A Child - A Shot - A "Family Affair"

CF: To which extent and how did your feelings towards your father, mother and maybe even sisters change during the shooting (filming)?

CDC: The change for me was my understanding of my sister’s relationship with our father. I realized that what they were creating is something very basic, very universal... something that we all ‘desire’ and that I had given up on, they continued to pursue. Everyone wants a loving mother and a loving father. Everybody wants a warm place to go for these special occasions, for holidays and for special events. Nobody wants a child to grow up to have to go school and to get the shit kicked out of them because they have to admit that their father or their grandfather is a child’s molester and that’s why they have no place to go for Thanksgiving. And so they fought really hard to give their children something they’d never had. They fought really hard not to have to constantly explain to people why they don’t have a relationship to their father. And so that was a real learning experience for me. I really understood that. For me I gave up all hope of a better past. I didn’t feel the need to reconstruct a better past with my father. I see him for what he is, but I don’t feel the desire, the need to have this superficial relationship with my father so that the rest of the world can treat me the way they should treat me. Instead I decided to make a very public film, to expose him for what he is and to say to the world that I should not be held hostage to the sins of my father. I should not have to pay for what he did. I refused to. Here you go world, here is what he did. I’m not that person. I’m the apple that fell very far away from the tree.

My mother wanted to have a relationship with me. I didn’t expect her to open the door after 18 years. I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would explain why she had left. But I thought she had made a very convincing argument for why she left and as an adult, I got it. So, she wanted to have a relationship with me but not my sisters. But for me that was not really an option. I wasn’t going to betray my sisters.

CF: Let’s elaborate a bit on your mother. As I watched the film, I already noticed in the first scene, with which joy she had opened the door for you, she seemed so free and uninhibited, and especially willing to give you information. She spoke over her story, her background and at that moment I realized that the film was interweaving three storylines and topics. The first thread is apartheid; the second is about violence and lastly the cultural differences. Your mother comes from Germany and your father was an African-American soldier. How do see these issues in reference to each other?

CDC: I think all of these issues are intimately connected to one another. And I tried to address this in the film. I think that my mother was as much a victim as my sisters. Here is this very young vulnerable foreign German woman who meets this Afro American military guy who grew up in the segregated south of Georgia in America. He comes to Germany and he promises her all of these dreams of going to America, he used to buy her these little 45 Elvis recordings. “This is what I can offer you: America!” He gives her these stuffed animals. He gives her his GI check and tells her to go to the stores and buy whatever she wants. And attempts to try and convince her that they can overcome the obstacles of apartheid, of segregation and racism, that banned interracial marriages in the United States. So they got married in 1959, the ban against interracial marriage criminalizing interracial marriages didn’t happen until 1967, the year I was born. And the attitudes were still there after 1967.
So he takes her from her environment in Germany. He places her into an environment that is radically hostile towards their relationship. He in fact keeps her hostage on this little island. That’s what he does. She can’t go back home, she can’t run to the police, she can’t go to the community in the neighborhood. She is trapped. So at this point my father could do whatever he wants to do with her. And he always has the threat: “I can keep your kids. I'll have you deported. You can’t go to the police” because they’d call her: "A nigger lover” and tell her that she deserves whatever punishment my father would hand out. "This is what you get for marrying this black guy" the police would say whenever she'd call them.

CF: Evidently, and this you had already said at the beginning of the interview, you were not allowed to speak German at home. It sounds to me as though fear of a different culture was predominant. Specific conflicts had already existed at the beginning of the relationship, which had been inevitable and insoluble…

CDC: There was this conflict. But here is the “masterful art” of a pedophile. These men, who do these things, with this particular pathology – and looking back we can say, it appears that there was a conflict from the very beginning. And my mother is the first to say. The first time he raised his hand to her, she should have been out of there. But it’s not that clear cut.
So he didn't just say: “I am removing you from your heritage, you can’t speak German” because I’m insecure about it, because I want to strip you of your identity. Nobody would say that. And anyone who did say that to someone would be like “you’re crazy, I’m out of here, bye…”.

Instead he used the political climate at that time, which was the cold war, which was this military environment, which called for all foreigners to assimilate. Wanting to become American is to speak English only.
To speak another language was at that time to be anti American, un-patriotic. That was what he used!

CF: Sometimes in your film you change the narrative and formal perspective. On the one hand you’re the one behind the camera, who is seemingly neutral, yet on the other hand you’re in front of the camera and actually involved in the scene. Was that always intended?

CDC: Extremely, very deliberate. When you say that, I see my wall with all the color coded index cards. The different colors were assigned to one of the subjects in the film - myself, my sister, my parents, or to a topic… The color code, for me, was visual, because, if I saw too much purple and not enough yellow, or blue, then I knew that I needed to see a more even balance of color to help with pacing and to ensure that I wasn't spending too much or too little time on one person or subject. I needed to have the same amount of treatment of yellow and purple, as blue. This is mostly how my editor and I worked.

Initially, I didn’t have myself in the film at all. It was just going to be a tribute to my sisters. It was all about them. Period! And I got a lot of push back on that and I resisted inserting myself in the film for years. Every time I would go through and log and digitize the footage… and every time my voice even came on, that was my out point. That was my queue for where to cut. And at first I cut ALL of me out of the film. But then, four or five years into the project, I had to go through all the footage and find my voice and find a way to work it in again. I cut some major scenes of me in the film because I didn’t feel comfortable with the way it compared me to my sisters. It showed me teaching at the university, a world somewhat removed from my sisters' daily lives. It just seemed like a distraction from the main story. So it became a delicate balancing act trying to figure out exactly how much of myself I wanted to place in the film.

CF: We spoke about images. An essential part of the film for me is the music, which you had chosen. I consider it as suited, calm, reduced and to a certain degree even classic, the piano is dominant and it has a recurring melody. How did you come to this music selection?

CDC: The composer is Miriam Cutler and she is a phenomenal film composer. She has worked on a number of documentaries. She has worked on a number of films with Rory Kennedy, like ”Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” and “The Fence” and I was using some of her music for my temp music plus some of the temp music from Babel, Syriana I was sort of tapping into that kind of tempo, the essence of that sort of music which is haunting. It is composed, it is not just a “bed” of tones, it has a presence and is clearly doing something underneath the dialogue and images. But what I would do is, where things where really volatile, uneasy, is to have the music play just beneath the rough ocean current. And where things where really calm I wanted the music to come out of the water and play above the surface... if that makes any sense? Yes, I did want there to be a theme, certain familiar melodies, but I didn’t want it to be redundant. I did not want you to feel like we were looping it over and over. So we would use different instrumentation. Sometimes the clarinet would pick up the theme, sometimes the piano.

And initially, its sort of the way I work with the editor, with anybody. I want to give them the freedom to just go. In my head I know what I want but I refrain from telling them because I want to be surprised. I want to be open to something that I haven’t even considered. And that happens and that’s wonderful when it happens. But then you get to the point where you are up against the clock and you have to step in, you have to make a call. And so she had over composed a number of cues and I would go in and strip them down. I wanted a very pure sound, no synthesizers, just real instruments that were somewhat under stated. And there did come a point when I flew to her studio in LA. There we had an intense two day session; working 16 to 18 hours a day side by side and it was one of the most productive, creative moments on the project that I ever had. We just sat and went through each cue, over and over, until we got it where it needed to be and I’m really happy with the end result. It’s understated without being absent. It’s composed, without being over composed and I don’t think it gets in the way of the dialogue. There was one point with my sister Chiquita, when she talks about enjoying the sex with our father. I wanted the music to be really dramatic. I wanted the music to compete with her bite. I wanted the music to challenge the dialogue or for her searing dialogue to challenge the music. And it was totally contrary to anything else I was instructing my composer to do on the film. So much so, that my composer didn't trust me -- because everything else I was telling her was to “strip that track. Get rid of that, get rid of that…” She was conditioned by me to get rid of layers, not build them up. Then in this one moment, with only days before my Sundance deadline, I was like: “Over compose!”.

CF: There is a scene in the film in which your sister Chiquita asks you, why you are so fascinated with your camera and what motivates you. To me it seems, as though you're not really answering...

CDC: No, I do answer. She takes a sip of wine, we let it play, out she looks and she says: ” What gives you the drive, why are you so fascinated with the camera? What gives you the drive to do it over and over and over?
And I answer! I say: “You!”
And she says: “Me? I am not that fascinating. I’m just as normal as anybody else…”

But sorry, you had not finished your question…