The director’s most recent film is the documentary Bright Leaves. He also teaches filmmaking at Harvard University.

Shelley Cameron: Bright Leaves is personal for you, as are all your films, but this one seems a little less so. Which film is the closest to your heart?

Ross McElwee: Good question. Well, you like to think that your films are like your kids, you love them all for different reasons, but I would say that Time Indefinite is the one that gets deepest into something that is important to me, that and Sherman's March.

SC: What do you consider to be the weightiest aspect of Bright Leaves?

RM: I’d have to say that part of the film that is a meditation on loss, that and image making – what it means to try to make images of people who are slipping away or have slipped away. The images of my father in the film, and the degree to which those mundane everyday images no longer have the raw impact that they had for me right after he died. Those images have taken on a different kind of cast and they begin to seem more like fiction in a way. The images haven’t changed but they have a different documentary meaning, the longing of the filmmaker/protagonist, me in this case, of trying to slow time down, to capture it. For me that is the weightiest thing in the film.

SC: How does reality become fiction?

RM: Through the way in which people become iconic over time, when they stop being real. I idealize and contemplate the iconic status of those people, and that’s a form of fiction. It’s not as real as when the person is with us, and the mundane everydayness of his existence becomes a more fictional representation of who he once was. It seems less immediate, less real, more like fiction.

SC: In light of that, I wonder if you might describe your films as metaphysical documentaries, almost the opposite of a documentary in the sense that they are evidence of things and prove things?

RM: Well, all my films definitely have metaphysical components, what it means to be alive, and then dying, and what the other possibilities are. One of the nice things about making documentaries is all that they can be, and all that they need to be. The whole gestalt of this kind of filmmaking is out of the tradition of cinéma vérité and that is the exciting thing. It’s about being able to just go out into the world with lightweight portable equipment and film things as they are happening. It set free filmmakers like Fred Wiseman, Pennebaker, the Maysles and a whole generation of filmmakers that don’t ever try to control what’s happening, and just respond to it with the camera. They don’t ever ask anybody to do things a second time, don’t ever interview anybody, and don’t use voice over narration.

SC: Were you disappointed that R J Reynolds would not let you film there? Presumably, they would not talk on camera either?

RM: They have a blanket policy that won’t allow any filming and I understand that. They are under such tremendous criticism and can’t afford to trust anybody, but I think my film is not an out and out condemnation of the tobacco industry. The audience in North Carolina seemed to like it and understand what I was saying.

SC: The way you weave the Gary Cooper film Bright Leaf through Bright Leaves was very clever. What sparked that idea?

RM: It seemed like a unique way to go about taking a look at tobacco and the other things we talked about. I didn’t want to make a film that was a standard condemnation of tobacco nor a film that preached about how smoking is bad for you because we all know that. So starting with this weird little Hollywood melodrama my cousin showed me involving my great-grandfather provided exactly the kind of angular way for me to make a movie that would deal with notions of family and also the tobacco industry.

SC: Do you think your great-grandfather really was the Gary Cooper character?

RM: What I say at the end of the film is what I think: that he may well have been part of the lore that the novel was based upon and ours one of the families that were crushed by Duke. I don’t have a solution to the problems of tobacco. The thing that I think we really need to stay on top of is marketing to kids. That’s got to be prohibited.

SC: Some scenes suggest other threads you might follow – your father wearing the yarmulke? Is that perhaps the unknown Jewish branch of the family?

RM: The point of that particular bit apart from its humor is that I kept thinking I’ve got to ask about that yarmulke and kept forgetting to ask and it became one of the things that slipped away.

SC: It is risky to expose yourself like you do. Are you concerned about how people might perceive you?

RM: Well, I love what I do. I am extremely aware that in autobiographical filmmaking, it may become totally uninteresting to everyone but the person making it. That’s why I try to open the films up to the world and to other people. This film is probably 30% me and 70% the world. Humor has a lot to do with the way people respond and I think it’s really necessary for this kind of film to work. I do try to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, even with of all the tributaries. They are stories and don’t exist just to make didactic points.

SC: I enjoyed it and wish you well with it. It tells a good story and at the same time it’s so elliptical, one can certainly see other threads that might be followed.

RM: Elliptical is my middle name. (Laughter)