Monday, Feb. 04, 2008

Q&A with co-director of "Arid Lands"

By Gary Wolcott, Special to the Herald

In 2005, Josh Wallaert and Grant Aaker spent the summer filming in and around the Tri-Cities and throughout the Columbia Basin. The result is the highly acclaimed documentary Arid Lands.

Wallaert went through the material and wrote the movie. Aaker filmed it and did the editing.

The response to Arid Lands has been stunning. Reviews from film festivals and from reviewers everywhere have raved about this wonderful documentary. I first learned about Arid Lands from friends at the Battelle Film Club but was unable to review the one-night showing at the Battelle Auditorium in time to put it in my column.

Eventually, co-director Josh Wallaert sent me a copy of the film. It blew my mind. I grew up in Tri-Cities and it is -- and always will be -- the best place I have ever lived. The Tri-Cities, as we all know, is a unique and wonderful secret. Those who move here from other areas often struggle with the weather and the lay of the land. Over time, that goes away. Few I have ever talked to that have lived in the region for any length of time would trade the experience for anything. They love it here and are glad to call it home.

After learning about the movie and the reaction from the crowd at the Battelle Auditorium, I thought more people should be able to see Arid Lands. I contacted the film booker that I work with at Carmike Cinemas and asked if they’d be interested in booking Arid Lands for a week.

Carmike said yes, and on Friday, Feb. 8 it will open. I hope all of you take the time to see this amazing movie.

Recently, I had an opportunity to talk with Josh Wallaert about his movie and about his experience in the Tri-Cities. Here is our conversation.

Mr. Movie: Why the Tri-Cities, why Hanford? Why the Columbia Basin?

Josh Wallaert: That’s a question we got a lot when we were out filming. People kept asking, ‘Why would you want to come here? What’s so special about this place?’ For us, it was wanting to tell a story about geography in general, and how complex anyplace can be when you start looking at all the different influences that come to play in a location. And the Tri-Cities is fascinating because so many stories can be told from one place at one time. You have the history of the river, of the Native Americans, the Hanford history, the development history. Once you put all that together, it was really easy to visualize a story about geography within a hundred-mile radius.

MM: It really isn’t just a geography story is it?

JW: It’s a story about how people respond to a place. How people react to a landscape and how they come together to create a messy, but interesting, and vibrant community. That’s where my interest began. I knew about Hanford growing up in Oregon, but I didn’t know much about it and was interested to learn more. When I drove through Tri-Cities, I realized just how much history you had coming to bear in one particular place.

MM: It didn’t seem to me that you had an agenda making this movie. You do make some strong statements and lean certain directions, but the film seems very even-handed.

JW: That was a difficult thing for us to work through because Hanford is a controversial political subject. Some of the agriculture and development in Eastern Washington is a controversial political subject. One of the ground rules we had when we set out to make the film was to not have our own voice in it. We just wanted to take the role of the observer. This isn’t to say we were entirely neutral.

We are pro-place. We think places are important. We think that places are interesting and that you can learn something from looking at them. So that’s where we came at it from.

MM: Did you fall in love with Tri-Cities?

JW: We lived there for three months, but I can’t say that I fell in love with the Tri-Cities. I have a real appreciation for the arid landscapes, and some of the people we met there were really wonderful. I couldn’t see myself living there for life. It was difficult enough to bike from one city to the next without getting on the freeway, and for me, that is one of the problems I have.

MM: You bicycled everywhere you went? Isn’t it kind of hard to make a movie this complex via bicycle?

JW: No, we had a car. Whenever I look at any place I want to live, I am interested in walk-able neighborhoods and walk-able communities, and Tri-Cities doesn’t have a whole lot of that. I love certain things about the area. I have a love for the open spaces and the arid landscape in Eastern Washington in general. But I couldn’t see myself living there.

MM: What stands out the most in your experience? If you had to take one thing away from the three months and hang onto it, what would it be?

JW: For me, it was the sense of exploration. We had nothing to do but get to know a place better. I’ve never had that experience before. My only task and responsibility for a summer was to explore a place as thoroughly as I could. I feel kind of guilty because we knew more about the Tri-Cities before we were done than we know about our own home town or our own communities. I enjoyed every day, getting in the car and going to look for film footage and to talk with new people.

Floating down the Columbia River is a good memory. It’s probably the strongest memory. We floated from the Vernita Bridge all the way down to Richland. It made for a very long day.

MM: That’s an interesting way to spend a day and something 99% of the people living in Tri-Cities have never done.

JW: It was kind of slow. As you get closer to Richland, you’re getting into the pool of water backed up by McNary Dam. We were in a river raft so we had to row the whole way. As we got close to the Tri-Cities, it was beginning to be a bit of a push.

MM: How did you pick who you were going to talk to?

JW: All sorts of ways. We wanted to get people out of their offices and out of their more formal roles and out into the landscape. So we went looking for people who had something to say about where they were from. Some of those people were from this official organization or that. Others we just stumbled onto. For example, we met the fisherman down by the Vernita Bridge. He was just sitting there fishing.

We found people through newspaper stories. We stumbled upon them while out exploring. We called them from the phone book randomly based on the name of their farm or the name of their business.

MM: They were happy to talk to you?

JW: Yeah, in general, they really were. Some people were skeptical about who we were and our agenda. That sort of thing. They didn’t know much about documentary films or how they are made. The impression they had is that we were doing some kind of Michael Moore gotcha-journalism. But in general, most people were glad to talk to us.

People like to talk about places, where they’re from, why their home is meaningful for them. They like to talk about the changes they’ve seen over time. Those are conversations people enjoy having.

MM: Even though I think you had an agenda, I found it to be an honest agenda. Unlike a Michael Moore, you were honest about what you presented—positive and negative. I admire that. A lot of the environmental stuff in the film is pretty much from a point of view.

JW: We weren’t trying to do objective journalism. We were trying to be filmmakers. And we weren’t concerned about being perfectly neutral. What we did want to do is be respectful to everybody.

MM: And that’s why it works. That’s the difference between this and something done by someone like Michael Moore. People will tolerate a point of view. Any point of view, as long as it’s honest and there’s no hidden agenda. Whether people in Tri-Cities are pro-Hanford or not, or anti-development or not, or pro this or pro that, they will love your movie because it’s an honest point of view, and I admired that the most about your movie.

JW: We’ve had a lot of the same response you just expressed about the movie from others in the Tri-Cities. What’s left to be said at the end of the day, if you are going to be honest about it, the final analysis is that it’s extremely complicated. And that’s pretty much all you can say about it. I think everybody recognizes that — the complexity of the situation.

MM: I was struck most by the scenes of development. I remember when it was a full seven miles between Kennewick and Richland. It is city the whole way now. One city blends into another. Same with Pasco and Richland in the west. Pasco and Kennewick would have grown together a long, long time ago if the Columbia River wasn’t there. Now everywhere you look, on every hill, in every nook and cranny there is some sort of development. When is enough, enough? The Tri-Cities is a beautiful place. We don’t have to put something on every hilltop. There are plenty of old places to tear down and redevelop.

JW: Like you, people see things they agree with and they see things they don’t agree with, and they’re able to sort through it and appreciate the film.

MM: In your Hanford research, did you learn about President John Kennedy visiting Hanford to dedicate a reactor? He came when I was in the eighth grade, and I was allowed to go out and hear his speech. As I remember, he talked about the peaceful mission of nuclear power and all that.

JW: We heard about him being there but didn’t come across anyone who talked about it.

MM: Your interview with Bill Wilkins was in the home owned by my great grandparents. Though I was very young, I think I was five when they died, I knew them and remember them quite well and spent a lot of time at that house. My great grandfather had a small farm as I remember and that section of Court Street was way out in the country.

JW: That’s a very strange coincidence. It’s a really cool place to have a tax accountant office.

MM: It was neat to see people and places that I know. And to see and meet people I don’t know. Others are going to view it the same way. You presented the desert as a beautiful place to see: the sunsets, the water, the gorgeous vistas, fields of grain and all that. The Tri-Cities Visitor & Convention Bureau had to love the movie, too. It really promotes Tri-Cities as being a beautiful, vibrant place.

JW: It’s not about a place where someone would normally make a documentary. In some ways, we were covering uncovered ground. Maybe in some small way we’ve done a small service to Eastern Washington and to the Tri-Cities by putting it on screen. You see L.A. on screen all the time. You see other places on screen all the time, but you don’t often get to see the Tri-Cities.

MM: You’re right. When it comes to film, who cares about the Tri-Cities?

JW: It’s the same across the intermountain West. We showed the film in Boise and got the same reaction there. They felt that in some ways representing Tri-Cities was representing all of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon and Southern Idaho. There aren’t very many films made in that part of the country.

MM: So what’s next?

JW: Neither of us are really filmmakers by profession. I’m a writer, and I just finished a book of fiction short stories, and Grant is now in his second year of medical school. Eventually, we’d like to get back to doing some kind of film, but it’s going to be awhile.

MM: You’re not really filmmakers? That surprises me. Your documentary is so well done. But you’re a writer and maybe that’s why.

JW: I do have a story-telling focus as a writer, and Grant studied philosophy and history in college, and he had an internship at a television production company for a year so he had filmmaking experience. But mostly we’re just curious individuals who like to learn about people.

MM: What did you leave out? What, after the final edit, do you wish you would have left in?

JW: We joke about the fact that we could do a Tri-Cities mini-series with the amount of footage that we had and the complexity of the story. We tried to get it down to a manageable size, but we still had 27 people and that’s a lot and touches on a lot of subjects in a lot of ways.

There were subjects that we had to leave out. One big one is the Latino presence in the community not being represented. There are 30 or 40 years of farm worker history in the area. The character of Pasco is left out of the story. Only one of the tribes is represented,m and we’re missing some Native American history. I wish we could have gotten out on the site with some of the Hanford workers to see what they’re doing as they are cleaning up. That was impossible for various reasons. Maybe we’ll put them in someday if we ever got around to that mini-series.

MM: Now what?

JW: It’s been to 18 film festivals and we’re about at the end of that. There will be just a few more. We have a distributor now, and we hope it will get into libraries and universities and schools and things like that. So the film will have a second life.

Arid Lands plays at Carmike Cinemas starting Friday, Feb. 8.