Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. Much as he did with his fantastic 2002 profile of producer Robert Evans THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, director Brett Morgan has turned the traditional documentary film on its head. His latest work, CHICAGO 10, is an in-depth look at the events before, during, and after the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. As a resident of Chicago, I collect recollections and film clips from these events, so I'm somewhat predisposed to love this movie, but nothing quite prepared me for Morgan's treatment of the subject matter. Much of the discussion of CHICAGO 10 (the title characters include the Chicago 8 plus their two lawyers, who were put in jail for contempt) has centered on the animated recreation of the trial that followed the riots. Using courtroom transcripts, actors like Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Nolte, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright, and the late Roy Scheider voice such radical luminaries as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Bobby Seale. It sounds bizarre, and it is, but it's still a really great way to bring history to life. CHICAGO 10 was slated in the coveted Opening Night slot at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and played again last October at the Chicago Film Festival, which is where I caught up with Brett for this interview. Enjoy…

Capone: Just living in Chicago, you hear about the events surrounding the '68 Convention so frequently but there's always something new to learn about it. I actually know a guy who was in the National Guard at the time, and was here. He obviously has a very different take than some people do on what happened. Coincidentally he's also the same guy who convinced my wife and I to go on one of the Film Festival at Sea things that Roger Ebert used to do, and that was the year he played THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE.

Brett Morgan: That's funny.

Capone: But as much as I've learned about the riots from film like MEDIUM COOL and certain documentaries, I didn't know that much about the trial of the Chicago 8 or Chicago 7--however you choose to refer to them. In a lot of ways, that trial is just as tumultuous and representative of the times as the riots. I'm sure that has something to do with why Steven Spielberg is planning on making his next movie about it [with a script by Aaron Sorkin].

BM: Yeah, I'm actually co-producing the adaptation of CHICAGO 10 that he's doing.

Capone: I didn't realize that. But in terms of the grand scheme of social injustices, what makes these events stand out in your mind?

BM: I think it's the first time in contemporary American history where the public watched the government beat the shit out of middle-class white kids. We had seen beatings during the Civil Rights movement, down in Alabama, Mississippi, etc. But I don't think anyone in America attack its own citizens in the manner that they did in Chicago. To me, it was the end of innocence in America. Norman Mailer said that the end of innocence in America started with the Kennedy assassination, ended in Chicago. That's a fairly accurate assessment. It was a tragedy. What people were fighting for touches upon the foundation of our culture and our society. It's like the Boston Tea Party and the Chicago riots. People were trying to protest and being silenced. That's one of the basic Constitutional rights that everyone across the board respects and honors. And to do it in a way that was broadcast almost live for 59 million Americans to witness, I think that's an unbelievable moment. I was born two months after the events. I thought in my weird universe that Altamont was the end of innocence, but you realize that everything got dark after Chicago. There was no more "love" after Chicago. Music changed after Chicago; films changed. I think culture changed came after Chicago. Acid rock come after. The movement became more violent and angry. What happened in Chicago that I think is amazing, and Abbie Hoffman said it, to a certain expect it was epic theater. I think there were certain parties that wanted to expose the fascist nature of the government at that point. Norman Mailer refers to a conversation he had with Jerry Rubin in the film, where Jerry said, "All we have to do is show up and smile, and they'll go berserk." Because they couldn't handle anyone that didn't look like them. And what did they do? They attacked them viciously. It's this great American foundation. It's got wonderful characters--I'm not so much speaking about my film, but this moment in history. All of those people are so different from one another. Dave Dellinger and Abbie Hoffman should not be at the same table. So you had all these really strong personalities. You throw Bobby Seale into the mix.

Capone: You couldn't have written it any better.

BM: You couldn't. It's absolutely epic. I firmly believe that this will become a story that every generation will retell. Mine certainly isn't the final word by any stretch of the imagination. Ten or 15 years from now, another generation will approach this material…look, I believe that when you make a film about a moment in history, it's really a film about the time you're making it in rather than the time you're making it about.

Capone: You certainly see some modern-day equivalencies in what happened then.

BM: Even I didn't consciously see them, how could I avoid them? There was a reenactment of this trial done in 1985, and what they were drawn do, or in 1970 when the BBC did a trail reenactment, was very different than what I was interested in, and probably different than what Spielberg will be interested in. But that's the beauty of this whole case; there are a myriad of ways to approach it. What I wanted to do filmicly…there are all these books and stories, whatever. I went through the canon of work on Chicago, and I felt that I'd read about what happened but none of the media allowed me to experience first-hand what happened, the way when you see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, you have a more visceral idea of what Normandy was like. So that was my goal; I wanted to do something uniquely cinematic. I wanted to do something that can't be achieved in a book or on stage, and that was in essence to put the audience at the center of the march on the Conrad Hilton [where the DNC headquarters was during the Convention] and allow them to experience it in a way that only film can. You probably saw this as a screener…

Capone: No, no. We say it in a theatre.

BM: I have a feeling that they didn't project it the proper Dolby SRD Digital. In fact, I know they didn't, but we spend nine months on sound design for this film with 500 hours of archival audio to pull from. And for those riot scenes, I said I wanted the audience looking all around them, not just at the screen. I want the chaos of those moments. And you can't do that in other mediums. I felt we had something to contribute to the canon of work, and that I do not think of it as a definitive film on Chicago, I don't even think of it as a document of Chicago. I'm presenting the mythology of Chicago. It's the linkage between THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE. My films aren't documentaries; people call them documentaries, but I don't know why. Probably because there's no other word to call them. My movies are consciously constructed as mythologies. Maybe that's my way of liberating myself from the chains of history, and giving myself the freedom to show Allen Ginsberg levitate or animate the trial or make a film about Bob [Evans] in which you only hear Bob. I try to find universal truths in my subjects the way a fiction filmmaker does.

Capone: But it's not like you're inventing facts to contribute to the mythology. You're using what's there.

BM: It's evolving. And I am inventing to a certain extent. Len Weinglass never war a purple jacket and wasn't that flamboyant. That was my interpretation. Allen Ginsberg never levitated. All non-fiction films are obviously fiction. Fred Wiseman called it reality-fiction, sort of based on reality but you construct them and sculpt them and mold them. You can take the same material I used to make CHICAGO 10 and make a film that's totally sympathetic to the police and the prosecution. Or you could take the same material and make a film that's sympathetic to the protestors. That's the power of film. But when I say mythologize, I really didn't want this to be a movie about 1968; I wanted it to be a fable for all times. I call my movies my movies "experiencial." The antithesis of that is context. Context is everything but experience, and so I put no context in this film, no Bobby Kennedy, nothing about what was happening in the convention hall. That was another movie for me. My movie is very primal: there's a war going on, there's opposition to the war, and the government is trying to silence to the opposition. That's it.

Capone: If you take your analogy of this being a fiction film all the way out, you certain have chosen your cast well. You cast the original Mayor Daley as the perfect villain.

BM: He cast himself as the villain [laughs].

Capone: My friend in the guard made it very clear that the police and the guard and the military in the city was simply following Daley's lead. He was all about law and order for the duration of that convention, and they fell in line. And you're right, you couldn't have cast him any better than he cast himself.

BM: Yeah, the guy is saying, "We're going to shoot all looters. Shoot to kill." I think of this film ultimately about the generation gap and about parenting, and I was very conscious of that as I was constructing the film, because I saw Daley and [Lyndon] Johnson and Judge Hoffman in the same vein. To me, they were guys who were hostile to change, which is the same as saying they were hostile to the youth. They couldn't accept anyone who wasn't cast in their image. I had a father that used to say things like, "As long as you're living in my house, you live by my rules. When you're 18, you can go get your own house, you can do what you want." Look like me, live like me. And that's what Judge Hoffman said, and that's what Mayor Daley said. He said, "I'm not going to let these people, these terrorists come here and do this in my backyard."

I think everyone's at fault in Chicago. Some of the protestors were completely innocent and really the victims and the martyrs there. I think the leaders of the movement have to share some of the blame for the rioting that went on. I certainly think the police have to assume some responsibility for their actions. And I think Mayor Daley is mostly accountable. I think he's the one man in the whole picture who could have avoided this by giving these guys permits. Listen, the funny thing about the film. I've read some reviews that say that Roy Scheider is playing Judge Hoffman over the top, and I say Roy Scheider does a perfect impersonation of Judge Hoffman. That's the amazing thing. We had access to courtroom audio. We unearthed for the first time in 40 years actual audio that was recorded by the court reporter, which was lost. After hearing that, we were able to get a really good sense of the cadence and the rhythm in that courtroom. And Roy nailed it, absolutely nailed it. But that's the whole thing about the trial: if you don't know better, you would either think we were making stuff up or we're taking ridiculous amount of license. And the reality is, that's exactly how it happened.

Capone: Let's talk about the animation. For the sake of this conversation, let's call you a documentary filmmaker. But you're not the kid that like the typical talking heads kind of chronicle of events or stock news reel footage. You added this graphic element to this film and your last one, and you're able to recreate the courtroom experience without re-enacting it. And you can make the characters look like the characters, as opposed to casting actors. Where did the idea to animate come from?

BM: That's right. Going back to talking heads. Generally, I don't like to look at someone just talking, unless it's their emoting or doing something amazing--like in a John Cassavetes film--why should I look at someone? That goes back to the idea of whether history is best served by books or by film. There's nothing filmic or cinematic about a guy sitting there talking. My movies take place in the present tense. They're historical stories that are presented in the present tense. Going into this film, I knew I wanted to make this story accessible to my generation and find a language that was appropriate and kinetic. There are probably three different ways I could have approached the courtroom. One would be to have actors and re-enactments. The problem with that is because the film was going to be 50 percent archival, you would constantly be comparing the voice and the look of those actors to their archival counterparts. That would have been a very unintentionally Brechtian film. You would have been constantly taken out of the story, and it would have been very unfair to the actors. It's one thing if you don't see the real-life counterparts, but to actually put them side by side…and then you're limiting yourself to actors who look like those people. Vincent D'Onofrio doesn't look anything like Abbie Hoffman. And it may work in the movie he did [STEAL THIS MOVIE], but if you put him next to archival footage, it's going to fall apart. So I knew that wasn't going to work.

I knew for obvious reasons, I wasn't going to do interviews. Beyond my own personal bias against them, the fact that most of the colorful characters of these events are deceased. So to let the few surviving people own the history seemed to be a disservice to everyone else. Why should they, just because they survived longer, be able to appropriate this history. And because I wanted to direct the film in language of the youth movements and I wanted to give it a contemporary feel, animation seemed like the perfect tool, coupled with the fact that it seemed like a commentary on the proceedings. And I'd read this quote from Jerry Rubin where he called the trial a "fucking cartoon show." And it was like a cartoon show. It could be a Saturday morning cartoon strip, it was so outrageous. Some of the mannerisms, like the guys coming in in judges robes, to me, in live action would be an embarrassing scene. I think a lot of the stuff in the courtroom, in the wrong hands, could go that way. So it took me two years to settle and arrive at, okay, it's going to be animation. It really didn't seem like there was any other alternative. I had a financier say that they would give me everything I needed except the money I needed for the animation. They said, here, you can have X amount of dollars and you can do the film tomorrow. And I said, "Yeah, but then I won't be able to do the animation." And they said, "So don't do the animation." And I said that there'd be no point in making the film. You're not getting any money back because you're making a History Channel documentary.

In terms of the style, a lot of critics have referenced it to WAKING LIFE, which is interesting since it's maybe no so obviously not rotoscoped, it's motion capture. And it's interesting to me that people think it's rotoscoped because Liev Schreiber doesn't look like Bill Kunstler. Roy Scheider doesn't look like Judge Hoffman. If it was rotoscoped, you'd have people that look nothing like the people they're depicting. Hank Azaria might look a little like Abbie Hoffman, but he doesn't look like Allen Ginsberg.

The film was originally supposed to be in 2-D. I contacted Ralph Bakshi, and I was going to have Bakshi do the animation. And then I started to think that Bakshi is so rooted in that period that it's going to look like a '60s film, and I wanted a more contemporary film. In retrospect, I kind of regret not doing the Bakshi version; we has some budget issues, but I love Ralph Bakshi, love his stuff. So then I said, okay, I want to do the hand-drawn, 2-D animation, old school. So we set out on that path for nine months, and I was working with a house in England, and I went over there to see the first movement test. And they were contracted to animate on the "ones and twos," which is every frame a new drawing. So there's really fluid movement. And as they got into it, the couldn't afford to do more than animation on the fives and sixes, which is totally staccato. What it ultimately felt like was almost courtroom drawings of the courtroom, representations of what happened, but you couldn't actually be there. And I was like, "Look I need these performances to feel directed. They're human form." It's hard with human form in animation to begin with. So I knew that with the budget I had, I would never be happy with the animation being hand drawn. Unfortunately between the time I started the project to the time I hit that crossroads, motion capture became something affordable. I mean, literally in a nine-month time span, I approach Curious Pictures when I initially did the bids. They had done motion capture, but it was way outside the budget for this. Nine months later, I called them up again, and they said, "Have you considered motion capture? We think we can do it for the budget."

Motion capture is a wonderful tool to work with because it provided me with the tool as a director to have total control, the complete opposite of 2-D animation. When I say that, you do have control over 2-D if you have a lot of money and can do a lot of revisions. But if you don't have enough money to do revisions, then you don't have any control. It's all in the artist who draws. I acted most of the motion capture in the films, so not only am I directing but I'm actually the actor in those scenes, so I have total control over the gestures and the expressions. The rendering style, I think was somewhat of a compromise, in that I really do regret having it so similar to [Richard] Linklater's stuff, which isn't really Linklater's stuff; it's more a cultural thing. That's a style that most people working on animation today, that's the way they tend to shade human form. So that more or less came from my pool of animators being culturally steered in that direction. I really wanted it to have a painterly feel, and we found that we didn't have enough time. We could have done it; we did some amazing tests, which will hopefully be on the DVD and will blow people away. But we just couldn't achieve it in every shot in the time we had to get the film done for Sundance.

Capone: The archival footage, a lot of which I'd never seen before, especially the color film, looks restored.

BM: One of the things I insisted on…most of these types of archival films, you call the network, they send you video tape, you online, and you blow it up to film. I insisted that everything originate on film, that we do proper cleanup of the films, transfer it up to HD, then back to 35mm print. I just saw the 35mm print that we're premiering in Austin next week, and it looks extraordinary. Par of that was that I didn't want history to be this dirty, scratchy, ugly, grainy thing. I wanted it to feel immediate. So when you take the Beastie Boys, and you take footage shot 40 years ago of people going up the Logan statue. And your restore that color to a palate that didn't even exist back then. So suddenly, it feels like something you can relate to; it doesn't feel like ancient history.

Capone: How was that Sundance experience for you. Robert Redford has been back on the political path again recently, and your film seems custom-made to open Sundance, or is it? Either way, it had to be a huge honor to be asked to be the Opening Night film.

BM: Not that they let you do it twice, but I don't think I would wish that on my worst enemy. I have to tell you. Yes, it's a huge honor. The second you get that call that they want to open the festival with this, as an American independent filmmaker, that's huge. As a documentary filmmaker, it's beyond your wildest dreams because it's not something you think about constantly. You maybe want to win an Oscar one day, but you don't have as one of your career goals to open the Sundance Film Festival. It's just this perk, if you will. It's fucking horrific. [laughs] I will never put myself in that position again, or my film in that position, because it was a bad place for my film. Jeff Gilmore [head of the festival], when he saw the film, he said, "I'm only going to program this film in one place, and it's opening night." And I was like, "Wait, does that mean if it's not opening night, it's not at the festival?" I think he thought it was really going to have this immediate impact. I thought it would have this impact.

The thing about Opening Night is, no one bought tickets to your movie. Opening Night is sold out because it's Opening Night. So you have 700 journalists, and they're always fun [laughs]. Then you've got all 350 filmmakers in attendance, the only film that you'd get more than two filmmakers in the house at the same time. By the way, each of them would each more their own version of the film, totally different than mine. Then you've got about 400 corporate sponsors, and that's your audience. I spoke to friends of mine at studios who have had films there, and they all said, "Worse screenings we've ever had there were Opening Night." The worst screening of CHICAGO 10 I've ever had: Opening Night. Every screening I've done since then has been great. That said, the film got a standing ovation, but I don't think it played well. A week later, in that same theater: rapturous, insane five-minute standing ovation. Every joke that was intended to be laughed at was laughed at. A week earlier, no one laughing. Part of that, I figured out, was being introduced by Robert Redford. By the way, he only flew in for that and then left the festival, so that was huge. He made a very passionate speech about the war in Iraq, and he linked CHICAGO 10 to what was going on today, or what wasn't going on today in terms of protest. But his introduction set up a film that wasn't the film we made exactly, so the people in the audience that actually were paying attention did not get the film Redford talked about exactly. So that didn't help. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, except I don't. I would never do it again.

Capone: Thanks for talking with us.

BM: My pleasure. Thanks.

Capone