Remake: Ross McElwee on the Film He Never Wanted to Make

Ten years after the death of his son, Adrian, from a fentanyl overdose, Ross McElwee was moved to explore his career-long obsession with turning a lens on friends and family. The resulting film is one of the year’s best

In the opening of Remake, Ross McElwee melancholically pulls back the curtain on the creative process that’s made him one of documentary cinema’s most singular talents. “Although [they] touched on broad issues like nuclear weapons proliferation or big tobacco,” says the director in his low-toned, southern-accented voiceover, “what was central in my films was always my own life, often involving my family.”

McElwee doesn’t boast the celebrity of documentarians Frederick Wiseman or Werner Herzog, but his non-fiction works like Sherman’s March and Time Indefinite have made him a revered voice in cineaste circles. Through a self-shot blend of autobiographical anxieties and deadpan explorations of American history and industry, McElwee gives absorbing and amusing insights into his occasionally self-sabotaging perspective.

But at the start of his new film, McElwee wanted to stress how his work has always been about more than just his personal afflictions. “Bringing my family and my personal life into the discussion [is] how I frame things that are bigger than me out there in the world,” explains McElwee to AnOther over Zoom. “I felt I needed to say that up front because the rest of the film is just me, me, me. My son and my own life.”

It’s understandable why McElwee felt the need to reintroduce himself. Although he has influenced filmmaker fans like Michael Moore and John Wilson (in our interview, McElwee casually drops that Primetime director Lance Oppenheim was once “a student of mine”), Remake is his first film in nearly 15 years. It focuses on his son, Adrian (also a subject in McElwee’s 2011 doc Photographic Memory), who died from a fentanyl overdose in 2016. Remake also incorporates scenes from about five other McElwee documentaries, making it a pained reflection on a father’s art and his child’s illness.

Most pertinent to Remake is his acclaimed 1986 road-trip doc Sherman’s March, in which a young McElwee looks for love in all the wrong places while retracing civil war general William T Sherman’s scorched earth campaign through the American south. At the start of Remake, McElwee learns that Sherman’s March is being eyed for a fiction remake by a Hollywood director, splitting the film’s focus between something pithy and something incredibly grave.

In painting a portrait of Adrian, McElwee cuts from 16mm clips of a playful young boy followed by flat, digital recordings of a surly teenager arguing with his father – it’s difficult to distinguish between McElwee’s home movies and his art. But the director downplays the idea of an infinite archive of The Truman Show-like footage. “I was shooting a 16mm film for the first 15 years of my archive,” he says. “You can’t shoot huge amounts of celluloid; it’s too expensive, too cumbersome.”

In Sherman’s March, the filmmaker’s discomfort at manning both a 16mm camera and a tape recorder manifested in moments of palpable frustration. “Because I was foolish enough to undertake all of this as a one-person crew, there was a huge amount of technical stuff to keep straight,” says McElwee. “On top of that, I was often filming someone I knew. I felt I was constantly split between the technical [side] and remembering to be a human. As I became more experienced shooting in 16mm, the technical part of it became almost unconscious, which freed me up to be more of a person.”

Graduating to lightweight digital cameras didn’t just prove more convenient, it opened up McElwee’s process in unpredictable ways. In one scene in Remake, McElwee has a stern talk with Adrian about his future while cooking an omelette in his crummy post-separation apartment. Adrian is holding the main camera, while McElwee has a GoPro fixed on his head, a bizarre shot-reverse-shot that McElwee can’t take credit for. “The GoPro on my head was Adrian’s idea,” he says. “I think he realised I looked like a total idiot. In an earlier cut, you see him putting it on my hat. He directed it that way. The discussion is quite serious, and the envelope in which it’s sent out is humorous.”

Gems like these indicate that Remake is somewhat of a collaborative effort. “I thought of us often as collaborators,” notes McElwee, referring to Adrian’s earliest movies, shot on a Bolex 16mm camera. As a young man, Adrian paid more serious attention to filming his life independently: his backyard stunts, his snowboarding in Colorado, and eventually glimpses at his addiction. 

“I had not realised how much he was actually documenting his own life until after he died, [when] I came across these external drives,” says McElwee. “He was willing to use the camera in a very brutal way on himself, open to capturing whatever happened around him with his friends and ingesting dangerous opioids. It seemed like he was going for broke in his filmmaking in a way I don’t do. I’m careful what I film, [and] how I put it together.”

Adrian’s self-shot footage of drinking and drug-taking accounts for some of Remake’s most uncomfortable moments – especially since it’s difficult to tell if Adrian was indeed engaged in an artistic project, or if he never intended for anyone to see these lonely, painful scenes. McElwee credits his wife, filmmaker Hyun Kyung Kim, with seeing something revealing and poignant in his son’s footage. “She was the first one who said, ‘Please take seriously what Adrian has accumulated. There’s something here for you.’”

McElwee also credits co-editor Joe Bini (editor of Grizzly Man, You Were Never Really Here and American Honey) with realising the potential of Adrian’s footage when a shoulder injury and burnout stalled McElwee’s progress on the project. Their cutting-room collab also created a niche bonding moment between the two editors. “Joe finished this scene where Adrian was upset with me for not taking an offer to edit Jaguar commercials, and he wanted me to hand over the option rights for Sherman’s March. He said, ‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to do these kinds of films yourself.’ Joe said it was like an echo chamber, because it was what his own son had said [to him] so often.”

Remake draws much of its immense power from the fact that McElwee’s artistic methodology – shooting someone to bring filmmaker and subject closer together – did nothing to reduce his grief. Before he could think about making a film, his fixation on images as a tool for personal clarity seemed to haunt him. “I found it hard to even look at him in the photographs on my wall,” he says. “I think for any parent who’s lost a child, the photographs are the first thing to deal with. You see them totally differently. The tragic component becomes the main meaning of the photographs for a while.

“My idea was if I could start to deal with photographs, that might be a bridge to being able to make a film. I hired an assistant to go through all of my documentaries in which my son had appeared, for even a minute out of a feature-length film, and take one still frame from the film itself and put them in a kind of chronological order. That helped me to think about him, what was going on in his life and in mine during that period. I began to write little essays to go with each photograph, and that helped me [imagine] the film I might make.” If the unproduced Sherman’s March remake failed to find a way to recreate the past, Remake uses McElwee’s body of work to reconstitute a father-son relationship with acute compassion and grace.

Remake is out now in UK cinemas.