March 16, 2020

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Lance oppenheim

NFFTY has grown into a wonderful community of over 2,700 filmmakers from around the world. Alumni have experienced success in many areas of the media industry. To celebrate these achievements, we are highlighting NFFTY alumni here!

Lance Oppenheim (NFFTY ‘13, ‘14, ‘17) is a filmmaker and graduate of Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies program. His films have screened at festivals around the world, including Sundance, Rotterdam, Tribeca, True/False, and they’ve been featured at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian.

Lance was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2019, was a 2019 Sundance Ignite Fellow, and is the youngest contributor to the New York Times Op-Docs. His first feature documentary, SOME KIND OF HEAVEN, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

OUR INTERVIEW WITH LANCE:

How do you find inspiration for the stories you want to tell, and how do you find such eccentric subjects?

I think I’m sort of obsessed with people who are kind of living off in the margins somewhere, like stories of American misfortune or something. Usually, for a lot of the folks that are in these films, something has happened to them in a previous lifetime that they’re trying to bury, and they’re chasing a fantasy — sometimes they’re even living in a fantasy that seems a lot more close to them. I’m not sure where that [interest] comes from, my parents are the furthest thing away from filmmakers, they’re lawyers, and in the recession in ‘08, they went from representing people who were building homes and buying homes to suddenly people who were losing their homes, and I think that had a pretty significant impact on me at the time. In a lot of ways, it was making me question ‘what is a home?’. It’s not just where you live, it’s a form of your identity. It’s who you are, it’s how you think of yourself, it’s kind of a fundamental part of who you are as a human being, so I was thinking a lot about those stories.

I’m from Florida, and I was reading a lot of shit in the newspaper about people living in storage units and people clinging to items and artifacts of their past, and I kind of just got really obsessed with this theme. I watched a film called Dark Days that Marc Singer made in like the 80’s about a bunch of homeless folks who live in this kind of abandoned subterranean Amtrak subway station, and they were building this really domestic life for themself, and I was obsessed with these kinds of stories. I just basically read the newspaper a lot and I just kept finding strange stuff that was going on. One of them was the surprising village of people who were living in this parking lot system at LAX, and then there was other stuff that was more local to me that was like, ‘here’s this guy who’s been living on a cruise ship for 20 years, and he doesn’t have real estate, he just literally lives on [cruise ships]’. Then there was obviously the feature, which was the story I had grown up hearing about: hundreds of thousands retirees moving from across the country to this snow globe of their youth, this place that reminds them of who they were when they were younger. I’m usually interested in a setting and the way in which people are settling in a strange or unconventional home or a place, and then I usually try to live in that place for quite a bit of time without a camera. From that point forward, it’s usually trying to identify who’s interesting, who seems like they can command the screen and has stories that they want to tell, and who’s willing to go there with me.

In the case of this feature, [the Villages] are such a mammoth place, and I was so nervous and freaked out all the time just by how large it was - it’s impossible to wrap your head around. I was there for 18 months, and I still haven’t explored every inch of the community, it’s just that big. It was like, ‘what’s my angle here, what’s an interesting way to look at this place?,’ and I’m very grateful for meeting the people who I met, the people who are in the film, because they’re on the margins of the place, and they’re struggling to fit into this kind of painfully optimistic worldview of aging gracefully. I connected with that in a pretty deep way.

Once you do find those interesting people with stories to tell, can you talk a little bit about how you then choose to portray them? How do you avoid any pitfalls in representation, and what’s the most important thing to you when you sit down in the editing room?

There’s nothing easier in documentary than to make someone look foolish, and that’s not interesting or smart filmmaking to me. I think in making a lot of films and shorts and stuff growing up, I definitely fell into those pitfalls. It’s a really miserable situation or place to be in - it’s not fair or fun to show your films to the people you’ve made the film about if you’re judging them. Even with some of my shorts, I think I’ve sometimes straddled the line a little closer to being too judgmental, but with this feature, I think it comes down to the amount of time you spend with someone. I think I entered this retirement community with a lot of skepticism and I thought that a lot of the practices and the attitudes of the place were so different from the way I live my life, and the more time I spent there a lot of my preconceived ideas about it kind of faded away. I think a large part of it comes back to the fact that this movie is about people who are going through real stuff in a really hyper-real place. The things that they’re going through are things that are relatively universal. They’re going through marital problems, they’re going through loneliness, they’re experiencing things that I really deeply relate to and think about a lot in my own life. It’s definitely a balance and, this is a place that I really credit my editor, Daniel Garber. He and I worked really hard to make sure the film was never toeing the line more closely to like, exploitation or laughing at the subjects rather than laughing with them, or just laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of some of the situations that they got themselves in. The beauty of this whole thing is that when we showed [the subjects] the film, they were able to laugh! They laughed along with the film.

As a documentary filmmaker, getting to that place where you’re asking those harder questions, do you have any tips, tricks, or advice for people when it comes to going really deep with your subjects, asking difficult questions, or even just shooting in difficult locations with tact and success?

I mean, I think it really comes down to how honest you’re being with your subjects, if you’re explaining your intentions and what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to film. In our case, we’re shooting this film in a way that’s a little different than other documentaries, just because we’re shooting with one camera, it’s all tripod, there are very few talking heads, we’re shooting vérité in a pretty heightened way, which requires performance from the subjects, but it also requires a level of almost brutal honesty on my end. I had to explain my aims or my end goals to film [the subjects’] marriage therapy session. I don’t think any of that would have happened if it didn’t come back to the initial place of trust and honesty, and the way you build trust is by going through things with people, you experience things with people, and you don’t betray them. Because we were there for such intense moments in our subjects' lives, I think in a lot of ways, they feel like they’re collaborators or co-conspirators with us. They feel like they’ve helped build this film. So, be honest. Let’s say you’re in an interview situation, and someone’s dancing away from your questions. Turn off the camera, and have that conversation with them. Tell them exactly what you’re actually after. That’s happened to me a million times, where I can tell someone is turning away from what I’m actually trying to ask, and literally just turning off the camera, having a really difficult conversation with them where I explain why I’m trying to get to the answer I’m trying to get to, or the question I’m trying to get to, and talking about the root of each other’s discomfort with that, usually leads to something interesting. But, you know, if someone doesn’t want to go there with you, then you also have to respect that. 

Filmmaking lessons aside, what did you learn from the subjects of SOME KIND OF HEAVEN that was the most surprising to you, or that you took with you into your personal life?

That’s a good question - I mean, I think there’s a few things, but I think the two biggest ones is that even nearing the final chapters, the twilight of people’s lives, that a lot of stuff is just not resolved, and that you return to the grave the same way you came up, with all of your complexities. I was with people who are trying to celebrate this kind of ‘life after life’, where they can do whatever they want to do. In a way, it was kind of a return for them to high school prom or college and more youthful times in their lives.

I was coming out of college, I had just graduated, so in a way it felt like people don’t really change, for better or for worse. There will always be, especially nearing your sixth or seventh decade on earth, things that are going to exist that will be just as horribly unresolved as they are now. I guess the thing that I’ve loved so much about the folks in the film is that there’s a refusal on their part to give up. Every person in this film, they’re still in the act of becoming. It’s like their coming of age story hasn’t ended. In a lot of ways, it’s beginning again or starting over, and that quest for becoming that never ends is a thing that I think about a lot. I definitely don’t feel like a person who is resolved in any way, shape, or form. I’m constantly tormented by self-doubt and a lot of other things, and seeing other people later in life deal with the same stuff is really interesting.

Are you planning to stick with documentary filmmaking, or do you have any plans to venture into the narrative world? If so, what skills or lessons do you think you’ll take with you?

I’m trying to make a narrative thing right now, and I really enjoy the kind of rigorous process of researching and getting to know people and getting to inhabit a space that is so foreign from the spaces that you spend your time in or live in. There’s something that I appreciate [when] making a documentary or just the films that I’ve made in the past, which is getting to spend time with characters whose decisions that they make are so outside of the realm of how I would imagine a fiction film happening and the setting of where these folks live. I still plan to spend the same amount of time and the same amount of curiosity and examination at these places that I’m trying to fictionalize, and I’m hoping that with fiction stuff I can still have that same attention to detail and to character that I try to have in documentary stuff.

Can talk a little bit about the jump from short to feature filmmaking through the lens of a young person working in this industry and share any advice you might have with fellow NFFTY filmmakers that might also feel like they’re in the position to make that next step?

It requires a lot more hands, and a lot more energy from a lot more people. I think the one thing I really liked about this whole process is the sheer amount of time you have to spend not only with your subjects, but with your collaborators, and finding who your collaborators are. It’s not easy to find and band together with people, but the process kind of forces you to. I still send probably like 2-3 cold emails to someone I don’t know every week, and I don’t know if it’s a thing about being younger, but I find that if you have work to show and you are approaching someone not for what they will do for you but you’re approaching them about how you appreciate their work, and you start from a place that’s more organic, I found that people are generally receptive to you. I think that’s the one thing I would urge people to do, whether you’re making a short or a feature, try and find people who you like who you don’t know and reach out to them. In terms of age, I think still it’s an uphill battle at times. You need to drink your own kool-aid even when you don’t. There were so many moments making this film that I literally had no idea what I was doing, or if what I was doing was the right thing to do. I had no idea what the story of this film was for so long, even though we had so many threads and material and great folks we were following. I think I just had to keep believing in something, I had to keep believing in myself, and never show that kind of weakness in a way. As a young person, it’s easy to not believe in yourself, so you’ve gotta do it! You’ve gotta make sure you don’t give up.

How has NFFTY impacted your life or career?

NFFTY was one of the first festivals to ever feature my work, so I feel extremely indebted to you guys. Going back to just having a belief system in yourself, I think getting my first shorts into NFFTY allowed me to believe in myself a lot more as a filmmaker. It also forced me to go out, as soon as I had the NFFTY laurel on my short, and send it to a million other people. That’s the other thing — going back to your previous question — if you’re young and you’re making shit, try and tell the world about the stuff that you’re making and keep hustling it out. It’s so important to have work, and it’s so important to have places like NFFTY that can support that work, and you guys provided an amazing support system so early on.

What’s next for you, what should we be on the lookout for?

There’s a project that I’ve been slowly developing for a bit, and I’m hoping in this time of social distancing I can focus and get to writing.