Transcript 0:00 From the moment they met, Patrick Bresnan and Yvette Lucas knew they would make art together. 0:05 They collaborated on visual art installations and photography projects, but their most fertile ground is through the lens of documentary film. I'm Matt Peiken of See Here. 0:15 I sat down with Patrick and Yvette to talk about their newest film titled First They Came for My College, which brings viewers inside the conservative takeover of the New College of Florida by the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 0:28 If you're watching this podcast episode, you're now seeing scenes from that film. 0:33 But our conversation goes far deeper, tracing the couple's unconventional path from the worlds of graffiti art, photojournalism, and underground media to uncompromising filmmakers with Sundance credits and a courtship with HBO. 0:50 Thank you both for joining me today. I wanna talk about your new film, but I also wanna talk about your path up till this film and your process as documentary filmmakers and how you got into documentary work. 1:05 But first of all, how did you two meet? After Hurricane Katrina, I moved to Louisiana, and I was working south of Houma gutting houses with Mennonite Disaster Service. 1:19 And I continued to work with them for the next three years on and off. And I met Yvette in 2008. I was working south of Lake Charles in Cameron, Louisiana, again gutting houses after Hurricane Ike. 1:35 And I'd been living with all these Christians, and I just really needed a break, but I had- [laughs]... 1:42 seen these 20-year-old couples and 70-year-old couples, all these wonderful people volunteering and in love, and I was like, "Man, I really need to meet someone." 1:51 And so I was living in a van at the time with two dogs, and I just decided I would drive south to Mexico to go do some peyote, and maybe I would meet someone along the way. 2:03 That's interesting that you went there with two goals. "I'm gonna do some peyote, and I'm gonna meet somebody." Did both of those come to fruition? I got very lucky with the second one. 2:16 On our drive down, we stopped in Monterey, Mexico. And I'd been there years ago and met Yvette's best friend, and we reached out to that person. They weren't there. 2:25 They were like, "You should meet up with our friend Yvette." And so I met Yvette on the first day of the drive, and we fell in love, and then we went to Real de Catorce, Mexico, and I think- Not, not with me. 2:37 Yeah, not with Yvette. And I think I was so happy to have fallen in love that I didn't need to do peyote. I thought doing peyote would be some pathway to figuring out why I couldn't meet someone. [laughs] Okay. 2:49 You told me that you were coming to, to do an art project. So [laughs] Oh, yeah. We were doing that too. Was that a ruse, or was that true that you were going there to do an art- Oh, yeah. 2:56 We were doing an art project for sure. Tell me about this art- They did do So were you a visual artist? Were you a, a multimedia installation artist? What was this art project? I was very fortunate. 3:06 I worked for a really famous graffiti artist, Barry McGee, and a painter named Claire Rojas in the early 2000s, and we had gone all over the world building their big installations at museums and Deitch Project in New York several times. 3:23 So I was really coming from that world, but I did documentary photography. So my volunteer work really was a way to gain trust in communities so that I could then do photography and do video work to tell their stories. 3:40 So you were already blazing that path to become a documentary filmmaker through this artwork and your documentary photography. Yvette, what was your life like in 2008 when you met Patrick? 3:53 So I was a little bit out of college, and I used to have a collective of other artists that we worked with. 4:03 We had, like, sort of an open access TV show that was really wild and artistic but also really funny, and we also had radio shows. And I was also... 4:12 I had worked for the newspaper as a photojournalist, and we had my collective of artists. We had just gotten a grant to make our first short film. 4:23 And I was also working for an independent production company, so I was already in the film world when I met Patrick, and we were in pre-production of that short film. 4:34 And we had gotten a really big grant, something like $50,000 to make this short. So- Was it a scripted film, or was it- Yes It was. It was a scripted fil- film, and it was almost like... 4:44 It was like this thing where each of us wrote a minute of it, and it all took place in this apartment building that was really run down. 4:51 And the elevator didn't have a door, so we would film the elevator going up, and you could see the different floors and all that texture. So it was really fun. So then I met Patrick. 5:02 He was coming to town, and I had been just, like, all day working. When you're almost going to shoot, you're doing, like, 14-hour days or whatever. And I said, "Okay, I'll help them find a place to stay." 5:14 And so then I met him, and we were, like, showing each other our photos, and we were, like, into something very similar. 5:22 And I said to him, "I'm not gonna take you to see, like, where all the American people go, just the touristy part. You're gonna go see the real stuff." 5:31 And so then I took him out to party, and we've been together since that night. Yeah. So you both had art backgrounds, photography backgrounds, alternative film, independent film backgrounds. Yes. 5:45 After you met, how soon did you start collaborating with each other or even thinking to collaborate with each other, if not in a documentary filmmaking sense, or maybe you did, but just in anything artistically, how soon did collaboration get onto the plate? 6:02 I think it was immediately. [laughs] I think it took a while because we were dating long distance a little bit, so he would come to town and then I would go visit him. 6:12 But immediately we started to talk about this project in Monterrey, right? Yvette would take me on road trips to very obscure places. 6:21 There was this religious cult leader named Fidencio, so we took a road trip to where he lived, and then- And that was my first documentary that I ever made, was about El Nino Fidencio, the Fidencio child. Yeah. 6:34 And you made that before you met Patrick? Yes. Okay. With my friends in Monterrey. Okay. Yeah, and I had made a mock documentary. I'm not a journalist person. I stumbled into this work. 6:46 My first film, I dropped out of NYU film school because when I was there everyone said, "You're gonna have so much debt. You- the technology is changing." Everything was shot on a, a 16 millimeter, an eight millimeter. 6:59 And so I dropped out and I made a film about two preachers traveling the country, preaching against masturbation. This was a mock documentary? Yeah. Yes. 7:08 It was during the time when Bill Clinton was getting impeached, and people were talking a lot about masturbating with cigars. And so we made up these Baptist missionaries, and we just would street preach all over the US. 7:20 So when you first started talking, and you said that happened very soon- Yeah... what did you talk about creating? 'Cause it's one thing to connect romantically. Both of you have an affinity to these art forms. Mm-hmm. 7:34 But it's another to share a collaborative spirit and that openness where you don't wanna just control your work and steer it. What was the project? What were you looking to collaborate on? Yeah. 7:46 I think for us it was immediate. Everything was happened together, and we were never guarded with our work, so we were people who were collaborative from the start. So why don't you continue what you were saying? 7:56 Yeah, I, I think I was going to rural flea markets a lot, and I had fallen in love with these wrestlers, these performers who would wrestle for 10, 15 people and risk their lives. 8:09 And I had discovered there was a wrestling event happening with two former WWF guys at a home for mentally handicapped adults. 8:18 And so I picked Yvette up at the airport, and we just immediately went there, and Brutus The Barber Beefcake was wrestling. I remember, I remember him. [laughs] Yeah. And, uh- Where, where was this? 8:27 Outside of Philadelphia. Okay. And Greg The Hammer Valentine. I remember him too. [laughs] Yeah, they were- Yeah. 8:32 So Y- Yvette had a video camera, and I was shooting film at the time, and we just kinda photographed these wrestlers among all these mentally handicapped adults, and- Who loved it, by the way. Yeah. They just loved it. 8:44 Yeah, it was a magical time in our relationship and for photography because you could still go anywhere with a camera and take pictures- Yeah... and people didn't ask for ID or- Yeah, this is pre-cellphone. Yeah. 8:55 Pre-social media, right? Mm-hmm. Just at the dawn of social media, I imagine. Yeah. It's interesting, even that project, and tell me if this is true. 9:03 So you have an eye for the odd, something that there's a spectacle to it. But yet you want to treat the people with reverence and respect. And so it's a tightrope walk to- Yes... do that kind of documentary work. 9:19 Did you wrestle with that struggle initially, or did that fall into place very easily for you to walk that tightrope between being drawn to and bring out the odd, and yet treat your subjects with re- respect? 9:36 I think it was very natural for us because we're both kinda odd. I think we were both sort of outsiders where we grew up. We were both seen as people who were different. 9:47 And we actually were always drawn to people who are different in ways that are less voyeuristic and more soul-satisfying. I just, my soul needed to be in kinship with people who were different. 10:00 And so I think the films that we make and the work that we've made has always been more in kinship with people than as look at them. And so it's always been that way. Yeah. 10:10 That's interesting that you use the word kinship. As a journalist, I've always, when I approach documentary and even written documentary- Mm-hmm... long-term reporting projects, deeply immersive reporting projects, 10:22 I try to get as close I can without being seen as in partnership with them. I don't want them to see me as a friend per se. 10:32 I'm not approaching it from any position of acrimony or friction, but you want your subjects to know what, that you're doing a job. Or did you take a more personal approach? 10:44 Have you always had a more personal approach with your subjects? I think yeah. Yeah. I date it back to discovering Diane Arbus. 10:53 I was living in Oregon at the time and had a friend in Los Angeles, and I would go and visit him, and he took me to see the show, I think it's called Revelations, at the Getty Museum. And 11:05 her work was just so mind-blowing and formative. And what I loved about Diane is that she got so close with people. She would have sex with people if she was photographing them, you know? I can't even imagine. Yeah. 11:19 That's unethical now, but- Yeah. [laughs]... I think- It would, probably unethical then, but maybe ethics weren't part of the conversation. But it just depends on the artist, right? 11:26 Because Nan Goldin, like, that wouldn't be unethical for her. Yeah. And we don't have sex with anyone we're working with. With each other. I'm glad you're making that- Just with each other. 11:34 I'm glad you're making that clear. Yeah. But I just- Setting the record straight... I just, I, I just love that becoming one with what you're documenting. Yeah. 11:42 We've documented Cajun Mardi Gras since we first met in Mardi Gras. And if I'm photographing Mardi Gras, I'm as drunk as they are, and I've broken- Wow... 11:51 like $2,000 lenses, and I've dropped cameras in ponds, and that's the way we work. It's not about- That's the thing, yeah... it's not about surgically... 12:02 recording something, it's really if I'm not in the moment with those people, I'm ruining the moment. Yeah. That's how we made a choice to be artists and not journalists. 12:11 I know because I worked at a newspaper for a little bit, and there is the professionalism that you have to have, and that's totally great for journalism, but we were very conscious that we wanted to become one. 12:23 We wanted an art practice, and the art practice was to do something because our soul was calling us to do it and not as a job. 12:33 And we love people who are creating things because their soul needs to create, and it's not something that they need money for. And so I think that f- to me sometimes, or I s- I see that as the definition of art. 12:45 Real art is something that you just need to do no matter if you're gonna get paid or not. And so a lot of these people, they're performers, like the wrestlers, and we also... 12:55 Our first real project we did together was weaving together the intersections of the lucha libre wrestlers in Monterrey, like the underground ones, not the ones that were already professional, and the drag queen community. 13:10 And they are performers, they're artists, and so we wanted to be a part of that and make work that was a part of that and not make work that is about that, if that makes sense. Y- yes, it does. 13:21 It's interesting 'cause I think once I'm in the project, I have the same viewpoint in some sense. Right. I guess it depends on the construct and what you're wanting to tell and who your audience is. 13:32 Who did you want or think of as your audience for this work? I don't- Or did that matter? Yeah, I don't, I don't think we considered it. 13:39 I don't, I don't think I ever thought about audience until we started making feature length documentaries, and you realize how hard it is to get them into a film festival and how much the film festival's thinking about who the audience is and who are gonna buy tickets. 13:55 So once you start thinking about who's gonna buy tickets, it really makes the work a lot more difficult. Yeah. Yeah. 14:02 Talk about your evolution from doing these independent works where it didn't matter how long it was, it didn't matter who your audience was, it didn't even matter where you were screening or if they got screened publicly. 14:13 Talk about how you moved or why you moved to that next step in your careers. I think it's just like a natural evolution of things, like how do you get your work seen. 14:26 We had a lot of art shows actually before we started making purely these documentaries, and we would be in galleries and we would build the whole thing out. Patrick is like a really good builder in many ways. Yeah. 14:41 And we would work really hard to have a whole installation, and then you had to take it down, and then you had to store the stuff that didn't sell or whatever. 14:50 And like you want it to sell because you want people to be a part of this art that you're making. I mean, I was also in grad school. 14:56 I was doing film school, and I was making shorts as my projects in grad school, and that kinda started to take off more, and that was easier because we didn't have to build a whole installation around it. 15:08 We would build spaces for people to watch the films or the videos that we made. 15:13 We would build like a little house or different kinds of houses, or there was one where Patrick built a whole like tree trunk and you would go inside the tree to watch what we had, and that was really hard. 15:25 I think as our work started getting into festivals and we would travel with it, that then we just started like naturally becoming more professional and needing money to make the longer work, and so that's how it evolved. 15:41 Before that, we would just... If we didn't get into a festival, we would just get in a car and go show our films wherever it would take us, like bars, wherever. 15:50 So getting in- even getting into festivals, there's not, you're not paid to be in film festivals, right? No. You're, you're just lucky if you get your film screened in these festivals. Yeah. 16:00 Tell me about the documentary that... or was there a documentary that kind of broke you out of this more hardscrabble struggle, and there was investment in your film and in your work? 16:12 What project brought that up to bear? I think it's all. It never stops being a struggle, but sometimes you have bigger budgets. You tell them that. W- when we finished grad school- And you went to grad school together? 16:26 Yvette went to film school. 16:27 I went to the architecture school at UT in Austin for sustainability, but that sustainability degree was really born from working on the Gulf Coast and rebuilding houses and then having to rebuild them again and wanting to find a better methodology. 16:42 So after grad school, I was really interested in working in rural communities of color, and my family was in West Palm Beach. I had been photographing the sugarcane fields there for years. 16:55 And Trayvon Martin was shot, and I just wanted to go back to Central Florida and tell stories in communities of color. And so the first film we made there was about prom day in this little town called Pahokee, 17:11 and that film got into Sundance, and that kinda changed everything because you go from making art shows, which you're lucky if 100 people see, to having meetings with HBO and producers and standing next- Yeah... 17:27 to Laura Poitras in a short film program. That really changed our perspective. Changed your perspective, and also did it color how you had to do your work? 17:38 Did it take you out of the soul rhythm that you had developed around your work and now that you had to respond to HBOs of the world? It didn't, no. We're like stubborn. 17:51 Patrick is a Gen X and I'm in the cusp of Gen X and millennials, and we remember the times where you just had to make zines and... 17:58 or I am like, I really am into countercultural music and I dress with spikes and I just never cared about what people thought about me. So we went into that world with that energy, and they weren't gonna change that. 18:12 But what changed was that people started seeing our work and liking it and liking how we did our work, so then we were attracting people who wanted to support the way we did our work. 18:26 And that's the only people that we accepted support from. If they wanted to change that, we had the integrity to say no. And did you face people who proposed ideas that just didn't meet your sensibilities? Yeah, sure. 18:40 That did happen? Yeah. [laughs] We, we... 18:42 So after that film, we made a film called The Rabbit Hunt, which is also in the sugarcane fields of Central Florida, and that film got into Sundance and Berlin, and Sundance wrote us and they said, "We never take 18:58 filmmakers back-to-back years, but the, The Rabbit Hunt is really special." So when The Rabbit Hunt came out, we started getting really weird calls. 19:09 This ad company in Portland, I forget what they're called, but they do Adidas and Nike and all this stuff, and they're like, "We saw The Rabbit Hunt at Sundance, and we want you to do a whole campaign for Facebook. 19:20 We want you to make 10 Rabbit Hunts in different communities." And we were just not interested in that because we wanted to make a feature film there. So all the short films were like 19:32 showing people what we could do and building an audience so that we could make a feature film because we had made a previous feature film that we spent all the money in the world we had on and tried to edit it for four years and never got into a festival. 19:45 So we really, we wanted to have a feature film at a big festival. A feature documentary. Yeah. You mentioned the film in Pahokee, The Prom. I think that is interesting and is illustrative of your approach. 20:00 You wanted to shoot, this is in the wake of Trayvon Martin, you wanted to shoot in a Black community. Why a prom? 20:08 I think that speaks to how you think through visually what you wanna present as well as spiritually what you wanna present. I can imagine a prom presented hope and happiness and young people looking their best. 20:26 I, I don't know if I'm answering the question for you. Yeah. But I think it's interesting that of all the angles and perspectives and settings you could have chosen, you chose a prom. Why was that? 20:35 You should tell the story. Sure. I was photographing the previous year, and I just stumbled into prom by accident, and it was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen in my life. 20:47 And we really wanted to make films that were surreal and magical and where we didn't need to interview people, where the idea was that where the photographs came to life. And w- I never went to prom. 21:04 My parents didn't give a shit if I went to prom or I played sports or any... I mean, what- We don't really have prom in Mexico, so [laughs] Yeah. Prom was something that just, 21:15 if you're thinking about Trayvon Martin and his life as a person who may not be from a community of color, when you see prom day and how much these families care about their young people, how invested they are, how much they love them, how much they want them to succeed, 21:35 and you see a loss of someone like Trayvon Martin and what communities of color were going through across the United States at a time when there was a ton of police violence against youth of color, when you see how much these young people mean to their communities, 21:52 the idea was that audiences that don't get to experience this would take these young people's lives more seriously and realize how grave these tragedies were where losing teens are. 22:05 It's almost a form of activism through art. So I was born in Brazil, grew up in Mexico, so I was always in between cultures. 22:12 I, I've just developed almost like it's a survival skill to think about culture and think what it means. 22:19 And moving to the States, I was very struck by how things that I saw on, in the media did not represent the beauty that I saw outside of those things. And so when Patrick... 22:33 I took him around to great places in Mexico, and he was taking me around to really weird, wonderful places and situations in the US. 22:41 And so to me, it became a calling to show these things, to make them into films and things that people could see and understand that the United States is more than what they were seeing on TV. 22:55 You said a little while ago you never really thought about, and maybe still don't think about, your audience. You started to have to think about it a little bit when the HBOs of the world started coming around. 23:05 When you started getting into feature length documentaries and investing more of your time and maybe focus in terms of what you were producing, did you want your films to have a certain impact? 23:18 Did impact or some tangible result of your work become important to you? I think every film is... If... I think it's important to look... I, it wasn't that we didn't really think about our audience. 23:31 We thought about our audience as people who wanted to share these experiences with us and as people who were smart and wanted to be challenged by the art that they saw. 23:41 We thought it in that sense and not as much as how can we broaden the audience or like who are we reaching and who are we not. 23:47 We were thinking about people as like people who we were having a conversation with through the medium of cinema and installation art. And that hasn't changed in that sense. 23:59 We still wanna have every film that we make is a conversation, and we are aware of what we are contributing to that conversation, and sometimes that is making a difference. So yes, we think about that. 24:12 I don't know if you wanna add anything to that, Patrick. I think For me, every film is like a reaction against a previous film. 24:20 So when we finally brought a feature film to Sundance, Pahokee, you know, there had been precedents, like Stomp had sold for millions of dollars to someone. Right. 24:31 The year before, there was this amazing film by RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. 24:39 And so there was a precedent for films about communities of color finding an audience, finding dis- distribution with Hulu or whoever. 24:47 And the year we hit there, these distributors had realized through the analytics of their platform that nobody was watching them. Reality TV had- Yeah... kind of taken over. This was n- 2019. 25:01 They were also really starting to understand their algorithms. Mm-hmm. And I actually had a meeting with someone at Netflix who was like, "So is your next film a nature doc, or is it true crime? 25:15 'Cause that's what our algorithm wants right now." So... We even had meetings with people at Sundance that year that were like, "Documentary needs more horror." 25:27 And, and when you make a feature film, like by the time I got- That's sad... to Sundance, I hadn't slept in two months, and you're really... You have to do many interviews. Yeah. 25:38 You have to sit on all these panels, and you have to be the smartest person you've ever been, and not sleeping for two months and killing yourself. And when we went to Sundance, I think we brought eight people. 25:51 Completely spent. We brought, uh- From the... We always... That's a thing. We, we always bring people that we make the films with- Oh, you do?... and about. Yes. Yeah. We always, since the first one. 25:59 So, so we were travel agents, and they're, these are people from Florida. They had no clothing to wear in a snowstorm. There was a snowstorm there. We went, we took them to get jackets- Y- yeah... and boots. Yeah. 26:10 So, so we went, we went to Sundance. I was completely deregulated, and we're meeting all of these people from the industry who've just been on vacation in- Oh, yeah... God knows where they go, Switzerland or Italy. 26:26 And they're starting the year ready to buy films, and my eyes are all red. I look crazy. I am crazy. 26:33 [laughs] And they're like, "We're not interested in this film that you have here, but could you make something, could you make a horror film? You know, doc and horror need to merge." Yeah. 26:42 And so you're just like, you've killed yourself telling this really important story. The industry doesn't want it, and you're just ready to jump off a cliff because you're broke, and it costs so much money to be there. 26:53 How did- It's weird because the... It's like Sundance, their slogan that year was fiercely independent, and we were like the most fiercely independent documentary that year. We didn't have that many grants. 27:05 We didn't have big name producers. We had done it all ourselves. 27:10 And so it is a culture clash because the people in the industry are looking at these fiercely independent people as talent so that they can do the work that they, as the industry, want, not as much as what we are trying to bring forth as artists. 27:23 So I think that fierce countercultural '90s thing that we still have in our bones was, like, we pushed back, and we were able to continue doing the work that we wanted to do, but definitely the pressure is always there. 27:39 How did that not just, not destroy your spirit, but how did you not confer with each other and say, "Screw this. We're gonna go back to our independent ways. 27:48 We're not gonna talk with the Sundances and the HBOs of the world. 27:52 We're gonna just try to do it the hardscrabble way, where we are happy doing it ourselves and doing this work that might not be seen by as many people, but we feel it's just as effective"? 28:02 How did you not retreat to that? We did that. [laughs] We did exactly that. You did? [laughs] So I, I- Sort of... I decided I hated the industry so much that, and this is not Yvette- Yeah... 28:12 that we would make the least commercial film you could ever make. Yes, we did. It wasn't a horror film. No. We made a film about a failing nudist resort, which was a healing place for people with body trauma. 28:27 People are overweight. People had been sexually abused, and we had to shoot it naked, and people had very natural bodies. They looked like everyone you'd see at Ingles, except they're naked. 28:38 [laughs] And we showed all, we showed everything. Yes. When was this? When did you shoot this, make this film? 20 tw- right before the pandemic. Okay. 20- that was started 2019. Yeah. Yeah. 28:49 The, the, the pandemic started right as we were finishing our shoot. Wow. So let me, okay, so you shot this with the intention that nobody's gonna want, nobody in the big leagues is gonna want this film. 29:03 I'd say not really. 29:04 This is where I put my perspective in, is that what doesn't completely discourage you when you're trying to make work that is very authentic and very earnest is that there are people along the way that you meet that do believe in the work, and that you, when you... 29:21 It's like Pahokee, for example, which was our first feature at Sundance, it didn't immediately sell because the algorithm was looking for something else. 29:30 These companies were saying, "We put all this money into," what was the film? 29:36 Mining the Gap, and we, it didn't do that well commercially, even though it was nominated for an Academy Award, so we're gonna shift our money. They just are thinking about where they're gonna put their money. 29:46 There's people thinking like that, but when we had people in the theater and they were watching Pahokee, I had young people crying and hugging me and crying and not even being able to stop 'cause they had never seen themselves and people who look like their family on a movie screen represented so well. 30:05 And that really nurtures my soul and what I wanna do in my existence. So there's the impulse of being countercultural and pushing back with Naked Gardens, but we still wanted to reach an audience. 30:18 So you do grow as an artist. One of the things I was curious about, as you're both approaching project to project, do you have a clear sense of, "Oh, my job is this"? Yvette, you'll do this. Patrick, you'll do this. 30:32 Or are the lines more messy, or are there no lines at all in terms of roles? Yvette shot a lot on Pahokee because we have very intimate scenes with young girls high school girls, and they're getting... 30:46 changing for ch- into their cheerleading outfit. A lot of- And I also shot a lot of them in the football games, too. Yeah. You know. Yeah, because we had such- In Pahokee, not in the- We had such little budgets. 30:56 I would be on the field shooting the game and the coaches and in the boys' locker room, and Yvette would be with the parents and the cheerleaders and the announcer- And the bands... and the band. I love the band. Yeah. 31:07 So Yvette shot a lot on Pahokee. I, I- But you've always been the main cinematographer. The reason why our collaboration has worked very well is that we're just, we're not jealous, and we kinda... 31:18 We can see what each other does and which of us do something better, and I could tell right away that he was a better cinematographer than [laughs] I was. You think so? Oh, yeah. For sure. 31:28 How, how do you think over these many years of collaboration, now it's closing in on 20 years, like 18 years of, of collaborating, how do you think you've affected each other? 31:37 How do you think you've influenced each other in the way you create work now? What does your eye look for, your ear look for now differently? Or what things do you look to pick up on now more so because of the other? 31:51 How do you think you've influenced each other? I think I've traumatized Yvette severely. [laughs] Oh. We... So let's, let's, let's just keep it- She doesn't disagree. She just laughs... 32:02 let's just keep the, the collaboration straight. 32:04 So we co-direct most of the projects, except for this last one that Patrick will probably talk about at some point, and then Patrick is mostly the cinematographer, and I usually edit. I've edited all of them, actually. 32:18 And then I have done a lot of sound. Hmm. But sometimes we hire help with the sound, and that's what it looks like. Do you wanna talk about how, like, how we've influenced each other? 32:28 [laughs] We are in a relationship, so we've influenced each other in so many ways that go deeper than just filmmaking. Yeah, and it's probably hard to just trace. 32:36 That's why I was asking how you've each influenced each other as artists. Yeah. Yvette speaks four languages, so she speaks Spanish and Portuguese, obviously. 32:46 So she has an incredible sensitivity to immigrant communities and the immigrant experience in the US, which is something all of our films explore. And women. And... Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. 32:59 I think Yvette has made me very sensitive to the roles of women in society because so often we've co-directed films, and we'll go to a festival, or we'll be with the protagonist, and everyone comes to me like I'm the only one who made the film when I'm just the imbecile with the camera. 33:17 Yvette is directing, and she's editing and producing and thinking about sound design. And a story. [laughs] I've been told, "Oh, it's so nice that you support your husband," and I'm like, "What?" [laughs] Yeah. Wow. 33:30 But it's, it's par for the course. Let's talk about the new film. I remember when you first told me about this, and please correct me if I'm not remembering correctly, this wasn't wholly your conception. 33:41 You didn't come across the, "Hey, look what the state of Florida is doing to the New College." How did this project come to you? 33:49 There's an alumni of the college who works for Richard Linklater in Austin named Holly Herrick, and she runs the Austin Film Society, the artist portion of it, and she'd been very active in giving us grants. 34:02 A wonderful thing the Austin Film Society does is when we got into Cannes, they gave us a travel grant of $1,000 each to pay for our plane tickets. 34:11 So she was very active in supporting us, and she called me one day knowing that we'd worked in Florida a lot, and said, "I need you to go on a shoot. I've raised some money. 34:21 My alma mater, the New College of Florida, has been taken over by the governor, and they're going to deny tenure to five faculty, and I wanna document it and find characters and cut a fundraising reel and see if we can make a film about what's happening." 34:38 Now, is this the first time a project has come to you in this way, that it was somebody else's idea, somebody else's motivation and goal? Yeah. 34:48 Yvette's been able to edit films for people and is very high functioning, so she can email and take feedback. I'm low functioning. 34:58 I can't do email with people or take any direction, so- You mean in your executive functioning. Yeah. You're very high functioning artistically. Uh, yeah. 35:05 You know, I had once been hired before when we lived in Houston to shoot a film about someone's execution and to find someone on death row that could be filmed for a Danish company, 35:17 and when they came and I had to work for them, it was impossible because we'd record all day, and then we'd go out to dinner, and they'd laugh at Americans and people of color, and I wound up in a physical altercation with the director. 35:31 [laughs] So I'm not really able to work for people. I don't think anybody would be able to work for that. Yeah. Or nobody with a conscience would be able to. I know. But there's a lot of that in, in documentary. 35:41 I didn't know that. There is a lot of that. Wow. I've experienced it too, like seeing people making fun of people who they are working. I did not know that. Yeah, it's awful. 35:49 It's- It's not a lot meaning that most of the people are that way, but there are people that way, and it's terrible. So anyways- Yeah... 35:55 but yeah, you- Yeah, so- You just refuse to do things that you have an ethical problem with. Yes, but in this situation- And be healthy. [laughs] Yeah. 36:03 Holly had been so supportive of our work, and as an artist, you rarely get to support someone who's supported you. 36:10 And so I saw it as a great honor and also a continuation of the work we'd been doing with high school students in Florida. And when I got to the New College of Florida, it's the honors college. 36:22 These are the, some of the smartest kids in Florida, many of them from first generation to go to college, from blue collar families, children of immigrants. This wa- this was such a special... 36:35 group of young people, and they were being tormented. And it had- Tormented is a mild word- Yeah... for what was going on. And never had we walked into a project where there was such a boogeyman. 36:49 There were such bad guys, and there were people losing everything because of these bad guys and fighting back. People who were just trying to exist and have an education. Yeah. You, you mentioned the bad guys. 37:03 It's almost like they typecast themselves. From Ron DeSantis on down, if you had scripted their language, it would've said, "Oh, this is too much of a trope. Nobody would really talk this way and act this way." 37:17 But your villains paint themselves in your film. 37:20 But as you went along, and you were at least operating from the beginning at the direction or at least the guidance of the person who was bankrolling this film, did you start getting your own sense of artistic direction in this, or sense of story that you went back to the woman who said, "Hey, I wanna put you on this project"? 37:40 Did you come back with observations saying, "Hey, the story is here or here," or, "I'm finding this"? Did you start putting in or having input- Sure... in that way? Yeah. I don't take direction from people. 37:51 The people who had hired me had probably sent me 20 articles on what was happening, but I need to go in and feel it, feel the emotion, feel 38:01 what the parents are feeling, what the students are feeling, not reading a New York Times article of someone who's just there for two days. So I was very fortunate that Holly had a lot of respect for our previous work, 38:15 and I produced this film as well. I was really the person casting, the person setting up production shoots, and so I had a lot of autonomy. 38:26 And I think that was very important because the, the alumni who were paying me were so traumatized that- Mm-hmm... everything that was happening was a grievance. 38:37 And they were all from different years and saw the college through the prism of when they were there and the experience they had, and that this place that was so formative was being destroyed, but I had to be very much in the present with students and professors and what they were going through in the present. 38:56 Yeah. Now, the footage of DeSantis and some of these Republicans and the new board that was appointed by DeSantis, did you gather all that footage yourself? 39:05 Did you shoot that yourself, or did you get footage from other sources? So this all started on January 6th, 2023. DeSantis appointed the new board. 39:16 They fired the existing president, who was a career administrator and scholar, and they put in someone who had no experience running a university and were compensating them over a million dollars. 39:30 So that was all filmed by students and news crews that were there, and there was an alumni of the school who'd gone down and documented a lot of this as well. 39:42 So some of the opening scenes were able to build from that very powerful and emotional footage that the community shot. 39:50 Okay, that's important because I think a lot of people don't know or understand how vital and fragile access is. 39:56 You don't have anything if you don't have your camera there, if somebody doesn't have a camera there or a microphone there. 40:01 It's really hard to convey that in a documentary film project if you don't have that to work with. Was it hard to source some of the things you needed to source to 40:12 give that sense of how tumultuous, and not just how tumultuous, but how that was happening in real time? 40:21 I was very fortunate because there was an alumni of the college who was extremely media literate and lived in Sarasota, and he left his job doing motion graphics to full-time archive all the community media and full-time archive all of the media that was in the library and theses and things that had been created by students. 40:44 So when I came to the project, Dan Potthast, who has lived in Asheville, had everything already saved and backed up for us- Mm... to access. What a gift. Yeah. 40:55 The alumni of the New College of Florida are truly remarkable, super intelligent people. 41:01 And it's very important what you guys had, which was I edited the film, so I wasn't in the field, but what you guys had, which was, like, just grassroots documentation of what was happening. 41:14 One thing that we did in Pahokee where we had students record some video journals and just have agency because there's the question of agency over footage that is in the film. 41:27 We had done that before, but then Patrick expanded on that in this film because it required it. And so he said a lot of the students are older too. They're media savvy. 41:37 And so you guys gave iPhones to a lot of students so that they could document their experience in many different ways, not just what was happening in the board meetings or whatever, but their lives, you know? 41:48 Well, the, the, the opening shot of the film is from that student. I imagine with her iPhone, right? Mm-hmm. Almost like a journal, like a video journal. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. And you edited the film. 41:58 Was it different for you because you weren't in the field? You're just getting this footage and seeing it for the first time as you're editing. 42:05 Did you have to construct story yourself with this partial blindness in a way of not having been in the field and not knowing what was happening on the periphery of the lens or even when tape wasn't rolling? 42:18 Was it a more difficult editing job? Some things are more difficult and some things are easier, and it's really, it was a benefit that I wasn't in the field 'cause I didn't know everything. Mm. 42:27 So then I'm more in the mindset of the audience that doesn't, like, they don't know everything, that nothing is assumed, so I can construct things so that the audience gets the information that they need without having to think, like, "I don't know what this..." 42:42 You know? Yeah. 42:43 So that's very helpful, but I think, like, in the sense that, like, the footage that they gave me, there's a lot of gaslighting happening with these people who are coming in to destroy academia, and they're say, "I didn't do this. 42:57 No, this is not what we're doing. This is free speech. 43:00 We're just including the right that you guys don't wanna include," or stuff like that, and- Do you think they believe that, or do you think they're knowingly gaslighting? 43:10 I am certain that they're doing this, that the manipulation is part of how they're getting what they want. Yeah. Yes, it's a strategy. Yes. Yeah. 43:20 And what I was saying is that when people are armed with their cameras or their phones and they're, like, shooting the stuff, there's no denying it. 43:29 And so it was more the work that I did, it was, yes, telling the story, making sure that there was a shape to the story, that it felt like a movie, that it had a narrative arc and all that, but it was also, like, finding all these pieces where this information or this thing that happened was undeniable, and so that the audience could see for themselves and feel like they're there in that moment, which Patrick and the team did a beautiful job of getting. 43:56 One of the things, and I don't know because this wasn't your project, I don't know if- Right... the title came from you, but I think the title says a lot. D- first they came for my college, meaning there's more ahead. 44:07 Where did the title come from? The title came from us, and the film really came from us. 44:13 Holly was very hands-on with notes in the edit, but I would push back against her, and we had another editor, Leah Marino, who made a Peabody Award-winning film, A Thousand Cuts. 44:27 So Leah, Yvette, and I were really this hub processing all of this- Yeah... and having to push back against the alums a little bit and make something that was very cinematic. 44:39 That was not just a list of the things that happened, but that took you through what it was like to go through what happened there. Yeah. So the title, I think- Oh, yeah. Sorry, yeah. 44:47 We didn't talk about the title [laughs]. Yeah. It's a very, it's a very clever title because there's foreshadowing just in the title itself. Yeah. What was the genesis? What inspired that title? 44:59 I think Patrick, as we were thinking about the title, I think at a certain point it was undeniable that, because initially with all the gaslighting and the manipulation, there's, "What are they really doing here?" 45:12 And the kids kept crying fascism. They kept calling, "This is authoritarian. This is fascism. This is..." And people were reluctant to call it what it is. 45:22 And so then Patrick was saying, you know, "When the fascists came," we were just trying different, and then I remember the poem, and I said, "First they came from a college, it's good because it's the foreshadowing, but it also has in the title that this was the first college that they came for, and that was the first college that they came from. 45:40 That was the prototype, and it also has in the title that you have to do something because in the poem it's all about how, "Look, I didn't do anything, until then they came for this person. I didn't do anything." 45:51 And so it's also a call to action. It's a shot, it's a flare gun in the air. Yeah. Okay, first they came for my college. They haven't done the next step yet. 46:01 It's like we can intercept now if we do something, but we don't wanna have to get to the next verse in this poem. 46:10 But we are in the next few verses because we were showing it at South by Southwest and, like, the University of Texas is just- Being gutted... it's like- Totally gutted... disfigured. UT is Austin? How- Yeah... 46:22 in what way? How- They closed the Latin American studies program and library. They just- The gender studies. They just eliminated gender studies, women's studies. They are just gutting the liberal arts. 46:36 The fine arts library, where I did most of my thesis work, they've gotten rid of a massive media resources library in that and turned it into a tech maker space. Wow. 46:48 So they've totally capitulated, and a big reason we left Austin was all of these tech oligarchs moving there. They've totally capitulated to the tech industry. 46:59 Then- And they also, the professors are really afraid, not all of them, but you cannot say certain things because the right-wing students are allowed to complain that you said a certain word or whatever, but hopefully now that Texas- With Hinojosa... 47:14 elected Gina Hinojosa and Talia Rico, that maybe there's some things there. There's a light- Yeah... coming for, I hope. You mentioned Texas. 47:23 Obviously, these things are happening y- in states all over the country, it may be at smaller levels. You mentioned UNC Asheville, that things are happening there. 47:30 I do know they cut back, they eliminated four programs not all that long ago, including the theater department. 47:37 Do you see any connection thematically with what's happening at UNC Asheville, or do you think this is strictly budgetary reasons? Absolutely not. 47:47 The dean of students, a woman of color, beloved by the students and faculty, they forced them to remove anything about diversity, equity, and inclusion in any language the college uses, and she was secretly recorded by a trickster saying, "We still practice diversity, equity, inclusion. 48:10 We just can't call it that," and she was fired. That's not free speech. Yeah. Of course. 48:17 When I first moved to Asheville, there were pride banners hanging from the library, Black Lives Matter hanging from the library at UNCA, and all of that-... is invisible on campus. 48:28 This is a campus that has a very large LGBTQ population and is a safe place for those students in the North Carolina system. Yeah, it's ostensibly the fine arts college in the UNC system. Absolutely. 48:42 And I don't know the legislature or which person is really responsible for that, but someone walked the campus and said, "We have to get rid of these people and make this a more STEM-oriented," you know. Yeah. 48:57 And, and we had that student in a prior screening here who was saying even the Save Our Woods movement, they couldn't have any signs about that. 49:06 They get harassed if they, uh, do, and they're asked to take it down, and it's like, that's just free speech. And so that, that's gaslighting what they're saying that it's purely a budgetary issue. 49:19 If it was purely a budgetary issues, the students would be able to speak their minds, and the faculty, and the administrators. I know we could talk a lot more about this. We've been talking for an hour now. Okay. 49:30 Uh, uh, tell me what you're working on next. We have a six-year-old, and typically we would live in the field for a year making a feature film. 49:39 So we're working on a scripted film about an end-of-life veterinarian who is an old Austin character, and his wife comes down with, like, a mystery terminal ailment, and he's faced with her mortality. 50:00 So you're turning to a scripted film in part because you just don't have the time and the freedom of space with a six-year-old boy that you're n- you can't spend that kind of team- I think there's- Yeah, we wanna work with actors and- No, I think there's a lot of things. 50:12 Now when Patrick met me, I was doing scripted work with non-actors, and so I always wanted to go back to that and to, like, in real locations and just say something about these places and these people without having to... 50:26 Because there's, like, very little control. We let go of control for ethical and artistic reasons. We let go of control a lot in documentary film, and we wanted to have a story that we could control the ending- Uh-huh... 50:39 to. Yeah. And so that's what we're doing. Will you be shooting that new film in Austin? You mentioned it takes place- Yes... and you'll be going back to Austin. Yeah. 50:45 So we used to live in Austin, Texas before we moved here. What brought you to Asheville? Why'd you pick Asheville of all places to come to? 50:52 My cousin and her husband have a really cool auction house here, Brunk Auctions- Hm... on Tunnel Road, and we had been coming here forever to stay with them and watch their kids grow up here. 51:04 Having a kid ourselves, Texas was so radically right back then. We didn't wanna raise them in Texas, and- Yeah... this just seemed like a nice place to raise a kid. 51:14 So you just picked it on a map and said, "We're coming here." No, I mean, I think it was because of Patrick's cousin. 51:20 We really love them, and we wanted to be around people who had raised kids and who could be a resource to us, and, and we loved it here. It's so beautiful and artistic. 51:30 I was gonna say when we were talking about being counter-cultural is, like, there's a reason we never moved to LA or New York, and there's a reason we live here, is because we wanna be, like, close to the people who are doing interesting things and are living authentic lives. 51:44 I think you're both doing really interesting things and serving as models for living interesting artistic lives with ethics and integrity. So thank you both for your time and your work. Thank you, Matt. No, thank you. 51:56 So kind of you. That was great. Thank you. 51:58 Patrick and Evette are screening First They Came For My College, 7:00 PM, November 17th at the Fine Arts Theater in downtown Asheville, and I'll be moderating a post-film discussion with the two of them. 52:09 So don't miss it. You can get tickets at a link on my show notes. In the meantime, if you haven't already, you can subscribe for free to See Hear. Just go to seehearwnc.com. 52:21 I'm Matt Peiken, and I'll see you next time at See Hear.
