The Making Of
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Producer, director and writer Jon Else talks about the creative motivation of unfinished business, oven-baking 30-year-old videotape and how “funny is important” when getting people to think seriously about nuclear war.
What led you to make WONDERS ARE MANY?
I actually saw the glow of an atomic explosion when I was about eight years old. We lived in Sacramento, about 250 miles north of the Nevada Test Site, and they always happened just before dawn. I remember my father taking me out in the backyard, looking over the fence and seeing the sky light up red. It really made an impression on my little mind. We carry these things around forever, and we spend our lives making movies about stuff that clutters up our childhood memories.
I did a film [The Day After Trinity] about J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1980, and I have worked on a fair number of other projects about nuclear weapons, as well as a fair amount of music production. There were some story threads, some unfinished business that never really got resolved in that earlier film, particularly the fierce resistance of some of the Manhattan Project scientists against use of the bomb on civilians at Hiroshima. I wanted to revisit those ideas.
The actual idea for making the film emerged fully formed (including the title) within three seconds of first hearing that John Adams was going to do an opera about Oppenheimer. I remember a sort of perverse pleasure at the prospect of filming two guys struggling with the same story I had struggled with years before.
I didn’t know John, but I got his phone number, called him up, he answered, we had coffee a couple days later and that’s how it started. No agents, no lawyers, no negotiations. When we first met, I confessed to him that I don’t really like modern opera and he said, “Neither do I.”
Also, over the years I’ve gotten more and more consumed with doing films about the unintended consequences of what seemed like good ideas at the time, so this fit right in.
What were some of the challenges you faced in making this film?
We had a hell of a time getting all three—or is it four—storylines going at once and braiding them together. The trick was to have the historical development of the bomb in 1945 progress in parallel with the making of the opera over the summer of 2005, while at the same time quietly reminding the audience that this is deadly serious business. We have, today, thousands of nuclear weapons ready to use. We were also trying to show the 80-year sweep of the nuclear enterprise from about 1920 to the present. On the one hand it was a rat’s nest that [editor] Debbie Hoffmann and [co-producer] Bonni Cohen and I had to untangle every week, but on the other hand whenever one of the storylines got boring we could cut 50 years ahead to the other storyline.
We also stumbled into the middle of a long-running labor dispute between the San Francisco Opera and some of the performers’ unions. As a consequence, we did not get the go ahead to shoot until half an hour before the first rehearsal and could not confirm, until a year and a half later, precisely what the music costs would be and whether or not we could release the film.
How did you gain the trust of the subjects in your film?
I did have a great time with John and with Peter [Sellars] and the cast. They were extraordinarily open about their process. It was a two-way street; they let me film the making of their opera and I gave them access to all the Oppenheimer research materials and interviews I had done over the past couple of decades.
Now trust is one thing, but actual access is quite another, particularly with singers. I have to give Peter Sellars and Tom Randle a lot of credit for being willing to talk freely about that horribly rough week when Thomas Glenn replaced Tom in the role of Robert Wilson. I think we all understood that making big art, like an opera, is horrifically difficult and can involve a lot of pain, so why pretend otherwise?
Freeman Dyson [the English physicist] had worked with me on The Day After Trinity; I could listen to him read the phone book and find it riveting.
How would you answer the question your film poses: how can art make history relevant to current affairs?
First of all, the art has to be really attractive, the history has to be a really engaging narrative and there has to be a connection that viewers can really feel. In this case, we’ve forgotten—if we ever knew—how extraordinarily powerful these weapons are. I mean you could blow a mile-wide hole in the middle of Manhattan with a Hiroshima-sized bomb, and that’s one of the tiny bombs in today’s world arsenal. Nobody wants to take their medicine, so with WONDERS ARE MANY we worked hard to make it entertaining and even funny. Funny is important if you are tricking people into thinking seriously about nuclear war.
How is Doctor Atomic relevant on the world stage in 2008?
During the time it took John and Peter to make their opera and us to make our film, the North Koreans built and tested a plutonium bomb. It’s a pretty good replica of the Trinity bomb, which sits at the heart of the opera and the film. And during that same period a fair amount of nuclear material went missing, mostly from countries of the former Soviet Union. Also, I felt it crucial that we make people put the 9/11 attacks into a nuclear context and understand just what would happen if that had been four nuclear weapons instead of four jet liners. Look, nuclear weapons are perpetually relevant; they are immortal, but everyone forgets. Every year or so we have to figure out a new way to remind people to take these things seriously.
What didn’t get included in your film that you would have liked to?
Originally Sellars and Adams planned Doctor Atomic to cover not only the making of the Trinity bomb in 1945, but also the explosion of the first H-Bomb in the South Pacific in 1952. I was eager to do the same with the film, and we made plans to film on Eniwetok, where a lot of those huge bombs were tested. But John and Peter learned pretty quickly that they could easily fill up an evening at the opera house with only one A-bomb, so the South Pacific part of the story fell away.
When we started filming, Peter and John genuinely did not know how the opera would end, so we started out building our film narrative around the suspense of how they would set off an atomic bomb on stage. But after a couple of months, Peter made the bold move of deciding not to have the explosion, so we had to start from scratch with figuring out how our structure would end.
I kept trying to get Peter or John to sing part of the opera, but they always managed to dodge that.
Tell us about a scene in the film that especially moved or resonated with you.
I love the scene where John and Peter listen to the sound effects in the opera house. We smother our films with words these days—narration, people yakking—and it’s so nice to make a scene that’s mostly non-verbal, with people sitting quietly. Watching the film, you have no idea how deafeningly loud that noise was and the heroic job that John Haptas did in recording John and Peter’s words in that environment.
Were there any technical challenges you faced while shooting?
There is a real format anarchy in this movie; the very first shooting was of the ruins out at the Nevada Test Site, which we did on 35mm with an Arri that DTC loaned us and short ends of film stock left over from television commercials. There’s some Super 16 and regular 16 out in the desert and at the opera house, and there’s even some mini-DV that Rob Harris and Jigar Mehta shot for me in New York City. But all the live action in rehearsals was done in HD 720 24p on Jon Shenk’s Varicam. Like everyone else, I’m now in the middle of trying to navigate the new P2 file-based work flow—in comparison the tape that we used to shoot seems so simple and reliable.
At the time we had Debbie Hoffmann working in her editing room in the Saul Zaentz building in Berkeley and a second edit room at Actual Films in San Francisco. Every day Jigar and Linda Davis figured some way that they could put the two edit rooms in synch; I’m not quite sure how, but it worked. The biggest headaches on this film weren’t the tech issues, they were the rights issues.
Peter Sellars doesn’t use a computer, no email, so communicating with him was quaint, all by telephone and through messages to his assistant. I think I even wrote him a couple of letters.
What has the audience response been so far? Have the people featured in the film seen it, and if so, what did they think?
Peter Sellars, John Adams and the folks at the opera all like it a lot, or at least they say they do. John asked that it be shown at the big party for his 60th birthday and the San Francisco Opera put on a special screening for all its people right after the Sundance premiere. Audiences at Sundance and the San Francisco Film Festival laughed at all the right places and nobody walked out. We got great reviews in Variety and in The New York Times, and that means a lot.
The independent film business is a difficult one. What keeps you motivated?
Working with all those people who are smarter than me and younger than me—how cool is that? And I love the physicality of it, the shooting, particularly the hand-held shooting, dollies, running after sunsets and dawns, just a lot of motion. When you get to be a grown-up, there aren’t many professions that let you combine all that running around with what amounts to high-level narrative calculus. Sure it’s difficult, but I’ve been really lucky to reach a point where I can work on stuff like this: big complicated movies about things that matter. Bonni Cohen and I are doing Guantanamo now, and that makes the atomic bomb seem easy. Like everyone else, I’ve had my share of depressing disasters: I’ve been fired as a director and as a DP, had films crash and burn, spent long periods not knowing where the next job was coming from. Now I have a day job teaching at [UC] Berkeley, which helps.
Why did you choose to present your film on public television?
I could be flip and say that I had no choice, which is true, because we got funding from ITVS, the most heroic institution in documentary today, and PBS. ITVS kept us alive in the early stages of this project when no one else would. But the fact is that public television is a national treasure. It’s free to everyone (unlike cable), it’s more or less commercial-free and so far it’s not driven by profit.
Is there anything else you’d like to share in this Q&A?
Part of our job is to protect the viewer from all of the technical hurdles we have to overcome. It’s supposed to look easy. I recorded the sound of the real Robert Wilson’s voice on a Nagra 1/4"; tape recorder in 1978. It was then used in The Day After Trinity, wedded to music and sound effects. So, to get a clean version of it for use in WONDERS ARE MANY, we had to go back to the original 1/4 inch tape, which had been sitting in my garage for nearly 30 years and had congealed into a nearly solid spool of plastic. We sent it to several restoration houses before Ann Kroeber was able to salvage it by baking it in an oven at 125 degrees for about three days.
The mushroom cloud is such a cliché that our original intent was to never use one in this film. But Peter Kuran helped me find some particularly sinister and lurid footage that hadn’t really been widely seen before and some that we got declassified for the first time. You think you’ve seen all this before, but most is new. In our world, awash in images of the 20th century, the mushroom cloud trumps everything else. We used nuclear testing from Alaska, the South Pacific and, of course, the Nevada Test Site.
I’ve never made a movie without Michael Chin, and this is no exception; Mike did about half of the interviews. Jon Shenk and Peter Thomas did the rest.
What didn’t you get done when you were making your film?
That’s a sensational question. I didn’t spend the time I would have liked with my family, Nina and Lincoln and Jorey and Nash. And the roof didn’t get fixed.
