I started going through the footage I began to see it everywhere. You know there's a shot where, where Matt is filming American soldiers in Afghanistan who are about to kick open a door and they want him to film it in a very particular way, so that they come off looking like military guys in Hollywood films. And you see it in the Libyan rebels as well. They're in the middle of, of an incredibly important task. They're trying to free their country from a dictator, but still they want images, photos, videos that they can post on Facebook and email their girlfriends. And they're influenced by Hollywood films. And want to appear like that.
Marshall Curry: I go on a summer vacation and you know I go to the beach and am I enjoying my vacation or am I looking for photo ops of myself enjoying my vacation that then I can post on Facebook? That challenge of wanting to document things, but also wanting to be fully present in life is not just a question that Matt VanDyke is wrestling with, and not just a question that Libya rebels are wrestling with, it's become a universal. I was at Gettysburg not long ago, the Civil War battlefield. And at the museum there they had these photographs of these teenage soldiers who are getting ready to go and fight, all having their pictures made, you know leaning on their guns or holding their guns, these old you know black and white daguerreotypes. And I remember when I saw them, thinking how amazing it was that even kids in the 1800s wanted to have their pictures taken with guns.
POV: It's an interesting parallel, particularly going all the way back to the Civil War, and probably even before that, of how we want our images –
Marshall Curry: I mean you've got Neanderthal paintings on the wall of guys with spears.
POV: How did you convince someone who obviously in his life needs to have control of his story, as he was trying to do in embarking on this journey, but also control over his environment – how did you convince him that you could have creative control over this piece?
Marshall Curry: You know it didn't require much convincing. The very first time we talked I told him that the only way that I would work on the film is if I had creative control and independence. And at that point he was talking to a number of different directors I think. And, and I told him, if you want to direct it, then you should direct it and I'll be happy to give you advice or give you notes on a cut of your film. But for me to direct it, I need complete independence. And he went away for a number of months and, and I think talked to some other people and thought about it and then came back and said, okay, I'll do that.
POV: Describe the film's structure and the aesthetic choices you had to make along the way, particularly working with someone else's footage for a large part of it.
Marshall Curry: After I first met Matt, after he came to New York and my wife and I met him, I came on the idea of just trying to reproduce that experience. Trying to capture that experience of meeting somebody on a long airplane ride or sitting in a bar and striking up a conversation with the person sitting next to you, where you hear a story, and then you leave that person and you interpret that story or you wrestle with the questions that that story raises on your own. And there were a number of films that had done that in the past. Kid Stays In The Picture and Fog Of War. That's the reason that, that I shot it in his apartment. I mean I wanted it to feel very informal. He's just sitting at his computer in his apartment. A couple of points, we cut to Lauren who's hanging out in the kitchen with you know dishes and mess around. And I wanted the interviews to feel as if you were simply meeting somebody and hearing his story.
POV: The ending of the film, where you ask the question and then cut, actually reminded me a little bit of The Sopranos series ending, where you don't know if Tony dies or not at the end – I thought it was fantastically brave. What was your process of getting to that point, I mean it's a pretty brave decision to ask the question, then end it and leave it open.
Marshall Curry: The movie is not trying to force an interpretation on you, and it's not, you know, it's a movie for people who like to chew their own food. It's not going to, it's not going to chew your food for you. And I wanted people to understand that that was intentional, that that wasn't a mistake. And that by asking the question and cutting before it answers, I wanted to invite people to walk out of the theatre or turn off their TV and argue with each other about how we define manhood, and about war and violence, and how we use cameras to capture our stories and define ourselves.
POV: I'm really curious, you've been out showing this film theatrically and at festivals, so given those ambiguities, what's been the audience reaction to some of them?
Marshall Curry: You know it's interesting, people read the movie very differently, which I find extremely interesting. There are some people who see Matt as a, you know, exemplar of selfless nobility, somebody who went and sacrificed, you know, potentially sacrificed his life, risked his life to get involved in a war against a terrible dictator and to help his friends. And there are some people who see the exact same movie, and see him as somebody who's reckless and, and delusional. And to me that is, that's really interesting as a filmmaker. I know for Matt, it's been frustrating because, you know it's his life, and he's not a character in a movie, he's a real person. And so when he reads, you know, reviews that criticize him or you know people make comments in Q&As, I think that's really frustrating and sort of hurtful to him. But, the movie, the goal of the movie was not to make a take down piece of Matt VanDyke. And it was not to make a hagiography of him where he's, you know, the flawless hero of the movie. It was to explore a human being that is complicated, and made of lots of different, competing impulses, just like all of us are.
POV: This is one of those little technical questions, which comes up for me. So he's in prison for five months. How did he preserve all his footage before that, and get it out, and get a new camera?
Marshall Curry: So when Matt was captured, he obviously lost his camera. The people who captured him took his camera away from him. But fortunately a couple of days before he was captured, he had backed up all of his footage on a hard drive and stashed it in Benghazi. So that's how we have all the footage that led up to the time he was captured. And then after prison he bought a new camera and began shooting again. And so that's how we have everything after. But we did have this period where there's no footage. And one of the questions was, what do we do? How do we show it? And Matt had gone back after the war and found his prison cell, and had filmed and photographed it. So I knew exactly what it looked like. So I worked with a guy named Joe Posner, who had also done some work on If A Tree Falls, and he built a 3-D animation of the prison cell based on the photographs and the footage.
Marshall Curry: I wanted to place the audience inside Matt's head. So all of the footage while he's in prison is from his POV, his point of view. And when he looks down, he sees his feet, and when he puts his hand on the wall, he sees his hand. But we never see him. And that did two things. First it placed an audience inside this cell and in a very small way, tried to help them understand the experience of what it would be like to be in a 7 by 4 foot cell for five and a half months. But also there's a series of auditory hallucinations that Matt has. And the animation at that point becomes very impressionistic and we see these hallucinations through Matt's experience as opposed to viewing them from an outside perspective.