Back to selection
“The Film Is a Portrait of Amy Goodman, But It’s Also a Celebration of Resistance”: Carl Deal and Tia Lessin on their DOC NYC and IDFA-debuting Steal This Story, Please!
Steal This Story, Please Steal This Story, Please! is a compelling and often unexpected look at the multi-award-winning investigative journalist (and author and syndicated columnist) Amy Goodman, best known as the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on over 1500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Since its inception nearly three decades ago, the daily, global news broadcast has been unwaveringly dedicated to telling the stories of those on the “end of the trigger.” And shockingly, it’s been doing so entirely supported by audience dollars: no government funding, corporate sponsorship, underwriting or advertising revenue required (or allowed). Just a lot of fearless gumption — and one giant finger to The Man.
Co-directed by the Oscar-nominated team of Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water, The Janes), the film interweaves a treasure trove of archival material — footage from both studio and field, as well as from the personal archive of the unapologetic advocacy journalist — with heartfelt interviews with several longtime colleagues. (Co-hosts Juan González and Nermeen Shaikh make noteworthy appearances, along with proteges Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jeremy Scahill, who landed at Democracy Now! despite having no background in journalism – indeed, no college education at all. Never underestimate the power of tenaciously begging for a job.) And of course forthcoming sit-downs with Goodman herself, the granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi who credits her “Jewish education” — “You ask questions and you take nothing for granted” — with teaching her to approach the world with “intense curiosity,” and to always “stand by your principles.” In fact, one of the most memorable scenes involves not any US policy-upending (East Timor) or corporate complicity (Chevron’s role in the murder of two Nigerian activists) reporting, but Goodman trekking to Brooklyn to be interviewed by a boy named Daniel Seagan in preparation for his bar mitzvah. The eighth grader had chosen her as his “hero.” (Alas, I learned from the press notes that he ultimately went with Billy Crystal as his “role model,” citing Goodman’s work-life balance as a deciding factor.)
Just prior to the film’s DOC NYC (November 13th) and IDFA (November 15th) debuts, Filmmaker caught up with Deal, a former investigative journalist and television news producer himself, and Lessin, a onetime labor organizer, whose first collaboration was “on a campaign to expose and disrupt the illegal US wars in Central America.” (Lessin’s bio also emphasizes her work on the Bravo/BBC satirical series The Awful Truth, which earned her “two Primetime Emmy nominations and one arrest.”)
Filmmaker: How did this film originate? Since you’ve known Amy for decades, was she immediately onboard? Hesitant considering her hectic schedule — and perhaps her inclination to keep the spotlight off of herself?
Deal and Lessin: As longtime listeners of Amy’s show — and occasional guests with our other films — we’ve watched Democracy Now! evolve from a scrappy radio broadcast airing out of the attic of a Chinatown firehouse into a multi-platform news program produced in a state-of-the-art studio in Chelsea. Over the years we’ve also crossed paths with Amy and her team in the field — from the WTO shutdown in Seattle, to the DNC convention in Minneapolis, to the streets of Baghdad in the weeks before “shock and awe.”
Amy has built her career by turning the camera outward, centering other people’s stories, not her own. So, yes, we were a little surprised when she agreed to be the subject of a film. It helped that she already knew us and our work, but like any sane person she was understandably hesitant about letting us in. Once she took that leap of faith, nothing was off limits.
Filmmaker: Amy’s longtime colleagues, who also seem to serve as her surrogate family, make up the bulk of the participants, which makes me curious to hear if others were left on the cutting room floor. How did you decide who to include?
Deal and Lessin: We drew on an extraordinary wealth of footage — eyewitness video of Indonesian soldiers turning their weapons on civilians, and on Amy; vérité coverage of Amy and her team reporting in the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq; raw field tapes of the Native American standoff at the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock; and dozens of other seminal stories she covered. So we didn’t have to rely solely on others to tell us about Amy, because we could show her in action, in real time.
Still, we couldn’t resist putting Amy’s co-hosts Juan González and Nermeen Shaikh on camera, along with several journalists she’s mentored over the years — Dave Isay, Jeremy Scahill, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Their stories were just too good. And since we could show them in the footage over time, they are organic to the story, not simply talking heads.
But those who sit for our cameras are not the only participants we feature in the film. There are those Amy has interviewed or reported on over the years like Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed by his government a year after appearing on her show; political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, banned from speaking to journalists soon after Amy aired his commentaries; and President Bill Clinton, who famously cold-called her on Election Day 2000 (a call he probably came to regret).
Of course, there were many many voices and stories that didn’t make the final cut — not because they weren’t compelling, but because there is only so much you can include in a 95-minute film. The test for us was, does it reveal anything new about Amy or her practice of journalism? If not, is it funny? (We learned early on from working with Michael Moore to never cut a laugh.)
Filmmaker: I also wondered what boundaries Amy may have set. Though she’s quite forthcoming with her backstory, including how Judaism has played a defining role in both her career choice and her approach to journalism, we see very few glimpses of her present-day private life.
Deal and Lessin: The great cinematographer Joan Churchill once gave us a piece of deceptively simple advice: “Point the camera at what interests you.” Simple, yet profound. Given the gravity of what was happening in the world as we were making the film — political assaults on press freedoms, and on democracy itself — it felt right to keep the focus on Amy’s work, and the urgency and purpose that drive her journalism. That’s what interested us most.
That’s not to say we weren’t interested in Amy’s personal story — we just decided to situate it within the larger crises in journalism and in democracy that she’s been navigating for decades. (Frankly, when the world is on fire, who cares what brand of toothpaste Amy Goodman uses?) The scenes of Amy with her family, the love and laughter so evident with her brothers and her grandmother, feel incredibly intimate; and her razor sharp wit behind the scenes reveals a woman who never gives up hope.
Yes, the film is a portrait of Amy Goodman, but it’s also a celebration of resistance, an argument for an independent, free press, and a call to action against the dark forces trying to silence us all. If the audience awards the film has won since we screened at Telluride is any indication (four and counting), we think we struck the right balance.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about the editing process? Dealing with 30 years worth of studio and field recordings, as well as Amy’s personal archives, seems rather daunting.
Deal and Lessin: At a time when the historical record is being erased before our very eyes, it was important to us to ground ourselves — and the story — in the archives. In a sense, that’s what Amy and other journalists do every single day: build what will be the historic record through their reporting, eyewitness footage and interviews. So we cast a wide net, drawing from not only three decades of studio and field recordings, but also countless broadcast news clips, family home movies, and our own contemporary vérité footage and interviews.
We screened for months with our editor Mona Davis — together, apart, over and over — making dozens of select reels of scenes, images and beautiful moments that spoke to us. Revisiting the barrage of human tragedy that governments and corporations have inflicted on the world is not for the faint of heart, so we also looked for the lighter moments — unexpectedly funny, hopeful, or just plain surprising.
Filmmaker: Did you share rough cuts with Amy during production? Now that the film is out in the world, especially at such a fraught time for journalism, how does she feel about being the storyline?
Deal and Lessin: As we’ve done with the key participants in all of our films, we invited Amy to a fine cut screening before we locked picture. (Who wants to see themselves onscreen for the first time in a theater full of strangers?) As for how Amy feels about being the storyline, we’ll leave that for her to say.
