E-mail a friendDanny Glover
airdate February 5, 2009
Danny Glover is best known as an award-winning actor, producer and director, with credits that include the film version of The Color Purple, the Lethal Weapon series and TV's Brothers and Sisters. He's also a passionate activist, who speaks on such issues as literacy and civil rights, and board chair of TransAfrica Forum, the lobbying organization on Africa and the Caribbean. Glover is co-founder of Louverture Films and exec producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina, Trouble the Water.
Actor-activist discusses the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water, which he executive produced. (3:41)
Full interview. (11:12)
Danny Glover
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Danny Glover back to this program. The award-winning actor and activist serves as executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Trouble the Water." The film is a compelling look at Hurricane Katrina and the fight to survive and to rebuild New Orleans. Here now, a scene from "Trouble the Water."
[Clip]
Tavis: First of all, Danny, congratulations.
Danny Glover: Hey.
Tavis: Congrats.
Glover: Why, thank you. So we had Kim there and Scott and certainly Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's the director. Because they were absolutely extraordinary.
Tavis: You call the names now, the people who were your partners on this project, and I'm glad you started there because you may not know the names, but for those of us at home watching this - there's a good picture - these are some of the same people, same producing team, that brought you "Fahrenheit 9/11," same producers that brought you "Bowling for Columbine."
I say that only to make the point that they know what they're doing, and yet when they went down to New Orleans to originally do this, as you know, they went down to do a documentary about the National Guard.
Glover: Exactly.
Tavis: That's what they were originally planning to do. The National Guard found out what they were up to, shut that down with the quickness, and they went a different direction on this storyline. I'm just amazed, here you go a completely different direction than what you had laid out on paper and you still end up with an Academy Award nomination. It must have been meant to happen, I guess.
Glover: Well, the Academy Award nomination is one thing. It's just the story itself. It's the first time we have a couple whose is the hurricane itself, and they were able to tell their stories. So we're looking from the inside out as opposed to looking at outside in. And so in some sense, they had - it's almost as if it was their mission, in some sense.
They were shut down, and I think the commander told them, "Well, you can thank Michael Moore for that." Michael Moore for the reason why we're not doing this. They did not - the commander did not know that they were associated with Michael Moore. They did not know that. But they just - it's so amazing.
Kim and Scott saw, both of them, they said - Kim said, "Hey," and Scott said, "Hey, there's somebody with a camera. We got this footage; let's try to sell it to them." Boom, look what comes out of that.
Tavis: I want to come back to this point about documentaries and how they're perceived in the post-Michael Moore era. We'll come back to that in a moment, since you raised that point. But tell me about the documentary, about this couple, and what we're seeing on film here.
Glover: Well, you're seeing a couple that I think exemplifies what you see in urban cities around the country, in those particular areas which are underserved, those areas where people are marginalized and just dispossessed and everything. You see this - this is a couple who's basically on the edge, living from hand to mouth, doing whatever they have to do to survive.
This hurricane comes and they find an opportunity. Kim bought the camera on the street for $20. This is Kimberly Rivers, who bought this camera on the street for $20. She uses it as a vehicle of telling the truth. She had no idea that this was going to happen to her. She had planned to buy the camera just to film family events and everything else.
The hurricane comes up; she begins to take this footage of the hurricane, interviewing people as the hurricane approaches. What are they going to do? You're going to stay, and all that. Here she is in the midst of it, and it was fortunate enough that both Carl and Tia saw this footage, understood how valuable it was, be able to put the wrap-around footage around it, and then making this documentary.
And I just happened to see it - I think I told you before - Joslyn Barnes, who was in the picture, who is my co-producer at Louverture Films, Joslyn Barnes saw this and said, "You've got to see this." I saw it, found myself sitting in my office, crying. I said, "We got to get people to see this."
The objective, certainly, is to get people to see it, because sometimes, through a documentary, you see the first glimpse of the truth of what is happening. Documentaries (unintelligible) Michael Moore with his healthcare crisis, or whether it's the war, or other documentaries, have showed the proving ground and been the basis of people understanding what is really happening.
Question is that you don't get this on network news. You don't get the full scope, and people are asking themselves, "What is really happening in my life?" The people who are connected with this story right here are the same people who connected whether you're on the South Side of Chicago or whether you're in South Central L.A. - wherever you are. The Bronx, wherever you are - the same story.
Tavis: Back to your point now, Danny, that you made about what documentaries at their best can do.
Glover: At their best, yeah.
Tavis: At their best, what documentaries can do. You mentioned Michael Moore. You mentioned earlier in this conversation the officer in the National Guard who told them, the producers, again, not knowing their connection to Michael Moore, "You can thank Michael Moore for the fact that we're shutting this down."
Glover: Yeah.
Tavis: So that was his way of saying, obviously, that we ain't trying to have this situation broadcast in movie theaters all across the country, talked about on the stage at the Academy Awards. What do you make of the fact that documentaries where the truth-telling part is concerned has become harder to do because people are afraid of being Michael Moore-ized, if I can turn Michael into a verb?
Glover: Well, I think one of the problems is that, because now, as we see even in (unintelligible) documentaries, documentaries don't do that well in the marketplace, except for if your name is attached to it, Michael Moore. So it's become commodified in another way as well.
So I think on the one hand it proves - it's almost like the oxymoron, know what I'm saying? It's some of the sense if you do a documentary and have something to tell the truth, are the investors going to get their money back? And what happens is that you have people, well-meaning investors, who say that it's an investment and they want some return on the investment.
You can see most of the documentaries at Sundance or any film festival, they either don't get a distributor or if they hit the marketplace and if they hit the theater, they don't make the money back and the return on the investment.
We've got to find a way, another way, with the technology that we have available to us, to get the documentaries out to people through whatever convenient way we can, whatever way through technology, and use it as a platform of having these things make money. They have to make money in order to do that.
Now, that almost sounds like a contradiction in itself - you want the truth on the one hand, because people could use this information.
Tavis: But it still costs money, yeah.
Glover: Look here - people use this information. PolicyLink had a conference now in New Orleans in May of last year, and we showed about 12 minutes of the film to them. And the first thing that Angela Glover and everybody else - Angela Blackwell Glover, the first thing, "How can we use this information?" People in the audience who deal in the inner cities, who deal with the issues of equity in urban areas and schools, so on and so on - "How can we use this as a platform so we can build some sort of consensus about what's happening?"
(Unintelligible) building consensus, we have right now the situation we have now with the economy the way it is, and it's sure a lot worse than it was in May of last year, but the economy the way it is, and those are people who are going to be further dispossessed by this situation are those people right there who are represented by Kim and Scott.
Tavis: How do filmmakers fight through that? When I say filmmakers, I don't mean just at the level of Michael Moore. But again, this movie is featuring two people who were just using a $20 camera they bought on the street. How do filmmakers - and I hear your point about technology. The good news is that because technology is so readily available, any of us ultimately can be a filmmaker.
Many of the big stories that break on the news these days is somebody with a camera phone or a digicam who caught the action themselves.
Glover: Absolutely.
Tavis: So how do true filmmakers, those who want to be filmmakers, fight through this matrix you've put them in - not you specifically, but the businesses put them in - how do they fight through that matrix of being committed to telling the truth and not fighting the investing, not fighting the vehicles, the platforms, to get that truth out?
Glover: Well, for example, there were other avenues, perhaps, for Tia and Carl as filmmakers. As filmmakers, they had other avenues. They came to us and they said to us, "We felt that you would be the ones who would represent the film." So the idea of someone representing the film, going out there on the limb, going to the film festivals, going to the various screenings, talking to the audience, focusing, having panel discussions and focus groups around the issues, etc., etc., is a big part of the success of this film.
And it takes legs, but you can't - the way you have the commodified symbol or program or framework of films in general and documentaries specifically is that they're thrown out there and just thrown out there with no kind of way of introducing audiences to the film.
Audiences have to be introduced to these films. You have to talk about these issues. You have to want to talk about these issues. Whether the issue - now Michael Moore, we talked about healthcare was a major issue. The war on Iraq was a major issue. Certainly "Bowling for Columbine" was a major issue as well.
So those are the kinds of issues that draw people together and draw people to a discussion about it. What documentaries do, hopefully, is that now it creates a bridge now in which there could be a serious dialogue, a serious discourse, about the real things that matter.
If that becomes the case in point, then we got something going. Who's to say that Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" or the healthcare system didn't now engage us in a different way in the discussion about the two issues that are involved there? Who's not to say that a film like this cannot engage us in a different way about the issues around poverty, the issues around people who are dispossessed? How can we know that?
But it begins a dialogue. It begins a dialogue. And what it does more than anything else is not only validates the story of Kimberly and the story of Scott, and not only does it validate them and those who live and die and grow and have to survive in those situations, but it validates the people who do it every day, who work and say, "We don't have the resources necessary to take care of that. We need more resources to take care, to talk about healthcare."
Before Kim and Scott had to deal with the issue around Katrina, there's a whole set of structural violence that had occurred in that community and occurred in their families before that happened - years before that. Decades before that.
Tavis: It is a powerful film, and I hope Danny's right. I think Danny is right, that this kind of honor by the Academy, just being nominated, much less winning, can in fact spread the kind of dialogue we need about these issues that so trouble the water that we all have to navigate.
The film is called "Trouble the Water," executive produced by Danny Glover. A wonderful team brought it to you.
Glover: And Louverture Films, (unintelligible) Louverture Films.
Tavis: Louverture Films - got to put Louverture Films out there. We'll see how it does on Academy night, but it's a great film anyway. Danny, good to have you on.
Glover: Good to be here.
Tavis: It's my pleasure to have you.
Glover: Take care, man.
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