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Interview: Kerthy Fix
The documentarian discusses her new film about the Magnetic Fields, Strange Powers, now playing at the Film Forum
Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields (Photo: Variance Films])
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The best kind of interviews to conduct are the ones when you’re talking to a fellow fan of something you love. In this case, it’s speaking to Kerthy Fix, co-director of Strange Powers, a documentary that follows Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields around for a decade. For a big time Magnetic Fields fan, this sounds like Heaven—even if by the end of it, you might not want to hear the band’s music for some time.
Encore spoke to Fix, who talks about Stephin the way a proud parent would their son or daughter, about how Strange Powers, which opens today at the Film Forum for two weeks only, came to be, whether Stephin’s aware of his cult legacy and the fortunate cabbie who drove, at different times, Merritt and Leonard Bernstein’s daughter.
According to the trailer, you’ve been working on Strange Powers for a decade. Will you ever be able to listen to the Magnetic Fields ever again?
[Laughs] That’s a funny question. I don’t pull Magnetic Fields’ music off my shelf anymore, although I’ve become really fond of [Stephen Merritt’s side project groups] Future Bible Heroes and the Gothic Archies. The thing is, some music you get sick of, you’re intrinsically sick of, but I’m not intrinsically sick of the Magnetic Fields’ music, just psychologically have to put it aside for awhile.
So the project began in 2000 then?
It actually started earlier. The film’s co-director, Gail O’Hara, was the music editor at Time Out New York, and she and I knew each other from college in Richmond, Virginia. I was the arts and entertainment editor of the student paper, and Gail took over when I left. By the time I moved to New York in 2000, she had been the music editor at Time Out for four or five years. Stephin and Claudia [Gonson, band member/manager] moved to New York in 1993, 1994 and they started playing around. Gail was a fan of the band. She heard that first single ["100,000 Fireflies"] and CD [1991's Distant Plastic Trees], and she became friends with Claudia first. Claudia called her up one day and asked if she could give Stephen a job. They met—and didn’t really hit it off. But, as Gail likes to say, Stephin doesn’t make a good first impression, but neither does she. Those are her words. Eventually, they really hit it off and became friends. They were working at Time Out together, doing copy editing, where you’re often waiting for someone’s story and there’s nothing to do in the middle of the day. So they would take these long walks and take photographs; Gail’s a wonderful photographer. In 1999, she started shooting video, too.
A year later, I moved to New York. I looked at the footage she shot and thought it was interesting. But because she was a journalist and not a filmmaker, some of the technical issues, like sounds…I said that we should get some better equipment and shoot vérité scenes. We had this great base of material, including some live stuff that no one else had. In 2003, Gail moved to Britain to write and I started shooting seriously with Stephin and Claudia while they were recording i and then Distortion. I went on a couple of tours, and it just sort of went from there. From the beginning, it was always going to be about their work and not their personal lives. That was something we established right away.
How often did they say shut the camera off?
That was said, probably every time I shot with them [laughs]. But, to their credit, in one instance in which I was told to turn the camera off, they let it be in the movie. They’ve been incredibly generous. I’d be recording and use, like, 10 tapes, almost 10 hours of footage, and they would just hang out and be around. They allowed us a lot of access.
How many hours of footage ended up being shot?
Three hundred and sixty-eight hours. We spent over a year editing.
When you were following them around, how much equipment did you have on you?
I like to be a one-man band. Booms and lights really throw off people. I like it to be more intimate, so I had a couple of wireless mics on them. It was a small format camera with a shotgun mic on it, and I had a belt pack with the wireless receivers. That’s about it. If we shot in a live venue, I’d plug one of my wireless receivers into the soundboard and get a feed on one channel, and then record off the shotgun mic on the other. It’s kind of amazing what you can do now.
What was it like being on the road with the band?
They used to take a car, but they pretty much travel by plane, unless it doesn’t make sense, in which case they would rent a big van. There’s a lot of tea drinking and sushi eating. They love food. We didn’t get to include this scene in the movie, but when we were in San Francisco, there’s this Japanese mall and we went in there with Stephin. He loves sweets, so he was just buying tons of these weird Japanese sweets.
The opening scene of the trailer is almost too perfect. Nothing in the film is scripted, correct?
I don’t believe in that kind of documentary. Nothing was set up, and they wouldn’t have done that anyways. That scene you’re talking about actually really happened. We weren’t technically shooting at that point. The cabbie was really awesome, though. We actually had to re-record that audio; we faked his voice with a friend of ours. But it’s exactly what he sounded like. He told us this hilarious story about driving Leonard Bernstein’s daughter around with a documentary crew because they were making a film about her father. He was like, “Yeah, so he was gay? Wasn’t he married to this beautiful woman?” And she said, “Yeah, I’m the daughter of the beautiful woman.”
When did you stop shooting?
We shot the Distortion tour [in 2008], and that was the last shooting we did.
Why stop then?
We had hours and hours of footage, and you just have to stop at some time. We waited 10 years for something dramatic to happen—and it never did. Gail and I were both like, it’s a portrait, and you can make a portrait from any good footage. The hardest part in the editing was constructing some three-act structure.
What would you say the three acts are? The A, B and C, if you will.
A is Stephin’s music. This is a creative American iconoclast of the first order, whose music hasn’t been recognized to the degree that it should be. B is Claudia and Stephin’s relationship. She brings him to the public through her creativity. C is where do they go from here? C is what happens when you’ve been in collaboration with someone for 20 years. You’ve got to change and shift, and will the collaboration hold.
Do you think it will?
Oh yeah, I do.
What was most striking to you about Stephin and Claudia’s relationship?
That relationship is the basis of the film. What was clear to us, being friends with them, is that they really function symbiotically. We don’t really have this model out there for a non-romantic relationship that’s artistically like a long marriage, and I felt like Claudia’s contributions weren’t as evident. Stephin, obviously, is the genius—he writes these incredible songs, without which no one would care—but he also has this vulnerability and helplessness in the face of the larger logistics of the music business, like the distribution of records. Claudia does all that, but she doesn’t just do it like a logistics organizer, she’s a creative organizer. The way she does it is actually quite beautiful. The film just really follows their creative relationship.
His “vulnerability” is why I’m so surprised he allowed the film to be made.
If Gail had not been good friends with them, we would have never been able to start. The flip side of that is that she is friends with them, and she didn’t want to hurt her friends feelings. Because I was a little more outside…I believe, as the documentarian, that compassionate observation helps people and I’m not there to rob or exploit them. I’m not an investigative journalist. Because I knew I was coming from a place of compassionate observation, I could sit in this place of trust. They would not sign an agreement with us until we finished the film. We didn’t even know if we would get the music rights. In their defense, they didn’t know if they were going to get a good portrait, so I think they did the right thing and, on a human level, we were able to have enough trust. I just kept showing up with the certainty that it would work out.
The fact that it exists, though, means they didn’t hate it. What was their reaction to the finished project?
They wouldn’t have given their permission if they didn’t like it. Because they’re artists, I think they see this as a separate artistic endeavor, and Stephin in particular has really great boundaries around that. The only change they asked for when they saw the final cut was—Stephin hated out music cuts. We had chopped up the music a little bit, and because of our video editing software, it’s hard to fine tune music, so we actually ended up using his sound engineer to do our mix. Stephin sat with the editors and me for hours, and it was the most horrible experience. He was in pain because he hated what we had done, and we were in pain because he was in pain.
Claudia’s main changes were that—there’s a piece in the film where she makes a distinction, for the early records, between Stephin’s recording…because he was in his room making these recordings, and she wanted a live band. So their live sound is totally separate from their recorded sound, and she really wanted that distinction made, and I think it helps the film.
Other than that…they didn’t really have a lot of vanity. They weren’t like, “Take that shot out, I look fat.” They pretty much went with the film as it was. They were a little nervous, though. We did a preview screening in San Francisco, with Stephin’s mom and so Claudia’s best friend in attendence—and they loved the film. I think once they heard from the people closest to them that it was a loving portrait, I think that reassured them.
The film includes interviews with a lot of famous fans, like Peter Gabriel and Sarah Silverman. How did they come to be part of the project?
Peter is buddies with Claudia, and because he was recording “The Book of Love” [for his 2010 album, Scratch My Back], they were already in correspondence. He actually was awesome. He shot and recorded his interview by himself and sent us a QuickTime file—and it was perfect. As for Sarah, while we were on tour, she came to the L.A. show with Jimmy Kimmel. Shirley Simms [guest vocalist] brought them backstage, and Claudia kind of interacted with them but Stephin was hiding in this dressing room area, off the main social area. And we were like, “Sarah Silverman wants to meet you, Stephin! Don’t you want to come and say hello?” And he’s like [in her best droll Stephin Merritt-voice], “Who’s Sarah Silverman?” He hasn’t thought anything’s been funny since, like, 1960. He’ll say that, too. But, looking at her work, it’s no wonder she thinks he’s amazing, because those songs she does, she too mixes that sweet and ironic quality. She’s so lovely.
Do you think Stephin’s aware of his cult figure legacy?
He is, although Stephin wishes he had Sondheim’s career. He wishes he were some anonymous songwriter from, like, the 1930s, writing MGM musicals. He doesn’t want to be a persona, the way you have to in pop music. I think that’s the discomfort. That’s why he’s perceived to be an “asshole” in interviews, because he’s not going to do that Rufus Wainwright thing and forefront his personal life…I’m not denigrating that, I think that’s an artistic project, if your persona is part of your art, but Stephin’s not interested in that. But I think I’ve gone off track. What was your original question?
Whether he was aware of his legacy.
To me, as a fan, it’s a little hurtful that he’s not more well known. He should be more of a household name.
You don’t find that to be part of his charm?
Of course [laughs]. I mean, us Magnetic Fields fans like feeling exclusive. We like being the ones in the know. Not for that sake, but because it requires intelligence to understand his work. There have been references where I’m like, “I don’t know what that is!” You want to be intellectuality stimulated, and that’s a particular kind of person.
For more information about Strange Powers, please click here.