Recently, I had the pleasure of screening a film at the Tribeca Film Festival called Low and Behold (see review: The Big Un-Easy). The film puts the Hurricane Katrina tragedy squarely in your face—as it should—but it is also a strongly character-driven sojourn through the damaged wards of New Orleans. It pulls us in among the stalwart denizens who keep on living after all that has happened, and somehow never lose their spark. It also follows Turner and Nixon, an unlikely duo. Turner, a novice claims adjuster, tries to interact with these residents who have waited far too long for too little help. Nixon and Turner’s growing camaraderie bring warmth, charm, and humor into a dour landscape. It’s a film every American should see, and will feel glad that they did.
Q: When did you get the idea to tell a fictional story set in the aftermath of Katrina, and what influenced you to write a narrative film as opposed to a straight documentary?
A: I recently heard a psychiatrist that lives in New Orleans and specializes in posttraumatic stress syndrome say that he believed the reality of what Katrina has done to the people of New Orleans could only truthfully be told through fiction. This is what Zack Godshall and I felt watching the unbelievable events unfold after Katrina. When you write a script, you are in total control of where the story goes. In a documentary, the subject you are filming is in total control of where the story goes. Zack and I believed that if we could combined both narrative and documentary elements, creating a hybrid film, it would be the most effective way to deal with the specific issues we wanted to wrestle with in a realistic and honest way. I think James Agee provided the perfect definition for our vision when he said, “The films I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but works of pure fiction, played against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.”
Q: Are you finding that the film elicits strong reactions from audiences regarding the disturbingly stark portrayal of post-Katrina New Orleans?
A: From Sundance to every other festival, the audience reaction to Low and Behold has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I think people have responded so strongly to our film because of the wide-ranging emotional ground we cover. With any tragedy on the scale of Katrina, there is not just one emotion, but many. From deep sorrow, to extreme joy and often, profound comedy. Zack and I wanted to capture all these complex emotions in Low and Behold.
CNN did a story on our film that aired nationally just before Sundance. The producer who did the story told me it was only supposed to run one time on a Sunday morning, but the immediate call in and email response was so heavy that they ended up airing the story all day, then the following day, then the next. We did an NPR interview and the same thing happened. Both stations said that if we get distribution they want to do follow up stories. To me that is evidence of the huge national intrigue with what happened after
Katrina.
Q: At the end, Turner sees the truth Nixon has concealed about his life. Was the choice to so abruptly end the film on that contained in the script itself, or did you make that choice during the editing process? Did you at any time consider expanding on the effect of this (and everything he'd been through in New Orleans) on Turner?
A: Zack and I believed the last scene between Nixon and Turner, coupled with the final driving sequence, would be a statement that would not only function within the story we created, but transcend our story into the heart breaking reality of what people in New Orleans were (and still are) living through everyday. If we had followed the final scene with some scene on the back porch where Turner and Nixon share a beer and have some sort of five-minute emotional wrap up, where the audience gets to hear exactly how that event has changed Turner as a person, it would have reeked of falseness. In real life, there [is] no such thing as five-minute emotional wrap up scenes. In that last scene, we didn’t want to do anything that was going to distract from the reality of the world we had invited the audience into. Turner wasn’t from New Orleans; he’s an outsider, just as many of the people who will see this film are outsiders.
