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“The public seems more inclined to spend twenty dollars on a movie they can own on DVD than spending twenty dollars to see a movie (ten dollars for the movie plus ten dollars for extra fees like parking and popcorn) as a ‘one time experience’.” — Jon Moritsugu
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| Search the BRAINTRUSTdv essays, interviews, and roundtables by keyword, subject, author, or title. |
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 Interviews
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| The vision for the BRAINTRUSTdv interviews is outlined in this brief prefatory note from the interviews editor. |
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| "I think every character who's thrust into a main role in a [documentary] invents an onscreen persona. They try very hard to be 'good,' to give the filmmaker what they think the filmmaker wants. They look for cues that would help them satisfy an abstract notion of an audience. They also realize that they need to be themselves, too, and they struggle against any artifice that they themselves create." |
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| "My interest is the activist and not the issue. I don't even think it necessary to present both sides of the issue to the viewer. There is so much information in the world, people can take bits of information from numerous sources and form an opinion that way. I just want you to experience what it is like to be with someone who really believes they can change the world and have the passion to do it." |
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| "I decided to embrace the budgetary limitations of the project and create a flick using 'trailing-edge technology' and all the detritus from our quickly accelerating technological culture." |
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| "Our grand ideals have become dangerously immersed in the terrain of 'prevention'...The preventative war is correct (and is thus no longer War) and positive discrimination is correct (and is thus no longer Discrimination)." |
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| "Perfection makes me uncomfortable, and imperfection scares the hell out of me...[T]here is too much emphasis on technical quality these days. My picture looks how I want it to look." |
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| "As someone who spent thirteen years under a totalitarian regime, at some point in my life I stopped believing in the message of a mass-media monopoly whose information (propaganda) was at odds with the reality of my everyday life." |
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| The founder and members of this youth-oriented video production program discuss independent video vis-à-vis major film schools, spoken word, hip-hop, and the mainstream media's ubiquitous depictions of drugs and violence in the inner city. |
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| "I have no patience for the fetishization of movie theaters. With the exception of comedies, that whole cliché about the communal aspect of the theater experience strikes me as wishful thinking. The movie theater experience is usually an experience of collective alienation rather than an experience of community." |
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| "I think there's something very messed up about a society in which only black people are considered qualified to talk about black people...I think it's a narrow thing to think that people should only write about themselves, and if that was the case everybody would have exactly one movie." |
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| "Warsaw is an attempt at creating a picture about the problems of people in Poland in the moment of transformation from socialism to capitalism...The biggest mistake of socialism was to imprint within us the inability to take responsibility for our own lives." |
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| "Although editing mixes documentary and fiction all the time, rarely are single shots themselves a mixture...As consumers, though, we want films to be like other products. We want to know whether we're buying a scarf, a sweater, a romantic comedy, or a documentary." |
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| "I composed the film with a video camera using a 2.5" LCD screen. The images that became the film were conceived and decided upon using this tiny screen. So I suppose that any screen 2.5"or larger is a viable way to experience the film." |
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| "I was the first and only filmmaker prosecuted in New York City for selling his films. That probably has more to do with the technology and my willingness to fight for my First Amendment rights, however." |
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"What I believe in is: I have the film and you call me and say you want to see it. 'Can I download it?' And I say, 'Yeah, go ahead, send me five dollars.' And you download it and I give you the license to see it. That's it. That's the way it should be."
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"I didn't want people hanging around, and I didn't want to do it in the traditional way because I was sick and tired of working with crews of 150 to 200 people. I wanted to make it more personal, and I felt that the DV medium was best suited for that."
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| "I realized that there might be an opportunity to have a slight advantage over the thousands of other no-budget DV filmmakers by having a unique camera with a higher quality image. And I set out to see if I could achieve that." |
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| "I vote for more urban venues and less investment in home media entertainment systems. If advanced DV technology ends up isolating us more, let's call it a failure and start over...[I]f any new language can't help us communicate better amongst ourselves, it's not a language, it's a virus." |
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| "I think one of the best creative limitations about working in film is that you have to record sound separately. And you have to make a specific effort to sync it up later, every piece of it...In video,...the sound is automatically fused with the picture and we don't think twice about how it got like that." |
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