by Dov Kornits
“Super PACs, officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees”, may not make contributions to candidate campaigns or parties, but may engage in unlimited political spending independently of the campaigns.”
Luke Walker’s latest documentary, PACmen, has nothing to do with gobbling up digital dots, though there’s surely a metaphor that could be derived from it if the dots were voters. Walker’s film is about the most recent US election which resulted in Donald Trump being elected as POTUS. And the result was certainly something Walker never anticipated, finishing the film with Hillary victorious and then having to recut the whole thing for months when the surprise result came out.
His documentary idea started off as something different as well, thinking that he would be following surprise Republican candidate Ben Carson, a doctor who once upstaged Obama and was suddenly the next great hope of US politics. But as he tells us, the best laid plans of documentarians, politicians and Super PACs often go awry.
Please tell us how you ended up making this film, and how easy was it to get the sort of access behind the scenes of American politics, and were they happy for you to follow them?
Back in 2015, I was trying to work out what to do with myself next and I thought, there is no bigger story coming up than the presidential race. I wondered if there was any chance that I could get near one of the candidates. I love The War Room, about the Clintons in 1992, it’s one of my favourite films; I love Primary about Kennedy. I’ve always wanted to make a classic observational film like that and just because I am fascinated by American politics in particular and the reason that I do what I do really is for an excuse to poke my nose into things that interest me…
And I thought ‘well, can I get near one of the candidates?’ All the drama was going to be on the Republican side, I thought Hillary’s got it all sown up on the Democrats side, no drama… I didn’t see Bernie Sanders coming at all; so I looked down the Republican side and I saw this name, Ben Carson which was the only name on the list that I didn’t know.
I thought, ‘who is this guy?’ So I looked him up and he had this amazing backstory, born into poverty, topped all of his classes just to get to Yale, goes on to become the first surgeon to separate Siamese twins joined at the head; and a black Republican which is rare. I thought that Carson may surprise a few people, he could mess with the demographics and I wondered if I could get near him.
I wrote to his campaign manager, Terry Giles explaining that I love campaign tours, I love American politics and that I’d like to make an observational film about how they do in the upcoming election, and how I saw Ben Carson as the Rocky Balboa of the upcoming presidential race. I sent him a copy of my last film, Lasseter’s Bones and I probably didn’t expect much from it. Terry got in touch and said that if I could get on a plane to Houston, we can talk. I think he wanted to test how serious I was so 3 days later, I jumped on a plane, flew to Houston, met with Terry in this beautiful, enormous Texas mansion, we sat at the long dining table and we were served dinner by his butler. We drank 4 bottles of incredibly fine wine and just hung out and got to know each other and told jokes and by the end, I was set for making the film!
By the time I got back over there, Terry had left the campaign to set up these Super PACs because in order to have a successful presidential campaign, you need to have hundreds of millions of dollars in these Super PACs to do the dark work for the campaign. And Terry said that he’ll let me see everything. ‘I’ll let you see me raising the money, I’ll let you see me spending the money, no one has ever made it without Super PACs, no one has ever been allowed to film this stuff. Do you want to make a film about that?’ And I thought that that’s got to be worth doing.
Focusing on the PACmen, and not really following Ben Carson is ultimately narratively sound for your film. Was that deliberate?
There’s a Chauncey Gardner [Peter Sellers character in the classic Being There] quality about Carson’s campaign, and there are these constantly reoccurring motifs in the film of the cardboard cut-out; we included those shots and it’s not there by accident.
Carson was running on this narrative that he represents the Republican ideal of the American dream. No matter where you come from, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps and be a success. Never mind the thousands of people that fail, anyone can become a success if they try hard enough and if they are failing, it’s because they are not trying hard enough. And Carson was running on this narrative and that’s Carson the cardboard cut-out, this recurring motif throughout the film.
Terry, his campaign manager wanted to brief him more effectively. He shows me this document that he had been working on for the last 6 months and it was all on foreign policy. He hired all of these great foreign policy guys and got them to prepare this document and all of the information in this document, he was going to give to Carson to make sure that he was prepared for the upcoming debate and the questions that people were going to throw at him on foreign policy. Because when you become president, you become commander and chief so it’s very important to understand world affairs, military affairs and all of the rest of it. And by that point, Carson had got to the polls and I think that he thought that providence was taking him all the way to the White House. I think he thought that all he had to do was just turn up and he said, ‘you know what Terry? I don’t think I need you to brief me anymore, I don’t think I need this information that you have been working on for the last 6 months’, so he sent him away, and within two weeks, he had fallen apart over foreign policy. Had he accepted that information, I think it could have been very different but instead, all that he was running on was this idea of the American dream and this man that came from nothing to become this incredible surgeon and that only lasted so long.
PACmen is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival
