Interview from April 2010 during documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles' visit to Vancouver for screenings at Pacific Cinémathèque and Capilano University.
It’s impossible to discuss Albert Maysles without also mentioning his late brother David who died of a stroke in 1987. The two were inseparable, working as a cinematic tandem to record sound and image on film for more than a quarter of a century.
The brothers are credited with developing portable equipment and a non-obtrusive methodology that revolutionized documentary cinema in the early ‘60s. Albert operated the lightweight, modified Auricon 16mm cameras while his brother David took care of the sound on films that covered a wide range of topics and gave them a chance to work with the Beatles, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and many others.
The Maysles’ 1970 film of the Rolling Stones American tour, Gimme Shelter, is cinéma vérité of the first order and their 1976 intimate portrait of a reclusive mother and daughter in Grey Gardens is a cult classic. In 1992 the U.S. Library of Congress named the brothers’ 1968 feature documentary Salesman one of the 25 best American films ever made.
North Shore News: A big picture question to start things off -- How did you get involved in documentaty filmmaking?
Albert Maysles: I started off life as a psychologist and had already been teaching at the university in Boston when I was 28 in 1955. I thought it would be interesting to go to Russia during summer vacation and to do something that would be good for us all: Namely take some pictures of ordinary people and because I was a psychologist I thought I should go to mental hospitals. Anyway, I borrowed a movie camera and visited Russia and made my first film in mental hospitals. That’s how I got started.
North Shore News: Wasn’t it difficult to get approval to shoot in the Soviet Union at that time?
Albert Maysles: It would have been except I crashed a party and met the top leaders and they gave me full permission.
North Shore News: In other words you started at the top?
Albert Maysles: Right with a simple wind-up 16mm camera and no sound.
North Shore News: How did you develop your approach to documentary filmmaking?
Albert Maysles: In 1960 I joined several other filmmakers and we had a big grant from Time-Life -- something like a million dollars -- to develop a camera and sound system where there was no connection between the two but both camera and tape recorder were in perfect synchronization. And the camera ran 10 minutes of film rather than three. This equipment allowed a two-person crew to tell what’s going on. We didn’t need a vast crew of people with tripods and God knows what else. You didn’t need a narrator or a host to explain -- the material explained itself.
North Shore News: What was the first film where viewers could see this process at work?
Albert Maysles: The first film I made with these other guys (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker) was called Primary on the 1960 (Wisconsin primary) between Kennedy and Humphrey.
The camera was based on an Auricon camera but we built the camera in such a fashion that it was balanced on the shoulder so that you could hold it for a long time and keep it very steady.
North Shore News: Once you had that new equipment as part of your repertoire how did you and your brother get established as filmmakers?
Albert Maysles: That film established us as documentary filmmakers but then we also made a film called Showman about a Hollywood producer. In 1963 we made the film with Orson Welles. In 1964 we got a call from Granada Television in England saying The Beatles are arriving in two hours would you like to make a film with them? Off we went to the airport in time to see the plane coming down. We spent the whole next week with them day and night. Granada cut their own version and we cut ours.
North Shore News: What was Welles like to work with?
Albert Maysles: Very easy and very interesting. I remember he wanted to make a film with us, the idea being to use documentary techniques with him in charge, but letting a lot of things happen on their own. He called these happenings “divine accidents” and that’s sort of the principle upon which we make all of our films.
Reality isn’t something you can control, or try to, in making a documentary film. It’s only real if you let it happen on its own and so Welles wanted to combine that sort of thing with his own talents.
North Shore News: Jean-Luc Godard was another man with very definite ideas about cinema.
Albert Maysles: He set everything up (on Paris vu par). It was a fiction film but he didn’t allow me to know anything about what was about to take place.
I was brought to the scene and filmed it as I would something real not knowing what’s coming up next. And that worked out just beautifully. I would recommend that many a feature film be made that way. Unfortunately even the great feature films are made with two shots, close-ups and it all becomes kind of choppy, not the way we really experience things. With me not knowing what was coming up next it made for a continuous shot.
North Shore News: Was Salesman your first feature-length documentary?
Albert Maysles: I would drop the word “length” and just use the word “feature” documentary. It was probably the first of that kind of film. Up to that point there were feature-length documentaries but not features.
North Shore News: Did you have to change your approach for feature documentaries?
Albert Maysles: No, the approach was the same. It was strictly observational but filming a subject that could have that kind of depth and length (was new).
North Shore News: How long was the shoot for Salesman?
Albert Maysles: Six weeks. Same with Grey Gardens.
North Shore News: Was distribution a consideration when you made Salesman?
Albert Maysles: We were determined to show it in movie theatres but none of the distributors were used to showing documentaries so they weren’t interested. We had to raise some money so we could show it in a theatre and the reviews and publicity helped us to distribute it further.
North Shore News: What was it like working with the Stones? You shot them on tour in 1969 but also watching the film and commenting on the footage in the editing process. Were they co-operative?
Albert Maysles: They said they’d like to see some of the footage once we’d got it processed and so we thought this is great -- we’ll show them footage and film them at the same time. That helped in the structure of the film as it was being edited. They were co-operative in every way.
North Shore News: How did you get out of Altamont?
Albert Maysles: I don’t remember that well enough. I remember coming in on the helicopter but I don’t remember going out on it but I must have.
North Shore News: It must have been a surreal situation. There were 300,000 people there but by the time the Stones came on it was dark and the film focuses on the few on stage or immediately around it.
Albert Maysles: Exactly. We started out thinking we wanted to make something more than a concert film, but just what that more would be we had no idea.
North Shore News: How did the Grey Gardens project come about?
Albert Maysles: We got a call one day from Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis’ sister, whose boyfriend was Peter Beard, the photographer, and she had heard of us from Peter. She wanted to make a documentary of her childhood in East Hampton and he suggested us. She came to us with a list of things that should be filmed. Item number 34 her eccentric aunt and cousin, the two women.
We began filming these various events and several days into the filming she got a call from young Edie saying the two of them were in trouble with the Board of Health and could she come and help out. We went along with her and filmed some of that scene and it developed such that (Radziwill) lost interest in her own project and we found interest in the two women. A couple of months later we filmed the two women in Grey Gardens and spent six weeks with them.
North Shore News: Your classic works are all in 16mm but now you work with digital equipment.
Albert Maysles: Once I switched to digital I stuck with it so that’s what I do now. It’s all digital. Once the video equipment began to look good we switched to it.
North Shore News: What’s the difference for you?
Albert Maysles: The way of filming is the same but it’s so much more economical. You don’t have the burden of shooting for only 10 minutes before you have to change magazines. The tape will allow you to go for a full hour without stopping at any particular time.
The equipment is much lighter. The camera has within it sound so sound and picture are in one device. All kinds of advantages make it obsolete to go to film. Of course we have high definition and Sony’s talking about coming out with a 3D camera.
North Shore News: What do you think about 3D?
Albert Maysles: I haven’t seen it. It may be some kind of advance but not as significant as the high definition.
North Shore News: You’ve worked with a number of editors on your films -- what is their role in the process?
Albert Maysles: Very important. So important we give them equal directing credit which is something I don’t know if anybody else does. So you’ll see for example Gimme Shelter co-directed by my brother, myself and Charlotte Zwerin who edited, as she did Salesman also.
We think the camera and the editing are of vital importance enough so that those people should get director’s credits. In fact the word director is something that is a little bit strange for a documentary. Filmmaker is much more acceptable.
