Read ahead for an interview with the director, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.
Most of us, to some extent, want to get away from the families we grew up in, to not be reminded of the people we were at 5, 10, or 15. Actress Mariel Hemingway had more reason than most: not only did her famous grandfather, Ernest, kill himself in his home, not too far from the house where she grew up, but her parents had their own problems, spending their nights drinking in the kitchen, then fighting, sometimes breaking glass and drawing blood, which Mariel, when she was still a child, would clean up.
In the documentary Running From Crazy, we see Hemingway reminisce about her growing up and also witness her current life, speaking to groups about suicide (her sister, the model and sometime actress, Margaux, also killed herself, and Mariel begins one talk with, “I come from seven suicides, perhaps more”), exercising with her partner Bobby, and spreading the word about holistic ways of staying physically and mentally healthy.
Thanks to archival footage the director, two-time Oscar winner (for Best Documentary feature) Barbara Kopple, discovered, we also see Margaux, in film shot for her own documentary (which you can see on Youtube) 30 years before, which retraces the steps of Ernest Hemingway, but also captures Margaux’s interaction with the rest of her family, including her parents (who are both now dead) and her other sister Joan (also known as Muffet) who, after a lifetime struggle with mental illness, is now, we see later, in assisted living (after Mariel’s grown daughter chides her into visiting).
The Margaux we see in the kitchen of the old family home (which Mariel later tells us was torn down after her parents’ deaths) seems nothing like the woman with the blonde hair and big smile we see in a white 70s jumpsuit, singing alongside a piano, in archival tape from “The Mike Douglas” show (the host declares her a “star”). Instead, she seems to physically shrink in the presence of her mother and father and even her sister, whose manner reminded me of girls I knew in high school: fun to have at a party but with personas that were a cover for troubled lives. She even has the same hairstyle.
Mariel later reveals that her father sexually abused her sisters (she would share a bed with her mother to stay safe), and the family dynamic then seems to make more sense, especially to those of us who have stood by a partner who tried to make nice with abusive family members–and seen all the old roles come into play.
Kopple combines the vintage footage with gorgeous current shots of Mariel hiking in the wilds near her hometown. She says of her childhood, “I knew if I didn’t get outside I’d just want to cry.” We also see her in other wilderness, climbing steep cliffs (after fighting with her partner) and dipping herself in a river, all of which, along with her public speaking and outreach, seems like a catharsis to break with the past.
In one of the many scenes in which she speaks to the camera (some of which are a little too much like one-sided therapy sessions), Mariel says, “We were good WASPs, you know. You don’t speak about your problems,” but she does seem to be breaking the cycle as she tries to involve her adult daughters in this work and talk to them about the family’s history of mental illness (which the daughters have, to a lesser degree, also grappled with). She tells us, “They say in spirituality you’re done with something when it doesn’t affect you anymore. I’m not there yet.”
Interview With The Director, Barbara Kopple
I was able to talk by phone to the director Barbara Kopple (who not only has won two Academy Awards but has had a career that started in the ’70s and hasn’t stopped since) about the film a couple of weeks ago. We started by discussing the footage of Margaux. (The following was edited for concision and clarity.)
Barbara Kopple: She (Mariel) didn’t even know it existed.
Bitch Flicks: So how did you find that then?
Barbara Kopple: It was really pretty wild. We not only found the documentary which was an hour, we found 43 hours of Margaux material. I never told Mariel that we had it because I didn’t want her to feel, “My God, what do they have?” I wanted her to be free to really talk. She never knew it (documentary footage of Margaux, Joan and her parents) existed.
The way we found out about it is the sound person named Alan Barker whom I’ve known for years was in Ketchum for our first shoot. And he said, “You know Barbara when I first (started out) I was a camera person and I did some filming here in Ketchum with Margaux.”
I said (about the documentary), “Where is it?” He didn’t know. I said, “Did it ever come out?'”
He said, “I think they had a little hour thing. But if four people saw it, that was a lot. It was called Winner Take Nothing.”
We finally found some footage at an archival house in Minnesota the footage had been given to. When we called them they said, “My God, we have tons of it but nobody has ever asked for it. We’ll have to go and blow the dust off for you.”
We said,”We will pay anything to get a screening copy made.”
“Well that’s going to take a really long time” he said
(Well) when you do some, just send them to us,” so they sent it to us little by little and we would get these Fedex packages that would be like Christmas. (We were) so excited to see what was on them. I just knew that the film would have sort of a richer context because we had that. From that we were really able to step inside the Hemingway family. Otherwise it would be Mariel’s reflections which were extraordinary, but this way you saw. You saw Margaux with her father, interviewing him. You saw how she was treated. You saw how she played tennis with Joan. We thought that all of these wonderful, extraordinary things that made, for me at least, the piece so intimate and so real. And when I showed it to Mariel, I still hadn’t told her until we were in final cut, we were just about to lock it, and I just wanted to have her look at it, so she wouldn’t have any surprises.
(About the part of the film in which Margaux appears) Mariel just sat straight up in her seat, she was like, “Oh my God, this is the first time I’ve seen my parents on film. And I didn’t know if the kitchen was really yellow and blue. I didn’t know. I was just trying to remember. And there’s my mother sitting on the sink, exactly as I described it.”She said, “This is going to be so amazing for my girls to see.” And it was just, it was just wonderful…She didn’t even know it existed.
Bitch Flicks: The documentary does have in it, if the rest of us were having documentaries made about our lives, things we wouldn’t want included–when Mariel was fighting with her partner and the scene where her daughter scolds her a little bit about Muffet (Joan) and tells her she should visit. And I’m wondering if you and Mariel talked at all about those scenes afterward or even during…
Barbara Kopple: No.
Bitch Flicks: So basically she just let you film whatever.
Barbara Kopple: She agreed. Yes. She just let me do the film, no holds barred. That was the deal. I mean she wanted to talk. She never said, “Don’t use that.”
Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering if there have ever been times in your long career when people have said, “Don’t film that,” or “don’t show that” and what has been your policy about that?
Barbara Kopple: It’s happened, but things have been so little and so inconsequential to the story of the film. (She gave a couple of off-the-record examples which seemed really trivial, things that no one else watching would have any objection to or would even notice.) I think that little things that don’t hurt your story or do anything, of course you’ll take them out.
Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering how much time you spent with Mariel and her family; was it in short spurts or an extended period?
Barbara Kopple: Short spurts. I wasn’t there every single day because every single day she was living her life, doing yoga or going for a walk or watching the sun rise. There’s only so many shots…
Bitch Flicks: I’m very interested in this framework that the film has, that Mariel said, “Just film me.”
Barbara Kopple: How it all happened was a really good friend of Mariel’s who worked at the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) who said, “Hey Mariel, I think we should do a film about your life.”
Mariel said, “Let’s just make a reality series.”
And her friend said…”I have an idea. I want you to talk to this woman, Barbara Kopple.”
And I guess Mariel had heard my name and she said, “Well, OK, alright.”
I said, “I’d love to,” and then Mariel and I got together and we talked about three hours or more and she just promised that she would tell me whatever I needed to know. She said whatever I asked her she would answer to the best of her ability and not hold anything back. Because she felt that it was important to sort of see the light of day, the bad things in her life. She just did it and kept her promise.
Bitch Flicks: Were you surprised that Mariel’s daughters have never read Hemingway?
Barbara Kopple:. No, because I don’t think Mariel read very much of it until she got married to Steve (her daughters’ father). I mean, it was a family that never really talked. They didn’t talk about books. They (Margaux and Mariel) were bullied because they went to the Hemingway school that was named after him. He had committed suicide. That was something that you just didn’t talk about. I wasn’t, but probably the audience who sees it (are surprised). It’s just who they were. People in the house were very dysfunctional–fights all the time. There wasn’t much time for fuzzy, cozy stuff. Her mother had cancer and Mariel took care of her mother. If you wanted to get close to the father you went fly-fishing or hunting with him.
Bitch Flicks: Is there anything else that you really would like to add?
Barbara Kopple: I guess if there was anything else I wanted to say, it was that I learned a lot. I learned that, in a sense, all of us are touched by mental illness, or by suicide, or we know somebody that is and it’s really important to talk about it. And that it’s really important to help each other and in the end I think what we really need to have is more love and more compassion for each other and that’s hugely important. I think that this film, if by getting out there, can convince people that they’re not alone and that there are people out there who love them and care about them and will help them, then we’ve done something very special.
Running From Crazy will be on Netflix starting on Nov. 25. For more information go to Facebook.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGYqdTAxEk”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender