How did you develop the different scenarios for each episode? What process did you go through to say “hey, let’s go with that one?”
Well first you go in with a long list, and the network says, “That’s never happening.” Then you come back with another list. I’m working with some great producers on this show, R.J. Cutler who produced the movie The War Room, which I think is one of the greatest election movies that’s ever been made, and a guy named Ben Silverman who is the king of format television. This guy has bought and sold shows all around the world. And to have these two guys who know television so well come in and help this vision of mine was very helpful.
From the beginning we knew what the network would and wouldn’t go for. So what we kind of went in with as our "A" list was pretty much what stuck around. Then you have to start trimming and cutting based on time and money. What can we realistically get on the air in four or five months? The timeframe to make the show was so fast. They green-lit the show in around December, so we were in pre-production. As soon as we were done at the Academy Awards, Alex and I went off to Columbus, Ohio where we were doing the first episode, “Living on Minimum Wage.” March 1, we started shooting the series, and then three months later we were on the air. And that’s a lot to accomplish in three months. Especially on our 30-day shooting schedule; we were averaging 150 hours per show, which is an immense around of footage to cut down to 44 minutes. Basically, we’re making movies, every week.
Going from 150 hours to 44 minutes—there’s a lot of good stuff that’s left over that can’t go in there. I remember when I first met with the network, I said, “Why don’t we make it a 90-minute show?” “NO ONE’S MAKING 90-MINUTE SHOWS!” The one thing that will be exciting and a lot of people are excited about are the DVDs. Teachers have taped the episodes and are showing them in their classrooms now. I think it’ll be awesome when the DVDs come out. That’s one of the things we did with Super-Size Me: We created an educationally enhanced version that was re-edited for schools, which had additional supplemental material, had lesson plans so the teachers could use it in a classroom curriculum. So, hopefully we can do the same with the series.
Most reality television deals with the surreal as opposed to reality…
Surreal Life was a show I could not turn away from when Mini-Me was on. I watched the first episode and could not stop watching for some reason. When Mini-Me was naked and peeing in the corner, I was like, “That’s television!”
Do you think audiences can develop an appetite for “real” reality shows like this?
I think we have been so weaned not to want stuff like this that we don’t think it can be entertaining, that it can’t be funny. But what’s happened is that people who have seen 30 Days have seen differently. People went to see Super Size Me who had never gone to see a documentary in the theater in their life. I met theater owners in Texas and Alabama who had never shown a documentary in their theaters ever, in the history of their cinema. They said the movie was selling out. It was in a theater with Van Helsing and Troy in Texas. I said “Wow. Me, Hugh Jackman, and Brad Pitt. That’s pretty impressive.” My friend called me from that theater and said, “I just want to let you know that it’s a Friday night and your movie is sold-out, full of teenagers.” And that’s an incredible thing, that you can reach a new audience, a different audience. And I think 30 Days is starting to do that.
A lot of critics of "entertaining" documentaries charge that the filmmakers have skewed things in the editing room to heighten the drama or the humor. Have you ever felt that temptation?
I think that what the reality is that when you have to cut a show down from 150 hours, you’re going to have to cut stuff out. You’re never going to be able to tell the whole story, or it’ll be a mini-series and nobody will watch: The seven hour melodrama of 30 Days. It would actually be 30 days long. If you look at the sources of the lot of the criticism, they’re coming from fixed people who have very specific views of the corporate involvement. In Super Size Me, it was lobby groups. With the TV show, people who are speaking out against minimum wage were from business interests. People who were speaking out against the Muslim episode who were very right wing fundamentalist Christians, or of that ilk. So for me, a lot of the arguments were completely unfounded. One of the arguments that people make that I love about the show is that the documentary is SO subjective. They say that documentaries should be completely objective. You need to realize that the filmmaking process is subjective. From the minute you set up a camera, from the minute you point it in a certain direction, from the minute you get to the editing room and make a cut, put music in, it is a subjective process—creating an ebb and flow of emotion. For me, filmmaking is not just an observational experience, it’s an emotional experience. Same thing goes for television. The best shows are the ones that create an emotional experience for the viewer. You can’t do that just by setting up a camera and pointing it at something. Andy Warhol movies will show that. He had a movie that was an 18 hour film of a shot of a skyscraper.
