Senior editor Roxanne Bogucka got to sit down with Laura Poitras and Linda Goode-Bryant, creators of the award-winning documentary Flag Wars, which chronicles four years in the lives of the old residents of a black, working-class neighborhood and the white, gay couple who begin buying and renovating homes in the community.

Roxanne Bogucka: … I’m with Laura Poitras and Linda Goode-Bryant, who are the co-directors of Flag Wars. Welcome and thank you very much. Could you please, either of you, explain co-directing in terms of what that meant in day-to-day work?

Laura Poitras: Actually Linda and I are co-producers. Linda’s the director. Linda’s the director, I’m the co-director, so we have different credits but we were co-producers and we worked on it four years. In day-to-day work, on this kind of a film which took us four years to make, it means we do everything. And it means that, luckily, we have complementary skills. So. We lived together on location. We were crew, we were producers, Linda was the director, I was the co-director. Anyway it means that we do a lot of things jointly and luckily we have the skills that sort of rounded things out.

RB: Well what sort of complementary skills? I mean downstairs I heard you for example say that Laura was very organized. Did you know that you had complementary skills before you started working on this project, or was it a serendipitous thing?

Linda Goode-Bryant: A little bit of both. I mean we knew each other as filmmakers. And we had done some short things together before. So yeah. We knew we had complementary skills but that knowledge increased, and the number of skills that were complementary. We became more and more aware of. They grew as we were on location. And sometimes it was just… in some situations it was good for Laura to kind of deal with what was going on in that situation and for me to kind of take a back step, step back. And in other situations, it was the reverse.

RB: What would be an example of a situation like that?

LGB: Let’s take Linda’s house. Linda did not let anybody in her house until the very end. Until that fourth year of our filming. She allowed us to go downstairs. I mean that she would allow us to go downstairs in the basement because Baba was fixing her plumbing and she would allow us to shoot down there. But it was a dark environment. But we never got upstairs. And for some reason, Linda related to Laura in a way that said it was okay for Laura to go upstairs. So that was a situation where Laura did that shoot by herself. And went upstairs. That’s the footage that you see near the end of the film, with Linda walking through the house.

RB: You have a lot of public things where you shoot. You shoot at a, what would you call, a housing court proceedings. You shoot in an operating room, or an exploration room. How did you, how difficult was it to get all of these permissions?

LP: It was amazing. People were amazingly open in the city of Columbus. And a lot of it was done on the fly. For instance the operating, I think the request went in 24 hours before the surgery. And they said yes. Judge Pfeiffer, who—in any courtroom you need the judge’s permission and approval, and he gave it to us at the beginning of the project. In terms of the neighborhood meetings, we told the neighborhood what we were doing, what the piece was about, and that we’d like to film and they welcomed us. So I think, and we got the police department to take us up in the helicopter so we got the nice aerial footage in the beginning. I think we had a certain, I think we approached people that we were hardworking, honest, and that we were telling this from many different perspectives. And I think once you get permission from one city agency it helps to get, you can use that to get permission from the next and so it builds on that. And I think in openness, I mean I think one of the beautiful things about the film is, it’s both the people’s honesty. You know really unveiled honesty. And then also the city’s honesty. And I think you wouldn’t find that in New York, which is where we both live. I mean it would be, to get access to courtrooms or surgeries would be much, much harder, because I think people are more guarded. And so that’s something that comes through, the sort of openness and honesty in the film comes through, with the characters and also with our ability to get permission.

RB: Could you amplify on what you discussed before the film, about your philosophy of doing this verité film and not using stock documentary devices?

LGB: One of the things we really felt that the story had the potential to do was to implicate the viewer. And so we kind of started there. How… what approach could we take to telling this story that is best going to accomplish that desire that we have, which was to have everyone who sees it feel implicated in it. And standard documentary devices don’t really do that, in my opinion. I mean, it’s very easy when you’ve got people identified as scholars, with lower thirds identifying what their scholarship is and their credits and et cetera, to say, “Okay, that’s a scholar that’s telling me this.” Or it ‘s very easy to just kind of distance yourself with those devices—title cards, talking heads, interviews. It’s not so easy to distance yourself when someone is in the moment, in a very human moment that they’re dealing with. And so we decided at that point, it was definitely going to be a cinema verité. But then it became, okay, let it be cinema verité, but what can we borrow from fiction filmmaking that enhances the sense of the drama that’s unfolding. In a fiction way as opposed to non-fiction way. So we looked to, both in the shooting and the editing, to try to make the story seamless in the way it unfolds very much like a fiction film.

LP: And it’s multi-character. I think the narrative of the movie weaves together a lot of different character stories and a lot of verité is usually one character, one place or institution. And we obviously couldn’t do that so we needed to be… we needed to use more craft than just be able to plant our camera, in terms of weaving things, so in the editing I think the narrative, the use of how to tell that many parallel stories at once lent itself to that.

RB: And there were several stories. There was one story that confused me a little bit, and that was the story of the preacher. And I can’t remember his name right now, the preacher who went before a, he was about to be arrested or had been arrested or something. Why was that story included?

LGB: Actually Chuck Spengola, we actually got to know Chuck Spengola and spent about nine months with he and his family in the Christian right. And had hoped to be able to interweave him as a main character in the film. What happened however, was, after six months of trying we just couldn’t do it. Because he and his family and the group, they were forming like a little cadre of Christian right people, in an area outside Columbus—

RB: What? Like a militia?

LGB: They’re not militia. They’re not militia. But they are a group that share a certain belief and certain views and they go out into the street. I mean that’s what they do. Chuck Spengola every day is a street minister. That’s what he does. To preach what he believes, which is his interpretation of the Bible. Which is against homosexuality and against abortion. At the same time, when we realized that he was not going to be able to be a main character in the film, we felt that it was important for him to still stay in the film to provide a broader context for the two groups that are coexisting in the neighborhood known as Old Towne. Meaning the larger societal context in which they live, and are oppressed in. The oppressors of them in the society. That’s not to say that the Christian right is the only oppressor of gays, nor the Ku Klux Klan is the only oppressor of blacks. But what was interesting in Columbus, Ohio, is that you have these two groups, actively in public protest and we thought it was important to capture that. To provide a larger societal context.

LP: And he inserted himself into our story. I mean we were going to, we followed the community, we followed the gay community during Gay Pride, and we were following them. And then he and his group protested and then he climbed the flagpole at the Statehouse because they hung a rainbow flag at the Statehouse, and he took it down. And in our piece we were dealing with the flag, with the flags in the neighborhood and so in a sense he inserted himself in the story, providing a broader context for whatever values of life in middle America. So we thought that was important to not just have the microcosm of the neighborhood, but to sort of zoom out a little bit.

LGB: And his tearing down the flag was so directly connected to what the story was about, the flags of Flag Wars.

RB: Okay. And if you would just tell me when the community members will get to see it and when the general public will get to see Flag Wars.

LP: The community is getting a small screening next week, the 15th, and then in Columbus we’re doing a large, two screenings on the 21st and 22nd of March. And then it will air on P.O.V. [on PBS] on June 17th at 10 p.m. and it will be the lead-off show for the season for 2003.

RB: And what is your next project that you’d like to do?

LGB: I’m currently in pre-production on a project, a work entitled The Vote. And basically it’ll be a cinema verité piece that follows very much the style of Flag Wars. That follows the passions and the politics that erupt during the 2004 primary presidential campaigns in order to discover why Americans don’t vote.

LP: Nothing that I prefer to talk about, so…

RB: And what’s the big thing that you learned on this four-year production? I’m sure there’s more than you can have fingers and toes for, but… one biggie?

LP: Trust your story. Trust your characters. And keep working them.

LGB: I’d have to say that I discovered, I discovered more tolerance for myself. I think I’ve grown more tolerant as a result of this film. And also less judgmental. The people in this community really opened me up to just how complex each and every one of us are. So that’s the big thing.

LP: And hopefully viewers will also become less judgmental. We hope that, by showing people that whatever people’s aspirations or dreams… we all can relate to.

RB: Thank you both.

LP: Thank you.

LGB: Thank you.