“When you stop shooting, that’s when the best thing is going to happen. You have to persevere”: an interview with Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman is often referred to as America’s great “chronicler of institutions”, although he feels the term is an inadequate shorthand for articulating his cinematic project. From the outset, his documentaries may appear to be dry public information films with colossal runtimes, but they also operate as poetic narrative works concerned with the minutiae of human experience. ‘Anthropological studies’ would also be too restrictive and academic a term for what Wiseman does, as there’s something non-didactic about the way he uses subjects or venues as a conduit through which to explore broader and more profound questions about communication, business, semantics, conflict, art and the fragile physiology of the human body.  

His debut feature from 1967, Titicut Follies, told of the horrors to be found behind the gates of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts. Since then he has made close to 40 documentary features, covering all aspects of American and European society, from horse-racing (Racetrack, 1985), vivisection (Primate, 1975) and commerce (The Store, 1983) to poverty (Welfare, 1975), education (High School, 1968) and even erotic cabaret (Crazy Horse, 2011).  

David Jenkins: Why did you settle on the National Gallery as the subject for this film?  

Frederick Wiseman: The first reason is that it’s one of the great museums of the world. Second is that they gave me permission. I wanted to do a museum for a long time. Thirty years ago I tried for the Metropolitan in New York and they wanted to get paid. And I said I didn’t do that.  

Why would they want to get paid?  

I have no idea. I guess they thought that in order for me to get access, I should have to pay for it. So I put aside the idea of doing a museum. Then the National Gallery came up by chance because I was skiing and there were some friends of mine in the same place. They had a visitor who worked for the National and she’d seen some of my films. She was the head of the education department, and she asked me if I’d like to make a film about the museum. So I said sure. 

She arranged for me to meet Nick Penny [the director of the gallery], so I talked to him. He watched a couple of my movies, I showed a couple to the staff. It was actually quite simple. He took the view, which I very much respect him for, that it’s a public museum, transparent, and what goes on there shouldn’t be kept a secret. The only thing I couldn’t shoot was personnel meetings, which was quite understandable. Other than that, I had free run of the place. I got a little badge.  

Did you consider documenting any other galleries?  

No. I got permission, it’s a great gallery. And from my point of view, the fact that it only had paintings – 2,400 of the best in the world – and there was no sculpture or other objects like that, was greatly appealing. Places like the Met, the Louvre or the Prado, they’re just too big. With the National, I can at least persuade myself into thinking that I could get my arms around it, if you’ll excuse the metaphor. I felt I could get a sense of the place.  

Are you able to survey a venue or a subject and guess how long the film you’re about to make is going to be?   

I don’t know. I think if I did the Louvre, I’m not sure I could cover it in one movie. It would be a mistake because it’d be too superficial. It’s almost a guarantee of superficiality. It would take two, if not three movies to cover. And even then, I don’t really know the Louvre, other than as a visitor.  

What about ten one-hour films?   

That doesn’t interest me at all. The problem with that is that I like to construct what I think to be a dramatic narrative. When you do ten films, you have to create ten dramatic narratives. Otherwise, it becomes a travelogue. I’ve never tried it so I don’t know, but my fear of doing it is that with each film you’d have to re-establish where you were and who the principal players are. If I was going to do it in the style in which I’ve done all the other films, I’d have to locate a separate dramatic narrative for each of the films. It might be possible, but my feeling is that it’s hard enough to find it for one film.  

Is the idea of “principal players” something that occurs to you during shooting?   

No. When I’m shooting, I’m merely trying to collect as many – for lack of a better term – ‘good’ or interesting sequences as I can. I cover as much as I can, all the various activities. There’s no time to think of themes or points of view. I collect a lot of material and think about all that later. I don’t like to start a film with a preconceived notion of what it’s going to be about, as it’s then that you miss out on things. If I’m only shooting to support a predetermined thesis, I’m going to miss things. I like the final film to be a response to the shooting of the film. National Gallery represents what I learned about the National Gallery after spending 12 weeks there.  

Do you know something will make it to the final film when you’re shooting it?   

Yeah, sure. I mean the woman at the start of the film who is talking about the religious triptych – it’s terrific. But sometimes you say that to yourself and, in the end, you don’t use it. In the cold light of dawn in the editing room, sometimes the affection, the feeling you had for the sequence is no longer there. It has to endure. I knew I was going to use that sequence, but it’s not always the case. 

This woman is talking specifically about how still images can come to life, which is a very cinematic concept. And, in a way, National Gallery feels like your most self-reflexive film – like you’re entering a dialogue with yourself.

Yes, I think so. Not everybody sees that. This curator was great, though. She knew how to talk to people. She had a lot of knowledge and knew how to present it in a charming, scholarly but non-pedantic way. To stumble across her… like so much in my films, it’s blind chance. It’s chance, and then you have to recognise what it is you’ve got.  

Has that recognition process become easier over the years?   

I hope so. But it’s something you have to have from the beginning. You have to shoot a lot in order to have choice. In the case of National Gallery, it was 170 hours. You go with your instinct. And you have to shoot in one go – you can’t stop and start. Inevitably, there’s only one rule in this kind of movie: when you stop shooting, that’s when the best thing is going to happen. Sometimes you’ll be shooting something very boring, but you have to continue and persevere, because it’s completely unpredictable the way things are going to go. It’s happened to me before and I’ve learned from experience. 
 
Did you and your DP John Davey go on a recce?   

I went on a one-day recce there. Then we did some tests to figure out what camera to use, then we started shooting. As far as I’m concerned, the shooting is the recce. That way nothing is repeated. All I want to get is a sense of geography and of the daily and weekly routine. If I had gone on that tour and hadn’t been shooting, I would’ve been very unhappy. And I’m sure she does tours a lot, but it’s never the same. Yes, it may have been better, but…  

Do you think the presence of a camera may have affected her ‘performance’?   

I don’t think that’s the case. It’s the old issue as to whether a camera alters behaviour. In my experience, it doesn’t. An extreme example to make the case here: I did a movie called Law and Order [1969], and there’s a sequence in there where the police wanted to make an arrest for prostitution in Kansas City, Missouri. They had to have a price and an act to make it stick. It meant the undercover policemen had to strip down and just about get into bed with the woman before they could arrest her. When he leads her down some steps in the seedy hotel they were in, she knocked him down and fled. He calls the vice-squad car which we were in. The hotel bellboy says she’s in the basement. Cops find her there hiding under some old furniture.  

They drag her out and one of them starts to strangle her. It’s dark down there, no sunlight in the room, and it’s one of the few times ever that we used an artificial light. Right in front of the camera, he strangles her for 20, 30 seconds. Then he lets her go. She walks over to another cop and says – referring to the strangler – “He was trying to strangle me.” And this other cop replies, “No, you were just imagining it.” Then the cop says to her, “Look, just don’t fuck with our boys. If you get caught, just come down to the station, we’ll fingerprint you, take your picture, you pay your $50 fine, you’ll be back on the street in half an hour.” He clearly thought that was an appropriate way to treat a prostitute who had knocked a policeman down.  

And that’s an extreme example of what goes on all the time. People act in ways they think are appropriate to a specific situation they’re in. You could argue that, on another day, he would kill her. But I don’t think that’s the case. He’s just introducing her to the cop-prostitute system. Most of us don’t realise that other people may not make the same judgements about behaviour as we do. I didn’t think it was appropriate.  

There’s a sequence at the end of Domestic Violence [2001] where the police are called to a disturbance between a man and woman having an argument. You do feel like the man is altering his behaviour for the camera, because he thinks you’d naturally be on his side. But if anything it makes him come across worse.   

There’s no way of resolving this question definitively. If people don’t want their picture taken, they put their hand up to the lens or they walk away. Any of us are good enough actors to suddenly become different. 

Another example is in the movie I made with La Comédie-Française [La Comédie Française ou l’amour joué, 1996]. I was afraid of dealing with actors, and this is a situation where the actors run the place. There are a lot of meetings where the actors aren’t on stage, but they’re dealing with health insurance or whatever. They weren’t performing for me, they were just people at a meeting. I’m not sure what the ultimate explanation is. 

Also, anyone who’s in a profession – mine, yours, lawyer, doctor, car salesman – where you meet a lot of people must have a great bullshit meter. You have a sense when someone you’re interviewing is conning you. I have a sense when we’re shooting if someone is acting for the camera. If I realise, we stop. If I don’t, we just don’t use it. Which isn’t to say I’m always right. I just think it’s such a minuscule problem that’s it’s basically irrelevant.

Going back to early films like Titicut Follies, Law and Order and Hospital [1970], did you ever find yourself being labelled a journalist?   

I found myself being pegged as someone who made exposé movies. I think I’m not. We make a movie in a place like Bridgewater where we made Titicut Follies; if you didn’t show how horrible it was then you weren’t doing your job. The point is always to make as good a movie as you can, and also to have the movie reflect the complexity of the place. The Follies is the most obviously exposé-like of my films, because Bridgewater wasn’t a very nice place. But if you visited any of the other institutions for the criminally insane in 1966, Bridgewater looked like a three-star hotel – in comparison with, say, the prison for the criminally insane in Mississippi at the time. Which is not in any way to excuse Bridgewater. 

On the other hand, I hope the film suggests the complexity of the job of the guards. They were crude, poorly educated, badly paid and they agreed to be at the place eight hours a day. They were dealing with people who had committed some of the most horrific crimes imaginable. I’m talking about the exposé issue more than the journalist issue here, but they are in part the same. It’s as important to show people doing good things as it is to show them doing horrible things.  

With that in mind, Hospital is a movie that feels like the opposite of Titicut Follies.   

When I shot that movie, they had 500,000 emergency ward and clinic cases a year. It was the only city hospital serving the area between 42nd Street and 125th Street in New York. That’s an enormous area with a very diverse population. The ambulances just kept pulling in, and those doctors worked their asses off. Similarly in Near Death [1989], I had great respect for the nurses in that movie. They cared. I described the strangling scene earlier in Law and Order, but there are other scenes in the movie where the police are being kind and helpful. When you ride around in police cars for six weeks, you see what people do to each other. It doesn’t condone police violence when it exists, but it puts it into a perspective of human violence, of which police violence is a part, but certainly not the only example.  

You’ve often said you see your films as possessing a literary or novelistic dimension to them. For something like National Gallery, do you see them as being inspired by visual art?   

I’ll give you a general answer first: the issue of comparative forms interests me a lot. What I mean by that is, how you deal with the same question in a novel or a movie or a painting, etc… The general issues are the same: how you deal with the passage of time, characterisation, metaphor, abstraction. One of the subjects of National Gallery, for me, is the relationship between painting and film. Not only painting and film, but between painting and poetry, dance, literature. The different ways you can tell a story and the different forms that story can take is one of the subjects of the film.  

When you talk about the inspiration of novels, what specifically are you referring to?

I’ve been helped most in the issues I have to deal with in trying to make a movie by seeing how writers have dealt with similar issues in another form. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Flaubert’s letters to George Sand are among the best things I’ve ever read about film editing. He’s discussing his writing technique, and there’s so much overlap with what I do when I’m editing the rushes. It’s nice reading someone who’s very intelligent and who also thought about these issues. It’s just, for lack of a better word, nourishing.  

How much does the real chronology of shooting transfer into a finished film?  

Only within a sequence, not between sequences. I don’t ever change chronology within a sequence, even though a sequence may start 30 minutes in, and then cut to something 35 minutes in. But I never start a sequence with something 30 minutes in, then cut to something one minute in.  

Why?   

Usually it doesn’t work. It’s already distorted in that I’m making a selection. The meetings with the executive committee in Near Death were typically an hour-and-a-half long, but I’d only shot ten or 11 minutes. It’s edited to make you think you’re watching a continuous, unbroken dialogue. But that’s a fictional aspect of the films. I like to use the word ‘fair’. Obviously, it’s my definition of the term, but I try not to twist the meaning to suit my own purposes. I edit a sequence so it’s a fair representation of my personal understanding of what went on. And I know that process is completely subjective.  

That description sounds quite journalistic.  

In journalism, you’re not necessarily trying to construct a dramatic narrative. You may or may not, depending on what the assignment is. I am always trying to construct a dramatic narrative.  

There’s a heartbreaking, very poetic scene in Public Housing [1997] where you observe an old lady slicing cabbage in her kitchen. How do you stumble across stuff like that?

Pure luck. I was following around a plumber, and he just happened to go into her apartment. And there she was, cutting up cabbage. The plumber went into the bathroom for a while, and I just thought this looked spectacular. I just shot it. We probably should have asked, but I think in that case we didn’t. I told her afterwards, though. That [kind of luck] happens a lot, though. 

For me, one of the funniest and saddest sequences in any film is in Welfare. A couple come in and they want welfare. He’s a former welfare worker and she’s got health problems. And they refer to each other as husband and wife, then later he says he’s not married. It’s obvious they’re lying. Finding those guys was just chance. I started to follow them purely because the woman was kinda funny looking. I didn’t say anything to them until after this sequence. They didn’t ask anything, they didn’t look at the camera. At the end, when they walked out of frame, I explained it to them and got their permission. It’s absolutely amazing to me that you can do it. Whether it’s [the result of] some combination of indifference and narcissism. I don’t know if there’s a general explanation, but time and again, it’s the experience I’ve had when it comes to filming people.  

Why did you call the film Welfare and not, say, Welfare Office?  

I like to think there’s a nuance there. I also like to pick a title that has some resonance. It’s a suggestion of what I try to do in the film. When a film works – and not just mine – it has to work in both the literal and metaphorical way. Somehow, in the relationship between these two ideals, the real film can exist. The title is the first indication of that. National Gallery is another example. Why didn’t I call it ‘Gallery’? Well, the film specifically asks, what is a ‘national’ gallery? It’s about the public sphere.  

Do you come up with titles before you start shooting?   

Sometimes before, most often afterwards. Usually between the end of the shooting and the beginning of the editing.  

You’ve said you came up with the title At Berkeley [2013] quite early in the process.   

I remember thinking about calling it ‘University’ or ‘Berkeley’, but I wanted to add the ‘At’ in order to avoid the suggestion that it was going to be everything about Berkeley. It’s impossible, even in a four-hour film. And so, that was my way of saying, “These are some things that happened, but not everything.”  

Your profile of Madison Square Garden, The Garden [2005], was put on ice because of objections from its owners. Do you think it will ever emerge from its current legal limbo?   

I think so, yes. It’s getting very close. I’ve solved my problems with Madison Square Garden, so now it’s just a question of getting permission from some of the performers who are in the film. In short, The Garden is no longer an issue. I hope it’ll be seen in 2015.  

Are you currently working on anything?   

Yes, on a ballet. It’s based on Titicut Follies. I’m going to be working with a choreographer called James Sewell who has his own company. I have no interest in literally translating sequences you see in the movie, but in a ballet you can go way beyond into the world of fantasy, and these are people, one assumes, who would have some of the weirdest fantasies imaginable. You can enter their lives through dance. Also, I want to see if some of the gestures of the mentally ill can be transformed into ballet movements. Ballet is thought of as beautiful, and the movements of mentally ill people can be beautiful and grotesque at the same time.  

In a sense, you already have dance sequences in Titicut Follies. The sequence of the nude man pacing and shouting in his cell, for one.   

Exactly. That’s the first sequence we worked on, because it’s already a dance. 

There’s a ballet sequence at the end of National Gallery which feels like something that is occurring specifically for the gaze of the camera and, by extension, yourself. Or that you have created a composition. Why did you choose not to show anyone else in that scene?  

Well there was no one else there. That’s not true: the choreographer was there in the corner. That took place because Wayne McGregor had commissioned a ballet based on the paintings of Titian. He wanted the dancers to rehearse in front of the paintings. The reason I didn’t show him was because I thought the dance was so lovely.

It’s quite radical that you refuse to inform the viewer, via a cutaway or something, that the dance isn’t happening purely for your pleasure.   

I do try to foreshadow that sequence, because you see McGregor about 20 minutes earlier, talking with one of the assistant curators about a dance floor and rope. So I tried to plant the little seed there. That was my way of explaining what it was so I didn’t have to interrupt the dance.  

Why place the ballet at the end of the film?   

There’s a variety of reasons. First of all I thought it was a beautiful sequence. It highlights one of the principal themes of the film, which is comparative forms. So it’s meant to suggest that ballet is a form that can be compared to great paintings. The true reason is, I thought it was a dramatic way to end things.  

Finally, I think your films offer a great modern history of the typeface.   

You’re one of the few people who’s ever recognised that. I work very hard trying to find each one. 

My favourite is the one used in your 1976 film Meat.   

Well yes, I looked for something which would suggest a branding iron for that one. I actually love just spending time looking through typeface catalogues. I’ve never had any custom-made for the films. They’ve all existed. Now you can just scan the internet, but I have these enormous books with all different kinds of type.