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Photo by Paul Porter/BFAnyc.com
3/6/15: We at Paper
were saddened to hear of the death of pioneering documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles today. In celebration of his life and work, which included the seminal Grey Gardens
, we're re-publishing some of our interviews with Maysles from the archives. The below Q&A was originally published online on January 10th, 2011.
Legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles stopped by the PAPER offices on Friday and was kind of enough to have a chat with PAPERMAG. Maysles, who is kicking around the idea of making short films about some of PAPER editor Kim Hastreiter's friends, has several projects on the horizon. Most of them are still top-secret, but he does have a short film based on a track off
R.E.M.'s new album,
Collapse Into Now, in the works, as well as a movie consisting entirely of children interviewing each other. Below, Maysles talks to us about that project,
Grey Gardens as a gay cult classic and what he wants to work on next.
You have the R.E.M. project and a couple of other big films coming up that are still under wraps. What else have you been working on lately that you can tell us about?I'm making a movie featuring pairs of kids, around age six or so, chatting
with each other. I just sit in on their conversations and see what they
have to say.
What made you want to work with kids?Well,
one moment of inspiration occurred many years ago when my daughter was
four and I took her to pick up the
New York Times one night. We got
to the newsstand and the paper hadn't arrived yet, and she turned to me and
said, "Daddy, the paper's not ready because the people haven't been
killed yet." Kids come up with the most beautiful ideas and can express
them so uniquely.
Why pairs? It's so much better than
putting just a camera on one person as an interview. Because these kids are of
the same age they spark one another. I've already filmed 10 couples
and then I'll probably do another 10.
What do kids tend to want to talk to each other about? They
talk about what they want to be when they grow up. During the election I
filmed a couple of kids -- a girl who was six and a boy
who was four -- and they were talking about voting. The boy turned to the
girl and said, "You know, we could stop war. If only people would vote."
And that will be out next year?Yes. And, going on from there,
we've been talking to Kim [Hastreiter] about maybe doing a series of
half-hour or hour-long portraits of her friends. She knows the most
interesting people.
Is there any of her friends you're specifically interested in?Well,
Marcus
Samulesson. I just had lunch at his new restaurant in Harlem, the Red
Rooster. I think there's a film there. He's so special.
I had lunch at his restaurant today. Here it was snowing fiercely
outside, it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, everyone had
already had their lunch, and yet the place was packed. I got to talk to the
people next to me. It was a table of three, and two of the people were locals
from the neighborhood. Really interesting people. One of them turned out to be from
Venezuela and we talked about Oliver Stone's film about Hugo Chavez,
South of the Border, which I worked on. It was one of those coincidental, exciting events that happen in our lives.
That sounds like a New York moment. Well,
it's interesting you say 'New York moment.' That's another film we're
working on. We're calling it
New York Secrets. It's about all of the
things going on in New York that you don't always know about. There are
so many special things that take place here that are unbeknown to us. Like when they had
all of those pianos installed around the city?
And people could come up and play them? We drove around and filmed
that, because that's something that can only happen in New York.
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What else will New York Secrets feature?
I filmed Ramadan in Brooklyn. We went and filmed this Muslim man who plays drums at four
o'clock in the morning on Ramadan so people will wake up and have
breakfast before the rest of the day, when they're required to fast.
That was beautiful.
Do you have any projects coming out of the Maysles Institute that you're looking forward to?
Well, we're probably going to change the name from Maysles Institute to "Center for Documentary
Filmmaking." We're doing that for two reasons: One, we're the only theater in the city --
we have a 60-seat theater -- that only shows documentaries. And, two,
because we're teaching kids how to make their own films. And it was so
exciting last year, we had a graduating class of a dozen, ages eight to 12.
They did a wonderful job making their own films, and we showed them to a
full-house audience, and then we did a Q&A. One of the people in
the audience asked the kids, 'Are any of you planning to make a career out of
filmmaking,' and all 12 of them raised their hands. It was such an exciting
and wonderful thing for all of us who do this work to see.
When did you know you wanted to start making documentaries?
Well, I was
already a psychologist. I was teaching psychology at Boston University and we
had the summer off and I went to Russia and made my first film in a mental
hospital there. I got so excited about the possibilities of both
passing on the experiences of the people in the film as well as introducing them to a world who would never otherwise get to know anyone
like that. I wanted to enter the lives of people in a very informal but
private fashion. And, through that process, I wanted to humanize these individuals and thereby make the viewer all the more humanized. We need to know one another as we really
are.
Is that your main intention when you make a film? To introduce your audience to people they would otherwise never meet?Yes.
For example, with my kids project, we might know a little of our
grandchildren and their ideas and their ways of expressing things, but to
see a whole film of children beautifully expounding on their experiences?
That's something to remember and to talk about.
With Grey Gardens the outside world already knew the Beales and had an idea of them, but maybe it wasn't one that was positive? Well, as it turned out, the movie was their
dream come true. Through the film, they could engage with the world without leaving their
home. In fact, I believe that dynamic induced a whole viewership of special people. I
think that movie has earned a special gay viewership because these two
women "came out," so to speak. And they did it successfully. They didn't
lose any of their character.
Is there a movie that's still your dream movie to make? That you haven't been able to do for whatever reason? Well,
there's one, but it requires so much travel and is going to be so expensive to make. I call
it
In Transit. I'll get on long-distance trains in China, Australia, Western Europe, South America and Africa, and I'll walk through the train looking for someone who I think
may have a story. Then, when it's time for them to get off the train, I'll get off with them and start filming. I was on a train in Pennsylvania, and this woman got on in Pittsburgh. She had two kids with her
and was 26 and, right away, she had to tell me why she
was on the train. When she was three her family broke up. It
was an ugly divorce and she had never seen her mother again after that. After all of those 23 years, she had just gotten a call from a woman in Philadelphia
saying, "I'm your mother. Get on the next train. Meet me at the train
station." So I filmed her getting off in Philadelphia and, as she was about to go up the stairs
into the station, there was already a woman waiting there at the top of
the stairs. She flung open her arms and rushed down the stairs and
they embraced and talked for a bit. Then the mother turned to me and
said, "Isn't she gorgeous?" It's that sort of stuff, that humanizing
stuff, that I think is so worthwhile and so satisfying as a filmmaker.
Are there any differences you come across when you're filming people outside of the U.S.?It's
the same thing. People are people. We all share common ground, and I
don't know of anything more important than that. I couldn't see people
going to war, then, if they knew even one or two families in Iraq. They
would say, "Oh no, we can't put them in danger."
Have you seen any documentaries recently that you really loved?
I saw a film,
In Search of Pitt Street, just the other day that my son showed me. It's made by Nina
Rosenblum. It's a film about her father, Walter, who is a
photographer, and his life and work. It illustrated the point that the more personal a film is,
the more powerful it becomes. It was all behind-the-scenes footage and she obviously has a great
deal of love for her father, and her father is clearly someone who is a loving
person himself. You can't help but love the film and the people in
it. To me, that word -- "love" -- is the love of my life. That word, wherever it exists, I think we should get to know it.
Photo by Paul Porter/BFAnyc.com
Claudia Comte. Photo by Gunnar Meier
(Photo courtesy of Isaac Mizrahi; graphic by Avinash Hirdaramani)
Coolest Mean-Teens in Paris: Kanye and Lorde! If this isn't "let's go smoke cigarettes in the parking lot of Dennys and pretend we like Echo and the Bunnymen" then we don't know what is. P.S. We see 
Best Way to Pay Your Brooklyn Rent: By 
Biggest Haters: The pop-allergic art critics destroying the new Bjork retrospective at MoMA. -- E.T.
Best Movie Promo of the Week: 
Best Way to Express Your Inner Drake: This new app. Called 
Most Persistent Nipple-Free-er: Chelsea Handler, who took to twitter topless yet again to show everyone she hasn't had work done. That's fine! Thank you. -- E.T.
All rise for his eminence and grace, King I Hate This. [
Your 2015 Horoscope. [
So that's how she does it. [
Just want to be best friends with this cat. [
For as long as I can remember, I've been gripped by two seemingly contradictory obsessions: the struggle for social justice and, snuggling right next to this noble belief, a fierce desire to possess the most beautiful material things that money -- usually a lot of money! -- can buy. In both arenas I am a woman of extremes: I like my politics tough and my sables soft. I really, truly believe that cruelty-free diamonds are a girl's best friend. 
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Still from Bight of the Twin.
