Confessional Documentary?
I didn’t look at it as confessional. It’s
revealing obviously of family secrets. It’s odd because it’s not a
film I set out to make. It’s a film that came almost accidentally. I
shot a lot of footage with my parents over the years. I’ve done
family history interviews. But it really was for posterity. It was
for my sisters and I to have and our kids in the way anybody does
home movies. But I’m a professional camera person, so my home movies
look a little more like verite than others.
This was all
sitting on the shelf for years and years and it really only started
when I went back right before my father moved…That 2 week period
when the movers were coming, I went back, discovered the diaries and
the weight of our family moving out of that house actually hit me
full force. My father started talking to me for the first time about
my mother and the marriage. It really happened when I sat down
and asked him whether he missed mom and he said, “No.”
That’s when I realized that not only is there a
film here, there’s a big film here. A really universal film about
how we think we know who our parents are, about family secrets,
about things not ever being quite what we think they are…very rich
primal stuff that I didn’t quite have a handle on.
When I set out to make the film it really was to
tell this story of a father and a son. When HBO got involved, I had
a meeting with Sheila [Nevins]. At the end of a long meeting, she
said, “You know, I really think the heart of your film is your
mother’s diaries.”
I wasn’t even sure I was going to go there in the
film at that point because I knew what was in them. I knew what a
Pandora’s Box that was and how frightening that was on a personal
level.
The reason [the film has] had such a powerful
affect on audiences is because I’m such a small part of the story.
They’re not sitting there in judgment of me, they’re coming along on
the ride and thinking “Oh, God, if this were my parents would I do
that? Would I read my mother’s diaries? Do I want to know if my
father ever had an affair?” That’s so universal.
Doug Block (May 4,
2007)
Universality?
No matter what the culture, they still have that
same issue with their parents that same ambivalence about wanting to
know them or not.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Details of the Diaries?
The first years of the diaries were far more
interesting because those were an outgrowth of [my mom’s] therapy
sessions. Her therapist had suggested that she write letters to him
and read them in her sessions. Those diaries really were “Dear Ben”
letters.
Four years later, she went back and retyped the
first years of the diaries because she was thinking of writing a novel about a
brilliant young therapist and his star pupil who were terribly
attracted to each other, but they have this conflict of
patient/therapist. That never happened. But that’s why the diaries
focused on that time period because she was so focused on the
marriage. Because they were typewritten, they were easy to read.
Something about the act of [my mom] typing them made it seem less
invasive than her handwritten ones. But the handwritten ones were
more mundane. They were later; they were about who [my parents] saw
that day; what they ate and what they talked about.
Doug Block (May
4, 2007)
Therapeutic Assist?
[My mom] claims absolutely that [therapy] saved
the marriage. She really was into self actualization. Her whole life
was about trying to come to some sort of understanding of who she
was; what her role in the world was and what kind of meaning there
was in it.
I really have come to respect and admire [my
parents]. Not necessarily for what they did to keep the marriage
together, but who they were as people. I’ve learned a lot about
them.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Capturing Kitty?
I try not to use [filmmaking] as a platform to get
back at anybody. I was really careful with Kitty in the film and how
we portrayed her. We intentionally set her up to be one way and I
love the fact that by the end almost everybody has a certain degree
of sympathy for her. Whatever you feel, she’s certainly not the evil
woman who came in and swooped my father away.
I showed [Kitty and my dad] a very early roughcut.
I told them to “be prepared because you’re not going to come off
well in the first half, but it’s all in the service of people really
liking you and understanding you at the end.”
Doug Block (May 4,
2007)
Feelings about Kitty?
The only gripe we ever had about Kitty was the
unanswered questions about what their relationship had been all
along. Also, because she’s so different than my mother, it’s kind of
shocking to see my father and her as opposed to how he was with my
mother…really night and day…He’s so much more present. Whereas with
my mother, he always kind of retreated. He was quiet. It took some
adjustment. It was so quick. Boom! She was suddenly into our lives
in a major way. She took some getting used to, but we always
appreciated how much she cared for our father.
Doug Block (May 4,
2007)
Lessons from the Film?
I was determined to keep my own feelings out of
the movie. I really want to give people room to come to their own
interpretations of [the film].
It isn’t a message movie, but I do want people to
leave thinking with some curiosity of who [their parents] are. I
think it’s always a healthy thing in terms of your own growth. It’s
always parents that get people stuck in their past. May be you won’t
ever resolve thing with your parents, but there is stuff that you
can do that puts certain issues from your childhood behind you.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Impact of Project on
Family Relationships?
It’s been really healing in the family to have us
represent so many families out there and have so many people really
connect to the story.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Dad Seeing Himself on
Film?
It was very hard for him. One of the things that
came out was he said, “I looked and I didn’t like the guy I saw on
the screen. I vowed to change.”
In some ways, it was therapeutic for him because
he did work through what he didn’t like and he feels like he’s much
more open and expressive.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Finding Father?
My father and I definitely needed to go through
this to get to the point where he could leave and I could feel okay
closing the book on the past. Now we can move on with our lives
feeling a certain amount of peace of mind that we’ve come to some
sort of understanding. We said what we wanted to say to each other.
The message I [imply in the film] is that “I’ve come to recognize
you dad as a person.”
I’ve seen [my dad] a lot and we talk all the time
now on the phone. The big difference is that the quality of the
conversation is so much different. We can really talk about
everything and be so much more expressive. We always get off the
phone going, “I love you”…all that corny sh!t.
Doug Block (May 4,
2007)
More on Natasha?
Natasha actually died in November [2006]. She had
a long fight with cancer and she actually was not doing great when
we filmed her. But she was present for some of the festivals the
first year. I’m really so pleased she got to see how pivotal she was
in the film.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Parental Divorce
Preference?
I certainly wouldn’t have liked it when I was in
the house. It would have been really surprising. [My parents] put up
such a good show of being compatible. I really do think they were
compatible on many levels. They really did spend a lot of time with
each other and did a lot of things together. They were good in that
way. But obviously, deep down they were mismatched. That’s very sad.
It was such a revelation to me to realize that
what I want for my parents and what my parents want for me is just
like what I want for my kid. I just want them to be healthy and
happy. It’s sad to discover that they weren’t. Particularly, my
father because my mother was such a life force that she created a
world for herself where she cold be fulfilled to some degree – may
be not sexually – but in a lot of other ways. My father is the one
who lost out. He spent a lot of time in that basement listening to
music and working on his stuff down there.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
Changing Marital
Expectations?
I don’t think [couples] necessarily go into
marriage differently than they used to. But I think in the old days,
during my parent’s time, there was more pressure to get married. If
my parents had lived with each other for a while before getting
married, they probably wouldn’t have gotten married.
Doug Block (May
4, 2007)
Regrettably Deleted
Footage?
There was a scene that was by far the most
powerful scene in the film that we cut out because it was too much
about my own marriage. It shifted the focus away from my parents to
me. It made it seem like the film was really all about me…that I was
using my parent’s marriage as a way to figure out my own.
Doug Block
(May 4, 2007)
Words to Film By?
My mantra making the film was keep it simple and
stay out of the way, you got too good a story to f*ck up with your
own directorial mishagosh.
The universe conspires sometimes when you’re on
the right path. Wonderful lucky accidents happen and you have to be
open to them.
Doug Block (May 4, 2007)
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