SXSW 2009: Crude Independence Q&A

Noah Hutton (left) and Sam Howard while in North Dakota filming Crude Independence.

Crude Independence had its world premiere at the Oxford Film Festival and won best documentary at the fest. Noah Hutton, director and Sam Howard, producer have been traveling from fest to fest since then and head next to SXSW as part of the Emerging Visions category.

I recently caught up with the two by e-mail, and some Twittering, mixed in with a little Facebook (ain’t technology grand?) to talk about the film. The interview is below, followed by a trailer for the doc.

Noah Hutton putting in drywall during their first trip that they went on to Biloxi to rebuild after Katrina. “I trace our present collaborations to the bond formed on that trip,” Hutton said.

First up, NOAH HUTTON, Director. At age 21, Crude Independence marks Noah Hutton’s directorial debut. Hutton first learned of the oil boom in North Dakota from a New York Times article published in January of 2008. He boarded a flight two days later for North Dakota and spent a week shooting location footage and talking to locals. After putting together a proposal and raising funds all spring, he set off along with his producer and stepbrother, Sam Howard, and co-producer, Sara Kendall, to spend the summer filming Crude Independence in the small town of Stanley, North Dakota.

Born in Los Angeles to actors Timothy Hutton and Debra Winger, Noah spent his childhood on and around film sets and developed a passion for film-making of his own at an early age. After attending the Fieldston School in the Bronx, NY, Hutton entered Wesleyan University as a freshman in 2005. In the summer of 2007, he traveled to Uganda with the Jacob Burns Film Center’s World Crew program and co-directed a documentary film entitled Shooting for Peace that tracked three pressing issues in that country: child soldiers, water treatment, and HIV/AIDS orphans. Before directing Crude Independence, Noah directed the narrative 16 mm short Knives produced by the Wesleyan Film Cooperative.

OFF: You read a news article, which prompted you to get on a plane and tell this story.  Why? What drew you to the story?

Noah: I was really drawn to the small town nature of the story and the fact that people had lived there for their whole lives with no idea that something like this would happen, and then how the discovery of a resource so far below the ground has dramatically affected life on the surface. It was a personal, human story the whole time for me, and I thought it was timely and socially interesting so I went to scout it out. I had been reading the news with the hope of finding a subject for a documentary to make the coming summer.

OFF: Your executive producer also recently successfully directed your mom in Rachel Getting Married. Was there a connection or did you know Jonathan Demme before?

Noah: The connection is that Demme are I are involved in the same independent film center in NY– The Jacob Burns Film Center. I started there working behind the concession stand, then two summers ago got involved in their education programs and they sent me to Uganda to co-direct a documentary there. Demme came to the screening of that film at the Burns and I met him afterward. Later in the spring I sent him the proposal for Crude Independence and he came onboard to our great delight.

OFF: You premiered your film in Oxford, MS and have now gone on to several festivals. You have been doing some traveling but also are still in school. What is next? Focus on school or keep traveling with the film?

Noah: It’s been a somewhat disjointed semester so far at school with the traveling but luckily it’s my senior year and I’ve been able to balance the two. After SXSW we go to Cleveland the following weekend for the Cleveland International Film Festival and then I plan to stay put for the rest of school to make sure I graduate. Once school is out Sam and I plan to develop our company in several directions. I want to keep making films but I have some other things I’d like to try as well, and so we want to create an umbrella media company that we can pursue our projects within and also collaborate with our friends who have projects of their own we’ll be involved with.

OFF: You are touching upon a very weighty subject but rather than looking at the global, economic, etc impact of oil – you looked at the people in a small town and how their lives were changing. Was that a conscious decision going in or something that came out of visiting the town?

Noah: Wasn’t even a decision in my mind. The small town scope was the original scope of the news article that attracted me to the story and that was the approach we took the entire time. We did have a terrific interview with U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) who related the local issues in our film to some of the national and global issues related to oil drilling and foreign dependence, because we wanted to represent the forces at large that shape this small town change in our film, and I think Dorgan really comes through in the film on that level.

OFF: As much as your story is about the oil industry, it speaks to me more about small town America vs corporate America. What’s left for their town?

Noah: What’s left is the possibility for their town and state economies to be rejuvenated by the revenue from the drilling, and at the worst, for the boom to abruptly end and for all the business to go away. As much as we tend to romanticize small town, rural America, this was a town whose economy was not in very good shape before the boom, and in fact isn’t doing so bad in the current economic downturn because of the revenue coming from the drilling. So part of what our film tries to do is portray the mixed bag that comes with an oil boom in a small town.

OFF: You are studying art history at Wesleyan. What are your plans after you graduate?

Noah: I will get my B.A. in art history but my current passion is also really neuroscience– it’s the subject of most of the classes I’ve taken in the past two years, though I continue to take art history classes as well. I think neuroscience is the defining field of this century and I can’t get enough of it, I read everything I can and I hope to make a film or a series of films about the brain and the people that study it. I also have a play that I want to direct that’s about the brain– I was going to put it on at school this semester but things got too busy with the film and the festivals we made it into, so hopefully sometime down the road I can do that.

OFF: You are the child of two well-known actors, not to mention your step-dad. How much influence did that have on you picking up your own camera, or did it?

Noah: It certainly has had some influence. I grew up around film sets and started feeling like I wanted to be behind the camera in high school. I have been making little shorts here and there for years, and I have to thank my parents for encouraging that practice throughout the years. I’ve heard their warnings about the business as well as their greatest joys being in it and I think that knowledge will help me as I move forward.

OFF: Tell me more about the original music you created for the film. Do you have a musical background?

Noah: I’m also self-taught when it comes to the music, I don’t read or write it and it’s all sort of intuitive. I have played drums for years in various jazz combos, so I enjoy the percussive side of things but I also play piano– mostly by ear– and use a keyboard to score stuff. The score for this film features a lot of hand drums, marimbas, strings and pianos. I composed it in August while I was editing the film with Alex Footman, who is also a senior at Wesleyan. We would be working on sequences and then I’d go off and make some music and come back and we’d lay it in to see how it worked, then I could tweak it as needed. It was all very organic and we worked pretty quickly, both because we were flowing well and because school was starting in September and we knew we wouldn’t have the kind of time we needed to really focus and get a first cut done with music laid in once classes began. So we packed it in and had a rough cut by the time school started.

Sam installs an air conditioning unit while working on restoring a home during Katrina.

SAM HOWARD, Producer.

Born in Northridge, California in April of 1987, Howard grew up with his mother, talent agent Karen Sellars, in Santa Monica, California. As a youth, Howard traveled with father and actor Arliss Howard, spending time on and off sets where he developed an unshakable interest in the behind-the-scenes aspects of film-making. In 2005, Howard traveled to Calgary to act in the Revolution Studios film, Dawn Anna, furthering his interest in roles behind the camera. Upon his 2005 graduation from Crossroads High School, Howard traveled to Manhattan to attend the Stern School of Business at NYU. It is in the city that he sustained his passion for the process of film-making. Having worked with a number of students at the Tisch School of Film, Howard entered the producing program at Tisch, and plans to graduate Stern in spring of 2009 with a BS in Marketing.

Crude Independence is the first feature documentary that Howard has worked on as producer.

OFF: How did you your step-brother Noah wrangle you into getting involved with Crude Independence?

Sam: Noah first brought up the idea of getting me involved when he returned from his first visit to ND.  I had been doing the usual junior year business school internship search, but once I understood how serious he was about the process, I read some literature and got right on board.  Something about this summer endeavor was so much more appealing than a cubicle.

OFF: Tell me a little more about what producing Crude Independence entailed.

Sam: Luckily for us/me, Noah had forged relationships with our primary investors from previous work, so I didn’t have to involve myself in the money raising.  My job was to essentially stretch our budget as much as possible.  I tried to plan our days so as to maximize the effectiveness of driving long distances, etc.  I also used Excel to the best of my abilities to make judgments on cost.  It ended up going wonderfully – well under-budget.

OFF: Is producing something you would consider full-time?

Sam: I hadn’t considered it until we got through a good portion of this film, but it seems like something I could be happy doing.  I like being closely tied to the creative process, and working with my brother has enabled that sort of producer/director relationship.  That direct tie to creative development would be necessary to attract me to future projects.

OFF: You are also still in college, at NYU. What are you studying and what are your plans for after graduation?

Sam: I’ll be graduating this May with a B.S. in Marketing from NYU’s Stern school of business.  I am also a minor in producing at NYU’s Tisch school of film.  My plans after graduation are highly dependent on whether or not we can get a new project off the ground, which we will be working hard to do after graduation.

OFF: You both began Couple 3 Films as your company for your independent documentary. What plans do you have now for the company? Will you continue to work together to create more films?

Sam: I touched on this briefly in the last question, but we would love to get another project going under the company name.  Beyond that, I am definitely interested in growing us into a multifaceted production company – moving beyond our own films, and working with others to augment their work.

OFF: Tell me more about your co-producer Sara Kendall and some of the other people involved. How did they contribute to the making of the movie?

Sam: Sara was wonderful because she has an uncanny knack for interacting with strangers.  I’ve truly never met someone so open to conversation with people from all facets of life.  Her presence aided in our characters opening up on camera, and without her, the movie would have never translated in its honesty.  Noah would be able to talk more adequately about Alex Footman’s contribution as editor, as he spent nocturnal hours with him for a month or so while I was live-blogging the Olympics in Manhattan.

OFF: Most nerve wracking moment from pre-production to now?

Sam: I think Noah contributes enough nerves for the both of us.  I’m just happy every day to see that his vision was carried out to the extent to which he is satisfied.  I just augmented the process, and I serve a lot better as the voice of calm reason than anything else.

OFF: Best moment so far?

Sam: It was pretty wonderful to win the award for Best Feature Documentary in Oxford.  The whole festival was such a vibrant experience, and having been to a few others since then, I can truly say that not one has compared to the environment that Oxford offered to it’s participants and connoisseurs.

OFF: How has your festival experience been so far?

Sam: Well, in adding to the previous question, varied.  I think you’re dealing with different levels of care and interest at the festivals, and it’s very easy to become disconcerted.  But beyond the atmosphere, we’ve been able to see great work at the places we’ve been, and there’s no better feeling to me than being joyfully surprised by someone’s film.

OFF: What hopes you do have for the movie?

Sam: Our hopes for distribution are pretty realistic, as it’s difficult to find a market niche for this film.  I would ideally like to get a deal worked out so we can sell copies from our website (hopefully this will get done in the coming weeks).  In terms of the public, my only hope is that as many people get to see the film as possible, and understand the care we took to show all of the sides in this situation.  This is one of the more relevant pieces of the domestic oil argument that doesn’t get any real play in the media.