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May 26, 2011
The Atlantic Yards Odyssey, On Film
The L Magazine
by Mark Asch
An interview with Battle for Brooklyn filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky.
How do you decide when you've "covered" an important aspect of your story? How do you prioritize which points, made by your subjects, need to be edited into the film, or countered, or followed-up, or emphasized by a title card or expert talking head?
In the end, we had to stick to the idea that the film was from the point of view of Dan's struggle to stop the project. We often use talking heads and cards during our process of creating the film. Then we find a way to show what the talking head or card was telling us and we take it out. It's a longer process, but it allows people watching the film to do the work of coming to an understanding themselves.
For example, we came to realize that the film was really telling the story of how government operates in tandem with business in Brooklyn these days (in the city? in the country?). It's from a very top-down approach, as if communities or schools are a business. The government makes sweeping decisions on behalf of many citizens and creates a "new" community from scratch. But it turns out the community was developing organically on its own, which is precisely why Forest City Ratner really wanted this deal to happen. Far from being a "blighted" neighborhood that was in dire need of government intervention, it was a thriving neighborhood, complete with three newly converted condo buildings, with condos fetching half a million dollars or more at the time.
Posted by eric at May 26, 2011 5:51 PM