From Hollywood Hedonist to Activist in Aotearoa: Part II

A conversation between our editor and TOM BURSTYN – PART 2

"Cloud South Films is the midlife lovechild of NZ-based, Emmy-nominated, multi-award winning Canadian cinematographer Tom Burstyn and New Zealand journalist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. They describe themselves as escapees from the fantasy world of feature film-making and corporate media." (From www.cloudsouth.co.nz)

So you had to get out of Hollywood, and you obviously had the link with New Zealand, but what was it that made you decide to come and live here, as opposed to going back to Canada?

I did return to Canada right after my divorce, and – I have an old Airstream trailer. After I lost everything to the ex, there was just enough left over for a little trailer! I lived in that for a few years, and then I got a job that brought me to New Zealand again, and that’s when I met Barbara. We fell in love; and Barbara moved to Canada and we spent a few years there, took care of my parents. Then when they passed away, we thought, Why don’t we try New Zealand?

How long ago was that?

Seven years ago. So I made the rounds here. As I said, my social skills aren’t the best – so I half-heartedly went around with my resume and my demo reel, and nobody really took much notice. But I didn’t push very hard, and it was always easier for me to take a gig back in the States or in Canada, go away for three or four months, then come back.

** That’s why I love watching bad movies,**

** they’re the only ones I learn from.**

Then Barbara and I just decided to start making films, and it was a really liberating experience. It calmed me down a lot in my day job too. I told one of the producers that I’d worked for since the 80s, done very many movies with him – “You know, I’ve finally got an understanding of what it’s like to be responsible for the money. Even though we make these pip-squeak little movies, I have a greater respect for your issues now.” I stopped busting his balls about absolutely having to have that lens with that camera, or whatever it was, and I became sympathetic towards his monetary issues. But it also calmed me down; I get now that in the Hollywood way of making films or television, the producer is the guy who runs the show – in television certainly; and in feature films or in independent features, my experience is that, unless the director is an incredibly strong-willed guy, the producer gets to pull the strings.

So, you are in service of a budget and you agree to that, that’s the contract you sign. You sign your deal for the weekly fee and the per diems and the rental car and the hotel room, and you agree to give your service as a cinematographer. But you also agree to complete the work in a 12-hour day, or however long the day is gonna be, and you agree to hold firm to the budget that they have and that’s part of the deal. So art comes after you’ve accomplished those tasks, once you’ve become a time-and-motion expert; and once you’ve put that issue to bed, then you can be the artist.

A couple of films ago I got on the plane having signed a deal to make this 30 million dollar film, and by the time I arrived in Vancouver a day later the budget had changed and become 8 million dollars! They lost one of their big funders, and then with that funder leaving another couple of little guys left, and they ended up with only 25% of their money. That poor guy – I looked at him; he wasn’t a smoker and now he’s chain-smoking cigarettes and pulling his hair and eating obsessively, he’s completely freaked out. He made a Deal with the Devil to do all the stunts that were outlined in that script, to do all the pyrotechnics and special effects and green screens; he had to come up with that, he had to fulfill that deal. Those guys, they’re mean bastards, they’re not going to back off: “Okay, can you do half the special effects; we understand” – No, they don’t do that! Your fortunes go their way, so you have to be… Or you leave,

I once met Haskell Wexler. He’s a great hero of mine, and I think he’s one of the world’s greatest cinematographers. I got a call from him, saying a camera operator I used to work with was working with him; that’s how we connected. He said, “I understand you’ve shot a lot of Fuji film; we’re gonna do a film on Fuji and I would like to talk to you about the emulsion and how it works”; and I said, “Wow, sure, I’d love to talk to you” – and then I said, “But here’s the catch – I’ll answer all your questions if you’ll answer one of mine.” He agreed.

So art comes after you’ve accomplished those tasks, once you’ve become a time-and-motion expert; and once you’ve put that issue to bed, then you can be the artist.

We met, had lunch, talked about his film, and at the end I said, “Here’s my question. I have seen every film you’ve ever made at least once, and I can’t understand how you manage to pick them – how do you know it’s going to be a great film before you start? I mean, a great script can be spoiled by a bad director. What do you do, where do you get that nose for the stuff?” He told me his big secret. Are you ready? You must have done the same thing, right, Tony, you never know – you’ve signed the deal, everybody’s nice in pre-production or in the interview, and then they turn – it’s Jekyll and Hyde! Haskell told me, “Oh, it’s pretty simple. I was privileged to come from a wealthy family. I sign on a job. If I go down the road and I see in pre-production that things aren’t going well, I quit.” Of course – why didn’t I think of that? There’s the privilege, of course… I mean, there’s no question about his talent, but his self-respect! There are other great cameramen who go off and do shitty films; and you look at their films and you go, Wow, beautiful camera work, what a lousy movie! But I don’t think you can name a Haskell Wexler film that is actually a bad film.

You mentioned having to sell yourself – that’s the one aspect of being a freelancer that I admit I too find hard. Motivating myself to sell myself feels somewhat hypocritical! I prefer to just say, Look at who I am, talk to the people I’ve worked with; hire me on that basis – and sometimes, if you’re lucky, that works. But if you’ve been away for a while, they forget you…

Talk about talking yourself out of a job! I was recommended to a big movie star who was making his directorial debut, his first feature, and I met him. You get the pass to go into Paramount and you drive onto the lot – and there is a cachet to that Hollywood thing, it’s a huge powerful cultural icon – and you meet this guy… We had our little meeting, then we went for a walk. We’re walking around the studios and he’s telling me, “I want every shot in this film to move, I want to shoot the whole film on a crane, I never want the camera to stop”; and I’d read the script, so I open my big mouth and I suggest that maybe the camera would move a lot better – the influence of the move might be better felt – if there were some still scenes, so that you could juxtapose the movement against the stillness; and that if the camera moved all the time you might get used to it. So, that was the end of the job, Bye, see ya later! Today, being a little more mercenary and a little more savvy in those ways, I would say ‘Great idea’, then I would let the producer or the production manager talk him out of the expense, let somebody else crash and burn! There was no way that budget would have supported a crane every day, but I wasn’t thinking – I was being the artist, right?

_And you were also, dare I say, acting with integrity towards the script. _

I find a lot of those people don’t even read the script! I mean, they don’t read it until they get right into pre-production, then there’s no time because they’re casting and they’re location surveying, they haven’t really focused on... So you know, it’s nice being your own boss, making your own mistakes, and there are many mistakes to be made! So we just start at the beginning, start making them.

_Do you learn more from mistakes than from when things go well? _Oh, yeah. That’s why I love watching bad movies, they’re the only ones I learn from. I think also you learn from where something almost works but doesn’t quite, and trying to figure out just what went wrong. That’s the hardest, trying to figure out why it failed, when the integrity is there but the technique has failed.

I understand there are family reasons for why you’re based in Hawke’s Bay, rather than one of the so-called film centres of the country?

But isn’t Hawke’s Bay the film centre of New Zealand? My wife Barbara’s parents live here and that was the draw to settle here. I like the living – it’s very pleasant living in a small town. You do miss some of the big city amenities, but I make myself comfortable wherever I am. L.A. wasn’t comfortable, it’s one of the few places I couldn’t settle.

I watched your doco One Man, One Cow, One Planet this morning. I was intrigued, Peter Proctor seems... uniquely individual. Although Rudolf Steiner is mentioned in the film, and clearly Peter follows the philosophy of Anthroposophy, I wondered how much Peter himself is simply into what works with the soil, and biodynamics happens to be it; or whether he’s deeper into the philosophy of Anthroposophy – and which came first? But I also wondered whether you folks were influenced by all that in choosing to make this film, or whether you discovered something about biodynamics and Anthroposophy through meeting Peter and making the film?

Well, our daughter goes to a Steiner school, and in fact, how we came to meet Peter was through the school. It’s a great school; I wish I’d gone to a school like that.

Peter has a profound understanding of Anthroposophy, and specifically about biodynamic farming obviously; but he doesn’t proselytize and he wasn’t terribly eager to spread the philosophical word, as much as he was eager to spread the agricultural word. Part of our film-making philosophy is to serve the subject and/or the person we’re telling the story about, as much as anything else; so we took our cue from Peter. As you noticed, he mentioned Steiner a few times in the story, but I think more importantly, he acted like an Anthroposophist.

I think the idea is that you notice something if you’re the audience; you hear the word ‘Steiner’, and you see something, you see biodynamics… The film is a stepping stone to further research, it’s an introduction to something. So hopefully, anybody who is curious will look a little deeper, and take it as far as they’re interested. I don’t think any film of 60 minutes in length, or even 2 hours, can do any subject justice. So you open the door, you open a window to the topic, and then let it go.

Thinking about the contrast between One Planet and This Way of Life… The former has a very particular political-social message; and yes, the other one does too, but in a much more oblique way. One Planet starts out with a very direct, strong statement of “This is what’s wrong and this is what’s right”, as opposed to the other film, which gently finds its way into where it’s going. The reason I’m curious about this is that when I watch a good documentary, I often feel that the only people who actually are interested in watching the doco are people who are in a sense the “already converted”

Preaching to the choir.

Exactly! I wonder whether your philosophy of filmmaking is evolving perhaps; is there a pattern emerging in terms of how you choose your subjects, for example – Obviously, you still want to change the world, (as I do!), but have you been thinking much about how your films might do that, and how to get something through to the unconverted?

Well, I hope This Way of Life is a more subtle film than One Man, One Cow! We cut our teeth on that film – it was done as more of an instructional film, and it’s a more concrete subject as well. So it has a clearer stance, while This Way of Life is more posing a question than giving a directive.

I mean that’s the way I like to do it – I don’t want to ram anything down anybody’s throat; I want people to be able to push against it and debate.

But This Way of Life also has a bigger subject, in that it’s about a life and a family, it’s an utterly universal subject; whereas I think One Man, One Cow was preaching to the choir – nobody who isn’t interested in organics or a related topic would ever pick that film off the shelf in a video store. It’s certainly targeted to a very specific audience.

This Way of Life I actually made for one guy – a friend of mine from LA, whom I knew from my very first year there. He was a sarcastic, outspoken, left-leaning, full-of-hopes-and-dreams film technician, who today has become very ill. He takes Prozac; he’s been taking it for about ten years now, if not more; and he takes a sleeping pill every night. And I’m convinced that his course of drugs, over that length of time, has rendered him stupid – he’s become a very thick guy! And that thickness has contributed to a change of politics for him as well – he’s become a right-wing guy, he’s acquired the attitude of ‘Fuck them, I’ve got enough problems just looking out for Number One’. He’s become the guy that brings Dunkin’ Donuts home to the kids as a breakfast before one of them has to go off to Weight Watchers.

That’s how tunnel-visioned and closed-minded he’s become – unconscious; and I’ve found that I need some kind of… I need a muse to work towards, so he became my muse. This guy who was so full of dreams, with such a sharp mind and such a creative spirit; now he’s been completely beat up by Hollywood. So I’m sending this film to him, so that he will hopefully wake up, scratch his head and go, “Hey, what the fuck happened?”

That was one of the images I used in my approach; I’d set up a shot and I’d think, ‘Well, do I include that?’ I’d think about how I was doing that shot, and I’d wonder, What would Tom think? Yeah, his name is Tom too – How would he react to that?

I take a lot of my lessons from Hollywood. I have to say it gave me a great education, I did my ‘post-grad degree’ in filmmaking about people skills; whereas the technical stuff – I always relied on getting my technical education from my camera assistant, my operator, the equipment house, a magazine. You look, you see – Oh, there’s a new toy, is it useful or not? Can we afford it or not? It’s a tool, and if it interests you, you can learn how to use it, or if the old hammer was just as good then you keep using the old hammer.

But the people skills are the big deal for me, learning how to seduce the people around you. If you have a great idea as a technician, as a cameraman, it’s one thing having the idea; but it’s another thing selling that idea, convincing the director it’s the way to go, that he really needs that shot or that piece of equipment or that look, whatever it is you’re selling to make a story tell better.

Your partnership with Barbara in making the films – she comes from a journalistic background, so obviously the writing aspect was important there. But it’s tempting to observe that you come across as quite different personalities, certainly on first meeting – and yet it’s obviously a connection that works really well for you both.

Yeah, I think what makes both our film partnership and our marriage so strong is exactly that we’re opposites in very many ways. I mean, our political points of view are the same, but our take on things is very different, especially in the process of filmmaking. Barbara is first and foremost content and structure, and I am first and foremost seduction. I think I know how to take a story point that Barbara makes and put it across, but about balance and structure, the overview – that’s more Barbara’s department. We have endless arguments over pacing, inclusion or not of this or that… It’s because we’ve come from such opposite ends of the process that we have to convince each other that this shot stays, or that scene goes, or whatever the thing is; and I think it works very much in our favor. I defer to her in those departments, and she to me in the visual.

I want to tell a documentary in a dramatic way; Barbara agrees with me on this too. You have your facts – but just look at any politician, facts can be made to say one thing or another, depending on what your self-interest is. As Barbara likes to say, the truth is highly overrated!

I want to tell a story that creates a mood and generates an emotion in somebody; and I want to tell that story in the way I learned to tell dramatic stories with the camera. I don’t want the camera to be objective; I don’t think the camera is capable of being objective. I think if you try to make a camera objective, you’re a bigger liar than I am by making the camera completely subjective. I know how to make you look like a villain or a hero, that’s my craft.

It goes back to that proverb, that simply by the act of pointing a camera you affect what’s happening in front of the camera; as soon as there’s a consciousness of the camera’s presence then people, even very subtly, alter their behavior – and their thinking modifies a little too, doesn’t it?

A little, or a lot. Given that any form of media, from a newspaper article to a feature-length documentary, is a distortion of reality, then I think it’s up to us to accept that fact, and to distort reality with respect and honor. Mind you, Leni Riefenstahl was also a great distorter of fact; she did it extremely well!

Indeed, Tom, she made some extraordinary films. But hopefully what comes out of this chat will be a distortion with integrity too!

Thank you.

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl was an extraordinarily talented and innovative filmmaker who shot propaganda films for the Nazis, the most famous ones being her documentary of the Nuremberg rally of 1934, Triumph of the Will, and her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, titled Olympia.

The famous footage of wins by black American Jesse Owens and NZ’s Jack Lovelock in the 1500m is hers. The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will “sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century."

She was a favorite of Adolf Hitler’s, though reputedly he spurned her romantic advances. But after World War 2 she spent the rest of her life denying and avoiding her past, partly by making films and still photography in Africa. At the age of 72, she began pursuing underwater photography, and on her 100th birthday she released a documentary called Underwater Impressions – she was the oldest scuba diver in the world at the time.

At the age of 101, she married her cameraman and lover of 40 years, Horst Kettner, who was coincidentally 40 years her junior. She died shortly after.

(The entry on Riefenstahl in Wikipedia makes a good read. Ed.)

“This Way of Life won its way into the top 10 films of the Vancouver International Film Festival out of a field of over 300 films. The Canadian premiere of this gem from New Zealand averaged an amazing 4.73 out of 5 in extensive public voting.”

**Alan Franey, Festival Director, **

Vancouver International Film Festival.

“Okay, there are many special films at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. But this one I’ve seen firsthand and the story and the characters in the documentary, This Way of Life are very special indeed. … This film is truly an inspiration on many levels. It provides a real life example of one way to live respectfully off of the land. It shows the violence that many have to endure in the civilized world. And it portrays the loving kindness that all of us could choose to live with our own families, if we work hard and smart enough…”

Dave Olsen, Reel Life, Real Ideas

Bill Gosden on This Way of Life, still playing at Film Festivals around the country, and selling out:

“As charismatic a subject as any filmmaker could ask for, Peter makes ends meet as a horse-whisperer, builder and hunter. Seeing the children riding bareback through the East Coast dunes or astride a horse moving up a river with their father is like glimpsing the infancy of the classical gods. (Yes, Tom Burstyn’s cinematography is that remarkable.) …This year’s out-of-the-blue discovery.”

The DVD of One Man, One Cow, One Planet is available through Tom & Barbara’s Cloud South Films website, and This Way of Life will be released on DVD next year.

Other planned projects are also illustrated on the website – which is one of the better film company websites around, for sure. (Ed.)