Interview with Amiel Courtin-Wilson / Man on Earth

Man on Earth directed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson  is a stripped-back and contemplative documentary that follows Robert “Bob” Rosenzweig on the last 8 days of his life. Having set out a time and date for his death through assisted dying, the audience is invited to peer into the diurnal routines and heartfelt moments as he deals with Parinkinson’s while coming to terms with his mortality and its impact it has on others. Although broadly about euthanasia, the film is ultimately an uplifting one that prompts reflections on family, intimacy, and how to live one’s life.

Bonnie: How did you find out about Bob and decide to make a documentary about him?

Amiel
Man on Earth grew out of a really extensive research process for another film that’s yet to be released, called Traces, which is a thermal imaging documentary, looking at the human body at the moment of death. We had a team working for close to two years looking for participants for that project. The initial contact we had with Bob was all of three and a half weeks away from when we landed. So it was a very fast turnaround. It was really unlike any other initial chat with a subject, it was about a 15 minute phone call…It took five minutes, and I knew that I wanted to make a film about Bob because he was funny as f***.

There are not that many documentaries dealing with this subject matter. But quite often, the subjects are much older and they’ve come to a very different part of their life in terms of their relationship to death. What was particularly interesting about Bob was that he, in many ways, wasn’t ready and that there was a lot of anger…some very conflicting emotions there.

B: It was also interesting seeing how the rest of the family interacted or navigated his death. Were there any considerations of how you wanted to involve the rest of the family?

A: I should say that it’s the first certainly the first time that we’ve ever made a film where it was really the subject instigating the film itself. It was really Bob who handled all the negotiations with other family members. For that reason, it did free us up from what would have otherwise been some pretty ethical knots that I don’t think we might have been able to untie enough to enable us the access that we need.

B: I guess in a way, he was also a director and producer of the film.

A:That’s, that’s exactly right. You know, like he had spent a lot of his life working in management and so he was amazing at being able to get the crew together.

Usually, I like to spend months, if not years, with subjects. I think 10 years is the longest I’ve spent following someone. So there were many things that we were still finding out about Bob. The fact that he was a frustrated actor, we only learned that maybe day two of the seven day shoot. So, that sequence in which he appears on stage towards the end of the film had to be organised and incorporated into the shoot unbelievably quickly to be able to tell that part of his story. I think in many ways, it was a constant process of negotiation as Bob knew the things that he really wanted to get out and at the same time trying to maintain a big picture in terms of giving the audience a snapshot of the other parts beyond that period of eight days.

B: It’s a very intensive period of eight days. You’re invited as part of the process and invited as part of the family. You’re there as a documentary maker but you’re also trying to facilitate some grander thing for Bob as well and what he wants out of this project. Were there any logistical challenges to that?

A: In some ways, what you maybe don’t see quite enough of in the film is how debilitating the illness was, at times.

We also suggested that he didn’t necessarily have to go through with it that day. We were wanting to make sure that Bob knew that he’d have the option to maybe do and see some things that he might not have otherwise thought were possible. But I think when presented with those options, it was clear that, you know, he’d kind of steeled himself for this particular date. I think that partially came from us being very conscious of any pressure to go through with it because the cameras were there.

B: Or I guess even being conscious of the fact that the filming process also takes time.

A: We spent maybe 12 or 14 hours together on the very first day of filming. By day three, he decided that he wanted to have a day off to spend with his family.

When he realised that we really wanted to see the in-between moments and that they were just as important as his life story, he very quickly adjusted things and made sure to have time with his family.

I guess that was his decision as well to just live out those few days with his loved ones. Just to give you a sense of how unbelievably selfless he was. He found out a couple of days in that our sound recorder Steve has a chronic illness, ALS, so Bob found time to zoom with Steve’s dad specifically to tell how proud he should be of his son and how he’s doing such a good job as a sound recordist.

I know that he can sometimes in the film be a little prickly and that some people respond accordingly. But I personally loved him very dearly. I respect him immensely for being willing to show us all aspects of his personality.

B: I want to ask more personally, what sort of personal impact did this project have on you?

A: I found myself drawn to this subject matter, initially, because of a couple of deaths in my own family and saw that there was maybe a lack of ritual or a lack of emotional scaffolding around that experience, especially in a family that is fairly secular.

So that was the initial draw, but after meeting Bob I underestimated the impact the film would have. How intense it would be to meet Bob, how close we became to his family. A year after Bob had died, Jesse and his wife, Jen, invited us back to the States to spread Bob’s ashes with the family. I had absolutely underestimated the kind of profound connection that we had with the family as a result of that.

There is sadness while watching the film…but there’s also something quite cathartic about it. I think in many ways, it was only after the premiere of the film, that I fully grieved the loss of my friend in that regard. Somehow, it was seeing him die with a group of strangers in some cinema in Northern England, that made it finally concrete.

Having said that, the other thing that has been unbelievably humbling is the number of emails and responses to the film in which people have reconnected with their estranged family. We had a 70 year old woman in the UK, who saw the film and got in touch saying that she had reconnected with her estranged daughter as a result of seeing the film. That’s why I think the film, hopefully will connect with as broad an audience as possible outside of the film being about euthanasia. I think it’s really just about how to live one’s life with a greater degree of urgency and intimacy and compassion.

B: For me, personally, I don’t think I’ve watched someone die on screen like that, like in the last few minutes of the film. And it’s like a very ethically challenging topic to deal with as a documentary maker. Choosing such a confronting scene, and choosing to film that was a very specific decision you guys made as well.

A: I was chatting with the cinematographer, Jacqueline, a couple of weeks back and there were moments where the camera was shaking a little bit which is from her sobbing uncontrollably while holding the camera. We could’ve stabilised that image but there’s something just inherently beautiful about that– being a part of the fabric of the film. It really is like nothing else to bear witness to that moment, with a group of people in a cinema.

B: Going back and talking more about the visual qualities of the film, I would say it’s quite minimal and stripped back. I would say pacing and audio are the main factors that drive that emotion in the film. Could you talk a little bit more about any stylistic or visual considerations your team had made in relation to the subject matter?

A: Once we found out where Bob lived in the Pacific Northwest and that we would be shooting during the last month of winter. There’s almost a mythical quality to this sort of etched wintry Americana in those landscapes and something innately liminal about that part of the country. It does quite often feel like you’re in this netherworld of sorts. Slow motion is something that I’ve used through all my films.

There were plans to engage with more sequences that were purely subjective. The condition that Bob, the Lewy body Parkinson’s, where you are hallucinating and you are experiencing the world in this quite heightened and impressionistic way. Hence, some of the more abstract impressionistic sequences in the film. In chatting with the cinematographer, Jacqueline, it was really just about not imposing as many of the sort of stylistic bells and whistles that I would usually employ and just document for the most part.

That followed through to the edit. It demanded comparatively straightforward structure…there’s a very kind of clear, consistent temporal mode that the film deals with. Certain elements of Bob’s past were saved for relatively later in the film, the home video or that stills montage, as it was just about giving the audience a chance to sit with him for as long as possible before giving you a sense of his past. The other aspect, that the recurring director address or close-up interview with Bob talking directly to the camera. That idea of him addressing the illness directly, was actually just like one of quite a few exercises, or provocations, we had. I had the instinct that he would have a lot to say when I found out that Bob had been kind of a frustrated thespian, and had wanted to be a stand up comedian at a certain point. It just came out of him in this like, pretty amazing volcanic monologue.

Sonically, we were really lucky to work with Nicolas Becker who did some of the sound with me… I’m a great believer in the kind of sonic bandwidth of a film, always incorporating at least one moment of total silence in the soundtrack to give you to this place of silence to allow for smaller sonic gestures to take on greater impact as a result. So it kind of brings us into a more intimate space sonically. Everything’s comparatively ambient and minimal until you get that final track that plays out during Bob’s last minute. So that was also sort of a conscious decision to to keep things not muted, but to have these gentle swells of sound so that the final track of House of the Rising Sun can have its full impact.

B: One last question…you’ve been making films since you were really young. Even at the age of 19, you had Chasing Buddha at Sundance and SFF winning Best Documentary. What advice do you have for younger people to get their ideas over the line and also what keeps you going in the field of documentary making?

A: I think the most important is to treat your filmmaking like a sketchbook and make all kinds of work; work to be seen by the public, work for yourself, work that’s an experiment. I think there’s a careerist tendency in young filmmakers being told they need to plot out their careers but it’s really important to allow yourself to experiment and to fail and to take creative risks. The other big piece of advice would be to find collaborators who you love and care about early, because it can be a bit of a comparatively lonely profession… don’t be afraid to work outside the system as well…help other people make films, you know, where possible, because you learn an immense amount from that.

I think it’s just just to stay creatively fertile, and to continue to kind of push yourself.

Interview by Bonnie Huang