So I thought, Wow, okay, so a smart writer like Harrison thinks that the idea of doing a documentary on Gary makes sense. So that gave me some confidence to do more work on the project. But I was slow to pull it together, more time passed, and I remember very distinctly a weekend barbecue with Jim Harrison, and he pulled me aside and said, “Hey, what happened to that Gary Snyder project?” And I said, “Well, I’d still like to do it.” And he said, “Why don’t you stop liking to do it, and actually do it.”
That was the final kick, or spur, to put together a crew, raise money, and talk to Gary more seriously; Jim was an enormous help there.
A documentary is a piece of journalism; you don’t go into it with your story already written. You go into it to find out what the story might be. I knew Gary would make a good interview. I also knew he could be quite terse in the way that he spoke. I had no doubt that once we got him going we would find more than enough material; one thing would lead to another. My background convinced me, if you have open access to a subject, you ought to be able to find the story.
But Gary said he didn’t want to be interviewed at his house in the foothills; it’s been done before. He said, “I’m tired of it, and I don’t want to be a Beat poet cliché.” Things were stalling, when Jim had an idea. My cousin had done a lot of work to create an agricultural easement at the Piedras Blancas ranch down on the California coast. The net effect was that this land, this very beautiful section of grass and range country at San Simeon, would stay undeveloped in perpetuity.
It also meant that it was going to remain a desolate cattle ranch and was not generally open to the public. So Gary, prompted by Jim, said, “I tell you what: I’ll give you the time, and I’ll sit and be interviewed, and I’ll spend several days with you, but let’s shoot it down at the ranch, because I’d like to walk it, and I’ve never seen it, and I like the Central Coast.”
We still had to assemble a crew, to find the right people who had a feeling for the subject. I knew the director should be John J. Healey, who had already made a documentary in Europe about the poet Federico García Lorca.
Casting is time well spent on any project. You have a feeling in advance, because you love the script, or because you believe in the subject, of how the movie will go . . . but something else happens when you start to shoot. The best people bring their A-game. They add to the show. Fresh things begin to happen. The movie starts to unfold itself.
As a producer, you learn the most important thing you then can do is feed everybody, see that they are comfortable, and worry about the cars. As Napoleon Bonaparte observed: “An army marches on its stomach.” Think about food, fuel, and transportation.
Finally, when the filming ends, the editor looks at everything you shot and tells you here is the movie you made. It changes again. Music and sound, which seemed so peripheral, begin to shape and cue the action. Your child has begun to walk on her own legs.
So we had a great locale and a commitment to participate. When Jim and Gary got together and started talking, all we really had to do was make good sound and frame the shots. The story of Gary’s life and how he came to think the way he does emerged from their conversations.
Like any good profile, like something you might read in The New Yorker, you discover so much more when you hear the actual words of the subject, and see the animation in their eyes, than you would ever have learned by merely researching that same subject.
Introduction
JOHN J. HEALEY
I worked in production in the feature film business as an assistant director for fifteen years before I decided to make documentaries. Taking advantage of the fact that I had a long history with Spain, good relations with the Lorca family, and an important date was approaching, I made my first film in 1998 about the life and work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It was aired in Europe in June of that year, marking the hundredth anniversary of his birth. One of the people who contributed to the financing of that film was Will Hearst.
Will became friends with Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison when he was still in the magazine and newspaper business, and the idea to do a film on Gary came originally from Jim, I believe. The concept ebbed and flowed over a number of years, and when it reached critical mass Will called and asked me if I’d like to direct it.
I knew Jim Harrison’s work because I have been a serious reader of fiction since my teens and Jim’s oeuvre held a solid place on my list of favorite contemporary literature. But I knew very little about Gary Snyder. There is some irony in the fact that both of my documentary films to date have had poets as their subject. I myself have never been a great reader of verse.
Will flew Jim Harrison and me to San Francisco in November 2008 so that we could meet and scout locations. Jim had already been working on a list of questions for Gary, and Will and I added some of our own. Jim is an easy man to love. He is very wise and very funny, at ease with his id, and a gentleman. After a long dinner at the Zuni Café, his worries about me, I think, subsided. The opportunity to shoot the film on the Hearst Ranch resonated with me on different levels. I have been a guest there during various phases of my life since I was fourteen, and it is one of my favorite places on this Earth. On that November trip Cynthia Lund and I flew down on a little plane, landing on the ranch’s airstrip where I had first learned to drive a stick shift. We were met by Will in his Jeep and by master ranch hand Bill Flemion in his massive pickup. We drove all over the place that day, including to some extraordinary locations that were quite far away and required significant vehicular stamina to reach. In my head I already knew that, barring some compelling reason, we would probably not be able to film at these more distant locations once we had our “cast” and crew assembled. Weather would also be a factor. Driving on the ranch in November was still relatively easy, although Will’s Jeep did work itself deep into a mud hole at one point. But generally it rains along the central California coast during December, January, and February, and the shoot was scheduled for the last week of February, so it behooved us to find places we liked that would also allow us to stay relatively close to structures where we could shoot indoors if forced to.
It was during this trip to California that we interviewed potential crew members. We went with Claudia Katayanagi for sound because she has the right level of technical obsession and because she had worked on something with Gary Snyder once before. We chose Robin Lee to edit the film because, in addition to his calm demeanor and enthusiasm for the latest digital editing techniques, to our astonishment he was extremely familiar with Gary’s work. We chose Alison Kelly to shoot the film because after interviewing some very competent Bay Area cinematographers with deep documentary experience, she was a breath of fresh air, a woman more at home with independent feature films, who has a great technical competence, a wonderful sense of humor, and a serious commitment to quality. Our mutual respect for Terrence Malick also helped to seal the deal. Before flying back to Spain I went to City Lights with Jim and bought everything Gary had ever published, and before the month had ended I had read it all.
Cut to February 2009: I returned to San Francisco a few weeks before the shoot to review and choose the archival material we would be using. On the way there I stopped in New York to visit the Allen Ginsberg Foundation, located in Ginsberg’s last residence in the East Village, where a wonderful collection of photographs is kept.
The weather was not auspicious. It was raining often during the second half of February, and during my drive from San Francisco down to the ranch on the twenty-third it rained on and off. By the time I arrived at San Simeon all the crew were there, most of them up from Los Angeles in two white vans packed to the gills with equipment. After loading everything into a staging room at the bunkhouse, we had a catered dinner together and watched the Academy Awards ceremony on a big flat-screen TV. This was Will’s idea, and it was a wonderful way for everyone to break the ice and to start feeling comfortable with each other. We spent the following morning doing a tech scout of the locations, shooting tests, and preparing the room at the bunkhouse