Jonathan Karsh made a beautiful, draining documentary about Susan Tom and her family of 13 children, most of whom are disabled or ill children she has adopted. Senior editor Roxanne Bogucka got to speak to Karsh after the only screening of his film at South by Southwest.

Roxanne Bogucka: … I’m with Jonathan Karsh, first-time director—?

Jonanthan Karsh: Yes.

RB: —of the movie My Flesh And Blood. Welcome to Austin and South by Southwest.

JK: Thank you.

RB: How did you identify the Tom family? How did you find them?

JK: I found the Tom family when I was working for a television show in San Francisco. It was a quick, two-, three-minute story that we did about the Tom family, and I wanted to follow up and make a longer documentary. So I asked Susan, she said, “You’ve got one year to do it,” Susan Tom, who is the subject of the film. And she said, “Get it done in a year and we’ll see what happens.” And that was the film.

RB: How did you… first, you’d been working in TV, but how did you get the gig of getting to make a movie? I understand your producer to say it was budgeted for under $300,000. That’s kind of a pressure-filled gig for a first-time filmmaker. How’d you get into that?

JK: Well, the producer of the movie is an old friend of mine, so we had a relationship before making the film that made it easy to jump into something together. And she put a lot of trust in me, and I wanted to do a good job because of her faith in me. So I put all my energy into making sure I pulled it off.

RB: Now talking about trust, how did you gain the trust of the Tom family? There’s 13 kids in this family, plus the mother. So I understand you went on a road trip with them. Could you talk a little about gaining the trust of the family?

JK: Yeah. The movie began with a road trip across the country. That’s what I thought would be the subject of the film. And while we were shooting I got to be kind of a very close friend of Susan Tom and an older brother to the kids. And it gave Susan an opportunity to get to know me as a person and to realize that I wasn’t trying to make an exploitative film about this family. I was trying to make strong, human drama. And once she understood that, she put a whole lot of trust in me. And now we’re great friends. Susan and I are buddies, and we talk all the time. We see each other all the time, and it made it easy because we had a really close friendship. And I don’t know how people make films about people they don’t know well. That must be a real challenge to do it. For me it wasn’t a challenge. It was actually a pleasure to spend this much time with someone I really liked.

RB: With this sort of film you had to be a fly on the wall. How much time did you spend in the household each day, and over what time period?

JK: We shot over the course of one year. We shot inconsistently, day-to-day. We never went more than a week without shooting, but some days it was a 20-hour shoot and some days it was a 5-hour shoot. And some things we were shooting specifically because we knew something might happen, and some days we were just shooting to get coverage of the house, and then something did happen. So it wasn’t ever routine. It was really an inconsistent year of shooting here and there, and some times more than others.

RB: How do you deal emotionally when you’re making a film with something like… I think I just find it hard that, you can see the shit’s going to hit the fan today. Things have been building to a head, and you really want to get it, you know? And then at the same time, there are these people whom you’ve come to care for now. How do you do your job with that sort of stress, I guess is what I’m asking?

JK: I think you stay as objective and as detached as you can. You try not to interfere. You try to just be there for what can potentially happen, and then you hope something interesting unfolds. And as long as you stay out of the way… you know, you figure out a documentary in the edit room. You don’t really figure it out while you’re shooting. So we just shot and shot and shot and shot and shot, making sure we were in the right place, but beyond that we weren’t analyzing too much of how not to interfere and how not to shoot too much or too little but just get as much as you can and then figure it all out once you’re back putting it together.

RB: So when you were editing, were there any stories or any moments that you wish you had been able to incorporate but that you had to leave behind?

JK: No actually. All the stuff that I wanted to put in the movie is in the movie. There wasn’t anything left out that didn’t make the film. Everything that is worth seeing is in the film. Other than other great things that the kids say. You know, their interviews were hours and hours long, and they had a lot of zingers. One of the girls without legs said, “I just don’t want legs. I don’t want a sprained ankle.” And Faith, who’s the burned girl, was full of funny, really precocious comments that we couldn’t use in the movie. So a lot of interview, but outside of that, you’re seeing all the good stuff.

RB: What will happen with My Flesh And Blood? I understand it was at Sundance.

JK: Yeah.

RB: And where’s it going now?

JK: Well it was at Sundance and it won two awards there and now it’s going around to festivals and it was bought by HBO so it’ll be on HBO or Cinemax some time in the next year.

RB: And will there be any update? Will you be revisiting the Toms so that you can keep current when it does hit HBO?

JK: Yeah. That’s up to HBO. I think if they’re interested in that kind of programming, if they want to do something outside of the film itself—the film is 84 minutes—and if they want to round it out and make it 90 minutes long and do 6 minutes of an update, that’d be great. But I haven’t heard that suggestion yet. So I might offer that, but no plans yet.

RB: What sort of project would you like to work on next? Or are you already involved in something?

JK: I’m starting to work on another project and it’s totally different than this. I think the next thing I want to do is, is… anything that’s different than this. And try to make films that are so different from each other that it’s difficult to distinguish a style, you know. I don’t want to get pigeonholed into just doing family movies or just doing disability films. To try to do a whole myriad of films, so actually whatever’s next is going to be anything not like this movie. Only for my own, just my own sanity.

RB: Fair enough. Thank you very much.

JK: You’re welcome.