A Child - A Shot - A "Family Affair"

CF: You named the film “Family Affair”. Could you briefly state what the movie is about?

CDC: When I was about nine years old, I discovered one of my father’s firearms, a rifle, and I used to watch Chuck Connors in the Western series “The Rifleman”. So while my sisters were busy cleaning and doing whatever, I went down to the family room, watching TV, the “Rifleman”. So one day I must have found not only my father’s rifle but the bullets too, and I would put the bullets in. I went upstairs in the kitchen, where my sister was washing dishes and I remember pointing the gun at her head and remembered thinking: “Rifleman wouldn’t do that”. So I actually pointed at her leg, thinking: “Rifleman only shoots people in the leg”. Because people would get shot in the leg and they put a band aid on and they would get back on their horse and then they were fine. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, as they say, but the gun went off and it hit her right in the leg. Then I remember the fire coming out of the barrel and the smoke and the sound. And then it seemed from that point on, my life as a child stopped.

My sister obviously was taken to the hospital and unlike in the movies, where people get shot in the leg and get back on the horse and go on with life -- they thought that she might not make it, she lost a lot of blood and so she thought that she might die. And it was there, believing that she was going to die that she had revealed to my mother and then later to the police that our father had been sexually molesting her and my other two sisters for years. And so my father went to prison for less then a year. Our family fell apart. We went in separate directions. I never really understood the full magnitude of what my father had done until years later and then stopped having a relationship with him, but my sisters have maintained a relationship with him all the while after he was released from prison.

CF: Even after that?

CDC: Oh, yes. And once I understood what he did I couldn’t understand why they would have a relationship with this man. I had not seen my dad for 15 years, until one day my sisters invited me for Thanksgiving and I found out just moments before that my dad was going to be there.

CF: In which year did you receive the Thanksgiving invitation?

CDC: This was in 2001. I always imagined that I would confront him, burn a cross in his yard and everyone would get behind me and we would beat him up (laughs).
And then he walks in the door and everybody runs up to him, hugging and smiling and laughing… But this was absurd, and you know – I felt that I was the outsider. And at the same moment, I also realized that I was afraid of him, that I feared him. Even though he was overweight, and had suffered several heart attacks, and I knew he couldn’t physically hurt me, l still was looking at him through the eyes of a terrified child. So basically, I hid behind this little camcorder, this little camera that I had and I felt like a coward.
I got back to Boston, where I live and I remembered saying to somebody, that if I thought I was going to make a film or a documentary or start something like that, I’m a complete failure because I didn’t confront him. And somebody said to me “I think that is your film. Your film is about: Why is everybody running up to him, accommodating this man? Why were you afraid? Why were you hiding behind the camera? Why is everyone treating him like nothing happened?” So for me that became what the film is about.

CF: Isn’t the title of the film too harmless?

CDC: I don’t think it is harmless at all. On the surface it seems like its harmless…

CF: In the first moment it seems like that, however there has to be a second reason why you chose it…

CDC: “Family Affair” occurred to me right away. It is a play on the sitcom from the late 1960s. “Family Affair” was about a wholesome family, where Uncle Bill raised Jody and Buffy, the kids. They have a butler and they live in a nice penthouse apartment in New York. And everything is very kosher.
I wanted to do a play on the title because, on the surface to an outsider, if you didn’t know this history, it would seem like “Family Affair” - in the best sense of the term – is about a happy, harmonious, perfectly, sort of well adjusted family, sticking together, but once you dig beneath the surface, then the term ‘affair’ becomes something rather seductive and insidious, like cheating on your partner. I thought it brought double meaning to the title and I wanted to play on that.

The title was right there and interesting, no one has ever asked me that questions!