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 hen I fell for Ross McElwee, he was lying on a guest bed in his parents' house, whisper-drawling into the camera. It was a scene from the brilliant Sherman's March: A Mediation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986), which begins as a documentary about General Sherman's march to the sea and winds up being an epic about the way fate flings us into each other's arms, the universal longing for real connection and the profound sexiness of crazy Southern women. All of McElwee's deeply personal documentaries, narrated in that handsome accent, are funny and brave, pursuing subjects as huge as death (Time Indefinite), birth (Six o' Clock News) and smoking in North Carolina (Bright Leaves). His films, recently collected into an essential box set, all deal in one way or another with intimacy. He spoke with Nerve from Harvard, where he teaches. — Ada Calhoun Is it scary to have a retrospective box set out, in that it's like a lifetime achievement award? Well, no, it's just you kind of look at it sometimes like, "You mean this is all that got done over twenty years? This little box?" And in that way it's a little bit scary, that everything can be reduced down to something that fits inside this small box. But I guess writers probably feel that way about looking at their bookshelf and seeing their five books.
Well, I think that is true, in film, in a general sense. It's not been true in writing — if you think about the history of Southern writers, it's a very rich one, an international phenomenon. The French love Faulkner, for instance. That whole school of southern writers, I think, are firmly entrenched in the national canon and to some degree the international canon. So there's always been that literary voice that's existed down south, which, to me, has always been connected to a larger sense of southern storytelling, that people have a kind of gift for storytelling. And it's a gift that actually I think I lack as a person, just talking. I've sometimes wondered if making these films is my way of compensating for the fact that I'm not actually a very good storyteller. My uncles and my brother — my brother's a great storyteller — and somehow I just sit and listen. You've been between worlds — North Carolina and Boston — for a long time. Is it frustrating to see how the South is perceived in the North? Well, can you give me an example? My husband's from East Texas, and when people here in the Northeast ask about his hometown there's this assumption that it's racist and backward. Well, for me, the whole issue of racism was very strongly corrected when I got to Boston. And corrected in an interesting way, because busing, when I came here to go to graduate school, busing was being enforced simultaneously in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is my hometown, and in Boston. And it was much more successful in Charlotte. There were far fewer instances of violence, while here in Boston, basically, whole sections of the city erupted in protesting. So that certainly was, right off the bat, insofar as I could observe from my safe little perch in graduate school, was a perfect illustration of what I've always felt was true. That, yeah, there's been this horrible history of slavery and so forth in the South, but in fact, that the races tended on a day to day level to get along much better in the South than it appeared. There was actually much more give and take between blacks and whites in the South than up here in Boston. Now of course, that's a somewhat naïve statement, because it's easy to have give and take down south if in fact all the power is in your hands. Of course they're going to be nice to you and you're going to be nice to them — there's nothing to lose by letting that happen. You have to look at the bigger picture, and I think the South does have this very troubling history of racism and enforced segregation that's never really an issue up here. And all of that still lingers — I hear it referred to a lot less than I used to, and I think the South is being assimilated and homogenized, and that's got its own set of problems. So it comes up now and then, as I travel around, but not as much. I saw a Six O'Clock News screening a few years ago. Your wife was filming you as you were introducing the film, and you cracked a joke about how she was getting back at you for always having a camera on her. Does that still go on? She's not making films anymore; she's a writer now. And I actually haven't been doing much filming around the house, partially because I've been dealing with teaching and the onus of getting the DVDs out. Which was like making another film — really complicated, getting all of that stuff together. But no, I think I was making a joke, I don't think it was ever really that serious an issue for her, or for anyone in the family. If people don't want me to film them, they just tell me and I generally stop. Why do people agree to be in documentaries? What's in it for them? Well, I've wondered the same thing. I mean, I'm far from eager to be filmed, and I wonder what about this whole phenomenon seems so appealing to people. I think part of it is just validating your existence. Once you've been filmed or videotaped, you enter that realm of exchange by which your image becomes part of the cultural flow of images that somehow means that you have presence in the world. Kind of sad, if that's your motivation. I think many people just enjoy performing for the camera. My friend Charleen is certainly like that. There are also political reasons for wanting to do it; you can further some political agenda. But I think there's a performance quotient in many people that finds its outlet — as reality television seems to be all about. The structure of your films reminds me of the personal essay — something that's not only a confessional, but actual examination of one's own life that makes some kind of greater point. Do you feel that way? I guess if you have to put a label on the kinds of films I make, they're autobiographical essays. You know, the early work of Emerson and Thoreau sort of morphed into what became New Journalism, with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer writing about public issues from the perspective of their very private lives. I think this kind of filmmaking — and I'm certainly not the only person who practices it — is an outgrowth of all of that tradition. It's been around in various forms for a long time. I read that you wanted to be a writer at one point. Is that still something you think about? No. I can barely get my taxes paid. Sitting down and writing a novel . . . no, I mean, I gave up writing because I felt it just required so much talent and discipline and, you know, I didn't have enough of either. You once quoted Godard about how every cut is political. Is there a cut you're particularly proud of? One shot in Sherman's March perhaps would be — I'm talking to the African-American car mechanic who's working on the little red sports car I end up driving on the trip. His name is Phillip, and it's clear from his conversation that we've known each other, and then, kind of unpredictably — I mean, I certainly wasn't planning on it while I was shooting — the conversation suddenly veers into the fact that his daughter has just died of cancer. And then he asked me about my mother, who had died from cancer. And there's this moment of connection that's so powerful — not an editing thing, but a shooting thing, where the look in his eyes is so full of pain. And I've seen that shot countless times, hundreds of times. It still causes me to pause, emotionally, when I see it. And it's so powerful that I was faced with a problem of what do you do next? How do you get out of this? And I think the solution that I came up with works really well. You asked me for an example of an edit that I felt was strong, and the edit from that moment where I'm pretty tight on his face as he shakes his head sadly, and then I cut to a shot of me in the driver's seat, behind this car, starting it up, and I'm shooting on my shoulders, I'm actually cranking the engine, and he's on the other side of the windshield, tinkering with the carburetor. And I think there's so much in that shot about relationships between the races, and, you know, putting the barrier back up — in this case, the windshield between the two of us. There was just a lot about that shot that seemed absolutely appropriate, the pulling back emotionally at a particular point because you've gone maybe too far in talking about something that's very powerful emotionally, that in fact that edit worked really well. n° 
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