Vision of self: contemporary self-portraiture

Interview with Julie Casper Roth  

Date: April 29, 2016  

Location: Uncommon Grounds, Albany, NY

Exploring a broad range of subjects, Julie Casper Roth is a video artist and filmmaker who engages her viewer through compelling narratives. She has won prestigious awards such as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and has twice been a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. Her films have been shown in venues such as the Athens International Film and Video Festival and the Anthology Film Archives. Despite numerous ongoing projects, she took time out of her busy schedule to sit down over coffee and let me ask a few questions.

JM: I noticed that you work in a variety of different genres within film such as documentary, experimental and fiction. You’ve also done quite a bit of writing. Which medium/genre do you enjoy doing the most?

JCR: Well, it’s interesting because as a filmmaker, people want to know what you do, is it fiction, is it documentary, is it experimental? And I feel like I’ve really grappled with that, feeling like I have to choose one thing over the other. I also love, love, love writing and I’ve realized over time that for me it’s not so much genre, it’s very much about storytelling. It’s telling that story and then finding the right genre/medium to tell it. And when I find something that’s big, that I say, “whoa I wouldn’t want to make that because it’s too much work, I want to write it out.” So I write screenplays, I really enjoy that, because that story might have a number of barriers, mostly financial. I wouldn’t necessarily step away from making it but it’s just easier to do it as a screenplay. Documentary I absolutely love. When I first started taking film classes in undergrad I was interested in documentary and then I veered towards art and now I’ve come full circle. I just find everyone’s lives so fascinating and I’m really interested in identity and how people identify themselves in the context of the world around them. I’m especially interested in stories where people are kind of sidelined or they’re outliers in some way or other. Be it fiction, documentary, or experimental the work has often dealt with people who identify as LGBT, or autism has been a topic of mine, and I’m also interested in mental health. So really for me it’s being invested in storytelling.

JM: When you do these stories, how do you approach people that you want to film? How do you avoid a situation being uncomfortable or awkward?

JCR: It’s funny because I have a student that I teach at SUNY Cobleskill that is so reticent to interview anyone and she tells me over and over that it feels so invasive to have a camera and approach somebody or talk to somebody and I used to be the exact same way. I think that’s part of the reason I veered toward experimental for a while because then I could deal with objects, narration, and light and color. Hmm, so how do I approach people? It’s been a good education being a producer. I got my first producer job in 2008 and you have to make things happen because you’re on a deadline, you can’t craft the most amazing stories because of those deadlines, but you just have to pick up the phone and ask. It took practice and I’m used to doing it now and I’m good at it but I still feel “oh I don’t want to invade your space.” It’s very much a matter of talking to people, talking to other people, and finding that chain that is going to lead you to illustrate the story you want to tell. I make sure I tell them what the project is, I make sure they’re as comfortable as they want to be, I find out if there are any boundaries in what they want to talk about or how they want to be displayed. You learn something new every time. I’ve been doing it for years now and I still find it to be a learning process.

JM: What was your main inspiration for making the documentary “Out in Albany?” Was it work related, did someone say this is a project I want you to do, or was it your own direction?

JCR: I definitely wanted to do it. When I got my MFA, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was return to broadcast television because it’s so much of this pre-packaged, deadline-driven process, with no art to it. I’ve always said that if I was going to work in television, it’s going to be PBS, because it’s the “nicest” one. Working there, we would have meetings about what we were going to do for content and during one meeting I said “Hey, I would love to do a documentary about LGBT lives” because no matter where you are, you want to see yourself represented. They said “Great! You have six months to do it.” There was a lot of other stuff I was working on at the same time so I had to juggle them. It’s great to work under the auspices of an entity like PBS because you have that financial support but unfortunately you lose some of that control. I love working independently for the whole issue of sculpting the story, having time and control. But I would rather struggle with the financial part of it than lose that control over content that’s really important to me, that I can’t represent it or allow it to be the best that it can be.

JM: So how do you fund your personal work?

JCR: (Laughs) I don’t know! I’ve done kickstarters before and there are grants but since 2008 a lot of the grants have dried up with the economy tanking. They are there but they are extremely competitive. I have friends who are filmmakers that do a lot of “creative fundraising” like parties. In the past what I’ve done is kickstarters, grants, applications for films. I had a fundraiser in Duluth, Minnesota for the documentary I did about my hometown and that was great because we had a sneak preview screening of a rough cut and then we had a silent auction. The wonderful thing about the LGBT community, which I realize is not one cohesive community, is that they come together and you have this support network.

JM: How much of yourself do you put in your work? Do you try to create a barrier between what you film and yourself?

JCR: I think it’s a habit of any undergrad for it to be me, me ,me. My work, my relations, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of my work in some way or another is referencing my interests and my experiences. Right now I’m working on a screenplay that I’ve been working on a long time about a memoir of when I first had an inkling that I was attracted to women. I was writing this story and it wasn’t working and then I became fascinated with the oil boom in North Dakota which tends to be a place that’s not very safe for women, there’s a big sex industry, and it’s not very safe for LGBT people. I was starting to do this documentary on North Dakota, I was interviewing people and had this weird week, all these people who were just moving there and trying to strike it rich. And I realized that I had this story and I was going to merge these things. Now I have a setting and I have a plot, and I’m going to make this into a screenplay. I’m doing work that is kind of tangential to what Adam [Frelin] is doing with “Breathing Lights” where I’m working with an organization and we’re going into the Troy community, essentially an inner-city environment, and talking to people about living amongst abandoned buildings. It’s fascinating for me because I’m interacting with people of color and I am constantly aware of the privilege and wonder if I’m exploiting people. How do they perceive me? I’m a white woman. They don’t know if I’m gay or not. I have a camera in their face. I don’t want to romanticize poverty so that’s really tricky. I come from a working class family in a blue-collar town on the rust belt in Northern Wisconsin, didn’t have much growing up. My family was not happy when I moved away for college; they wanted me to stay home. So, I don’t know I guess in some ways my experience informs things. The reason that I’m interested in autism is because my son is slightly on the spectrum. So yes, my interests inform the work and of course, LGBT lives and experiences. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with that. Right now I’m working with a colleague and we’re dealing with the unclaimed dead in America. So that’s very different. But it disproportionately affects people of color and earlier on, people with AIDS.

JM: So you told me about the project you’re currently working on with the unclaimed dead. Is there any other project that you’re currently working on?

JCR: Yes, I’m writing a screenplay, I have a draft and a half of that done but I really want to work on that this summer with the fracking boomtown and coming out and coming of age in the midst of that. A draft of that was actually a finalist for the Sundance Screen Writers Lab, which was a big deal, but now I’m at a place where I want to sell it or produce it. The Potter’s Field documentary with the unclaimed dead, we’re just starting on that and it’s probably the most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on. We had a set back this week because we had a big person who was going to be an advisor on the project sign a contract with another production company to be their advisor so A) we lost our big advisor B) there’s another company working on something similar although we don’t know what their story is. That’s a fascinating topic and it’s huge but this summer we’re hoping to get a lot of work done. I’m not really into episodic television but recently I’ve had a couple of ideas I’ve run by friends and I think that I’m going to develop at least one of those and see where it goes. Another thing I’m working on, I do way too much, is I’m finishing up that project in Troy, which is an affinity project to the “Breathing Lights.” I just applied for another grant to possibly do something related to “Breathing Lights” in Albany. Then there’s a project that I’m going to be working with the Boys and Girls Club in Albany and the kids are going to tell stories about their neighborhood, they’ll write them and we’re going to take those stories then me and my cinematographer are going to adapt them into films that kids are going to be in. We don’t want to exclude anyone so if a kid’s story doesn’t get selected they’re still going to be able to be a part of it. We just really want to celebrate the kids in inner city Albany that have a rough go of it.

You can find a selection of films and videos and more information on Julie Casper Roth’s work on her website at juliecasperroth.com.