After quite a few years of directing episodic television (including a multi-episode run on HBO’s “Deadwood”), director Davis Guggenheim turned nearly full time to the directing and producing documentaries, beginning with the Oscar-winning 2006 release AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which encapsulated former Vice President Al Gore’s presentation about the dangerous state of global warming. In 2010, Guggenheim turned his attention to the education system in America with WAITING FOR ‘SUPERMAN,’ so clearly he tends to favor weighty subjects for his films.
But like many of us, Guggenheim also loves music. In 2008, he made his ode to the electric guitar, IT MIGHT GET LOUD, in which the instrument’s infinite possibilities were examined by the likes of Jack White, Jimmy Page, and U2’s The Edge. Three years later, he worked again with the members of U2 on the terrific movie about making of the band’s Achtung Baby album, FROM THE SKY DOWN.
Guggenheim’s latest work is back to more heavy-hitting subject matter, but he also manages to include lighter touches in HE NAMED ME MALALA, concerning the tragic events involving 15-year-old Pakistani school girl, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban for speaking out on girls' education. She survived the attack and has continued her mission to secure promises from the world’s governments to make sure all girls receive an education—a path that has given her the chance to speak before the United Nations more than once and one that has earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s an uplifting and sometimes painful film to watch, but well worth seeking out. I spoke with Davis Guggenheim recently when he visited Chicago. Please enjoy my chat with him…
Capone: I think we actually spoke on the phone for GRACIE [Guggenheim’s most recent feature film] many moons ago, so it’s nice to finally meet you in person.
Davis Guggenheim: The press tours are a blur to me. I was in Austin when I met you guys for the first time, but you weren’t there. For WAITING FOR SUPERMAN.
Capone: I’ve actually been a great admirer of your music documentaries. One of the big reasons I go to SXSW every year, they have an incredible lineup of music docs that I know if I don’t see them there, I’ll never get to see them.
DG: Isn’t that weird how music docs have been struggling to find a market?
Capone: Now they all seem to land on cable. Your U2 film premiered on cable, right?
DG: Showtime. FROM THE SKY DOWN.
Capone: But there are a bunch this year that are all landing on cable. There’s one about Mavis Staples that is so good. And I heard this Sharon Jones film that Barbara Kopple did [MISS SHARON JONES!] is supposed to be fantastic too.
DG: I hear that’s fantastic. Someone said that’s her best movie ever.
Capone: So with MALALA, how did you get involved, and more importantly, why did you say yes?
DG: I’m learning the hard way that saying yes or no is one of the biggest decisions you make. Picking the story is part of the success or failure of something, because the pieces all have to be there. So when [producers] Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald asked me to do it, they wanted me to make a movie, a feature; they bought her life rights. But then they met her and said, “Who would play her? It should be a documentary. Would you be interested?” And I just remember that she was the girl who got shot on her school bus, and then I read more deeply an early copy of the book…
Capone: I was going to say, that was before the book came out.
DG: Yeah, I think they only had a couple chapters, and I was like, “There’s something to this father-daughter relationship.” There’s a mystery that I wanted, as a filmmaker, to figure out. What was it that made this girl? Was he pulling the strings? Was she just born great? What’s the character recipe for this person?
Capone: It’s funny you say that, because I did realized really early on that it’s not just a father-daughter thing, but a family story, but it’s primarily that father-daughter thing. I kept looking for signs in him, because I think any other father would just be overwhelmed by guilt, that that would be just the predominant force in his life after something like this, but it’s hard to find. It’s there, but they must have had a conversation at some point where she begged him not to feel that way. Did you get a sense of that from him?
DG: Part of that is their faith. They still look back and think they did the right thing. He says this, “I should rather die than to live if I do not speak up for my rights.” It’s so unusual. People here in America, we see things that bother us and don’t bother to speak up. For them, it was life or death. Losing their school was life or death, and they chose to put everything on the line. To me, that’s the heart of the movie.
Capone: Like any good documentary, it makes you look beyond the story being told. Taking this personal story and making us think of the larger implications. I started to think about the way girls or women are treated in so-called first-world countries. We might be a little better, but are we good enough? You don’t bring that up specifically, but you can’t help but think about it. That’s quite the sneaky plan you had there.
DG: [laughs] It wasn’t sneaky; it was a plan. I always try to make every story connect to me, and if I feel like it connects to me, then it connects to everyone. I have two daughters, and even though they live in a safe neighborhood and their schools are safe, I worry about them, and my daughters are a mystery to me. I think there are invisible forces that pull at them. You see in the movie, girls that are afraid to speak out, girls that aren’t as confident as boys, and my daughters have that too. And then I think as a father, am I as brave as her father? Do I really believe the way he believes, that she can do anything? When I make a film, I like to have it play on me, to say “Wait a minute, even though he’s from Pakistan, 6,000-7,000 miles away, I want to think about that and how I am with my own daughters.” I feel if I think that way, if the movie provokes me, then something’s working.
Capone: In the course of making this film, did certain expectations about their faith or about them get completely subverted? How did making this change you?
DG: I remember the other day—because the [Syrian] refugee crisis is happening right now—I’m looking at the paper and see this heartbreaking picture, and all my children are there, and I say to my son, “Hey Miles, look at this.” I said it to my son. I didn’t say it to my daughters. And I was like, “Wait a minute.” That’s the one little signal that I’m giving to my daughter that I find him more interesting.
Capone: His opinion matters more.
DG: Right. So suddenly I’m saying, “This man from Pakistan is teaching me something.” The other thing is, when I went to Birmingham for the first time, and I took a cab to their house and knocked on the door, I didn’t know who I was going to meet. I’m half Jewish, half Episcopalian, and I’m really meeting for the first time a Muslim family. I’ve maybe been introduced to some Muslims, I know a few, but not the journey that I was about to take. And it was eye opening.
Capone: How long did you spend with them?
DG: Shooting was about 18 months, but on and off. I wasn’t there every day. I’d go for a time in Birmingham, another time in Birmingham, then I’d go to Kenya with them, then Jordan. My process is to do intensive interviews. I start by doing these audio interviews. Almost exactly like this—you and me. I find when you bring cameras in, people start to get self conscious. And I sat in Malala’s office, where her Post-Its are, in a little tiny room, and we just talked. Through those conversations came out all these stories. I was just following my instincts about what I wanted to know. At the end, she was like, “I’ve never told stories about these people.” Same with Zia. And those stories, those first interviews were at the heart of what the movie is. The story about the Battle of Maiwand, and that’s what led to the animation, because I had these stories. And I’m like, “How do I put a battle that happened over one hundred years ago in this film?”
Capone: In terms of your timeline, because this is a story that is still happening, and I’ve noticed that you don’t tell a lot of stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. How do you know when you have enough material? How do you know when it’s time to stop shooting and start making a film?
DG: That’s a good question. I think what’s particularly true about that question…
Capone: Other than deadlines, maybe.
DG: [laughs] Budgets and deadlines. Time and money. Other than time and money, I’m fine. What’s interesting is there are still so many chapters to her story. There is still more to tell in her story. There are many versions of this movie, many cuts of this movie that were terrible. I would show them to friends, and it was not working. So the ultimate test is, Is it playing? Does it work? Is the audience taken on a journey, the journey I had imagined? And we went months past our schedule because I hadn’t gotten it right. I don’t know how detailed you want to get, but it’s a very complex story structure going back. I cut between her time in Birmingham after she was shot to her time in Pakistan before she was shot. Back and forth, in a very non-linear way. For a long time, that wasn’t working. There’s always this solving a puzzle thing, but this seemed like a puzzle that couldn’t be solved. I talked to my wife [actress Elisabeth Shue], and I got very depressed and anxious, that I would never get it right.
Capone: One of the more interesting things in the film is when we see them moving [the family has moved several times since they moved to England], and it made me realize they’re still rootless right now. They haven't really been able to establish roots where they are yet, and that’s got to really weigh on them to a certain degree.
DG: No one has ever asked that question, and that’s true.
Capone: I think it’s an important scene.
DG: She says, “This is our fourth house.” And some people think “They’re just living high on the hog in Birmingham.” They are absolutely, deeply homesick. That’s the only time I really feel their pain; they really want to go home and they can’t.
Capone: Nothing makes you more home sick than not having a permanent home. Let’s talk about the animation for a second. There really is no other way to tell that part of her story—about her name. What’s funny about the origin of her name, is that if you had written that in a feature film, you would have been laughed out of the room, because it seems too coincidental.
DG: She’s named after a girl who speaks out and is killed for speaking out.
Capone: Using animation had to have added something to your budget that you hadn’t anticipated.
DG: I went to ImageNation who put up the money originally, I called them back and said, “Hey, remember that chunk of money I asked for? I want another chunk of money because I want to build an animation company.” And they’re like, “You want to what?” They were great, because I explained to them the problem, and I did some animation tests, and it wasn’t just animation, because I had done some in other movies. It was a reach to do this very storybook, very childlike animation. The idea was, instead of doing a battle the way it was, doing a battle the way a girl would imagine it. The animators are talking about, if you’re a girl with your eyes closed right before you go to sleep, how would you imagine this girl climbing a mountain and speaking? What I loved is that it gives another tone to this story. There’s so much baggage from the region—negative news, scary images—andI wanted to capture the richness in how they describe their life in Pakistan.
Capone: I’ve seen her on a few talk shows in the last couple of weeks. Is she university bound now? Is she on that path?
DG: Yeah. One of the reasons why she’s not here in Chicago is she’s in school. She can’t miss school. She loves this movie and would promote it, but she can’t. To her, her education is more important than anything. She knows she’s a symbol for girls education and she better get it right. But the idea is she goes to university, and she will.
Capone: Great. Well, thank you very much.
DG: Nice to meet you. Thank you for writing about it.
