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“Doc Filmmaking Can Be a Very Weird Process of Interpersonal Negotiations”: Debra Granik on Conbody vs Everybody
Conbody vs Everybody Though Debra Granik is no stranger to Sundance — 2004’s Down to the Bone, 2018’s Leave No Trace and 2010’s Oscar-nominated (in four categories) Winter’s Bone all premiered in Park City — I was a bit surprised to see the indie vet’s name attached to a project at the fest’s 40th edition earlier this year. Unlike the director’s prior critically-acclaimed films, Conbody vs Everybody is neither narrative nor a traditional feature doc, but a documentary in five chapters (six at Sundance, of which only parts four and five were screened) that took Granik and her longtime collaborators, EP Anne Rosellini and EP/editor Victoria Stewart, close to a decade to make.
Over eight years the team followed Coss Marte, a man on a Herculean mission to “de-stigmatize the formerly incarcerated community, ease their integration back into society, and change the systemic inequity of the criminal justice system,” according to the website for ConBody, the business Marte founded based on his self-invented, prison-style fitness method; and also the ConBody instructors, all formerly incarcerated individuals like Marte determined to defy both statistics and preconceived notions. Needless to say, many days bring an uphill battle, especially since Marte, a native son of New York’s Lower East Side, is doggedly waging it on his now privileged-white-gentrified (on steroids) home turf.
To learn all about this unexpected, longitudinal cinematic study Filmmaker caught up with Granik soon after the project’s Sundance (Episodic program) debut, and again prior to its DOC NYC premiere on November 17th. (Parts one and two of the newly revamped version will screen in the Metropolis Competition.)
Filmmaker: So how did you and your longtime collaborator, EP Anne Rosellini, go from developing a fiction project with a writer from The Wire to meeting ConBody founder Coss Marte at a reentry event where he was delivering a presentation?
Granik: We were initially in Baltimore researching a fiction project that dealt with a person coming out [of prison] and trying hard to proceed differently than they had before, to not engage in anything that could get them jammed up or returned to prison. That story showed how formerly incarcerated people experience tense poverty when they get out — they can’t support themselves or their families, and their records prevent them from sustaining gainful employment. The author of the screenplay wanted people to understand that in the way we’ve structured our criminal justice system, life after prison can frequently be like a second life sentence. When a person gets out they’re deprived of everything they need to have a part two of their life. Even after a person has settled with the state and done their time, this other set of blocks and obstacles can ensnare them rig
I was shown research that suggested statistically, if people do manage to stay out five years, there’s very little chance they’re going to go back in. Anne and I then wondered, what if we shine a light on the story of people who don’t go back in? How do they do it given that it’s so hard? That was the burning question. So we started scouting reentry programs, one of which was focused on teaching entrepreneurial skills to formerly incarcerated people, and that ultimately led us to Coss.
Filmmaker: How do you build trust with your characters, especially someone like Coss, who has every reason to be wary of a stranger with a camera? How does that process actually work?
Granik: Doc filmmaking can be a very weird process of interpersonal negotiations. Often the documenter is approaching a stranger and asking: will you have a conversation with me? Do some of my ideas hold interest to you? Unless it’s adversarial, unless you’re trying to get someone to expose something or to investigate someone, you have to have some form of friendship. There has to be some level of trust, which has to be built from a series of conversations. It’s hard for me as a filmmaker to imagine forging a long-term doc-making relationship with someone who doesn’t want to be in it.
Part of that process was also Coss vetting me. He had to ask himself: Do I want to be aligned with this person? Does her interest in criminal justice reform dovetail with mine? What does she understand about the criminal legal system? Are we synced in productive ways? He could read me very well. He knew that I was trying to comprehend the vast topic of why and how our country practices mass incarceration. Eventually we could joke about wearing a wire [a lav mic] and being an informant, in the sense of [him] letting the general population know something about experiences behind the bars [by being in the film].
From there, we filmed a little bit, at which point he had to decide does he like the process? What’s it like having us around? Is it interesting? Can he say what he wants to say? Does he like the crew? What boundaries does he want to set?
One of the key videographers for this project has criminal justice experience, and family members who had been in the New York state system as well. This meant that who was behind the lens wasn’t just someone completely foreign to Coss’s experience. There was someone on our team with first-hand experience, which was indispensable throughout the process.
Given that Coss is a person looking for veins of connection and for who can be allies, he early on said something like this to me: I have a subject that directly affects my life — the process of reentering society after being incarcerated and having felonies. I want to move the needle on what people understand about reentry, and the stereotypes of people who’ve done time, especially for people who haven’t lived it. You have social capital in the sense that you have access to cameras, you have connections to a crew. You can do something for me, with me, about me, by me — all these things. You have something that I also want access to — the means to record American experience, especially related to surviving the sprawling matrix of mass incarceration.
Filmmaker: I also wondered how choosing a hustling entrepreneur as your main protagonist might have affected your overall approach to the project. Though Coss is undoubtedly on a righteous mission to change lives, he’s also a media-savvy businessman obviously promoting a brand. Did the fact that you’re giving the company “free advertising” in a sense give you any pause?
Granik: I look at this way — he hustles because he doesn’t want to be poor. Our society would be very comfortable with him being poor. Coss and his peers saw when they came out of prison that it was a new weird world. Startup was a mania. Startup was a hysteria. Startup was an MO. He came out to a world of social media, of branding. A couple weeks home from prison, he was confronted in a reentry program with suggestions like, “You’ve got to re-brand yourself as soon as possible. What do you have to sell now?” So as someone newly home, he was encouraged to do that. So, an aspect of our film is to also document what it looks like for someone to feel a lot of pressure to brand themselves. We’re not promoting his brand — he’s promoting his brand — and we are photographing that process. Something important to me about creating a film over most of a decade is recording America as it constantly sheds its skin and morphs. We started shooting in 2014. By 2015, startup culture was in full swing. Talk about visual anthropology! The sheer number of pitch sessions, “shark tank” type competitions, incubators and accelerators that Coss and peers participated in is a film in itself. We could only use a fraction of what we had recorded.
Filmmaker: I’m likewise curious to know if the closing of production company Participant Media had any repercussions for the project.
Granik: It had big repercussions for so many documentary teams like ours. But I think the first blow was [executive] Diane Weyermann’s passing. After she died, Participant experienced the loss of a visionary who devoted her life to shepherding unusual work out into the world. She saw the beginning of the streamer monopolies shutting the gates and was swimming against a tidal wave of cultural flattening. The repercussions were felt for all of us who wanted to keep US documentary culture diverse and some part of the social impact ethos alive.
So I’d say that losing her had a devastating impact because Diane was such a champion, singlehandedly trying to resist the hermetic sealing of the doc space. She thought there was room on the most wide-reaching exhibition platforms the world has ever seen to represent the lives of everyday people. She believed American doc offerings could be more than just “crime, true-crime, cults, and celebrity” on these platforms. She was pushing back against the stultifying c’s. She truly realized how quickly those of us drawn to social realism were being pushed out of the cultural space.
Her mission through Participant was to keep space in US doc culture for work in which the stakes don’t exclusively rely on violence or being humiliated or annihilated. She saw stakes in the lives of everyday people seeking the opportunity of education, questioning the distribution of resources in our country, deciding how to get to work when you don’t have subway fare and jumping the turnstile could send you back to prison — those are high stakes in the every day. I think that’s what she saw in this film about reentry. There are 76 million people with criminal records in the United States. That’s a lot. At any given time there are two million people who are incarcerated. That’s a lot. We state the statistic in the film, that 650,000 people are coming home each year. This was a very meaningful cohort of human beings to Diane, citizens she felt it was worthy to create work about – with, by and for. If there’s a way to keep some of her theory and thought, practice and desire alive, we have to join forces on that.
Filmmaker: So what are your — and Coss’s — hopes for the series? Are they the same?
Granik: I’d say that Coss wants to impart the hope that there’s life after incarceration. He thinks of himself as tenacious hustler who’s forging a second chance to grow his life. And he would like that for his many brothers and sisters who are incarcerated in the United States — to have chances for post carceral growth.
And I think that our hope for the film is similar, that Coss and the other trainers in the film that make great strides would be somehow inspirational to people inside — when they’re thinking about reentry, when they’re thinking about how nervous they are about coming out, and about how they’re afraid that society won’t receive them well.
As for potential viewers who haven’t had opportunities for in-depth conversation with someone who’s been incarcerated, I hope that through this film they would get to know a little bit about how a person gets jammed up, how they survive their time inside, what they learn inside, but mostly what they do when they get out, and who’s actually there to help them with what they need to move on.
Filmmaker: Do you have any closing thoughts? Any important aspects I neglected to ask about?
Granik: I’d like to end with reflecting on a beautiful moment that happens in filmmaking — finding archival gems. Finding lasting evidence recorded by a previous documentarian that gives you a little window into time and ideas we may have lost. We couldn’t fit it in the film, but we found some archival footage from the 1960s of a warden who had initiated an experimental program in which people who were incarcerated were assigned mentors in the outside world. This is a practice that some reentry groups are catching on to, and is something that Coss feels passionate about. And this warden, externally conforming to many stereotypes, was on a roll with something fresh. He proposed that if every person who came out of the U.S. prison system had one person who would do something supportive for them when they got out, we would not have the recidivism rate that we have. I thought it was fascinating to hear that idea expressed in 1965 and heartbreaking to realize that 60 years later, it’s still almost nowhere to be found.
