The Other America

I have aimed for a kind of filmmaking that is direct, intimate, and unmediated. In other words, I wanted to find a way to crash through the pretty staid conventions of filmmaking and get to this other place, although at times I had no real idea where I was going with it. But that got me excited, and I think the cast especially enjoyed our long sessions of screenings dailies and quickly assembled versions of scenes; then spending time to talk about it and coming up with a plan for each day. If we felt like we didn’t have anything to offer that day, we would just watch dailies and go home. Other days when we would hit a rhythm, we would keep filming into the evening.

I began the process of writing the script for The Other America by observing and doing interviews of kids for a period of about 18 months in several large public high schools.I went in not really knowing what I was looking for or even what the story would be about. I had an idea that I wanted to make a film about a homeless kid that does grafitti, but keeps both of those issues a secret from everyone. I basically went to high school for periods of days and even a few weeks at a time so I could adjust to the rhythm of it. I also attended several meetings of a student union and watched the activist tapes they were making. I ended up creating a core of three characters to write about based on these interviews. As the project developed, I became less interested in filming scenes in a school, and for that matter, anything having to do with adult characters. It felt right to keep the story focused on just a few kids, in order to make it personal. If politics are personal at their heart, then the characters would have to tell the story in their own words, not mine. The crew was very small – at the most it was five people, and often it was just two or three. I decided to do most of the shooting myself after doing some tests with the new 24p Panasonic DVX100 camera. I took a few weeks to get comfortable with it, shooting scenes without actors. The idea of blending documentary and fiction techniques felt like the right call for telling this story authentically.