“What if we consider using A.I.?” my co-editor, Meghan Sims, asks with trepidation. The question indicates how truly desperate we have become. It is early June and our rough cut is due in three months. A.I. is a slippery slope in documentary, even when audiences are made well aware of its use; the ethical implications for storytelling truth are enormous, and it is highly unlikely we would secure approval from our producers at American Masters. More importantly, we are talking about a film about Mary Oliver, beloved poet of the forests and beaches of Cape Cod, the woman who reminds us to let the “soft animal” of our body “love what it loves.” For her most ardent fans, she is the natural world personified – she embodies authenticity! The technology to replicate Mary’s speech is available, but nothing could feel more fundamentally wrong than to fake any poet’s voice – especially Mary Oliver’s.
“No! No, no no, that’s not an option,” I wail. But I too am out of ideas. We are facing a documentary filmmaker’s worst nightmare – a black hole where critical data is needed. And not just facts, figures, narrative exposition. We are seeking a way to transmit emotional resonance which is not only about getting the story right, but about connecting audience-feeling in real time to Mary’s lived experience.
By this late stage in the edit, we have been searching for many, many months for an audio recording that we are increasingly certain no longer exists. Up to now, we’ve had incredible luck – locations that fell through at the last minute were replaced by even better spaces; every interview yielded brilliance, candor and even laughter. Mary’s literary executor and her biographer had patiently answered a million questions and provided unprecedented access to Mary’s personal archives before they were deposited in the Library of Congress (where they live today). These include boxes of her fan mail and her personal correspondence; notebooks filled with lists of bird sightings as well as her private musings. Also significant were Mary’s photo albums with snapshots of her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, their home on the water in Provincetown, their friends, and their many, many dogs across the decades. Such materials are foundational for any visually-driven documentary, but even more so when one is plunging into the life of a person as private as Mary Oliver, who was rarely documented in public.
The missing element, with the rough-cut deadline looming, is a critical interview between Mary and her friend, the writer and activist Maria Shriver, from December 2010. This interview appeared in print in the April 2011 issue of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine – a special issue dedicated to poetry for National Poetry Month. Maria Shriver, a huge fan of Mary’s who had befriended her some years earlier, flew down to Florida, where Mary lived, to converse with her in person. The photos from O Magazine show them seated on a cozy sofa together and walking in the nearby woods. Maria, a sensitive and experienced journalist, coaxes Mary toward reflection and revelation in what was then Mary’s 76th year:
Maria Shriver: So you never wanted your poetry to be a place where you worked out your own struggles. And yet "The Journey," my all-time favorite poem, seems to deal with darker themes.
Mary Oliver: Well, looking back, I'm shocked to see that I wrote that. Because I was always very private about my life, and yet the poems in Dream Work [1986] are not so private as I thought. I'm glad I wrote them, and I'm doing a little more of that now – using personal material. I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage – that's the first time I've ever said that out loud.
Holy shit, the first time she’s said this?!? Later, I realize that Mary means the first time she has said it publicly; she had begun grappling with this terrible truth decades earlier, in her own private way. To read her disclosure in O Magazine is both troubling and quite moving in its straightforward bravery. But because it is a direct transcript of a conversation, the deeper nuances of feeling in that moment are elusive… “That's the first time I've ever said that out loud.” Is Mary near tears? Is she scared? Defiant? We can't tell from the words on the page. But where there is a transcript, surely there is, there must be, an original audio recording. And if we are to get it right, this moment so meaningful to the story of Mary’s life, we have got to find that audio!
By now, my campaign of near-harassment directed at the very patient and helpful folks who work for Harpo Productions, Oprah’s multimedia company, has escalated. I insist that even if they can’t find the audio recording in their archives, it must have been sent to a transcription service. Can they please go back and check every single email from early 2011 to see if they can find it? They tell me over and over: it’s gone. Hence the desperate need for Meghan and me to find a solution.
Although there is not much video documentation of Mary in existence, her voice is a huge presence in our film, culled from rare interviews, her recorded readings, and extended conversations from audience Q&As. Her distinctive sound is woven into its very fabric, so the idea that we might hire an actor to read as Mary for this one crucial turning point feels…wrong. Not as wrong as A.I. fakery, but still untenable. Meghan and I are left with praying to the Documentary Gods and praying to the spirit of Mary. We are totally out of ideas, but full of unreasonable hope.
Six months prior, our plans to film an interview with Maria Shriver were scotched by the Palisades Fire; it is June, in the midst of our editing panic, before we are able to reschedule. Seasoned storyteller that she is, Maria recalls her time with Mary in Florida: “When I close my eyes and think about that day….” she begins. With immediacy and warmth she brings us to the experience of interviewing Mary and the shock of her disclosure of being a survivor. We are closer to capturing the moment and mood, but we still really need that audio. As the crew starts to wrap after the shoot, I tell Maria about the search for the missing recording and ask if she has any ideas … any at all?
“It wasn’t a sound recording, it was a video. The guy who O Magazine hired, he took the photos and videotaped the whole day,” Maria explains. “Maybe he still has it.”
From 2010?
Our L.A. cinematographer, Zsolt Kadar, a friend since college who is himself an old-school cameraman ever-clad in a multi-pocketed vest, looks up from packing his lenses and says, “Oh sure, I bet you that guy still has the footage.”
“OMG STOP! Don’t get my hopes up!” My heart is pounding. “Do you think I can find him?” I ask Maria.
“He’s credited on the photos published with the story,” she says.
And so he is. It took one quick email to find Rob Howard and his awesome wife Lisa, who wrote me back right away with the response every frantic documentarian dreams of:
“There is good news! Rob has the entire Maria Shriver-Mary Oliver shoot saved in his archives. I remember that he enjoyed that shoot so much. He found Ms. Oliver to be delightful.”
In the footage, Mary is neither sad nor defiant; she is just Mary – comfortable with her old friend, thoughtful, slightly self-effacing. The moment of epiphany is a rare chance to see Mary listening, thinking and speaking as life unfolds around her. “Look, there’s the spider!” she exclaims to Maria as they walk in a drizzling rain. We see intimately the “legendary” (as per Maria) Mary Oliver, then in her seventies, as the still-curious girl who ran away to the woods, who in her own words was “saved by the beauty of the world.”
There is so much that goes into making a credible biographical film possessed of real feeling – reading, writing, research, questions, consultations, meetings and interviews, library carrels, document scans, and so many, many boxes of personal artifacts to be pored over with care and consideration. But sometimes – more often than we filmmakers might wish to admit – the key ingredient is “chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity.” Or as Mary Oliver also writes, “I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”
Featured image, showing Sasha Waters with cinematographer Tyler Kirby during the making of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, by Departure Point Films.
