“I like to describe ONE MAN DIES A MILLION TIMES as part documentary, part legend and part oral history. It’s the true story of one of the world’s most important seed banks and the heroism of the botanists who worked there throughout the Siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944.
But the whole film takes place in a disturbingly close near future. These characters aren’t musty, forgotten extras from antiquity – these are living, breathing contemporaries, enduring in a world that is both familiar and relevant. And what they are fighting for is even more critical now than it was 85 years ago.” Director Jessica Oreck on ONE MAN DIES A MILLION TIMES which screens at the 2019 edition of SxSW Film.
You are back at SxSW this year! Tell me about what you have had here in the past, and your favourite aspects of the city.
I came to SXSW in 2009 with my very first film BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO. I was so nervous; I actually don’t remember anything else about the festival!
So how did you get into this movie-making business? Talk to me a bit about how you got your start and what you have worked on in the past.
I grew up without TV, so when I saw my first nature program in school at age 14, David Attenborough’s Private Life of Plants, I felt like my life’s path had been illuminated. I studied filmmaking, biology, and ecology in university and started working as a docent and live animal keeper at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
My work at the museum shifted my interest from capturing “wild” nature to studying how we portray that type of rarified nature in education and media. Thus began my fascination with ethnobiology – the way human cultures interact with the natural world.
Working at the museum I was also able to witness adults becoming kids again; I was able watch them rediscover a sense of wonder. That became a big part of what I want to do in the world.
And so far I have pretty much stuck to that. My three previous features, all documentaries, have focused on ethnobiology. My first film, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, was about the Japanese love of insects; Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys was a year in the life of a family of reindeer herders, and The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga was about folklore and fairy tales in Eastern Europe, and how those stories affect our ideas of the wilderness.
I also make a lot of short educational, animated content for the web (mostly TED), and though it’s not usually about ethnobiology, it is still about creating wonder for the mostly invisible things we interact with everyday.
How did this project come together for you? Give me a rundown from the preparation, to shooting, to post-production to now!
When I was making THE VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA in St. Petersburg in 2010, we passed through St. Issac’s Square. Our line producer casually mentioned, “Those are the world’s first seed banks.”’ Needless to say, I was intrigued.
Coming from ethnobiology-based documentary, this sort of hybrid fiction/non-fiction in the same theme seemed like a natural progression for me and a sort of extension of my documentary work.
The more research I did, the more the story haunted me. I spent so much time, years even, researching, reading, watching, that the Siege became its own character. More than that, it felt like the first time that history came alive for me.
It became a major driver for me to try to communicate that level of reality; both the intense anguish and the astonishing conviction of these heroes who were just normal people.
What keeps you going while making a movie? What drives you?
Making the movie is the easy part! It’s *this* part I struggle with. Every time I get to this stage of filmmaking; the promotion and self-promotion, the waiting on festival decisions, the deals, or lack thereof, I promise myself I’ll never make another film. But in the end, another idea will catch me and I will be driven to make something else.
What was your biggest challenge with this project, and the moment that was the most rewarding to you?
Getting this film funded was difficult. Trying to convince foundations that they should send money to Russia right as Trump was taking office proved, well, challenging.
I was very lucky to have a couple of generous donors and investors that swooped in to help out. And grants of course. I’m endlessly indebted to TFI/Sloan for the immense amount of support they have provided, financially and otherwise!
The most rewarding moment? Not a moment but the entire production of the film. I had an incredible crew and amazing cast. It was a dream team. There were difficulties, of course, but overall, making this movie was pure delight. Though delight is a strange word to use in the context of the actual story.
I’m about to get technical, but I would love to know about the the visual design of the movie; what camera did you film with, your relationship to the director of photography and how the movie was photographed.
Sean Price Williams has worked with me on almost all of my films. And he and I had been talking about this story since that first trip to Russia together. But in 2014, I was driving across Kansas when the entire film came to me all at once. I watched the whole thing from start to finish. I could hear the music, see the characters, the costumes, the light. Obviously, those ideas shifted as I wrote the script and started actually making the film, but the visuals and sounds still align very closely with that original vision. Sean’s prismatic view of the world is very much a part of my process. And I knew from the first few minutes of that drive through Kansas that if he couldn’t make this film with me, it wasn’t going to be made.
What is the ONE THING you would say to someone who is wanting to get into the filmmaking business?
My advice for any director is just to be 100% sure that this is what you want more than anything else. If the idea of making a film isn’t keeping you up at night, it’s probably not the right one.
And final question: what is the greatest movie you have ever seen?
BEAU-TRAVAIL by Claire Denis.
This is one of the many film titles playing at SxSW 2019. For more information on this and any other title playing in the festival, point your browser to http://www.sxsw.com/film!