On Mentorship: A Veteran Filmmaker Reflects on Sage Advice

As I have gained experience as a documentary filmmaker over the years, I have found myself either being asked to provide, or wanting to offer, mentorship to others at earlier stages in their careers. It has precipitated an interrogation of what mentor­ship actually means, and whether I know how to give it.

It is somewhat ironic that the term comes from the character Mentor in The Odyssey, who was meant to protect Telemachus when Odysseus went to war. Mentor, somewhat ineffective, failed in his task until the goddess Athena took on his form and whipped things into shape. We want to believe in the gifted sage, the selfless teacher, the elder who finally sees us. But sometimes the mentor is projecting: a younger version of themselves, a better ending to their own story, a proxy for the second chance they were never given. And when you, the mentee, fail to live up to that projection—as you inevitably will—you may find the hand that once lifted you now rests more heavily on your shoulder.

As anyone involved in the practice knows, a freelance career in documentary is a full time undertaking. Nothing comes easily, so you put your head down and move through the contingencies. It’s never a straight line, and you never solve the overall puzzle as it’s always changing, even the prolonged adventure in the edit room. If I had a maxim, and I’m not sure I do, it would be: things are subject to change.

Embracing uncertainty, rather than trying to impose an external and often arbitrary structure upon it, is perhaps the most authentic way I have found to realise each of our documentary films. This realisation only happens with extensive collaboration, but also with the disinter­ested help, sometimes from the most unexpected places, of others. That outside help is what I am trying to parse here.

Documentary is a vocation for me, and I realize how lucky I am to have found something that still compels, thirty years later. At this stage, I am happy to share the wisdom I may have gleaned from my successes and failures over the years; but not in a vacuum, not in a “sage on the stage” or “masterclass” way. Documentary, like reality, is particular. If you want to share your specific problem with me, chances are I have experienced something similar and can share that, plus what I did to address it and whether it worked.

You can’t teach someone how to make a film. You can’t impose your own creative agenda as a solution to the filmmaker’s conundra, in a “tada!” sort of way. You need to open up more possibilities and try to inspire or re-inspire, then get out of the way. I am deeply grateful that this has happened for me over the years, but it hasn’t happened often.

In 1994, I had a dream about the writer Paul Bowles, whose work had obsessed me since the age of eighteen. At twenty-one, I ran away to Morocco to meet him and spent a year occasionally visiting him in Tangier and exploring the country he adopted as his home. In my dream, exactly ten years after our meeting, he was unwell, and I was trying to find a way to see him again. I wrote to Bowles and proposed an interview. He invited me to come visit again, and this, along with an informal thesis film about personal identity called Looking You in the Back of the Head, started my journey as a filmmaker. It also marked the end of the academic career (philosophy and theology) I thought I was going to pursue, the beginning of my relationship with my husband Nicholas de Pencier, who was “hired” as the cinematographer (we had no budget), and my search for mentorship in the fraught, changeable world of filmmaking.

Over the years I had read and seen everything by or about Bowles, as well as by and about his wife Jane, also a brilliant writer, and all of his friends: Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, etc. The biographies and films about him were reductive. They didn’t convey the person I remembered meeting years before, who wore an impeccably pressed white suit in the middle of the desert; a landscape that he said made him “ecstatic.”

I thought: what if you could address the problem of biography by spending time with someone? What if chronology and analysis were replaced by something less theoretical and more experiential so that the reader/viewer somehow actually got to know the person you were trying, and failing, to describe? I knew I wanted to explore these ques­tions but had no experience in the medium of film to help me figure out how to do it.

After our first Morocco shoot, we needed guidance and funding to continue the project. The enormity of what we didn’t know about mak­ing films would have been daunting—except, of course, we didn’t know it. We were proceeding on instinct, hope and passion, jumping at any reasonable opportunity that presented itself. These were rare.

Along with some newfound film friends, I was the recipient of a CTV Fellowship to the Banff Television Festival in 1996. It was my introduc­tion to the industry. I tried to set up meetings but was basically persona non grata and couldn’t get any, so I roamed around with my delegate list, trying to identify people who might give advice, help or money. At the time, a lot of these delegates were men. There were a few I managed to intercept and blurt out my pitch. Their responses (“Let me show you how this all works”; “I could probably find the time to give you a few tips but would need an agreement in place beforehand”; “Just leave it to me; don’t worry”; “Would you like to have a drink at my hotel later this evening to discuss?”) ranged from the condescending to the predatory to the scary. Was it really not possible to find guidance without having to endure arrogance or advice without a subsequent demand? Yes, I was naïve.

The second morning, there was a speed-dating event with commissioning editors and producers. After a few desultory exchanges, I sat down in front of someone who imme­diately declined my half-baked pitch for a project I had deemed industry-viable but for which I had little passion. Given the fact that we had another twenty minutes together on the schedule, we started to chat and quickly ended up in an argument about the existence of God. He said that he was an atheist. I said that claiming to be an atheist was as much a statement of belief as claiming to be a theist. And then he asked what else I was doing, and I told him about our self-financed Paul Bowles project and my thesis film. He agreed to come to the edit room when we were back in Toronto where Denise Holloway, my collaborator, was assembling Looking You in the Back of the Head on a 16mm flatbed in a tiny windowless room above the Organ Grinder restaurant. He bought the film.

That person was Rudy Buttignol, three years into his role at TVOntario (TVO) and one year into commissioning the flagship creative documen­tary series he started, The View from Here. And so began a working relationship that spanned nine years and five feature documentaries. Here are some pivotal moments from our conversations around those films over the years:

The Holier it Gets

Rudy commissioned this for The View from Here, and it was our first officially financed film with broadcast money and Telefilm investment. He also bought Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, even though it did not exactly conform to TVO’s mandate, in order to clear a path for developing The Holier it Gets. In our first rough cut screening, Rudy, the atheist, was not a fan of the spiritual exploration in the film: he wanted to know more about the sibling dynamic. I veered in that direction, wondering why on earth I ever thought it was a good idea to make a movie about taking my father’s ashes to India with my brother and two sisters (and Nick). I also kept trying to conform to the story we said we were going to tell in the pitch proposal and was worried we would have to give the money back because things did not go according to plan. After three months of editor David Wharnsby and I struggling in the edit room, I finally realized that the whole documentary project is precisely to be open to things not going according to plan. That’s when the film started to work, and Rudy, recognizing this, pivoted and supported it, to the extent of coming up with the frankly spiritual title.

The True Meaning of Pictures

Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams’s work was an ideal arena to explore the ethics of representation. Different voices analyzed the photographs—Vicki Goldberg, A.D. Coleman, Mary Ellen Mark, Wendy Ewald, Dwight Billings. Everyone had a different perspective, and I wanted viewers to absorb all of these and reach their own conclusion, rather than try to convince them of one viewpoint. Then a rare sophis­ticate in the Canadian film industry, Charlotte Mickie, after a rough cut screening, told me that most people—Americans, in particular—don’t like ambiguity; they want you to be definitive, conclusive. Was I wrong to highlight the competing and sometimes contradictory interpretations? When I brought it up with Rudy, he said, “You don’t have to come down on one side or the other in the film. But it might help your process to figure out what you think about Adams’s work in your own mind.” That was the extent of his notes. It gave me the freedom to go in the direction the film had to go: embracing complexity, eschewing the easy answer. I still don’t have a definitive perspective on Adams’s work. It is problematic in terms of tropes and stereotypes. But there is an authentic exchange of vulnerability between him and his subjects. By making that film, I learned how crucial this exchange is in any medium of representation, including mine. And it can’t be faked.

Manufactured Landscapes

We had spent half a day touring the three-quarters of a kilometre long factory floor in Xiamen, China, trying to figure out how to convey it. Then we saw a golf cart zipping by with some supplies. The singular filmmaker Peter Mettler, who was our cinematographer (Nick stayed home with the babies), said: “Let’s do it as a dolly!” We blew through a week’s allotment of 16mm film in one day getting that shot, and I knew from the moment we did that it would be the opening of the film—a conviction that had never happened before, nor again. Cut to the rough cut screening with Rudy. “I understand why you want to use that opening dolly, but we’re going to lose a lot of people. Can you jazz it up somehow?” There were banners hung across the walls; editor Roland Schlimme and I had them translated and added the supers. We added in credits and music early into the shot. And none of it worked: it almost made the interminability worse. Then, an epiphany: experiencing the whole nine minute sequence as it was remained the only path to a recognition of scale in the time-based medium of film. When I told Rudy this, he immediately got it and allowed us to proceed as we had to. I will always try a suggestion, and the confidence to do so comes from being trusted that I would always be honest about whether or not it worked.

Rudy Buttignol was the first to demonstrate to me the merits of being an authentic mentor. He asked questions without having an answer ready in the wings, allowed vulnerability without sanctions or attacks, and was a steadfast supporter of the individual creative process. What he demanded was my fidelity to that process—to cleave to it, even when mired in the depths of uncertainty (there were, and still are, lots of those moments). I have known false mentorship, and it is not worth going into here, except to say that if it feels wrong, it probably is. But that recognition requires as much self-examination as analysing the source of advice.

There were other voices that were crucial in the early days, with one relationship that has endured across our entire career. Post the 1996 Banff experience, we still had a mountain to climb on the Paul Bowles film. We never received commissioning dollars, having no previous films to show, so would work our day jobs and chip away at it. Eventually I had gone as far as I could, editing footage with burned-in timecode on two VHS machines.

Enter Rhombus Media, a newly established and thriving partner­ship making creatively exciting films. Two of the principals, Sheena Macdonald and Daniel Iron, had a proposal for us: they would give us free access to their Avid non-linear edit system—a nascent and miracu­lous technology, which at the time cost the equivalent of a house—if we entered into a creative relationship with David Wharnsby, their in-house assistant editor, who they wanted to give more experience so he could become lead editor on some of their projects. This was an absolute game changer for us. Sheena and Danny’s generous support—watching cuts, offering advice and just letting us hang around the office with so much going on—gave us a rare window into what a working model of success could look like. When Let It Come Down got theatrical distribution out of TIFF in Canada, the US and Japan, then won an International Emmy, it gave us the credibility we needed to apply for real financing and start our film career in earnest.

David Wharnsby became an essential and trusted collaborator on our subsequent three films, and Rhombus is also where we met Roland Schlimme, our editor on the next four. Sheena Macdonald took us under her wing and became our valued sales agent for years, marching us around markets and festivals with her mix of relentless drive, insight and humour. Daniel Iron remains a key mentor and partner to this day, bringing us ideas (Manufactured Landscapes and Act of God), helping solve the Tetris puzzle of the financing landscape, calming me down at bleak impasse moments, and always offering a unique creative perspective.

My career, Nick’s, and Mercury Films’ never would have progressed without the invaluable support and mentorship of these trailblazers. They took time out of their own busy trajectories to lift up less experi­enced colleagues who needed a boost. The salient point is that they did so without an agenda. They gave concrete advice and support. But they also opened up possibilities, inspired or re-inspired, then got out of the way. When I am given the opportunity to mentor, I remember them, and strive to do that too.