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Steve Pink on Filming Across Political Divides with Adam Kinzinger

The Last Republican recalls the art of conversation

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21 mins read

American politics have recently swung in such surreal ways. An orange-faced con-man has instilled his ideologies and impulsivity into a political party to the point of radicalization. Taking these things into consideration, it’s perhaps no surprise that we look to philosophical and moral guidance to help navigate this bleak new normal—surprisingly from the helmsman of Hot Tub Time Machine.

Steve Pink, the writer behind the likes of High Fidelity and the director of romantic dramas like The Wheel, makes his non-fiction debut with The Last Republican. It’s a fascinating, complex, and humorously bemusing portrait of the maelstrom that surrounded Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger in the last months of his term.

Kinzinger was one of a small handful from Donald Trump’s own party to not only speak out against the appalling events of January 6th, but to back those words up with action. The notion of adhering to one’s oath to the country over party, or having the courage of one’s convictions, seems almost trite. However, as Pink’s conversation with his subject illustrates, there’s more here at play than mere posturing. The results of the decision to speak up continue to resonate. The result is not only a warm yet profound look at the man, his rise and fall politically as well as the toil it had on those closest to him, it’s a deeply engaging exercise in having conversations with those on opposite sides of what feels to be an intractable divide.

POV spoke to Pink prior to the film’s debut at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

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POV: Jason Gorber
SP: Steve Pink
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity

 

POV: How did you first connect with Mr. Kinzinger?

SP: Me and my colleagues started a documentary film company called the Media Courthouse Documentary Collective, or MCDC. They’re all renowned documentary filmmakers, except for me, which I found hilarious.

 

POV: That’s about to change.

SP: Yeah. [Laughs] We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve always been a political junkie and interested in political stories. Ordinarily I would not think that Adam’s [story] was even remotely an interesting one for me. He’s a conservative Republican, and I am a left-wing progressive. But in him I saw a guy who sacrificed his career, his friends, his social circle, and some of his own family members when he stood against Trump in the face of January 6. I had to reconcile these two things in my brain – on the one hand, I don’t agree with a single thing that this guy says, and yet also he did something that I really admire. I think anyone who stands on principle and sacrifices so much to do so deserves to have their story told.

 

POV: Let’s talk about the timing. When you reached out he had already stood up to Trump, but the committee hadn’t yet convened?

SP: When we connected, he had already joined the committee, but the committee hadn’t done anything, really. This was very early days, and it was almost a year before the Jan. 6 committee hearings happened. They had started their work, and then we met him in Utah. I thought this was going to be an interesting portrait about a guy who stood against Jan. 6 and his party. At that moment, he could have run for Congress, he could have run for Governor, and so on. As we were shooting in Utah, and the moment is in our movie, literally our very first day of shooting, he finds out that he’s being redistricted. His district was combined with a hardline MAGA Republican, and he knew it would be a street fight he couldn’t win.

I immediately starting wondering, well, what then is our documentary about? Everything transformed right before my eyes. As a first-time documentary filmmaker, that was terrifying. And then, of course, I was told by my colleagues that is how it goes.

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POV: Part of the joy of a great documentary is witnessing a filmmaker who is competent enough to take the story where the story needs to go, and not locked into their preconceptions about what it should be. What was that like process like, and how do you think that’s going to change your filmmaking even in your fiction films?

 

SP: It was terrifying. It’s true I felt very comfortable with the camera and being able to be in an environment and capture it, as a general filmmaking skill. But because I was in real spaces with real people, I was always at sea. I actually didn’t have any idea. Again, I didn’t realize that actually was the skill.

I got comfortable not having any idea, but being able to go into a space and disappear and look for the story. I knew what the story was about, or, I at least that there were certain things that I wanted to understand about Adam’s life: what he was going through in that political moment of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, etc. I had some context. I had to just walk into a space and try to understand that there was context to be found tied to the story I was trying to tell, but then be open to letting things happen before my eyes.

Another challenge was to then actually capture these moments. When you have a scripted movie, you have a shot list, you have a day of shooting planned, you know what you’re shooting, and so on. It’s one thing to then be aware of the thing you have to capture, and it’s another thing to actually figure out how to capture that thing. That obviously was very difficult when you’re in a real space with real people and you’re not in control of anything that’s going on.

 

POV: Ideally, when you’re writing, you’re not limiting your ideas and thinking of the challenge of directing a given scene. When you’re directing, you’re not constantly thinking of the world of editing. And then when you’re editing, you’re not thinking of what the day was, or the struggles with the blank page. You’re thinking about what the actual footage is. From everything you’re saying, it’s a radical departure, and yet, in the end, looking back, how much of a departure truly was it?

SP: In terms of what we do as storytellers and filmmakers, it was exactly the same. This is how I naturally think about storytelling and filmmaking, and that was something I could rely on. I could focus on what Adam’s going through, what he’s going through with his family, his fight to make the Jan. 6 committee relevant, to get the story out there, at a moment when it’s his last year in Congress. He’s leaving this thing that he loves. So there’s all of these very emotional and dramatic things that are going on with him. Then, of course, [there is] the emergence of the fact that we don’t agree about anything. That unexpectedly became its own dynamic.

 

POV: I assume the catering budget was different.

SP: There was lot of sitting in congressional hallways eating wrapped sandwiches for sure. Which I was fine with!

 

POV: I am fascinated by films like this that are shaped as world is changing. I screened it just before Adam went to the DNC. We are talking about it now before it plays its festival run, which is again going to change the reception of the film. I’m Canadian, but I understand you Americans have an election coming up, which will whatever its outcome will change this film in major ways without adjusting a frame. Is that also unique to the nonfiction world?

SP: As a filmmaker, it’s not the first time I’ve been asked to tackle the crucial question in American life, namely, can you time travel in a hot tub? So there is a direct progression from that to The Last Republican, clearly. [Laughs.]

Many amazing documentaries continue to reflect current events in society. You can look at many films that are still reverberating in its own way with the times, and I hope our movie does that. There is a separation between the events we cover and how history may or may not repeat itself very soon. Then there’s the other part of the film to me, which is the conversation between Adam and I. What I absolutely learned in a more formal way and a structured way, by virtue of just being in a space with him all the time, is the question of how to get along with someone whose political views you oppose. Like, vehemently oppose. We don’t agree on anything.

 

POV: I’m surely not the first person to point out the irony of you being named Pink, given its leftist connotations.

SP: Yeah, Adam loves that one too. But we do have the common ground of Hot Tub Time Machine, in a hilarious way. I didn’t know that when I started the film. I was, you know, setting off to make an important political documentary, and the first thing he says to me is that he loves Hot Tub Time Machine. So right there we knew we had this shared sense of humor. We had common ground there to build from. The movie clearly becomes about how to have a conversation with people [whose views] you oppose. I want people to see this movie and find the person with whom they most disagree and figure out how to have a conversation with that person. Understand that you’re not going to convince them of your view, and you don’t actually have to embrace their view. But in that exercise, there will be grace. If you respect each other and you have grace for each other, you will both realize that, at least this is my hope, that in a fundamental way, you will find agreement. We’re both Americans, we’re both living in the same society, and we both want things to be better. We may define what is better differently, but we both want those things. We are polarized to a point where now we have to reinvest in this question of agreeing disagreeably.

 

POV: Are there specific films, even not about politics, that you looked at specifically to see how to navigate having conversations with those outside of your traditional silo?

SP: Harlan County, USA I love. It’s interesting because I didn’t think about the movies where the filmmaker had to figure out how to engage with the subject, especially a subject with whom they disagreed, I thought of it more in terms of how to capture the political drama of it. All the President’s Men was very influential for me, actually. Another Eric Roth screenplay that Michael Mann directed, The Insider, was very influential for me. Russell Crowe’s character learns that institutions of various stripes are trying to destroy him. What does a person do when there are forces that are so huge bearing down on them? What does that feel like? How do you deal with that?

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POV: With all this footage you could have cut it to make him look like an asshole, or you could have made it a hagiography. You thread that middle ground beautifully.

SP: Credit to my filmmaking colleagues like Jason Kohn who made Nothing Lasts Forever, Manda Bala, and Love Means Zero. He was telling me we could not do hagiography. I was asking, what is that exactly? He was arguing that we don’t want to just do exclusively a portrait. That’s where the idea of a conversation crept in. I was not in it at all as the filmmaker when we were shooting. I was only in the film because audio was running and we tended to have these hilarious conversations during the interview. By that point, we had so much trust, we were always razzing each other. And so that idea of a conversation between us emerged.

I didn’t want to be in the film at all. I couldn’t think of anything worse than me being in the film, because I didn’t know what part I would play. Clearly it has nothing to do with me, and I was set to capture this person’s life as he’s going through these momentous things, and try to get his view of those things. Then this conversation emerged where we would just constantly debate, and that emerged in editorial.

That comes through in a moment where he’s talking about why he became a Republican. He’s talking about how it was the ’80s and how Reagan was the president. He stops and looks at me behind the camera and says, “You probably hated Reagan, right?” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely hated him. I hate Reagan, I don’t think he was a good president.” It got to the point where he could anticipate what my perspective and reaction were going to be when he said things out loud. That became this really exciting and surprising part of the film because, even though it’s funny, it’s also him acknowledging that I totally disagree with what was coming out of his mouth. There’s a funny thing when you’re acknowledging that somebody’s going to disagree with you in the moment you’re actually saying it.

What was a revelation is that I thought I was making a film about a guy who sacrificed his career. He tells that story in the film about having intervened on the street at night when he was a young man to protect a woman who was being stabbed. I asked him about that early in the movie, and then I ask him about it and he tells me the story. When I ask him about it later, and [I] ask what is it about him that will [inspire him to] jump into the breach without thinking about the consequences. He certainly thought that all of his Republican colleagues were going to join him once they realized that everyone’s going to uphold their oaths. When he realized that wasn’t the case, he felt alone. I was interested in someone who jumped into the breach without fully thinking about the consequences but believing it was the right thing to do. It’s in that moment in the film when he says he didn’t want to lose his willingness to serve.

The thing he wouldn’t sacrifice is this willingness to serve, to do the right thing by others, and to not become cynical. Cynicism was sapping his energies and his desire to continue down the path he was going. It’s clear to me that is the most important thing to him, to make sure that he stays energized so that he can be of service to people. It was in that moment that the film changed again and became about something that was revealed to me the moment when I asked that question.

The Last Republican premiered at TIFF 2024.

Read our review of the film here.

Get more coverage from this year’s festival here.

Jason Gorber is a film journalist and member of the Toronto Film Critics Association. He is the Managing Editor/Chief Critic at ThatShelf.com and a regular contributor for POV Magazine, RogerEbert.com and CBC Radio. His has written for Slashfilm, Esquire, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Screen Anarchy, HighDefDigest, Birth.Movies.Death, IndieWire and more. He has appeared on CTV NewsChannel, CP24, and many other broadcasters. He has been a jury member at the Reykjavik International Film Festival, Calgary Underground Film Festival, RiverRun Film Festival, TIFF Canada's Top 10, Reel Asian and Fantasia's New Flesh Award. Jason has been a Tomatometer-approved critic for over 20 years.

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