When Passion Meets Reality: A Q&A with Marshall Curry

Marshall Curry started his career as a writer and director of documentaries auspiciously, when his debut film, Street Fight (2005), which followed Cory Booker’s first bid for mayor of Newark, was nominated for an Academy Award. Since then he has made three other feature length pictures: Racing Dreams (2009), the Oscar-nominated If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011), and his latest, Point and Shoot, which is currently showing theatrically in limited release in New York City and select other cities across the country. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Point and Shoot chronicles the story of Matt VanDyke, a 26-year-old American who while exploring the Middle East on a motorcycle joins the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya during the Arab Spring.

City & State Editor Morgan Pehme asked Curry what impact he is aiming to achieve with his films, what surprises he has experienced in making them, and whether he thinks Cory Booker has changed since the days Curry followed him on the campaign trail.

The following is an edited transcript.

City & State: You have picked rather disparate subjects for your movies. Is there a through line or a unifying theme in your films?
Marshall Curry: Only in retrospect have I figured one out or thought of one. I think I am interested in people who have strong passions, and I’m particularly interested in the moment when their passion slams into reality. With Cory Booker, he was this young idealist who discovered how politics was really fought in Newark. Racing Dreams is about kids who dream of becoming NASCAR drivers but discover how hard that can be. With A Tree Falls, you’ve got a guy who is passionate about environmentalism and discovers what happens when you cross lines. And with Point and Shoot, you have somebody who has a lot of strong passions and then bangs into reality.

C&S: I presume that your goal with your films is both to entertain and inform, but are you also aiming to have any tangible real world effects with them?
MC: I always want them to have an effect, but it’s not necessarily an effect like a campaign film might have. I’m not trying to pass bill X-Y-Z or overturn a Supreme Court decision. I love films that do that, but that’s not what I do with mine. What I’m interested in is exploring complicated issues and complicated people, and I think there’s a real world value to that. I think elevating conversations and giving people insights into characters and situations that they don’t know about has a real world impact, but it’s not the same as a more polemical film might make. I try to make films that feel more like novels than editorials.

C&S: I’ve read you express disdain for the “he said/she said” approach to journalism. Do you feel that the nuance and complexity in human nature that you are trying to evince is something that is missing from journalism today?
MC: It’s funny. I feel two opposite ways about it at the same time. On one hand, I do feel frustrated with reporters just transcribing talking points from opposite sides into an article or into a movie or into a news story. That to me is them not doing their job. But I’m also frustrated when I see news that has no regard for exploring complexity and is basically an extension of a political campaign. Fox News is an extension of the Republican Party. I don’t consider it to be real journalism. And in some ways, you might say that I’m making two arguments at the same time: One is that I don’t want to have both sides, and the other is that I don’t want to have just one side. What I actually would like is to have intellectually honest journalism that acknowledges complexity but also holds people to the facts, and doesn’t edit things out of context or force a particular point of view. I feel like the media should be like a referee. A good referee doesn’t call the same number of fouls on both sides. A good referee calls fouls when there are fouls. In an attempt to be “fair” we give up accuracy, which I think should be the primary goal of journalism—and documentary, too.

C&S: Clearly, Cory Booker has come a long way since Street Fight. You saw him at a fledgling point in his career when he was a sort of paragon of idealism. What are your thoughts on where he is now and his current approach to politics?
MC: In some ways he’s a different person than he was during that time. He was very politically green; he was figuring out how politics worked. But in many ways I think he is still the same person. I disagree with him about policy decisions that he has made from time to time and things that he has said from time to time, just as I do with everybody in government. There’s nobody who I agree with 100 percent of the time. But by and large I feel like he is the same essentially idealistic person who he was when I was filming him.

C&S: When you spend so much time with a documentary subject—oftentimes years—is it possible not to develop some sort of affection for and intimacy with your subject?
MC: I hope that I have intimacy with the subject. That’s part of the goal of making a film: to understand someone in an intimate way. One of the things I love about making documentary films is that it gives you a license to approach strangers and ask them intimate questions and follow them in intimate moments. As somebody who is just a curious person, I love the way it allows you to explore and probe people whom otherwise you wouldn’t be able to. As for affection, it depends. I certainly like some of the people who I have followed much more than I like others. It’s not a given that everyone who is the subject of your documentary will become the object of your affection. In most cases I make films about people whom I find interesting and compelling, and have some sort of a positive feeling about them. That’s what makes me interested in them in the first place.

C&S: Obviously, you have no sense how real life is going to unfold when you embark upon a film. Have you found yourself surprised at how your stories play out when you’re chronicling them?
MC: They’re always surprising, but when I go into a project I usually do have a sense of what’s going to happen. With Street Fight one of the reasons that I made it is because an election has a built-in narrative arc. You know at the beginning of the film that two people declare that they’re going to run, over the course of the film some things are going to happen, there’s going to be a debate, there’s going to be assorted moments of conflict, and at the end somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose. And while I would never have imagined when I started that film that my camera would get broken by a Newark police officer, I did have a sense that there would be a dramatic and fascinating story that would tell us something about democracy and inner city life. So I always try to predict, as much as I can, what might happen before I make a film. Part of what makes me decide that this is worth spending a year or two years on, or raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for, is my instinct about what might happen. And then usually 30 percent of the things that I imagined happen, and 70 percent of the film is a surprise.