“Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life, is about the prolific artist Geoff McFetridge. You may not know his name, but his art is everywhere. It’s on your Apple watch, splashed on the sides of buildings, exhibited in countless galleries around the world, in title designs for films by Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, and featured in collabs with Vans, Hermes, Nike, and so many others. One of the most prolific artists of his time, Geoff has undoubtedly influenced the way the world looks. Geoff is the antithesis of the archetypal artist fueled by drugs, alcohol, and chaos, what sets him apart is his quest for balance as a father, ultramarathoner, and designer. Because I am a fellow artist, I was able to have unprecedented access into Geoff’s world, to create an intimate portrait of a man whose work is guided by intention and authenticity. Drawing a Life reveals the details of McFetridge’s life and work while delving further into the universal questions of what makes a fulfilling life and how to live with intention in the limited time we all have.” Filmmaker Dan Covert on GEOFF MCFETRIDGE: DRAWING A LIFE at SxSW Film & TV 2023.
You are back at SxSW this year! Tell me about what you have had here in the past.
In 2014 I came to SXSW with Font Men, a documentary short I co-directed with Andre Andreev about renowned typographers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. This is my first feature film and I’m excited to come back to SXSW to share it with audiences, and I will be all three screenings of the movie.
How did this whole project come together?
I knew Geoff a little from a short documentary I directed about him years ago, and in 2019 I was contracted to make another short about him for a big award he was winning. Geoff has been an inspiration to me for twenty-plus years, and I wanted to share the magic of his work with a wider audience.I thought we could dream a little bigger than another short, so I floated the idea of making a feature documentary. Geoff never said yes or no, I just kept asking to come back and he kept letting me. Geoff has a public image of this cool, calm, and positive family guy that in the beginning I assumed must somehow be contrived andmasking a chaotic darkness I would soon uncover. In the beginning, I was searching for the stereotype of the tortured artist that’s been instilled in me by American culture: a drunken, chauvinistic, angry person. Instead, I was pulled in by how genuine Geoff was and the clarity he had around the kind of life he was searching for and aiming to live. It was his authenticity that became the shining center of the film.
While working on a project, what is your creative process? Do you have any particular ritual or tradition when working on something?
I usually edit the majority of my work because in documentaries editing is where things live or die. The physical act of being at the computer with my hand on the mouse is the easiest way to control the edit process, which for me is super abstract and intuitive. I started to edit this film by myself, but realized bringing in another editor would push the film to a place that I couldn’t go on my own since I was so close to the content. I brought on Erik Auli, an amazing editor who I’d worked with on commercial projects. I pitched a process where we’d co-edit the film, inspired by something I’d read about the band The Postal Service, who would collaborate by sending audio files back and forth in the mail rather than working together in the same room. So that’s how we edited for the first few years, sending Adobe Premiere files back and forth—each spending time with it on our own. We were building upon, remixing, and scrapping each other’s work every step of the way. When the movie began to take shape and the file got too unwieldy to pass back and forth we started epic zoom edit sessions. A lot of these were second shift sessions after dinner from at eight at night till like one in the morning, which allowed for a big block of uninterrupted time.
If you had one favourite moment out of this entire project, the “Yes, this is IT” moment, what would that be?
There were so many ups and downs along the way. But the two biggest highs or, “Yes, this is IT” moments, on the journey of making this film were when Spike Jonze came on as Executive Producer and when I found out we got into SXSW. I am not a super emotional person, but hearing one of the greatest filmmakers in the world and such a major festival believed in our project brought on a few tears.
I love to get technical, so I would love to know about the visual design of the movie from the cameras you used and the formats and your relation to the cinematographer.
Claudio Rietti and Danny Vecchione were the cinematographers on this film. I am blessed to have these talented artists in my life who were willing to bring their skills to the film. I met both of them while working as a commercial director and we’ve come up together. Claudio Rietti, and I have been collaborating together for a decade, and he was instrumental in establishing the look. We created a combined aesthetic of deliberate lock-offs and interview frames inspired by the geometry and compositions in Geoff’s paintings. We contrasted this language with slightly more traditional, yet equally composed, hand-held shots. Claudio can make beautiful images with limited resources, yet do the same with huge crews—it’s rare to have someone so versatile. He also pays very close attention to what’s happening when he’s shooting and intuits where the action is going to go next. This is an extremely hard skill to master, and is invaluable in documentary filmmaking. Danny shot some of the bigger interviews and traveled around the world with me documenting Geoff’s work. He can really lock into making artful images out of ordinary b-roll moments, and is as obsessive as I am with this kind of thing. We shot the majority of the film on an Alexa Mini using the Angenieux EZ-1 30 to 90mm S35 Spherical Zoom, creating a 4k UHD image that we cropped to 2.39:1.
What are you looking forward to the most about showing your project at SxSW 2023?
I am excited for people to learn more about Geoff’s prolific career and amazing work, and for audiences to be inspired by Geoff so they might take a step back and think about how they use their own time in pursuit of what’s important or has value in their lives.
Where is this going next? More festivals or a theatrical or streaming release?
After its world premiere in competition at SXSW, the film will continue its festival run. We are working with the amazing sales team at Visit Films to find a partner to distribute the film to wider audiences around the world.
How do you feel about the current moviegoing climate? Are you wishing more people to see movies in theatres, or is it okay to opt for a streaming release where more people could potentially see a movie?
I am feeling extremely excited about the filmmaking climate right now. There are so many amazing movies being made, on both the fiction and documentary side. I am fortunate to be alive at this moment in time to tell stories.
What is the one thing that you would say to someone who is looking to get into movies, even now in such a changing world?
My advice to someone looking to get into movies is to start making things small or big, rather than waiting around for someone’s approval or validation. Because if you keep making things, eventually they will find an audience. My career has been a very slow climb. I made my first short in 2006, and have never had a giant breakthrough moment. Instead there have been a lot of small successes that keep building upon each other. Along the way, I’ve learned so much about the craft of filmmaking by creating countless short films and commercials.
And final question: what is the greatest movie you have ever seen at a film festival and why?
The best movie I’ve seen at a film festival was The Birth of Sake at Raindance Film Festival. It’s a quiet and cinematic vérité film that shows the process of making saké by hand at a small brewery in Japan. There isn’t a lot of crazy drama or stakes, instead it focuses on a meditative and poetic world I’d never seen before, and shows what the workers chose to sacrifice in order to honor the tradition of their craft.
This film and many others like it will be showing at South By Southwest taking place March 10-19. For more information point your browser to www.sxsw.com!