LAFF ‘08 INTERVIEW | “Must Read After My Death” Director Morgan Dews by indieWIRE (June 28, 2008)
A scene from Morgan Dews' "Must Read After My Death." Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Film Festival.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: indieWIRE is profiling the Narrative and Documentary Competition filmmakers who are screening their films at the Los Angeles Film Festival as world premieres.] Screening in the Documentary Competition of the Los Angeles Film Festival, Morgan Dews’ “Must Read After My Death details the lives of Dew’s grandparents, Allis and Charley. From a mass of recorded audio diaries, Dictaphone letters, photographs, and home movies, Dews recalls two independent thinkers raising a family of four in 1960s Connecticut. indieWIRE talked to Dews about the film, and is expectations for LAFF. What initially attracted you to filmmaking? I was living in Spain and read an interview with Almodovar. He said a filmmaker has to be a failed writer, musician, actor, artist and photographer. I had already come to the same conclusion: that if you’re an artist interested in a variety of modes of expression and impatient with having to settle on just one, filmmaking is the place for you. Having done all those things with a modicum of success I felt that the modern space for gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art?) was neither architecture nor opera but filmmaking. I could be wrong. It may be video games.
This film was inspired by a box of audio diaries my grandmother made in the 1960’s while embroiled in psychoanalysis and supported by the family home movies and photographs. This material was so raw and compelling, my only task was not to get in the way of one of the many stories that was in that box.
When I took creative writing courses in college they told you to listen to your character, listen to your character’s story, let them lead the way. So I put on my headphones and listened to what my characters were saying, and tried to help them tell that story. In service to that idea I tried out everything. I made an audio database of all the tapes and records. I selected all the pretty shots from the home movies. I tried out a lot of things and cut a lot of great scenes together. When I had an idea of what the story was really about I started paring away what didn’t illuminate that story and digging for details in sound and image that did. I tried to invent ways to tell this story in my little New York editing cave slash apartment. People would come by and say, “go see this film, go see that film.” I would go say, “Oh my god, people did this ages ago, I didn’t invent this”, or, “Oh no, that’s an awful way to do it.”
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