A Journey with Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim By Jonathan Marlow April 19, 2006 - 4:55 PM PDT "We wanted to take people on a journey with the family." Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story is a "little-known-in-these-parts story of thirteen (confirmed) Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea (although the actual kidnapped total may be much higher)," wrote Jonathan Marlow when he saw it at Slamdance. "The filmmakers have exceptional access to the parents of one of the victims as they attempt to pressure the Japanese government to get a definite answer from the Kim Jong Il administration about their daughter's fate. To put it succinctly, this is one of the most emotionally draining docs that I've seen in ages." As we enter the conversation he's having with husband-and-wife filmmakers Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, they're just now discussing the impact Variety can have on the fate of an independent film... Chris Sheridan: A friend of ours made this film called the Guatemalan Handshake... Todd [Rohal], yes. [See Jonathan Marlow's interview at GreenCine Daily.] Sheridan: They said, "Theatrically toast." He was hurt by that and I would've been, too, if they'd had said that to us. Patty Kim: I just looked at the Variety website; it wasn't in the weekly issue. They didn't even bother to print it in the weekly thing. So I thought, "I'll have to go online and read it... Oh, no!" Sheridan: He pulled it up and said, "Hey guys, the review's up!" They were all around the house. Then he said, "Oh, it's not here yet," because he didn't want his crew to see it... Kim: For morale. Honestly, you can't trust this rag. Their concern is more in theatrical viability than any kind of artistic quality... Kim: Right. With Todd's film, it would be difficult for somebody to look at it and say, "I see exactly how this is going to make us ten million dollars." It's a quirky film that would require someone to be careful about how they distribute it. Regardless, what's happening with your film? Why are you both so painfully oppressive about your damn tapes? Why won't you let anyone see your movie? Kim: We let you see it twice! I saw it at Slamdance and again at SFIAAFF. The publicist said, "They don't want to do interviews if you haven't seen it yet." To which I replied, "I've seen it! I've seen the damn movie!" I was standing in the back of the theater in Park City the whole time... Sheridan: We would have made an exception for you, probably. Our strategy is to try, whenever we can, to get the people who can make the decisions about whether this is going to get in theaters to be there in an audience setting. It's simply because we've seen the reaction from audiences and I think that it's important that distributors, in particular, see that, too. I think they also need to see the sort of audiences that are coming to this film, which are people who usually wouldn't go see documentaries. We wish they were in Cleveland last week. There was an unbelievable audience at the festival. It was a packed house and a lot of emotion. Kim: It's a cliché but there is a bit of truth to it. I think that, as a filmmaker, you care so much about what you're doing and you want to give it the best chance possible. You want it to be seen in the ideal context and, for us, we realized that the ideal context would be in a room full of two hundred or three hundred other people who had never seen it before and were going through it with you. For distributors and press, we thought that would be the best way to go about it. As much as people will say, "Show me a screener in advance," they don't really want to see a screener in advance. Who wants to ruin their Saturday? I do. I've ruined plenty of Saturdays. Sheridan: If we were only concerned about a TV deal, then probably we'd be less concerned about it. But we really want to get a theatrical deal and I think you've got to see it on a big screen in an audience setting... Kim: I think it holds generally true that most films work better when you give them your undivided attention. There's nothing that matches the theater experience. I almost feel it's even more true in our case because I think that there are things - it's such an emotional film that I think that it's amplified when you are sitting there with many more people. I really think that you might have the tendency if you are alone in a room to just kind of go, "I'm feeling something I don't want to feel," and kind of intellectualize the experience... I saw the film in Park City, perhaps not the most ideal location for this kind of documentary. It obviously resonated with audience, where it won an award. Probably not the last award that you'll receive for the film [true enough; it's also picked up awards since this conversation at SFIAAFF and the Omaha Film Festival]. I suspect that there is distributor interest but is anyone doing anything more that saying that they're interested? Sheridan: Our goal right now is to get them to the screenings... Are you screening in Los Angeles at all? Sheridan: We're hoping to. Of course, New York is the other place we'd want to show it. Those are the two big markets that we want to try to hit. Everyone calls it a "cat and mouse" game. We have a lot of distributors, big ones that want to see it but who haven't seen it yet. We keep in touch with them, we don't ignore them, but we've said, "Look, we would love nothing better than for you to pick up this film, absolutely. But, this is the honest truth, we need you to see it in this setting and we promise you that it will be a better experience." You're looking for a distributor that listens to you... Sheridan: Yeah... ... And comes to a screening, rather than someone who gives you lip service and says, "Yeah, that's all great. Just send me a damn screener and let me look at the film." Sheridan: That's a great way to describe it. To be honest, it's a little bit of a test to see how interested they really are. I mean, if someone had flown to Cleveland last weekend and if they had walked away from it saying, "I really want to talk to you about this film," then I would've thought that they were really interested. But we haven't had that kind of experience yet. We've had all kinds of different size distributors approach us. We still have the attention of the biggest ones and we've heard from the medium ones and even the very small ones that I've never even heard of before... Kim: Just to add to that, I think that they've shown an interest but how serious they are has yet to be determined. We know that it's going to be tough. It's kind of like dating. You just have to find the right person who really connects with you and that you have chemistry with. That person really has to really believe in the relationship. In this case, believe in the film. So I feel like we're doing a little bit of speed-dating right now! The one encouraging sign is that at each of the festivals we've sold out every screening. I have no idea how common or uncommon that is... It isn't all that common... Kim: We take that personally. It's a very big encouragement and it propels us to keep going forward. It tells us that the film does connect with people in these places and after they've walked out, all the audiences at each festival so far have been overwhelmingly positive and very emotional. I hate to overuse the word, but it's true. You've had it easy because you've made a really good film. Kim: We hope. The other thing that has been encouraging so far is that the festivals that we're going to, the organizers are very passionate about the film. The festivals have told us themselves that they wanted to highlight this film and that they see it as an audience grabber, to paraphrase them. How did you come to the subject? The way that it's constructed, it seems that at any moment the story could unravel. What is really incredible about the structure is that the further along you get into the story, the more absurd the situation becomes. How much of it did you know to be concrete and how much was material you had to wait and let happen in front of the camera. Sheridan: It's actually good that you say that because we came into it relatively late in the story. It's not entirely clear from the film. Sheridan: That's good, because we wanted to take people on a journey with the family. We came into it in 2002 when the North Korean leader and the Japanese Prime Minister met for the first time. We heard about it in an American newspaper - it made the international press - but, like a lot of foreign news stories, we Americans kind of went, "What's going on in the Michael Jackson case today?" Patty turned to me and said, "Read this." We heard about the abduction and we read about how one of the victims was a thirteen-year-old girl and that, of course, was a natural draw. We asked the same question everybody else does when they read the synopsis, "How the heck could that happen?" That's kind of what started the process of us asking questions. Then, after we started shooting, we struck a deal with one of the largest broadcasters in Japan, Fuji TV, and they opened their archives to us. It's very rare for a company in Japan to do because they don't like to provide access to foreign companies but they thought that this situation was so extraordinary. We somehow managed to convince them. That's when we started to get access to all that stuff in the film that goes back years and years, because they've been covering the story for years. Kim: But, like a lot of documentary filmmakers, we didn't know what the ending would be. We were waiting in anticipation with the same kind of nervousness everyone has when they're trying to structure a film. We needed that high point, that climax, for the arc to be in place. We didn't know what that was going to be, but miraculously... Sheridan: When it came along... Well, we don't want to spoil it for your readers. Kim: Obviously, while we were shooting, we had a feeling that we didn't know what was going to happen next. We were there for their journey as well. Sheridan: You've seen the ending. We were actually in New York City when a big development in the story was happening. We were actually at a film festival and we both realized instantly that we had to go there immediately. We jumped on a plane and we were in Japan a few days later. We shot some footage and we knew that was going to be the ending. Some people might've picked a different ending but we just thought it was sort of a natural place to end the film. It's still the ending, as the story continues to develop. We didn't start shooting until about 2004, two years after we had first heard about the story. When did Jane Campion come into the project? Was it after you had already finished all of your shooting? Kim: She came into the post-production part and Chris and I realized that we needed somebody, a third eye, to kind of guide us through the huge menagerie of tapes. Sheridan: She's someone that we really respected and trusted. Also, we wanted this to be first and foremost a film. We didn't want it to be a political history, we didn't want it to be a Frontline story, we didn't want it to be a "he said, she said" kind of thing. We wanted it to be a film, so we wanted somebody with the street-cred and film backround that could give us the right kind of feedback. Patty had known Jane for a while... Kim: I had first made her acquaintance about fifteen years ago and then kept somewhat sporadically in touch. When we were doing this, we approached her and it was a very organic thing. We showed her a little bit of the footage and she was very moved by it and excited by the material. Was she familiar with the story at all? Kim: No, and that actually was so wonderful because she came in so clear-eyed and she didn't look at this in any kind of large political or historical context, which some other people might tend to do. She saw it purely as an amazing human drama and she really connected with the very strong characters at the center of the film. She loved the way that their characters shined through the story. Sheridan: She was phenomenal because we had never worked with her. We knew her a little bit but we didn't know how she works. Maybe she was going to get really embarrassed and at some point say, "This is terrible, what are you guys doing? This is horrible, what you're showing me." But she was always very supportive but she has an incredible ability to weed through the BS and tell you exactly what she's thinking. She said to us early on, "My only promise to myself with this project is that I'm always honest with you." And she always was and it was great for us. Kim: She's got this really special ability, this uncanny ability, to be very direct in her comments. But she's also got an incredibly light touch. She never big-footed us anytime and said, "This really bothers me, you really have to do something." She always encouraged us to bring out our natural voice, if you will. She never, never said, "This is what you have to do." Sheridan: All the time she'd go through this incredibly insightful and direct commentary, and then she'd say, "But you guys are the experts, you don't have to listen to me." And we were like, "You're an expert, too! You know what you're doing!" In what capacity did you first meet her? Kim: I had seen her film Sweetie and I was just so blown away by it. I thought it was a remarkable film and I felt like I hadn't seen anything quite like it. I got in touch with her and we started a sort of pen-pal-ish relationship over the years, but very casual. Sometimes a year or two would go by and I wouldn't hear from her and we'd loose touch. But we reconnected on this project, which was an unexpected and really wonderful experience. She's been unbelievably supportive, firm and unwavering, which is scary because there are times when I think, "Maybe she's just pretending!" Sheridan: You wonder, as a filmmaker, if the people that are around you are having any doubt about what you're doing or how you're doing it. But she never seems to have doubts, or at least never expressed them to us. Kim: She didn't seem to be that kind of a person, either. If she believes in something and she likes it, then she likes it. What was your filmmaking backround before you came to this project? You have a company together, Safari Media. Sheridan: We have a very strong journalism background but we don't like to say that too much because it biases people's opinion. Kim: But thanks for saying it. Sheridan: She worked at the Discovery Channel and I worked at National Geographic. Kim: We luckily had a lot of training and experience from making half-hours and hours for different television stations. Sheridan: We had both gotten jobs at National Geographic, not at the same time, but we eventually started working together. She was a correspondent and I was a producer. That's when we got the idea to actually make our own film and then we came across this story. It was a really good lead-up to a feature-length documentary. Kim: It was very gradual and it didn't feel at all like a huge leap. The only leap, of course, was the incredible leap of faith that you have to take when you make something completely independently. You know, when you run out of printer ink, if you've had a rough day, it can send you sobbing. It can make you want to curl up in the fetal position when you run out of staples. But are there certain advantages to being a married couple making a film. Kim: Well... Particularly when you're both so invested, time-wise? Sheridan: There are. Of course, this sounds funny, but we've never fought as much as we did while we were making this film. At the same time, at the end of the day, I'd always say that I never minded losing an argument to Patty over this film because I totally trust her instincts. Kim: I've never heard this before. And it's easier when you let Patty win every argument. Sheridan: Pretty much. That's pretty much the way it works. I'm to blame for that. Not him. [Laughter... and fade.] back to articles >>> Index "We wanted to take people on a journey with the family." back to articles

Jonathan Marlow In addition to his persistence in acquiring obscure films for GreenCine, Marlow is a writer, filmmaker, curator and occasional critic. Not necessarily in that order. He is also a dedicated skeptic. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles