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August 30, 2013
Bringing grey to a black art
Oscar winner became a producer to help tell essential stories.
BETH KISSILEFF JNS.ORG
The career of British-Jewish film producer Simon Chinn, who has received two Academy Awards in the best documentary category, might have taken a very different direction if not for the death of a journalist in the line of duty.
Chinn, who won Oscars in 2009 for producing Man on Wire and in 2013 for Searching for Sugar Man, was initially interested in a career in journalism. But a sniper in El Salvador killed war correspondent David Blundy, the father of one of Chinn’s friends, in November 1989, while Blundy was working for London’s Sunday Correspondent. Though impressed by Blundy when he met him, Chinn said in an interview that after reading Blundy’s obituaries, he understood that he “did not want [Blundy’s] life, a perpetually unsettled life.” It was a life Blundy “thrived on,” but Chinn realized that he could have a reasonable facsimile of the war correspondent’s experience – but with more stability and significantly less danger – by getting involved in documentary films, where one “parachutes into situations, has adventures and leaves.”
For years, Chinn worked on documentaries for British television – on Zimbabwe, the Balkans, South Africa, Serbia and on Iraq, after the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein. Once he married and had children, however, Chinn said he wanted to stop going to what he called “hairy places.” Not that Chinn’s current line of work is risk-free. For example, recently he was involved in a project on the narcotics wars in Mexico, “helping a director who is putting himself at considerable risk,” he explained.
Being a producer is “sort of a black art,” Chinn added. There are many aspects to what he does, but primarily, he “originates projects” and is the “person who has the first vision of the film, creative and financial.” He figures out “how to get the resources to make the film we want to make,” Chinn explained, and “how to get the work out in a way that will maximize its potential.”
As the producer, Chinn is “where the buck stops,” because he is responsible for bringing a film in on time and on budget, he said. Ultimately, however, producing is a fundamentally creative role, because it involves enabling the directors to realize their ambitions to make the films they want to make.
It can be challenging to decide which projects to take on, and Chinn said the movies he is interested in making are those with “bigger themes,” ones concerned with “human dramas set in a human context.” He cited as an example his work on Project Nim. Based on a book, the documentary told the story of a 1970s experiment that saw a chimpanzee raised in a human family. He hadn’t seen this type of “animal biography” on film before, and he found it appealing to tell a story that “generates huge ideas [about] who we are as humans, nature versus nurture in parenting [and] how we discharge responsibility to those more vulnerable than ourselves.” Project Nim also fascinated Chinn as a “parable of parenting,” he said.
Asked about the role Judaism has played in the films he has made, Chinn was temporarily flummoxed, acknowledging it was the “first time I’ve considered that question.” After pondering for a bit, he said Judaism is “culturally what I am used to, lots of discussion and debate, the Passover table, [so it is possible] that sort of discussion and debate informs the way I approach documentaries.”
Chinn said documentaries are an “opportunity to tell stories in ways that are surprising and complex,” and that he is “drawn more to the moral grey in characters and stories than the black and white.”
Currently, Chinn is at work on The Green Prince, a documentary telling the story of Mosab Hassan Yousef (whose autobiography, Son of Hamas, came out in 2010 on Tyndale House Publishers), the son of one of the founders of Hamas who goes on to become an informant for Israel’s Shin Bet security agency. Chinn called The Green Prince, directed by Nadav Schirman, an “extraordinary human story” about people “whose motivations are complex.”
“In a funny way, I have always been very wary of making a film about this, such an emotive issue,” said Chinn, who noted that he has a nephew about to serve in the Israeli army.
Winning his most recent Oscar in February 2013 felt “absolutely incredible,” he said, “the best feeling in the world.” Staying true to his practical nature, Chinn said that after earning such accolades, it is important to “roll your sleeves up and get back to work. The glow fades, I need to make hay while the sun shines.”
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