Today was our first real shooting day at L’Athletique d’Haiti. Yesterday was the first school day after the holidays, but we learned that in Haiti, a lot of kids don’t show up right away after the holidays. So, we shot a bunch of still photographs yesterday, met some folks and got oriented at L’Athletique, but we decided to delay shooting video until today. In fact, some of the staff at L’Athletique advised us to wait until Wednesday to shoot when more kids would be there, but we’re only here for a week, and we leave on Saturday, so we can’t afford to lose a day.
Last night, we were a little worried about how feasible it was going to be to shoot anything worthwhile this week. So few kids showed up the first day, many of the key staff members weren’t there, and we got the impression that they weren’t really going to be running at full speed this week. There was another troubling aspect to our first day: it was apparent that the staff at L’Athletique was very used to having visitors, including TV crews. The initial tour and explanation of the program seemed quite routine, and they seemed accustomed to the approach of television journalists—come in for a few days, interview the key people, take pictures of the kids, and leave. That’s fine for television, but our goals and intentions for the week are much different.
We’re really here to do casting for a feature film. We’re trying to find the kids and coaches whose lives, relationships and struggles will be rich enough to hold a viewer’s interest for 90 minutes. While we’re also interested in talking to the administrative staff and filming the kids playing soccer—similar to a TV crew—we need to get to know some of the kids and coaches more intimately. We need to see them interacting and hear directly from them about who they are, why they’re there, and what they think about the world. We’re shooting with the hope of making a trailer, so we’ll be able to show possible funders the potential of the film; but more importantly, we’re trying to find a story and characters that we’ll be shooting over the next year or so. In the past, I’ve run into situations where people I’m filming are so used to the expectations of TV crews that it’s even harder to communicate what I’m trying to do in making a documentary. On the surface, what we’re doing looks very similar to TV production, but in fact it’s very different. Yesterday, it seemed like the conditioning by previous video crews would harm our ability to get what we needed in the short period of this week.
Today turned out to be a great surprise. We started the day by talking to one of the key faculty members (without a camera) for over two hours. At the beginning, he seemed confused by why we were asking so many strange and boring questions—like, exactly what time of day do the kids do their psychological interviews, what’s involved in the physical tests the school uses to evaluate kids, and what are the exact dates of the various stages of their training? We were taking a lot of his time, and his ankle, which he had recently twisted, was swelling more and more during the interview. But at some point during the conversation, he started to realize why we were being such a pain in the butt and why our questions were so inordinately detailed. His face lit up, and he got it. We were in it for the long haul, and we wanted to capture L’Athletique from the inside out—the way he knew it, the way only insiders knew it. He couldn’t have been happier. The resistance we had met up until that point had nothing to do with a resistance to us making a documentary. It was simply a misunderstanding about what we were doing, and how and why we were doing it (we owe this feat of communicating subtle differences to Cedrick Roche, who grew up here and is equally comfortable in Creole, French and English).
Once this faculty member was on the same page as we were, he was invaluable. The conversation moved from the dry facts of how the operation works (which were nonetheless important) to his personal opinions of what specific teams and coaches would make good characters in the film. We moved past the routine, general answers to specific names. We thanked him, left his office (and let him attend to his swollen ankle), then found one of the teams he recommended following, and spent the rest of the day shooting that team, including an interview with the coach. Without his help, we would have wandered around shooting a lot more teams in a more superficial and truncated manner.
Tomorrow, we’ll be shooting another of his recommended teams, possibly interviewing Boby Duval, and trying to lock down permission to shoot in a school of one of the kids in Cité Soleil the following morning.
By the way, while I tend toward cinéma vérité in documentaries, I often start out shooting some interviews. There’s a chance they’ll be useful later on, but more importantly, they help me get a sense of people on camera before deciding whether to pursue them more as characters. For my last film, Mississippi Chicken (which I shot on Super 8), I interviewed the main character, Guillermina, on video the first time I met her. We didn’t end up using this or any other traditional, sit-down interview of her in the film, but that initial interview helped me realize what a good character she would be. These initial interviews are informational, but they’re also screen tests in the traditional Hollywood sense.
