Interview: Academy Award Winner Allie Light’s on ‘Any Wednesday’

Allie Light, winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the 1994 National Emmy Award for best interview program, writes, directs and produced documentary films.

In Any Wednesday, An octogenarian with dementia meets a PTSD afflicted homeless veteran after choir practice and gives him a ride instead of going home. Separated by age, race, class, and even diagnoses, the two bond in their frail humanity. Director Allie Light walks us through her thought in the making of her short film…

indieactivity : Give a background of your personal experience with the story, writing, and production?
Allie Light : After the death of my longtime movie-making partner and husband, Irving Saraf, I became interested in the subject of grief and desire in old age. In our last stage of life, we live with both emotions and, for many of us, we are alone for the first time. I wrote four scripts on the subject of grief and desire in old age. Any Wednesday is the first of these scripts. I felt very confident writing the stories because a) I am in old age myself. b) I have had many losses in my life and so I understand grief. c) We never lose the need for desire—to live, to love, to be happy, to feel young.

Related Story : Interview-Patrick Stark, 1-on-1 with Co-Director of ‘Any Wednesday’

As I began to write Any Wednesday, it was Agnes’s story: An old woman beginning to forget. She had not told anyone what was happening to her. She no longer wanted to wake up each morning for fear that more of her memory would be gone. She was losing herself, forgetting her past. I introduced her to a stranger who she might confide in. I set her up with an adventure.

I didn’t have much in place for C’Mo until I got to the lightning and thunderstorm, and then I thought that he should react in such a way that she would be frightened. So, I gave him PTSD. When he freaks out, her fright turns to concern.

The theme of grief and desire is evident when C’Mo asks her what word it would take for her to remember him. She thinks for a moment and says, “Grief.” He likes it and tells her that when he hears the word, he will think of her. Then they play a game of how to say goodbye and her delight has a quality of childhood. She laughs like she was young again.

After bonding occurs and they tell one another their stories, the end fell into place. I wanted to leave the viewers with two questions: Was C’Mo better off at the end than he was at the beginning? After all, he had now told someone he intended to take his life and once that thought is put into words, it may be more likely to happen. And, when Agnes is questioned by the police officer and later by her husband and son, has she really forgotten her adventure, or is she protecting C’Mo? During the Q&A, after the film, someone always asks this question. I say that I really don’t know the answer. I finished the story before I had to make that decision. But I did ask Mary Black, the actor, and she said that she decided from the beginning of filming that this was Agnes’s secret adventure and she was not going to tell anyone what happened—ever!

indieactivity : Did you start writing with a cast in mind?
Allie Light : I had no specific cast in mind when I was writing. Various friends and older actors I thought of for my characters. I actually made a list of female actors I could think of who are in old age. I googled them and saw that most are still working (which shows we want stories about aging). Then when we cast for the film in Vancouver, Patrick had heard of Mary Black and she was our only serious contender, and for the part of C’Mo, agents had given the script to their clients and 15 African Canadian and American young men showed up. Each one told us how much they liked the script and we noticed they had memorized the lines. This was a difficult choice and we pored over the videos for several days, but during Shane Dean’s audition, while the other actors had played to the video camera, when it came time to fire his ‘pretend’ gun, he looked straight at me and fired directly into my heart. I couldn’t forget. I shiver now to remember how it felt to be fired at.

A few days after casting, Mary Black fell and fractured her pelvis. We wanted her for the part, so we waited until she was healed. During this time (3 months), Shane, who didn’t know anything about PTSD, read all he could and watched TED talks. He came to the set the first day with a cardboard sign that he had made. The art director remade it using his words: MY WAR CONTINUES. The first time he spoke my words, they became his.

indieactivity : How long did you take to complete the script? (Do you have a writing process?)
Allie Light : I wrote the four scripts, one after the other in 2015. I described a bit of my writing process above.

indieactivity : Why was ‘Any Wednesday’ a perfect title for this short?
Allie Light : I like Any Wednesday, though in the script, C’Mo says “Some Wednesday, A Wednesday…” I think Any Wednesday is more alliterative.

indieactivity : What was your first project?
Allie Light : I have been making documentary films for more than 40 years. My first project with Irving Saraf was a film for Public Television called Mitsuye and Nellie – Asian American Poets. The film is still with a distributor and continues to be shown in colleges and universities.

indieactivity : Which scene (that made the cut) was the hardest to shoot?
Allie Light : I don’t know if Patrick and I would agree on the hardest scene to shoot. For me, it was the scene with Agnes and C’Mo sitting outside of the convenience store eating ‘munchies’. It was really raining that night (we often had fake rain). It was cold and they were both wet. This was a very intimate scene—the denouement—and I was listening intently to the dialogue and having trouble hearing it. Finally, our producer, Julia Hilder, located a generator and asked to have it turned off. Only in post did we hear a second generator! I wanted to do ADR in this scene because C’Mo also had a mic that was malfunctioning according to the post-production sound people at Skywalker, but they really worked on the sound in that section and today it sounds pretty good. I worried so much about that scene while we were shooting it and editing.

indieactivity : What worked better in this latest production that mightn’t have worked so well in the last one you did?
Allie Light : I don’t have an answer to this question as Any Wednesday is my first narrative dramatic film using actors. Very different from the last film, Empress Hotel, that we made before my partner’s death. They are dramatically different. We had a crew of three people for the Empress Hotel, a San Francisco hotel for the homeless, and we just hung around the hotel shooting for about two years. Any Wednesday had a crew of 30 people plus the actors and was wrapped after four nights of shooting. Post-production was 1 ½ years. This last film was a whole new and different experience. Patrick did a fabulous job handling the crew. I learned so much from him.

indieactivity : Is there anything about the independent filmmaking business that you struggle with?
Allie Light :  In the Independent Film business, everyone struggles to raise money. I don’t think the Academy Award helps much in documentary film when it comes to getting more funding for the next project. The award helps in every other way—it is very validating for one’s work. Other struggles as independents have to do with an overload of work. You try to wear all the hats. Even though we were directors and producers, we did sound, camera, archival research, editing—even foleying. It was always thrilling to learn all the aspects of filmmaking.

indieactivity : Where do you think your strengths lie as a filmmaker?
Allie Light : My strengths as a filmmaker: See above, learning to do everything. My greatest strength is in writing dialogue. I’m a good interviewer because of many years of documentary filmmaking. And I believe that listening carefully to people I’ve interviewed, now helps me to write good dialogue. There are wonderful, and sometimes strange and unique, rhythms to spoken language—so much fun to capture. My editor asked me how I was able to write Black dialogue. I said, “I didn’t, I just wrote what C’Mo wanted to say.” I created C’Mo to be smart, verbal, charismatic and deeply suffering. I had to give him the language to express these feelings.

indieactivity : How was the film financed?
Allie Light : I had $60,000. When Patrick and I met, I said, “You can’t make a film on $60,000. He said, “Yes, we can. I can call in a lot of favors.” That’s what he did and the film was shot and finished on that amount. Post-production costs more, though Skywalker was extremely generous because they liked the film. My social security paid for much of post and a friend left me $50,000 in her will. I still have $30,000 of that for my new film.

indieactivity : What do you hope audiences get from your film?
Allie Light : There is what I hope the audience get from this film:

Any Wednesday, as a film, teaches one how to look at the world. How to look at black and white—challenging racist fear. How to look at aging and the loss of self. How to understand PTSD—the wounds of war. The expansion of gender bonding and the desire for connection. How to look at pain and grief and then how to express it. How to reach out to a stranger not from strength, but from weakness—for, as C’Mo says, “You can’t remember, and I can’t forget.”

indieactivity : Describe Any Wednesday in one word.
Allie Light : Grief

indieactivity : What else have you got in the works?
Allie Light : What I have in the works is a short doc called The Ship That Turned Back. It takes place in Poland 1939. My husband was a Polish Jew whose family was able to escape the Holocaust with the Nazis at their heels. The film is Irving’s passage from Poland to Palestine when he was seven years old. We shot a few scenes before his death, so I have given the film two narrators: an adult man and a seven-year-old child. Of course, they are the same person.

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