Being Human: An Interview with Steve Sanguedolce

By Andrew Lennox

Steve Sanguedolce has been making films for over twenty years, films that wrestle with what it means to be human, with all its complexity and pain. He is generally considered part of the “Escarpment School,” a group of filmmakers that includes Phil Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom, Richard Kerr, Gary Popovich and Louise Lebeau. Aside from having all studied at Sheridan College in the late-1970s/early-1980s, what this group shares is a belief in the validity and importance of personal filmmaking, a form of filmmaking that naturally leads to commonly explored themes of memory, home movies, documentary and history.

Sanguedolce is at heart a storyteller, and this drive towards story has led him away from formalist or abstract filmmaking to a form of experimental narrative which blends elements of both documentary and fiction. Formal experimentation such as colouring and split-toning is always tied to the story, to trying to find a way to express its emotional heart and a particular way of seeing the world. Whether exploring his own history or other people’s experiences, the thread that links his work is an abiding interest in our shared humanity and the common struggle to survive.

Andrew Lennox interviewed Steve recently as part of his research on the Escarpment School filmmakers. - Larissa Fan

Andrew Lennox: Let’s talk about some of your earlier films first. Sweetblood deals with your identity within a community, and your family life. There are so many layers for the audience to work through: text, visuals, music, voiceover--all this stuff at once, all these elements that are on top of one another. I’m curious as to why you wanted to make it so difficult.

Steve Sanguedolce: I was very conscious of trying to create something that was multi-layered. So that in order for you to get it--if I can use that term, I’m not sure I agree with it--but in order for you to get the most out of it, you’d have to watch it several times. Having said that, I do think the film stands up on one viewing. You make choices, like you do in life. I was trying to build layers and force the audience to make choices as to what they would read, hear or watch. Most films don’t allow you to do that. You and I can go through the same experience or view the same film and we will both have seen something entirely different. I think Sweetblood is similar to that…

I also wanted to structure it like a dream, and dreams come to me in fragments, disjunctive. So it’s really about trying to put this puzzle together. I do think there’s a main kind of trajectory through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Ultimately, it’s about the circularity of it, the overwhelming-ness, I think, of being different from a culture in which you grew up in.

AL: What you’re saying about making choices in the film reminds me of Truffaut--he objected to traditional linear narrative film because you become a kind of slave to the narrative. And you don’t get to make those choices.

SS: Truffaut also said that you just keep making the same film over and over again. I believe that. When I look at my films, even though stylistically they’ve changed, they’re really about similar stuff--they’re personal, diaristic works. They’re films about self and life. The only question in making the films becomes how to cloak them--some may be cloaked in fictional garb, and others may be more documentary-based, but they’re really films that come from self and personal experience. The shape or colours of the films have changed, but ultimately I would agree that I’ve tended to make the same film over and over again.

AL: Can you tell me about the title for Sweetblood? It reminds me of Rick Hancox’s Waterworx, was that an influence?

SS: My last name is Sanguedolce, which is Italian for “Sweetblood,” so that was a simple one… Because the film was about being Italian in an English culture, I thought that was appropriate, to give myself the English name.

AL: I’d like to ask you a few questions about Smack. There are two things that I see going on in the content: one is intravenous drug use, or drug use in general, but I think a larger issue is friendship itself. What do you think it is about ultimately--is it about friendship over a period of time, or is it a statement about drugs?

SS: Well, I think the drug use might be a common denominator in most North American kids’ lives. Not I.V. drug use, but recreational drug use and alcohol--we all have similar access to that kind of thing, and I’m sure everybody has horror stories… So, that is just a starting point, that’s where I understand some of my past stories or history. But ultimately I think the film is about survival and trying to make it through, and it’s about the bond between three brothers. I come from a family with two other boys, so it was loosely based on my experience. I think you could look at most people and find some kind of tough haul, so I think it’s about the will to survive and how relationships help build human beings… and it’s about the inter-dynamic between the three characters--how they’re so closely connected, even though they’re very different. Maybe drugs are the plot, but the story is about the love and trust between brothers, or the mistrust in some instances.

AL: Can you talk about the mix of documentary and fiction in the film? You have a voice-over which is like the documentary “voice of God,” which the audience might automatically accept as true, but there are also fictional elements in the film. Do you think it’s ethical to be lying, in a way, to the audience?

SS: Well, I don’t think there’s really any truth in documentary any more than there is in fiction. We assume that dramas are fiction and documentaries are truth--sometimes I think it’s closer to the other way around. So the notion of “lying” doesn’t exist for me. I think that, yes, a question of ethics does exist, and ultimately it’s about how you feel and how you’re representing the people that have entrusted you with their stories. I don’t feel that I have any problem with that. Everybody who’s in the film has seen it and feels that their lives have been somewhat enriched by it, especially the central character--he feels that through this whole life of I.V. drug addiction and misery, he has offered something back to the world that might help somebody.

AL: Can you talk about the process of writing the script?

SS: The process of coming to the stories was really simple. I’ve always interviewed people and had people tell me their stories, with no ultimate goal or understanding of where they might end up… It’s almost like a pseudo-confessional. I invite people into the studio and they tell me their life’s stories. They’ll tell me near-death experiences, relationships, problems--really intimate parts of themselves that in many cases I hadn’t known before, and I’d known these people twenty years in some instances. I compiled these stories, eliminating all names, and looked for a commonality. After I’d interviewed a lot of people, including one of my brothers, I noticed that this could really be a story about my family. So I asked them to tell the same stories, but assume the names and roles of the characters in the film. And so it’s the same stories, there’s just a little bit of acting involved… The only fictional part of Smack is that some of the stories told in the first person were really stories that didn’t happen to them but happened to their friends.

AL: But that’s what perturbs me. I watch Smack and I think I get a picture of who Steve Sanguedolce is, or who he was and where he’s come from, but then I’m forced to question: Is this who Steve is, is he telling the truth?

SS: …Well, I think we always take dramatic license and liberties, regardless of whether we’re doing documentary or dramatic work, and I think that’s part of why I like this hybrid. Because sometimes I don’t know what my real story is. My memory of myself as a four-year-old, hanging on the fridge--is that what I look like? That’s what the picture tells me, but are pictures always telling the truth? I don’t think so. It’s how memory creates your new history, that your memory is now being fed by videos you watch of yourself, or photos you’ve seen… I think there are always elements of fiction in our history, in our notions of self. I’m not sure that there’s a singular, unified understanding of self…

There are always elements in a film that are more about you than about what you’re trying to present. There’s a fluid kind of line between the imagined and what actually occurred, or between fiction and documentary. I’m more interested in that, than I am in trying to delineate it. I am more interested in bringing those two elements together.

AL: It seems like you are a conflicted self, you don’t want to say that something is good or bad, it’s pieces of everything. It’s that jumbled mess, and trying to organize and clarify it.

SS: Yeah, exactly. Life is way more complex than most of the two-dimensional characters that we see in film. It’s not one thing or the other, that’s too simple. It’s a little bit of both. For example, I both love and hate making films. I hate film because it is so painful and difficult, it’s tough… but it’s a challenge and it’s that challenge that drives me. I feel a compulsion or desire to continue to make films because it helps me to figure out things… it’s the process that brings something else, although I don’t always like the process.

I don’t really know what I’m doing when I’m making the films, I’m figuring them out until they’re done. Somebody might look at a film and think it is a final statement, but I don’t think it is. This is a piece in time, an assembly of these particular experiences, presented in this light. I’m always conflicted and struggling with that: What kind of work am I making, and why am I making it? One thing I did learn is that I want to make films that I enjoy making. They’re not always fun, because I get stuck in each and every one of them for six months or so, and that’s pretty painful… but I do have a need to try to figure stuff out with film.

AL: Let’s talk about Mexico, which you made with Mike Hoolboom. While in Smack there is fictionalization of the characters, in Mexico there’s a fictionalization of the imagery. A lot of the time the audience thinks they are in Mexico, but in fact they’re in Toronto.

SS: I think that in the larger scheme of things, any time you point the camera, you really are included in that image. So if we take pictures and think we’re capturing another culture, in a sense we’re really only reflecting back what we understand of that culture. It’s a limited understanding in terms of being a voyeur or a traveller in a foreign culture. I thought that was what was being addressed in the voice of Mexico: the inability to see anything but oneself… So it’s really about an inability to see, and the power of cinema, the power of the gaze. Who has power? When you start making images of other cultures, the person making the images ultimately ends up with that power… And so it came back to ourselves: What are we really making pictures of? Well, it’s ourselves, it’s our own mortality.

That wasn’t where we started. We started going on a road trip after breaking up with our respective girlfriends, and trying to make a film about love. None of that’s in there, it became more and more about the inability to see and about dying and Mike being HIV-positive. Films have a way of, I don’t want to say making themselves, because that’s the furthest thing from the truth, but they have a way of moving in directions that I’m never ready for. And all I’ve learned to do over these twenty-or-so years is to try to be open to them and to try to read the change that’s happening. I always try to listen to the film and allow the film to breathe. I think that’s a good skill to have acquired…

Executing or making films isn’t that hard, knowing what the hell I’m making them about is the hard part. Every film seems to have a new language, I keep trying to re-define how I want to tell story, whether it’s personal or not. That’s the skill, it’s finding out how to make this work. I never know when I start and I’m always open, trying to let the film grow or evolve in some way. Evolution of the work is important, and that’s where I’m at with the new film [Dead Time].

I think there’s a responsibility to making images, too. I didn’t like travelling with a camera, and I didn’t do it after that. And there’s a responsibility to kind of “rest” the image, and find a home for it. I think that taking an image is a violent act, and I never feel like my images are resolved unless I’ve put them in a film and I’ve dealt with them in a way. Like the one sequence in Smack of the cattle slaughter, I shot that fifteen years before Smack was done but I could never find a place for it, and I felt really weird having this footage until I actually found a place for it to rest.

AL: How have you changed over the years, what was your approach when you started out as a filmmaker as compared to now?

SS: Well, my films in college were short little skits, kind of. They were very simple one-person re-enactments of parts of my life. With Woodbridge it became a little larger, in that I was shooting a lot of different scenes, it was a bigger piece. But it was still the personal, trying to deal with family and growing up Italian in Canada. Then I continued making personal films. When I made Rhythms of the Heart, which was about a break-up, I started thinking “I’m not sure I want to be up there anymore.” I don’t mind making the personal stuff, but it’s too hard putting myself on the screen, all the vulnerability. So I thought, “I’ll still make personal films, but I’ll start pretending that they’re fictions.” That’s when Mexico came along, and Sweetblood. I could hide in Sweetblood--as much as it’s about me, my voice isn’t in it, my image is partly in it. It’s more my point of view, but I’m almost separate from the film. It didn’t leave me feeling as vulnerable as Rhythms, no film has. With Away--which was once again a kind of invented documentary, about going to Thailand in search of my twin brother Sam (played by Earl Pastko)--I was still making personal films, but disguising it as a fiction. I think that’s partly where I moved towards.

Also I was trying to develop a visual language in which I might be able to see and to tell stories. Trying to develop something that feels authentic, something that is more indicative of how I see and experience the world. The camera style was there right from the start, a lot of frenetic jump cuts. I never really cared about always being in focus, and I think framing was too locked into a conventional style. I think exposure is also overrated. Some of my best stuff was when I over-exposed and shot slightly out of focus at 36 fps, like the trapeze stuff or walking on the street in Smack. I think they speak of a different place. But I always found I was a little too abstract earlier on, now I’m trying to let the image speak more, instead of imposing the camera on the image. To let the subject in front of the camera do some of it…

AL: Has being a musician influenced your filmmaking?

SS: Learning music has helped my filmmaking immensely. Most people who cut sound are ex-musicians. And editors have to have a sense of tempo and pacing and timing and rhythm. And whether you learn it from music or learn it in film, that’s something you have to learn.

Some of the best things that I’ve learned are some of my biggest curses, in that I’ve tried to do everything myself. One, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with other people, I can do it all alone (which is also something that I resent) and two, so I wouldn’t have to ask people for favours and arts councils for a lot of money. So I learned how to cut, I learned how to shoot, I learned how to develop, I learned how to do music, I learned how to neg cut.

AL: Can you tell me about the new film that you are working on, Dead Time?

SS: It’s a feature-length film, 16mm, and like Smack it started by collecting stories from different people. Friends and acquaintances, people would come into my studio and tell me stories about their lives. I use the scripted material as the base and then try to find consistent themes. Some of the same themes surfaced: drug abuse, incest, crime, jail time --and so I developed a story out of the process. Then I hired actors to shoot some of the dramatic scenes. I didn’t shoot all of them, because I didn’t want it to be a re-enactment. The result is a feature with documentary stories presented in a dramatic context. It’s all hand-developed, some of it stays black-and-white, some of it is coloured. All of the dramatic stuff is black-and-white, the more “metaphoric” images I toned.

AL: Can you tell me about the metaphoric images? How did they come about, and what guided you to shoot certain things?

SS: I have always just gone out with a camera and collected footage. Knowing what the story is about helps, because then I can be a little more specific, but mostly I shot things that seemed not to relate at all: cars on the street, going up the CN Tower, kids in a playground. Then I figured out what worked in the editing room and intercut it with the dramatic scenes. The dramatic stuff was harder to do, because you have to coordinate the people, location, props, etc. I was the only crew, so it was just me and a couple of actors. It’s nice that way because it’s small, it’s intimate, it’s non-threatening, but it’s also a bit harried and it makes it hard to focus.

AL: So in terms of how the film comes together in the end, does that happen primarily in the editing?

SS: Yeah, because I don’t really know where the footage goes until I see it with the sound. It’s just hit and miss, trial and error. A lot of the images that I thought would work with certain scenes became redundant, or too much of a literal interpretation. A lot of the footage that I shoot is intentionally out-of-focus, slowed down, abstracted... It’s not meant to be representational, so I think it allows the perception to be a lot looser. Finding that sensibility that matches what the voices are talking about or what the actors are doing becomes a matter of moving stuff around until it seems to work.

AL: So how do you know when it works?

SS: I like to think that after cutting for a long time that I’m starting to get a sense of what feels right. You kind of feel it in your body, it has to sit right, it has to feel right… It’s kind of like jazz music, finding something else that allows you to work in the same thread, but not with the same melody line. It’s like bringing two melodies together, they both work but they’re very different. Because the voice drives the narrative, I feel like I don’t have to be that literal in terms of my visual interpretation. There’s no point in being redundant about what the voice is saying. That was a real challenge, especially working with actors doing literal things. Going from the representational stuff to the more metaphoric stuff gives you a break, a respite, and I think really allows the viewer to enter into it.

AL: Is this the first work that you’ve edited digitally?

SS: Well, it’s the first time I’ve cut picture digitally. I did the sound for Smack digitally, which I really loved. With Dead Time, I’m working in surround, which gives another element to the sound. Cutting digitally is really liberating, because you can do it really fast, you can make very minute changes without seeing the actual cut-mark on the film. So you can try stuff out. I’m not one of these people that has 55 versions of the film, but I will try 50 different things, and it’s a lot more precise in terms of transitions and execution.

AL: Do you think it will affect the editing style of the final film, as compared to your other works?

SS: No, I don’t think that working in Final Cut Pro will, but I think that working with another person will. Jeffrey Paull is helping me cut the film. He’s been involved with film for many years and he teaches at Sheridan College, and he’s really sharp. I think that will have way more impact than the actual technology. The technology just helps execute the editing, but working with someone will actually change the style of the editing. I was always a lot more loose in my cutting, but working with Jeffrey is bringing in a more specific approach to telling story.

AL: What does the blend of documentary and fiction that you’re working with bring to the film that you wouldn’t be able to do if you were doing either strictly a documentary or a narrative?

SS: I think most of the subjects of documentary films can be pretty interesting. But I don’t think talking heads really offer anything, except getting to know the characters. The hybrid allows me to use real people, who have pretty compelling stories, so the stories are coming straight from the people who experienced them. The performances are really strong. It also gives me a lot more freedom, because now I can cast in any way that I want for the characters, and I can work with the strengths and structure of drama and with the authenticity of documentary film. In that way, it gave me a lot more liberty to express some of the stories. I think I’m able to get the best of both worlds. It seems like a happy connection--this way the two forms kind of own each other.

AL: Where are you at in the process now?

SS: I’m about half-way through a fine cut, so pretty far along. Then I have to conform on film, whatever that means. I don’t know whether it’s going to be on 16mm in the end. I know I’ll have a DVD with surround sound, but it’s hard to go to 16mm because of the mono optical soundtrack, which sounds like shit. If I go to 35mm it will be stereo and digital, which is better. I was thinking of doing my own 35mm transfer at LIFT, but then I still have to make a 16mm print first. I still feel compelled to finish on sprocket. I like the idea of looking at it on a big screen, in a dark room, with a projector, and that nice image. So I’m kind of stuck at the moment. I’m not ready to say good-bye to film yet.

Filmography

Dead Time, 85 min., 16mm, colour,  work-in-progress

Smack, 55 min., 16mm, colour, 2000

Away, 60 min., 16mm, colour, 1996

Sweetblood, 13 min., 16mm, colour, 1993

Mexico (with Mike Hoolboom), 35 min., 16mm, colour, 1992

Sang Song, 2 min., 16mm, colour, silent, 1991

Rhythms of the Heart, 43 min., 16mm, colour/B&W, 1990

Woodbridge, 32 min., 16mm, colour/B&W, 1985

Full Moon Darkness (with Carl Brown), 90 min., 16mm, B&W, 1984

Ever Last, 2 min., 16mm, colour, 1981

No Mime Game, 4 min., 16mm, colour 1980