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- Access is a big part of subject choice, as well.
Julia, in your case, you were dealing with this
Chinese entrepreneur who gave you extraordinary access
even when he was going through some rocky times.
Can you talk about navigating that relationship?
- You know, I live in Dayton, Ohio
and it's you know, kind of known as like,
a blue-collar place that has a great history of invention
and you know, a great history of manufacturing and so forth,
and I think that's partly why the chairman,
chairman Cao, chose Dayton as where he was going
to have his American factory.
And I think he chose that General Motors plant,
you know, the General Motors plant was where
we had made an earlier film, my partner and I,
called "The Last Truck: Closing of a General Motors Plant",
like 11 year ago, and really it's kind of a mega story.
That film, the closing of the plant,
the leaving of the American capitalist
and then the coming of a Chinese capitalist
to our town to offer jobs to people.
So, access, I think the chairman was proud
that he was doing that.
I felt he was, he was bringing jobs to our community,
he was gonna produce high-quality glass.
It's one thing to get access,
it's another thing to get trust.
Two different things.
And I think the reason we got the trust
of the American blue-collar workers
is because they had all seen "The Last Truck"
and they knew that we understood their journey
and we had followed it for 10 years almost, at that point.
The chairman could see we could make a good film.
He saw it was an Oscar nominee.
I think he thought, these are my guys.
And once the chairman said yes,
you know, it's, it's a Chinese company, privately owned.
So, everybody had to say yes.
So, even though there were some uncomfortable meetings
around tables like we are right now,
where people said things that, you know,
they might have been made uncomfortable by,
they had to go, you know, the chairman said yes,
and he never took back that access.
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I think it's interesting that
several of our films examine power, the nature of power.
Yours very directly, I mean, your main character says,
"You have to be willing to strike and hit to get power".
I mean, Imelda, clearly uses her manipulative abilities
to gain power and she brings her own family in.
You see the power of propaganda,
which is phenomenal in your film.
And even in our film, in this small little factory,
you see the power that those jobs, that plant,
has over people's lives.
You know, you see the power of
what's going on in our country, capitalism-wise.
Like, you see peoples being being beaten down.
You know, workers who made a living wage
no longer can do that.
Workers who want a union,
the powers that be keep that from happening.
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- I'd like to hear about the editing room for you.
What was that process like?
- I will say, we have, my partner Jim Klein and I
edited our first films together
and then Steve Bognar and I edited those films together,
although Steve was definitely the lead editor.
So, all the films, we had never had an editor.
We were very lucky to have the support of Participant Media
so we could actually hire an editor.
Which had, we would have never been able
to do before in that sense.
So, we actually were able to hire the editor
whose name is Lindsay Utz and she is a fabulous editor.
She would sometimes see a scene, like,
there was a worker who gets injured, Bobby Allen,
and he comes back to work after being away
for like six weeks with a really bad injury.
And, you know, it's another day and we're there
and we're filming him coming back.
And she's sitting at the editing table crying, right?
Because she sees the emotion of the workers
welcoming him back, poking at his belly that he,
that he had developed, this scene is not even in the film.
But, the working class comradery and warmth
at bringing him back.
She was sitting at the, in front of the thing crying.
Now, I would've never ever thought that.
I would've never seen the emotion in that scene.
So, Lindsay brought a verite sense
and big tune in to the emotion of the, of the scenes.
Which we knew, in our film, we need it.
I don't think we could've edited
that film ourselves, the way it is.
I think it was a tremendous collaboration.
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