An Interview With Jordan Bahat: Making Ripples In The World Of Film

Below is the recent music video for “Itchin on a Photograph” by American band Grouplove. For the majority of its four minutes and forty-two seconds it is a bouncy feel-good romp, where the band performs in the cramped, messy bedroom of a motel; destruction and pillow fights ensuing. These scenes, shot in vibrant pastels, are interspersed by grittier moments taking place in the surrounding motel rooms. The totality of which is to place us in a surreal, let-your-hair-down world of motel limbo. Entering a similarly surreal world is the man who helmed this video, LA-based filmmaker Jordan Bahat.

A while back I conducted an interview with Jordan over Skype. We held the interview just after the controversial release of his previous Grouplove collaboration, “Colours” (watch below), and a couple months prior to “Itchin On A Photgraph”. This was also prior to the premier of his long-running passion-project, a feature film entitled “Jealous of the Birds”. It is a project that I actually had the honour of working on for a couple of months back in 2009. The experience was memorable and intense and provoked some of the most interesting discussions I can remember. The feature, a highly personal and original spin on the familiar topics of the holocaust, was extremely well received at the educational organtisation, ‘Facing History’. The film was scored by legendary oscar winning composer Hans Zimmer (The Lion King, The Dark Knight, Gladiator), who also felt a personal connection to to it’s subject matter.

In this interview we talked at length about the “Colours” video and the controversy surrounding its release, “Jealous of the Birds”, and Jordan’s influences and insights into the world of film-making.

So what inspired the “Colours” video?

My friend Ryan is the drummer and Producer of the album, and he had played the song to me long before the band had even relocated to LA. The song has this great energy it was really happy. But it was also complex. I was interested in the balance between the giddiness of the song, and the context where Christian Zucconi [Grouplove's enigmatic lead] talks about someone who had killed themselves. We started talking out all sorts of ideas, and I mentioned “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge“, that short story by Ambrose Bierce that every American filmmaker seems to have a crack at. A “Twilight Zone” episode is the most renowned interpretation, although Johnny Depp had just done a direct translation of the short. Structurally that story has had a lot of influence.

The original short story, written in 1871, is about a Union soldier being hung by Confederate soldiers in the civil war. What decisions did you have to make in your adaptation?

For a number of reasons – primarily creative and production feasibility issues – a direct adaptation wasn’t going to work. In the original story there’s this seredipitous moment where the noose breaks on its own. But I wanted the band to be the hero – the reason for his escape. It’s important to integrate the band as much as possible when making a music video.

Do you enjoy directing music videos, as opposed to narrative films?

This music video is totally a narrative short. But a music video is always the original intent. You have to respect that medium. I aimed to use the band in an appropriate way as characters for the short, and create a hybridised project. I never like it if the band is a last minute add-on, an afterthought.

There was some backlash to the video. What was that?

I don’t know if it was a backlash. But there was a very vocal small group of people that felt in a certain way offended by the video.

Did you intend the Native American referencing that so pissed of this group?

No, we never intended to do that. We were more concerned people would be off-put by the brutality, not by any thoughts that we were stereotyping. It was never in our minds that we were creating characters specific to racist portrayal of native americans. I apologise if people were offended, but the intone was never there. We just incorporated elements of tribal culture – that wasn’t exclusive to any culture – in our wardrobe and make-up…. We did have other references that were absolutely not Native American or tribal. Wouldn’t have put them in jeans and converses as well. These were runaway, Lord of the Flies-types, who had gone into the wilderness.

Then you have the burly, spitting, redneck, perpetrators…

They are who they are. Historically the burly lynching redneck has been the antagonist of all cultures.

OK, let’s talk about “Jealous of the Birds“. How did you get into making it and what drove you through that… was it year and a half?

It’s been two and a half years now. I think by the time it really comes out it will be at least three…

It was a really personal project. My grandparents are holocaust survivors who remained in Germany after the war. They’re polish born, so they had no nationalistic claim to living there – it wasn’t an act of defiance – like “we’ve reclaimed our homeland” or anything like that. And as an American with a separated view of it, it always seemed perplexing that they lived there. If they had had a choice. Imposing my point of view – there was this choice. Well maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t – it’s something we played around with in the film.

It was always fascinating because it sparked the imagination. Certain images of encounters between survivors and their persecutors. It was something I didn’t understand, that was very personbal and defined my background in a lot of ways. I figured I’d make a film about it.

And did you always consider it very much a personal project, or was there an aim to try and tell the story for others as a documentarian?

That’s a good question. I didn’t intend to try and become ‘documentarian’ at any point. So when I bought my ticket to Germany two weeks before, I realised that I didn’t know a lot about documentaries. I had never been an avid documentary film watcher. So I studied up. I watched everything I could find. And there’s this huge huge library of docs, especially holocaust or related to WW2.

Did these inspire you for “Jealous”?

At first, I watched them in a technical way, because I was so nervous about how to construct one of these – everything I had done on a small scale was scripted, ya know… so it was also malleable in a way. I just watched as many of the recognised, greastest documentaries to see how they were constructed.

Which ones in particular…?

The first one that made a real connection with me was “Bus 174″… at this point its a blur because I became a huge documentary enthusiast; I watched tonnes and I loved them. ”Hoop Dreams” was massive and one that strangely affected the structure of the film – I know I’m getting ahead of your question – was ”F for Fake” (the Orson Welles’ pseudo-doc), which had a huge influence on the conceptual boundaries on the genre and manipulation. Another that had a huge effect that I stole from was “The Thin Blue Line”. I realised there was room for artistry and aesthetic in documentaries. They don’t all have to look like a news camera, or shot on a phone. It was an introduction, in a way, to auteur documentary. So it began with structure and style, then I started zeroing in on the topic, and educating myself on the subject matter and what had been made.

So, to get back to your original question, midway through the editing process I had put together this objective-style documentary. I wasn’t present in the film as a character. I hadn’t made the audience aware of my presence.

But at the same time I felt like this film could only be made by me, and that I had a role to play in the story – because I’m related to it and the next generation of it. And once I came to terms with that, and figured out how aesthetically and structurally I was gonna incorporate that, the film went through a major change and now it’s admittedly a much more subjective take on the subject. And thankfully so. Because if I had tried to make a film presented as if it was objective, I would have failed.

So was there some sort of ‘eureka moment’ where this decision was made? Because you actually place yourself in the film to make it more personal.

A couple of things happened around the same time that made me realise I shouldn’t and can’t ignore my role in the story. Not that this is a film about me, but it is in certain ways a story that only I would have made, or at least only someone in my positon with these relationships. I think one of the big moments was when I met with Hans Zimmer and we discussed the film. We were discussing the film and I think I was already on my second or third revision, and during this candid two hour discussion it turned out that the story was very relevant to him,. We talked about the complexities of the subject, and of judgement in general and specifically against these people. Against the survivors that stayed and specifically held by the second generation and indeed the children of the persecutors. The discussion was so personal that I kind of realised that I couldn’t tell the whole story without personalising it. I felt I couldn’t dicsuss the scenario with him without bringing myself into it. From there I realised I needed to do that in the film itself.

And in making that decision did this blow open new options for you?

Totally. All of a sudden I didn’t feel like I was pretending to be a historian. I felt like I was really telling the story from my honest perspective. Had I not introduced myself and my relationship to the story, the viewer would have assumed it could have been made by anybody – by a historian. And that wasn’t the intent or angle.

So what’s the future of the film in your eyes?

We’re aiming for festivals in the 2011 circuit and hopefully an international and domestic (US) distribution as well in 2011. The goal was always to get the story out there and I think the film does best as a conduit for conversation. We want to get it out to the right spaces so that people can confront the taboos that the film touches on. We’re also partnering with a really fantastic Educational Institution in order to do that, called ‘Facing History and Ourselves‘.

One thing I remember when working on the film with you, was going through that AP real-life footage shot at the camps. Hours and hours of it, day after day. You sorta go numb to it. You stop feeling anything. Totally desensitised. But then I remember catching myself crying onto the laptop and realising that underneath this was affecting me.

Yep. The thing is you can’t let yourself feel sorry for yourself, in light of all that suffering, ya’know.

But of course the experience affects you. Because you have set your deadline and your’re forcing yourself to view this subject objectively, but at the same time your not just connected to the tale as a 3rd generation Jew, your own grandmother is survived Auschwitz… you saw the bed where she slept there…

… And the many other characters in the film.

Right. But did you need some sort of coping mechanism to dedicated the three years to this project.

It was challenging and incredibly personal to deal with the process throughout. I mean my granddad was in the film and he passed passed away while I was still editing the footage. That was a strange feeling. In certain ways it was really nice – you have his legacy there – it doesn’t feel like he’s gone because I’m listening to his voice on repeat…

…Eerie.

It is eerie.  But overall you don’t or can’t focus on that during the process. And on that note it’s important to stress that this isn’t a film about the holocaust. It’s about the reconstruction afterwards.

So do you think this is what distinguishes the film from many other holocaust-related films?

There is absolutely a sense of holocaust fatigue which exists in large part amongst the Jewish Community, because that community has always been the viewers and consumers of that material. I didn’t set out to make the film intent on skirting the holocaust, or to make a holocaust tangential film – this just happened to be the story I fixated on. I think holocaust fatigue, obviously, is a dangerous idea and a generality that’s not exactly accurate. Those stories still need to be told, they don’t need to be belittled, they need to find an audience. And this film certainly is different. It is true as soon as you say “I’ve made a holocaust documentary” people say “Oh, not another one”. But the funny thing is if you ask those same people “Well which holocaust doc films are you referring to?” they don’t generally have an answer.

Do you think the film is optimistic on the whole?

I don’t know. That was never the intention. Initially the intention was just selfish.

What do you mean?

To ask questions I was curious about – it was to be a personal and cathartic filmmaking experience. But this evolved as I had time to do more adequate research. I realised this story had never been told outside of an academic standpoint and I realised there’s only a handful of books or literature written about this specific subject. So there was a reason the subject had never been confronted properly and that wasn’t because this wasn’t a worthy subject. It was because this was a massive taboo. [The reconstruction of a Jewish society in post-War Germany was much derided by Jewish organizations the world over. Nonetheless, about 15,000 Survivors remained.] I mean it’s incredibly uncomfortable to tell a story about holocaust survivors, and introduce an element of judgement against them… or at least to explore that element of judgement. That’s a very uncomfortable balance and uncomfortable situation to create.

I think that’s why the film was never made. And why people were so slow to talk about it.That’s why the conversation that exist in the film happens between interviews, as opposed to on camera with two people talking.

What about your decision to add ficitional elements to the film?

That was part of an epiphany where I realised before making the film that I had a serious fixation on this dynamic; of survivors and torturers, survivors and perpetrators, revenge… these sorts of things. I realised it sourced from this part of my family history. As you know, I had actually written this short story about these two old  men playing chess in the park. And this was part of my realisation of my connection with this on a personal level. I decided to included it because it helped clarify my point of view. The way that my voice appears on screen is through those sequences. Those fictional elements represent my imagination before and during the film-making process.

To whet your appetite, here is the opening clip from “Jealous of the Birds”:

So, how did you get into film?
I got into film by making films. An academic would probably call it a post-modern experience. Always loved movies. I don’t feel like I, as a young kid, connected with them in the way some filmmakers report to. I started experimenting at 12 years old with a friend’s video vamera. By the time I was 15 years old I decided this was something I really wanted to do. It was around then that I started watching film as an education, not just passively. What im doing today is a result of this naive decision to not try and do anything else!

A decision that seems to be paying off. Who became your major influences?
My brother’s friend left a copy of “Trainspotting” at the house on VHS. I had no idea what it was. I watched it at 12 and it blew my mind. That grimy world was an introduction to so much else beyond filmmaking. The transportation of films… carrying you elsewhere. Some kids get carried along with “E.T.”. For me it was “Trainspotting”. And really heavy John Cassavettes on repeat. I have this older brother and I inherited his version of the anime “Akira”. I loved that film. It was so messed-up. All my shorts as a kid were messed up! None were romances. All a murder story, or a drug film. Our parents were all shocked.

You said started to consciously educate yourself in cinema at 15. How does this frame your approach to making film?
I’ll set up a shot and it will be the imaginary voice of some director in my ear. And you wonder if anything is original. It’show some directors could do specific things. Performance of Cassavetes and the aesthetic of Kubrick. Kurosawa, Sidney Pollock, Sidney Lumet. You find the directors who are most compelling first discovered the work of icons who are iconic but contemporary, then discovered their mentors.

As an up-and-coming film-maker, do you have any advice for young filmmakers?
Ha! People that are considered, on a mainstream level, to be “up and coming filmmakers”, are at a more advanced position in this industry than I am! I’m still very much a Nobody.

We like your modesty. Nonetheless, would you recommend “aspiring filmakers” like yourself go to films school?
Filmschool [Bahat went to USC] was helpful. A condensed period where I could think exclusively about filmmaking. You’re forced to. You’re surrounded by other filmmakers, and you have the protection and support of the uni with regards to equipment and insurance etc. But other than studying films in a active way – it’s really not necessary. They teach you how not to break the equipment, but its up to you to make a film. Not that I’m not thankful. Ultimately they teach you how to do things appropriately… legally. Ideas that stick with you but you don’t always abide by! Then you go out and figure out wats in your head.

Your production company is called ‘Toy Human Productions’. Where did the name come from?

It just popped out my head. A friend drew a picture of a robot and the name popped up.

You are in some senses the complete auteur [Jordan laughs this off] in the sense that you write, direct, produce and edit – all very Sean Meadows. Which of those do you consider yourself first and foremost.

I think that I’m a director. And I feel like I do the rest because I have to. But the lines are certainly blurred on a low budget. I shoot specifically for myself to cut. It’s contingent on the idea that it won’t leave my hands – an idea I need to let go of as I progress. With “Jealous” specifically this was the case because so much of it I had to do myself because I was completely unproven as a director.

Congratulations to Jordan, who has just joined renowned East-London based Production House, Stamp.

About Alexander Phillips

The Founder of Urban Times :-)...

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