On finding something you'll never stop being interested in

Drew DeNicola is a director and editor with a focus on music history and culture documentaries. His films have been showcased at SXSW, BFI London, IDFA, DOC NYC, Tribeca Film Festival, The IFP Market, Sarasota, and Full Frame film festivals, as well as theatrically and on Netflix, HBO, MTV, and VICE.

His feature directorial debut was the film Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. The film unpacks the decades-long legacy of the 1970s Memphis cult band Big Star, who inspired artists as diverse as The Jesus and Mary Chain, R.E.M., The Replacements, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, and Hot Chip. Big Star premiered at SXSW and the BFI London Film Festival, won the jury prize at Indie Memphis in 2013, and was released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures in July 2013, receiving positive reviews from The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Film Comment, and The New York Times.

He is currently directing and producing Sun Ra: Door of the Cosmos, a sonic cinema odyssey about the life and work of one of the most celebrated and least understood conceptual artists of the 20th century, Sun Ra. The film has a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter running through the month of September.

What first drew you to documentary as a form, rather than any other kind of film or any other creative pursuit you could have taken on?

When I started, I was working on TV news, and I didn’t really have aspirations to be, quote-unquote, an artist. I’m still not totally comfortable with that term. I was just trying to do something that was practical and that satisfied me. But once I had these tools around me, especially access to editing, I started thinking about what I could do with them. I discovered I was a little too afraid of narrative film. I had an interest in it, but I never went to film school, and documentary is what was blossoming for me at the time.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston documentary had just come out, and so had the one about Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. Seeing that these outsider artists, people who were basically my heroes, could have full feature films made about them, was mindblowing. I didn’t even know that kind of interest existed. Watching that happen got me into the art of documentary. I went down the road of the Maysles brothers, Frederick Wiseman, Ross McElwee. I saw Sherman’s March on VHS, and that was really the beginning for me.

I still love documentary because I think it’s one of the most experimental forms. Or at least it should be. I don’t think we see enough experimentation in it anymore. It’s become more like TV again. But for me, seeing that there was everything out there from A&E-type stuff to things like Chris Marker’s work, the form seemed wide open.

I was in San Francisco at the time, got laid off during the dot-com bust, and interned at a documentary production company in Marin County that was working on a project about overfishing. I never actually touched the editing machine there, but being a part of how things got made was inspiring.

The subjects you’ve made films about embraced reinvention and risk. They were OK with being outsiders to some degree, because they knew they were doing something really different. Spending years inside stories like that, does it change how much risk you bring to your own work?

It’s risky just being an independent filmmaker. I never got an agent as a director, and I haven’t exactly been approached by major studios to do a lot of projects. So you take it on yourself, knowing you don’t know where the money is going to come from, and you do it anyway. On all of my projects, I’ve started with my own credit card and just hacked away at it over time until it becomes something. Money comes, and then it goes. So there’s risk in doing projects that are never going to be commercially viable.

With Sun Ra, there was also a bit of calculation. I knew he had maintained a ton of interest from musicians and artists from every genre, from the highest echelons of culture down to the avant-garde. There might even be more interest in him now than a few years ago. I’ve always looked for that: some phenomenon in the mainstream that you can trace back to an outsider story.

The first documentary I ever worked on, when I was 26 or 27 and had never made a film before, was about Black radio DJs from the ’50s and ’60s—how they bought their own airtime and ended up controlling it, right as Madison Avenue realized Black audiences had money to spend and needed to reach them through those same DJs. Meanwhile, the R&B scene those DJs were playing was heating up. The DJs were taking records that would’ve been sold out of someone’s trunk and turning them into gold records, and creating an on-air style that was loose and performative, with rapping, years before hip-hop existed.

I bring this up because the thing that actually drives me is the 20th century. The stories of it. I don’t think we can really make sense of the 21st century yet. This country we’re in was actually built in the 20th century; that’s when so much of what America culturally is took shape. I’m not interested in our military dominance. I’m interested in our cultural dominance—especially how Black American culture dominates the globe. It’s something I think about constantly.

When you’re working on a story like Big Star’s or Sun Ra’s, where there’s already a mythology the subject cultivated, as well as one that’s built up around them after the fact, where do you draw the line between honoring the factual truth, the way a journalist would, and making room for interpretation or myth?

I see it as: I’m not really here to provide answers. When I tell a story, I like to just ponder the implications and play with the subtext. That’s how it stays artful to me. I don’t want to ever close the book on any idea. I don’t see myself like a reporter. My focus is making something that continues to endure. So a lot of the time I’ll just hint at things in the film and let the audience think about them and talk about them afterward. With Big Star, for example, I wasn’t able to get into all of the homosexuality in the story directly, and afterward people would come up to me with all these theories. I loved that.

Things do enter the realm of myth—Big Star has, and Sun Ra obviously has, too. And I think that the mythology becomes a very real part of the true story. That’s actually the more satisfying side of it for me. Everything’s always moving and changing. We get to understand the stories of the past in a way that people living through them in real time couldn’t be; they were too inside it to make sense of it. I get to take these films, books, and records and revisit them, think about what they actually meant, what might have been missed, and how they apply now.

That’s actually tied to something I never expected about getting older: you go through a phase, put a song away, and then you hear it again at fifty. The same song you loved at sixteen, and you’re suddenly tearing up over it. It’s not nostalgia. Nostalgia is rooted in one place, trying to go home again, and there’s something a little pathetic about that, honestly. This is more like seeing the work for what it actually is. I used to get in trouble for being nostalgic, but I don’t think that’s really where I am now.

We’re in a time of so much mediocre stuff coming at us constantly. When you can say a work of art truly endures, that’s a real proclamation to be able to make. With Sun Ra, his whole catalog endures. There’s so much there that you’re never really done with it. And the mythology is very much wrapped up in that.

This kind of documentary can take five, six, seven years to make. How do you keep a project feeling alive for yourself that far into it, so the work of doing it doesn’t start to feel routine?

I have to say, I’m sort of an authority on this by now. After my first documentary got some attention, people started coming up to me saying, “You should make a doc about this band,” or “You should make a doc about that band,” and I always felt like, no, we don’t have to make a documentary about every band. Anyone can have someone on YouTube throw together photos and talk over them. If I’m going to make a documentary, it can’t just be because there was a somewhat interesting story behind some cultural blip. It’s got to be about something I will never, ever stop being interested in. So committing to Sun Ra was a decision I made because of how passionate I am about him. I’d been dipping my toe in here and there for a long time, and I eventually realized nobody’s really explained this guy, or the brilliance of what he was doing well enough. So I had to do it.

Another way of saying it is that staying interested starts with finding the right subject to begin with. There have been plenty of nights, on both Big Star and this film, where I was up all night on an edit, out of money, feeling terrible, asking myself: Is this really as good as I think it is? Is it worth all this time? And the answer always comes back almost immediately: It’s totally worth it.

I’m blessed to have access to this material, and to have made enough work that people trust me to do right with the story. With Sun Ra especially, my interest never wanes, because his catalog is so vast, and there are so many aspects to his story. It’s basically a whole omniverse you can live in. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really listen to much other music right now. I’m a total Sun Ra head at this point.

You have supporters who have helped you by contributing content for the film, and people who’ve backed it through crowdfunding. Does having those supporters change how you approach making it?

I’m really trying to make this film with a lot of openness and transparency. I sometimes see someone make a documentary about a subject and think: Who elected you? Who let you make that movie about something I love? I kind of think there should be an American board of documentary filmmaking or something, because whoever gets to make a film like that ends up having the last word on a story, and a lot of the time these things just come out of nowhere and suddenly it’s, boom, done. Here’s your condensed, ninety-minute, Wikipedia-page version of an incredible story, and everyone’s supposed to just move on with their lives.

I’m trying to make this film into more of something people are actually talking to us about and actively weighing in on while we’re making it. I love when you’ll think there are no photos left of someone, and then someone who saw one show, once, decades ago, will reach out with an incredible picture. We have a very active Sun Ra Arkestra Facebook group, and I think every one of the side stories that gets posted there is worth listening to. It makes the process more organic, and it makes me want to make sure I’m actually hitting all the different angles of a story rather than just serving up a product.

Documentary has been drifting back in that product direction. Like I said before, it’s basically back to how TV docs used to be. It’s genuinely difficult right now to make something different; so we’re relying on crowdfunding, and we still need to find an investor or two to bring this home. I feel indebted to all the people who’ve backed it to get there. But the one thing I can say for certain is that I won’t stop. Even when my mother tells me, “please, no more documentaries.”

What would you tell someone at the beginning of a long, uncertain creative project? Something with no guaranteed big audience, not even a clear end date? How do you sustain yourself, not financially, but personally?

I actually do have some wisdom on this one. You cannot be a results-oriented director. Forget about fame, forget about money. Do it because it’s satisfying, because it’s rewarding to you. It’s not about the result.

It’s gotten to the point where people want to know what the ending of a documentary is before they’ll fund it. If someone tells you they know the end of their movie, run for the hills, or they’re lying. You shouldn’t know the ending. Why would you even do it otherwise? It should be exploration, every single day, starting from the day you begin. Just find a way to stretch it out for as long as you possibly can.