VINTERVIEW: Director Chris McGilvray talks Wine Documentary EDEN (2024)

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What price wine?
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Like the phrase, what price victory?
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Today's Vinterview is with the director of a documentary that asks us, what price wine?
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We celebrate the sacrifices that winemaker and vineyard owners make in pursuit of what they say is their passion, but what about their lives outside of wine?
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What about their families?
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We went into this interview expecting it to be maybe 20 to 30 minutes in length.
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Instead, we chatted in depth about the themes of this extraordinary wine documentary that took seven years to film.
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We had to cut ourselves off to keep it a mere hour.
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And then the director, Chris McIlvery, he will be joining us for a full length wine and movie pairing episode about the Western to end all Westerns once upon a time in the West.
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That episode should drop maybe a day or two after this one.
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So we hope you enjoy this interview.
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We hope you check out Chris's documentary Eden from 2024.
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It's streaming on Plex, I believe, in the States.
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So go see if you can find that and you can rent it on both Apple and YouTube.
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And we hope you join us in two days for the Once Upon a Time in the West episode with Chris.
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Let's get this rolling.
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You not entertained?
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Will Dave and I'm Dallas and this is Ventertainment.
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We have opinions on just about everything.
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Sometimes those opinions are spot on.
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Sometimes they go down easier with a glass of wine.
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This is entertainment.
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The wine.
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Preparing Podcast.
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Welcome everyone to Vint- Entertainment, the podcast where we pair wine with entertainment.
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It is as simple as that.
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And today we have a very special guest with us, Chris McIlvray.
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First we'll be discussing with us what is arguably the Western to end all Westerns, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinal, and James Robards.
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And he and we will, of course, pair wines with that indisputable classic.
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So make sure to listen to that episode right after this one.
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But for now, let's learn everything about Chris and why he's here on this podcast all about wine and movie pairing.
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So Christopher McGilvray is an award winning independent filmmaker based in Santa Cruz, California.
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His feature film Eden premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival in 2024, winning the Audience Award.
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It is currently distributed by Gravitas Ventures in North America and continues to engage audiences through experiential screening events, which we know all about.
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We got our first experiential screening event coming up in June.
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We'll hear all about that at the end of this episode in the housekeeping.
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But for now, continuing with Chris, he studied film at the University of Southern California and linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directly out of college.
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He worked as an associate producer for Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker David Hoffman.
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His directorial debut, The Silence, took home awards for Best Short Film Editing and Best Western at the Action on Film Festival in 2009.
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His subsequent short films screened across the country at various film festivals, and in 2010 he began working full-time as a branded content filmmaker.
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His current company, Nomadic Bear Productions, has produced branded content for a wide variety of companies and organizations, including Ridge Vineyards, Oracle, EMI Records, and Mayor of Oakland, Liddy Staffs Oakland Promise.
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Chris, welcome to the interview segment of the entertainment, Vinterview segment, as it were.
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I'm holding for the applause on that one.
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Bravo! You do them today man and you know can't wait to hear all about your film work and especially the Eden documentary but are you ready?
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I am ready, After a fun, long intro like that, it's always weird when somebody reads your bio.
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It's such a weird intro.
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I'm like, oh, wow, are those all the things that you did in your one little paragraph?
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Right right oh It's way too much it's way too much um We had another guy on one time and like I got to like the eight bullet point and I was like, fuck you like picks pick three This is just a little intro.
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Let's get into the actual talk.
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Yeah, speaking of that so ah Chris welcome again, let's start with talking about your own Western by the way Bravo I'm making a goddamn Western.
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We don't get enough of those.
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I have one in the can myself I've written and God knows if it will ever see the light of day But I love the format love the genre and we need to see more Westerns Yeah, your very first short film was the silence the log line reads ah In the fading days of the Western frontier, a group of outlaws journeyed through the desert in search of another score.
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As isolation and futility turned the posse upon itself, the leader works to prevent an all-out bloodbath.
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So, tell us about how you came to make this film.
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What were the key inspirations?
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Well, you know, what was what was the process?
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What was the the the issue because I'm sure every filmmaker has a singular issue that if they could go back and change that one thing, right?
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Just the one man.
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Just the one.
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Oh, the silence.
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was, God, that was almost 20 years ago.
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And so it's fun.
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like, know, it's okay.
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I don't mind aging.
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Doesn't bother me that much.
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It's one of the things I like about wine, right?
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It gets better with age.
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So I like to maybe think I do that too.
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I don't know.
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So I always loved Westerns.
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Westerns were something that I got really, really excited about at a relatively young age because they just have this cool sense of mixing like American mythology and really, really strong iconography.
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And one of the first things I happened to love about cinema was the imagery side of it.
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know, like even from a young age, there were always those images that would sort of stick with me when I saw a film that I absolutely loved.
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And that was the thing that I remembered probably even more than, you know, the story or particular lines.
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would always have these images burned.
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the back of my head.
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So I always loved sort of the iconography of Westerns.
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And, uh you know, this was in my early 20s when I decided to make this movie and actually made it with my older brother.
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Daniel was the only film we ever made together.
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um And, you know, basically he, you know, sort of took on more of the producing.
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I took on more of the directing from a script that I wrote, but we definitely shared both both hats there.
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And at the time I was really starting to get really interested in lot of European cinema.
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And so I had had this love for Westerns and, in particular, I love Sergio Leone Westerns, which is something we'll obviously get into a little later here.
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And I was sort of marrying it with my like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky phase, you know, my existential crisis phase, right?
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Lots of reflection.
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Right.
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And I was like, dude, what happens if you like basically took like uh John Ford or Sergio Leone style Western and put those characters in Central Crisis movie?
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um So that was our hope.
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That was what we were going for uh with the silence.
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And, you know, as you can imagine, I'm not going to pretend that the script was the most logical.
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uh I mean, one of the first starting points that we had as a challenge is we had like no money.
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And so we couldn't even afford horses.
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And so, you know, when you don't have horses in a Western, it's like literally it's characters just wandering around aimlessly through the desert.
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And so it's like right off the bat, we're in sort of you know, absurdist world right there because oh You got the Bergman thing going on, know, it's slightly heightened reality.
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Yeah.
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Yeah Totally.
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It's heighten reality.
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But the thing that, you know, I think really holds up with it is a lot of the like fun iconography, like, you know, especially with when I think of Sergio Leone, we all think of the showdowns, right?
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And one of the things that's really cool about the showdowns from like a filmmaking standpoint is that he's actually much less interested in the actual violence.
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It's the buildup.
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and the tension building and all of the, you know, everybody preparing for that actual moment.
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So I knew we wanted to like end with this cool showdown.
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And then we also wanted to have, you know, there's this character we literally just named everybody like, you know, there's the leader, there's the kid, there's, you know, the leaders like, you know, right hand man who's the drunk, who's basically just the, you know, the drunk alcoholic who basically has like a moment of um You know, sort of has an epiphany and realizes that his life is wasted and he gets a nice, you know, monologue about how he's essentially wasted his life by, you know, going around and being a hired gun and doing nothing meaningful.
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um That's kind of the Bergman, you know, Tarkovsky stuff.
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And then at the end, it very much ends with, you know, sort of Leoni style Western showdown.
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And it was just such a fun.
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project to get to do and you know, we actually, you know, got to play at some, you know, regional smaller festivals because it was like, like you were saying in the beginning, Talis, almost nobody makes Westerns, especially at this point.
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This was, you know, like 2005, 2006, that kind of thing.
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It was just sort of a, you know, it was somewhat of a dormant genre.
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down.
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Well, I people struggle with it, especially in festivals where genre is so key, like what genre are you?
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Is so key to where they're programming you or whether you even fit within what the festival is looking for.
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like a Western, is it a drama?
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Is it action?
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Is it a thriller?
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And it's kind of it's like, yes.
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The answer, you know, and so.
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of all of those boxes totally.
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It does.
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Yeah.
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But then it doesn't fit, you know, exactly into any of those things.
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And so I can imagine a western short being especially like, could fit anywhere, but you also you're easily rejected from being a natural fit from just about anywhere, is.
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Oh, yeah.
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Real quick, do you remember what camera you guys shot on?
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Yeah, totally.
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Canon XL one.
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So, yeah, we are talking, you know, what is that guy?
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He is the um it's mini DV, right?
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Standard definition mini DV.
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And it's like and we have an HD cam of it um showed it on, you know, a massive screen in um Oklahoma.
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We got to go to this.
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uh small film festival in Duncan, Oklahoma called Trail Dance because they love Westerns as you could imagine.
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And they had an enormous, enormous screen.
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It actually surprisingly held up pretty well for standard, deaf, you know, 480p.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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man.
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was the same camera they shot 28 days later.
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Right.
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Yep.
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It's that camera.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Fix lenses and everything like.
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just the one fixed zoom like we tried to do like one rack focus and I had to put the characters like 75 feet apart to be able to have a rack focus you know it was pretty f***ing yeah like there's no such thing as shallow depth of field with those lenses There was that one shot which actually was well done you had the two guys standing I guess it like it's probably like 35 degrees in the background of a carrot in the foreground stagger to kind of add some depth of solid that was very solid job Thanks man, I appreciate it.
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Thank you.
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That was a fun project.
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One of the things I also learned from that one is that I had a very weird and sort of absurd sense of humor that didn't necessarily translate in the way that I thought it would, you know?
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And it's like, when I wrote that script, I thought a lot of it was really funny.
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And then watching audience reactions, people didn't.
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dead somber everyone was taking a dead somber yeah Yeah, sometimes that humor is only in your mind's eye and then you gotta like manipulate the hell out of it to get it on screen, which you know, that's the idea.
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Yeah, I learned a lot from that one.
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Yeah, I think humor you start to realize why humor is so broad most of the time is because people don't understand you're doing humor if you're not Heligraphing like Comedie del Arte type things where it's like this is why we do the face and the gestures and it's like because now you know you're watching a comedy and so now everything can be funny, but if you don't tell people it's a comedy they're like, huh?
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Yeah, so yeah.
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Yeah It's so true.
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And it's funny, it's like Sergio Leone, he's so good at that.
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He's so good at the Comedia dell'arte.
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Like, it's why my nine-year-old daughter loves watching these movies, because the facial expressions are so over the top.
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So much of it is those extreme close-ups of just the face.
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And it is, it's like telegraphing to such an extreme amount, which is a really fun thing to do.
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So for your shorts on that note, I actually wanted to ask you because you've made not just the silence, but you've made a number of shorts throughout your career.
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are they, do you have plans to make them available in any way, or form?
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Or I tried to search for them.
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I could not find the shirts themselves, only the shorts.
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Where, what's the status of all of that with you writing?
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You know, that's a great question because like I made them and they were mostly part of my, you know, artistic development, you know, and yeah, it was part of my real like initially I wanted to be a narrative filmmaker.
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That was my dream.
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And I mean, you know, truthfully, like, do I think that I still have a feature like, you know, Western in me?
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I think I do at some point, but I've really become a documentary based filmmaker.
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And so it sort of lies outside of my brand, which is part of that.
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So it's like they're kind of in a nowhere land.
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I show them to friends.
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They're all on Vimeo.
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um But it's not something that I'm like heavily leveraging right now because it doesn't.
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It's very it's like my student work, you know, it's like all stuff that I.
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I worked on to develop into the filmmaker that I've become, but I don't see it as part of like my traditional, you know, brand and repertoire.
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It's not necessarily with Nomadic Bear Productions.
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You know, it's interesting.
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um Another filmmaker I met recently, the DTLA Art Walk, if you don't know, we are in the process of putting together this uh wine cellar cinema.
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uh And so we are sort of sourcing uh short filmmakers.
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And uh two of the filmmakers that came across are currently in the documentary space and did lots of narrative shorts.
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And they kind of have the exact same perspective as you do, they it's not necessarily something they're interested in putting a whole lot of energy behind at the moment, I guess, because they brand it themselves, in part.
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em But I'm curious about that, because you're you are the third person I've heard this sort of this angle about that from in a while.
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Well, that note, one of the reasons a lot of filmmakers are, you know, they've done their shorts, they might have a feature in their future, they would love to make a career out of narrative filmmaking and things of that nature.
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you found that the pathway was not so easy by trying to go with these shorts.
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Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Because we are we know a lot of filmmakers that feel exactly the same way where there is.
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the pathway that used to exist, kind of the pathway we grew up believing existed.
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Starting in the 2010s, like roughly when you were starting, it of, it vanished.
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And you can still make shorts, you can get in festivals, they'll screen at festivals.
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That's about it.
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That's about it.
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Like, have the magical ride where you like premiere at Sundance and play all your cards right and everything is great, it's very, very challenging to be able to get to that next step, to be able to, you know, get a talent manager, to be able to get signed, to be able to get someone to take a look at your feature length script and...
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Yeah, that's actually a really interesting conversation.
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Also just about documentaries in general.
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Documentaries are going through this tremendous financial crisis because it's actually sort of a similar model where, you know, a documentary is largely produced in an independent space.
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And then it is, you know, brought to film festivals where it receives awards and accolade with the hopes of being able to attract, you know.
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distributors, right?
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That's the standard model right there.
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One of the things that that model is broken because, partially because the kind of films that festivals are looking to program in terms of documentaries tend to be, you know, very strong, intense social issue documentaries that are really hard to watch and really, really important stories that really, really need to be supported.
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And we all need to get out there, but when a distributor takes a look at that, they realize that the number of eyeballs that they're ever going to be able to drive to actually watch it is very, very small because especially in a modern world that we're all living in, at the end of the day, do you really want to like watch the movie that's going to make you feel terrible about yourself as a person when literally you're experiencing that feeling all the time while you're reading the news throughout the day.
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You know, people like sort of escapist content.
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so I think that's one of the things the documentaries are trying to figure out is how to find a balance between making essential stories, exploring stories that haven't been heard before and perspectives that haven't been explored while at the same time making it entertaining.
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Because that's one of the things that narrative films just as an industry tended at least have more of an emphasis on is you got.
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Point for much of it now even yeah, I mean these solitary point and soul point of much of it now, you yeah That becomes a problem in and of itself.
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But I mean, you know, with my actual shorts, I struggled to be able to get in to break into festivals a lot of the time.
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You know, I think it took me a long time to realize and I probably didn't even realize this until after I was done making shorts that a short is really nothing like a feature.
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think most people start by thinking like, I'm going to make a short film.
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that is the like has to have a three act structure.
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It's just a shortened version of what my feature is going to be.
00:20:34.288 --> 00:20:37.901
And that's, that's really not what the form of a short should be.
00:20:37.901 --> 00:20:38.570
Yeah.
00:20:38.570 --> 00:20:40.632
In and out super quick.
00:20:40.632 --> 00:20:42.903
Give it a nice fun little twist.
00:20:42.903 --> 00:20:50.655
Give them something at the end to, either make them think, make them laugh, And then you're out, dude.
00:20:50.655 --> 00:20:52.856
That's the form of a short.
00:20:52.856 --> 00:20:58.057
And I never figured out how It's a tasting menu rather than a 12 course dinner.
00:20:58.190 --> 00:20:59.260
Totally.
00:20:59.602 --> 00:21:38.009
Yeah, but it's meant to be its own thing and standalone just like short stories like in prose format versus a novel and short stories are not meant to be chapter one they're not or even a You know a very reduced version like you're like I'll expand this into a novel someday but for now and I think a lot of filmmakers that's the problem is they want to make proof of concepts and so you wind up with just a shrunk down version of Something that you really want to make which is going to be your 90 minute version And it can work okay as a short but yeah, the best shorts are the ones where it's like they exist for their own purpose and Standalone in that way.
00:21:38.009 --> 00:21:48.040
Yeah That's always the best advice I have to people that are going to be making a short and it's it's hard to like train your brain to think that way.
00:21:48.602 --> 00:22:02.038
I actually think short stories um translate better to feature films a lot of the time than a novel does because the timeline of a novel is so like, dude, I'm never going to make war and peace into a film.
00:22:02.038 --> 00:22:03.632
There's been what?
00:22:03.632 --> 00:22:05.430
Ten generations of an anomaly.
00:22:05.430 --> 00:22:06.382
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:22:06.382 --> 00:22:07.797
it's not happening, bro.
00:22:07.797 --> 00:22:08.829
It's not happening.
00:22:08.829 --> 00:22:09.740
Yeah.
00:22:10.859 --> 00:22:22.095
Well, I know, you know, there was a we know producer had hope who was like, gee, old school producer, 150 films under his belt, been producing since the 90s.
00:22:22.095 --> 00:22:28.376
And he essentially stopped producing indie films because he can't make a living doing it anymore.
00:22:28.477 --> 00:22:33.138
His wife just did a documentary and they're pushing it for all it's worth.
00:22:33.439 --> 00:22:38.050
But he's basically been a big champion of, you know, we've got to find another way.
00:22:38.050 --> 00:22:40.107
We've got to find like pathways.
00:22:40.107 --> 00:22:50.423
because it's like if I can't make a true blue living with my resume, it's like, don't know how any of you are making a living, you know, doing anything out there.
00:22:50.423 --> 00:22:53.535
And so we've got to do something else.
00:22:53.535 --> 00:22:55.498
And streamers, can't pay.
00:22:55.498 --> 00:22:57.218
And everything's more expensive to make, right?
00:22:57.218 --> 00:23:03.901
So on the one hand, no single platform can get enough eyeballs on your thing, can make enough money off of it.
00:23:03.901 --> 00:23:08.983
Yet to make it just keeps getting more and more expensive in the first place.
00:23:08.983 --> 00:23:20.958
So that dissonance is also kind of one of the biggest hurdles to all of this is we need more money in order to make these things and yet no one can give us more money to make these things.
00:23:20.981 --> 00:23:32.454
Yeah, like Coppola famously said, you know, a couple of years ago, he's like, look, the next generation of filmmakers, they're all going to be doing this as a side hustle for they're going to like basically have your job.
00:23:32.454 --> 00:23:52.075
And you've got to find a job that doesn't have, you know, doesn't tax your, you know, personal and intellectual space so much that you can't make movies on the side because you can't it's just almost impossible to make cinematic art and make money doing it, so...
00:23:52.450 --> 00:24:05.587
I like that Coppola said that he's a guy who like renovated a uh hotel while he was filming Megalopolis like he found a second job and like you know made it come into being just so he could have a second job while he was still on his office.
00:24:05.587 --> 00:24:09.305
um post audio facility.
00:24:10.470 --> 00:24:12.692
Hotel into this thing totally.
00:24:13.171 --> 00:24:13.721
Amazing.
00:24:13.721 --> 00:24:15.337
So are those video links for your shorts?
00:24:15.337 --> 00:24:18.076
Are they like are they listed or are they private?
00:24:18.076 --> 00:24:19.720
Like can people buy?
00:24:19.736 --> 00:24:21.688
I can put him, yeah I'll send him to you guys.
00:24:21.688 --> 00:24:24.060
Perfect, set him to us and we'll share him.
00:24:24.311 --> 00:24:25.025
Yeah.
00:24:25.259 --> 00:24:26.718
Now would you be funny?
00:24:27.102 --> 00:24:35.185
It's fun for people to see that work because it's very different than what I do, you know, now.
00:24:35.185 --> 00:24:53.987
uh As I started this conversation with, it's very different than what Nomadic Bear became, because like what happened was that I made all of these short films and, you know, sort of developed my voice and they're mostly, you know, different genres, but very, very visual.
00:24:53.987 --> 00:24:56.357
That was always sort of a my emphasis.
00:24:56.357 --> 00:24:57.698
also learned I'm not a writer.
00:24:57.698 --> 00:25:05.798
I was one of the things I figured out because I wrote all those things myself and I'm like, yeah, I don't know, Screenwriting, not my strong suit.
00:25:05.798 --> 00:25:14.597
But, you know, in 2010, I, you know, met another friend who's a filmmaker who's a little bit older than me.
00:25:14.597 --> 00:25:27.267
And he had been in the tech industry for about, you know, 15 or 20 years and was getting sick of it and looking to be able to pivot to be able to make, you know, sort of corporate video communications.
00:25:27.267 --> 00:25:44.090
And so he came, we met and had this idea of being able to make these sort of cinematic branded documentaries for different companies.
00:25:44.090 --> 00:25:49.573
And so we initially started in the tech industry, did some recruitment videos and that kind of thing.
00:25:49.573 --> 00:25:52.344
And I'd never even thought about documentaries.
00:25:52.344 --> 00:25:53.773
was like, I didn't.
00:25:53.773 --> 00:25:59.594
really watched that many documentaries because I was a hardcore filmic language guy.
00:25:59.594 --> 00:26:10.773
I'm a very classic, like, you know, really, really into the auteur theory and the European masters and the Asian masters and then the American, all that kind of stuff.
00:26:10.773 --> 00:26:11.374
Right.
00:26:11.814 --> 00:26:16.354
And so I started doing it, you know, because they would pay me.
00:26:16.354 --> 00:26:58.573
And it was really interesting because I found one of the things I initially found was that like that problem that I had about being able to sit down with a blank page and write a script went away because I was working with a story that actually exists, other individual stories and helping them sort of take their personal narrative and actually elevate it to a higher theme by juxtaposing it with other narratives and other people's individual narratives to be able to make you know, something that hopefully is more relevant to, you know, people who don't even know anything about your industry, who don't care about your product.
00:26:58.573 --> 00:27:11.979
And the other thing that I loved is being able to walk into a living, breathing actual scene and consider it in a cinematic way of how we're going to actually capture all this stuff.
00:27:11.979 --> 00:27:18.465
largely shoot a lot of B-roll when you're doing, you know, a documentary.
00:27:18.465 --> 00:27:21.768
But that's actually the visual language of your film.
00:27:21.768 --> 00:27:30.492
You you largely have like an interview that, you know, it's just a talking head, but seeing the talking head is not very compelling.
00:27:30.492 --> 00:27:42.509
And so instead you have to think about how to instantly make a cinematic sequence out of something that you don't have control over that's just happening in front of you.
00:27:42.509 --> 00:27:47.576
So you're like, all right, if I can capture, you know, closeups from this perspective and then.
00:27:47.576 --> 00:27:55.798
pull back and get the wide shot here and, you know, do a little bit of slow motion here, that kind of thing.
00:27:55.798 --> 00:28:04.279
You get all of these pieces that then in the edit, you get to sort of be able to construct an entire piece of film out of.
00:28:04.279 --> 00:28:17.134
it's like, it's a little bit more of a like intuitive thing versus a completely, you know, David Fincher style, complete control of the world.
00:28:17.877 --> 00:28:28.952
myself and my department heads dream of every single aspect and make complete control of like, you know, how that napkin is placed, you know, 50 feet from the camera on the back right there.
00:28:29.250 --> 00:28:30.053
Yeah.
00:28:30.700 --> 00:28:56.044
Well, I noticed in the the Eden documentary too, especially having just watched Once Upon a Time in the West, and then I went and watched the Eden documentary, you did a thing that you don't see that often in documentaries, but you used it not sparingly either, but the you would have your your talking heads, your your subjects, you would actually capture and keep in the movie the silences and their hesitations.
00:28:56.044 --> 00:29:10.382
And they're just like watching their face try to work through something and figure out how they wanted to put it into words and stumble over the words and then no stop and maybe go back and try it again.
00:29:10.382 --> 00:29:15.178
And that's not something a lot of the times those are the takes that don't get used in the documentary.
00:29:15.178 --> 00:29:17.229
You know, they just they wipe all that out.
00:29:17.229 --> 00:29:29.996
And I really appreciated that the themes of the documentary come through so much more strongly in terms of what the struggles of these people were, and especially as a family, because like they were they were dedicated.
00:29:29.996 --> 00:29:38.147
They were tight knit and yet they were struggling in a lot of like each individual in their own separate way.
00:29:38.147 --> 00:29:48.421
And uh the documentary is very good at making them more not just subjects of a documentary, but human in that way where you don't documentaries rarely have characters in that way.
00:29:48.421 --> 00:29:50.771
But then you let those moments breathe.
00:29:50.771 --> 00:29:53.363
And it felt very coming off of one spot a time in the West.
00:29:53.363 --> 00:29:58.433
like, wow, these are the closeups of the face and the face is just working and you're just like.
00:29:58.496 --> 00:30:03.191
leaving the camera on it and being like, you could, you'll say something when you say something.
00:30:03.191 --> 00:30:05.567
Let's just, let's just hold this here for a minute.
00:30:05.628 --> 00:30:06.430
Yeah.
00:30:06.604 --> 00:30:17.540
That is kind of the magic of like a skilled documentarian, by the way, knowing to just let the fucking camera roll and run and people will reveal themselves.
00:30:17.540 --> 00:30:21.834
like you were saying, Chris, you have all that later to kind of piece together.
00:30:21.834 --> 00:30:28.038
Because I imagine sometimes you don't even see the magic you're getting on set because it is, you long form.
00:30:28.038 --> 00:30:30.594
You're recording for a year, two years, whatever it is.
00:30:30.594 --> 00:30:30.990
Yep.
00:30:30.990 --> 00:30:37.155
uh That is, uh Dave's point, to grieve everything he said, that is kind of the magic of this doc.
00:30:37.155 --> 00:30:44.542
um And another thing I think which is beautiful about uh Eden is since we're all, we're currently into the Eden portion.
00:30:44.542 --> 00:30:45.053
We're there.
00:30:45.053 --> 00:30:47.986
We're in the Eden portion now.
00:30:47.986 --> 00:30:56.798
um I think one thing that you often don't find in documentaries is this sort of...
00:30:56.798 --> 00:30:59.859
full circle relationship moments, right?
00:30:59.859 --> 00:31:19.093
Because what you end up doing with the parentage of the vineyard of the vintage of the winery um between the couple and how they started, um and then ultimately showcasing how different they are, those two individuals are just completely different people.
00:31:19.253 --> 00:31:26.471
And We don't necessarily know that until the halfway point when the sun sort of brings it up and essentially says they're completely different people.
00:31:26.471 --> 00:31:28.372
They should not be together.
00:31:28.853 --> 00:31:31.053
They just should not be together.
00:31:31.653 --> 00:31:34.094
Nothing about it works on paper.
00:31:34.153 --> 00:31:45.037
And another thing you do so well is m in the doc is without saying it, you highlight this sort of dissonance between the father and the son.
00:31:45.477 --> 00:32:27.442
And uh Seeing that son sort of create this surrogate father relationship with the I forget his name the uh Andreas um was stroke a genius bringing that in and softening that sort of relationship and and sort of illustrating like well He has had some softer people in his life to kind of just guide him and nudge him in the right direction and not this Alpha kind of concept of a father that's driving and really stoic um So it's just a fantastic kind of chronicle of this uh family and this vineyard and job well done, man.
00:32:27.442 --> 00:32:28.123
Looks great.
00:32:28.123 --> 00:32:31.979
Great shots, great narrative, great weaving, all of it, great editing, all of it.
00:32:31.979 --> 00:32:32.970
Good stuff.
00:32:33.179 --> 00:32:35.180
I mean, thank you guys so much.
00:32:35.180 --> 00:32:40.998
it's like, I mean, yeah, you guys hit on so many points there that Yeah, we do that.
00:32:40.998 --> 00:32:42.683
We tend to overwhelm, so sorry.
00:32:42.683 --> 00:32:43.404
Go.
00:32:47.079 --> 00:33:09.413
You know, I'm a big fan of slow cinema and in particular in as the movement of cinema, especially popular cinema has moved more towards a more manic, hectic, know, cuttier, especially as we're getting more influenced by YouTube film.
00:33:09.413 --> 00:33:13.314
um more intense experience.
00:33:13.314 --> 00:33:20.834
There's this whole other movement that's the counter movement to that, which is slow cinema led by like, you know, the Hungarian filmmaker Bellatar.
00:33:20.834 --> 00:33:39.701
I don't know if you guys have ever seen a Bellatar film, like Satsang Tango is literally a six and a half hour movie and they purposefully chose to hold on any individual shot way longer than anybody, including themselves.
00:33:39.701 --> 00:33:40.603
is comfortable with.
00:33:40.603 --> 00:33:47.806
I mean, we're talking like, have like 15 minute tracking shots of characters trudging through the mud.
00:33:47.806 --> 00:33:56.500
and even the we're talking about today like you know another they hold on some shots there man Once upon a time like that is not in a hurry man.
00:33:56.500 --> 00:34:27.001
No, it'll it really Sergio Leone is not in a hurry and it's like so and I think that that is one of the curses of a lot of modern filmmaking is the people are so Nervous about losing audience attention and retention that they like are Just jumping the gun all the time And one of the best things that you learn from watching, especially classic movies, is take your time.
00:34:27.001 --> 00:34:35.208
And if it's an interesting enough scenario and interesting enough character, it's always going to be compelling.
00:34:35.208 --> 00:34:47.407
And so like when I think of like Reed in our film, Eden, who's the son, Reed is one of the most internal people I have ever encountered in my entire life.
00:34:47.688 --> 00:34:49.559
Absolutely fascinating.
00:34:49.559 --> 00:34:54.291
but it's very hard for him to find the words to be able to express himself.
00:34:54.291 --> 00:35:05.085
And so by nature, in order to really do him justice and turn him into a character, which is another thing you brought up, Dave.
00:35:05.085 --> 00:35:17.501
For me, if I put somebody on film, I come from the old narrative world where it's like, you don't take two characters that could have been one.
00:35:17.501 --> 00:35:19.021
You eliminate one.
00:35:19.021 --> 00:35:21.501
and then you make it just one character.
00:35:21.501 --> 00:35:31.302
So if somebody's gonna be in a film, that you should know who they are as a person and give them the screen time to develop them into a character.
00:35:31.302 --> 00:35:45.282
can't stand when you have to have a lower third to be able to tell you who this person speaking is and give them justification for their opinion.
00:35:45.641 --> 00:35:59.643
And so many documentaries are made of like, literally getting as many celebrities as you possibly can to be able to talk about why this person matters and everybody gets their five second sound bite.
00:35:59.643 --> 00:36:01.934
This is the exact opposite of that.
00:36:01.934 --> 00:36:24.253
It's like I wanted to really spend time with these people and they're pretty normal, regular people that happen to make something that's extremely well received and well made, but they're very normal, regular people.
00:36:24.253 --> 00:36:44.070
so my favorite moments from that film are always those moments where somebody like Reed is sitting there contemplating what the significance of growing up on Mount Eden is stated, right?
00:36:44.092 --> 00:36:45.818
Yeah Right.
00:36:46.318 --> 00:36:48.099
An isolated mountaintop.
00:36:48.099 --> 00:36:50.760
Right, right.
00:36:50.760 --> 00:36:59.213
And actually, right before we keep talking about this, I just realized we should tell people what this documentary is real briefly, because we haven't actually said it in audio at this point.
00:36:59.213 --> 00:37:01.255
I'm sure people can read the description of this episode.
00:37:01.255 --> 00:37:14.239
But this is Eden released in 2024 about the Mount Eden Vineyard and Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, considered to have the longest lineage of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in all of North America.
00:37:14.465 --> 00:37:18.009
So that is the documentary, the family that runs the Eden Winery.
00:37:18.009 --> 00:37:20.251
That is what this movie chronicles.
00:37:20.251 --> 00:37:21.992
And so Reed is the son.
00:37:21.992 --> 00:37:35.726
And one of the things, it's a great theme that we discover where the parents, before they had kids, it's one thing for them to decide, ooh, like a nice rural away from everybody, home and vineyard up on a mountaintop.
00:37:35.726 --> 00:37:37.204
But then you have kids.
00:37:37.204 --> 00:37:43.789
And the next generation are like one of the, at one point in the documentary, the kids are like, we had to learn how to negotiate.
00:37:43.820 --> 00:37:51.432
them taking us down to see our friends because the friends would never come up to us because we were the only thing up on this bloody mountain.
00:37:51.432 --> 00:37:54.432
know, it's like civilization was down there.
00:37:54.474 --> 00:38:01.436
And so they struggled to love the winery and the vineyard as much as their parents did.
00:38:01.436 --> 00:38:05.097
And they struggled with their own relationship with it.
00:38:05.097 --> 00:38:07.617
That's something the documentary, I think, explores.
00:38:07.617 --> 00:38:30.007
beautifully actually before anyone else says anything else one quick thing Dallas make sure to center yourself on the camera there you keep disappearing every time you start talking so you're still disappearing you're still disappearing it's such awkward social media clips when like the person's talking and they're- the talking is like doing this That's all you see of me is like half a face.
00:38:30.382 --> 00:38:33.327
All the- B-roll, b-roll, you know?
00:38:33.327 --> 00:38:36.525
Just throw some b-roll over it, nobody wants to see you talking about Exactly.
00:38:36.525 --> 00:38:45.846
On the question of B-roll, you had clips throughout this documentary of the main two parents, the husband and wife duo that run this winery.
00:38:45.846 --> 00:38:48.925
You have them at all sorts of ages.
00:38:49.186 --> 00:38:53.925
Were they sitting on some footage from when they were younger?
00:38:54.525 --> 00:38:56.925
What was the span of time?
00:38:58.190 --> 00:39:03.570
Yeah, so it's seven years and it wasn't intended to be that, you know.
00:39:04.349 --> 00:39:08.090
It's obviously, as you can imagine, a pretty epic and long story.
00:39:08.090 --> 00:39:12.409
I'll try and tell it in a somewhat concise manner.
00:39:12.550 --> 00:39:28.181
So in 2014, towards the end of it, I got hired by the Santa Cruz Mountain Wine Growers Association to be able to make a promotional film of, you know, sort of tracking the 2015 vintage.
00:39:28.181 --> 00:39:29.943
with four separate wineries.
00:39:29.943 --> 00:39:37.264
Those wineries were Ridge Vineyards, Mount Eden, excuse me, Thomas Fogarty and stores.
00:39:37.425 --> 00:39:40.527
And at the time, I'd done a lot of work in agriculture.
00:39:40.527 --> 00:39:43.367
I really loved filming craft, that kind of thing.
00:39:43.367 --> 00:39:44.789
But I didn't know anything about wine.
00:39:44.789 --> 00:39:51.550
I drank wine, thought it was cool, was not intellectually engaged in any way, or form.
00:39:51.672 --> 00:39:55.393
And I was super excited about this because I love the Santa Cruz Mountains.
00:39:55.393 --> 00:39:59.030
That's, you know, my home region for you know, wine.
00:39:59.030 --> 00:40:01.110
And so I was like, all right, it sounds cool.
00:40:01.110 --> 00:40:08.173
And so we get to spend that entire vintage of 2015 tracking it and doing these interviews.
00:40:08.173 --> 00:40:28.266
And I got to learn about winemaking from some of the best and coolest winemakers out there, like Paul Draper from Ridge Vineyards and Jeffrey Patterson from Mount Eden and Nathan Candler, you know, Thomas Fogarty and, you know, John Olney and all of these really, really Amazing people.
00:40:28.266 --> 00:40:42.746
One of the things that was fun for me is that a lot of it was spending time in the vineyards and actually, you know, sort of documenting the experience of the amazing amount of labor that actually goes into producing these wines.
00:40:42.746 --> 00:40:47.346
And so I fell in love with the vineyards even more before I fell in love with the wine.
00:40:47.346 --> 00:40:52.246
And then once you get the intellectual bug with wine, then it gets really interesting.
00:40:53.306 --> 00:40:55.150
So one way to put it.
00:40:55.150 --> 00:40:56.983
You're going back once that hits.
00:40:56.983 --> 00:40:58.045
Still going back, man.
00:40:58.045 --> 00:40:58.545
Still going.
00:40:58.545 --> 00:41:02.961
It's sort of an endless cycle, you know, until my bank account runs out.
00:41:02.961 --> 00:41:04.242
Oh, shit.
00:41:04.242 --> 00:41:21.853
my goodness, oh our wine for this podcast and let me tell you there are there's no amount of patreon that can keep up with us it's a problem it is definitely an expensive intellectual habit.
00:41:21.853 --> 00:41:24.534
It's not like, you know, just watching movies.
00:41:24.534 --> 00:41:28.034
Literally, you watch movies, you used to be able to rent them, you know, that kind of thing.
00:41:28.034 --> 00:41:29.713
It's not that expensive.
00:41:30.190 --> 00:41:40.414
Well, in streaming nowadays, have a streaming service and you've got like thousands at your fingertips and just just touch scotch month to month and then you've got more thousands at your fingertips.
00:41:40.414 --> 00:41:57.960
It's, know, a really fun fact about back in the heyday of DVDs at the peak of DVD sales and releases, which I think was 2006, there were roughly 30,000 feature films released on DVD at that point in time and.
00:41:58.661 --> 00:41:59.742
In total.
00:41:59.838 --> 00:42:39.621
like all you had to choose from was 30,000 exactly and right now in 20 I don't see this is the thing we I try to bring this up for people that are like physical media whatever happened to that I'm like guys it wasn't as good as you remember like there was so much not available to us or it was only you know the butchered version in your country that was re-edited and redone and then you had to like search out the French DVD that didn't have subtitles and Yeah, for the for the like it wasn't as good as we remember but now in 2026 on any given day there are over 250,000 things to stream.
00:42:41.186 --> 00:42:43.851
compared to what it was at the peak of physical media.
00:42:43.851 --> 00:42:46.478
And let's be fair, that's way too many damn it.
00:42:46.478 --> 00:42:48.492
Let's go back to old analog times.
00:42:48.492 --> 00:42:53.585
We don't need all that option, all those options.
00:42:54.014 --> 00:42:54.835
Totally.
00:42:54.835 --> 00:42:55.385
Yeah.
00:42:55.385 --> 00:42:57.297
Well, pros and cons.
00:42:57.516 --> 00:43:00.079
you know, there's, there's always those.
00:43:00.079 --> 00:43:00.500
man.
00:43:00.500 --> 00:43:20.469
Um, so anyway, I start, you know, I worked on that in 2015 and so I got really interested in wine and I fell in love with Mount Eden because, know, when I went to Mount Eden for anybody that has never been, which is most of you, because it's not a very easily accessible winery.
00:43:21.070 --> 00:43:25.829
You know, in 2015, they didn't even have a tasting room, man, which I thought was fascinating.
00:43:25.829 --> 00:43:31.210
Like what California winery, any size, doesn't have a tasting room.
00:43:31.210 --> 00:43:38.657
apparently, Apparently back then, like in the 2010s, even Pastor Robles was only just starting to really get his shit together and put tasting rooms everywhere.
00:43:38.657 --> 00:43:41.472
Like it was a new thought for a lot of places.
00:43:42.262 --> 00:43:44.373
Yeah, that's probably true.
00:43:44.373 --> 00:43:47.976
But like you look at like Napa, I mean, it was just it was the thing.
00:43:47.976 --> 00:43:52.442
Napa and Sonoma, everything was about the tasting room and it was all D to C.
00:43:52.442 --> 00:43:57.532
It all trying to be able to get you in the wine club and get you to be a lifetime fan.
00:43:57.532 --> 00:43:59.192
All of that kind of stuff.
00:43:59.253 --> 00:44:02.896
And, you know, Mowdy never played that that game.
00:44:02.896 --> 00:44:12.063
They were much more they were sort of based on like a, you know, Burgundian chateau style where it's like you had to get an invitation.
00:44:12.063 --> 00:44:13.394
in order to be able to go out there.
00:44:13.394 --> 00:44:20.599
So it feels very magical when you're up there because it's not the hospitality experience.
00:44:20.599 --> 00:44:24.771
It's a uh dirty, dusty, windy road.
00:44:24.771 --> 00:44:26.862
It's a vineyard.
00:44:26.862 --> 00:44:34.862
And then you're like in the vineyard and you can like maybe sit at their front porch and out amongst the vineyard and you know.
00:44:34.862 --> 00:44:36.907
The true family operation.
00:44:37.293 --> 00:44:39.574
true family operation.
00:44:39.735 --> 00:44:46.300
And it also, you know, I grew up in the town next to them, which is Los Gatos, they're in Saratoga.
00:44:46.521 --> 00:44:59.112
And it made me feel like what I think going to a California winery in the 70s would have felt like because it's somewhat trapped in time.
00:44:59.112 --> 00:45:03.838
Because it doesn't have that hospitality, that D to C angle.
00:45:03.838 --> 00:45:05.907
It's There's no bullshit, man.
00:45:05.907 --> 00:45:08.628
It's basically just, it is what it is.
00:45:08.628 --> 00:45:12.190
This is our wine and it's an agricultural space.
00:45:12.389 --> 00:45:13.840
So that I thought was really cool.
00:45:13.840 --> 00:45:16.262
I loved that it was a family run winery.
00:45:16.262 --> 00:45:25.737
And so then at the end of 2016, I was looking for a feature length documentary to do and I live pretty close to them.
00:45:25.737 --> 00:45:30.266
So that made it easy to be able to go out and film all the time.
00:45:30.266 --> 00:45:34.561
I had kept up my relationship with both Ellie and Jeffrey.
00:45:35.695 --> 00:45:42.041
and I, you know, I remember I took Ellie to lunch and I was like, Hey, I'm thinking about making a documentary.
00:45:42.041 --> 00:45:55.114
Um, because the initial thought was to make a film that tracks the 2017 vintage showcase the incredible hard work that goes into being able to produce these wines.
00:45:55.114 --> 00:45:58.835
There's a lot of people don't know, especially when it's a mountain vineyard.
00:45:58.835 --> 00:46:00.396
mean, it's done by hand.
00:46:00.396 --> 00:46:02.507
There's not much mechanization.
00:46:02.507 --> 00:46:07.561
It's a very dusty, intense, labor-intensive job.
00:46:07.722 --> 00:46:13.065
And then I also wanted to track the progression of the vines throughout the year.
00:46:14.065 --> 00:46:14.836
And so we did that.
00:46:14.836 --> 00:46:24.023
basically we went up and filmed multiple times every single month, basically tracking the labor as well as tracking the progression.
00:46:24.023 --> 00:46:31.757
And that actually is most of the B-roll imagery that you see of the progression of the vines and everything that happens.
00:46:31.914 --> 00:46:34.204
And, you know, it was great.
00:46:34.204 --> 00:46:34.905
It was beautiful.
00:46:34.905 --> 00:46:45.730
We did some interviews with both Jeffrey and Ellie and a couple, you know, other people uh and took all of that back and started to cut it together.
00:46:45.730 --> 00:46:53.922
And I realized pretty quick that like we had this like elevated Brandon film, you know, it's like it was beautiful.
00:46:53.922 --> 00:46:54.824
Yeah.
00:46:54.824 --> 00:46:57.985
And but it's like it had no human story.
00:46:57.985 --> 00:47:05.467
And then I realized that when I was looking at the footage, both Jeffrey and Ellie were always brand representatives.
00:47:05.467 --> 00:47:09.407
They were speaking as the voice of Mount Eden.
00:47:09.407 --> 00:47:13.889
They weren't speaking as Jeffrey or Ellie Patterson, the individual.
00:47:14.690 --> 00:47:17.771
I'm like, that's kind of interesting.
00:47:17.771 --> 00:47:20.681
And then I started thinking about my own career.
00:47:20.681 --> 00:47:28.173
And mostly what I do is basically interview people as brand representatives and try and humanize it.
00:47:28.173 --> 00:47:31.914
And so I, you know, felt very comfortable with that and was normal and whatever.
00:47:31.914 --> 00:47:35.594
But like, as I tried to come up with any kind of structure, was like, why does anybody care?
00:47:35.594 --> 00:47:40.693
You know, like, this could be a beautiful, like we could do a queen, a Scotsy kind of thing.
00:47:40.693 --> 00:47:41.574
They could be gorgeous.
00:47:41.574 --> 00:47:45.514
It would have been, but like, it's not like who cares.
00:47:45.514 --> 00:47:45.838
so.
00:47:45.838 --> 00:47:50.139
It's like a tourism video if you don't have something else going on there.
00:47:50.139 --> 00:47:51.130
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:47:51.385 --> 00:47:52.646
Exactly.
00:47:52.646 --> 00:47:57.931
And so just when I'm starting to have that existential crisis of those shit, what is this movie?
00:47:57.931 --> 00:47:59.592
What am I doing?
00:47:59.626 --> 00:48:08.297
I get a call from Ellie and she's like, hey, you know, our son Reed has decided to come back.
00:48:08.297 --> 00:48:11.760
like I had, know, we had talked about Reed a little bit.
00:48:11.760 --> 00:48:13.905
I knew that he was the next generation.
00:48:13.905 --> 00:48:16.244
I knew we lived in San Luis Obispo.
00:48:16.244 --> 00:48:18.795
I had like met him once briefly.
00:48:18.795 --> 00:48:21.467
Back in 2015, he was there for the harvest.
00:48:21.467 --> 00:48:25.188
got some footage of him, you know, basically picking that kind of stuff.
00:48:25.188 --> 00:48:28.778
But, you I never really talked to the guy and she's like, Hey, you're doing the documentary.
00:48:28.778 --> 00:48:29.579
Why don't you talk to him?
00:48:29.579 --> 00:48:30.728
I'm like, okay.
00:48:30.728 --> 00:48:41.612
So we go up and it's pruning and he's just decided to, you know, sort of commit to coming back and sort of working at the winery and taking, taking it on.
00:48:42.012 --> 00:48:48.204
And so I met him out in the vineyards and you know, we just started talking and it's like.
00:48:48.204 --> 00:49:03.320
He's just like an open book and like such a fascinating person because he's largely interested in his personal process and his identity and how he makes sort of sense of significance in the world.
00:49:03.320 --> 00:49:07.052
so like, I'm like, whoa, this is really interesting.
00:49:07.052 --> 00:49:11.664
So we then go and do an interview with him about a week later.
00:49:11.664 --> 00:49:18.197
And that is that interview that is one of the key interviews ends up in the film where he's in like his blue sweater.
00:49:18.197 --> 00:49:25.733
And it has that great moment that Dave was talking about where you hold on it and he's trying to process.
00:49:26.222 --> 00:49:28.641
The long silence for a documentary.
00:49:28.641 --> 00:49:35.041
there is that moment, it's one of the first times we see him as like the camera up close and having him talking.
00:49:35.141 --> 00:49:40.742
And he he like says like three words, pauses for what feels like an eternity.
00:49:40.742 --> 00:49:44.822
And his eye, you can just see the eyes working and the gears turning in that in his mind.
00:49:44.822 --> 00:49:50.702
And you're just, and it's just this moment of tension where it's just silence, silence, silence.
00:49:50.782 --> 00:49:53.621
And then he finally comes back to it with something to say.
00:49:53.621 --> 00:49:55.393
And that really sets the tone.
00:49:55.393 --> 00:49:57.385
for where the documentary goes from there.
00:49:57.592 --> 00:49:58.503
It does.
00:49:58.998 --> 00:50:02.239
Yeah, it's because that's when it got really interesting.
00:50:02.239 --> 00:50:05.130
As a filmmaker, that literally is the moment.
00:50:05.130 --> 00:50:09.231
And that's one of things I like to say about documentaries.
00:50:09.231 --> 00:50:25.065
I encourage people is like, if you were there, and you got excited about a moment, and you're like, wow, you need to try and recreate that experience for your audience when they actually view it.
00:50:25.065 --> 00:50:46.175
That's one of the best ways to be able to sort of make a documentary that I think works is that you need to have those actual moments of epiphany that both happened for your characters, but also for you as an artist and for the whole crew that was there.
00:50:46.275 --> 00:50:49.396
like use that as the structure for the film.
00:50:49.396 --> 00:50:56.041
Because it's like, it's so many documentarians like get so caught up in.
00:50:56.076 --> 00:51:05.710
the messaging side of it and then the narrative that they're telling because a lot of the time you're dealing with really, really important issues that are very, very complicated.
00:51:05.710 --> 00:51:17.974
And I understand that, but I encourage people to always remember that at the end of the day, cinema is based on the human experience and that's what we want to see.
00:51:17.974 --> 00:51:26.961
And it's like, it's so much more compelling when you're watching somebody be human.
00:51:26.961 --> 00:51:36.181
That's what allows those long, slow moments to have resonance, I think, is that it's so relatable.
00:51:36.181 --> 00:51:38.461
You know, we all have those.
00:51:39.362 --> 00:51:40.842
And it's unpolished.
00:51:40.842 --> 00:51:51.322
That's what takes it out of being a branded film, too, because this is the first thing that you cut out of a branded film or the moment where somebody's trying to think about what an answer is.
00:51:51.322 --> 00:51:53.242
You just cut right to the answer.
00:51:53.242 --> 00:52:22.436
And it's like Again, to be able to tie this back into wine, I think that's also the best way to think about wine and wine tasting and, you know, understanding it is to slow it all down and not get so caught up on, you know, what you've read about this wine, what somebody's told you about it, like just take the time to let the experience overtake you.
00:52:22.436 --> 00:52:24.827
That day, that time, that glass.
00:52:25.646 --> 00:52:28.077
Well, in that moment, like, don't worry about the tasting notes.
00:52:28.077 --> 00:52:29.478
Yeah, don't worry about tasting notes.
00:52:29.478 --> 00:52:34.452
Don't worry about saying anything like you don't have to have thoughts that you have to vocalize right away.
00:52:34.452 --> 00:52:36.313
Like just experience it.
00:52:36.313 --> 00:52:37.753
It's a slow product.
00:52:37.753 --> 00:52:41.876
It should be a slow experience.
00:52:41.876 --> 00:52:48.862
you know, much like the documentary itself, like life, you're tasting the wine, but it doesn't have to be the whole point of the moment either.
00:52:48.862 --> 00:52:51.103
Like socializing, you have that human element.
00:52:51.103 --> 00:52:53.405
You are still people just sitting there together.
00:52:53.405 --> 00:52:54.818
The wine's a part of that.
00:52:54.818 --> 00:52:59.639
but it doesn't always have to be sometimes us wine nerds, get a little too obsessed with like, we're here for the wine.
00:52:59.639 --> 00:53:02.579
And it's like, let's just talk about that and nothing else.
00:53:02.579 --> 00:53:04.121
And I'm like, no, talk about those things.
00:53:04.121 --> 00:53:07.722
You're people, be people beyond just the wine part of it.
00:53:07.722 --> 00:53:11.503
um One of the tensions in the documentary, I think that happened too.
00:53:11.503 --> 00:53:22.306
I'm sure this was something that plainly you did not know was coming, but the couple, the husband wife duo too, and the tensions that arose between them as documentary went on.
00:53:22.597 --> 00:53:38.927
And the fact that one of them seemed to just keep sinking and almost melting into the vineyard, like just disappearing more and more into the work and into this version of identity.
00:53:38.927 --> 00:53:42.728
Whereas the other one was like, isn't it a shame we become what we do?
00:53:42.969 --> 00:53:46.610
And we don't, and we don't become.
00:53:47.672 --> 00:53:50.353
We can't remain more than that.
00:53:50.353 --> 00:53:52.545
And this becomes something that is.
00:53:52.545 --> 00:54:10.260
kind of heartbreaking as the documentary goes on and really questions like, again, as wine people, we romanticize the vineyard and the chateau and the winery and the winemaker and the winemaking to a level that then watching this documentary and it's like, yeah, but at what price?
00:54:10.581 --> 00:54:17.445
know, what is lost if this becomes too much of who we are and what we obsess about?
00:54:17.458 --> 00:54:19.608
See, I take the other route on that.
00:54:19.608 --> 00:54:28.164
I see that relationship split up, and I reflect back on the earlier statement of the Sun saying, you know, these two people are just so diametrically opposed.
00:54:28.164 --> 00:54:33.597
But in that sort of opposition, they built something phenomenal.
00:54:33.597 --> 00:54:38.949
They did something that perhaps neither one could have done on their own.
00:54:39.050 --> 00:54:46.135
And I think those tensions lasted for a while, and inevitably they did fray at the edge and sort of, you know...
00:54:46.135 --> 00:54:48.574
pull apart but we'll be the thing.
00:54:48.574 --> 00:54:56.173
The one thing I'll say about that, but the reason it's still heartbreaking to me is that one, the partnership predates the winery.
00:54:56.173 --> 00:55:03.054
So if anything has had more work put into it, it would be that versus what the work that had put into the winery.
00:55:03.054 --> 00:55:08.114
And the guys like a hop, skipping and jumping away of pretty much having to retire anyway.
00:55:08.114 --> 00:55:10.733
But he just couldn't do it in time.
00:55:10.733 --> 00:55:13.273
He to just keep pushing.
00:55:13.273 --> 00:55:15.034
He's like, no, I can't let go yet.
00:55:15.034 --> 00:55:16.206
I can't let go yet.
00:55:16.206 --> 00:55:27.706
To the point where, and again, we were talking about the price of the family, even the kids, and their weird relationship with the winery because of how much living on a mountaintop was not ideal for children.
00:55:28.246 --> 00:55:31.606
for growing a family and raising a family.
00:55:31.646 --> 00:55:35.806
And so so much that gets sacrificed just in the name of this thing.
00:55:36.246 --> 00:55:43.065
And at some point, like some of that sacrifice can be seen as, and I would agree with you on this, like can be seen as like a positive thing.
00:55:43.065 --> 00:55:47.092
And it's like, yes, but this is look at what they built, look at what they were able to do.
00:55:47.092 --> 00:55:52.797
And even the kids as they got older start to come back and see some of that value as well.
00:55:52.818 --> 00:55:55.039
But there is still a but where's the line?
00:55:55.039 --> 00:56:09.211
At what point do you that usual line where it's like when does it cross over into obsession into like just sure there's nothing I've lost so much of myself except this part of my identity that I don't even know what I'd be if I let this go.
00:56:10.514 --> 00:56:11.206
Yeah.
00:56:11.206 --> 00:56:20.878
And that's why her statement is so potent and so powerful, because she's clearly been right next to that in tandem watching it, but also one annoyed by it.
00:56:20.878 --> 00:56:23.510
Clearly, she's annoyed by it to a certain degree.
00:56:23.590 --> 00:56:28.371
But also she understands that it is the underpinning of their entire life.
00:56:28.371 --> 00:56:37.074
And so when she makes that statement saying you are not your reputation, you cannot just be your reputation or paraphrase, I'm sure it's wrong.
00:56:37.074 --> 00:56:39.054
But whatever it is to that effect.
00:56:39.242 --> 00:56:40.844
It's a really potent statement.
00:56:40.844 --> 00:56:50.556
And I like what you guys did in the editing by allowing that to kind of just play uh early on in Act one with no real sort of context.
00:56:50.556 --> 00:56:55.443
And then, of course, looping back in the end where we get the context of where she get why she said that.
00:56:55.443 --> 00:56:58.110
um So, yeah, it's.
00:56:58.110 --> 00:57:00.612
Alice, you're my hero, dude.
00:57:00.612 --> 00:57:18.942
You're very no, you are the very first person other than Ellie herself that has ever realized that we use the same clip twice and put it in there at the beginning and then give context because the context provide completely changes the statement.
00:57:18.942 --> 00:57:19.722
I'm not kidding.
00:57:19.722 --> 00:57:21.204
Nobody has ever.
00:57:21.204 --> 00:57:24.135
All right.
00:57:25.356 --> 00:57:39.186
But the reason I think I appreciate it so much is because of what you were saying earlier in that documentaries often end up being a little stilted, a little stale, a little point and click, a little sort of empty.
00:57:39.186 --> 00:57:45.159
And it's those sort of magical moments of knowing when to take a statement.
00:57:45.286 --> 00:57:53.449
and placing it early on, then sort of looping back to and creating that sort of, book ends and like you said, giving context.
00:57:53.449 --> 00:57:54.889
That's the narrative, that's the story.
00:57:54.889 --> 00:57:57.030
mean, that ultimately, that's the takeaway.
00:57:57.030 --> 00:58:05.952
The theme of the entire documentary is almost that one statement in that you cannot just be your reputation.
00:58:05.952 --> 00:58:08.972
And for him, that's all there is.
00:58:08.972 --> 00:58:11.164
And for her, there's gotta be more.
00:58:11.724 --> 00:58:22.597
When I would even that really became one of the key themes and explorations of the film is this study of identity.
00:58:22.597 --> 00:58:25.985
And I would say that this is a cultural thing.
00:58:25.985 --> 00:58:28.438
I this is like an American situation.
00:58:28.438 --> 00:58:40.512
It's not specific to wine in any way, because America has a tendency when somebody is working on a product that we all admire.
00:58:40.818 --> 00:58:49.164
it's there's so much pressure to be able to focus all of your energy into producing that product.
00:58:49.164 --> 00:58:55.969
And you only have so much energy, so much time, so much identity available to be able to give.
00:58:55.969 --> 00:59:09.677
And because you're getting so much influence to push all of yourself into that, it, you know, always leads to the question of what are you sacrificing?
00:59:09.677 --> 00:59:10.978
in order to do it.
00:59:10.978 --> 00:59:12.858
Work-life balance has always been a problem.
00:59:12.858 --> 00:59:15.338
It's a terrible problem in the wine industry.
00:59:15.338 --> 00:59:29.257
mean, so many winemakers that I've interviewed that are amazing winemakers that we all admire have, you know, really challenging personal lives because they've sacrificed so much in order to produce this.
00:59:29.257 --> 00:59:31.177
The same is true of cinema.
00:59:31.177 --> 00:59:35.038
There's so many wonderful filmmakers that I love their films.
00:59:35.038 --> 00:59:37.077
I would never want to be in their family.
00:59:37.077 --> 00:59:38.025
I would never.
00:59:38.025 --> 00:59:39.657
Any craft like this, you're right.
00:59:39.657 --> 00:59:51.101
Any craft like this you find, and like you said, it does seem to be kind of um exacerbated in the American sort of persona with our work culture and hero worship.
00:59:51.101 --> 00:59:52.992
yeah, everything else has to suffer.
00:59:52.992 --> 00:59:54.103
Or I shouldn't say has to suffer.
00:59:54.103 --> 00:59:59.769
It seems as if everything has to suffer when you're chasing this sort of dragon, this muse.
01:00:00.014 --> 01:00:15.034
Well, we believe in America, you know, we always kind of give shit to the Europeans for like how many vacation, how much vacation time they get in family time and family leave and it's like, but it's so much healthier and we're like, but we're much more productive.
01:00:15.034 --> 01:00:16.773
And I'm like, and still poor.
01:00:16.773 --> 01:00:19.373
What good has it done us?
01:00:19.373 --> 01:00:21.974
Like we're more like, what is, what are we doing?
01:00:21.974 --> 01:00:26.134
We're still getting beaten by China in the latest technological races.
01:00:27.293 --> 01:00:29.376
It's levels are in stain.
01:00:29.376 --> 01:00:35.635
And any job that pays well enough, we demand people essentially live, and eat it.
01:00:35.635 --> 01:00:43.735
know, it's like if we're At three vacations a year is great, but Europe never gave us anything like the Snuggie, so I'm going to push back on that.
01:00:45.842 --> 01:00:47.914
I would like to just say that's the truth.
01:00:47.914 --> 01:01:05.574
There's no clean answer to this because there is a sacrifice for taking a lot of personal time and taking breaks and you know holding a personal part of your identity away from your professional identity.
01:01:05.574 --> 01:01:12.110
Like I will fundamentally admit I don't have an answer as to you know what the right balance is.
01:01:12.110 --> 01:01:15.130
It's just that that became the nature of the exploration.
01:01:15.130 --> 01:01:38.130
I think it's important for people to at least ask themselves that and then also ask that of the people that they admire because it's one of those things, you know, like in the wine industry in particular, one of the big things that kicked this film off for me is how frustrated I get by like, you know, wine marketing because it is so aspirational.
01:01:38.130 --> 01:01:40.010
It is very lifestyle oriented.
01:01:40.010 --> 01:01:41.226
It is it.
01:01:41.226 --> 01:01:51.509
literally made to be able to sort of have you idealize this version of being a vineyard owner, being an estate owner.
01:01:51.509 --> 01:01:53.148
And that's not the reality.
01:01:53.148 --> 01:01:56.710
we all, anyone who's worked in it knows that it isn't.
01:01:56.710 --> 01:02:02.612
But at the same time, it's always the thing that is being encouraged to be sold.
01:02:02.612 --> 01:02:08.923
And so I purposely wanted to do an exploration of like, well, that's not that's not it.
01:02:08.923 --> 01:02:16.385
know, Even from a consumer standpoint, it's always like, well, you have to travel to these vineyards to really understand the wine.
01:02:16.385 --> 01:02:26.831
I'm like, so the world, have to be able to travel the world at all times with our non-existent vacation days and our workloads that never stop.
01:02:26.831 --> 01:02:37.217
it's like, how, how was anyone even, it's one of the reasons why wine though remains so niche is like people who can afford both the time and the physical ability to do these things.
01:02:37.217 --> 01:02:39.246
And so we sell that.
01:02:39.246 --> 01:02:45.795
uh, image and that lifestyle, but it's, just unavailable to so many of us for the most part.
01:02:45.795 --> 01:02:51.262
Um, but on that note, we are to keep desperately keep this at one hour.
01:02:51.344 --> 01:02:53.032
Yeah, right.
01:02:53.260 --> 01:02:54.512
Because we gotta move on.
01:02:54.512 --> 01:02:55.405
I I noticed.
01:02:55.405 --> 01:02:56.166
I know.
01:02:56.166 --> 01:03:24.673
So now we're going to now we are going to move on the definitely go check out Eden the twenty twenty four documentary from Chris McGilvray and in a few days you'll be able to check out our epic conversation with Chris on the trailblazing Sergio Leone Western film once upon a time the West we are about to head off to go record that right now and of course we will be doing some epic wine pairings with that film as well or if you're listening to this well after its original release just jump right on over to the next episode and catch us all there.
01:03:24.673 --> 01:03:25.639
We will see you there.
01:03:25.639 --> 01:03:26.880
Ciao for now.
01:03:26.936 --> 01:03:27.769
guys