Director's Cut

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There's new homes, new businesses. It has been booming. -

Interviewer

Has the town gotten bigger? It's the most significant oil play on the planet at the moment. This has been a challenge and an opportunity, but still a challenge.

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Hi, welcome to Director's Cut. I'm Pete Schwaba and we just saw a clip from Deep Time, a documentary about one of the largest oil booms in the recent history and the effect it has on a small North Dakota town. Joining me today to discuss this film is director Noah Hutton. Noah, welcome to Director's Cut. Thank you for having me. - Yeah, sure. That was a great clip there, great energy. And that must have been fun to put together-- That was fun, editing that. So, you're not from North Dakota. No. - But this the second film you've done in North Dakota and about oil. Talk about your connection to North Dakota and how you came to make a film there. Originally, the connection where they saw, there was a front page article in 2008 when the boom was starting, that they had discovered the, you know, geological survey had just discovered the Bakken basically, that they could tap that shale formation, when men were lining up. And I just saw this as a young filmmaker wanting to make my first documentary and I thought, you know, I'd just seen the film There Will Be Blood, and oil was in the news and it was that summer when oil prices were spiking like $145 a barrel, gas was going crazy, 2008. And I thought that this could be a good subject for a documentary film to get in there on the ground level at the beginning of a boom. So I went out there and I just met people, made my first film, and then came back now, five years later, to make this film. And your first film is called Crude Independence. Right. - So you knew some people and you said you used some of the same characters in both films, right? That's right, a lot of the people who I forged that relationship with the first time, I was able to go back and say, what's changed in the last five or six years? Which is nice to be able to do in a documentary. Yeah, right, and how much time would you say you spent in North Dakota between those two films? A lot, you know, it feels like a lot of my adult life now, it's been in North Dakota.

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Maybe, in total, between the two films, a year and a half, two years. Okay, and how long was each shoot would you say for each film? Seven months, eight months. - Okay. You should just get a place there, really.

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It would be cheap. Let's take another look at a clip from Deep Time. -

Man

Before the Garrison Dam, there was river bottoms with rich soils, it was beautiful. There was towns here, like, called Independence, Elbowoods. They grew their own foods, they had their own lumber mills, built their own homes. So our people were highly independent at the time.

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Narrator

One of our main bulwarks against major floods are dams. The 480,000 acres of land, which will be needed for the reservoir area, are being acquired by the real estate division of the Garrison District, under the direction of Roy Doughery. Let's look at a typical transaction as it was carried out by Mr. Doughery's division.

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Corps of Engineers, you know, they came and they surveyed our lands, and one day our people looked out and there was these flags around, I guess.

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They brought it to our leadership, and our leadership, when they seen that, they showed everything, that there's gonna be a lake there, that all these lands are gonna be gone, you're gonna have to move these towns, they were sad, because it's like, Corps of Engineers is probably backed up by military, you know, and so it was like either you sign this or, you know, we're gonna force you to do it. And there's a picture, a famous picture, our leader, our tribal chairman at the time that he's signing that document with the Corps of Engineers, he's standing there with his hand over his eyes, crying, because he's, you know, he knows that life's gonna change. -

Narrator

Sometimes they have had to blast their installation sites out of solid rock, destroying in order to build.

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In the opening clip, you talk growing pains. Or not the opening clip, in the film, you talk growing pains at the beginning. Talk about what those growing pains are for a community like Stanley. A lot of new housing, a lot of new businesses in a town that had been 1,300 people for many years, and North Dakota had been lowest on pretty much every economic indicator before the boom, so, a town that's not used to that level growth, all of a sudden you've got three new motels being built in town, ton of new chains coming in, Subway opened right next to the Flickertail Village Museum, you know, the old town museum, there's a Subway all of a sudden. I bet they were excited about that.

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Right, so, people were excited and it did help people with their main street businesses. But at the same time, there are the growing pains with that. A community like that is conservative by nature and they don't really wanna hedge based on just this boom and build all this new housing because it could disappear overnight as booms had in the past, so that was the tension that I've experienced. Where are things now in that town? Like, are they, is it still vibrant and robust? Or have things settled down a little bit? Things have plateaued, since oil kind of dropped down to $35 a barrel a year ago. Now it's kind of come back to a $50 barrel, which is profitable barely for the Bakken area. And so, people have been able to sustain their business with the oil industry, it hasn't left town yet, but it's not booming like it was. So, there is still that tension there. I was just there two months ago just to visit and people are in less of a boom mentality than they were, certainly, when I was making the film. So, is there an exit strategy for these companies when things, like, let's say, it just dries up? What do they do? Are they left with vacant hotels? They just clean up shop and leave or is there? I don't know that anyone, any of these companies have exit strategies, and especially, I'm sure that they're thinking of the welfare of the town. These are multinational companies that have contractors on the ground level, but at the end of the day, they're there for the profitable play of the Bakken. Sure. - Yeah. You have a lot of great aerial shots in the film, talk about getting those and how did you get those? Do you have a, do you contract a plane, a helicopter? How did you get these great shots? I contracted the one helicopter pilot that we could find in western North Dakota, who had been hired by the tribe on the Fort Berthold Reservation to assess for new leases and I think just to do safety around the lake there. I don't know if it's uncouth to talk about film budgets here, but.

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No, you're okay. I tend to shy away from asking filmmakers, 'cause a lot of them don't wanna talk about it, but be an open book if you want. Yeah, sure, no, I think it's helpful. You know, I like to see directors talk about it. Yeah, me too. - 'Cause it's helpful. But, you know, so, the total production budget of this film, all in was about $36,000. - Wow, nice job. Which is low in the film world, you know. But, you know, the aerial footage, which you mentioned, which does raise the notch of your production value. Yeah, absolutely. When we got in contact with this helicopter pilot and said, this is what we wanna do, he said, "Okay, 2,500." And when you're talking about proportionally for your whole budget, you're like, ah! That's steep. - Is it worth it? Right. And I decided it was and I just went for it 'cause I thought to have those shots will give these sequences in the film a feeling of grandeur that could not be achieved on the ground. So, I bit the bullet on that. Money well spent. - I hope so, yeah. Let's take another look at a clip from Deep Time. We have a lot of people that are moving here because they can't make it from wherever they're from. There's a lot of hardship going on, no matter where they come from. Then they're dragging their kids up here and their kids are, you know, North Dakota can be a culture shock.

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That's where I grew up at, right there. And here's the new development out here. This was all farmland here last year at this time. And these are, like, $300,000 and $400,000 trailer houses, basically. I would never pay that kind of money. You'll never get your money back out of this, ever. To tell you the truth, though, I haven't really been over here. I just usually drive by on the highway, so this is all, I'm kind of taking this in with you right now. My mouth is kind of dropping too. But I have a guessing game for you right now and for our viewers. And we've decided to do this because it recently made very big news. Can you guess where rent is the very highest

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New York, Los Angeles, or Williston, North Dakota? Are you ready? - Oh, my goodness! -

Liz

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$2,394 per month. People paying $2,500 to rent an apartment in Stanley, it's just, you know, anybody working just a regular job, you know, say here or the hardware store, you know, you can't afford that. -

Man

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Those are $2,800 a month. I never thought I'd see it. The greed in some people that has come out, I just. It shocked me. That's crazy. You have, your characters and your visuals are basically your narrator, you don't have a narrator in these films. Is it harder to tell a story without a narrator? Yes, it's harder to prosecute a beginning, middle, and end that's clear without a narrator. Why that choice then? Why don't you use one? Because I, in this context, I think I will make documentaries, eventually, where I narrate, but in this context, I would be skeptical of myself as a New Yorker coming in to narrate a film about people in North Dakota. I wanted to build the film, if I could, out of the people there and let them narrate and tell their own story. It was my task. For them for granting me the trust to tell their story, I wanted to grant them the ability to narrate the story, so that was the trade-off in my mind. Now, I will say that I think of the narration, I think of the control of the tone of the film is in the music, for me. And I'd score the film myself. And so, in a more subtle way, I feel like, because I'm building these sequences with music that I've made, I'm subtly telling you, the viewer, maybe, what I think about what you're about to see. I did notice that. When you had the explosion, you had very ominous music when they exploded that. And I didn't know if I was gonna ask you about that or not because you do have obviously point of view as a filmmaker, but you do a pretty good job showing all the, like, some people love that the oil companies are there, some people don't like the growth. How do you not let your own opinions steer the narrative? Or do you? I think I do, because the moment you decide who to feature and what section and what sound bites to use from them, you've steered the narrative. So there's no claim to full objectivity here. I've selected things and I've edited sequences and I've told parts of the story that I wanna tell. But, you know, I also haven't told you right away up front what I think about this issue. And if I were in this film being interviewed, I would have a very strong point of view about the oil activity. Well, can you tell us what it would be?

both laughing

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I'm very skeptical of the long-term vision of fossil fuel, so I fall very much to the left of this issue, politically, for sure. I just didn't necessarily want to make a film, there are other films out there, like, there are the Gasland documentaries, which people might be familiar with. I actually worked on the first one of those and contributed some footage. But there are films that have a first person investigative approach to the oil and gas industry that are important and show some of the problems with water contamination, et cetera. But I'm just more interested in making a film that's more about the social impact on the ground level for the people living there and it's, in a way, maybe more of an anthropological study than it is, like, a political first person point of view story. So, I would just want people to see actually on the ground how residents are dealing with all of this change. I would imagine, too, you want to gain their trust and if they do have an opposing viewpoint, you still want them to talk. So you have to sort of show both sides regardless of what your point of view is. It was interesting because you had Byron Dorgan, the senator, and he seemed all for it, you know, probably because he's bringing jobs to his state, but what is the long-term? How do you get these local governments to think long-term? And I'm sure they do, but that's a challenge for them, isn't it? Yeah, first of all, I think you have to get everyone to be able to talk to each other. And the point, in a way, of putting conservative people and people to the left of this issue in the same film is in a way so that they can see themselves mirrored on screen and say, next to that person that we just cut to, do I like my point? I don't know, and I'm hopeful that maybe, if you can get people talking to each other and level the dialogue in some way, you could enact some kind of community change where people could work together. But things are so polarized right now, I just don't know that filling a film with everyone who agrees with your position is gonna talk to anyone new. You're gonna hit your base. - Sure. But who are the new people that you're gonna talk to? So I'm interested in featuring people in this film who I don't agree with politically but whose voices will be needed to make political change in a community level. Definitely, let's see another clip from Deep Time. I'm Fred Evans, and this is my wife, Joyce. We're sitting at the Triple-T Ranch, which is located in the middle of Mountrail County, North Dakota. Joyce is a, I'm kind of more of the big picture guy, but she's a detail person, she puts the finishing touches on it that look right, I'll tell you that much.

Fred laughing

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Joyce

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You know, it's a gift from God. You know, we don't deserve it, but it is a gift from God. I have a hard time hearing it, but you notice it, when it hits the top there, it goes chingling, chingling.

Fred laughing

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But now, after these oil wells, I'm pretty well convinced that this land here was really never really made for raising cattle or raising wheat on, it was more for drilling oil wells on, that's where the real value is. We have a bottle of that Bakken oil and it's a little thicker than kerosene maybe, kind of a blue, green, yellow-looking, and when you smell that, it smells like a combination of roses and money. It's just the best smell you could imagine. We've had the best wheat crop in the last three years than we've ever had, way better, and I know the rain had to have something to do with it, but what I'm telling folks is it's this dust, and how it accumulates on the leaves in the morning there, and holds the moisture in better, and them crops just keep getting better and better, that's got to be what it is. We could definitely have more people here, but say if there's a group of six with another group of three, then one of those three's just, there's no doubt about it, one of those guys is gonna be a jerk for sure. So then I've got a problem. But then if that group of five or six, they bring a jerk, then they've got the problem, I don't have to worry about it. It can happen in Ohio, in can happen in Pennsylvania, it can happen in California, but there needs to be lightening up on regulations, and just be more industry-friendly, and then enjoy the wealth. Before we went to the clip we were talking about the politicalization of the issue and all that, but what I find interesting is the people you talk to, regardless of, I don't know what any of these people, where their political innings are, but a lot of them agree, regardless of their political innings and one character you have, the guy who's worried about the sexual predators 'cause he had all the kids, when the roughnecks come in, he seemed to parallel sort of the whole issue, 'cause he was for it, because he was making money, but then he didn't like some of the effects it was having. So, is that a common thing you see with these towns? That people are concerned about their town, where's the balance there, you know? Absolutely, I found people who are deeply conflicted about this issue. You know, there's so much going on here. There's the economic sense of it. They were struggling before, you know, he has a farm, he has a ranch and he can make so much more money having a man camp or leasing his land for some kind of development than he could with a few cows on that, you know. So, he's balancing his own family checkbook, but then he doesn't like what's going on with the sexual predators who are coming to town. And so, he's conflicted. And I just think that's it's important for people to see because it's not cut and dry. It's not you're Republican - It's not an easy issue. and you like it, or you're Democrat and you don't, it's not like that on the ground. You need to know how to talk to people because if you want to get people on your side of the issue, it's important to see what their conflict is. And I think in small towns, I live in a small town right now, the issues aren't political, they're hey, how are we gonna solve this? And we work together. You don't care who is on what side of the aisle or whatever. What has been the reaction? I assume you've shown the film in North Dakota. How did people respond to it? Did they like it? Is it a positive reaction? Yes, generally positive. People who might feel like their view is not supported by my, let's say, tone in the film, for example, in the clip we just showed, there's kinda ominous music underneath them talking. Again, I think I'm controlling tone there a little bit with music that's like my narration. Right. - And there were people who I knew that I would be doing that with that didn't have such a great response to the film because they can sense that I don't agree with their position, I think. So it wasn't cut and dry, everyone liked it, no. I mean, I've sent it to people and I've not heard back from them. Oh, no kidding? - Yeah. And I've sent it to people and gotten glowing emails back. And I've shown it to people and you know, I've had mixed responses. So, I had a feeling that would be the case. It's interesting because the music is pretty subtle, it's not like they come on screen, like, dun, dun, dun!

Noah laughs

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You know, it's pretty subtle. But it's interesting that non-film people might pick up on that. I have to ask you something, too, you have, at the beginning of the film, you have a child on a playground piece of equipment kinda going back and forth and then you sort of bookended, you have it at the end of the film. Talk about, is there symbolism there or something that you were trying to say with that imagery? Yeah, that was, it's sort of this, he's doing kinda this rocking motion on it and I use it at the beginning of the film, there's a text card that comes over that shot that sort of says, announces the beginning of the boom, they just discovered all this oil and they're about to go out and drill. And then it comes back at the end, but he kinda walks off and sort of walks off frame. And I just felt like there's a little bit of a visual metaphor there with the drilling of this playground toy. And you get the sense when you go around this landscape, there is a sense of like a big playground, a little bit of exploiting natural resources for someone just to get up and walk away at a certain point. So, it's not exactly the most optimistic visual there, but it is what I worry about that will come, which is sort of like everyone is gonna get up off their drill rig playground. - The party's over. Party is over, we're just gonna walk off to the next party. And meanwhile, the drill rig stays there, right? So the derelict equipment will be there. They'll make some art out of it or something. Let's see another clip from Deep Time.

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My name is Chip Miller. I'm from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, and I am the principle investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment, or CARVE, which is a five-year airborne sciences mission. We're here in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the hangar where behind me you see the CARVE C-23 Sherpa, which is a NASA airborne sciences aircraft that we have completely re-fitted and optimized for making measurements of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses coming up off of the thawing permafrost. Now, to date, we've seen all kinds of physical indications that the permafrost thaw is widespread and is happening more rapidly than any of the sophisticated computer models that we use have predicted. Current rates are maybe 30 to 50 years ahead of what most of the models say. It's very clear from the experimental evidence, and from the observational records that there is an incredible amount of change taking place, especially in the Arctic, and there are clear indications that the root cause of this change is man's activity. In fact, the imprint of human activity on the Earth is so widespread and so obvious that it's now in the geologic record, and many people have started to call the current era the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man. Talk about a little bit, a couple of things. Explain the title to me a little bit and then I wanna ask you about the patience you have to have as a filmmaker, if you wanna segue into that, when you undertake a project that lasts this long, and we talked about that a little bit before, but is it maddening or is it a process you enjoy? It's both, I mean, I was exasperated many times making this film feeling like, where is this going? You know, what's the conclusion of the story? Where is the drama? And it's ongoing, the drama is playing out. So, you asked about the title, though. Yeah. - This concept of deep time. It's kinda vague, like, Crude Independence, your last film, that's a very, I get that. But Deep Time is, and you pointed the historic issues, but, yeah, talk a little bit about the title, 'cause it's a little more vague. Yeah, deep time was a concept by James Hutton, who I am not related to, even though my grandfather's name is James Hutton. You're not related to your grandfather?

Noah laughing

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James Hutton was like the Darwin of geology. He was the first guy who said, "No, the Earth is not 6,000 years old." And we look into geological record, you're seeing millions of years of strata in the rocks. So he came up with this concept of deep time that the Earth's record shows that it's much older than what the Bible said. Okay, but the idea of naming this film that is I'm trying to build this kind of mythology around the fossils, because these booms are intimately tied to these old animals that decayed and became methane and the fossil fuels underneath the Earth surface. So, by beginning and ending the film the way I do, and by calling it Deep Time, I'm trying to situate a very local, a hyper local phenomenon that's just happening in this town in North Dakota, in the context of this eons old drama of life dying, decaying, and then becoming the fodder for us. So, that's the idea here now. It's kind of an experiment, I'm not sure that works. That's a great title. I was trying to, like, much like the kid on the playground equipment, I was like, "I gotta ask him about this." What is the biggest challenge when you make a film like this? We have about a little less than a minute left, but when you span it like that, over years, do you get sidetracked? Do you wanna go on other projects? Talk about that a little bit, how you have to stay laser-focused on this. Yeah, you do. I'm really interested in these longitudinal films, I'm working on another 10-year-long documentary right now and it just, the idea is that you do something that kinda works against the new cycle, which is so fast and such a quick turnover. You actually get to know people over a length of time but with it comes a frustration of, like, when is this story gonna wrap up? And when can I move on to the next thing? And you just have to kinda trust your intuition at a certain point. I wish we had more time because we have to wrap up now, but it was great having on, thanks for being here, great film. - Thank you, appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thank you for watching Director's Cut. For more information on Deep Time, please go to wpt.org and click on Director's Cut. While you're there, send us an email to find out how to submit a film. Also, don't forget to like WPT on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. I'm Pete Schwaba, we'll see you next time on Director's Cut.

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Man

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And I know that this may sound weird, because I come from the logical background, too. Mother Earth is mad. She's hurt. And she also has a temperament. And the repercussions from that are coming.