an interview with América filmmakers Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll

Earlier this year, Chase Whiteside & Erick Stoll joined us for a screening of their debut documentary América as part of the ReelAbilities Film Festival. One of our cinema programmers, Annie Horner, spoke with them about their paths to becoming documentarians.

América screens at The Museum of the Moving Image September 2019 and on POV in October.

This interview has been edited for length from two separate conversations.

AH: What were your favorite films growing up, have those films changed? Or what were general earlier influences of films, and how did that evolved?

Chase Whiteside: Well I grew up in rural Ohio before Netflix or streaming video, it’s wasn’t like we had a really cool rental shop or anything like that for videos, so I had whatever were my parent’s tapes and I think, fortunately, my mom had this love for a lot of cool classic Hollywood movies. So I grew up watching a lot of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Movies like All About Eve, and The Wizard of Oz, and Labyrinth. I mean you wonder how a kid ends up gay having to watch The Wizard of Oz, the Labyrinth, and All About Eve on rotation for the early years of your life. So those were my favorite movies. My favorite movies were all my mom’s favorite movies basically. But yeah I mean it totally changed, cause when I was in high school or whatever I think I saw, um, you know I had like gone to the video store to rent, like, I don’t know, 8 ½ and like something from Bergman, and it was like ‘oh my god, there’s this whole other world out there.’ If I think of like a high school movie I really liked, that I thought was really special at the time was Being John Malkovich, which I thought was like the best film that could ever be made. But it wasn’t until college that I got really turned on to documentary, which I hadn’t really considered. I think a lot of my favorite documentaries that I discovered happened when I was in film school. So yeah it changed.

You studied filmmaking in school?

CW: Yeah. That’s how Erick and I met, we met at Wright State University, we both went. I remember cause I studied screenwriting, Erick wanted to be like a director or cinematographer. While we were there the economic reality of how difficult it actually is to make films, you know, becomes clear. I think any person in film school is really thinking about what they’re going to do after film school, there’s this dread that sinks in that you’re either going to hold the boom pole, in New Orleans or you’re going to be, you know, trying desperately, with a low percentage of success, trying to get someone to either buy your screenplay, or produce a movie of yours.

At the same time these beautiful HD cameras with cinematic quality were becoming affordable, like, seriously affordable, the difference between it being a hundred forty thousand dollars and being like five or less, and so I basically realized that in documentary, the whole breadth of the cinematic language was pretty much available to us, and we could just do it ourselves. So in our third year at university we studied under Julia Reichert, this was before we wanted to be documentary filmmakers, and we watched all those great films, and we went to film festivals, documentary film festivals, and it was from there that we decided like oh wait, maybe we can make our own work. It just can’t be like fiction cinema with actors.

So something that drew you to documentary as a medium was its apparent achievability?

CW: Yeah, totally. I mean it was twofold. One it was just the educational realization that documentary could possess all the power that fiction cinema could possess. And that was not something I knew. You know my understanding of documentary was the popular understanding, which is to say extremely limited. I didn’t think of documentary as something with the breadth of artistry that I now know it to have, and so it was the discovery of that alongside realizing that hey most of these great amazing docs were made by teams of 1, or 2, or 3, that it was within reach or something.

And of course now you have successfully gone on to create one of those cinematic pieces as a team of 2. Having released a feature film, how do you feel like that has changed your personal life, your career?

CW: Erick and I have been working together for more than a decade, so it’s the culmination of all these things we thought were possible, like in theory, and you know in the early part of any kind of co-working relationship, you’re inspiring each other all the time, but by the end of it you’re probably working better together than you ever have, but the inspiration is kinda replaced with just kind of a knowing. América was like all the things we still agreed on and were still co-inspired by, in one film, so it was the culmination of so much that it was really a period of fear and anxiety leading up to it, where it was like oh are we gonna release it and everyone’s gonna be like eh, and the kind of obscurity I’d hoped to avoid by you know making documentaries in the first place. There was a real belief, cause when it was first put out, we didn’t have any institutional support, no grants or anything like that, so we really thought there was a chance we would play it at True/False, and no one would ever watch it again. So I would say having released a feature film, it’s mostly just relief. I can’t say my perception was that it was super within reach or possible, because it took 5 years, and it took an unbelievable amount of dedication, and in the meantime my friends had become doctors, and lawyers, and so maybe this was all a big mistake. But it does feel like a relief to know at least that it was all not a total miss.

AH: What did your early documentary influences looks like?

Erick Stoll: I would say the earliest films would’ve been classics like Harlan County, and I mean maybe a more contemporary verité classic like Last Train Home, which I think really convinced me of documentary’s narrative potential. But then even more formative and important I think was actually 45365 by the Ross brothers. Mostly because of certainly the relatibility of being a filmmaker from Ohio, making films in Ohio about their community and the things that they know in Ohio. Cause Ohio has very small cities, but I think in contrast with the really strong narrative qualities of Harlan County or Last Train Home, it’s more the sort of mosaic city symphony sort of film. Except rather than being in, I don’t know, Berlin, it’s in the de-industrialized midwest. So I just really think it really showed me the infinite formal possibilities of non-fiction work and to this day that’s a strong reference for me.

AH: How did documentary come to be the medium that you participated in as a creator?

ES: It quickly dawned on me in college that I had neither the vision nor the talent to actually write and direct modernist film masterpieces, but coinciding with that realization was really a kind of a growing. I mean at least a sort of initial political coming into consciousness with the invasion of Iraq and all the terrible shit George Bush did, and the hope of Obama, and then the disappointment of Obama, and then sort of a political radicalization. So documentary and non-fiction film became really how to be a citizen of the world, how to engage with the world, how to engage with the political process, and also how to reach out and meet people, and then learn about the world. So I think the non-fiction film process really became a way to interact with the world.

And just to be really  specific, Chase and I were like whoa there are tons of crazy people who we know, cause we grew up around them, in opposition to like healthcare reform, and the general administrative goals of the Obama presidency, and we were just like whoa there’s this really big seismic political thing happening that at once we’re like alienated from being weirdo film snobs, but also really have some intuitive understanding of, being like Ohioan, and so we’re just like let’s go film them. I think at the time our interests weren’t that cinematic. It was just this way to kind of reach out and touch someone. A way to reach outside the neo-liberal alienation, to be actors in the world. Kind of like nascent political ambition. Nascent but like political and creative ambition, just channeled through an intersection of history and our own sudden interests and documentary filmmaking and the possibility that like hey we can really, we can just do this, right. We have cameras, and we have a 98 Toyota Corolla, we can make films.

AH: Having completed your first feature length film, what is next for you?

ES: Just really try to think about what’s right for me next, and also figure out, trying to think and talk with other people and learn, because you can’t really do it alone, just think about really like how to like work effectively, to do effective politics through documentary filmmaking, and like where and when and how that’s possible. right, Cause it’s  really easy to seem political, but I think it’s like, especially for like radicalizing creative urban white people, that class of people who really try to think critically of how they can engage in political struggle, right, better than just being a part of urban political media culture disruption. So you know, just trying to take it easy, enjoy Cincinnati, trying to save up a little money, and just trying to figure out what’s right to do. We’ll see. I mean I think my dream goal would be move to Chicago or Philadelpha and start a insurgent socialist filmmaking collective. But you know, there’s no concrete step towards that.