It’s the first time we’d worked together in this capacity where we were both kind of filmmakers. He’d worked with me on a project for PBS, a series about race, where he was the editor. But this is the first time we’re both on the production side. It was a little challenging at times (laughing).
I was the one who set the tone for the approach and how we were going to get the task accomplished, as well as trying to have a vision of what the story would be. I mean, we both did a little bit of everything but Randy, since he’s also an editor, there were a lot of technical things and other things he brought to the material. I think we have different approaches and we were trained in this business in different ways. I’m totally coming from the production side of things. I was a PA, an AP, and then a producer/director. And he’d been an assistant editor and other things as well.
So it was a nice balance?
Yeah, I thought so. It was also a nice balance to have women and men on our team. I’m African American and he’s white, and I think we were able to make people feel comfortable about talking about a range of things, particularly when we got to race. In our country it makes everyone nervous to start talking about race. Well, I should say it makes a lot of people – a lot of people who are white – uncomfortable about talking about race.
The thing is that some people are working really hard to make sure that they don’t say anything wrong. They don’t want to be misinterpreted, so they get nervous. And then there’s other people who just don’t want to share their true feelings on the topic, especially if I’m sitting in the room. There was one interview where I actually didn’t go because there are ways that people enter [the room] sometimes where you can tell they wanted to make sure they weren’t saying something that would upset me.
How many hours of interviews and footage did you end up collecting and how hard was it to make the final cut?
We found a fair number of home movies, which was really exciting. We have some home movies that have never been on the screen before. It was very challenging to decide. How much? We used a very small fraction of what’s out there.
One of the biggest things we did not include in our documentary is the story of the civilians that worked on the highway. There’s a fair amount of footage out there of men who left from different places in the country. There’s a group from Iowa and other places. Some of that was documented and there’s some really nice footage of the equipment and men leaving the country to go up to Canada. We didn’t use any of that.
What was the reasoning behind the decision not to show that aspect of the story?
Because the highway story is so complicated and people were coming at all different times, and they were coming in all different places. When we tried to tell it with more detail, people were losing where we were. The highway is 1,500 miles and we’re talking about 11,000 men just working on the highway project. There are almost as many civilians working on the project. And then there were thousands of men who were up there working on related projects. They had to have communications so there was the Cantel project for telephone wires and telegraph. There was an oil project to get oil to them, the Canol project. So it just became too much information.
The story, the Alaska Highway story, while they started building it in 1942, the story actually continues until after the war. So we had to have a cut-off date. In conjunction with American Experience, the ceremony celebrating the completion of what they call the Pioneer Road became the end of the film. We stayed focused on the experiences of the American soldiers.
Historian Ken Coates says in the film working on the road was “an arrogant act in one sense, and it is also a very courageous one.” How do you view it?
Well, he’s saying it’s an arrogant act because, first of all, he’s Canadian (laughing). Our country tends to decide things and we decide to do big and bold things. We charged ahead [without] a route through the Rockies, the place hadn’t been mapped. The men weren’t trained, they didn’t have the right equipment, and they didn’t have enough equipment… They’re like, “We’re going to blaze a highway through the Canadian Rockies to Alaska – and we’re going to try to do it in a year!”
How do I view it? I agree with him, but I also think it’s part of the American character in many ways. You see it in large scales like that and in small ways, too, in people. At least foreigners tell me that (laughing).
