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.
Q: You and Eddie seemed to have an amazing rapport. How much of the Turner/Nixon dialogue was scripted? Were any scenes improvised? Did you know each other at all before working together here?
A: I knew Eddie through David Gordon Green. I’ve admired Eddie since I saw George Washington and have always wanted to work with him. So when Zack and I sat down to write the script, we had Eddie in mind for Nixon the whole time. Even though Eddie and I were both friends with David, we had never met. I think we talked on the phone once or twice before he got to New Orleans, but neither of us wanted to talk that much before he got here. We wanted to do everything we could to make Turner and Nixon’s relationship as fresh and organic as possible.
Nixon and Turner’s relationship was tightly scripted, but Zack and I were always planning on fleshing out the rest of the film with totally improvised scenes of Turner working with Real People (non- actors) in their own damaged homes. The challenge for Zack and I as writers was to create dialogue that would match up with what we knew we were going to improvise. Anytime you are mixing reality with fiction, you are risking the danger of the scripted material coming off overly stilted.
Q: How did you go about finding the Real People you interviewed for the interstitial footage?
A: We found most of them when Zack and I were driving around New Orleans scouting before the film. We just started making a list of names and numbers of the people we were meeting. We told them what we were doing and asked them if they would be willing to tell us their story, or if they would be willing to let us shoot a scene with them
taking me (Turner) around in their house like they did with the real claim adjuster. We shot all the scripted material in three weeks and then we set up appointments with all the people we had talked to. Zack, Daryn Deluco (Director of Photography) and I shot those scenes over the next two weeks, while we were shooting B-roll. A few of the people who ended up in the film walked up to us while we were filming something else and just started talking, so we turned the camera on them. We filmed everything and anything. We are totally indebted to those people and to everyone involved with this film for making themselves vulnerable enough to tell this story in an honest way. Outside of Eddie, Robert, and Sarah Hendler (our amazing producer), everyone who made this film was from New Orleans.
Q: This film seems to be a very personal statement by you and Zach about the New Orleans devastation. Coming from that region yourself, can you share any thoughts about the situation? Perhaps things that people might not already know through media coverage and/or exploitation of the tragedy?
A: No one has truly seen what happened after Katrina unless they have smelled it or touched it with their own hand. What you hear over and over from people who have come to New Orleans after the storm is, “I had no idea it was this bad.” What people don’t understand is Katrina did not just destroy the 9th Ward; it ravaged all of New Orleans and greater New Orleans. That was something that really bothered Zack and I about the news coverage after the storm—how isolated it was. In Low and Behold we really wanted show all the areas that were hit by the storm, like St. Bernard Perish, Chalmette, New Orleans East. I think people who live outside of Louisiana assume that since the French Quarter is up and running that all of New Orleans must be fine. That is far from the case. New Orleans is years and years away from being fully re-rebuilt. What is so discouraging is the lack of government leadership on the local and state and federal level. It doesn’t feel like anyone is in charge of this situation or, even worse, cares.
That being said, there are some amazing things going on in New Orleans; I think because of the lack of government leadership, people of this city have realized that if something is going to get done, they are going to have to accept responsibility and do it themselves.
You have seen a lot of community initiatives. Neighbors who have lived next door to each other for years but had never met are coming together to help each other.
There is still so much to be done in this city. We need people to move to this city that have a heart for making a difference. If anyone is interested in giving to the relief effort, we have researched charities that we believe are making a difference in this city. You can find those charities on our Web site.
Q: Anything else you'd like to share about the project?
A: We are looking forward to continuing to show Low and Behold to the world. I want to put a plug in for another film I had a staring role in opposite Michael Shannon called Shotgun Stories, directed by Jeff Nichols. It is a beautiful film that just had its U.S. premiere at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and will soon be screening at the Seattle International Film Festival. Also keep an eye out for Craig Zobel’s Great World of Sound, which I also acted in and will be released this fall. And Michael Almereyda’s new film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which I was fortunate to have a lead role in opposite Christopher Eccleston and Elisabeth Moss. I feel extremely fortunate to be in all these films and I want to do everything I can to get the word out.