Filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau has made an impressive career out of a very particular type of documentary—the kind that appear as DVD/Blu-ray extras of both new and classic films. He has amassed 300 credits across 20-plus years, directing both short and long-form docs on film by such legends as Steven Spielberg (his MAKING OF JAWS feature is extraordinary), Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lean, Brian DePalma, Jonathan Demme, and so many more (looking it up; odds are you’ve seen his work many times over). He’s both an on-set filmmaker who captures as much of the process of making a new film as possible, and he’s spent months combing archival materials to create “Making of…” docs for older works.
But his latest work is another animal entirely—the three-part, Netflix series FIVE CAME BACK, in which Bouzereau takes the book and screenplay by Mark Harris and turns it into an exquisite examination of five legendary directors—Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, John Ford, and George Stevens—who put their Hollywood careers on hold for the duration of America’s involvement in World War II, creating propaganda films seem mostly by in-training soldiers as something of a motivational tool. Probably the most famous of these works is Capra’s WHY WE FIGHT series, but each filmmaker had their own unique take on the films they made and the resulting impact each film had.
Bouzereau adds a contemporary touch to the analysis of this phenomenon with essential interviews from noted directors Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan. Netflix has also added many of the archival films available on their service, but before you dive into those (and you should), take a look at this extraordinary effort by a great documentarian. I had the chance to chat with Bouzereau via phone recently about FIVE CAME BACK and the herculean task of organizing the stories of these five men, and how their lives were before, during, and after the war. None of their lives or careers were ever the same. With that, please enjoy my talk with Laurent Bouzereau…
Capone: Hello, Laurent. How are you?
Laurent Bouzereau: I’m good. How are you?
Capone: Good, good. I’ve been a long time admirer of all the DVDs you’ve been featured on over the years.
LB: Oh, thank you so much.
Capone: It’s great to finally get to talk to you, especially about this project. It seems like it was such a colossal undertaking. First of all, how did you and Mark even begin to tackle the epic structure of this piece?
LB: It was epic. Mark wrote a script and did a really amazing job at trying to distill the story down to what was extremely essential, stuff we absolutely could not miss out on. Then what I decided to do, I said, “You know what, Mark? I’m going to interview you as if you are the only person that I’m going to have, and I’m going to sit you down for days, and I’m going to film this, I’m going to use this as a template to start creating the structure of those episodes, and really try to figure out how to come in and out of each of those guys. Because it was super important to me was to maintain of course this brilliant structure of those five guys and how they intersect with one another,which I found extremely cinematic, obviously.
So Mark was really game, and we sat down for several days and I interviewed him on camera, and indeed that’s what we did. We created with my editor parks, using Mark’s interview as a spine, and we were able to start researching this in a very dynamic way and really find everything that was available. After that, we knew we had a really strong three-act structure in those three episodes, and within those three episodes we had a very clear understanding of the stories we were telling and what was essential to it. Then we proceeded to contact the filmmakers, and I interviewed all of them. Then we were blessed with Meryl Streep’s voiceover. This came together like in November or December, so very late because we were tweaking and changing things, and the narration had to be perfect by the time that Meryl or whomever was going to do it. So she actually did it on the day she was nominated for her 20th Oscar. It was amazing. We instructed her to shut off her phone, because that was going to be ringing off the hook.
That was the way that it all evolved. It was a very long process, because, as you said very rightfully so, it’s a very complex story. It’s this epic canvas of World War II and politics and Hollywood before, during, and after the war. At the same time, it’s this very singular, emotional story of five guys. So it’s the epic and the personal, and how to balance that without disorienting the viewer is extremely challenging. We had a really great team, not only Mark’s book and his script, but the interviews we did were absolutely phenomenal. The research they all did, what they brought to it, and everything was just extremely impressive, and my editor [Will Znidaric] was also extremely sensitive to the responsibility involved with telling that story. So we really made for a good team and hopefully good work.
Capone: The idea to bring in these contemporary directors to guide us through the history, it feels like you assigned each modern director one of the directors who are your subject. For example, Del Toro is always talking about Capra the most, and so on.
LB: Absolutely. You are absolutely correct. That is the case. Of course at the beginning, at the very beginning, when I got involved, I was thinking “Oh my god, who’s still alive? What family members? What historian?” But very quickly, and this was actually Steven Spielberg talking to me directly, saying “Laurent, I think there’s a chance here for you to do something completely different. This is a really very special story, and let’s try to figure out a way to tell it in a different way.” And it made sense. We had different concepts that we discussed with [executive producer] Scott Rudin and all the producers, and it was a great exchange about this, but it made me very nervous because I didn’t want it to be a gimmick. It was like, “Who better but filmmakers to tell stories of filmmakers?”
So that helped us tremendously, and the fact that we had five subject, as opposed to telling a vast story of all directors at the time. I said “Let’s find five directors.” And each of them were comfortable talking about any one of the five guys that there were. But there were some affinities, so I was very sensitive to listening to that, and it turned out that, more importantly to me, when I sat down with Steven I would talk about Wyler, but of course I was going to ask him about George Stevens, and of course I was going to ask him about IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. They were all really game to step outside of the assigned director. They all did a tremendous amount of research.
Mark by then had written the script for the three episodes. We highlighted, if it was Wyler, everything pertaining to Wyler so that Steven, for example, would have a very visual way of tracking Wyler’s story, as would I. I did a gigantic amount of work on questions and topics and how to really play out the discussion, again with the help of my editor who had by then really figured out what footage exists, what is the footage we can license and illustrate this, so there would be no “Oh my god, this is such a great quote and we have nothing to show for it.” So it was a really interesting thing.
But when you really analyze both the five past directors and the five contemporary directors, I love the fact that Paul Greengrass is a documentary filmmaker himself, thrown into political situations and probably in danger, and I could potentially see him in the same way I could picture John Ford on top of a platform during Midway, avoiding bombs but wanting to get the shot. Guillermo is an immigrant and really identified with that side of Frank Capra, and Guillermo, for all of the fantasy and horror films he does, is extremely sensitive, extremely emotional, and yes, he is Frank Capra. No doubt about that.
Coppola, of course, I love the fact that when I was a kid I remember APOCALYPSE NOW being released in France, which by the way was the biggest event. Forget any event film that you see today with superheroes flying all over the place. This was THE event—lines bigger than THE FORCE AWAKENS or anything you’ve ever seen. I was more interested about seeing this than about seeing anything else. There were so much mythology around the making of that film. And of course it had been at the Cannes Film Festival a week before it came out in France, and I remember the famous press conference where he said, “This was my war. I lived just like a war.” And the famous picture of him with a gun to his head. I was like “Oh my god, this reminds me of John Huston.”
And Larry Kasdan, who I’ve known for years, we have had many talks about movies in general, and yes, Coppola was a writer before he directed and wrote many great scripts, but Larry wrote some of the most iconic lines in film language, and I thought it was kind of interesting to have a writer who then transitiioned into an iconic director and who made a return to screenwriting with THE FORCE AWAKENS. I was really interested in finding those qualities in those guys, because I think they mirror some of the qualities in our guys.
Capone: Normally, you essentially make two different types of documentaries in your career. One is, you actually spend time on sets and you film things as they’re happening. But then you also are sometimes given the assignment to make a “Making of…” for a film you weren’t there for, so you have to use what’s available, much like this. You weren’t there to film this, so you have to use what’s available in the archives. Do you have a preference? Do you like doing the digging, or do you like having everything available to you?
LB: That’s a great question, but frankly, I love both because there’s nothing else like being on the set of a Steven Spielberg movie, and I’ve had that privilege many times over, and I would not trade that experience for anything else in the world. There’s nothing like being on the set of a film where you admire the director, and you embrace the process, and you see everything that goes into creating a potentially iconic movie moment. You don’t know that at the time, of course, but everything that you’re watching is potentially an iconic movie moment that will be remembered forever and ever. So being present, and as a filmmaker myself, I love to be able to then find what is the story I want to tell as I’m witnessing the making of the film. So I think it’s a great storytelling moment for me to realize what is the story of the making of this picture.
Now being a student of film and loving to dig and that’s how I started—not only with documentaries, but writing books—I love the idea of being brought in to do a documentary of any Hitchcock movie or David Lean. The way I met Steven, which was for the “Making of JAWS,” and I’ll never forget being sent to the backlot of Universal in some giant dumpster to look for posters and finding an original painting for a poster concept for DUEL, and being told that “By the way, there are rattlesnakes in that dumpster.” So those are great experiences.
I’ve had also the privilege of doing documentaries about Roman Polanski [ROMAN POLANKSI: A FILM MEMOIR], which was at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a completely different type of narrative as was my film on Dick Zanuck [DON’T SAY NO UNTIL I FINISH TALKING: THE RICHARD ZANUCK STORY], who passed away after he watched the film, and I had to change the narrative of that film as a consequence of him passing away. So it’s been a really interesting journey for me all around, and I hope it just keeps going.
Capone: My introduction to these wartime films was seeing seeing WHY WE FIGHT in college, and I watched all of the parts of it to in college. I don’t think I realize films like that existed, and it was shocking to me in your film to find out that that was essentially reaction to Capra seeing TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, and I’m sure I saw those two films pretty close together too, because it was like a history of documentary film class. It’s amazing that Capra was terrified by TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Talk about some of the surprises that you came across as you were researching these films and these directors.
LB: I think the biggest revelation for me was some of the footage was staged. I didn’t know that. And finding the outtakes with clapboards and crew directing crowds to fake footage was really a revelation, and I think it’s a very interesting aspect of this documentary, that discussion, that debate. You can look at it as “Wait a minute, they weren’t hiding that they were doing it. This was a propaganda machine.” They had to get those shots. On the other hand, how do you reconcile this with never acknowledging in the case of Huston that you staged footage. So that to me was probably one of the biggest revelations.
But I have to say, watching the Holocaust footage that George Stevens filmed is devastating, and yet you realize that the director had another transformation. He goes from, at the beginning of the war, a narrative director to documentary filmmaker to evidence gatherer by the end of it, where this footage was used in the Nuremberg trials and the great debate over the Holocaust. Those were extremely powerful benchmarks, not only in history but in the story of FIVE CAME BACK.
Capone: Spielberg’s reaction and comments about finding out that [John Huston’s] SAN PIETRO was staged are like a kid finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist. He was so heartbroken.
LB: I know. The interesting thing is, in my case, I’ve made a business out of the revelation of trickery in film. “Oh my god, you weren’t even there for that scene because you couldn’t be there, but the way that it’s composited in…,” things like that that I discover as I’m documenting a Hitchcock movie or something. It’s the artifice of film. So when you discover that in the context of the documentary, it definitely gets me going.
Capone: Laurent, thank you so much. It’s great to finally talk to you, and best of luck with this. And I’m glad Netflix is putting so many of the films that are discussed in your doc out to watch, because I haven’t seen some of them.
