Editor’s note: This interview was conducted in 2020 before filmmaker Ron Mann was scheduled to appear at that year’s James River Film Festival, which was cancelled for the last two years due to the pandemic. Mann is returning on Saturday, April 2 for this year’s 2022 festival, so we’re re-posting the interview.
Canadian-born director Ron Mann has been making documentary movies since his aunt gave him a Super 8 camera when he was 13. A lifetime of well-received movies later, a personal one he made as a teenager in 1975 still stands out to him.
“[‘Flak’] was the first film I made when I was 16,” Mann recalls about the short, black-and-white movie centered around activist friends who lived beside a gypsum factory and were trying to reduce pollution emissions. “It became a metaphor for the ’70s, how we devolved from a political decade to an apolitical one where all we do is talk about the problem.”
That film seemed to put him on something of a trajectory, he says. “It was pure on many levels. There were no pressures,” he adds. “I strive still to be that amateur [laughs].”
A lifelong film geek who has made many beloved documentaries over the past four decades, Mann often explores subcultures that he loves. His films have included: “Comic Book Confidential” (1988) about the history of comic books; “Grass” (1999) about America’s draconian drug laws; “Altman” (2014) about the famous film director; and the recent “Carmine Street Guitars” (2018), a charming tribute to longtime Greenwich Village guitar-maker Rick Kelly, who refuses to change with the times. When a young employee chastises him for not having a cellphone and tells him to move into the 21st century, Kelly responds with a simple “why?” (resonating like a bell with those of us who don’t suffer from a lifetime indoctrination of associating technological speed or innovation with progress.)
In conversation by phone, Mann’s mind twists to its own funky rhythms and tangential recollections, with a verbal patter somewhat reminiscent of a stoned Harold Ramis. “I use that excuse ‘I don’t remember’ a lot now,” he notes.
Beginning in the 1980s, Mann felt he had a responsibility to document alternative culture during the Reagan years. “There was a swing toward conservatism and everything that was progressive, culturally, was being reduced to sex, drugs and rock and roll,” he says.
Today he considers himself more cultural historian than filmmaker, noting that he found early inspiration from director Emile De Antonio, “the Michael Moore of his day,” a countercultural figure who made the Vietnam doc “In the Year of the Pig.”
“De Antonio said there are only two reasons to make a movie: You love something intensely or dislike something intensely,” Mann says. “For me, it’s academic in the way I pursue a subject. I feel like a historian or closet librarian.”
Mann’s movies are not only historical primers but can also function as tools for grassroots organizations. “What I do is propaganda, but my propaganda is called the truth,” he says, laughing. “I did a film with Margaret Atwood, a 70-year-old who donated the profits of her book tour to save songbirds; basically a message to boomers to get off their asses and engage.”
Having directed the marijuana doc “Grass,” Mann was amazed to see the progress some American states have made on marijuana laws: “Woody Harrelson once said to me, you look at a mountain and it doesn’t look like it’s moving. But after a period of time, it actually does move.”
These days, the director splits his time living between Austin, Woodstock, New York, and Toronto, home to his boutique distribution company, Films We Like.
Friend and colleague Jim Jarmusch (“Down by Law,” “Mystery Train”) was the guy who suggested he look into the Carmine Street Guitars shop. Mann met Jarmusch years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, where the indie director with a similar shock of white hair was preparing a talk for the Telluride Mushroom Festival about psilocybin in cinema. Mann went to the festival and got inspired to make “Know Your Mushrooms” (2008).
Later, when both directors were at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jarmusch and his Sqürl bandmate Carter Logan couldn’t stop talking about Rick Kelly, the likable custom guitar maker who is so memorable in the film with his quiet observations and love for using rare pine and other woods reclaimed from historic New York buildings.
The “Carmine Street Guitars” doc is shot mostly inside Kelly’s tiny, cluttered shop, where famous musicians regularly drop-in to shop, chat and sometimes play tunes. Featured guitarists in the film include Lenny Kaye, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Nels Cline and Charlie Sexton.
“Alfred Hitchcock said that in fiction films, God is the director, but in nonfiction, the director is God,” Mann says. “But I had no idea these musicians were going to come in. [Jarmusch] said it was like a post office, a wonderful kind of crossroads with such a wonderful history … Lou Reed, Robert Quine.”
Funnily enough, the film’s most dramatic moment comes when a young real estate agent who had just sold painter Jackson Pollack’s former building next door, sticks his head in to say hello and the always friendly Kelly barely acknowledges him.
“Oh absolutely, that was unplanned,” Mann says. “The film is really about change and what we’re losing. This is happening everywhere. I just got evicted from the building I had been renting for 33 years, which was sold and is being turned into a condominium in Toronto. It’s scary.”
The documentary was also inspired by two of Jarmusch’s movies, “Coffee and Cigarettes” and especially, “Patterson,” Mann says. “I borrowed that trope of a week in the life of a guitar shop from that film,” he says. “I followed Altman’s dictum that the film will tell you what it is.”
And what does he think about the current, Netflix-inspired golden age of documentaries? “Well, Netflix controls your film, how it’s seen and if it’s an original, how it’s made,” he points out. “So don’t pretend the artist’s vision isn’t impacted, unless you’re Scorsese or someone.”
The good news is there are increasingly more streaming services, he says, and cheaper ways to make digital films. People often refer to this as the ‘democratization’ of filmmaking.
“Filmmakers and distributors put their films on their own platforms. But because its digital, there is a plethora of films. You need curation,” Mann explains. “Real estate has decimated movie theaters, where they can’t afford to show independent and international films. When you don’t have international films, you have an insular North American culture. That is dangerous.”
Today, grants for most American filmmakers are nearly impossible to get unless your subject matter includes some variation of identity politics, while Hollywood clearly traffics primarily in sequels and comic book movies with built-in audiences.
“The algorithms have replaced the accountants,” Mann says.
“That’s the death of cinema.”
On Saturday, April 2: “Grass” (2000, 80 min.) / “Poetry in Motion” (’82, 90 min.) (dir: Ron Mann) w/ special guest Ron Mann! At the Byrd Theatre, 1 p.m. $8; and “Carmine St. Guitars” (dir: Ron Mann, 2019, 80 min.) w/ special guest Ron Mann at Grace St. Theater at 8 p.m. $8