Thomas Johnson:
The film that I submitted, along with my team, for
Film Lounge is called Marieke and it's about
Marieke Penterman who emigrated from the
Netherlands when she was in probably her mid-20s
and over the course of the last ten plus years has
very much built kind of like a gouda cheesemaking
empire in Thorp, Wisconsin.
And so in terms of cheesemakers in the world
she's one of the most prominent of those.
So that's what the film is about.
When it comes to the making of cheese it very
much is its own subculture and it's one of those
things that I didn't know that much about before I
went into it.
Obviously you do your research and you try to
get a feel for what goes into it, the process, but
one of the things that we wanted to do with the film
is to explain this process for people.
So, with any documentary, with any film, you want it
to be entertaining, you want it to be
enlightening, but with this one we wanted there
to be a certain educational component
where people learned a little bit about the
process.
And so I think that we've done a pretty nice job of
mixing those various things together.
Johnson: One thread that has kind of become clear
in my recent film work is just this idea of
creativity and making that a central component of a
person's life.
And a lot of people will say I'm not creative, I
don't have that energy, but I think that there's
something creative in all of us.
And my hope is that when people watch my films that
they can kind of take a little bit of that away
and think about how they could apply it to their
own lives.
♪♪
One night I was tossing and turning and I
heard a cow in the background and I thought,
well I want to start my own business, they have
beautiful Wisconsin dairy milk here right on the
farm and I'm missing my gouda from Holland.
So I woke up my husband and said, honey, I think I
know what we should do, I think we should start
making our own cheese, our own gouda.
And like every good husband he says, yes dear,
let's talk about it tomorrow.
So he fell back to sleep and my wheels were turning
and that's where our next adventure and new passion
started.
♪♪
Cows are just like humans.
So when I walk between the cows you will see some
will interact a little bit more than others, some are
nice, some are more outgoing, some are rude,
they're just like people.
They all have their own character and it's funny.
But in general you can see because if you walk
through our barn you will see different breeds of
cows.
So we have mainly Holsteins and then we have
Brown Swiss cows and we have a mixture and then we
have some where a Holstein is a little bit more like
hey let's shake hands, who are you, that's where a
Brown Swiss says hey buddy and keeps hugging type of
cow.
So we really enjoy seeing the different breeds.
And the cow is still, it's not just a cow, it's a
personality.
♪♪
When we started this cheese adventure we
wanted to make a traditional gouda and for
us it was very important to use old world methods
that are very traditional to Holland.
So when we got the idea to start making gouda cheese
I traveled back to Holland and I went to this lady
that tends cows and she was the first one to see
me, to show me these old methods that are still
using in our cheesemaking process.
Some of those methods would be you wash the
curds, that is one of the traditional ways of making
gouda.
You don't often hear you wash the curds and whey,
with gouda you wash the curds in water.
Another very essential way true to the Dutch gouda
recipe is that you don't put salt on by hand but
you actually let the cheese soak up its own
salt.
Another way is the aging process.
American cheese often gets vacuum packed and put in a
cooler versus the gouda way of making it, so it
comes out of the rind, it goes into a cheese and
what we do then is we hand brush kind of a paint onto
the cheese that dries up like a skin around the
cheese that will let the cheese breathe because
it's a living organism.
Cheese will lose moisture during the aging process.
So this coating will let the moisture come through.
And then we need wooden shelves to help enhance
the whole aging process of the cheese.
So the moisture of the cheese, the wooden shelf
helps us regulate a little bit the aging process
because it will capture the moisture of the
cheese.
So if it's dry in the area it will release the
moisture and when it's humid it will capture some
moisture.
The wooden shelves are very essential but you
need the right protocols to make sure that you have
a very safe product and with the right protocols
it's a very safe way of aging the cheese, it has
been done for generations and it's a very essential
part of true methods that we use in Holland and we
wanted to take to Thorp, Wisconsin.
♪♪
I think at this moment we have more than
30 awards and so we have been very blessed that
way.
But it's that feedback on the floor or at shows,
it's kind of funny when they put a piece of cheese
in their mouth and you know how they just grab a
piece of cheese and they go, they keep walking.
And then we always say wait, wait for it.
And then they stop and then they go back, they
walk back, what kind of cheese was that?
And they want more and they want to know more
about it.
So that's kind of funny.
♪♪
What do I feel when I walk into the aging
room seeing all those wheels?
What do I feel when I come home and I can put my feet
up and I eat a piece of cheese?
I feel like it's not just a piece of cheese, it's
something you inhale and I've had a lot of fun
moments already with having cheese on the
table, I'm proud.
I'm amazed what this cheese has brought us so
far.
I never thought when I started this adventure I
thought I would just make a couple of times a week
cheese and I would do this to get an income for my
family and being able to stay at home, and along
the road I think something more came.
Yeah, I'm very, very super proud, all the people that
came along that helped us make this piece of cheese
and the people that I got to know, the opportunities
that it gave me.
That piece of cheese is kick ass.
♪♪
Johnson: In terms of production for Marieke, so myself
Aaron Lerth and Jack Ross, we went up to Thorp, Wisconsin
and we spent two nights in Thorp and shot over basically a two
and a half day period and doing the interview and also gathering
a variety of b-roll. And so that's kind of the short of
the production but quite a bit of it went into making
sure that we were going to ask the right questions, making
sure that we had an idea of what we wanted to get from the
shooting script. So if I look back on the shooting script
maybe about two-thirds of it, it's like we're getting that
shot but the other third is like, well, we didn't expect
that to happen. So it worked out pretty well in terms of that
balance.
I think that one thing that really unfolded before our
eyes is we spent a lot of time in the cheese wheel room
and when you watch the film you very much know what shots I'm
talking about where there's just these rows and rows and rows
of these cheese wheels. And so we tried to do some things with
motion and utilizing the camera to get some close-ups, to also
use rack focus and so I knew we were going to shoot in the
cheese wheel room, I knew that was going to happen, but we
started to get really creative and tried to do some really
interesting things there and I think that is where we were
able to really produce some quality shots that ended up
just enhancing some of the things that she had to say
within the film.