Today, my guest is documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson.
She initially made her name as a cinematographer, shooting for non-fiction luminaries such as Michael Moore and Laura Poitras. And in the past decade, she’s become a director in her own right, with two very personal and hugely contrasting doc features, Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead, that demonstrate her unquestionable greatness.
When I came up with the idea of doing this podcast, Kirsten Johnson was immediately one of the people I knew I needed to talk to. Because we have a very meaningful shared history.
She and I first met in 2017, the year after Cameraperson came out. For anyone unfamiliar, Cameraperson is a formally innovative piece of cinematic memoir primarily comprised of footage Johnson shot for other people’s films. It’s a profoundly moving and impactful work that shows all the horror and the humanity she has witnessed as a non-fiction D.P., and to me is one of the most significant documentaries of the 21st century.
The reason Johnson and I connected was that Agnès Varda was in town for a gallery show of her visual art work, and I invited the two of them to sit down for an episode of the Talkhouse Podcast. It was a memorable experience. The legendary French New Wave director, then about to turn 89, was exhausted by press and other commitments, but KJ – as Johnson is usually referred to – used all her charm and wiles to get Varda enthused and talking – despite the fact that she tried to shut down the conversation 20 minutes in!
After we wrapped the recording, KJ and I rode downtown on the subway together and somehow got to talking about our parents: my mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, and her (still living) father, whose death she was making a film about, even staging his funeral and letting him watch it.
We stayed in touch and in the wake of my mother’s death, KJ was critical in helping me move through my grief. In 2020, right before the pandemic shut down everything, the film she had been telling me about – Dick Johnson is Dead – premiered at Sundance, and hit Netflix during lockdown. Funny, expansively creative and celebratory, it’s a poignant portrait of slow, preemptive grief and the need to cherish our time with the ones we love.
In the years since, we both got busy with work and family – Johnson is married to Tabitha Jackson, the recently appointed Director of Film Forum, and with filmmaker Ira Sachs and his husband, Boris Torres, co-parents teenage twins, Viva and Felix. Though we hadn’t been in touch since the pandemic, when I reached out to KJ suggesting we talk for this podcast, she immediately said yes.
I knew the conversation we’d have would be unlike anything else, and it did not disappoint. In this episode, we dive pretty deep as we talk about … our mutual pursuit of connection, her growing up in the shadow of an imminent apocalypse, the truly remarkable dream she had while shooting in Sudan, a great story about Stephen Colbert’s hands, the disappointing way in which she and a legendary artist have NOT been collaborating … and much, more more.
Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead are both available to stream, and both are essential viewing, so please go check them out.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is one of the most brilliant new filmmakers to emerge in the past few years, Goran Stolevski …
