Kirsten John­son: ​‘I was ask­ing cin­e­ma to keep my dad alive’

More than any oth­er art­form, cin­e­ma has the abil­i­ty to immor­talise peo­ple. In her deeply per­son­al fol­low-up to 2016’s Cam­er­ap­er­son, doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Kirsten John­son takes this idea to its log­i­cal extreme, med­i­tat­ing on loss and mem­o­ry while con­duct­ing a series of mor­bid­ly fun­ny stunts depict­ing the demise of her elder­ly father, who has dementia.

Dick John­son Is Dead is on one lev­el a love let­ter from a daugh­ter to her dad – but it’s also a won­der­ful demon­stra­tion of the pow­er of movies, how they allow us to explore and in turn expe­ri­ence the mean­ing of life, death and what­ev­er comes after. Here the direc­tor speaks inti­mate­ly about her pro­found state­ment on the human con­di­tion, and why the film is ulti­mate­ly about hope.

LWLies: I have to start by ask­ing how your dad is doing.

John­son: Thank you. My dad is utter­ly him­self. He’s also new­ly in a demen­tia care facil­i­ty. He stayed with my broth­er from March until July which was just an incred­i­ble gift to our fam­i­ly that the pan­dem­ic gave us. My broth­er is the head of the Smith­son­ian Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um and works incred­i­bly hard, but when the Muse­um shut down he was able to stay with my dad. Between Covid and the state of the demen­tia, the only thing that feels ten­able to us now is hav­ing him in a home, which is bru­tal, I’ve got to say – it’s work­ing out real­ly well and they’re treat­ing him real­ly well but he’s still like, ​‘When are you com­ing to get me?’. I’m def­i­nite­ly feel­ing what a lot of peo­ple are feel­ing in this time which is the impos­si­bil­i­ty of being with the peo­ple we love most.

You began shoot­ing the film in 2017 – when did you finish?

We pre­miered at Sun­dance in Jan­u­ary and I think our last day of film­ing was late Novem­ber [2019]. But I had the ini­ti­at­ing dream for the film in 2016.

It’s inter­est­ing to observe Dick’s con­di­tion begin to decline over that peri­od. To what extent did the nature of the film change as you were mak­ing it?

It changed a tremen­dous amount. The thing with demen­tia is it makes you feel like you’re grasp­ing at some­thing that’s dis­ap­pear­ing in front of you. When I first had the idea it was this incred­i­bly exu­ber­ant thing, I want­ed to trav­el around the world with my dad and go to Hong Kong and meet Jack­ie Chan and we’re gonna go to Ghana where they have these incred­i­ble cas­kets… By the time we had got­ten the fund­ing for the film it was real­ly clear that we were going to have to do dif­fer­ent kinds of stunts from the ones I’d orig­i­nal­ly thought of.

As soon as we did the first stunts I was like, ​‘Oh my god, we’re actu­al­ly gonna kill him’. So on one lev­el the hope and the scale of what I thought the film could be had to change, but also I had this feel­ing of, ​‘I’ve start­ed too late… I’ve start­ed too late…’ It was only at the very end that I had this real­i­sa­tion that we did cap­ture him. I thought he was already gone. That was the feel­ing the whole time we were mak­ing the film.

You’ve spo­ken about the abil­i­ty of cin­e­ma to immor­talise peo­ple. Can you expand on that?

I’m ter­ri­bly grate­ful to the pow­er of cin­e­ma. I real­ly mean it in very real terms. It wasn’t just about cap­tur­ing his like­ness, it was me try­ing to keep my father alive, to stop him from falling apart. That’s what I was ask­ing of cin­e­ma. Because I do think there’s a dif­fer­ence between the mem­o­ry of a per­son and the filmed pres­ence of a person.

I was lis­ten­ing recent­ly to an inter­view with Oliv­er Sacks about hal­lu­ci­na­tions, and appar­ent­ly bereaved peo­ple often have hal­lu­ci­na­tions of the peo­ple they’ve lost. He was say­ing that it’s not imag­i­na­tion; the part of your brain that is actu­al­ly see­ing and hear­ing is acti­vat­ed. So in a sense it’s like when you’re watch­ing a movie: you’re not imag­in­ing the movie in front of you, you are expe­ri­enc­ing the movie. It’s like, I love Buster Keaton, and he’s nev­er been dead to me, he’s always been alive. So that was what I was grasp­ing for. Actu­al­ly I was shoot­ing even high­er than that – I want­ed to make this movie in a whole new way.

What was the first ​‘death scene’ you filmed?

The first thing we tried to get him to do was to trip. It was actu­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing because we couldn’t com­mu­ni­cate to him that he shouldn’t real­ly trip. My father is already unsta­ble on his feet, you know, because he has no toes. So I was try­ing to fig­ure it out and I was work­ing with the won­der­ful stunt per­son named Kemp Cur­ley, and we would say to my dad, ​‘Just bob your head a lit­tle bit and move this way a lit­tle,’ and then he would start to fall and Kemp would have to grab him. He would for­get what we would tell him, so the stakes of it were very active from the beginning.

Actu­al­ly I think it was him falling down the stairs that we filmed first, because we were alone in the house togeth­er and I made him lie down at the bot­tom of the stairs. There’s an incred­i­ble humil­i­ty to that, that my father – at that point he was 84 – would just will­ing­ly lay him­self on the floor and pre­tend like he’d had a hor­rif­ic fall. The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of that… not just to see my father in such an extreme sit­u­a­tion, but his under­stand­ing of the sit­u­a­tion, real­ly hum­bled me.

One scene I’d love to talk about, with­out giv­ing too much away, is the funer­al. It feels like the part of the film where you your­self are at the fur­thest remove from what’s happening.

It was a real­ly pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence. I’d had a lot of con­ver­sa­tions with my dad’s friends and asso­ciates in invit­ing them to the funer­al, and all those peo­ple knew my dad, loved me dad, knew he had demen­tia. So they were ready in some ways to mourn him, and they showed up for that. It was prob­a­bly the most chal­leng­ing part of the film for me and my broth­ers. I asked every­one who spoke to speak in the past tense, and my broth­er couldn’t. I actu­al­ly did film myself giv­ing a eulo­gy – we filmed a day with the cas­ket where it was just the cast and crew, and the eulo­gy I gave to the cast and crew on that day was clos­er to the emo­tion­al­i­ty I have.

I was too bifur­cat­ed dur­ing the whole funer­al: I was direct­ing, I was the daugh­ter, I had to wran­gle every­thing and make sure the cer­e­mo­ny went ahead as planned. In the end we very pur­pose­ful­ly took the cam­era away from me at cer­tain moments and gave it back to me at oth­ers. So I was able to be up with my father watch­ing, I was able to be down with the crowd mourn­ing but also direct­ing the scene. When I first start­ed mak­ing the film I thought I was going to keep mak­ing it until my father real­ly died. So I thought we would have the mock funer­al and then do his real funer­al at the end, but I realised that we had both already in what we’d filmed. But you’re right, I think I was pro­tect­ing myself. I was see­ing it from afar. I actu­al­ly woke up the morn­ing after the funer­al kind of dev­as­tat­ed because I think I thought that doing the funer­al would mean that my father wouldn’t have to die.

You approach the sub­ject of death with a sense of gal­lows humour. Why do you think we use humour in this way?

I think there are some sit­u­a­tions that are so far gone that there’s no oth­er way of cop­ing. It strips away the per­for­mance of soci­ety. It strips away the pre­tence of how we present our­selves I have full respect for the way that peo­ple wish to main­tain their dig­ni­ty, but I think that humour aris­es often when your dig­ni­ty has been tak­en from you, or when you realise that dig­ni­ty can’t save you. From the trav­el­ling I’ve done through my work, I learned from peo­ple who are liv­ing with so much more dif­fi­cul­ty than any human should have to endure: go to that place and you will find hilar­i­ous peo­ple there. Any­where in the world, when things are real­ly bad there’s some­one who’s real­ly funny.

Dick John­son is released 2 Octo­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.