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not look her up
with the camera
and see what happens? The miniportrait of Mary went well. She was gone the next day, so there was no potential for filming her more, but it was a start. And it was a microcosm of how the film might work.
Then I met Pat, who was a natural film subject. She loved being filmed, had no self-consciousness whatsoever, was somewhat outrageous, articulate, and had bizarre outlooks on life. And she had nothing to do but allow me to film her. It was perfect.
MacDonald:
One complaint I've heard about
Sherman's March
is that you center on women who are bizarre, a little wacky, maybe objects of patronizing humor.
McElwee:
I see them as being independent and intelligent for the most part. But eccentric, yes. I don't see anything wrong with having chosen women who are eccentric, who are unusual. Having decided to film women who are independent in the South means they're going to have to be somewhat eccentric. The fact that they decided not to embrace the more traditional conservative values of the South, nor to accept the roles that most Southern women seem to accept, made them by definition somewhat eccentric.
You know, I hear myself saying these things and immediately feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure I have the sociological background to even begin to define who's eccentric and who's not, who's conventional and who's not. And yet I feel somehow that the women I filmed are out of the norm, and that's why I decided to film them. I can only say that I wasn't attempting to make any statement about the status of women in the South or in the United States. I felt no obligation to select a group of women who were somehow representative of something. I think the women in the film are wonderfully individualistic; some are eccentric, some seem quite normal to me. A lot of them are struggling with life, and I'm interested in that kind of struggling. We all do it.
I'm
doing it in the film. I was interested in capturing some of that. A lot of documentaries try to package things very neatly from an ideological point of view. In some ways it leaves the viewer with a false sense that problems have been solved, points of view have been neatly defined. I think that's very dangerous. Life isn't like that.
A more valuable question to ask is, are we laughing with people or at them. Pat, the woman in search of Burt Reynolds, is an aspiring actress. Some of the things she says are quite outrageous, but she has a sense of self that in my view enables her to get away with saying the things she says. I think she's a fascinating and complicated and very unique person in the film, very entertaining, very funny; she knows that we're laughing at a lot of the things she says, but she's pleased with that fact. It's part of her way of presenting herself to the world. She's seen the film and is