Regarding Susan Sontag recently screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, where it was one of the most talked-about films. After a few dozen SIFF films, it stands as my favorite of the festival. It’s a brilliant documentary that makes the daunting author and critic accessible for readers who are both familiar and unfamiliar with her work. Director Nancy Kates does a brilliant job of making sense of Sontag, a literary giant I’ve found intimidating, even when absorbing her (somewhat more accessible) essays like “Notes on ‘Camp'” and “Fascinating Fascism” (her 1975 essay in the New York Review of Books about the films of Leni Riefenstahl).
Regarding finds a common ground in providing an overview of an artist from curious non-fans and in-depth discussion for more devoted readers. Yet almost all viewers will want to find a bookstore or library and pick up something to read from her vast bibliography.
When her film was in town for SIFF, I jumped at the chance to talk to Nancy Kates about Susan Sontag, eager to learn more about the literary giant.
Let me start at the beginning of this project, if you don’t mind. What was it about Susan Sontag that made you interested in making a film about her?
This film is kind of a middle-aged person looking back at herself. When I was 20, which was in 1982 that was the year The Susan Sontag Reader was published. If you were reasonably intelligent and curious about things, you were into Sontag. She was definitely a big part of the intellectual firmament when I was younger. When she died, I was very saddened by her death. I wasn’t sure why I was so sad because I didn’t know her.
A few months later, I was having an argument with someone. I said Susan Sontag was gay and my friend said “no, she wasn’t.” After the argument, I decided I should make a film about her. It was one of those Rube Goldberg moments where something falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I went home and I had seven of her books, out of the sixteen that she wrote when she was alive. I took that as a good sign. I’ve always been interested in her. That’s how this happened. I just had this idea. It wasn’t because of this argument, but I had one of those hot moments. It was really because I had been interested in her ideas for so many years. A hot moment also happened in March of 2005, a few months after she died, that if I did this, I could be the first one to make a movie about her.
I didn’t realize it would take so many years to make the film. I didn’t start working on it until 2006, but it’s been a long a process.
Could you please talk a little bit about what you learned from making the film and diving into her work more, versus what you thought you knew before starting the project?
It turned out that I knew almost nothing, which usually turns out to be the case. As a filmmaker, I’m actually interested in what we think we know. My first film was about American women who served in Vietnam. What we know about Vietnam, just talking in very general terms, is that a lot of soldiers died in Vietnam. We think of men running around in rice paddies. But there were 58,000 women there as well. But they were such a tiny percentage.
But my interest is in looking beyond what we know. With Sontag, it was a journey with a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes I really admire her; sometimes I’m annoyed with her. That came out of the admiration, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that. I think that her diaries and papers reveal her fragility. She was such an iron lady in public, but she was also a normal person in her own head or in her own life. She was extraordinarily intelligent. I was interested in the disparities between the iron lady and the person with frailties, and her unwillingness to admit those frailties. I wanted the film to be both about her work and her life. It’s hard to make a film just about her work; it’s not the right medium. I think some people want it to be more about her work, but we did as much as we could. I do think trying to show someone who could be considered heroic or an icon as a real person is something I came to.
There is also a big disparity you explore a lot in the film with the quality of her novels not being on the same level of her nonfiction writing and criticism.
There are a number of American writers, probably in other countries as well, whose genius is in nonfiction but they don’t think that nonfiction is worth bothering with. She was one of those people. She was a semi-tragic figure in that sense because she was unable to fully embrace what she was good at. She was trying to go for something that she thought was more important but she wasn’t as good at. I’ve read all of her novels and it was a painful process. A couple of her short stories were great, but I would only say a couple. That’s me and I try not to editorialize in the movie. It’s not my opinion of her. I think it’s hard to write fiction.
One thing I didn’t get to say because no one said it out loud is that I think she kind of shot herself in the foot with fiction. I’m not sure she had the talent to write fiction, but by not being open about her passions, and to access her sexuality in her writing, she cut herself off from the deepest stuff in her. I don’t know how to write a novel so I’m sort of talking out of my ear here, but if you can’t put your passion into your fiction, how can it be any good? The thing she most wanted was to be a great novelist like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. She did not have access to her desires. She said “I can’t talk about that.” Even if she had been able to do that, I’m not sure she could have made it as a novelist, in my sense of making it; she did win the National Book Award. I just don’t like her fiction as much.
That’s why she becomes a tragic figure to me because kind of cut off her ability to do what she wanted to do by limiting herself. Another novelist I talked to about this said that you have to have a lot of empathy for other people and your characters, and Sontag wasn’t a wildly empathetic person. I’m not sure even if she had been able to talk more openly about her passions and her desires in her fiction if she would have become a great novelist.
I was going to bring this up later in our talk, but I’ll ask now that you brought up Sontag not being a terribly empathetic person and writer, do you think that had anything to do with the firestorm she found herself in shortly after September 11 because of the very short piece she wrote in the New Yorker? It was the very first thing shown in the film.
Well…I think that also had to do with her being in Berlin when 9/11 happened. I happen to personally agree with her.
I do too.
Arundhati Roy wrote a much longer piece in the Guardian. Sontag’s piece was like three paragraphs. Arundhati Roy’s piece is very, very long but said a lot of the same things, that Americans do not realize that what we do in our foreign policy creates a lot of enmity around the world. We think we’re always the good guys but it isn’t necessarily true and it’s not true to literally millions of people around the world who are subject to sanctions and bombings, and the number of Iraqi children who died, etc. I don’t want to get involved in the politics of that. I think it was very hard for people who loved her because she couldn’t always see things from their point of view.
9/11 is a bit more complicated. I don’t think Sontag was unaffected by how many Americans were killed. She says, “Let’s mourn together but let’s not be stupid together.” I think that’s so classically Sontagian. She didn’t want anyone to be stupid, but the pabulum that was coming out of the mouths of politicians and commentators was just BS. “Go shopping.” What is that?
Right. I try to read that short essay at least once a year for that reason. It reinforces something I want to believe about how we conduct discourse. One of the things I think Craig Seligman mentions in his book, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, is that she didn’t use any of her word count to denounce Al Qaeda. But you have a clip from “Nightline” where Sontag is debating someone who says she’s part of the “Blame America first crowd.” I know exactly what she’s saying and agree with her, and I know the guy she’s arguing with is way overmatched intellectually, but it doesn’t play well on television.
He’s from the Heritage Foundation. Todd Gaziano.
One thing I should mention with that clip is that Susan Sontag was interviewed a lot. She made a lot of literary and other pronouncements, but she was not a pundit. She was put in this punditry situation on “Nightline.” It’s a ridiculous situation where there are four people, but the guy from the Heritage Foundation is a pundit and that’s what he does all the time. It was a ridiculous situation. It’s not that Susan Sontag couldn’t hold her own but she’s normally interviewed like how we’re talking: talking to one person who is probably not particularly hostile to her and is interested in whatever she was doing, if she had a new book or AIDS or whatever it was. The person was essentially on her side, or at least not hostile to her. I don’t think that “now you can be a pundit about 9/11” was an easy position for her.
I want to add that I think she also assumed that any intelligent person reading the New Yorker would understand that she felt terrible about the number of deaths and the tragedy of it and was not happy that it happened. It’s just assumed, you would have to be an evil person or a moron. But the level of the intellectual discussion was kind of ironic because you had to say that you were really upset about this. She took it as everyone understands that. Since she was only given two or three paragraphs, she thought she could skip the introductory material, but she was lambasted for that.
I want to talk a little bit about logistics with the film. How many people did you talk to in shooting the film, and was there anyone you really wanted to talk to that refused to cooperate?
We talked to a lot of people. There were a lot of people who wouldn’t talk to me, and that was very hard for us. One thing I will say, though, is that if they had, it would have made making the film even harder. We have footage of David (Reiff, her son) and Annie (Liebovitz) but neither of them wanted to be in the film. There were other people where it was more of a logistical problem.
We also cut out a section about Salman Rushdie and the fatwa. He didn’t want to talk to me. It was another thing like with Leni Riefenstahl* where there was a lot of information about something that was very, very important at the time, but now might have been forgotten by the average American. It took so long to explain what happened to Salman Rushdie, and then explain that Susan Sontag was the president of PEN at the time and came in to help him in a very heroic way. Even explaining this to you is talking a lot of time. You have a certain amount of running time for a film and you can’t include everything.
There were a lot of things that were heartbreaking when someone said no to me, but I also knew that the film would be okay without any one person. It was a sort of blind faith on my part.
I tend to think that it’s more acceptable for a feature film to have a long running time than a documentary is.
The first draft of this movie was over two hours long, and that was just too long. We had this joke that we should’ve made a miniseries. There were so many things I would have loved to have gotten into. My favorite metaphor for the film is that forget the documentary, we should have made an opera. All of the girlfriends could have had these grand arias and then come together at the end and have this group wail when she dies. All of the lesbian drama would have been perfect for opera!
I would fly to see that anywhere in the United States.
It was just a joke but I thought, “I should talk to people.” I don’t know if her son would be any more pleased with that idea than the film and I don’t necessarily think intellectual work translates well into the opera.
Did you find that other pieces, like “Notes on ‘Camp’” didn’t need the same introduction that “Fascinating Fascism” or the Salman Rushdie incident did?
Early on in making the film, I realized that it could very easily be the illustrated Susan Sontag. It’s very odd that On Photography and On the Pain of Others were published without photographs. There are hundreds of references in “Notes on ‘Camp’” to all of these cheesy movies. We let ourselves go loose with the ‘Camp’ section because it was so much fun, but I was very aware we weren’t making a lecture with slide pictures that were missing from On Photography. We didn’t want to make the film a handmaiden to the printed work.
There are a lot of notes that are about Oscar Wilde. That’s the dark side about making a film about a writer. You can’t include most of the interesting things. I put the picture of Oscar Wilde and told the editor not to take it out because people who know the essay know that it’s about Oscar Wilde. 95% who watch the movie don’t know that. It’s almost inside baseball.
But yes, obviously “Notes on ‘Camp’” and On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor are more accessible to a quick treatment in the film than the (Antonin) Artaud introduction or the Genet essay.
I don’t want to be the CliffsNotes for her work, but I do think that it will allow people who would never read her work to have some entry point.
What do you think are the best entry points for beginning to read Sontag?
I think the things I just mentioned. I think Regarding the Pain of Others, is her last book. By rethinking her ideas about photography and asking us to think about images of war and torture, I think it’s the most “of the moment.” I think On Photography anticipated the world we live in now with Instagram and people taking selfies all day. She had this idea and now that idea is on massive amounts of steroids in our culture. She called for ecology of images, but now we need a mega-curator of images. But “The Way We Live Now” is an extraordinary short story about AIDS written at the height of the AIDS crisis. I think it depends on what your interests are. There is a wonderful essay she wrote that was the introduction to a book of Cuban poster art. The art is amazing because Cuba is known for graphic design. It’s a fantastic essay but no one is going to read it. It was never anthologized. It’s part of a huge book that you’ll need to get out of the library.
We could have spent ten years just reading stuff and never made the movie. That’s why she’s such a great subject, and a really challenging subject is because the homework is endless. I would have them read [Sontag and Kael] and then read some of her work.
I want to ask about your narrator, which is Patricia Clarkson, who I just love.
I love her too. She was my first choice. I don’t watch “Entertainment Tonight” or know who most famous actresses are, but I wanted someone who had a great voice, classy, and extremely intelligent. I felt like the subject and the film deserved that. I think there are other actresses who are equally classy but she was always my first choice.
I couldn’t really do a casting call, and I wanted someone who is a well-known actress. I wanted to hear what someone sounds like when they’re not playing a role or trying to be a certain character. This is so awful. I spent three days watching endless YouTube videos of daytime talk shows, like Laura Linney on “Oprah.” I felt so bad for these poor people because they have to go talk to Ellen about their charity work, or whatever. Being a prominent actor or actress involves so much nonsense. After that, I was more and more convinced that she was the right person. The other person I thought of was Catherine Keener because her voice is so deep.
I got in touch with her agent and sent her a rough copy of the film, a copy of Reborn (her journals), and a jar of jam because I make jam and it couldn’t hurt. I think she thought the material was interesting and she got a kick out of doing it. It is a role, if you will, of a person of supreme intelligence. It was fun. It as a little daunted by her. Afterward, I thought maybe I should have directed her more. I don’t direct actors, I make documentaries. It was really great. One thing I can say about acting is that she’s so good at it. Somebody who is not as skilled would have had a much harder time. She makes it look effortless and it’s not.
She worked hard during the short amount of time we spent with her. I was very, very happy when she said yes. She has this thing that Sontag had; this elegance and intelligence to the movie and her voice.
I don’t understand why Meryl Streep gets cast in everything because Patricia Clarkson is just as great of an actress. That’s nothing against Meryl Streep, but she’s been anointed the goddess of American cinema. I don’t understand how that all works.
What’s coming up next for the film?
I’ve been beating festivals back with a stick. I’m very touched by the interest in the film. I’m going to Sheffield documentary festival in England next month and lots of other festivals. It’s going to be broadcast on HBO, probably in December. HBO has been really great to work with. I hope people see it at a film festival in their area, but if not, it’ll be on HBO. It’s very nice to see it on a big screen.
* When I told Kates at the start of our talk that Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” was one of my favorite pieces Sontag wrote, she told me that a section about it had to be cut out because too much time would’ve been necessary to explain Leni Riefenstahl and who she was and set up the historical context of the piece.
