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Kurt Kuenne’s Shortlist

Published on June 17, 2011

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders – leaders like Kurt Kuenne. We asked Kurt to share his favorite films and his thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world.

So what films make Kurt’s Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Kurt Kuenne
Photo by Richard Kuenne

Who is Kurt Kuenne?

Kurt Kuenne is a filmmaker and composer of fiction and documentary films. He has made two documentary features: Drive-In Movie Memories (2001), a history of the outdoor moviegoing experience, and Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008), which chronicled the murder of Kuenne’s best friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby, and how the government of Canada set Bagby’s accused killer free on bail during her extradition process, allowing her to commit a second murder before trial. Dear Zachary, named one of the top five documentaries of 2008 by the National Board of Review, screened for Canada’s Parliament in early 2009, inspiring the creation of Bill C-464, which gives courts the right to deny bail to someone accused of a serious crime who is deemed a potential danger to children 18 and under. C-464 became law in Canada on December 15, 2010.

Kurt is a recipient of the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and is also the creator of a series of award-winning black & white short musical comedies which have played at festivals the world over. The most popular of these is Validation, starring TJ Thyne of TV’s Bones. Kurt just completed a new feature film called Shuffle, about a man who begins experiencing his life out of order, also starring Mr. Thyne. Kuenne is also currently working as a composer & lyricist adapting Frank Beddor’s New York Times bestseller The Looking Glass Wars into a musical for the stage.

Kurt Kuenne on the Power of Film

My most direct - and surprising - knowledge of the power of film comes from letters I’ve received from viewers. I’ve had people write to me after seeing Dear Zachary to say the film kept them from committing suicide, to say it helped them decide what career to pursue, that it made them want to be a better parent, etc. I’ve had people write to me after watching my film Validation (which is just a comic fable) to say it has changed the way they interact with people, has helped them see a way out of their depression, or simply that they return to it often (it’s up on YouTube) because it picks them up when they’re down. I didn’t anticipate any of these reactions when I made the movies, nor did I intentionally plant “messages” (aside from the obvious outrage directed at the Canadian legal system in Dear Zachary and subsequent call for change, which we got). I simply did my best telling a story I wanted to tell and hoped people would embrace it.

I once had someone ask me at a seminar, “How do you go about weaving messages into your films?” I had no response other than to say, “Uh…I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sorry.” I think if you’re making a movie with the intent to preach, you are making a bad film. Who you are and what you believe is going to come across in your work if you’re wholly invested, so I think it’s more magical to just tell your story, then step back, see what you made and see what others discover in it. You never know how people will respond to something you create. The reader completes the text, if you will, and movies continue to be a living, breathing thing constantly in dialogue with the audience long after they’re finished.

David Mamet said in his book Bambi vs. Godzilla that movies had unlimited power to entertain, but no power whatsoever to teach or change lives. While I agree with the former part of his sentence, I’ve seen plenty of concrete proof that renders his latter conclusion false (and have this proof in my possession in the form of viewer mail). I can only imagine what responses other filmmakers must have collected over the years. Film can do a lot of things, but I’m most interested in film’s power to exhilarate, inspire and uplift.

Kurt Kuenne’s Shortlist

Nobody’s Business (1996)
I had the good fortune to stumble upon Alan Berliner’s work on PBS right when I had been hired to make my first documentary 11 years ago. Seeing his dazzling, virtuoso approach to cutting and sound design for the first time was akin to someone pulling back a curtain and revealing a whole other level of possibilities in the medium. No one else working in documentary excites me as much as Alan on a pure craft level. He makes inanimate objects dance while moving things along at a dizzying clip, but while always keeping you involved in the tale he’s telling.

I’m a fan of all of his films - Intimate Stranger, The Sweetest Sound, Wide Awake, etc. - but Nobody’s Business stands apart for me. It’s an hour-long interview with his father, the irascible and hilarious Oscar Berliner, who does not want to be interviewed and would rather be doing anything else. That may sound static; it is anything but. It is by turns hilarious, biting, dazzling and incredibly moving, and has even more power now that Oscar is sadly no longer with us. Until recently, Nobody’s Business was only available on VHS and was very hard to find, but with The Alan Berliner Collection (a DVD box set of all his films to date) being released on DVD through Amazon.com on June 28th, that will no longer be the case. I urge everyone to pick up this box set; it’s a treasure.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991)
We are now awash in “behind the scenes” documentaries that are manufactured as bonus features for DVDs, but as far as I’ve seen, no one else has come close to the intimate access and emotional portrait of the creative process that this film presents. It shows the daring leaps necessary - and the terror that comes with them - to have a shot at creating something wonderful. (The filmmaker documented in this case is supremely talented, and the movie he was making fortunately turned out to be a masterpiece, but for the flip side of this process - where the creators risked much and the end product did not turn out so well - see the terrific documentary American Movie or read Michael Bamberger’s book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale.)

I only wish the film had also documented Coppola’s editing process on Apocalypse Now, as that went on almost as long as the shoot itself, and likely contained as many emotional peaks and valleys (though Walter Murch discusses that process extensively in the books In the Blink of an Eye and The Conversations)—but I’ll take what they gave us, which is a document to cherish.

Bowling for Columbine (2002)
For my taste, Michael Moore tends to put himself on screen unnecessarily in his films when he is not the story or the subject, which I find often distracts me from the topic he’s covering. But his treatment of teen violence in this film had such power that it transcended my usual misgivings for his approach and became my favorite film of its year when it was released. It is a true emotional knockout and a thought-provoking exploration of our national character. I do think he put Canada on a bit too much of a pedestal during the sequence where he compares and contrasts our crime rates, giving the impression that crime and murder do not happen in Canada, which they most certainly do. Anyone who has seen my documentary Dear Zachary knows that the Canadian legal system’s lack of respect for the danger accused killers pose led to the entirely preventable murder of someone I cared about. But his observations about America are dead on. Its Oscar was well-deserved.

The Civil War (1990)
One of the things Ken Burns does that I admire most is take his time. He doesn’t race through his material, nervous that you might change the channel. He takes the time to sit in a moment, let it breathe, and explore all of its dimensions, confident that you will be as fascinated as he is with the subject. How he manages to be this captivating with long running times, I don’t know, but he does it. (David Lean did the same thing in dramatic features, and it’s always been a source of amazement for me.) The Civil War is Burns’ masterpiece. His treatment of letters, photos, paintings, sound effects and music make the past immediate and tactile for us. Burns calls himself an emotional archaeologist, and here he captured the defining event of our country with depth and soul. The reading of the Sullivan Ballou letter that closes the first episode is perhaps its finest moment.

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (2008)
I don’t even like heavy metal, and this story totally involved me, even made me cry…and made me want to go out and buy the band’s album. It follows the two lead members of the metal band Anvil, Lips and Robb, who should have made it big back in the 1980s - many of the bands that did make it big from that time cite them as influences that they looked up to - but Anvil itself somehow slipped through the cracks. It follows their struggle 30 years later as they continue to create their music, unsure if anyone cares anymore, working toward the future they always knew they deserved, but which the universe had thus far denied them. This is a film that is a touchstone for anyone involved in the creative arts who has toiled for years doing work they believe in but has yet to be appreciated, struggling to keep their spirits up and their faith in themselves when many around them are saying, “Maybe it’s time to give up.” The film’s popularity ended up giving Anvil a new lease on life, opening doors for them that were previously closed.

I was fortunate to get to know Sacha [Gervasi, director] a bit following the release of the film, and had the good fortune to be at the DVD release party for this film the night that Lips & Robb went on The Tonight Show to promote it, shortly after they had played a gig opening for AC/DC, an opportunity that came about because of the film’s success. Having just watched the film, when I arrived at the party, I was immediately struck by the confident way Lips & Robb now carried themselves, the sparkle that was present in their eyes that was considerably dimmer in the film itself, when they were living through such soul-crushing struggles. It was clear to me that the events this movie had set in motion had not only changed their lives, but the way they felt about themselves. Sacha was a roadie for Anvil when he was 15, became friends with Lips & Robb, and never gave up his belief in them over the years. This film is a love letter that changed the lives of its subjects for the better.

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
This is the movie that more than any other made me want to make films and continues to remind me of what is truly possible in this medium. It’s easy for people today to forget how audacious this movie was when it came out—the concept that a rubber puppet could not only be one of the lead characters in a movie but actually make people the world over feel something deeply was unheard of. The story of a little boy who becomes best friends with a lost visitor from another planet could easily have been a cringe-worthy movie, but Spielberg walked a thin line of precise vision to create a film that is original, beautiful, honest, mysterious, funny, suspenseful, soaring, heart-wrenching, profound, enchanting and climaxes with what is still one of the best chase scenes I’ve ever seen, a bicycle chase through a developing 1980s suburbia. It also features my favorite score of all time, by the incomparable John Williams.

I almost wish the movie had not been so successful at the box office, so Mr. Spielberg wouldn’t have felt the motivation to go back and play with it 20 years later. He made some unforgivable revisions to the film in 2002, the worst of which was about 50 shots in which CGI was used to “improve” E.T.‘s facial expressions—I consider what was done to the film in 2002 to be vandalism. Movies - whether fiction or documentary - are a capsule of the time in which they were made, and I prefer them left alone as time winds on, warts and all; the rough edges are sometimes the best parts. So find a copy of the original cut of the film (there’s a limited release DVD of it out there, and hopefully we’ll see a fresh release of the original on Blu-ray sometime soon) and cherish it; this, in my opinion, is what movies are for.

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