"It's a long film about a scary subject, but it is NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT."

By Steven Yates

The directors of the much-praised documentary A Lion in the House, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, tell Kamera about the experience of making their film on childhood cancer. We suggest reading first the review (see link on the left) to fully grasp the context.

The Cincinnati Children's Hospital contacted you in 1997 and asked would you make a documentary. Was that right?

Yes, it was to be specific Dr Robert Arceci, head of Pediatrics/oncology He is the doctor in the film who reads The Plague. He then convinced the hospital to allow us to make a completely independent film in their institution—no small bit of trust on their part.

A few years earlier, Dr. Arceci had seen Hoop Dreams, the classic documentary about two young men aspiring to basketball stardom. Much of the power of films like Hoop Dreams comes from documenting a story for years, then compressing the narrative into one movie. Dr. Arceci started thinking someone should take this approach within his world.

Did you then put this to the PBS network?

PBS came into the picture years later. We worked independently for four years before we got connected to ITVS, which is the independent wing of PBS. ITVS gives funds to and helps produce films with independents like us. They were involved in films like The Weather Underground, The Farmer's Wife, and The Education of Shelby Knox.

(It's) never that simple with PBS. It took years before we got the green light. It was ITVS who worked to make it happen.

I read that your own daughter is a survivor of cancer. Did this partly inspire you to make the film for her and for those you saw alongside her who didn't survive?

Yes.

Julia: If I had not had the experience of fighting cancer with my own daughter I would have never thought or felt right about making this film.

Steven: We wouldn't have understood how utterly alive, how vital and urgent, this world of fighting to save kids actually is.

Did you realise then that the Documentary series was going to be such a long process, six years in the making?

Well, actually the film was eight years in the making. But no, heavens no - when we started, we figured we'd film for a year or two, edit for a year or two, and produce a documentary that ran somewhere between an hour to two hours. As we filmed, we realized we were quickly in far deeper than we ever thought, or had ever experienced with our kid's cancer journey. At some point, we crossed a threshold, or fell through the looking glass as it were, and knew this was going to be bigger, harder, scarier and more amazing than we ever could have guessed.

The film itself focuses on five children and teenagers. How many young people were you filming before deciding on the five you chose?

It was an organic process, finding and connecting to these five families. First of all, let's be clear - when you find out your kid has cancer, your first thought is NOT "Hey, let's get this on tape." The prospect of going through the hardest thing your family may ever experience on camera, for the world to see, is not for everyone.

And we didn't want to be any more of a burden on people than we were already, inherently, going to be. So when we got started, we didn't approach families directly. We agreed with the hospital that a hospital staff person would first bring up the subject, like "We're working with these filmmakers to make a documentary. They're looking to meet families who might be interested in being in the film. If this is something you'd like to have a chat with them about, let me know, and I'll arrange a meeting." So it was easy to say no thanks, which many families did.

But there were still a real number of families who said yes, and with whom we talked. In the end we began filming eight families, and even as we had started filming, we gradually kept meeting families. By the end of the first few months or so, though, we had organically shifted to the five families in the film. And we were off and running.

Of the five children you focused on, some died and some survived. The film would have seemed too pessimistic if they all died and too optimistic if none had.

When we started shooting, and began connecting emotionally to these kids and families, we believed they would all survive. That's very naive, but hope is like water - it is never still, it always seeks to flow.

What you're saying here connects to the question of present and past tense. Cancer is a present tense experience. Someone you love gets diagnosed with cancer, and you DON'T KNOW how it's going to turn out. No one knows, not even the best doctors. Millions of people now survive cancer. Survival rates for kids in developed countries like the UK and the USA are now over 75%. But that doesn't mean a thing if you are the mom or dad of a kid who just got the bad news. As Dr. Vinod Balasa, Tim's doctor in the film, told us once: If it's you, the survival is either 100% or 0%.

Even at just under four hours, I felt glued to the screen for every second. Were there tough choices in the TV series and film, where you had to reluctantly leave bits out?

Painfully so. We left out deeply moving, powerful material, and very funny scenes, because of the overall need to tell the best story. Documentary is still a narrative art, even though its building blocks are real people's life experiences. You can't include something in a story unless it contributes to the overall narrative. As one of our consulting editors said, "You must shift your allegiance from the material to the film."

Editing this film took five years, and was about the hardest work we've ever done. Our first rough cut was something like 22 hours long. A year later, the film was 12 hours long. The following year, it was 8 hours long. And so it went. By the time we had the film down to six hours, all the material was top shelf.

How would you describe the experience of being so close to these families for the long periods you spent with them?

We both feel it has been one of the greatest gifts of our lives, to be allowed in, to be trusted, to be taken in by these families. They are amazing people, each in their own way, and the depth to which they allowed us in was a profound act of generosity. After days of filming, we would go home at night and lie in bed and talk about what had happened, and search our own souls for what would we have done, how would we have handled it. That's what's so hard to explain sometimes - is how alive and vital and urgent this world of fighting childhood cancer is. Every hour counts and people in this world - the families thrust into it, the professionals who choose to work in it - they each breathe and walk with a deep sense of purpose.

Were there ever times that the families wouldn't allow you to film?

We had ground rules we laid out before we started filming. One of the most important was that the families could ask us to stop filming at any time, and we wouldn't try to argue with them or talk them into letting us continue filming. They could also ask us to leave at any time. But the families very rarely exercised these options. On occasions, someone would wake up with really bad hair - a bad hair day - and they wouldn't want to be on camera. Or someone was in a particularly cranky mood. But this was very rare. And Alex's family - the little girl - they withdrew for a while, after a particularly traumatic few months - but then they came back, they let us back in.

You questions begs another, which is why did the families agree to this in the first place. What they've said, with their modesty and directness is that they hoped it could help. They hoped that by sharing their story, their own family turmoil, in full honestly, that it could help other families. Give voice to what a lot of families go through, which stays behind closed doors. And so often, when a kid gets diagnosed with cancer, it's like a wall goes up between that family and the people around them - friends and neighbours are on the outside of that wall, and they don't get it, they can't truly see the fight and fear suddenly thrown onto this family. We hope this film will take those friends and neighbours through that wall, to the inside.

Did you experience such traumatic moments that you felt that you couldn't film?

Steven: I learned from Julia how to not flinch, how to not put the camera down during even the most intense or traumatic moments. Before this, my own inherent character, which is to be a nice guy, to take care of people around me, would lead me to not want to make people uncomfortable. But Julia helped me understand that our job was to bear witness. And if we flinched in hard moments, we were failing these families, and we were failing the truth we were trying to tell.

That said, there were many moments we were both crying while shooting. There's one particular scene, where a prayer circle occurs around the bed of one young man, Justin, who is going through a terribly scary crisis at the time. We had been filming for eight or nine hours already that day, just non-stop run and gun filming since six am or so, as all hell was breaking loose and the doctors and nurses are struggling with their tools, and his family is struggling with what decisions to make. And when he finally stabilised, his family all gathered around his bed and said a simple prayer. After we filmed that, I put the camera down and went into a corner and just cried and cried. It was just too much.

When did you think it could be turned into a film and be playing at theatres and film festivals, and who suggested this?

Documentaries can and should have the complexity of novels, and the best ones do, and if they reach this level, they are far more satisfying than yet another Hollywood movie with a script written by committee. We always make films for screening in cinemas - we love and believe in the power of sitting in the dark, collectively, sharing a narrative with others, experiencing catharsis with others - this is as old as the Greeks. So from the beginning, really, we intended to make a film which would be a theatrical experience. We just didn't think it would be as epic as it is, or take as long to make.

What has the reception been like at the screenings and festivals so far?

The reception, starting with Sundance in January, has been amazing. We received a few standing ovations at Sundance, which is rare, and the film has won major awards at festivals in the States and Canada since. The reviews have also been utterly great - overwhelmingly positive, which is a huge relief to us, having toiled to tell this story for eight years. Our biggest hurdle is getting people to take a chance on the film - to overcome their expectations or trepidations about the subject matter, or the length. It's a long film about a scary subject, but it is NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT. This film will take a viewer to some places they have never been, and yet it's hard to explain that in words.

As documentary filmmakers, who have you been most influenced by in your careers?

Steven: The documentaries that have left me humbled and in tears at the end are my biggest influence, I'd say. Films like Barbara Kopple's American Dream, or the classic The Times of Harvey Milk, or Eyes on the Prize, the profound series on the US Civil Rights Movement. These films taught me the power and value of documentary.

At college, I saw Night and Fog and learned about the holocaust for the first time. I saw a film about apartheid there too and learned for the first time about that system. I saw Titticut Follies, and was blown away. The first film I saw, even earlier, that really

changed my sense of reality was Edward R Murrow's Harvest of Shame. His work affected me as a teenager. Of course we have made fiction films as well as documentaries, and many fiction films have deeply affected me. One that comes to mind is The Piano, the first major fiction film I ever saw that to me had a truly woman's voice.

You've also both been involved in narrative films in your career as well. How does it compare to documentary for you, including differences between producing and directing?

Narrative films are great fun, because they involve the creation and conjuring of an entire world, and this means the psychoanalysis of your characters, as to what they would do, or wear, or say. But it takes a great deal of hubris, or arrogance even, to make a fiction film, because they are so much more costly and demanding. You had better feel confident that the story you want to tell is worthy of so much damn money. Documentaries have a level of intimacy which can be thrilling and scary, that fiction films mostly do not.

Julia: I love making both. But in recent years I have come to feel that documentaries can be more important, can go further. I'd say my heart is there, now.

Can you imagine undertaking a similar project like this again for TV or film?

We need to rest up first. And the future is unwritten, as Joe Strummer was fond of quoting.