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to me. But I continue to be very interested in the way the South resists the homogenization that seems to have made most other parts of the United States indistinguishable from one another.
As to whether I consider myself to be a particularly Southern filmmaker: it's not important to me that I be described that way. I'm sure I could have gone to California and made a film that in some senses would have been an equally accurate portrait of California life. But because I am from the South, I have a particular slant on the South that non-Southerners might not have, which includes having access to people and places an outsider might not come across. I take advantage of the fact that I'm Southern in making my films, but I don't really think of myself as a Southern filmmaker, and I hope that the films I've made are of interest to people outside the South. Of course, there is a tradition of Southern fiction (Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe . . .), and the label as used there to indicate a genre of literature that was created by writers from the South but transcends the region, transcends the label of "Southern," is what I'm striving for.
Macdonald:
The parallel between Sherman's march through the South and yours suggests that you also think of yourself as a Northerner.
McElwee:
I am trying to draw a parallel between Sherman and myself, which is accurate in some ways and comically ironic (I hope) in other ways. I do have some things in common with Sherman although some of the parallels have been reversed. He's a Northerner who was coming down South; I'm a Southerner who went up North. But I also take it a step further and posit myself in the role of an exiled Southerner living up North who returns to the South again. I both identify with Sherman and find my personality and what my life stands for as being in contradistinction to what Sherman stood for. I both consider myself to be a Southerner
and
to no longer be a son of the South. In some sense the South is alien territory for me.
MacDonald:
There's also a parallel in the fact that you and Sherman met mostly women.
McElwee:
Yes, most of the Southern troops were in Virginia at the time, with Robert E. Lee, entrenched around Richmond. Left behind were women, children, and old people. There's also the basic difference between Sherman and me in that Sherman was quite successful in his campaign. He achieved his military objectives. If one considers the purpose of my journey finding an ideal Southern woman to marry, to fall in love with, whatever, I'm unsuccessful in my "campaign." Time and time again, I meet with outright defeat or at best there's a draw.
MacDonald:
Is there a sense in which you use the camera as a weapon? Is that an implicit parallel?
McElwee:
In no way am I really trying to use the camera as a weapon.