Together with veteran documentarist D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim charted the meteoric rise and fall of GovWorks.com and its founders in their film Startup.com. In this exclusive interview with kamera.co.uk they explain their methods and their feelings for the subject.
kamera.co.uk: Firstly, I'm interested to know how many hours of film you amassed and how long was the actual period you filmed over?
Jehane Noujaim: We shot for about a year intensively and then edited over a six month period, going back periodically to keep up to speed with the story. We had about 400 hours of footage.
Chris Hegedus: I've never amassed that much footage before but in a way we had to accumulate so much material because we didn't have any funding for the film, though there were organisations that were interested in it. To try to snare some of these organisations - and I also did this with The War Room and Moon Over Broadway - I made a half hour selling film to show that it was an interesting story with real character development. The fact that the subject was so timely also meant that any potential purchaser (it was Artisan in the U.S) would be able to ride on the coattails of the subject.
k.c.u: There's a painful honesty to the film that shows the personal cost of [GovWorks.com founders] Tom and Kaleil's dedication to the business. The fact is, as the scenes with loved ones reveal, they treat the people that are closest to them quite badly.
CH: When Kaleil watches it now he finds it very painful to see how he treated certain people. Of course he had to be dedicated to the business 24 hrs a day because there was so much riding on it but he was also obviously trying to juggle this with the need to have a personal life and he couldn't really do it. It was the same with Tom and his daughter Tea. He started off by saying that he wasn't going to work weekends but then of course he started having to go in. The business took a toll on their personal lives.
JN: The criticism over the way they handled their private lives and relationships has been the most difficult part for Tom and Kaleil. As filmmakers however, we were privy to the responsibility Tom and Kaleil had to assume with the business. They had people dependent upon them, including family and close friends who had put their lives and careers in their trust so we could understand why they put the business first.
k.c.u: I think the most telling line in the film and in the relationship is when Tom describes Kaleil as Machiavellian and undeniably he is. He seems torn between doing what's right in regard to his friendship and what's right for his business. This must have been tough to witness.
JN: The scene were Tom has his employment contract terminated was devastating to film. After so long of following them around and having to witness multiple boring meetings there is a part of you that thinks well, this is the culmination of an amazing story but on the other hand you want to just put down the camera and try to offer some kind of assistance. At one point, during the meeting where they are breaking up Tom did begin to cry and asked me to switch off the camera. I went outside and then came back in after they had talked privately for a short time. I think this also shows the commitment that the pair showed to the film and to the filming process, they really were in it for the ups and the downs and recognised that much of the most crucial stuff was actually about their relationship. Finding the line between being a good friend and sticking to the business of making an honest and accurate film was a difficult one and in many ways mirrored the story we were telling.
CH: There were also points in the film where we knew information that they didn't know. That was really difficult because we were torn between telling them to save the friendship from becoming something really bitter. This is also difficult from the perspective of watching the film afterwards. I would imagine that Kaleil has real trouble with the scene after he has terminated Tom's contract and then instructs a security guard to on no account let Tom back into the building.
k.c.u: In general, how would you describe the dynamic in the relationship between the two protagonists?
JN: Though many may disagree, I think Kaleil is driven by the desire to succeed though most people feel that he is driven purely by money, a result I think of his background in banking. Kaleil also has very strong spiritual beliefs, which we didn't perhaps capture as well as we should have. Tom was always the technical guy and I think that the money meant less to Tom than the idea of creating something.
k.c.u: At times it reminded me of watching a natural history programme where you will the camera operator to put down the camera and intervene before the gazelle is torn asunder by a lion.
CH: It was certainly at times hard to remain objective, especially once the relationship started separating.
k.c.u: Did the separation in any way affect the dynamic of your working relationship?
CH: No we managed to ensure that we got both sides of the story.
JN: Also, the period where things came to a head was over a really short period of time, a period in fact of about two days.
k.c.u: I was involved myself in a dotcom. The whole thing went exactly the same way as GovWorks. Which made the film seem so relevant.
CH: Well, we always look for documentary subjects that can go in theatres. These have to have a timeliness about them to attract the kind of people that still go to the movies. The War Room was very much like that and was able to have a successful run because of the young people involved in covering the film. The Internet movement was very much about a young energy and a feeling that something new was being created, it was an energy very much like Monterrey Pop in the sixties, an energy, which said, we are going to change the world. I had in fact felt that we had missed this feeling on Startup.Com simply because it was taking us so long to fund it and I was determined not to make another film that I had to fully fund out of my own pocket. For us it ended being a different film because a lot of the entrepreneurs involved in the dotcom revolution at its very inception did go on to become millionaires and enjoy a really hedonistic lifestyle. Our film simply became a different thing because by the time we had got involved the Internet had become a much more serious business.
k.c.u: How did you two initially get together on the film?
JN: Well Kaleil and I were at Harvard together and roomed together for a period after that. The idea originally came from Kaleil who saw it as a piece of publicity for the company he was trying to start. As fortune would have it, David Kemp, who had just signed on as marketing director for the company, told me that he knew Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and asked me if I wanted to meet them. I jumped at the chance. Chris had wanted to make a film about the Internet and was looking for an entrepreneur and fortunately we straightaway hit it off.
CH: I was trying to do this exact story because the Internet was fascinating to me. I met Kaleil when he was just about to leave his job at Goldman Sachs so the timing was perfect because he was about to go to a venture capitalist who I was originally going to film as the subject for the film. The fact that Kaleil was undertaking the venture with his close friend gave the film another dynamic. Jehane being Kaleil's roommate ensured that we would have incredible access that could only benefit the story. It was also important to Pennebaker and I that Jehane demonstrated such a desire to make this kind of film.
k.c.u: The film, sometimes to humorous effect, also perceptively captures the macho, patriarchal business world where everything is imbued with portent, such as Kaleil's "I'm on the frontline of pain" speech.
CH: At times this was very funny to us but it could also be frustrating because that kind of business jargon can be hard to understand and at times we were literally saying, "will you just speak in a language that people will understand." Kaleil especially couched everything in a business speak that was so formal. On the other side you have Tom who loved to use a very technical jargon.
JN: There were some shots were you see the camera slowly moving up to the ceiling because I was nodding off. I can also think of two specific scenes where I just kept repeating to Kaleil "well what does that mean?" until he was forced to explain it in plain English. It also helped that we were somewhat ignorant about a lot of what Kaleil was saying because it would ultimately force him to simplify for us. We were assumed the role of the audience that necessitated having things put as clearly as possible. Of course, sometimes it was easier to just play dumb if you wanted to understand the crux of what he was trying to say.
k.c.u: How do you feel that the documentary format has changed and evolved?
CH: Well, it seems to have always been a more important art form in Europe in the States. I don't think it's ever truly been considered important in America. It's always been a limited audience, even for the work of directors such as Wiseman. My interest in it remains the same: the excitement that I had in the very first films that I saw in the sixties, that feeling of using technology to drop into someone else's world to tell a dramatic story. That remains overpoweringly exciting for me. I think that the technique may have now became a little less trendy and old fashioned but I still think that there's a real power to the medium if you can find a story where you can reveal characters interacting with each other and going through various crises before slowly emerging from these circumstances. The mini-characters have obviously also contributed to the form, they are so small and so relatively inexpensive that they allow you to go places that were previously off limits and to also show two sides of the situation at the same time.
