Thom Fitzgerald Interview, Director of 3 Needles

Movies Online recently sat down with writer/director Thom Fitzgerald to talk about his latest film, "3 Needles," a three-paneled look at the worldwide AIDS crisis. The film begins in Montreal where a porn actor, Denys (Shawn Ashmore), schemes to pass his mandatory blood test while his mother, Olive (Stockard Channing), pursues a deadly course of action to protect their future. In Africa, a young novice nun, Clara (Chloe Sevigny), makes a personal sacrifice for the benefit of a South African village. And in rural China, a black market operative, Jin Ping (Lucy Liu), poses as a government-sanctioned blood drawer and jeopardizes an entire village's safety.

Since his 1997 feature debut, Thom Fitzgerald has won over two dozen international awards including the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television Award (Genie), The FIPRESCI European International Critics’ Prize, The Emerging Master Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Reader Jury of the "Siegessaule" Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. He won both the Best Canadian Film Award and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Fitzgerald is a three time premiere guest at The Sundance Film Festival, and has been lauded abroad with the City of Grandola Prize at the Troia Film Festival in Portugal, and the Best Screenplay Prize at the Mar del Plat Film Festival in Argentina. He was awarded both the Best Screenplay Award and the Most Popular Film Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. He was cited as "One of the top 100 filmmakers in the world" by Screen International and "One of the Top Ten of the Next Generation" by the Hollywood Reporter. He recently won the Best Director Award at the Atlantic Film Festival for "3 Needles."

Fitzgerald believes "3 Needles" is especially relevant in today’s global society where the AIDS virus knows no boundaries: "What defines our moment in history? Terrorism. Internet Pornography. Human Rights. One major characteristic of our time is AIDS, and it has the potential to change history on a greater scale than just about anything else going on. Tens of millions of people, entire ancient cultures and languages are likely to disappear. Despite the preoccupation of celebrity and war, I would guess that when the history of our time is written, the AIDS pandemic will be seen in retrospect as much more significant than the ongoing jihad."

The director elaborates on why he set out to seek deeper truths about the worldwide pandemic: "I asked myself this question: why at a time when all of mankind has a common enemy in this virus, has it not served to bring us together in order to fight it? The answer I discovered along the path of writing the movie is that the enemy is unrecognizable from continent to continent, from culture to culture. The virus itself is invisible so the social impact of the virus becomes its identity in each community. To us in the west, AIDS was a gay disease which has become a manageable condition. In Africa, AIDS is so common it is looked upon as an inevitable part of being alive. In China, most people still don’t have a word for AIDS, so it remains a mysterious early death. And since the virus is invisible, it is culture and religion that give it a face. Religion became the central metaphor and provided the structure for the screenplay."

What becomes clear in the course of our interview is that Thom Fitzgerald is a very thoughtful, deeply committed person. He gave well reasoned responses to our questions and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his latest film and why it focuses more on what we have in common rather than what sets us apart:

TF: Great. How’s it going for you?

TF: Well it’s a good feeling to get the person you had in your head. I think a writer always has a face in their mind when they’re writing a character. It can either be a famous actor that you imagine in the role or it can be just someone from your life that seems to fit the face of the character. But you can’t be disappointed [laughs] if the actor you approach doesn’t necessarily see the same things or why on earth they would be appropriate for what you wrote. It’s all about your imagination and the inner life. A face does not come across on a page.

TF: [laughs] I would have continued on even in the face of Lucy turning me down. We had a lot of conversations about the character and I knew that I was making a film where I’d be working with a lot of non-actors from around the world – people who not only had never been in a movie but some of them had never even seen one. Those characters…those people I knew I would be spending time with and sharing stories so that their point of view was incorporated into the film because this wasn’t a film that I could tell from my point of view and then I extended that process to some of the professional actors as well so that they could bring their ideas of that character into the film. And it often was in subtle ways that sometimes had a big impact. For example, there was a scene where Stockard Channing’s character has sex with a stranger that she’s picked up and she’s using him. I wrote that scene to happen in her home and Stockard’s concept was that her character wouldn’t bring the man back to her home because that would be too intimate for someone that she was using and so we decided to set the sex scene in a public arena and that sent us out on a big tour of Montreal strip clubs looking for the right place. And ultimately the scene completely changed by a simple change of location and that kernel of the idea though came from the actor.

TF: [laughs] I set out to redefine the face of AIDS for me because I grew up here in America and coming of age in the late 80s, I had very, very specific ideas about AIDS as it had been taught to me, that it was of course a Gay disease and something that probably, inevitably I would get. I’d moved past that intellectually but I knew perfectly well I’d never move past it emotionally and I also thought a lot of other people haven’t either. So I went out into the world looking for the real face of AIDS and quickly discovered of course there is no one face of AIDS. In fact, the face of AIDS is unrecognizable from place to place because it’s completely defined by who’s looking at it, who’s facing it, by where they’re born, by the religion they’re raised in, by their culture and their local history and traditions. So I really wanted to know why AIDS has been derisive and pushed people apart. Diabetes never caused people to call God’s intentions into question or blame people for getting it, but this disease did. And it’s because a virus is invisible so God became a metaphor in the film because AIDS like God takes on a face depending on who’s looking at him. So as different as Jesus is from Buddah, from the Pagan gods, AIDS is just as different in each of these cultures.

TF: Well, for one thing, I chose to never have any character in the film utter the word AIDS or HIV. I think that people here have such a visceral, automatic response to hearing the word. We have so much baggage, we have so much emotion wrapped up in these simple terms, and that’s about *us* though, that’s really about the viewer. And I was really hoping that in a more subtle way the point of view of people from other parts of the world might be shared more easily if I didn’t do anything to provoke the ideas that viewers would be bringing into it. I just know from experience that the word AIDS is a red button that pushes people. There’s two things that really piss people off – it’s AIDS and religion – [laughs] and I decided to put copious amounts of both to the film.

TF: Well a lot of the people who worked on the film in Africa have lived their lives without running water, without electricity, many of them had never seen a movie, and that taught me about media literacy. I’d always used that term, media literacy, but I’d never understood what it meant. There was this scene that was set some hours away and I had to take the kids and put them up over night in a hotel. Well Anele, the teenager in the film, stayed up all night in this hotel watching infomercials because he’d never seen them before. And in the morning he came to me and there was a particular pocket organizer that you could get for $29.95 which would give him the competitive edge to make him #1 in his town and beat out all the other guys. And I had to explain to Anele that you had to have a mailbox in order for this product to actually be sent to you and we even called the number which he’d written down. They said they couldn’t send it to him. And Anele fell to the ground and sobbed for forty minutes because as far as he was concerned, what the infomercial told him was absolutely true. He had no reason to suspect that the pocket organizer would not change his life and make him #1 in his town. We don’t look at infomercials that way. We look at them from a point of view that we simply know that advertising is false. So I learned about media literacy. I am not going to go show this film to the people who are in it. This should not be the first film that they see. I’ve lost track of your question.

TF: Well, of course, to the people of rural Africa, the making of a film made me seem like a crazy man to them. The idea of repetition. When I had to try and stop and think about the process from their point of view, I realized that for them, with no idea what a movie was, the experience of making the film was the telling of the story. That for Mabel Adams who plays the African grandmother who is 81 years old and has never seen a movie, she did her scene where she was deceased and at the end of the scene I said, ‘Hey Mabel. Thank you so much. You did a great job. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And she chased me down with a translator and said, ‘Thom, how can I be in the movie tomorrow if I died today?’ because to her the experience of making the movie was the movie.

TF: There was a lot of reluctance initially in South Africa. I was trying to learn and through sharing stories, trust was built. They thought that I might be trying to, who knows, make fun of their culture or religion. I think they’ve experienced a lot of that in the past. I would go and sit down with the tribal elders and I’d share my stories. I was really trying. It’s difficult for anyone to see what makes their culture and rituals unique, what makes your wedding special if you’ve only ever been to your kind of wedding, you don’t really know. So I’d say, ‘Well, hey, back in New Jersey one day a year we dress up our children as goblins and witches and monsters and we send them out door to door and they bang on the door and then they threaten the people and in order to save themselves, the people give them candy and send them away and they don’t get tricked. And so of course the chief stood up, angry, and he said, ‘How do you make up these crazy stories to try and get us to tell you crazy stories about out town?’ And I was like, ‘Oh no, really, that happens.’ But over time we sort of built up our rapport and I’ll tell you one horrible but enlightening thing that occurred. When the producer and I were swept out to sea in South Africa by a riptide and we nearly died. We were out for forty minutes until we were finally rescued by a lifesaving team. And when I came back to shore, when I came to, the crew and the cast were delighted not just because my life had been saved but in their faith when you die, you go to the sea whereas we go to the sky to heaven, they go to the sea to heaven. And in their belief, when someone is taken by the sea, it’s so that the ancestors can get a closer look and an inspection. So they hit upon the idea that if I was taken out to the sea and the ancestors had sent me back to finish the movie, that must mean that a movie was a very good thing.

TF: You know partly I didn’t want to change their way of life. I didn’t want to introduce things to them that weren’t already a part of their lives. I was there to try and capture a story and some of the children in the film had – in particular had seen a video about Jesus Christ that had been brought to them by missionaries and only some of the people hadn’t seen a movie. People who lived ten miles away did have electricity and I think that they didn’t necessarily need… There were a lot of things we chose not to introduce to the community. For example, diapers. Even though we had to take children sometimes to accommodations, I thought not a good idea to introduce diapers. They live in houses that are made of poo so it’s no big deal if the baby poos on the floor. This was not always a happy thing for hoteliers [laughs] but the idea of Pampers scattered all around the landscape of South Africa after I left was not something I wanted to risk.

TF: Lucy and I talked over the course of a year about the film and the character. Initially, her character which is somewhat of a typhoid Mary kind of character in the film I had conceived of as spreading the disease unknowingly but the focus of the story was also largely on the rice farmer and his family that is affected by her actions. Over the course of research it was one of those things about redefining the face of AIDS for me and of course in most of the rest of the world through the course of my own education I realized that while it has many faces, the face of AIDS is largely female. And as I learned how women are biologically and socially more vulnerable to HIV and AIDS, Lucy’s character also took on a greater life in the scenario and Lucy’s ideas became a bigger part of the film.

TF: Drastically. Ever country is different and sometimes I say Africa and I shouldn’t. It was South Africa that I went to and know a bit more about. For people your age, 25 to 29?

TF: For every man with HIV, there are three women. Because of, pardon my frankness but, a vagina is a lot more vulnerable to a virus than a penis is. A penis is covered in epidermis and a woman’s body will allow a virus to stay alive longer, but it’s not just biological, it is social. And this is where we have really let the people of Africa down because we still have AIDS prevention techniques that stemmed out of our debate in the 1980s between Gay men and political conservatives. We went there and we taught them ‘use condoms,’ ‘abstain from sex,’ ‘be faithful.’ These things that work for us do not work for the people of South Africa. Because greater than 50% of school children are raped before they graduate from elementary school. They cannot choose abstinence there. Everyone I met knew to use a condom but nobody had one. They knew that a condom would protect them because we went there and we taught them that, but we never actually provided any. And if a woman does not have the social status and power to say no to sex which is very commonly the case, then she can’t choose abstinence and a lot of women where I was, women were raised not to look a man directly in the eye, that this was not her place. If a woman can’t look her husband in the eye, she certainly can’t tell if he’s faithful to her. So I think that looking at AIDS in such strict terms is where we failed. We need to look at it societally. We need to look at social issues, the status of women, and human rights, children, and address it that way because our methods obviously, as the rate has climbed from 3% to 30%, have completely failed.

TF: [laughs] I’m going to go with race cars. Really, I’d like to know a lot more about race cars and I think I should learn it publicly.

TF: Thank you everyone.

"3 Needles" opens in limited release in theaters on December 1^st.