Liz Mermin

Liz Mermin (NYU Anthropology and Culture & Media MA ’97) is a London-based director and producer. She has directed nine feature documentaries, as well as series and documentaries for BBC, CNN, Netflix, PBS, Discovery, Sundance Channel, Arte, and many more, as well as branded content for Sony and an award-winning series of spots for the US non-profit Speak Truth to Power. For three years, she set up and ran the documentary division of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, making character-driven short films on under-reported humanitarian stories.

Interviewer Melissa Lefkowitz is a filmmaker, doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at NYU, and graduate of the Program in Culture & Media.

Melissa Lefkowitz: What brought you to the Culture and Media Program?  

Liz Mermin: I had been writing about film. I did the Whitney Independent Study Program, and I had been doing a lot of critical studies and theory. In undergraduate [at Harvard University], I studied literature and postcolonialism. And I'd spent a year in Senegal right after college on a Fulbright writing about Senegalese film, which is how I got interested in film. When I was in Senegal, I became interested in filmmaking because the French had put a lot of money and time into developing Senegalese filmmakers, and I started studying and writing about African cinema and then that segued into issues around the burden of representation, and theory about Black Cinema, Black American Cinema, and Third World Cinema. As I was reading more deeply into that criticism, I saw more and more references to anthropology. I became more interested in how anthropology at that point in the early nineties was engaging with critical studies and the things I’d been reading [while] doing art criticism at the Whitney. So, I was intrigued by anthropology and then, because I had been writing about film so much, I had started thinking a lot about the form. I didn't feel like I should go to film school because I still thought of myself as more of an academic. I was just really fascinated by this idea of being able to learn filmmaking as part of an anthropology degree. So, I applied. And I got in. I lived in New York, anyway, so I figured I’d try it [laughs]. But I wasn't at all sure about it. It was very much a “let's see what this is” kind of thing.

ML: Following the program, what drove you to the next phase of your career and how did you break into the field?  

LM: Basically, once I got into the program, I really, really loved the filmmaking courses. I decided I wanted to do more of that, and so my partner - you know how it works at NYU, you pair up for shooting and sound – Jenny [Raskin] and I worked on each other's student films and then we decided we wanted to make a film together. We were both really interested in what was going on with the abortion debate at that point, which is frighteningly like what's going on now. It was a time when there were a lot of clinic bombings and abortion providers were being shot and people were dying. I mean it was terrorism, but no one called it that at the time. We decided to take a year off to just try and see if we could give it a go being filmmakers. We went the fiscal sponsorship nonprofit route. We hooked up with a producer partway through, through one of the grants we got. We just clawed our way through it with little fundraisers, a grant here, a grant there. We paired up with Medical Students for Choice, so it had a social change element from the start which made it more fundable.  

While we were raising money for that, we were both working in the field. I got a job working on a public service program for ABC as a producer, which was a dreadful job [laughs], but I learned a lot about television production and then I started working as an editor as well, so I was assistant editing, editing some short films for people and just trying to get as much experience around the industry as possible. But basically, what allowed me to break into television was Jenny and I making this film together. And we did it the same way we had done things in Culture and Media, a two-person crew swapping off camera and sound, and then we’d take turns sitting at the AVID editing together. When we finished, On Hostile Ground was picked up by a distributor and it ended up on the Sundance Channel and having a cinema release - a very small one - but still, it gave us the credibility to then be able to go on and get hired to work as directors, at which point I decided not to come back to NYU.

“Remember all the stuff you've learned in anthropology about the phrase they use here in the UK. 'duty of care'.”

—Liz Mermin

ML: Could you describe the process of establishing yourself, including some of the challenges?  

LM: I was lucky to some degree that our first film went as well as it did, because it did allow me to jump straight into directing and not have to be a researcher and an AP [Associate Producer] and do all those working your way up jobs, which most people in the industry do. It could be attributed to the fantastic training I had at NYU, who knows [laughs], but somehow Jenny and I knew how to make a film and it worked. We must have learned that somewhere! Once we had a credit that was on broadcast television and had a respectable distributor, then there were lots of lower budget documentaries being made for a whole plethora of cable channels that had just started, and my first job after that film was actually a nonprofit film, an anti-gun violence piece. And the company that I did that with then hired me to work on a series for the Oxygen Network, which had just been created and everyone was all excited about this women's cable channel that Oprah had started.

But, at the time also, budgets were coming down and they really needed people who could shoot. I edited all my own work for the first five or six years of my career, maybe more than that, through my second feature. So, that was always a selling point because they could save a lot of money [laughs]. I built relationships within one production company doing several things for them. It's an industry that is entirely about knowing people. You need your CV with the credits that show you can do it, but you also need to be out there meeting people because it's just always word of mouth. Every job I’ve got in television in America was a word-of-mouth thing, no one ever contacted me out of the blue for anything. People don't list jobs, there's nowhere to apply for them - at least there wasn't then. So, it was just about establishing competence and shooting, directing, producing, editing, and building a reputation. I did that for a while working in different parts of television.  

And then I really wanted to make a feature doc again. In 2002, I was hired to work as producer and editor on a first anniversary 9/11 film about first responders and I did most of the interviews. The director wanted to sit with the cameramen and tell them where to point the lens and so he let me do most of the interviews, or asked me to do them, which was very, very intense. At the end of that – it was a two-hour film and we interviewed 30 or 40 people – I felt intensely moved, but also vaguely complicit in this patriotism surge. And maybe as a result, I was looking at what was going on in Afghanistan. I found a story in the New York Times about a beauty school that was being opened by a group of American hairdressers and it just was one of those things that just jumped off the page. Was it a joke, or was it serious? And it's very visual; who are these people, why are they doing this?  

It was back before any of these things were on the Internet, so I managed somehow to track down one of the women in the newspaper story, who also lived in New York. I met up with her and started filming things for her to help them raise money and insinuated myself into their group. I was introduced to a producer who came on board and together we sold that idea. It's hard to imagine now that there have been hundreds of films about Afghanistan [on] women's boxing and cricket and television stars, but there hadn't been one of these “ordinary people doing normal stuff in a war zone films” before. If it was a film about Afghanistan, it was going to be about war and the Taliban and death and horrible things. There’s wasn’t an anthropological daily life, ordinary lives, ordinary people approach. I was lucky in that the idea was strange enough at that time and really grabbed people, so I was able to get the BBC on board, even though I had never done anything with them before. The Beauty Academy of Kabul did very well, got a cinema release, and was broadcast. Off the back of that, I was able to continue making films with BBC with a specialty in international stories, which was what I’d always really wanted to do. And that's how I ended up in London. I really wanted to keep doing international films and no one in America was doing them.

“I really like the films where you sit with an idea for long enough time to start seeing things differently.”

—Liz Mermin

ML: Are there specific elements of the Culture and Media program that you have applied to your career as a filmmaker?

LM: Definitely knowing how to edit. They [Culture and Media] had just purchased their first AVID [editing system] when I was there, so coming out knowing how to operate an AVID was – as hard as it may be to believe – at that time, a marketable skill [laughs]. It's so different now when everyone shoots and everyone edits. I mean, we had big clunky cameras. And at the time, also being able to do sound [was an asset]. Everyone was looking for producers to do sound, because no one wanted to pay a sound person. So, just knowing your way around all the technical stuff makes it so much easier when you're going for those first jobs to just say I can be an AP [Associate Producer], but I can also do sound or I can shoot. They can double up and save money by having you do two jobs and that always helps.  It also means that, like when I was at my first jobs, because I was editing on my own, I would literally pull all-nighters editing just to figure out what the hell was going on. So, you make your way through. You can't do that if you're working with an editor. You'd be panicking on paper at home maybe. I'm really glad that I had all the practical skills.

And then obviously the theoretical side of Culture and Media. I was already steeped in this before I got to the program, but just the emphasis… When I was at the Thompson Reuters Foundation they kept saying, “Why can't we use voiceover? Why can't we have commentary? Why are you so insistent on the fact that there can't be a voice leading you through this, we're just using the voices of the interviewees?” And I would say, whose voice is it that should be leading us through? Just the ethics of letting people speak for themselves and figuring out what it is that they want to say or are trying to say. David and Judith MacDougall were teaching while we were there and they were just fantastic because they were great filmmakers and anthropologists. What I remember most from the theory classes were discussions about how people reacted when they watched the films that they were in. That whole feeling of your responsibility to the people in the film, even if you think they're ridiculous or if you don't like them necessarily, that sense of, “Would you be comfortable sitting next to them at a screening watching this?” as a kind of ethical test to make sure you're being fair to people. I definitely have that drilled into me more than people who just go straight into television do. I think that's really important. I see a lot of filmmakers who don't have that, people in television, and certainly very senior people who don't have it.  

ML: What are some of your most meaningful projects thus far?  

LM: The films that I’ve made on my own, the feature documentaries The Beauty Academy of Kabul, Office Tigers, Shot in Bombay, and Horses. I really like the films where you sit with an idea for long enough time to start seeing things differently.

ML: What motivates you?   

LM: I really, really, really love just the process of filmmaking. I mean filming itself, like shooting can get really boring sometimes and these days I don't have the patience to spend three months hanging around in an office or in someone’s house. I'm doing less of the observational filmmaking and more interview and archive, creative reconstruction and studio stuff, but I still really, really love editing. I still love the creative part of filming. I love interviewing people. So, [it’s] just being able to get another job which will allow me to learn about something new, meet interesting people, ask them lots of questions and sort of figure out how to create something which is artistically satisfying and intellectually satisfying. Part of the reason that I realized that I'm glad I didn't get a PhD is that a year is about as long as I can immerse myself in these things, and then by a year and a half I’m really ready to be working on another subject [laughs]. I don't think I would have been very happy in academia just staying on the same thing and going deeper and deeper and deeper. I think that would have driven me crazy.  

I like the excitement of taking on new things. And so part of what motivates me is just to continue to have the chance to work on another project, which will be creatively challenging and interesting. And then even if the films I’m making aren’t actively making the world a better place, I do hope that they are making people see the world differently. I want to work on things that bring something good. I just feel like it should be adding to our senses, our aesthetic experience, our understanding of the world. I like to work on projects that I think bring something to people.

ML: What advice would you give Culture and Media students hoping to pursue a career in filmmaking?  

LM:  Learn your technical skills. Remember all the stuff you've learned in anthropology about the phrase they use here in the UK, “duty of care.”  I mean the weird thing about documentaries, right, is that you're asking people to give you lots of time and tell you lots of things and expose themselves and do all this stuff for you, for free. They'll have their own motives for doing it, but it's a huge risk for them and I think it's very easy to stop thinking about them as real people and think about them as characters in your films. There are way too many people in the industry who see it that way. So, remembering that, which broadly goes into just being a really good person to work with. Just being nice and caring and supportive is probably the best way to get more work, because there are a lot of very unpleasant people in the industry and, like I’ve said many times, it's all about reputation and connection. The best way to get work is just for people to want to work with you again.

This conversation was edited for length.