For Martin Scorsese, growing up in Little Italy, seeing On the Waterfront and East of Eden as a young man was a life-changing experience. Scorsese appears on and off camera throughout A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan’s life and through his own as well, and through his growing realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone “who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.” The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you’re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies.

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Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan’s life, and Scorsese’s commentary on and offscreen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation – the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience.

A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art.

What first got you interested in doing a film on I.M. Pei?

When Eugene Shirley, the producer of I. M. Pei: Building China Modern, contacted me back in 2003 to ask I would be interested in directing a film about Pei, I was very excited about the idea. I had seen Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre and other buildings done by him – CAA in LA, the East Wing of the National Museum of Art – and was eager to find out more about the man behind these great works.  Eugene had been directing as well as producing up until that time, but found that producing itself was more than full time, especially in China.  I was very happy to be asked to take over that role.

While making the film, did you learn anything that surprised you about Pei?

I was amazed at the sheer number and variety of buildings Pei had designed and built.  And I found the story of his exile from China very compelling.  Pei left China in 1935 at age 17 to study engineering, intending to return home at the end of his studies. For decades his return was interrupted by war and revolution, keeping him in the United States for his whole adult life. Then at the age of 85, he was asked to design an art museum for his hometown city of Suzhou.  The story of the “Return of the Native” was very compelling for me.

Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or the interviewees?

Suzhou Museum, Night View, I.M. Pei Architect with Pei Partnership Architects. Photo by: Kerun Ip

Filming in China presented huge challenges for the production.  We were constantly shadowed by friendly but strict representatives of the Communist Party, including our translators, so we were not able to hear any negative points of view about the museum, which after all was extremely controversial in that it required destroying neighborhoods in an area protected by UNESCO, which had designated that part of Old Suzou as a World Heritage Site.  When interviewing officials, we were required to adhere to a very strict list of questions. Filming Pei at the Louvre was a joy, however – he seemed very free and happy to be there, and that shoot provided an opening to the film that enabled audiences to enter into the story of tradition vs. modernism, our focus in China.

Please describe your approach to the film.

During interviews, I like to prepare a list of questions, but then to be spontaneous and open to following interesting threads that I may not have foreseen.  I also like to get as much verité footage of everything that is happening around the subject of the film, and then to discover the story in the footage during editing.

What were some of the obstacles in achieving your vision of the film?

This was one of the rare films that I directed but did not produce, and Eugene’s and my visions were not always the same.  I was more interested in the biographical and personal aspects of Pei’s life and how these influenced his design of the museum; while Eugene’s focus was very much on the theme of the film – tradition vs modernism – as reflected in the in the creation of the Suzhou museum.  In the end, we created a film that we are both very proud of.

Please describe your background credits, how maybe they led to this film.

Eugene contacted me in 2003 after seeing my recently completed documentary, Robert Capa: In Love and War, which I had written, produced and directed for American Masters.  Apparently, he liked what he saw there, and I had also been recommended to him by people at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and elsewhere.  The Capa film, as well as my previous film on Edward S. Curtis, which was also broadcast on American Masters, gave him confidence that I could direct a strong film about an artist and his work.

Airs Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 8pm EST on PBS

Adapted from his son Christopher’s 2003 play and based on the remarkable letters Dalton Trumbo wrote during the devastation wrought by the ‘Red Scare’ in mid-20th century. With credits for Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo to his name – and the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun – the young Trumbo was one of the highest paid Hollywood writers. Refusing to testify before HUAC in ‘47, he was part of the group known as the Hollywood Ten – convicted for contempt, he spent 11 months in federal prison and lost all right to ply his craft. Writing 30 scripts under pseudonyms – he won an Oscar in ’56 for The Brave One as Robert Rich – he was not recognized publicly again until 1960, when Otto Preminger credited him on Exodus and Kirk Douglas did so on Spartacus – actions considered to mark the end of the blacklist. As late as 1993, Trumbo was awarded a posthumous Acadamy Award for Roman Holiday (’53.)

Sen. Joseph McCarthy

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing in Eastern Europe and China. Capitalizing on those concerns, a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred “card-carrying” communists had infiltrated the United States government. Though eventually his accusations were proven to be untrue, and he was censured by the Senate for unbecoming conduct, his zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics.

While the House Un-American Activities Committee had been formed in 1938 as an anti-Communist organ, McCarthy’s accusations heightened the political tensions of the times. Known as McCarthyism, the paranoid hunt for infiltrators was notoriously difficult on writers and entertainers, many of whom were labeled communist sympathizers and were unable to continue working. Some had their passports taken away, while others were jailed for refusing to give the names of other communists. The trials, which were well publicized, could often destroy a career with a single unsubstantiated accusation. Among those well-known artists accused of communist sympathies or called before the committee were Dashiell Hammett, Waldo Salt, Lillian Hellman, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin and Group Theatre members Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and Stella Adler. In all, three hundred and twenty artists were blacklisted, and for many of them this meant the end of exceptional and promising careers.

During this time there were few in the press willing to stand up against McCarthy and the anti-Communist machine. Among those few were comedian Mort Sahl, and journalist Edward R. Murrow, whose strong criticisms of McCarthy are often cited as playing an important role in his eventual removal from power. By 1954, the fervor had died down and many actors and writers were able to return to work. Though relatively short, these proceedings remain one of the most shameful moments in modern U.S. history.