Q&A WITH THE DIRECTORS

Selections from American Cannibal Q&A sessions culled from various film festivals on the 2006 Circuit.

 

Question: How did you begin making American Cannibal?

Perry Grebin:     Documentaries are rewarding to make because the more you get involved, the more choices you have to follow a story.  The most satisfying ones surprise you even as you're shooting them and you wind up with a very different film from the one you expected.  American Cannibal began in 2003 as a small effort to follow a TV pilot from pitch to production.  After two years and over 250 hours of footage the film had ballooned into a much bigger project about the human costs of reality-based entertainment.  

Michael Nigro:                  We started with out with a group of writers slogging through the trenches of entertainment during a time in the industry when all that was being bought was "Reality Programming."  Eventually we focused only on Gil & Dave.  As veterans of the TV business ourselves, we felt it was important to tell their story in context.  So when we interviewed network execs, psychologists and TV critics we asked not only about the origins of reality TV, but the reasons for its popularity and why "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Crappiness" remains television's unofficial slogan.

Q: Does the movie have a message?

PG:       American Cannibal  is about the sacrifices we make when reality is re-packaged and sold to us as entertainment.  Every TV news story, every documentary film, every reality TV show has been edited within an inch of its life, to grab the audience by its eyeballs.  When you produce and direct real life for maximum watch-ability, the result isn't so much fact but non-fiction. As a culture we've become so good at imitating reality that we'll take the fake version over the real one every time.  Lots of people in power would rather deny it, but it's no secret that in the race for popularity, truth comes in second.  We don't mind saying so.  In fact, we tell you right up front: American Cannibal doesn't tell you the whole story, which happened over two years.  What you're seeing is only the most entertaining 90 minutes, the narrative we wanted to tell.

MN:     It is about that, yes, but I have a rather difficult time answering this question because, in a way, that is one of the arch messages of the movie:  think for yourself.  When you surrender the meaning of words like reality, and to a point where it's actually lost substance -- I feel anyway -- that we endanger ourselves to becoming a spoon-fed culture, being told at every juncture what is real, what is truth, what is newsworthy.  Given the frequent public demands for truth-in-media, I'm surprised how much pseudo-reporting we let slide.  We had a number of critics who wrote something akin to: Nigro and Grebin didn't take it far enough, didn't tell us what to think about Reality TV.  I'm sorry.  You want me to tell you what to think?  That's your criticism?  These were clearly fans of the Michael Moore polemics masquerading as documentaries.  

Q: What happened to the girl? 

MN:      The girl on "The Ultimate Ultimate Challenge/Starvation Island" appeared to be badly injured and we looked into that further than is shown in the film.  One of the producers spoke to her not long ago, and apparently she's okay.  

PG:      This question comes up a lot and although the movie is about the human cost of reality-entertainment, it's not about a contestant or her injury and we're not interested in exploiting it.  However her injury does highlight the public frenzy for real-life drama Ð the media love a damsel in distress, and the public seems to want to know about it -- 

MN:      Particularly when she's busty and blonde and white.  Laci Peterson, The Runaway Bride, Natalie Holloway, the Aruba girl, Jessica Lynch.

PG:      If there's more to the story, or even if there isn't, surely several newspapers will find room on their pages to talk about it.  Extra ink if she's dead and/or nude. 

Q:  Is it true you had an impact on the events in the film?

PG:      Of course we had an impact.  It's impossible not to.  Carrying a camera around, you often find yourself the center of the actionÉyou try to be as non-involved as possible of course.  But it's a classic documentary situation, from Nanook of the North to Bowling for Columbine Рevents in the film are set in motion, or change direction, only because you're aiming a camera at it.  It's like walking around with a lit bomb.  People see it and change their behavior.  You're not seeing things as they normally are.  In pitch meetings, for instance, the camera made the writers look important Ð oh look, a camera crew is following them -- and the network execs sat up straight and paid attention.  Nobody came off looking like the archetypal TV executive, taking phone calls or running a treadmill while a pitch was going on.  

MN:      Other documentarians might push this issue under the rug, but we feel it's important to shine a light on it. American Cannibal is a legit documentary about how phony reality can be when shot through a lens.  There are a number of things in the film, that might not have happened if the camera wasn't there.  It's my feeling that Kevin Blatt might never have taken the pitch, or said yes to "American Cannibal" if we hadn't been making a film about it.   Often the reality is set up but the documentary remains real. Hell, look at Supersize Me, a great doc, but would Morgan Spurlock actually have a film if he didn't set up the situation?  The results, however, of what happened were real. We may have taken it to another level, but these are real people doing real things.

Q: What are the two writers, Gil Ripley and Dave Roberts, doing now, and what do they think of the movie?

PG:      Gil Ripley is currently living in New York and working on a comedy-variety show with another writer.  He's been gracious enough to join us at a few film festivals and answer questions, and even attend a some radio interviews.  The movie covers probably some of Gil's lowest career moments but he's taken it all in stride.  We feel like he got the shit end of the stick, but he's managed to use it as manure.  He's very creative.   Dave is living in Los Angeles, writing short films and also acting under a different name.  He was upset with a couple of personal moments we included in the film but says on the whole we treated him fairly.  The latest report is he's begun production on "Virgin Territory" with Kevin Blatt, and several big networks are involved.

Q: What happened to "The Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge?" 

PG:       According to Gil [Ripley], there really wasn't a lot to work with when the show was finished shooting.  It was left to Kevin Blatt to shop around to networks as a 22-minute pilot but so far we've heard nothing about it.  Like a lot of things KB does, his foray into reality TV seemed to us to be driven more by a wish for publicity than an ambition to be a legit producer.  On the other hand, KB is now working with Dave Roberts in L.A. to produce "Virgin Territory."  We expect to hear "great" things on that.

Q: How low will reality TV go?

PG:      TV networks are after ratings, pure and simple.  They'll follow America's moral compass, especially if it's pointing due South. We asked a lot of network execs how the most shamelessly lowbrow shows make it to air, and their answers generally said that the quality of TV finds its own level.  In other words, if the censors okay it, why not show it?  A cannibalism-reality show isn't so hard to believe when you think about a German show called "Sperm Race."  They took actual sperm from male contestants, and raced them under a microscope to inseminate an egg.  The winner was declared Germany's Most Virile Man.  It seems there's hardly an idea so disgusting or invidious that it won't at least go through development.  

Q: Can you explain the movie's title?

MN:      American Cannibal is a metaphor for our voracious appetite for  entertainment made from one another's lives, spiced up and made real tasty before being labelled Òreality.Ò  Mostly you think of it as reality TV, but you see it also as salacious news, memoirs, talk shows.  So much of it is manufactured for the sake of ratings, the facts are very often beside the point.  Authenticity is irrelevant, the goal is entertainment.  The more lurid, the more ratings.  

PG:      TV news cuts down real events down into bite-size pieces, tarts them up with music and graphics and drama, and twist it with an agenda, and we swallow it all whole.  Political ads are a more colorful example, they go right for the gut.  News, too Ð gotta grab you fast and keep you watching. Reality TV takes it farther, re-making reality into a game, and convincing contestants it'll make them famous, maybe.  But those shows are made to get ratings, not mint celebrities.  The desperate hopefuls are just virgins lining up for the volcano, and their desperation makes for great TV.  If a producer's doing a good job, who cares whether it's real Ðit's super dramatic and we won't look away.  In fact, we'll want more.  TV is a monster, and it needs to be fed.