Sasha Waters discusses the challenges of issue-oriented documentaries, how making RAZING APPALACHIA informed her views on the environment and why aspiring filmmakers should go into medicine.

Why did you make this film?

The community battle in Blair, West Virginia over the expansion of the Dal-Tex mine is a story that encapsulated a number of my interests as a media maker. It was – and is – an object lesson in the power of grassroots organizing. The people of West Virginia who speak out – from parking lots to public hearings – are having a say in the role and responsibility of government and corporations at every level of our lives, which I think is the right and duty of every American citizen.

The project also provided an opportunity to depict, with what I hope is a very human face, the cultural and environmental costs of our insane energy policies in this country, and as an environmentalist, this issue is of great importance to me.

Finally, I have long been interested in communities and populations who appear on the outskirts of conventional media representation, who are invisible due to their class or race or place, or represented as one-dimensional stereotypes. RAZING APPALACHIA is an act of resistance to that kind of marginalization.

What do you hope to achieve with this film?

There’s always a concern in issue-oriented documentary, that one is merely “preaching to the choir.” That said, I do believe (or hope desperately) that there is an important place and role for alternative, progressive media; if not to spark immediate, profound change, then to stimulate public dialogue about urgent cultural and social issues.

It may be a small gesture, but it is a significant gesture nonetheless to put a document out into the world that creates a space for a given perspective that might otherwise go unrecognized or unheard. Is there a viable, realistic, political end to issue-oriented documentary? Does the medium have the power to provoke anger, dissent, collective action? Can documentaries give a voice to the voice-less, in their use, if not, perhaps, in their form? I can’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but I do think they are questions worth asking.

If RAZING APPALACHIA can circulate within the community of people fighting mountaintop strip mining and provide that community with the rare privilege of seeing their ideas and information represented, and at the same time stir a more mainstream audience to question the fact that 52 percent of American energy is powered by coal and that the incredible environmental and social costs of this dependence are not being adequately addressed, I would consider that to be quite an achievement.

Did your beliefs about the issues you tackled in RAZING APPALACHIA change over time?

I would have to say that my core beliefs – that we are an energy-crazed society far too dependent on fossil fuels; that the radical expansion of mountaintop mining in the 1990s (thank you Clinton administration) occurred with scant regard for environmental impact; that when we talk about “economies of scale” we do not often enough account for long-term social and cultural costs; that the government has a duty first and foremost to its citizens rather than to its corporations – my core beliefs on all of these issues remain unchanged, and were in fact bolstered by the making of this documentary.

And yet, my understanding of the complexity of the issues did change, in ways I hope are reflected in the structure of the video. I grew to be sympathetic to the concerns of the miners over time – they earn good wages, are very concerned about their communities and about creating opportunities for their children. They are stuck, in essence, trying to make the best of it in a place where a single industry has dominated the economy and local politics for a hundred years.

I think that what lawyer Joe Lovett of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment points out near the very end of the film is particularly relevant and true, that this situation – these gargantuan, out-of-control mines with not enough environmental oversight - didn’t materialize overnight. As such, the coal companies and their workers have a huge investment in maintaining the status quo – a status quo I would still like to see radically transformed.

What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers?

Go to medical school. Study anesthesiology. Become really, really good friends with your fellow future anesthesiologists because they are among the highest earners in the medical profession. Drop out of medical school to write your script or develop your documentary. Write, write, write. Revise, revise, revise. Don’t forget to send holiday cards to your old anesthesiologist pals as they make their way up the career ladder while you toil in rotten oblivion. When you are sure that you have a brilliant project obviously worthy of financing — wait. Revise, revise, revise. When you have perfected your script (or proposal), your budget and your pitch so much that even people who don’t like or know you express interest, hit up the now-wealthy anesthesiologists for funding using one or more of the following methods: a) guilt; b) flattery; c) the promise of an executive producer credit and lots of cool parties; and d) blackmail.

If you could have one motto, what would it be?

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
-- W.B. Yeats

What are your three favorite films?

I am tempted here to say Bowling for Columbine, Bowling for Columbine, Bowling for Columbine, but to be true to the sprit of the question, I will say:

Bowling for Columbine, dir. Michael Moore, 2002

The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse), dir. Agnes Varda, 2001

Bob Roberts, dir. Tim Robbins, 1992