DIRECTOR INTERVIEW

BEN LEWIS
October 2006

How did you arrive at the theme of your documentary film?
I was making a film about Ceausescu, the communist ruler of Romania, and living in Bucharest in 2001. My Romanian AP and his friends started telling me all these Ceausescu jokes, and I thought, I wonder if they told similar jokes in other communist countries. A quick trawl through second-hand book sites on the internet and I knew my hunch was right: there were thousands of jokes! Not all of them sounded funny today, but there was something about even the unfunny ones that seemed funny if one analysed them seriously, as historical documents. That's really the point of the film - just how serious humour is.

What does this film mean to you?
A lot. I spent two-and-a-half years making it. It's my baby. Almost every story is primary material - no one knows the story of the German cabaret troupe who were imprisoned by the Stasi in 1961 for telling bad jokes (bad in both senses). No one knows about the Romanian public transport worker who collected overheard jokes and then analysed his material statistically so he could calculate the speed of the average Romanian communist joke.

Was your filming spontaneous or meticulously planned?
Everything was researched in advance. That's how you make a good history film. It's all in the research. I had researcher-producers in every Eastern European country I filmed in, looking for stories for me and organising actors and locations for the filmed sketches of the jokes. Sometimes I asked them to look for specific people - secret policemen who monitored the jokes, for example, or people who were arrested for telling jokes - and sometimes they came back to me with suggestions, like Zenon Laskowik, the comic genius of communist Poland.

What do you enjoy most about your work as a director?
Storytelling - the only thing that matters in directing. People think directing is about shooting nice shots. That's the easy part. The difficult one is making your documentary as exciting as a movie. I always think of the opening scene of Speed and the rest of that film - Keanu on the bus, Dennis out to get him... a documentary ultimately works on the same principle as a Hollywood movie. Get them hooked quick, give them surprises all the time, play with what they know and don't know. It's called storytelling. The other thing I like most about being a director is watching the audience watching my film in a cinema and hearing them laugh at my jokes. Sorry, it's vain of me I know, but I love making people laugh.

What do you enjoy least?
The worst thing about directing is getting a 'no' from a prospective interviewee. In a documentary you are totally dependent on your interviewees and contributors. A film is only as good as they are, and often the really bad guys just won't appear in front of the camera. I hate it when they say 'no'.

What would you be doing if you weren't a filmmaker?
I write a lot about contemporary art for magazines and newspapers. I also present and direct my own series about contemporary art, Art Safari. So If I couldn't be a filmmaker I'd be a curator or an artist. Or maybe I'd try my hand at stand-up comedy.

What characterises your generation of directors? Is there a change perceivable?
Well the old days of expensive crews and the hierarchy of documentary styles with observational docs at the top, is over. There used to be a taboo about voice-over/commentary in a 'good' doc. That's gone. In its place is an anything-goes, do-it-yourself attitude. We use cheap cameras. We shoot it ourselves. We edit it ourselves. We often sell it ourselves. Nowadays a documentary filmmaker is more like a novelist than he ever was before - because he can do it all himself, just like a writer. Ten years ago that wasn't possible.

How did you arrive at the basic idea that communism depends on humour?
First I observed that there was this anonymous body of literature in communist countries, namely the jokes. Then I asked former citizens of communist states if they remembered the jokes. They all replied with a tangible passion and enthusiasm, that these jokes were important to them. They told me ones I hadn't yet heard spontaneously, and told me how they used to spend evenings round the kitchen table telling each other political jokes. That convinced me that the jokes were important - they not only had a significance as historical documents, they had an emotional significance to the people who told them. I don't know if communism 'depends' on humour but it is, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a humour-producing machine. The absurdities of communist economic theory, and the obvious gap between what the state said was happening and what people were experiencing in their daily lives, was in itself absurd and ridiculous and therefore humorous. As one interviewee told me "Reality contained jokes, and the jokes contained reality."