SIFF Interview: Director Jairus McLeary Honors Humanity in ‘The Work’

Jeremy of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) podcast, SIFFcast, interviews Director of The Work, Jairus McLeary.

“Let’s be what we could be,” former skinhead and inmate, Patrick Nolan, says to the twenty-odd men sitting in a big circle with him. They’re in a large, enclosed room with high ceilings at California State’s Folsom Prison. A group of about twenty men, mostly convicts who have gone through the program, are about to start a four-day intensive group therapy co-facilitated by the Inside Circle Foundation. This is how the documentary, The Work, begins.

I wrote about this film in last week’s SIFF Centerpiece Roundtable at ye olde SunBreak, so I don’t want to double up here with too much chatter on what the film entails. I haven’t stopped meditating on, and thinking and talking about the film since I watched it – twice – a week or so ago; nor do I want to. The Work is such an important documentary film for us, humans. It’s a reminder of what honoring humanity looks like, a gentle admonition of what we could be.

I had the pleasure of chatting with the director, Jairus McLeary, by phone. I could hear the choppy, whirring blusters and blows of the Chicago wind as we spoke. I imagined Jairus tucked away somewhere by the courthouse, where he’d just been for work, plugging one of his ears with his finger so he can hear me better. He’s found audial coverage for our phone call between some buildings, he says. I can hear his smile as he talks. He’s cheery and down-to-earth. After fumbling around with my high-tech set up at home (iPhone on speaker and handheld digi-recorder capturing the conversation), I dove into my first – ever – phone interview. (Thanks again, , for being my unknowing inaugural interviewee guinea pig!)

What a huge accomplishment you and your crew have achieved birthing this fifteen-years-in-the-making documentary! I imagine you have a ton of footage. Have you considered using the footage for another film project, perhaps a series? A follow-up film with the participants to see how it’s impacted their lives, maybe?

Oh, for sure. We have 300+ hours worth of footage. Beyond what happened in that room, I got to know some of the convicts who started the program. I got to know some of the founders of the Inside Circle Foundation, Rob Allbee (Executive Director/Founder and ex-convict biker turned poet), Don Morrison (Certified Public Accountant) and Chaplain Dennis Merino. Merino started with Patrick Nolan (former skinhead and inmate), who is no longer with us. The story of how those guys came together was sort of clandestinely but also out of just sheer chance. It’s kind of an impossible story and we wanted to weave that in and so we got loads of talking head interviews. We have all that footage along with some of the convicts that are out and some of the guys who were there for the first events that these guys did. They were kinda conscripted by Patrick Nolan out on the yard, secretly. That’s a story that we’re very much looking into. There’s also an idea to do the same thing that you’ve seen but perhaps 10 parts or so, so you can see how guys who get into the program change over time.

That is awesome. The circle that the guys sit in at the beginning of the movie kind of reminded me of the first day of school where everyone’s looking at each other and keeping their distance a little bit, but by the end of the film, the circle was much smaller, and everyone was leaning in. It was palpable – the connection that was made. It’s a pretty amazing process.

Yeah, it does kinda feel like that. It almost feels like a school dance. You get in and you don’t know anybody. Everything just sort of goes off of what you feel in the moment. There’s a lot of stuff in that four days that we couldn’t fit into the film but as part of day one, there’s a vetting process for the convicts to gauge everyone’s level of safety because there are men coming from all over the world sometimes. They sit down with all these preconceived notions about what prison is like just like I did the first time I went in. I didn’t know anyone in prison and I had never been in prison, so I was getting all of my ideas from fiction, like television.

So, these guys wanna know…well, it’s their house and they are essentially going to trust the volunteers on the inside who are their brothers, but the guys who are doing this for the first time… They wanna gauge your level of safety, why you have come, what drew you to this. They ask you questions like, “Have you ever been a victim of a crime? How did that make you feel?” Also, part of that is explaining the rules that go on inside this community. Not only with the circle but just basic prison rules, such as, it’s not polite to ask what a person did. You don’t want to focus on those things and they’re very polite to one another. You see Kiki, at one point, says, “pardon my language” when he curses because there’s so may people packed in, they have to be polite to one another or else they would be squabbling all the time. It’s one of those things you don’t expect. They’re so polite, it’s as if visiting your grandmother’s house. 

Wow. At the beginning of the film, when the ‘outsiders’ (Charles, Chris and Brian) introduce themselves and talk about why it is that they’re there, Brian says something about the lure of experiencing a sense of being in danger. So, like you were talking about, there are the preconceived notions of what jail life is and what convicts are like. They’re human like everybody else and we definitely see that in the movie.

Absolutely.

At the beginning of the film, Chris says in the van after group therapy one day, that in our American gender normative culture, men are taught and expected to suppress or hide their emotions. I’m wondering what you think a program like this might look like in a women’s prison? With incarcerated juveniles? 

Some of the guys volunteer because they’ve done this work on the outside in other groups. I know that’s true for me, my brothers and my dad. We worked with at-risk youth and in situations and programs where both genders took part.

The work, what it looks like in there with the men, by their nature and because of the setting, there is aggression. There’s sort of a toxic masculinity that takes place in environments like this and even on the ‘outside,’ at the workplace – anywhere.

I don’t know what it would look in a women’s prison but the Inner Circle Foundation is expanding. They are now going to work in women’s prisons and that means getting women involved. On some level, that might mean allowing women into the program at Folsom Prison to learn how to facilitate, because it’s not rocket science and you don’t need to have a degree. You just need experience doing it yourself and watching it, listening, and so I’m not sure what it would look like in a women’s prison but we’re gonna find out!

Very cool. It can only be good stuff that comes from it because everyone’s intentions are good. It will be interesting to see what sorts of themes come up because masculinity and machoism are definitely huge things when there’s a huge room of men talking about problems that they’ve had or things that they run up against.

Yeah, absolutely. Violence perpetrated against them or violence they’ve perpetrated on others is not gender-specific. To speak towards the intention, that’s exactly how the program functions. The Inner Circle has a set of social skills that they use that have been useful but it’s really sort of…Rob Allbee calls it a “spiritual soup.” When you get a room full of 80 people who, all of their intention is to help one another, then some pretty magical stuff can happen.

Definitely. Well, a lot of magical stuff was captured on your cameras.

Thank you. We were just pointing the cameras and those guys did what they did.

I also like the idea – and it totally makes sense, it doesn’t make sense to do it any other way – that everybody who was a part of the program and part of the film actually went through the four-day intensive program. Was it criteria for them to be involved?

Yes. Absolutely. My brothers and I, my father – we all had the experience going through this. As far as the crew was concerned, we knew it was part of how we basically collaborated with the convicts as to how to make this work. We came to the conclusion that the crew had to be sensitive to what was going on in that room; they had to do it themselves. We had some guys who were willing to volunteer first, and then taking part in the project of filming it was second.

Yeah. You can’t do this, but it would be interesting to see how different the film would have looked if not everyone had gone through the process themselves and really understood it from a first-person perspective.

Yeah. I don’t know that that would have been possible. I don’t know that the convicts would have allowed that. Plus, that would have been the only opportunity those guys had from a technical perspective – to get a look at where they were gonna be shooting. We could describe it to them all day long. You know, Thomas Curley, our sound guy, Matt Rudenberg (additional camera) and Arturo Santamaria, the VP of camera ops, and even the stills photographer, Joe Wigdahl – they had to see the environment they were gonna be in and that’s how we planned from a technical perspective.

The three ‘outsider’ and first time ‘insider’ participants shared and confronted some sort of trauma in their lives, be it abuse or neglect. They open a can of traumatic worms, so to speak. Are participants offered resources or support after group therapy? Have you been in touch with the participants and do you know if they’ve sought out therapy?

We knew the guys from the outside, our subjects, on a personal level and we decided to invite guys from our lives. Brian still does this work and he had done a bit of this work beforehand. The other guys, I don’t know that they have sought out work… The guys who go in, there are programs out here that potentially — I wouldn’t necessarily say “partner” with the Inside Circle Foundation — but what it does is sort of open your eyes to and let you know that there are things on the outside that you can be a part of and a lot of the guys in the room have participated in that.

As far as the guys who are actually convicts, when they get out – and there are about about forty-some guys who’ve gotten out – those guys, along with civilian volunteers and guys who have been on parole and now gotten out on parole, have created a sort of “catch” system for one another so they’re not coming out cold. There are people they can talk to and sort of mentor them on what life on the outside is like after being in prison for a number of years or decades.

I can’t even imagine.

It’s so necessary. We think of rehabilitation as a thing that happens after you’re released from prison and these guys, with this program, are starting it inside prison so that by the time they get out they’re already making difference choices. There’s not a whole lot of support for the guys coming out. They give you a check for like $200 and a bus ticket. You have to get a job, you can no longer vote, housing is such that even if you are trying to, say, stay with a relative who lives in controlled housing, there are rules against allowing felons to even visit you, and that’s a violation of the lease in many instances so it’s really important that these guys have something that allows them not to return and make positive decisions so that can live healthy, fulfilling lives on the outside.

That makes so much sense. You know, one of the main protective factors for people, in terms of substance abuse or mental health issues, is having a social circle so the fact that they have friends to go to makes all the difference in the world, I’m sure.

Yeah, the rate of recidivism of guys who’ve been released, because of what they’re doing, is 0% in the state of California, where this program operates, and so that tells you that there is something to it – having supports.

I can imagine that working on this project with your brothers and father has been an amazing experience. You’ve mentioned that you think that the presence of your family constellation was what enabled the incarcerated men to trust you and allow you in to their sacred space to make the film. Do you think that this would still be the case if you hadn’t attended family therapy together when you were younger? What did you glean from family therapy that helped you in the process of making this film?

When I was about 15 years old, my Dad came home one day and he was different. He grew up on the south side of Chicago, and he didn’t really have a childhood. He didn’t have anybody to support him. He had to figure everything out on his own and a lot of his friends and people he knew wound up in prison or dead and so…nobody tells you how to parent, but it’s one of those jobs where you always make mistake, but when my dad came home after doing this sort of work on the outside, he was a completely different person and he continued to do it. He always made sure that we had the opportunity to participate with him and even my mom, we would do co-ed things on the outside, so our family kind of looks like that circle that you see in the film and so that’s how my brothers and I came to this kind of work…

Lots of people tried to film this before we did and, for various reasons, it was just too difficult to manage and we saw how difficult it was but I think one of the things that we did have, is a lot of those guys saw us come in continually as a family, and so when they would see us they would always say something like, ”You guys are so lucky to have each other; you add something to this even by all being together so that we can see it,” and so I think perhaps it did have something to do with our ability to make it work.

So much of this is about empathy – expressing and exercising empathy. From what I’ve experienced with these guys, they don’t get to experience anywhere else outside of that room. So, I have to imagine, from everything I’ve experienced and what some of the guys told me is just seeing something that we take for granted out here really can do some things in ways that you could have never really imagined for guys in that environment.

I can see what you meant earlier when you said it was kind of an impossible project because how many filmmakers have brothers and a father who work together in the way that you do with your family? It’s kind of like magic!

Yeah! It definitely felt like that at times. I remember when I was, even before I asked my brothers to help me, I was thinking about it and I would talk about it with Angela Sostre, one of the producers, and she would just say, “You need to think about why you’re the one to do this project and nobody else can.” So I was just like, OK, other people have tried and it’s very daunting but I know that my connection with my brothers and my dad – I know that, together, we can make this work.

I’m glad that you pushed through the logistical nightmares and things! I was astounded by the men’s ability to compartmentalize. It’s literally a different world that they’re aware of, and eye contact was such a huge skill or way of connecting in group therapy. In the program, it’s a means of connection, safety, and of being and feeling seen, whereas making eye contact with others on prison grounds is an aggressive gesture that could end in violence. Do you think programs like these, over time, have the ability to change the culture of eye contact and what it means in the prison environment?

Yes, and these are in the interviews, but they explain a lot of rules. I studied anthropology when I was in college and I got into filming through ethnography, which is like personal interviews. One one of the things these guys would say when we would ask them questions about what it is to be in prison, they’d say eye contact is rule #1, day one. You look at somebody in the eye and that is a sign of aggression but you also have to be aware of everything that’s going on around you, 360 degrees, and be watching people’s body language to survive. Eye contact in that room is one of the only places they can do that with people they don’t know, without it being a bad thing.

But we do that even when we’re on the outside, when we’re walking or on public transportation. People, we sort of look away from these connections and it means you’re sort of uninvited; it can be a violation sometimes. So practicing that in there and out here has actually been very important for me in my personal life.

Eye contact is definitely a practice.

Yeah and there are so many different little rules we have in society, between gender, between social settings. It’s a difficult thing to navigate but that’s how we take everything in.

In one of the beginning ceremonies, you see my dad doing a chant that he picked up in his travels to Africa. Some of those indigenous things really mean a lot to those guys inside and it really works. He told everybody to close their eyes; when you remove that experience of sight, then you’re more focused with what’s going on with your body and that’s how important it is. That’s how we connect to one another, through eye contact. For some people it’s really hard to do. Even on the outside it’s an uncomfortable experience.

Definitely, but it’s a practice worth taking on. It’s a life-changing sort of thing.

Yes. When you don’t feel it’s a sign that someone wants something from you, just to acknowledge you… To be acknowledged is so important.

What has this project provided for you on a personal, human level outside of the film world that has surprised you?

I would say, I guess, the foundation itself. What they do in that room has just made my interpersonal skills more sharp. I’m more aware of what stuff is mine and what stuff is someone else’s, and what they may be projecting and what I may be projecting onto different relationships. I’m aware of where that stuff is coming from…I try to be aware of where that stuff is coming from.

The project itself, as far as filming, there were times when it felt impossible, there were times when we were ready to give up and, just like in that room, where people’s intentions make things possible, we never gave up. I know that so much is possible if you just keep trying and people will appear, like Gethin Aldous (filmmaker and Co-Director), Alice Henty (Producer) and Amy Foote (Documentary Editor), who appeared tangentially. She heard about the project and we just really vibed.

Gethin’s intentions added to ours and he was so passionate about this project that he gave it new life; it was just enough fuel to push the thing into getting it finished. So, I feel like never giving up is the key. Know why you’re doing things, have a positive intention and things will work out even if it takes ten years.

Keep making eye contact with people and things will work out, right?

If you wanna boil it down, then, yeah.

I have one last question for you about the word “therapy,” and this is something that I think about a lot because it carries so much stigma.

It’s loaded.

Yeah, it’s totally loaded and it can be a turn off for people who really need that help but won’t go because it’s called “therapy.” I’m wondering if there’s another word we can use to honor “the work” involved in therapy that doesn’t carry the stigma-laden connotations attached to the words “therapy” or “counseling”? Did this question come up at all during the course of the project? What are your thoughts?

For sure. Therapy is such a loaded word that, within the prison establishment, it’s a legal term used to denote a budget item line that this is money the state pays for groups like AA and NA, but they have lots of different words. The guys just call it “the work.” Hence, the title of the film, but even when we were interviewing camera ops to come in, I remember one guy that would not come in because his idea of therapy was that you couldn’t stand on your own two feet and that you were weak. That is not the case. Really, you’re just trying to bring knowledge to a personal place that you didn’t have before, and you’re seeking it.