The IdeaLists

First time filmmaker and long time friend Alex Stapleton recently invited us to a screening of her soon-to-be released documentary on Roger Corman. Corman is a character that I’ve always found fascinating: only film geeks know his work, but without Corman, we wouldn’t have De Niro, Scorsese, Cameron, Nicholson, etc. And now he has inadvertently brought us one more new talent with Alex Stapleton. Besides being eager to hear how she made Jack Nicholson cry onscreen, I wanted to learn more about her experience as a first time documentary director. I thought you might as well…

What’s one thing you learned about the doc process that made you more appreciative of the genre?

That they take a very long time. It’s actually made me think a lot about when you have too much, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have about 300 hours of footage. Which is not always a good thing, (like) during the editorial process of the film, which is going on its second year. Filmmaking in any capacity is hard, but (docs) are a marathon vs. a sprint.

As a director, you’re competing in a space dominated by men. By highly competitive men. The detriments to being a woman in the industry are obvious but are there ways that it's helpful?

(pause with coy smile)

I see the upside. I’m a woman and also woman of color. My name is Alex Stapleton so people think I’m a white male until they meet me. If Alex Stapleton was a white man, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten this movie financed–people are intrigued. Now that’s just an entry card, then you really have to do the work. But it gets you in the door and I think that’s cool and that’s encouraging.   It’s only going to last for so long then half the industry is going to be female…

You think so? What’s going to change to make that happen?

You always hear about these male directors–the Spielbergs and the Sam Raimis–when they were really young, they would make their own films. I always thought I was a fraud because I never concocted a horror film to show my parents when I was 10 years old. But I wonder if that’s because I was a girl? I had an interest in filmmaking, but it was like, “Oh, you’ll be an actress.” And I knew I didn’t want to be an actress. But now if you see people like Kathryn Bigelow or Sofia Coppola, you can be young and inspired. It won’t be a big thing to accomplish ‘cause there’s more women doing it.

How is the business of docs in particular changing?

When I started the film I think the industry was in a really different place compared to now. Five years ago documentaries meant Ken Burns, PBS, something very academic, and now their getting more pop.   The world of independent (feature) film is just shrinking and shrinking. But if you keep your budget low, you can self finance a doc. You shoot as you go, you edit when you can, then you own your content. It would be much harder to set up a narrative feature for the regular person. You can't self finance a movie and have it compete with real movies.

Production standards are much more forgiving with docs.

It’s way easier to go, “I know this guy down the street that’s really insane and really cool and I have gear I can just go shoot him and I can make a story out of that content and people will watch it.” Versus all the musical chairs that you have to do to create a narrative feature. King of Kong for instance, those movies look so crap but it’s a great story. And he’s now making huge features!

So a lot of young directors are seeing this as a place to make their mark and the shot callers are seeing this as a talent pool worth dipping into?

Yeah, people don’t make music videos anymore and it’s really hard to get in the commercial business. Five years ago if you did a documentary, I don’t think anyone would take you seriously enough to then be hired to do a narrative film because they would be looked at as completely different things. But now executives that are controlling the purse strings, I think they finally understand that to make a good documentary, you have to be a really good storyteller.

What's one thing you learned from Corman you found to be invaluable?

When Roger started (in the 50s), everything was very corporate in the film industry. He was an outlier: the right person at the right place at the right time. And he had a DIY work ethic on top of that to just go out there and try it. There was an area to be exploited and he saw it.