Like many producers of documentaries, Iain McCray Martin was drawn to a story that was very close to home. He happened to be fortunate that his home was on an island and that the story was one of local interest: lobstering. You might say, “lobstering? Hasn’t it all been done before”. While lobstering may indeed be a frequent topic in films and broadcast specials produced in Maine, what Martin has done is unique. Life By Lobster is a powerful insiders look into the lives of lobstermen and the Maine youth who enter this profession. The film addresses the complexity of the question: “Should I stay on my island home in Maine to earn a living as a fisherman, or do I leave my community, go to school and perhaps never return?” It’s a question that speaks to the angst facing many young people today.
Recently, Maine Film & Video Association web chair, Mark Ireland (MFVA) spoke at length with Iain McCray Martin (IMM) about the making of Life By Lobster (LBL). This is part one of the interview:
(MFVA) How did the idea of Life by Lobster come about? Was it something that had steeped in your mind for a long time or did it come out of an “ah-hah” moment?
(IMM) Well it’s kind of a combination of both. I grew up in Deer Isle, spent my entire life there, graduated from a class with 26 kids at a local public high school in ’05 and from there I went on to college and started attending Emory University down in Atlanta and I began to get really interested in filmmaking pretty quickly. Suddenly this idea of, ‘well, what if I did this documentary about lobstering – I wonder if that would work?’. That started to percolate and both of my parents work in the industry and have worked in the fishing industry a long time and so they immediately became a source of guidance and so the idea was: I’ll go around with this consumer camcorder that I have and do some interviews with some guys I grew up with who made this decision to go fishing. A lot of them will be doing that for life now and it’s sort of an incredible moment that they’re all going through where they’re still adolescents but they’ve made this decision to be a lifetime commercial fisherman and so it kind of evolved from there into its own thing. What I originally thought was going to be a small community project, something that was just a way for me to exercise some of the rituals of filmmaking and see if I liked it and see if I was capable suddenly turned into a 3 or 4 year venture and an hour long documentary. So it definitely grew on its own.
(MFVA) At the start, what were some of the early goals you had set for yourself?
(IMM) Well first and foremost even when I didn’t know how long this project was going to be and what the endgame was specifically, I always felt that it was going to be important to make a film that fishermen were going to watch and going to stand behind - a real fisherman film. There’s a lot of stuff out there about the lobster industry or commercial fishing industry that’s either way overblown and overly dramatic in my opinion or it can get stale and boring. So it’s a matter of finding that fine line where you’re not being sensational, but you’re also not putting your audience to sleep and so that was always important to me. If I could have finished Life By Lobster and it was being revered by the world’s best filmmakers and I was being flown off to Cannes and all that, if then the fisherman were like, ‘this is not a real representation of who we are’ – it all would have been for naught. So it was really important to me from the beginning to make something that was true to them and true the community and true to my roots, but then with the actual story itself we started pretty broad. We were doing interviews with guys I knew who I was close with and it evolved from there where I really wanted to let the story develop on it’s own, I didn’t want to be forcing drama or forcing the story on the viewer so I got really lucky in a lot of ways. One of my best friends growing up who continues to be a great friend, Mac Hardy became one of the key protagonists in the film. He suddenly decided that he was going to go out and go fishing full time and so it was really incredible that that happened over the course of the 3 years I was shooting this. He made this sudden decision and that became a real focus of the documentary. It was a mixture of both knowing the points I wanted to hit - I knew certain topics I wanted to cover, I knew certain things that were just pivotal and needed to be included in the film - and also just letting things develop on their own and letting the reality shine through. Because in my opinion a lot of what people claim as reality on TV shows is far from it.
(MFVA) In the documentary form, typically the producer is guided by finding answers to certain questions. What were the primary questions you were exploring?
(IMM) Well, I really wanted to delve into what these fishermen were going through, what motivated them making this decision because a lot of people that I talked to who didn’t grow up in my community, whether it was Atlanta or - I waited tables for a long time and I used to listen to summer people who wondered what would make a kid in his teens or early twenties make this decision to pursue this career for life. There were a lot of misconceptions, sometimes about parents putting on the pressure for them to do this and it couldn’t be further from this truth. So it was really a matter of building into the real struggle that these guys go through: you see Mac working two jobs, struggling to say afloat – no pun intended – get his gear together, get enough money to buy a used boat and then get out on the water and again even when you’re out there, there is no guarantee you’ll make a profit so for me it was all about trying to show the struggle that these guys face and how hard the profession really is. It deserves a lot more attention than it’s been given in the past and it’s a really important industry in the overall economy in this nation in general. At the end of the day I wanted to get into more about what was important in their lives and in their profession.
(MFVA) So I imagine one of your questions was: “why has this industry endured, despite all the hardships?”. How did people address that issue in the film?
(IMM) You know, these guys are part of an extremely proud tradition: the reasons that they do it are they love where they live, they love where they come from and they love what they do. Now, if you want an absolute honest answer to this question, lobstering can be a very profitable industry. So there are guys who go into this and everything clicked. Not only do they love what they are doing, not only were they growing up and continuing to stay in the town that they loved, near their family, and were able to accelerate into adulthood rather quickly, but they also were making a damn good living for themselves at a very young age and that’s very hard to beat for a lot of these guys and it’s a combination of all those things. I certainly wouldn’t want to portray them as doing it purely for money but that’s something to consider and they’ll be honest about it. You can make a great living fishing but one of the continuous issues we address in the film is: Will that money be stable in the future, will you be able to support your family a decade from now and what are the reasons that you would NOT to be able to support your family 10 years from now and how can we stop that? So it was all those factors but a big part of it is that it’s a proud tradition. These guys make their own decision and they’re continuing something they love to do. One of our characters in the film – Ben – at one point has a great quote; he says: ‘I could never sit behind a desk. I can think of nothing worse in the world that I could be doing. I’m out here on the water and what better office is there than this? I get to wake up every day and come out here. I’m my own boss.’ So there’s a lot of reasons to do it but that’s kind of the gist of their reasoning.
(MFVA) Was it challenging to get your interview subjects on board?
(IMM) You know that absolutely wasn’t a challenge at all. I really thought that – lobstermen are generally not guys who are real excited to get in front of a camera and be verbose and talk about their feelings an whatnot. These guys were not overly eager to do this but I had a tremendous amount of encouragement and patience from all my subjects in the film and I think a big part of that had to do with the fact that I grew up there and I knew most of them pretty well from a young age. So that was great for me, it was a huge advantage, being from the island. I think there is immediately this feeling of, ‘I can speak freely in front of the camera and to Iain and he is not going to take things I say out of context. He’s an insider, I can trust him with that information’ And that was huge for me. I can’t thank these guys enough for the amount of exposure they gave me and allowing me this insiders look. And they continued to be extremely supportive of the film throughout the entire process. And they continue to be great. It was very exciting when the film came out. Of course I was worried about what these guys were going to think about the movie – I was kind of slinking down in the back of the room when they all first saw it. But as far as I know so far, they all loved the movie and were all thrilled with the way it came out. That was one of the most important things for me, making sure that these guys felt I represented them correctly and that I told a portrayal of lobster fishing that was true to life and I think that we achieved that. And I say ‘we’ because it certainly wasn’t just me. It was me and the fishermen in the film and the community and my producer as well and my parents. I can’t thank everybody enough.
(MFVA) I was struck by how comfortable your subjects seemed in talking with you. It feels like you are simply in a room hanging out with them, not filming. They aren’t the stereotype- reserved, shut-down Maine fisherman. What were some of the ways you were able to achieve this level of comfort?
(IMM) I try and have always tried when doing a documentary to just try and be invisible and make people forget about the camera and I always told them – it was my first interviews with these guys and I certainly didn’t know a ton about what I was doing and they had no idea what I was doing, so it was this feeling out process initially of what are we really doing here? Where is this going and what should we talk about? But as the shooting continued and the film progressed over a period of years, suddenly the comfort level went up so far. I always would just tell the guys, ‘be natural, don’t worry about the camera being here. I’m not going to put some moment you had in front the camera and wished you didn’t, in there just because it makes for a great movie’. I don’t think that took away from the movie either, censoring it. I just told the guys ‘be yourselves, speak to me the way you would if there wasn’t a camera here’ and it ended up allowing for some very honest and real moments from the guys. Mac, out on the boat where his hauler died – that was an incredible moment where I’m standing there with a camera at one of Mac’s worst moments in life and I asked him ‘what are you going through – tell me what’s going on right now?’ So where a lot of other people probably would have stood up and punched me in the face at that moment, Mac was used to it, he knew the deal already and not only was used to it but was extremely supportive of helping propel the movie forward.
(MFVA) What were some of the challenges you faced on this project?
(IMM) Well funding is always a challenge. We did “Life by Lobster” on an extremely small budget. But there are some specific people I have to thank: at the forefront, J. Miller Tobin. He came on as my producer in the second year of the project. He’s an L/A based television director, he has family in Maine. His parents have lived here a long time. He’s spent a lot of time on Deer Isle where this film takes place. I spoke with him and liked the idea. He’s a super nice guy , super talented guy and the next thing I knew he’d signed on as a a co-producer of the project. Through Miller’s guidance – I never would have been able to make the film without him.
(MFVA) For the producer of any documentary, there is always the question: “do I go into this with a fully formed plan for what I want to get” vs “do I go into this strictly as an observer and see what comes out of it organically?” Where did you fall on this spectrum?
(IMM) Well, it was a combination of both. I certainly did a lot of things in the making of LBL that I look back on and say ‘Oh my God – talk about reinventing the wheel, I would never do that again’. But that’s important. I think my words of encouragement to aspiring filmmakers would be, ‘Just go out and do it’. Don’t wait for this one thing to come through or don’t say ‘I’d love to shoot this film, if I had an EX-1 and a guy to boom for me then I could really do it’. You know, just go out and shoot something. That is how LBL began – I was just shooting to see what would happen and next thing I know it evolved and the quality improved and it went from there. A lot of the way I went with LBL was to start with a general idea and specific topics I wanted to cover and hear the fisherman talk about . Then, when I started doing the project – and I think most if not all documentaries have this - when you’re asking a series of questions and then from that starts to come this new angle when you say, ‘oh that’s interesting’ and then it goes from there. You have to allow for that, you can’t be shut off from those things or you’ll end up with a sterile documentary. You can’t force a documentary like you can a narrative. It needs room to evolve and kind of organically grow. It’s tough. You need to be there to capture those moments and you’re always going to miss some opportunities but some are going to come your way that you never expected. But the one thing I would say to aspiring filmmakers is you should have some kind of structure for what you do. That was always kind of frustrating in making LBL. When it first began I had a general idea but it was far too general. And when the documentary is too general the next thing you know you’ve shot a ton of footage that you don’t know exactly what to do with and you’ve really got to hone the idea down. So, if you do that from the beginning and you plan ahead and you have a general arc for the story in your head, that allows you to make changes according to that arc. So, it’s important to have a general plan and we always did, but it’s also important to allow for those organic moments and changes to come to the camera and let them fall within the story where they may.
(MFVA) When you began the project you were using a non-professional camcorder. When you had better gear, did you go back in and reshoot some material that you had shot with your original camera?
(IMM) There are some moments you see in the film where we drop in some early stuff , like there’s an interview we shot in 2006 called our ‘preliminary interview with Mac’ and that is one of those moments. But a lot of that material ended up on the cutting room floor. Since it was shot over four years, once I had a better idea of how the film was going to evolve and I had the better gear and a better idea of the way this was going to evolve, that material that I shot henceforth kind of took that place of a lot of that footage I had shot early on. But it always was important for me to still include it because that was what sort of gave birth to this whole project and so it’s in there.
(MFVA) So the idea was that you were more content driven and even though your later work was better quality you kept some pieces because the content was too important to let go?
(IMM) Exactly, and that’s another thing. Some of my favorite documentaries, hands down, are films where they don’t sacrifice content for aesthetics and in a lot of ways for me the aesthetics that I prefer is that more rugged content. Joe McGuinness who did the music for LBL – he did most of the music and he also narrated – he has a great musical style that is a lot like the way I like to make movies and that is to really leave those spontaneous moments in there and when you’ve got something good, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s clean and perfect looking or perfect sounding. To me an old camcorder interview, if it’s real and it adds something to your story, that can be better than a professionally shot interview with lesser content.
The truth of the matter is that I’m pleased with the way LBL looks even in those shots when I wish I had a bounce card for that certain interview. Because, it’s a documentary about fishermen and it’s a gruffly shot documentary. It’s a story about rugged guys and a rugged lifestyle so I was happy with the way it came out, with the content and the subject matter and the way I was able to film it and I was still able to get some nice aesthetically pleasing shots in there of the coastline and really hopefully capture some of the elements of what it’s like to live in a fishing community.
This concludes Part I of the interview with Iain McCray Martin
(ed. Note: If you would like to learn more about Iain’s project, go to our forum’s page and read up and discuss this project with Iain himself)
http://www.mainefilm.info/index.php/forums/viewthread/37/
Posted by MFVA at 11:30 AM. Filed under: Screenings/Festivals • (2) Comments • Permalink