Documentaries need a journey, the subject needs to be wrestling with things about themselves and their lives and you are hoping for a change. And then he told me he was working on a book. He talked to me about his kids and his mortality, but he never stopped smoking. And then he told me about his gambling trips. He presented as this regular guy but he wasn’t a regular guy at all.Īs I was interviewing him I noticed that to my left there was a massive guillotine-watch the film and you’ll know what that was all about. He was a wordsmith but he had a raw and unfiltered aspect to him. One of the associate producers said, “We need to interview Tim O Brien.” Within 20 minutes of the interview I had my heart blown open by this guy. We had basically wrapped The Draft but we were in Texas for another shoot. I was working on another project for PBS, a documentary about the history of the draft. SV: What made you want to make this film?Īaron Matthews: It was really meeting Tim. Throughout the documentary, which is a just under 90 minutes, we do hear Matthews voice occasionally. And as we follow along as Matthews documents O’Brien struggling to write his perfect sentences in between his sons' basketball games and Walt Whitman poetry homework, and to address his relationships to his fans, his fellow vets, his siblings, his wife, his magic tricks, his cigarettes, and his own mortality, we can’t help but leave the film sometimes relating to the quotidian frustrations, while still in awe at the phrasing of even O’Brien’s off the cuff remarks- not to mention his mastery of swearing effectively. There is humor in here, too, plenty of it. He embedded with the O’Briens for almost five years to establish the trust that is clearly evident in the honest and sometimes raw portrayal of the creative process, of family memories and dynamics, of aging, and of the aftermath of war, the one fought on battlefields and within ourselves. Matthews has been described by Esquire as a “disciplined storyteller,” one who does not allow himself to participate in self-indulgence.
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