Born and raised in North Carolina but now based near Harvard, where he’s taught filmmaking since 1986, Ross McElwee is one of the most original, consistently excellent nonfiction filmmakers of the past half-century. His powerful new film “Remake”—about the passing of his son Adrian, a regular presence in his later work—is playing exclusively at New York’s Film Forum through July 16, following nine months of screenings at film festivals, and will eventually be viewable at home, although no release date has been set.
In addition to representing how many years McElwee has taught at Harvard, 40 is significant for McElwee the documentarian: it’s the number of years that have elapsed since the release of his first feature, 1986’s “Sherman’s March,” one of cinema’s most inspiring examples of a director leaning into a behind-the-scenes disaster and making art from it. The story: McElwee received a $28,000 grant (in today’s money) to make a documentary retracing Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Civil War campaign through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. He was about to start shooting when he and his girlfriend broke up, which devastated McElwee and made it hard for him to focus on the film’s original premise.
In his own circuitous, digressive way, the result does get around to telling the story of Sherman’s march. But it’s intertwined with McElwee’s musings on the cultural aftershocks of the Civil War, the threat of nuclear extinction, and interviews with women. The latter tend to fall into one of two categories: new prospects that McElwee would like to hook up with, and former girlfriends that McElwee hopes can give him some perspective on why their relationships failed. Sometimes McElwee’s interview subjects interview him back.
McElwee’s filmography flows into and out of “Sherman’s March.” “Charleen” (1978) focuses on his longtime friend Charleen Swansea; his 1984 featurette “Backyard” is about his relationship with his father and the complex dynamics between Black and white people in the southern states. “Time Indefinite” (1993) is a direct continuation of “Sherman’s March” that touches on the death of McElwee’s grandmother and father, the sudden, shocking death of Charleen’s husband, and the filmmaker and his then-wife, Marilyn Levine, experiencing the miscarriage of what would have been their first child. “Photographic Memory” (2011) was an unwitting prequel to the agonies depicted in “Remake,” detailing McElwee’s increasingly uneasy relationship with Adrian, by then a teenager who was developing his own interests, viewpoints, and spiky personality while struggling with the mental illness and drug addiction that would claim his life.
The totality of McElwee’s work brings to mind Robert Altman’s comment in 2006 while accepting a lifetime achievement Oscar: “To me, it’s just been one long movie.” I was blessed to talk to McElwee about the long movie of his life—in particular, the experience of grieving for Adrian off-camera and then struggling to translate his feelings into images and words. Shaken by watching “Remake,” I told McElwee about my own experience as a man who’s been widowed twice, and he sensitively referenced these losses periodically throughout our talk, which to me was like a small-scale, verbal equivalent of watching one of his wonderful films.
My condolences on the loss of Adrian.
Ross McElwee: Well, thank you. That’s a nice way to begin to talk about this. It’s been quite a journey getting through that. The decision to make a film about it was not easy.
As a father myself, I can’t imagine going through something like that.
That’s interesting to know that you have had experience raising kids, or maybe you’re still in the process. I’ve spoken with people who’ve really appreciated the film, both with and without children. The way people perceive the film seems to break down into two audiences.
What other patterns have you noticed in audience reactions?
Maybe it’s predictable, maybe it’s obvious, but I do think that as you get older, you’re more sensitive to these kinds of losses.
I’ll tell you a quick anecdote, which I haven’t shared with too many people, maybe nobody, but at the end of my film, there’s this peculiar choice of “El Erlkönig (The Elf King),” a famous 1782 ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that Franz Schubert put to music as a song for the credits. The story is about a father holding his son, who’s very, very ill, as they race on horseback to reach a place where there might be help for the boy. And as he rides, his son sees monsters in the trees.
The son keeps saying that he sees the Erlkönig, this sort of mythical king of the monsters. He tells his father, “It’s the Erlkönig, and he’s trying to take me to his kingdom of death.” And the father keeps saying things like, “No, my son—that’s only the mist in the trees that we’re running past—don’t worry!”
The piece goes through several cycles of this, and finally, the Erlkönig grows increasingly upset with the child because the child won’t agree to go with him, and the monster starts threatening him. He tells the child, “Okay, now I have to take you with me,” and the son says, “Mein factor! Mein factor! Mein factor!” My father, my father, my father. The father finally pulls up to a place where he can get some medical attention for his son, still holding his son, and he looks down, and the son is dead.
I mean, even telling you the story…It sort of…[Long pause] I get a little choked up just telling that story.
The story adjacent to that is: I knew that poem [set to music] from a college course decades ago. It always stayed with me because it was really vibrant, written in a way that lets you hear the horse’s hoofbeats as it tries to get the father and son to their destination in time. It’s really beautifully constructed, the whole thing. You know, I wasn’t weeping the first time I heard the music or anything. I wasn’t thinking of my brother and my father. For a while, I didn’t quite know why that song stayed with me.
Then suddenly I realized it was because my father, who was a doctor, also had an experience like that, where his son—my brother—was injured, and it turned out he was injured mortally, and my father was out in the wilderness somewhere and couldn’t get help in time. And that’s why the story of the Erlkönig stayed with me for so long. Then, at a certain point after my son died, I realized that turned out to be true for me, too.
This film is having its commercial release in 2026, almost 10 years after Adrian’s death. What made you decide that enough time had elapsed to address that loss as an artist, after spending a decade trying to process it as a dad?
It is a distinction that needs to be made. The dad part of me could never come to terms, I guess.
Maybe you know some of this yourself, after what you’ve been through with the double death of your first wife and your second wife: there’s a thing that people say to me, this phrase, ”Well, at least you had”—in my case—“twenty-six good years with him before he died.” When they say this, I don’t reply; I just nod my head.
And you know, they say things like “Memories are so important, and they will sustain you through this.” Joan Didion wrote two books about losing people: The Year of Magical Thinking, about losing her husband, and Blue Nights, about the loss of her daughter soon after that. In Blue Nights, someone tells her,’“You have your wonderful memories,” and she says something to the effect of, memories are the things that I no longer cherish, or no longer need. They’re too painful. I think that was really my situation for a while.
What was it like processing Adrian’s loss from a father’s perspective?
The way I got through it was to first go through a long process of doing nothing. No writing, no thinking about a film or anything. I thought about the wording Joan Didion used: that memories are the things we don’t want to remember.
I didn’t quite answer your original question, though, which was how I finally got over the part of the grieving dad to become the grieving artist. I think I had to do it in stages. One stage was that I hired an assistant to go through my films, select only those in which Adrian had appeared, and choose one of two still frames from each film that featured him. I just wanted the still frames, the frame grabs. I wanted to see if I could begin writing about the still frames without breaking up and being unable to go any further, which is what happened to me when I tried looking at home movies: I just couldn’t do it because they were moving.
This was something different, though. The still frames gave me a little bit of objectivity. And I wrote paragraphs to accompany each still frame. There were seven of them altogether. Doing that helped tremendously, because I got to see that I could somehow eventually come around to being able to do a film featuring home movies in which Adrian had appeared, and scenes from my feature films in which he’d appeared, if necessary.
After that, I started going back to the archive and choosing moments with him that I’d filmed when he was a child, piecing them together into a kind of timeline and using that as the basis for the film.
About those paragraphs you wrote to go with the still frames: what were they like? Did you make the text merely descriptive? Or did it spin off into other areas?
It went off in other areas. It was descriptive, giving context to each case, but I also had to start dealing with my emotions because I was thinking, “My emotions are probably going to end up playing a role in this film as voiceover narration,” which helped me get to that point.
There’s a bit of narration that says, “My family life had been the lens through which I tried to make sense of the world around me.” That made me wonder if, at this point in your life, having lost so many family members to natural and unnatural causes, you are concerned that the lens is gone? Or at least harder to use, or harder to focus?
The answer is surely yes, but maybe for more than one reason. One is what you say: it’s just emotionally very, very difficult for me to think of ways to creatively reckon with images of people who are no longer here. But also, as I’m getting older and older, I think I’m losing some of my libido to go out and film the world, which is kind of a sad thing. I don’t know that I have the desire or energy to continue undertaking these journeys into the real world, whatever that means these days. I’m not feeling entirely comfortable with asking other people to reveal themselves to me when I’m holding a camera.
Now, this could all change. I’m still very much in the throes of living and working on the distribution of “Remake,” the film I just finished. I think when I’m all done, I can take a deep breath, reconsider everything, and make another film—one that actually does allow me to use that lens that you just referred to as a way to see the world
I was struck by the particular words used in Adrian’s death notice. It says “Adrian R. McElwee, 27, passed away on December 24. 2016, after a long illness.” There was a time when most people would wonder what kind of physical illness: cancer, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis. But it refers to mental illness generally, and to addiction, which is increasingly thought of as a category of mental illness.
As recently as 10 or 15 years ago, a notice for someone like Adrian would have had a headline that either obliquely communicated the cause of death or omitted it entirely. What do you think about all this?
I think now that those two terms, mental illness and addiction, are being described and perceived today much more readily than in the past. I’m not quite sure what moved my former wife to describe it in the way that she did, but we were very aware that he’d had mental health issues. We spent a lot of time helping him find therapists and work with psychiatrists. He went away to wilderness camps that dealt with substance abuse issues. I think if this [event] were happening now, in 2026, instead of 2016, it would have been possible for [the death notice] to be even more forthcoming from the very beginning about the issues involved in his death.
It all happened so quickly, too. Suddenly, there was a need to hold a funeral service and post something. And to be honest, I don’t even remember how it all came about. I’m not even sure I was able to read what was written before it was published. It was just so complicated.
It’s interesting what you did, going back to that death notice. Adrian himself was very much interested in the whole phenomenon of addiction and left behind footage that proves it. He has lots of footage that he shot of his friends experimenting with these opioid drugs, and you know [from the film] that opioids led to heroin and then fentanyl, which of course is what Adrian got in trouble with. So I think it would be described differently if it were an obituary that was written these days.
You could probably hear me stammering and stuttering as I talked to you. I find it amazing that we’ve been traveling with the film for almost nine months, and that still happens. You’d really think that by now it would have become very simple for me to talk about this more eloquently and in a more flowing way. But something happens when I start talking about Adrian’s death. I can feel the constriction in my throat. It’s just very, very hard for me to do, as you well know.
People constantly tell you it’s unhealthy or abnormal to carry a wound like yours around for the rest of your life. Some of the greatest poetry in English, by poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and John Donne, is about loss and grief. In the 1800s, someone who had suffered a loss like yours might have visited their loved one’s grave every week and left a flower there, and no one in their circle would’ve judged them negatively for doing it.
Did you, by any chance, read George Saunders’ book Lincoln in the Bardo?
No, I haven’t.
Oh, you should. I mean, that’s exactly what it’s about! President Lincoln just can’t help himself in going back to the tomb of his son, who died when he was a child. It’s largely fictionalized, but it’s about the phenomenon that you’re talking about. I read that book early on while trying to work my way through the grieving process and create something. It was very useful for me to read and understand what was going on with Lincoln.
It’s also unexpectedly amusing in places. Saunders creates these fictional people who are writing articles that appear in local papers, with very florid descriptions of the loss of the president’s son and how that’s affecting him and his family.
There’s a moment in “Sherman’s March” where the camera is pointed at you in a medium shot. You’re just sitting in a chair with a window behind you, and you say, “My father’s asleep upstairs. I think he already has enough questions about the validity of my film project without seeing me dressed up like this.” I wonder, in the 1980s, did you know any other people who were filming themselves that way? Do you feel like one of the founders of that form of expression?
There were certainly other people doing it. In fact, one of my film school teachers was one of those people, and I was greatly influenced by him. His name was Ed Pincus, and he made portraits of his family. He had a large impact on me and other filmmakers. There was a small colony of us, mainly in Boston and Cambridge, who were making those kinds of movies. Half a dozen people, maybe. We all encouraged each other foolishly to keep doing it. I persisted because it was something I felt comfortable doing.
But it also was very important to me to be sure that the films, certainly the early films, featured other people, because otherwise you ran the risk of something being really narcissistic and self-centered, and that would never work as a movie. It needed expansiveness to strive for some sort of universality.
But now it seems like everybody’s doing it. And you’re right, selfie-making has become an international phenomenon. I hope my films weren’t a catalyst for that happening. I would be very disappointed in us as a nation if that happened because of my filmmaking.
Of course, there are differences between how most people make [selfie videos] and how I do them. For one thing, most of theirs are over in 25 seconds or whatever, where I really give the time in all of my films to let whatever version of reality I happen to encounter and alter with my filming to take as long as it needs to sort itself and explain itself. Even that monologue you just mentioned: I think that was like two or three minutes long, an unedited single shot. So, in a way, if I helped create or help launch the selfie revolution, I was continuously undermining it at the same time.
In “Sherman’s March,” there’s a scene where you’re filming your first meeting with a prospective date. Your friend Charlene, who introduced the two of you, intervenes and says, “Would you stop? Would you stop? This is important. This is not art. This is life.” What do you think about Charlene’s warning today, 40 years later? Where is the divide? Is there a divide?
Are you asking me if the whole concept of trying to film a version of your own reality is no longer a valid pursuit?
No, I’m curious to hear your interpretation of what Charlene said to you. The implication is that if a personal moment is really important, you should put the camera down.
That’s a very urgent phrase that Charlene tossed up, and there was nothing rehearsed about it—it just unfolded before the camera. She was really sort of upset with me for doing [“Sherman’s March”] but also highly amused by it. And, having taught poetry in schools for many, many years, Charlene was aware of what art can do and of its importance. So I think there’s an ironic implication in her juxtaposing those two possibilities in the same statement, but it is kind of a clarion call for caution, because you can overdo it one way or the other with a camera when you’re trying to live your life.
Can you really live your life when you’re filming it at the same time?
Good question. I think about it all the time: This is not art, this is life. There are times when you should put the camera down, stop filming, and deal with what you have to do in order to live your life. So I think there’s validity to what she says.
When I’m watching iPhone footage of somebody who’s caught in, let’s say, a war zone, or a tsunami, I think, “It’s so stupid that they’re filming this! They could be killed!”, but also, “Wow, we’re so fortunate to have this footage to look at, because it shows us what it feels like to be in that situation.”
Yes, I think both things are true. They could be killed, and it’s pretty amazing that they’re getting this footage. And then there’s also the question of whether you have the right to stick your camera in somebody’s face as they’re going through some traumatic event, or have just been through a traumatic event, and expect them to be able to respond?
I made a film called “Six O’Clock News,” which asks those questions as I travel across the country. That was one of the things that set my journey in motion across the country: how do people deal with these tragedies, and how in the world does television think it has the right to stick a camera in their face and ask these questions? So I went out and did it myself. But I broke the ice by allowing the TV camera crews to sort of do the dirty work of finding the person who was willing to talk to a camera, obviously, because I would never have known anything about them, but then I’d go interview them a few weeks later to see where their lives were now.
By the way, on that film, I think I was motivated by the fact that I had just lost my father, and so I’d had my own grieving period and got through that. I never totally left it behind. But was able to move forward with making a film. How do other people deal with their losses? That was the question that motivated “Six O’Clock News.”
What sorts of reactions have you heard from people who have seen “Remake” and have themselves lost a child?
A few people have come up to me after screenings and talked about that experience. Invariably, they’re weeping, and then I start weeping too, and it’s kind of a mess. I learned pretty early on that I should vacate the theater. But I feel bad about that because one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about showing films—my previous films, anyway—was interacting with individuals in the audience who had just seen the film. To avoid that entirely would be to deny [myself] that important experience. So it still seemed necessary to do it sometimes.
As for the people who have come up and talked to me…I mean, it’s, it’s very difficult. Everybody’s loss is, in some ways, similar and, in others, absolutely unique. I guess I found it supportive of my filmmaking that they felt the need to discuss something similar and deeply tragic that had happened in their own lives with the filmmaker.
I do hope maybe that something could be done once this year passes and we’re not doing live screenings anymore, of offering the film to groups of people who’ve lost family members or loved ones to addiction, so they could then go out and talk about the process of dealing with what they’ve been through. There are already groups like that. They exist and have existed for many years. But maybe films like this can also play some role. It’s still too early for me to know.
I think what I’m bringing to people is a sense of solace. I can never make the pain go away, any more than they can make it go away from their own lives. But the film gives them the sense that they’re not alone, that there are other people who’ve been through this, too. All of that, I think, is worth doing.
Hence then, the article about this is not art this is life ross mcelwee on remake and sherman s march was published today ( ) and is available on Roger Ebert ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( This Is Not Art, This Is Life: Ross McElwee on “Remake” and “Sherman’s March” )
Also on site :