Oscar winner and Academy member Roger Ross Williams is saying publicly what many in the documentary community have stewed over privately – that the sums of money being spent on Oscar documentary campaigns has “gotten insane.” And Williams, a former Academy Governor representing the Doc Branch, says something may be done about it.
“We in the Academy, in the Doc Branch, have a campaign finance reform committee… to sort of try to work through that and figure out solutions to that. It’s gotten insane. It’s gazillions of dollars to get seen and heard,” he said, “and that’s so troubling because it should be on the merit of the films.”
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His remarks, less than two weeks after the Academy Awards, came in a discussion with documentary programmer and Pure Nonfiction podcaster Thom Powers at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Powers asked the filmmaker about “the escalating attention that awards season sucks up in our industry,” and Williams didn’t hold back.
“We know it’s awards, it’s the Oscars — it’s a game, it costs. But we are trying to deal with that as a branch, us documentarians, and we lead the way in the Academy,” Williams said. “The Doc Branch — the most diverse branch in the Academy, the most progressive branch in the Academy — we really lead the way. So, we’ll figure it out and we’ll lead the rest of the academy. They’ll follow us, as they do in everything.”
Williams arrived in Copenhagen to share his latest documentary, Love to Love You, Donna Summer, about the late singer-songwriter and Queen of Disco. Brooklyn Sudano, Summer’s daughter, co-directed the film and is joining Williams for CPH:DOX screenings tonight and Friday night. The film will debut on HBO in May.
Asked what drew him to Summer’s story, Williams replied, “My love of disco. I grew up in this small town in Pennsylvania, and we had a hustle competition, and it was a year-long… and every month someone would win and they would advance to the next round. And [I] kept advancing and advancing and I won it… I won to ‘I Feel Love’ [by] Donna Summer, and I have felt love for Donna Summer ever since.”
Among many elements of Summer’s life, the film explores the entertainer’s complicated relationship with the church. She was sexually abused by a pastor when she was a girl, a traumatic experience that affected the course of her life, yet she remained deeply religious and felt torn by being perceived as an avatar of sensuality because of some of her songs – especially the orgasmic “Love to Love You Baby,” released as a 17-minute moaning mega-single.
Williams said he identified with Summer’s struggle.
“I grew up in the Black church, the illegitimate son of the pastor,” he noted. “I was thrown out of the church for being gay, ostracized from the church. My mother was ostracized from the church for having an affair with the pastor.”
Williams said that experience also motivated him to direct one of his earlier documentaries, 2013’s God Loves Uganda, which examined extreme homophobia in Uganda that has been seeded by an influx of American evangelicals. He expressed alarm over the vote by Uganda’s parliament earlier this week to approve anti-LGBTQ legislation even more shocking than laws already on the books. The bill provides for a life sentence for anyone convicted of engaging in gay sex, and calls for the death penalty in certain cases.
“I saw [Ugandan President] Museveni yesterday on CNN saying that it is Uganda’s goal to wipe out every gay person in that country… It’s a very painful and dangerous place. It was a very dangerous sort of time for me making that film, being in Uganda where they were hunting gays,” he commented, adding, “I always want to go to those places… of personal pain because I believe great art comes out of that.”
In the 90-minute conversation with Powers, Williams went into depth on a number of his new projects, including his first foray into fictional storytelling, the drama Cassandro, which premiered to great acclaim at Sundance in January. The film stars Gael García Bernal as the titular real-life gay lucha libre star who became a sensation in Mexico and the U.S., wrestling in drag. Williams made a short documentary previously about Cassandro, whose real name is Saúl Armendáriz.
“I went to El Paso to begin shooting with the real Saúl… and I met him and I was just blown away by his energy, his positivity, his story, he was so inspiring on so many levels,” Williams said. “That night the crew and I went to a tequila bar, and I said, this is going to be my first scripted feature.”
Williams revealed how Robert Redford played an instrumental role in the film’s artistic evolution. His path to RR began with the screenplay to Cassandro that Williams wrote with David Teague, his editor on the documentary Life, Animated. They submitted the first draft to the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, but got rejected. A proverbial “long night of the soul” ensued, but it ended well.
“It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because then I went back to the drawing board,” Williams recalled, “and we made it better and we rewrote it.”
After completing the screenwriting lab, he got invited to take part in the equally prestigious and rigorous director’s lab.
“You shoot five scenes from your screenplay,” Williams explained. “You bring actors that you cast that come with you for the five weeks.”
Each of the eight writer-directors is paired with a mentor. Really famous, important mentors, including the Sundance Institute founder and Oscar winner himself.
“Redford takes one of the eight [directors], and he’s their advisor — this is probably the last time he did this — and he chose my film,” Williams said. “So, I had Redford on set with me in rehearsal, in the edit room with me. And he was amazing. The most memorable thing is there’s a big sex scene in Cassandro. I was really nervous [about directing it]. I said, ‘How do I do a sex scene?’ And he said, ‘It’s all about storytelling and the choreography.’ He drew it out. Bob Redford storyboarded my sex scene. And I have it framed in my office hanging on the wall.”
Williams became the first Black director to win an Academy Award, with his 2010 short documentary Music by Prudence and earned a second nomination for Life, Animated in 2017. In addition to Cassandro and Love to Love You, Donna Summer, he’s directing a docuseries on supermodels that’s due out in the fall.
At the CPH:DOX event he also spoke about working with Oprah and Nikole Hannah-Jones on The 1619 Project, the documentary series based on Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times opus. The Hulu series, which premiered in late January, explores the history of racism in America from the year African slaves were first brought in chains to what became the United States, to the present day.
“I started to develop it really closely with Nikole and Oprah,” Williams said, “and we would do biweekly brainstorming sessions. Great to brainstorm with Oprah.”
Williams’ upcoming documentary Stamped From the Beginning is based on the book by Ibram X. Kendi, which interrogates the way racist notions have taken root in the American psyche.
“It’s all about how a racist idea is created, like the invention of Blackness, the invention of whiteness — which happened in America early in America when Black slaves and white indentured servants started rebelling against landowners. And they had to create white laws to protect white people,” Williams said. “It’s a lesson, but it’s so super entertaining… It’s actually, I shouldn’t say fun because it’s heavy stuff, but it’s… actually really entertaining. And it was so fun. I like to challenge myself. It was a huge challenge. And I’m in the middle of it right now, pulling my hair out.”
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