The DMW Interview with Filmmaker Robert Greenwald

Authored by Ned Sherman on June 19, 2007 - 4:36pm.

On June 13, 2007, I met with award-winning filmmaker, director and producer, Robert Greenwald, at his Los Angeles office and home to Greenwald's new media company, Brave New Films. Here is the transcript from the interview:

You have had great success as a “filmmaker” in the traditional sense of the word. What attracted you to new media?
Focusing on new media has been part and parcel of focusing on documentaries and telling stories that are more directly political in their goals. What I found when I started making my first full length features is that I needed to reach people and reach them quickly. The thing about gatekeepers, good, bad, indifferent, left, right and center, is that they don’t move quickly. That’s the nature of the gatekeeper because there are so many people trying to get in the gate that they have to parse and make decisions. With these films, when we started them, it was really a revolution because it wasn’t about something that happened ten years ago. It was about something happening now, and there was no model out there for this. How do you do a film about something that’s happening now when you want to impact people? You can’t wait two years for it to show on PBS. So that by necessity created the need to reach people quickly. One of my partners, who was MoveOn.org on the first show, knew how to reach people online, so I thought I’m a practical guy, here’s what’s in front of me, let’s try doing that, so we created an environment with MoveOn, and started using them on the distribution side. Then, on the content side, I needed to figure out how to tell a story in two minutes instead of two hours. It’s a way to reach an audience, it’s a way to affect change, and it’s a way to participate in some of these amazing arguments. I wake up in the morning and I can get involved in a way that is not just sending an email to some one about how angry I am. I can actually do something.

How has the Internet changed the media landscape? On the one hand, television news ratings are down, more people are getting their news and information online and there seems to be more segmentation, so that you can pretty much go online and find the point of views that you want to find without having to come into contact with views and opinions that you dislike. On the other hand, there seems to be a bigger opportunity for the truth to get out since the Internet is a democratizing vehicle as well. I’m interested in your thoughts on these two competing and juxtaposed developments.
On the getting truth out side, it is completely liberating. Any day that you have an idea you don’t have to convince the New York Times to run an op-ed or letter or write an article, you can write a blog, you can post something, or in my case you create a video. I can’t tell you what an extraordinary change that is. We are the first generation to embrace this. Can you imagine what it will be like in ten to fifteen years? They won’t even consider the other model existed. This will be the natural way to do it. That’s a wonderful and great radical shift assuming we keep the channels open and they don’t get closed off. So I think the democratization part of it is completely positive. In terms of self selecting so that you only deal with what you agree with, that is one of the shortfalls, if you will, that you essentially get people reinforcing what they already believe. I think it’s too soon to see how that will play out. We are certainly at a time in the electoral world where the current administration made a decision to use that. They ran an election in 2004 which was designed to turn out people who already agreed with them. Whether that is an inevitable or long-term trend, who knows, but it’s going to be interesting to see.

How long can the open and democratizing nature of the Internet last? Is there any fear that big media, or some force, will eventually control these outlets and that the Internet will cease to be the free flow of ideas that it is today?
Definitely, there is a huge concern. What’s happened with big media is that it kind of became big media while people were looking the other way. With the Net that’s not going to happen. Net neutrality is a huge movement – right and left – fighting very hard against the system of the fast track or what many people see as an effort to control the pipes. I’m pretty optimistic that given the size of the people who care passionately about keeping it open and given the fact that in my belief democracy was injured when media was allowed to consolidate so greatly, I don’t think we will allow that to happen again.

Has the Internet replaced television as the main battleground for social and political causes?
I don’t think it has replaced it because television has huge viewership and is still very important, but it’s the ground swell. More and more the debates you see on television start on the Internet. I’ve seen it with my own experience with some of the stuff I’ve done around Fox News, which started on the Internet and then broke its way to cable news and then the networks. The Internet allows for more debate because you’re not limited to two seconds or five seconds or a quick sound bite. I think we are getting to a place where there will be a thousand arguments on the Internet and five of them will end up on television.

Is there more or less accountability in news and information today as opposed to in the past?
I try to stick to what I know. I don’t really know the past well enough to say, but we know for sure that as news has become a monetized commodity, the pressure on news to be profit making has increased and this has increased the pressure to be first. It has increased the pressure to get out there sooner. By being first you get more eyeballs, you make more money. So certainly that is a big pressure that removes some accountability in the rush. The other thing we know for sure its that because of the pressure, journalists are hesitant to criticize those in power because they then cut off their access, which makes it harder for them to get the stories they need to get the viewers to make more money, which also leads to less accountability. These are two strong trends that exist for logical reasons because of the nature of the system. I would assume that there is less accountability today, but I can only talk about what I am seeing.

How do you decide what causes to put your energy behind? What is your vetting process for deciding what to do when you wake up each day?
It’s frighteningly unscientific for a business audience and insanely instinctive. It really is like that thing that someone said about art: I can’t describe art, but I know it when I like it. It’s purely a gut feeling. Now it’s a gut determined, I believe, by my world views. All of our guts are. Mine is a strong connection to underdogs, a proud tradition of wanting to speak out loudly, and, because I’ve made films all my life, an orientation towards those issues that can become personal stories. There are a lot of great issues, but not all can be addressed in two hours or two minutes, so I have to see a way to reach people’s emotions while feeling deeply about it. I have to bring those to things together.

What do you see as the most significant issues that will shape the campaign in 2008, and what role will your work play in that?
First of all, I don’t get involved in electoral campaigns. I stay out of them by choice. I think that my effectiveness can be on the issues. I think we can have a big effect on the issues, whether its Outfoxed, Wal-Mart or War Profiteering. But those films were not about issues of who to vote for. So we’ll stick with that game plan. There’s a new book out by Drew Westen, a psychology professor. Very interesting. He talks about how the brain responds to emotion. In the films and shorts I’ve done, I’m often criticized by people, who agree with me, for not including enough facts. Drew’s point, which I totally agree with, is that this is not how people make up their minds. So in an age of increased video storytelling, be it the Internet or downloaded or the iPod or your telephone, I think that the emotion factor will become more and more important and, therefore, lead to the character factor. In a time of such complexity, people are more likely to vote for someone because they “feel” like he or she is a good guy or “I can trust” him or her, so we’ll see even more of that. Plus there will be a zillion dollars spent on polls and focus groups to figure out how to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

Going back to digital media, any thoughts on where the industry is going? I think a lot of people were caught off guard by the rapid success of MySpace and YouTube. Anything like that that you see coming down the pike?
Well, everyone who knows this area better than I do – like Jim Gilliam and Wes Boyd of MoveOn, who I work with, and are quite brilliant at this - says Facebook is going to kick MySpace in the ass, it is so good. They are incredibly excited about it. Of course, it’s a version of the same thing. So that certainly seems to be a specific. And more generally, the explosion of video viewing is off the charts. It’s no surprise anymore, but it’s is great for someone who makes videos.

NOTE: Robert Greenwald is keynoting at the 4th Annual Digital Media Conference in Silver Spring, Maryland on June 22.

Ned Sherman