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Interview: Honor Killings Filmmaker Mick Davie |
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Rebecca Shokrian for National Geographic News |
| February 12, 2002 |
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onMouseOver="self.status=='Photo Gallery';return true onMouseOut="self.status='';"title="PhotoGallery">View Photo Gallery>> Note: following photos are graphically shocking Michael (Mick) Davie, 27, is a field journalist, producer, and writer for the National Geographic TV Channel. He has traveled extensively documenting the hardships that people endure on a daily basis. Traveling often as a child, Davie believes, sparked his interest in other cultures, while early experience as a local TV news reporter strengthened his ability to identify compelling stories. In 1999 Davie won an Emmy Award for his War Diary and War Child productions. He is now working on a new series, World Diary, documenting sensitive social issues such as honor killings in Pakistan. Davie discussed his life and work in an interview with Rebecca Shokrian for National Geographic News. Was there any experience as a youth that led you toward journalism and documentary filmmaking? I think my youth had everything to do to with the job I have now. The civil war in Zimbabwe meant we had to move to Australia when I was four. In the 25 years that followed, my family and I moved about 36 times, living in Tasmania, Indonesia, and Borneo, to name a few. All this traveling meant I attended numerous schools perpetually making me the new kid, forcing me to learn how to make friends fast. I feel I apply that same survival-instinct approach to the people I meet while in the field. I also think that traveling so much at a young age exposed me to so much, giving me the chance to see an incredible array of perspectives. That has highly influenced my work, making it easier to tell people's stories from so many different cultures. Where did you learn filmmaking? I have never had formal training in filmmaking. I majored in English and drama, with a minor in journalism, at the University of Queensland. My only paying job after college was in TV journalism; at 21 I was hired as a nightly reporter at a regional TV station in Australia. The next seven months were spent reporting only local stories, but it was a great experience because I had to cover two to three stories a day, which my team and I had to write, shoot, and produce quickly. Eventually, I got a bit frustrated by the work, leading me to buy my own video camera and pitch the idea to ABC-Australia of hitchhiking from Cape Town to Cairo. The channel would not fund my expedition, but agreed that it was a good idea and said if I came back with decent footage, they would fund the post-production. So off I went, on my first real filmmaking experience, for eight months. Who has been most influential in guiding your filmmaking? Ross McElwee. He made a great film called Sherman's March, which was about his journey from the northeast coast of the United States to the South. I admired that he was able to make a story out of whatever he stumbled across, which became my goal from Cape Town to Cairo—to start the journey with no preconceptions and being totally unprepared. Spending either a few days or weeks in a city or region to obtain a sense of what is happening, what the big story of the day was, and making that into a documentary piece. Tell me a little bit about your style of filmmaking. Do you think it differs from National Geographic's traditional documentaries in the sense of camera direction, editing, and the subjects you cover, for example? I don't think my documentaries differ radically from the style of National Geographic's. My films follow the same principles of filmmaking. The only thing I tend to do differently is that I get people to look straight down the barrel of the lens. I am often both the correspondent and the cameraman. I think that there is a real power when the subject of the interview or of the particular scene looks directly at the camera because it makes a real immediate connection with the audience. And traditionally that hasn't been done at National Geographic. In fact, is has been frowned upon a little bit. The more traditional way of filming is to have a camera man standing next to the correspondent and then the subject looks off camera at the correspondent. I find that creates a slight disconnect. My camera work might not be the same caliber as most at National Geographic, but because I use small camera equipment and usually travel with only one other person, the advantage I have over larger camera crews is that I am light, flexible, and I can just go. If something explodes or erupts in front of me on the street, all I have to do is switch the camera on and go. I know how to make that work. You have been described as an activist, how do you reconcile that with being an objective journalistic? What do you hope your documentaries will achieve? I would not describe myself as an activist even though that label has been pinned on me. I'm a journalist and I stand by the tenets of journalism. So first and foremost I am a journalist, but I want my stories to move people. If my viewers' have a higher level of awareness about honor killings in Pakistan or poverty in South Africa, I think I have done my job. My goal in taking an advocacy role, beyond raising people's awareness by telling the stories, is to activate and motivate people to do something. To get those people to maybe surf the web to learn more or tell their friends about a particular issue. Or better yet, make donations to a really needy schoolchild or to an organization like Doctors Without Borders. How well are you succeeding in that goal? I am getting there. What has been really great since the South Africa piece went on the air is I have had a large number of viewers write to me saying, We saw the story of the school kids in the townships of South Africa with no books or shoes. We want to help, what can we do? And so far we have raised enough money to send one of those girls to college, which is fabulous. We aren't raising sums of money that are comparable to UNICEF or Care America, but people are responding. How long do you spend filming a documentary segment? I usually spend four to five weeks in pre-production, which entails organizing the film and camera gear, doing research, and contacting people in the field. Then another four to five weeks are spent filming in the field. I'll film every day, no breaks, from sunrise to sunset, taking full advantage of the light available. I've been shooting roughly 65 to 75 hours of material for a one-hour documentary. Seeing so much poverty, corruption, and hardships borne by people, what is the worst part of your job, if there is a worst part? I think the hardest part is getting the work done in the time allotted, but that isn't a very exciting thing to say. On a personal level, one of the toughest obstacles is adjusting from the level of adrenaline and intensity in the field back to the work environment here. Out in the field there may be fighting, dead bodies, or angry, frustrated, and depressed people to work with. It is a very emotionally charged environment. So adjusting from that back into this work environment that is also very intense, but in a different way, is difficult. I find it very hard having to work from nine in the morning till nine at night to meet deadlines. The hardest part by far, is the emotional aftermath of witnessing horrific violence and having to do it repeatedly. I've learned to focus on my goal as a journalist, which is to tell the story. My job is to capture it on camera, bring it back and then maybe something can be done about the situation. It's not easy though and I often find myself both angry and upset at things I've seen, the limitations my role puts on me and the physical inability to step in and help. Conversely, what is the best part of your job? The best part of my job is meeting new people in new situations who can just teach me something about humanity. By learning from them, I am learning something about myself. I get to not only raise people's awareness of issues worldwide but also remind them and show them something about themselves. I think that being constantly reminded of one another's humanity is important. That yes, they might be Arabs or Muslims in a distant part of the world who for all intents and purposes don't seem to believe the things we believe in, but at their very core they have joys, fears, dreams, hopes, and feelings just like us. And in today's fearful climate, people are prone to forget those things. Throughout your travels and conversations, what is an important lesson you have learned and apply to your life on a regular basis? I've learned over the last few years to talk less and listen more because I think the things other people have to say are much more important. So the lesson I've learned is just to shut up and listen. Which of your stories do you think is the most special or is the one you feel most connected with? The story I feel most connected with is of Isabel in my Cape Town to Cairo series. She was a five-year-old orphaned Mozambique girl whose leg was blown off when stepping on a land mine. I meet her at a prosthetics clinic in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and followed her prosthetic fitting and rehabilitation process over ten days. Being able to witness this child learning to walk again was one of the greatest privileges of my life. When the doctors attached her prosthetic limb and she began taking those first tentative steps, I saw her transform. Her shoulders went back and her head came up. I was never able to verbally communicate with her, but she still touched me very deeply. What are you working on next? Well, I look for stories that fit the mandate of the World Diaries series, which is essentially looking at youths at crossroads in different places around the world, relating it to culture, race, poverty, disease, and conflict. I look for a deficiency in our understanding of a particular part of the world, an information gap. Right now I am busy editing my film from my Israel/Palestine territory documentary and am not sure what topic I will cover next. I'm thinking about documenting the current state of the genocide in Sudan. For questions or comments, write to Mick Davie at: mickdavie2002@yahoo.com World Diary: Honor Killings premieres in the United States February 13, 2002, on the National Geographic Channel. Click here for details of the documentary and how to get the Channel and see program listings: Go>> Click here to read a National Geographic news investigation about honor killings which occur in more than one dozen countries: Go>> Online chat with Mick Davie: AOL members can log on to AOL to chat with Davie at 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, February 13. Keyword: Live |
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