Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) was kind enough to answer some questions about his work. Be sure to check out his films and read the full interview in Kitty Snacks #2.
"For the past twenty-five years, Ross McElwee has given new meaning and flair to first-person non-fiction cinema. Always wise and irreverent, ever the unreliable narrator, McElwee makes the grandest themes of human comedy his artistic province: love and death, chance and fate, memory and denial, the marvelous and the appalling."
- The Museum of Modern Art
Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Kitty Snacks: You've written about influences from literature like Walker Percy.
Have you had other significant literary influences? Do you find
yourself using the narrative techniques of an author when you make
your films?
Ross McElwee: I strive to achieve a non-literary quality to my narration - that is, something that doesn't feel written, but rather felt or thought. So there's not particular Southern author's techniques I try to emulate. Rather, my narrative style has probably evolved form the sense of being introspective and somewhat ill at ease and out of the loop - perhaps an overall Southern condition. Many Southerners have sailed this ship - Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty , but Walker Percy appears to lead the flotilla.
