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MacDonald:
Were you there when
The Gods Must Be Crazy
[1981] was being filmed?
McElwee:
No. That was done before I arrived. It was wonderfully ironic that those two films were being made in the same place at the same time. They should be shown side by side.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
had its charming moments, but it was silly and condescending about the !Kung.
MacDonald: Backyard
is your first full-fledged portrait of the South. It centers on two themes: the relationship of the two races and your relationship with your father and brother.
McElwee:
How
Backyard
was conceived might be of interest to you. It started out as two separate films: a portrait of Clyde, the beekeeper; and a study of my brother's last summer at home before going away to medical school. I was thinking of doing a film about the difficulty of getting through four years of medical school. I felt pretty confident that my brother would return to North Carolina and practice with my father, which he eventually did, so there would be a kind of closure to a story filmed over five or six years.
What happened was that the two separate films kept pulling toward each other like magnets, and I found I couldn't separate them. There was this interwovenness between the lives of Clyde and the other black people who worked around our house and my father and my brother, and it seemed artificial to try to pry the two stories apart. Finally I realized I had to make a film that incorporated both elements. When you're making unscripted documentaries, your preconceptions about the film you're going to make usually start out very different from the film you end up making. Then, given that I didn't have much film stock, I decided to give the film a restricted area in which to work: to let it literally be confined to my backyard, with a couple of departures to other places in the neighborhood.
MacDonald:
The panorama of relationships between black and white people is interesting. There's the scene where your brother walks into the kitchen and kisses Lucille, the cook, in such a natural, automatic, unconscious way that I'll bet many Yankees fall out of their chairs. Then there's a scene where the new bride surveys the people and says good-bye to them before she leaves on her honeymoon: she seems totally oblivious to this black guy who, on his part, is totally involved in an almost fawningly sentimental way with her leaving. In their juxtaposition these scenes capture the surreality of the social life of the South. Also there's that scene where you visit Lucille's brother (who's had a tracheotomy) in the hospital room. His total discomfort with your presence is obvious.
McElwee:
Yes, he makes a gesture, a sideways move of the hand