Kirsten Johnson’s most recent film “Cameraperson” premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Her short “The Above” premiered at the 2015 New York Film Festival and was nominated for the IDA’s Best Short Award for 2016. Her camerawork appears in Academy Award winner “Citizen Four,” Academy-nominated “The Invisible War,” and Cannes winner “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
“Dick Johnson Is Dead” will premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on January 25.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
KJ: The film is my best attempt to keep my father from dying.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
KJ: I wanted to make something funny! And we had already lived through to the end of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, and I, for one, literally could not bear to experience this stretch of life with my father without imploring cinema to help us find a new way through.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
KJ: This film is evidence of how desperately I don’t want my dad to die. My greatest wish is that it opens the space for anyone who watches it to think about our shared territory of what it means to love and to question how in the world we can face dying.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
KJ: Staying true to the original premise of the film — that making the movie would teach us how to make it — and that along the way, I would do everything within my power to not betray my father nor filmmaking nor audiences.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
KJ: I was completely ready to make this film with no funding, because I needed to make it, and I wanted to spend as much time with my dad as possible. But I got a cold call from producer Priya Swaminathen, who had seen “Cameraperson” and wanted to talk to me about it. I was stupefied by how deeply she understood our film. She asked me what I was doing next. I told her I wanted to make a irreverent film with my dad in which he would die so that he might live. She said that she thought Annapurna Pictures and Megan Ellison might be interested in helping us get started.
Years before, I had a fabulous conversation with Lisa Nishimura, vice president of independent film and documentary features at Netflix, without realizing who she was or who she worked for. Remembering that first interaction with her, I felt like she might be interested in the project. We pitched the film once to her when it was just an idea and we hadn’t shot anything, and she said come back. Priya and producer Chelsea Barnard found the way to help us film the funeral. And then once we’d filmed the funeral, we went back with the footage and pitched the project again to Lisa and Jason Spingarn-Koff at Netflix.
We had a great conversation with the two of them in which I asked both of them to imagine their own deaths. And then they said yes to making the movie. It is the first time in my 30-plus year career that I have ever had all of the money for a project upfront. It has been and still is a total joy.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
KJ: Wishing to become a filmmaker happened in many steps for me, but all of them had happened by the time I was 19. To make a long story short, the reasons I wanted to become a filmmaker were because I thought racism was outrageous, and I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t gone from the planet a long time ago. When I saw a handful of films from West Africa — among them Ousmane Sembene’s “Xala” and Djibril Diop Mambety’s “Touki Bouki” — I discovered the representations of a world I hadn’t seen before, a world where the American racism I was so distressed by did not dominate all.
They were films in which the whole language of cinema was so different from what I knew that I suddenly understood that making movies might be a way for me to ask the questions I had about what the world is and might be.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
KJ: Best advice: Drink water.
Worst advice: You should pretend to know what you are doing.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
KJ: You must hold two completely different realities in your mind at the same time. One is that you can make the films you wish to make and you must aspire to the most ambitious and meaningful work possible, and the other is that you are part of an ecosystem that has its own history, its patterns, its biases, its financial imperatives, and its tendencies to support what is known — and that you are the unknown.
Always seek to recognize the craft and commitment of everyone you work with — because who they are and how much it demands of them to collaborate with you is unknown to you. Believe in the unknown at the same time you search to understand why the unknown is the source of such insecurity and fear in so many of us.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
KJ: “Beau Travail” by Claire Denis. I have watched this film more times that I can count, and it always fills me with questions, wonder, and pleasure.
W&H: What differences have you noticed in the industry since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?
KJ: I have noticed great differences in myself in the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp. I find myself revisiting how I think about the past, and I ask questions more carefully now. I even reconsidered why “Beau Travail” is my favorite woman-directed film, given that it’s a film mostly about men — but it’s still my favorite. I think more actively about what assumptions I am making, who I am hiring, which movies I go see, and what I talk to my children about. I have realized that I believed too many things in the film industry were as they had to be, and that I placed more onus on myself than I should have for why certain things did or didn’t happen in my filmmaking life.
It’s helpful to recognize that we have all been struggling within systems that are full of discrimination and unspoken violences, with some of us benefiting unfairly, and others paying the terrible price for it. Recognition of this cannot completely transform the present, but it certainly helps. The acts necessary to transform our landscape still elude most of us, and it’s clear we have to act collectively as well as individually. We are still in a place where we ask female directors these questions, and a female director like me wonders whether directors who are male are being asked the same questions.
But thank goodness something broke the dam one more time. We must speak. These transgressions and silences and this shame will kill us all. We all have so much work to do to address the violence within each of us as we search for ways to make this a world in which all humans can be respected — body and soul.
