Morgan Dews is a documentary maker that I hope is on the cusp of major success. I’m a documentary junkie, no doubt, and his very personal work, Must Read After My Death, is a fascinating glimpse into the secrets of a family. Here’s a synopsis of the work: “When a Hartford couple turns to psychiatry for help with their marriage in 1960, things quickly spiral out of control. Couples counseling, individual and group therapy and 24-hour marathon sessions ensue. Their four children suffer and are given their own psychiatrists. Pills are prescribed, people are institutionalized, shock-therapy is administered. This is an intimate story in the family’s own words, from an extraordinary collection of audio recordings and home movies, illuminating a difficult and extraordinary time.” The couple? Dews’ grandparents. One of the children? Dews’ mother. Enough background, now on to the interview. My thanks to Morgan for his time. Keep an eye out for upcoming film festivals in your area, if your lucky, they’ll be showing this documentary.
Tim O’Shea: Growing up with your grandmother, did you have any idea the degree of what she and her children endured as a family?
Morgan Dews: None. As I say at the beginning of this film, this is a story that my grandmother never ever talked to me about. I found out about it through the tapes after she died. She would always say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This story is basically the opposite of that. She had psychiatrists saying that she should express herself, her doubts, anger and fear. These audio diaries became a place for her to do that. So it really is made up of the worst hours of the worst days of the worst years. In that sense, it isn’t a complete picture of their life as a family, which was, in many ways, quite lovely. It is the secret story of the dark days of a family.
O’Shea: How hard was it to get the opening title sequence to mimic your grandmother’s handwriting?
Dews: That is her handwriting. “Allis’ Must Read After My Death File,” was quite literally on an envelope full of her transcripts of the tapes, and notes on those days and what was going on. The folder was given to my mother and uncles when she died.
O’Shea: At one point in the documentary, a family member is committed to a mental institution. It’s a jarring revelation and is one of the few details (to that point in the work) that is not revealed through audio recordings per se. Did you mean for it to be a startling moment for the viewer?
Dews: I think it was a pretty startling decision even at the time. It comes as a complete surprise, and I think is one of those shocking decisions that once taken, becomes very difficult to take back. I wanted the revelation to that my uncle had been committed to mirror the way it happened as understood in the tapes. It is startling.
O’Shea: Given how personally involved you are in the material, did you ever get another documentary maker’s opinion to make sure you were not losing your perspective on the project or making it to inaccessible to a un-involved observer?
Dews: Yes. I think Alison Bourke, my wonderfully talented executive producer saw the film and gave me notes 6 or 7 times. Not that we would always agreed, but I think she was most helpful in getting me focused thinking through every inch of the story. My wife Sarah Langley Dews was also there through the entire process from the very beginning and she is the credited story consultant, though she was much more involved than that implies. I also got many friends and family to screen the film and give me feedback, many many times. It can be quite difficult to maintain perspective while editing anything and something magical happens when you see a film with other people in the room. You literally start to see it through their eyes, and that can be extremely helpful.
I also have to say that my goal throughout the process of making this film was to shape a very classical story out of the material. I always thought that the strength of this story is the material and the craft with which it is constructed. I was always obsessed with the idea that you could make almost a narrative film out of this material, and have Allis tell the audience her story directly. That means that there was no need to interview anybody today and ask them what they felt about it, and no need for my connection to the material to be very explicit. My intention was to involve the viewer directly in Allis’ story and leave all my stories about that out.
O’Shea: How painful was it to watch this deconstruction of a family, your family–or were you able to detach yourself from the personal nature of the work?
Dews: It was excruciating. Some of the fight scenes took months to edit. It wasn’t very easy on the people around me either. After eight hours of listening to the same fight I was kind of shattered. At the same time though making the film was cathartic for me. It taught me a lot about the way I am and the way my family is. There is something amazing about the way families are gets passed on through the ages with very little change. I got to see that first hand.
O’Shea: Was your opinion of the mental health profession changed after making this documentary?
Dews: I find a lot of the ideas very helpful to me. I feel the same way I do about auto mechanics. You’re probably better off if you don’t need them, but when you do they can be extremely helpful or less so. Like so many things it depends on who you’re talking about. Certainly my family had some back luck, but I think they also were helped by some very decent competent and caring people.
O’Shea: Did you have to get permission to leave in some of the last names that were used (Dr. Lenn, for example)?
Dews: That’s an interesting question. I decided to leave my family’s last name out of the picture. In their case, it was to insulate them a little from the story, which is mostly about the trauma of their childhood. However in my grandparents case, and in the case of Dr. Lenn and others, this was really a story that could only be told after their deaths. I think if it had only involved my grandparents I would have used their last names. The short answer is that the dead have no image rights or say in the matter, and that’s why you can see John Wayne in a commercial today. Another answer is that Allis only referred to her experts by their last names. I would have had a very difficult time not using his name. Dr. Lenn was a doctor of social psychology and not a medical doctor or psychiatrist. The other answer is that, like all the people in the film, he is a product of the ideas of his time. He may come across as a bad guy, or may even be a bad guy, but like everyone else in the film, he is acting totally within the realm of the acceptable. The film works this way a bit, that part of the shock is just how different some things were, and how much other things are the same.
O’Shea: Amidst all the home movies, audio recordings and materials you sifted through for this documentary, was there one piece that when you found it you realized you had the lynchpin or pivotal piece for the documentary.
Dews: I think it was more an accumulation of things. At some point I said, “Wow, if I’m clever, I can make something out of ONLY this material, and that could be really amazing.” There was just a tipping point where I realized there was a good enough story and enough material to tell it. It was also realizing that this one very personal story was also very much about that time in history in America and had something to say I hope about american society.
O’Shea: How many festivals has the film been shown at? I noticed that at an upcoming festival you’re slotted to do a Q&A. Are you ever concerned that viewers will try to pry too much or do you consider no subject to be offlimits?
Dews: It’s been shown at about 33 festivals so far. I always really love showing the film to people and hearing what they have to say about it. On the one hand, I’m really interested as a filmmaker in how they react to the story, in what they take away, and in how the film combines with the stories the audiences bring. I really love talking about all of it. Audiences have really helped me learn about what was happing in this story and why these things went on. Audiences are really when stories come alive. Sometimes it’s really flattering when people pick up on things I was being very subtle about and sometimes they teach you about dynamics you were not even aware up, but were only able to sketch intuitively.
O’Shea: Do you intend to release the documentary on DVD–and will there be a commentary track involving any of the family (other than yourself, of course)?
Dews: The film will have a theatrical release and then come out on DVD/online/tv etc. I recently had the opportunity to do Q&A sessions at festivals with my mother and two uncles. They were all so fantastic. I wish I had been able to record those sessions. I would like to do that with them for the DVD, maybe just audio or maybe interviews. I’m not sure if another audio track is the right thing for this film, but certainly as an extra feature for the DVD and streaming elements.
O’Shea: Given that you come from musical family and you are a musician yourself, how important was to select the right composer for your documentary and how did you come to choose Paul Damian Hogan?
Dews: I am not a great musician, so it was clear to me from the beginning that I would need someone else to do the score. In the beginning I approached another really great composer, Albrecht Kunze. He made a score for the film, but we started working on it quite early and kind of wound up in totally different places. I showed him my very early ideas long before I really learned what the film was about. It was a very traumatizing thing for me because I had a really beautiful score from somebody I really admired but it wasn’t right for the film. I had a really great discussion with audiences in Amsterdam at IDFA. Somebody said they thought the music distanced them from the texts. I asked for a show of hands and about ninety percent agreed. Then I asked how many people loved the music and only about ten hands went up, and mine was among them.
About that time Gigantic Releasing made us an offer to distribute the film. They were willing to pay to rescore and suggested Paul. Mark Lipsky from Gigantic had taken me to see Paul Damian Hogan’s band Frances play a few weeks earlier and I really loved their neo-folk vibe. I didn’t make the connection right away to my film. A sound that was more connected to the sixties seemed to make a lot of sense. For me there is something very fifties science fiction about my film and the way my grandparents really embraced all this new frontier of technology that worked really well with Albrecht’s score. But people were having a really hard time connecting.
Paul was really a joy to work with, and I had also learned to be more up-front and vocal about wanting to create certain moods at certain points in the film and Paul was able to really work to give me what I wanted. Albrecht had started much earlier in the film with me, and the original trailer that I showed him was nothing like the final film and we only communicated by email, so we kind of wound up with two different interpretations of the material. By the time it got to work with Paul the film was finished. I was much more sure of what the story was and how the audience should be reacting at any given point. I had been screening the film for months, so it was much easier for me to give him the kind of direction he needed.
When I began working with Albrecht I felt that the whole way of doing scores was wrong and that you should really start out with the music as an emotional script for the work. But a story has a tempo of it’s own and it’s the story that is paramount and the music that should be working to that end. So now I have two scores that I really love for two totally different reasons. I hope somehow to make them both available at some point.
O’Shea: Are you still pursuing a “visual novelization” of your travels throughout Europe or what is your next project?
Dews: Oh absolutely! It’s a project I am so excited about. Mostly it’s working title is Road Movie, because the second act is a road trip I took with my best friends from Barcelona and my wife to be. But another title could be what my dear friend Paco says, “I’m happy when my friends are happy.” In a nutshel, it’s about a group of people move to Barcelona in the ’90s and become friends and then family for one another and how at one point they come of age together and go their separate ways. The road-trip was a really transformative experience for all of us and the point were we looked around and said, you should really go for it with that person, she’s a good partner for you. We basically married each other off.
The ‘visual novelization’ comes from the idea of taking a universe of footage my friends and I all created; videos, super 8, photographs, recordings, etc. and making a sort of autobiographical novel out of it. It’s a really similar idea to what I’ve done with Must Read After My Death. It’s an attempt to create a “fictional” and intimate narrative from the facts and souvenirs of your life. It really wants to be playful in a cinematic sense and honest in an emotional sense. My friends and loved ones are not as eager as I am to lay out their lives for all to see, so I’ve promised to fabricate as much as possible and cover them with the veil of fiction. Call it a fictional documentary comedy about love and friendship.
O’Shea: What else is on the creative horizon for you in the near to long term?
Dews: Just on me I have a list of ideas for 16 fiction and documentary films that are far to juicy and on the tip of your tongue to talk about. A couple I want to do with my wife, one I want to do with my mother. I’m trying to work with a few writers on fiction scripts for dramas and thrillers and I would LOVE to do science fiction, one of the great loves of my childhood. There’s always that question of what is it you want to spend your time doing. MRAMD was really healthy for me to do in terms of learning about my family when I’m about to embark on creating a family of my own. I’m obsessed with my Road Movie now and I hope I’ll continue to pick the projects that I simply MUST do. It makes choosing so much easier!
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