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Operation Filmmaker By Andrea Shea  Listen to story (Real Audio)
It explores what happens when a filmmakers gets too close to a subject, and everything ends up going horribly wrong. "Operation Filmmaker" is currently on screen at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. WBUR's Andrea Shea has the story. ANDREA SHEA: Who knows? "Operation Filmmaker" might never have been made if actor-turned-director Liev Shreiber hadn't been channel surfing. In 2004 he stumbled on an MTV profile of a young Iraqi film student in Bagdad: Muthana Mohmed. FILM CLIP: Muthana: There's this famous place to see movies burned completely and damaged completely. Schreiber: It basically was all about the moment when I saw him go to the book market and looking for books, magazines, anything that had to do about film. ANDREA SHEA: As it happens Schreiber was getting ready to shoot his feature "Everything is Illuminated" in Prague, and he decided to try to help Muthana by giving him an internship on an American film set. FILM CLIP: Schreiber: I think Baghdad needs filmmakers, I think Baghdad needs writers, I think Baghdad needs all of that and that was I guess my fantasy about Muthana. ROSS MCELWEE: Our sympathies are completely with him when we see the footage of the destroyed film school and it's so poignant, he represents you know what?s happened to the whole country of course but his personal story I think is very engaging. ANDREA SHEA: Ross McElwee teaches documentary film at Harvard University. He?s a mentor to the director of "Operation Filmmaker" Nina Davenport. NINA DAVENPORT: I was just interested in meeting a real, live Iraqi as opposed to the sort of parade of victims across the television screens. ANDREA SHEA: Davenport was hired by Schreiber to document Muthana?s experience in Prague. NINA DAVENPORT: But I quickly saw that there was this conflict developing between Muthana and his American benefactors on set. ANDREA SHEA: Which, Davenport says, had serious plot potential for her documentary. NINA DAVENPORT: Neither side lived up to the other's expectations. ANDREA SHEA: The Americans expected Muthana to be grateful for his opportunity. Instead he?s blatantly resentful of having to fetch coffee and food for his higher-ups. FILM CLIP: Muthana: The most important scene was rolling on the set while I was mixing the snacks, not my job. ANDREA SHEA: In "Operation Filmmaker" Liev Schreiber and his producer Peter Saraf are frustrated time and time again by Muthana. He resists the hierarchy on set. He parties instead of working. Tensions escalate as he asks for film equipment and money. FILM CLIP : Peter Saraf: You don't want to, it's not about lying, you don't want to say something that makes you look bad or me look bad or me angry at you so you?re always convoluting some kind of story. Just be straight. ANDREA SHEA: Finally the Americans wrap the shoot, leave Prague, and leave Muthana behind. Documentarian Nina Davenport stays to film him, doggedly, and the story changes. As with her other films, "Operation Filmmaker" becomes as much about Davenport as Muthana. After a while he starts asking Davenport for help. NINA DAVENPORT: It wasn?t "I want to go buy clothes" it was "I need money to get my Visa or I need money to survive" and I found it just impossible not to help him because there he was, he had no one else to turn to, I had money he didn't, I?m an American he?s an Iraqi, how am I not going to help? ANDREA SHEA: But when Davenport eventually does say no he threatens to quit the film. He holds her tapes hostage. Then their relationship gets really ugly. FILM CLIP : (audible physical struggle) "You're hurting me. I know you don?t have any money it's not my fault I?m not responsible for you." ANDREA SHEA: This scene is a documentarian's nightmare. At a recent screening at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston filmmakers in the audience squirmed as "Operation Filmmaker" broke boundaries and practically imploded before their eyes. Susan Steinberg was one of them. SUSAN STEINBERG: It was absolutely terrifying; I could hardly bear to watch the film. ANDREA SHEA: Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee explains that while the filmmaker/subject dynamic is dramatic and antagonistic, in this film the need on both sides is not unusual. ROSS MCELWEE: If you're heavily invested in the making of this film and you have a personal connection to it that co-dependency is going to exist. You have one kind of power in that you have the camera on your shoulder but the subject also has a power and that power has to do with access. ANDREA SHEA: And the filmmaker/subject struggle continues today. Davenport finally finished editing the 400 hours of footage she collected over one and half years. She says Muthana has seen the film and hates the way he's portrayed. They don't talk anymore. Nina Davenport admits it's sometimes hard for her to accept that she's made a film that makes an Iraqi look unsympathetic. She acknowledges she looks na? too. She also says if she knew how misguided the cross-cultural experiment was going to be she never would've started "Operation Filmmaker."
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