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| Homegrown Photo: Glasgow Film Festival |
Whilst the return to power of Donald Trump and his allies has evidently come as a shock to some, the movement behind it has already been the subject of multiple documentaries. Screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival, the latest of these, Homegrown, does something a little different. Tracking three individuals as they become increasingly involved with MAGA, it’s noteable for the wide range of views that it showcases within that movement. I put that to director Michael Premo and producer Rachel Falcone when we met up for a chat.
“Why we wanted to do the film was very much for that reason,” he says. “We wanted to understand what all the ideas at play are. Our experience with all different types of social movements, or doing documentaries about all sorts of topics, no matter what the topic is, it's always a push and pull of different ideas. That's what we were really excited to dig into.
“We started filming in 2018, and we spent time with a dozen people around the country. We really had to make some hard choices once we got into the edit. We made the choices we made because we thought that the people that we landed on, who you see in the this final film, represented trajectories or broad communities that we discovered in the movement.
“Chris was the type of person who was newly politicised, somebody who said he never really paid attention to politics before 2016 but was inspired by Donald Trump to get off his couch and get involved. Thad represents this increasing multicultural dynamic that's present in the conservative movement. That's not something we talk about often, particularly in the United States, around how there's all different types of people being attracted to conservative movement. And Randy represents that sort of behind the scenes organiser who is really the grease in the wheels of any movement, who's just always on his phone or always on his laptop, sending emails, trying to get people coordinated and moving.”
I note that the three of them all say things at one point or another which don't really gel with what they say their positions are. It's not exactly hypocrisy, because I don't think they're aware of it, but there's a sort of a misunderstanding of a lot of what the ideas involved are.
“I think often in movements like this, there's so many different ideas,” says Rachel. “There's an assumption that people are driven by just the idea or the policy. Obviously, policies attract people to different moments, but it's really the feelings. It's like, how do people feel when they're joining an event or hanging out with different people? That is what attracted people, this feeling of belonging. They're looking to fight the isolation that they're feeling, and they're looking for community. And so that actually what is bringing them into the same space. There's not necessarily a feeling of hypocrisy, because it's not the ideas that are driving it.”
I was struck by the anger that one of them expresses towards Trump himself, feeling betrayed by him because he had promised to join them at the Capitol building and then failed to do so.
“Yeah, yeah, totally,” says Michael. “The plan on January 6 was for Trump to walk to the Capitol, and it was fascinating to watch them vent their frustration at Trump in that moment. I think that really speaks to the revelation that so many people are driven by this movement, like you said, looking for meaning, looking for purpose. That was really affirming to what we had discovered.”
Of course, many of them have now been pardoned by Trump. It's a really difficult thing to take on a film like this in a moment when things are changing so fast, I suggest, and Michael agrees.
“I've never worked on a project where every week a news event makes the film relevant in a different way. It's been wild to watch the developments, for sure. And, you know, now that the pardons have happened, we're working on updating the ending for future broadcasts.”
“Just so you know, Chris has been pardoned,” adds Rachel.
I ask if they were thinking about it at the time as capturing a piece of history or more something sociological?
“We were thinking about it as a little bit of both,” says Michael. “Like, if we could understand this moment of history, the people who are driving this moment, that could help us understand the moment in the moment, so to speak, but also be a sign of things to come as well as, you know, something that'll be increasingly relevant ten or 15 years from now, when we look back on this moment, which is going to be transformative in the history of the United States.”
Something that stood out to me in the film, I tell them, is that Chris generally seems to have a good understanding of who he is and what his values are, but he has no understanding of how getting caught up in a crowd might change that.
“Yeah, totally,” says Michael. “Chris has such moments of lucidity, and one of those moments is when he's drumming up support, telling everybody on the morning of January 6th that he's going to the Capitol. And he's like, ‘Well, you know, if there's just this small percentage that goes, then everyone's going to go.’ I think that's so true about the mob mentality, the crowd mentality that it's so easy to get swept up in. Which is not only a comment about what happened physically in that moment, but, like, psychologically what is happening in this era where people are just swept up in this space where they want belonging and they want meaning.”
Did they ever feel unsafe in the middle of all that?
“We were prepared,” says Rachel. “For most of the film we wore bulletproof vests and helmets and gas masks, as did our protagonists.”
“We were shocked, but not surprised,” says Michael of the attack on the Capitol building.
“Yeah,” says Rachel. “We anticipated what was going to happen. I mean, it was definitely terrifying on the day. You know, you had people with guns. You didn't know if they were going to shoot live rounds, you didn't know the push and pull dynamics. We were just trying to survive that day and continue to press record and still make sure things were rolling and the camera lens was still intact.
“I think it was actually an advantage that it was just Michael and I, because I was doing sound and Michael was filming. It would have been much more nerve wracking if we had a large crew to take care of just because there was so much unfolding during the day.”
I ask if people there were respectful about what they were doing there or if they encountered paranoia about their cameras.
“There was a lot of paranoia,” says Michael. “We're lucky that none of that was directed at us necessarily. One moment there was a group of people that were demanding we give them our helmets, but that quickly passed. But beyond that, no, I think we had developed enough relationships over the course of making this film. On that day, we kept running into people that we had seen. It was like the culmination of having been filming the last three years, that we saw enough people and had enough relationships that we didn't necessarily feel like that violence was targeted at us. It was just pandemonium. So we felt like we could just be collateral in something that was happening.”
There’s a flip side to that thought, isn’t there? One can get attached to people, and that makes it harder to do the job.
“Yeah. Journalists call it developing rapport,” Michael observes. “We definitely had a strong rapport with a lot of people. And sure, we liked people. We see them as people who are complicated and emotional beings who want to do right by their family, and maybe they make choices that are different than I would make, but they’re still people. So it's impossible not to recognise them on that level.”
Is that something that's missing from a lot of narratives around this?
“Yeah,” he says. “I think part of our obstacle in this moment, globally – and it's part of the wedge that's driving polarisation in many ways – is the politicians and the people who are benefiting from this polarisation. But when you look to people across society, by and large, there's a bunch of studies that suggest that we have much more in common than the conversation about polarisation would suggest.
“What happens – and we all do this, across the political spectrum – we use stereotypes to flatten and distance and delegitimise people that we want to distance ourselves from. And so if you can get past that flattening and understand people for who they are, what their motivations are, we can begin to understand ourselves and our complications, I think, in more dynamic ways. And I think that's really helpful to consider in this moment.”
“We felt privileged to get to see people as people and spend time with them and try to understand the movement,” says Rachel. “It's something that we hope that other people get the chance to do by watching the film. We want to give people a window into a world that maybe they'd otherwise shut away. But yeah, it’s so challenging to watch people make a series of horrible decisions.”
“We set out on this investigation because we really wanted to understand why people were fighting so fiercely for whatever it is they were fighting for,” says Michael. “We wanted to know why many people felt like violence might be a necessary tool in whatever they were fighting for. And we didn't know where that would take us, but through a very circuitous route, we wound up looking at what we set out to look at, which is, why do people feel so compelled that violence might be necessary, period?”
Did the generally chaotic atmosphere make it harder to knit the film together?
“Yeah, so much harder,” he says. “I think people feel so alienated, and that alienation leads to loneliness, and that loneliness leads to anxiety. And in that wave of anxiety, it's sometimes very hard to make sense of things. What we wanted to do with our aesthetic choices – the type of camera we used, our approach to composition, composing shots, our approach to sound – was all guided by this aesthetic inclination to be able to make sense in a fog of anxiety. What is driving people?
Stories are sometimes described as a way of bringing people together. Is that something that cinema can do, to help to reunite people?
“Absolutely,” he agrees. “Why we love cinema, particularly documentary cinema, is because, you know, written prose can maybe convey facts and figures in a particular way, but what cinema does really well is it allows us to see the emotional life of individuals, and we can really feel what they're feeling and what they're pushing up against. That friction is what creates drama, and that drama creates these sparks, I think, that lead to deeper understanding of why people do the things that they do, in a way that I feel is very unique to cinema. You can get that in drama or in theatre, but I think cinema just has this visceral nature that theatre doesn't.”
“We're incredibly excited to have UK audiences watch the film and have it in Scotland,” says Rachel. “We're sad we're not going to be there in person, but we're really excited to hear about it. You know what? It's been such a privilege to bring the film to different communities and have these rich conversations and get to see audience members. I will return two hours later, and they're still talking, because the film sparked all these different things that people could relate to. So we're really excited for audiences to see it.”
