The Windmill Movie introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Alexander Olch.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Audio Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

April 29 2019, the Harvard Film Archive screened The Windmill Movie. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating is director Alexander Olch, photographer/producer Susan Meiselas and HFA director Haden Guest.

Haden Guest  0:19  

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest. I'm director of the Harvard Film Archive, and I want to thank you all for being here tonight as we welcome Alexander Olch to present and discuss his 2008 film The Windmill Movie, an exploration in tribute to the imagination of his former teacher, mentor, and friend Richard P. Rogers. The film offers a kind of refracted portrait of Rogers, composed of memories from former friends and colleagues and those closest to him, as well as evocations of the places and experiences most cherished by Rogers. At the center of the film, of course, is Mr. Olch’s attempt to decipher and read the intent and direction of Rogers’ unfinished film The Windmill Movie, a highly personal project by a filmmaker whose best-known films—and we saw some of them last night—are often piercingly self-critical and self-reflexive. What fascinates Olch about Rogers’ long-labored project is why exactly it was never finished and what inhibitions, fears, and other factors contributed to its poignant incompleteness. As you have no doubt read in Alexander Olch’s text—a wonderful text included in our calendar—the project came about, this film came about at the invitation of Susan Meiselas who, after Rogers’ untimely death in 2001, invited Alexander Olch to examine and try to make sense of the collection of footage, the archive of materials that sat in boxes, raw memories, fragments of the past, shards of deeply personal investments and emotions.

Susan Meiselas, the celebrated, indefatigable photographer was also the inspiration of the tribute that we're so proud to present here at the Harvard Film Archive to Richard P. Rogers. We've been presenting his films here throughout this month and this is the final program. Last night's screening included a really wonderful introduction by Susan Meiselas of Rogers’ autobiographical films to which the unfinished Windmill movie seems most closely related. Ms. Meiselas is here this semester as a Radcliffe–Film Studies Center fellow, with the focus of her fellowship upon the sizable archive of photographs that reveal an earlier, lesser known chapter of Rogers’ foreshortened career. There's a small but really fascinating exhibition that was lovingly assembled by Susan Meiselas together with her team of research assistants, and that's in the cases right outside the theatre that includes original archival photographs as well as other materials. So I encourage you to linger before those cases at the end of our program tonight.

I'm really excited that the Harvard Film Archive will become the home—like I said, it’s already happened, right?—to this trove of photographs, where they will sit alongside Richard Rogers’ motion picture materials, including the footage that we will see reanimated tonight, thanks to the devotion and skill and patience and guiding intelligence of Alexander Olch. I want to personally thank Mr. Olch for being here tonight, but also for donating to the Harvard Film Archive the thirty-five millimeter print that we're about to screen. Mr. Olch is one of the founders of a great cinema in New York City, the Metrograph, and with this gift, and with his wonderful and dynamic program there, he truly reveals himself to be a kindred spirit and a cinephile of the highest order. Mr. Olch will join myself and Susan Meiselas for conversation here about The Window Movie and with you immediately after the screening, and I do hope you will join us. I'd like to ask you to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic device that you have, please refrain from using them. And now please join me in welcoming Alexander Olch.

[APPLAUSE]

Alexander Olch  4:26  

Thank you. Actually, I realize now the last time I stood here was at the memorial for Richard Rogers. And so it's an odd way to come back and in some ways be talking about the same things and slightly different things. So here, I think in the making of the movie, first, I'd like to say I've known a lot of producers in my day, and producers often speak about how painful it is to make a movie. I think Susan Meiselas took that adventure of producing to a new level and so I would just like everyone to applaud before you see what happens in this movie, Susan's producing here. [APPLAUSE] And I would also like for us all to applaud the wonderful music that you're about to hear in this movie, and Robert Humphreville is here in the audience. Robert? Please, if we could all applaud Robert... [APPLAUSE] You may also often enjoy Robert’s accompaniment of silent films in this very room, and that's, in fact, how Robert and I first met. Robert scored a film that I made for VES 150, which is kind of a silent film. And I think it really worked because Robert’s a genius. So I'm not going to say very much because we will answer questions later. Thank you very much for being here. I hope you guys have been able to see a lot of Richard's work in the retrospective prior. And I think it's a wonderful way to culminate that retrospective with this attempt. So, enjoy. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest  6:10  

Well, I just want to start just once again by acknowledging Robert Humphreville for the music. I feel like its subtle elegance is so much part of this film and of its subject. And, you know, this film contains this wonderful meditation by Rogers on memory, and on human memory and how it's shaped. And I was just thinking... I found myself thinking about the ways in which cinematic memory is, you know, different, the ways in which, you know, so much of our memory is also things that we forget, and yet these images do not forget. And I know that that can also be a very difficult part of cinematic memory, so to speak. So I really want to acknowledge you know, the courage… that is so much part of your work as a photographer but I think also as a producer of this film, Susan. So I commend you for that. But Alex, I mean, I also wanted to ask you about the challenges and emotions of this project. This body of work, this body of footage was this, you know, difficult project, which is also about, again, the possibilities and dangers of autobiographical cinema. And I was wondering... you, of course, had this direct connection to Dick Rogers, and so in a sense, this film is also an extension of your own autobiography. We see this wonderful sequence at the end, where your relationship with Dick Rogers as a student and teacher is, you know, embodied in that sequence, and I was wondering if you could talk about, yes, what that experience was, what it gave you perhaps in the way of insight, hesitation, fear, discovery.

Alexander Olch  8:08  

Well, I think it started rather simply insofar as I had gotten an apartment down the block from Susan—this was after Richard had passed away—and slipped a note under your door, said that I was down the block if you ever needed me. I think it was about three days later I got a phone call saying actually, I’m cleaning out the loft, could you help? And so I came by. I should say, Richard and I had won a grant connected to this department—in fact, the George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship—and so we were set to go make a film in Spain that he was going to produce, I was going to direct. When he passed away, I had gotten out of my apartment in Cambridge, I was in New York, about to go to Spain, and then I really just never went to Spain, basically. It didn't feel right to go without him, and so I was in New York with the grant and no movie and so didn't really know what to do. And so this phone call was actually quite exciting, and I went to the loft, and there was, as you saw, all these boxes of film, and the Avid editing computer was broken. I managed to turn it on. All the hard drives were named after people from the Watergate scandal. So there was the Ehrlichman drive, the Haldeman drive. Managed to figure out how to boot up the computer and up came... it was just one of the landscapes. And I asked Susan, you know, “Do you know anything about this?” And she smiled and said, “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” And so the process started quite, I would say, outside of the material. So I lived down the block, it seemed like maybe we could cut something together for Richard's friends, and it was very much a project in the meantime, while I would figure out what my next film would be. And for me it took... ultimately it was a seven-year journey, and that journey was basically a process of me– well, I always lived down the block; actually halfway through, I moved to an apartment even closer. And so I kept getting kind of deeper and deeper into the material, into the story, to the point where I think it would be fair to say, I was, in some ways becoming Richard, in my own mind. I think that was the only way to figure out how to make this movie. And we come from different backgrounds to a certain degree. My family background is quite different though he grew up at 168 74th Street. I grew up at 174, East 74th Street. So there was a certain understanding that we shared that was part of our friendship. And so I think I could get inside his head to a certain degree, but I also needed a lot of help from Susan, which was itself an adventure, where, you know, I would find a box of film and I would say, “So could you tell me a little about Noni, who's Noni?” And so these were, you know, whether they were living or dead they were... and these were painful, potentially skeletons that were actually in closets, being pulled out of closets. And it was quite an adventure. But for me, personally, it was an adventure of really just getting closer and closer into Richard’s mind, Richard’s filmmaking. And the funny thing, even another example was, I always assumed... well, once I had the idea of Wally getting into the film that was already three or four years later, by the time I was almost throwing everything including the kitchen sink because what had happened is I had put so much time already that this now was my next film. And there were all these expectations for myself from my friends, family, but I wasn't, I still hadn't figured out how to do it. And so started with the idea of actors, started writing voiceover for Wally. And, you know, Wally’s a successful performer so his schedule was limited. So, standard, what one does is you sort of temp-out the voiceover. So I started performing the voiceover to make sure it works so I'd be ready for the day he comes in to perform. I played it for Susan and David, the other producer, and they smiled and said, “it's not Wally, it's you.” And I said, “You have no idea what you're talking about.” And I did the whole session with Wally. Wally did the whole performance then edited about, sort of two months later, I had to go back and say, “okay, maybe you're right.” And so I honestly hadn't even thought of my voice and yet, once you hear it, it started making more sense and yet I was even closer into the material.

Haden Guest  13:05  

Was there ever any desire or a temptation or need to put, insert more of yourself at all into the film? I mean...

Alexander Olch  13:16  

There were experiments and attempts. So we certainly shot a fair amount of footage, certainly whenever we shot with the actors, there was sometimes a camera on me. What became clear though, was we needed to find a place where it's not about me, but you know I'm there. Because if you take me away, it's somehow less emotional, less interesting, but if it starts just being about me, that's not what we're here to see. And so almost by luck when I started filming Richard's gravestone, there was bird shit on it and I didn't realize the camera was running and I started cleaning it, and going through all the footage that seemed like, that's about right. You don't see my face, you sort of feel a presence. It's hopefully a caring presence, it's trying to clean the gravesite. And so that seemed about the right tone and/or amount of me in there.

Haden Guest  14:15  

Susan, I wanted to ask you about this, about The Windmill Movie and this footage and this material; how close were you to this project as it was being... as Richard Rogers was struggling with it? And another question though was also... part of me started to wonder, did he really want to finish the film or was there a need to keep making the film and to keep having it as sort of open because it seems to be a dimension of self-therapy, exploration…?  Trying to, you know... that it feels like there's a need for it, and so...

Susan Meiselas 14:58  

Hmm, I’m not sure I can answer the second question actually. I mean, he was doing other films in and around this film, that's important to say. You know, if you really look, in fact we showed…

Haden Guest  15:09

Elephants? Of course it’s...

Susan Meiselas  15:11

No, Elephants is ‘73, this footage is much later, but you know Laurie’s here. He was doing A Midwife’s Tale, that was what, a year and a half? You know, he did the Manet film. So he's shooting in and around other films, trying to make this film and probably never gave himself the full time to only do that because he's also teaching. So I think all those are dimensions to the answer of the second question. How close was I? I mean, it's so interesting about memories, because what Alex is forgetting is that I had always heard about Alex, but I didn't meet you until the memorial, which you spoke of, which I had forgotten. You probably hadn't been here since Harvard did a two, three day film, you know, honoring of Dick and, you know, William Carlos Williams wasn't here, but William Kennedy came—Dick had made a film with him—and there were many other moments in this two, two and a half day celebration of his life and his filmmaking. And that's when Alex had the courage to make a joke really, at the memorial as I remembered it. He was the only one that said, so I moved to Mott Street and the guy goes and dies. It was just kind of so startling. And the note you left me, which is...

Alexander Olch  16:27  

I think, for the record, before I got up, I think someone, maybe it was you...

Susan Meiselas  16:30

No!

Alexander Olch  16:31

Someone, no, someone said, “Just be funny.” And I looked at them. And I said, “Really?” We're in the middle of a memorial and... but somehow it seemed like the right thing.

Susan Meiselas  16:40  

It was totally appropriate. So it's after that encounter that you leave a note, and what was beautiful about the note, he said, “I think the geraniums have been watered so maybe you're alive in there,” you know. And that was the offer to respond that, you know, I clearly felt overwhelmed because that room, Dick’s editing room, it's just, I mean, we hadn't yet explored the closet. The skeletons in the closet as it were, and I'm still exploring the skeleton because you notice the two big, you know, boxes of prints that ended up in a trunk, and then the trunk lived in my house until... actually three or four months ago. So... but I think being close... I think the other thing that was interesting about working, because Alex lived in that editing room for a period of time. I'm not quite sure when we moved you out of the editing room down to the production room. But I was going to sleep listening to Alex playing Dick's voice in the middle of the night because he was obsessing, as Dick would have. But I was hearing Dick all night. So finally I had to move you out of the loft into the studio where there was some kind of separation. Then you lived there for what seemed like an incredibly long time I mean, seven years, something like that, in and out of other things that were going on for you. And it was a long process. And I think the key thing is building trust, I mean progressively, trust in Alex's talent, which really came first from Dick and secondly, from Rob and from Ross, who said, “Yes,” you know, “this is the one person who could maybe do this.” That was very important, but it had to be earned and not continuously tested. And I think one of the first moments I remember where I felt like, he's got something, he gets something deep, is when you discovered the consciousness of Dick off camera, which he weaves through many sequences, particularly in the beginning, because Dick was wandering around trying to explain to people what this film was, and he kept saying, “The kind of film I'm trying to make is…” And so, you know, Alex understood there was this character. So there was what you see of Dick filming himself, but there was this other person who was hidden in the outtakes of sound that Dick might well have cut out of the movie, for all we know. We have no idea what movie Dick would have really made. He didn't leave a script, as he makes clear. And it's all intuitively driven. And I don't know, I don't know if he ran out of ideas, you can see when he gives the camera to David Grubin, or it gives it to his friend, Rick Rosenthal. He's trying to get them even... I mean, he gives the camera to other people to pull from him something that will help him see himself in the process of making the film. And those were just restarts to try and trigger a process. So I think it was a genuine struggle, that was ongoing really.

Haden Guest  19:51  

I guess I'm just thinking of, I mean, a number of filmmakers who I feel like, you know, that unfinished work is a kind of open sketchbook. It's a kind of... as I said, self-therapy, but it's a different kind of creative drive; it's not necessarily about completion. I think of people like Orson Welles for instance, and I guess I was wondering if you ever felt like that was a dimension perhaps of this project that is, yes, there was a genuine desire to close, to finish the film, but at the same time there was a contradictory force, you know, to sort of... keep the camera focused on these painful and contradictory relationships, for instance with his mother, and just like the desire, even at the end, you know, when she has cancer, it’s like he doesn't want to, but then he does want to film; he doesn't want to, he does want to, and you realize that having the camera present over all that time he's come to recognize is meaningful and ending it means then, right? not filming someone who he cares about. So I guess it's a... yeah it's just...

Alexander Olch  20:55  

Well there was, I mean, the photograph that Wally and Bob first encounter when they come in the house... I mean, when I first saw it, I mean, when you think about it, it's a very strange image. I mean there's a father giving sailing awards to one of the daughters in the Georgica Association. And there's a guy in a sailor's hat with, like a relatively large professional broadcast camera, like filming this. And you realize that that was just kind of the way it is, or was, at Georgica, that there's this guy, Richard Rogers, and he goes around filming everybody. And so I think there was, I mean, even more than... I think there was also just an element that that was just the way, that he was always there, documenting. And I'm sure when he was filming that particular event there was not, sort of, the object and completion of this film was clear in his mind. That was just, he's not going to attend that award ceremony without filming. And I think that much was clear in his mind, which, to me, at a dramatic level just makes him also just very intriguing as a character. But I think for him, I think there was really that it was a way of life, in some ways, it was just to document.

Haden Guest  22:17  

Now how much—as a student of Dick Rogers, I mean—how much of this was part of his pedagogy, this idea of the necessity, that sort of, you know, intimacy of the camera of one's own life experience being part of the creative process.

Alexander Olch  22:37  

Well, the funny thing is, when I was an undergraduate I, as some of my teachers will remember, I was very…

Haden Guest  22:46

In narrative... 

Alexander Olch  22:47 

I was very interested in narrative films. And certainly at the time, the department was very much about teaching documentary films and I made it a point at all times to attempt to look at fiction opportunities, and I was very interested in the difference between documentary and fiction. I was interested in studying dramatic writing and lighting... and with very funny conversations with my teachers. And one of the reasons I really hit it off with Richard is he understood that and certainly supported that my thesis film here in VES was a scripted documentary. And so we really bonded in the exploration of that territory, which was, you know, in many ways, one of the reasons it seemed comfortable and right to continue pursuing that in the context of Windmill.

Haden Guest  23:47  

I know that there must be some questions and comments from the audience, and so if you want to raise your hand we have microphones on either side. Are there any questions? Comments? Any brave souls? Yes, right here in the front, Brittany? Perfect, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Audience 1  24:16  

Hello. I suppose I just wanted to ask about the moment towards the end of the film when the screen turned green, and then the proposal sequence was in text. Just how did that decision come about? Because it was that moment when, uncontrollably, the tears fall. [LAUGHS]

Alexander Olch  24:37  

Well, I hate to say it, but whenever people say that, I feel good. So sorry that you're crying, but it shows– That was, I think, an excellent example of extremely long trials and error. I mean, it was very clear to me that, you know, ‘cause all I had was the footage of the wedding ceremony in the courthouse. There's no way that that's going to mean anything to you as a viewer if you don't have some concept of what led to that. And I mean, we looked at, you know, shooting in a hospital and having Wallace Shawn in the hospital we even, I dare say, shot scenes with Cynthia Nixon playing Susan Meiselas. When I say the kitchen sink, there was many sinks thrown at this, and it got to the point where I basically gave up, and I think, in fact, the idea came in a similar way from... similar to when I figured out my voiceover was... I said, “well, to hell with this, I don't know what I'm doing. Let me just keep cutting the rest of it. And when I show this to Susan and David, I'll just put some title cards up there. So they just know what was supposed to happen.” And then when I did that, I was like, Oh, wait, and then spent a lot of time getting the writing right. It's four cards, it needs to pay off, and then get the tears so it took a while to get that right, but I'm glad to see it was effective.

Haden Guest  26:11  

Other questions, comments, observations?  From John Gianvito there in the back.

John Gianvito  26:18  

I'm curious if at any point Dick had attempted editing passages of the film and whether any of that survives in what we see or whether that gave you a direction to go in the kind of mosaic that the film so beautifully... this kind of tapestry of the way images come in and out throughout the structure of the film.

Alexander Olch  26:44

The…?

John Gianvito  26:46 

Whether that was already hinted at in some of the ways that he was approaching the material.

Alexander Olch 26:49  

Sure. The Avid computer with Ehrlichman and Haldeman had folders, and the folders just said, “tennis,” “beach,” “girls on beach,” “mothers on beach.” And it was very much organized just around what was shot softball. So there were no synthesizing of those things, except for one short sequence that was about a minute-and-a-half long, which was him cutting to the voiceover where he says it's getting revenge on their mother-in-laws. So that's the only thing that Richard actually recorded as an attempt of voiceover. It wasn't a very polished edit in terms of what the images were. But what was intriguing to me is that it said to me—because for all I knew this was supposed to be a fly-on-the-wall, non-narrated documentary—so it said to me that he was thinking about voiceover and so that at least was a placeholder for me to feel that maybe we could think about voiceover in a totally different way one day. But that's as far as I found his work.

Haden Guest  28:11  

There's the gentleman to your side there...

Audience 2  28:15  

He wasn't going to relinquish it until you told him so, good man. I've known… Hi Susan. I knew Dick. Just briefly and incidentally, since I was twenty, and he was twenty-one. And I knew him mostly through the eyes of another friend who Susan knows. And it's so moving and rich, to see him through both of your eyes in this way, with the sympathy and the love you had for him and I just... y’know... Thank you.

Alexander Olch  28:51  

Thank you.

Audience 2  28:52  

No aesthetic points.

Haden Guest  28:53  

Okay. Any final questions or comments? I mean, this is a really moving film, and I know that it's one that you'll continue to think about long after tonight, and so, if not, maybe I'll take… Well, there you go, we will take the gentleman in the back and then…  I mean, sorry, in the center, I meant to say.

Audience 3  29:24  

I was just curious about the voiceover later in the film when Richard is sick and sort of, you know, talking about his understanding of his surroundings when his cognitive decline is very clear. Like I was curious if that was written, or if those were his words or how that scene came about and how you approach that scene because it's such a [INAUDIBLE].

Alexander Olch  29:53  

Well, you're touching on one of the interesting topics of the film, and there is, well, how would I say it? I would say, at the end of the movie there's a credit, I did take a credit for “written” as well as “directed.” And I think that's accurate. So there's a lot of original writing in the film, which is another dimension, I guess, to think about. And it became a whole thing, in fact, because when the movie came out theatrically in the New York Times review, they said, “Alexander just reads Richard’s diaries,” then there was a whole sort of correction on it, then the Times got very upset and had to issue a reaction and Film Forum defense– So it was a whole thing. And so that's always been, certainly in a maybe less emotional but more intellectual plane, a big place where this film has, you know, kind of sparked conversations, because, in many ways, that's my real way to pose some questions to you about the difference between documentary and fiction. I would say at a high level, my hope is, ultimately, you don't care. It's a story that is emotional. And just the idea that that works is very interesting to me, you can unpack it as sort of how it ultimately was put together. But the idea that it works and carries emotion first and foremost, that's pretty interesting to me.

Susan Meiselas 31:27  

Yeah, and I would just add that that was probably the most complex tension that we had in the process. Because I'm a documentarian, I literally when I interview don't even change the order of words. I might eliminate a sentence or two, but I'm always very truthful to the way in which somebody said something in a very specific– and my photographic work is very often complemented with oral histories and whatever... with testimonies. So what I felt and my memory was I really felt, I insisted really, it was my probably one card on the producer’s role was to say, “I just want the audience to know,” you know, so there were two ways for you to know: one was the written credit at the end, but the other is very slipped-in, and it was very important to me that there's a moment in the film, in fact it is when those photographs are being pulled out...

Haden Guest  32:21  

And you say, there's no more voiceover, right…

Susan Meiselas  32:24  

...and Alex acknowledges there’s no more voiceover. So... there are diaries that you draw from, and I think the other brilliant thing Alex did is he really did listen to many different people telling him different parts of the Dick they remembered. And you drew on some of that. So literally, there's language that I may have given him or Janet at the time or X, Y, or Z person might have contributed that you integrated into that. So it felt very… for most of us who knew Dick well, it felt like you know, it came from a real place. I think that's, that was very important to me that you acknowledge to the audience, and that it felt true. So even things that might seem painful, and there were many people for whom, who came to me not understanding how I could have let this film be made in the way that it was. It wasn't the documentary, but the truth of the relationships that anyone who knew Dick knew about. So I didn't feel like there was something being revealed, that there was a betrayal involved. And that was very important, you know. The issues of betrayal between us were an open marriage, of a certain kind of... set of relationships, but others who were in, you know, the circles, the close circles, let's say, would have known about one or another. So I felt it was honest, and as it should be.

Alexander Olch  33:50  

And also, I'd say as part of some of the kitchen sinks that were thrown at this, there were probably two years where I was going around shooting quite traditionally, sit-down interviews with every single person that knew Richard. And those were not entertaining. They were interesting. They started giving me information and understanding, you know, for me to be able to figure out what Richard's mom means when she says, “Let's talk about deceit, well, let's go back to England.” Well, okay, that takes probably two years to figure out that what she's talking about is that her husband came with his secretary, and then Richard knew and didn't tell his mom, and so that just took a lot of detective work in the context of traditional interviews and then in the desperate effort to figure out how to make a good movie, figured out, Well, okay, maybe let's just not use the actual footage from those interviews. But that information started giving me enough to work on...

Susan Meiselas  34:53  

Yeah and you also decided you weren't going to use those soundtracks either. That would have interrupted the fluidity that Alex, you know, evolved his own language to telling so he incorporated some of those insights. And I think the other the other story that's, you know, Cynthia Nixon ending up on the cutting floor, you can imagine how much fun it was to tell her that after she had donated her services for whatever number of days, and Wally had spent his last, you know, kind of trade getting her in there. And that was interesting, because you see, for me that felt totally wrong whereas Wally felt completely right. Because Dick wasn't there at a certain moment and Wally knew Dick, so it was an intimate relationship, it wasn't just hiring anyone as Dick had done. What's also interesting for those of you who saw Elephants, that scene was created for Elephants and was cut out of Elephants. So when Jan and Patti pretend to be Dick and whichever girl for the night, it's quite interesting that Dick couldn’t make it work in his film Elephants. So if you ever get a chance to see Elephants again, it's interesting he left that out. And when Cynthia was cut out it was more that Cynthia playing me with me present in the film felt strange because I was still around, you know, had I not been maybe that would have made sense in some other way.

Alexander Olch  36:19  

And also that it was very easy or tempting to try to make this whole, Well, we're gonna have actors in a fiction world and then there's gonna be the real world. That could have been conceptually, “Oh my god, this is gonna be amazing.” So we shot a lot of stuff. But it's not on the story. The story is about Richard and so it's not even to me it wasn't even so much that, you know, you're here or Susan or Cynthia, it was more just, It doesn't feel like that's what the story is about. If it's not about Richard trying to figure out how to make this movie, then it has to not be in the movie.

Haden Guest  37:01  

Yes.

Audience 4  37:04  

So I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed seeing it again, and how much the trust that you two built between each other. One really feels it. And I think you did, with the narration that you wrote in Dick's voice, you did channel Dick quite effectively. But I wanted to ask about that final scene where Dick asks—I don't know who it was, who was shooting, whether it was David or one of his other pals. That wave and whether he imagined when he said, “No, no, go in go in,” whether he imagined that would be the way he’d end the film or whether that was your choice. It was a brilliant choice. So thank you very much, both of you.

Alexander Olch  37:51  

It was a... well it seemed to just capture the spirit of what this was. I mean, I knew when I first saw that footage, that it's just too amazing. I mean, the way the camera just smashes. And so it was one of those things that sort of always is there on the bulletin board. And it's just like, okay, where is the scene going to go? I can't not put this in. And it was just one of those things where you realize, oh, what about the end? But it took probably six years to figure that out or be able to build enough of a story where that would feel emotional coming at the end.

Haden Guest  38:37  

Well, we have another emotional end right now, and I want to thank you both for your generosity being here and for making this wonderful film.

Alexander Olch  38:47  

Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE] 

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