SXSWFilm - Austinist Interviews Turk Pipkin, director of Nobelity

After a career spent writing books, performing and acting, what led you to want to direct?
I thought maybe it was my turn to be act like a butt-head…. No that’s not it… The real answer is, I didn’t want to spend my whole life making product that I didn’t get to control creatively or from a business point of view.

Where did the funding from for the picture come from and how difficult was it to raise funds?
I started with the idea of one investor funding the entire project and was lucky enough to find someone who could do that and who believed in the idea and the potential success of the film, which are pretty much the hallmarks of raising money for films. My argument was that if I started with the basic premise of Nobelity – really smart people showing the best way ahead - then find a way to make it personal and universal, make the pictures as great as the idea, it’d be a slam-dunk great investment. People are hungry for films that are real and relevant - especially if there’s good filmmaking involved. I also had the argument that Nobelity could play in theaters, on television, and would be strong on DVD, and because it was global in nature, would sell in those markets all over the world.

So I make myself sound pretty wise, but of course I just about blew it, because I didn’t ask for enough money up front, and didn’t want to go back for more. So for the two years I was shooting and editing (at 501 Studios in Austin), I kept having to write magazine stories and museum films, whatever I could to get some more money into Nobelity.

And speaking of 501 Studios, I wouldn’t have a film at all if they hadn’t believed in the product and stood by me through ridiculously long sessions as my editor, Chet Hirsch, and I found this movie.

How did you choose the people who participated in the project?
I chose all the laureates based on the topics I wanted them to specifically address. I wanted Weinberg the physicist to talk about Global warming and problem solving in general, Rick Smalley to talk about Energy, Dr. Harold Varmus - global health, Jody Williams - landmines, runaway military spending, and the power of one person to change the world. Jody led me to Joseph Rotblat who talked about his 60 year mission to save us from nuclear proliferation.

I started with a full crew - 3 camera, lights, audio, mixer, everything you need for an efficient doc shoot - and as we got farther and farther into the shoot, began to strip the crew down - partially because the money was running out, but also because I was learning more and more about what I needed and how to get it. For London and India, it was just Vance Holmes and I - two guys with Panasonic DVX100A cameras and a Nikon D70 still camera. We shot 35 hours of footage and 3000 stills. By the time I got to Kenya, it was just me - shooting, grabbing audio and taking another 1,500 stills.

So when we put it all together, we had 160 hours of footage and thousands of stills, and the only way in the world I ever made sense of it was to have a great editor, Chet Hirsch, and a fantastic post house, 501 Studios and 501 Audio. I practically lived at 501 for a year, and the film just came together piece by piece, image by image, song by song. If you're preparing to shoot a smart movie with a lot of great images and music - my advice is, hire Chet.

Do you feel that people want to hear more of this message and understand and help more but it is a question of funding and the mainstream media preferring to shovel schlock because it has done a fine job thus far of paying the bills?
I don’t think the mainstream media necessarily prefers shoveling schlock. But they do have to pay their bills and have the ratings to make their ads sell at a good rate. They are also under a lot of public pressure from various groups saying they tilt too far to the left or to the right. We spend way too much time and energy arguing who’s right, fighting for what is perceived as the undecided people in the middle. My general thought – and this was backed up by most of the Nobelists – is that these problems don’t have a thing to do with left or right. They’re not the domain of any political movement, and they’re so massive, the only way we’re going to come up with effective solutions is by working together. In the film, Nanotechnologist Rick Smalley tells me that we’re going to need 10 Terrawatts of new, non-polluting power in the next fifty years. To explain how much power that is, if you figure out how to build a new, non-polluting energy plant about the size of the big gas and coal plants they build today – and you pay somewhere between 1 and 5 billion dollars to build it, then you turn that baby on. Now you have to do that the next day, and the next and the next, every day… for 27 years to get 10 Terrawatts of new power. These are big challenges.

What were the greatest challenges in making the film and what did you find most rewarding?
The whole film was a challenge – I sometimes feel like I haven’t slept for the last two years – and the most rewarding thing is that I feel like I lived up to my promise to the Nobel laureates –Desmond Turu, Wangari Maathai, Jody Williams, Ahmed Zewail, these are some busy people – and I feel that I lived up to my promise to make good use of the time they gave me and the faith they put in me.

In what do you find hope?
Filming in Santiniketan, India, at the boyhood home of Amartya Sen, one of the world’s foremost authorities on population, food, famine, cultural identity, women’s rights, women’s education – big stuff, and at the end of the interview, I ask Sen if he was hopeful about where we were headed. Now he’d already told me some mind-blowing things about the meaning and duties of democracy, about the value of public discussion, about the necessity to reign in out of control military spending, the need to focus on the bigger killers in the world like malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – and after all of that he said he was ultimately optimistic about our ability to address these problems.

What scares you?
A world in which a billion people live on a dollar a day… and a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.

Who came up with (and how) the idea of releasing Nobelity on Earth Day and using an innovative grass-roots marketing campaign?
I was hoping to do a grassroots release from day one, and had promised to all the Nobelists that we’d be raising money for international work and education on the topics we were all concerned with. I wanted Amnesty International to be one of our partners on that release – particularly since Amnesty repeatedly rescued Wangari Maathai from unjust political imprisonment in Kenya. Wangari flat out credits them with saving her life, and the result is that her environment and empowerment organization, The Green Belt Movement, goes on to plant 30 million trees in Kenya while dramatically improving the lives of the women and families who planted those trees. So our connection with Amnesty is fantastic! Likewise the connections with Physicians for Social Responsibility/PSR, The Unitarian Church, and other groups.

At a preview screening in L.A., my old friend Craig Baumgarten – who gave me my first screenwriting work 20 years ago – saw the film and heard me talking about digital grassroots distribution. After he produced “Shattered Glass” and soon after, Craig had formed an alliance with Monterey Media – who already had a great video and DVD catalog – on a company whose main goal was to do digital, grassroots distribution. The coincidence and timing were as fortunate as all the other great things that fell in my lap on this film.

If a group – or even an individual – wants to host a screening of this film, they simply go to www.nobelitythemovie.com and sign a simple host contract. The basic terms are, you agree to charge a minimum of ten bucks and pay five of that to the distributor. If you have access to DVD projection at a college, a church, a civic center or a local cinema, you can raise pretty good dough for your group while kicking off an amazing conversation about what we could be doing better in the world.

What is your hope for the movie in terms of who it inspires and what it inspires them to do?
My hope is that about five million people around the world will see this film and be reminded that we are all a lot more alike than we commonly acknowledge, and instead of believing all the bull about how different we are and how much we have to fear each other, that we’ll reach out across political divides and national borders and make a world for our kids and grandkids that will be better than the one we were born into. It would really suck to look back someday and realize that we blew it.

Who has inspired you in life, personally and professionally?
The last couple of years, the inspiration has come from the Nobel laureates in the film, each of whom has worked pretty much non-stop to use the prestige and attention that came with the prize as a way to bring attention to and work on issues that they care about. They haven't given up their day jobs or their time with family and friends, but they still find the time and energy to do good in the world. And that's pretty cool.

Shifting gears, how did you come to love the game of golf?
My dad took me to the golf course in West Texas when I was seven years old, put an old golf club in my hand, dropped a ball and said, "hit it." So that's what I've been doing. It hit me pretty hard when he passed away a couple of years ago. He'd been in a nursing home a long time and we'd missed what could have been the best years of our life playing together. So I dedicated the year before I started this film to the idea of making myself the kind of golfer he would have been really proud of. I enlisted some of the best players and teachers in golf in my dream of taking ten strokes off my game, and actually managed to do it. But since I started the movie, I haven't had much time for golf. I played a few holes at Calcutta Country Club, and played the Mount Kenya Safari Club - both with really old loaner equipment from the courses - and I paid for a chunk of the movie by writing magazine stories about those and other golf trips.

I'm not sure golf is for everyone, but I think all of us could use more time outdoors, away from the computers and TVs and cars and phones, and closer to things that might actually be more important. Golf is a good opportunity for that, but so is fishing, hiking, surfing, sailing... you name it. So my advice is, quit reading now and go outside.

Speaking of Willie, I have always felt that if I took a rock from the Blanco River and cracked it open, Willie’s voice would emit, that if the sound of the wind blowing through the Hill Country and across the plains of West Texas could take human voice it would be Willie’s. From Outlaw to Zen Grandfather of Texas, can you please speak to the experience of not only writing your forthcoming book with him but of your relationship with him and his place as in our state’s and country’s cultural history and his affect on its landscape?
Willie and I have collaborated in writing what I think is a fantastic book, "The Tao of Willie", which will be published by Gotham Books in May. It's pretty darn funny - as Willie always is - but it's also heartfelt and spiritual, a genuine look at why Willie is one of the most amazing people of our time.

How did you come to play a role in Waiting for Guffman, I assume it wasn’t the typical auditioning process, or am I wrong? Whose idea was the ping pong ball trick?
I met Chris Guest when he was casting Waiting for Guffman through my longtime friend and partner, Harry Anderson. Chris said come audition for the play tryouts in the movie, and I auditioned by juggling Ping-Pong balls out of my mouth, which is exactly what we shot. I think I was in the trailer longer than I'm actually in the movie.

I'm in a bunch of movies that come out this year - How to Eat Fried Worms, Scanner Darkly, Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I shot a couple of independents, the pilot for Friday Night Lights and rumor has it - since HBO sent an episode to critics with me in it - that I'm back on The Sopranos. But I'm glad I don't have to make a living as an actor. It's so much easier when you don't need the job.

Any final thoughts about Austin and its creative community?
My final plug is for Austin's creative community in general - both the filmmaking and music scenes. I don't think we could have made this movie anywhere but Austin, where we have the most generous and knowledgeable crews and filmmakers of any place I've been, and more great musicians than you could listen to in a lifetime. I was lucky to get songs from Willie Nelson, Bob Schneider and Bob Livingston, but their are dozens of Austin musicians playing on our original score which ranges from acoustic guitar and jazz, to full-blown classical and some great World music as well. If we'd tried to record this score in L.A., the music budget would have cost more than we spent on the film. Everyone still got paid, but that wasn't the main reason they worked on the film. So thanks to Austin. See everyone at the Paramount on Thursday, or next month when our national distribution kicks off with another Paramount screening on April 18th.

Nobelity
Premieres Tonight @ 7pm
Paramount Theater

View Trailer