Oscar-Winning Director Morgan Neville Talks To The 13th Floor

The New Zealand International Film Festival revealed its schedule this week and we here at The 13th Floor are very excited. In the weeks leading up to the festival we’ll be presenting interviews with directors, producers, actors and musicians who have films featured this year. Once the festival gets underway in Auckland we’ll have a team of reviewers in the cinemas reporting back with their considered opinions on this year’s crop of films.

To start things off we have an interview with Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville. Morgan won his Oscar for directing the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. This time around he has teamed up with co-director Robert Gordon for Best Of Enemies which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January.

Best Of Enemies documents the bitter rivalry between two of the 1960’s most esteemed intellectuals, William F Buckley and Gore Vidal. Buckley was a right-wing conservative who hosted the Firing Line political talk show and edited the National Revue magazine. Gore Vidal was a respected author who penned the controversial novel Myra Breckinridge.

Despite their similar backgrounds, the two men despised reach other and their opinions. With that in mind, American TV network ABC persuaded them to appear together during the Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions in 1968 for a series of ten debates. The results were nothing short of explosive.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to director Morgan Neville about making Best Of Enemies:

MD: After making 20 Feet From Stardom, what brought you to this subject matter?

MN: I actually started this film before 20 Feet. Even though I love music and I love doing music films, I’m a political junkie and actually my beginnings were as a journalist. My first job out of college was working at The Nation magazine as Gore Vidal’s fact-checker. So I knew quite a bit about Gore. But what’s interesting is, even though the film is seemingly about politics, to me, it’s about culture. And that’s the umbrella that attracted me, telling stories about how culture affects our lives.

MD: So how did your knowledge from working with Gore Vidal influence the film?

MN: Working as a fact-checker for Gore Vidal was a thankless task. It was pretty much the worst job I ever had. I’d call him on the phone and tell him he’d got very small details slightly wrong and then he would berate me.

I knew he was thorny and we actually did a long interview with Gore for the film, and we decided not to use it for a couple of reasons. One was it felt out of balance to have him speak and not Buckley speak. And also, he was just so…he didn’t want to get into any of the substance of it. He just basically wanted us to say that Buckley was vanquished and Vidal was the hero. At one point when we were trying to get into the substance of what they were debating…it was a very thorny interview. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film. I guess some of those experiences taught me something.

MD: How did you And Robert Gordon work together on the film? Did you divide up the work?

MN: Yeah, Robert and I made several films together before and part of it…the first couple of years we were working on it we had no money, it was just kind of a passion project. It’s kind of an odd passion project to have, but it was. It’s a great story…it’s like an opera. I think, you know we never discussed it, but in a way, the unspoken division of labour was Robert was really embedded in the debates themselves and there were probably two and a half hours of total debates and I concentrated more on the biography and interstitial. Those were our general areas and we’d come together and argue about how much to add. But we agreed 90% of the time, which is good. And disagreeing is good too because you have to justify your opinion, it makes things stronger.

MD: There’s a lot of archival footage in this, was it fairly accessible to you?

MN: There was a lot. It’s one of those things when you start a project like this…yeah, we knew the debates existed but we didn’t know what else existed. One of our lucky breaks was, at ABC, they opened up the vaults and said, ‘Here you go guys’. And we spent a long time there. They literally brought out carts full of 16 millimetre film canisters a lot of which had never been screened. And we put it on the Steenbeck, watched it, and there were so many of these little archival moments, or just little nuggets we found along the way. When you’re doing a project like this, an archive documentary, it’s all about the paper chase, all about finding these little tidbits. You put enough of those together and it works. We’d find a little nugget and it would make our day or week. All those little bits…Gore in his later life. We found more that aren’t even in the film, making these little asides about Buckley on talk shows in later years.

MD: Some of the footage that I thought was priceless was William Buckley on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. That was just awesome.

MN: I know! It’s one of those things. I mean, can you imagine in this day and age, any intellectual going on TV or on game shows? To me, all that speaks volumes about how far we’ve come, or how far we’ve sunk as a culture. Really, just to step back, overall, something has changed since that era. On the one hand something great has been lost and on the other hand, good riddance to some of it. On one had we’ve lost the patriarchal media structure where a select group of white men tell us the truth as it is…and that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite would say. In a very kind of monolithic way it didn’t really reflect the reality of a lot of Americans. The flip-side though, and this to me is kind of the more dangerous thing, is that it’s not that we don’t agree on opinions anymore, we don’t agree on facts. When you lose a centralized media you allow people to not have to pay attention to any semblance of an objective truth. And that’s dangerous for a country.

MD: I thought it was very refreshing to see two people on camera on television who were so openly intellectual and not apologetic about it which just wouldn’t have I don’t think, these days.

MN: Absolutely. I see very smart people on talk shows occasionally and if they do make an obscure reference, they usually make a joke about it because they feel self-conscious for doing that. You know, you hear politicians, you hear Obama, you hear any number of people who can speak at a very high level, really trying to ‘aw shucks’ it, in a way, that to me is just pandering.

MD: Even somebody like Jon Stewart who, he started out as a comedian, but obviously a very intelligent guy, he seems very uncomfortable with himself when he does get serious…he has to start mugging to the camera.

MN: Yes, he does. Stewart’s amazing but he tries to have it both ways, to be serious, but then to say, “I’m only a comedian”. I wish we had people who could just be serious on TV and that we would pay attention to. I don’t know if I’m that optimistic.

MD: I’m curious as to what younger people think of these two guys when they see them. I’m old enough to remember who they were…

MN: Sure, and that was one of the things that worried me about the film because people in their forties don’t really know who these guys are. But I think just as characters they’re so bigger than life that I have found young audiences transfixed by them too. Somebody once said, ‘the past is a foreign country’, it’s something that we don’t recognize at times. It’s so distant. And I think that’s true here.

MD: William Buckley, you can barely take your eyes off him, he’s just amazing…the tongue swishing around…

MN: He’s almost like a cartoon character. They both are, in a way. Like I said, so me it’s operatic. Their characters…I think somebody should adapt this documentary to an opera. I would love to see that.

MD: At the same time that it shows how things have changed, it also shows how similar things are today with a lot of the subject matter that they were addressing back in 1968.

MN: Yeah, we’re still fighting about the same things. I think what’s really interesting was they were at that perfect moment where the culture wars that we’ve been living in for the past 45 years were really born. And that’s something…it’s a maze that we can’t find our way out of unfortunately.

MD: It seems like we’re digging deeper into the hole rather than getting out of it.

MN: Yeah, and I think part of it is that echo chamber of us listening to people we agree with and not ever having to confront the other.

Click here for more information about the screening of Best Of Enemies at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Watch the trailer for Best Of Enemies here:

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