Alan Berliner on THE SWEETEST SOUND

1. Are you still in touch with the 12 other Alan Berliners you found for The Sweetest Sound?

Three of the other Alan Berliners (the Belgian Film Director, the French Doctor, and the Photographer from Los Angeles) attended the world premiere of the film at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. I've kept in touch with most of them, though there are still a few of them I haven't heard from since the film was broadcast on American Public Television in June. I still correspond and speak on the telephone with several of them on an ongoing basis. But I'm more than certain that we won't ever get together again as a group.

2. Were you expecting to find something in common with your namesakes or convince yourself you are special because they were different from you?

I wasn't expecting anything. I was hoping for some variety in my name, like a five year old named Alan Berliner, or an Alan Berliner of color, or even a woman named Allyn Berliner. In the end what I managed to do was create a kind of living dictionary of what my name means in the year 2001. I discovered that it means middle aged, middle class, mostly Jewish, white male. I had wanted it to be unpredictable, to contain diversity, to surprise me. Instead, I got 12 other variations of me.

3. What is it that compels you about family, identity and intimacy and why commit these issues to film?

For better and/or (often) for worse, the family is still the crucible; still the most intense, far-reaching and powerful set of relationships most of us will ever have. I'm forever fascinated by the pushes and pulls of family dynamics, especially the hidden stuff - family secrets, patterns, ironies, mysteries, mythologies - that might help explain the ongoing various psychological, cultural and intellectual transmissions that pass from generation to generation. I'm always in search of the insights (the ones that are usually off the radar screen) that might help me understand who I am and how I got that way.

4. I 'm not convinced viewers would be too bothered about my family relations least of all any other Angela Akomah's out there. What made you confident Intimate Strangers and Nobody's Business deserved hour long status not shorts?

I am a storyteller and film is my language. Like anyone else who writes memoirs or creates personal essays, I'm interested in transforming the elements of my life into broader universal dimensions. I want my films to transcend the specificity and detail of their stories to become windows and mirrors for those who watch them. To make the viewers reflect upon their own lives.

Beyond that, I'm never really certain that anyone will be interested in my films. Ironically, I think one of the reasons they've succeeded is that they're about ordinary people, individuals who have not led lives that would or should warrant any kind of public attention. My grandfather and my father are anti-heroes in that sense. Their lack of objective accomplishment provides me with a built in excuse to explore the very essence of biography. To create new ways of reckoning with and measuring the meaning of a life lived.

5. To avoid the trilogy being just a personal diary I'm guessing you had to be pretty adroit in the editing suite?

All of my films are put together in the editing room. I am committed to a kind of storytelling in which the way I tell a story is as compelling as the story I intend to tell. I try to invigorate my work with an ongoing series of investigations exploring the vocabulary of cinema - trying to find new ways of creating meaning and metaphor out of unconventional approaches to the juxtaposition of and between sounds and images.

6.Funerals of family members are usually icebreaking opportunities to meet relatives and dissolve old running feuds, has this been your experience?

I often say that on the Berliner side of my family, the cousins (and there are lots of them) are the "movie extras" we invite to fill in the crowd scenes of the weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals of our lives. Other than those occasions, we don't see or speak to one another very often.

7. While filming did you develop a method for cultivating a more candid responses from family subjects?

I always try to make my interview subjects relax. To remind them that there is no such thing as a wrong answer, and therefore no pressure to produce one. Beyond that, my family members know that I'm serious about what I do, that I will treasure the information and insight they give me, and that someone had to ask these questions one day, so it might as well be me, now. I try and create a tenor of approach and process that declares our mutual responsibility to be truthful with one another. I also think that they like that I share whatever I learn with them as well.

8. Observing our parents age before the inevitable usually adds a sense of "Uh oh I really should get to know them". Was this true of you when making Intimate Stranger and Nobody's Business?

This is a particularly poignant question for me right now. I recently put my father in a nursing home because he has lost his memory. He's no longer capable of being in the moment; of participating in decisions about his life. Ironically, he says in Nobody's Business that he wants to be remembered as "a man who still has all his marbles." Unfortunately, my father has become a man who has lost some, if not all of his marbles. I realize how lucky I was to make Nobody's Business when I did. There's no way he could participate in any film project anymore.

9. By now you must have developed a philosophy on the family unit and identity?

My family is no more interesting than yours, maybe even less so. But every family is a complex system of forces - an amorphous continually evolving web of implications that cannot help but shape the what, where, when and especially the why of who we are. For many people, "the family" is a horror show. It's hardly surprising that more and more of us are seeking out other emotionally and psychologically charged and meaningful relationships outside the traditional family circle. More and more people are looking to create alternative or even substitute family structures - from and with friends, colleagues and/or various like-minded or life-style affinity bound individuals that coalesce into communities that evoke if not actually resemble family-like situations. The very idea of "family" has been stretched and in many cases replaced.

Along the way I've also learned that every life that is looked into deeply and passionately is poised to reveal secrets about the human condition. And ordinary people sometimes spell it out much more clearly.

10. Are you still NY based and what is your next film project?

Yes, I still live and work in New York City. No new film project just yet. There's always a kind of extended pause after I finish a film, when I need to learn from what I've just done, take some time to think it through, and then instinctively find my way to the next stop on the journey. I feel my way from project to project; it's never calculated. Whatever it is though, I hope it's broadcast on Storyville.

Am I allowed to mention that if people want to learn more about my work that they can visit my website at www.alanberliner.com?