The
Evolution of a Filmmaker: An
Interview with Sam Pollard
By Jane Rubinsky
Film and television editor and
documentary producer/director Sam Pollard receives the Riant Theatre’s 2013
Pioneer of the Arts Award for an extraordinary body of work that spans four
decades. His career encompasses both
feature films and documentaries, working in nearly every capacity within the
industry. He has collaborated with
filmmakers such as St. Clair Bourne and Spike Lee and won numerous awards.
He didn’t originally intend to be a
filmmaker. As a young man growing up in
East Harlem, he set his sights on becoming an electrical engineer before
deciding to study marketing at Baruch College.
Three years in, Pollard wasn’t at all happy. A college counselor steered him into a film
and television workshop at WNET/Channel 13, which had been started in 1968
after Dr. King’s assassination. An
effort to get more people of color behind the camera, the one-year program met
two nights a week, bringing in professionals to teach how to shoot and edit,
write scripts, and record sound.
Pollard, one of the youngest in the class, gravitated toward
editing. “It was the first time I ever
felt like I was creative,” he recalls.
He also realized that he “could make a mistake and put it back together”
without the scrutiny of being on location.
“As soon as I was alone in that editing room,” he says, “I knew I had
found something that was for me.”
The following year, in 1972,
Pollard was hired as an apprentice editor by Victor Kanefsky and worked as his
assistant for the next three years. “By
the time I was 25,” says Pollard, “one of his clients who couldn’t afford him
hired me to cut one of my first films.”
As a youngster, Pollard had loved
old Hollywood movies; once he began studying the craft of film, he says, “I
started to fall in love with Federico Fellini and Kurosawa and Robert Bresson,
foreign filmmakers. And then, as I
focused on editing, I really started to look at films for who the editors were,
and what they did in terms of bringing rhythm and pacing and storytelling
structure to the film through the editing process. Dede Allen, whose films like The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, Serpico,
and Dog Day Afternoon I thought were
phenomenally put together, was a big influence on me editorially.”
Pollard’s first project with
Kanefsky was a feature; his second was a documentary, and he was introduced to
a whole new world that he fell in love with.
“What I came away with after working with him for a few years on
documentaries,” says Pollard, “was how important the role of the editor was in
really being a surrogate director, and shaping the story and direction of a
film in the editing process. You really did that in documentaries, where you
didn’t have scripts; you had to really figure out – sometimes by yourself and
sometimes with the director or producer – the arc of a film and how to tell the
story.” Style Wars (1983), a documentary on graffiti culture that he
co-edited with Kanefsky for PBS and which won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in
1984, remains one of his favorite projects to this day.
He has collaborated with Spike Lee
for more than two decades, as editor on films such as Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle
Fever, and Bamboozled as well as
co-producer/editor on documentaries like the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997) and the Emmy and
Peabody Award-winning When the Levees
Broke (2006). Working with Lee is “a
really interesting kind of dynamic,” he says.
“It’s never been one where there’s a lot of open dialogue between us. He’s a very strong director; we will screen
the footage together and he’ll give me his notes and thoughts about what he
likes and doesn’t like, and I’ll take my own notes, and then I’ll shape the
sequences according to his notes and my notes.
Then I’ll show it to him again, and he’ll give me feedback, and I’ll go
back and change it again, and then show it to him again. When I used to edit films for the late St.
Clair Bourne, Saint and I would sit and philosophize and talk about sequences
and the direction of the film for hours. With Spike, we’d never do that.”
At the helm of his own project last
year, Pollard produced and directed Slavery
By Another Name (2012), shedding light on the little-known system of forced
labor that emerged after the abolition of slavery and which persisted until the
onset of the second World War. The
documentary was broadcast nationally on PBS and was nominated for a Grand Jury
Prize at Sundance. The editor on the film
was Pollard’s own son, Jason. “He’s been
coming into editing rooms ever since he was eight or nine,” says Pollard. “We’d worked together before on some smaller
projects, but this was gonna be a big one for both of us. I used to brow-beat him a little,” he
confesses, “but I don’t anymore. He
works hard and is a very creative editor; our relationship is one of
give-and-take.”
Pollard began teaching at Columbia
University in 1988 and has taught at New York University since 1994. “To tell you the truth, I always liked the
idea of giving back; I think that was one of the things that Victor taught me,”
he says. “It’s important to share what you have with the next generation of
people coming up in the business. I
really love looking at these young people and getting them excited. And the students just keep energizing me and
making me still feel excited about filmmaking.”
He is currently in pre-production
with WQED in Pittsburgh on a documentary for American Masters about the life
and work of playwright August Wilson, to be broadcast sometime in 2014. As filmmaking technology changes nearly every
day, says Pollard, things can be done faster; the look and feel is
different. “Now, we don’t edit with
physical film anymore; we edit with computers.
What people need to remember is, even though the technology has evolved,
the thing that’s really important in making anything creative is what’s in a
human being’s mind – what you think and how you view the world. It’s still what’s inside a human being that
informs how you make your films and gives them that vision.”
* * * * *
The Riant Theatre and the Founder & Artistic Director Van Dirk Fisher, will be honoring Sam Pollard with the PIONEER OF THE ARTS AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN FILM & ENTERTAINMENT at the Screening of the Video Diaries Project on Saturday, February 16, 2013 at the Tribeca Grand Hotel - Cinema, 2 Avenue of Americas, NYC at 3:45pm. For tickets to this event go to www.therianttheatre.com.
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