The Cinema Lounge

Adam's Rib Examines the Senseless Tragedy on the Set of Rust

Mayor Pete: Q&A with Director Jesse Moss

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

A preview screening of the documentary film about Pete Buttigieg Mayor Pete was held at the Washington Jewish Community Center's Cafritz Auditorium on October 27, followed by discussion with the film's director, Jesse Moss. The moderator was Annise Parker, president of the LGBTQ Victory Fund. This Q&A is edited and condensed.

Moderator: The LGBTQ Victory Fund only works with LGBTQ candidates and we've been around for 30 years. When Pete was Mayor of South Bend and decided to come out, he contacted us and we helped him through that process. He was re-elected overwhelmingly and when he decided to run for president he contacted us. I said, "Really? You're a mayor of a middling town [South Bend] in Indiana and you have a funny name and no one knows who you are. We're going to work with you and let's see what happens." I knew Pete and respected him. Why did you think it was a good idea to follow him around with a camera? Why Pete, why then? What was the spark?
Jesse Moss: Actually I said no. My friends who produced the film, Jon Bardin and Dan Cogan, called me to ask if I was interested in following Pete's campaign. He hadn't announced officially and I knew about Pete vaguely, that he was a rising star in the party. I was already making a film about American politics, they were fake politicians [the documentary Boys State, 2020] but I don't think so. The week before, I'd been to see Cory Booker at a fund raiser. I thought he was impressive. My producers said watch this town hall, and call us back. They said Pete might be willing to give you access to make this film. I watched the town hall, it was really impressive; you see some of it in the film. If the access is really there, how could I pass this opportunity up? There's a one percent chance he gets anywhere. I know what it's like to run for governor of Boys State Texas but I don't know what it's like to run for president. I've only seen it from a distance. And I'm really curious to see it up close if he lets us in. I didn't believe the access would be there but I said let's start shooting and see what happens.

Moderator: When did you join the campaign?
Jesse Moss: The first shoot was in March 2019. He announced officially in April, so we were filming for a month before that.

Moderator: You were just off Boys State, you were still in final production?
Jesse Moss: Boys State hadn't come out but I'd been living with that film for a year in the editing room. I was looking for a way to engage with what was happening in the country with the election as a filmmaker. It was a way for me to get out into the world and experience it and make sense of it, the craziness of the campaign. I didn't go in as a Pete supporter. I was curious. I love making these immersive cinema verite films. When I was in my early 20s I worked in democratic politics and had left that life behind. In 1994 when I was working in Washington on Capitol Hill, I went to see The War Room, the great documentary about the Clinton campaign, which is about the consultants, not the candidate. That catapulted me into documentary. I left Washington, moved to New York. and started my career as a documentary filmmaker. The film was extraordinary--the access, the narrative. Of course he wins; it has a happy ending, which is nice. The great thing about a campaign is you have a finite ending. Someone wins or loses.I didn't know where this would go. Maybe this is a 10 or 20 year project, not something I was sure I wanted to sign up for. Pete is a difficult person to access. The campaign grew quickly. The stakes got higher, I was dealing with the challenge on how to know this person. He's running for president. He doesn't have time for me. That's hard.

Moderator: Chasten [Pete Buttigieg's partner] plays a role in the film, and apparently that reflects on how much of a role he plays in the campaign.
Jesse Moss: I met Chasten in one of the first shoots when I came down to DC with Pete, I think it was when he made that Victory Fund appearance. I was struggling with how I was going to connect with this story. Then I met Chasten, who is very different from Pete as you can see. This opened up the story to me emotionally. Chasten was more available to me because he wasn't running for president and he had a little more time to figure out who I was and what I was doing. And I saw the relationship for the first time as where part of the story could live. I thought it was a purely political story even though I knew Pete was a gay man in an unusual relationship to become a national political figure. Chasten unlocked a dimension of this story. It was really necessary for me to continue to be engaged. If I could see Pete from Chasten's eyes, this could be something wholly different from what I imagined.

Moderator: What are some of things you wanted to include in the film but couldn't?
Jesse Moss: I loved the time I could spend with them at home or in South Bend, and I hated the time on the campaign trail. I find it miserable, didn't want to be there and spent as little time as possible there. Being in South Bend, either as Pete being mayor or being home with them, I fought hard for that. The home time was downtime, the time protected from people like me. But Pete had agreed to make this film and part of the challenge was getting past the campaign staff. Pete and Chasten were very open to it but their [the staff's] job was to keep me away. I wasn't campaign staff and I wasn't traditional media following Pete, so I fell into a chasm: who are you? To answer your question: the scenes of their relationship; some of those moments have tension and some are tender relationship moments. There was a great scene when they were arguing about home renovations. Chasten had purchased a toilet that was too modern for Pete's taste. He was totally exhausted and showing a side of himself which you never see. And Pete's mom was there too. So I filmed a scene about a toilet. And we put it in the movie but it doesn't drive the plot. But what a scene of marriage. I loved it. But you have to kill your babies.

Moderator: You could have made a movie about a relationship, a marriage.
Jesse Moss: I kind of wish I had. I wish it was more about the relationship. It's such a challenging time. We are all so traumatized about the election, what we went through. I feel like it's a little bit of bait and switch maybe. It's really a love story in part, or it could be a more of a love story or a more complicated story of a relationship. I haven't seen that in political documentary. There's a film about Mitt Romney where you see his family life. That's where I connected. The political narrative is interesting, but the relationship is where I connected. We had to shoot all the debate scenes and there were a lot of them. I wanted to find those emotional feelings that are buried in him.that he needs to access to connect with people That exquisite dilemma that he faces, I found so compelling. Chasten frames that and that's why we used that reflexive opening. It frames the central question of the story which is Pete's struggle to be his authentic self and this process that demands he be so many things to so many people at once. So we had to shoot all of those debate scenes to find these interesting moments. But they never kicked us out. surprisingly.

Moderator: Pete is one of the best natural politicians. His instincts are so incredible. He truly listens to what people say. He has thought deeply about the issues and he can reflect back. Bill Clinton can do that but somehow you always know it's about Bill Clinton. Pete is listening, he is responding. Pete doesn't emote but he gets it.
Jesse Moss: In campaign staff meetings, and there wasn't much of those in the film, he often wouldn't say much. He would listen. I did share the film with him. With all my subjects of the films I've made, I shared the film They don't have any editorial rights but I like them to know what I made. We had this really interesting conversation about his leadership style. He listens a lot. People expect you to yell or scream and give marching orders. Sometimes he would barely talk which is a challenge for me as a documentary storyteller when you have an internalized person who you just can't read.
Moderator: So you used Chasten as a mirror.

Audience Question: Did you have full editorial authority?
Jesse Moss: I did.

Audience Question: Some of the footage could be in the middle or towards the end of the film but it was from different points of the campaign. How do you balance fidelity to when things happen vs when it would be most impactful for the viewer to see?
Jesse Moss: I try to be honest about those choices. We're not trying to present a tricky chronology. It's montage although I actually don't do a lot of montage work in documentary.

Audience Question: Will there be outtakes? They might be even better than the movie.
Jesse Moss: I don't know.

Audience Question: Is there a public Pete and a private Pete?
Jesse Moss: We shot about 90 days over the campaign and found that what you see is what you get, about Pete. He does change. It is a bit of a coming of age story. He was always a good debater, so I don't think he changed there but I think he grew into the role. It's hard to chart precisely but I feel he did grow into the role as a national figure and I think some of what you see in the film charts that and exactly how he was able to arrive at those debate moments where he did summon the emotional dimension of what he was communicating. None of those great debate moments was scripted. I think there was a lot of work he did on himself and hired people like Liz to help do that work. I don't know if it's right to call it therapy but it was work he did in this process. I do think it changed him.

Moderator: Do you think at some point he actually came to believe he could do it?
Jesse Moss: I think you have to believe you can do it. I hear those lines in the film: Chasten-"You'll be the next president", and I'm "Really?" You have to believe it. It's too hard to do it otherwise, I think.
Moderator: Politics at that level is an absolute meat grinder to go through. But he also knew going in that it was a long shot campaign. He was coming from a standing start and everyone else was running down the field. But then the momentum started coming, and the money starting coming in and the attention.

Audience Question: What was your sense of why he was willing to do the film?
Jesse Moss: The stakes were really low when he committed to do it. I think it's more why he continued to do it when he became a credible candidate. Was it because he honored the commitment, because he trusted me at that point? What politics demands in 2021 is different from what it demanded even four years ago. What did he want from me, what does he want from this? Those weren't explicit conversations but of course you think about them. That's true for any film you make with someone who opens their life up to you whether they are famous or not. What is it they want from you, what is it they want from the camera? What do they know about what the outcome will look like? Pete knew. I think he ws playing a very non-traditional media strategy He would do TMZ all the time. If you are an outside candidate you do non-traditional media. You figure out new ways to communicate with people. Chasten was all over Twitter in the beginning, in a very funny public profile but he had to rein that in. I was part of a strategy of "let's get our story out, people need to meet me and know me. I'm not sure we can trust Jesse but we'll take a leap here."

Audience Question: The movie wasn't going to come out until after the election. That wouldn't help in the election.
Moderator: This is also a man who has written his autobiography. Since his days of college, he has thought a lot about politics and policy and has been working on figuring out his way to impact that.
Jesse Moss: He'll probably write a memoir someday about the campaign journey. This is my version of his journey on the campaign. Probably in his imagining of the film, there is a lot more policy.

Mayor Pete will be available for streaming on Amazon November 12.

The 46th Toronto International Film Festival

By Ron Gordner, DC Film Society Member

The 46th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was held from September 9-18, 2021, showcasing a curated selection of over 100 instead of only 50 mostly virtual films last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year was a hybrid festival of limited onsite screenings and virtual screenings. A good percentage of the films were directed or co-directed by women, minorities or LGBTQ artists. TIFF2021 included some physically distanced onsite screenings at the Bell Lightbox theatres, some drive screenings around Toronto, and at the Roy Thomson Hall, Princess of Wales Theatre, Scotiabank Theatre, and Festival Village at Ontario Place for Cinesphere IMAX experience, and virtual red carpets, and industry and artist interactions. Virtual screenings were the mainstay for many international press and industry screenings, or patrons who were limited primarily to tickets for those who could screen the films in Canada. TIFF tried to be more inclusive with press and industry representatives of color, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities this year also.



Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director and Co-Head of the Toronto International Film Festival and Joanna Vicente as the new Executive Director and other Co-Head of TIFF were in charge again. Many of the films had TIFF usual world premieres and some films from earlier festivals such as Cannes but curated a number of films also. Some films also may have been presented at the Telluride Film Festival which also did not take place due to the pandemic and a few had had days earlier screenings at the Venice Film Festival. Rival film festivals coordinated as never before this year to curate their selections and determine how to screen them onsite, digitally, or in some workable combination. Telluride and Venice festivals this year were not hybrid but onsite with COVID safety precautions. I found the virtual tickets easily sold out but many tickets for onsite screenings were available for those in Toronto. Higher prices for premiere screenings of the higher profile films like Power of the Dog and Belfast, virtually or onsite also were in place and unlike other pre-COVID years ticket packages were more restricted by size of tickets allowed per patron.

TIFF Tribute Awards for 2021 included those honoring actors Jessica Chastain and Benedict Cumberbatch and Canadian directors Denis Villeneuve and Alanis Obomsawin (some of her earlier films were available). Lead sponsors for TIFF are Bell Media Studios, L’Oreal Paris, and VISA, the Government of Ontario, Telefilm Canada, and the City of Toronto.

TIFF has sections or categories of films but smaller than much earlier years when up to 350 films were on display. Sections this year were: Gala Presentations, Special Presentations, TIFF for free (a free additional screening of the Audience Award winner on the last Sunday), Discovery (first and second time filmmakers), TIFF DOCS (documentaries), Contemporary World Cinema, Canadian Programming, TIFF KIDS, Visions (filmmakers who challenge our notions of mainstream cinema), Primetime (TV movies), Wavelengths (avant garde cinema), and their famous Midnight Madness section (primarily horror and black comedy films screening at Midnight with usually an appreciative and rowdy crowd). The Wavelengths category described as: daring, visionary, and autonomous voices. Primetime included serial television storytelling that shows how recent tv films are blurring the line between big screen and small screen viewing experiences. One film Clifford the Big Red Dog was taken out of the list of films presented by its distributor.

TIFF has become a major market and sales stop for films to North America. There is a small market at the Venice Festival but it is really Toronto where they are primarily sold although this year sales were slow after the festival.

This list is culled from primarily films seen:


MUST SEE FILMS:

We Need to Hear From YOU

Calendar of Events

Previous Storyboards